Skewered by skeuomorphs, smarting at smart

 

Like many averagely intelligent and moderately well-educated  people of my age I find the products of information technology to be among the principal causes of stress in my life, resulting in much bad language and wasted time. Touch wood, it isn’t malevolent hackers that cause me the problems. It’s not even that systems crash with alarming regularity, like Spotify did yesterday and much of Google did today, or even that Windows 10 needs to update for a couple of hours every day or two (you’d think after all this time they would have got it right). No, it isn’t that, not entirely. While these examples reveal how – even without the impacts of malicious intent – our crucial information infrastructures are absurdly, crazily vulnerable, unreliable and flaky, the issue I want to address here is subtly different. From the perspective of an everyday user of computerised systems it’s the intrinsic design – one might say the underlying ambient assumptions – that forms the subject of my concern today. Just to be clear, I refer to those systems without which it is scarcely possible to continue to lead a civilised life – to find things out, to write, to buy stuff, to communicate with people, to take photographs, to play or listen to music, and so on.  Important activities.

Design, in a word, is much to blame for this impoverishment of our collective quality of life. Simple activities never used to be complicated, and they don’t need to be. Being incomprehensible is not the same as being clever. “Smart” should never be a synonym for “stupid”, yet so often it is. Now, even attempting to switch on the telly or to answer the phone can be fraught, with no guarantee of success, without prior instruction. A lightbulb can take longer to fully illuminate than the time it takes to do whatever you needed it on for. Just lately I’ve noticed that some people on the other end of a phone line sound as though they are immersed in a polygonal steel tank full of soapy water while simultaneously inhaling helium. Since when was a flat piece of glass the ideal geometrical form connecting the mouth and the ear; has human anatomy really changed that much since the dawn of the telephone? Did a clever man with a clever algorithm work that one out? Yes, of course he did. A straight line is the shortest distance between two points. QED. This is  progress, and if you don’t like it I’ll warm up the lecture about making omelettes – yes, the same one they use for promoting driverless cars.

Many of the difficulties technology inflicts upon its users result from a perverse desire to design counter-intuitively, and from a failure to align what has to be done in order to get some device or function to work, with what common sense and intuition suggest should be done. 

What ought to be user-friendliness so often appears as user hostility or user contempt. What should be the bleedin’ obvious is frequently baffling - and that is without the added strains imposed by age-related deficits concerning dexterity, hearing and eyesight. Just don’t get me started on the subject of packaging.

One needs to fight back. Recently, having had quite enough of G-mail altering the words I intended to use, and then telling me that my spelling and grammar were wrong, forcing me to go back through my message to unpick the consequences of this unwanted interference, I decided to do something about it. The crunch came on the day when it took me two attempts to get “Wombledon” to stick, in a silly piece I was writing about a trip to the alternative W villages of south Notts, including Wibberley, Wobberley, and Wallaby-with-the-Wind. That’s it, I thought, I’m not putting up with it any more. Actually, I was rather taken aback that Google knew of Wimbledon. Apparently there’s one (population 192) in North Dakota, so there’s your likely explanation. Mind you, Microsoft has never heard of Belsen, as you’ll discover, if you use their spellchecker. Enough’s enough, I fumed. I was determined to remove the unwanted idiotic “smart” intrusions, there solely – as far as I could see - to intimidate me into acknowledging the dumb omniscience of the onanistic oligarchs of Asperger Valley.

But how to go on the attack? Well, a resort to instinct and nebulous intuition is often a good idea. Over the preceding weeks I’d developed a sneaking suspicion that the symbol which I’d always taken to be a flower, or possibly the sun, or just an arbitrary piece of decoration, was in fact a cogwheel. I guessed – rightly as it turned out – that this tiny icon implied “settings”. It might, of course, have been a cue for the whirrings of considered mentation, for thought itself, but no, it was the sort of cog that could be vaguely symbolic of machinery as we used to picture it, in that dreamily long-ago era before nail parlours provided the principal contribution to our economy. Perhaps it was a nod in the direction of the clattering computations of Charles Babbage. Holding my breath, I clicked on this little symbol and then - refusing to be fobbed off with cosmetic, geek-pleasing banalities - I found a link where I could deal with the unasked for “preferences” responsible for screwing up my e-mails. Now I could disable all these irritating “smart” reflexes, and take charge of writing what I intended, not what some pre-set algorithm had decided was best for me. Best of all, I could be British again.

