[The] hyperventilating false drama about never-delivered transformative change is by no means unique to the tech beat. Here on the politics blogs, we’re only too happy to remind our readers that every coming election is the most important election in a generation, that the fate of our civilisation depends upon which of two barely discernible politicians’ cronies get paid. If we can’t generate a narrative with live-or-die stakes out of meaningless developments in public-opinion polls, then we’ve got nothing worthwhile to offer. Reflecting too often upon the ultimate triviality of almost everything we write about does no good for technology or politics writers, or for their readers. The illusion that the next thing will be truly meaningful has always meant more to us than the reality of the next thing. I agree with Mr Lee that there is something quite sad in the way Mr Madrigal, after having discovered that he has been reporting on nothing of significance, does not then go on to draw the well-warranted conclusion that he has wasted some of the best years of his youth foolishly yammering on about ephemera, but instead doubles down and declares “we all better hope that the iPhone 5 has some crazy surprises in store for us later this year”. But it’s only sad because life is sad. Really, why not roll the rock back up the hill?

I am rarely out-gloomed, but I think this is one such instance. So let me present a case for technology being meaningful. I think it’s possible! Anyone who knows me can tell you that, contra my somewhat embittered bloggy pronouncements, I love technology. I mess around with Arduino on weekends; I obsessively amass, modchip and then fail to actually play game consoles; I spent my holiday building a programmable array of Christmas lights; and I can put my hand on a Digikey packing slip without leaving my bed (though this last credential is perhaps as much about messiness as it is about geekiness).

The point is that I believe in this stuff. Information technology, in particular, is incredibly powerful and democratically accessible, and I genuinely think it can improve our society. When you see me getting upset about the tech industry, it’s because I feel that others have lost sight of this. They’re making this inspiring thing I love into a silly business school game, or they’re making ignorant promises — on my behalf, it feels like! — about things they don’t understand and which won’t ever come to pass. Loudmouths are distracting from good work done humbly. Fuck those guys; I hate ‘em. I wish they would shut up and go away. But since they won’t, we might as well get on with things.

If you’re someone with technical skills, hopefully you you will prove to be better at ignoring those people than I have. Aside from that, I’d like to talk about the ways that I feel a career making technology can be meaningful. Because I really do believe it’s possible; I would hate the people who know me, who work with me, to read this blog and conclude that I feel otherwise.

Not, mind you, that your job has to define you. There’s nothing wrong with doing an honest day’s work and coming home to enjoy your family, or partner, or dog. Pick up a hobby. Enjoy your vacations. In a few short decades you will only exist as the memories of your loved ones. A few more and you’ll be nothing more than a couple of kilobytes in the Mormons’ genealogical databases. I wish I had a better deal to offer, but by all accounts history is relentless, and it seems assured that rocking back and forth muttering/tweeting about “innovation” and “disruption” will be no charm against it. The important thing is to try not to waste the time you have on stupid bullshit.

I should warn you: this will be grandiose and sappy. To wit:

Improve the World

Yes, the hi-tech, still-quite-expensive things that you build will mostly be used by rich people. That’s just a for-now thing, though. Smartphone adoption is already better than home broadband penetration. Speaking very conservatively, in two generations, everyone in America will be using this technology. In four, I’d bet on everyone in the world using it. And in the meantime, you can push on the decisionmakers. Correcting asymmetries of information can ameliorate asymmetries of power, despite the occasional troublingly counterintuitive result. Look at what Public Laboratory is doing: democratizing technology to make it possible for ordinary people to monitor and — hopefully — legally defend the quality of their environment. I’m admittedly biased, but I find their work incredibly inspiring.

A lot of efficiency gains are made possible by better information — dynamic energy pricing systems, car- and bike-sharing fleets, programmable thermostats. Information technology has a real role to play in keeping the earth habitable.

But you don’t have to know anything about IR filters or weather balloons or Arduino to make a difference. Designing a webform that serves the needs of some fraction of a social worker’s clients, freeing resources for others: that’s work that isn’t flashy, but is truly important. By way of example, my friend Chris helped build a clearinghouse of performance data for the microfinance sector, and though I know the day-to-day development experience was nearly indistinguishable from any other CMS-project-hell, it still seems to me a very fine thing to have done. I’m sure that toiling on the EHR problem is even more mind-numbing, and yet it’s unquestionably of huge potential importance. Writing a line of code can feel very distant from the act of directly alleviating human suffering, but that distance is and will continue to shrink.

