9 ms·

The Great Flattening

139 points by sturza 2y ago

baal80spam 2y ago
It definitely feels that people just NEED to be angry about SOMETHING these days...
- dartos 2y ago
  It’s been a constant since 2016. Tho the article has some interesting ideas and historical insights.
- greg_V 2y ago
  Marketing doesn't happen in a vacuum. The creative industries have been having it rough for the past year and a half, and there's practically an internet war going on between AI prompt using artists and real ones. Add to that the writer's strike, the job market, etc. If they had a proper control screening for the ad, the backlash could be anticipated, as shown by the fact on how the simple act of reversing it would have a much different message/effect.
- pjc50 2y ago
  People have been "angry on the internet" for decades, but it's more recently that it's metastatized into the "real world" on an overwhelming level, and been monetized. This is grossly irresponsible and is going to result in violence and pushbacks, of which the US ""TikTok ban"" (not a ban) is a small foreshadowing.
  - edent 2y ago
    Please, I beg you, pick up a history book. Culture warriors inciting violence against popular culture https://pophistorydig.com/topics/burn-the-beatles-1966/ https://pophistorydig.com/topics/burn-the-beatles-1966/ Or, you know, literally anything from the Children's Crusade to the War of Jenkin's Ear. Raising a rabble to violence has been going on forever.
    - pjc50 2y ago
      Just because it's always happened doesn't mean that present day complicity in it is fine.
- CPLX 2y ago
  I think it may be the opposite. People are mad at a culture and economy that is increasingly dehumanizing and exploitative, where they feel hopeless when contemplating basic things like ever having a permanent home for their family, and when every interaction with modern commerce seems to be designed to trick them or steal from them. Since they feel (and to some extent, are) powerless to affect the forces acting on them directly, they lash out at anything that reminds them of this dynamic, in whatever forum will listen to them.
  - seoulmetro 2y ago
    No, this isn't it. People aren't mad at the people dehumanising them. In fact people celebrate those people en mass. Facebook, Google, etc. would all disappear if what you said were true. Politicians would be voted out, etc. The truth is, people don't mind being dehumanised if it can make them feel more like their neighbours, or even better, above them. We're all too lazy to care about being dehumanised, like pigs to slaughter. People lash out not because they feel helpless, but because they feel superior. They're not, they're just bored and life has been good so things they invent to get upset about look extremely bad to them.
- madeofpalk 2y ago
  Many people consider it a possibility to like something. So equally, it's completely valid to dislike something.
  - add-sub-mul-div 2y ago
    Nobody takes an L in the marketplace of ideas anymore. If people don't like something that you do, you can just say they have a type of derangement syndrome, or it's because they have a need to be angry about something, or because they're afraid of change, or so on. The key is to make sure that your accusation is broad and vague.
- Ensorceled 2y ago
  Yes, all of those creatives who have been losing their jobs over the past few years to this "flattening" process and are now seeing a existential threat from AI that could eliminate most of their careers entirely just "NEED to be angry about SOMETHING". The lack of empathy is astounding...
- seoulmetro 2y ago
  Life is so good that we get bored, so we get upset at things that are perfectly fine because we know we can control how we feel and stop at any time. Hardship keeps people busy, boredom forces people into drama.
antfie 2y ago
The URL contains a JWT token which is a CWE-598 security weakness of the application. Reference: https://owasp.org/www-community/vulnerabilities/Information_exposure_through_query_strings_in_url https://owasp.org/www-community/vulnerabilities/Information_....
- mooreds 2y ago
  Haha, I know. As soon as I saw it, I decoded it and saw { "aud": "stratechery.passport.online", "azp": "HKLcS4DwShwP2YDKbfPWM1", "ent": { "uri": [ "https://stratechery.com/2024/the-great-flattening/" ] }, "exp": 1718188732, "iat": 1715596732, "iss": "https://api.passport.online/oauth", "scope": "feed:read article:read asset:read category:read entitlements", "sub": "WsrLyrr6qemVAgEGCjMm34", "use": "access" } Not sure who user WsrLyrr6qemVAgEGCjMm34 is, but thanks for sharing the article with us all! At first glance, looks like passport.online is a subscription management service: https://passport.online/ https://passport.online/
  - docdeek 2y ago
    Pretty sure that Passport is Ben Thompson's (of Stratechery) own subscription management service. Not sure it is out in the world as a product yet.
  - glenjamin 2y ago
    Given that the token says it only allows reading of content and assets of this particular article for 1 month, it seems like this is an intentional feature for allowing subscribers to share paywalled URLs
    - frankthedog 2y ago
      Indeed, the same mechanism is used by Bloomberg for gift links. A signed JWT with expiry 7 days from creation. A fitting use case in my opinion.
      - flakiness 2y ago
Waterluvian 2y ago
I think the ad was uncharacteristically tasteless but I still don’t understand the leap from “well that isn’t convincing me to buy their product” to “I’m personally offended and my day is ruined. Someone must apologize to me.” Is this just the “I need validation by other people liking what I like” thing we see a lot in gaming, sports, etc. fandoms? What I’m also curious about, given how shocking it is for Apple to totally miss the mark, is if this was calculated.
- delichon 2y ago
  > the reason why people reacted so strongly to the ad is that it couldn’t have hit the mark more squarely. I think this is right. The ad is about the flattening of the old analog world into the digital one and it evokes strong feelings because our nostalgia for that is not a little about a real and significant loss, which the Apple commercial grotesquely celebrates.
  - zer00eyz 2y ago
