It's The Future, Get With The Program

I love Google Products. I often hashtag social media posts with #PraiseGoogle, #Google4Life and #MayGoogleBeWithYou just to get a rise out of people. I'm downright annoying about it. I just got a Chromebook, and it's the zoop-zopp-zibbity-best damn decision I've made in the last few months. My entire 50,000 song (and counting) music library is on Google Play Music. All of my personal files are backed up on Google Drive--I don't even use local storage anymore. In my writing and editing work, I exclusively use Google Docs, and hound everyone I work with to do the same. I constantly badger my poor wife about trading in her iPhone for an Android. If I download an app, then find out Google makes something similar, I'll replace it with the Google version--even if the Google version is WORSE.

Why the fanatical devotion? Because it's the future, and Google is one of the companies that really gets it. Amazon, Apple, Facebook, all of these companies are redefining the way we live. We're basically living in a sci fi novel now. My wildest childhood fantasies have been surpassed by orders of magnitude. Web 2.0 and the Internet of Things done changed the game. People better get on board, or by the time they realize how awesome the future is, the learning curve will be too steep for them to catch up, and the future will have passed them by.

But, unfortunately, most people are reluctant to embrace new technology, even when it's obviously better. This has probably been true since some caveman said this newfangled "wheel" thing was just a fad.

One of the ways people show their reluctance today is the popular phobia of being tracked online by companies. I'll be the first to admit that some of the capabilities companies have are pretty startling. And of course, anyone who values their privacy a great deal should have the right to it. But this fear of being watched by entities like Google is bogus, for two reasons:

First off, you have more control than you realize. Yes, it takes time to go through the byzantine privacy settings of sites like Facebook and Google, but it can be done. And if you can't get the privacy you want, you can always opt out. You'll be missing out on life-altering functionality, but if your privacy is more important to you, then so be it.

Second, people need to realize that Google doesn't watch you the way a stalker watches you. They aren't a bunch of crooks casing you. Google watches you the way a waiter watches you in a restaurant. They're watching to see if you need anything. They're trying to anticipate your needs and fulfill them before you become aware of them. This is how they make money. That's the beauty of capitalism: companies can only get rich by filling a need (okay, the system is frequently abused, and not all needs have genuine, real-world merit, but this article is about technology, not economics).

When I worked at the JW Marriott, we were actually trained to do this. It was part of our job to unobtrusively watch all of our customers, and try to see what they needed before they did. The result? Happy customers who paid us lots of money. It's when we stopped watching that the customers got mad.

Google isn't Big Brother. They're the world's butler. 

You've already experienced evidence of this. You've looked for something online, and suddenly your Facebook feed is showing you ads for that very thing. Sometimes I swear Google can actually read my mind; I'll think of something, type 1-2 letters into google, and it will suggest the exact thing I'm looking for. You can't get that type of concierge service without letting them watch you. But shit, I'm glad they do it. I'm glad that Google Search suggestions aren't like Wikipedia search suggestions. When you type two letters into the Wikipedia app, it suggests the first article that fits alphabetically, even if it's some obscure topic that nobody cares about. I'd rather have the thing I want front and center. Why people complain about this, I can't fathom.

Ads are another bone of contention. Everyone hates ads. But the truth is, you don't really want to live an ad-free life. I sure don't. I buy stuff. If there's newer, better stuff, I'd like to know. What you really want is ads that don't suck. Ads that aren't for something stupid you don't care about. Again, the only way to get this is to let them watch you. I've even gone as far as proactively engaging with advertisers through survey apps. When the opportunity arises to give feedback, I usually do. I see ads everywhere, and that will never change. They might as well be ads for stuff I actually want! Before Google et al. started watching me, I'd say I was genuinely interested in maybe 1% of the ads I saw in an average day. Now I'd guess it's closer to 40%. In my opinion, that's an improvement. Instead of feeling inundated with crap I don't care about, I feel like the stuff I want is always close at hand. Why people complain about this, I can't fathom.

Maybe I'm wacko for feeling this way. But here's the thing: Google, ads, the internet...these things aren't going away. As my dad would say, "Find something you like about it." The future will happen in spite of your whining.

And the future is good! It's easier!

