Dear Twitter

It’s been a week or so since I last spoke to you.

I’ll be honest, right from the start. I’ll just come out and say it: I’ve suddenly and pretty much completely fallen out of love with you.

I don’t know what this means. I don’t know if I’ll get my love back, and I don’t know that if I do I’ll feel the same way I used to. I think it’ll happen, but I don’t know when. It might be now, when I push “publish”, or tomorrow, or next week. It might – although I very much doubt it – be never.

I’m not sure why this happened, although I’ve got a few ideas, which, if you’ll bear with me, I’ll write a little bit about here.

While I’m being so honest, I’d also like to say this: In the last week I’ve missed you, but only a tiny little bit. It hasn’t hurt nearly as much as I thought it might. I’ve popped my head in, sent a DM or two, checked that no-one is being too rude about me, but for the most part I’ve been out of the loop.

While I’m really laying my cards on the table: I’ve actually felt relieved for the most part. Relieved, and quiet, and more in touch with the stuff going on out here in that thing they apparently call the real world.

As you know, Twitter, I’m a Scorpio, which apparently means I’m either all or nothing. Personally, I think the alignment of the planets has diddly fuck all to do with anything, but in this particular aspect the magicians with the big hats and big hair have got it right. I’m an “in or out”, “up or down”, “violently agreeing or not” kind of guy. I always have been, I always will be, and I’m way past being able to change this. I know it makes me a bit of a wanker at times, but that’s just me.

So when I sucked on the crack pipe you offered me back in [whenever it was], it came as no surprise to me that some level of addiction would follow soon after. I tweeted on average – Christ, I dunno – 20 or so times a day. I used to check it way more frequently than that. That’s the beauty and the danger of being always connected. I got to the stage where I’d read a book and tweet about it every couple of pages. I couldn’t watch a film without checking to see if anyone else was watching it. I spent entire mornings having conversations about stuff I won’t give a shit about in 10 days time, let alone in 10 years. I’d look up and it’d be lunchtime. My concentration is shot to fuck. I can’t hold down a paragraph of anything heavy, let alone a chapter. This isn’t a Susan Greenfield moment, by the way: tiredness, an over-busy brain and life in general don’t help. But Twitter doesn’t, either, especially when you misuse it like I got into the habit of misusing it.

I loved you, Twitter. I will again. But right now, you just feel like too much noise, too much presence in the wrong place.

Don’t get me wrong. This is – as everyone says who takes part in a breakup – not about you. It’s about me, and the person I am. It’s also about where I am right now: busy, book in the offing, head full of stuff, wanting to understand who I am and where I fit; wanting to simplify, radically; wanting to reduce the damn noise and get at the good stuff, the meaningful stuff, the lasting stuff.

["Clearly," - I hear you say - "he's getting old"...]

Social media – the big bad thing that we’re not apparently allowed to be good at anymore (since the inevitable tribes of wankers selling “social media guru” services arrived, with no clue about what it *actually* means to engage with people in meaningful ways) is one of the things I do, and one of the things I understand. I believed in it. I still believe in it, unfashionable though that is right now. I’m not selling out of social media, in my brief spell away: after all, I’m blogging this fucking post, like the social media twat that I am. I just happen to have gone too damn far, just like those fuckers with the astrological charts said I would. And, irritatingly, my response to that is just as predictable: a total break, not just a lessening. I don’t do lessenings, remember? I do extremes.

And that, for those of you who are asking (and thank you for asking), is that.

I started writing this thinking I might have something profound to say. Turns out I’m just saying “It’s all a bit noisy, I’ll be back” and in doing so, I just added another 700 words to the noise.

Maybe I’ll just tweet it instead.

Having discovered during a routine upgrade thingy whotsit that my WP install was stuffed to the nines with SEEBRITTNEYSKNOCKERS / BIKINIBABES / HUGESCHOLNG / type files I thought I’d start fresh and knock out the whole variousbits site. Clearly therefore things are under construction while I bugger it all up a bit more. Bring on a retro gif.

What if the hype is actually all hype?

