A couple of weeks ago the New York Times ran a piece pointing out that while plane passengers are asked to turn off their mobile phones during take-off and landing, no-one knows why. The Times speculated that if just 1% of American plane passengers secretly left their devices on, that meant 11 million flights a year somehow managed to stay in the air even though someone had left their phone on.
The 1% number was just a guess, though. So last week I got the guys at my company, Holiday Extras, to run a poll and ask our customers. We run our polls on the "welcome back" email we send to customers, so we know that all of our respondents have just flown back from a holiday.
Scott Adams wrote recently about the increasingly poor online shopping experience. Every time you buy anything online you need to register, enter discount codes, work out shipping costs, struggle through endless attempts to sell you extra things you don't want...it's no longer possible to meaningfully comparison shop because every online retailer hides the final price in different ways, and it's already easier to just go to a damned shop.
My own frustration shoping online is with ad retargeting.
Appointment television ceased to be appointment television when we all got TiVos. We could skip the ads so we skipped the ads. Then we all got Twitter, and appointment television became appointment television again because what's the fun of watching Xfactor or The Apprentice or Dr Who the day after the twitter stream has flown by?
There's a couple of possible solutions to this, but the one that strikes me as most obviously achievable without the invention of any new technology is for us all to agree to a minor conspiracy.
This weekend I saw two things with the same uncompromising message. Charlie Brooker's latest Black Mirror 15 Million Merits, and the Timberlake / Seyfried film In Time.
Both apply the brutally belaboured metaphor of time as money and depict a class of indentured post-industrial serfs slaving away at pointedly mindless tasks for, in Brookerverse, the "merits" (Facebook likes times retweets times pounds) they need to buy everything from toothpaste to ad-skipping, and for the doomed residents of the In Time ghetto literally the minutes and hours they need to keep their hearts beating. Both depict a vast underclass grinding away to support a neofeudal aristocracy (in the one case of bankers, in the other a thinly-disguised Simon Cowell analogue celebrity freak-wrangler). Both offer the same escape routes for their doomed underclass - blind chance, inheritance and gambling.
So far so mind-numbingly obvious. The funny bit is that I paid thirty quid to take my parents to see In Time and we sat through maybe half an hour of ads while watching 15 Million Merits.
The appearance on Amazon of the book Farmville for Dummies - a self-consciously dummed-down how-to for Zynga's Facebook "game" that is absolutely nothing more than a time-sink without an iota of mental challenge - so depressed Umair Haque today that he declared it the end of culture.
"You know what's really cool about our culture?" he tweeted. "Oh wait. I can't think of anything."
Hyperbole is hyperbole. But since this is a cultural golden age, I do not like to see the odd bump in the road cause one of our greatest minds to write off the whole thing. Contra Farmville for Dummies, therefore, a handful of points in favour of the culture at the start of the second decade of the third millenium.
