This month’s issue of Harper’s Bazaar magazine has an augmented reality feature in which you use a smartphone to ‘bring the cover to life’. It’s far from the first magazine to do it, and it’s hard to miss adverts on the tube or at bus stops that have some variation of ’scan this advert to see something cool’. I’ve never actually seen anyone do this, but in the spirit of inquiry I decided to test exactly how long it would take to make this happen.
Here are the steps required for Harper’s Bazaar:
Unlock my iPhone 4
Go to Home Screen
Open the App Store
Switch to the Search tab
Type in ‘Zappar’
Select ‘Zappar’ from the list of apps
Tap to download (3.1MB)
Type in my password
Wait for the download to complete
Open Zappar
Skip the tutorial
Select ‘Harper’s Bazaar’ from the list of ‘zaps’
Tap to download this specific ‘zap’ (4.4MB)
Wait for the download to complete
Tap ‘Zap’ to start the AR feature
Watch the thing
That’s a lot of steps. Going at full speed and using a wifi connection, plus starting from step 2, it took me 90 seconds from start to finish. If I wasn’t in such a hurry I would imagine it’d take about 2 minutes, and if you actually bothered to swipe through the Zappar tutorial you’re looking at 3 minutes.
But at least with a magazine there’s a good chance you’ll be at home when you’re reading it and on a fast wifi connection; plus you might be more inclined to try it since you bought the thing – why anything imagines that someone would do this while walking around outside is beyond me.
It would be OK if what you got was the most awesome augmented reality experience ever, but with Harper’s Bazaar, it was just a video. To be precise, I watched a video superimposed onto a magazine cover that I’m looking at through the camera of my iPhone. My iPhone screen isn’t that huge, and when the video only covers part of the magazine, it’s really quite tiny. If it was a great video, then you’d probably want to watch it on a computer or tablet, or at the very least, full screen on the iPhone; but here it’s just a gimmick, and a bad one at that since it pales in comparison to superior gimmicks that show 3D objects or similar.
So basically my point here is that it’s a big waste of money. What’s new? Precisely nothing at all – we’re just seeing augmented reality go through the classic hype curve in which a new technology makes possible something that we’ve always wanted to have (i.e. Terminator-vision) but in a form that is manifestly unsuited to most applications. Consider:
There is no standard platform and it’s not built-in to phones. If you want to view any AR, you must download a special app, and people underestimate the public’s tolerances for downloading any old thing.
It’s not hands free, and usually you’re extending your hands right out in front of you. It severely limits interaction possibilities, plus it’s not comfortable to hold that position for more than a few minutes.
Most applications are desperately unimaginative, often involving advertising or some kind of navigation system that’s better executed in standard top-down maps.
It’s too small. How much useful information can you overlay onto a small screen that only displays a tiny slice of the world? I have no doubt that pictures like this will make kids of the future crack up with laughter and be featured in the Paleofuture blog of 2031:
None of these challenges are insurmountable, but it’s foolish at best and disingenuous at worst to suggest that smartphone-based AR is anything other than experimental and highly unlikely to provide any conventional return. So, hey, if you’ve got money to burn, by all means play around with AR, although it wouldn’t hurt to try something a bit more interesting; but if you don’t (as is the case for most of the publishing industry), save your cash. No-one wants AR yet because there has been no clear demonstration of its strengths above and beyond what we already have.
Just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should do it.
When I first heard about Occupy Wall Street, I had two conflicting reactions: I was happy that the incredible rise in inequality and the pernicious influence of corporations and vested interests on democracy was finally getting the attention it deserved – but I found the sheer lack of organisation painful to see. In particular, the ‘total consensus’ decision-making process in some areas seemed like it was a definite roadblock to scaling things up. Only with scale, I thought, could the Occupy movement make a real impact.
We’ve treated ’scale’ like an unalloyed good for so long that it seems peculiar to question it. There are plenty of reasons for wanting to scale businesses and services up to make more things for more people in more areas; perhaps the strongest is that things usually get cheaper and quicker to provide.
The problem is that scale has a cost, and that’s being unable to respond to the wants and needs of unique individuals. Theoretically, that’s not a problem in a free market, but of course, we don’t have a free market, and we certainly don’t have a free market when it comes to politics and media.
