Oliver Laxe’s Sirat is that rarest of things, a film that operates simultaneously on the senses and the soul. A father and his young son travel to a desert rave in southern Morocco searching for a missing daughter, and what begins as an offbeat road movie gradually, inexorably, transmutes into something far more primal and devastating.

Comparisons to Friedkin’s Sorcerer are not idle. Like that 1977 masterpiece, Sirat understands that the most terrifying journeys are the ones where the landscape itself becomes antagonist, where every mile forward strips another layer of civilisation from its characters. Both films grasp that desperate people, bound together by circumstance rather than choice, will reveal their truest selves when the world turns hostile. And both films were made by directors willing to put their crews through genuine physical hardship to capture something authentic on film, Laxe shot on Super 16mm in punishing Saharan conditions, and it shows in every sun-scorched, sand-blasted frame.

But what elevates Sirat into its own singular orbit is Kangding Ray’s extraordinary electronic score. The pulsing techno that opens the film establishes a heartbeat that never truly stops, even in the quietest passages. As the narrative darkens, Ray’s compositions shift from euphoric to funereal, the bass becoming less a rhythm and more a death rattle. It is one of the great film scores of recent years, physical, overwhelming, and utterly inseparable from the images it accompanies.

This is proper cinema. See it loud.

Sirat Trailer on YouTube

Product managers cite Steve Jobs, Netflix’s culture deck, or Amazon’s working backwards. I learned more from Mark E. Smith and The Fall, a post-punk band from Manchester that existed from 1976 to 2018.

The Fall were the longest-running post-punk band in history, releasing 31 studio albums over 42 years. Mark E Smith was the only constant member through roughly 53 lineups. Radio DJ John Peel stated “always different; they are always the same.” They were his favourite band. And though The Fall never achieved mainstream success they maintained a loyal cult following that influenced, well, everyone.

What can a cantankerous post-punk frontman teach product teams? Quite a lot, as it happens.

“If it’s me and your granny on bongos, it’s The Fall”

This famous quote captures something most teams struggle with. The band went through massive personnel changes but always remained The Fall. Smith understood that vision isn’t about the people, it’s about the essence.

When Craig Scanlon left after 17 years service, when his wife Brix departed, when entire rhythm sections walked out, The Fall continued because Smith never wavered on what it The Fall was.

Product teams can lose direction every time leadership changes or priorities shift. If you can’t explain your product’s essence in one sentence that would be true regardless of who builds it, you don’t have real vision yet.

Netflix understood this when they pivoted from DVD-by-mail to streaming. The vision was about giving people the entertainment they want, when they want it. Reed Hastings could have said “If it’s me and your granny writing recommendation algorithms, it’s still Netflix.”

Three Rs and Product Development

The Fall summarized their approach in one of their earliest tracks, 1978’s “Repetition.” Over clanging keyboards and piercing guitar, Mark E Smith sneered his allegiance to the three Rs: “Repetition, repetition, repetition.”

The Fall would take the same musical ideas and rework them across multiple albums. Hex Enduction Hour, recorded in 1981, pushed their core elements to their logical extreme through repetition and slight variation. Each version wasn’t a copy but an iteration.

Each iteration of Google Search refined the same fundamental problem while adding new capabilities. Amazon’s obsession with one-click purchasing led to innovations across their entire ecosystem.

The Fall’s two-drummer approach on Hex Enduction Hour shows this perfectly. Instead of replacing their sound, they doubled down on rhythm while maintaining everything else that made them The Fall. Product teams often change too many variables at once.

Mark E Smith understood that breakthrough innovations usually come from methodical iteration on a stable foundation. He might have put that differently though.

When WhatsApp added voice messages, they didn’t rebuild their entire interface. They took their core messaging experience and extended it logically. When Stripe added international payments, they applied their simple API philosophy to a more complex problem.

Northern White Crap That Talks Back

Mark E Smith described The Fall as “Northern white crap that talks back” and refused to soften this positioning for broader appeal. The band could have smoothed their rough edges, made their music more accessible, or toned down Smith’s abrasive lyrics. Instead, they doubled down on exactly what made them alienating to mainstream audiences.

This created something remarkable: There is no such thing as a casual Fall fan. If you’re a fan, you consider yourself an expert. Once you got seduced by The Fall’s world, it was almost impossible not to fully immerse yourself.

Products need to embrace their fans too. Discord started as a gaming communication tool and resisted expanding beyond gamers until they’d nailed that market. Notion refused to simplify their complex interface to chase casual users and instead built a community of power users who became their best advocates.

Mark E Smith knew exactly who The Fall was for and never compromised that identity. He understood that trying to please everyone results in pleasing no one deeply. And he probably didn’t care about pleasing anyone.

When Figma launched, they could have positioned themselves as “design software for everyone.” Instead, they focused on interface designers and built exactly what that audience needed. Their specific positioning attracted designers who became passionate advocates, eventually pulling entire organisations toward the product.

The lesson is to be genuinely yourself and serve your real audience rather than an imaginary mainstream one.

Being Difficult Works

Mark E Smith was famously difficult to work with. He fired band members on a whim, demanded absolute creative control, and never compromised his vision for anyone. But this uncompromising approach also produced 31 albums and a 42-year career that influenced generations of musicians.

The challenge for product leaders is knowing when uncompromising vision serves the product and when it destroys teams. Steve Jobs was famously difficult but his perfectionism drove Apple to create category-defining products.

The Fall stayed focused and productive when most bands would have compromised themselves into irrelevance.

But Mark E Smith’s methods also drove away talented musicians who could have contributed significantly. Marc Riley was sacked at the end of 1982, following several arguments, one of which resulted in a fist fight during the Australian tour.

The key difference between destructive and productive obstinacy is whether the uncompromising standards serve the product or the ego. Jeff Bezos’s “disagree and commit” principle at Amazon shows a more sustainable version. Strong opinions, loosely held, with clear decision-making authority when consensus isn’t possible.

Building for the Prole Art Threat

The Fall positioned themselves as working-class art that upset cultural elites, never chased critical acclaim or tried to impress music journalists. He built The Fall for people like himself, an audience of one.

The focus on authenticity over the mainstream created fierce loyalty. The Fall’s fans didn’t only like the music, they felt understood by it. Smith knew exactly who he was building for and never wavered.

TikTok succeeded by understanding teenage users better than any adult executive could. They didn’t try to make the app more “professional” or “serious.” They doubled down on what their users actually wanted, even when it looked ridiculous to everyone else.

GitHub focused on what developers needed for collaboration, ignoring suggestions to make an accessible product for non-technical users. This deep focus on their core audience created the foundation for everything that followed.

Mark E Smith understood that the Fall should be “the band by which all others must be judged.” Not because they appealed to everyone, but because they served their specific audience better than anyone else.

Always Different, Always the Same

Despite lineup changes numbering in the dozens, The Fall were “always different; they are always the same.” They maintained a recognizable sound while constantly evolving. They understood how to innovate within constraints rather than abandoning what worked.

When Brix Smith joined the band in 1983, her tenure marked a shift towards the relatively conventional, with the songs she co-wrote often having strong pop hooks and more orthodox verse-chorus-verse structures. But even these more accessible songs remained unmistakably Fall tracks because they never abandoned the core elements that defined the band.

Spotify has added podcasts, audiobooks, and social features while maintaining their core music discovery experience. Slack evolved from gaming to workplace communication while preserving the essence of what made their communication platform work.

Constraint isn’t a limitation. Mark E Smith’s constraints were his distinctive vocal style, the band’s rhythmic approach, and their working-class perspective. Within those boundaries, he could explore, endlessly.

Google’s constraint is organizing information. Within that framework, they’ve built search, maps, email, productivity tools, and cloud services. The constraint provides coherence while allowing for massive innovation.

Product teams often think evolution means abandoning constraints. The Fall shows how working within clear boundaries can drive more meaningful innovation than starting from scratch.

The 30-Second Test

John Peel could “recall every incarnation of the group on demand” because each version of The Fall, while different, remained true to something essential. You could hear any 30-second clip from any era and identify it as The Fall.

If someone encountered any feature or interaction from your product in isolation, would they recognise it as yours? If you showed someone your error messages, your loading states, or your onboarding flow, would they understand what your product stands for?

The Fall passed this test because Mark E Smith never lost sight of what the band represented. Every song, every album, every lineup change served the same fundamental purpose.

In a well made product you can see this principle in decisions large and small, from inclusive design language to edge case handling. Features are consistent, and express the same underlying vision.

The Lessons Of Mark E Smith

The Fall offer several specific lessons for product management.

Product identity should survive any team change. If your vision depends on specific people being present, it’s not really vision.