Oh yes, British, as in British government. We’ve heard quite a lot about algorithms this week, haven’t we. Algorithms are clearly bad news; they’re not designed for you or me, but for someone else, someone who wants to cut corners in the interests of making their own life easier and more profitable, but yours or mine more difficult and lowly. Algorithms work to the lowest common denominator; they democratise mediocrity. As we have seen, they are designed in their quasi-mathematical pseudo-objective faux-scientific thuggery to impress the likes of our esteemed heart-warming education secretary, William Gaviscon Jnr. While I tend to visualise young Gaviscon in short trousers, at this point I should emphasise strongly that he is not a major participant in my erotic fantasy life. Although I admit that when he bleated at the Russian leader to “shut up and go away”, at the time of the Salisbury poisonings, I felt a quiet thrill of submission-by-proxy, at the same time hoping that Vladimir Vladimirovich was able to enjoy a more direct and robust physiological response.

However, ugh, shudder, I digress. Following my sussing out of the cog symbol and my subsequent smug victory over Google - fooling it into writing the words of my choice, beating it down, one-nil to the human race - I realised that, as regards most of the symbols that are sprayed round the edge of the computer screen, on phones and tablets, and all over the place, I haven’t a clue what they mean. I wouldn’t dare touch them. Does anyone know what they all mean? I’ve just noticed one of them  which as far as I can tell, with the aid of a magnifying glass, features a man in a pale blue pullover with an unnaturally extended right arm. I’ve been hovering over this symbol, cautiously, with mouse in retracted pounce mode. A box has popped up, saying “Welcome Center”. Well, thanks but no thanks, for it has something of the aura of a touchy-feely religious cult, something best left in the bleak suburbs of middle America, in an endless desolate prairie of the soul, where everything from pecan pie to the clear night sky is omigod awesome. Pale blue pullovers, that’s the giveaway. I can visualise the plate glass, the A-frame in pale brick. [Can we please get back on track? We left Wimbledon, North Dakota, some time ago. - Ed].

Anyway, those few icons that I (sort of) understand, I do so because they operate metaphorically to suggest physical items from my past, like the dustbin symbol for getting rid of rubbish, and the floppy disc icon meaning ‘save’ or ‘store’. They remind me of real things and therefore they mean something to me, though not necessarily what is intended. The dustbin is quite like one that my grandmother had. I think bin day was on a Friday. Yes, I can relate to that, just the thought makes me feel happy, and I can imagine other rewarding possibilities for on-screen iconography. I so wish that computers had something like a bus conductor function. Or a chocolate application..

But then again, your average enthusiast is too young to remember floppy discs, or bus conductors, or decent non-greasy chocolate made in Birmingham in satisfyingly large chunks at half a crown a slab. His real-world bin, if he has one, is a wheelie bin, quite different in form and profile from the much beloved fluted variety with ill-fitting lid that would bang around cheerfully in a strong wind. If analogy is perception, as Douglas Hofstadter would have us believe, it will rattle and clang its way up the garden path, and leave you there, gripping a hovering mouse without a paddle. The use of skeuomorphic imagery – the fancy name for stylised bins, cogs, floppies and the like, inspired by associations now anachronistic or redundant - has to keep pace with the mental associations of users. Otherwise it merely confuses.

