Category: The Internets

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Notebook Technology The Internets

Apple announces iPhones for the 99 percent

Today Apple announced the new iPhone 5s, available in three different metallic finishes, including gold, and the new iPhone 5c, available in an array of colorful plastics for just $99. The dichotomy between the two phones is striking, almost as if they were built for the 1 percent and the 99 percent, mirroring the inequality of incomes and access to the Internet.

Make fun of the colors and plastic, but cheaper access to hardware and all the data along with it is a good thing. In 2009, twenty percent of Americans didn’t use Internet at home, work or school, or on a mobile device. In 2013, twenty percent of Americans don’t use Internet at home, work or school, or on a mobile device. After four years and seven billion dollars spent, the number hasn’t changed.

Our conversations about taste should be conversations about access. “Persistent digital inequality — caused by the inability to afford Internet service, lack of interest or a lack of computer literacy — is also deepening racial and economic disparities in the United States,” reports the New York Times.

While we guess that Steve Jobs is rolling in his grave in response to the colorful plastics, former Wall Street Journal journalist Jessica Lessin reports that in fact, cheaper phones were being considered as early as 2009. The affordable options were sidelined because of increased difficulties in the manufacturing processes, not because they weren’t pretty.

Meanwhile, sixty million people have been “shut off from jobs, government services, health care and education, and the social and economic effects of that gap [is] looming larger,” argues Edward Wyatt in the Times. So we can argue that Apple’s high-brow brand is being watered down (although surely the gold iPhone 5s makes up the difference), or we can rejoice that as technology grows the wealth gap, profits off your free labor and eliminates middle-class jobs, the industry is also providing affordable products and solutions while you make ends meet.

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Notebook Start-ups Technology The Internets Uncategorized

Your Startup Probably Shouldn’t Exist

It’s always fascinating to see why a startup fails, always useful to see what goes wrong. Not everything can or should be a huge business, or “a big hit.” For that reason, I appreciate that Pando Daily reporter Erin Griffith wades into the deadpool to bring us stories, like how YC alum Tutorspree shut down.

Tutorspree graduated from Y Combinator in 2011, calling itself an “Airbnb for tutors,” reports Griffith. Basically, Tutorspree was a marketplace that matched a tutor with its tutee. Besides the glaring pitfalls in such a model, several of which Griffith outlines in her article, we should also be thinking about whether this startup was really worthy of a $1 million investment and $7 million valuation in the first place.

Our obsession with building “big hits” hides all the other wonderful opportunities to make a real difference in people’s lives. Aggregating existing exchanges, like tutoring, and trying to monetize off the backs of others isn’t world-changing. Founders should try creating and providing real value.

Journalist Noreen Malone argues in the New Republic that tech bubbles exist, but mostly to protect the relatively young, well-off, and like-minded generation that builds apps that don’t matter. “Tech is something like the new Wall St. Mostly white mostly dudes getting rich by making stuff of limited social purpose and impact,” economist Umair Haque argued on Twitter. Malone also quotes Mother Jones’ Clara Jeffrey: “I saw the best minds of my generation building apps to send sexts and brag about fitness and avoid the poors.”

Scale, for the sake of size alone, is a small ambition. When you get investment, from venture capital or angel investors, your entire company changes. Your goal is to seek users or sales at the expense of everything else. I have been part of startups that failed – or will fail – for this reason. You sacrifice learning, and as a result, you don’t build a useful machine. You don’t build a meaningful machine. You build a marketing machine (which most people will fail at, since good marketing is predicated first and foremost on a good product). But the strongest biz dev strategies can’t save a crappy product. The best sales people won’t conceal thin intentions.

SIlicon Valley is losing its ability to inspire. “Popular culture has soured on Silicon Valley’s hotshots,” Malone argues. And that’s because long ago, Silicon Valley lost its ability to innovate.

Want to create real value? Start here.

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The Internets

This is Your Tech Life

The weather has turned, and now I am feeling restless. My eyes are glazed as I look down at the timestamp on the lower right-hand side of my screen. There is a mere splinter of sunlight on the brick wall outside our window and oh, how it makes my foot tap, my chest tighten. Can I stand another moment on my computer? I wonder.

It used to be that if we could escape the cubicle, we could escape the aimless sound of settling that ticks off nine-to-five. Now, we want to escape the sitting. We want to escape the screen. The poor cubicle isn’t forcing our dreams to hunch over; the screen inside of it is.

People are envious of me because of the cubicle thing. I work remotely, which means my dining room table is my office. Ask any other remote or freelance or location-independent worker however, and they will agree with me: it’s lonely. When you can work wherever you want, the path of least resistance is to sit inside your house all day and meet people through the Internet.

Social disconnection isn’t really the Internet’s fault though. People waved to neighbors from their porches until air conditioning arrived. Now, I don’t meet my neighbors until the fire alarm goes off and we all wait outside for the fireman’s clearance. I don’t even bring my computer; everything I own that matters is in the cloud.

Back online, here is my indulgence: I like visiting a person’s About page and studying their photo. I like turning my head to examine the wrinkle on their chin when they smile. And I like looking into their eyes. Indeed we are on the Internet, in part, because it allows us to stare.

I am intoxicated with my Internet life until I live my real life. Where all the senses inform my experience, not just what goes on inside my head. I particularly like going out for dinner and drinks because the service industry has not let go of looking you in the eye – their tip depends on the mysterious and momentary connection that results. And then there is running and because I recently sold my car, bicycling. I like when the humidity suffocates your lungs and you can feel everything in the air pushing back on you and yet, you move forward.

