In pro journalism, American style, the View from Nowhere is a bid for trust that advertises the viewlessness of the news producer. Frequently it places the journalist between polarized extremes, and calls that neither-nor position “impartial.” Second, it’s a means of defense against a style of criticism that is fully anticipated: charges of bias originating in partisan politics and the two-party system. Third: it’s an attempt to secure a kind of universal legitimacy that is implicitly denied to those who stake out positions or betray a point of view. American journalists have almost a lust for the View from Nowhere because they think it has more authority than any other possible stance.
It was never the object of [patent] laws to grant a monopoly for every trifling device, every shadow of a shade of an idea, which would naturally and spontaneously occur to any skilled mechanic or operator in the ordinary progress of manufacturers. Such an indiscriminate creation of exclusive privileges tends rather to obstruct than to stimulate invention. It creates a class of speculative schemers who make it their business to watch the advancing wave of improvement, and gather its foam in the form of patented monopolies, which enable them to lay a heavy tax upon the industry of the country, without contributing anything to the real advancement of the arts. It embarrasses the honest pursuit of business with fears and apprehensions of concealed liens and unknown liabilities to lawsuits and vexatious accountings for profits made in good faith.
After what I wrote earlier, I now find myself dreary, and maudlin, and seriously considering writing a love-letter to Mac OS8’s popup Finder window mechanism.
Tuesday, 11 October 2011, around six in the evening.
The closest I think I ever got to meeting Steve was in 1999, at the Macworld expo in San Francisco. I spent a lot of time on the showroom floor that year, and it is very likely, statistically speaking, that Steve and I were in the building at the same time at some point during the week.
So yeah, not very close.
It was a good trip all the same. I was there with my stepdad on a kind of geek vacation — we got a cool hotel room near Moscone, and I got to wander around on my own for a few days, looking at all the neat stuff people were making for the beleaguered world of Apple computers. The morning following Steve’s keynote address, I remember sitting in the hotel restaurant and reading the Chronicle, which had run an article on the just-announced candy-colored iMacs — or as they put it, Mac’s Life-Savers. I had a notion that it was a Good Thing, and that I definitely wanted to collect them all.
Among the enormous amount of loot I gathered that week was a glossy poster advertising the new iMacs. It went up on my wall the minute I got home.
Figure 1 | Yep. Hanging right over my bed.
I find the memory of 14-year-old me plastering my walls with advertising kind of cringe-inducing — but to be fair, the same can be said for basically every other memory I have of my adolescence. More to the point, Apple kit in the nineties just wasn’t that good, so I have been wondering where all the emotional attachment and identity issues came from. It could simply be that I needed a team to root for, given how completely I ignored sports. But even back then I think I had the sense that there are basically two approaches to technology: you can make a thing and try to sell it, or you can see a problem and try to solve it. Doing the former is respectable; doing the latter, and doing it well, is admirable.
I’m about to start an engineering career at post-Jobs Apple. When I interviewed with the company, Steve had already formally resigned as CEO; when I start, they will have already held his memorial service. He is gone, and I am sadder about it than I expected to be, but I am also excited. A few weeks ago, Guy English wrote a piece called Not About Steve, and I’ve been turning it over in my mind since. Here’s what gets me:
One of the first things I remember reading in the news when Jobs first returned to Apple was that he had the Icon Garden mothballed. At the time, around 1997, Apple had pixelated sculptures of Mac OS icons on the campus grounds. Once Steve returned they had to go — appreciating history is one thing, enshrining it is something else.
To me, dismantling the icon garden speaks of a remarkable combination of pragmatism and imagination. For fourteen years, Apple’s ethos has been a statement and a question: what we have done is good; how can we do it better? That’s not just good business, that’s people aspiring to greatness.
So with that in mind: thanks, Steve, for making what I have done possible. I can’t wait to see what I’ll do next.
Every once in a while I’m talking about movies or television and I’m reminded of the Bechdel Test, which is also known as the Bechdel-Wallace Test, the Mo Movie Measure, or simply The Rule. The test comes from a particular 1985 installment of Alison Bechdel’s comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For, and is meant to gauge gender bias in film and television. In order to pass, a movie or TV show must:
Include at least two (named) women
Who have at least one conversation with one another
About something other than men
Try to name a few that pass. It’s easier with TV shows, because the casts are usually larger and the stories can span dozens of episodes. But with movies, where the format generally imposes a limit on the number of developed characters and plot lines, The Rule is surprisingly limiting.
