At Some Point, Creative Destruction Simply Destroys
January 14, 2023 12:04 PM Subscribe
And yet, while dragging the likes of Apple CEO Tim Cook off to the whipping post may be fine sport, what’s the state of our own souls in all of this? We who encourage and enable these 21st-century digital robber barons? Are we their victims? Co-conspirators? Could we find our own way out of the walled garden? Do we even want to? from The Pulitzer winner who predicted Elon Musk and Elizabeth Holmes 25 years ago, a look at Steven Millhauser's 1997 novel, Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer
Tim Cook off to the whipping post
Bullshit framing. Lightly roasting multimillionaires and billionaires on social media does not compare with capital punishment in any way, shape, or form.
posted by StarkRoads at 2:06 PM on January 14, 2023 [13 favorites]
Bullshit framing. Lightly roasting multimillionaires and billionaires on social media does not compare with capital punishment in any way, shape, or form.
posted by StarkRoads at 2:06 PM on January 14, 2023 [13 favorites]
[derail]
The whole green/blue thing on iPhone messages annoys me, because green doesn't mean 'Android phone' it means 'not iMessage' instead of 'iMessage' for the protocol. If you turn off iMessage on your phone, or you are in a place with cell service but no Internet connection, your iPhone messages will be shown in green too! Quelle Horreur! What will they think of you?
Of course, I know that there are people that actually do use this as a metric of ... dating fitness, or something? But it's an emergent property from usage and not one that I think Apple planned on. When they made this split, the green messages were specifically SMS messages, which could possibly incur charges, so it was kinda important to know one vs. the other. (I don't think the SMS thing is strictly true any longer.)
Not that I am defending Apple on anything, just pointing out the inaccuracy. That split was horrendously painful for just about everyone's Contacts databases and really did push Android users into a kind of lower strata. I'm sure that Apple loves that the association that Blue Messages == Persons of Quality has arisen too.
Carry on.
[/derail]
posted by dragstroke at 2:50 PM on January 14, 2023 [9 favorites]
The whole green/blue thing on iPhone messages annoys me, because green doesn't mean 'Android phone' it means 'not iMessage' instead of 'iMessage' for the protocol. If you turn off iMessage on your phone, or you are in a place with cell service but no Internet connection, your iPhone messages will be shown in green too! Quelle Horreur! What will they think of you?
Of course, I know that there are people that actually do use this as a metric of ... dating fitness, or something? But it's an emergent property from usage and not one that I think Apple planned on. When they made this split, the green messages were specifically SMS messages, which could possibly incur charges, so it was kinda important to know one vs. the other. (I don't think the SMS thing is strictly true any longer.)
Not that I am defending Apple on anything, just pointing out the inaccuracy. That split was horrendously painful for just about everyone's Contacts databases and really did push Android users into a kind of lower strata. I'm sure that Apple loves that the association that Blue Messages == Persons of Quality has arisen too.
Carry on.
[/derail]
posted by dragstroke at 2:50 PM on January 14, 2023 [9 favorites]
While the protocol might not have intended it, I’d be willing to bet there was a marketing team somewhere that specifically worked to push that green/blue message dichotomy into the our cultural zeitgeist.
posted by Jon_Evil at 3:19 PM on January 14, 2023 [6 favorites]
posted by Jon_Evil at 3:19 PM on January 14, 2023 [6 favorites]
Apple intentionally made the green chat bubbles of Android text messages look gross
posted by glonous keming at 4:08 PM on January 14, 2023 [2 favorites]
posted by glonous keming at 4:08 PM on January 14, 2023 [2 favorites]
We!?
