You know when you go to buy a track on the iTunes store and, without warning, iTunes demands that you again read through many pages of legalise before it’ll deign to serve you. Is that something you’d class as an elegant user experience?

For all the times I’ve confirmed that I’ve “read and understood” these various terms and conditions at best I’ve read it, I don’t think I’ve been confident enough to say I’ve really understood it.

I recently took the Eurostar from London to Paris during which I watched a movie rented from the iTunes store. The journey is usually about 2 hours and 15 minutes – a length so suited to movie watching it would be tragic if they ever spent millions trying to shave another 20 minutes off the trip.

Incidentally the film was Jeunet’s “A Very Long Engagement”, which I’d somehow never seen despite, or perhaps because of, it being pitched as “Amelie… with polio”. I would, however, commend to fans of the First World War Fighting Moustache. Slightly more sex in the movie than I’d like to be seen viewing on a train (those scenes judiciously hidden behind a calendaring application…  but really, the train was full of French and this stuff was, I imagine, no more explicit than a typical continental yogurt advert.)

Just over an hour into the movie, as I passed out of the tunnel and into the French countryside it occurred to me that, by watching a UK rental outside of the UK I might possibly have violated one of those Terms and Conditions I may have skimmed though…

10. Territory. The Service is currently available only in the United Kingdom and is not available in any other location. You agree not to use or attempt to use the Service from outside of the available territory, and that iTunes may use technologies to verify your compliance.

Purchases and rentals (as applicable) from the iTunes Store are available to you only in the UK. If you are not in the UK you may not use or attempt to use the service. iTunes may use technologies to verify such compliance.

Given the definition of “Service” seems to covers the purchasing of licences rather than their activation I appear to be in the clear.  The point of consumption, rather than of purchase, seems to be something unmediated in this case.

Although, if that action was forbidden by the terms, there’d be no technical way of checking to enforce it.  My laptop doesn’t always know where it is, so it wouldn’t be in a position to give me up. I can’t expect to always have a network available, and I’ve no built-in GPS.

But really, we’re not too far away from being able to assume that every computing device we use has some way of determining its location on the surface of the earth.  And when that becomes the norm, will disclosure of physical location end up becoming a pre-requisite for any use of licenced content? If my device thinks I’m not in the UK, will it one day refuse to play my UK-purchased media? Will it refuse to play things licensed for home use if it thinks I’m not at home?

Not that that seems reasonable, of course.  At least at this point in time. But we already live in a world where content providers dictate the types of physical connectors you may use to watch HD content on external screens.  There are already videogames that, despite having no online element, require that players be constantly online while playing the game.  Stories of people horribly inconvenienced by the Microsoft media licensing servers. Etc.

Coming up with plausible scenarios in which DRM would a major pain-in-the-ass never stood in the way of its adoption. Perhaps real-time location verification seems inevitable, we’re just waiting for the devices to catch up. (Want to watch Avatar 4? You’ll need to upgrade to a location-sensing player.)

After all, the markets and territories of the content business are defined by physical territories.  Unlicensed (“grey”) imports are regarded as losses by territorial licensors, equivalent to piracy.  (And no doubt these losses feed into the industry’s total worldwide losses.) Why wouldn’t they demand that widespread availability of a tomorrow’s technology be leveraged to enforce yesterday’s business models?  (And, as a bonus, provide additional valuable marketing data.) There are plenty of reasons the region-based licensing of media content works like it does, and not one of those reasons is anything actual consumers give a damn about.

For the determined, I’m sure there’ll be was around it. VPNs can be used, as they are now, to present a different location.  Cell phone signal isn’t always available, so offline verification might just rely on GPS. GPS is a weak signal, not impossible to fake. But if you’re planning to perform an act of geofraud everytime you want to watch a movie remember you’re still constrained by the laws of physics – there’s still only so much travel time you can allow between an account registered in LA and one in London.

As it turned out, the reason I was asked to read-and-understand revised iTunes conditions was concerned with this issue. Apple have reserved the right to share your real-time location data with whoever they chose and for whatever purpose (i.e. advertisers, advertising).  They then seem to implausibly claim that this isn’t personal data since it’s only the location of the device. Phones aren’t human, right?

I’d blithely agreed to it already, but it seems that it’s caused concern beyond the Jason Bourne-types attempting to stay “off the grid” (hey, what are they going to do? Refuse to agree and forgo the rest of their Chuck season-pass?) Apparently they’ve got the German government concerned.

