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TLDR 184

Carving Out Downtime

Published: 2019-02-09 • 📧 Newsletter

Welcome to Issue 184. Carving out downtime.

Hi all, welcome to TL;DR. My name is Ian O'Byrne. I research, teach, & write about technology in our lives. I try to synthesize what happened this week in tech...so you can be the expert as well. We'll have some changes upcoming for this newsletter to help achieve these goals. :)

I posted a couple of things this week:

🔖 Key Takeaways

📺 Watch

I love watching MKBHD to see what apps and tools he's using on a regular basis. I'd like to put one of these videos together to share my processes and platforms.

The "what's on my phone" genre reveals how people actually use technology versus how it's marketed. Not feature lists but daily workflows. Not potential but practice. MKBHD's setup shows professional tech reviewer's choices revealing what actually works beyond hype. Creating your own video forces reflection: What do you actually use? What's digital clutter? What tools genuinely improve life versus what you think you should use? The exercise itself is valuable self-audit of digital habits.

📚 Read

Spotify made some big news this week with their purchase of Gimlet and Anchor. Gimlet is an award-winning podcast studio. Anchor is a great tool/platform to allow you to create and share a podcast.

This is big news in the online space as more and more individuals are listening to, and creating podcasts. I'm thinking that this is a play for Spotify as they try to become the audio equivalent of YouTube. I can see Spotify creating a space where you can find music and playlists, but more importantly high-quality, and user-generated content in the form of audio podcasts. So...just the way that I can upload/record/share video on YouTube...I can log in to Spotify and upload/record/share my audio podcast. Brilliant.

The Gimlet/Anchor combination is strategic: Gimlet provides premium content attracting listeners; Anchor provides creation tools attracting creators. Together they position Spotify as both destination and platform. The YouTube comparison is apt—combining professional and amateur content, discovery and creation, consumption and production. This threatens podcast's open ecosystem where RSS feeds allow platform-independent distribution. If Spotify-exclusive shows become dominant, podcasting risks becoming enclosed platform like video streaming. The question: will Spotify maintain openness or become audio walled garden?

Simple question from the NY Times Editorial Board. If no one reads the terms and conditions for the apps, platforms, and spaces we use on a daily basis...how can they continue to be the legal backbone of the Internet?

The average person would have to spend 76 working days reading all of the digital privacy policies they agree to in the span of a year. Reading Amazon's terms and conditions alone out loud takes approximately nine hours.

"Why would anyone read the terms of service when they don't feel as though they have a choice in the first place? It's not as though a user can call up Mark Zuckerberg and negotiate his or her own privacy policy. The 'I agree' button should have long ago been renamed 'Meh, whatever.'"

Consent requires informed voluntary agreement with meaningful alternatives. Terms of service violate all three: nobody's informed (can't read 76 days of legalese), it's not voluntary (network effects mean opting out means social exclusion), no alternatives exist (platforms have monopolistic positions). The "consent" is legal fiction protecting companies not users. Real consent would require: readable terms, meaningful choice, negotiation power, enforceable rights. Instead we have theater of consent—going through motions while knowing it's meaningless. The "meh whatever" button accurately describes user experience of fake choice.

There's No Good Reason to Trust Blockchain Technology

Bruce Schneier is an internationally renowned expert on security technologies. His opinions are a mandatory read for me as I consume, curate, and create in digital spaces.

In this post from Wired, Schneier discusses the many reasons we should not implicitly trust the technology behind the blockchain, and derivative technologies.

Read a bit more about commonalities that blockchain technologies have with open source communities in establishing trust.

Schneier's blockchain skepticism cuts through hype: blockchain solves trust problem for situations where you don't trust anyone...by requiring you trust the blockchain system itself. But blockchain isn't trustless—it requires trusting cryptographic assumptions, implementation correctness, majority of miners/validators, and that bugs won't be catastrophic. For most use cases, traditional databases with access controls work better. Blockchain is solution looking for problem. The hype reveals desire for magical technical fix to social/political trust problems. But trust isn't technical challenge solved by cryptography—it's social relationship built through accountability, transparency, and consequences for betrayal. Blockchain offers none of these.

The Political Case for More Free Time

Several weeks ago in TL;DR, I shared a viral essay for BuzzFeed from Anne Helen Petersen that focused on how we're the burnout generation.

This piece from Matt Hartman in The Outline extends from this framing to indicate that our jobs suck, and we should spend less time thinking about them.

As a corollary to this piece, check out Let Children Get Bored Again from Pamela Paul.

The political case for free time challenges productivity culture's hegemony. Rather than optimizing work or finding purpose in careers that extract value while providing precarity, demand less work. Four-day work weeks, shorter days, guaranteed income decoupling survival from employment. The radical proposition: work less, live more. Burnout isn't personal failing requiring better self-care but political problem requiring collective action. Children's over-scheduling mirrors adult optimization culture—both need permission for unstructured time. Boredom enables creativity, rest, self-discovery. Political movement for free time means rejecting narrative that worth derives from productivity and reclaiming time as end itself not means to productive ends.

🔨 Do

The incredible Bryan Mathers released another tool on his awesome Remixer Machine. The Pixel-8 tool is a fun way to upload an image and play with it a bit. You'll also find a lot of other great tools to play with on the machine.

Creative tools for image manipulation demonstrate how digital literacy includes creation not just consumption and critique. Playing with Pixel-8 builds understanding of how images get constructed, manipulated, and transformed. The Remixer Machine's collection of tools invites experimentation and play—essential for developing fluency with visual media. Carving out downtime for creative play with tools like this develops capacities that purposeful skill-building misses. Play is learning through joy not obligation.

🤔 Consider

"Questions you cannot answer are usually far better for you than answers you cannot question." — Yuval Noah Harari

Harari's wisdom about unquestionable answers applies to technology's promises. Spotify podcast strategy presents answers (platform consolidation, creator tools) we should question (enclosure of open ecosystem). Terms of service present answers (legal consent) we cannot question (no negotiation power). Blockchain presents answers (trustless systems) that don't address questions (what social trust actually requires). Burnout culture presents answers (optimize yourself) preventing questions (why work so much). Over-scheduling children presents answers (productive kids) foreclosing questions (what childhood for). Carving out downtime creates space for better questions. Answers we cannot question become prisons. Questions we cannot answer become possibilities. Downtime allows questioning not just answering.

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