Fitbits for conviviality

My son received a Fitbit for Christmas. Since receiving it, it’s clear that he enjoys its ability to track his steps. He’s already quite active and so he’s using the device largely to recognize and acknowledge his existing behaviour rather than as a means to encourage any change in behavior. At the moment, the other functionality and measures of the device aren’t of interest to him.

But they are to me.

When I was reading up about his particular Fitbit, the feature that I was personally most interested in was its silent alarm feature. I immediately recognized that this was a solution of my current problem of how to start my day earlier without waking up my husband with an alarm from my phone.

And so every night my son lends me his Fitbit. And every morning, after the silent alarm rouses me out of bed, I remove it and set it aside for him and I start my morning routine.

What amuses me is that already the dashboard analytics of the device suggests that every evening, the resting heart rate of my son suddenly drops.

screen capture of Fitbit metric

It reminds me of Matt Haughey’s LoT Story:

The app had a new UI and once I got my bearings, I noticed a tab with a red notification, marked “unknown” with over 100 data points over the course of several years. As a bit of background: the scale works by guessing who is who based on differing weights, and lets you name those people and the people in my house all had different weights when I bought it, making it easy to track us.

But there was an unknown person.

The unknown tab was interesting since the data started at a different number than any of us and then steadily fell. A lot. And there was years of data. At first, I thought it had to be data from another account on Nokia’s servers leaking into my profile. Who else lives in my house and could do this for years? I logged into the website to double check the logs.

I couldn’t think of anyone it could be. After a couple days of thinking it over, I finally noticed an obvious pattern in the data. It was only one recording a week, for years. Always around noon. Always on the same day.

Oh shit. I know who it was. It was our housecleaner.

An IoT story“, A Whole Lotta Nothing, November 4, 2018

This is a good reminder that ‘personal’ tools or ‘smart tools’ are built not to be shared. They are built to measure and track known users. Any use generates data and that data both reveals and betrays use.

I think we need to insist that our tools be convivial:

So what makes a tool “convivial?” For Illich, “tools foster conviviality to the extent to which they can be easily used, by anybody, as often or as seldom as desired, for the accomplishment of a purpose chosen by the user.” That is, convivial technologies are accessible, flexible, and noncoercive. Many tools are neutral, but some promote conviviality and some choke it off.

Why the Landline Telephone Was the Perfect Tool“, Suzanne Fischer, The Atlantic, Apr 16, 2012

I would write more but the silent alarm on my son’s Fitbit reminds me that it is time to go to bed.

Everyone loves a Canadian boy

It is the first day of 2019, a year in which I have resolved to write more. I haven’t written anything on this blog since just before the election of 2016. No further explanation is necessary.

Some days ago, I was in a Holiday Inn in Burlington, Ontario. I was in the city to visit family and we opted to stay in a hotel to be less of a burden. We had been to this particular hotel before, and like our previous stay, we found that the hotel was filled with eight year old boys and their fathers as there was nearby hockey tournament. And this was fine. We knew not to book a room near the atrium lest the hockey dads would get too drunk and start singing through the night.

During our breakfast at the hotel, I passed a table as I made my way to the buffet table. There was middle-aged man and a small boy eating breakfast. The boy was wearing a t-shirt reading, Everyone Loves a Canadian Boy.

And I was a bit thunderstruck when I saw it.

It might be necessary for you to know that just before breakfast, I was reading the 2018 Massey Lectures, Tanya Talaga’s All Our Relations: Finding the Path Forward, which explores the legacy of cultural genocide against Indigenous peoples. I had just finished the third lecture, The Third Space that describes the scale and the depth of the horrific abuse that Indigenous boys and girls have endured at the hands of those who were supposed to care for them.

And so when I read the T-shirt, I thought to myself, “That’s just not true. It’s never been true.”

If you don’t think you are ever going to read the Final Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, I strongly recommend reading All Our Relations in its stead.

I’m not entirely sure what I am going to write about in this blog in 2019. When I first conceived of The Magnetic North, I had hopes to write about technology, utopia, and the Anthropocene.

But if today’s writing is any indication, it is going to be about the Canada that we need to see. We need a Canada in which every child is loved.