What if someone in the press misheard an Apple employee talking, and did that – pretty normal – press thing of inflating it beyond all proportion? What if it became a pretty standard Silicon Valley / noomeedya / excited geek Chinese whispers kind of thing, no basis of truth whatsoever:

“…well there I was at the bar, and I said to him that – well, Wednesday 27th January is late for a product launch”

I mean, it wouldn’t take much, would it? A crowded room, a misheard phrase. iSlate. Is late.

Maybe “An Apple spokesman said the company did not comment on rumours” actually means “there is no fucking iSlate“?

Maybe Jobs has spent the last week desperately trying to rustle up a product, an idea, anything that fits the hype which was created out of a false rumour? Imagine the board room scene:

Jobs: “What do you mean, we have NOTHING?”

Employee: “Sir, I’m sorry, we’re just all out of ideas”

Jobs: “Nothing at all?”

Employee: “Well, we just got these shots of an iPhone and – like – well, Photoshopped them a bit and it kinda looks quite cool…”

Jobs: “But you don’t actually HAVE one, right? There IS NO PRODUCT?”

Employee: “….well…er…not as such, no”

…just sayin’…

Today, following a tweet and a link to this blog post, I went out on a post-Christmas, “balls to it” kind of whim (the kind your bank manager and wife hate) and bought myself a GPS travel tracker.

This is a small  (matchbox-sized) unit with a single button on it (on/off), and it basically does one thing – logs location data at a regular (user-specifiable) frequency.

Why would you want to do this? Well, apart from tracking cats or taking on board the subliminal message that you might want to follow your unfaithful husband or wife (the unit is called – rather nastily – “i-gotU”), one of the main reasons is this: you can use it to geotag photos automagically.

The nice thing about the unit is that you can use it with any camera, not just your fairly-crappy iPhone (already GPS-enabled) one. How? it’s really, really simple: you just sync the clock on the GPS unit to the clock on whichever camera you’re going to use. Bingo. The supplied software does the hard work of matching geo-location to time and then (here’s the cool bit), writes that data back as EXIF to the image. In human speak, that means when you upload your pictures to Flickr or import to Picasa, the location of the image is automatically logged. And that, ladies and gentlefolks, is cool.

None of this is rocket science (although as a kid I would have probably wet myself in excitement about a matchbox-sized Bond-style tracking unit..) but the cheapness, small size, simplicity with which this particular idea has been executed is pretty compelling.

Simplicity, as always, is a fine thing.

Here’s one thing that we use daily that we’ve never had to use in previous generations: passwords.

With passwords comes that moment – you know the one – when you’re at someone’s computer and they need to login to something.

You make a big show of LOOKING IN THE OTHER DIRECTION, either by wandering away in as pointed a way as you can or by DELIBERATELY DOING SOMETHING ELSE. Whatever it is you choose to do, you do anything to make it look like you’re not staring over their shoulder at the secret combination of keys they’re tapping.

Watch it happening. It’s fascinating. Some people rub their eyes in a mock show of NOT LOOKING. Others make a joke of it: “I’ll just go OVER HERE while you do that”. Some people look up at the ceiling. Others check out their phone (phones are good for situations like this, or for that moment when the drunk person starts talking to you on a bus…)

However you do it, it seems clear to me that we need a verb to describe the action..

“I’ll just degaze myself while you do that”

“Sorry, let me chicago for a moment” (cmon 80′s kids, get with it…)

“You login – I’ll just offstare until you’re done”

Maybe some latin? Or rhyming slang?

Climate change sceptic? You, sir or madam, are stupid. But more importantly, you are also a coward.

You’re stupid because you’re in denial of a vast wealth of evidence. Vast. But that’s not what really needs saying: the arguments are going to roll on with the leaked emails and the naysayers, the green camps, the marches. People like James “right about everything” (his words, not mine) Delingpole are going to carry on writing the kind of stuff we’ve seen recently, and you endless lines of people denying there is anything wrong are going to keep commenting and blathering and pulling other figures out and countering every argument that is put forward.

