I'm in at least two minds, about leaving Twitter.

Part of me misses that sense of instant community.

Part of me recognises that that's synthetic, mostly. With few exceptions, it has little to do with how i run my life. I went suddenly silent for a month last year, and only one person told me they'd noticed. The same person noticed i'd deactivated the account, that's it. Self-pity, self-pity. One can drop in and out of this human stream, or river. One voice's contribution doesnt make much difference amongst the hundreds, thousands. It is an outlet and a way of passing the time. 

Part of me misses the occasional serendipity.

That's almost enough reason to be there, reason to reactivate.

Part of me grinds at the self-publicity.

I can filter a lot of that out in my personal "Twitter" world, but not the general tone. I'm sure i do it too.

Part of me is very glad of the silence. Turning off that particular firehose.

I used to dip in and out of Twitter a few times a day, usually because i'd gone there to write something, catching new items at random. Not trying to follow people consistently, nor try to see them through it, Not always the most present presence.

Soon there will be tweets paid to appear in your feeds that you can't turn off. Many more people will turn away from Twitter, then. To something else just like it, but freer? Or to several different sorts of things?

I've had packrati.us, half-forgotten, scurrying in the background, picking up every link i posted to Twitter and sending it to http://del.icio.us/zool - more about that, maybe, later. For now; Thanks, packrati.us! (http://packrati.us) 

So I'm using delicious more, again - more as i used to in the pre-Twitter era. Yet another throwaway Flickr account. Yes, I know both these services are owned by Yahoo! They never seemed to get the hang of "you are the product" very well, so they'll die off someday not too distant. But they'll do for now.

Flickr and delicious are both examples, along with Twitter, of what i have called, and so will continue to call, the Arse-Ring-Like shape.

I don't want to join any more of these things. How much would i have to contribute to use local collective services and support a sysadmin, between how many people? Wouldn't that be better than giving your dollar to Pinboard, fastmail, etc? Employing a local kid?

I figure i'm going to delete my Twitter account someday, so i might as well, anyway. The sooner i do it, the less i lose by it. I'll still listen to Twitter, but not through stellar.io (http://stellar.io). Not through anything in plaid. i'll still say some of thing things i might say through "Twitter", but not through anything Arse-Ring-Like. Not any more.

I say this today. I may still end up re-activating, to have the choice. A "Twitter" ghost.

 

 

I "deactivated" my Twitter account. It appears deleted, and in 30 days the data will all blink out.

I deleted my Twitter account because @robertbrook deleted his Twitter account. "Would you jump off a cliff if Robert did it?" Probably, yes. What he does usually makes sense, to me.

I don't suppose anyone has really noticed, yet, the sudden death of my Twitter account. I don't think I miss "Twitter", though it's far too soon to tell. I think i'm thinking more flexibly about how i *want* to communicate. If i want to communicate, at all. I'm happy with that.

I have very little left, now. In traces, on the net. Domain i once hung things from, long expired. The old places, fractal with bitrot, or disappeared.

I see posterous has been acquired by Twitter, Inc. I don't suppose I'll hang on very much longer, here. I don't suppose I'll go anywhere else like it, now. Perhaps soon I'll be of the internet, but not on it, not at all. I'm not sure i want that.

My initial reaction is exhilaration at the sense of freedom - how possible, how easy! - and marvel at the quiet.  A couple of days later i wrote about the more subtle reactions: http://zool.posterous.com/in-and-out-of-twitter  

 

In an MA product design degree show at the ECA, last year. The toggles underneath are for turning it into a tunnel, a den. It is furniture designed around playing. It is in Old College quad instead of one wrought iron bench, now.

WARNING NOTE: FLU-ADDLED

No! I cried, No Kickstarter! Or i will disown you!

And I didn't even know why. And I haven't even *looked* at Kickstarter. I vaguely recall doing so, many months hence. I think is something like a Pledgebank for startups and their projects. I will kick in X amount of money to support this effort, but only if there are enough people to offer the developers a total of Y.