If I was Apple I’d want to soften the Terms and Conditions anxiety fast becoming associated with their products. I’m sure that most companies will throw up their hands and say they hate this stuff as much as consumers do, that it’s just the cost of doing business in a litigious society, and that they’d never try to hoodwink people into agreeing to things they wouldn’t want to.  But surely there’s some way to finesse the experience?  I’d suggest

• disclose the new Terms and Conditions a week in advance, instead of ambushing people into reading and accepting them on the spot.
• make the T&Cs available in a structured (e.g. xml) plain text format in which the changes can be clearly determined.  i.e. via a “diff”
• and, if you really think your terms are reasonable, maybe pay an independent public/consumer advocacy group with legal knowledge to provide an interpretation of the proposed changes. Then provide links from the form. I’d be less intimidated by n pages of legalese if I knew they’d already been checked over by some EFF-type organisation.
• god, I don’t know…  Present it in the form of a Scott McCloud comic or something?

After all, if you’re reading this, it’s probably on a laptop or desktop with a decent enough screen. Not as light as an iPad, I’d imagine. Not as convenient. Apple seems to have finally cracked the technologist dream of a computing device it won’t seem contextually alien to be using whilst on the toilet. Truly, the successor to the magazine.

Cory Doctorow is pouring scorn on the iPad already. Ostensibly for the closed and controlled ecosystem of the iTunes store, but I do recall him telling me (years before the iPhone, in the context of London Underground ticket machines) “I don’t understand your British obsession with touchscreens”.

And yeah, as Cory points out, the iPad does seem designed for a stereotype of a technophobic mother. Certainly that was my first thought: This seems ideal for my technophobic mother. She refuses, point blank, to touch keyboards. When, as a kid, I got my first computer she asked me if I knew what all the buttons did. “That’s not an answerable question,” I told her, “the function of the keys is contextually dependant. Any key can potentially do anything.” Whoops, turns out that sort of revelation is not an effective way to cure the older generation’s fear of computers. Every home visit involves lugging along a laptop purely for photo display purposes.

(Amusingly, my own long-term fear of touchscreens is based on the LCARS displays on Star Trek: TNG. Rather than have the actors learn where all the functions were located they just had them perform contextual actions and fill in the interface in post-production. Dangerously complex machinery with dynamically inconsistent control interfaces. Whenever the ship got torpedoed and the bridge crew fell against their control panels I used to worry they’d end up accidentally ejecting the warp core or something…)

Myself, I’m still a little wait-and-see iPad-wise. Certainly I’m not overly excited by the prospect of enhanced paperless versions of all the magazines I don’t already buy. (Although comic book downloads may be another story, but that’s for another post.) Of course, my instinct is to think “buy”, but magazine circulation in the UK is dominated by TV listings (already an app) and what appear to be tax dodges of some kind – i.e. not something you’d ever pay for directly. The only other magazine close to a million circulation in the UK is the sort that might be bought by those technophobic mothers.

Many on the net seem confident that the magazine format obsolete anyway, a byproduct of physical distribution constraints that mean nothing in the context of online distribution. I remember buying the Sunday paper and dropping entire sections of it, unread, directly into the recycling bin. The resentment at paying for something you don’t want is likely to be greater for anyone already used to the internet’s a-la-carte.

I’ve only managed to read one magazine cover-to-cover this year. The only reason that happened was that all the seats in the train with power sockets had been booked-up. Paper media is great for when you’re more than ‘n’ hours away from a charge point. (And I imagine charting that ‘n’ against magazine sales might reveal some rough symmetry.) It may turn out that people just want a convenient way to burn through their Instapaper queue, rather than a bundle of editorial consistency.

Certainly, whenever I see Jack Schultz showing off a Mag+ product, I’m more excited his magical CGI desk (he’s like David Warner in Tron!) than the actual real magazine he’s demonstrating. A lot of existing magazine layouts seem a little too gimmicky to me and, as Danny points out, it’s possible that the expensive presentation of text is how these paperless magazines intend to justify themselves.

I could be wrong though. While I recognise that the publishing is attempting to retrofit their pre-existing paradigm, I’m just as guilty of assuming the last decade of web-based media consumption is going to prove healthier as an ongoing model. God knows I wouldn’t wish my own online consumption on others. I learned all my bad habits back when all I had was Email and Usenet. The feed reader always fills, and every night I engage in the same goddamned truffle-hunt.

What am I thinking about? Curation? Quality vs Choice? Curating personal values in choosing quality. Like price comparisons for laptops before understanding the value of not having to use Windows. Liking chocolate fine, before tasting really good chocolate. I’ve been happy to eat the stone soup the web has provided thus far, but I’m not wholly resistant to a finer gastronomy.