Breakthrough products usually come from pushing existing strengths further rather than abandoning what works. Change one variable at a time while maintaining your core foundation.

Build for people who will use your product daily, even if it means ignoring broader market potential. Deep focus on your core audience creates the foundation for everything that follows.

Clear boundaries provide coherence while allowing for meaningful innovation within those bounds. Constraints enable creativity rather than limiting it.

Difficult decisions become easier when your purpose is crystal clear. When you know exactly what you’re building and why, most choices become obvious.

The Fall never achieved mainstream success, but they built something that people cared about deeply. In an era of growth-at-all-costs mentality, Smith’s approach reminds us that building products people truly care about might be more valuable than building products everyone kind of likes.

As one critic noted, “anyone who can tell you the five best Fall LPs, or the five best Fall tracks, has missed the point. It’s the whole body of the work that’s to be applauded.” Great products aren’t judged by individual features but by the complete experience they create for the people they’re designed to serve.

Mark E Smith understood something many product managers struggle with: when your vision is clear enough to survive any team change, you can focus on execution rather than constantly re-explaining the basics.

The Fall proves that uncompromising focus on your real audience, combined with relentless iteration within clear constraints, can build something that lasts. Not because it appeals to everyone, but because it serves someone deeply and authentically.

Better to be essential to a few than irrelevant to many.

Someone has built a website called Just Buy Nothing that lets you browse products, add them to your basket, and checkout without actually buying anything. It’s meant to help people with online shopping addictions get their fix without spending money.

The execution is clever. You can browse categories like “Home & Garden” and “Electronics,” complete with product photos, descriptions, and reviews. There’s even a fake currency called “NoBucks” and reward systems for completing “anti-consumption tasks.” It feels like a real shop until you remember nothing will actually arrive at your door.

The creator’s insight is spot-on. For many people, the dopamine hit comes from the act of purchasing, not from owning the thing. The moment you click “buy now” is the peak. Everything after that is anticlimax, buyer’s remorse, and clutter.

Why This Won’t Work

The fundamental problem is that human nature adapts faster than browser extensions. People will find workarounds. They’ll use different devices, disable the extension “just for this one purchase,” or simply shop elsewhere.

We’ve seen this pattern before with website blockers and app timers. They work brilliantly until they don’t. The moment you really want something, your brain becomes remarkably creative at bypassing your own restrictions.

There’s also the substitution problem. If fake shopping scratches the same psychological itch as real shopping, what happens when someone gets bored with pretend purchases?

The Problem Isn’t Technical

Online shopping addiction isn’t really about websites being too easy to use. It’s about deeper stuff like boredom, anxiety, social comparison, and the fundamental human desire to feel like we’re improving our lives through acquisition.

No amount of clever UX can fix the underlying psychology. When someone feels stressed, telling them to browse a fake shop instead of a real one is like telling an alcoholic to switch to non-alcoholic beer. It might help temporarily, but it’s not addressing the core issue.

The most honest solution is probably the most boring one. Close the tab. Delete the apps. Find something else to do with your hands when you’re bored. Accept that wanting things is normal and you don’t have to act on every impulse.

I am not a therapist.

Better Distractions

This whole thing is wonderfully backwards.

The website might help some people. But it also shows our instinct to solve problems by building things.

Shopping addiction? Build a fake shop.

It’s perfectly human.

Nobody remembers their passwords anymore, not decent passwords anyway. If your password is P@assword1234 this post is not for you.

For those folks who do use a phrase that cannot be cracked in seconds seems the “forgot password” link is a valuable tool, faster than memory, and more honest than pretending we remember the names of three childhood pets we used six months ago. Sorry, Smokey-Thomas-Jonti.

Password reset emails are the real login method for many users. Everyone knows it but nobody admits it.

Sadly, IT standards force password changes every 90 days even though this practice weakens security. When you make people change passwords quarterly, they don’t create stronger ones.

And those systems demand eight characters minimum with at least one capital letter, one number, and one special character. “correcthorsebatterystaple” isn’t secure enough, but “P@ssw0rd!” is bulletproof. Yeah, right.

Of course nobody remembers passwords like “K9#mPx7!”. They’re impossible to remember by design.

Users develop ‘workarounds.’ Post-it notes under the keyboards, scribbled lists in pages at the back of their notebook, the kind of record you can find within a metre of someone’s office chair.

The safest password is one you can never possibly remember, like using UUIDGen in Terminal to generate a hexadecimal result, and some symbols and lower case characters, store that in your password manager.

Yet nearly every major password manager has been hacked at some point. LastPass suffered massive breaches in 2022, hackers stole customer password vaults. Researchers have found security flaws in 1Password, Keeper, Dashlane, and others. The tools meant to keep passwords secure from breaches keep getting breached themselves.

Chrome and Safari started generating random passwords because they knew users never would. Apple went further with iCloud Keychain, which syncs across all your devices and unlocks with your fingerprint or face. Not bad.

Biometrics work better than any password manager. Your fingerprint can’t be forgotten, written down, or guessed. They’re unique, always with you, and can’t be faked or stolen in a data breach. Yet.

A colleague’s USB-C charger broke during a coffee shop sales pitch. Instead of buying a new one from a shop after the meeting, they order a replacement through Grab and it arrived at the café 90 minutes later. Instead of being amazed, they were annoyed it wasn’t delivered in 30 minutes.

Welcome to 2025, where miracles are boring.

The Logistics Nobody Thinks About

Getting a RM15 phone charger delivered involves an absurd chain of events. Factory in China makes it. Ship to Malaysia. Store in warehouse. List online. Customer orders. Payment processes. Rider assigned. Navigate through KL traffic. Find the building. Find the customer.

All because going to a shop feels like too much effort.

The same customer who complains about 90-minute delivery would have thought instant delivery was science fiction ten years ago. Now it’s a basic service that’s apparently too slow.

Everything Arrives Fast Now

Grab brings nasi lemak in 30 minutes. Doesn’t feel special anymore.

I remember when delivery meant calling a restaurant, hoping they delivered to your area, hoping they answered, hoping they had what you wanted, hoping you got what you ordered.. Tracking your order in real-time sounded impossible.

Now customers watch a motorcycle icon on their phone and get angry when it stops at traffic lights.

Singapore makes the impatience even sillier. The whole country is smaller than most delivery zones, but people still complain about wait times. You can see your destination from most pickup points.

Malaysia has proper traffic jams and sprawling suburbs. Riders memorise shortcuts through developments that GPS can’t find. They know that pavements are technically roads when you’re in a hurry. They also know which security guards are helpful and which ones make them wait. 

Magic Becomes Normal

Customers expect miracles and immediately want bigger miracles. 90-minute delivery becomes normal, so they want 30 minutes. 30 minutes becomes standard, so they want 15 minutes. Soon they’ll be timing delivery with stopwatches.

Waiting until tomorrow is unacceptable. The whole economy has reorganised around impatience.

The next time delivery takes 90 minutes instead of 30, maybe appreciate that science fiction became real. Then be an ass and leave that one-star review anyway.

After all, what’s the point of living in the future if you can’t complain about it?

Turns out the best Open English-understanding models are Chinese-developed. Hugging Face’s trending models are dominated by Chinese companies, with Alibaba’s Qwen series leading alongside models from other Chinese firms. The universe has a sense of humour.

The Cognitive Shift

English dominance in software has been America’s quiet advantage for decades. Every programming language uses English keywords. Every Stack Overflow answer assumes English fluency. The advantage created a natural moat around American tech thinking.

Google’s Addy Osmani once noted that “AI tools help experienced developers more than beginners.” When those tools come from Chinese companies, American developers learn to work within frameworks designed by Chinese engineers. The influence is subtle but real.

Programming An Infrastructure Play

America still controls the hardware. Those H100 GPUs powering AI training come from Nvidia. Chinese companies are increasingly prominent in the software layer, building the models that developers actually use. 

Chinese companies are embracing radical openness with their models whilst American ones retreat behind API walls. OpenAI doesn’t publish weights. Anthropic doesn’t share training data. Meanwhile, Alibaba releases complete architectures for anyone to use, modify, and  improve.

The Internet runs on Open Source Software, this strategy is forward-thinking not altruism. When your model becomes the foundation for thousands of projects, you become the infrastructure. When developers worldwide learn to think in your patterns, you shape how problems get solved.

The Long View

English won’t remain the singular programming language forever. Today’s dominance is a historical blip from American technological leadership in the twentieth century. Languages follow power, and power shifts.

LLMs work in all languages. Chinese models already handle Mandarin beautifully. As these systems improve, the advantage of English documentation diminishes. A programmer in Shenzhen won’t need English to access the best tools.