Playing Attention

Last night I read that Trump’s position in the polls is slowly rising. As I read the news my stomach lurched and a feeling of dread spread through my body like vinegar in milk.

The GOP presidential candidate has generated an absurdly long list of lies, fraud, and promises that curdles the blood of anyone who believes that the rights and freedoms of the United States are for all Americans regardless of creed or colour. It chills the blood of those who fear for the most vulnerable among us. And yet his polls rise.

Again, we have been reminded that the mass media – especially television news – is hegemonic. The companies that produce television cleave to power. The news can be bought. It will back foreign invasion without credible evidence. It will act with extreme negligence during natural disasters and in doing so, bring about needless death. It does not believe that Black Lives Matter.

Perhaps you are like myself and unsure how much consternation should be thrown at the feet of cable news and how much should be hurled at the men and women who find it easier to bring themselves to vote for a leader supported by Putin and neo-Nazis than for a woman and/or a Democrat.

It makes me wonder, has it always been about identity politics?

How much of the racism and misogyny – now shamelessly out of the open and now somehow – absurdly – beyond public rebuke – was already there, quiet, just waiting for a cue to express itself?

On the other hand, how much of what we see is just the loud and virulent audience participation of a few – not unlike the crowd that boos the bad guy in wrestling or MMA – who have no real power outside of the arena when the audience no longer has an audience?

How many conscientious objectors are among the GOP, silent but resolute in their belief that what is seen on television is not the America they live in nor the America they want.

2016 earned its title of annus horribilis many months ago when David Bowie and then Prince, passed on and left us with their music. Bowie and Prince did not transcend the societal boundaries placed around them but they did extend the boundaries of music, style, sexuality and identity for themselves and for all of us.

One answer to 2016 is more Prince. One answer to 2016 is more David Bowie.

I believe another answer is to hold your nose and get involved in every level of politics you can.

And I’ve been thinking still of a whole other coping mechanism to fight against the fear and rage shown to us on television and our social media feeds at every hour of the day that can mirror itself in our own nervous systems if not checked.

And that answer is – paradoxically – to let go of want.

And there is another, subtler reason you might find yourself convinced that things are getting worse and worse, which is that our expectations outpace reality. That is, things do improve — but we raise our expectations for how much better they ought to be at a faster rate, creating the illusion that progress has gone into reverse.

Perhaps my anxious feelings are because I’m wishing for a world that is different than the one that I am in. The world is not a wish-granting factory.

Perhaps my expectations for a world that forms to my will is a problem unto itself. Perhaps it a fundamental problem of how most of us understand ourselves in our world.

 What if we treated everything the way we treat soccer and Tetris – as valuable and virtuous for being exactly what they are, rather than for what would be convenient, or for what we wish they were instead, or for what we fear they are not? Walks and meadows, aunts and grandfathers, zoning board of appeals meetings and business trips. Everything. Our lives would be better, bigger, more meaningful, and less selfish.

The above is from the preface to the recently published, Play Anything: The Pleasure of Limits, the Uses of Boredom, and the Secret of Games by game designer and scholar Ian Bogost. It’s a book that has given me much comfort during this past bad weekPlay Anything starts with an exploration of boredom – not unlike the late David Foster Wallace in his unfinished work, The Pale King.  But Bogost, unlike Wallace, doesn’t believe the cure for boredom is within ourselves but outside of ourselves once we pay a different kind of attention to the world around us.

bogost-play-anything-high-res

Bogost then moves on to his real target – the ever present layer of irony that smothers our day and age. Play Anything is a difficult book to summarize. Between trips to Walmart and other excursions in pursuit of a greener lawn, Bogost slowly builds his case that it is working within materials and systems of constraint that brings us a sense of freedom and that fun is the opposite of happiness.

(Speaking of games, while I did not play The Witness – the 2016 game about exploring an abandoned island and solving puzzles, I did watch a ridiculous number of videos watching other people playing the game. Here’s a slight spoiler: in one part of the island of The Witness, you can watch a small series of videos from within the game and this particular video is strangely fitting).

I want to be clear – while I am considering giving up wishing for a better world, I am not giving up working towards a better one.

Between the rise of Donald Trump and our rising sea levels – the time to fight for our future is now.

