Amerika

Biologically speaking, anything external which an organism comes to depend upon results in a corresponding loss of the traits which the organism previously used for that function. When your phone memorizes numbers, you lose that ability over time because it is no longer needed.

Similarly, it is possible that working with technology is forcing us into a narrowed mode of thinking that makes us oblivious to wider reality:

“The people on the outside think that it’s like this wonderful world of Oz or Disney going on, and all of us are all just these brilliant amazing happy people, and it’s not, it’s like a sausage factory, you really do not want to know how a lot of this happens. A lot of it is just bad arguments, and politics, and working around the rules, and not doing the right thing, and apologizing for it later, and getting fired a few times, I mean, that’s how things got done. It’s definitely like ‘don’t pay attention to the man behind the curtain.’ It’s a lot of that kind of stuff. You really don’t want to know how this stuff is built. To me, it’s embarrassing, like, there’s always big flaws to a lot of the stuff. There was a computer that we shipped where the speaker’s magnet was right next to the hard drive. Now, when you played a sound it caused the hard drive’s read-write head to misalign. So, in the midst of playing your Quicktime movie, your computer would completely freeze because it played a sound. And I’m like, what kind of engineers do we have around here that would put a magnet right next to your hard drive? Jesus Christ! It beeped, and it crashed. And then they wanted me — believe it or not, this is the solution — they wanted me to change the decibels of the speaker so that it wouldn’t interfere with the hard drive. You’re kidding me. That’s classic. Engineers are retarded. They have some kind of brain damage that allows them to not have social skills, so that they can concentrate long enough to write code. But it’s a disease. That’s why I had to quit. I mean, I’m like, an engineer in recovery. I don’t want to write code anymore. It just makes you retarded. I mean, get a girlfriend. Get a life.” – Jim Reekes, Welcome to Macintosh (2008)

This documentary may be a bit much for non-nerds, but it chronicles the rise of Apple and implicitly asks the question of what Apple contributed to history. The answer seems to be a few good ideas and lots of simpler, more fun versions of ideas from other people.

If we take anything from Apple — besides that writing code makes brains break — it might be that people want to use technology to do other things, and are not interested in getting buried in the details just to get to the point where they can do that.

Ironically, this is consistent with the computer hobbyist vision, which saw computers as a way to do things, not necessarily an end in themselves. Information wants to be free, which means that computers are a means to information.

The Windows ecosystem does things differently, emphasizing configurability over facilitating common tasks, but not so much that it gets to Lunix levels, where simple problems often involve days of fixing stuff. However, it is less managed than the Apple world.

Apple figured out that 90% of the people wanted to do the same 90% of the tasks approximately 90% of the time, and so making easy pathways to those guaranteed satisfaction.

They then patterned their ecosystem after Mercedes-Benz, where all access to the technology is heavily controlled and only the official parts and licensed service centers can be used, protecting the brand from hacks and incompetents.

The downside of this is that once you purchase the product, you become entrenched in the ecosystem, and start to rationalize its high costs as better quality. This produces the cult-like atmosphere that has lingered around Apple products since the late 1970s.

Tags: apple computer, Nerdcore, programming, retardation