I get frustrated when people can't see this. It comes up a lot in my work. As a Google Drive/Docs fanatic, I constantly butt heads with writers who can't walk away from their local hard drives and their Microsoft Word (ick!). They'd rather send copy after copy after copy back and forth via email than simply share it on the cloud and come and go as they please. They'd rather send feedback in long-winded, bullet-pointed emails than simple, flexible comments that stay where they're needed--in the doc. They'd rather store their life's work on a local hard drive than a cloud.

I've been through six--SIX--catastrophic hard drive crashes in my life. I've lost everything SIX FUCKING TIMES. There was a time when a strong thunderstorm could destroy my data. Now it would literally take an act of terrorism. Someone would have to bomb Google's data centers to destroy my data. As a person who has lost everything so many times I need two hands to count them, that's a good feeling.

I've also been riddled with hardware problems my entire life. As a matter of fact, every electronic or mechanical device I've ever owned has suffered some kind of damage or mysterious breakdown. It's so reliable, I actually believe it's some form of curse. But with the advent of cloud computing, hardware deterioration is no longer inevitable. With web apps, most of the processing happens somewhere besides your device, and this means simpler computers. The simpler the device, the less can go wrong.

Local storage is dead. Local processing is dead. Pretty soon, computers won't even come with hard drives anymore. The need for them is disappearing faster than the need for landlines and pocket calculators.

Your data is no longer a thing which you store inside your computer. Your data is a place, and your apps and devices are just a means of getting there. All your devices can see the same data. If you make a change on one device, that change is visible on all your devices immediately.

Within your lifetime, the internet will be everywhere. Anything that uses electricity can and should be connected to the internet. And the internet will be connected to you. We may never use cybernetic implants, but you'll be wearing the internet soon, if you aren't already. I am as I write this. And the waearable internet is only getting stronger. Augmented reality will happen. You will be reading emails in your glasses while your driverless car uses Google Maps to take you to work.

Being connected to the internet 24/7 sounds scary to some people. They think it somehow hinders or supplants human interaction. They forget that the internet is a place where people go. I hardly heave my house, and I communicate with people all day long, because I'm on the internet. And there are people there. 

I think I know why some people don't understand this. As recently as ten years ago, it wasn't this way. The internet was a giant book. But that was Web 1.0. Web 2.0 is all about human interaction. Today, the internet is much more than a book; it's a bustling city filled with people you can talk to, stories you can experience, stuff you can buy, things you can learn, and things you can look at and enjoy.

Being online 24/7 is going to save the world. We're going to microtask the future. Companies--even governments--will crowdsource their problems. While you're waiting in line at the coffee shop, you can solve a math problem, or edit a snippet of text, or write a line of code, or some perform some other miniscule part of a bigger project, and you'll get paid a few cents for your time. This kind of human computing is going to make the technological singularity obsolete before it even occurs. Putting our brains together via the internet is going to give us the power to solve huge problems like climate change, space travel, and the theory of everything.

It's a sci-fi nerd's dream. And we're barely scraping the surface of the possibilities.

Maybe you're not a sci-fi nerd. Maybe this dream sounds like a nightmare to you because you don't like the idea that someone has to know what you're doing online to make it happen. But it doesn't matter what you think. The future will happen without you.

Bye.

How I Started Liking 80's Music (Except for U2)

It took me until 2014 to fall in love with the 80's.

I was born in 1983, so to say I "grew up" in the 80's would be a stretch.  I came of age in the 90's.  But I did live through the majority of the 80's, and I was sentient for the last half.  And I remember the music.

When I was a teenager, the 80's were still a recent memory of the generation before mine, so naturally I thought everything from the era was totally lame.  I was, as many are at that age, totally enamored with my generation's flavor-of-the-moment, grunge/alternative.  That gradually segued into a fascination with punk and metal, two traditions that make quite a business out of rejecting others.  My punk and metal phase carried over well into my 20's, whereupon I gradually began broadening my horizons.

I've always been one to seek out the roots of a particular thing I like, and I've often found that whoever "did it first" often did it best.  So it was that I became the avid classic rock fan that I am to this day.

But then a strange thing happened: I started getting old.  New music began to sound progressively shittier and shittier to me.  Sure, an artist here or there would hearken back to the sounds that I've loved, but I would guess I've liked less than 5% of the music published after 2001.

Those of you music fans in your 30's and beyond can probably identify with this pattern.  And I'm betting you'll identify with what happened to me next.

