Tone Control

This is a post from Robin Sloan’s lab blog & notebook. You can visit the blog’s homepage, or learn more about me.

Craig Mod, an aside in his pop-up newsletter cur­rently underway:

There was a kind of smoothed-over Eng­lish deployed by all these “new systems” and he could imagine a future in which, much like how every new street­lamp is the wrong color temperature, every written thing will be the wrong tone. Not only would how soft­ware work be hateful, but so, too, would its overly-familiar tone.

One dreams that the pen­dulum might swing back to crisp formality — that soft­ware might address one in the style of a high-end concierge rather than a chirpy per­sonal trainer.