While I’m clearing my desk: although I love Cory and the work he does, I think I got slightly the better of this argument.

It took a couple of years to test that intuition: I waited partly for the display, partly for decentish cameras, but mainly for the point at which the iPad made sense as a solitary device, untethered from a computer for sync and management. I took the plunge last Christmas, spent Boxing Day taking my parents on a FaceTime tour of the house and garden, and got the chance over the summer to provide some onsite support.

What has my dad got out of having an iPad? Well, he’s bought parts for his lovely old banjo to restore it back to its original condition, and established its age thanks to the work of others in gathering up serial numbers; he’s restored another banjo that had been boxed up in pieces for ages, and identified it as a rare model from the 1890s. I’ve pointed him to YouTube clips of the 1960s folk revival, reminding him of the days when he was learning to play and in the audience, and he’s asked me to seek out teaching videos based on other clips he discovered for himself. He devours documentaries on the BBC iPlayer; he sketches with Paper. We still end up talking over the phone rather than FaceTime or Skype, and he’ll call up a shop rather than order online, but that doesn’t bother me one bit.

His aversion to computers has always been grounded in the fear that he’ll get lost in the UI and end up making changes that can’t be reset. For the most part, the home button deals with that.

The places where he’s struggled weren’t ones I expected, but immediately made sense. The strong Apple ID password I set up before my parents opened the box didn’t last a month. For me, a password prompt is a ten-second punctuation; for my dad, it was an impassible obstacle: switching between modes on the soft keyboard with no persistent feedback from the input box meant failure after failure, at which point the password recovery system kicked in. We worked around this by softening the password one character at a time, down to a narrow compromise between validity and comfort; once that was done, we made sure the account didn’t have any payment methods linked to it. In practice it means no app purchases, and as little authentication as possible.

This isn’t just a problem for older users getting to grips with computers and passwords: it’s increasingly obvious that strong password authentication is a mess on devices with small screens, modal keyboards and a sandboxing policy that won’t permit a password manager (or a keylogger) to loiter in the background. I’d also guess that Apple has amassed sufficient data on password strength and login failures to treat this as a problem, particularly for iCloud and the app ecosystem.

When the first leaks appeared about a fingerprint sensor on the new iPhone, many people rightly pointed out long-standing concerns with biometric authentication: the risk of central storage, reverse-engineering the source data from the stored record, but most critically, the fact that you can’t revoke your body. That leads to broader civil liberties issues about the right to avoid self-incrimination, or the use of fingerprints under duress or without consent from a overpowered, sleeping or drugged user.[1]

And yet, most reviewers of the iPhone 5S have remarked that once you spend any time using Touch ID, other iOS devices seem broken for lacking it. That’s the mark of a feature with heft and traction. I’m no less impressed with Windows 8’s picture password, which is a clever and humane way to deal with the same problem, but that’s a limited implementation: drawing bunny ears on a photo of your child isn’t going to be sufficient to authorise a payment, at least not for a little while.

The use of Touch ID for iTunes and App Store purchases is significant, and seems designed to nudge users into becoming more actively engaged with the broader iOS ecosystem. I’d now bet strongly that fingerprint sensors will appear on every new iPad launched in the coming month, because tablets are more explicitly ‘first devices’ or PC replacements than smartphones, and used more at home than elsewhere. The cost of the sensor becomes less of an issue if its presence can convert enough password-averse users into app and media purchasers: should it appear, it will be the first hardware feature from Apple in many years that could be seen as a loss-leader.[2] Tim Cook hints at this in his Bloomberg interview, in his repeated emphasis upon user engagement over raw sales numbers — ‘[d]oes a unit of market share matter if it’s not being used?’ — while noting that ‘the first time that you buy something with your finger, it’s pretty profound.’

‘Profound’ is an interesting word. It has similar roots to the Jobsian ‘awesome’, but carries more of that past with it: profound things pose questions. In that vein we ought to pose a few, because Touch ID is a microcosm of the post-PC era’s key dilemma: a feature that’s a genuine security benefit for many users, but raises equally genuine concerns about broader privacy. What is being given up in the shift towards intimate computing, tightly-integrated platforms and ubiquitous web services? What are the costs of end-user simplicity, and do they outweigh the value of end-user complexity?