I just don’t know what that looks like yet. Or, more importantly, what it feels like.

But.

The most troubling thing about the “disconnection” section of the bill is that it seems to imply that every household has a single point of legal authority. Perhaps those in favour of the bill have only lived in houses with someone like that, a parental figure, a single leaseholder? It’s certainly not a universal experience.

To date, I’ve never been the single point of legal responsibility in a household. Even after graduating I’ve still ended up in a variety of shared flats and houses. Attempting to work in London is like that. Sometimes, if you’re unlucky, you end up sharing a house with people you don’t particularly get on with. (And sometimes these people lose their jobs and spend all day in their room smoking and surfing the web. And how do they manage to go through so much toilet paper? It’s mind-boggling.) Anyway, it’s all rich life experience.

Like other utilities it’s usually the case that there’s only one phone line going to a shared house. Which means one DSL connection. Which means one router. Which means a wi-fi router with a shared password. (Unless the different items needing access can’t support a common authentication scheme for whatever reason. Ugh, in a dense enough area it’s hard enough finding a clear channel.)

But, while the DSL connection has a single bill payer, there’s no reasonable way (with today’s domestic networking equipment) for that person to even know what traffic is going over that connection, let alone have grounds to call a house-meeting or whatever it is they’d be expected to do as part of “policing” the house network.

And who even wants that job? “Network nazi”? Who wants to be nominated as the chump in line punished for the risk-taking of others? You can’t even take legal action against your flatmates since actual real evidence implicating them doesn’t even need to exist.

A possible arrangement might be for the bill-payer to require a bond from the network users before allowing them access (on top of the deposit or something). A chunk of money that’s at risk regardless of their personal action. But how much would that bond need to be? What price do you put on being banned from the internet? (Personally? A lot.) If I were the network bill-payer, how reasonable would it be to ask for my flatmates to deposit, say, the equivalent of a year’s rent up-front in order to use the wi-fi? That’s clearly not going to fly.

Just the possibility of this punishment existing punishes everyone in shared living arrangements regardless of any intent to engage in unlicensed file distribution. And it’s likely to increase the costs of accessing the internet for those in tighter financial situations.

I’ve gone from someone who used to buy at least one newspaper a day (often two) as a teenager, to someone who has only bought a single physical newspaper so far this year. So I’m following the stories about the impending newspocalyse with interest and some little sense of guilt.

It’s been a long drawn-out separation. Last couple of years I’d buy The Guardian on a Saturday purely because I liked the physical form factor of the weekly listings guide – these days ‘there’s an app for that’. (Not that I really watch TV anymore – around four hours so far this year, all on my laptop.) The only physical paper I’ve paid for was a copy of the Guardian International edition I picked up at Gare du Nord before hopping on a Eurostar. Because I’m Jason Bourne, obviously.

I don’t even have enough loyalty to visit news site home pages, like most of the news beach-combers I just read that which washes up in my friend’s feeds and searches. Naturally the “paywall” concept, the last desperate gasp of “old” news, seems antithetical to how I and my friends are exposed to news articles. Single source; no sharing? Do remember to label your former customers as thieves when that plan backfires…

And yet, if only because that’s the prevailing net-head axiom, indeed
echoed by the Guardian’s editor, that my contrarian mind awakes. What if there was a paywall scheme for news that was compatible with the customs and values of the current network-news consumer? A “digg this up” for the news?

Let us imagine some fictional Fleet Street ox, say The Daily Brute, sells their online access for cash. Credit-cards, paypal, anonymous code scratchcards bought for spare change at whatever remains of newsagents, whatever. Load up your credits and you can read whatever you like.

But the twist is, it’s not a walled garden, you’re participating in a variation of a threshold pledge system based around granting free access to others.

The very first person to access an article has to pay. But once they’ve done so the article is free to access for the next few people to attempt to read it. Once those “free riders” (although one assumes third-party advertising will still feature) read the article, and assuming they’ve got credit, they have the option of “passing it on”, gifting access, to the next few people attempting to access it. Then once a pre-advertised threshold of payments has been made on an article it becomes permanently “unlocked” (and perhaps ad supported), safe to cite and link to, and (to ensure some semblance of permanence) accessible by the archive spiders and the like under an irrevocable (but not exclusive) license.

In those circumstances the cultural instincts of the web generation, the link sharing and micro-blogging, take on additional meaning. To those behind the news curve, only viewing the highly trafficked links, it might seem like web business-as-usual. And the infofreakos, sitting at the intersection between hard-core news consumers and respected linkers become the king makers. If enough people pay for this thing of value now, that value can be freely shared in perpetuity.