Just look at how the Occupy movement have been covered – or not, as the case may be. National news organisations naturally want to cover the biggest movements that they think will be of the most interest to the most people, and crucially, can be explained in the least time possible; no wonder they were so adamant on getting a single demand or list of issues from Occupy Wall Street and the rest of the movement – it’d make their lives easier.
And that process of simplification has a feedback effect on politics, focusing attention on just a small number of actors who appear to have ’scale’ and an interesting story. Who cares about some little protest in some town when you can profile Michelle Bachmann, potential Republican presidential nominee (or indeed, Donald Trump, Sarah Palin, Tim Pawlenty, Herman Cain, etc.)? But there is one good reason behind focusing on them – it’s the ultimate instance of scale, one person representing over 300 million people.
I find that disturbing. I’ve made no secret of my belief that bad gatekeepers (like commissioners and editors) can waste money, favour their friends, and harm creativity. Some think that the solution to this is to have better gatekeepers. I think the solution is to have fewer gatekeepers – as few as we can manage with.
The system of politics in the US and UK has a similar problem, where you have a single person wielding a massive amount of power. When we see a bad leader in power, we think the solution is to elect a better leader. For some reason, we don’t think of having fewer leaders.
So, on second thoughts, I can see understand the strengths of the Occupy movement. By being a leaderless organisation, small groups that are loosely connected, it neatly eliminates the problem of abusive or ineffective leaders and devolves power to a much more local level – a level that can be more reflective and responsive to the people directly involved.
OccupyX is not perfect by any means but it demonstrates an alternative to the lure of scale. Just by itself, that’s a remarkable achievement.
A few months ago, I finally had what I’d been dreaming of for years – digital delivery of every single magazine and newspaper I read. No more stacks of New Yorkers and Economists lingering on tables waiting to be given away (or more likely, recycled); no more hunting for all the bits of subscription forms hiding in The Atlantic. I was free and the iPad did it all. Even better, I discovered that the New Yorker made far more sense as an actual reporting magazine when you received in on time rather than one week ‘late’ in the UK.
Of course, it hasn’t all been perfect. Each magazine has a completely different method of operation and user interface that conspires to frustrate me in big ways and small. Before a recent trip abroad I dutifully opened up every single content app and synced everything, but The Atlantic proved too wily and when I tried to read the magazine while offline, it sniffily informed me that another update was required. Thanks for nothing. It turns out that because the app delivers both web content and magazine content, it’s often confusing whether you’ve actually downloaded the whole magazine or not.
I shall refrain from going too much into The Atlantic app’s failings (powered by Rarewire) as a reading experience; the fact that it delivers magazine pages as images that are just-about-but-not-quite readable without zooming in; the practically non-existent navigation; the weird text-only mode that is missing images (at least when offline). The short story is that it has very little in common with other iPad reading experiences – apart from, presumably, other Rarewire apps – which is more than enough to cause irritation.
The Economist has been cited as one of the best magazine apps out there. I can’t disagree – it’s simple and it works well. I don’t understand why it isn’t on Newsstand yet, since auto-downloading would be nice, but otherwise I can’t complain. It’s worth noting that you have to swipe left to read the next page though, which sort-of makes sense given its two column layout but is nonetheless at odds with many other apps (other The Atlantic, which doesn’t count).
The New Yorker is an interesting one. It has the usual Conde Nast engine so the download takes forever and frequently hangs (although last week it downloaded itself automatically, which was great). Despite this, I personally think that the New Yorker has one of the best reading experiences out there. The font size and layout is very agreeable and I like the way in which you flick up and down to read through articles. There are plenty of adverts, but it’s easy to skip them and the multiple navigation options allow me to get to where I want to go quickly (i.e. skip the entire first half of the magazine). If only it were faster.
The problem with The New Yorker app, though, is that it has all sorts of weird UI quirks. Articles rarely have genuinely interactive elements, and when they do, they behave in all sorts of strange ways. I gather that red links to supplementary material require you to be online, but I wish they were downloaded at the start. I also only realised last month that you could actually tap the ‘buttons’ on the Cartoon Caption competition page to see the nominees and winners; the buttons just don’t look like buttons. I imagine that a lot of other readers have the same problem of just not knowing what the hell is going on. Keep reading →
I wrote the following piece for the Telegraph a few hours before Steve Jobs’ death was announced, so unsurprisingly, it didn’t go up. And since it’s all about Siri – which is now released – it’s a bit out of date. But I thought you might be interested in seeing it anyway:
This week, the iPhone 5 – sorry, the iPhone 4S – was announced by Apple to millions of anxious fans across the world. Despite containing a significantly faster processor, better antenna, longer battery, higher resolution camera, and more memory and storage space, many were disappointed because it didn’t look any different from the previous model, the iPhone 4 – specifically, because it didn’t have a bigger screen and a thinner body.
