Archive for September, 2010
Designed by Apple in California
The number has transferred, and the ordeal is over: I am finally free of my iPhone, which I have used for about twenty-three months, the last ten of which saw my frustration with the device grow and grow. I’m now ready to move on to my nice, simple, £22 Samsung GT-E2120, free of Apple’s twisted world of consumption for now. Monetarily, I haven’t done that badly out of it – I’ve had the phone for two years and, subtracting how much I am selling it on for and the value of the free data I got when I bought it, it cost me £130 for those two years. But why this volte-face? Why have I gone from someone who was willing to pay out such a high initial expenditure to get hold of the thing to someone who is now celebrating his freedom from it? This is worth exploring.
There are straight up, pragmatic reasons why the whole enterprise was frustrating. iTunes, the software one is forced to use, is really, really terrible: it is slow at the simplest of things, and my opinion is always soured by the fact that it has hosed my music library a couple of times when I hadn’t done anything out of the ordinary. iTunes is representative of the whole Apple enterprise: we want to design software – nay, electronic environments – for you to do a couple of tasks really well that we are happy for you to do, but we’ll make you do them all our way, with our ‘superior’ flavour dripping from everything. When you want to do something else, you’ll need to jump through some licensing hoops so that we can control you and make sure that the software you write is acceptable to us – a friend of mine has described to me the mind-boggling complexity of the process one must go through to develop for the iPhone and related devices. Then we’ll charge you way, way more than it’s worth for all of this because we put it in pretty boxes, and because we’ve made your friends go starry-eyed with admiration for those few features we wrote that they like, so they can help assimilate you into the collective.
I jest, to an extent, and it must also be noted that only some of these remarks apply to the iPhone; I do not know much about development for Mac OS X. But there is something very, very sinister about the whole affair. Companies exist to eek money out of the population, as many have heard me rage before, but in general technology companies tend to do this in one of two ways: they produce really decent products for those in the know – people who know what technology is worth or who, such as me, know people who can advise them about hardware – or they produce really rubbish products that they foist on the ignorant masses who just buy buy buy because they, blamelessly, have no idea what a gigahertz is, and wonder if it’s the rating on a lightbulb or something. This is the fault of our terrible information technology teaching in schools which leaves everyone just ready to open their wallets, and people suffer. But with Apple it’s something much worse: both groups fall to the seduction. The geeks tell themselves that the software makes it worth it, while they are drawn merely by the appearances – both the physical beauty and the good show put on by those few features that work really well.
Just look at me if you want a prime example. I bought an Apple laptop, telling myself it was okay because I was going to put GNU/Linux on it. I didn’t know as much at the time about these things as I do now, and I failed, though this may have been due to the specific model I had not being very well supported. Then the horror of what I fallen into crashed in on me; I am feeling slightly nauseus thinking about it now. I was able to send the laptop back, but at that point I wasn’t sure I was going to be able to. My stomach somersaulted as I imagined being forced to spend my university years with Mac OS X. I was shaking and very close to tears at my stupidity. I did manage to send it back in the end, very fortunately, and now I have a lean, mean GNU/Linux laptop configured for freedom, control, power and elegance – but it could have been disaster. And then of course there’s the fact that I bought an iPhone and had that for two years, seduced once more by the same old tricks. I’m considering buying a replacement keyboard from Apple at the moment for various reasons, but I would like to venture that that’s not quite the same thing. A keyboard isn’t an opportunity for Apple to worm its way into your life, and in my view a classic Model M beats it in any beauty contest.
I should be more careful when dishing out criticism on this topic: in reality, Apple is no different from all the rest of the corporations. As Stallman has said, the Free Software movement isn’t competing with other companies because it’s offering something completely different that none of them can really claim to be able to offer, which could be said to carry the implication that they’re all as bad as each other – and I think that would be correct. There are other, far more positive reasons why I have decided to downgrade my mobile phone so much, why I no longer have a smartphone at all, nevermind the fact that I moved away from a particular model. My new phone is technically capable of e-mail and web browsing, but one would be a fool to really try and use it for that. It’s a 2G device that is great at making phone calls, texting (my iPhone SMS database contains 7812 texts – I didn’t think I sent that many, though I guess compared to most people nowadays that’s tiny for two years), playing MP3s and tuning in to FM radio; I wanted something with the latter two features as these are parts of the iPhone I get genuine use out of. But why did I feel the need to downgrade? I could have switched to an alternative smartphone platform, with a less restrictive development ethos, and continued on much as before but without the drawbacks just described.
