Mexico 68

I love the iconography for Mexico City’s metro system. This 99% Invisible podcast explores the history of these icons, their evolution from Lance Wyman’s work on the graphic design campaign for the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City, and how local activists co-opted the campaign to bring attention to police brutality:

Between the logo, the typeface, the colors and icons, Wyman created a visual identity that saturated the whole city. It was everywhere…The 1968 Olympics were decreed “Los juegos de la Paz” (“The Games of Peace”). So Wyman designed a little outline of a dove, which shop owners all over the city had been given to stick in their windows…Students went around the city spraying a small burst of bright red paint over those doves in all the shop windows, to make it look like the dove had been shot. They were playing with the propaganda of the Olympics and hinting at a darker political reality.

Roma also brings this period to life in stunning and tragic detail.

CDMX

 
If we’re able to leave room for the encounters that will change us in ways we can’t yet see, we can also acknowledge that we are each a confluence of forces that exceed our own understanding. This explains why, when I hear a song I unexpectedly like, I sometimes feel like something I don’t know is talking to something else I don’t know, through me…I find it to be the surest indicator that I’m alive.

Jenny Odell
How to Do Nothing

 

"It's a Little Like a Spaceship Landed"

Apple

I remember watching video of Steve Jobs’ last public appearance in June of 2011, when he presented plans for a new Apple campus before the Cupertino City Council. Two months later, he would step down as CEO, and only two months after that he would pass away. The campus was one of the last products he shaped.

Eight years later, and after spending two of them working in Cupertino during the construction, it felt a bit like stepping into the future to visit the finished Apple Park Visitor Center for the first time yesterday. Fun fact: the “spaceship” is the largest LEED Platinum-certified office building in North America. Also, the aluminum replica below weighs over 5 US tons. Also, I’m a nerd.

And Now for Something Completely Different

Thanks to Screen Time on iOS, I learned that I averaged 3 hours and 55 minutes per day with my fresh horrors device this past week. Instagram alone totaled 6 hours and 39 minutes. Twitter clocked in at 2 hours and 25 minutes. That’s over 9 hours on social media that I could have spent elsewhere. Extrapolating out for a year, we’re lookin’ at 468 hours.

Almost 20 days! 3 weeks! 5% of a year!

Why on Earth am I doing this? Mostly because I am a status-seeking monkey. After some introspection, I think these are the main reasons I use Instagram today in rough order:

  1. To keep up with friends and become closer with acquaintances

  2. To be entertained or distracted

  3. To seek inspiration from people I admire

  4. To craft a curated visual journal of my life (to signal my status for posterity)

Twitter shares a partially overlapping list:

  1. To seek inspiration from people I admire (and sometimes interact with them!)

  2. To be entertained or distracted

  3. To feel like I’m one with the zeitgeist (and to be an informed citizen)

  4. To craft a curated list of pithy thoughts, retweets, and likes (to signal my status for posterity — look, Mom, my tweets were on Techmeme thrice!)

Over the past month, while reading the excellent How to Do Nothing, by Jenny Odell, I started to run some experiments around my usage of these apps. I learned that when I post something, I’m much more likely to check back in to see the response. Like 10x more likely.

So, in an attempt to salvage that sacred 5% of my life, I’m going to try to change my relationship with the attention economy. I’m going to stop posting on social media. Instead, I will post here, on a domain that I own. The tradeoff is significant: folks will have to come here deliberately, but I hope once they arrive they’ll have a better sense of who I am, and that what they find here will spark more meaningful interactions with me offline. Maybe this space will even outlive the rise and fall of new forms of social media over the years. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

And, since you still seem to be reading, here are some other changes I’m making. Maybe you’ll find them helpful too:

  • Turn on Do Not Disturb by default. Set up Favorites so important calls can still come through.

  • Disable social media, email, and news push notifications.

  • Check social media once a day, with a 10 minute maximum for each site or a combined 30 minutes. Don’t post. You can set limits systemwide for iOS and Android now, and I suspect we will see this for Mac in the very near future. In the meantime, there are other options.

  • Favor push over pull. Sign up for newsletters that come to you rather than going to the news. (Insert disclosure that I build things at a company that delivers a lot of email.) And then check personal email twice a day max. Prioritize quality over recency: books over news, but not at the cost of being disengaged. I’m continuing to experiment with this, but here’s what I receive in my inbox right now:

    • Breaking news alerts from The New York Times

    • Daily newsletters from Techmeme and Stratechery

    • Weekly newsletters from The Economist, The Browser, and kottke.org

    • Sporadic newsletters from other interests

  • Charge your phone outside of your bedroom at night, and get an old-school alarm clock. Relive the joy of subjecting your roommates and partner to phantom alarms when you’re out of town!

  • Consider getting an Apple Watch with cellular (and Do Not Disturb enabled) if you can, and leave your phone at home. The unforgivable (or nonexistent) state of Lyft, Uber, and Spotify on Apple Watch prevents me from doing this regularly, but I’m optimistic that this will get sorted with time. The camera also keeps me tethered to my phone. I struggle with this the most. Perhaps new form factors will help here some day, but they threaten to introduce other distractions.

  • Try to embrace and revel in the discomfort of sitting around with just your thoughts without pulling out your phone. In my experiments with this earlier this month, I found that time slowed down, I noticed little details, and that I was much more engaged in conversations. I not only saved a portion of that 5%; I seemed to stretch it out too.

Computers are bicycles for the mind. We can still decide where to take them.

Thanks for participating in this lil’ experiment with me. 🙏