I can understand that this may have been a letdown. Over the past few years, we have been accustomed to constant improvements in performance and form-factor among all consumer electronics – not just from Apple, but from all manufacturers like HTC and Samsung and Sony. For better or worse, these devices have taken the same role as jewellery and watches in terms of being status symbols and signs of wealth and taste.
These outward changes, however, can blind us to the remarkable changes in software that are constantly making it easier for a wider number of people to use computing devices. It wasn’t so long ago that to use a computer, you had to master the instructions of a command line in UNIX or DOS; and even more recent versions of Windows and Mac OS have required an understanding of graphical user interfaces that can fox the more timid or cautious user. The touchscreen interfaces of iPhone and Androids, in comparison, are much more intuitive to use – not only do you not need to use a mouse, but the ’skeuomorphic’ designs they frequently employ which mimic existing physical interfaces (like calculators and address books) help ground us in the familiar.
It’s easy to deride these changes as being mere crutches for those who aren’t smart or quick enough to learn Windows or Mac OS. After all, the very notion of computers and the internet is tied up in most people’s minds as involving scrollbars and mouse pointers and menu items and so on. But the truth is that there are millions of people out there – from infants to the elderly – who are now able to use applications, browse the web, write email, and play games, in a much easier and less frightening way than before.
With its new voice recognition system and Siri, its ‘intelligent assistant’, the iPhone 4S takes matters even further. According to the demonstrations, iPhone 4S users will simply be able to speak “Tell my wife I’m running late” or “Remind me to call the vet” and the phone will be able to send the appropriate text message or to-do item.
Now, this is not the first phone to include voice recognition – the iPhone 3G and 4 have included it, along with numerous Android phones; indeed, Android phones also allow you to dictate text messages and find out what the weather is without any button presses. However, the big difference is that you have to be much more specific in how to speak to those older phones – you can’t be too conversational about it, you need to say something like “weather in London” or “indian restaurants near SW4″.
Any self-respecting geek will not find it at all difficult or unusual to phrase requests in that way; they’re used to writing commands and performing operations that suit the limitations of computers. Normal people, though, don’t actually speak in that way. We don’t say to each other “weather in London?”, we say “What was the weather like down there yesterday?” Yes, it takes longer, but it’s much more natural.
Ultimately it’s the ability of computers to adapt to human habits and limitations rather than vice versa that will determine how useful and widespread computers will be in the future. There’ll always be a place for the command line and the graphic user interface for programmers and scientists and engineers, for whom ambiguity can cost millions and kill lives, but for the rest of us, it will be much easier to be able to speak to computers as we speak to anyone else.
It has a Downton Abbey/Mad Men retro vibe, mixed with a go-getting drive to the future; we’re meant to admire these brave ‘young men’ (as they’re always called – not ‘young people’ and certainly not ‘young women’) as they venture forth to build ’superhighways in an unknown sky’.
For all the gorgeous visuals, the overwrought narration destroys any chance of nostalgia by continually reminding us what we should feel, eventually descending into a mish-mash of increasingly similar-looking shiny planes (including, amusingly, the Concorde, which conveniently zooms out of sight at the end lest we start thinking too hard). It could have been much more powerful if they had just a little bit more confidence in themselves.
It reminded me of two, better, time-travelling commercials that also try to impress viewers with their company’s longevity:
Hovis’ attempt is better simply because it’s more interesting and doesn’t have any godawful narration. However, the fact that it has practically nothing at all to do with bread is perhaps not the wisest of choices.
As an aside, these sorts of ‘historical vignette’ stories always make me wonder what would happen next, after the present day; might the little boy jump into a driverless car and then zoom off on a spaceplane to avoid the AI civil war in 2030? Speaking of vignettes, Hovis is clearly hitching its wagon to what it feels are all of Britain’s finest moments like suffragettes, wars, the 60s, miners’ strikes, and, bizarrely, the millennium fireworks celebration. One might have thought that a gay pride parade wouldn’t be amiss, but perhaps that’s too risque for such an old brand.
