Five Things: Magic, Wright, Costco, US Enshittification, Nuclear Power Plant
It's Sunday. Read this now.
Hello and welcome back to Five Things!Enjoy these Five Things!
So this week was rather packed, first the circus came to town and attracted some 70.000 people who came to the annual OMR Festival in Hamburg. I attended a bunch of side-events and mingled with too many people until I really didn’t want to talk anymore. On Thursday I went to Berlin to have lunch with our oldest daughter, who currently does an internship there. This was the highlight of my week. And as always when I am in Berlin Mitte, I bump into people I know, just randomly on the streets. So weird, but also kind of fun. I really want to be in Berlin again more often, but currently the train takes at leat 2 1/2 hours, which is just a tad too long for there and back at the same day. And my ritual for the train back to Hamburg has been the same for decades: I always buy two beeers before I get on the train. If I meet someone on the train, which oftentimes happens, I have one spare beer to share. If I don’t meet anyone, I have one more beer to drink. Either way that’s fine.
The iPhone That Never Was
General Magic engineers were custom‑building almost everything, and innovation came fast and furious: an early form of USB; touch-screens with a virtual keyboard; “skeuomorphic” graphics that depicted their functions, like a filing cabinet, a game room, and a virtual street with a store for new applications (i.e., an app store); messages with stickers and animated characters (i.e., precursors to emojis); interactive graphics, like a pair of lips you could tap if you wanted to record your voice and send it as a message; Telescript, a new programming language that would allow devices to communicate in a virtual network for information sharing and ecommerce. Their name for that remote gathering space: the cloud.
I remember how awe-struck I was whenever I saw something about General Magic in magazine back then. Really amazing stuff and I totally see the need for these kind of companies in our current times as well.
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Frank Lloyd Wright as a mirror of the American condition
Wright’s reputation has always lived in a kind of crossfire. Victorian America condemned him for violating domestic propriety. Midcentury modernists dismissed him as theatrical. Late-20th-century critics faulted him for the hierarchical studio culture, while contemporary readers judge him for transgressions of power, ego and gender. Part of the difficulty is that Wright invited contradiction. He championed individuality while demanding absolute loyalty from the young. He preached democracy but ran a studio with near-monarchical authority. He believed in nature yet celebrated the machine as a necessary extension of it. He spoke of order and ‘truth’ while leaving behind a trail of debts and unfinished obligations. He was a sensualist who designed with ascetic rigour. A moralist who broke rules as if they were suggestions. A romantic who insisted that structure obey logic.
I like his buildings and I understand the historical dimension of his architectural style, but I would not want to live in one of these homes.
I Want to Live Like Costco People
One encounters a thousand and one stories observing the swath of humanity at the Costco, amongst the realm of the Costco people, doing whatever Costco people do. Here we find the well-to-do and the hoi polloi, kings and paupers, the nearly dead and the very recently born. It starts in the parking lot—there’s a man rolling his cart with a single bottle of margarita mix in the child seat—and continues through the membership-gated doors. Here’s a young couple playing house; here’s a pack of families with unruly kids. There’s a man wearing a US Air Force Vietnam Veteran hat; a man wearing a hoodie that says “Moral Monkey”; a man in a full Adidas tracksuit in the style of Christopher Moltisanti.
Recently a Costco opened in France, close to the German border. It would be interesting to know how shoppers there differ from the one in the USA.
The Enshittified States of America
No one is quite sure when it started, but at some point people realized that USA was no longer interested in making users’ lives better. Instead, it had decided to see just how much pain the user base would tolerate before it abandoned the platform. USA had become half Spirit Airlines, half Facebook, and half cable company.
And USA’s business clients—the other countries who had bent over backwards to get access to USA’s platform and user base—resented it and began looking for alternatives as they were also abused.
As a result, USA saw its position in the market decline.
Well, that’s one way to put it.
The man who blew up a nuclear power station and disappeared
A limpet mine is about the size of a whisky bottle. It has a magnetic plate on one side so it sticks to whatever metal you attach it to. Inside the casing is a timed fuse: when you pull the pin, a mechanism begins a slow countdown to detonation. There is no way to stop it once it starts. If the mechanism fails, it fails quickly. Wilkinson had been given the longest fuses available: 24 hours. Pull the pin on Friday afternoon, and by Saturday afternoon, if everything works, the mine detonates. If something goes wrong, it goes wrong while you’re still in the building.
What a story.
That’s it. Have a great Sunday! If you missed last Sunday’s edition of Five Things, have a look here:
— Nico