posted by Reyturner at 4:13 PM on January 14, 2023 [2 favorites]
posted by Reyturner at 4:13 PM on January 14, 2023 [2 favorites]
One of my favorite bits of writing in the last ten years, if only for its use of deceit in the pursuit of pure honesty:
It sounds obnoxious, but I have to say, I kind of liked this guy. I liked all of them. They were a charming bunch. They had been born this way. That’s how they’d gotten jobs on the front lines of capitalist hypocrisy, while those of us who sucked at lying were hiding in the trenches, smoking cigarettes, writing letters home about how miserable we were. They just said the stuff that we all lived. Who of us behaves as if we were in immediate trouble? We work, and at the end of the day, if we think at all, all we have time to think about is that we are cowards, or, before the thought comes, to escape it. Raise your hand if you have never hoped you will die before you have to thoroughly disrupt your own life for the lives of those who will live after you are dead. I do not mean to yell at anyone. Every day, I ask myself, what are you willing to do? And sometimes I feel righteous and strong, but mostly what I feel is fear, and a drive towards self preservation. I can laugh at the prettily arranged soap, or the privately-viewed sunsets, or the Jet Skis, because those are not my drugs, but Niu Kitchen, and all that goes with it, will be dragged from my fake wedding-ring-adorned cold dead hands.
Like, people who live absurdly good lives arguing about the fucking color of text bubbles on someone else's phone, while Google et al make their phones with what amounts to slave labor.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 4:48 PM on January 14, 2023 [6 favorites]
It sounds obnoxious, but I have to say, I kind of liked this guy. I liked all of them. They were a charming bunch. They had been born this way. That’s how they’d gotten jobs on the front lines of capitalist hypocrisy, while those of us who sucked at lying were hiding in the trenches, smoking cigarettes, writing letters home about how miserable we were. They just said the stuff that we all lived. Who of us behaves as if we were in immediate trouble? We work, and at the end of the day, if we think at all, all we have time to think about is that we are cowards, or, before the thought comes, to escape it. Raise your hand if you have never hoped you will die before you have to thoroughly disrupt your own life for the lives of those who will live after you are dead. I do not mean to yell at anyone. Every day, I ask myself, what are you willing to do? And sometimes I feel righteous and strong, but mostly what I feel is fear, and a drive towards self preservation. I can laugh at the prettily arranged soap, or the privately-viewed sunsets, or the Jet Skis, because those are not my drugs, but Niu Kitchen, and all that goes with it, will be dragged from my fake wedding-ring-adorned cold dead hands.
Like, people who live absurdly good lives arguing about the fucking color of text bubbles on someone else's phone, while Google et al make their phones with what amounts to slave labor.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 4:48 PM on January 14, 2023 [6 favorites]
Anyway, having read the linked article, I think my criticism would be that the pull-quote is perhaps kinda tangential to that, instead mostly joining in what we all generally do: transference of our own moral failures in helping make shitheels like Elon Musk richer and more powerful every day. We like our toys, our Teslas etc. and while we might bitch and moan about Twitter and who runs it, and so on, we are generally okay with that guy as much as we are with all the other shitheels who run our society and burn up our world, who set up rules that effectively game the system in their favor. We're okay with this, but we don't like to admit it because the toys are shiny and the introspection part is hard as hell.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 5:05 PM on January 14, 2023 [2 favorites]
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 5:05 PM on January 14, 2023 [2 favorites]
glonous keming:
ArsTechnica has a screenshot here so I’m not going to turn mine on long enough to get one but, seriously, Google has tens of billions of dollars to pay PR people and lobbyists in service of their campaign to get governments to bail them out of a messaging problem entirely of their own making, there’s no need to recirculate it pro bono.
posted by adamsc at 6:05 PM on January 14, 2023 [12 favorites]
Apple intentionally made the green chat bubbles of Android text messages look grossThat wording sounds a lot more confident than it would if it was accurately described as “some random dude on a blog claims without evidence”. Here’s how deep the conspiracy runs: Apple made SMS green to sabotage Android half a decade before iMessage was first released, not to mention over a year before Android shipped. How dastardly, to have a time machine and be so unambitious!
