Right as I’m about to jump ship, Gabriel is going back to Apple. Once he started drawing on the new iPad Pro, it wound a clock somewhere in the heart of the universe that would bring him back to the platform in other ways. He has sent me some animojis or whatever and it seems like he’s having a good time…?

The first time I lost the Lightning to Headphone adapter for this iPhone 8, another clock was wound, except this one ran opposite to the first. I am weird about headphones and I have a lot of them. There are people with much deeper wells of jargon to describe sound, which they might call Audio, but this may be the only time I eschew lexicon. I hear music with my gut. I change headphones all the time so I’m the worst person for this transition period. I thought I’d be safe on Android because Google talked so much shit about Apple removing the headphone jack, but then they did it too. Lots of people are. That’s just sorta where everybody is going, and I know there are some options here, but I feel like buying a non-Google Android Phone as a longtime Apple user isn’t a good plan. I want to believe at some level that somebody is at least trying to define the experience all the way down to the metal.

Because this stuff is now on my periphery, I watched the Android P stuff with genuine interest. I’d say I’m getting in while the getting seems, at least preliminarily, quite good.

They did show something novel called Google Duplex, which seems (at this juncture) to be a kind of Rorschach Blot. How do you feel about your phone not simply acting as a personal itinerary, but also an assistant that literally makes calls for you to other humans and schedules services? The way I’ve seen it break down online is sharp. You’re either excited slash complicit or concerned slash a luddite coward.

Brenna probably wouldn’t want me to say this, but it’s not too bad: she really doesn’t like calling strangers on the phone. “Doesn’t Like” is not strong enough as a term. I thought for sure she’d find this type of feature helpful, like, as helpful as other ingenious social prophylactics, for example “vaccines.” It mostly freaked her the fuck out because it feels like, and may well be, lying to people.

I find this sort of thing very interesting, though your mileage may vary; I don’t know if I hate it because it’s kinda fucked or if it’s just new. The case I would make is that the more we cocoon the more we need cocoons. This state of affairs is awesome for cocoon vendors and maybe has ramifications for everybody else that we don’t know about yet. And it’s okay to think about that.

(CW)TB out.