Category: Blog Post

Post AV. My Neo-Luddite Utopia

 

We bought a new Microwave oven. The dials broke on the old one and it became impossible to accurately time the heating of the macchiato for my espresso. Having super-heated the milk into a frothy explosion-then painstakingly sponged the inside of the microwave clean again-one too many times, I sighed, gathered my Extra-Vehicular Activity equipment and prepared to suit-up for an excursion beyond the safety of our habitation pod.
…by the way, on the subject of biological hazard protection, I have a stash of vintage t-shirts that I have never gotten around to throwing out. Many sport amusing and/or iconic motifs. Opinions may differ here, so I will not make any claims to objective coolness, but a Darth Vader cartoon on a face mask should look at least as cool as it once did on a t-shirt. I have persuaded my wife to add these bespoke, handmade, vintage items to her burgeoning end-times, lifestyle-accessories store.

So, microwaves. My amplifier broke. It was a monster; 7.1 surround sound, multiple zones, pain in the arse to install, far too many settings. I bought it because it could play music from iTunes, not that the single feature I bought it for ever actually worked.

When it died, I braced myself for an excursion into the HiFi zone and down amongst the seething Youtube reviews and editorials, I stumbled across a whole new segment: ‘Post AV’.

Apparently, ‘Post AV’ means simple, beautiful devices targeting a demographic tired of dicking around with tangles of cables, unwanted features, and endless menu items. They claim to do everything a complicated multi-channel AV receiver can do… only with friendly old-school Stereo instead of dozens of speaker boxes which all require power and space in your living room.

Two speakers, a couple of nobs, works pretty much out of the box…
 …Take My Damn Money!!!

I am prone to interpret things as signs. This is a sign. People are fed up with products that do things they don’t need while smuggling in features they don’t want.

Anyone for a TV that has Disney+ permanently cemented into first place on your channel list and listens to everything you say?
No?
Then we are not going to let you have HDCP2
Don’t want HDCP2?
Don’t even know what HDCP2 is?
Tough. You need it to watch Netflix
Now shut up and buy it!

This Bundled-Crapware outbreak spread from its patient-zero-the dodgy PC manufacturers of the 2000s-to become a raging pandemic infesting our entire economy.

It doesn’t even matter to the big boys if you fight back and protest by buying an overpriced niche alternative from one of their competitors. As soon as this plucky challenger gains any appreciable market share, they will be gobbled up and your beloved product line discontinued. That will teach you!

The customer is always wrong
You get what you are given

Look, I don’t want to go off-topic and get too ranty here, but society has become numb to the incessant badgering government and big business uses to push us things we don’t want. Numb and beaten down, we became resigned to just taking it. This only empowered them to push harder and ignore our pleas to stop shoving that junk in our faces. It’s the Harvey Weinstein economy.

You don’t want it?
Tough. Take it and stop complaining!

They are not all bad, the big companies. Elon seems to be ahead of the curve again. His cars do what people want. He focuses on making them safe, fast, cheap to run, and, well, bulletproof. He doesn’t spend money on advertising. Imagine that, people buy his cars because they want them?!? It almost sounds quaint and old fashioned.

Perhaps as sales plateau and consumer’s belts tighten, we will witness more nascent stirrings of this radical idea. Others might get in on the trend of offering people what they actually want to buy, rather than what big monopoly power can force them to swallow.

Don’t force people to take what they don’t want
Respect for the freedom of others begins with little things

The microwave we ended up choosing has two nobs: power and a timer. It’s a ‘Post AV’ Microwave. Tech for Neo-Luddites. We love it.
Okay, sure, it probably has Siri and Alexa built-in to spy on me, but baby steps, right?

—

Monkey Logic is a weekly column to help us through these unhinged times.

Why are people so angry?
Why are people so stupid?
Why the hell did she/he/it just do that?

The answer is Monkey Logic. We are not sanguine sages or intellectual titans. We are messily evolved amalgamations of ad-hoc fixes collected over Billions of years of hard-knocks trial and error. We have high expectations for the world, but Sanity and Rationalism are human inventions. Truth does not equal Beauty. Madness, money, and monogamy are our own psycho-cultural inventions; emergent tokens; semiotic short-hand heuristics for the recurring patterns of reality—

One man’s sanity is another man’s bat-shit crazy.

 

Monkey Logic — A Light Take on the Dark Patterns of our World

Why are people so angry?
Why are people so stupid?
Why the hell did she/he/it just do that?