The answer is that I realised just how little I was getting out of owning a smartphone, and just how much, in a sense, it was taking from me. There are many occasions in modern life when someone pulls out a smartphone and solves an otherwise annoying and time-consuming problem with it: they might find some directions, send a picture to someone else who can then provide information, look something up that sorts out an argument. These are useful moments, but they are accompanied by so many wasted ones. Many a time has my sister looked at me in frustration as three-fifths of her immediate family pull out smartphones and stop talking to each other in a coffee shop or something. Many a time have I checked the latest tweets from people I don’t really care about, as an easy way out of trying a bit harder to maintain my concentration in a lecture. Then there are the organisational features. Someone in Oxford once remarked about how I was entirely dependent on the device to organise my day. I want to run things myself, to get better at keeping track of my time myself; I want to check my e-mails periodically, not with a frequency that almost has me waiting to be told what to do by an incoming message.
I am very happy to be moving on from two years with the iPhone, and am proud of having the courage to turn away from smartphones altogether. They have many useful features, but most of the time they instead suck time and focus out of my life. They’re a gadget, a luxury, and they represent a major affront to freedom: we use them as computers yet have so little control over their internals. I will learn from my dual experiences of falling for the temptation of Apple’s hardware as so many have done before me. I hope that by explaining my story here I have, at the very least, strengthed the resolve of those who stand with me.
Thinking the Unthinkable, part 2: examination as the good
This post is part of a series, meant to be read from the beginning. Go to the first post.
The only real element of the philosophical system I aim to set out that was present in my last post was the claim that the timeless edict
The unexamined life is not worth living.
—Socrates in Plato’s Apology
forms the axiomatic basis of my system of ethics. In this post, I hope to say what I really mean by this loose claim, and also give a little argumentation for it; why I am led to choose it above other similar starting points.
On its own, the sentence isn’t very helpful. What is the unexamined life; where on the scale between the extremes of a fifty year orgy and a fifty year meditation or degree course does it lie? By what standard, necessarily (we might think) external to life are we to judge whether or not something is worth living? The statement is informal and to worry about this misses the point. What I really mean is that my starting point is the belief that a careful, rigorous consideration of everything that we come across in our mind and outside it (if such a place exists; it is irrelevant for we certainly have a mental model of it) is worthwhile. I assume for now that it is the only thing that is truly worthwhile, to avoid adding axioms to my system, but as I go on it will surely be questionable whether I really have avoided drawing on anything else.
But my language remains loose as to the nature of this examination, the word I will use to refer to this assumed good. I am stuck, as we all are, in the context of the society I live in, and what it sees as thoughtful examination. For purposes that will become clear in the political parts of this series, I shall attempt to give a minimalist account of examination, and what I mean by it. The full view of what it is will likely emerge as we go further. Examination, then, is for me very philosophical in nature, taking that term in the informal sense that may be used with derision against philosophers in the modern world: it’s about questions and an understanding of those questions, not about asking questions and then seeking out answers to them. In my next post I will talk about the scepticism which leads me to this statement, but for now just consider the two things, side by side: a deep understanding of a question and how it relates to other questions and everything else that we come across, and an answer, which I take to be a statement that removes the uncertainty of a question and fills the gap that it leaves.
It is obvious that the latter is almost entirely useless without the former. An answer will not be accepted by anyone in a thoughtful state of mind until they have at least a rudimentary understanding of the question that led to it. So we are certainly to have the former if we are to have either. But as I will argue in my next piece, when one has a decent level of understanding of the significance, ramifications and nature of a question one will quickly realise that any answer that might be a genuine addition to the thoughts one already has is entirely out of reach.