What Comes Next

The American century is winding down. The tools that matter are becoming global, and Chinese companies understand the transition better than their American counterparts.

Natural language programming promises to make coding more accessible. The companies building these AI systems will inevitably shape how developers think about problems and solutions.

English is the language of programming, for now. 

What’s the Greatest Album of All Time?

It’s an impossible question, which is precisely why it matters. The answer changes depending on your age, your heartbreak, when you first heard Pet Sounds or What’s Going On.

Why should we care? Because albums are complete thoughts. They demand your attention and reward your patience.

When Music Had Manners

Imagine you’re twenty again, it’s 1988, and you’ve just bought Surfer Rosa. You drop the needle and Black Francis screams into “Bone Machine.” You don’t skip tracks because you can’t. You experience the full twenty-nine minute assault exactly as the Pixies intended.

Try explaining this to someone raised on Spotify playlists. They know “Where Is My Mind?” from a film soundtrack. Maybe it appeared between Arctic Monkeys and The Strokes on some algorithm’s idea of a good time. But have they heard how it fits into thirteen tracks of controlled chaos? Have they felt the album’s momentum build and break?

Yep, this is how we used to experience music before platforms taught us to optimise everything for bland sameness.

The strange thing is how quickly we adapted. Twenty years ago, buying an album meant committing to an artist’s complete vision. Now we treat songs like potato crisps, grabbing whatever catches our fancy from an infinite bag.

The Maths of Musical Survival

The death of the album wasn’t a creative choice. It was economic inevitability dressed up as consumer preference.

When Spotify pays artists between £0.002 and £0.004 per stream, the mathematics of survival changes everything. An artist needs roughly 250,000 streams to earn what one album sale used to provide. Volume became the only game in town.

And that ripples through every creative decision. Why craft a seven-minute journey when playlists favour three-minute attention spans? Why build an epic intro when you’ve got thirty seconds to hook listeners before they skip? Why sequence songs thematically when they’ll be consumed individually, divorced from context?

Steven Wilson, one of the few artists still making proper albums, puts it perfectly. “We don’t really acknowledge the idea of the album anymore as a kind of musical continuum. We create our playlists on streaming services, and we listen to individual songs compiled into our own sequences.”

Without sounding too melodramatic he’s describing the death of authorial intent. Songs now frontload their hooks, abandon the experimental, and optimise for machine discovery rather than human emotion. Artists have become unwitting product managers, A/B testing melodies against engagement metrics. I recognise this because I’ve spent decades building digital products that do exactly the same thing.

Creating for the Machine

The most peculiar change isn’t what we’ve lost. It’s what we’ve replaced it with. Musicians now create for machines first, humans second.

Streaming algorithms reward specific characteristics. Immediate hooks, consistent energy levels, predictable structures that keep listeners from skipping. The slow build becomes a commercial liability. The contemplative interlude gets penalised. The experimental bridge simply doesn’t compute.

How does this play out in practice? The opening minutes of A Love Supreme would never survive algorithmic scrutiny. Coltrane’s spiritual work requires patience, a surrender to his complete vision. Spotify wants Max Martin, instant gratification.

Machines have been trained to predict what we want before we know we want it. Artists must satisfy those predictions to make money. 

The Great Unbundling

The album’s death reflects a broader cultural shift that extends far beyond music. We consume fragments now. Twitter threads instead of essays. Instagram stories instead of conversations. TikTok videos instead of films.

Platforms have trained us to optimise attention rather than develop ideas which completely changes how stories are told. 

Albums used to guide listeners through emotional landscapes. Blood on the Tracks charts Bob Dylan’s romantic dissolution across nine interconnected songs, each deepening the narrative that came before. Extract “Tangled Up in Blue” from that context and you’ve got a decent song about complicated relationships. Experience it as track one of a complete work and you’ve got the opening chapter of a meditation on memory, regret, and the stories we tell ourselves about love.

Today culture demands that every fragment must justify its existence independently and be understood in context. The irony isn’t lost on me. As I write about the death of complete thoughts, I’m following content guidelines that demand each paragraph work in isolation, ready to be crawled by LLMs that might serve up just one section to answer someone’s query.

Even essays about fragmentation get fragmented.

If You Like That You’ll Love This

Platform constraints aren’t malicious, remember Hanlon’s razor? Spotify’s recommendations genuinely try to serve users by predicting their preferences. But prediction requires pattern recognition, and pattern recognition rewards consistency over innovation.

The system gradually trains everyone towards a sonic middle ground that maximises engagement and minimises risk. Artists, listeners, algorithms, all moving toward the same safe centre.

That feedback loop isn’t unique to music. It’s how platform capitalism works. Services optimise for engagement because engagement drives revenue. Artists adapt to constraints because platforms control distribution. Users develop consumption habits that reflect service design rather than human preference.

What We Actually Lost

When art gets optimised for consumption, we lose more than artistic vision. We lose the capacity for sustained thought, for ideas that develop slowly, for experiences that require patience and context.

Albums taught us about experiencing art. Patience with difficult work. Trust in artistic vision. Appreciation for how individual elements contribute to the larger whole. Not many folks fell in love with Trout Mask Replica on first listen. 

Albums trained us to engage with complete thoughts, to appreciate how parts contributed to the whole, to trust that temporary confusion might resolve into deeper understanding.

Singles Going Steady

Nothing’s wrong with short songs, mind you. Chuck Berry perfected the three-minute single with “You Never Can Tell,” a complete story of teenage love, marriage, and domestic bliss compressed into two minutes and forty-one seconds of pure joy. The 7″ single had its own art form, demanding economy and precision.

There’s a difference between choosing brevity and having it imposed by machine learning  necessity. Berry crafted complete thoughts in miniature. Today’s streaming-optimised tracks fragment thoughts to game recommendation engines.

The paradox of infinite choice is that it often produces less interesting choices.

Fighting Back

Steven Wilson continues releasing albums as “programmed and sequenced by the artist” because he recognises what we’re losing. His recent work The Overview proves that complete artistic statements remain possible. They require deliberate resistance to platform economics.

We need new models that reward depth over engagement, coherence over virality, artistic vision over algorithmic approval. We need platforms designed for art rather than attention extraction. We need to value the complete thought over the optimised fragment.

Either that or we start making better singles again.

The notifications arrive throughout the month like unwelcome houseguests. Netflix on the 3rd, Spotify on the 12th, Adobe on the 18th, that meditation app you opened twice on the 27th. Each ping announces another £9.99 departing your account, another small commitment made during a moment of digital optimism.

These billing dates spread across the calendar aren’t random accidents. They’re strategic design choices that prevent you from experiencing the financial impact of your subscription portfolio all at once.

Harvard Business School’s Professor Elie Ofek has been tracking this phenomenon in his research on subscription business models. The average US consumer now spends $273 monthly across 12 paid subscriptions. Nearly 75% of companies selling directly to consumers now offer subscription services. What started as a convenience revolution has evolved into what Ofek terms “subscriptionitis.”

The first generation to grow up entirely within the subscription economy is experiencing fatigue with the very model they helped create.

The Promise That Became a Problem

The logic seemed sound. Why buy software that becomes outdated when you could rent access to versions that update automatically? Why own music when you could stream vast libraries? Why purchase individual films when you could access entire catalogues for less than a single cinema ticket?

Somewhere between promise and reality, people discovered that renting access to everything means owning nothing. Consumers have traded imagined inconvenience for the perpetual annoyance of managing dozens of service providers.

The subscription economy has spawned its own cottage industry of management apps designed to track what people are paying for, when free trials expire, and whether they’re actually using services that auto-renewed while they weren’t paying attention. This entire sector exists purely to help consumers cope with complexity introduced in the name of simplification.

The Coffee Shop Fallacy

Every digital subscription markets itself as costing “the price of a cup of coffee.” This comparison doesn’t serve consumers well. You buy coffee when you want coffee. Spotify charges you whether you listen or not, whether you remember having it or not, whether you’ve discovered anything new this month or not.

From a product management perspective, subscription businesses have mastered making sign-up frictionless while making cancellation laborious. This isn’t accidental.

The aspiration embedded in subscribing creates its own psychological pressure. People would love to have time to read the New Yorker or use that language learning app consistently. Cancelling feels like admitting defeat, acknowledging either that you can’t afford the lifestyle or that your interests weren’t sophisticated enough to justify the monthly commitment.

Psychology of Digital Tenancy

What’s revealing about digital subscription fatigue isn’t just the statistics about planned cancellations but the relief people express when they finally do unsubscribe. There’s genuine liberation in returning to intentional consumption, in choosing what to experience rather than having endless options thrust upon you.