Then there’s the master:
I still remember watching Honda’s ‘The Impossible Dream’ commercial for the first time. Not only did I immediately go and download Andy Williams’ song, but I watched the video again at least a few times. Unlike Hovis, it’s actually about what Honda makes – cars, vehicles, and other transportation devices – and unlike British Airways, it has enough confidence in its message and audience that it doesn’t need to tell people what to think.
One can only imagine what British Airways’ advertising geniuses would have put on top of it:
Those first young men, the pioneers, the drivers, building superhighways across an unknown land … roaring across roads to go really fast … they didn’t have seatbelts or shit like that, they drove where they were no traffic lights … they drove motorbikes, small cars, big cars, fast cars, and hey, even a motorboat! We follow them to fulfill an unbreakable promise*, the same four words stitched into every uniform of every engineers who builds our stuff: The Power of Dreams.
Luckily, that didn’t happen and we got a good commercial instead. And while I’d be the first person to be cynical about what commercials are meant to do (often, to get us to buy things we don’t need), I’d rather watch a good commercial than a bad one.
(*Is it wise to make ‘unbreakable promise’ in a commercial? I suppose if it’s as vague or uninspiring as BA’s “To Fly. To Serve.” then it doesn’t really matter)
Sadly, someone at Honda decided to update ‘The Impossible Dream’ last year, adding on some boring scenes with robots and completely robbing the commercial of its dramatic, uplifting, and frankly inspired (since, after all, the song – and the video – is about Don Quixote) ending. Somehow, a guy slipping into a nice jacuzzi doesn’t elicit the same emotion:
I’ll leave you with a final commercial I discovered while trawling YouTube that proves that at least someone at British Airways once had a sense of humour, even if they presumably got fired five minutes after this aired:
Have I missed any good time-travelling story commercials? Let me know!
When I heard about Reamde’s premise of hackers, spies, and gold mining in a massive multiplayer online game called T’Rain, I had the same worried feeling that I had when I heard about Anathem’s monasteries – that Neal Stephenson was venturing away from the sort of adventure/SF capers I enjoyed best. However, I was pleasantly surprised at Anathem and I held out the same hope for Reamde.
The problem with Reamde is not that it’s trying to be more ‘accessible’, if by ‘accessible’ we mean it’s set during the present day and has no obviously futuristic elements that might put the ‘mainstream’ off. No, it’s problem is that it’s frequently boring and it doesn’t add up to much at all.
Sure, there are flashes of the classic Stephenson brilliance – the insightful observations of how technology is changing the world, the clever ideas about business and gaming, the tangents into the finer points of grammar and MMO economies. But these are buried in literally thousands of words describing stuff that I frankly couldn’t give a shit about. Every fight, every journey, every thought is explained in excruciating detail, often from multiple points of view, and a lot of the time, none of it is particularly relevant to the plot.
Even worse, the usual and excusable Stephenson vices seem to be on particular show in Reamde: the tendency of almost all the smart characters to speak in the same over-specific way, the cliched over-weaponed and sprawling family of hard-bitten survivalists, the revisiting of Manila and Trinity College in Cambridge, the baffling hookups. I accept these things as being integral to Stephenson’s soul and writing, just as Iain M Banks frequently lapses into forced-jokiness and gratuitously violent torture scenes in his novels, but usually there are more than enough good moments to balance them out. But not this time.
It’s upsetting because there are some fantastic moments in the book where Stephenson was clearly having a lot of fun. I was impressed by the man-hunt in Xiamen, and later on, a massive battle in T’Rain occurred simultaneously with real world shenanigans. Many reviews (such as the WSJ’s*) suggest that these moments, and others like them, are the meat of the book; in fact, they’re far outweighed by tiresome detailing of gun battles and people travelling from A to B. Perhaps if it was a mere 500 pages instead of 1000, I’d have enjoyed it more. Unfortunately, as it stands, I can’t see myself recommending this book to anyone.
Stephenson is still clearly capable of writing awesomely interesting and entertaining fiction. The question is, what happened with Reamde? I can see three possibilities: Keep reading →
There’d be three more if I weren’t going on holiday to Sudan for a couple of weeks in Oct/Nov. Plus I’m not including two workshops I’m doing with the British Museum about A History of the Future (for kids).