Thoughtfully employed, digitally or otherwise, skeumorphy can be useful, innovative and inspired. For instance, I like the reassurance of the soft scrunching sound made by some digital cameras to indicate that a picture has “taken” – referencing the shutter clicking on a photographic camera. However, for the young digerati, unused to “analogue”, I fear that all it tells them is that anyone nearby can hear them taking a photograph, and so they had better be careful, since their voyeurism or breach of performance copyright is audible. The archaic metaphor may be lost on them. Tough. Technology grinds on mercilessly.

Beyond the Elephant

Don’t think of an elephant !

Come on, you’re not really trying. Have another go. Don’t think of an elephant !

Mm. Better. All right, does this help?

This is not an elephant. This is Dinky, a piano-playing dingo from central Australia who has performed on Piccadilly Radio, Manchester.

 

Did that make it easier for you? I hope so. And then there’s the elephant in the room. Don’t think of him either. While trying not to think of that particular elephant, or of any elephant, please accept the observation that this noble beast has a peculiar and very valuable role to play in communication. Perhaps you will agree that the elephant deserves better recognition as an informational asset, and should be awarded his own symbol, an emoticon or similar, to indicate when he is in the room. Though such a device would itself, of course, for reasons of safety as well as of propriety, have to be invisible.

Meanwhile, can we please have some silence. OK.

“There was a time when there was nothing at all, nothing at all, just a distant hum”. Recognise it? Part of the lyric of a song called “Hide and Seek” by Howard Jones, who once upon a time performed on Piccadilly Radio, Manchester. 

Nothing at all. A distant hum. Silence. The sound of silence. A bear farting in the forest while Bishop Berkeley was lying unconscious after a tree that he hadn’t heard fell on him. Mains hum. The pulsing of blood in the ears. Deafness. Beethoven’s deafness. It’s getting louder all the time, isn’t it. The silences in Beethoven’s later works. The silence between. Meaningful silence. Louder, please. Ludwig, are you there? Da da da da. Morse V. V for Victory. We shall catch it on the beaches. 

Noise out of silence; something out of nothing. Meaning out of meaninglessness.

Oh, get on with it. 

The hazardous nature of modern information handling was brought home to me unintentionally the other day by a very good friend, to whom I had mentioned, without elaboration, my virtual band, The Catford Tendency. This august institution, whose illustrious, rhodium disc-awarded, stadium-filling history extends back into the mists of time, has no web presence as such, and is known only to my immediate family and a few friends. Sufficiently intrigued to conduct a search, evidently, and presumably via the default method, my friend unearthed a reference to “Catford’s tendency”, from an obscure journal, relating to John Catford, who founded a school of linguistics in Edinburgh and was a noted expert on phonetics. And, seemingly, had tendencies.

Oh dear. Not right at all. What’s known in the trade as a false drop, a factoid that bears no relation to the truth, an inappropriate Venn overlap, a Boolean blunder, an illusion of knowledge. The “Catford” in The Catford Tendency is London S.E.6 and the “Tendency” was inspired by the name of a militant organisation a few decades back. Like the names of all musical groups it is both deliberate and arbitrary, and is so named for perfectly good reasons that I won’t go into. 

How often do we retrieve nonsense? How often do we realise it is nonsense? Well, at this very moment, probably you do.

Google, assuming that was the search tool invoked, works (to the extent that anyone knows, and to put it simplistically), by measuring the statistical proximity of terms. The more that people use those terms together, in their searching, and the more they co-occur in the documents retrieved, the stronger is the assumption of a valid semantic link. From the adjacency of words Google builds up a simulation of knowledge, mostly very plausibly so, and sufficiently so that it can make a pretty good go at “understanding" what something means. It’s all about association, and mostly it works well. Whole subject areas can be fabricated thus, and texts translated quite well into other languages. Occasionally it doesn’t get things right, and when it fails, it reveals, just for a moment, a vertigo-inducing image of a whole cyber-can of worms. That’s what happened to me the other day.