Create Knowledge

The callowness and innumeracy of those promoting the Big Data brand almost defies belief, but (I should remind myself more frequently) it’s important not to let this distort your perspective. Yes, there are dopes who don’t understand that a properly selected sample of their (inevitably clickstream or social media) data could get them the same “insights” (always insights) as their massive Hadoop infrastructure. Plus it would let them use scientific-looking error bars, which I bet they would enjoy.

But there really are problems in need of solving which are bigger than human cognition. The gulf between the people who think their FitBits will extend their lifespan and the people working on actual computational biology problems is vast, but those willing to traverse it should be celebrated. There are archives to be digitized, regressions to be run, extraterrestrial radio signals to be processed. There are more disciplines than I can imagine that could make use of our skills if only they were introduced to them.

Make Art

All of this stuff is changing us, and we’re going to need to spend some time figuring out how — particularly as the energies, quantities and general magnitudes of the things we can manipulate grow ever more threateningly huge. Somehow we’re going to have to give this old monkey brain the slip.

That would be the pragmatic case, but maybe it’s foolish to try to mount one. What better thing could there be to spend your time on than making beauty? Besides, you’d be hard-pressed to read much of rhizome.org or the (now-defunct) New Aesthetic Tumblr or the increasingly philosophically-minded indie game scene and not come away convinced that a bunch of exciting, fast-moving (and yes, somewhat insufferable) conversations are reaching crescendo right now. It’s getting to be the part of the party where you have to shout to be heard, and either everyone will start to dance or there’ll be a fight or we’ll get up on the roof. Something interesting is sure to happen — it probably already is, in fact.

Try, At The Very Least, Not To Hurt Anyone

There are a few subdisciplines that you should probably stay away from. “Neuromarketing,” Zynga-style games, Klout scores and other algorithmic approaches to eliminating human agency, dignity and/or equality strike me as basically evil, and though the trend they represent is probably unstoppable, I sure wouldn’t want to be associated with it. Ditto becoming one of the quants designing the HFT engines of tomorrow, or one of the parasites that make their living off of SEO.

On the more benign/less high-skill end of the spectrum, coupon sites are starting to look less like a positive-sum marketing interaction and more like a system for skimming small businesses’ revenue. This model has been deployed to arguably good effect in the past (newspapers! Gmail!), but this latter phase seems to merely be subsidizing my fellow yuppies’ lifestyles in a sort of bizarrely regressive retail sales tax scheme. If you have the economic freedom to choose, I’m confident that you’ll be able to find something more productive to do with your time and talents.

If You Absolutely Must Play The Startup Game

Understand that you’re unlikely to come up with a million dollar idea solely by sticking together free software like so many legos, hoping that lightning will strike and you’ll wake up to a valuable population of users who are now pleasantly locked into your product by network effects and/or transition costs. Sure, it happens — for now, Instagram still counts as an example rather than a punchline — but a lotto ticket offers only slightly worse odds, and requires you to spend much less time fiddling with Keynote. It’s simply too easy for other, smarter people to have the same idea and build it. Competitive markets are good for consumers and bad for entrepreneurs.

But if the startup dream compels you, I would suggest two things.

First, realize that ICT makes information cheaper. That’s it, really. If you want to earn money with this technology, you should look for tractable problem areas where information is still expensive.

Second, connect your project to the logistical nightmare that is the real world. Ship physical goods, install a bikesharing fleet, go meet with the bureaucracy to get the data you need for your business intelligence site. These things are hard to do without leaving the house (or at least picking up the phone), and consequently fewer of them are being done. Another handy heuristic bucket: pursue ideas that require capital for things other than loft space, foosball tables and your bar tab. The low hanging fruit has been plucked, in other words. Reach higher. It’ll certainly be more interesting, and you might even improve your odds.

I’m a Lucky Guy

I’ve already copped to not being a startup guy myself. I guess I should probably acknowledge that I’m not a particularly cheerful person, either. But while I have admittedly made some terrible decisions, my professional choices haven’t been half bad, if I do say so myself. I’m extremely grateful to have the opportunity I do: one that affords me the chance to do work that I count as meaningful across a couple of the above dimensions.