At the games/tech conferences, I’m going to be speaking about some of the new things we’ve been doing with mobiles and in particular, Zombies, Run! At the other conferences, I’m more interested in talking about some new thoughts I’ve had about the change shape of creative work (not terribly original, to be honest, but maybe I can give it a new spin).
So, things are very busy these days between Six to Start and all the extra-curricular stuff I’ve signed myself up to. I’m hoping to break the back of A History of the Future before the year is out (along with Balance of Powers) meaning that next year should be pretty different!
Finally, if you’re wondering why I’m not posting here as much, it’s partly down to the time I’m spending on A History of the Future (22,000 words and counting) and my blogging at the Telegraph. Sorry about that.
(This piece may be appearing in The Telegraph, but I felt it would be useful to have it up soon given the recent interest in Unbound from places like The Economist).
The Southwest Pacific islands of Melanesia are some of the most remote places on the planet. Until the Second World War, its inhabitants had few encounters with technology or war, let alone planes and tanks. When Japanese and American soldiers arrived to set up bases, the Melanesians would have been astonished to see planes setting down on their newly-cleared runways disgorging massive amounts of materiel, medicine, food, weapons and clothing.
It would have been difficult for the Melanesians to grasp the reasons why the soldiers were there, or the vast and complex logistics chains that produced the planes and the weapons that moved the supplies around. And so when the soldiers left, taking their supplies with them, the Melanesians did what made perfect sense to them – they imitated the US soldiers by clearing the forest, building wooden control towers, carving headphones, and they fruitlessly waited for planes to arrive with cargo.
Today, we call the Melanesians’ behaviour a ‘cargo cult’ and use the term to describe anyone else who imitates superficial features of a system (in this case, military logistics) and hopes to replicate the original’s success, without any thought or understanding of the intrinsic workings of the system.
Though the cargo cult story is fairly well known, it’s hard to believe that anyone could be short-sighted enough to repeat their mistakes – yet there are countless examples of cargo cult thinking from the small to the massive, all showing how tempting it is to believe that the success of others can be copied as easily as an MP3.
One website that’s succumbed to cargo cult thinking is Unbound. Unbound is a new kind of book publisher that invites readers to help authors write books by buying them in advance. Each book has a target amount it needs to raise, and if that target is met, the author will finish the book and supporters will receive a copy. The venture has been described as a new and innovative way of harnessing the crowd to fund books that traditional publishers might otherwise shy away from.
But there’s another way of looking at Unbound, and that’s as a cargo cult version Kickstarter. Kickstarter is a crowdfunding site that helps creators to fund projects via pledges, for everything from documentary films to book, games, toys, and exhibitions. Most of the pledges aren’t donations but advance purchases of products or tickets, and over the past two years its has raised over $40 million for 8000 projects (including hundreds of books, one by me), and so when Unbound launched, it was immediately labelled as a ‘Kickstarter for books‘.
On first glance, it’s easy to see why: Unbound has a very similar layout and format to Kickstarter. So far, so good. But the closer you look, the more differences you spot.
Instead of having a clear fundraising goal (e.g. £20,000), Unbound only has a target number of supporters (e.g. 2000). Since 2,000 people pledging £10 each raises much less than 2000 people pledging £250 each, this has caused some confusion. It later emerged that only a quarter of people would be allowed to pledge at the lowest £10 level and that fundraising targets could be ‘adjusted’ at any time.
Where Kickstarter is transparent, Unbound is bafflingly opaque – although this coyness may stem from publishers’ reluctance to talk about hard numbers even when they’re raising all their money from the public. Transparency also applies to creators; on Kickstarter, they write their own project descriptions and film their own videos, allowing their personality, experience, and trustworthiness (or lack thereof) to shine through, and from the earnest amateurishness of some efforts actually helps convey how much they could use the money.
Unbound writes project descriptions for their authors. They’re slick, but they’re also soulless (which is odd, since if anyone ought to be able to write well, it’s authors) and distancing. This leads to another issue – do successful authors like Terry Jones even need the money? After all, they’re asking for a lot – £10,000 at a minimum, and much, much higher in most cases – so you want to be sure it’s being used wisely.