ArsTechnica has a screenshot here so I’m not going to turn mine on long enough to get one but, seriously, Google has tens of billions of dollars to pay PR people and lobbyists in service of their campaign to get governments to bail them out of a messaging problem entirely of their own making, there’s no need to recirculate it pro bono.
posted by adamsc at 6:05 PM on January 14, 2023 [12 favorites]
Maybe it helps frame thinking about this subject to recognize we make decisions based on the mental model with which we frame them. We are finite beings. Our capacity for evaluating nuance is limited. Evaluating the ethical burden of our consumer decisions can be an involved process, especially when our ability to see the knock-on, out of sight consequences is poor, and intentionally obscured by marketing to preserve customer esteem for products.
Attempts to assert an inherent burden of ethics in consumerism runs into both entrenched ideas about freedom, self-interest, the moral value of buying stuff to "support the economy", and basic need/desire to function in the world in a way compatible with others around you.
I guess what I'm getting at is that our capacity for making constant, individual ethical and moral decisions as consumers is limited by our own abilities, our lack of knowledge and visibility into the meaning of those choices, and the active efforts of industry and marketing to subvert or outright mislead any such instincts.
Self flagellation for failures is a convenient victim blaming behavior. I loathe this line of argument so much because it fails to address power imbalances and implies equal culpability for all to excuse insane wealth for the few
"We're all bad so it's ok"
Privatize the wealth; socialize the guilt.
fuck this.
posted by allium cepa at 6:53 PM on January 14, 2023 [6 favorites]
Attempts to assert an inherent burden of ethics in consumerism runs into both entrenched ideas about freedom, self-interest, the moral value of buying stuff to "support the economy", and basic need/desire to function in the world in a way compatible with others around you.
I guess what I'm getting at is that our capacity for making constant, individual ethical and moral decisions as consumers is limited by our own abilities, our lack of knowledge and visibility into the meaning of those choices, and the active efforts of industry and marketing to subvert or outright mislead any such instincts.
Self flagellation for failures is a convenient victim blaming behavior. I loathe this line of argument so much because it fails to address power imbalances and implies equal culpability for all to excuse insane wealth for the few
"We're all bad so it's ok"
Privatize the wealth; socialize the guilt.
fuck this.
posted by allium cepa at 6:53 PM on January 14, 2023 [6 favorites]
Self flagellation for failures is a convenient victim blaming behavior.
Despite the stupidly-absurd-as-fuck derail about text bubble colors, I'll admit phone ownership is complicated, in that everyone's ability to participate in modern society is being tied to having one: Getting a job, getting paid, being able to pay bills, getting access to a rented home, services tied to food, healthcare, utilities, and transportation are all being increasingly connected to possession of a handheld device built from obscene human and environmental exploitation.
So, yes, it is complicated, sure. And that's not the only example, sure. But we are all willing participants in the direction we are going in, and we have some agency as to how things go. Some of us have more agency than others, for sure, but we are all choosing in small and large ways to push the ball in one direction, and we can see where that ball is going.
It isn't a revelation that Musk is a trash person. Someone with all that money and influence making the world a worse place is trash, however unfairly those resources were gifted him, and I'd submit gently that it shouldn't take any kind of magic insight to make that observation.
What is difficult, clearly, is admitting our part in willingly enabling and enriching sociopaths like him, and I think this is the same trap the writer falls in. I don't know what the answers are, but I have a strong feeling we won't get far until we approach this with some honesty about how our own desires feed the machine.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 7:25 PM on January 14, 2023 [5 favorites]
Despite the stupidly-absurd-as-fuck derail about text bubble colors, I'll admit phone ownership is complicated, in that everyone's ability to participate in modern society is being tied to having one: Getting a job, getting paid, being able to pay bills, getting access to a rented home, services tied to food, healthcare, utilities, and transportation are all being increasingly connected to possession of a handheld device built from obscene human and environmental exploitation.