I can’t guarantee you’ll have the good fortune I’ve had in finding a fulfilling way to spend your workdays, but I do wish you luck at not wasting your time.

Lude just wants more money, better parties and prettier girls and I want something else. I’m not even sure what to call it anymore except I know it feels roomy and it’s drenched in sunlight and it’s weightless and I know it’s not cheap. Probably not even real.

My affinities for Newt Gingrich grow ever more troublingly unironic.

But! I still think he’s too skeptical about the prospects for widespread cord-cutting.  Matt doesn’t link to any figures, but, contra the headline, this chart sure looks like it’s showing a downward trend to me, albeit one that’s noisy and surely confounded by other effects like slowed household formation. And there’s some reason to think that cord-cutting is still a nascent idea but one that, like abandoning landlines, will catch on once people see their peers doing it without ruining their lives.

I’ll add that my own experience doing without cable TV has been a positive one. Netflix reliably has stuff I want to watch; iTunes has delivered season passes to the new Avatar series and Deadliest Catch that, while not a steal, are reasonably priced and, aside from the slightly delayed delivery and regrettable absence of Cap’n Phil (RIP), totally acceptable. Live sports remain the real problem, of course. A few years ago, when the leagues did their business with broadcast networks that made their money on ads, this would’ve been totally solvable. Recent years’ shenanigans with cable networks and proprietary distribution channels make this situation seem a bit less hopeful, but I’m optimistic that growing consumer impatience will eventually spur lawmakers to get involved with these legally-granted monopolies and deliver the digital bread and circuses that the public rightly demands.

Finally, Matt makes a technical point:

The problem for people who do want to watch all their TV over the internet is that to provide enough video content to everyone for that to be the standard way of doing things, you’d need much more broadband capacity. And we could build much more broadband capacity, but people would have to want to buy it. And at the moment, it seems like people don’t really want to. Of course they would want to if cable television stopped existing, but all the infrastructure is already there. Now maybe aggregate population preferences will change over time. There’s certainly some evidence that they’re shifting a bit. But hard as it is for web junkies to remember, lots of people seem perfectly happy checking Facebook on their phone.

First: I do think preferences will change over time. Cohort replacement!

Second, there’s more capacity than might be apparent. The basic problem Matt’s gesturing toward is broadcast versus video-on-demand (VOD). Multiple viewers can watch a single, synchronous stream of programming — the same amount of bandwidth is needed regardless of how many people tune in. For on-demand stuff, everyone typically needs their own stream of data, making scalability a problem.

But of course most cable providers now offer substantial VOD services without choking their systems. I believe that AT&T’s U-verse system actually delivers everything in a VOD-like manner, though it’s a bit hard to suss out the details. Regardless, one can easily imagine various solutions to this that take advantage of consumer predictability and caching technology.  When you tune into The Voice, you could be offered the option of watching immediately for a surcharge or waiting X minutes to hop on the next every-X-minutes scheduled broadcast stream. Or your DVR could download the week’s ads every Sunday night, then stagger their distribution between pre-roll and mid-broadcast placement in order to line you up with the next broadcast stream. One can even imagine dynamic schemes where content is priced according to current network conditions and your subnet-neighbors’ current viewing habits. That would probably be economically fascinating enough that even Matt would be in favor.

Somewhere, in a better universe, the Weakerthans became America’s preferred purveyor of pretentious steampop. Colin Meloy is doing fine, almost certainly writing Objective C at a tidy standing desk, atop which sits a coffee cup, moleskine and carefully-chosen pencil.

Another issue raised in comments is the idea that a “fair use” by definition can’t be commercial. I was glad to see someone raise this point if only because I do wish we could re-inject more life into the commerce/non-commercial distinction for broad copyright purposes. But my goal would be to use the distinction to raise the scope of tolerated non-commercial copying, not to narrow the scope of allowable commerce. Commerce is a legitimate and important human undertaking, and the goal of copyright law should be to facilitate useful commerce. That includes preventing large-scale commercialized digital copying, but I think also means allowing commercialized sampling, quoting, and repurposing of existing material.