The fact is, if we had a form signed in blood by every scientist on the planet swearing blind that all the evidence was overwhelmingly supportive of man’s impact on global warming, you’d still find something or some way to deny it. You’d probably decide that science was in fact the wrong discipline to be basing Western civilisation on, that gravity didn’t exist and we should all start howling at the moon instead. Then if we got the moon to sign the form too, you’d move on to something else. That’s what you’re like, right?

Here’s the thing that you, Mr Sceptic, seem to fail to realise:

I, and the millions of others who are convinced by the overwhelming evidence (that’s the evidence that just keeps coming pretty much universally from scientists the world over):  we don’t mind looking stupid. In thirty years time, I’m actually going to be pretty damn pleased when my kids and their kids swing by and take the piss that “once upon a time, dad thought that the WORLD WAS GOING TO END! What a FOOL!”. I’m going to laugh at myself, too. Long and very, very hard.

If I spend the next thirty years turning off lights, cutting down my waste, trying hard to economise and re-cycle and minimise my impact as much as possible and it then turns out that actually there really IS a bottomless pit of oil and a corresponding hole in the ground into which I can pour all my plastic shit, I’m going to be delighted. I’ll be out there partying with the rest of you, burning a few tyres, driving my 4×4 round the block and running my dishwasher all night. Count me in. I’ll be needing to get drunk MORE than you lot because I’ll have been denying myself all this WASTE FUN that you’ll have been having for three decades. Fantastic.

But the thing is, Mr Sceptic, I’d really rather not take the chance. And there’s two points for me here. Firstly, it’s Tim O’Reilly’s post about Pascal’s Wager: if we’re right about climate change, we should do something. If we’re wrong, what have we got to lose? Argue your arse out of that one, if you please. I know you’ll try.

Secondly, and this is possibly as important to me: wasting things is wrong. It has never been right. Food, electricity, lives: when has anything good ever come from using something that you don’t need? Why sit outside the shop with your engine running if you can turn it off and stop wasting something? Why throw plastic bags away when you can use them again? If you’re as rational as you claim to be, Mr Sceptic, please lay out the arguments why waste is good, if you please. I’d be delighted to hear them.

In short, Mr Sceptic, I would much much rather be in the camp of people who are trying and prepared to be wrong than in the camp of people who are denying. I think if you look deep inside yourself and behind your wall of bravado; I think if you take just a little bit of time to look not just at the world immediately in front of your eyes but the one beyond that; if you look behind the – oh so terribly fashionable to be cynical – exterior, you might find you actually feel the same way, too.

I knocked out a quick tune last night..

You can hear it here. As always the disclaimer is: “it ain’t finished yet”; subtext: “…and probably won’t ever be…”

Things I like: the offbeat squirches when the kick and snare comes in; the dropped echoey electric piano; the slightly conflicting wash behind the back and the way that it comes to the front near the end of the mix

Things I don’t like: the bass line. That fucker is SO lazy. Sorry about that – I was tired at the time and couldn’t think of anything more interesting to do with it; the mix is also pretty lazy, but that’s me through and through. I need a TECHNICIAN to do that trivial stuff for me

This, and a whole other bunch of unfinished aural fiddlings are here.

I like this. A new door, a new office, a new environment. A broken piece of usability.

Why is it that everyone (I’ve watched: it is -everyone-) thinks that this door pushes rather than pulls? Is it because it is the first door you get to from a public space and the assumption is it opens inwards? What is the norm? No idea.

My bus fare from Odd Down to the town centre in Bath (a 2.2 mile journey) has just risen again, to £2.10 a single. Let’s say (I don’t know for sure – I rarely get returns) that this means a 2-way journey is, what, £4.00?

Now let’s think about me, my wife and 2 boys, wanting to go down into town on a Saturday. The boys are currently (but not for much longer) free. So for just my wife and I to go down and back into town is £8.00, or thereabouts.

Car parking in Bath isn’t cheap, but I know that I can park ours for an entire day at a central location (I’m not telling you where it is in case you find it) for £4.00.