Unlike older, pre-millennial “text retrieval” systems, which depended upon laborious human indexing of selected vocabulary items and not on automatic full term indexing, today’s search engines have no sense of meaning. Well, of course, they’re just pieces of software, they have no sense of anything. They are entirely computational, mathematical, semantically blind, associating away there in the dark. Human indexers would compile a thesaurus (later generally known as a taxonomy) of broader, narrower, and synonymous terms. Their method was based on meaning, on human understanding, and on the classification of knowledge developed over many years by librarians and others. Google doesn’t employ knowledge in the same way. Given its central role in so many activities I sometimes find this pretty scary. Corporate foundations built in Silicon Valley, intellectual foundations built on sand.

This means that (even in its entirely non-conscious way) Google will never “get” a joke, or appreciate wordplay or a remote allusion. It doesn’t do meaning, it just computes statistical usages and associations. It wouldn’t, for instance, realise that there is absolutely no reasonable relevant connection between a synthesiser-friendly 1980s popstar with spiky hair and a wild antipodean pooch howling and plonking randomly on an old, beat-up, stand-up piano far away in the dusty outback west of Alice - although it might pull out “Piccadilly Radio, Manchester” as a commonality (something which we might be able to use creatively, admittedly). Nor would it “get” the Holmesian dog that didn’t bark in the night. What is extremely interesting is that it wouldn’t index the elephant in the room. For obvious reasons it won’t even know it’s there.

In various parts of the world there is currently much concern over freedom of speech. Dreadful fates await those who say the wrong thing or harbour ”incorrect thought”. Abuse, trolling, hate campaigns, physical assault, dismissal from post, withdrawal of funding, censorship, de-platforming, arrest, torture, and being “disappeared” are among possible outcomes according to where one lives. People want to say things but are afraid to. Many people want to say the same things. We live in frightening, self-righteous, unfunny, unforgiving and illiberal times where so often the rules of tolerance are set by the congenitally intolerant and enshrined in convenient spur-of-the-moment legislation. Hastily airbrushed legacies, instant wisdom, hysterical historical rewrites, Bebelplatz revisited, the Heinrich Heine warning trotted out once more. “Ah, but it’s different this time”. ‘Course it is. It always is.

The worse things get, there will be more elephants seeking room-space, elephants of many different shapes and sizes and colours and styles. We will need to be better able to create, identify and “read” them, as projections thrust up into mental space. To paint elephants in the sky will become a necessary skill, perhaps like those Dalinian beasts with surreally spindly legs, hovering and hallucinatory in cognitive space; we will need to learn how to see them, to know what they mean, and to share them with others. Like elaborate Joycean multilingual puns (James, that is, not William), and as demonstrated by many writers, artists and musicians, we need to be able to project multiple allusions to a point where they focus and intersect, a point whence an exact meaning is extractable. Intersections where the fringes of ideas, the haloes of sounds and the outer suburbs of verbal connotations conjoin silently to say something precise and legible to those who have learned how. All free from the censor, since there is nothing there to remove; all free from the algorithms of the search engine, since there is nothing to index; all free from the secret policeman, since there is no evidence, not even encrypted evidence. But – like the wise old elephant in the room – there all the same. Massively there. Free.

We see already, in certain unhappy parts of the world, how the oppressed are resorting to non-linguistic codes and symbols, abandoning the potentially self-condemnatory traces of electronics or written texts for the transient, the semiotically offbeat, the irregular and the allusive. To transmit meaning reliably but without the usual indicators of what it is actually about. To erect multilevel cognitive edifices significant to intended recipients but indeterminate to the ambient enemy. To create sense out of nonsense and messages out of silence. While persecution because of a desire for freedom of speech is nothing new, today’s everyday technologies leave readily traceable and permanent accusatory footprints. Ironic, wouldn’t it be, that – in our informationally intense societies, in our gadget riddled lives - in order to communicate while remaining free we should retreat from the definite, recoil from the word, abandon the recordable signal, subvert conventional language,  and learn to express ourselves in varieties of silence. For now, though, we need to return to the elephant. 

This is The Elephant. He himself is towards the right of the picture.