Ways of Seeing

Over the last week, several people in my social media circles have been wondering out loud if we should reconsider how we spend our attention especially when horrific violence is perpetrated specifically to generate a mass spectacle.

For myself, I know that when I’m online at the same time something horrific is happening I feel terrible but I’m not sure that my following along accomplishes anything other than the sick feeling in my stomach as the images, speculative details, and the immediate hot-takes unfold and scroll before me.

Knowing that I can’t continue this way, I thought I would divert some of my attention from the news of the world and cast it towards the formal visual arts. I’m doing so not because I’m looking for answers but I’m looking for a better understanding… of what? I don’t even know. If I had to rationalize why I’ve decided to spend more time looking at art, I can tell you this story: there was a passage in At the Existentialist Cafe: Freedom, Being and Apricot Cocktails* that described a particular philosopher’s definition of art as ‘anti-technology’ in that art is not meant to “do anything” and this definition pleased me.

*I don’t have the exact wording of this passage because I lent the book to a friend who has taken it on vacation

It was recently my birthday and to celebrate I took the day off of work before exactly knowing how I wanted to spend the day other than not-at-work. I was debating between several options for short day trips but once I learned that The Cranbrook Art Museum was featuring a special exhibition called Hippie Modernism: The Struggle for Utopia, it was as if the decision was made for me.

I was delighted to discover that the exhibition covered more than the work of traditional visual artists. It also considered the work of architects, radical social and political movements as well as graphic designers who were particularly attuned to the intersection of information and mass media.

The knowledge box

As I did the museum shuffle through the rooms, I recognized some of the creators whose work was present (Stewart Brand, Archigram, The Diggers) but there were many who were new to me. There was so much to see, experience and absorb and rather than work through the art slowly, I bought the exhibition’s catalog for future study.

To be honest, I don’t know what makes one particular exhibition more exceptional than another once you you’ve set aside one’s personal taste for the art within. Or perhaps I should say, that because I enjoyed the art so much, I can’t objectively judge whether the collection of art made up a particular strong exhibition.

This happens as much in our feelings about art is in our feelings toward people. If you develop a “love” for, say, science fiction films, you no longer see them as you do other films; it becomes difficult to consider them outside your own love for the larger genre. A friend ask, “Should I see this sci-fi film?” You say, “Well, if you like science fiction films you will like it, otherwise…” When our love is too great, our taste blinds us. The designer Jason Kottke once described this on his popular Web site a new viral video as “so perfectly in the kottke.org wheelhouse that I can’t even tell if it’s any good or not.”

The above passage is from Tom Vanderbilt’s You May Also Like: Taste in an Age of Endless Choice.

I picked up the book… why, well, because of the book I have no confidence in my ability to explain my choices relating to taste because what I have learned is that taste is complicated and there is a lot of scientific evidence that suggests that our rationales are largely rationalizations and not reasons:

Our ability to express an affective judgement about something happens in the range of milliseconds. This is a great skill for a complex world, a filtering mechanism for effectively navigating the crowded marketplace of life. But shortcuts come at a price: We may miss what we might really prefer, we may discount something we will later come to love, we may be misattributing the source of our liking.

(Although if I had to rationalize my choice after the fact, I would tell you that I became recently interested in taste after seeing the tapestry series The Vanity of Small Differences by Grayson Perry at the AROS in Aarhus, Denmark last month).

I agree with much that was written about the book in this review from The New Yorker and found the book was somewhat disappointing because, disappointingly, it is very difficult to say anything definitive about taste. I did particularly enjoy the chapter on “The ecstasies and anxieties of art” where so many of the variables relating to taste come into play and conflict: the expert versus the beginner, context versus content, the emotional response versus a more intellectual approach, observing versus judging, and being fashionable versus being timeless.

One thing that is known is that they do not look at paintings very long. When Jeffery Smith, who for many years headed the Office of Research and Evaluation at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, analyzed the viewing times of Met visitors across a variety of paintings — including Rembrandt’s Aristotle with a Bust of Homer and Lautze’s Washington Crossing the Delaware he found the median viewing time for a painting was seventeen seconds.