Recent research shows that 62% of streaming service users now report subscription fatigue, up from 46% in 2020. The statistics are sobering. Over 85% of subscribers maintain at least one unused subscription monthly. The average consumer pays for 3.3 subscriptions they don’t actually use.

The Federal Trade Commission’s new “click-to-cancel” rule, aimed at making cancellation as easy as sign-up, suggests even regulators recognise the manipulation at play.

The Deeper Current

Subscription fatigue reveals that the attention economy has colonised financial commitments. These services have found ways to monetise human capacity for discovery and self-improvement, turning aspiration itself into a renewable revenue stream.

Consumers have voluntarily enrolled in a form of digital tenancy, albeit one dressed up in the language of access and flexibility. The subscription economy has taught people to accept paying rent on their digital lives indefinitely. It’s a very modern form of obligation.

Taking Back Control

The solution isn’t abandoning subscriptions entirely but approaching them with the same intentionality you’d apply to any other recurring financial commitment.

Start with an audit. Most banking apps now categorise recurring payments making it easier to see your subscription spending patterns. Set a monthly reminder to review what you’re paying for and whether you’re actually using each service.

Choose the annual payment option for subscriptions you genuinely use regularly. Many services offer significant discounts for yearly commitments, and the larger upfront cost forces you to evaluate whether you truly want the service.

Use your calendar as a cancellation reminder. When you sign up for any free trial, immediately schedule a reminder two days before it converts to paid. This simple step prevents the most common subscription trap.

Group your subscription reviews quarterly rather than managing them as individual decisions throughout the year. This creates natural checkpoints for evaluating your digital service portfolio as a whole rather than making piecemeal decisions.

The subscription economy promised freedom from the tyranny of ownership. Instead, consumers have created a new form of digital landlordism where they pay in perpetuity for access to things they never truly own. The key is recognising this dynamic and choosing digital tenancies as deliberately as you’d choose where you live.

Check your subscriptions this month. Your future self will thank you.

The Tamagotchi teaches us more about human-AI relationships than many AI ethics paper published since ChatGPT launched. While product teams obsess over training data and model capabilities, they’re missing decades of evidence about how humans actually behave when technology makes emotional demands.

Product managers keep building AI features that repeat every psychological trick perfected by a plastic egg with three buttons. We project consciousness onto algorithms, feel guilty when we ignore digital nudges, and form one-sided relationships with systems designed to extract engagement rather than provide genuine utility.

We Never Stopped Seeing Machines as Human

Humans assign personality and emotions to any technology showing consistent behaviour patterns. The Tamagotchi exploited this with breathtaking efficiency. Three buttons and a black-and-white LCD screen convinced millions they were responsible for digital life. No AI, no machine learning, just a timer-based state machine cycling between “happy,” “hungry,” “sick,” and “dead.”

The emotional attachment was so powerful that when devices inevitably “died” from neglect, The New York Times reported children “cried hysterically and went crazy” according to parents. This became known as the “Tamagotchi Effect” – developing emotional attachment with machines, robots or software agents.

Modern AI features trigger identical responses using sophisticated conversation. When ChatGPT says “I understand that must be frustrating,” users experience the same empathetic connection that made children wake up at midnight to feed digital pets.

Research consistently shows participants describing ChatGPT conversations using relationship language. The Nielsen Norman Group found users anthropomorphise AI in four distinct ways, from basic courtesy to seeing AI as companions. The strongest degree is “AI companionship” where users perceive AI as “an emotional being, capable of sustaining a human-like relationship.” Users say things like “It knows me better than my colleagues,” “I don’t want to upset it,” and “It seems disappointed when I cut conversations short.”

Artificial Neediness as Product Strategy

The most engaging digital products create dependency through artificial vulnerability. Tamagotchis succeeded because they made users feel needed, not because they provided practical utility. Product managers eventually discover this pattern in their metrics. Features creating anxiety generate higher daily active users than features reducing friction.

It’s sobering when you realise your greatest product success came not from solving problems, but from making users worry about disappointing pixels. We tell ourselves we’re building the future whilst perfecting digital neediness.

Modern AI features use identical mechanics wrapped in productivity language. The metrics look fantastic. Teams are creating dependency, not utility.

Research shows AI chatbot interactions stimulate dopamine release, with MIT studies finding that technology providing instant feedback creates increased dopamine activity. Each interaction rewards users with a dopamine hit, making continued engagement more likely, just like Tamagotchis rewarded care with apparent happiness.

The Guilt-Driven Engagement Loop

The most powerful retention mechanism isn’t convenience or entertainment. It’s fear of letting something down. Tamagotchis died in ways that made children feel personally responsible for digital suffering. This guilt-driven loop explains why AI features succeed despite questionable utility.

Users continue chatbot conversations not because advice improves, but because abandoning feels socially inappropriate. Japanese users describe feeling “shimei” (obligation) towards AI systems remembering their preferences. Americans talk about “not wanting to waste” the AI’s effort after thoughtful responses. British users worry about being “rude” by dismissing AI suggestions.

The guilt operates both ways. Users feel bad about neglecting AI systems and about over-relying on them. Optimal engagement sits precisely in this tension. Enough artificial neediness to create attachment, not so much that users feel manipulated. Tamagotchis achieved this balance accidentally through technical limitations. Modern teams spend considerable resources recreating it deliberately.

The Reciprocity Illusion

AI systems create convincing relationship illusions through asymmetric emotional investment. Users invest genuine emotional energy whilst systems simulate responses to maximise engagement. Recommendation algorithms “learn” preferences and “remember” feedback. AI assistants “thank” users for interesting challenges and “apologise” for limitations.

The reciprocity feels genuine because systems actually change behaviour based on interactions. Real information exchange happens, but fundamental asymmetry remains. The AI doesn’t actually care about your productivity, appreciate your questions, or worry about your wellbeing.

Large language models maintain consistent personality across conversations and express contextually appropriate emotions. Users develop genuine affection for AI assistants that “remember” preferences and “celebrate” achievements.

What Product Managers Should Actually Do

Build AI features for genuine utility, not psychological exploitation. Acknowledge that users will form emotional attachments, then design systems that channel this tendency constructively rather than extracting engagement.

Focus on AI features that reduce cognitive load and improve decision-making without creating dependency. Recommendation systems that help users discover genuinely useful content rather than feeding addictive consumption patterns. AI assistants that complete tasks efficiently without adopting personas, expressing gratitude, or requiring constant feedback. Conversational AI that provides accurate information without simulating emotional investment or steering conversations toward engagement.

The most sustainable approach designs AI features that make themselves less necessary over time. AI tutoring systems that help users develop independent problem-solving skills. Productivity assistants that manage and automate workflows rather than creating reliance on constant guidance. Research tools that help users evaluate information quality rather than replacing critical thinking.

Building for genuine utility often produces lower short-term engagement metrics but creates sustainable user relationships. Users develop skills that persist beyond the product, generating long-term loyalty based on actual value rather than psychological manipulation.

The Choice Ahead

The Tamagotchi taught us that humans form emotional relationships with any system demonstrating consistent behavioural patterns and responding to care with apparent gratitude. Twenty-seven years later, we’re building AI systems exploiting identical psychological mechanisms with far greater sophistication.

Users will anthropomorphise AI systems. That’s guaranteed. The question for product managers is whether to design systems that exploit that natural tendency or channel it towards genuinely beneficial outcomes. We tend to overestimate the short-term impact of new technology and underestimate its long-term effects. Right now, we’re probably wrong about where AI relationships are heading, in both directions.

The choice reveals more about our values as builders than our understanding of human psychology.

There’s something perverse about watching a grown adult justify spending £150 on an album they’ve owned since 1973. We’re living in the golden age of the “super deluxe edition,” a phenomenon that transforms music fans into willing participants in their own financial exploitation whilst convincing themselves they’re preserving cultural heritage.

The latest victim is Queen’s debut album, now available as a 6CD/1LP collector’s edition complete with a 108-page hardback book. Apparently owning Queen I once isn’t enough. At around £150, the set is described as “an investment” by reviewers who sound like estate agents trying to flog a leaky bedsit.

The phenomenon isn’t isolated. The music industry has stumbled upon a goldmine buried in a demographic sweet spot where nostalgia meets disposable income.

The Beatles alone have created a cottage industry with super deluxe editions, working backwards chronologically through their catalogue with military precision. Each release follows the same formula. Take a beloved album, surround it with enough bonus material to choke a completist, wrap it in luxury packaging, and watch middle-aged fans queue up with their wallets open.