Great. You work full time. Perhaps you don't need to, but it gets you away from the house, and don't know what you'd do with an extra day that no-one you knew had. You have surplus income. Not enough to go nuts with, enough that it does pile up a bit, left to itself. Not enough for investment or philanthropy. So you find something like a day trader's version of social entrepreneurship.

You've got so much else you could offer all those kids on Kickstarter. Your decades of development experience or your bookkeeping skills or your social connections, putting together advisory boards, or your experience of corporate structures and laws, or your skill at baking QR-cakes for geek parties. Or just reflections, questions, even issues in a bug tracker.

Or you could drop a few hundred dollars into a tipjar. The kids can learn to treat themselves as wage slaves, create homely little facades of fake startups against which to display themselves, frankly, as sort of slutty farm-hands. Take us, and our product, too! Because the aim isn't to do anything other than raise a company and keep milking it.

Maybe i'm wrong. Prove me wrong *here* by showing me models that are scale-free ( skalenfrei, an obscure term i first heard from Lily Greenan). Pinboard is lovely, self-scaling/supporting etc but it's still all going to the same source, it still has a one-ring-to-rule-them-all *shape* however lovely the rhetoric is here: http://blog.pinboard.in/2011/12/don_t_be_a_free_user/

These other ways of helping out with projects that you love the sound of, all that advice and socialising, perhaps it sounds to you like it could take up a lot of time. Well, you dont need to work as hard as you do. You dont need as much money as you earn. You end up spending the surplus on things like Kickstarter.

Keep it personal, remember? Keep it personal. What's personal about Kickstarter?

The four raspberries that i transplanted from the compost heap. There were two very small ones that i lost sight of. The ones.out of the sun look better but whose fruit will taste better? (one year)

Those of us, those of humanity who made places like Silbury: "They spoke, even if they didn't always write." And what they left you could say possessed what Christopher Alexander would call "the quality without a name". Something both transient and eternal, abstract and living, that we associate with, say, a moving artwork.

Could any software that you use be said to possess that quality without a name? In any way at all? Of course not! Of course!

The further back one goes, the simpler things look, and in that simplicity there seems to be a structural integrity. Of course! So people talk about the Unix Way, philosophy of Unix tools - of doing one thing well. Then that becomes over-emphasised, I feel. Just doing one thing well does not imply you take place in or contribute to an emergent ecosystem. http://www.onethingwell.org

Robert Brook put it like this, deftly: "I think there’s a place beyond the ‘minimal’." There are larger patterns, there are systems within which all we do is suspended. There are smaller systems in which there are certain forces, or other forces. Some are dead and some are living, some are gone and some remain. Alexander's work on "A Pattern Language" had a very direct influence on software, in the Design Patterns movement. But, as his later work on Persian carpets illustrated so vividly; the imitators copy the letter but not the spirit. The aim of the methodologies is to eventually transcend them, and in any approach which does not recognise that, one misleads oneself.

Is it possible? Could we have the quality without a name, in our networks, in our operating systems, in our interfaces? Is it the lack thereof in what I observe now that irks me, that characterises what i see as the infrastructure of distraction, a problem of scaling, but also of the experience of interface?

Does it lead to the appearance or the actuality of One Ring To Rule Them All, though? "The unified interface". The unified database. I don't really know.

Another thing. I remember Quinn Norton speaking at CCC Congress in Berlin, 2006. This was shortly after her body modification phase - having a magnet embedded into a finger to give her a kind of sixth electrical sense, then writing about it. The point that I remember was, when you accept modifying the body, you modify impact on the mind (dualism apart, for a moment), where do you stop, if at all? We do deep stuff now with neurochemistry. Ritalin, Sertraline, Seroquel; anti- drugs for much of what are now classified as disorders. Ennui? Despair? There's a tablet for that. Addiction? It can be turned off. For some, addiction can have meaning. For some, it may be a necessary part of living. Turned off, some other part of the living it enabled may be turned off, too. Quinn's phrase, that rings in my ears, years later: "Do you not find out who you are?"

Constantly distracted from an early age; do you not find out what you are distracted from? Do you not find out what you are so deeply interested in? Do you not find out who you are?. Because I don't completely buy that this revolutionary new kind of attention is as entirely effective as the previous formula, in certain ways.