In setting this out I have used the word “axiom” without any definition, and it has been clear that the definition used in mathematical and philosophical logic isn’t what I intend. A better way of describing my intent might be to say that I am treating this belief that I have tried to expound as self-evident, that I am treating it as if it contains everything it needs to justify itself within itself, in the same way that we see the phrase “a bachelor is an unmarried man” as being true.
I will close by attempting to describe the reasons which lead me to this axiom rather than others, to set this project in its context. On the assumption that working from single starting points makes sense, there are many I could have chosen: religious, utilitarian and scientific (where science is taken to mean the optimistic view held widely today that it can discover the nature of the universe, rather than what it might sensibly be taken to mean) spring to mind. I am biased, no doubt, by my good experiences of studying Philosophy and thus my axiom might be summarised as “Philosophy is good”, but in doing so we would strip away subtleties that I would rather keep around.
I do have, though, one reason that I will boldly claim as being a strong one: the advantage of examination is that it is capable of self-replacement. If it turns out that we are able to find that we should base our lives on something else, and in some way not known to me we are able to secure certainty and infallibility for ourselves on this point, then we will have found it through examination and examination will yield to it: we will have examined our lives and come to a different conclusion because our scepticism and thirst to examine will have driven us to pursue all possibilities. Examination is capable of being an axiom yet not being absolute. This lies in stark contrast to many other starting points; I will not be to crude as to exhibit “examination is bad” but instead briefly, and bravely, knowing my readership’s knowledge of my views, consider “seek happiness”. In following this, we will only perform examination as a means to an end, and chances are in gaining happiness for ourselves (or our society, depending on the formulation), and if another axiom is in fact that right one, our chances of finding it are either reduced or entirely destroyed.
I take the rigorous, “philosophical” examination of everything that we come across to be the basic good that we should pursue. The reason that leads my mind to this starting point rather than any other is the way in which examination is capable of finding out other starting points that may be improvements on this one if they do exist, and of yielding to them. But this is just my attempt to describe why my mind has got where it is. The important thing to take away from this post is that I am treating examination, as elucidated here, as self-evident, and I am basing the rest of this project upon it.
Wake me up when September ends
So yesterday I spent around ninety minutes carefully constructing a plan for the rest of September. Yes, I know – a recent post claimed that doing this wasn’t being at all successful for me. But I think the reason for this is primarily because I didn’t make a strong enough commitment; each plan was just another plan. This plan is the plan to end all plans. I’m committing to it publicly on this blog: I expect you guys to hold me to it. If you are talking to me on IM or something, ask me what stage of the plan I am at and if I should really be chatting to you. If you see me tweet something that is basically just a link to something interesting online, hammer me with @-replies telling me that, chances are, what I’m doing isn’t scheduled. I desperately want September to end because I know I can get so much more done when I’m back in Oxford – but the start of term will be terrible if I’m not ready, and I need your help in getting there. Hammer me!
Here are the elements of the plan, in no particular order:
- Get going immediately at 8, rather than starting to check e-mail etc. at 8 as I would otherwise do. Stop wasting the fact that I get up early at 7 but then don’t get started on useful things until 10. Instead, don’t turn computer on until 10 (unless needed for study before that or if something urgent has come up. E-mail and Twitter and RSS and reddit can be checked, according to the schedule, at 10.
- Stick to the set routine, or modify the routine, but don’t drift: I’m the kind of person who works best when I’m keeping to a routine strictly, so capitalise on that.
- Once RSS feeds and inbox have been got to empty, keep them that way: be more vicious in discarding things from both.
- When completing a task, cut out distractions better. I already have a little script that completely toggles my distracting applications – e-mail, Twitter, IRC, calendar etc. – on and off, but I need to also clear my mind in order to concentrate. I’m going to put in a concious effort to clear my mind out before settling down to something for a designated period of time. I’m going to try and be more aware of how my mind wanders and how to focus it back.
