Technology
Beautiful Rant: My Life
I found this on Twitter. It’s perfect. It puts to word the chaotic thoughts and feelings and suspicions I’ve harboured since forever.
I didn’t write this. I didn’t even collate the tweets myself. Gravis McElroy and the TinySubversions Spooler did, respectively.
Buckle up.
The thing that really kills me about the silicon valley hypercapitalist hell spiral is how many good, desirable ideas they’re killing forever by implementing them so fucking horribly that when everyone wakes up from this daze we’ll reject massive swaths of concepts reflexively.
My phone is out of space. I know this is because I have a year+ of photographs on it, but I’m loathe to delete them because then I won’t be able to find them. I have my phone photos for the last four years on my PC at home and I can’t get to them when I want them. Call me petty or shit-talk my lifestyle if you want but I /am/ extremely Digital and I /am/ extremely Online and I do want to be able to recall images of anything I can recall, instantly, wherever I am, at a moments notice.
What if there was a service that automatically uploaded every photo from my phone to a server I could get to from anywhere UH HUH and what if it used heuristics to classify those photos UH HUH sounds real neat except google and apple FUCKING RUINED THE CONCEPT, PERMANENTLY
thanks to the FUCKERS at these HORRIBLE COMPANIES we know that this /entire concept/ is rotten to the core and unfixable because it is impossible for any company to even discuss it without some marketing turd convincing them to steal our data and sell it
We KNOW this. We know that no company, regardless of size, can be trusted with this information. We KNOW it will not stay private, our photos of our partners genitals and tax documents will become public either deliberately or accidentally. We know that any company that tries to buck this trend can’t be trusted, and even if they are completely, absolutely transparent, it doesn’t matter because we will wake up one day to discover they were purchased at 2 AM and the data transfer /already started/
We represent billions in revenue but they hold our info in escrow and that means we don’t have enough money to buy their loyalty, because a business considers business money more real than person money. I turned off the Google cloud services the moment I switched to Android, just as I’d done with my iPhone when I had it, and I did not end up regretting it. The shit they have since done makes me feel good that I did that.
It’s just like banks. I can’t pay someone to hold my money. That’s impossible. No business exists that will simply Hold My Money, every fucking last one of them is busy playing twelve dimensional Monopoly with it. All I fucking want is a website I can visit that shows me an account balance in dollars and cents and a plastic card to access it at stores. I can’t buy that. That service is nonexistent. Instead I have to store my money with someone who is running thousands of dubious scams.
So OF COURSE I am not surprised when their wheeling-and-dealing bullshit spills out of its lane and the tangle of their shitty lives invades mine in the form of an asinine account maintenance fee for doing nothing other than maintaining a pair of integers in a database. I do not want to be involved in their shit. I hate the banks and wish they would perish, but I don’t even have the LUXURY of letting that be a passive disapproval, I have to ACTIVELY hate them because they are the only option available, they force me to be involved.
So, same shit. Even IF there was an alternative backup service for my phone, it’s never going to work 10% as quickly and efficiently or integrate as well as Google’s because Google wants me to use their shitty service instead of someone elses
And even THAT doesn’t matter because no matter how many backup services start up, every last shitty vowel-stripped startup is going to be sold to google within six months and my data will end up in their bastard fucking claws anyway. Or, sorry, no, let me rephrase: They will sell to google within six months and my data will be deleted unless I download a 580GB .zip of unsorted, unlabeled jpegs with UUIDs for names. And I have ten days to do it.
That’s what fucking FROSTS me about this era. What these shitty internet companies are offering are NOT BAD IDEAS. They are things we WANT. they are in some cases the ONLY SOLUTION to these problems. and they ruined them. google et al made it so normal, so completely expected to flagrantly, egregiously and unapologetically violate peoples privacy and ignore data security that the market simply cannot support any company that does any better, and we’d be fools to trust any such claims. So here I am, having to say “oh i wanted to take a video but my phone was full” because i haven’t remembered to solve this problem when i was near my PC at home.
like it’s fucking 1999, like things haven’t improved a lick in twenty years. i mean i could start complaining about the UI in the phone that makes it hard to scrub through my photos and clean them up – I have shaky pictures of cats and blurry nothing shots i took 11 months ago and didn’t think to delete at the time which I can’t find because the UI sucks there’s probably 20GB of photos on here I don’t actually want at all, not even on some cloud service, but because the phone UI sucks shit and the PC interface sucks shit I can’t do anything about it. the phone UI sucks shit because it just does, i’m not going to go into that, but i particularly resent that the phone>PC interface is literally like using an MP3 player in 2002. the broken fucking microsoft media protocol can’t actually handle this scenario.
so even when I AM home and i DO think about this problem when i’m in a position to solve it, i cringe and ignore it because i know otherwise i’ll be stuck in literally hours of rage-inducing bullshit problems oops the phone just DOESN’T SHOW UP in explorer, no reason! oops we copied 350 files and then the USB connection turned to This Device Has Errors And Cannot Start, no reason! IT’S FUCKING 2018 WE WERE DOING THIS IN 1998 WHAT IS THE FUCKING PROBLEM WITH US so i have a Palm III. that’s the situation now. i have a Hiptop, i have a fucking Ericsson flip phone, i have a fucking Newton, not a Nexus 6P. because a modern device shouldn’t be a data island but this one is.
i can have a fucking jpeg on my phone screen, i can be sitting at a computer with a USB cable plugged in, and if i use any method to move that file other than sending it to myself over Telegram i am a fool wasting his time god fucking forbid we have something like a send option in the android UI that notices I have a USB cable plugged in and lets me send shit to my PC where i get a dialog asking where to save it. that’s the work of a weekend but instead we’ve gone decades without it. god forbid my phone have the ability to zip up a library of gallery thumbnails, ship it off to my PC, let me pick the files i do and don’t want, and then let me send back a simple list of files to remove so i can clean up my photo directory
no, instead all we get is ultra-high-level interfaces designed to allow absolutely nothing more complex than sending a selfie you just took to one recipient in one app or we get “lol idk here’s a file listing nerd” this is why i am more than hesistant about the impending PC apocolypse we’ve been warned of for years, the idea that these pissy little battery-dependant ARM shit-slates are going to replace The Only Fucking Things That Ever Even Kinda Worked is really shitty to me.
i don’t want my primary computing device to run fucking Java for the entire OS with all the problems that I said Java apps always have for the last decade, the incredibly long hangs and the apps that just stop responding because whoops we garbage collected the whole UI.
I didn’t ask for anything that mobile does. And that’s fine, it’s mobile. I wish I could not care about it. But this is the nature of devices like this: That’s not an option. These are only USEFUL if you INTEGRATE them into your life.
Taking a single photo on a mobile device is the act of signing a support contract with yourself. Congratulations, dipshit, you are now committed to Developing A Workflow, like this is your job. Or you can live as a beast and someday your phone fills up with photos you can’t save
Taking a photo on your phone? Hope you have a gameplan. Hope you have contingencies. Hope those photos don’t matter or you’re REAL disciplined, because someday you’re going to need to make a decision
You’re leaving for Jamaica tomorrow – oops! your phone says your storage is full. You have to pack all your luggage and it’s 11 PM and your plane leaves at 6 AM. what are you going to do, asshole. Which one is it – wipe your phone and lose countless photos you can’t even remember the value of, things you might deeply regret not having later? Or will you commit to two hours of sitting at your PC feeling waves of anger, defeat and hopelessness? The device cannot start -3921
--NFG
[ Apr 10 2018 ]
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