The Bechdel Test Movie List provides a forum for reviewing movies based on whether or not they pass the test. As of today there are 2,595 movies listed, and some of the comment threads are pretty interesting. Like any litmus test, whether or not a given film passes does not necessarily say much about how “feminist” that film is. For example, as is pointed out in the strip, Alien passes the test; however, it does so only because the women talk about the monster they’re trying not to get impregnated by, rather than the men that their lives revolve around.
Ok, actually, I suppose there’s a mountain of subtext there if you look at the movie like that.
In any case, the point is to draw attention to a bias in pop culture — without necessarily making a value judgement about it — because it is surprisingly easy to overlook. Probably no one expects an obvious sausage party like The Expendables to spend much screen time on the ladies, but did you notice that the latest Harry Potter movie fails the test too? I didn’t.
Michele Bachmann receives edicts from God Himself, which many people seem to consider a selling point for her presidential bid. If she were poor, or slightly less functional, we’d all just dismiss her as an unmedicated schizophrenic and move on.
In a similar vein, thanks to the magical powers of the stock market, I am worth $20,000 more this week than I was last week, when mostly I just sat around in my underwear re-re-re-watching episodes of Battlestar Galactica. Where did that value come from? What is it a measure of? It’s a complete fiction, but somehow we all agreed that it’s a fiction I can more or less literally take to the bank.
Thursday, 15 September 2011, around eight in the evening.
I’m thrilled say that today I accepted a job at Apple. I’ll be writing software as a member of a small internal developer tools team, helping to make iPads and iPhones even more awesome. I’m just beside myself with how great I think this all is.
It’s funny how things can change. A month ago I was thinking that I’d be in San Diego for at least another six months, likely longer. I thought if I’d be leaving at all, it would only be under the condition that I was able to keep my current job and work remote. I thought maybe I’d go back to Davis and use a café as my office. I thought that sounded pretty nice.
Then I got an email from a friend I hadn’t talked to in years, someone I’d taken a software engineering class with at UC Davis. He’s been working at Apple since he graduated, and he thought I’d be great for a position they were trying to fill. Two weeks later I was up in Cupertino slogging through an interview marathon; a week after that I had a job offer.
I’m going to be in San Diego for about six more weeks. Then I’ll be in Cupertino — temporarily at least. I’ll have some time to decide where I actually want to live. Much as I don’t like the thought of a 90-mile daily commute, the idea of getting a studio in San Francisco seems pretty great right now. Apple runs wifi-equipped shuttles for people who don’t want to live in Cupertino, which means the daily two-hour drive wouldn’t be time wasted. And I’m so sick of being in Southern California that being back in a city I know, living near friends again, sounds pretty damn good.
It’s awful weird, suddenly getting the chance to do a few things I’ve always wanted to do: work at Apple, make money programming with Objective-C, and live in San Francisco. I feel like I got a golden ticket, except instead of buying a stupid candy bar, I had to spend a decade or so getting good at something. In any event, I feel extremely goddam fortunate, and I’m excited to see what comes next.
Saturday, 10 September 2011, around four in the morning.
She decided she wanted to cut back on her drinking, and suddenly hanging out in bars wasn’t a shared interest. I don’t think I drink too much, but “too much” is tricky. Quoth the Poet: “You say that I drink too much, well I say that’s half true. I drink half as much as my daddy did, I drink twice as much as you.” It may or may not be significant that that song is called “Thanking Jose Quervo”.
It became clear pretty quickly that alcohol was one of the pillars of our relationship. We were doomed. She’d probably have seen it sooner if looking into the future like that was in her nature; I’d probably have seen it sooner if I’d had the self-respect to acknowledge such problems.
On the one hand, everything looks different once the dust settles, which is itself deeply troubling. We have no real choice but to get on from day to day, deciding what’s true and false when we know from experience that the things we believe now might look completely insane to us in hindsight.
On the other hand, man. It’s a bummer how things work out, sometimes.
“My fellow Americans,” Bush said, “at long last, we have reached the end of the dark period in American history that will come to be known as the Clinton Era, eight long years characterized by unprecedented economic expansion, a sharp decrease in crime, and sustained peace overseas. The time has come to put all of that behind us.”
Makes me a little nostalgic for the Bush years, when you could be angry about what the government was doing, rather than what it was refusing to do.
Friday, 29 July 2011, around three in the afternoon.
Paul Krugman, writing for the New York Times on the debt ceiling negotiations:
So what was the headline on an Associated Press analysis of that breakdown in negotiations? “Obama, Republicans Trapped by Inflexible Rhetoric.” A Democratic president who bends over backward to accommodate the other side — or, if you prefer, who leans so far to the right that he’s in danger of falling over — is treated as being just the same as his utterly intransigent opponents. Balance!
Read the whole piece. Also, “intransigent” is my word for the rest of the day. Mine, you hear?
