In Computing, Politics, and Micromobility: Always Have a Backup
The theme of this week is backups.
Always have a working backup strategy.
Much ink has been spilled (🔗 The Verge) about the CrowdStrike fiasco which is being called one of the worst global IT outages in history. The biggest question isn't how it's technically possible to take down 8.5 million Windows machines (that's not hard to imagine 😏), but why updates with even a slim chance of affecting critical systems aren't rolled out in staggered deployments to ensure one rogue update can't take down entire infrastructures.
It sounds like that's exactly how it'll work going forward, but it still begs the question: how could there not have been an expectation that a faulty update might crash systems? Because no matter how awesome a technology organization is, it's not a matter of if but when they release software with a catastrophic bug. Your job is to plan for that ahead of time, not after the damage has been done.
Always have a working backup strategy.
Apparently this is true even in politics. Less than a week ago (!!), United States President Joesph R. Biden Jr. was the presumptive nominee of the Democratic Party. It was Biden v Trump: the matchup most people had come to dread…or so we were told by a steady drumbeat of negative press.
What a difference 120 hours makes!
This isn't a political newsletter, so I'll keep my personal thoughts to myself (you can certainly follow me on Mastodon for that!), but I will say the speed and agility of the Biden campaign & Democratic Party machine to rebuild the airplane while flying mid-cycle in order to back Kamala Harris has been nothing short of astounding. Not only was this a winning backup strategy (as least from what we can tell at this point in the race), but it has positively electrified the Internet.
Some people are calling Kamala Harris (🔗 TechCrunch) the “meme candidate” and that's not meant pejoratively, it's stated with fondness. That's “lightning in a bottle” you simply can't manufacture. When Internet culture and the youngs have decided you're interesting and worthy of attention, all you can do is thank your lucky stars and run with it. And since Kamala Harris hasn't just fallen out of a coconut tree, her campaign is definitely running with it (🔗 Deadline).
Speaking of Kamala Harris and of particular importance to you, dear readers, where does she stand on the issues of Big Tech? That's the subject of a news roundup I just posted (🔗 The Internet Review). The short answer seems to be that she'll continue operating along the lines of the Biden-Harris campaign to date. We may also see her lean more on her background as California attorney general where—despite cordial personal relationships with many in Silicon Valley and the Bay Area tech scene—she didn't hesitate to go after companies and platforms on issues broadly popular with the general public, such as curtailing revenge porn and stomping out privacy violations.
I've felt rather critical of the Biden-Harris administration's tepid response to the rise of generative AI—showing far too much deference to the tech companies peddling these unethical services—so I can't say I'm too optimistic we'll see further developments on this front quite to my liking. But certainly a Harris presidency would be far preferable to the alternative in this regard (🔗 ArsTechnica).
Always have a working backup strategy.
And now for a personal anecdote.
I bought my first electric scooter in fall of 2022. I hadn't been riding a bicycle much in some time, and to be honest I'd never felt any particular affinity for the cycling community. But when an e-scooter rental fleet first arrived in Portland and I tried one out, I fell head-over-heels with this new mode of transport.
This, along with a growing interest in urbanism as a genre of online content, led me down the rabbit hole and into the new era of modern silicon-enabled, battery-powered micromobility.
And then last year, my e-scooter broke. womp womp
Really, only the back tire went bust…but I discovered to my horror that the company who made the e-scooter (AnyHill) apparently has no real support in the United States. (A hazard of buying a product off Best Buy that's just shipped directly from China, I suppose.) And my attempt to order a tire and put it on myself resulted in various e-scooter parts sprayed across my very small garage and the busted tire only partially ripped off the wheel. (I'm terrible at anything mechanical!)
So I decided to get my old bicycle fixed up and attempted to ride it more. And that's when I began to discover: I love riding bicycles! 🥰 And there's a fun and very lively cycling culture here in Portland that I'm only now becoming familiar with.
I eventually did purchase another e-scooter though: this one from Segway/Ninebot. Surely they have good support infrastructure in the U.S. I can rely on should anything go wrong!
Womp womp. Once again, after only a few short months, I had another flat back tire. And nowhere local to Portland, Oregon to get it fixed! 😭 (I may have tracked down a shop in Eugene which works on e-scooters. Will keep you posted…)
This time though, I was less bummed because I'd totally gotten bit hard by the cycling bug (the good kind of bug!) and was having a blast riding every day for both business and pleasure and leaving my car in the garage.
Until my bike got stolen. 🤪 womp womp
Hey, it happens. You lock it up somewhere, think it's safe, go about your business, and when you come back, it's gone.
Thankfully, I had a backup pla—oh shit. 😵💫
This is when it fully dawned on me: you shouldn't rely on micromobility as your primary form of personal transportation unless you have more than one working vehicle.
In other words, always have a backup.
Ideally, I would have a working e-scooter and working mechanical bicycle at the same time—and in the best-case scenario, also an e-bike.
This is different from the "oh, I own more than one car" flex because (a) cars are an order-of-magnitude more expensive than even luxury micromobiles, and (b) micromobiles are physically much smaller and easier to store.
I just wish I'd known when I started down this road (pun intended) that owning one e-scooter or bike isn't enough—at least if you take this form of transportation seriously, which I do.
Always have a backup.
P.S. I did end up buying a cheap used bicycle off of Craigslist…which then ended up needing more work done on it than the price I paid to buy it off Craigslist, but I'll save you the full sob story. At least I'm back out and cycling again—and that's some hype I can live with! 🙌
Cycles Hyped No More (unless they're bicycles) 😜
by Jared White
I hope you enjoyed this issue! Please let folks know about the newsletter and feel free to let me know what you'd like to read about next!