Category: jotter

Who keeps tying people to the tracks in front of trolleys and why don’t the police want to catch them? Why is a trolley company allowed to run trolleys with no brakes? Why are random civlians allowed access to the switching equipment? Why is the most famous philosophical thought experiment of the age really just “Toytown: Fury Road”?

Also I feel like maybe all these things are in fact happening in San Francisco

I have this idea that you don’t necessarily get Proust, on some level, until involuntary memory becomes an aspect of sheer mental weight. Until you’ve been above ground long enough to have filled up with significant mass of memory.  And, when you lay down, gravity makes it fall into your conscious mind.  The slightest things trigger it at night, now.

Ghost hands tugging at the rope of a trapdoor with forty-odd years of memory balanced precariously atop it.  The door drops and memories tumble out across the front of my head, unordered and unbidden and often uncomfortable. I notice it a lot, these days (and nights).  The nature of presomnal reverie has changed hugely as I’ve gotten older.  

It’s an odd thing, to see the workings of your brain change over time. Frankly, it’s not as fun as it used to be, and this may be one reason why old people are cranky.

Fuck you and your fucking little biscuit.

On memory:

• Stress, Memory And The Brown Bear
• THE MEMORY POLICE, Yoko Ogawa
• The Things You Don’t Take Pictures Of
• You Can’t Live In This World But There’s Nowhere Else To Go (Unless You’re The Moon FedEx)

The thing about daily routines is that, in the end, they slip and slide. I was reading over my most recent Daily Routine notation from earlier this year (that I somehow managed to misname as Jan 2022) and, boy, it’s the end of May and I don’t do all of that any more. Winter went on forever, there was family health stress, a few deadline-intensive jobs, getting DEPARTMENT OF MIDNIGHT up and running, various other things and, frankly, a large dose of fuckit.

This leads me back to the start of the loop, where you begin thinking about “productivity” and what you need to change or begin doing. And the thing about thinking about “productivity” is that you can easily find yourself in a space where thinking about “productivity” becomes the only activity you’re performing, and the things you’re trying to design to make work easier or better become the entirety of the work.

So I went outside and planted strawberries in the raised bed instead.

I have a magpie mind. Maintaining a concrete routine can work for months and even years, but in the end I’ll feel caged and look for a side door to slip out of, loosen the days up, turn a nine-part plan into a beginning and a finish and just wing it from A to B in whatever route suits me. I say to people: I always have a plan, but I always wing it in the middle and adjust to the air currents as I go.

Unfortunately, this can lead to me saying to myself, I can pick up that fucking notebook again or I could watch THE GROUNDSTAR CONSPIRACY with George Peppard and Michael Sarrazin, and what happened to Michael Sarrazin anyway, he was in fucking everything when I was a kid and often seemed to be either hallucinating or naked or both, and the music in this film feels really weird for the kind of film it is, and maybe I should isolate some of that music for sound design or maybe a basis for incidental music or an ident because Seventies electronic sound really is its own thing –

And then I pick up the notebook. Just not when I was supposed to.

Anyway, I need to change my routine back up, because I’ve gotten lazy.

I mean, it works fine. I just went from an iPhone 8 to an iPhone 14 Pro (on a free upgrade). Five years between phones. There was a time when that would have seemed like a quantum leap. From the Nokia N95 to the iPhone 3GS. Or the Nokia 7110 – WAP-enabled, the huge screen and springloaded slider to the much more powerful N95. Now, it’s – well, it’s got the battery life we actually promised for the previous one, there are even more and bigger camera lenses so now it won’t lay flat, and we’ve found new and interesting ways to hide the functions that used to be obvious and easy to reach. And… well, it doesn’t really do anything new, and it does the old stuff pretty much the way it always used to.

I actually really miss the days of Nokia releasing an insane new phone design every six months. Remember the Nokia evening phone for ladies? An evening phone.

Technologically spoiled in 2023? Perhaps. I mean, it’s a great device, right? I think I just miss that sense of – you’ve just spent a crazy amount of money on a device you need for various reasons, here’s a new function you never even thought of, because we work for very rich people who want us to invent these things. Here’s something new. Not just “it’s pretty much the same as your old phone but with a battery you haven’t thrashed out yet and a bigger screen.”

