Babies: Famously private about their diaper status

Welcome to Notes from the Economy Class, your newsletter where the flight attendants are fully authorized to eject anyone attempting to live-tweet the doings of other passengers on the plane.

About a decade ago, I was at CES & noticed an abundance of smart home products working on the model "device + proprietary app + user's phone = license to print money." 

My favorite product in this device/phone/app market  was a sensor to be clipped to a baby's diaper. Once the sensor detected the diaper was wet, it would ping the phone, then an  app would alert the phone owner, and the diaper situation would be addressed. (Babies, of course, are famously uncommunicative about unpleasant diaper situations. You obviously needed an app to stay on top of things.)

"So does the sensor send messages to both parents? Is there a way for one parent to tell the other they've handle the diaper situation?" I asked.

"Oh no," the man pitching the product told me. "The sensor is paired to only one phone."

"Many babies have two parents," I said. "So it seems like your product effectively consigns one parent to diaper duty. Or that there's incomplete coverage if the child is in daycare. What then?"

The young man began to look around for other people to talk to. "You can get around that by getting multiple sensors to clip to the diaper then, so everyone is alerted."

Then he fled before I could get into my follow-up questions like, "So how many sensors is a working parent to clip to a diaper here?" and "Are there quiet hours so paid caregivers aren't getting alerts at 3 a.m. for diaper changes?" and "Have you tested how many sensors you can put on a diaper before the nappy collapses under the weight of all that tech?"

So many of these products felt like they were designed by someone who would rather rage-code for 48 hours than change a baby's diaper. Or by someone who was hoping to dupe someone else into taking on a parenting duty they didn't want. 

These products also betrayed a real ignorance toward pain points in human relationships. Who is going to willingly adopt a technological system that guarantees them 100% ownership of all diaper changes for the next two years? Just what every relationship needs — the codification of domestic inequity! The overall sales pitch demonstrated a real lack of understanding for the source of friction in household chores. The problem is never that the chore exists. The problems arise when one party feels entitled to the time and labor of the other. That sort of disregard festers.

I'm reminded of technologists' brazen disregard for human society — either as a topic of academic research or the relational milieu in which we all live — whenever I read something about how, once again, people are not taking to the privacy-violating Meta glasses, no matter how many pulchritudinous women Meta recruits to try and make the product seem vaguely desirable.

Technology that encourages people to ignore the reality of inhabiting shared space is not technology that needs to be granted any social cachet. We're living through a tragedy of the commons in real time, and it's on us to assert that we're not NPCs in someone else's stream.

In a shrewd bit of merchandising, Amazon.com has deeply discounted the Kindle e-book editions of all four of Stephen Frey's books around Greek mythology — Mythos, Heroes, Troy and Odyssey. I inhaled them all within a week and they're simply marvelous. Not only does Frey tell the stories, he adds canonical context and wry asides via amusing footnotes, and he's got a bit of exegesis and historical grounding at the end of the book. 

This isn't to say the books are brainy, bloodless quiptoriums. In Troy's penultimate chapter, Odysseus's clever gambit has succeeded, the horse is inside the walled city of Troy, and the strongest men are waiting for nightfall. The final line of the chapter stopped me cold:

“You all know what to do,” Odysseus said to them, drawing his sword. “To work.”

What a set-up for the sack of Troy. Find the Fry books and fall back into a world that is foundational to much of Western civilization even today.