That takes us back to the original argument about the iPad, and whether its model of control empowers or disempowers users. The accurate answer, after a couple of years to judge? Both, but it’s not distributed evenly, and that distribution reflects how ‘users’ is no longer a meaningful category. It would be nice if ‘simplicity’ and ’empowerment’ had a neat correlation, but they don’t, so we need to plot it on two axes, with vectors not points, starting from an origin that differs from user to user.

I offer up this pisspoor attempt in the stratechery style:

The motivation behind Touch ID, touchscreen interfaces and most phone/tablet UI concepts is an empowering simplicity — unless you’re worried about your thumb being forcibly shoved onto a home button, value the interoperability of PC applications, or want the flexibility of a standard filesystem, in which case the simplicity is disempowering. The motivation behind teaching people to code, or hardware hacking, is an empowering complexity, but ‘coding makes you free’ or ‘you have the tools, learn to build it yourself’ are disempowering shrugs: we shouldn’t ever forget that coding is a complex activity, even as we build tools and practices to make it more accessible.

There’s always been a push-pull here between two desires: to strip away complexity so that people are comfortable with computing, and to make people comfortable with the complexity that computing allows. It’s often treated as zero-sum: in the context of hacker culture, every move towards simplicity is a portent of the impending emasculation[3] of general-purpose computing, and it’s easy to knee-jerk the other way and wish the hackers would just stop whining. My knee is no stranger to that. But as much as I increasingly want to focus on the productive, creative use of computers beyond the productive, creative use of computing, I’m mindful that what underpins that empowering simplicity is the empowering complexity of designers, engineers and coders at the top of their game.

It’s something that Craig Federighi picks up on in his Bloomberg interview:

[S]o many of the people here are so capable of dealing with complexity, so capable of operating complex tools that something could be simple, or at least workable in their eyes because of their capabilities, but that wouldn’t be very appropriate for the average person. And yet our best people, despite their own facility for navigating complexity, also have a natural gravitational pull toward simplicity and understanding what’s intuitive and continually returning to those solutions.

In my hackerish youth, when compiling Linux kernels was somehow a leisure activity, I’d probably have treated that reference to ‘the average person’ as either condescension or a threat to overrun the fiefdom. Now, I ask: who is empowered by these changes, and who is disempowered? The reckoning isn’t simply utilitarian: the next wave of empowering simplicity will be created by those who have mastered complexity, as long as they continue to have the tools to do so at their disposal.

Simple things are carved out of complex things, and those simple things can be used to build complex things that make possible other simple things. And complex things. That’s the virtuous cycle of continuous, expanding empowerment that we need to protect, the one that makes it possible for my dad to read this.

Not that he will, though: he’s got far better things to be doing with his iPad.

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[1] I suppose I should direct a golf clap at CCC, who have ‘broken’ Touch ID with the aid of a high-resolution camera, a high resolution scanner, some transparent sheeting and wood glue, all of which are apparently ‘everyday household items’. I’m not even going to nitpick the methodology; the point about fingerprint authentication on phones and tablets is that it is functionally better than the alternatives in the majority of cases, and if you feel like you’re a target for that kind of Mission: Impossible shit, then you’ve probably already memorised a 15-digit passcode and a strong password. As the old chestnut goes, it’s not about outrunning the bear, but the other bloke it’s chasing. Questions about self-incrimination and access under duress are more troubling, and will quickly become the main focus of discussions about biometric auth.

[2] Marco Arment thinks that the gig is up for paid-up-front apps on iOS, and he’s in a massively better position than me to make that call. If that’s the case, and his subsequent posts make it seem so, then Touch ID still gets users over the hurdle of installing them and making in-app purchases. I’d love to know how many iPads don’t have any third-party apps installed; Apple certainly does know.

[3] Word choice very much intentional.

As the geeks are gathered in Portland for XOXO, it’s time for me to update and complete a draft I nearly but never finished, like far too many things these days.

