How it started: TNG had just come out on DVD, and the box sets for each season were running about $100 each. With 7 seasons I was looking at $700 to binge-watch the whole show, about $1100 today’s money. Even renting the discs from Blockbuster meant I’d be spending $150 before I was done. That felt like a lot.

Instead, I tried out this new service for a fixed cost, about $10 a month. Netflix would send me a DVD at a time, so I could watch 4 episodes and send it back for the next 4. I loved that model for reasons I won’t go into here, and I did indeed binge all 7 seasons of TNG in a less than a year. Money well spent.

I know that was at least 20 years ago because I enthused about Netflix in 2004. Since then, between Netflix and Paramount I’ve probably spent about $2500 total to keep my Trek supply flowing. More than that initial sticker-shock cost, but over time it included the other Trek shows, the upgrade to streaming, and the TOS and TNG remasters to HD. I probably came out even.

Today I’m ditching Paramount because their new owner decided to choose the fascist path. Eff those guys. So I need an alternative to the Star Trek Channel. My usual go-to is Apple, and I did the math on what it would cost to get all the Star Trek series.

For example, TNG is now $100 for all 7 seasons. Enterprise is $50 for the 4 seasons they were able to get through. Older shows like Voyager and DS9 are cheaper, newer ones like Discovery and Picard a little more. The most expensive (Strange New Worlds) is about $25 a season.

The total for TOS, TNG, DS9, Voyager, Enterprise, Discovery, Picard, Lower Decks, and the first 2 seasons of Strange New Worlds is… $600!

(Oh, and I did NOT forget Prodigy. I already own Prodigy because Paramount took it off their service and then Netflix did the same, and that’s a whole other reason not to stream. But I digress.)

Paramount’s least-garbage tier is $13/month. At that rate I could buy a season or so every couple months and have them all, every last Trek show to watch whenever I want forever, in 4 years. (Or I could decide to buy now so their sales numbers drop to zero after the merger.)

What about the new stuff? Yep, I’m giving up early access to Strange New Worlds, the only Trek show currently being released. I expect I’ll have to do the same for Starfleet Academy if they decide to release that. Maybe that means waiting a few months for a season to be available on Apple, or it might not be released there at all. I can be patient.

In the best case, they’re releasing new stuff and I’m buying it on Apple when it comes out. Wait, isn’t that just the same thing as paying them monthly? No. They’d need to be releasing an entire season every 2 months to cost the same, and we all know that’s not the direction they’re headed.

But also wait, isn’t this just replacing one big-company streaming service for another? OK, yes. Sure. I’m relying on Apple to be less terrible, which so far they have been. (No pre-roll ads. No “autoplay next video”. No pulling a show entirely. So far.) I’m also relying on the ability to download each video file in its entirely, and if Apple stops authorizing them for some reason I could REDACTED because the data’s all technically there, not on a remote server.

If I want to go further (and I might), I can look at my friendly local bookstore for seasons on disc. I’ve been doing that for shows like Mork & Mindy that aren’t on streaming at all, and they similarly tend to be about $10-20 a season. So I bet that over time I’ll end up with physical copies of all these shows, backing up the more-convenient Apple digital files, and ensuring my Trek supply for the next 20 years.

The first letter was a delight, of course, the best possible gift for your 11th birthday. It told you of your purpose, and set out in detail how you had built – would build – the time machine. It told you step-by-step how you would stop – had stopped – your grandfather all those years ago, with subtle redirection to make him the kind man you cried over when he died. You were just 10, and it seemed that everything changed, and here it was changing again at 11.

It gave you a chance to meet him again, eventually, after all that study and experimentation changed you too. You became his friend, maybe the only one, and little by little you helped him avoid the horrors that the letter warned you about.

So that one last day when you left him and wrote the letter to yourself, you didn’t expect to find another letter waiting. You copied it – will copy it – word for word just as you had the first, starting: “The second note was a surprise…”

And in the end, you understood – I hope you understand – what it was telling you. The purpose is done, but not gone. You can be proud of who you are – who we had to be. Now you are yourself. After this one last task, you’re free. Go on.

One of the attractive (to me) features of a resilience center is placing emergency supplies and aid in the same place that people will ordinarily use on a regular basis. Need to charge your phone during an outage? Go to the same community center where you take art classes or play board games. Need a meal when your kitchen isn’t safe to use? Use the kitchen at the community center where we do potlucks and movie nights. That familiarity is useful for a lot of reasons, but one that stands out to me today is that the resources get regularly used, maintained, and verified useful. I don’t know my camp stove and battery backup are in working order, because it’s been years since I used either. I do know my “Mr. Induction” hotplate works because I used it this morning.