And since there’s potentially a financial transaction involved (for the reader or their friends, or those trusting a linker’s reputation) it might, I’d hope, help correct one of the plagues of the current web newsphere – and financially vote-down the link-bait trolls.

My normal mode is to complain about all software/hardware, but I thought I’d share a couple of examples where tasks could actually be completed mid-VOIP conversation.

“I need a good photo of myself – can you send me all the photos you have of me?”

Initially this sounded like a “sure, when I get an hour or two, I’ll get back to you”-type request, but then I remembered: I ended up importing the last few years of photos into iPhoto so that I could play with the facial recognition feature. For once, geeky software fiddling pays off in real life. Select her face, export all images to a new directory, compress the directory, drag resulting zip on to the chat window and let it upload in the background. No problemo.

It was one of the few times I’ve felt like an actual use case instead of an edge case.

“I need to be at St Pancras for 8pm on Sunday, what time do I need to leave to make the connection?”

This one I know. Fire up traintimes.org.uk and plug in the details. So far, big deal right?

The trick here is that traintimes.org.uk gives you the result on a page with a terse but readable, hackable, stateless URL. Which means I don’t have to read out the results, I can just copy-n-paste the address into a text chat window. This ability to easily share and bookmark searches, while it seems bleedin’ obvious to me, is curiously absent from so many big sites.

Cities are public backlots. Cities aren’t galleries and museums, they house the physical locations of stories. And while many find the tales of history compelling, I’ll confess that it’s the city’s fictional narritives I find more attractive.

Paris, in my imagination, is shaped by movies like Diva, Nikita, and Amélie. I’ve recently made a few attempts at visiting locations from The Bourne Identity.

If you’d like to check out the Paris geography of Bourne, I’ve fed the lat/long details into a Google Earth-compatible file, bourne-identity-paris.kmz . Just load it up and hit the play button for a virtual tour, or view via Google Maps.

“There’s a tram coming towards you.  Get on it.”  - Bourne, The Bourne Supremacy.

It’s odd when you see a realistic depiction of computer interfaces in fiction.  We’ve been primed to expect one of two different types.

The first is overly simple.  Only things pertinent to the context of the computer use are displayed.  The only actions available are those that will move the plot forward.  Of course, anyone who spends enough time using computers finds this ludicrous.  Real computer interfaces are full of extraneous cruft.

The other type of interface seems chaotic compared to everyday screens.  Packed full of information, constantly updating, changing, zooming.  The effect of just a couple of seconds exposure is disorienting.

The short-hand here is: the person using this computer is smarter and more capable than you.  Or is possibly a cyborg assassin from the future.

(In the office I tend to have six or so semi-translucent terminal windows on my screen, green text on black.  For the last decade many people have remarked that it’s ‘like you’re looking at the Matrix’.)

In the imagined future of Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex the information presented is so dense that people get cybernetic brain prosthetics in order to cope.  This leads to a few oddities, such as the the way printed information is conveyed.

Matrix codes have been appearing on London’s streets for a couple of years now (sometimes in advertising, sometimes in asset control systems) but we’re nowhere near the exposure of, say, Tokyo.  And if you don’t have the electronic eyes to see them, they’re just visual noise.  Basiliks in the corner of our illiterate eyes.

From a distance the newspapers of GITS look unremarkable, but, while the headlines are in familiar type, the text of the articles is set in some kind of barcode-like format.  After all, if you have an interest in absorbing information, you’d probably already have a neural-enhancer installed, right?  But then why the old fashioned delivery mechanism?  Since they already have streams of data superimposed on their vision, why not just have the information beamed in wirelessly?

One of the characters, despite having an entirely artificial body and “cyber-brain” wears an old-fashioned wristwatch to remind them of their original humanity.  Both the watch and the the newspaper are just (potentially anachronistic) physical conveyers of information, but with relative inconveniences that give rise to ritual and fetish.

The humans ages are defined by their technology, but this imagines a future where the concept of humanity is alluded to by its practical separation from information.

An idea of humanity that diminishes beyond the point where a wearer of contact lenses could see more than someone without them.

I have an icon on my desktop computer in London that shows me the local current weather.  I’ve never looked at it.  Or rather, I’ve never needed to look at it.  The only time I’m motivated to use a computer to check what the London weather is like is when I’m not actually in London.  Yet I catch a glimpse of this thing many times a day.  So why did I put it there?  Why do I leave it there?  Info Freako?

