#6. Life archive, Amazon conflicts
also Kings of Tomorrow, House of Cards 1990, Beyond Black, vegan mapo tofu
Hello!
It’s been a cold week. When we moved into this house the gas boiler was condemned within a fortnight. Obviously we were going to renovate by Christmas so we didn’t get it fixed. That was four years ago. Electric radiators are OK until those two weeks every year when they’re not.
Fingers crossed I’m starting the new job on Monday. If I start then I’ll talk about it next week. If I don’t there’s a non-trivial chance that I might lose all frame of reference and become unmoored from the normal world. (This might have already happened tbh).
Life archive
Ah, the mythical life archive project.
For 20 years I’ve been collecting bits of dead computers with the vague idea that some future version of myself will go through them and make sense of it all.
Except I didn’t meet this future version of myself at any time in the last 20 years. He didn’t turn up in the first 11 months of the pandemic. He didn’t even surface in the 6 weeks of not having a job after Christmas. But, for some unknown reason, when my new contract got delayed for a fortnight he finally rocked up and went into the loft.
So I’ve gone through all the IDE/SATA hard drives for my computers since 2000. All the memory cards. All the USB sticks. All the folder-dumps in network-attached storage devices. All the corners of Dropbox and Google Drive and TimeMachine. I’m even running recovery software on drives that won’t mount to recover raw files. Gulp.
With Ant’s help it’s involved weird Shenzhen devices with incredible brand names…
There are three things that I’ve loved about doing the archive:
A life in photos. We now have a single archive of all our deduplicated photos that is available on all our devices, shared across our two accounts, searchable by date/person/location/AI-magic (thanks Google Photos), backed up as actual files in my house (thanks TimeMachine) and set up for an easy future.
Lost music recovery. From 1996 to 2007 I was in bands and had a studio. I never archived anything because I was hurting when I walked away so it’s a relief to have done it now. My favourite find was a throwaway re-edit that ended up in the hands of The Unabombers who played it at Electric Chair at the Music Box when I was on the dancefloor unaware they even had it. One of life’s perfect memories.
The lifting of guilt. These things have been in my cupboards/basement/loft/mind taunting me for more than 15 years. It’s been like a ghostly voice telling me that there’s unfinished business. I’ve learned over the last few years that closing these loops is important but I’ve never had the courage to just throw it all away. So I’m feeling liberated and uplifted now that I’ve dealt with this.
But it’s also been a bit painful. Not just technical frustrations but something deeper. I think it’s that the old me saw the future as bigger than it’s turned out to be.
I found more than 300 book recommendations that I intended to read. Hundreds of ideas for startups, novels, blog posts, poems, songs. Ghosts of lost careers (so much web analytics stuff!). It’s like looking at this massive firehose of life sparks.
I’m mostly peaceful about letting these things go. I’ve held the top five regrets of the dying close since Esther’s dad died. I accept the four burners theory. I changed how I work after I burned out. I try to face things as they are. I’ve done a ton of meditation which has helped me understand what matters most to me and I’m going after that.
But, still, when I come face-to-face with the raw past there is a part of me that yearns for that person who didn’t know that it wasn’t possible to do ALL OF THE THINGS.
I’m happy that I’ve met the future-self who had the time and inclination to go through all those hard drives. But I didn’t realise this would mean coming face-to-face with all those past-selves who were so busy imagining the future that they didn’t have time to think about archives beyond throwing things in a cupboard.
Bittersweet.
Amazon conflicts
Something I’ve been thinking a lot about recently is what I think about Amazon. I guess the CEO leaving has brought this stuff up again for me.
On the one hand it’s straightforward for anyone who leans to the left. There’s a ton of evidence that they treat their low-paid workers badly. I know people who work there and the culture for high-paid workers doesn’t seem great either. My gas engineer friend Jeff - not a man known for an ethical boycott - refuses to use them because of the way they abuse their monopoly position to destroy independent businesses, don’t pay drivers properly, and harm the environment by using diesel for the last mile.
I don’t like any of these things. Not a bit.
But, still, there are some things about Amazon that make me wonder - even as someone who leans to the left - if it isn’t that straightforward. For example:
I’m fascinated by their concept of teams communicating using APIs as a way to improve large organisations. If you want a strong central state that efficiently redistributes wealth to decrease inequality then the problem of communication in large institutions looms large. For me anyway.
I think they might be creating a valuable public good with AWS as a cheap utility service which allows others to build previously-unthought-of innovations on top (a core concept in Wardley mapping). Yes, it was the state, not corporations, that funded DARPA which gave us the internet and all that associated innovation. But I’m not seeing states fund that kind of work at the moment. And it’s not a given that a tech giant supplies infrastructure for everyone else either.
My economist friend Raj thinks Amazon is a net positive for non-rich people by opening up a level of service, access and value-for-money that was previously only available to much richer people. Fundamentally that it saves a LOT of time people would have spent trawling shops for equivalent bargains. It’s one of those economist-type arguments that makes me think about ‘good’ from a new angle.
That’s why I’m conflicted. There’s a ton of things I don’t like about Amazon. But I do wonder if there are things in the way they do things that might be useful in building a fairer world and I want to stay alive to the possibility of learning from those.
Listening
Like I said above, Electric Chair in Manchester holds a special place in my heart. And nothing takes me back there like this track. “I hope I’m in a better state, when here and now crumbles and falls”. A passing-of-time banger for this week’s theme…
Also loving this playlist from The Blessed Madonna that Matt put me up on. New York mostly-house music that makes me wanna go out!
Watching
My mum came round for our Wednesday bubble and we watched the UK House of Cards because she used to ride her bike to Stratford-on-Avon in her teens to watch Ian Richardson. My bedroom got taken over as ward Labour HQ in 1987 and I’ve been a politics nerd ever since. I loved this trilogy at the time - and although it’s dated and slow these days it’s still a fascinating throwback to what politics looked like back then.
Reading
Seeing all those books I’d once meant to read led me to picking up the Kindle to rage-read recommendations. I’m in the middle of Beyond Black which Lynn recommended ages ago. No one does descriptions of the light industrial wastelands of the Thames estuary satellite towns like Hilary Mantel. I didn’t realise this was missing in my life.
Cooking
In these two weeks of cold winter all I want is chillies (heat) and szechuan peppercorns (euphoric numbness). My go-to vehicle for getting these onto my plate is Meera Sodha’s mushroom mapo tofu which Dan Hancox recommended years ago and for which I am thankful every time I eat it. (Which is often.)
I’m looking forward to letting go of the past and living in the present again from next week. It’ll be interesting to see what I’m thinking about once I’m employed again too :)
Stay safe,
Will