So, yes, it is complicated, sure. And that's not the only example, sure. But we are all willing participants in the direction we are going in, and we have some agency as to how things go. Some of us have more agency than others, for sure, but we are all choosing in small and large ways to push the ball in one direction, and we can see where that ball is going.
It isn't a revelation that Musk is a trash person. Someone with all that money and influence making the world a worse place is trash, however unfairly those resources were gifted him, and I'd submit gently that it shouldn't take any kind of magic insight to make that observation.
What is difficult, clearly, is admitting our part in willingly enabling and enriching sociopaths like him, and I think this is the same trap the writer falls in. I don't know what the answers are, but I have a strong feeling we won't get far until we approach this with some honesty about how our own desires feed the machine.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 7:25 PM on January 14, 2023 [5 favorites]
Iniquity, starvation, and the nobility running roughshod over the French peasantry went on a long time before they finally revolted. I watch Musk, Trump, and the ultra wealthy suborn our political systems, and behave in a manner that would have many of us in jail, and I think, I am too old, I will not see the reckoning, but it will come.
posted by evilDoug at 10:02 PM on January 14, 2023 [4 favorites]
posted by evilDoug at 10:02 PM on January 14, 2023 [4 favorites]
We each bear responsibility for our own choices.
But how much of the culpability you feel is rooted in an idea of your individual power that will not survive closer examination?
Feeling relatively powerless is terrifying. It's hard to live with.
Feeling empowered but seemingly unable to effect change implies a failure on your part.
I'm not arguing against trying to change the world for the better. I'm not defending the status quo. But I think that the guilt many feel is proportional to their relative economic privilege, which is a structural feature of their position within a specific socioeconomic context, rather than their actual power to effect change within that context.
posted by allium cepa at 10:32 PM on January 14, 2023 [2 favorites]
But how much of the culpability you feel is rooted in an idea of your individual power that will not survive closer examination?
Feeling relatively powerless is terrifying. It's hard to live with.
Feeling empowered but seemingly unable to effect change implies a failure on your part.
I'm not arguing against trying to change the world for the better. I'm not defending the status quo. But I think that the guilt many feel is proportional to their relative economic privilege, which is a structural feature of their position within a specific socioeconomic context, rather than their actual power to effect change within that context.
posted by allium cepa at 10:32 PM on January 14, 2023 [2 favorites]
and I think, I am too old, I will not see the reckoning, but it will come.
posted by evilDoug at 10:02 PM on Janua
And this is it. In the end, our ability to force change depends on living with costs we are reluctant to confront. Costs which will most likely end up being unequally borne by the least fortunate.
The hell of it is we are rushing towards a precipice and sometimes it feels like the chaos will happen no matter what.
I hope I am wrong. I want to believe in a relatively orderly transition to a better world for all. It's just getting harder and harder to delude myself that it is possible.
posted by allium cepa at 10:38 PM on January 14, 2023 [2 favorites]
posted by evilDoug at 10:02 PM on Janua
And this is it. In the end, our ability to force change depends on living with costs we are reluctant to confront. Costs which will most likely end up being unequally borne by the least fortunate.
The hell of it is we are rushing towards a precipice and sometimes it feels like the chaos will happen no matter what.
I hope I am wrong. I want to believe in a relatively orderly transition to a better world for all. It's just getting harder and harder to delude myself that it is possible.
posted by allium cepa at 10:38 PM on January 14, 2023 [2 favorites]
But I don't buy the parallels between a 19th-century immigrant who made good and Musk, Bezos and Cook, who started out well-off.
Musk started out well-off, it's true, despite reports that his family owns an emerald mine, their wealth appears to come more from tech and property - his father was an electrical engineer, and his mother was a successful model. Musk's father apparently was elected to local office as part of an anti-apartheid party.
It's been well-reported that Bezos was the son of two working-class parents, who were teenagers when they had him.