    20 odd years ago I worked for a bank. We were doing a focus group that went slightly off the rails and a room full of people all agreed that the bank must still have paper records. The bank had not had paper records for decades. Im not sure that "nostalgia" is the right word...
  - DocTomoe 2y ago
    It's more than just nostalgia. The ad visibly destroys items associated with creativity and culture, celebrates such destruction, and replaces it with an iPad. It reminded me of that scene in Pinocchio where the boys trash the mansion and the piano in it, it reminded me of book burnings. It could easily be understood as "screw the old world, it's all in our product now." And to a demographic of Apple buyers who actually tend to like culture, who are more likely than the average to attend actual concerts, visit a gallery or enjoy their vinyl collection, that was highly, highly offensive. Contrast that with Steve Jobs "It is a music player, it is a computer, it is a phone" skid from the iPhone introduction: Back then, it was not about replacing music players, it was a music player. The product was a tool, not the end. With the ad, the product is the end, not the tool.
KingOfCoders 2y ago
"The Internet, birthed as it was in the idealism of California tech" The moment CERN is transmogrified to California. One could argue the internet pre-WWW existed (I joined the internet myself on IRC and NEWS) but then, who today was on the internet pre-WWW?
- mooreds 2y ago
  Gopher and Usenet forever!
  - kgwgk 2y ago
    > Gopher From the University of Minnessota in California.
- dpflan 2y ago
  Agreed, found this to be a cute distillation. Give Utah some credit too…
- blipvert 2y ago
  <raises hand> If you haven’t used telnet on a Gandalf PAX via RAL SPAN gateway to get to a talker then you haven’t lived.
- Karellen 2y ago
  > I joined the internet myself on IRC and NEWS And email, right? You do have email, don't you? Which is not implemented over the WWW, and is pre-WWW by the best part of a decade. (RFC 821/822 are dated August 1982, and the first publicly documented version of HTTP 0.9 is, I think, 1991?) I think it's pretty safe to say "The Internet", without any other qualification, came into being with the publication of the IPv4 RFC 791 in September 1981, by Vint Cerf and Robert Kahn. Now, California might not be entirely accurate, as while a fair amount of the work on the Internet Protocols was done at UCLA and UC Berkley, MIT was also heavily involved along with co-ordination from DARPA's IPTO in Virginia (specifically, The Pentagon). But I think "California" is a much more accurate birthplace for The Internet than CERN. Edit: I'm guessing you also use the not-built-on-WWW DNS system from RFCs 882/883 published in 1983?
yourapostasy 2y ago
A flattening I’m watching with interest is the gradually increasing digital integration of the physical world. I’m hopeful that it opens the door to at least tap the brakes on the enshittification of our physical artifacts. For example, there are landfill dumps-ful of mass produced electrical devices like shavers, toothbrushes, AirPods and so on tossed out for want of just a replacement battery made too difficult to replace by those mass consumers. But I’m seeing green shoots of hope in people leveraging the flattening by sharing how-to hacks to repair these, and in rare but hopefully increasing number of cases, improve them for longer service lives. With gains in pushing CNC mills, wire EDM and more fabrication to small scales, big chunks of which are enabled by this flattening, I’m cautiously optimistic we will be able to distribute persisted, good engineering.
- BobbyTables2 2y ago
  It’s gross that people spend so much effort repairing things. Manufacturers could simply publish this info. Water got into a medical thermometer I had. Claimed some water resistance protections. Quickly drained the battery. Managed to open it up (with difficulty — pry tab located under label) but inside was corroded. Saw the battery but not easy to get out. Of course peeling the label makes it not stick back properly either. What should be a cheap and easy battery change was not. And for what should be a cheap battery is over $5 at the local grocery store. Makes buying another $10 thermometer look a good deal. It shouldn’t be this hard…
_the_special_ 2y ago
" will AI be a bicycle that we control, or an unstoppable train to destinations unknown? To put it in the same terms as the ad, will human will and initiative be flattened, or expanded?" Interesting line of thinking here. I've never considered this but an observation from my usage of chat AIs at least is an increased willingness to defer my thought-organising process to the AI by just jotting down some random ideas and asking it to make it coherent. I guess on a personal level I'm flattening my own mind?
- stiiv 2y ago
  > an increased willingness to defer my thought-organising process to the AI by just jotting down some random ideas and asking it to make it coherent ...and then accepting that outcoming as sufficient, and moving on, right? Is the alternative that without the AI, you would spend more time researching and thinking about your ideas, pursuing (or stumbling upon) related ideas, and maybe ending up with a more broad understanding at the end of the endeavor? If so, working with a chatbot is good to extent that you value economy. That is a worthy outcome in many circumstances. But the "inflated" alternative sounds valuable in its way too. From a broad social/behavioral perspective, I wonder the extent to which the "inflated" way will die off (or perhaps adapt and become something new?) given these new tools.
  - sbarre 2y ago
    > > jotting down some random ideas and asking it to make it coherent Isn't this is more or less the same thing as spending a bunch of time going to a bunch of webpages from Google search, except it takes way less time, arguably leaving _more_ time for the critical thinking and subsequent research you espouse? > ...and then accepting that outcoming as sufficient, and moving on, right? Much like you can either immediately trust what you read on the Internet, or apply some critical thinking and dig into it more, you can do the same with whatever an AI returns to you. AI can be an accelerator for mundane tasks and help you get to the high-value work quicker, or it can be a lazy shortcut that lets you do less. The same can be said for almost any tool.