A recent Microsoft concept video (“2019“) suggests that, if nothing else, the future is going to be full of infomatic detritus you’re going to have to tune out or go mad. It’s perhaps a glimpse of sort of delusory cleptoparasitosis as suffered by arithmophobics. “Can’t you see them?  A thin layer of charts and graphs covering everything!  Everywhere.  Always moving. Can’t eat, can’t drink. Little bastards are all over my coffee cups!”

The video does, however, have a brief moment when someone walking through an airport points his phone at the floor and it projects an arrow of the direction he should be walking in.

Just an arrow. No need to see a constantly updated overhead map of your position or a voice in your ear counting down the distance. (8 metres… 7…. “They can’t be, that’s inside the room.”) Not telling you about the places you won’t be going.  Not showing you what’s behind the doors you won’t be opening.

Just a hint, a gentle nudge.  Like a cheat in a videogame.  Technology finessed to the point that you could easily convince yourself that if you were smarter, a more capable person, you wouldn’t need it.

It’s 2009.  You may be wondering where your rocket-pack is, I want to know what happened to my Travel Agent.

I recently tried to arrange a weekend with my girlfriend in Copenhagen, leaving from Paris.  Two cities of which I have no real local knowledge.  (How easy is it to get to Charles de Gaulle?  A six am, on a weekday?  No idea, but I can check.)

Personal logistics is one of those things I never successfully mastered, but sometimes I like to indulge in the fantasy that I have. Merely a glance at a timetable and Beck-esque transit map, and I’ve potentially mentally absorbed a foreign city. Jason Bourne wouldn’t take the tube from Leicester Square to Covent Garden. Jason Bourne wouldn’t have just missed his bus.

I’m quite a fan of traveling by train rather than plane, so I suggest the possibility to my girlfriend.  Perhaps an overnight sleeper?  I have no idea of the time it might take, or at what price.  But surely this is the sort of thing the web is good at?

It’s a quest that ended in frustration and failure.

Maybe, with a little more laser-focus I’d have been able to uncover the information, but this was attempted during conversation. (Always a good benchmark of a technology’s ease-of-use: can you use it while holding a conversation.  If the answer is no, it probably won’t catch on.)  Searches are shallower, never beyond the first page of results.  Sadly, for travel information, that first page is usually multiple sites, multiple middlemen, all pimping the same affiliate deals.

Even adopting the usual information-gathering strategy of “pretend you’re going to buy something right up to point it asks for payment” failed. I was passed from pre-filled webform to pre-filled webform, each with a differing design and slightly less English, some audibly augmented by the ba-ba-bah-dah of French railway stations. Eventually descending into multi-coloured confusion and a “Serveur introuvable”. Computer says non.

How on earth did people sort this stuff out before? Did they literally go to some shop on the high street and have someone else make the arrangements. I’m sure I remember seeing one once, between the “Our Price” and Wimpy.

Presumably, important people have their personal assistants do it for them.

(The next day I received an email from my, far more organised, girlfriend containing a spreadsheet detailing our travel options – flights only. Apparently the French don’t like long train journeys which is probably why they spend so much money trying to speed them up.)

Whenever you’re booking tickets the question you always have to ask yourself is, what’s the earliest time you’re prepared to travel.  Which usually implies “what’s the earliest I’m prepared to get out of bed?”

No site ever asks that question directly, of course.  Even taking into account the amount of time it takes people to execute morning rituals, the full journey to, say, an airport has its own complexity.  If you’re traveling from “any London”, for example, you have a whole series of choices based on time and budget.  Trains, tubes and buses, all depending on time of day.  Walking routes tolerable with weekend bags, but not with suitcases. If you’ll save money using one airport over another, do you lose it based on the higher train fare?

The TFL Journey Planner displays some of the complexity here, but if you want estimates that incorporate the possibility of taxi usage you need an additional source of information.

You can’t manually go through every possibility for the best match. You either have some enhanced travel estimation skills (a “Bourne sense”), or you just put in a buffer and potentially lament the additional 30 minutes you could have spent in bed.

Applying the web’s current operational paradigm to this problem would result in a solution along the lines of “why not just provide detailed data about every part of our lives to Multivac“.  It’ll act as the middleman, either taking referral fees, or selling your the rich demographic and timely information to advertisers.

I’m still nervous about the collection and consolidation of personal information that’s happening.  These problems all look like nails to the businesses already selling hammers. While a hammer is merely a tool, its potential as a weapon is clear. The weapon potential for personal information is less clear. There are Mjolnirs being constructed with no real guarantee that they will only be wielded by the worthy.