In fact, Terry Jones has already written a big chunk of his book and Tibor Fischer’s Possibly Forty Ships (on Amazon) is already published. I wonder whether these books would be published one way or another even if they don’t meet their targets.
These questions would be less important if pledges weren’t so expensive at £10 for eBooks and £20 for hardbacks. Higher level rewards are also frustratingly vague, talking about ‘goodie bags’ for pledging over £150; again, in contrast to the often more specific and highly-imaginative rewards that many Kickstarter creators offer. There’s a reason why Kickstarter’s average pledge is £44 – it’s because people look forward to getting something really special.
I could go on – Unbound doesn’t have a wide enough selection, it’s too UK-centric, Gavin Pretor-Pinney’s Clouds iPad app vanished without a trace (although with only 2 per cent raised after a few weeks, it’s easy to speculate why).
But the biggest difference is its success rate. Of the six projects Unbound started with, it seems that one has been funded so far: Evil Machines by Terry Jones, and only by a gnat’s whisker at that, even though it’s by a Monty Python member with over 30,000 Twitter followers. Four other books on the brink of failure have had their deadlines unexpectedly extended, hopefully long enough for the public to come to their senses and cough up more cash. Unbound isn’t some fly-by-night operation; it was heavily promoted at the Hay Festival, it’s received gushing praise across the media – yet it may end up with a one in six success rate.
So, why was Unbound set up in the first place? It’s because they constructed a cargo cult, believing that if they mimicked the superficial elements of successful crowdfunding, they could enjoy the same success as others – but perhaps even more, thanks to their relationships with publishers, agents, authors, and the media.
Unbound are learning. Unlike Kickstarter, they’ll refund supporters’ money if the books aren’t delivered, and their newest author, Rupert Isaacson, has more specific rewards and a more realistic (i.e. lower) fundraising goal. Yet with a such a low target, you wonder whether a small publisher or Kickstarter might be a better choice.
I genuinely admire the sentiment behind Unbound, but there’s been a real lack of understanding of what makes for successful crowdfunding. I hope they can fix it soon.
Kickstarter isn’t the only success to attract cargo cults. Mere months after the iPhone was announced in 2007, a parade of competitors built their own cargo cults around it, hoping that by mimicking the iPhone’s design and its characteristic ‘apps’ they’d attract customers who don’t know any better, even if their phones didn’t have the same range of apps as Apple, or weren’t as fast.
Cargo cult thinking in technology products might have worked in the past, when customers really didn’t know any better and you could overwhelm them with slick marketing campaigns, but things are different now, thanks to online reviews and word-of-mouth. Yet they still try, wasting millions and millions on modern-day equivalents of wooden radar towers, or rather, yet more iPhone and iPad imitators.
Cargo cults abound in governance as well. The institutions that underpin western liberal democracy – universal suffrage and free and fair elections – are so strong and have produced such comparative stability and growth that you see other organisations and countries erect their own cargo cults, hoping that the illusion of elections will quell the people and produce similarly positive results. The sham of the FIFA voting scandal and recent ‘elections’ in countries such as Egypt and Iran have put paid to such craven hopes.
In our own country, the events of the last few weeks have shown that the Press Complaints Commission has been another cargo cult. With its Code of Practice, power to impose sanctions, rules on conflicts of interest, we thought it could deliver the goods, but we didn’t understand what really made for effective commissions, like functional and financial independence and an actual desire to challenge power.
Someone once said, “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.” A cargo cult is copying the most superficial parts of a success and expecting the same results. It comes from our desperate desire for quick success and power. It’s magical, childish thinking made more seductive now that it’s so easy to copy things, both online and in the real world. We forget that the beautiful and apt verse by Ecclesiastes:
I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.
Success is rarely as simple or straightforward as we hope it to be. Just ask the Melanesians.
I’d been walking back from a meeting in town when it suddenly began raining. I’m the type of person who packs an umbrella even at the slightest possibility of rain – in fact, at school my friends found it amusing how I always seemed to have an umbrella even in the middle of summer.
Lately though, I’d begun relying on a new weather app that provided very reliable hour-by-hour rain predictions to figure out what to wear in the morning – a sort of just-in-time clothing process – and today it told me the probability of rain was very low, hence no umbrella. And so here I was, sheltering underneath an awning waiting for the pedestrian lights to turn green, speaking to a guy who’d just been standing there.
