winter mornings
alternating hibernation and rage
reminder:
fyi - this draft was started in early January, so the things below aren’t strictly about the past couple of weeks. hugs.
this is a long read, but I think an excellent one. it started a bit slow for me; maybe stick with it a bit if you feel similarly. maybe, also like me, by the end you’ll be fashioning a torch from a spent-but-not-yet-recycled wrapping paper roll. maybe also like me, ranting about jeff bezos’ stupid mountain clock for the past six seven years to anyone who will listen:
I observed a family member trying to read a news article on their phone recently, and watching them trying to actually read the words in the article, between trying to click tiny, grainy Xs to close out popups — in the cases where they realized that the thing was a popup, and not some other interrupty thing to scroll past or around like the world’s worst game of tetris — was… excruciating. Inadvertent taps on links that opened new mobile browser windows into new hellscape ad target landing pages: it gave me a sense of doom and despair at how fun [cool? interesting? just…. not infuriating?] browsing the internet used to be, and a very real sense that it was impossible to make large-scale changes to bring the un-shittiness back in a meaningful way.
I had a real *shakes fist at cloud* moment and experienced various other disconcerting “you’re old now, too,” thoughts. Mostly, though, I was just mad at this being the state of what using technology is like (which Ed much more thoroughly and satisfyingly details in the piece above). And also mad that although I’ve spent 75+% of my career making technology, whatever I did and worked on seems to have made no dent in the public’s internet experience writ large being better (or even, arguably, in any way decent). Not that I expected my particular work to make a tangible and miraculously positive impact? I just, I guess I didn’t expect it to feel broadly and definitively worse, across the board. Also this isn’t like the first, single moment I realized all of this (lol; time to read my own reflections). It’s been ebbing and bobbing along for a while, like, idk a good chunk of my technology career. But just reading that piece, and then seeing this example of a real human fighting with it, kinda got me in a different way.
This blog post kinda lists out the same crimes against internet user humanity that most websites subject us to. Both the less technical, user-experience-type annoyances that I tried to avoid introducing across years and products [occasionally even “successfully”! despite the efforts of various ~*growth*~ and ~*monetization*~ models and goals, and the stated objectives of various a/b tests], as well as the mostly-invisible-but-definitely-noticeable dust and cruft of user tracking tech that’s always lurking below the surface of basically any commercial or public-facing internet property*. That’s the stuff which of course enabled me to know if my efforts at a “consumer-grade”** UI were achieving said growth and conversion objectives. Yes, I used session replay tools to observe how you navigated that page (yes you specifically, sometimes but probably not consistently enough, assuming you used products I worked on, and viewed screens I cared about in terms of MeTrIcS), and silently nudged your mouse along, hoping you would justtt click the… thing… come on… argh! it’s right there AHHH NO not that thing. welp. :(
anyway, eternal recommendation to read Uncanny Valley.
some other things:
alexa, what’s gerrymandering? (from 2022, but an excellent visualization)
I’ve seen a few people mention Ralph Lauren as a reference, in the fashion/lifestyle influencer world, of the global rising tide of authoritarianism because of RL’s “old money” aesthetic and, I mean, I… guess? in that RL generally has flowier hemlines and more minimal cleavage than like, Skims? obviously Ralph doesn’t need my defense, but I’m going to need someone to write my Miranda-Priestly-cerulean monologue about how actually it’s Hill House’s “nap dress”*** that truly heralded the [more recent] mainstream vibe shift to tradwife—not a rakishly-styled RL oxford buttondown or pique polo shirt. anyway here’s yet another ponder about “are clothes signifiers?” (…yes)
if you’re ever like “dude… why are you so focused on weird internet drama?”, 1. please know I ask myself the same constantly 2. because it turns out that we live in the internet. 3. it has broken our IRL brains. so here I am recommending(?) you read a LinkedIn post illustrating one of our many realities (CW: horrible godawful abusive stuff?)