- btbuildem 2y ago
andrewstuart 2y ago
Yes what a great observation. The ad is so shocking because it's the truth. We all know it.
- polotics 2y ago
  Do you really think any of the professionals actually using the tools being destroyed in the add actually are dropping their tool and using an iPad instead? May I propose to give Damon Albarn's aka Gorillaz "The Fall" record a listen? This was indeed only produced on iPads, from a world-known musician, so it's the perfect test case for this, and I quote you here: shocking truth!
martinclayton 2y ago
I'd forgotten about the Aggregation Theory piece. "By extension, this means that the most important factor determining success is the user experience: the best distributors/aggregators/market-makers win by providing the best experience, which earns them the most consumers/users, which attracts the most suppliers, which enhances the user experience in a virtuous cycle." Sadly, the reality of the virtuous circle though is: enshittification. "...from music to video to books to art; the extent to which being “special” meant being scarce is the extent to which the existence of “special” meant a constriction of opportunity" I don't get this. Rarity or inaccessibility has been used as marketing tool, sure. But great music and books were not scarce for a long time pre-internet. Feels like a "never mind the quality, feel the width" view of culture. "LLMs are breaking down all written text ever into massive models that don’t even bother with pages: they simply give you the answer." When will people stop saying that? The give an answer, yes, but is it the answer: caveat emptor.
- matwood 2y ago
  > But great music and books were not scarce for a long time pre-internet. For some maybe. When I was first learning to program I would drive to the local bookstore and copy down code from books out of their very small tech section. I couldn't afford to buy any of the books at the time (out of the very small selection), and they were too new for the local library to carry. Now, I can learn about almost _anything_ for free within a few clicks. Music was similarly gated, but more so by lack of money than overall access.
- magarnicle 2y ago
  > Sadly, the reality of the virtuous circle though is: enshittification. I had the same thought; where does this fit into Ben's idea that user experience trumps everything?
lasermike026 2y ago
Reject it. Go analog. Enter the world. You'll be happier and your life will have meaning.
- paulcole 2y ago
  Hard to take this advice seriously from someone on HN. Vast majority of people here owe their wealth to “going digital” and then seem to love telling other people to do the opposite. Computers are pretty great. The only people who really (think they) want to go back to 1980 are the people who were 16 in 1980.
  - haxiomic 2y ago
    I feel like I straddle the spectrum and would agree with op. I grew up in the 90s, worked in tech all my life and will tell you about the wonderful time and amazing experiences I have with people who quite literally live in VR But I also recognise that the happiest most alive times in each year are when tech goes away and people are the focus. When power is out and we all gather to play board games, when we gather in the countryside and talk until the camp fire burns out. Inside of tech and out I’d encourage people to focus on their connection with others if they feel something missing in their life
  - kevindamm 2y ago
    I'd take a compromise and go back to '99. Sure, we had punch-the-monkey ads but social networks had barely become a thing, it was all blogs and forums for the most part. Plenty of reasons to go outside without filming the endeavor, people were ok with not being able to reach you every minute. But I was also 16 in the late 90s so you probably have something there.
    - paulcole 2y ago
      > But I was also 16 in the late 90s so you probably have something there. Whenever a man talks about the ideal time for __________, you can have a very high level of certainty that he was ~16-22 years old during that time period. It's roughly 8-10% of his life, but it'll be correct about 90% of the time.
towLoord 2y ago
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towLoord 2y ago
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RcouF1uZ4gsC 2y ago
> specifically, will AI be a bicycle that we control, or an unstoppable train to destinations unknown? I am more worried about AI becoming a tank - an instrument only the approved agents of the state are allowed to possess and which is used to flatten dissent. Look at the push for regulations in the name of “safety”. It is more about control than safety.
LtVodka 2y ago
So.. what's the problem again?
from-nibly 2y ago
At this point im convinced Apple is commissioning these prices to get people to watch their ad.
deleted 2y ago
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btbuildem 2y ago
> the ad resonated so deeply is that it captured something deep in the gestalt that actually has very little to do with trumpets or guitars or bottles of paint [..] - everything is an app. I feel like the author -almost- has it here. It's not that everything is an app, it's that all tasks and activities are performed and accessed via a glowing screen of varying sizes. It really does flatten the experience, literally and figuratively. As an amateur "contractor", I've got a shed-full of tools; each of these tools serves a rather specific purpose. Most of them are (conceptually) old and complete, and their physical form closely reflects their domain. A brute sledge hammer next to a set of mini screw drivers, a sharp Japanese chisel of folded steel, a relentless bulldog of a sawzall with a multi-purpose blade. You hold a tool and it resonates with the type of work you've done with it in the past. Using these tools, a person feels extended in a physical sense. It's true, Jobs's little big epiphany that "humans are tool makers" - we're very little without the tools we've made. But the tools we made in turn shape us. The old adage "when all you've got is a hammer, everything looks like a nail". When all you've got is a smooth screen, everything looks like rainbow puke. The great flattening