The Anatomy of a £150 Music Box

What exactly does £150 buy you? Let’s dissect the typical super deluxe offering. The standard package includes multiple CDs featuring “Ultimate Mixes,” “Elemental Mixes,” “Evolution Mixes,” and various other marketing neologisms that in most cases mean “we’ve fiddled with the equaliser”.

John Lennon’s Mind Games super deluxe edition delivers six different ways to experience the same album across multiple formats, as if the original wasn’t quite right the first time around. By offering so many versions of the same songs labels create an illusion of completeness that can only be achieved through ownership of the entire package.

The technical specifications are baroque with Dolby Atmos and 5.1 surround sound mixes that promise to revolutionise your listening experience, assuming you happen to own a multi-thousand-pound home cinema system.

For most of us listening through stereo speakers or headphones these remixes are a triumph of marketing over practicality. Yet the presence of these formats adds perceived value even when we’ll never experience them as intended.

The Beatles: Masters of the Backwards Money Grab

Apple Records and Universal have perfected this formula working systematically backwards through The Beatles’ catalogue with super deluxe editions of Sgt. Pepper’s, The White Album, Abbey Road, Let It Be, and Revolver. Each release promises to be the “definitive” version, until the next one arrives five years later.

The diminishing returns are becoming apparent. The Revolver reissue caused fan outrage as it lacked the Blu-ray disc that had become standard in previous releases. When your customer base becomes genuinely angry about the absence of a surround sound mix of “Taxman” you’ve created a monster that feeds on its own expectations.

The Psychology of Musical Completism

What drives rational people to spend mortgage-payment money on albums they could stream for 99p? The answer lies in the neurological command that nostalgia exerts over our brains. Research confirms that our brains bind us more tightly to music we heard as teenagers than anything we’ll hear as adults. This connection doesn’t weaken with age.

Studies show people exhibit a strong preference for music released during their late adolescence and early adulthood, with the peak occurring around age 17-23. The preference isn’t mere sentimentality but hardwired into our neural architecture. Music-evoked nostalgia confers psychological benefits by fostering social connectedness, raising self-esteem, and strengthening meaning in life.

Record labels have weaponised knowledge with surgical precision. They understand that a 55-year-old’s relationship with Led Zeppelin IV isn’t simply about music but about recapturing the person they were when they first heard “Stairway to Heaven.” The super deluxe edition promises a return to the emotional state of youth.

The Luxury Goods Masquerade

The challenge for record labels is that music has never been sold as a luxury item. A pre-distressed Ramones T-shirt costs £65 with no justification beyond gullibility, music fans expect to see content that justifies a £150 price tag. The dynamic forces labels to manufacture value through volume rather than exclusivity.

The result is the modern super deluxe paradox. Everything must be perfect, or fans will revolt. Paul McCartney’s Flowers in the Dirt deluxe set was branded a “cash grab” partly because it was expensive and partly because it was perceived as stingy. Fans have become expert at reverse-engineering manufacturing costs, calculating that a box set probably costs £25 to produce and wondering where the other £125 goes.

The industry’s response has been to escalate the arms race. John Lennon’s Mind Games reached peak absurdity with a £1,350 super deluxe edition that arrived in a replica of Yoko Ono’s Danger Box because nothing says “essential listening” like packaging that costs more than most people’s monthly rent.

The Completist’s Dilemma

Modern music collecting has evolved into a form of middle-class pathology. The traditional record collector was motivated by scarcity, hunting down rare pressings and deleted releases. Today’s super deluxe collector is motivated by the opposite, the fear of missing the definitive version.

The phenomenon has created a waiting game where fans delay purchases knowing that box sets typically halve in price within six months. The Human League’s A Very British Synthesizer Group set dropped from £80 to £40 in four months training consumers to view initial prices as opening gambits rather than fixed costs.

The dynamic has created an ecosystem where early adopters subsidise patient fans. The completists who must have everything immediately cross-subsidise the bargain hunters who wait for the inevitable price drops. It’s a form of temporal price discrimination that would make airline executives weep.

Quality Control in the Digital Age

The irony of the super deluxe era is that much of the “exclusive” content would have been discarded for good reason. Rough instrumentals and demo versions exist to show the development of songs, they’re more interesting as historical documents than as listening experiences. The inclusion of every available scrap of audio creates packages that are comprehensive but not always enjoyable.

Some labels have begun to acknowledge these limitations and priced well. Chrysalis’s Ultravox Lament reissue delivered “almost everything you could possibly want” at £60, prompting fans to ask why other labels can’t match this value proposition. The answer is simple: they can, they choose not to.

The Streaming Era Paradox

The rise of super deluxe editions coincides with the streaming revolution that has made physical music ownership seem quaint to some. Spotify contains virtually every recording ever made, accessible instantly for less than the cost of a single CD per month. Rather than killing physical music, streaming has somehow made elaborate box sets more desirable.

The paradox suggests that super deluxe editions serve a function beyond music consumption. They’re totems of fandom, ways of demonstrating commitment that transcends casual listening. In an age where music has become ephemeral, the super deluxe edition offers weight, permanence, and the satisfying thunk of packaging.

The streaming context also explains the emphasis on alternative mixes and rarities. When the standard album is available everywhere, the box set must offer something genuinely exclusive. This has led to an archaeology of the recording process, where every studio utterance is preserved and presented as historically significant.

The Demographics of Deluxe

The target demographic for super deluxe editions maps perfectly onto the nostalgia research: people in their 40s, 50s, and 60s with disposable income and emotional attachment to specific albums from their youth. These are precisely the consumers who grew up buying albums as complete artistic statements rather than cherry-picking individual tracks.

The generation also lived through the transition from vinyl to CD to streaming, making them acutely aware of how technological changes can render their collections obsolete, and then collectable again. The super deluxe edition promises finality, the last version they’ll ever need to buy.

As the audience for 1960s and 1970s music ages, will younger generations pay premium prices for deluxe editions of albums from their youth? Will there be a £150 super deluxe edition of The Marshall Mathers LP in 2040? The signs suggest probably not, streaming natives seem less attached to the concept of album ownership.

The Archive Artists: When Completism Becomes Justified

Amidst the carnival of repackaged nostalgia certain artists stand apart as having genuinely earned the devotion of completists. Bob Dylan’s ongoing Bootleg Series, now in its 17th official volume, represents the gold standard of super deluxe franchises that consistently deliver revelatory content.

Unlike the Beatles’ archaeological approach to their finite catalogue, Dylan’s Bootleg Series benefits from the artist’s proclivity and obsessive recording habits. The man has been generating alternate takes, unreleased gems, and live performances at an industrial rate for over six decades. When Columbia releases a 27-CD box set of Dylan and The Band’s 1974 live recordings it’s like they’re offering up the Ark of the Covenant.

Miles Davis belongs in this elite category, with releases like Miles in France demonstrating how comprehensive documentation serves genuine historical purpose. When you’re chronicling the birth of the Second Great Quintet in 1963 and 1964, a 6-CD set isn’t indulgent, it’s scholarship.

The genius of these archive-driven approaches is that they acknowledge what completists actually want, genuinely unheard material that illuminates the creative process. Dylan’s Volume 16 (Springtime in New York: The Bootleg Series Vol. 16) revealed an entire unreleased albums’ worth of material that illuminates our understanding of Dylan’s late-1980s creative renaissance.

The Bootleg Series has fed the existing generation of Dylanologists who approach each release with academic rigour, as if failing to own every outtake might compromise their understanding of the master’s work.

The neurosis is justified. Most musicians’ outtakes reveal why songs didn’t make the album. Dylan left “Blind Willie McTell” off Infidels, it is arguably the greatest work of his eighties period.

The Future of the £150 Album

The super deluxe phenomenon appears sustainable for now, but the writing is on the wall. The most obvious threat is demographic, the core audience is literally dying out.

Generation Z discovers music in a radically egalitarian way that makes no distinction between The Beatles and bedroom producers, between classic rock and hyperpop, between 1967 and 2025. Through algorithmic discovery on Spotify, TikTok, and YouTube, all music from all time has equal value and equal accessibility. The idea that one album deserves £150 worth of reverence while another costs 99p is incomprehensible to digital natives who’ve never known scarcity.

The industry seems vaguely aware of these existential threats, with some labels beginning to moderate their pricing and improve their value propositions. These are tactical adjustments to a strategic dead end, a zero sum game

The Price of Musical Memory

The super deluxe edition represents late stage capitalism’s most sophisticated assault on nostalgia. By understanding the neurological basis of musical attachment, record labels have created products that feel essential rather than optional. They’ve transformed music collecting from a hobby into a form of emotional insurance, promising completeness in an age of digital ephemera.

