-
Arrogance Is Not A Good Look
Arrogance is never a good look. We all wear it to a degree. Too many think they wear it well. Until they don’t. When whatever flavor of arrogance they’ve draped themselves in trips them up, the fall makes Icarus look he’s still soaring.
The lessons of history, literature, religion, heck — even cartoons — tell us that all inflated egos, like balloons, either pop or fizzle. As long as the balloon can be kept aloft, life’s a party. Funny how we’re able to brush that all aside. Arrogantly so.
Seeing Apple get a real courtroom comeuppance yesterday, tech titans in general thinking they can out reason human reasoning, and the continual display of cock and bull topsy-turvying in the political world, one would think that most sensible people, especially those with armies of lawyers on retainer, would begin to sense a few chinks in their armor long before they become dangerous vulnerabilities. They’d probably be served better employing fools or court jesters.
Oh, wait….
Given how we’ve turned gambling into the national sport, it makes one wonder how long before we gamify the entire human experience and begin betting on the timing of career stumbles and failures beyond what already happens in the stock market. Predictable as they are though, the odds wouldn’t offer much change of a big payout.
Then again, keep in mind what Terry Pratchett says:
Modesty is only arrogance by stealth.
You can find more of my writings on a variety of topics on Medium at this link, including in the publications Ellemeno and Rome. I can also be found on social media under my name as above.
-
Dan Moren Questions What It Means To Be An Apple Fan These Days
The headline of Dan Moren’s final column for MacWorld says it all: I’m An Apple Fan In 2025. What Does That Even Mean?
Moren has been writing for MacWorld and been a sensible voice inside the Apple community for close to 20 years. He’s signing off his regular column gig for MacWorld, but he’ll still be around on the likes of Six Colors, podcasts, and I’m sure other places. Which is good, because his voice is an important and reliable one.
In his farewell, he raises the question many are asking of themselves, and the questions many are asking of Apple in its current state and our own state of affairs. As he puts it in a nutshell of a statement:
As Apple started becoming more and more successful, I’ve become increasingly skeptical that one should ever really consider oneself a “fan”of a company.
It’s a well thought out and well reasoned post and one that I think should be read by anyone considering themselves a fan, or a no longer fan, or even someone who just doesn’t care for Apple or its products.
A big part of the self-examination I know quite a few folks are going through in assessing their current relationship with Apple deals with issues bigger than just the products. For lack of a better description call them corporate issues. Even using that label — corporate — feels dirty to type in ways that seem damning in more dangerous ways these days. But that’s a fungible feeling and thinking that’s becoming increasingly tangible.
Here’s the thing. Technology advances. Humans advance. Nothing that feels foundational or allegiance adhering, or even worth being infatuated about is going to ever stay the same. Nor are our feelings about what we first might have fallen in love with, regardless of how the object of that affection itself grows and changes. Change is constant.
Microsoft had my allegiance back in the Tablet PC days because they won it when those much maligned devices provided a better, more productive way to do my work. Microsoft changed. I did too. iPads replaced what Tablet PCs were for me in my work and my play, and those are the tools I still use today. Do I think that will be forever? Not a chance. I mourned the loss of Tablet PCs. I’m sure if Apple stopped making iPads, I’d go through a similar grieving process. But again, that’s change. That’s life.
That’s also growth. But growth on the human side of the ledger rarely equals growth on the corporate side. In my brief time on this planet the two have never added up to successful equation that yields anything other than diverging results. That’s one thing I don’t ever expect to change.
Kudos to Dan on a job and career well done, (and still going) and kudos for a lovely farewell column in MacWorld.
You can find more of my writings on a variety of topics on Medium at this link, including in the publications Ellemeno and Rome. I can also be found on social media under my name as above.
-
Hostile and Political Amazon
I guess someone at Amazon read my post from a few weeks ago about how it is possible to bring a bully to heal. I doubt it. But it is fun to watch Jeff Bezos make the Trump administration sweat a bit under similar circumstances. At least for the moment.
In response to the Trump tariffs, which are already driving up prices and driving down consumer confidence, Amazon has announced that they will be displaying the amount of price increases that are due to tariffs on its product pages.