If you keep going for five or six miles you’ll develop a tendency to reach Catford. Good luck.

The Algorithm of Self Destruction

If you catch a mainline train out of St Pancras, after 10 minutes or so, and shortly before you cross the M25, you may notice an industrial looking building on the left hand side. Travelling north just before Christmas I spotted it and, infused no doubt with seasonal spirit, read its name as “Turkey Lighting Solutions”. Which got me thinking. Do turkeys do much reading? Why do they need lighting? Are they afraid of the dark? Does enhanced lighting make it easier to cull them ready for a festive lunch? Or (alternative train of thought), why should a company on the fringes of north London be catering to the illuminative requirements of the good citizens of Istanbul or Ankara?

I remained puzzled until January, when on a subsequent trip I realised I had misread the sign. Actually it said “Turnkey Lighting Solutions”. Ah ha, I love those sort of names. My genre favourites include “Domestic Water Solutions” (wonder what they dissolve it in?) and “Granite Solutions” (gravestones). Mm, a tough one that - perhaps something involving hydrofluoric acid. Anyway, “Turnkey Lighting Solutions”. So, I thought, at last, someone has invented the light switch, or something close to it. They’ve solved that age-old problem. Not so much a light bulb moment as a light switch moment. Ta da !

Just in time, it seems, for last week I was told the cautionary tale of a lady going to visit a relative in another part of the country. At the time she was due to arrive she knew the house would be empty, but she had a key so she could let herself in. The problems – she feared - would start when she came to switch on the lights. No switches, just a beeping gadget sulking in the corner. “Dalek” (or whatever its stupid name was), she would have to address it, abruptly having to overcome a sense of absurdity and self-consciousness borne of a lifetime of being sensible, “switch on the light !” She knew she would feel much happier with “Exterminate ! Exterminate !” but apparently that is now deemed to be a politically incorrect command inflected with an ageist subtext. You aren’t allowed to say it this week. Well then, no switch. No flip of the finger. Just the gadget. No manual override. Here goes …. If she gets the pronunciation right (luckily she’s not Scottish or a Brummie) there will be light. If not, not. Oh, the suspense …

No override. This is where the theme suddenly lurches from farce to deadly serious. Dim hallways are rarely fatal. If it takes you a minute or two to work out how to switch on the lights you’re probably going to survive the inconvenience. If you’re in an aircraft determined to nosedive into the ground with 157 people on board just six minutes after take-off, you’re probably not going to survive at all. I wouldn’t wish to pre-judge the results of the enquiries into the Boeing 737 Max 8, or exploit a tragedy for comic effect, but it rather looks as though an insuppressible piece of software “trying to be clever” was the cause of the Ethiopian Airlines crash near Addis Ababa last Sunday, and of the Lion Air crash in Indonesia last October.

The Germans have a wonderful word, Verschlimmbesserung, which means an improvement that makes things worse. I don’t know if the Germans have another word meaning “what a ridiculously long word - I wonder how you’re supposed to get your teeth round it?”, but they aren’t stupid, and neither (allegedly) is Donald Trump, who tweeted a remark about planes getting too complicated. Bang on, Donald (allegedly). It isn’t just aircraft, though, it’s potentially most of our lives that are getting stupidly and pointlessly complicated, with “improvements” that in a very short time will make life not just worse, but almost impossibly tedious. What were for most of civilised human existence trivially simple, instantaneous, automatically performed actions will now take hours, genius-level IQs, training courses, feasibility studies, and therapies for PTSD.