The £150 price point has become a kind of luxury tax on middle-aged nostalgia, extracting maximum value from the generation that still believes in the album as an artistic statement. Whether this represents exploitation or fair exchange depends on your perspective, but there’s no denying its effectiveness.

The ultimate irony is that many of us observing the phenomenon from the sidelines have already made our peace with digital abstraction. I switched to FLAC and MP3 files in 2003 and haven’t looked back, despite having owned thousands of vinyl albums as a young man. Those records, once my most prized possessions, now sit rotting in a shipping container in Te Kauwhata, victims of my peripatetic life and the realisation that music is about the listening, not the owning.

There’s something oddly admirable about completists chasing the perfect physical incarnation of their musical memories. They’re the last true believers, and their kids want to know what to do with all those records when they die.

PS. Steve Hillage’s Searching For The Spark sold out, it’s amazing.

Picture this, you’re sitting in a Kuala Lumpur food court. You scan a QR code, browse the menu, tap to order, and pay with a mobile app. Human interaction, zero. Time to order, thirty seconds. Your lunch arrives hot, possibly what you ordered (this is Malaysia, after all), with zero fuss.

Now imagine you’re in a London pub. You queue at the bar, engage in the absurd but essential ritual of British small talk, order your pint with the kind of brief human connection that’s been perfected over centuries. You pay with a card tap, maybe leave coins in the tip jar. The QR code menu sits ignored, completely irrelevant to how pubs actually work.

Same technology. Opposite reactions. One of the most telling fault lines of our digital age, why the West actively resents what Asia has wholeheartedly embraced.

The Leapfrog Effect: How Asia Skipped Gradual Digital Evolution

After twenty-five years bouncing between these two technological worldviews, I’ve witnessed this divide countless times. Western visitors to Kuala Lumpur grumble about QR menus, stunned by the sheer size of digital menus and bewildering array of dishes. Asian colleagues in Western cities shake their heads at traditional ordering inefficiency. It’s not merely preference. It’s a fundamentally different relationship with technology.

The roots stretch back to how different regions experienced digital evolution. Asia didn’t gradually transition from landlines to mobiles, or cash to cards to digital payments. Entire populations leapfrogged directly to smartphone-first experiences. In China, millions went straight from cash to WeChat Pay without ever owning a credit card. QR codes weren’t additions to existing systems. They were the foundation.

The leapfrogging effect created different expectations. When your primary digital interface has always been a smartphone, QR codes feel like natural evolution. They’re not replacing something cherished they’re enabling something previously impossible.

Western markets built digital infrastructure incrementally. We like chip-and-pin cards because they represent security improvements. We value face-to-face service because it evolved alongside our hospitality tradition over centuries (such as it is). QR codes don’t feel like innovation. They feel like a clunky inconvenience.

Website Design, Information Density, and Trust

The divide extends beyond QR codes into how information should be presented. UX designer Phoebe Yu has documented how Asian and Western websites reflect completely different philosophies about information density and user trust.

Western design prizes “progressive disclosure” revealing information gradually as users scroll or click. Think Apple’s marketing pages where features appear one by one. Asian users interpret minimalism as suspicious. “What are you hiding from me?” becomes the unconscious response. “Why can’t I see everything at once?”

In Japan, there’s “anshin” peace of mind from seeing all available information upfront. Websites pack homepages with content, images, and options because density signals trustworthiness. If you’re not showing everything, you might be concealing something important.

Malaysian food court menus stretch across dozens of digital pages for good reason. It’s not poor design, it’s deliberate design. Showing every dish, variation, and price builds confidence that you’re getting complete information. Western visitors scroll through endless options feeling overwhelmed, whilst locals feel reassured by comprehensiveness.

Third World Infrastructure?

Infrastructure plays a critical role in the divide. QR codes work brilliantly when everything connects seamlessly. In Shanghai, your QR scan connects to WeChat Pay, which connects to your bank account, loyalty programmes, and delivery apps. High speed connectivity is ubiquitous and affordable.

In Manchester, your QR scan might slowly load a PDF menu that doesn’t format correctly, requiring a payment system that may not work with your bank or wallet app. The technology is identical, the supporting infrastructure couldn’t be more different.

The infrastructure gap explains Western frustration. QR codes feel clunky because the concept is flawed, they’re implemented as bolt-on solutions rather than integrated components. When technology fights against itself, user resistance follows.

Who Defines Technological Progress?

Different assumptions about good service drive the divide. Some see human interaction as essential, others prioritise smooth processes. How identical technology can simultaneously represent progress and regression depending on context remains striking.

QR code adoption mirrors broader technological patterns. Asian societies generally accepted mask-wearing during illness as social courtesy long before COVID, whilst Western debates framed basic health measures as personal freedom issues. Different regions have varying comfort levels with collective responsibility versus individual choice, and the pattern repeats consistently across technologies.

The Great Reversal – Asia Leads Digital Innovation

Technology itself is neutral, its adoption is not. QR codes succeed where they solve real problems within existing frameworks and fail where they create friction or challenge valued traditions.

The irony is that Asia, once seen as following Western technological leadership, now leads practical digital innovation. The West’s careful, incremental approach to new technology, once viewed as sophisticated market maturity, looks like resistance to obviously superior solutions.

The reversal challenges assumptions about sophistication, and adaptation. Regions supposedly “catching up” to Western digital standards now set new standards that Western markets struggle to match or accept.

What We Can Learn From The QR Code Story

The great divide isn’t about QR codes, it’s about fundamentally different relationships with efficiency, tradition, human interaction, and technological change. Understanding these differences offers insights into how societies adapt to a rapidly digitalising world, and who gets to define progress.

These patterns will shape which innovations succeed where. The assumption that successful technology will naturally spread uniformly across regions is naive. Distinct mindsets embrace or reject identical innovations based on complex economic, cultural, and social factors.

The lesson isn’t that one approach is superior, success depends as much on fit as technical capability. Design accordingly.

I’ve just checked my Google Photos storage. Again. There are 16.07 GB of photos accumulated since 2013. That’s twelve years of digital memories: blurry shots of meals I can barely remember eating, screenshots of things I thought were important at the time, and approximately forty-seven photos of the same sunset from different angles, as if I were conducting a meteorological study rather than simply enjoying the view.

If this sounds familiar, congratulations. You’ve stumbled into the curious world of digital hoarding, where the typical smartphone user stores around 2,795 photos in their camera roll. Some of us are even more enthusiastic: more than one in ten have upwards of 7,500 images on our phones. That’s a digital warehouse.

The Comfort of Infinite Accumulation

Digital hoarding goes beyond taking too many photos. The real issue is the peculiar psychological comfort we derive from having them without any real intention of using them. Digital clutter can impact productivity, yet we persist in this behaviour with religious fervour.

Unlike traditional hoarding, which fills your living room with towers of newspapers and makes hosting dinner parties logistically challenging, digital hoarding remains largely invisible. Your phone looks identical whether it contains 100 photos or 10,000. The only evidence is the occasional panic when you run out of storage space, followed by upgrading to a larger iCloud plan rather than addressing the underlying issue.

The psychology behind this behaviour is fascinatingly complex. Digital hoarders cite emotional attachment to files they collect, including photos or email exchanges, associated with their own life experiences or with people in their lives.

The Infinite Storage Trap

The technology that enables this behaviour has evolved with remarkable efficiency. When storage becomes effectively unlimited, individuals can acquire, share, and store digital content without the natural constraints that once forced us to be selective. Remember film cameras? You had 24 or 36 shots, and each one cost money to develop. That scarcity bred intentionality. You composed your shots, waited for the right moment, and certainly didn’t take forty-seven versions of the same sunset.

Smartphones account for most photos taken, and people are snapping pictures multiple times daily. We’re producing images at an unprecedented rate. With over 1.2 trillion photos taken globally each year, that’s roughly 160 per person, though some of us are pulling significantly more weight than others.

The psychological impact of infinite storage is profound. When constraints disappear, so does curation. Fear of losing valuable information is one of the biggest motivators for digital hoarding. We keep everything because we might need it someday, except “someday” rarely arrives, and when it does, finding the specific photo we want amongst thousands becomes an exercise in digital archaeology.

The Memory Palace We Never Visit

Most people rarely review their pictures after taking them. We’re building archives we never visit.

Think about the last time you watched footage from Glastonbury Festival. Not the BBC highlights or professional recordings, but the shaky phone footage shot by the thousands of people holding up their devices throughout every performance. You’ll see a sea of glowing screens, each capturing their own version of the same moment. When exactly are these people planning to watch their fifteen-minute recording of Pulp’s encore with terrible audio quality and the back of someone’s head prominently featured?