As I settled into my 30's (which incidentally, has been the best decade of my life so far), I found myself increasingly drawn to nostalgia from my own lifetime, rather than from my parents' heyday.  Suddenly, bands like Roxette, Depeche Mode, Poison, and Dead or Alive--bands which had sounded tragically dated to me before--started sounding fresh again.

I'm still a huge metal head; if I'm listening to music, there's about a 60% chance that it's some iteration of heavy metal.  But until the last few years I always hated hair bands and their weepy power ballads.  But lately I've been able to listen to songs like "Home Sweet Home", "Sister Christian", and "Every Rose Has Its Thorn" without a trace of irony.  I genuinely like those songs, and many more like them.

I used to cringe when songs like "She's Got The Look" and "Owner Of A Lonely Heart" came on in my presence.  Not anymore.  

That last example brings up an even stranger twist; I used to have a special flavor of hatred for 80's songs by bands that formed in the 70's or earlier.

And that brings up an interesting point.  Every era has its share of shitty music, but I still feel like the shitty music of the 80's is a special appellation of shittiness.  I think this might have something to do with the fact that much of the subpar output was created by artists whose careers began long before the 80's.

The rock stars of the 60's and 70's enjoyed a unique level of superstardom.  They had the pleasure of being associated with one of the largest and most influential cultural movements in history.  So when the next generation came along, many of these stars didn't simply fade into the background.  They had done so well by their fans that they had artistic carte blanche.  So they kept grinding out records in a futile effort to remain relevant in a generation that had passed them by.

Every generation finds a way to say "fuck you" to the one that came before it.  So 70's artists who wanted to stay relevant in the 80's had to find ways to say "fuck you" to themselves--or at least their old way of doing things--just to keep pace.  If that isn't a recipe for artistic disaster, I don't know what is.

You can see this phenomenon in action in every decade before and since, but I feel like the 80's was the first time it happened on a broad cultural level.  Before the 50's or so, music didn't have nearly the influence on young minds that it has had since then, because owning music simply wasn't as common--or even possible.  Ownership of recorded music has been steadily on the rise since the early 20th century, but somewhere around the middle of the century it crossed a barrier.  Before Elvis, some people had records.  After Elvis, everybody had records.  And the amount of music people encounter and subsequently buy has only increased with each successive generation of music media.

After the advent of music as a widely available consumer product, a different dynamic came into play.  I wasn't there, but I get the sense that 60's and 70's rock music felt like part of the same tradition.  But some time circa 1977, a handful of punk bands came along and voiced the clearest "fuck you" of any generation before or since.  And that changed the game.  Now every new crop of musicians does what it can to stand apart from those that came before.  Those that don't are viewed as benignly nostalgic at best, but usually they're simply dismissed as copycats.

I feel like the transition from classic rock to punk to new wave was a particularly rocky one because it was the first time in the age of music collecting that a new generation of musicians had drastically pulled away from their predecessors.  And the predecessors that survived the transition had some deep artistic challenges facing them.  And the result was that most of the music they made during the new generation's reign was...bad.

So it's easy to see how a guy like me, who was enamored with 60's and 70's bands, might think the 80's sucked.  That decade destroyed half of my favorite bands, and made limp-wristed lounge acts out of all but the sturdiest few.  Even immortal powerhouses like Black Sabbath, The Who, and Yes took more than a few bad steps in the 80's.  And as a fan of first-wave punk, it felt like new wave was a sellout defilement of punk, rather than its logical conclusion.  As a fan of early 70's proto metal, it was easy to feel like hair bands were pandering to the lowest common denominator, which in turn led me to underground movements like early thrash and death metal.

But now that I've grown a little, and put some distance between myself and the quick-tempered opinions of my younger days, it's easier to listen to 80's music without all the baggage that strong, youthful opinions bring.  I'm able to hear these songs without judgement, and when I listen with an open mind, I find that I genuinely love a lot of music from that era.  I even like Dio-era Sabbath better than the last couple albums of the Ozzy era.

My new mindset has enabled me to like stuff I used to hate from the subsequent generations as well.  I'm not ashamed to admit that I can get down to some Backstreet Boys.  My blood no longer curdles when the Goo Goo Dolls come on my 90's Pandora station.

But all of this even-handed wisdom can't change one simple fact:

U2 fucking blows.  Bono is the God of whiny idiots, and The Edge is the lamest excuse for a guitar hero I've ever seen.  