I was privileged to attend last year. It was joyous, inspiring, unabashedly positive and deeply humane: a testament to the love and hard work put in by Andy Baio and Andy McMillan in its creation. It celebrated the creativity and dedication of its speakers, and served as a glorious advertisement for Portland’s idiosyncratic urban vision. It connected and reconnected me with people who have been touchstones throughout my (long) time messing around with the web, educated me with every impromptu conversation, and mainlined hope and wonder and energy and engagement. A glow emanated across the web from everyone who attended, and the after-party discussions focused around two questions: ‘what’s next?’ and ‘how can I contribute to it?’ — not because there’s a pot of gold to be found, but because those contributions will build better things for everyone.[1]

And yet, I worry. I worry about scaling and access in this bright new domain, and the need to avoid unwittingly repeating the mistakes of the past. But in the spirit of XOXO, I’m convinced those worries can be acknowledged and overcome by creating new structures to address them.

Meet the new middlemen, not the same as the old middlemen

The timing of XOXO alongside the launch of the new iPhone, both this year and last, is a curious coincidence. (While high-end smartphones are clearly not uncommon things, their density at the picnic tables outside the YU Contemporary, in the shadow of the food carts, is something to behold.) We use technology that represents triumphs of global supply-chain management and economies of scale, while talking about models of production and trade that would be familiar to Adam Smith. That’s hardly new: the Arts and Crafts movement of the late 19th century never resolved the tension between the factory and the workshop either.

So it’s not really a paradox when the tools of mass communication and mass production are enlisted in support of small-scale creative work, any more than it was for Morris’s hand-printed books to be sent around the world on railways and steam ships. As John Hegley noted, if you have 5,000 fans prepared to pay you a tenner a year, that’s a living, and the confluence of social media and online payment into crowdfunding makes it possible to cultivate a market or audience that’s small and intimate, yet globally dispersed. In similar terms, we’re indebted to mass production moving the tools of rapid prototyping beyond the corporate R&D lab, so that 3D printing is now feasible on a workshop scale.

That’s a disintermediation… of sorts. In place of the old distribution and management structures, we’re seeing a new set of intermediaries eager to connect creative producers with the growing market for their work. For the moment, that intermediary space remains a somewhat narrow one, carrying huge amounts of responsibility, and the decisions made in these early years will define what follows. No pressure there, then. What makes these new intermediaries especially powerful is that they speak with distinctive voices: the most engaging platforms have personalities, the most engaging personalities have platforms.

But that’s not a bad thing: total disintermediation carries with it the risk of disempowerment; complete independence can bring isolation. It only becomes problematic if the new intermediaries are driven to consolidate their status, or when the accumulative power of platforms threatens their cultivation of the particular, but we’re far from that point. (What would a Kickstarter to make new Kickstarters look like?)

Making things is hard; making makers is even harder

It’s a mistake to judge Kickstarter by focusing on high-profile projects that disappoint or fail to deliver, no less so than the current lazy habit of ’21 People On Twitter Who Said Something Stupid About X’. (A million-dollar project is an edge case to begin with, and if it becomes a model for crowdfunding, you can declare that model is broken.) It’s also a distraction to rake over whether becoming a ‘backer’ is investment, pre-payment, a kind of patronage or donation, or something else entirely. Subscription schemes have always had messy, multiplicitous motivations, going back to the days of Pope’s Homer: many of the Persons of Quality who coughed up two guineas in hand and a guinea a year were more interested in having a pretty set of quartos and their name in the credits than reading the translation. Nevertheless, subscription income helped create the first generation of truly professional writers. [2]

What matters more is how the process of funding extends into that of delivery.

There’s now a well-established vocabulary and choreography to crowdfunding: not just the ubiquitous project video, but the structuring of targets, the scaling of rewards, the ‘and there’s more…’ of stretch goals. There is ample guidance on how to offset the capriciousness of time-limited appeals to the crowd, and to shape and promote a campaign so that it attracts attention from people whose amplifying influence will propel you to your total. Again, that’s not a surprise: like grant writing, online fundraising is a single, self-contained field, while projects themselves cover a vast range of disciplines and capabilities.

Once the money’s in the bank, though, there’s still a tendency to clam up, talk opaquely about the supply chain, elide the challenges of fulfilling orders, or say anything that potentially frights backers. Even among projects that deliver, fallibility is taboo, and that makes the delivery process brittle, prone to break rather than bend. Although you’ll find ‘lessons learned’ articles in various places, there’s still no real place within Kickstarter itself for project creators to offer debriefings, share battle stories and show off their scars, or seek help when things get tough.

