Matt is back at blogging
After a half-year hiatus, my novelist friend Matt Gemmell has returned to writing on his blog with a double-barrelled indictment of Apple and the U.S.A. (all that was missing, I guess, was a scathing takedown of apple pie as well ::chuckle::). I call Matt a friend even as I'd never met the Scot in person, having had email correspondence with him for the past decade or so, since I volunteered myself as a beta reader for his "Kestrel" series of novels, which he began writing about a decade ago now. Over that time I got to know Matt as a person, finding him to be among the kindest and most thoughtful humans I've ever known (which is saying something, considering my 6-and-a-half decade's accumulation of yearly sojourns now, around Sol). Such is the marvelous affordance of technology in the 20th and 21st centuries that one gets to know and cherish someone from the other side of the planet so well, as if they were just in the next hamlet down.
I first encountered Matt back when he was a prodigious tech writer and software engineer in the Apple/Mac space and remember how I was struck by his writing style, which stood out from the mass of tech columnists and pundits at the time (the early- to mid-2000s). Yes, it was opinionated, like they mostly were, but Matt's prose also struck me as lyrical, and... literary. So it was no surprise at all to discover that he wrote short stories on the side and, eventually, Matt took the leap from tech to the arcane world of novel-writing, in the mid-2010s. (The thumbnail in this paragraph is from when I was beta reading the first novel in the Kestrel series, Changer. That's Pa'ia Bay in the background, on Maui.)
As for those essays. I couldn't be possibly more in agreement with their theses. I myself have 'bled in six colors' all the way back to the early 1980s, when I along with hundreds of fellow nerds listened rapturously to the 2 Steves (and evangelist Guy Kawasaki, a fellow Hawaii person) when they'd visit the UC Berkeley campus and preach about this Macintosh thing they had going. Usually at Pimentel Hall on the engineering side of the campus. Anyhow, time-traveling to 2016 and, when Apple CEO Tim Cook and a host of other tech CEOs went and kissed the ring after Trump had won the presidency, something soured for me. Quickly.
Hitting that time-travel button again another decade to today and we find Cook's Apple (it stopped being Jobs' Apple long ago) once again being craven, its tech mouldering. Matt says the true thing perfectly:
"Whatever the nuance, Apple’s old and hard-won reputation just doesn’t ring true now. The company feels like a performance of itself, diverging farther and farther from the original, shuddering with escalating dysfunction, and held together by the sheer, grotesque extent of its indentured income."
I just spent the morning rereading many of Matt's blog posts, a throng of which are piquant Proustian madeleines for me, invoking as they do the sensations and thoughts I had at the time I first read these. For most of the past handful of years, Matt's essays have been largely on writing and the tech of writing; so these latest 2 pieces of a sociopolitical nature are a deviation from that norm. And what a twist it is! Just like the endings of many of his weekly stories, which leave the reader gasping for more.
But, knowing there's another one the next week, can thus be patient about it. ::chuckle::
[ This was from sometime in December 2018, when my copy of TOLL arrived in Wailuku; and I remember what a thrill it was to see my name somewhere in the physical papyri, as among its first readers ;-) ]
