Rhinocrisy

This article in the Financial Times really must be read. It’s astonishingly forthright in its discussion of how, although it has been a “great time for capitalists”, “workers” “demanding their share of the pie” may start eating into profits. I’m always amused by the fact that the most devoted Marxists are the fat-cat capitalists.

Yesterday I happened to watch the above advertisement on television. It made me more enraged than I have been in a long time, so that by the end of it I was swearing loudly at the screen and flipping it the bird with both hands. Here was some marrowless, etiolated corporation, deigning to tell me what my dreams had been as a child, attempting to rewrite my memory! “That was your dream”? No. No, no. My dreams weren’t so hollow. I didn’t dream of owning your pathetic piece of plastic bric-a-brac, you vampires. My dreams were much larger. I dreamt of rocketing through endless space and of walking on the flat, black bottom of the ocean. I dreamt of moving the sun, of churning clouds into whirlpools in the sky, of opening my hand and releasing hummingbirds, of shaking gold dust from my hair, kissing rose-fingered Eos as she came up over the horizon, spreading my wings and flying. I dreamt I was Batman. I was Hanuman. I was Hercules, wrapped in the skin of the Nemean lion. I was the Buddha. I was all of Creation.

This is an evil plague, my beloved friends. This is a disgusting and savage attack on all of humanity. Stealing our dreams? What else do they take every day? My capacity to love has shriveled up - I have been taught that it should not extend beyond the clarity of my love’s skin, the luster of her hair, the mere shape of her bones. My capacity to be loved is a similar husk - my worth is decided by the scent I wear and the type of orange-infused vodka I drink. I have no aspirations. I am merely a collection of desires for material possessions. For them I bend and obey.

I took a long trip up to Montreal to visit my best friend Thomas, who is a painter. Pride compels me to post a link to some of his stuff. There’s a lot that could be said about that; our conversations tend to be incredibly dense and traverse a great deal of territory. But I’ll leave that aside and instead speak about my trip:
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Well, there’s that revolution I wanted.

This nice Monitor article about Iraqi graffiti contains the following excellent joke:

Ahmed Chalabi, the Pentagon’s favored exile, enjoys little popular support in Iraq. But pro-Chalabi slogans crop up in certain neighborhoods. “Chalabi is the engineer of democracy” is a common inscription near his headquarters in the upscale neighborhood of Mansour.

But these graffiti sound bites can bite back. “Chalabi, symbol of sacrifice,” proclaims one Chalabi supporter - in Arabic, “Chalabi, Ramz al-Ikhlass.” Underneath it, some wit adds “Chalabi, Ramz al-Ikhtilass” - changing the meaning, with the addition of one syllable, to “Chalabi, symbol of embezzlement.”

Please, please, PLEASE, can someone explain to me the appeal behind an iPhone? Here we have a $600 device - the equivalent of a modestly-priced laptop computer - that, as far as I can tell, succeeds at providing the following services:
* Phone
* Internet
* Camera
* Music
Now, many devices have provided these before in combinations of twos and threes. I suppose the iPhone might be the first to provide these in one package, and has the usual Apple stylish design and the propensity to break. And yet, YET, the iPhone is being hailed as a “revolutionary” device!

Here is where I put on my “what the fuck” hat.^*

I am unclear exactly what revolution the iPhone is supposed to precipitate. People being able to listen to music on the go? No, no, this was accomplished some twenty years ago with the Sony Walkman. People being able to answer the phone on the go? No, no, this was accomplished some fifteen years ago with the first cell phone (whatever it was). People being able to access the Internet on the go? No - dozens of different sorts of devices are doing this even as we speak. In fact, it seems like a large minority of phones are now somehow ‘Net capable.

As to the iPhone’s stylish design and (putative) ease of operation: if this is revolutionary, then the world is in sad, sad shape. First, bad design is not something that requires advanced technology to overcome. Bad design should not happen, period. There is only one reason why you should release a badly-designed product: because you can get away with it. Is this the revolution? That someone has circumvented the fact that people are willing to tolerate crappy products, merely because NO ONE, to date, has bothered to make a passable one? I am skeptical. In any case, making it slightly easier to enter text into a phone does not qualify as a revolution in my book.

So, what, exactly is the revolution the iPhone has allowed? As far as I can tell, it lets us do one thing: it lets us (after spending $600) throw out our iPods.

As a geek, what I want from my phone is the ability to futz around with it. My current phone has some amazingly bad presets - button bindings, for example. Why can’t I change those button bindings? Surely that would vastly improve the appeal and usability of the phone. Every phone, additionally, is equipped with a very crappy, low-baud bluetooth modem, and usually with an equally crappy IR port. This is an absurdly powerful functionality that is completely underutilized. Why do I still have to tell people my phone-number, for example? Why can’t I just squirt out a bluetooth signal to their phone, announcing who I am? Why can’t I set my phone to respond automatically to a bluetooth transmitter in a movie theater, putting it into silent mode the moment I enter the hall? Why can’t I easily patch into my neighbor’s conversation via bluetooth? Why doesn’t every fricking cell phone let me control my TV?

More to the point, why isn’t there a phone with an open API that lets people build such applications? Cell platforms should be minimal operating systems that third parties can add onto. Such a cell phones could do all sorts of awesome nonsense with relatively trivial effort. THAT would be revolutionary. I suspect, however, there’s too much money to be made nickel-and-diming us, so we’ll have to please ourselves with the likes of the iPhone. As far as I can tell from the frenzy, fake orgasms are better than the real thing anyway.

^* You know the one: it has a large stuffed vulture on it, last seen on the head of Neville Longbottom’s grandmum.