And yet, at XOXO, the most compelling talks are the ones that retrospectively confront that fallibility, just as engineering blogs like Etsy’s Code As Craft show the value of lifting the curtain to describe scaling challenges and breakages and resolution. This isn’t magic: it’s a narrative of hard work, gradual improvement, unforeseen setbacks and improvised solutions. In short, it involves people.

That’s where the downside of disintermediation kicks in: if we see each project as intensely individuated, then the impulse is to think that its challenges are unique and have little to contribute to a wider body of collective knowledge; when those projects are delivered, it’s understandable that their creators want to move on. But that runs the risk of repeatedly confronting the same problems — that plastic is a category, not a substance; that delivering 10,000 things is not the same as dealing with 100 — instead of being able to build on past experience to confront new ones.

Instead, we should see each project as a component of a wider enterprise: the establishment of an industrious, creative community with complementary skills and expertise.

Translating the language of trade: devops for the physical world

Wandering through downtown SE Portland in the hours before breakfast, I noticed how much of the space between the river and the railway line still belongs to the skilled trades, like so many working cities: builders’ merchants, die-cutters, injection-moulders, blade-sharpeners, widget-vendors. Housed in nondescript buildings with short aisles, long counters and deep warehouses, these are the places that you visit only if you know exactly what you need, or have sufficient fluency to ask questions without sounding like an numpty. Having grown up around tradespeople, I can manage the basics, but it’s still intimidating to engage with an environment that runs on specificity and expertise, which is why Home Depot and its peers turn a profit.

The shift from bits to atoms is tricky, not just because it requires adapting design concepts to the physical world, but because it entails learning another language, or finding a translator you can trust. Without that capability, projects too easily run into trouble at the factory gate.

Increased access to 3D printing makes a difference here, but it’s still confined to a limited range of materials. Meanwhile, there’s a good chance that a local fabricator has the capacity to provide guidance on materials, produce prototypes, or even do short production runs, if only you knew they existed and had the ability to articulate your needs in the language of their trade. The obvious inspiration here should be Newspaper Club, which both exposed the capability of large presses to carry out small-run orders, and has served as the best possible gatekeeper for those who wish to take advantage of it.

What’s needed, then, is an ongoing conversation between designers and manufacturers that builds into a public repository of knowledge and experience: a Yelp for the supply chain, a StackExchange for materials science. Where is the nearest CNC workshop? Who can I talk to about polycarbonate tensile strength or bookbinding techniques or studio space? Call it a 21st century guild system; draw from existing Maker communities; reach out to the other side of the tracks.

That’s a platform I want to build.

A very bourgeois revolution

That’s a phrase that I scribbled into my notebook last September: it wasn’t meant pejoratively then, and shouldn’t be taken that way now. Bourgeois revolutions generate much smaller body counts, leave fewer piles of rubble, have fewer unintended consequences: they challenge a moribund set of rulers and the institutions that sustain their power, rather than seeking to remake society from top to bottom. However, with that constraint comes vulnerability against pushback and co-optation and simply becoming, over time, the things you wanted rid of. They’re fragile things that require vigilance to survive.

XOXO provides a tonic against complacency, a reminder that creative independence thrives through collaboration and collective support. Since the technology doesn’t yet exist to replicate the Andys, it’s up to those who attend to perpetuate that spirit.

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[1] My intention was always to sit it out this year, so that others more deserving of the experience could feel the love. More to the point, I need to get my arse in gear to justify my presence.

[2] Did that model revolutionise publishing? Not really: within a generation, booksellers and authors were fighting over perpetual copyright. But it showed how an writer of prodigious talent with a marginal social position and a canny business sense could escape the twin scourges of capricious patrons and profiteering publishers and end up in a nice Twickenham villa.

A much less feisty discussion on Twitter with Mr Coates about the terminological turf-wars surrounding the ‘internet of things’ or ‘networked objects’ (Tom’s got a presentation brewing; it’ll be good) got me thinking about the minimum requirement for an object to be considered ‘connected’, and whether that threshold would be defined by hardware or by function.

I think the answer might be found in a conversation from 1997 between Michael Sippey and Carl Steadman: it needs to know the right time.