robs us of the universality of tool-making and tool-using, in a big part because we've created these universal tools that serve a myriad purposes in their one form. Sure, the markings on the screen are different every time. But look from away, and all you see is a person hunched over a glowing rectangle for endless hours; replace that object with anything else and the scene becomes grotesque and tragic. At work the other day I joked that an LLM is a "data laundering service" -- and for the most part, that it primarily is. Washing away any licences and attributions, it mostly preserves the coherence of knowledge it's trained on. Ask it something and anything, and it will render it for you. Now we're in the realm of conceptual flattening, now the universality has begun to interface with our minds directly, it has begun to replace and therefore atrophy and rob us of some of the prime abilities that let us construct tools in the first place. It is a terrifying thought that we are heading into a future where people outsource their reasoning and creativity to tools. We're giving up something inherently human, but we've also (and we have been for at least a century) climbed so high onto the shoulders of giants, we've long ago lost sight of the ground. A vision of a world looms, post-collapse, where worshippers line up to consult oracles; the last vestiges of before-the-fall tech, remaining repositories of knowledge we've given up, still functioning, but now pure magic to those who attend them.
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huygens6363 2y ago
I found The Ad to evoke feelings of crushing power and being demolished by an actual moloch. I don’t care for the instruments, but the sheer physicality of it, the dominating, destructive awesome power does linger. It captures Apple and all big tech beautifully: pure, raw, admittedly impressive power that will swallow everything in its path. I found it one of the more (unintentionally) honest ads in years. Not sure if society needs such presences, but that’s another discussion.
EricE 2y ago
"Like today, the industrial revolution included a period of time that saw many lose their jobs and a massive surge in inequality. It also lifted millions of others out of sustenance farming. Then again, it also propagated slavery, particularly in North America." Slavery existed long before the industrial revolution and still exists to this day. Talk about being grossly ignorant of not just history but of today too.
- harimau777 2y ago
  I think that it might be accurate to say that it propagated slavery in a unique way even if it didn't start it. I.e. would slavery have been the same institution in the US without an international slave trade and industrialized cotton processing & manufacturing?
  - Nasrudith 2y ago
    Look up the Triangle Trade. An international slave trade was the status quo for centuries before the Industrial Revolution.
- itishappy 2y ago
  That's what "propagate" means...
fl0ki 2y ago
I'm not sure I see the point. It's not hard to see that humans almost everywhere and in almost every point in history organized (voluntarily or otherwise) into those with more agency and leverage and those with less. Most people are content to find a comfort zone and continue in that for decades at a time as long as conditions are bearable. Some people find themselves both able and willing to make tough decisions that affect many other people. This could be through compassionate leadership, dispassionate but mutual agreement, or even violent oppression, and I think the people involved care more about that context than whether certain human-computer interfaces are involved.
fl0ki 2y ago
The tendency to compare Meta and Apple offerings is always at least a little unfair. Given that this type of product and ecosystem is going to exist now, Apple did everything they reasonably could to avoid the problem of people being isolated behind their glasses, even to the point of introducing more weaknesses in a product because they felt it was worth pointing this trend in a certain direction. The simulated face on the outside is a perfect example. By all accounts, it doesn't work well. They knew it didn't work well, and surely somebody had to say that the product was worse off including it. But clearly the decision was that they'd rather make a product that isolated people less than making a product that was more polished. There were other VR & AR headsets for many years before Vision Pro; how come there weren't viral videos of people wearing them going about their day in city streets? Of the two, which is more like WALL-E with people reclined in total immersion and which is at least trying to head in the direction of AR being a seamless part of every day life? Of course it also has an immersive mode, because you can't seriously make a product like this without accounting for that use case. It just shouldn't be the only way the product can ever be used. Being usable without any controllers is also a significant way that it keeps you in touch with your surroundings. You're not giving up normal interactions in exchange for VR ones; you're gaining AR interactions in addition to all of your normal physical interactions. I think most people don't appreciate just what a radical difference this can be. I think part of why the Vision Pro launched when it did with the strategy and philosophy it did is specifically so that the market doesn't default to how Meta does things. Even if the Vision Pro doesn't sweep the world like the iPhone did, the future will be better if we have examples of how to balance the potential of VR with the potential of AR. Disclaimer: I don't actually have a Vision Pro and a lot would have to change before I'd consider buying it. I'm just explaining why I think they deserve credit for good intentions, and why, given the market is going to contain products like this now, I'm glad the Vision Pro is one of them.
nunez 2y ago
This article made me think of something. Does anyone else find themselves trying to revert back to doing certain activities the "pre-smartphone" way? Examples: - Radio stations and records instead of streaming - Longform, newspaper-like text (this site) vs. all video all the time - Finding ways of reducing phone usage, ideally to zero?

