Month: June 2020

(Part 3)

How Wellness when Always-On relates to other Mega-trends and Big Questions:

Because The Next Computer is likely to be iPad and other mobile-first devices, they will have native support for social media apps, which have turned notifications into a dark art for holding people’s attention. Apple’s solution to this has been Screen Time, which chiefly measures the time you spent on your phone, along with a list of your most-used apps. With iOS 13 Apple now also nudges you whether you really want notifications from an app – perhaps by tracking if you haven’t responded to past notifications. Over and above this, apps like Moment not only measure phone pickups and screen and app usage, but also have coaching programmes to help you kick your phone (or tablet) addiction. Regardless, none of this is a substitute for you being conscious about your computer usage, and apps being actively designed to get and hold your attention.

Conscious Discovery and Curation is extremely important to wellness. Not only because of its sheer abundance, but also because the incentives are stacked towards making it as outrage-worthy and negative as possible. It is now difficult to find mainstream news institutions, whether in print, on TV or online, that do not optimise for attention in this manner. But there are encouraging signs of individuals who recognise this, who have opinions on what is important and what is not, and while finding them is hard, following them is not. 

The Internet has made it possible for people to build an Audience directly and get their message out, independent of mediating institutions. Even so, it goes both ways: we have recently have seen one notable example of such an individual disintermediating his institution, and another placing an institution in between. The About page of the email newsletter services startup Substack links to more examples of independent publishers.

Speaking of which, email newsletters and podcasts are making a comeback from over ten years ago because of a sense of fatigue with the constant emotional manipulation and lowest-common-denominator algorithms of social media. These are part of the Dark Forest of the Internet, private, in that they are not typically not available as publicly indexable web pages. As conversation shifts away from the noise and hostility of Twitter and the envy-stoking of Facebook, it is shifting towards closed groups on messaging apps like Telegram in order to maintain a sense of sanity and focus. (Telegram has for many years been the medium of choice for cryptocurrency projects, but it’s expanded to several interest groups, including becoming a test-prep platformin India.)

So there we have it. Wellness when Always-on requires being aware of the distractions of our Next Computer, how we Discover and consume new content and the Dark Forests we retreat into, even as we build direct relationships with people who know that that Audience is their Capital.

In an age where our attention is the most valuable commodity of all, with entrenched systems and institutions that cultivate, hijack, farm, package, sell and resell it, paying that very attention, being conscious, is more important than ever before.

(Part 5 – TBD)

Yesterday’s post about Uber’s decision to scrap, en masse, tens of thousands of perfectly functional electric bikes due to, according to them, potential liability issues reminded me of the debate between shareholder and stakeholder responsibility of corporations. 

Stakeholders are a broader set of people, which include employees, the communities in which the company’s offices operate, the environment, among others. Shareholders are therefore a subset of stakeholders.

This 2019 survey published by the Stanford Business School shows, though, that

Only 12 percent of the CEOs and CFOs of S&P 1500 companies believe that addressing stakeholder interests is a short-term cost that leads to long-term value… 

Common consensus is that U.S. companies are not investing in areas like sustainability, the environment, their employee base, or communities because they do not want to incur the costs today that are necessary for long-term success in these areas. However, the companies themselves do not see it this way. Most do not believe that a tradeoff exists between short- and long-term outcomes. Instead, their viewpoints tend to fall into one of two buckets: either they believe addressing stakeholder concerns is costly to the company in the short run and will continue to be costly in the future, or they believe that addressing these concerns is immediately beneficial to the company and will remain so into the future—a so-called ‘free lunch.’”

No wonder that Uber didn’t much care for, or go the extra mile for ensuring its bikes ended up with the hands of people, neighbourhoods, communities that could have really used them.

We have seen before my bias towards using solid, well designed tools for many years, repairing them instead of replacing:

These machines appeal to me because they’re such a terrific example of sustainability. Apple may release new laptops and revisions every year but you don’t have to buy them that often. In fact you can go five years, even ten depending on what you use your computer for. The relatively high price you pay up-front translates to many years of trouble-free use. The ‘cost per wear‘ equivalent of Apple’s laptops is extremely low.

May 2020 saw an incident that is the polar opposite of this ethos, which is why it caught my attention.

The summary is this: In 2018 Uber bought the electric bike sharing company Jump. In 2020, Uber made an investment in another shared electric scooter company named Lime. As part of this deal, the ownership of Jump’s assets was transferred to Lime. In other words, Lime took Jump off Uber’s hands. Except that “there were also “tens of thousands” of older-model bikes that Lime did not inherit as part of the deal”. 

These electric bikes were all destroyed. 

Specifically, the company that has the contract

is removing and keeping the electronic and battery components. After that… the bikes and scooters will “be shredded through the auto shredder, and the metal will be distributed out from there.”

