Culture of Distraction

Essays

From the Hacker News discussion of my Silicon-Valley-is-destroying-the-world remark I came across a Joe Kraus talk on We’re Creating a Culture of Distraction. (I’m a huge fan of Joe and excited to see he’s on WordPress now.)

It’s also important to read Paul Graham’s Acceleration of Addictiveness where he compares addictive technology to alcohol and cigarettes, society developed “antibodies” to the danger of cigarettes, but it took about a hundred years, and technology is changing much faster than that now.

The most prescient here is Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death, originally published in 1985. It’s long, but I’m going to quote the foreword in its entirety because it’s worth reading a few times over:

We were keeping our eye on 1984. When the year came and the prophecy didn’t, thoughtful Americans sang softly in praise of themselves. The roots of liberal democracy had held. Wherever else the terror had happened, we, at least, had not been visited by Orwellian nightmares.

But we had forgotten that alongside Orwell’s dark vision, there was another – slightly older, slightly less well known, equally chilling: Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. Contrary to common belief even among the educated, Huxley and Orwell did not prophesy the same thing. Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley’s vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.

What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny “failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions”. In 1984, Huxley added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us.

This book is about the possibility that Huxley, not Orwell, was right.

Oh, and we just launched new comment push notifications for iPhone and iPad. It’s one of those days. 😉

Email Reloaded

Email

So the long and short of it is, I’m loading all the email I receive into a database using a fun combination of Procmail, Spam Assassin, and a sprinkling of command line PHP. I’m very excited about this, more excited than I’ve been about a new project in a while. For me, email has been steadily waning in utility for the past year, and I want to breathe new life into it. I’m tired of folders. I’m tired of slow searching. I don’t want to hand my email over to someone else, even if it’s Google. I don’t want to deal with mbox or IMAP or maildir or any of that junk. Those are implementation details of various servers and clients.

Mirroring my email into a MySQL database has some interesting ramifications. Imagine instant Gmail-type searching using FULLTEXT or LIKE. Imagine instant email backup using MySQL replication. Think email RSS feeds, keyed on searches or senders or anything. Don’t forget the interesting metrics that can be extracted from this as well. Right now I’ve replaced my timely dozen with an counter running since this morning. If you send me an email, you’ll see it increment live. If it increments the spam counter you may want to resend it and reword your mortgage suggestion. This is the most basic of a hundred interesting things that can be culled from this data.

I want to hear your wildest dreams. Besides the obvious search, backup, and statistics benefits, what can you imagine this system doing? What would you like email to address? (groan…) What email metadata is interesting? (I’m currently tracking subject, date sent, date received, from, the message itself, and spam status.) What statistics would be interesting to you? Is anyone even interested in this or am I just spinning my wheels?

Today my mail lives in 400 MB of mbox folders I access using IMAP. Tomorrow I want something better.

No Smartphone for Lent

Tech

nophoneEvery year for Lent I try to give something up that I would otherwise find unimaginable or consider myself particularly dependent on. Last year I gave up meat, which isn’t that unusual but you have to remember I’m from Texas. 😉

This year as I surveyed my life there was one thing I kept coming back to as being completely dependent on: my smartphone(s). It’s only been a few years since the iPhone came out, but it’s inconceivable to imagine my life today without my calendar, email, Foursquare, Path, Chrome, Tripit, Simplenote, WordPress, Tweetbot, Sonos, Uber, Spotify and my iTunes library, and most importantly Google Maps. (On my second screen: SmartThings, Nest, Lociktron, Lutron, 1Password, Calm, Authy, NextDraft, Withings, Circa…) These apps and everything they represent weave into every aspect of my life, I’m sure I’m one of those people who looks at their phone at least 150 times a day. My smartphone is my camera, my flashlight, my connection to the world, and my crutch.

A small selection of what a phone replaces, from Reddit.

And now it’s what I’m giving up for Lent in 2014, from March 5th until April 17th. (Yes, that includes SxSW.) For safety and business reasons I’m going to have a makes-phone-calls-only phone, and might hop in a friend’s Uber, but the idea is there will not be a device on me 24/7 that I’m tethered to, constantly looking at, and lost and hopeless without. You obviously can’t turn back the clock on progress, so I don’t expect this to be a permanent thing, but I’m curious what I miss the most, how it affects my ability to focus throughout the day, and how it changes my relationships with other people, especially the lack of messaging.

