We're Just Meta Uber Super Tool Users

We are tool users. When I was a kid they said using tools separated us from 'the animals' but it turns out we're just animals with more tools. Gorillas fashion sticks into tools for pulling termites out of their nests. Otters use rocks to break open shellfish. Elephants make back scratchers out of branches.

But if we want to reclaim our difference from other animals, we can claim to be 'meta tool users' or 'uber tool users' (but I think meta is the new uber). Whatever you want to call it, we make tools that use tools. Our tools are so many layers of abstraction removed from smashing open a sea urchin that we forget just how much stuff we're using to do simple tasks.

Now, I say 'simple tasks' but they are only simple because there are so many tools between you and the thing you're using.

Today, for example, I decided to fire up my hourly Twitter posting. Anyone can post to twitter, even though there are plenty of people who shouldn't. But setting up a feed to automatically post to twitter every hour or so? Well, that's a bit trickier. First you gotta get keys, which I assume use a pretty sophisticated series of programs, computers, hard drives, routers… you know, the basic collection of everything that makes the Internet.

But let's not play the exploding universe game where you press a key and we follow the electrons down the wires. I think we all assume that kind of complexity happens every time you turn on a screen.

No, let's talk about one tool that I had to use (it gets a bit geeky, but hang on). In order to submit stuff to Twitter, I had to take my posting and 'URI Encode' it -- that is, get rid of weird characters like colons and ampersands (so a : becomes %3A and an & becomes %26).

I don't know why %3A is better than : but that's part of the point I'm trying to make here -- I need a tool to convert my text into something that another tool can understand. It's like going to another country and needing a power adapter so you can plug your computer in or needing the long wrench to use the short wrench. Tools not for people, but tools for tools.

Only the tool I was using didn't convert the exclamation mark into %21. Turned out it wasn't turning parentheses into %28 and %29 either… Which really worried me because here was a tool that took a couple hundred megabytes on my server to install and it didn't do everything I needed. I mean, if it's as much data as the printed version of the Encyclopedia Britannica it's gotta be complicated, right?

Only it turns out it isn't that hard. I found this snippet of code that Mick wrote for Conquent back in 2001. Don't worry about the code itself, just count the lines of code.

encodelist($[0], '%', '&', '=', '?', '\'', '#', '+', ' ', ':', '!', '/', '(', ')'); sub encodelist { my $estr = shift; my ($t, $t2); foreach (@) { $t = sprintf('%%%x', ord($)); $t = uc $t; $t2 = quotemeta($); $estr =~ s/$t2/$t/g; } return $estr; }

Right. 10 lines.

So here's my point -- we just assume that if someone already bothered to make a tool for it, it's easier to use that tool than to make our own. We don't even think about if the tool makes things easier. We just accept the entire Rube Goldberg series of tools using other tools without even knowing that a candle had to burn through a string to trigger the URI encoding…

Because of the lack of a single character being converted, my entire morning got sidetracked. Tools that use tools are great when all the tools work, but there are so many moving pieces in everything today that we gotta expect this stuff to break sometimes. And the problem is we don't know what it's all attached to, what we can keep, what we can kill, or what will kill us.

That said, Jokeindex is now posting silly comments to twitter, so that whole value thing goes both ways -- just 'cause you can build a tool doesn't mean you're doing anything productive.