Everyone will be talking about Apple's big streaming announcement event today. Who cares? I’d argue that the more influential and more telling announcement by Apple was released quietly with zero fanfare last week. I've written before about why AirPods became a signifier of cool and status among youth. While that is a sign of their success, I think the AirPod is more than just a successful consumer product: they're the first step toward a ubiquitous voice-controlled wearable computer future. Apple's streaming video service is not new. But a computer that never leaves our faces may be. Jus think about AirPod creep - the amount of time that it is acceptable for AirPods to be in your ears. I'd argue the creep will continue, that that time will suck up more and more minutes and hours of the day. Many of us wear already AirPods throughout the day. Even during sex, allegedly. The fact that they're socially acceptable - even enviable - and physically easy to wear means they're positioned perfectly to become the de facto interface.
Adding voiceless Siri only strengthens the case that Apple is building a new platform, like the iPhone before it, that will only become "more independent over time," as Slate's Will Oremus puts it. This new platform will connect you to your friends and to a growing list of services from banking to shopping while being all around you for an ever-growing chunk of your waking hours. With more and more relationships being geographically dispersed and virtual, AirPods give us a continuous cure for the creeping loneliness that has come to color our age - even while trudging through our endless work-induced burnout we can be with our friends as long as our AirPods are in and our podcasts and Twitch streams are whispering in our ears. It bodes well for companies with an interest in entertaining audio content. It does not bode well for community. See more on that below.
Another Vessel for permissionless invasion
Shocker: selfie-trap created by real estate behemoth owns your photos. The Vessel is a gigantic new sculpture at the heart of Hudson Yards in New York designed by Thomas Heatherwick. It made news for owning any photos you take there. Is this the first physical structure to declare eminent domain on your property on behalf of a private company simply when you walk into it? Almost certainly not. But because it's the crown jewel of Hudson Yards - the most expensive real estate development in US history - its aggressive terms of service have riled people up. And that may just help the world better understand the oppressive contract terms we're wrapped up in daily without our consent by the tech companies the Vessel's privacy contract is probably inspired by. In this way, the sculpture is just one more Vessel for permissionless seizure of rights that we're so used to online. Whereas we used to not read the excessively long and complex digital documents before clicking, now we don't even have that option: just by walking into a structure we've agreed to the company's terms of service.
If we don't read the fine print when it's popped up in our face, what are the chances that we'd go to the web site of Hudson Yards before we visit and read a legal document? The Vessel is a monument to the degradation of the contract, among other things.
Where there's no local news
Facebook can't find local news to showcase. After launching a special section of the app called Today In, the company has found that they'll need to invest $300 million to fund local journalism.A recent New York Times profile of Priscilla Villarreal a.k.a. La Gordiloca, who "roams the streets of Laredo in an old Dodge pickup, scrambling to drug busts and murder scenes to bring her tales from the dark side of the southwest border to her many viewers," shows just how much effort goes into covering local news and shines a light on how tuned out coastal media companies are. Facebook can shrink any distance and any geography across the globe in seconds, but it can't shrink the distance between neighbors. According to Rani Molla and Kurt Wagner of Recode, “About one in three users in the U.S. live in places where we cannot find enough local news on Facebook to launch Today In.”We're in a situation eloquently predicted by Paul Virilio in Information Bomb: "Since the early 1990s, the Pentagon has taken the view that geostrategy is turning the globe inside out like a glove.
For American military leaders, the global is the interior of a finite world whose very finitude poses many logistical problems. And the local is the exterior, the periphery, if not indeed the 'outer suburbs' of the world."There lies the great globalitarian transformation, the transformation which extraverts localness - all localness - and which does not now deport persons, or entire populations, as in the past, but deports their living space, the place where they subsist economically. "The real city, which is situated in a precise place and which gave its name to the politics of nations, is giving way to the virtual city, that de-territorialized meta-city which is hence to become the site of that metropolitics, the totalitarian or rather globalitarian character of which will be plain for all to see."
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