At best, these machines are like the notebook-toting angels from Wings of Desire. The invisible benign presence watching over the people as they read. Hearing their thoughts.  Following them through the city.  Gathering information but incapable of physically interacting with the world beyond occasionally whispering suggestions into people’s minds. They can only observe and record.  Capable of giving detailed city directions; unaware of the taste of blood.

The episode of Ghost in the Shell: SAC “Trans Parent” subverts this by giving guns to the angels.  A doctor inadvertently sees the memories of a patient’s computer enhanced brain (like a computer technician finding a directory of compromising jpegs) suggesting the man is a terrorist and informs the state.  These technologically camouflaged angels move invisibly through the city, looking through emails, diaries.  Ultimately there is physical interaction.  And bloody.  Justified in the context of the story, but certainly not benign.

But beyond the potential privacy concerns, the problem is that these centralised services would be fated to becoming middlemen. Avoiding middlemen is why my instinct wasn’t to go through a comprehensive travel service.  My cultural understanding, informed by advertising, is that middlemen survive by restricting choices to those that benefit themselves and over-charge on top of that. That their use demonstrates a lack of savvy.

It was one of the promises in the early days of the web – disintermediation, the elimination of the middleman. Consumers would deal directly with producers, etc. Odd then, that the biggest successes of the web were the companies that positioned themselves as the über-middlemen.

It’s a situation I blame on the failure of another early promise that failed to deliver: agents.  Software programs that searched through data-sources for us, processed and filtered them, and presented the information in the form most pertinent to ourselves.

What we seem to have ended up with is services emerging to fulfill the tasks that agents would have performed, then taking on the properties of middlemen in order to fund themselves.

I still look to a future where the software runs specifically under my control, for my benefit – even if that means taking direct responsibility for the costs.  For the last few years that’s meant running desktop apps,  but with the availability of cloud-based processing we can be geographically separate from the machines we run our own software on.  (And, assuming efficiencies outstrip resource/power costs, you’d expect the costs to drop over time.)

Tell your automated assistant “Traveling from Paris to Copenhagen for a couple of days in August.”  That’s enough, in the alternate present, for it to spin-up a Travel Agent. A personal WOPR crunching trough the possibility space of your personal trajectories.

Temporary computer space is obtained online. The relevant routines are downloaded, perhaps open source, perhaps not. Some basic travel preferences are uploaded.  Data sources are downloaded.  Short-term-use API keys obtained if necessary. All without direct human interaction.

When ready, it feeds back choices.  Actual real-time possibilities ordered by your preferences. Like an interactive radar chart, you can start windowing it up and down.  Find your preferred dates. Tweak the budget around to reduce the choice, tweak the travel length, the departure time, the arrival time, the buffer for missed connections.  Tweak the environmental impact level.  Adjust for luxury.

Similar to a Mapumental approach covering both intra-city and inter-city travel.

And then, when you’re happy with a handful of possibilities, you make an emotional choice.  Tickets get ordered, calendars updated, full electronic itineraries prepared. Mission complete, the agent self-destructs.

But it doesn’t need to stop there.  The details are monitored for changes, either via requested alerts, or through polling.  A transport strike declared for the day you’re due to travel?  Your automated assistant will let you know, and if necessary a “plan B” is prepared.  Flight delayed?  Adjustments will be made.

And when you actually need to travel, your personal devices will keep you on track.  For example something the “JITwatch“, or that iPhone app that triggers an alarm when GPS indicates you’re within a particular distance from your destination.

They know where you are, and where you need to be.  A voice from your phone will guide you through the streets to your bus-stop.  And if real-time information about the bus network is available, it’ll tell you when you need to be there to catch it.

And later, when you’re smarter and more capable, you may no longer feel the need to keep asking for hints.

I needed to get an iTunes gift-card this weekend. I tried buying one at the train station’s newsagent.

The thing about these electronic gift-cards is that, even if you have the physical instantiation of the thing, they’re worthless before subjected to an electronic blessing by the cashier. Unfortunately this card swiping ceremony merely resulted in frowns from the cashier. “Are the iTunes cards still not working?” he asked a colleague. No, apparently not.

A weekend malfunction. These things happen. I’d seen it happen to someone else in another store last year. I’d just assumed the gift-card activation process isn’t very robust to communication failure. Apple are already making mad money, so it’s probably not worth the extra effort making it easier for people to give them more.

I was just a little bit peeved that I’d spent time in the queue holding the impotent gift-card when apparently there was already a known problem. Of course, I don’t make a fuss.

So I try again on Monday. Different station, different branch of the same newsagent. Longer queue.

