Christopher Schroeder

Tag: digital devices

  • Matchmaker, Matchmaker

    Matchmaker, Matchmaker

    A recent Atlantic article offers a different perspective on dating app problems, but these conditions suggest something more significant.

    This article by Olga Khazan shifts the dating app discussion from its products to its approach. Central to such challenges Khazan suggests is the reduction in socializing, especially in “mixed-gender, non-dating” situations.

    Dating apps as Khazan describes allow users to filter for hight for example in ways that might make the process more efficient. Such preferences however can be supplanted by other, and more appealing attributes, such as poise under pressure or kindness to strangers, that often and sometimes only appear in repeated interactions over time.

    These apps might make looking for love more efficient, but that encourages users to expect perfection as Khazan explains and reduces these experiences to chemistry with strangers rather than affection that arises with context. The more important issue I believe is that these digital matchmakers are no match for human experience.

    Human analogues obviously aren’t perfect. Some arrangements whether marriages or something less legal don’t succeed for any substantial time.

    This imperfection however is essential. Human relationships more generally not only consist of but also depend upon imperfect experiences, which can be gateways to bigger benefits and more satisfaction.

    I’m not suggesting that dating challenges, which others have documented and discussed, can be completely explained by digital difficulties. I do think these conditions though cannot be disentangled from the digital devices and platform technologies that have catalyzed, or at least contributed to, these.

    Efficiency more importantly isn’t always an unalloyed good. Not everything is or should or even can be an engineering problem.

    Apps and algorithms in other words cannot completely replace human experience and expertise. Some areas of human existence in still other words must be protected from the intrusion of digital technologies, including AI.

    And that is something worth remembering for all of us whether we dating or not as we consider first principles for incorporating these technologies, including AI, into our lives.

  • The Only Guarantee

    The Only Guarantee

    I was quickly consumed by the new comedy crime thriller Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed but ultimately couldn’t find any significance substance behind the flash, which only confirmed my larger concerns.

    Divorced fact-checker Paula (Tatiana Maslany), who is fighting her remarried ex-husband Karl (Jake Johnson) from moving their young daughter Hazel (Nola Wallace) to a different state, is blackmailed by a cam-boy and later witnesses this cam-boy’s murder by his boyfriend. She becomes a suspect after NYPD detectives process the crime scene — she had gone to her blackmailer’s home to confront him — and uncovers in exonerating herself with her co-workers’ help a larger blackmailing scheme.

    This streaming series, which is well liked by credible critics, cleverly incorporates contemporary technology and its cultural effects, which is part of its appeal. It also features tech-savvy characters and multiple plot twists, like a Möbius strip, across ten episodes that never exceed forty minutes, which maintains its fast pace.

    None of that though prevents its creator David J. Rosen from developing both primary and secondary characters. For example, the often-abrasive ex-husband Karl, who remarried apparently after an affair, plans to relocate to a rural state, and is fighting for custody of their kid, offers to rent an apartment near their new home for his ex-wife Paula, which he believes is compassionate and not as Paula suggests controlling.

    Paula as protagonist is clearly complicated, and as convincingly portrayed by Maslany reestablishes some credibility only to reveal herself as manipulative or dishonest or just something other than she seems. This fact-checker offers intriguing and insightful philosophical pretzels, such as the difference between facts and truth in a bathroom conversation with her boss, for nibbling.

    These clearly converge in Paula’s courtroom custody hearing testimony. She has been ruthlessly interrogated by the opposing counsel about her online sexual activity for example around her daughter when she reminds that she is the only mother in the courtroom, which contrasts her with Karl’s new wife Mallory (Jessy Hodges), and that she as Hazel’s mother best knows what her daughter needs.

    Paula wins, which surprises Karl and quite possibly the rest of us, and she quickly reassembles her life only to have it upended as expected by yet another revelation that fittingly comes in the conclusion, which reinforces the reality that this master manipulator, and not the blackmailing corporation, is the actual, or at least the emotional, center of this story.

    This cast of appealing characters does everything it can to cover up for the underdeveloped plot. Its premise — a fact-checking divorcee investigates blackmail better than the NYPD, and a shadowy corporation that offers blackmail as a service — might be satisfying but is ultimately implausible.

    Why would this flailing and frenetic single mother be less credible to experienced detectives than the cam-boy’s blubbering boyfriend who is being interviewed by them in an interrogation room, and who is the actual murderer? Why would these off-book employees be inspired by this criminal corporation to establish their own blackmailing schemes?

    The combined effect at least for me is a shove from the story into other observations, such as the product placement pattern of Apple devices for Paula and her co-workers and non-Apple devices for others. That made me recognize the ways that digital devices both facilitated and complicated the lives of these characters and by extensions our own, and even the reflection of their affordances in the aesthetic of this streaming series, which was co-produced by Apple Studio and premiered on Apple TV, and other stories.

    The extreme pleasure promised in the title comes from its flash that after fading seems superficial and shallow. Perhaps it’s intended to be ironic, and as such illustrates the limits of lives that suspend delayed gratification and seek pleasure at all costs.

    If so, then this streaming series could be a commentary about master manipulators that exert control and avoid consequences while everyone else chases the next dopamine hit, which makes us the actual victims. That in the digitally maximal world of today might have death and taxes as our only guarantee.

  • The Neo Danger

    The MacBook Neo by all accounts is amazing.

    This newest Apple laptop, which consists of MacBook Air compromises for a much more affordable price, has been praised for its performance, build quality, and value. The demand for this “perfect compromise” even surprised Apple, and reportedly contributed to a record number of new customers.

    MacBook Neo website screenshot

    The Neo has few competitors among Windows budget laptops at least at the moment although it could motivate Lenovo for example or HP to improve its offerings. It has next to none among Chromebooks, which are little more than surveillance browsers without the Linux virtual machine option, and still nowhere close with it activated.

    For these and other reasons, the Neo laptop will attract individual users, especially those who already have iPhones and AirPods or Apple Watches but before now couldn’t justify a thousand dollars or more for an Apple laptop. It will also likely have an increased appeal to institutions, such as schools and small businesses, as a result of the same reasons, including the network effect.

    With it, Apple is extending its reach into hardware, which has always been its focus, and adding this extension to its software, platforms (FaceTime, e.g., or iMessage), and services (iCloud, e.g., or Apple TV). As a result, Apple is consolidating its control, and slowly but surely becoming the primary portal through which people access digital networks.

    Such a consolidation challenges adversarial interoperability, or the cooperative potential of different devices and platforms even without the consent. This condition, which has long been considered a threat by Apple, is both central to the invention of the internet (Berners-Lee 2025) and possible remedy to its chronic devolution (Doctorow 2025).

    This consolidation also promotes its colonization of psychological, social, and cultural spaces, which should be increasingly evident. More and more people are walking or worse driving for example while messaging, surfing, or talking as a result of Apple devices. Too many if you ask me seem enthralled with immersion, subjectivity, and other cultural immediacy features that have been promulgated by these devices.

    Some might be more or less alarmed about a human future that increasingly exists within digital networks. Regardless, all of us can be concerned with the way that Apple has positioned itself to exert the greatest control and make the most money, which only compounds its control.

    None of us can dismiss this dependency no matter how much Apple promotes user privacy for example or environmental stability or otherwise presents itself positively to the world. We cannot be confident that it will continue to promote these or other prosocial practices, especially if or when sales start to slump.

    The Apple MacBook Neo in other words might be amazing but upon second thought is also alarming because it contributes to the degradation of digital networks and encourages digital dependency.

    Equally alarming is that such second thoughts might not disqualify the MacBook Neo as my replacement laptop when I need a new one or worse before then.