I hadn’t noticed him at first; I was listening to a podcast of This American Life, the one about Father’s Day, and it took a while for me to realise he was actually trying to speak to me. The man was smartly dressed, wearing a dark suit jacket over an open-necked white shirt. He didn’t look like a weirdo, but you never know. I took one earbud out and turned towards him.
“You have a lucky face,” he said.
I laughed. “Thanks,” I said, thinking that he was just in a cheerful mood.
“You have a very lucky face,” he continued. “I can tell from your eyes and your mouth.”
“Hmm,” I said.
“But you look worried, you are frowning here,” he said, gesturing above my nose. “You should know that you will have good luck in the next three months, you will work hard but you will get what you are looking for.”
Ah, I thought, a fortune-teller. I glanced up at the lights; they were still red, and the rain was still coming down.
“Do you want to know why I think this? Let me tell you.” He slipped a red wallet made from leather out of his jacket and pulled out a few small bits of paper and a pen. He scribbed a few words on a scrap of paper, then crumpled it up into a little ball and gave it to me. “Don’t open it yet,” he said.
I took the paper and stuck it in my pocket.
“Okay, now pick a number from 1 to 9.”
Before I went to university, I thought I was interested in genetics and molecular biology. After precisely one lecture, I realised exactly how wrong I was and became determined to switch to something more stimulating, and I eventually found myself taking experimental psychology and neuroscience lectures. Many of them were highly reductionist or focusing on development or pathology, but some were at the cognitive level, and from them and from various textbooks I knew all about how humans reason and how poor we are at understanding logic and probability and causation.
They didn’t teach us specifically about magic, but it was clear that our limited capacity for attention and our ease of being misdirected was really the key to successful magicians. I once saw David Blaine perform a bit of magic at a TED conference. I was standing about one metre away from him when he did a fairly standard card trick on a guy he was close enough to touch, and then at the end gave the guy his watch back. We were all duly impressed; we had all been watching his hands intently, wanting to be the one person who was smart enough to see the trick, to figure out the ending. But he was too good.
“3,” I said, shrugging. He noted it down on a new piece of paper.
“Your favourite colour?”
The lights had turned green. This was the perfect opportunity to escape, but I wanted to see where this was going.
“Blue.” Why not?
“Your age?”
“Uh… 28.”
“How many brothers and sisters?”
“One.”
“Brother or sister?”
“Brother.” He wrote down ‘B – 1′ at the bottom of his list.
“Okay.” He looked up. “And what do you want most? Good health, good life, good fortune, good love, good family?”
I laughed. What an absurd question. “All of them,” I said.
For the first time, he laughed as well. “You have to pick one.”
“Okay then… good family.” He wrote down ‘G – F’.
He asked me for his bit of paper he’d given me at the start. I pulled it out of my pocket and handed it over, and he waved it in front of his face at precise points, and gave it back to me. “Don’t open it,” he said again. Then he began talking about how the numbers all added up and how if you combined this and that, I would figure out my fortune.
I was starting to finally get worried. I figured that he’d be asking for money shortly, and things had gone on for long enough that it was already going to be embarrassing when I left. With the lights back to green again, I backed away and said that I had to go now.
“No no no no no, we haven’t finished yet!”
“Sorry,” I said lamely.
“But you haven’t opened the paper!” he protested.
“Sorry,” I repeated behind me.
Befitting my status as a former scientist and being an avid reader of all the science blogs and such, I’m intensely suspicious of superstition. I have no problem with black cats. I deliberately walk underneath ladders. I’m sure I’ve broken at least two mirrors. But walking away from this guy, I couldn’t help but think I’d somehow cursed myself by not letting him finish his shtick; it was surely a rude thing to do, no matter how (eventually) annoying he had become.
Of course, I opened the paper. Written on it was:
3
Blue
0 – 28
B -1
G -F
For about three seconds, I froze.
Firstly, I thought: Wow, could it be true? Did this guy actually figure this out? Have I been completely wrong about all of this my entire life?
Secondly: Obviously not. But what are the chances of him guessing? Still pretty high – certainly not high enough to get a decent hit rate.
Thirdly: Wait a second… he must have done a classic switcheroo while I wasn’t looking! This must be the same bit of paper he’d been writing my answers on, and when he was waving it around, he’d swapped them over.