humanity from a hedge fund? yes
OK so many cool things: this loneliness visualization is fantastic and sobering
this is a great piece with real, realistic suggestions — so many pieces in this genre**** are like “audit your spending!” without explaining in human terms what “audit your spending” entails
it’s probably good I wasn’t in Alamo Square the day this guy was filming, because I’d likely still be there talking about the caught-cot merger
‘Yes, totally,” she agrees, marking the article for future, peformative sharing; “It can’t be the entirety of our personal expression. There has to be a part of ourselves that we keep for ourselves.”
did you need this? I didn’t know I did, either
* yes, including this thing/email/newsletter/whatever it is. subsnack, and every other “email” “publishing” “platform”, is basically one giant user-activity-conversion engine with a [very stylized, very sleek, very intentionally-engaging-but-not-overwhelming] user analytics dashboard. I can check if you opened this one, and all the others you’ve received, and see how many times you opened each one. but! beyond just the sibsnack-powered analytics and ~*data*~, I happen to know that gmail (which most if not all of you use; a vestige of the kind of product no one would dare build today and which is honestly kinda charmingly weird and innocently retro when you think too much about it) is notoriously unreliable with open rates, so I don’t really trust that number. why do I know that about gmail open rates? just… years of trying to optimize transactional product emails and needing to know just enough about all the dust and cruft of user and ad tracking [all of which is on top of more important than… just writing good adequate emails] to be able to string together plausible improvements to what could be reducing open rates (not enough/too many emoji in our subject lines! bad preview text copy on iOS! too much time spent internally explaining the difference between subject and preview text!) and click-through rates (default unloaded images! less-than-compelling calls-to-action! not enough personalization but also not so much that it’s creepy!). just generally making “good email number go up”. I can see what links you (you!) clicked on — usually I don’t look at that not because I don’t care about you but because I might choose my topics more carefully and write in the future about the stuff people clicked on in the past. I might earnestly investigate affiliate and referral schemes versus just dropping in some unmonetizable links and commenting on them via stream-of-consciousness until I hit some length that seems like the maximum I’d subject people to on a Sunday morning with a bit more than a first cup of coffee. I spent a lot of time last year trying to deeply unsubscribe from so many things and to delete accounts from so many more; I’d hate to think I added to the swarm of tracking cookies seeking out your time and brain and retirement savings.
** “consumer-grade” is product-and-design shorthand for “doesn’t look like it would ‘seamlessly integrate with PeopleSoft'”, or “no grey dropdowns and checkboxes all over the place”. it is also shorthand for the unspoken hierarchy of product management roles; a job-description mainstay and resume signifier. if you’re a product person looking for new opportunities, it’s how you signal to consumer product companies that you know the non-consumer products you worked on aren’t cool or impressive enough to matter because they didn’t democratize last-mile burrito delivery, or give you “experience running large-scale a/b tests with millions of users” (a common PM job requirement, which maybe someday I will write about, elsewhere, because mercifully most of you are not product managers). “I want to work on consumer-grade user experiences” you whisper tearfully to yourself after some important person slacks you with a casual, “hey! I saw this cool thing airbnb does in their app. could we try that here?” — even though “here” is more likely a tool that back-office teams use to accurately balance financial ledgers, or a web app that enables offline data entry but does not silently monitor a user’s location, versus a laser-focused e-commerce platform. you dutifully type up a jira ticket and attach a screenshot and add the most important metadata tag: “exec request”.
*** yes there was a New Yorker piece about the nap dress a few years ago but I think the tradwives skipped the literary references in it
**** I listened to the audiobook of Your Money or Your Life (that’s the link to buy but borrow it on Libby if you can) over the holiday break. I have been recommending it ever since — and prefacing that recommendation with the admission that I’d heard of this book for a few years, but tbh kind of ignored it because I thought it was just FIRE/hustle-culture fluff and is one of those books people reflexively recommend as they try and register you for a subscription to their Patreon to teach you how to make courses on Patreon. WELL. I am delighted to tell you that I was wrong, and I wish I’d read it at least several years ago. it was first published in *1992* (not like 2018, by a vanlife vlogger, as I assumed). and it focuses, yes, on the psychology of money and our relationship to it, but also substantially on the ecological impacts overconsumption and the damage it wreaks on our personal finances and on the earth.