The sum  is already looking pretty weak in support of Bath’s buses, but let’s add in some other bits of the equation: on the plus side, travelling by bus is greener. On the minus, the journey time is the same in bus or car and comfort (getting 2 kids + pushchair etc onto crowded bus) is much better in a car. There are a whole load of other things on the periphery too: endlessly rude and suicidally fast bus drivers and bonkers passengers among them, but I won’t bang on here.

Now, we’re reasonably green, and like to think about the environment as much as possible, but the equation is looking pretty badly balanced to me. Not only do we have to suffer a worse journey but we’re also asked to pay double what we’d pay in the car. Double. And that is only going to get more expensive as the kids get older.

I know that X councillor at  BN&S or Y worker at First is likely to point out that buses are an expensive bit of infrastructure and that pointing at London or Manchester or any other big city who seem to manage to do this stuff right is somehow irrelevant because of the scale involved. But to them I just say – if you have to, run the buses at a loss – because that is the only way that you’ll get people to really embrace their use. Or maybe less radically, try some other pricing models – for instance loyalty cards or “every 100th person wins an ipod” – anything – just not this horrific, creeping, ever-increasing ticket price for a transport mode which represents absolutely nothing to normal people apart from some far-away notion of “being a bit more green”.

For buses to work, the price point either needs to be the same or more attractive than the alternative. We’re a middle class not badly off family who cares about green issues and we quite often choose the car. What possible hope is there of attracting a single mum with 3 kids and a minimal income at these prices?

I’m probably not supposed to say this, and will probably not be saying it when our mortgage triples or we all lose our jobs, but I’m actually kind of glad we’re having to think a bit more about our money and lifestyles in these “troubled economic times”.

For a long while now, I – like many people – have felt an increasing sense of unease at the obscene cheapness of  some of the things us Westerners can get our hands on. From Asda jeans for £3 to Argos kettles for just under £5, to DVD players (yes, players) for £16; less than the DVD’s that go in them.

Cheapness is compelling. I’d be lying if I said my wife and I didn’t have some of these clothes for our two boys. They grow their way through jeans at about one pair a month. We try not to do it, but sometimes we crack in the sheer face of price. Spend £20 on jeans or get 7 pairs for the same money? Not an easy place to do the right thing.

But – do we, here in our comfortable houses, being paid at least a minimum wage, with a whole range of different clothes in our wardrobes to choose from – need many of the things that we buy? Do we need clothes at £3 when – really – we could afford (and in the past, have afforded) a spend of £10 or £20?

These things are so cheap they have to involve a terrifying level of exploitation somewhere in the chain. The economics of scale only answer part of the question. This exploitation might be of people or exploitation of oil, or both. It might, actually, be exploitation of our incredible greed in wanting to JUST BUY STUFF all the time.

There’s an Ellis family story which is slowly edging its way into legend about my lovely (if slightly cantankerous) gran and how – shortly after the war – she dropped a cabbage by mistake onto her local train line. Rather than just leave it, she went to the effort to go to the signal box, found out that the train wasn’t due and then got staff to retrieve the cabbage for her.

Whether this is true or not, the point is that our current understanding of value in the Western world is skewed in a badly unrealistic, exploitative and damaging way. Tim O’Reilly quotes from the now-famous Fake Steve Jobs post about the suicide of a Chinese worker. Both posts are well worth a read:

We all know that there’s no fucking way in the world we should have microwave ovens and refrigerators and TV sets and everything else at the prices we’re paying for them. There’s no way we get all this stuff and everything is done fair and square and everyone gets treated right. No way. And don’t be confused — what we’re talking about here is our way of life. Our standard of living. You want to “fix things in China,” well, it’s gonna cost you. Because everything you own, it’s all done on the backs of millions of poor people whose lives are so awful you can’t even begin to imagine them, people who will do anything to get a life that is a tiny bit better than the shitty one they were born into, people who get exploited and treated like shit and, in the worst of all cases, pay with their lives

Maybe a good old recession might help even the balance a little bit. It probably won’t have us hunting on train lines for cabbages, and some might argue it’ll mean we look for even cheaper jeans, but maybe we’ll also start looking closer at the reality of the value chain and begin to re-use rather than re-buy.