For me, it’s like when air speeds plateaued – takes the same amount of time to fly to NYC today as it did when I first started flying 30 years ago. That slight sadness of “well, nothing new in this space here is going to happen in my lifetime now.” I’ve had pretty much the same piece of glass and metal in a rubber case in my hand for thirteen years, and I guess it’s really not going to change much before I go.

I’ve been poking around this device for days, trying to make it do something new that I haven’t seen before. It’s not going to. Hell. it won’t even re-sync my music from iTunes on the laptop. It’s a weird feeling, to know new iterations of the thing I rely on aren’t actually going to get fresher or even better. Just clean off the factory floor and probably slightly worse at some things.

There have been a bunch of “How to break up with your phone” articles in my RSS feed of late, so I guess it’s that time of year: the digital equivalent of spring-cleaning posts.

There was once a time where telephones were wired into buildings, and to speak with the voice of someone else you had to call the telephone in the building where you hoped the person you wanted to speak to was located. Or you had to go to a public telephone box, which was a metal kiosk most often used as a rain shelter or toilet, where once again you had to place a call to a building, as calling other phone boxes involved pre-planning and guesswork and hoping someone else wasn’t using it or sleeping in it.

And then the mobile telephone became available generally, where you could call the pocket(ish)-sized device belonging to the person you wanted to speak to. Though the first person I knew with a mobile phone, in the last half of the Eighties, carried it around in a briefcase and used it to “impress” girls at clubs by letting them call people with it from the club floor. Until that cost him all his money.

Mobile phones developed new features – “feature phone” was the word – and became connected to the world in new ways, with SMS evolutions and WAP, the early mobile web. Feature phones became “smartphones” and before we knew it they became always-on anti-boredom devices, weaponised to become more immediately interesting than whoever you were sitting with or whatever was on the television.

And now they’re a Problem, because they’re attention-sucking focus-destroying addiction-generating monster boxes that eat everything around them. Just today, I have seen solves for this ranging from putting a rubber band over the screen to spending a couple of hundred on apps to stop you using apps.

Here’s the thing. If you own a smartphone, then you hold in your hand a very powerful little computer that’s capable of connecting to millions of handy little services. It should do what you tell it to, to the best of its ability. But the apps that make it go are programmed by people who want it, and you, to do what they tell it to. “Breaking up with your phone” is really just about busting that chain and threading your own. The people who made the phone itself want the phone to be useful to you, just like any other consumer product. Vorspung durch technik. Bosch and its “with many solutions that can lead to a better way of living.” Obviously. Think of it as a concierge device, there to make life smoother and simpler. And disable any function that gets in the way.

Just take social media off your phone, for God’s sake. If you really need the private messaging functions, get the dedicated apps like Facebook Messenger or Instagram Direct Messenger rather than the full-fat apps, but letting FB on to your phone is a bad idea in any case. Train your friends to use Signal or something. Twitter is broken and you shouldn’t be using it anyway, but if you’re determined to keep it on your phone, create a local news list and pin it so it’s what you see when you open the app. At least that’s useful. Also try disabling commenting on all of your social media posts for a few weeks and see if you can be bothered to switch back afterwards.

Kill all of your notifications except for the useful stuff – delivery notices, weather alerts, maybe newsflashes (although these are not all made equal – getting a BBC breaking news alert about the fucking cricket is, I submit, not worthy of a breaking news alert push), and people you need to hear from. Turn your phone into a useful concierge device, is the thing. Ask it to tell you only what’s useful to your life.

Use widgets to make your home screen more useable at a glance, and stuff your “problem” apps into a folder that you have to tap to open. If you have phone twitch, make it so you can get what you need from flashing the home screen. Weather, headlines, photos, calendar, whatever works for you. Unless it’s actually urgent, wait until you’re back at a desk to answer your email. Your concierge service is there to tell you a message has arrived for you, not to demand an immediate response.

Smartphones are incredible tools. I can use mine to identify a plant in seconds, see weather radar on my home screen, check my heart rate, send money to family within a minute, download and listen to podcasts, order goods (even my organic produce provider has an app, an excellent one), read a book and get the news. It will tell me when it’s going to rain and track my deliveries. Also I can use it to place telephone calls to people rather than buildings. It’s not for mitigating fleeting moments of “boredom.” Everything bad we say about phones now is pretty much everything bad we used to say about television: it’s just that phones have been made better at the bad stuff. Reconceive it as a tool in your pocket with many solutions that can lead to a better way of living. It’s your service. It works for you. Keep it that way. That’s all you need to do.