Jasperland

Whence the Inarticulate Enthusiasm in Early Apple Headset Users?

Listening to interviews with folks who’ve tried Apple’s new VR headset (like this interview), I note an over-the-top excitement mixed with an inability to make the thing actually sound that exciting. It’s always “It’s a screen without edges” or “You can turn the knob to fade in and out of reality.” Like, I guess that sounds cool, but it’s hard to tell what it will actually mean for me, Jasper, using the thing. Will that be transformatively great? Maybe?

The signal here probably isn’t the words these folks are using to describe the device but just the fact of their overwhelming enthusiasm. That’s what’s most noteworthy.

Perhaps the inarticulateness stems from this: new interfaces are inherently hard to describe. What is most interesting will be what we do inside that paradigm. The payoff for end-users, if and when it arrives, will be in the form of the applications that run in this new operating system, that couldn’t run anywhere else. It’s not Windows 98 that’s exciting, it’s Baldur’s Gate and Photoshop that make it a must-have.

For me so far, the thing I’m most excited about, to be honest, is the chance to watch NBA games from a highly-immersive courtside seat. Heck yeah!

Separating Creation and Consumption

From Craig Mod in 2019:

Here’s another, more subtle, point about the grace of email and newsletters: Creation and consumption don’t happen in the same space. When I go to send a missive in Campaign Monitor the world of my laptop screen is as silent as a midnight Tokyo suburb. I think we’ve inured ourselves to the (false) truth that in order to post something, in order to contribute something to the stream, we must look at the stream itself, “Bird Box”-esque, and woe be the person in a productive creative jag, wanting to publish, who can resist those hot political tweets.

I’m not even sure this point is that subtle—or maybe I’m an outlier—but when I open up a social network to post there, it is the rarest of times that I don’t find myself scrolling, indefinitely, before saying to myself, “Wait, why did I open this app?” By the time I remember what I wanted to post, the spark of creation has often winked back into the brisk morning air.

Email newsletters are a great way to circumvent this pattern, but I especially appreciate Mod’s insight because it also explains why my current arrangement for posting tweet-length things works well for my can’t-resist-the-scroll brain. That arrangement being:

Draft tweet-length and longer blog posts in MarsEdit, which contains no feed at all and only enables creation.
Hit publish and MarsEdit sends them directly to my Micro.blog-hosted personal blog, jasper.land, where they exist indefinitely on a website I own and can directly link to.
Micro.blog automatically reposts to RSS, a weekly roundup newsletter, and Mastodon, so I am hypothetically having the same social media experience as someone who posted directly to Mastodon. (Before the Musk takeover and attendant API ruining, Micro.blog could repost on Twitter, too.)

The part of this that I have previously noted is the joy of having my own blog that isn’t affiliated with any VC-funded corporation. But now I’m think that an equal or perhaps even more important factor in my enjoyment of all this is the way these low-fi tools elegantly separate creation and consumption.