“We’re not selling the iTunes gift-cards.”

No pretence of running it through the machine. No frowny, apologetic faces. A brutal customer slapdown. The weekend’s iTunes gift-card outage had apparently extended into Monday, but nobody thought to take the cards off the shelves? It was the closest I’ve been to a full-on Hulk-out this quarter.

“Why, when you know you can’t sell them, would you still have them out on display? Why would you actively want to convey the impression you were selling something that you’re unable to?”

And, as I asked the question aloud, a possible – speculative – reason occurred to me. When I’d seen the gift-card activation failure before it was at a branch of a formerly major music retailer. A retailer that not long afterwards collapsed, unable to pay its suppliers.

At the time I didn’t see a gift-card failure portending the store’s collapse. But maybe it was an early sign? Maybe the activation ceremony is as much to protect suppliers from distributers as it is to protect the distributers from thieves. If that’s the case, what does an extended failure period imply about the retail distributer? That they’ve been shut-out by their suppliers?

Sooner or later, someone’s going to get narky after queuing and put together a wild thesis based on nothing but scant evidence and conjecture. Not me though. I’m sure the problems I’ve experienced are just a confluence of technical glitches and piss-poor customer experience management. UK business as usual.

All of the insurance ads seem to be emphasising speed and convenience at the moment.  One insurance comparison site sponsors “24″ on Sky, which is surely the pornography of effective time-management.

Not being a car owner I’ve never tried these services myself.  I can only assume that their major breakthrough is that they’ve dispensed with the many dense pages of legalese usually presented when buying insurance.  Possibly, they’ve been replaced by a short series of simple manga-style diagrams?

After all, the ads don’t proclaim “Get a quote in minutes… then spend a couple of hours wading through terms.  Bring a sandwich.”

I jest, of course.  The only time anyone reads their insurance policy is after they’ve been denied a claim.  Who has time?  It’s less “caveat emptor”, more “festinet emptor”.

Maybe it’s to be expected from insurance policies, but it seems that every action on a computer presents you with some legal contract of sorts.  Its like a blight on the web.  Want to register for a website, buy something online, install a piece of software?  You’ve just agreed to the following non-negotiated terms…

If I want to watch TV I can somehow do so without being presented with any kind of contract.  If I want to watch the same programmes on my computer, on a service run by the TV station, it’s apparently become a matter for the lawyers.  Computers = risk.

“Print this for your records” they sometimes suggest, imagining that people still have printers at home.  If you’re me you hit print, set the printer type to PDF and file destination to “~/Documents/legalbullshit/”. I rarely read them, of course.  I used to skim through them but invariably you’ll come across a part that says they can modify the terms without notification at any time.  So, complete waste of time then.  It’s like that fabled test which instructs you to read through the paper, has a page full of questions, and at the end instructs you not to answer any of them.

And, in the US at least, anyone breaking these (modifiable without notice) website Terms of Service can apparently be subject to criminal prosecution.  The Internet is serious business.

You end up hoping that the “many eyeballs” axiom of the open source world has some sort of equivalent here; that there’s some dedicated individual looking for the evil “first born” clauses.  Indeed, when a recent change to the Facebook TOS (not widely announced by Facebook, natch) was made, it caused a stink on a few blogs.  Commenters seemed outraged that they would try to slip something like this by.

So these things are prevalent, but where are the tools for managing them?  Where’s the security update tool equivalent?  What if, instead of just saving these documents, I imported them into desktop software or web-service.  When the terms change, I receive notification.  If I’m presented with a new document detailing terms, I get to easily see the diffs – and then be one step away from a wiki discussing the implications. 

Companies could play nice with this ecosystem by presenting downloadable dated and versioned XML formats of their terms. Perhaps even participating in related discussions and providing justifications. But it wouldn’t be necessary, all we’d need is a few healthily paranoid individuals looking out for us all, something that will always be available.

Our hero awakes in a partially destroyed apartment, an ambitious DIY project apparently abandoned after initial demolitions.  Plastic sheeting forming its notional walls.  But beyond the collapsed appartment – a collapsed world.  Tehran’s anti-America murals adorning an eastern European housing block.

Street markets hawking nothing but guns. The fashion cues are part military, part Snow+Rock – windbreakers and light body-armour. But this is a shopping trip for food, and all that’s on offer is freshly caught rabbit.

Deftly skinned, sliced and sautéed.  Our hero prepares to eat the meal accompanied, surprisingly, with a glass of red wine. The rugged mercenary showing a touch of sophistication.  An odd touch of elegance that may betray the director’s nationality, and perhaps a nod to how the actor’s name must sound to french ears.  The juxtaposition of refinement and utility: Le vin et diesel.