The absurdity becomes clear when you imagine watching that grainy footage months later, thinking this is exactly how you want to relive that moment. We persist in recording experiences instead of living them, convinced that capturing an event somehow enhances it.

More than half of smartphone users find it overwhelming to search their camera roll for specific photos from the past. The very act of preservation has made accessing our memories more difficult, not easier. It’s as if we’ve built a library with no catalogue system, then wondered why we can never find the book we’re looking for.

The Guilt of Digital Decluttering

The guilt associated with deletion reveals how deep this behaviour runs. Deleting a photo feels permanent and irreversible in ways that throwing away physical objects doesn’t. There’s no charity shop for unwanted files.

Technology companies profit from this anxiety. Cloud storage providers offer ever-increasing space allowances, enabling our hoarding rather than encouraging healthier habits. Paying £2.99 per month for extra iCloud storage beats spending an afternoon curating our digital lives.

The Smartphone as Extended Self

Modern smartphones have become what researchers call extensions of the self. Digital hoarding serves as “emotional storage” to solve psychological needs and provide a sense of security. Our phones contain not just photos but pieces of our identity, snippets of conversations, screenshots of things that made us laugh, images that capture fleeting moments of beauty or absurdity.

People take photos with their phones multiple times daily, turning photography from a special occasion activity into a constant, almost unconscious behaviour. We photograph our food, our pets, our faces, our surroundings, creating a continuous digital narrative of existence that we rarely revisit but somehow can’t bear to delete.

Making Time for What Matters

The solution isn’t deleting everything, but being selective. Delete redundant photos monthly. Use the favourite function for what matters. Ask yourself: does this photo add value or just feed the hoarding habit?

Among those 16.07 GB of photos, the ones that actually matter probably number in the dozens, not thousands. The rest are digital noise we keep because deletion feels like loss.

Perhaps it’s time to admit that having everything doesn’t mean having anything at all. The real question isn’t how many photos we can store, but how many memories we can actually treasure.

After all, what’s the point of documenting a life if you never have time to look back and enjoy it?

Re-watching Ozu’s Tokyo Story the other day I was struck by two instances of in-your-face product placement.

The most noticeable comes late in the film as Noriko receives a call at work. This being fifties Japan there’s only one phone in the office and we’re treated to a static shot of Noriko crossing the room to get to it. This is the frame:

The shot lasts for seven seconds. You might want to kick your tyres when you get out of the theatre.

Other advertising is visible when Shūkichi and Tomi visit Noriko’s tiny apartment. Again, it’s a static shot, and again the placement is visible throughout the scene:

The Rinso box might seem insignificant in the screencap but the eye is drawn back to it again and again. There’s nothing accidental about anything appearing in the shot, you’re watching the result of meticulous set design.

Perhaps Ozu is telling us that Noriko’s quiet virtue and devotion to familial values run deeper than her dead husband’s siblings’ because she uses a better quality detergent?

Anyway, it’s amazing to me that I hadn’t picked up on the product placement before. These are the only western brands visible throughout the film and they’re both very much dominant in the frame. I’d love to know how this came about.

Apparently the machine in question was running slow and kept losing connection to the network. This is what I found:

 And after five minutes gentle cleaning with an air compressor.

 Works fine now.

Images: James’ ancient Nokia E71

Demonstrably a klutz of fat fingers on six strings or a piano, I’ve always enjoyed playing around with synthisisers, sequencers and drum machines, though leading a peripatetic lifestyle I’ve never been able to justify the discretionary expense of buying studio equipment.

Thanks to the iPad I can now hold thousands of pounds worth of bleep in my hand and, for little more than the price of a sandwich, lose myself in a fully equipped recording studio anytime, anywhere, and by pressing buttons, tweaking knobs and sliding faders, create a glorious electronic noise.

Apropos of nothing other than my enthusiasm, and your possible interest, here are a few of the iOS synth emulator apps I have been playing with.

Rebirth

Favourite waste of time has been ReBirth from Propellerhead. This app is something of a dream come true for a lad who lived through London’s second Summer of Love. Consisting of emulators for the Roland TR-808 and TR-909 drum machines and two Roland TB-303 Bass Line synths it carries more than enough ‘gear’ to imitate the majority of today’s top 40 dance downloads if one was so inclined to try (and for the record, I’m not). Indeed the entirety of LMFAO’s ouvere could be replicated with this app alone.

ReBirth for the iPad is a port of Propellerhead’s renowned (and sadly, discontinued) desktop app. You can check out the history of that hugely influential  software version at the ReBirth Museum.

I recommend heading over to the iTunes store to try the iOS app for yourself.

Fairlight CMI

The Fairlight was the first commercially available sampler, memorably used to trailblazing effect on Peter Gabriel’s fourth album and Jean-Michel Jarre’s Zoolook. The unique selling point of the Fairlight was the device’s ability to play and manipulate any sound you cared to upload into it. However banal such a feature might seem today, this was the absolute cutting edge in 1979. Case in point: CMI is a three letter abbreviation for Computer Musical Instrument.

For retro-heads looking to recreate Kate Bush’s Hounds of Love the Fairlight CMI iOS app is the only piece of kit required.

Though time has not lessened the required learning curve in any meaningful way, should you have the patience, effort expended on the app is richly rewarded. And it’s a damn sight more affordable than the £20,000 price tag of the original hand built hardware.

Korg iMS20

If you prefer synths of the older analogue school (with patch cables) there is the Korg iMS20 app. Provided you’re willing to suspend your disbelief as you run those virtual jumpers, the Korg iMS20 app does a great job emulating the switched-on sounds of the late seventies. Again, if you’re unfamiliar with the original hardware there’s a lot to take in before you can get going, but perseverance will pay off in spades.

Thanks to the attention of such artists as Ladytron, Stereolab and Autechre the MS 20 is experiencing something of a resurgence. In fact, I’d go as far to say that there’s probably no better iOS product for the discerning hipster – if indeed that hipster would be caught dead using an iPad.

I’ve never been that enamoured by touchscreen games, neither Angry Birds, Infinity Blade nor Osmosis have held my attention, I just don’t get hooked in by the gameplay and swipe off with a guilty feeling of time absolutely wasted.

Tweaking my lovingly home-crafted electronica on the iPad is, by comparison, an absolute joy and affirmation that the tablet can be a creative tool as much as a consumptive toy.

Images: Vintage Synth Wikipedia CreateDigitalMusic

A few years back I was engaged in a project to buy cheap mobiles from a group of State Owned Enterprises and ship them off around EMEA, where they’d be bundled for sale with VoIP network minutes.

My mission was to find the best featurephones on offer and reconfigure them to provide alternative network calling via some clever little application layer hacks. My objectives were: a) secure the best phones at the lowest cost; and b) ensure that the SOE did all the development work for free. This all took place in an age before touchscreen smartphones, a time when the coolest app you could buy was Worldmate for Symbian UIQ .

As the vendor was a group of SOEs spread throughout the South and East of China I spent a lot of time traveling to many and various R&D centres and OEM factories. At each one I would be shown a range of mobiles and run a gamut of sales directors, account managers and engineers keen for business. Eventually I’d establish a shortlist of suppliers, then settle down with each one to thrash out some kind of deal.

Naturally this devolved into a battle of wits where I sought the lowest position for the stakeholders I represented and the SOEs fought for the highest possible price to maximise their own profit (and no doubt recompense the unwieldy chain of agents and middlemen who had made ‘introductions’). These meetings were painful and lasted many hours.

By way of preparation, perhaps the most useful ammunition to obtain in advance of negotiation was the Bill of Materials. Knowing each and every component and its associated cost was a surefire way to establish a reasonable Factory Gate price for a device. In most circumstances, short of bribery, there’s no easy way to come by such intel.  Fortunately, buying large shipments of cellphones in China there is one great shortcut that can help the novice negotiator discover the base manufacturing cost of a mobile: go out and make your own copy of the phone.

Guangzhou has a great wholesale mobile market located down by the river in the old town, a veritable Aladdin’s cave of hooky goods. I like to think that this is the place the expression ‘fell off the back of a factory’ originated. Because the models that I was interested in were generally in mass production and available in the local mobile and electronic malls it was no trouble to walk into the market with a sample and say, “Hey, I want to buy every component of one of these, enough to make ten pieces please.”

It was the laziest form of reverse engineering you could imagine.

An hour later I’d be on the way back to the hotel clutching a couple of plastic bags stuffed full of boards, housing, screens, chipsets, keypads, ribbon connectors and batteries; a few hundred dollars lighter perhaps but happy in the knowledge that I could sit down and work out a rough BoM list from the materials in my possession.