So, there are days I want to take the web middleman from his place between me and the rest of the world never to return. But my relationship with the web is a paradox. I can’t imagine life without it. And it is here that I want to say we should stop looking down at our computers, and down at our phones, and down at the rest of the screens that will inevitably arrive during the the rest of our lives. We should rebel.

We should look up.

But I cannot do this myself.  And so I feel the stillness pooling in the bottom of sitting muscles no matter if I go for a run or a drink. And the glow of the screen lights my face. If we were in a movie, this would be the doomsday ending. But somehow, I think it will all be okay.

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The Internets

Being Always On, Always Right and the Case for Anonymity

There are a lot of reasons I stopped writing my last blog. Primarily though, it was because the Internet takes a lot out of you. It expects to be able to dissect everything. The Internet wants to pull you apart. Everything should be accessible and out there for all. In the Interneted world, you have to be always on.

I don’t particularly want to be always on. For starters, I am incredibly moody. Most people on the Internet seem like happy people or are on their way to being happy.

I am not happy. At least not today. Try again tomorrow?

Still, I soldiered on with my last blog until it petered to its end and took the last bits of me. And then after some distance and perspective, I started this new blog. I started showing up on Twitter. I logged onto Facebook more. But it’s even harder to be on the Internet than I remembered.

It’s exhausting. There hasn’t been a day when I didn’t crave the freedom of anonymity, if only to escape for a moment the pressure to be always right and available.

Not that I even hold anything back. I am not someone different in person. (Although how would you know, right? Or do you trust the identity I’ve put on the web?) What I write is what I experience. Perhaps a temper tantrum or two doesn’t make it in to a post, but well, now you know.

Point being, if I were anonymous, I would write the same things. But I think it would be easier.

There are a great many people, however, that cannot or do not express their opinions and thoughts and ideas so easily. Those people are forced into the category of degenerates on the web: trolls.

Many believe the trolls’ online anonymity “is a treatment of a symptom rather than a cure for the disease. The disease is a total lack of tolerance for the differing views of others in our society. The symptoms of our disease are things like racism, ostracization, unjust reprisal, stigmatization and persecution. [Anonymity] does nothing to address the root causes of these maladies.  On the contrary, it gives people carte blanch to revel, indeed to roll around gleefully, in them. [Anonymity] allow people to be their worst selves, to perpetuate the cycle of hate, fear, and cowardice that has gripped western societies, without the need to face the consequences of their words and actions.”

That comment is fairly reflective of the values of the open web. Radical transparency is linked to the promise of a “more tolerant, peaceful and profitable digital world.” Besides, would trolls ever say the things they do if their real identities were attached to their comments? Probably not, goes the usual argument.

Online authenticity and transparency forces you to live a certain kind of life. First of all, it forces you to live at least part of your life online. For anyone on Facebook, it’s a large part. Add anytime that you log in with your real identity to buy a product on Amazon, or use Twitter, or blog, or sell something on Etsy and it’s an increasingly large part until you don’t have a distinction between public and private identity.

Not only does such transparency force you to live your life online in order to complete basic tasks on the Internet, but it also forces documentation, so you have to live a certain kind of life that can be documented. You have to be right. And good. Online, all the time.

Sure, this allows you to Google yourself and the guy you met at the bar Saturday night, but it also allows you to make judgements based on that data trail. At its best, when we follow our friends’ profiles around the Internet, it is little more than novelty and entertainment. At its worst, employers and potential lovers decide our fate in just a few clicks.

Either way, it’s not hugely beneficial to you.

Companies, on the other hand, retain a large benefit from your identity. They are the ones that want to collect your real identity so they can use that data to their advantage. Facebook’s crowning virtue is authenticity and it seeks to control the web by poo-pooing anonymity at all costs. Now Facebook, Google, Yahoo, Twitter, and everyone else who wants you to login with their account follows you everywhere on the web and collects every bit of data it can about you.  Mark Zuckerburg famously once told an interviewer that “having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity.” How very virtuous… and profitable.

What’s real authenticity anyway? Is there room for you to change your mind on the Internet? One anonymous commenter argues, “Having to log in or authenticate myself makes me less likely to leave a comment. Having to identify the comment back to myself in a traceable way makes it less likely as well. My mood or sentiment about a topic might change, but that post will be written in stone.”

4chan, a site where “roughly 90 percent of all messages on 4chan are posted under the site’s default identity, ‘Anonymous,’” is generally known as the scurds of the web. But “those messages are not only anonymous but ephemeral, because 4chan has no long-term archives: old message threads are automatically deleted when new ones need the room. This mechanism was originally meant to save storage costs, but as [its founder Chris Poole] notes, ‘it’s both practical and philosophical.’ Among other things, it challenges the idea that digital identity should follow you across time, linking what you say when you’re a teenager to the middle-aged business owner you might become.”

Novel, that. People actually change and grow? Say it ain’t so, Internet! Anonymity allows people a place on the Internet to be wrong, Poole says. That’s important because while trolls may not say their real opinions to you in person, they’re still thinking it. And when we take away the place to test those ideas, we take away any chance of tolerance for differing views.

So do you prefer to live in a world where people don’t speak their minds at any cost? Or do you want to allow anonymity? One is decidedly more virtuous.