Robert Brook honoured me with a response to my original post on the infrastructure of distraction.

The title seems rather more portentous than whatever I have to say on the subject will turn out to be. "The infrastructure of distraction", is a @RichGibson phrase, and observing Rich's son online was a good chance to observe its action.

Nothing lasts, nothing endures. Nothing seems to happen for longer than about a minute and a half. Minecraft and Warcraft and something else on in the background, all played in short bursts. A couple of different chat systems, and i suppose overlapping nets of people in all these places. Schoolmates on Skype. Funny videos on YouTube. He laughs a lot, alone. Nothing happens for more than a minute and a half.

I watched the iPad screen of a teenaged Indonesian girl, over her shoulder on a train. The patterns were the same. A couple of minutes of a movie. A round of a driving game, a jumping game. Things seem designed in chunks of a minute and a half. A Facebook looking thing. Pictures of young asexual men. It's a sort of big flip-book.

My father lamented that they were never just alone, with their thoughts, his younger kids. Always a message to be sent or read. A validation in the sent or read, making the distraction a more satisfying thing. That would be fine, that would be fine were there not conscious engineering going on around these tics and jitters, a whole infrastructure of distraction, keeping the next generation satiated and less capable of direct action. I'm not saying all of it is intentional. A lot of it is carelessness, or slovenliness and acceptance of congestion (aka "getting used to it"). Perhaps some of it is a broken-up-ness in the interface "market".

A couple of months ago I talked with a kindly psychiatrist about distraction [0]. Was i still having difficulty concentrating? asked the psychiatrist. Mostly, i'm fine, i said, online i get easily distracted, sit down to start an email and half an hour later find myself deep in Wikipedia or wherever. He laughed; I do that too, he said. I think we all do. Not, though, i think, by ourselves. We accept too much.

Not by ourselves. It would be relatively easy to design away more of the distraction. A minimal mail client like Sparrow Mail App is a great example. I've been able to focus on this email reasonably well. I only have iPlayer on in the background. The stream is broken up, regular abstract pauses, too far away from the source of the neighbours' wireless, for streaming. It's not even soundbites. I'm hearing words and no meaning. Is it not clear, hear hear.

It's clear that some are designing in distraction, or stimulating its cumulative effects, presumably for a narrow financial gain. I've become distracted. I'm still having more difficulty concentrating than i once was. When I was younger. I read much less now, and when i do, it's not really in a sustained way, but more in short bursts. I joke that i've become "Twitterised" but it's not a joke, really. Perhaps i want concentration exercises. I definitely want a fashion for simpler interfaces. For less, to last. 

[0] Yes I do have a kindly psychiatrist, though probably not for much longer. Last summer i had a bout of "thyrotoxicosis", something labelled Graves' Disease that has been building up for some time. A lot of trouble with my eyes; not really eating, sleeping; progressive detachment from consensus reality. I'm responding well, now, to treatment with carbimazole, a kind of thyroid-suppressing drug. It took them a wee while to figure out what the problem was, though. I had a couple of months' sick leave, a lot of support from the local NHS "Intensive Home Treatment Team", and still check in each few months with the psychiatrist who interviewed me then. We're dragging out the process a bit, because i stopped taking the "mood-stabilising" atypical antipsychotics as soon as i could, as soon as the thyroid drug was scheduled to have some effect.

Due both to the side-effects of the drugs and to my pre-existing condition, i had had difficulty concentrating, sustaining any kind of focus. Entertainment was cheap, if jittery. A sweet tooth developed. Instant gratification, a short hand to mouth loop, repeated.

I asked the donor of the shiny toy some very basic questions. He smiled, "I was hoping you'd be able to tell me about that sort of thing!" I'm a refusenik, I explained. I was put off early by too much wild talk of LBS and AR that left me feeling cold. I do have an Android, now. I've had it for the past year or so. It was partly a price point thing; 99 for the phone, 10 a month for enough data without video. That, and the peer pressure, of course; but all my friends have one...

