Introducing: EXECUTE

A user guide for the third millennium

DECEMBER 14TH, 2016 — POST 337

If tech had one story for 2016, it was the annihilation of choice. This story started in whispers about an iPhone to be released without a headphone jack. It matured when it started to look like no major hardware release of the year — perhaps hampered by stalled innovation on the part of Intel — would be able to be particularly compelling. And it was arguably the lack of choice that drove so many to engage on only a handful of platforms such that Donald Trump became President-elect.

For me at least, a fundamental mistake with how we talk about tech presented itself. Forever caught in the whirlwind of new products and “innovation”, conversations around tech invariably become conversations about consumption. “Should I buy this?” is the question most tech coverage seeks to answer, generally as an extension to a product review. If we’re not talking about what ought to influence a purchase decision, we’re talking about the machinations of the companies that are so culturally salient. We want to know about Elon Musk folding SolarCity and Tesla together, of how Samsung is handling (or not handling) recalls of exploding phones, or of Snap’s plans for its future beyond an IPO. To me it seems as if we talk more about the next thing than the thing that’s right in front of us.

Those of you that read me regularly might have begun to track my own thoughts on technology change in the closing act of this year. Whilst I can’t say I’ve entirely shed the seduction the tech spectacle has over me, certain questions specifically around the ways we use technology have become increasingly pressing. Whether that’s around managing device tyranny or solving a problem in one of my own workflows, I can’t shake the sense that we’re more concerned with buying technology than we are with using it.

Frankly, this quirk in our thinking about technology doesn’t make sense. It’s not only from a perspective of time spent using versus buying (or thinking about buying) that this should seem strange; but more fundamentally, it positions the action of choice almost exclusively around a purchase, as if those are the only decisions that matter when technology is concerned. The truth of the matter is every single thing we do with technology is a product of choice. Neglecting to acknowledge this only means that those choices aren’t always your own, instead outsourced to manufacturers’ ideas of “defaults”, “intuition”, and “user avatars”.

We’ve never been as technologically literate nor as shepherded by technology companies as we are today. There are thousands of developers working to bring apps to your smartphone but then we hear that no one downloads apps anymore, instead living exclusively inside of Facebook’s Big Blue, Twitter, Snapchat, and YouTube. There has never been a time before now when as many movies, as much music has been available to us from myriad sources and yet I’m guessing you, like me, still listen mostly through Apple Music or Spotify and lose hours in front of Netflix for a collection of flat fees every month. Is this really a period of technological enlightenment?

I’ve been publishing daily to Medium since January 5th of this year. Which means that this year-long project is almost up. In thinking a lot about what this thing could become once I stop publishing daily, one thing kept coming up: a weekly newsletter — something I can deliver directly to the inbox of those that are interested. And when I think about what that newsletter would be about, these still-nebulous ideas around technology and usage choices keep bubbling up.

So this is a post to introduce that newsletter.

EXECUTE: A user guide for the third millennium

EXECUTE will treat tech as a movement, not as an amalgam of the actions of technology companies. EXECUTE will deal with using technology everyday, not buying technology once every few years.

If EXECUTE exists somewhere on the web right now, it’s somewhere between Real Life, Verge@Work, and old issues of Processed World. Essentially, EXECUTE will be an attempt to better understand technology in terms of our myriad postures before it.

You can sign up for EXECUTE now — just click here.

Hope to see you soon.