139 points by sturza 2y ago

baal80spam 2y ago

It definitely feels that people just NEED to be angry about SOMETHING these days...

dartos 2y ago
It’s been a constant since 2016. Tho the article has some interesting ideas and historical insights.
greg_V 2y ago
Marketing doesn't happen in a vacuum. The creative industries have been having it rough for the past year and a half, and there's practically an internet war going on between AI prompt using artists and real ones. Add to that the writer's strike, the job market, etc. If they had a proper control screening for the ad, the backlash could be anticipated, as shown by the fact on how the simple act of reversing it would have a much different message/effect.
pjc50 2y ago
People have been "angry on the internet" for decades, but it's more recently that it's metastatized into the "real world" on an overwhelming level, and been monetized. This is grossly irresponsible and is going to result in violence and pushbacks, of which the US ""TikTok ban"" (not a ban) is a small foreshadowing.
- edent 2y ago
  Please, I beg you, pick up a history book. Culture warriors inciting violence against popular culture https://pophistorydig.com/topics/burn-the-beatles-1966/ https://pophistorydig.com/topics/burn-the-beatles-1966/ Or, you know, literally anything from the Children's Crusade to the War of Jenkin's Ear. Raising a rabble to violence has been going on forever.
  - pjc50 2y ago
    Just because it's always happened doesn't mean that present day complicity in it is fine.
CPLX 2y ago
I think it may be the opposite. People are mad at a culture and economy that is increasingly dehumanizing and exploitative, where they feel hopeless when contemplating basic things like ever having a permanent home for their family, and when every interaction with modern commerce seems to be designed to trick them or steal from them. Since they feel (and to some extent, are) powerless to affect the forces acting on them directly, they lash out at anything that reminds them of this dynamic, in whatever forum will listen to them.
- seoulmetro 2y ago
  No, this isn't it. People aren't mad at the people dehumanising them. In fact people celebrate those people en mass. Facebook, Google, etc. would all disappear if what you said were true. Politicians would be voted out, etc. The truth is, people don't mind being dehumanised if it can make them feel more like their neighbours, or even better, above them. We're all too lazy to care about being dehumanised, like pigs to slaughter. People lash out not because they feel helpless, but because they feel superior. They're not, they're just bored and life has been good so things they invent to get upset about look extremely bad to them.
madeofpalk 2y ago
Many people consider it a possibility to like something. So equally, it's completely valid to dislike something.
- add-sub-mul-div 2y ago
  Nobody takes an L in the marketplace of ideas anymore. If people don't like something that you do, you can just say they have a type of derangement syndrome, or it's because they have a need to be angry about something, or because they're afraid of change, or so on. The key is to make sure that your accusation is broad and vague.
Ensorceled 2y ago
Yes, all of those creatives who have been losing their jobs over the past few years to this "flattening" process and are now seeing a existential threat from AI that could eliminate most of their careers entirely just "NEED to be angry about SOMETHING". The lack of empathy is astounding...
seoulmetro 2y ago
Life is so good that we get bored, so we get upset at things that are perfectly fine because we know we can control how we feel and stop at any time. Hardship keeps people busy, boredom forces people into drama.

antfie 2y ago

The URL contains a JWT token which is a CWE-598 security weakness of the application. Reference: https://owasp.org/www-community/vulnerabilities/Information_exposure_through_query_strings_in_url https://owasp.org/www-community/vulnerabilities/Information_....

mooreds 2y ago
Haha, I know. As soon as I saw it, I decoded it and saw { "aud": "stratechery.passport.online", "azp": "HKLcS4DwShwP2YDKbfPWM1", "ent": { "uri": [ "https://stratechery.com/2024/the-great-flattening/" ] }, "exp": 1718188732, "iat": 1715596732, "iss": "https://api.passport.online/oauth", "scope": "feed:read article:read asset:read category:read entitlements", "sub": "WsrLyrr6qemVAgEGCjMm34", "use": "access" } Not sure who user WsrLyrr6qemVAgEGCjMm34 is, but thanks for sharing the article with us all! At first glance, looks like passport.online is a subscription management service: https://passport.online/ https://passport.online/
- docdeek 2y ago
  Pretty sure that Passport is Ben Thompson's (of Stratechery) own subscription management service. Not sure it is out in the world as a product yet.
- glenjamin 2y ago
  Given that the token says it only allows reading of content and assets of this particular article for 1 month, it seems like this is an intentional feature for allowing subscribers to share paywalled URLs
  - frankthedog 2y ago
    Indeed, the same mechanism is used by Bloomberg for gift links. A signed JWT with expiry 7 days from creation. A fitting use case in my opinion.
    - flakiness 2y ago

Waterluvian 2y ago

I think the ad was uncharacteristically tasteless but I still don’t understand the leap from “well that isn’t convincing me to buy their product” to “I’m personally offended and my day is ruined. Someone must apologize to me.” Is this just the “I need validation by other people liking what I like” thing we see a lot in gaming, sports, etc. fandoms? What I’m also curious about, given how shocking it is for Apple to totally miss the mark, is if this was calculated.

