The Cult of the Unified
JANUARY 22ND, 2016 — POST 018
There’s an almost pervading wisdom within tech of simplification, of unification, of centrality. This is most evident in what could loosely be grouped under ‘Productivity’. You even have Microsoft and the ‘One’ brand — Xbox One, OneDrive, OneNote — a blatant claim that this is the One product you will need. And really, this is the paradigm of most technology, but specifically smartphones: a bolting together of disparate functions. You’ve probably seen the image: twenty years ago we carried all this, now we just carry this — a phone, a Walkman, a Gameboy, a camera, a notebok, a pager, a video-watching device, a dictaphone etc. The smartphone has completely engulfed all the use cases these devices would have filled. The multitouch display has allowed essentially anything to be virtualised, miniaturised, and put into a smartphone. In broad stroke generalisations, this multitouch-enabled virtualisation of any once-physical interface is a world-changing moment. Every tech company identifies with this idea in some way. Every tech company has a foot in the door of the Cult of the Unified. But sometimes you have to go a little deeper than broad stroke generalisations.
I wasn’t into tech until 2012. I had a laptop, a shitty phone but I didn’t care much about them beyond their immediate utility. The laptop was a MacBook and whilst I did start to dip my toes into products like Alfred, Bartender, and even terminal commands to snap the dock left or right instead of centre, I never thought I would ever be anywhere close to “early” on the adoption spectrum. Part of that was money, part of that was interest. But when the original Nexus 7 came out in 2012, I was all in.
I suddenly became obsessed with tech. In hindsight, one of the most nutritious foods for this obsession was the promise of unification. With this Nexus 7, I really could have that Gameboy in my pocket, with the help of an emulator. I could have all my uni notes typed into Evernote instead of written on paper (I still have these notes sitting in Evernote today). I could fill it up with books. More than anything though, I felt every problem I had could be solved by something under that 7” display.
And this is what you’re supposed to believe in the Cult of the Unified. You’re supposed to look at your old game console and shrug, look at all your books on your shelf and shake your head, look at your collection of vinyl and go out and buy a turntable with a USB port and spend countless hours digitising vinyl.
After a while, the Cult of the Unified wears down its acolytes. I got to point where I would be entraining my usage to that of the device. This came to a head years later when I bought a stylus for my iPad. I had this grand scheme that Penultimate, the handwriting/drawing companion app to Evernote, was going to be the truly futuristic notebook. That I would handwrite onto a 9.7” pane of glass with less fidelity than a crayon and that this would be the perfect system and I would have access to this notebook wherever I was and world hunger would get solved too. I’m not here to give a review of this experience — wait, maybe I am: it sucks — but to admit this was the start of me waking up to the crumbling cathedrals of the Cult of the Unified.
This impulse toward unification that was endlessly alluring to the tech neophyte was lost when I realised the fatal flaw in the impulse toward unification: if the interface of the one thing is meant to adequately handle seemingly any application, it can’t help but be suboptimal for the majority of those applications. We can build a car that can become a boat. But it’s going to fucking suck as a car and do even worse as a boat.
Up until this point, any friction in the experience I put down to my own inadequacies in using the technology. Opening up my phone to jot down an idea, only to get lost looking at Facebook was a fault of mine: I should have used Siri to lauch the app from locked. Getting distracted whilst reading by the torrent of notifications meant I was doing it wrong: I should be on ‘Do Not Disturb’ mode. This constant conforming to the limited set of paradigms that this piece of tech was programmed to identify became too much.
I now carry a notebook and pencil everywhere. I have probably 8 or 9 currently in the process of being filled by a variety of coloured pens and markers. I’ve bought bookshelves to house more books, a vinyl rack to house more vinyl. And no longer believe in Apple’s computer peripherals of keyboard and mouse as being the best simply because they’re unified in their aesthetic.
Critically, I’ve spent the last 18 months carving out my own existence. I’ve embraced the ways I naturally think and work and weilded my tech to conform. Sure, I still use a smartphone.
It just no longer uses me.
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