On Sleeplessness, the iPhone, and You
It is 4:46am, I can’t sleep, and I have a question.
The future, as seen by the internet is often expressed by gadgetry, and there’s a particular trap involved in writing about outbreaks of the future in that gadgetry is often really shiny.
And if you’re writing about the future, chances are pretty good that you really like shiny objects.
But, gadgets are not the future. Look at the iPhone.
The iPhone is a fantastic bit of gadgetry, but it’s not the future - no matter how many proto AR apps get developed for it, there’s no way to escape the essential limitations of the device. The iPhone is simultaneously fiendishly useful and completely useless at the same time. It’s filled with a lot of really useful little apps and features, but it’s still handicapped from reaching a certain horizon of real productivity. Without extensive hacks, the iPhone is unable to connect to a variety of external devices for both input and output. It is extremely limited in what programs it can run.
It is essentially a closed system, and the reason for that is that it is designed by a company that holds true to a business and design philosophy that states that you do not own the product that you purchased. While a pervasive business philosophy in many fields (you don’t own your iPhone, you don’t own your music, your movies or your books, your food is made from genetically modified or patented seeds that are never actually owned by the farmers who grow it) it’s not future friendly — or to be more specific, it is a design philosophy that is friendly to a future that is, simply put, a retail opportunity.
The iPhone’s use to any sort of a future worth having is in changing the way that many people relate to technology. It’s now cool to have a computer in your pocket. It’s cool to be on the internet (via 3G and EDGE and Wi-Fi and Bluetooth) 24/7. In the countries where the iPhone has been able to saturate the market, it’s instigated a real sea-change in the way that people react to electronic mediation of their relationship with their environments. Unfortunately it has come with the baggage of corporatization and loss of ownership that is also as pervasive as the new environmental relationships is helps negotiate.
I say that the iPhone is not the future, but what I mean by that is that the iPhone is not representative of a future I want to see. The future is not just a retail opportunity and a finer world is not built entirely of consumer goods. I’m not keen on a future where the major technologies of environmental and social mediation are owned and controlled by corporate ideology. As AR creeps closer and closer, the question of who gets to plant a flag in the liminal space of a technologically re-mediated environment becomes a more pressing concern - with new horizons there are always new forms of colonialism.
The question is, or at least my question is: How do you separate the positive technological and sociopolitical advances of the iPhone and its ilk from the anti-open source, anti-democratization, future unfriendly ideology that they bring with them?
By hacking as much at the edges as you can, by doing your best to back-engineer everything that makes the iPhone great as open source?
Though iPhones cost too much for most open source projects to start producing an equivalent unit, don’t they? Due largely to the pervasiveness of copyright and patents, etc, but also due to the cost of production facilities.
I’m curious how, exactly, you feel the iPhone is different from any other consumer computing device. The iPhone is a system with clearly defined entry points to its functionality, and working around those entry points carries a cost, in both time and money. Any desktop or laptop contains those same compromises. With the iPhone, Apple made a considered decision to minimize those entry points. With OS X, there’s more entry points, but not as many as with a RedHat distribution. On the other hand, and OS X box, or an iPhone, can basically be counted on to do what they promise with a minimum of fuss. Systems with more entry points are harder to keep working for all possible points in their configuration space.
I’d argue that Apple’s design philosophy is less “You don’t own this” than “We’re going to do a few things very well, and lock down the rest”. As opposed to a Linux distro which will try to let you do everything under the sun.
Instead of worrying about who’s making clients, I’d say the bigger concern is the lack of entry points to the network for any mobile clients. You can roll your own hardware, plug it into the wall, or pick up a WiFi network, and have full access. If no WiFi is available, then you have to go through a closed system to get to the open net. That’d be the real gate for defining who gets to define AR - who gets network access?
Well done, Kevin.
I agree that hacking is the way to go. It’s reclaiming ownership. It’s saying “If the price of you taking care of me is not understanding my devices, it’s not a price I’m willing to pay. I will take the platform I bought from you, and remove the restrictions you put on me.” Now we just have to keep fighting to not be prosecuted for making that choice.
“How do you separate the positive technological and sociopolitical advances of the iPhone and its ilk from the anti-open source, anti-democratization, future unfriendly ideology that they bring with them?”
That depends on what you’re driving at. If you’re asking “How do we quickly convince a majority of technology consumers that it’s desirable to strike off the chains that bind them, vis EULA’s and black-box gadgetry?”, then the answer is, probably, “You can’t get there from here.”
Most consumers are only peripherally aware that their choices are being restricted by their equipment, and many of those that ARE aware do not believe that they can do anything about it.
However, if you’re asking “How do we, as a minority of willful warranty-voiding tinkerers, promote our perspective to neophytes in order to make our worldview more widespread?”, then the answer might be any of these:
“One public and fully-documented hack at a time.”
“One consumer at a time.”
“One script-kiddie tool at a time”
The goal that you seem to be hinting at, some sort of paradigm shift of consumer behavior away from shiny, click-wrapped one-trick-pony widgets, is a lofty one. I don’t see that happening easily or quickly. Market forces and the tendency to follow the path of least resistance are working against us. It’s up to us to demonstrate, one grind at a time, that the warranty isn’t King, that the EULA only applies if you let it, and that being technically inclined is…well…cool.
Let’s assume we’re talking about the actions that a certain group or subculture can take to adapt these future unfriendly devices for themselves - aboniks is totally right that we can’t somehow convince the mass body public that the abridgement of rights they are barely aware of in the first place is enough reason for them to give up their shiny toys and stop responding emotionally to well crafted marketing. That’s just human nature, and immutable, at least for now.
