there are things in life , (real life, the kind developers avoid like the plague) that cannot be solved with software solutions. your view has gotten pretty polarized. just because you spend twelve to sixteen hours in front of a computer every day doesn’t mean there’s not more to life, or that what seems like a matter of course to you means anything to anybody else.

for people who do live and work in the real physical world, the exent to which google is trying to suck up all the music, pictures, email, searches, etc etc is very noticeable and not great. the whole “evil” thing may be a bit overstated, but it’s GOOGLE, not spammers or frauds, that asks me for more information and pushes google plus or photos or music when i asked for EMAIL. give me email when i ask for it. don’t put up a convoluted screen that is obviously designed so that i will just give them whatever information they want so i can go look at my email. yes there are obvious ways around this but it’s not nice. perhaps to everyone sitting in a meeting at google this makes sense, but not to me; and i get no impression that google is listening to anyone but themselves.

there’s this “we know best” attitude from google. maybe it’s being a victim of their own success with the search function. and in some sense i believe that google does know what’s best, but only for google. what’s best for me is a simple email account that i check twice a week so i can get on with my happy simple life in the real world. none of these products, google anything, facebook, GPS, smartphones, do to your life what the ads say they will. these companies with their endless updates… nothing is done properly anymore, they release software that is not ready to perform as advertised, but rather it’s just barely good enough to be advertised. similar to how politicians spend 15% of their time pretending to do their job and 85% trying to get reelected so they can keep up their insider trading to fund their next campaign. there’s no meat to any of it. the only people who truly believe any of these meaningless promises are the people who are steadily getting checks out of it.

and understand, what i’m talking about is social networks, file sharing services, music, tv, sometimes operating systems. what i mean is personal computing. all the stuff that only seems like real and useful work to the people who write the software. i think that users at least subconsciously aware that they are pissing their lives away to marketers and getting very very little in return. This kind of software as opposed to software development in engineering, sciences, manufacturing… because those things actually have to work, not look cute or make you feel good about yourself.

i can’t blame google for getting huge, i can’t blame them for running a successful enterprise. that doesn’t mean that i am at all as convinced as they are that all of their services will be useful to me.

prattling on about the past gets me nowhere, but people used to listen to a whole album. it existed, physically, in front of them, along with everything else. to some extent my attitute is anachronistic, but sometimes things are just better that way. a weekend with no phone, no computer, no interruption to tweet and blog pics and crap, is better than wandering around some place looking every five minutes at the tiny little screen to see what friend posted the sandwich they made for lunch on facebook. and i think that the people who do think it’s better a.) are totally fuked. b.) never tried actually being where they are. c.) would be completely lost if they did, because they decided that the parts of their brains that need to know how to read a map, or interact with people in real situations was unnecessary.

i say bring on the EMPs so i can watch all you idiots die because you can’t order a pad thai at two in the morning from your iphone anymore and you’ve never cooked anything in your life. let alone built a house, repaired a car, grown corn…

go i just want to go to any primitive tribe somewhere and tell them not to change. don’t jump on to this sinking ship. your ways have sustained you for thousands of years. our whole system can fail and you will be fine, going on the same as always. the lives those people lead, the depth of understanding of their world and each other, is something none of us will ever know. and i for one am not celebrating.

http://blog.thiux.com/p/dont-be-evil-with-publishers.html