- I need at least an hour per day spent on the following things, and two hours on the last one. It’s pretty simple: revision of last year’s Maths, starting work on next term’s Maths, background reading for Maths, reading for next term’s Philosophy, administration/dull typing up of minutes etc., working on the JCR website. I’ve got a chart to tick and cross for each of these things, as well as for other elements of the plan, to help motivate.
And that’s it. I’m not attempting to set up complicated filing systems or make myself super-skilled in some obscure art form. I just want to get a certain set of things done, and also make a few procedural changes, relating to e-mail and the like, in order to get myself in a better position for the start of next term. Please help me to achieve these things by holding me to what I’ve committed to in this post.
Thinking the Unthinkable, part 1: Introduction
In mid-2009 a group of Balliol students discovered the website seanwhitton.com, and proceeded to poke fun at the banality of its statements regarding the ultimate worth of (what I conceived to be) Philosophy; particularly, issue was taken with Socrates’ timeless edict that
The unexamined life is not worth living.
—Socrates in Plato’s Apology
In the proceeding months I have realised that a great deal of what I claim in moral, political and academic contexts can be traced back to a strong belief in the truth of Socrates’ claim; indeed, I have an almost axiomatic respect for it. My aim in this series of posts is to put together all the claims that I make that seem to me to stem from this, in an attempt to figure out just where I am coherent, and precisely where a great deal more enquiry is needed: where the strengths and weaknesses of my thought lie. This is my promised essay that I have deferred to in discussions for months.
In characterising this as a work of Philosophy, I am aware that I invite the ire of many modern academic practitioners of this, the greatest of all mental pursuits, in that I would seem to be merely setting out a system of belief for my own reasons, rather than attempting serious analysis or dialectic. But this is one of the great issues I have with the philosophers I find in Oxford. Philosophy is merely the thoughtful, reasoned and – crucially – rigorous pursuit of understanding of the deepest questions we are capable of asking. For me, what I am asking here are the deepest questions I have yet to come across.
I write this now as an undergraduate who has yet to properly engage with the analytical Philosophy of my course. As is the nature of different levels and ways of thinking, it is likely that my future self and others who I pass this to will see this as immature and underdeveloped. But every piece of writing has its context, and all I ask is that this be considered in that of my mind, which has only too recently been opened up to the weaknesses in our common modes of thought, and desires little more than consistency, and that which I intend to set out in this essay. Nothing here is fixed. I intend to revise this in subsequent years, when the hold of analytical positivism over me will likely be somewhat stronger.
Ultimately, what I aim to achieve in this piece is a foundationalist linkage of the various passions I have for idealised ways of living into something drawn from the natural light of reason, as Descartes would put it, and the above Socratic edict. This is then something I can mould and shape, add to and remove from, as the years go by. But we do well to be clear where we are beginning if we intend to get anywhere at all. I do not expect to get absolutely ‘from point A to point B;’ I am under no illusions that from this axiom I can derive with compelling certainty very much at all. But I want to see what I can get, and whether my informal reasoning draws on any other axioms, and then to see how useful and sane the foundationalist project turns out to be.
I suggest a technological analogy. I have a server that sits in London and stays on continually, serving my e-mail, storing my files and keeping processes running throughout the night when my own computers at home are switched off. The data on that server is backed up in two ways. When I first put the backup system into place, I took a full backup. The entire content of the server’s hard drive was mirrored onto the backup server. Following that, incremental backups are performed nightly: the way in which the hard drive contents has changed relative to the full backup are recorded, which means that the backup server consists of the original copy, and for each day since a description of how the files have changed. This series of posts is my first full backup: I want to be in a position where I can write incremental backups of my thoughts with something to refer back to. Every so often the backup server is wiped and a fresh full backup is made, when the contents of the hard drive have changed very substantially. This is what I will do in years to come.
I write this as a series of posts because I would like to accept and incorporate criticism, if anyone will be kind enough to present it, as I go along: I’m taking a foundationalist approach, and it is harder to extract misshapen and unstable stones later on, when they have much of import piled atop them. This introduction was written in the Spring of 2010, and then added to in early September. I’m ready to go. Watch this space.
Next: examination as the good