The Chaotic Nature of Standard Systems

I’ve always liked music. That’s why I used to collect music albums, both in their physical and digital forms. I believe the structure of an album—its songs, their distribution, their length and the order they are laid out—is a concept by itself. A single track says nothing about what the author wanted to express. Instead, a certain sequence of tracks is what makes up a great idea as a whole. Marvelous creations that speak collectively, telling us a story which reflects the mastermind’s ideas of the world at the moment of release.

Or so I thought, but I was wrong.

In a rapidly-moving world, releases seem not to be as magical as I once thought. They come and go as a stream of Terms of Service clauses. With different versions and remixes and erroneous ID3 tags like (ProgHouse remix) or [Live] or simply (Bonus Track) at the end of the title. Life is not as ordered and beautifully balanced as I once thought.

Many times I’ve fallen victim of the same mistake. When building a perfectly-looking naming convention for a conversational agent, my idea to index every term alphabetically went horribly wrong as soon as someone else started doing the job. When someone else added a new artist bio to Last.fm, or when a Japanese user typed an en dash instead of a hyphen for the %album% field. And when I found out—thanks, Iva!— that an apostrophe and a prime symbol were two completely different things. Does my keyboard layout care? Does anyone else care?

Things started to get uglier when I found out that ASCII did not care, and different operative systems had different solutions to the prime vs apostrophe problem. Assuming a user will do what they are expected to do generates uncertainty, which generates unmeasurable results and multiple indices for the same idea. The World Wide Web Consortium had no idea WYSIWYG editors would lead to such rubbish. As if a click on any external link on Facebook would not add a tracker with a unique fbclid, I continued to think somehow, somewhere, there was a perfectly organised database with clean entries. I had no idea this cooperative effort called “the Internet” would lead me to such conclusion: standardisation is impossible.

I am now eager for the release of the universally accepted USB 7.0. I’m quite sure Area 51 Xenos surely plug their devices with USB 7.0.