Of course this generated an immediate response from the White House with the press secretary, standing at the podium beside the Treasury secretary, labeling Amazon’s move as a “hostile and political act.”
Oh my.
Three things to quickly comment on:
First, when you need to trot out Treasury Secretary Bessent to try and clam waters you’re losing. As I’ve said before, he reminds me of the LaLa guy. Remember him?
Whatever Bessent says seems to make as much sense.
Second, we just reached the 100 day mark of this dangerous farce of an administration and the meaningless polls are telling us folks are unhappy. You don’t need polls to know that, see that, or feel that. The unease in the air is thicker than this Spring’s pollen count.
You can only create a fake reality in the movies. And even then, those fake realities fall apart in the end.
Third, most early bets are Bezos will fold and pull back on this. But one can only bend a knee so far before it breaks. Or they don’t let you launch any new satellites.
And the bending begins.
You can find more of my writings on a variety of topics on Medium at this link, including in the publications Ellemeno and Rome. I can also be found on social media under my name as above.
-
Sunday Morning Reading
Back from a brief hiatus, there’s plenty to read and share. It feels like it’s becoming increasingly important, and perhaps more urgent to do both. I promise there’s some happiness amidst all of the Strum and Drang down the page.
First up, Canadian Stephen Marche is singing the Red, White and Blues. It’s easy to look from the outside in, or even from within and be dismayed at what’s going on in this country. Because it’s so damn easy to see. Unless of course you’re still in shock, or choosing to ignore it. Marche’s tune doesn’t hit a false note as he says America was a “country of bubbles.”
David Todd McCarty is back Poking The Bear. It’s good seeing him write about politics again.
Drik de Klein of History of Sorts wrote Evil, I Think, Is The Absence of Empathy back in 2019, using Captain G.M. Gilbert’s quote from the Nuremberg trials as the headline. I remember reading it a while ago and it resurfaced this week, proving, as always, just how short our attention spans are. Or perhaps our comprehension and retention capabilities.
NatashaMH says, “I can’t stand people being ignorant bastards” in her excellent piece Our Modern Discontents. Again, a viewpoint from outside the red, white, and blue bubble that feels like it’s ready to pop.
Jacob Silverman’s Welcome To The Slop World: How The Hostile Internet Is Driving Us Crazy is an invitation to a party that turned into something nobody was expecting.
Speaking of bubbles, big tech is in hot water of its own boiling these days. Google is facing anti-trust charges and a possible breakup that probably won’t happen. Wendy Grossman takes a look at Three Times A Monopolist.
Who’d a thunk it? Bot Farms Invade Social Media To Hijack Popular Sentiment. Eric Schwartzman does some digging in those all too fertile fields.
This past week we celebrated William Shakespeare’s birthday. As usual lots of words were written about the writer who used them better than anyone else to describe the human condition. One of the accepted parts of the Bard’s legacy is that he was an absent husband that left his family behind to pursue his calling. But a discovery of a letter might just change that. Check out what Ephrat Livini has to say about the possibility in an Overlooked Letter Rewrites History of Shakespeare’s Bad Marriage.
And for that happiness I promised, I’ll stick with Shakespeare and Cora Fox with ‘I Were Happy But Little Happy, If I Could Say How Much’; Shakespeare’s Insights On Happiness Have Held Up For More Than 400 Years. We often focus on his tragedies, but he reveled in the joys of life as well. Keep those happy bubbles afloat as long as you can. Pop the bad ones.
(Image from Rey Seven on Unsplash)
If you’re interested in just what the heck Sunday Morning Reading is all about you can read more about the origins of Sunday Morning Reading here. You can also find more of my writings on Medium at this link, including in the publications Ellemeno and Rome.
-
Néle Azevedo’s Melting Men Reminds Us That Life Is Short
Life is indeed short and it makes sense to pay attention when things that remind us of that come back into focus when someone new discovers them. Néle Azevedo’s famous ice sculptures, known as “Minimum Moment”, seem to be making the rounds again recently and I thought I’d highlight them here. I’ve never seen them in person yet I’ve always been taken by every photograph I’ve seen of them.
The installation features small ice figures sitting on public steps around parts of the world begin melting almost as soon as they are set in place, reminding us our our short time here on this planet and the ephemeral nature of our place.
