Cool story, techbro

Last week I walked a bunch of product out of a Canadian Tire, because the self-checkout machine (for which there is no human alternative) couldn’t scan anything, besides my first item ($8) multiple times; the (human) assistant guy couldn’t do anything about this, besides nullify the multiple $8 charges; and there were so many other people having similar, baffling issues with the (again, only) self-checkout machine option, that among the gathering crowd of customers and staff, no one seemed to mind when I just shrugged, took my booty, and left.

I don’t feel even moderately bad about stealing things from mega chains except in that I bet somewhere downstream, there will be an excel spreadsheet about “float” that will have an arrow connector to “this quarter’s layoffs,” and some shithead who only ever drives places will think (smugly) that he’s earned his obscene salary that month by declaring that even more entry-level staff need to be eliminated because clearly, it was all Their Fault. Still.

There’s no need to re-litigate in these pages what we already know, besides saying that this is the future that has been chosen for us, by people we never even get to punch: the future where nothing works, everything is unusable, and even the process of handing over our paltry and very-hard-earned dollars is posted up behind a wall of friction so high that no reasonable consumer can easily scale it. Jobs are gone, the tech is buggy, and everything looks like crap. Shrug emoji, I guess? Way to go, Silicon Valley.

or, tl;dr, this (c/o Smooth Dunk on bluesky):

There’s a James Bond movie I quite like (it’s terrible) where the bad guy is trying to redirect the San Andreas fault to cause an earthquake which will flood that selfsame Silicon Valley. James Bond stops the bad guy — throws him off the Golden Gate Bridge! — but still, I bet if Max Zorin turned up in a blimp with Grace Jones on his arm and pushed Silicon Valley into the sea nowadays, he’d be a full-scale Luigi Mangione folk hero before his body hit the water. Just speculatin’.

On the far other end of the friction spectrum, I got this letter the other day.

Downside: it’s from one of the hate-fuelled stooges of the Christ Industrial Complex. But I’m still stunned nearly to the point of being moved, by imagining the time and effort that went in to just writing this out — person by person and unit by unit — for my entire god damned building. (A random neighbour, five floors up, confirmed he got one too, when he saw me opening mine.)

The hand cramping! I write longhand in my journal every single day and yet when I needed to up that to three full Morning Pages this spring, I nearly felt my thumb dislocate in real time. Whatever else I can imagine about this person’s values, the willingness to put in the work ain’t something I get to whine about.

And whining, this all is. I know that. I come to it by way of a recommendation, which is: in between the events described above, I was listening to last week’s episode of the Culture Study podcast, whose subject was — coincidence of coincidences! — when convenience actually kinda sucks.

Again: no need to re-litigate what we already know. I’ve written a lot about friction vs. frictionlessness. It’s always worth remembering who frictionlessness (at least as I’m describing it here) actually serves: hint, it is not born of some utopic, Universal Design approach to building our societies, meant to ease the burden of those marginalized folk who most need it. If you recall the pod-people in WALL-E, you’re closer to the centre of the goal.

Also interesting to note that in the conversation between Anne Helen Petersen and her guest, Gabe Bullard, author of Against Convenience, the aesthetic faddishness of “frictionmaxxing” was brought up more than once. Two things can be true: there are a whole lot of people for whom divesting themselves of the conveniences of modern systems is just a self-directed performance to let the iPhone camera see the sweat. But also: it’s nearly always revealing to do it anyway, even if only as an experiment, to remind oneself: what was hard about this? What was this (actually) costing me, in time, in effort, in mental capacity? What is the “frictionless” (it’s never frictionless) solution costing me now, that I wouldn’t have intuited then?

I think this ties back to last week’s stuff about decisions, albeit in the opposite direction: no, you can’t time-travel back and un-fuck the overtechnologized choices that may have drained some tension and tactility out of your day-to-day life. But having relied on Alexa for a decade, one can comparison shop at a retail store instead, and better see what feels different. (NO OBLIGATION: you do not have to do this more than once!) Having disappeared long ago into the endless stream/endless scroll of Netflix and TikTok, one can pay single-screen attention to a film, paying attention only to one’s breath, and see if the meditative state that John Boorman mentions in Boorman and the Devil can still be attained. (It can!) Having optimized one’s errand schedule, one can just walk somewhere, without airpods in or phone out, and see what being “bored” now feels like.

They’ve reopened most of the paths on the Lower Don at some point in the past few months, everything from Corktown Common northwards. I used to walk down there, down by the river, a lot (especially during the pandemic) and it’s been behind iron bars for so long I’d forgotten how much I enjoyed it. Well, I walked there a bit on Saturday — this past, perfect, September Saturday; we seem to be having a perfect September, ending now as you read this — with nothing but my own time and my own mind and my own body with which to occupy myself.

Purposelessness (at last)

Birthday was good. Birthday was nice. Birthday felt like it lasted about six of my dwindling remaining weeks alive, but it was nice to see everybody / hear from everyone / eat everything. I’m rich in friends.

Weirdest gift (complementary) of the lot came from the Chief, who gave me a glow-in-the-dark coffee mug with my 1994 student card on it. Also got a lot of whiskey — I am known as a whiskey man, when I am known as a man at all. Nobody got me a pocket knife, which is good for a young person to have, but that’s okay; I have other pocket knives.

Now I’m at loose ends between contracts for a couple of weeks and couldn’t be happier about it. Hoping that our perfect September transitions cleanly into a perfect October (understanding that the criteria for the two are slightly different). Planning to take in some art, some structures. I’ve got a big, wide, very strange pool of ideas for something I want to write — potentially multiple somethings — that I need to gather into a workable design before the end of the year. The freedom to do any of this, boy, it’s priceless.

Hilarious shit and other

• Here was a FORP. (The Tederick.com Internet Archive)
• This piece about the layoffs at Microsoft captures the broad, and broadly-understood, problem with the CEOS, the VCs, and the disruptors, which partially informed the above. (Aftermath)
• But if those gutless sunzabitches are the main target of my ire, don’t worry, I saved some for Doug Blunderfuck Ford. Incredible to me that no one (outside Toronto) is enraged about this absolute boondoggle of a project. (Spacing)
• Obviously, I loved this. (MUBI)
• I think a lot about the popular disconnect between the reality of working in the arts — even as a person who acts in movies! — and what Gen Pop thinks those peoples’ lives are like. This piece about Jack Haven, who gave a singular and incredible performance this year in Teenage Sex & Death at Camp Miasma, outlines the atrocious state we’re currently in. (Pajiba)

And finally: the action figure pipe has started flowing again. Here’s me giving a few words to a Sandtrooper who could not hold his little guns: