Mark O’Connell wrote a very interesting article about a fairly unsettling iOS app called Days of Life — “a counter for the days you have left to live.” In Deathwatch he explores just how weird and absurd this app turns out to be:

Days of Life is one of those technologies that seems to incidentally satirize our relationship with technology more broadly. It sits in the “Productivity” folder on my iPhone’s home screen, along with my calendar and a to-do list app called Remember the Milk, but it would be as appropriately housed in a folder called “Existential Terror.”

So much of what we value in technology is its promise to upgrade the hardware of our lives, to make us more useful to ourselves — more productive, more profitable, more effective. Days of Life functions like a reductio ad absurdum of the logic of personal productivity. The pie chart becomes a special way of being afraid: an image of the self as a micro-economy of numbered days.

We sometimes have such a warped view of what it means to be “productive”, and this essay does a good job of shining a spotlight on that.

Alexis Madrigal — who is turning into one of the most interesting journalists of our time — goes deep on Netflix’s 76,897 (often bizarre) micro-genres in How Netflix Reverse Engineered Hollywood:

Netflix has meticulously analyzed and tagged every movie and TV show imaginable. They possess a stockpile of data about Hollywood entertainment that is absolutely unprecedented.

Netflix is putting in a staggering amount of effort on the structured data of their TV shows and movies. And of course, it’s all for one reason — to get to know you better:

They capture dozens of different movie attributes. They even rate the moral status of characters. When these tags are combined with millions of users’ viewing habits, they become Netflix’s competitive advantage. The company’s main goal as a business is to gain and retain subscribers. And the genres that it displays to people are a key part of that strategy. “Members connect with these [genre] rows so well that we measure an increase in member retention by placing the most tailored rows higher on the page instead of lower,” the company revealed in a 2012 blog post. The better Netflix shows that it knows you, the likelier you are to stick around.

And now, they have a terrific advantage in their efforts to produce their own content: Netflix has created a database of American cinematic predilections. The data can’t tell them how to make a TV show, but it can tell them what they should be making. When they create a show like House of Cards, they aren’t guessing at what people want.

What’s interesting is that similar things are happening in other forms of media as well. Spotify and Rdio’s knowledge of our listening data can be used to inform record labels what type of albums they should invest in. And as David Streitfeld reports in As New Services Track Habits, the E-Books Are Reading You, a new crop of companies are helping authors figure out what type of books they should write:

The move to exploit reading data is one aspect of how consumer analytics is making its way into every corner of the culture. Amazon and Barnes & Noble already collect vast amounts of information from their e-readers but keep it proprietary. Now the start-ups — which also include Entitle, a North Carolina-based company — are hoping to profit by telling all.

“We’re going to be pretty open about sharing this data so people can use it to publish better books,” said Trip Adler, Scribd’s chief executive. […]

Scribd is just beginning to analyze the data from its subscribers. Some general insights: The longer a mystery novel is, the more likely readers are to jump to the end to see who done it. People are more likely to finish biographies than business titles, but a chapter of a yoga book is all they need. They speed through romances faster than religious titles, and erotica fastest of all.

All of this raises familiar questions about the loss of serendipity — finding interesting things we’re not looking for. But I still think this is an unnecessary fear.

Megan Garber takes on Instagram Direct¹ in Behold, Facetwitterest: The Standardized Future of Social, and makes this observation:

So one of the biggest challenges facing the major (and the trying-to-be-major) social networks is a structural one: How do you build yourself up and out in ways that balance users’ desire for intimacy with their desire for publicity? How do you merge the web’s ability to create communities with its ability to create universalities? 

You could read Direct as Instagram’s (and Facebook’s) latest attempt to navigate that tension. The service is, basically, attempting to add a layer of privacy to its existing, public-leaning architecture. But Instagram isn’t just Snapchatting itself. It’s offering its users a Snapchat-like functionality within the context of its much more public social network. It’s trying to have it both ways — cynically, but perhaps ingeniously — by offering a refuge of privateness within a very public service.

It reminds me of something Luke Wroblewski said recently:

Every mobile app attempts to expand until it includes chat. Those applications which do not are replaced by ones which can.

Direct appears to be a necessary defensive move by Instagram — private messaging is now a basic expectation for social networks. But it also looks like people are getting more savvy about their privacy and what happens to their data (Thanks, NSA!), so it will be interesting to see how this mixing of public and private plays out in 2014.