From Vanderbilt I have learned that we pay more attention to the things that we like and we like the things we pay more attention to. And so with that message primed in my short term memory, I somehow I come across this video from Amy Herman who dropped by the offices of Google to discuss her book “Visual Intelligence: Sharpen Your Perception, Change Your Life” and decided to watch it because I had decided that I was going to learn more about the visual arts. And I’m so glad I did, but it was for reasons that surprised me.

Amy Herman was once Head of Education of The Frick Collection in New York City. In that position, she developed a special class for medical students to help them get past the various forms of myopia that doctors can develop that can make it difficult to see symptoms that they don’t expect. That class was based on the work of the Yale Center for British Art but what Amy Herman did after was her own – she developed a similar class for law enforcement and then eventually, for many of various security and military bodies of the United States.

What I particularly responded to in her talk was Herman’s premise that every professional must be accountable for their observations and how those observations are put into words.

And this is my opportunity to tell my sessions there are very, very few things that are 100% in your control. Choice of words is one of them. Both in speaking and in writing, choice of words is up to you. And I’m implore my classes, don’t make poor word choices.

At the end of the talk, she again stresses the importance of words after giving a couple of examples of how essential that our words match our observations and not what we expect to see, including one that brings race into play.

In this course, you think about your observations and perceptions, you keep your inferences, biases and assumptions in check, you’re careful about your choice of words. You ask what you know, what you don’t know and what do need to know. If you think about all those concepts, I think it makes you a sharper professional.

Herman suggests that if you are to be a professional that serves the public, it is both in your best interest and in the public’s best interest to adopt a practice that takes the time, care and effort towards the act of observation before jumping to conclusions and actions that may prove, with time and reflection, completely unwarranted.

To me, this can be read as a demand for accountability in a deeply human way.

And it can start by all of us taking the time to observe and be aware of the ways of seeing art.

Hoping for an end to technology

It is Sunday evening and the last moments of the first weekend of July. I’m at home in my living room in Windsor Ontario. The last two months have been the driest in a decade and area farmers are using words like ‘frightened’.

I’m back after a week’s vacation in Denmark. Can we now define ‘vacation’ as designated time in which we find more novelty and enjoyment IRL than online?

Forgive my weak attempt at aphorism. It is one of many after-effects (after-shocks?)  I’ve been feeling after reading The Age of Earthquakes by Shumon Basar, Douglas Coupland and Hans Ulrich Obrist. [This interview of the authors  is a good introduction to the work].

The Age of Earthquakes is a re-working of The Medium is the Message by Marshall McLuhan. While McLuhan’s court jestering in the House of Don Draper always left me cold, I found The Age of Earthquakes much more emotionally resonant. Perhaps this is because I’m currently struggling -and I really mean struggling – with how much of myself I want to be online.

dazed

The only section of the book that I didn’t particularly enjoy was dedicated to the idea of the Singularity. This is a terribly dark thing to confess but I don’t believe our planet’s resources are plentiful enough to carry us into to a future in which we have to worry about our computers reaching consciousness.

Everyware

What’s a much more interesting idea, to me, is the idea of the ‘End of Technology’ which Douglas Coupland recently put forward in his essay, What if There’s No Next Big Thing in e-flux magazine. That being said, this particular piece is more about the possible end of “capital A” Art than of technology. For more about the  possibility of an end to technology, I would recommend listening to the episode The Future in which Benjamin Walker both considers how our present social media landscape was predicted years ago on television as well as the end of Moore’s Law.

Is it wrong to desperately want an end to technology?

In her recent dystopia, Oryx and Crake, which concentrates on biotechnology, Margaret Atwood also portrays the collapse of civilization in the near future. One of her characters asks, “As a species we’re doomed by hope, then?” By *hope*? Well, yes. Hope drives us to invent new fixes for old messes, which in turn create ever more dangerous messes. Hope elects the politician with the biggest promise; and as any stockbroker or lottery seller know, most of us will take a slim hope over prudent and predictable frugality. Hope, like greed, fuels the engine of capitalism.  — Ronald Wright, “Rebellion of the Tools”, A Short History of Progress.

First we need to lose hope? Perhaps yes. Perhaps we need to lose faith in a future that can be solved by technology so we can – perhaps – see the alternatives and perchance, utopia.