The photo above is from the 2005 installation “Minimum Moment” in São Paulo and photographed by Marcos Gorgatti. You can read more about it here.
You can find more of my writings on a variety of topics on Medium at this link, including in the publications Ellemeno and Rome. I can also be found on social media under my name as above.
-
Time For The Shibboleth of Targeted Ads To Die
We all fell for it. We all thought it would be beneficial to us as users. I don’t want to say we were all suckers, so I’ll just say we were naive. But in the end we were all suckers. Targeted advertising was supposed to cater to our needs, desires, and wishes. Surfacing what we were interested in out of the clutter was a hope and a promise that died in colliding avalanches of greed and gluttony.
To be fair some ad targeting actually works. To also be fair, even a broken clock is right twice a day. But the money came rolling in and the temptation to grab it all became far too much and made it far too easy to let slip those early promises.
Now the brains behind Artificial Intelligence are doing what many suspected from the get go and edging their way into the browser wars. TechCrunch has an interesting post talking about Perplexity’s plans to get to know us better by building a better browser.
Here’s the money quote:
“That’s kind of one of the other reasons we wanted to build a browser, is we want to get data even outside the app to better understand you,” Srinivas said. “Because some of the prompts that people do in these AIs is purely work-related. It’s not like that’s personal.”
Focus on the “personal” part.
Both Perplexity and OpenAI have made statements they would be interested in buying Google’s Chrome browser should Google be forced into a breakup for anti-trust reasons. But that’s years away. So why wait? Better to get in the game now before the regulators catch up. Or before all the data that’s good to grab gets grabbed and starts feeding on itself.
There’s irony in all of this that underlies and underlines the dissembling behind it that might just be seeping into the open. One of the promises of this new technology is that it will free us from drudgery, giving us all more time for creative pursuits and more balanced lifestyles. But the underlying goal is the same. Grab as much data as possible, especially “personal” data. That’s the currency. That will always be the currency.
Here’s the second money quote from Perplexity’s Aarvind Srinivasa:
“On the other hand, what are the things you’re buying; which hotels are you going [to]; which restaurants are you going to; what are you spending time browsing, tells us so much more about you.”
AI might continue its move into the enterprise, but that’s not enough. And if the corporate mindset of using AI to replace workers continues, that equation points to diminishing returns eventually, even if the advertisers never catch on.
We all know how this story plays out. Because it’s a rerun. And too often a plagiarized one as well.
You can find more of my writings on a variety of topics on Medium at this link, including in the publications Ellemeno and Rome. I can also be found on social media under my name as above.
-
All The World’s His Stage. Happy Birthday (We Think) to William Shakespeare
William Shakespeare is the playwright and poet that described us all. He did so with intelligence and wit. Today, April 23, is the day most mark as his birthday. The record of his baptism is April 26th, so it’s a decent bet the date is close enough.
There really is nothing new in human behavior under the sun. In his plays and poems I don’t think he missed much in describing every thing good, bad, noble, and foolish about how we operate with each other and within the world. In my view, it’s a shame more of us don’t pay enough attention to his cataloging of humanity. But then he predicted that as well.
Here’s an intriguing side note on this very intelligent man’s celebrated birth date. I asked several AI engines on what day was he born. Gemini, ChatGPT, Perplexity, and DeepSeek returned April 23rd as the likely date with the typical (and mostly accepted) disclaimers that we celebrate that day, but there’s no definitive proof it was the actual date. I asked Siri and Alexa, both returned April 23 as the definitive date. Intriguing that Siri didn’t try to pass that off to ChatGPT. I’m sure Amazon will now offer me all kind of suggestions to purchase anything Shakespeare.
So, I’ll amend slightly my statement about the Bard describing us all and there being nothing new under the sun. He’s correct in that we’re both smart and too often not smart enough to understand what we do and do not know, but he might have missed the mark when it comes to artificial intelligence. Or did he did he?
I’m reasonably certain his works have been fed into AI engines and Chatbot training given that they are long in the public domain. I’m also reasonably certain they ignore his nothing new under the sun descriptions of human interactions in the same way those of us still walking around do.
“Lord, what fools we mortals be!”