Aha. I felt proud of myself at this piece of Sherlockian deduction, then slightly sad. It was a tremendously engrossing piece of street magic; certainly not that technically impressive, but no doubt more than good enough to fool the average passerby. I wondered how much money he made by doing this. I wondered what he would have told me next.
And I wondered whether this was his life, giving other people a glimpse ahead into their lives. Giving them a certainty, proven with written evidence and without any caveats or probabilities or qualifications, that things were going to get better. I looked down at the piece of paper again, thought about whether to throw it away or not, and kept on walking.
Ever since last year’s UK elections produced a hung Parliament and the current Conservative/Lib Dem coalition, I’ve been following politics with a keen eye – particularly the travails of the Lib Dems, who find themselves in (sort of) power after many, many decades. It’s been interesting to see the spirited debates on places like Lib Dem Voice and the reactions of party members to their drubbing in last month’s local elections (alternately complacent and apocalyptic).
When I saw that the Social Liberal Forum conference was being held in London on a Saturday (yesterday, actually), with two cabinet members speaking (Chris Huhne and Vince Cable) and tickets for only £25, it seemed like a brilliant opportunity to see how political parties come up with policies at an early stage. The Social Liberal Forum is an:
Internal party pressure group with the aim of developing social liberal solutions and approaches which reflect these principles and which find popular support.
Despite being only two years old, it has around 1800 members and claims to have influenced Lib Dem party policy to a significant degree; so going to the conference wasn’t exactly like going to a proper Party Conference with all the attendant votes and such, but it was definitely a step up from the usual local confab.
I wasn’t sure what to expect. I’ve been to dozens of conferences from TED to SXSW to FooCamp to book publishing conferences in Italy and spoken at many of them, and my feeling about those is that you rarely learn anything new (apart from maybe TED; otherwise, books and the web are better) but they’re very good places to gauge the general feeling of a community, and of course, to swap gossip. The purpose of the SLF Conference wasn’t clear to me – was it to listen to some speeches, or was it to try and formulate a bit of policy – but either way, I was hoping it’d at least be a novel experience. I also strongly believe that there is desperately little political engagement among the tech community and I wanted to see how things were done.
Due to general laziness and not knowing my way around City University, I ended up missing the first session, which apparently was quite good, but I did arrive just in time for the second session, Deficit Reduction – Ideology or Necessity?
(Side note: This month there was a very big kerfuffle within the Lib Dem community about how attendees to the upcoming Party Conference will need to provide accreditation, i.e. address and passport/driving licence/NI number, to check that they’re not about to embarrass everyone with protests a terrorist. Both the Conservatives and the Labour Party already do this for their conferences, so I think the Lib Dem organisers were taken aback by the strong opposition regarding privacy, civil liberties, etc, not to mention the fact that the decision was made in private.
Anyway, the reason why things are different this year is apparently because David Cameron is speaking at the conference and that the Home Office and the police have ’suggested’ to the Lib Dems that increased security measures should be in place. After a lot of back and forth in the comments, it emerged that the measures have happened mostly because they couldn’t get insurance for the venue otherwise.
The reason why this is relevant is because when I walked in to the conference venue, all I had to do was say my name and I could pick up a badge. Since I wasn’t asked to show ID, I could have just said any of the names I saw laid on the registration table; and because there was no bag search or metal detectors, well, who knows what someone could have done to two Cabinet Ministers, multiple MPs, and a room full of party activists… but hey, David Cameron wasn’t there, so I guess it’s all OK).
The two speakers were Vince Cable, Business Secretary in the Cabinet, and Ed Randall, a Senior Lecturer in Politics and Social Policy at Goldsmiths. After an endearingly unorganised struggle with the microphones, Vince Cable entered the room and was greeted by a round of applause. I found this a bit odd until I realised that the sentiment was probably along the lines of, “Wow, how awesome are we as a group to get Vince Cable, a Cabinet Minister, to come along to our audience?” rather than “This guy is so amazing he deserves applause wherever he goes.”
(Side side note: There were about 200 people in the room and it was about 90% white, 70% male, and mostly middle-aged. Not many students – I guess they’re all too annoyed with the Lib Dems to come along any more. When I tweeted this observation (along with the caveat that it was probably the same at other Conservative and Labour gatherings), someone told me that it used to be worse. Well, I hate to think what the last meeting was like then…) Keep reading →