The answer is Monkey Logic. We are not sanguine sages or intellectual titans. We are messily evolved amalgamations of ad-hoc fixes collected over Billions of years of hard-knocks trial and error. We have high expectations for the world, but Sanity and Rationalism are human inventions. Truth does not equal Beauty. Madness, money, and monogamy are our own psycho-cultural inventions; emergent tokens; semiotic short-hand heuristics for the recurring patterns of reality-

One man’s sanity is another man’s bat-shit crazy.

- case in point, for some, my use of a gendered noun will mark me as a moral degenerate and legitimate target of whatever heinous acts the mob considers appropriate this week for infractions against its shifting and arbitrary taboos.


My wife crochets. Small baskets for keys, square boxes for change, and recently, awesome little bags perfect for when she’s baking and doesn’t have a place for her iPhone while she listens to the Joe Rogan podcast. After early skepticism and perhaps a little good-natured criticism, I converted. Last week I asked to borrow the bag - I wanted to use my wired, noise-canceling headphones to listen to the Joe Rogan podcast while hoovering. It was at this point she decided she might just have a viral hit on her hands…

She set off to set up an online store but quickly stumbled into a thread of Etsy artisans bemoaning the introduction of advertising on the platform. I shuddered when she told me. As an author, I am a long-time sufferer of Amazon’s dubious practices. I know how the introduction of advertising forces authors to buy-in or fade-out. Products stop being surfaced according to quality and popularity as creators are forced to cut further into their profits to buy visibility. It becomes a race to the bottom fueled by a constant influx of hopefuls willing to accept selling loss-leaders in exchange for making it big somewhere down the road…

Etsy, Amazon, and their like, obviously love this model. Of course they do. They are no longer limited to a cut of platform sales. When they started shaking down their ‘tenants’ for protection money they unlocked a whole new revenue source.

“Nice line in hand-made socks you have there… it would be a shame if some upstart with deep pockets and a fresh pair of knitting-needles was to move in on your turf…”


Etsy is a publicly-traded company. A very large chunk of this ‘quaint little hand made goods store’ is owned by capitalist hegemons who are far from quaint; think BlackRock and Vanguard. If you are not familiar, these are among the world’s largest and most successful investment companies. Shares are massively disproportionately owned by the richest members of society. (The wealthiest top ten percent of people own more than ninety percent of the shares).

So what we have here are the most affluent elites - the billionaire hedge-fund oligarchs - shamelessly turning the screws on the smallest most humble workers. How much can anybody make selling socks or charming crocheted bags? Not a lot, but it’s about to become a lot less. My confident prediction is that in most cases it’s going to end up being less than nothing.

The slum-lord-monopolist-kleptocrats are bulldozing the dreams of their residents to squeeze out a little more value. It is not a victimless crime. True, some platform denizens are merely playing, slumming it by pretending to be an artist. They can cope with paying a bit more each week for their hobby, but there are livings being made in these digital ghettos too. The single mum who makes a little extra money making and selling baby mittens to help pay for winter warmth will just have to knit her family thicker hats.

On the upside, it’s good news for the Klepts. If they can press just a few more drops of sweat from each of their disgusting peasant tenants, they can manage to fill their penthouse infinity pools.

Do the super-rich really need more?
Clearly the answer is no, but they want it.
Monkey Logic.


They are really good bags with universal approval from our friends, she has gifted many, but you will never find them because she’d rather languish in obscurity than capitulate to a shady protection racket.

Tech from Singularity’s Children: Vacuum Dirigible



Article from the 1930s with a concept for a Vacuum Dirigible (Sky Whale).

“LONG before the invention of the Mongolfier fire balloon, and just as soon as it was discovered that air has weight, an ingenious clergyman, the Rev. Francis Lana, S. J., suggested that the buoyancy of a vacuum might be used to make an air-craft rise (as sketched at the right). This was the first real scientific suggestion for a lighter-than-air craft; before his time, people had suggested putting dew in a vessel, because “dew has a natural tendency to rise,” as shown by its evaporation. But, unfortunately, it is hard to make a ball which can resist a pressure of a ton to the square foot without collapsing, and yet be lighter than the air it displaces.”

The Singularity’s Children SkyWhale flexes its hull to ‘swim’ through the air and uses Magneto-Hydrodynamic affecters in its hull-envelope to accelerate plasma across its skin reducing drag and providing thrust.

The SkyWhale vacuum dirigible keeps its envelope open by magnetically containing super-fluid and spinning it through a helical loop up and down its hull. This active dynamic structure employs centripetal forces to keep the envelope open and requires less mass than an equivalent passive rigid structure.