delichon 2y ago
> the reason why people reacted so strongly to the ad is that it couldn’t have hit the mark more squarely. I think this is right. The ad is about the flattening of the old analog world into the digital one and it evokes strong feelings because our nostalgia for that is not a little about a real and significant loss, which the Apple commercial grotesquely celebrates.
- zer00eyz 2y ago
  20 odd years ago I worked for a bank. We were doing a focus group that went slightly off the rails and a room full of people all agreed that the bank must still have paper records. The bank had not had paper records for decades. Im not sure that "nostalgia" is the right word...
- DocTomoe 2y ago
  It's more than just nostalgia. The ad visibly destroys items associated with creativity and culture, celebrates such destruction, and replaces it with an iPad. It reminded me of that scene in Pinocchio where the boys trash the mansion and the piano in it, it reminded me of book burnings. It could easily be understood as "screw the old world, it's all in our product now." And to a demographic of Apple buyers who actually tend to like culture, who are more likely than the average to attend actual concerts, visit a gallery or enjoy their vinyl collection, that was highly, highly offensive. Contrast that with Steve Jobs "It is a music player, it is a computer, it is a phone" skid from the iPhone introduction: Back then, it was not about replacing music players, it was a music player. The product was a tool, not the end. With the ad, the product is the end, not the tool.

KingOfCoders 2y ago

"The Internet, birthed as it was in the idealism of California tech" The moment CERN is transmogrified to California. One could argue the internet pre-WWW existed (I joined the internet myself on IRC and NEWS) but then, who today was on the internet pre-WWW?

mooreds 2y ago
Gopher and Usenet forever!
- kgwgk 2y ago
  > Gopher From the University of Minnessota in California.
dpflan 2y ago
Agreed, found this to be a cute distillation. Give Utah some credit too…
blipvert 2y ago
<raises hand> If you haven’t used telnet on a Gandalf PAX via RAL SPAN gateway to get to a talker then you haven’t lived.
Karellen 2y ago
> I joined the internet myself on IRC and NEWS And email, right? You do have email, don't you? Which is not implemented over the WWW, and is pre-WWW by the best part of a decade. (RFC 821/822 are dated August 1982, and the first publicly documented version of HTTP 0.9 is, I think, 1991?) I think it's pretty safe to say "The Internet", without any other qualification, came into being with the publication of the IPv4 RFC 791 in September 1981, by Vint Cerf and Robert Kahn. Now, California might not be entirely accurate, as while a fair amount of the work on the Internet Protocols was done at UCLA and UC Berkley, MIT was also heavily involved along with co-ordination from DARPA's IPTO in Virginia (specifically, The Pentagon). But I think "California" is a much more accurate birthplace for The Internet than CERN. Edit: I'm guessing you also use the not-built-on-WWW DNS system from RFCs 882/883 published in 1983?

yourapostasy 2y ago

A flattening I’m watching with interest is the gradually increasing digital integration of the physical world. I’m hopeful that it opens the door to at least tap the brakes on the enshittification of our physical artifacts. For example, there are landfill dumps-ful of mass produced electrical devices like shavers, toothbrushes, AirPods and so on tossed out for want of just a replacement battery made too difficult to replace by those mass consumers. But I’m seeing green shoots of hope in people leveraging the flattening by sharing how-to hacks to repair these, and in rare but hopefully increasing number of cases, improve them for longer service lives. With gains in pushing CNC mills, wire EDM and more fabrication to small scales, big chunks of which are enabled by this flattening, I’m cautiously optimistic we will be able to distribute persisted, good engineering.

BobbyTables2 2y ago
It’s gross that people spend so much effort repairing things. Manufacturers could simply publish this info. Water got into a medical thermometer I had. Claimed some water resistance protections. Quickly drained the battery. Managed to open it up (with difficulty — pry tab located under label) but inside was corroded. Saw the battery but not easy to get out. Of course peeling the label makes it not stick back properly either. What should be a cheap and easy battery change was not. And for what should be a cheap battery is over $5 at the local grocery store. Makes buying another $10 thermometer look a good deal. It shouldn’t be this hard…

_the_special_ 2y ago

" will AI be a bicycle that we control, or an unstoppable train to destinations unknown? To put it in the same terms as the ad, will human will and initiative be flattened, or expanded?" Interesting line of thinking here. I've never considered this but an observation from my usage of chat AIs at least is an increased willingness to defer my thought-organising process to the AI by just jotting down some random ideas and asking it to make it coherent. I guess on a personal level I'm flattening my own mind?