You can find more of my writings on a variety of topics on Medium at this link, including in the publications Ellemeno and Rome. I can also be found on social media under my name as above.
-
Carole Cadwalladr’s Final Column for The Observer
A couple of weeks ago I linked to Carol Cadwalladr’s recent return to the TED conference to deliver a speech entitled This Is What A Digital Coup Looks Like. It’s worth a watch if you care about such things. Heck, it should be required reading if you care at all about what’s happening in our digital and non-digital lives.
This post is linking to her farewell column in The Observer, the Sunday sister paper to The Guardian and The Guardian Weekly papers in Britain. Like all media outlets it’s been through some things in recent years. The Observer was purchased late in 2024 and like all such transactions that prompted staff layoffs and terminations, including Carole Cadwalladr and a number of her colleagues. You can read all about that on in her post Fuckty bye in How To Survive The Broligarchy. I suggest you do that as well as read her final Observer column It’s Not Too Late To Stop Trump and The Tech Broligarchy From Controlling Our Lives, But We Must Act Now.
I happen to believe she’s fighting the good fight. That last column provides some excellent behind the scenes during her preparation and anxiety leading up to that recent TED speech, as well as some reactions she received while at the conference, including an interchange between her and OpenAI’s Sam Altman, in addition to making the important case she continues to make.
She’s paying attention and raising alarm bells. We should too. She’s standing in the way. We should too.
You can find more of my writings on a variety of topics on Medium at this link, including in the publications Ellemeno and Rome. I can also be found on social media under my name as above.
-
Distrust-By-Default
In a typically thorough article on Ars Technica about Microsoft preparing to reintroduce the Recall feature to Windows 11, Andrew Cunningham sums up his, and I think many of our, queasy feelings about these kind of feature and marketing failures we’ve recently seen from the likes of Microsoft, Apple and others, using the phrase distrust-by-default.
Here’s the quote in context:
This was a problem that Microsoft made exponentially worse by screwing up the Recall rollout so badly in the first place. Recall made the kind of ugly first impression that it’s hard to dig out from under, no matter how thoroughly you fix the underlying problems. It’s Windows Vista. It’s Apple Maps. It’s the Android tablet.
And in doing that kind of damage to Recall (and possibly also to the broader Copilot+ branding project), Microsoft has practically guaranteed that many users will refuse to turn it on or uninstall it entirely, no matter how it actually works or how well the initial problems have been addressed.
Unfortunately, those people probably have it right. I can see no signs that Recall data is as easily accessed or compromised as before or that Microsoft is sending any Recall data from my PC to anywhere else. But today’s Microsoft has earned itself distrust-by-default from many users, thanks not just to the sloppy Recall rollout but also to the endless ads and aggressive cross-promotion of its own products that dominate modern Windows versions. That’s the kind of problem you can’t patch your way out of.
Briefly, Recall is the Windows 11 feature that was built to capture and recall almost all of what you do on your PC via snapshots, making it available for recall later. After substantial promotion, Microsoft pulled and delayed the rollout last year after security concerns were raised. Skepticism was high even before the security issues were raised that caused the delay. Cunningham’s article provides an excellent rundown on that and I encourage you to read the full thing.
I think Andrew is spot on calling the uneasy feeling many of us have distrust-by-default. Certainly when it comes to this specific Microsoft moment and other tech companies. Zooming out, I think it also describes well the armor we’re all adopting on any number of issues in these moments of mistrust we seem to be facing on so many fronts in our lives.
(Image from Atmospher1 on Shutterstock)
You can find more of my writings on a variety of topics on Medium at this link, including in the publications Ellemeno and Rome. I can also be found on social media under my name as above.
-
Sunday Morning Reading
Sunday Morning Reading is on hiatus this week for family time. For those who celebrate Easter, and for those who don’t, may you find warmth, joy, and laughter in the company of family and good friends. A little peace would be nice also.
If you’re interested in just what the heck Sunday Morning Reading is all about you can read more about the origins of Sunday Morning Reading here. You can also find more of my writings on Medium at this link, including in the publications Ellemeno and Rome.
Skip to content
Life on the Wicked Stage: Act 3
Musings on life, the theatre, technology, culture and the occasional emu sighting
Life on the Wicked Stage: Act 3 