Fraser Speirs’ analysis of tech insiders’ negative reactions to the iPad is the best I’ve read so far.

The visigoths are at the gate of the city. They’re demanding access to software. they’re demanding to be in control of their own experience of information. They may not like our high art and culture, they may be really into OpenGL boob-jiggling apps and they may not always share our sense of aesthetics, but they are the people we have claimed to serve for 30 years whilst screwing them over in innumerable ways. There are also many, many more of them than us.

While Alex Payne is absolutely right that the iPad is not a tinkerer’s machine, I think it’s not only reasonable but long overdue that users who don’t want to have to tinker won’t be required to, or, more often, as Speirs notes, rely on regular visits from a technological shaman to keep their machines working.

Yes, the iPad is optimized for consuming media, but it’s no more of a sinister inducement to consumption than a book is. The idea that a single, complex, general-purpose tool (the “computer”) has to serve so many different purposes and audiences through a single hardware interface is merely an artifact of the history of computing. It’s crazy to insist that in 2010 my mother should use the exact same tool to send email and view photos that I use to develop software.

That said, as a tinkerer myself, the prospect of a future where someone who does want to tinker is actually prohibited from doing so worries me as much as it does Payne. The fight for greater openness on the platform is justified. It feels to me like this decade’s analog to the battle over DRM in music, except in this case Apple is the RIAA. They’ll eventually open the platform, or they’ll be routed around. And I’ll be happy to tinker for the cause.

UPDATE: See Roger’s comment below for a reference to Steven Frank’s excellent piece on this very issue.

Fellow Old Worlders, I hate to tell you this: we are a minority. The question is not “will the desktop metaphor go away?” The question is “why has it taken this long for the desktop metaphor to go away?”

Exactly.

This morning I was looking for a reference to back up what I assumed was by now a commonplace, which is that the iPhone is the new cigarette (original credit for this assertion to @wendyrama). Google gave me nothing relevant (neither did Bing or Cuil for that matter, so much for decorrelation). So, for the next person looking for such a reference, here it is.

The iPhone is the new cigarette. That’s it. Simple as that. You can stop reading now if you get it.

For people who smoke, the cigarette is still the cigarette. For people who don’t, the iPhone does almost everything that cigarettes do.

1. The iPhone changes your brain chemistry. For better and for worse it makes you feel good and want more (mechanism of action be damned).
2. The iPhone gives you an excuse to step outside and fiddle with something when you feel like not working for fifteen minutes.
3. The iPhone gives you something to do in boring interstitial situations, like waiting in line at the store, or waiting for the bathroom, or waiting in line for the bathroom at the store.
4. The iPhone gives you something to do with your hands in awkward situations.
5. In really awkward situations the iPhone gives you a way to check out entirely (granted, that’s a slightly different type of cigarette).
6. When you’re using your iPhone in public, some people will think you look sophisticated. Others will think you’re annoying.

Come to think of it, even for people who smoke, the iPhone is the new cigarette. It gives you something to do while smoking.

Kottke’s defense of Twitter has it right, as far it goes. Things people say on Twitter are no more or less interesting than what they say on the street, or on the phone, or at home. It is like standing next to a conversing couple on the subway platform, but it isn’t just that.

I can only be on one subway platform at a time, but with Twitter and the emerging category of similar and related services oriented towards realtime, perishable information, I can, whenever and to whatever extent I choose, be on as many subway platforms as I can handle all at once. Or I can tesseract from one platform to another. We can even write our own tools to slice and dice the time and space of conversation any way it suits us.

Twitter and its ilk are technologies, no more and no less. Just as telescopes allow us to see farther than we could with the unaided eye, Twitter enhances our ability to pick up on ambient conversations. It makes us all a little bit more cyborg, and a little bit more Sookie Stackhouse too.

I’m a big fan of Mark Growden and his music. I met him at a party in Oakland almost four years ago, and since then I’ve seen him at a handful of events. With the combined magic technologies of foursquare and Twitter, I have a good chance of being able to tell you exactly where he is at any given time. Does that mean that if I know he’s buying groceries at Bi-Rite I’m going to rush down there to say hello? Not necessarily. But the fact that I could — or even more to the point, the fact that I have this invisible tentacle with a Growden-sensor on the end of it that I can tune into whenever I like — takes that much more of the edge off the alienation, or rather, the disconnection, of modern life.