When Messages in iCloud is enabled, iMessage, Apple Messages for Business, text (SMS), and MMS messages are removed from the user’s existing iCloud Backup and are instead stored in an end-to-end encrypted CloudKit container for Messages. The user’s iCloud Backup retains a key to that container. If the user later disables iCloud Backup, that container’s key is rolled, the new key is stored only in iCloud Keychain (inaccessible to Apple and any third parties), and new data written to the container can’t be decrypted with the old container key.

I care about people more than I care about positions or beliefs, which I tend to consider a subservient class of psychological phenomena. That is to say: I think people wear beliefs like clothes; they wear what they have grown to consider sensible or attractive; they wear what they feel flatters them; they wear what keeps them dry and warm in inclement winter. They believe their opinions, tastes, philosophies are who they are, but they are mistaken. (Aging is largely learning what one is not, it seems to me).

Criticism must serve some function to justify the pain it causes: it must, say, avert a disastrous course of action being deliberated by a group, or help thwart the rise of a barbarous politician. But this rarely occurs. Most criticism, even of the most erudite sort, is, as we all know, wasted breath: preached to one’s own choir, comically or indignantly cruel to those one doesn’t respect, unlikely to change the behavior of anyone not already in agreement.On the other hand! There persists the idea that culture arises out of the scrum of colliding perspectives, and that it is therefore a moral duty to remonstrate against stupidity, performative emoting, deceitful art, destructively banal fiction, and so on. If one doesn’t speak up, one cannot lament the triumph of moral and imaginative vacuity.

One must believe, of course, that there are abstractions worth protecting, and therefore abstractions worth hurting others for, in order to criticize; and the endless repetitiveness of cultural history seems to devalue such abstractions as surely as bad art and cliche devalue words.

My biggest concern about the bill is that a huge chunk of the revenue raised ($124 billion) is purportedly going to come from increased IRS enforcement — enforcement that requires an $80 billion investment. But the image of a super-IRS going after wealthy corporations and rich billionaires who skirt tax laws is not the reality. Instead, the IRS usually spends its money where it is most efficient: Auditing the middle class and the most economically vulnerable taxpayers who can't afford teams of lawyers. According to The Washington Post, More than 4 in 10 of its audits in 2021 targeted recipients of the earned income tax credit, one of the country’s main anti-poverty measures.

The bill is a climate change and health care bill with very clear direct tax hikes on profitable corporations to offset the spending. It will almost certainly reduce emissions and, in the long term, bring more green energy onto the grid. Health insurance and drug prices for Medicare recipients and people on the ACA will probably come down. They may go up for others, depending on how private insurers react. Some of the new revenue will come from increased IRS enforcement, which could hit middle and lower-income people hardest. And, of course, corporations are liable to pass on tax hikes with increased prices or layoffs, along with stock shares falling.

The goal? To make new green energy production cheaper for utilities to build than fossil fuel plants are.

Material-based software can also have gentler learning curves, because the user only needs to learn a small set of rules about how different metaphors in the software interact with each other rather than learning deep hierarchies of menus and terminologies. In the best case, users can continue to discover new capabilities and workflows long after the initial release of the software.

Take nonlinear video editing software, like Final Cut Pro and Premiere Pro, for example. Though they have their fair share of menu complexity, it’s pretty intuitive for anyone to understand the basic building blocks of video and audio clips sitting on a layered timeline. Here, the video and audio clips are composed of a software material that have their own laws of physics: they can grow and shrink to take up more or less time on the timeline. They can be moved around and layered in front of or behind other clips, but they can’t occupy the same space on the same “track” of the timeline. The timeline that runs left-to-right is a kind of “world” in which the materials of audio and video exist.

In complexity science, ‘emergence’ describes the way that interactions between individual components in a complex system can give rise to new behavior, patterns, or qualities. For example, the quality of ‘wetness’ cannot be found in a single water molecule, but instead arises from the interaction of many water molecules together. In living systems, emergence is at the core of adaptive evolution.