I am in the market for a cool feature phone though, maybe a small one like Zoolander had or a slidey one like in the Matrix. Any suggestions?

I’ll leave you with the “I forgot my phone” video from last year:

Facebook Dropping Patent Clause

WordPress

I am surprised and excited to see the news that Facebook is going to drop the patent clause that I wrote about last week. They’ve announced that with React 16 the license will just be regular MIT with no patent addition. I applaud Facebook for making this move, and I hope that patent clause use is re-examined across all their open source projects.

Our decision to move away from React, based on their previous stance, has sparked a lot of interesting discussions in the WordPress world. Particularly with Gutenberg there may be an approach that allows developers to write Gutenberg blocks (Gutenblocks) in the library of their choice including Preact, Polymer, or Vue, and now React could be an officially-supported option as well.

I want to say thank you to everyone who participated in the discussion thus far, I really appreciate it. The vigorous debate and discussion in the comments here and on Hacker News and Reddit was great for the passion people brought and the opportunity to learn about so many different points of view; it was even better that Facebook was listening.

State of the Word 2012

Events, ,

I had an amazing weekend at WordCamp San Francisco hanging out with hundreds of WordPress users from all over the world at the main event and the dev day afterward. Then on Sunday I was humbled to be featured on the cover of my hometown paper the Houston Chronicle in an article David Kaplan wrote following the 10-year high school reunion I went to (PDF).

If you wanted to catch up on the State of the Word address I gave on Saturday, the video and the slides are now online, or you can watch it embedded below. The slides are on Slideshare.

It was a pleasure meeting so many of you, and I hope it’s not next year before we meet again. Thank you to Michael Pick and Pete Davies for helping me out under tight timelines again.

Twenty-Eight

Personal

This is the tenth year I’ve blogged my birthday: 19, 20, 21, 22 (this one is funny), 23, 24, 25, and 26, 27. Wow… I don’t think I’ve ever done anything for ten years in a row before.

The public awareness of blogging comes and goes every two years, but for me it’s been a rock of intrinsic goodness that I keep coming back to. I think that’s why I love working on the platforms around it so much.

I was on the road a lot this year, covering about 190k miles over 245 days. (An average velocity of 21.6 mph.) I spent longer stretches in the same place, and often to places I had been before, which was nice for starting to appreciate the character of a given place. (52 cities and 12 countries.)

It was also one of my most productive years yet. The big resolutions from last year — launching Jetpack, Jazz Quotes, three major WordPress versions — all were completed, and as the team at Automattic grew and matured I was able to focus my time a lot more, even finding time to start coding again and switch (back) to Mac after 8 years on Windows.

In my twenty-eighth year I want to focus more on friends, family, and loved ones, something I’m running late for by doing this blog post, so will wrap this up now and see you all more later in 2012. 🙂

Reminder: In lieu of gifts, I’m trying to raise $28,000 to help bring clean water to Africa. It’s ambitious but I think we can do it. Please chip in!

All birthday posts: 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40.

Pingdom writes WordPress completely dominates top 100 blogs. I’m quoted in the article saying that the 49% marketshare we have among top blogs will continue to grow, and I’d like to expand on that a bit because it’s a strong statement.

Typepad and Blogsmith, the two platforms that dropped the most over the past 3 years, are going to disappear either through blogs still using them losing relevance, or their active blogs switching away. Movable Type will likely follow suit, unless its now Japanese-led development makes a pretty drastic change in its product direction. (Consultants focused on Movable Type and Typepad have already started shifting focus to switching their clients to modern platforms to avoid losing the relationship.)

The other big shift will come from the ~22% on custom platforms — this is going to become as niche as writing your own web server instead of using Apache or Nginx. Some organizations like Huffington Post might continue to make the necessary investments of over 40 engineers to maintain a platform at scale, the rest will find better return investing those resources in editorial. Great stories find an audience regardless of their platform.

