Adding onions to the unreality soup
The author launches a budget-friendly workshop on product writing while battling delivery mishaps and tech fatigue.
First, a plug: I have a new workshop coming up. It’s a professional development session that teaches product writing skills. But it's only $99.50 because I don’t want to do stuff only people with tech jobs can afford. It’s called Product Writing Crash Course and that's exactly what it is.
Bring your design colleagues, your engineering buds, your PM frenemies. If you have a big team but limited budget, you can send a lotta folks for not a lotta dough. If you know someone who needs this, you can send it as a gift. And since you’re a friend, I’ll clue you in: the workshop is just the start; the same product you buy today will be expanded into a full course, and you’ll have lifetime access to all of it.
Now: Back to our irregularly-scheduled kinda-glum but also maybe cathartic(???) YGEFSK letter!
Hi friend,
FedEx says delivery was attempted yesterday. The only evidence they have presented is a single photograph of my front door, blurry and dutch-angled, captured on the move from the bottom of the porch steps. It’s not hard to picture the camera app opening as they exit the van, arm swinging upward as they approach the steps, a formless digital shutter button tapped without looking, instinctively and through long practice. “Delivery attempted. Here’s the proof, asshole.”
Our doorbell doesn’t work but I don’t know how they'd know that, not having used it. The leave-behind tag I'm being told to use to have the package left today without a signature does not exist. If it fell off and blew away, it did so in the handful of minutes between me receiving the missed delivery notification and me stepping outside with vain hope that it might be there anyway, or that I might yet chase down the truck like so many neighborhood dogs.
It wasn’t, and I couldn’t. So I’m on our third-floor deck, listening to pigeons fighting or fornicating or perhaps both in the liminal, pigeon-only space between our mildewed deckboards and whatever structure they rest upon. It's louder than you’re imagining. Louder. There you go. I peer over the railing at every vehicle louder than a Prius, and race back from the kitchen or bathroom at any semblance of sound that resembles a knock.
Thankfully, it is a very nice day today. But I’m not an outdoor boy, not really. I’m only out here because the doorbell that doesn’t work was never rung, because the delivery that was attempted wasn’t, and because the hang tag that was placed upon my door wasn't and does not exist. It feels very—as we have continually joked after seeing Parasite some years ago—metaphorical.
A metaphor for what, I can’t quite say. The times? The vibes? We seem to living at the inception of a pervasive underlayment of non-reality, suffusing all of actual reality; a worldwide sewer of slop.
We're long past the point where anything mediated by technology can be trusted, of course. The person on the phone might not be. The agent in the chat is an agent, sure, but likely not a corporeal one. The photos, the quotes, the videos? All suspect. It's hell. No thank you.
Or whatever. All of the tech criticism is boring now. It's all way too long and too full of itself and big words and just impossible to read. If I need a dictionary to understand why you think AI is bad I'm not gonna finish it, man. We went to a talk on “platform capitalism” at the bookstore bar a couple months back where one guy who wanted you to know how smart he was interviewed another guy who wanted you to know how smart he was, and I bought the book anyway and it's been gathering dust on my nightstand since, dog-eared forever around page 30 because Christ, man, have you forgotten what people sound like? Isn't that your whole thing, computers bad, people good? I don't understand why people write books that don't sound like people wrote them. Do they like those kinds of books? I sure don't.
After LEGO and books, computers and the web were the main thrill for this indoor boy growing up in rural Nebraska. They were a frontier and a joy, then a sanctuary, then an everyday tool, then a necessary evil. Now, I mostly hate them. Your email does not find me well because I am checking my email. I do not want to be checking my emails. I do not want email. I do not want accounts and passwords. I do not want to live my life inside of this information immersion blender.
So of late I'm trying to touch grass, as they say, because even if it turns out to be astroturf, I’ll have at least determined that for myself... I’m taking walks and running again. I started a new LEGO set. I've dusted off the film camera and lenses. I traded in all my old digital camera stuff for new digital camera stuff so I can make more videos that I, at least, will know are real. (That's what's in the package, BTW; a new-to-me camera and lens, selected after watching so many YouTube videos that both were and were not advertisements.) We went to the protest, even though I find all of the chants and the signs and the back-patting to be so very cringe. I'm getting movies on discs and books on paper and making as much music as I can without a screen between me and the sound.
And yet, here I am, writing an email. It's hard to even send these things anymore, to feel like I'm adding onions to the unreality soup. But existing here is part of how I make my living, such as it is, so exist here I do. All you can do some days is stick a note on the door that says “I promise I'm home, so please: knock loudly if you're out there.”
Until next time, probably,
Scott