Macos

While Apple is slowly coming around to recognizing that some of its users listen to classical music, there is one quirk in the Music app on macOS that betrays its deep bias toward pop music. It’s this: when you create a new playlist, the application defaults to displaying the tracks in its “Playlist” view, which as far as I can tell serves no other function than to consume real-estate in the UI by displaying a thumbnail of the album art.

Maybe I’m just getting cranky after over a year of on-again-off-again pandemic lockdowns, but I’ve had it with Apple’s heavy-handed attempts to get me to upgrade to Big Sur. Mind you, I have nothing against it. It’s just an operating system. I don’t particularly like it’s translucent bubbly iOS look. But I could live with.

But I don’t want it. I depend on a very unorthodox setup. I have a lot of infrastructure tools that depend on certain versions of Python to be in just the right place. Every single macOS major upgrade breaks all of this and I spend days picking up the pieces. I’m tired of Apple messing with it. So when my system launched into what seems like an unbidden upgrade process today, I lost it.

(N.B. I am not a security expert. I’ve implemented a handful of reasonable measures to prevent cross-site tracking and limit data collection about my preferences and actions online.)

Surveillance capitalism is a real and destructive force in contemporary economics, politics and culture. Whatever utopian visions that Silicon Valley may have had about the transformative power of ubiquitous network technologies have been overwhelmed by the pernicious and opaque forces that profit from amplifying divisions between people. While I can’t change the system, I can change my own practices and reduce the degree to which surveillance capitalists, state actors and others who have no rights to my data.