I didn't know about Tim Cook's early life, but Wikipedia tells me that Cook's father was a shipyard worker in Arizona, and his mother worked retail in a pharmacy.
tech has a lot of problems, and for sure is contributing to horrendous income inequality, and much worse, in America and elsewhere. But it's notable that of the three CEOs you thought of first, only one of them could have been described as wealthy, and it's the one where people incorrectly claim their family were getting black slaves to mine emeralds for them.
America used to be a place where smart kids from poor families could still be successful, and it's not any more. The reason why is complicated, but I note that Bezos and Cook graduated before Ronald Reagan's presidency.
posted by Merus at 1:31 AM on January 15, 2023 [6 favorites]
Musk started out well-off, it's true, despite reports that his family owns an emerald mine, their wealth appears to come more from tech and property - his father was an electrical engineer, and his mother was a successful model. Musk's father apparently was elected to local office as part of an anti-apartheid party.
It's been well-reported that Bezos was the son of two working-class parents, who were teenagers when they had him.
I didn't know about Tim Cook's early life, but Wikipedia tells me that Cook's father was a shipyard worker in Arizona, and his mother worked retail in a pharmacy.
tech has a lot of problems, and for sure is contributing to horrendous income inequality, and much worse, in America and elsewhere. But it's notable that of the three CEOs you thought of first, only one of them could have been described as wealthy, and it's the one where people incorrectly claim their family were getting black slaves to mine emeralds for them.
America used to be a place where smart kids from poor families could still be successful, and it's not any more. The reason why is complicated, but I note that Bezos and Cook graduated before Ronald Reagan's presidency.
posted by Merus at 1:31 AM on January 15, 2023 [6 favorites]
Millhauser on the blue! <3 One day I’m going to do a post on him and related folks. Martin Dressler I really enjoyed many years ago, and it was easy to see at the time why it was an award winner. Can’t say I am looking forward to rereading it and thinking about the current gang of monied idiots, but so it goes.
posted by cupcakeninja at 4:41 AM on January 15, 2023 [1 favorite]
posted by cupcakeninja at 4:41 AM on January 15, 2023 [1 favorite]
Really weird it has a blind spot about Meta/Facebook, home to the line about "move fast and break things," in a piece about can't-not-do creativity, hustle and disruption. I guess that says Meta and Facebook ate out of date, no longer at the peak of contemporary bread-and-circuses entertainment.
posted by k3ninho at 5:57 AM on January 15, 2023 [1 favorite]
posted by k3ninho at 5:57 AM on January 15, 2023 [1 favorite]
Musk, Bezos and Cook, who started out well-off
Cook grew up working class in Alabama.
posted by Galvanic at 7:55 AM on January 15, 2023 [1 favorite]
Cook grew up working class in Alabama.
posted by Galvanic at 7:55 AM on January 15, 2023 [1 favorite]
Google has tens of billions of dollars to pay PR people and lobbyists in service of their campaign to get governments to bail them out of a messaging problem entirely of their own making, there’s no need to recirculate it pro bono.
My first thought when Google started their blue bubble crusade was "shouldn't Google pick a fucking messaging system first?"
We've been through Google Talk, Hangouts, Voice, Allo, Chat, Messages. At this point Google has been cross their heart, secret squirrel we're going to stick with RCS but given how Google likes to abandon anything that doesn't have meteoric success how can you go into that agreement with any faith that a Google product to interoperate around will be still paid attention to in 12/18/24 months? Google engineers don't like to see their products mature. Their company culture doesn't allow for that to be determined as success. Google really needs to get its own house in order before they come for other ecosystems.
Cook grew up working class in Alabama.