stiiv 2y ago
> an increased willingness to defer my thought-organising process to the AI by just jotting down some random ideas and asking it to make it coherent ...and then accepting that outcoming as sufficient, and moving on, right? Is the alternative that without the AI, you would spend more time researching and thinking about your ideas, pursuing (or stumbling upon) related ideas, and maybe ending up with a more broad understanding at the end of the endeavor? If so, working with a chatbot is good to extent that you value economy. That is a worthy outcome in many circumstances. But the "inflated" alternative sounds valuable in its way too. From a broad social/behavioral perspective, I wonder the extent to which the "inflated" way will die off (or perhaps adapt and become something new?) given these new tools.
- sbarre 2y ago
  > > jotting down some random ideas and asking it to make it coherent Isn't this is more or less the same thing as spending a bunch of time going to a bunch of webpages from Google search, except it takes way less time, arguably leaving _more_ time for the critical thinking and subsequent research you espouse? > ...and then accepting that outcoming as sufficient, and moving on, right? Much like you can either immediately trust what you read on the Internet, or apply some critical thinking and dig into it more, you can do the same with whatever an AI returns to you. AI can be an accelerator for mundane tasks and help you get to the high-value work quicker, or it can be a lazy shortcut that lets you do less. The same can be said for almost any tool.
btbuildem 2y ago

andrewstuart 2y ago

Yes what a great observation. The ad is so shocking because it's the truth. We all know it.

polotics 2y ago
Do you really think any of the professionals actually using the tools being destroyed in the add actually are dropping their tool and using an iPad instead? May I propose to give Damon Albarn's aka Gorillaz "The Fall" record a listen? This was indeed only produced on iPads, from a world-known musician, so it's the perfect test case for this, and I quote you here: shocking truth!

martinclayton 2y ago

I'd forgotten about the Aggregation Theory piece. "By extension, this means that the most important factor determining success is the user experience: the best distributors/aggregators/market-makers win by providing the best experience, which earns them the most consumers/users, which attracts the most suppliers, which enhances the user experience in a virtuous cycle." Sadly, the reality of the virtuous circle though is: enshittification. "...from music to video to books to art; the extent to which being “special” meant being scarce is the extent to which the existence of “special” meant a constriction of opportunity" I don't get this. Rarity or inaccessibility has been used as marketing tool, sure. But great music and books were not scarce for a long time pre-internet. Feels like a "never mind the quality, feel the width" view of culture. "LLMs are breaking down all written text ever into massive models that don’t even bother with pages: they simply give you the answer." When will people stop saying that? The give an answer, yes, but is it the answer: caveat emptor.

matwood 2y ago
> But great music and books were not scarce for a long time pre-internet. For some maybe. When I was first learning to program I would drive to the local bookstore and copy down code from books out of their very small tech section. I couldn't afford to buy any of the books at the time (out of the very small selection), and they were too new for the local library to carry. Now, I can learn about almost _anything_ for free within a few clicks. Music was similarly gated, but more so by lack of money than overall access.
magarnicle 2y ago
> Sadly, the reality of the virtuous circle though is: enshittification. I had the same thought; where does this fit into Ben's idea that user experience trumps everything?

lasermike026 2y ago

Reject it. Go analog. Enter the world. You'll be happier and your life will have meaning.

paulcole 2y ago
Hard to take this advice seriously from someone on HN. Vast majority of people here owe their wealth to “going digital” and then seem to love telling other people to do the opposite. Computers are pretty great. The only people who really (think they) want to go back to 1980 are the people who were 16 in 1980.
- haxiomic 2y ago
  I feel like I straddle the spectrum and would agree with op. I grew up in the 90s, worked in tech all my life and will tell you about the wonderful time and amazing experiences I have with people who quite literally live in VR But I also recognise that the happiest most alive times in each year are when tech goes away and people are the focus. When power is out and we all gather to play board games, when we gather in the countryside and talk until the camp fire burns out. Inside of tech and out I’d encourage people to focus on their connection with others if they feel something missing in their life
- kevindamm 2y ago
  I'd take a compromise and go back to '99. Sure, we had punch-the-monkey ads but social networks had barely become a thing, it was all blogs and forums for the most part. Plenty of reasons to go outside without filming the endeavor, people were ok with not being able to reach you every minute. But I was also 16 in the late 90s so you probably have something there.
  - paulcole 2y ago
    > But I was also 16 in the late 90s so you probably have something there. Whenever a man talks about the ideal time for __________, you can have a very high level of certainty that he was ~16-22 years old during that time period. It's roughly 8-10% of his life, but it'll be correct about 90% of the time.

towLoord 2y ago

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towLoord 2y ago

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RcouF1uZ4gsC 2y ago

> specifically, will AI be a bicycle that we control, or an unstoppable train to destinations unknown? I am more worried about AI becoming a tank - an instrument only the approved agents of the state are allowed to possess and which is used to flatten dissent. Look at the push for regulations in the name of “safety”. It is more about control than safety.

LtVodka 2y ago

So.. what's the problem again?

from-nibly 2y ago

At this point im convinced Apple is commissioning these prices to get people to watch their ad.