Japan has this great infrastructure pattern called “disaster parks“, where coordination and supplies and other resilience infrastructure is built in (and under) city parks, so that when disaster strikes people can go to their nearest park for aid. Very helpful in fires or earthquakes, where buildings themselves are the danger to avoid and distance from them is a benefit. The familiarity is “go to the park”, but are any of the emergency supplies used regularly to test them? Is there a big ol’ cookout every 6 months as they rotate in new dry goods?

I go to the local library on the regular, so I do think of it as a cooling shelter or a warming shelter. (Seattle isn’t awful in either regard, but we do have our days.) Cooling the library in a resilient way makes a lot of sense, and by design it’s got great capacity for a lot of people at once. (Books like to have a big sturdy building around them.)

Are we expecting too much from a library, though? People in crisis need to eat, to marshal their resources, to go to the bathroom. Libraries don’t like this day-to-day; even the most trafficked university library generally wants you to go somewhere else to get refreshed. At most, a library dedicates a portion of the building to the less book-friendly stuff. So when people in crisis start to cross those lines, we hear about “safety concerns” at libraries or a lack of staff. (Because if you’re looking to work at a library, are you really thinking of it as a resilience center?)

So when I say a “community center”, what do we actually have that suits that purpose? Is it the library, expanded? Is it something else? (Don’t say a mall, we already showed that isn’t true.) Where do you go when you need to find community?

Turns out LLMs won’t so much solve the climate crisis, but the energy they use will hasten it. (from The Tyee, which I encourage reading on the regular if you aren’t already)

Turns out AI “copilots” hallucinate software packages that don’t exist, which creates a security hole ready to exploit.

Those are the costs, though. What about the rewards?

Well, turns out government chatbots tell people it’s OK to break the law. So that’s a savings?

And at the absolute forefront of automation in retail, Amazon is giving up on AI-driven checkout in favor of (checks notes) scanning the bar code of the thing you’re going to buy, because the “automation” turned out to be 1000 people in India watching customers as they shop.

Except it wasn’t. Clearly.

In development, it was an intriguing prototype that wasn’t likely to go anywhere unless it got expensive enough that no one could buy it. On release, Nintendo created only two games that could use it. Those would be the only two games ever released for it, and for good reason. And even today, with folks developing sophisticated games for old systems for the sheer challenge of it, and despite how many of the original systems were sold, there are still just the two games. (Watch the video for details.)

So in short, it never fulfilled its purpose.

As a robot, that is.

It was an excellent marketing ploy. The robot could sit in a shop window and draw people in. The breathless ad copy on the packaging could promise a “toy experience” that got past parents’ objectives to another video game system. And underneath it all was the vague sense that it could be the future. You never know, right?

Except it wasn’t. R.O.B. was a flop as a robot, as an experience, and as a technology.

But it was successful as a distraction.

Whenever I could get access to one, I read it cover-to-cover. Well, I probably skipped over the front bits with their opinions and letters, but I definitely spent time on everything in the back, including the ads. The science-magazine ads had a delightful mix of very-specific technical tools I wanted but didn’t understand or couldn’t afford – oscilloscopes, glassware, the occasional computer – but also bizarre ads for dubious contraptions like electric-shock pads to build muscle mass. (That one had a photo of arm wrestling with the huge caption “RUSSIA WINS?” because 80s cold-war movies.) The comic books dispensed with anything scientific or practical and focused on the dubious contraptions, with full-page spreads of “novelty” catalogs. Joy buzzers. Switch blades. Chattering teeth. Mini binoculars and spy cameras. And most intriguing of all: x-ray glasses.

The blurb under “x-ray glasses” always contained the keyword “illusion” to take the sting off, but it was surrounded by enticing phrases like “see bones through skin” and “see through clothes”. As an adult, I can look at that ad and easily spot the real message: this thing provides the illusion of seeing the bones in your hand, if you squint and aren’t familiar with what the bones of your hand should actually look like. If you look at someone from a bit of a distance, their clothes seem to take on a ghostly edge as though you could see through them to what’s behind the person. It’s a bit of a laugh for 5 minutes, and then you put it away.

