La Tinaja

Links

• It’s Kind of Cheesy Being Green—The Message—Medium: Paul Ford explores the real political consequences of superficially innocuous product design decisions through the lens of the ‘green bubbles’ used for standard SMS messaging on iOS. The most important part of this essay for me was that Ford doesn’t fall into the trap of conflating the fact that these consequences are not self-evident parts of the design with the conclusion that they are therefore necessarily unintended. These sorts of non-obvious design consequences receive relatively frequent notice in (good) tech writing these days, but almost always with the assumption that they are a surprise. Ford, correctly in my opinion, asserts that Apple is perfectly happy to create these negative associations with non-iMessage message bubbles and to play on consumer anxieties in doing so.
• Replacing Middle Management with APIs: Peter Reinhardt’s essay on Uber, Lyft, 99designs, and other online services that mobilize freelance labor forces in realtime to answer customer requests provides a nice exploration of the human consequences of approaching tasks that require human work as API problems.
• Supernatural Swells—re:form—Medium: Tim Maly takes the Wedge at Newport Beach, CA as a jumping off point to discuss the ecological (and surfing) consequences of hardscaping coastlines against storms and rising sea levels, including a run through new innovative techniques that solve the old problems of unyielding seawalls, jetties, and groins. As someone who grew up going to the barrier island of Galveston on a regular basis, the transformative effects of seawalls and other coastal hardscape are familiar to me, but it seems like it will become more common to pay attention to this aspect of our built environment as sea levels rise. (This piece apparently originally appeared in ACID which looks absolutely amazing.)

Books

• Nicholas Carlson. Marissa Mayer and the Fight to Save Yahoo!. New York: Twelve, 2015.

  A lot of the coverage this book has received in the tech press has focused on Mayer’s social idiosyncrasies and how they have damaged her ability to relate to and to lead the people she works with. The book’s three part structure, however—outlining the serial struggles of several pre-Mayer Yahoo! CEOs, Mayer’s success at Google, and Mayer’s struggles at Yahoo!—drives home Carlson’s doubt that it may be possible for anyone to succeed at Yahoo!. Carlson asks whether Yahoo! was simply the product of a specific, and now past, historical moment. Also of interest, but underdeveloped, was Carlson’s insight that Mayer’s hiring problems have her trying to do the work of a ‘media’ executive when she is a ‘product’ person. Reading this at the same time as Paul Ford on ‘product’ at The Message this week added both some weight and some skepticism to that distinction.

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• Felipe Fernández-Armesto. Our America: A Hispanic History of the United States. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2014.

  Our America is a provocation that mocks North American myths regarding the WASP foundations of the United States and their supposed exceptional consequences. It also, however, neatly packages for a general audience the benefits of addressing the deep Iberian histories of not only the large swathes of the continental US that were once part of the Spanish Empire and of Mexico, but of those regions typically understood to have only Anglophone legacies.

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