I made a somewhat similar point recently when talking about open data:

[...] I think it’s flatly wrong to consider private actors’ interest in public data to be uniformly problematic. We should be clear: we won’t tolerate those interests’ occasional attempts to lock public data into exclusive monopolies. I think our community has done a pretty good job lately of identifying such situations and stopping them, and of course people like Carl Malamud have been doing important work on this question since well before most of us ever heard of “open data.” But if commercial activity is enabled by data, that’s all to the good—the great thing about digital information is that scarcity doesn’t have to be a concern. Google Maps’ uses of Census TIGER data, for instance, is proprietary, motivated by profit, and unquestionably a huge boon to human welfare. And the source data remains free for anyone else to use! Cutting off those kinds of uses with noncommercial licensing would be nothing more than a destructive act of pique.

This really came into focus for me when I was in Berlin for a conference run by the good folks at the Open Knowledge Foundation. I admit that before I stopped to think about it, I never found noncommercial licenses that problematic, and would casually throw them on material I produced on the web. That way our vaguely-defined communal web society (so pure and untainted by the profit motive!) could use it, but “they” wouldn’t benefit from my hard(?) work tagging photos on Flickr. Honestly, this was dumb. I was never going to put in the time to try to make money off of those photos. If someone else could do the work to make them useful to others, why begrudge them that opportunity?*

I wouldn’t go as far as Matt about the goal of copyright law being to facilitate commerce (this formulation seems to ignore the kind of deadweight losses that Matt’s writing about IP is usually about).  But he’s right about commerce being a “legitimate and important human undertaking.”  Certainly the private sector is capable of excesses, but it’s also an incredible tool for identifying and satisfying human needs. We shouldn’t resent it out of some sort of ideological tribalism — particularly when we’re discussing digital goods, where things are rarely zero-sum and where (with apologies to Julian and Kash) the negative externalities (Mark Zuckerberg can infer your sexual preferences) are less severe than those found in the physical world (the chemical plant next door means your baby was born with fins).

* I should acknowledge that this is just a for-instance. As there’s very occasionally a market demand for unflattering photos of some of my friends by ideological press outlets, I’ve elected to keep somewhat restrictive licensing on my meager photographic output. But in less problematic cases — the code I put on GitHub, for instance — I’ve moved to open, nonviral licensing.

I’ll submit that the project of making women feel comfortable in this industry — a project that is very worthwhile — has basically nothing to do with whether that industry’s men work out, wear their baseball caps backward, or listen to shitty music.

Believe me, I don’t like it when douchebags start showing up at my favorite hangouts, either. But it’s important to distinguish our  insular cultural grudges (which can be fun!) from our insistence on equality and fairness (which is actually important).

I think everyone should learn to write code. That includes the mouthbreathers, if they behave themselves.

True, across a range of disciplines, there is cause for gloom. Some technologies — batteries, getting into orbit — sure look like they’re bumping up against immutable physical limits (fingers crossed that we invent flying saucers; get on it, physicists!). Others, like the speed of your home broadband connection, are hitting commercial or regulatory problems sufficiently imposing that the benefits to overcoming them don’t seem worth the cost. In other cases it’s a mix: growing (and arguably justified!) bureaucracy and depletion of low-hanging fruit combine to slow progress to a crawl.  Future societal changes related to information technology seem likely to be more about growing adoption (“even poor people have smartphones”; “wow, they’ve applied the carsharing model to that?”) than the deployment of new innovations (“he probably misses his old glasses“) — though note that this isn’t actually much of a problem for human welfare if you exclude tech journalists from your analysis.

Certainly some of these points of stagnation will be overcome with unanticipated developments.  And obviously I’m just as in the dark as anyone about what those innovations will be.

But I can guess at a couple of things — there are a few obvious bright spots. Supplementing education, for instance: I don’t know if something like Khan Academy can serve as a kind of pedagogical prosthesis, allowing a mediocre teacher to borrow some of the skills of a great one. But it at least seems plausible, and is something that’s being actively figured out.