Oh, but the implications to a kid! Especially a kid who just read through 5 minutes of a GI Joe or X-Men soap opera episode where either technology or “science” gives people powers. What if it really means you can see the bones in your hand, even if it’s using an “illusion” to show them to you? What if the “illusion” of seeing through clothes is of the person underneath, which is as good as the real thing? After all, the joy buzzer does something, and the switch blade is an actual knife, and even the chattering teeth do what they say in the big print.

What if it really works?

And if there was any barrier put up by skepticism or critical thinking, that one question was enough for my childhood optimism to swarm right over. And even if someone else tells me “it says it’s just an illusion”, then I have the perfect counter. I know it’s an illusion, but what if it really works? Bam, if I hold onto that cognitive dissonance, then it’s worth the purchase.

Which works in reverse, too. If I buy the glasses and try them on only to find that it’s an illusion that doesn’t show me bones or bodies or the insides of anything, really… “it didn’t work”. “It said it was just an illusion.” “Oh.” But does that stop the next person? Of course not. Because to them, what if it works? And that’s enough to keep people buying.

All that said, even though I understand the draw, I’d still be shocked if a doctor pulled out a pair of x-ray glasses to diagnose a pain in my arm. “Let’s see if there are any broken bones.” It wouldn’t just be a reason to doubt their diagnosis, it would be enough to doubt their competence.

This isn’t about generative AI specifically, but that’s what brought it to mind. I get sincerely baffled when someone leaps from “it’s just a language generator, but the ad said it could do this” to “I saw a demo that looked kinda like this if you squint” to “I’m going to base a critical decision on this.” “But it doesn’t actually do that,” I say, but they have the perfect cognitive-dissonance counter. “I know it’s an illusion, but what if it works?” And I have no recourse but to wait for the glasses to arrive, to watch them put the glasses on, and then watch them take the glasses off 5 minutes later. I want to be kind. “OK, how would you like to handle that critical decision now?”

It seems like there’s an endless supply of x-ray glasses out there. Crypto. Ride sharing.  ”Full Self-Driving”. Or a political candidate. Or a stainless-steel truck. Or a VR headset. Or “we’re going to Mars.” I can point straight at the part of the ad that calls out the illusion. And do it over again. And again.

But what if it works this time?

Luckily we live in a time when that’s a choice. I don’t just mean Youtube Premium or the ad-free tier of Disney+; most of the Web is built on delivering content without conditions on how I use that content.

Wait, hold on, I hear you say. That’s not the web I see at all. And you’re right, of course. Everything you see has ads: embedded in the paragraphs, floating alongside, popping up to play you a video, hijacking every link. The content being delivered has ads along for the ride.

But I was talking about what the Web is built on, at least for now. When you’re reading something like you are now, you’re looking at a copy I sent you. Your browser asked my server what it has, and my server sent you an HTML file, some images, a few other bits and bobs. Your browser then chose to combine those in a way that suits how you read. Is this page thin so it fits on your phone? Is it wide so it fits on your 4K monitor? Is it read to you by text-to-speech? That’s all possible because the Web is built on me sending you the components of what you want, and you rebuild them to suit.

So where are the ads? Not in the standards (or not yet). I could choose to send you an ad along with the components for this post. A particular image, some HTML to describe how to display it, how to pop it up, how to make sure it gets onto your phone screen or your 4K screen or (less commonly) into your screen reader. But here’s the thing: your browser still chooses whether to display it. Just like it can ignore the Windows-specific instructions, or ignore the night-mode display values, or the super-large-screen background images. It’s making choices all the time. So why choose to display the ads?

A physical example: when you get the (postal, physical, snail) mail, it has things you want to read (or have to read) alongside things that were sent to you as advertisements. Grandma’s card and a Jiffy Lube offer. The water bill and Disney On Ice at the Civic Center. When you sort out the mail (which I’m sure you do diligently), you probably toss the things you want to read in one pile, the things you need to read in another, and the other stuff goes… yep, in the recycling. You don’t open Grandma’s card feeling guilty that you “blocked” the flyer for 20% off an oil change you don’t need because you don’t own a car. You don’t pay the water bill by carefully placing it behind Elsa (on ice!) and then removing it after 15 pre-defined seconds. You toss the stuff you don’t want. You focus on the stuff you do. Why would anyone expect anything different?