WordPress’ biggest challenge over the next two years, and where we’re focusing core development, will be around evolving our dashboard to be faster and more accessible, especially on touch devices. Many of our founding assumptions about how, where, and why people publish are shifting, but the flexibility of WordPress as a platform and the tens of thousands of plugins and themes available are hard to match. We might not always be the platform people start with, but we want to be what the best graduate to.

Small Handheld Recorder

Asides

I’ve gotten some great recommendations for podcasting equipment for when I’m at home, but because I spend so little time at home that’s not practical for 95% of the time when I’d want to be podcasting. Once I was interviewed by NPR and the lady had this awesome pocket thing with a fuzzy mic on the end, the sound quality was great on it. Does anyone have recommendation for something I could carry in my pocket that sounds better than what I use now?

There is No Such Thing as a Split License

Asides

There’s a term that pops in the WordPress community, “split license”, that we should put to rest. It’s sloppy at best, misleading at worst.

First, some background. WordPress is under a license called the GPL, which basically says you can do whatever you like with the software, but if you distribute changes or create derivative works they also need to be under the GPL. Think of it like a Creative Commons Sharealike license.

In the past people weren’t sure if themes for WordPress were derivative works and needed to be GPL. In 2009 we got an outside legal opinion that cleared up the matter saying that the PHP in themes definitely had to be GPL, and for CSS and images it was optional. Basically everyone in the WP community went fully GPL, sometimes called 100% GPL, for all the files required to run their theme (PHP, JS, CSS, artwork). The predicted theme apocalypse and death of WordPress didn’t happen and in fact both theme shops and WordPress flourished, and best of all users had all the same freedoms from their themes as they got from WordPress. It was controversial at the time, but I think history has reflected well on the approach the WP community took.

As I said the PHP has to be GPL, the other stuff can be something else — many people started to use the term “split license” or “split GPL” to describe this. The problem, especially with the latter, is it leaves out the most important information. “Split GPL” doesn’t say whether the theme is violating WordPress’ license or not (maybe it’s proprietary PHP and GPL CSS), and more importantly doesn’t say what the non-GPL stuff is, which is the part you need to worry about! It also makes it sound like a split license is a thing, when all it really means is there are different licenses for different parts of the work. If something has a “split license” you have no idea what restrictions or freedoms it provides.

If someone decides to have different licenses for different parts of a theme they ship in one package, it’s probably worth taking a few extra words to spell out what the rights and restrictions are, like “GPL PHP, and a restrictive proprietary license for all other elements included with the theme.” This is really important because if you’re a smart WordPress consumer you should avoid proprietary software, there is always a GPL alternative that gives you the rights and freedoms you deserve, and probably is from a nicer person who is more in line with the philosophy of the rest of WordPress. Vote with your pocketbook, buy GPL software!

 

“We have the largest and deepest audience profiles on the web.” — David Fleck, general manager of advertising at Disqus. Translation: We’re tracking everyone who visits a website with Disqus enabled and building a profile of them based on the content of the sites they visit and any comments they leave. “Deeper” than Facebook.

“So I’m particularly excited to announce that we’re bringing our native advertising product, Sponsored Comments, to the world of programmatic and we’re doing it on a global basis. […] Starting today, Xaxis clients, which include some of the best brands in the world, will buy and place Sponsored Comments advertising across much of the Disqus network.” Translation: It’s not comment spam if we’re getting paid for it.

I was just reading some comments the other day and thinking how it’d be great to see some sponsored brand content there instead of users, like there already was on the rest of the page. Glad there’s a solution for that on a global basis now.

Essential PC Software

Asides,

I recently got my Sony TX690 back from the repair place, I asked them to wipe the HD to rid me of the plague that is Vista. Here’s the software I installed, in order, after getting it back: Firefox, Foxmarks, Thunderbird, Putty, TortoiseSVN, MIRC, Dreamweaver, Photoshop, Topstyle, AutoHotKey, iTunes, EVDO drivers, Filezilla. I will probably install XAMPP later for offline plane hacking. That’s all I need to do everything I do on a computer.