The statement from Uber simply says

“We explored donating the remaining, older-model bikes, but given many significant issues—including maintenance, liability, safety concerns, and a lack of consumer-grade charging equipment—we decided the best approach was to responsibly recycle them.”

This is a travesty. These bikes could have been donated to communities in the US or even to lower-income countries, de-branded and with the battery pack and tracking elements removed. A bike-sharing enthusiast website describes how this could be done for the specific Jump bike model being scrapped. It is hard to imagine that Uber could not have found a single local government body in the US that was not willing to work with liability issues. 

The same bike sharing enthusiast site described a worse problem with a new Jump model that is now with Lime:

the JUMP engineers who designed the 5.8 were never able to get the system to work just right… The new 5.8 has chipsets with firmware built into almost everything. Even the taillight has to talk to the other boards, or it will not unlock or power up. It is arguably the most technologically progressive dockless bicycle ever built, and all of the code and engineering behind this firmware was executed entirely in-house by JUMP techs… And UBER fired every last JUMP engineer that designed the system.

For a combination of corporate fecklessness in the name of risk avoidance, this episode is going to be hard to top.

“Your email inbox is other people’s to-do list for you.”

– Chris O’Neill, former Evernote CEO

This is the opposite of vapourware. By the CTO of Amazon Web Services, back in 2006, an all-time classic for me:

To ensure that a service meets the needs of the customer (and not more than that) we use a process called “Working Backwards” in which you start with your customer and work your way backwards until you get to the minimum set of technology requirements to satisfy what you try to achieve.

Therefore, completely counter-intuitively, 

Start by writing the Press Release. Nail it. The press release describes in a simple way what the product does and why it exists – what are the features and benefits. It needs to be very clear and to the point. Writing a press release up front clarifies how the world will see the product – not just how we think about it internally.

A review of the Echo Look speaker from Amazonlaunched in 2017:

The good The $200 Amazon Echo Look lets you take voice-activated full-body selfies and short video clips that make it easy to catalog and keep track of your wardrobe. The hallmark feature, Style Check, provides input when you’re comparing two outfits, and the feedback is usually spot-on.

The bad The sound quality stinks. The app is missing features that would make it a more useful style adviser. It’s more expensive than other smart speakers in the Amazon family. And privacy concerns? I have a few.

Just three years later, the company has not just discontinued the device, but confirmed that existing devices will stop working as well.

Amazon is notifying at least some Look owners that they can get a free Echo Show 5 if they add the connected display to their cart and use the code ECHOLOOK20 by September 24th. It’s not clear if every customer is getting that offer, so don’t be surprised if it doesn’t work.

And that 

Amazon is offering a free Amazon Photos account to store all of the users’ photos and videos through July 24, 2021. However, if they do not create an Amazon Photos account by July 24, 2021, the photos will no longer be accessible and deleted.

That’s it. If you spent USD 200 on a device, allowed it access to your wardrobe, not just passively but by actively taking photos, and relied on it to learn and give you suggestions, Amazon has left you with a piece of plastic and circuitry that will no longer work even though the device itself is undamaged. 

For those of us who think that when we buy an Echo or such smart device, we are buying a device or appliance like a mixer or iron, it’s very different

Amazon thinks about devices as a means of providing services. If the device isn’t leading to more use of services or if the service can be delivered as effectively through another device that provides other benefits, then it follows that the original device can be eliminated or replaced

You’re spending an up-front non-refundable amount to let Amazon conduct an experiment on you and your data. 

It’s not an isolated incident. This 2016 article from Wired magazine describes how the Google subsidiary Nest shut down a smart home hub product– a product thymat was explicitly designed to control other devices and services. A Revolv user made the central point on a blog post:

“When software and hardware are intertwined, does a warranty mean you stop supporting the hardware or does it mean that the manufacturer can intentionally disable it without consequence? Tony Fadell seems to believe the latter. Tony believes he has the right to reach into your home and pull the plug on your Nest products.”

In fact, Google last year shut down its entire Works With Nest program, designed explicitly to create an ecosystem of smart devices connected to the ecosystem of its subsidiary Nest. There would be no new integrations allowed and some – not all – integrations would have to be re-made with Google’s Assistant program.

Finally, Xiaomi’s Yeelight smart bulbs were reduced to becoming regular, expensive bulbs after a GDPR-related software update. 

These are all services. Not devices. And you pay an up-front cost to the manufacturer. Whether they continue to offer the service or not is entirely up to them. And whether you can use or repurpose the device – which you have already paid for – after they decide to shut the service down – is also entirely up to them. 

This is the unequal relationship we agree to take part in. Let us make sure that decision is conscious and educated.