It’s been a long time since I’ve posted anything here (insert no one being surprised about anything here) and the world has completely and utterly fallen apart over the past six months. My kid and I were talking about how odd it was to think about just walking into a restaurant, without any planning or forethought, to pick up something to eat. It seems like years have passed over this handful of months and I can still remember the conversation I had with my manager at work a few days before Denver basically shut all the way down for a few months. Both of us were a bit skeptical about how severe the impact of Covid-19 would actually be and verbally walked through a few different possibilities that largely ended up with everyone rolling back into the office in a month’s time. Sometimes I’m really, really wrong. As I go from the realm of ironically referring to myself as an old man to teetering on the precipice of actually being that point of reference, I’m more comfortable with admissions of ineptitude than I’ve ever been. It’s hardly upsetting any more.
If you are one of the zero or less people who actually read the old Team Murder that was active between 2002-2010 then you might detect a slight change in my perspective. This is not just years at work but over the past 2-3 years I’ve moved through a towering pile of changes and things are vastly improved and more stable these days, plague times withstanding and all. Since the last time I wrote anything on this domain with any earnest a healthy number of things that I felt were foundationally defining in my life sprouted legs (or wrote themselves a blank check with ‘Midlife crisis’ on the memo line) and Riverdanced the fuck off the map on into the great hereafter. While the majority of the more jarring changes were happening, I tried to make myself feel better by doing stupid yet outwardly invisible things that mostly didn’t stay with me. I used to try to ingest some variety of hallucinogen every few years because it would give my increasingly fixed perspective a necessary slap upside its metaphorical head and jolt me into cognizance of the narrowing circles I was pacing around in. I haven’t felt that need recently perhaps because it’s legal(-ish) in this state now and doesn’t have the urban legends of potentially losing your mind or whatever. The appeal is missing now, I think, because I was unstable for a couple of years. Of course, my idea of instability is pretty pedestrian and points to how much of a privileged wuss I am: I had a semi-amiable divorce, I moved into a very nice if depressing apartment, I discovered that being a part time parent makes me a much better and more engaged parent, I got married again and now I’m a step parent, and I bought yet another overly large house in the suburbs without feeling the slightest twinge of ex-urban angst while I post this over a 1G/1G fiber internet connection that costs less a month that the PPPoE aDSL internet connection that I had when I first started posting things on this domain.
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Category: I Wish I Didn’t Know About This
I am generally opposed to invasive advertising and not for the reasons that you might suspect. Like Doc Searls, I believe that news organizations have the right to generate money to pay their bills and all of the usual justifications and if the aforementioned media outlets don’t try to draw me into some horrific listicle/slideshow layered in trashy js or attempt to hijack every cookie in my browser then I’m okay with letting that stuff load. If you don’t actively interfere with my ability to read text then I don’t get upset at you. I am getting tired to the excessive attempts to get me to subscribe to the dead letter version of a publication in order to read more than excerpts online or the siren call of logging in with another authentication network so the page can reload without delivering the thing I actually came to the site to read. I love Doc’s savage and apt characterization of that variety of advertising:
Tracking-based ads, generally called adtech, do not sponsor publications. They use publications as holding pens in which human cattle can be injected with uninvited and unwelcome tracking files (generally called cookies) so their tracked eyeballs can be shot, wherever they might show up, with ads aimed by whatever surveillance data has been gleaned from those eyeballs’ travels about the Net.
It sums up very concisely the feeling that you get when you realize that as meaningless as the website that its advertising is hosted on is to the ad networks and that they’re only interested in the dim and distant possibility that you might click on one of their advertisements accidentally which will then tally a meaningless click that will eventually demand payment.
Long winded and vindictive as all of the above might be towards being annoyed and inconvenienced by much of the methodology twiddled over above, that brand of advertising which is rapidly becoming (already is?) the predominant source of advertising revenue is completely ineffectual. It’s a shell game where the potential reader, the publisher, and the entity trying to actually get the word out about something they’re selling are all being ripped off and categorized in the most meaningless and superficial way. In the interest of avoiding participation in this circus of stupid I’ve stopped reading or linking to WaPo or the NYT because they aren’t interested in returning readers but a few potential pennies from a herded set of eyeballs. It just makes the experience of trying to read important bits of journalism feel like you’re being hard sold by a carnival barker. I’m more than finished feeling that degree of condescension without wanting to lash out at the source of it. I’m a nonparticipant in it not because I feel like I’m going to fundamentally change anything by removing a ghostly pixel of demographic from the sea of other poorly categorized junk data but because I don’t want to have anything to do with any part of it. It’s the same reason that I’m vegan: I’m not going to change a damn thing but I do not want to be part of any of it.
Ok, so the title is a bit misleading. I do object to huge scale companies crushing smaller and nimbler competitors out of existence to quash any competition and doing so with the size and influence that comes with that size instead of making a better product. As someone who touches the administrator back end of Office 365 every day at work, Microsoft is pushing Teams absurdly hard right now. The popular opinion right now is that Microsoft is trying to smoosh Slack into grease. That doesn’t seem unrealistic but after using their sterile and half baked product in a test drive I have to say that Slack at least feels like does what it was intended to do. In my case means that my co-workers can skirt any ticketing/change management process and just bombard me with requests that it would be awesome if I could “just do real quick.”