Granted, the principle of openness could be crafted into a compelling message that might slowly challenge these closed cultures, but that’s an eternal vigilance problem - we’d have to have to resources to push our message on a similar scale, push it hard, and keep pushing it. If we were really capable manipulators, we could try dressing it up in religious clothes, but again, that’s not something a small group of hackers can easily do (though I’m always for starting a cult of technology).
This is all just paraphrasing of the old maxim “show, don’t tell”. Open source and future friendly systems and devices need to beat closed systems at their own game. We have to design systems, devices, whatever it is we design to be more usable, more focused, more elegant, more aesthetically pleasing, and with not necessarily more features, but better and more applicable features.
So, what can we do? Design stuff. Make stuff. Publicize everything we do. Help each other make stuff. Get past ego - it’s not about designing things to make one person or one subgroup look awesome, it’s about designing things to help us all move forward. Hack things. Publish our hacks. Design our creations to work together. Establish open de facto standards before the big corporates come in and foist closed ones upon us. Put every good idea in the commons, and make that commons so visible that patent inspectors can’t help but notice it. Encourage our children.
Some of that’s really practical, some of that’s philosophical. I think both are necessary - ideology without designs is just pretentious pap, design without ideology is all to easily co-opted by the greedy.
I would like to add to aboniks list:
Creating more centers like Free Geek (http://www.freegeek.org/) around the world
Its a pretty potent step in the right direction.
Rereading through your post Kevin, I am reminded about the frustrations felt by some of the protagonist in Vernor Vinge’s Rainbows End. Centered in a world where AR is ubiquitous and technology has progressed to a point where all daily appliances are stamped with “No serviceable parts inside”. The frustration felt by the characters of their inability to hack their world on one level turns to resigned acceptance.
The world we live in is the one we create
This may be a stupid question, I’m not terribly well-versed in electronics and computer hardware, and am still at the trial-and-error of building a desktop, so bear with me.
What, programming or hardware-wise, is to stop folks from getting bricked older models, gutting them, and reverse-engineering them into tiny laptop-like devices with a more standard wireless connection? I mean, other than that people on EBay still seem to think they’re worth a couple hundred bucks as shiny, white paperweights?
How do we get the iPhone benefits without having the entire damn thing locked down? Well, don’t buy Apple. It’s not like they’re the only ones making smartphones. My HTC Touch Diamond came out last May, has comparable processing power, runs Windows (I know, hardly an ideal solution, but at least it’s more open to anyone who feels like it writing any app they like), runs mobile versions of Word, Excel and Powerpoint, plays videos and MP3s, takes pictures and video, uses an Opera browser (and most of the time I can get an HSDPA connection here in the UK - it’s actually faster than my home broadband), A-GPS, etc. etc. The screen is a little smaller, but so is the phone, and aside from my supplier not setting up ActiveSync properly (which was, I’ll concede, not very straight-forward) I’ve not had any software problems.
The iPhone only just caught up with it’s feature-set when they released the 3GS. Though I *do* envy their built-in compass for it’s AR possibilities.
There are, in my opinion, far better phones than either mine of the iPhone out there that have been released over the past year. Society just needs to stop collectively wetting it’s pants over Apple, while it’s competitors need to step up their promotion. THEN we’ll get options, and with options come things that we can actually fiddle with without Steve Jobs slapping our wrists.
Seej: Honestly, I think the focus on the iPhone here is part visibility and part climbing the mountain because it’s there. At least in my case; I’m not a Mac enthusiast in the slightest, but part of me wants to do this simply because all that locking-down must mean there’s something good there to play with, and there’s a bit of the flipping-off-at-Jobs in there, too. ‘Hah, I unlocked your shit’, or something.
I have the LG VU, and I honestly think the biggest leg up the iPhone has on it is simply that more people are looking at it, and therefore developing for it. Well, that and it seems to have an aneurysm if you try to install more than 4 gigs of storage.
I’ve found some modding sites for the VU and similar phones, and picked up a data cable, but no one seems to be doing a whole lot more than cosmetic modding, whereas I’d like to find out, say, how to have it use any open network for data instead of paying AT&T through the nose for that capability. Or any number of things that aren’t just font and skin changes. It’s all about how these things are viewed, though. If no one’s seeing it as something that can do awesome things, something worth the effort, no one’s going to even bother trying.
Almost everyone I know who has an iPhone in India HAS to hack it, because the iTunes store has limited functionality if you’re from a “third world” country. So we all have fake UK/US accounts so we can download free apps, and so I can avoid the “This service is not available in your country” message.
So with a fake UK account, I am allowed to use the “Genius” functionality in my supposedly “free” iTunes music software. Not only that, now I have to pay up for an upgrade, without which all the cool apps coming out wont work.
I know they have a business to run, but its evil if you look at it in this way.
Easy, two-word solution to closed hanset:
Google Android?
If not, then gleeful and unrestrained hacking is the grinder’s only chance, as other comments unanimously put it.
Excellent write-up once again, Kevin. May you sleep better in the future ;)
There are two parts to getting the future you want. Part 1 is the Linux nerds and other hackers taking the phone apart, making Android devices work better etc. That’s all obvious and the other commenters have covered is admirably.
Part 2, which no one has mentioned is that the Open Source people still have little to no respect for the kind of attention-to-detail design that a device like the iPhone displays. If the dream is to rival Apple in the marketplace (or the mindspace) then we need devices that are as awesome to use for people WHO DON’T CARE that there are no user-serviceable parts inside. THIS IS MOST PEOPLE.
Start up a viable open-source team that has as many designers as programmers and is user-experience focused in a radical way.