From the Editor’s Desk: Missing the Point ⭐

In the early 1990s, my wife and I moved to the Phoenix area so that I could go back to school to study computer science and pursue a new career in software development. Life had other plans for me, of course, but during those first few years in Arizona, when friends and family would visit for the first time, we’d often take short trips to notable sights elsewhere in the state, too, like the Grand Canyon.

On one such trip with a good friend and his brother, we parked the car and walked across the lot to the gaping maw of the Grand Canyon, a view so astonishing in depth and breadth that it’s impossible to fully capture in words, photos, or videos. The reality of this place is so mind-bogglingly impossible that your brain almost switches off. As we walked down the steps to the viewing platform, mouths agape, trying to reconcile what we were seeing with our sense of reality, a cry rang out.

“Mommy! Mommy!” a young girl yelled from the platform. “Look!! A puppy!!”

We lost it. The three of us all doubled over in laughter. Here we were, at one of the earth’s greatest sights, a literal natural wonder, and all this child saw and could think about was … a puppy.

In our insular little world of technology enthusiasts, we see a similar lack of focus, an inability to see what’s truly important. Or even what’s really happening.

It’s everywhere.

You see it in the outrage over the Control Panel, a legacy interface that almost no one sees and doesn’t impact our day-to-day experience in Windows 11 in the slightest.

You see it in the complaints about the PlayStation/Xbox “duopoly,” despite those products being dominated by the Nintendo Switch and the relative tininess of this market compared to those for smartphones, tablets, and PCs, markets where real abuses occur.

You see it in how obsessed people are with web apps, their supposed limitations, and how these things will never be “real” apps because they’re not “native” apps. Whatever that means.

Again and again, we ignore the real problems in our world, and instead of collectively agreeing on the important points, we focus, like that little girl at the Grand Canyon, on the ridiculous and superficial. Indeed, some seem almost diabolically incapable of not voicing an opinion, no matter how off-topic and underdeveloped. The discussions that accompany anything related to antitrust are cesspools of this nonsense. Instead of celebrating that the world’s regulators are finally doing something, anything, about these monstrous superpowers that have gone unfettered for far too long, we debate minor points and worry about the government’s role in app design.

But I’m especially freaked out by people with strong opinions about things that do not impact them, like all the Sonos complaints coming from those who don’t even own any Sonos equipment. Or even worse, the complaints about changes in whatever products or services that won’t impact them but will help others.

No opinion is uneducated enough to not be broadcast immediately and, if ignored, repeatedly. It’s almost as if the people who know the least about any given topic are the most inclined to voice their thoughts, spreading their mistakes and broken ideas casually but also earnestly.

Mommy, look. A puppy.

Part of the problem is that we live in an era of bias confirmation, which is a semi-polite way of saying misinformation. I’ve raised this issue before, but our ability to automatically curate the information we receive online has turned us all into insular, tunnel-visioned cretins, unable to even listen to contrary opinions, let alone consider their validity. It’s an interesting issue when our common sense is undermined by a lack of diverse data inputs. But that’s what happened.

Two very recent events highlight how a lack of critical thinking can be problematic. And these are just the tip of the proverbial iceberg.

Almost two weeks ago, someone watching the Windows Weekly live stream asked why we weren’t discussing a story about a Windows Update corrupting SSDs in PCs. I had seen the story, of course, but when I looked into it, I couldn’t locate a single credible source for the complaint. There was a guy on Twitter/X basically, and then a handful of people on Reddit. So I never wrote about it, though I would continue to keep an eye out and see how it developed.

In time, Microsoft and a disk controller maker both came out and said that the story was untrue: No Windows Update had corrupted SSDs, HDDs, or any storage devices. This was a useful proof point to my belief in maintaining a reasonable level of journalist credibility and not just writing about something because one person said they experienced it. But it also led to the types of bizarre arguments I often get from people, including one who claimed on social media that Microsoft’s denial was bogus because it used the term “hard drive” instead of SSD. Because there’s some version of this world in which that type of stupidity wouldn’t be exposed immediately.

Last week, my news feeds were taken over by claims that Google had “warned 2.5 billion Gmail users” that their accounts had been compromised, so the company was recommending that everyone change their passwords. This seemed unlikely to me, and I figured I would get this warning in at least one of my several Gmail accounts. But I never did. Jokingly one morning, I asked my wife if she had received a warning email from Gmail. She did not. And once again, I couldn’t locate a credible source for this story either.

Yesterday, Google denied these reports. It never told Gmail users that their accounts had been compromised, and there is no major Gmail security issue. The issue, as it turns out, is us: Phishers always use social engineering and other methods to fool people into exposing their online accounts so that they can be hacked. Nothing has changed. Lots of people use Gmail, so it’s a prime target. We’re so gullible that we fall for these tricks. And we’re so gullible that we believe these types of stories, even when there’s no proof.

We are at the wrong moment in time to be this unsophisticated and to think so non-critically. AI is expanding dramatically across personal computing and it seems to be getting more powerful and more useful on a weekly basis. Landing in the middle between the AI deniers and the AI doomsayers, it’s clear that what AI needs from us, as people, is some oversight and fact-checking. That we are uniquely incapable of doing that right now is historically problematic.

I can’t snap my fingers and help anyone think more clearly. Heck, I can’t even do it myself. This is a classic example of seeing the problem, understanding the danger, and still not having a clear answer or solution.

Mommy, look. A puppy.

I laugh because there’s no good response to this kind of disconnect. But it hurts my heart as much as it hurts my brain. Surely, we can be better than this.