Maybe more whiz-bang-ishly, I’m very excited about self-driving cars. Again, this is something that’s actively being worked on: not just by Google but by a number of automakers. And, somewhat shockingly, the early word on the regulatory state’s ability to adapt is not completely depressing (though I expect it to get more so). I realize that this might seem like a somewhat trivial technology — certainly when I first pondered the idea I didn’t understand it to be much more than a better cruise control.  But if you haven’t, let me strongly encourage you to read Tim Lee’s three part series on what this all could mean. It’s not just about playing George Jetson and watching a movie during your next road trip. Self-driving cars would free a huge amount of human capital and dramatically reduce the number of cars and supporting infrastructure that we would collectively require.  This has implications for our cities, our environment — even the experience of being a child or parent (a relationship that, Matt is fond of pointing out, involves a hell of a lot of chauffeur service).

I genuinely think this will arrive in my lifetime (pre-dotage, even! though I think this remains an excitingly uncertain bet), and that it’ll be a very big deal.  It’s worth noting that it’ll also be yet one more thing fueling inequality: no more truckers, no more cabbies, fewer construction and auto workers.  This is why I think learning how to make peace with our new robot overlords is so important.

But it’s hard for me to read this and not despair. He comes so close to the realization that a guy as smart as him ought to have already had:

I can take a photo of a check and deposit it in my bank account, then turn around and find a new book through a Twitter link and buy it, all while being surveilled by a drone in Afghanistan and keeping track of how many steps I’ve walked.

The question is, as it has always been: now what?

Decades ago, the answer was, “Build the Internet.” Fifteen years ago, it was, “Build the Web.” Five years ago, the answers were probably, “Build the social network” or “Build the mobile web.” And it was in around that time in 2007 that Facebook emerged as the social networking leader, Twitter got known at SXSW, and we saw the release of the first Kindle and the first iPhone. There are a lot of new phones that look like the iPhone, plenty of e-readers that look like the Kindle, and countless social networks that look like Facebook and Twitter. In other words, we can cross that task off the list. It happened.

What we’ve seen since have been evolutionary improvements on the patterns established five years ago. The platforms that have seemed hot in the last couple of years — Tumblr, Instagram, Pinterest — add a bit of design or mobile intelligence to the established ways of thinking. The most exciting thing to come along in the consumer space between then and now is the iPad. But despite its glorious screen and extended battery life, it really is a scaled up iPhone that offers developers more space and speed to do roughly the same things they were doing before. The top apps for the iPad look startlingly similar the top apps for the iPhone: casual games, social networking, light productivity software.

For at least five years, we’ve been working with the same operating logic in the consumer technology game. This is what it looks like:

There will be ratings and photos and a network of friends imported, borrowed, or stolen from one of the big social networks. There will be an emphasis on connections between people, things, and places. That is to say, the software you run on your phone will try to get you to help it understand what and who you care about out there in the world. Because all that stuff can be transmuted into valuable information for advertisers.

That paradigm has run its course. It’s not quite over yet, but I think we’re into the mobile social fin de siècle.

This is just an excerpt. But the whole post is pervaded by a sorrowful impatience. A sense that that all that stuff that came before was okay, but not quite what we were looking for, you know? It’s time for something new; something that, finally, will really change everything.

A pessimist might be worried. It’s almost as if these endless cresting waves of technical fads are never actually going to carry us beyond the threshold that we perceive but can’t name — that we won’t achieve transcendence through apps, that HTML5 won’t remake human nature, that meaning might be more than one more MacWorld away. That technology is only important to the extent that it lets us do things we otherwise couldn’t, and that a maniacal focus on tech as a movement, beat or industry will necessarily rob it of all its vitality, leaving the obsessive observer of valuations and launches on a joyless and masturbatory trudge through the sucked-dry bones of a topic that is only worth considering in its relation to a vastly richer, larger and more important cultural landscape.

I mean… it could be, right? Should we at least consider the possibility?

Actually, no, nevermind — whew! — that’s all wrong. Check it out, the new iPhone 5 could be AMAZING:

[...] I think we all better hope that the iPhone 5 has some crazy surprises in store for us later this year. Maybe it’s a user interface thing. Maybe it’s a whole line of hardware extensions that allow for new kinds of inputs and outputs. I’m not sure what it is, but a decently radical shift in hardware capabilities on par with phone–>smartphone or smartphone–>iPhone would be enough, I think, to provide a springboard for some new ideas.

Also, lightbulbs:

I have some [ideas] of my own, too. The cost of a lumen of light is dropping precipitously; there must be more things than lightbulbs that can benefit from that.