Small human beings learn by mimicking and so they learn patience by mimicking patience. Perhaps this means that a larger human being somewhere many thousands of generations back took a long and patient breath as the smaller human being in his or her arms squirmed. Perhaps the smaller human being saw this long and patient breath and internalized it and began to understand. Perhaps all of the patience in the world is a copy of one sigh.

— Paul Ford, What I’ve learned from fatherhood

I’m most aware of my shortcomings when I lose patience with my daughters. Of the many things I know I need to improve on, it’s the one that I wish the most I could fix with the flip of a switch.

“Oh, I see the problem, sir — your patience switch was turned off. It happens sometimes… There you go, that should do it.”

But of course, it doesn’t work like that. Yesterday I was watching a mother trying to get her 3-year old son to stop screaming at her. After a few minutes they were both yelling — which isn’t a very effective way to diffuse a situation like that. The thing is, I’m sure she knows that. And before I had kids I probably would have judged her. Not any more. I’ve made enough bad decisions in the heat of the moment that it would be hypocritical of me to judge anyone for their parenting techniques¹. In fact, I’m pretty sure that no matter what decision I make at any given time (should I give her the cookie, or is this a teachable moment?), there’s about a 50% chance that it will be the wrong decision.

But that doesn’t mean I shouldn’t strive to do better — to be better. I’ve already made most of the mistakes I didn’t want to make with my daughters. However, that doesn’t stop my desire to be a better dad. I’m painfully aware of how cheesy that sounds, but hey — it’s the truth.

I often ask my wife if she thinks we’re doing it wrong. It just seems like other parents have it all together, all the time. Yet, every once in a while I see cracks in the veneer — an honest moment on Twitter, a knowing look of camaraderie in a coffee shop — and I know I’m not alone. We all love our children very much. We’re also all human and selfish. And patience — like money — doesn’t grow on trees.

So maybe I need to stop trying to be “a better dad”. That’s just too vague (how will I know when I’m “better” enough?). Instead, I need to focus on that one sigh. The one breath that could be the difference between letting a difficult moment pass, or letting it get the best of me.

One moment of patience. That will be my focus in 2014 — in parenting, but also online, and in my work.

Will you join me?

It’s always worth reading Eugene Wei’s thoughts on Amazon’s strategy, and Amazon and the “profitless business model” fallacy is no exception. Wei discusses how most analysts don’t understand Amazon’s business at all. In particular, he tears into the idea that at some point, Amazon will just “flip the switch” — increase the prices on all their products and instantly become profitable:

But “flipping a switch” is the wrong analogy because Amazon’s core business model does generate a profit with most every transaction at its current price level. The reason it isn’t showing a profit is because it’s undertaken a massive investment to support an even larger sales base.

How does Amazon turn a profit? Not by flipping a switch but by waiting, once again, until its transaction volume grows and income exceeds its fixed cost base again. It can choose to reach that point faster or slower depending on how quickly it continues to grow its fixed cost base, but a simple way to accelerate that would be to stop investing in so many new fulfillment centers.

Amazon is using their revenue to build more and more infrastructure until they become so large (and efficient) that no one will be able to compete with them. That’s pretty smart.

Speaking of Amazon, Benedict Evans wrote an interesting post discussing Amazon’s “selective” secrecy. He explains in Amazon’s PR genius that there is one area they don’t mind exposing to the world — logistics:

Price is obviously a large part of the consumer story, but talking about logistics is a competitive weapon just like not talking about Kindle sales. Every story about how Amazon has built an amazing, incredibly efficient, incredibly low-cost distribution platform is another ecommerce start-up that doesn’t get funded, or even started. Jeff Bezos famously said that he was happy for Amazon to be misunderstood for long periods of time, but no-one is in any danger of underestimating the scale of Amazon’s distribution. 

Sean Madden makes some interesting points in American-Centric UI Is Leveling Tech Culture — and Design Diversity:

Just as user-centered design transformed technology in the 1990s and early 2000s, cultural fluency needs to transform it today: user experience (UX) design that’s familiar enough with a user’s cultural background to meet him or her halfway.

Cultural fluency demands abandoning the idea that functionality is a universal language, and that “good UX” is culturally agnostic.

He goes on to give some examples of this cultural bias:

Consider the use of gestural interfaces in a world where gestures mean very different things in different cultures. Or using scrolling for timelines when time horizons (among other culturally sensitive dimensions) represent different values to different societies. Even the idea of touching our screens is a culturally sensitive UX action.