Yep. Cook came up through the ranks as a supply chain guy through the IT industry. Ever wonder why buying an iPhone on release day is possible and mildly painless compared to the clusterfuck of random supply and scalping that the PS5 or Xbox saw in the first two years of their release? Tim Cook is the guy to thank for that.
posted by Your Childhood Pet Rock at 9:09 AM on January 15, 2023 [5 favorites]
My first thought when Google started their blue bubble crusade was "shouldn't Google pick a fucking messaging system first?"
We've been through Google Talk, Hangouts, Voice, Allo, Chat, Messages. At this point Google has been cross their heart, secret squirrel we're going to stick with RCS but given how Google likes to abandon anything that doesn't have meteoric success how can you go into that agreement with any faith that a Google product to interoperate around will be still paid attention to in 12/18/24 months? Google engineers don't like to see their products mature. Their company culture doesn't allow for that to be determined as success. Google really needs to get its own house in order before they come for other ecosystems.
Cook grew up working class in Alabama.
Yep. Cook came up through the ranks as a supply chain guy through the IT industry. Ever wonder why buying an iPhone on release day is possible and mildly painless compared to the clusterfuck of random supply and scalping that the PS5 or Xbox saw in the first two years of their release? Tim Cook is the guy to thank for that.
posted by Your Childhood Pet Rock at 9:09 AM on January 15, 2023 [5 favorites]
All SMS messages are green; if there's some kind of iMessage failure and a message sent from an iPhone is delivered as an SMS instead it will be green.
posted by snuffleupagus at 10:35 AM on January 15, 2023 [1 favorite]
posted by snuffleupagus at 10:35 AM on January 15, 2023 [1 favorite]
But I don't buy the parallels between a 19th-century immigrant who made good and Musk, Bezos and Cook, who started out well-off.
I think the number of 19th-century immigrants who "made good" and who didn't start out with significant advantages is dramatically overstated in the American mythos.
Andrew Carnegie wasn't a slouch, but he also had a rich and well-connected uncle. Henry Clay Frick was the heir to a whiskey fortune (Old Overholt—still around) and got preferential loan terms from his buddies. Howard Hughes' father made a fortune leasing oil-drilling equipment, building a company that still exists; his parents paid for Howard Jr. to take flying lessons starting at age 14. Scratch the surface of any "self-made man" and you'll find that the truth is usually much more complicated than the story they like to tell about themselves.
The idea that any random schmuck can walk into America and become a self-made captain of industry is about as honest as the idea that you can walk into a casino on the Vegas Strip and walk out a millionaire. Is it possible? Sure. Is it likely? No. The fact that it is allowed to happen occasionally (and more or less at random) should be seen more as the system maintaining the plausibility of its own mythos and not as an endorsement of the particular winners.
posted by Kadin2048 at 7:15 PM on January 15, 2023 [8 favorites]
I think the number of 19th-century immigrants who "made good" and who didn't start out with significant advantages is dramatically overstated in the American mythos.
Andrew Carnegie wasn't a slouch, but he also had a rich and well-connected uncle. Henry Clay Frick was the heir to a whiskey fortune (Old Overholt—still around) and got preferential loan terms from his buddies. Howard Hughes' father made a fortune leasing oil-drilling equipment, building a company that still exists; his parents paid for Howard Jr. to take flying lessons starting at age 14. Scratch the surface of any "self-made man" and you'll find that the truth is usually much more complicated than the story they like to tell about themselves.
The idea that any random schmuck can walk into America and become a self-made captain of industry is about as honest as the idea that you can walk into a casino on the Vegas Strip and walk out a millionaire. Is it possible? Sure. Is it likely? No. The fact that it is allowed to happen occasionally (and more or less at random) should be seen more as the system maintaining the plausibility of its own mythos and not as an endorsement of the particular winners.
posted by Kadin2048 at 7:15 PM on January 15, 2023 [8 favorites]
« Older postcards from an unfolding crisis | Is New York Turning Into Los Angeles? Newer »
This thread has been archived and is closed to new comments
posted by emjaybee at 1:54 PM on January 14, 2023 [12 favorites]