Every generation invents new ways to fall off the shoulders of giants
Oh and they invented ‘falling’ too
Plucking hell.
No, I am not bowdlerising my usual expletives. I am pulling unwanted hair with tweezers.
Youthfully self-conscious about the scar across my right eyebrow, I found that middle age sorted a few things out by suddenly making my facial hair grow like I’d been adding fertiliser. Brilliant, I thought: my eyebrows have developed their own comb-over. But a few years later, the occasional tweezer-pluck evolved into a routine pass with hedge trimmers to prevent myself from looking like a retired Tory grandee shuffling around the House of Lords.
All was explained this week in some “research” by an expert at proxy provider Geonode which observed a correlation between the modern fashion for thick eyebrows and the increasing use of smart headphones. Could the latter have caused the former?
Betteridge’s Law has the answer, obviously, but that doesn’t hold back Geonode’s expert-in-residence, Josh Gordon, who posits some possible explanations for the phenomenon. “Infrared light promotes blood circulation to dormant hair follicles” he notes. “This light also improves cell activity, leading to increased hair production.” He goes on to explain “The influx of nutrients and energy can revitalise weak and underperforming hair follicles, leading to more lush and full eyebrows” – as indeed any proxy data collection expert should know.
The flaw in the argument is, of course, that nobody wears headphones on their eyebrows.
On the other hand, I do wear earphones a lot and, well, admitting that my ears have recently experienced “increased hair production” would be an understatement. My eyebrows might look like they’re the product of a little fertiliser but my ears, in comparison, are positively terraforming.
This makes me wonder how people managed to achieve bushy eyebrows and ears in olden times, before the headphone era. Maybe they didn’t. Maybe cavemen of the Palaeolithic were as hirsute as the Slag Brothers from Wacky Races – except for completely bald, pink patches above their eyes and around their ears. Maybe humanity had to await the invention of the headphone before these began sprouting hair.
If the headphone-eyebrow correlation logic tells us anything, it’s that every generation believes it has invented the world rather than inherited it. Unfortunately, if we don’t realise we are just standing on the shoulders of giants, we are doomed to fall off them, repeatedly. And while we won’t fall all the way down, we do tend to end up flat on our faces regardless, spilling blood on an admittedly higher ground.
It can be amusing in a cruel way to observe the baffled, bloodied faces of those who invented the modern world as they try to take lessons from history – which for them can be traced back literally… oh, I dunno… days. ”Where did it all go wrong?” they ask themselves. “And can I blame the Baby Boomers as usual?”
This week alone I have read gawpingly un-self-aware reverse ferrets from among that most pitiful of creatures, the futurist. Several of these futurists are, again, showing the power of their valuable insight by noting the lukewarm response to Apple’s Vision Pro and suggesting that the mainstream market might not yet be ready for virtual reality.
Absence of excretia, Conan Doyle’s literary amateur sleuth. Futurists have been pushing the metaverse crap for literally decades and the market response is the same every time: nobody wants don scuba gear to edit a spreadsheet. I suspect that the standard strategy for a futurist is to keep predicting something is going to happen “soon”, over and over again until hopefully one day it does. And if it doesn’t? Who cares?
Another futurist this week wrote a post on LinkedIn to suggest that applying generative AI to tackle absolutely everything in your business is not a good idea. Thanks for that. I can’t imagine what fools were telling us the opposite merely weeks ago. It’s as if futurists are hell-bent on contradicting what they previously said, pretending not to realise it was them that said it. But hey, you gotta make a living, right?
Along similar lines, yet another commentator has been posting to say that it is not a great idea for businesses to outsource too much. Well, duh. Balance was restored days later by some press releases from other great thinkers reminding us that outsourcing is, in fact, mandatory.
Glad we got that sorted.
Look, it’s all a heap of jargonistic baloches. In t’old days, businesses just did business with each other. This was considered normal. But oh no, my generation pretended to invent this concept: we called it B2B, as if it was a totally new way of working in the entrepreneurially liberated Thatcherite frontierland. The generation that followed simply gave it a new name: outsourcing. But they also came up with something genuinely novel: that everything could be outsourced.
Previously, in those, er, t’old days, you’d outsource things that you couldn’t (or didn’t want to) handle yourself to businesses that specialised in that function. At some point, this quality of ‘specialisation’ got forgotten. For example, instead of a business outsourcing its customer support to an organisation that specialises in, say, customer support, these days it gets outsourced to some bloke in India who happens to know where he can pick up a job-lot of cheap telephone headsets at short notice.
Or, taking an example closer to home, outsourcing life-critical medical supplies to an uplift bra saleswoman.
Still, the futurists among you can dismiss my criticism as the senile rantings of an axe-grinding, bushy browed and fluffy eared old git. Later on, you can criticise those who criticised me. That’s how being a futurist works, I have learnt.
In the meantime, I am being wowed by what VPN flogger Zenshield is claiming to be a “technological breakthrough” and “game-changer”: the offline internet.
This apparently involves keeping a local backup of your cloud data so you can use it when you are offline. ZenShield’s Darius Blake says doing so “transcends the limitations of constant online reliance, offering seamless access to data whenever and wherever needed. It's a leap towards universal connectivity beyond the constraints of conventional networks.” Elsewhere in the press release they use the words “paradigm shift” – at which point I glazed over a bit, I must admit.
Essentially, they have invented the download.
At last! How on Earth did we manage before?
Alistair Dabbs is a freelance technology tart, juggling IT journalism, editorial training and digital publishing. He toned down his column this week to mention only his eyebrows and ears. Let’s not talk about the tufts sprouting from his nose that require weekly strimming. He had been considering more drastic solutions but apparently they don’t sell Roundup any more.
I predict the future will arrive tomorrow, at which point I will focus my attention on the day after that.
Why do I always accidentally read "paradigm shit" instead?