We see this not just in how people use products differently, but also how we interact with them during the user-centered design process. Last year I started working on a talk called The challenges and opportunities of user-centered design in developing nations. Somewhere along the line I ran out of steam with it, but I still think it’s an important topic. For example, a usability lab in an office full of Macs and giant screens can be quite intimidating to users if you’re doing research on low-end phone usage, so that’s something you have to account for. Even our user-centered design methods need to be user-centered, but it’s unfortunately something we tend not to pay much attention to.

Craig Mod’s newsletter is one of the few emails I always look forward to reading. In the most recent one Craig gives some advice for people in their 20s:



To the younger folks reading now: If you’re willing to live in that small apartment, forgo that fancy food and expensive clothing, and uphold a semblance of disciplined and focused work ethic, you can probably hack more experience into your life than you’d imagine. […]



The emotional textural quality of my memory of life then is so intense because it was a period of only the ephemeral. Those years can only reverberate in my gut because there is no material thing upon which to place those feelings. No physical token to help me remember. It’s a period of my life where I learned to walk a city (because it was cheaper than eating through a city, or five-star hoteling a city), learned to find great pleasure in the night-sounds of one piece of town winding down or the stirring of another the dawn following.



His thoughts brought me back to my own story, and the similar circumstances I was in when I first moved to the US years ago. I moved into my first apartment with only a blow-up mattress I borrowed from my then-fiancé, and a coffee machine she bought me as a housewarming gift. I bought my first chair for $20 at a Salvation Army store, and since I didn’t have a car I had to leave my passport with them so I could borrow a dolly and push the chair back to my apartment (what a sight that must have been to passers-by).



But you know what? It was an amazing time. It taught me not to take anything for granted. It taught me how to really get to know a city (on foot — always on foot). And it taught me the value of working hard, and always keeping an eye out for things to make me laugh, especially when it’s not going well.



Starting from the bottom of a mountain teaches us that there’s more to life than standing at the top. What matters is the people you’re with and the conversations you have and the lessons you learn — not how far up you go. I’m not saying we shouldn’t be ambitious. I’m just saying that as long as you enjoy the views with those who give your moments meaning, who cares where you’re standing?

Clive Thompson takes on the “social media is bad for teens” narrative in Don’t Blame Social Media if Your Teen Is Unsocial. He discusses some findings by Microsoft researcher Danah Boyd:

What she has found, over and over, is that teenagers would love to socialize face-to-face with their friends. But adult society won’t let them. “Teens aren’t addicted to social media. They’re addicted to each other,” Boyd says. “They’re not allowed to hang out the way you and I did, so they’ve moved it online.” […]

The result, Boyd discovered, is that today’s teens have neither the time nor the freedom to hang out. So their avid migration to social media is a rational response to a crazy situation. They’d rather socialize F2F, so long as it’s unstructured and away from grown-ups. “I don’t care where,” one told Boyd wistfully, “just not home.”

Thompson and Boyd are joining a growing number of authors who push back against the notion that technology makes us stupid, social media is bad for us, etc. I’m currently making my way through Thompson’s book, Smarter Than You Think: How Technology is Changing Our Minds for the Better. It’s really great so far, and I’ll write a full review when I’m done, but his core argument comes down to this:

What are the central biases of today’s digital tools? There are many, but I see three big ones that have a huge impact on our cognition. First, they allow for prodigious external memory: smartphones, hard drives, cameras, and sensors routinely record more information than any tool before them. We’re shifting from a stance of rarely recording our ideas and the events of our lives to doing it habitually. Second, today’s tools make it easier for us to find connections—between ideas, pictures, people, bits of news—that were previously invisible. Third, they encourage a superfluity of communication and publishing. This last feature has many surprising effects that are often ill understood.

Also consider Jason Feifer’s impassioned rejection of Sherry Turkle’s doom-and-gloom ideas¹ in Google Makes You Smarter, Facebook Makes You Happier, Selfies Make You A Better Person:

Turkle imagines that any interaction with technology somehow negates all the time spent doing other things. She also imagines that we must devote ourselves in only one way to every task: At a dinner table, we are only serious and focused on conversation; at a memorial service, we are only mournful. That is not the way we live. It’s never been the way we live. And that’s the beauty of technology, which Turkle cannot see: We can use it for all purposes, to express joy and sadness, to have long conversations or send short texts. We made it. It is us.

I’m coming around to the idea that online connections are as real as “IRL” connections². We’re just going through a reframing that happens every time a new technology comes along, and that’s ok. I also think we need both sides of the argument — pessimists as well as optimists — to help us work through it all and find our middle ground.