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btbuildem 2y ago

> the ad resonated so deeply is that it captured something deep in the gestalt that actually has very little to do with trumpets or guitars or bottles of paint [..] - everything is an app. I feel like the author -almost- has it here. It's not that everything is an app, it's that all tasks and activities are performed and accessed via a glowing screen of varying sizes. It really does flatten the experience, literally and figuratively. As an amateur "contractor", I've got a shed-full of tools; each of these tools serves a rather specific purpose. Most of them are (conceptually) old and complete, and their physical form closely reflects their domain. A brute sledge hammer next to a set of mini screw drivers, a sharp Japanese chisel of folded steel, a relentless bulldog of a sawzall with a multi-purpose blade. You hold a tool and it resonates with the type of work you've done with it in the past. Using these tools, a person feels extended in a physical sense. It's true, Jobs's little big epiphany that "humans are tool makers" - we're very little without the tools we've made. But the tools we made in turn shape us. The old adage "when all you've got is a hammer, everything looks like a nail". When all you've got is a smooth screen, everything looks like rainbow puke. The great flattening robs us of the universality of tool-making and tool-using, in a big part because we've created these universal tools that serve a myriad purposes in their one form. Sure, the markings on the screen are different every time. But look from away, and all you see is a person hunched over a glowing rectangle for endless hours; replace that object with anything else and the scene becomes grotesque and tragic. At work the other day I joked that an LLM is a "data laundering service" -- and for the most part, that it primarily is. Washing away any licences and attributions, it mostly preserves the coherence of knowledge it's trained on. Ask it something and anything, and it will render it for you. Now we're in the realm of conceptual flattening, now the universality has begun to interface with our minds directly, it has begun to replace and therefore atrophy and rob us of some of the prime abilities that let us construct tools in the first place. It is a terrifying thought that we are heading into a future where people outsource their reasoning and creativity to tools. We're giving up something inherently human, but we've also (and we have been for at least a century) climbed so high onto the shoulders of giants, we've long ago lost sight of the ground. A vision of a world looms, post-collapse, where worshippers line up to consult oracles; the last vestiges of before-the-fall tech, remaining repositories of knowledge we've given up, still functioning, but now pure magic to those who attend them.

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huygens6363 2y ago

I found The Ad to evoke feelings of crushing power and being demolished by an actual moloch. I don’t care for the instruments, but the sheer physicality of it, the dominating, destructive awesome power does linger. It captures Apple and all big tech beautifully: pure, raw, admittedly impressive power that will swallow everything in its path. I found it one of the more (unintentionally) honest ads in years. Not sure if society needs such presences, but that’s another discussion.

EricE 2y ago

"Like today, the industrial revolution included a period of time that saw many lose their jobs and a massive surge in inequality. It also lifted millions of others out of sustenance farming. Then again, it also propagated slavery, particularly in North America." Slavery existed long before the industrial revolution and still exists to this day. Talk about being grossly ignorant of not just history but of today too.

harimau777 2y ago
I think that it might be accurate to say that it propagated slavery in a unique way even if it didn't start it. I.e. would slavery have been the same institution in the US without an international slave trade and industrialized cotton processing & manufacturing?
- Nasrudith 2y ago
  Look up the Triangle Trade. An international slave trade was the status quo for centuries before the Industrial Revolution.
itishappy 2y ago
That's what "propagate" means...

fl0ki 2y ago

I'm not sure I see the point. It's not hard to see that humans almost everywhere and in almost every point in history organized (voluntarily or otherwise) into those with more agency and leverage and those with less. Most people are content to find a comfort zone and continue in that for decades at a time as long as conditions are bearable. Some people find themselves both able and willing to make tough decisions that affect many other people. This could be through compassionate leadership, dispassionate but mutual agreement, or even violent oppression, and I think the people involved care more about that context than whether certain human-computer interfaces are involved.

fl0ki 2y ago

The tendency to compare Meta and Apple offerings is always at least a little unfair. Given that this type of product and ecosystem is going to exist now, Apple did everything they reasonably could to avoid the problem of people being isolated behind their glasses, even to the point of introducing more weaknesses in a product because they felt it was worth pointing this trend in a certain direction. The simulated face on the outside is a perfect example. By all accounts, it doesn't work well. They knew it didn't work well, and surely somebody had to say that the product was worse off including it. But clearly the decision was that they'd rather make a product that isolated people less than making a product that was more polished. There were other VR & AR headsets for many years before Vision Pro; how come there weren't viral videos of people wearing them going about their day in city streets? Of the two, which is more like WALL-E with people reclined in total immersion and which is at least trying to head in the direction of AR being a seamless part of every day life? Of course it also has an immersive mode, because you can't seriously make a product like this without accounting for that use case. It just shouldn't be the only way the product can ever be used. Being usable without any controllers is also a significant way that it keeps you in touch with your surroundings. You're not giving up normal interactions in exchange for VR ones; you're gaining AR interactions in addition to all of your normal physical interactions. I think most people don't appreciate just what a radical difference this can be. I think part of why the Vision Pro launched when it did with the strategy and philosophy it did is specifically so that the market doesn't default to how Meta does things. Even if the Vision Pro doesn't sweep the world like the iPhone did, the future will be better if we have examples of how to balance the potential of VR with the potential of AR. Disclaimer: I don't actually have a Vision Pro and a lot would have to change before I'd consider buying it. I'm just explaining why I think they deserve credit for good intentions, and why, given the market is going to contain products like this now, I'm glad the Vision Pro is one of them.

nunez 2y ago

This article made me think of something. Does anyone else find themselves trying to revert back to doing certain activities the "pre-smartphone" way? Examples: - Radio stations and records instead of streaming - Longform, newspaper-like text (this site) vs. all video all the time - Finding ways of reducing phone usage, ideally to zero?