Luxury is dedicated
JUNE 30TH, 2016 — POST 178
A new device purchase is tantamount to a new life purchase. Or at least that’s the promise sugary technology product ads would like to make. You might remember Apple’s ‘Holiday’ ad series from late-2013, locating the iPhone 5s as inextricable from an honest, pure enjoyment of the holiday months. In ‘Misunderstood’, the iPhone is wielded by a teenage boy who appears fundamentally disaffected from the moments his family is sharing in the snow, around the Christmas tree. He’s “tragically” glued to his phone, missing the embodied human enjoyment we all ought to cherish at this time of year. The final act of the ad reveals, rather predictably, that the iPhone in fact wasn’t a drain on this boy’s attention, but rather the means by which the holidays are condensed. Presenting a video, shot and edited on the iPhone, beamed over wifi to an Apple TV, the family rejoices not only at the boy’s suspiciously poignant visual narrative voice, but implicitly at the “what a time to be alive!”-ness of how technology has enriched and preserved the moment. The iPhone has done everything. The world is better for it. And you could buy this life for the price of one of Apple’s handsets.
One of my earliest pieces on Medium explored this focus of technology, “the Cult of the Unified” as I termed it: that technology’s goal should be to consume as many discrete technologies, that a successful product is one that is, really, a whole lot of products in one. Moreover, the multi-device strategy specifically of Apple (but one Microsoft under Steve Ballmer pursued) is that a user’s life can be unified once all products in a “family” are owned. Whilst that piece tracked a personal journey to become a reformed once-acolyte of the Cult of the Unified, I’ve come to think the world is increasingly becoming realigned around dedication, as opposed to unification, in both its buying and usage habits in the protracted wake of the iPhone’s 2007 release. In the almost 10 years since this handset changed the world, people’s technoliteracy is enabling an exploration of an infinite set of technoidentities.
This has all come to a head for me today in reading an interview in The Atlantic with Matthew Kirschenbaum, an English professor who just published a history of word processing and writing software Track Changes. This is a man out for my heart. My own retreat from technological unification was simultaneous with my discovery of disciplined writing — first from my Honours thesis, to screenwriting, to these daily posts. In the interview with Robinson Meyer, Kirschenbaum points to a current trend away from unification that begins with writing apps, with what Kirschenbaum terms “austerityware”:
“I think we’re going to see more and more of those special-purpose writing platforms. I think writing might move away from the general-purpose computer — we’ll still do lots of writing of all sorts at our regular laptop, but it might be your email, your social media. For dedicated long-form writing, I think there may be more and more alternatives.”
I still remember when I saw the domineering royalty of Microsoft Word undermined by a cheap, “distraction-free” app called iA Writer, one of the earliest (and now largely superseded) entrants into the austerityware category. Tight, specific, and intentionally barebones, these apps (like my most beloved Ulysses) are built upon the concept that writing digitally no longer necessitates composition to occur with the printed page in mind, a principle that was lost along with longhand to the typewriter. Practically, the expansion and complication of coding languages has allowed basic syntactic “languages” like Markdown and Fountain to enrich plain text whilst preserving platform agnosticism. Both Markdown, the standard for web-ready writing, and Fountain, a similar option specifically for screenwriting, are dedicated by design: they’re really only good for one thing.
Kirschenbaum’s account noticeably tracks the dedicated-unified-dedicated cycle of word processing and writing software. Beginning with machines like the IBM Magnetic Tape/Selectric Typewriter, or IBM MT/ST for short. A machine that carried a sticker price of $10,000 in the 1960s, this was the pinnacle of single-purpose luxury. A machine solely for the composition and editing of the written word, the keyboard itself still serving as a holy grail of input design for mechanical keyboard enthusiasts today. But very quickly, Kirschenbaum notes, the function of this machine was easily folded into what we now know as personal computers. By the early 80s, writing was just one thing a user could do with a new computer.
Support for robust word processing became table stakes for personal computers, an oft-overlooked feature that remains one of the most primitive digital applications (probably second only to calculation). Writing’s relatively paltry resource load makes it a perfect candidate for the increased dedication we’re witness to. Fold onto the act of writing the act of coding, a practice that is largely the same if not for the need for ad-hoc compiling/running/testing and the basic practice of inputting text is returning to pseudo-monastic traditions of dedication. Kirschenbaum points to the Freewrite, a product that’s basically a mechanical keyboard strapped to a tiny E ink display, a tiny processor, and a wifi card — all contained within a footprint reminiscent of the portable typewriters of the 1970s and 1980s. Computational power from a computer smaller than the size of a single keyboard key is more than ample for text input and this is starting to be exploited. Just a few weeks ago, someone posted to the r/mechanicalkeyboards subreddit a DIY build of a keyboard that itself was a computer, just needing the power from a phone-style AC adapter over USB and a monitor to plug into over HDMI.
If I can bet on the presumption that writing will return to being a dedicated, personal, and luxurious purpose, the future of other technological applications is brought into starker relief. Working on the assumption that miniaturisation of exorbitant computational power enables writing to become dedicated, it would follow that still image, music, and then moving image — in order of requisite computational load — will too see a level of dedication previously offered only by their analog technologies. What exactly this looks like is hard to say, but a good place to start might be to think of everything you can do with your iPhone. Each of those discrete applications, which can be unified within a single device, are ripe to be spun off to dedicated hardware, analog in aesthetic but digital in mechanism. With a revitalised age of industrial design — where discrete items once again matter like they did for Dieter Rams-era Braun — could come an age where our pocket and our homes aren’t necessarily filled with all the same stuff but instead all our own stuff.
Photographs by James Ball appear here without permission. Please get in contact if you would like them removed.
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