Multiplicity as Richness, Multiplicity as Annoyance, Multiplicity as Saver of One’s Butt
This morning I woke up, and my browsers were screwy.
I had rebooted. Vivaldi would not load. Opera would load, but seemed to have forgotten my saved tabs. Chrome had issues I still do not understand. I ended up back on my old friend Firefox — because it works.
A morning that was going to be dedicated to doing work, got lost to doing maintenance. This happens. And it made me think, using the tool of the Mu Ratio, about what multiplicity on the internet gives us.
The Mu ratio is simple. For any tool, it is the time spent maintaining it divided by the time spent using it. If you have a tool that always works, MU is very low. One hour spent setting up some software — but then it works for 100 hours. Maintenance/Use or MU is 1/100 or .01.
First, and very obviously, the internet offers us choices. I can go to millions of locations. It is a library bigger than any that has ever existed, and host to stores larger than any bazaar of any trading city in history.
With choices, though, come confusions. Slightly different procedures have to be learned and remembered. Can I use ALL CAPS here or not? What cute and arcane sign-on procedure, intended to protect me, instead thwarts me?
This is one layer of foot-tangling, the constant background mild frustration of small things. It is like walking through a grassy field. Gopher holes and bindweed impede your path. But we get there. It is a complex ecology, and therefore a bit unpredictable.
Sometimes, like this morning, everything on my corner of the internet just fails. It is not a gopher hole in the field, it is a sink-hole. The morning becomes all Maintenance, and the use sinks to zero — MU is very high indeed.
In that moment I appreciate the same multiplicity of tools that annoyed me in my trip across the field.
I had tried three tools — Vivaldi, Opera and Chrome. All three had “issues.” If I spent time tracking down the problem, I would have lost even more time.
Instead I reached into the multiplicitous world of internet browsers and got Firefox working. It did not share the chromium engine that the other three use. It worked.
Had I had a browser monoculture, using only my chromium-based browsers, I would have been unable to work. It was the presence of a minority-browser that let me through.
The same complexity that had annoyed me before saved me today
The grasses that tangled my feet on ordinary days bore me up, and got me across the sinkhole.