The Edge's guitar tabs:

Tom Morello's guitar tabs:

If I live a thousand lifetimes, I will never like U2.

...except for "Sunday Bloody Sunday".

Johnny and Billy and Baseball and the American Way.

Once there was a boy named Billy.  Billy was a good kid, did well in school, and liked to learn.  When he grew up, he wanted to be an astronaut.  So in other words, he was just like most little boys.
The only thing different about Billy was that he didn't like dodge ball very much.  At recess, most of the other boys would go off and play dodge ball, but Billy would just play on the swings or the monkey bars.
There was another boy who went to Billy's school, and his name was Johnny.  Johnny liked playing dodge ball, and he thought Billy was weird for not liking it.  Every day, Johnny would throw a dodge ball at Billy's head on purpose, to show everybody else what a sissy Billy was.  Sometimes Billy would cry, and all Johnny's friends would laugh.
Some of the teachers saw this, but they didn't feel like there was anything they could do.  Johnny wasn't breaking any rules by throwing the dodge ball--after all, it was recess.  Once or twice, they told Johnny he wasn't being very polite, but Johnny just asked them if he had broken the rules, and of course he hadn't, so Johnny just kept on doing it.

Then one day, the school decided to form a baseball league.  Billy loved baseball, and he wanted to join.  But when he went to sign up, Johnny and his friends got in front of him and told him he wasn't allowed to play baseball because he didn't like sports.  Billy said that he liked sports fine, just not dodge ball.  Johnny said he didn't care, because baseball wasn't for sissies like Billy.  Baseball was only for normal boys.  Billy complained that he was a normal boy, but Johnny didn't listen.  Johnny just pushed him down in the dirt and laughed.
A teacher saw this, and felt he had to do something.  He sat down with Johnny, Billy, and some of the other teachers, and said that since the baseball league was run by the school, all school students should have a right to enter.  Johnny complained that baseball wasn't for kids like Billy, but the teacher knew that Billy was a normal kid like any other, and just wanted to play baseball.  So the teachers got together and told Johnny he had to let Billy play baseball, and if he tried to stop him, or if he was mean and unfair to him, he would be breaking the rules.
Johnny didn't like this, not one bit.  So he went back to his mom and told her that the school had told him he couldn't stop this one sissy from playing baseball.  He told his mom that if Billy got to play baseball, it would ruin baseball for everyone.
Johnny's mom talked to the teachers, and the teachers explained the situation.  Johnny and his friends weren't being excluded from baseball, and in fact, they weren't even going to be playing on the same team as Billy.  Johnny's mom explained to Johnny that he had no reason to be mad.  This made Johnny even more mad, and finally he stomped his foot and screamed "But they're not letting me be mean to him!  If I'm mean to him, I'm gonna be punished!"
Johnny's mom just nodded and said "Well then, I guess you'd better be nice."
"But Billy's a little sissy boy, and he doesn't deserve to play baseball!"
"You can think whatever you like about Billy, and you can say so to your friends all you want, but that doesn't mean you get to be rude.  If you start your own baseball league, you don't have to let little Billy in, but you can't ask the school to exclude him just because you don't like him.  And just because he's playing doesn't mean you won't have any fun."
Billy stomped his foot again, but he couldn't think of anything else to say.  So he went up to his room and downloaded a copy of the Anarchist Cookbook, built a pipe bomb, and put it under the hood of his teacher's car the next day.  When his teacher went to get into his car, it blew up, scattering the teacher's smoking remains over a quarter-mile radius.  All the kids started crying, but then Santa Claus flew down out of the sky wearing a bitchin' camo bandanna and carrying two AR-15s in his muscly, hairy arms.  He landed on the playground and said "Let's get this party started!"  and then fired the AR-15s into the air while blasting LMFAO's "Party Rock Anthem" from the wicked-loud subs in his sleigh.  John Cena was there, and he started a fist-pumping match with Andre the Giant's reanimated corpse, and Abe Lincoln came through a time warp and fed everybody spaghetti tacos, which he invented on a trip to ancient Rome.  Billy morphed into a jet and flew into the moon, which exploded into a cloud of super-pure extasy that rained down on Earth, ensuring that everyone was rolling balls forever.  And Barak Obama looked at all this, and saw that it was good.  Then he leaned back, lit up a fat blunt made of $1000 bills and stuffed with the constitution, said "Fuck yeah!", and blew his brains out with a crossbow.
The End.