Vista, SSD, and Sound

Uncategorized

So I managed to snag a 32gb flash solid state drive. (Here’s a picture.) I personally think SSDs are the future and a computer sold with a regular hard disk in five years will seem as quaint as selling one with a tape drive is today. However the technology is still really early, as evidenced by the difficulty I had obtaining one, the cost, and the relatively small storage size (larger sizes are promised or announced, but only 32GB is commercially available). 32gb is more than enough for my primary HD, as anything heavy I can store on a cheap and slow SATA drive or on the network.
I spend a lot of time on my desktop, so I’m fairly sensitive to the speed of things there. I year or so ago I upgraded to a Western Digital 10k Raptor SATA drive and I was pleasantly surprised by the speed boost, more than I normally get from upgrading the CPU. So I thought the SSD would be a nice chance to refresh my desktop and also do a clean install of Windows Vista, which I’ve had laying around. I decided not to touch the CPU, memory, or graphics card, which are a FX-55, 4gb, and Radeon X800 respectively. Installing the SSD was easy, I just needed an IDE converter because it is laptop size.

First off, I like Vista better than Windows XP. There are just a lot of little things, like when you press Windows + M it minimizes windows on both monitors, that are a lot more polished. Also, thanks to the SSD, install and boot times are incredibly fast. Launching programs also feels snappier. The visual effects seem fine on my slightly-old video card, and in general everything feels great. There is also a benefit to wiping the OS and starting with a fresh, I probably had some cruft accumulated before which may have contributed to a slowdown. I don’t know if Vista is worth an upgrade, but if you’re going to start fresh I would go for it.

I have run into two problem, one large and one small. First, about 24 hours after I had set things up,  I came back to the computer and it said it had rebooted to recover from a “blue screen” error. I have no idea what caused this, but it hasn’t happened since.

More importantly though, something is seriously wrong with the sound. System sounds, and playing music through iTunes or Windows Media sounds great… for about 5 minutes. At some seemingly random point all the sound switches to this really awful distortion which is painful to the ear. When this happens I have to close the application that was playing sound, be it a Youtube video in Firefox or an MP3 in Windows Media, and restart the application for any sound on the computer to return to normal. This sucks. I’m just using the standard nForce sound card built into my motherboard, nothing fancy, and according to Vista it can’t find a better driver for it. I’ve googled around a lot but can’t find anyone with a similar problem, but if I figure out a fix I’ll update this entry to help future net searchers.

What is Google Cooking?

Uncategorized

Watching my logs, I’ve been getting random requests from Googlebot for atom.xml and index.rdf files on this site and others. It’s always in the root or in relevant subdirectories (usually /blog or similar). All of these sites run WordPress, and I can promise there is no mention of or links to atom.xml or index.rdf anywhere. This means Googlebot is guessing that these files will be there. Now I’ve come to expect random flailing for syndication files from Feedster and Kinja, but Google? Et tu, Googlebot?

I suspect this is a hint of something new coming, perhaps feed-aware search like Feedster or RSS links in search results like Yahoo. Maybe a Google-aggregator? Google BlogNews? I want answers! They’ve got some room on above the search box since their redesign, maybe the next item there will be a “blog” tab. (Of course since their redesign they aren’t real tabs anymore, a regression in my opinion. I think tabs are a very effective navigation metaphor and worked well for Google.)

Anyone have any clues, ideas, or notice something similar in their logs?

Update: As always, we’re a few days ahead of the curve here at photomatt.net. Dave Winer has noticed the hits on his server and is covering the issue today.

Update: I’m late to the game, but Evan Williams confirms in part what I was suspecting and also jabs at the conspiracy theorists.

Is it more likely that this is not a calculated move, but that they are experimenting with crawling feeds in general and that, if they’re going to index them, they probably want as many as possible? And that maybe (hmmm…) they started with Blogger blogs first, since they were handy, and they tended to find feeds at index.rdf and atom.xml, and they haven’t yet optimized their crawler because they’ve been working on other stuff?

Follow-up Questions from WCEU

Matias and I just finished up the discussion and Q&A for the online WordCamp Europe that is going on right now, which was originally happening in Porto.

There were more good questions than we had time to get to, so at the end I suggested that we continue the conversation here, in the comments section! Comments are the best part of blogging.

So if you have a question we didn’t get to, please drop it below. If you don’t have a Gravatar yet now’s a good time to make one.