I've enjoyed the Android. I've become dependent on, rejected, later more circumspectly re-engaged with, it. But now there is another one. Goodness, i didn't realise there were so many kinds of Android. I should have been paying more attention to Charles Arthur. I have to give Google my email address before I can use the GPS hardware on my own phone. I need a Google account to use my own hardware. That's "free" now, but for how long before i need a subscription for that Google account? The telcos of yore would cheerfully disable parts of handset functionality so as not to disrupt the market with excess innovation.

Tying the Market activity to the account to the search history to the location history; all apparently unnecessary to the user. I don't see how the user is benefitting from it. As Robert Brook once said of Google's personal search history tools, it changed from something useful to me, into something useful to them. This behaviour seems on a par with the unnecessary permissions-grabbing on the part of apps. There's no need to write to the SD card or to post messages now; when you want to do it in the future, why not ask for permission then? I made a throwaway Google account so i could use the Market. I think about some of the links between location, search and communications made with my old account, on my old phone. Over here, implicitly, i've compromised myself. Over there, implicitly, i've compromised someone else. One never knows what will leak through, later.

There's a big shift in desktop / UI metaphors between versions of Android. I was used to paging through screen-by-screen, in an imaginary straight line marked out with dots. Now, i'm sort of gliding round a larger field. The background moves at a different pace from the foreground, giving an illusion of depth. The contents of the screen compete to be more drop-shadowed and comic-realism than one another. There is lots of colour. It took me a while to find the settings. It took me a while to find the apps list, even though it was in an 'obvious' place on the starting screen.
I guess the experience is somewhat consistent with getting a new phone from a different proprietary hardware/software company in the old days. There's not such a big divergence in look and feel as that. Except for the one horror:

They moved the key to switch between the numeric / special character keyboard, and the QWERTY keyboard, to the other side of the screen. Dropping me into a menu of - ah, language options, as it's quite likely i'll want to easily switch my spelling autosuggestion to Spanish or Danish while i'm in the middle of writing an email. The bottom left key also shifts from 'Show me the application menu' to 'Bump me right back to the clock page and the menu for the whole phone'. Which i enjoy doing a couple of times per attempted composition of an email.

Perhaps i'm too easily upset by strange new things. I like constant small changes in my environment but not a whole lot at once like this. The experience of same-but-different in the Android UI was making me feel a bit nervous, a bit stressed. I installed K9Mail and felt a great relief. Nothing zooming or flashing, a quiet screen completely familiar with everything where i expect it to be. Apart from the bottom left menu button.

And I can't uninstall Facebook.

Imagine this sounding much better in the original French: "In a world
which really is topsy-turvy, the true is a moment of the false."

The origins of the term protest: testament, the witness, a third wheel. A whole too big for one to be a part of it.

Neither one thing, nor the other. Write about Occupy, she said. Tell me what you learned. I couldn't, at the time. I tried there, in a tent, to write. Looked at a title word and a blank page. Looked again. Drew a box. Looked, looked again. Packed up my tent and left, again.

Just moments, no story. The camaraderie of being known by people who don't feel the need to know my name. A few of them were there last Thursday morning, outside the Princes Street branch of the Royal Bank of Scotland. A couple of attractive young women who I didn't know. The Press turned up, with cameras. There were capers, for the cameras. Banners, slogans, forming queues. The cameras went away, the capers stopped, the attractive new people went away. Who's left? A media student, the top half a suit, the bottom half a surfer. A wholly repentant, semi-retired banking technologist. An insistent Socialist Worker, waiting his whole life to come to life, fire in his eyes. And me: I'm here.

"The account of the meeting was told me by Miss Maria Thoreau:

Henry, why are you here?

Waldo, why are you not here?" 

I couldn't not-be-here. That's all, Waldo. When challenged on the why, I couldn't answer. No wherefore, there. No shame in only being there to witness. In the space between the two sides of a purse, a jigsaw piece. "Such a division is itself divided."

Society of the Spectacle. Guy Debord.

Window displays at Harvey Nicks, next to Edinburgh bus station.