That could be a thing, right? Lightbulbs as a platform, man. You go email the alumni list for a technical cofounder, I’ll start working on the pitch deck. Do you think we should do it Ignite style or aim for more of a TEDx thing?

And don’t forget Big Data. No, we still have no idea what problems we actually want to solve with it (all human disease? let’s discuss in Campfire). But check it out, I found an amazing Stack Overflow thread about building a software RAID array out of EBSes. Once we spend a couple hundred bucks on an Elastic MapReduce run, how could we not have fundamentally improved our civilization? It’s inconceivable!

There’s vast amounts of databases, real-world data, and video that remains unindexed. Who knows what a billion Chinese Internet users will come up with? The quantified self is just getting going on its path to the programmable self. And no one has figured out how to do augmented reality in an elegant way.

Anyway, thank goodness. For a second there I was worried.

It’s funny: I tend to be skeptical about expansive visions of technological transformation. Our human impulses keep the reality that actually unfolds quaintly venal and simple-minded. Douglas Adams remains my favorite guide to the future. But I do think this could be a real problem.

Americans’ physical needs have been pretty well met for a while now. It sure looks like more and more people are hitting a ceiling on the marginal utility of their dollars. And there haven’t been any hugely popular new product categories for decades — no flying cars, no medical breakthroughs that add decades to life. Just steadily better and cheaper consumer goods, and the debut of various useful but negligibly expensive information technology gadgets. I’m starting to actually believe I could outlive scarcity (in America, anyway).

I am much less gloomy about what we do after that point than Mr. Staniford seems to be. Robots might take a lot of work away from us, but I can’t imagine a future where they take all the meaningful work. Ever been in a nursing home? A mental health facility? An underperforming school? If we really find ourselves with more resources than we know what to do with, applying them toward minimizing human suffering strikes me as a pretty worthwhile project, and one that could occupy an almost arbitrarily large number of people.

Or we could just have everyone spend their days carving elaborate friezes onto our public infrastructure. Hell, let’s build some new pyramids! I don’t know! But I am increasingly suspicious that how we redirect our surplus resources will be the central moral and political problem of the next few generations. No joke: this is why I’m trying to convince Yglesias to write his next book about the economics of Star Trek. Barring some deeply unsettling discoveries about physics, we’re not going to see replicators or holodecks arrive anytime soon. But it’s probably the most widely-known fictional work that even occasionally addresses this problem, which makes it seem like as good a framing device as any.

Or, perhaps more plausibly, we might have an ecological or epidemiological catastrophe that causes the collapse of global civilization. In which case we can probably just ignore these questions and enjoy the time we have left.

UPDATE: I realized I should’ve linked to this post by Yglesias; for how short it is, it really covers an incredible amount of territory.  Better still, I finally got around to reading the Peter Frase essay it links to, which is shockingly good (and includes the trenchant Star Trek analysis I crave). And that, in turn, links to this Charles Stross blog post, which is also very good.

• Will CISPA come to fully carry the “new SOPA” framing that advocates (intoxicated by the overwhelming success of that earlier campaign) are going to be unable to resist suggesting?
• Will that be productive, or will the net bloc feel that it’s being manipulated and disengage?
• Can organization of this constituency succeed without the support of the net’s commercial entities?  By most accounts they’re indifferent to CISPA in a way they weren’t with SOPA.

All I can tell you is that people who who have spent years promising that the internet will transform our democracy* are very excited about how the SOPA/PIPA fight went down — and with good reason! It was a thunderous victory by all accounts. The people who have been quietly toiling in this arena feel that they might have discovered a new weapon, and the temptation to try to use it soon will no doubt prove irresistible.

Normally, trying to clone a successful campaign action is a recipe for disappointment.  But it really is true that reflexive opposition to everything Congress tries to do to the internet is a pretty sound policy rule of thumb; there’s an online constituency with vague political preferences but a strong sense of net territoriality and disillusionment with Washington; and the business communities who are most interested in mucking with the internet aren’t really set up to run successful campaigns against an engaged public opposition (these guys are used to getting their way because there’s basically no one paying attention on the other side).

So we’ll see!

* in more inspiring ways than opening up a bunch of small donor money or boring, non-cutting edge (or just uninterestingly egalitarian) things like enabling constituent communication, I mean