Design for emergence prioritizes open-ended combinatorial possibilities such that the design object can be composed and adapted to a wide variety of contextual and idiosyncratic niches by its end-user. LEGO offers an example — a simple set of blocks with a shared protocol for connecting to one another from which a nearly infinite array of forms can emerge. Yet as we will see, design for emergence can generate value well beyond children’s toys.

In contrast to high modern design, user-centered design takes a more modest position; the designer does not inherently know everything, and therefore she must meticulously study the needs and behaviors of users in order to produce a good design. User-centered design remains the dominant design paradigm today, employed by environmental designers, tech companies, and design agencies around the world.

In this paradigm, design is about gaining knowledge from the user, identifying desirable outcomes, and controlling as much of the process as possible to achieve those outcomes. ‘Design’ remains synonymous with maximizing control.

But consider even the ‘desire path’ example pictured above. The modal user may be well supported by paving the desire path indicated by their behavior, but what good is a paved path leading to stairs for a wheelchair user? In practice, user-centered design tends to privilege the modal user at the expense of the long-tail user whose needs may be just as great.

User-centered design has a better track record than high modern design, but it still exerts a homogenizing effect. The needs of the modal user are accommodated and scaled through software or industrial manufacturing, while power users and those with edge cases can do nothing but actively petition the designer for attention. In most cases, diverse users with a wide variety of niche use cases are forced to conform to the behavior of the modal user.

In design for emergence, the designer assumes that the end-user holds relevant knowledge and gives them extensive control over the design. Rather than designing the end result, we design the user’s experience of designing their own end result. In this way we can think of design for emergence as a form of ‘meta-design.’

In other words, to address the long-tail problem, the tool must be flexible enough that it can be adapted to unexpected and idiosyncratic problem spaces—especially those unanticipated by the tool’s designer.

In contrast to user-centered design, design for emergence invites the user into the design process not only as a subject of study, but as a collaborator with agency and control.

What all these tools have in common is support for open-ended adaptation to highly contextual problems without the need for technical knowledge. Rather than building a static, purpose-built solution to a single common problem with lots of users (and lots of competitors), they’ve won robust user bases by supporting a broad swath of long-tail user needs.

Design for emergence is composable. It provides a limited ‘alphabet’ and a generative grammar that’s easy to learn and employ, yet can be extended to create powerful, complex applications. As Seymour Papert once remarked, “English is a language for children,” but this fact, “does not preclude its being also a language for poets, scientists, and philosophers.”

Subject after subject reported that they were on Tinder to find someone to love and to love them back and defined love in the most traditional of terms: something that took work, a container in which sex was sacred and where intimacy built over time. They acknowledged that their encounters on Tinder didn’t offer that, yet they went to Tinder to find it. The contradiction was confusing: They wanted sex to be meaningful but felt that Tinder removed the sacredness. They wanted bonds to be lasting but acknowledged they were easily broken.

When we launched Instagram, there were no stories, there were no DMs. What's happened over the last decade is that how people share with friends has changed. It has shifted to stories, and it has shifted to DMs and to group chats. More photos and videos are shared in DMs in a day, then are shared into stories. And more photos and videos are shared into stories in a day than are shared to feed. I don't think connecting people with their friends and family is any less important to us than it was two years ago, or five years ago, or eight years ago. But how that works, and how we try and meet that need, has changed as how people communicate with their friends has changed. Which then begs the question, what's the future of feed? And in a world where more of the friend content has gone from feed into stories and DMs, I think that feed is going to become more public in nature. We want to steer it, to the degree we can, towards creators and individuals, and less towards publishers and institutions. (Though obviously they will always be the platform, too.) But we also think that creators’ public content can connect you to friends. Feed could be, and to some degree is, a place to discover things to talk about with your friends. With Reels, we're seeing this happen a lot. Reels are inspiring a lot of conversations — people just send funny videos to their friends that they've discovered in feed. And then they start talking about other things — and we think that is great, too.