The content producer ouroboros (or: Lou Plummer is right)

Lou Plummer on The Phones of Normal People and the recent, I dunno, caterwauling over the fact that Apple keeps making tech bloggers buy the newest iPad on launch day then cruelly betrays them by not making it a touchscreen Mac by WWDC the next month: 

Even further from the norm are what the professional nerds do. Those folks who make their living from monetized blogs, podcast ads, subscriptions and other forms of content are so far removed from what your Mom does with her phone that they could be living on another planet. 

What a population. I used to be one.  At the time, blogging was novel, "podcast" wasn't a word, and "content" was a term of art among media people, but I used to be one.

I quit being one because it became harder and harder to enjoy technology, or just use technology. It puts you in touch with a certain kind of weirdo who harbors grievance narratives over some developer somewhere breaking an ancient treaty by saying your favorite desktop environment's Minesweeper clone  has usability issues.

Over time you begin to assess the technology on the basis of how well it lets you do your very professional work of making screenshots and writing about technology. It's an ouroboros.

To the extent I left on my own terms after a decade of layoffs and a dumb acquisition, I survived a massive culling of online tech editorial in the late '00s and early '10s that, at the time, I thought was completely deserved.

A lot of my colleagues in the tech content space had migrated over from the enthusiast print world that flourished in the '80s. I was sort of star-struck when I realized that my boss at one point had been a monthly columnist for Run! magazine from my high school years.

With the development of the social web, early blogs demolished a lot of the demand for the product we were making: We made you deal with banner ads, advertiser-friendly reviews and editorial practices, and much slower production cycles. We had the kind of copy editor who'd fuck up a Samba tutorial by trying to make the configuration examples grammatically correct.

Personally, I reacted by refusing to hire "tech journalists" for anything other than industry reporting. For anything that involved making a computer do something useful, I hired people from the local university's network operations center who wanted a little extra spending money but required a bit more editing.

But in the ensuing 15 or 20 years, a sort of re-professionalization has emerged. It's just more entrepreneurial and involves more sole proprietors doing the influencer grind, because the end state of a relentless drive to efficiency is either AI-generated, SEO-oriented sludge or  small operations that understand how to give the impression of being normal humans with an emotional connection to third-party iPad keyboards and also  understand how to ruthlessly exploit YouTube's discovery algorithms. 

I read Gruber's review of the new iPads and initially had a mild eye-roll reaction, because while I believe he is generally sincere, I also believe his sincerity is informed by a kind of brand identification that makes it hard for him to do anything other than work backwards from "Apple is the best." 

He said: 

iPadOS is what it is. Whatever you (or I) think of it as a productivity platform, you’re a fool if you think it isn’t beloved by many. It’s popular, even for some “professional” use cases, not despite iPadOS’s guardrails but often because of them. Those guardrails feel limiting to me, often very much so, but those same guardrails are liberating to others. There is tremendous power in having a computer that is simple not merely by suggestion but by hard and fast technical constraints.

I wanted to roll my eyes because sometimes when Apple faceplants or makes a mediocre thing you get this "ineffable wisdom of Apple" line that is hard to swallow.

But I think I buy his line this time: The "Pro" in the name of these new iPads is about "premium," as opposed to "able to handle the demanding workloads of people who probably took 20 pictures to get just the right 'amazed gape' expression for their poster frame."

Less snidely, "don't buy the thing because you're hoping Apple will make it a MacBook surrogate; buy it because it's a very nice object with overkill specs and it feels good to use on its own terms."

That's a much more honest, transparent reason to buy the damn thing that equips you to make a rational decision, vs. making the mistake of identifying with the interests of gadget bloggers and "content creators."

Which brings me to the exit point I was looking for when I moved on from just approvingly boosting Lou's toot:

I didn't mind so much when the social web obliterated a chunk of the tech content industry, because all I ever wanted to do, initially, was say useful things about computers and technology. I wanted to be helpful. I didn't think we were actually being helpful. 

I would not mind, today, if the small web managed to obliterate the current commercial incumbents. Their self-referentiality and obsessive need to churn out content makes them less helpful.