For a brief moment the movie looks to offer a tantalising exploration of grim meathook cuisine. 

(Of course within the next 60 seconds, Vin’s quipped beligerantly before shooting someone in the head.  By halfway-through, the movie has descended into unintelligible Golden Child/cyber-messiah nonsense.)

In Vin’s spartan quarters – makeshift bed, improvised gym, etc – there is an interesting inclusion. A couple of Google-branded net devices, one a half-screen sized touch-screen PDA and media centre combo, the other a wall mounted TV-style display.  Naturally it’s sporting 27 channels of rolling terrorism alerts and civil unrest footage.  While Demolition Man prophesied that all restaurants would be Taco Bell, dystopian movies suggest that all future television will be Fox News.

Nicely encapsulating the life-support priorities of future generations – the world may have turned to crap, but as long as I’ve got a fast net connection I’ll be OK.  Maybe that’s even becoming true of today’s youth? Given a choice of hot running water or “facebook”, net access may be seen by younger people as the more essential of the two.

I mention it because I’ve had to go without Internet for a few weeks recently.  And then, not long after it returned, I’ve had to go without hot water.  Not as a direct result of some weird Hobson’s choice, obviously.  Just things falling apart. (Such as the breaking of whatever it was dampening the washing machine’s violent seizures, triggering a bold and destructive bid for freedom, cut short by its own cruel reliance on electricity.)

Things failing used to be just mundane inconveniences.  Now they’ve somehow become temporal echos heralding future disaster.

I feel like I’ve been psychologically primed, if not quite girded, for massive institutional collapse.  When an extreme weather event hit London last week (i.e. slightly more snow than we were eqipted to deal with) it interupted the collection of domestic refuse in the area.  I immediately began to fantasize an inevitable path from a mounting backlog, to disease, to rioting.

(As it was, the rubbish was mysteriously gone by Thursday.  Sudden out-of-schedule collection is disturbing – it may cause you to reassess your previously low opinion of the council’s logistical competence.)

My recent internet outage was countered with a return to something like the old-school pre-Friaco batch-download internet technique.  Take the laptop into a free wifi area, sync the off-line email and feed apps, then process through everything offline. It’s not quite cold turkey for my Info Freako, but it has forced me to be more discerning in my consumption.  For the first time in years I’m not running a unread backlog in my feeds.

And now the hot water is gone.  Get used to the icy showers, I told myself, warm water is a luxury of more carefree times.  At least while we’re awaiting a part from “bunny boilers” (an unfortunate mnemonic for Vaillant, from a logo featuring a cartoon rabbit).  But then I started getting up earlier in the morning and making use of my gym’s showers and getting in a (previously rare) work-out while I’m at it.  Any longer and it may become a habit.

Both positive outcomes from annoying situations.

I’m quite a fan of those near-future dystopia tales – essentially a genre in which the miseries of the real world are visited upon anglophones (Brian Wood’s current comicbook DMZ is highly recommended).  One of the trends in UK-set futures (seen in the likes of  V for Vendetta and Children of Men) is the weird idea that while things are grim, they’re far grimmer everywhere else.  The fiction that, all things considered, Britain adapts surprising well in a crisis.

While America’s national survival myth might be of the self-sufficient rugged frontiersman, Britain’s is “Blitz Spirit”.  When the secret words are invoked a magic lightning bolt infuses the public with the super-powers of stoic bloody mindedness and temporary submission to the state’s Woolton pie paternalism.  Keep calm.  Carry on.

But maybe that’s a wartime-only deal?  Every new British government has a stab at fostering peacetime patriotism, or as they usually put it “a sense of national identity”.  A difficult concept to a nation that largely considers its own flag out-of-place when seen anywhere but a sporting event.

Apparently the Brown government was looking for a motto to push this forward.  Something displayed on public buildings, such as the French “Liberté, égalité, fraternité”. Of course the idea tof coming up with a motto to etch into the stonework of new British post offices is stymied by the inability imagine there ever being new British post offices. Most of the publicly submitted suggestions were sarcastic at best.

The only suggestion I could possibly support as a summation of British values (and the Gilliam-esque absurdity of it actually being used would amuse me) would be a latin translation of “It could be worse” (“in deterius cadere potest“?).

This is why I fail at blog.  I can’t just moan about my broken boiler – I have to bury it in some larger rambling context.  Better perhaps to cultivate a style of the twitterish précis: “Still no hot water; mustn’t grumble.”