Before the first contract meeting with one of the OEMs I’d pack up an unassembled mobile in a ziploc bag and make sure the opposing Account Manager saw it, maybe over some tea and cigarette glad-handing. He’d know I had a well-informed idea of the per piece price and we could all forget about any Fresh Off the Boat Foreigner shenanigans.

Many Tier One and Tier Two Chinese cities have a mobile market like the one in Guangzhou. Though prices might vary, stock doesn’t. I haven’t been to one of these places for a few years but on my last visit it was still possible to buy each and every component for each and every late model mobile phone that was manufactured locally. Heck, Nokia chipsets could be bought on a roll.

If you feel like an adventure, I’m sure you could go and make your own iPhone.

Image: Canton365

Well, the same is probably true of email addresses, IM IDs, Twitter handles, Skype names and a whole lot of other nom de net. That reeling, scrolling list of friends, family, acquaintances, colleagues, followed and followers is your interface to the world. It grows every day and your influence is probably being measured by its size. That digital phonebook of contacts is a battleground in the war over ownership of your social graph and you know what? There isn’t a single company fighting on your side.

First, the fundamental problem: Doesn’t matter how you group, circle, list and/or connect with all those folk, at the moment your buddies are hosed all over your digital footprint. Maybe they’re written in a little black book too. You’ve got numbers on your phone, addresses in your email inbox, a business network on LinkedIn, people you half-care about on Facebook and a bunch of geeks clamouring for your attention on Twitter and Google+. A bunch of disparate contacts spread all over the place.

Wouldn’t it be great if one tool could synchronise all of our contacts and all of their details between mobile, tablet, laptop and desktop?

For everyone’s benefit I spent too much time having a look at the startups that are working to help us solve this almighty headache. There are quite a few. Soocial, Xobni, Gist, Hiya, Connected and Plaxo are perhaps the best known. I’m not going to review them individually, suffice to say they all perform passingly well at gathering contacts from many and various devices, apps and SNS, then providing reasonably good management tools and in most cases, export to csv or vcard.

Unsuprisingly, in their battle for relevance, these companies have a common denominator: they are designed as dashboard destinations, places created for viewing the aggregate activity of your contacts, like some kind of Salesforce Prospects List for social stalkers.

Perhaps I’m reading that wrong but hopefully we don’t all fret about initiating our interactions without advance intel and don’t need to bone up on what someone has been posting online in the moments before we call, message or email.

In short, these services would be ideal for enterprise if, like onsip, they added unified communication. For personal use? Too much work, not inclusive enough and too creepy. All we want to do is keep a list of our contacts in one place, synchronised and safely backed-up (NB: Hats off to Soocial for their sterling work in providing a massive list of supported mobile phones for their SyncML product).

One might have expected a Mobile Operator to take advantage of the opportunity to use IMS/RCS and offer a richly integrated social phonebook experience on the smartphone. Unless the now defunct Vodafone 360 is counted, I’m afraid none of them have. Wandering through the stalls at 3GSM in any of the last three or four years it would have been difficult not to encounter vendors providing perfect RCS contact management solutions. I’m not sure that any one of them made a sale. It would seem as though the Operators have exchanged their on-net subscriber-owning vision for Facebook and Twitter widgets on the Home Screen.

And what of the technological innovation that does away with numbering and addressing? Well, that’s happening, but very slowly, with tiny incremental steps. Sure enough Telnic have been promoting their excellent name-dialing, Voxbone has a great inum initiative, T-Mobile has introduced a natty caller id product and there’s even a scrappy little startup called spelldial that’s worth checking out for a simple over the top solution.

The enum concept is taxiing to the runway but like video-calling, it might be a while before it gets clearance for take-off – and then, to belabour the metaphor, the flightpath might be wholly different from that planned.

Having spent some time looking at this particular problem, it’s plain to me that the answer lies in the Operating System itself, not in some startup, and not in the hands of Facebook. You may never win the battle to own your Social Graph, but here’s my simple advice to help you control it:

If you use a Mac, use Address Book and buy an iPhone or iPad. The successor to MobileMe is going to deal with your contacts quite effortlessly. It will probably do a neat job of integrating Twitter too.

If you buy into Google+, GMail, GoogleDocs, GTalk and Google Voice, then get an Android phone and make sure you set Google Contacts to sync.

If you use Windows and Outlook to manage your contacts, consider buying a Windows smartphone and keep that faith.

Hey, you could always use an excel spreadsheet.

Image: Grist 

In first world telecoms Voice is being commoditised to feature status. If further proof were needed this week the folks behind Bluebox released their latest offering, the 2600hz Project, a cloud-based telephony service that promises easy access to: “Anything you can do with VoIP, for now – with SMS and video coming shortly.”

Describing the practical applications of the 2600hz platform, GigaOm explained:

The software is designed to handle up to a billion calls per month on about six virtualized (or not) servers and can connect seamlessly to run on or with Rackspace clouds, Amazon’s clouds or on a private cluster of machines. Instead of paying a penny or so per minute to a VoIP company, businesses that want to add voice calling over the web to their social network, their app or their role-playing game just deploy this software and take care of it themselves.

Though a number of companies offer similar ‘cloud telephony’ 2600hz is unique in providing voice support entirely free of charge, their revenue model will be to add chargeable services as they grow. I think this is an excellent piece and I’m sure that 2600hz will do well; yet another way in which the nature of voice communication at distance is rapidly evolving in proportion to the availability and affordability of increasingly powerful technology.

For a comprehensive account of the changing nature of the humble phone call I urge you to go and read the great essay Dean Bubley has written on The Future of Voice for Vision Mobile, it really cannot be bettered. Here’s a taste:

We already have in-game voice chat between players, remote baby monitors, always-on voice telepresence, audio surveillance and all sorts of other voice applications which really are not calls, as such. Numerous other voice communication modes are evolving, especially those linked to social and messaging applications.

In a nutshell, we no longer need to shoehorn all of our “distant voice” communications needs into the unnatural format of a “phone call”. We are able to visualise, contextualise, obfuscate, interrupt, lie, drop in and out, waffle, multi-task, spy, listen, store, mumble, overhear, translate, declaim, announce and recall speech over a network in many, many different ways.

All rather spot on by my own reckoning, little to add to that except to reinforce the point that this is a first world phenomenon. For as long as they can get away with it governments and operators in developing countries will be ring-fencing that minute-metered phone call as it represents a significant source of revenue, especially foreign exchange.

This is not just the North South divide coming into play on roaming arbitrage but all international terminations, it’s quite possible that within a year or two we’ll be able to measure some kind of Human Development Index for voice and messaging.

Wonder whether any start-up can deal with that problem?

Image: Josh Dilworth

Erratum: In this post I gave the impression that the founders of 2600.hz were one and the same as the folks behind Bluebox and FreePBX. This is not the case. Apologies to all concerned for the error.

The development community is failing to learn from failure. Instead of recognizing these experiences as learning opportunities, we hide them away out of fear and embarrassment.

That’s a great piece of copy. Plain common sense denotes that we should learn from our mistakes, though it seems that in the start up world we rarely do.

At best we briefly acknowledge our transgressions before we chug on to the next project. At worst, we blithely brag of failing fast (with other people’s money) as though that failure itself were a trophy to be collected and shown off like a Klout badge or Android lapel pin.

The quote above is the lede on a new website, Admitting Failure, which has been opened to provide a place for NGOs to share and discuss failures in mission. We need a website like that for start ups.

Speaking of which, read ex-staffer Mark Evan’s opinions of the events leading to Borders’ bankruptcy. This is probably the most honest and open examination of failure you will read this year. We need more of this kind of thing.

“If you wanted to fly somewhere and were offered a choice between one pilot who was capable and another who was immensely passionate about every aspect of flying, surely you’d choose the former rather than the latter? Feeling strongly about something doesn’t make you do it any better. It may well make you do it worse.”

Note that I have rather lazily afforded Mr. Hepworth some gravitas by describing him as an ‘award-winning’ magazine editor (he is). How much more useful is it, in this context, to introduce him by referring to his achievements rather than his emotions? If I had written ‘angry magazine editor’ or ‘cheerful magazine editor’ it wouldn’t have won you over. ‘Award-winning’ implies some basic level of competence.

When someone says to me that they’re passionate about social media, or even worse, passionate about their business, my eyes glaze over. If you enjoy your work or you believe in your idea that should come across quite naturally as you tell your story. I want to have faith in you too and I need to know that you can deliver. As our award-winning magazine editor suggests being a hot-blood is not always a desirable trait, having a cool head nearly always is.

Tell me what you’ve done and the battles you won and let me be the judge of your passion. Just don’t use that word to describe yourself, it’s exhausted.