So when I look at updates to the Web that threaten to take that away, that force Grandma’s card to be glued to the flyer, that shred your water bill if you don’t pay Elsa her due… I’m against those. I’ll avoid them, I’ll stop using them, I’ll support whatever’s not that.

Or should it? As an individual, I actually dislike magical interfaces. I groan when I read setup documentation, because it always has 3 steps that fail somewhere between step 2 and 3. “Take the device out of the box, place it next to the main device, and it will pair.” Right. And if it doesn’t? (For me, it rarely does.) Then suddenly I’m in 300 more steps that are spread out over a dozen sites, hidden among the worst documentation interfaces possible. I’m pushing the one button on the device in a staccato rhythm while reinstalling the operating system of the other while draping a mylar blanket over both to block stray radiation, and… I realize I’m on the wrong end of the magic.

What I prefer in a case like that is good old fashioned* infrastructure. Plug A into B, tell B that A exists, tell A that B is what you want. Once they’re paired, remove the plug and you’re in the same situation the magic would have left you after step 3. Except! If you run into a problem, you know how to drop into the infrastructure and perform the same set of steps to get you back where  you need to be.

(*It’s not actually old fashioned. We just get used to the infrastructure that works, and it feels like it’s always been there. Infrastructure that doesn’t work is technology, and we get used to it not working and route around it.)

To design infrastructure vs magic, the difference is asking, “what happens when this goes wrong? How can someone using this get to the part that isn’t working and direct it manually?” That’s where the difficult work of engineering comes in, because you need to ask not only how your system works when it all works, but how the whole system it relies on behaves when it doesn’t. What does the process do when there’s no internet? What does it do when the signal from the other device is too weak? What does it do when the list of devices it sees is too long? When the device doesn’t speak the right protocol?

A lot of that design deals with falling back. If the latest protocol doesn’t work, is there an older one that might? If the signal is weak, is there a way to connect that doesn’t use radio? And above all, how do we communicate this to the person looking at it, so they know which part needs help?

So it’s hard work, but really it’s doing the work needed to create full automation. It’s not just automated when it works; that would be magic. Putting me in a place to fix it when it doesn’t work automatically is good infrastructure.

Being prepared is also a challenge, a way to think deeply about the infrastructure I rely on even when it’s practically invisible. (Yes I am still thinking a lot about water thank you.) What would I do if the power went out? What would I notice? How would I change so I could keep doing the things I need? The answers let me design alternate systems that take effect when things go wrong, or (in the absolute best case) replacement systems that keep working despite the trouble.

So let’s talk about preppers, though. I grew up loving trips to the army surplus store. Survival gear and wilderness-focused preparation strategies are attractive because they involve stuff that feels tough and adventurous even if I can barely operate a can opener. Now, though, I reject the idea that my survival has to be set up in opposition to other people. It doesn’t just feel wrong, it completely contradicts how I’ve seen a good community operate in a time of crisis. People help each other to survive and recover.

The moment that convinced me was a multi-day power outage when I lived in San Diego. It’s the classic example of what preppers are prepping for: the city is without power, everything shuts down, no one has any of the things they need, and… well, what’s supposed to happen is chaos, looting, folks barricading themselves in their neighborhoods and trading with gold. What actually happened is folks took the day off work, emptied their fridges and freezers, went outside to be in the evening light, and had block parties. Want some ice cream? It’s just going to melt. Need to charge your phone? Here’s  a brick and a solar panel, go ahead. Need a spare flashlight? Let’s share.

It’s hard to describe the feeling in our neighborhood over those couple days. It was a time out of time. People really didn’t want it to end. Which is better than survival, isn’t it? It’s something different. It’s resilience. And it wasn’t even planned, it’s what we all fell into when there was a pause in television broadcasting.

More recently, the state of Washington has talked about resilience centers (or resilience hubs, I’ve also heard), which are places that people can go for essential things during a disaster or an outage. Each center builds up the infrastructure it needs to keep the lights on, to keep the wifi going, to keep the water running, to keep cool or keep warm. I love the idea, because it’s just as attractive a prepping opportunity but it assumes we’re going to find each other, to work together, to form community when something goes wrong. A resilience center doesn’t need an arsenal, it doesn’t need a way to bug out. It still has challenges, though, but they start to look like resilient infrastructure. How would we keep the wifi on? How much power can we produce? What does at-hand food storage look like in the long term?

So now when I prepare for the worst, I think about resilient infrastructure. How about you? What would you build? How could you share it? What helps when we all know how to do it?