A simple flick of the forefinger and the light goes on or off. Easy. No, sorry, not any more, the server has gone down - and anyway, a spotty oik six thousand miles away is having a bit of a laugh on his pizza-encrusted cliché, so you’ll have to sit in the dark. And don’t even think of trying to make a cup of tea. It’s called progress, you see. Anyway, never mind, are you sure you’ve signed up for the introductory sessions on how to switch on the telly? No? Oh dear. You’ll probably be needing a dalek, then, to do it for you. We’ll arrange a course for you so you can find out how to order one. Er, not quite sure what we do as regards arranging courses …

We love progress, don’t we. Progress can be extremely helpful. Indeed, there’s quite a strong argument that it should be. SatNav is progress – it’s just that if you rely on it all the time you’ll never learn your way around. Smartphones are progress, so long as you look where you’re going. Google Translate is progress, but it will do little to encourage you to master another language. Calculators are progress, so long as you don’t have to rely on them to work out how much two items from Poundland are going to set you back. Predictive testicle is progress too. So are spell chequers. Google itself is progress, although if you seriously don’t know what you would do without it, it has become self-harming, it has won and, basically, you’re stuffed.

The algorithms are in place, not to mention the innate laziness, to reduce us all to drooling imbeciles within no time at all, if we allow it to happen. Or hurl us to the ground. A once noble species destroyed by algorithms. What a shame, Homo sapiens had so much going for it.

 
Currently I’m reading Franklin Foer’s “World Without Mind” (Vintage, 2018;  £9.99 from Waterstone’s).

Unironic Ikonic

A vision of the world, now and in the near future, as dreamed up from within the business parks of genericised Silicon Valley, is presented in an exhibition at the Ikon Gallery in Oozells Square, Birmingham. I visited it on Saturday. Called “Internet Giants : Masters of the Universe”, and devised by Ben Langlands and Nikki Bell, it features imagery and statements relating to (primarily American) information technology companies and their bosses.  

As far as I can tell it’s not supposed to be in any way ironic, critical or cautionary. What would be the point? Ordinary folk can draw their own conclusions, while these powerful and wealthy individuals are insensitive to all uncertainties, just as (as we have seen in a number of recent cases) they are to small matters like ethics, national laws, taxation, or intellectual property rights. They’re not bothered by the doubts and quibbles of lesser mortals, and are very sure of what’s good for everyone. Some of their products can be, of course, quite handy, and very evidently, many people like to use them. Unfortunately what is on offer at Ikon is completely up-itself, obscure, joyless, and tedious. A successful exhibition, like any successful work of art, shouldn’t need long-winded accompanying documentation to tell you what it’s supposed to mean (assuming it means anything).

The explanatory printed guide refers to a series of pixellated “mosaic” icons (well, of course) of 26 IT luminaries. These are, as the leaflet says, “combined in diptychs with their inspirational utterances”. What that means is that unless you’re seriously cross-eyed – or preferably “pixellated” yourself (there’s a big Wetherspoons nearby in Broad Street) -  it’s hard to tell what or who they are. Not that it matters a great deal. Megalomania is nothing special these days.

However, there is one “inspirational utterance” that outshines all the others, and it is by Mike Krieger of Instagram, who says “just because you’ve googled something doesn’t mean you’ve learned”. That’s a golden rule of education which should be etched in big letters across the top of every screen and taught to every infant well before it reaches – puling and wailing - for its first gadget. Most of the other “inspirational utterances” in the exhibition are too embarrassingly inane to be worth repeating here; a few more are sensible but state the obvious. The following five are my shortlist for, shall we say (politely), the most frightening and deadly unironic of these “utterances”:

1) “There is an important artistic component in what we do” (Larry Page - Google)

2) “You have to make words less human and more a piece of the machine” (Marissa Mayer – Google, Yahoo)

3) “I’m trying to make the world a more open place” (Mark Zuckerberg - Facebook)

4) “We want Google to be the third half of your brain” (Sergey Brin - Google)

5) “I want to put a ding in the universe” (Steve Jobs - Apple)

I’m tempted to add a sixth: “I’m an obnoxious undersized arrogant charmless pointy-headed geek with a small penis. I have a problem with the real world, and especially with people”. (Greedy Retard - Fruitcake). Perhaps I should go back and scribble it on a wall and see if anyone notices.

Suitably unimpressed I emerged into the sunshine, smug with the thought that none of the above characters would ever understand why an Oozell can never be Square.