Life, Dammit

UX Design, History, and The "Eternity Myth"

2011-05-20T19:30:00.000-07:00

Modern software is an amazing example of unplanned obsolescence.

Few people think about how user experience changes over time. This is a particularly brazen oversight when speaking of Web sites; and it becomes downright ludicrous when it comes to feed readers, social networks, and other systems whose content increases geometrically over time by design.

OK, so maybe someone thought about it, but not hard enough. How can they? There's no vocabulary for this. UX design came out of graphic design, which came out of the typographical mindset. The key principle of typographic design is: when you're done, nothing moves. Nothing changes. A good layout is a splendid mausoleum for an idea. The idea is complete, immutable, dead (in some languages, the etymology of the term "writing" traces back to the phrase "dead words").

Things might have been more interesting if history had taken a slightly different but equally-plausible path, in which technologists found themselves precariously allied with filmmakers instead of graphic designers. The chances of that alternative future were likely smashed when the Web started to grow geometrically before either broadband or effective video-streaming technology became prevalent. Yet now that all three -- a mature Web, pervasive broadband, and motion-picture streaming -- have been available for some time, and our civilization has taken its first modest bite out of the 21st century, we are still timidly feeling our way toward fully incorporating a temporal dimension into user experience.

While historical circumstance may be one factor, I think there's a more profound anthropological cause: the consensual hallucination of permanence, or what I like to call the "Eternity Myth." Because many changes span more than one human lifetime, even changes that would be a mere blip to a geologist seem to elude our collective awareness.

Some time around August 2007, our species became predominantly urban: more than 50% of all humans now live in cities. This is a tipping point that will propel changes, backlashes and more changes. But it's just an extremely recent example.

We live -- indeed, we organize our lives, governments, culture -- strongly rooted in an unchallenged presumption that the fundamental building blocks of our society are eternal, and somehow accretive. We live as if cars, money and computers, for instance, are here to stay. There is all of human history before/without these things, and the rest of history with them. Our daily experience incorporates no sense of a future in which these elements are gone, transcended, surpassed, disappeared.

The automobile, which has transformed the urban and trans-urban landscape, has enjoyed its central place in human experience for just over a century. Currency in its modern form has been with us less than 400 years. The Internet as a public resource and de facto global nervous system has been around for a mere 22 years. None of these are eternal; and all of these will, in time -- progressively or cataclysmically -- make way to new forms of mobility, transaction and connectivity. Indeed, the telephone, an explosively transformative 20th-century technology, will all but disappear within the next 20 to 30 years, supplanted by ubiquitous voice communications using a variety of devices and means. It might take years, or centuries, but automobiles, money and even computers will eventually vanish as well.

A reasonable question is: then what? But I'll leave that for futurists and speculators.

A more pressing and potentially more interesting question is: what should we do about that now?

I see short-term and long-term approaches.

Short-term, it would be terribly adroit to bring people with strongly-developed temporal presentation skills into the UX loop. Among these one could include: musicians, cinematographers, choreographers, thespians and other theatre-folk, and of course animators. But we need to transcend the current practice of asking such people to supply mere "attract loops" or transitions or exciting little bits to an otherwise static, even tempophobic, interface. The understanding such people can bring to UX needs to become the heart of the conversation. Temporality will become the cake, and not the icing, of UX.

There's a wildly successful industry that has largely made this transition already: the video-game business. Because narrative, immersive experience and temporality are at the heart of gaming, game designers and developers had no choice but to figure this stuff out. And game interfaces have been, for many years now, a reliable predictor of the "feel" of interfaces for general-purpose software and devices developed a few years later.

Long-term, the challenge will become to build on those new interfaces, permeated with temporality, and give them a sense of history. Computers can remember the email you wrote sixteen years ago, but modern interfaces provide no intuitive framework in which that message can be referenced or manifested. You could search for it of course, but why would you? An interface steeped in a sense of your personal -- and interpersonal -- history would "know" when to leave you "in the moment" as it were, and when to summon references to bring insight into the interconnectedness of your activities and the many threads of your life.

While I've characterized this challenge as a long-term imperative, its development has its own urgency. As our attention is drawn across an ever-widening array of information sources and sinks -- mobile devices, tweets and text messages, voice calls via two or more devices, dozens of social networks, multiple email streams -- we (often unwittingly) sacrifice depth to keep up with the growing breadth. We ourselves lose sense of the depth of our lives, of our delicious links to our own past, and of the wondrously intertwingled threads of continuity running through our increasingly-scattered interactions.

It seems reasonable to at least try to get the machines to help us restore that which we have too easily surrendered to them.

Help Me Understand The (Information) Environment

2010-12-12T14:29:00.000-08:00

Experiment # 1 in a Series

I'm working on a book. Because its premise is easily purloined, I need to be coy (for now) about the exact subject. But I can reveal that a big part of the book is a series of exercises designed to make us more aware of our environments -- our homes, offices, cars, elevators, any place we spend time. My specific interest is in information as a material ingredient of those environments.

By information I mean messages -- pictures, words, shapes & forms created by someone with the intention to convey meaning. A tree, by this definition, is not information, but a billboard is. So is a traffic sign. So is any manufactured object (car, building, garbage can) as all of these were designed with an intention to produce a certain effect.

I need to test these exercises. But since I'm irreducibly myself, and since I'm just one person, I can't muster the great number of different perspectives necessary to test them properly.

So, if you're willing to help me out, here's your "homework." To keep things simple and specific, we're going to start with advertising.

Pick an ad from anywhere -- TV commercial, billboard, magazine, Internet banner, doesn't matter. Look at the ad, and put into words one (just one) way the ad "works" -- what is it doing to make you want the advertised item or service? Or how does it present its message to make you interested?

You just need to identify one device or technique in the ad, and it doesn't need to be effective. For example: "This magazine ad shows me a car in front of a beautiful house, but I know the ad's for the car and I don't get the house... plus I like the house I already have, so that doesn't make me more interested in the car." In the example, I identified a technique the ad uses to motivate me, even though that particular technique failed.

Remember, you're not going to be graded. There are no right and wrong answers. If you spend more than one minute looking at the ad, you're trying too hard. Relax.

I don't want to be too greedy here. No one reads this blog anyway (except you, apparently) so I don't expect many replies. Here's the list of what I'd need from each of you:

(Mandatory) a brief sentence like the example above, briefly describing the ad, what it's selling and what technique you noticed. You don't even need to tell me if you found the technique effective.
(Optional but super-helpful) a copy of the ad, or a link to it if it's online. A mobile photo will do, and it need not be pretty.
(Optional) share this link with your friends and encourage them to do the same... the more data I get the better the exercises will be.

If you want to help but find any of this confusing, please just contact me and we'll clear it up.

Thanks!

To My Sofa Surfing Sensei (all 17 of them)

2010-12-02T14:30:00.000-08:00

I have been homeless since February 1, 2010. I mean this in both the sentimental sense of having no place to call home, and the practical sense of having no dwelling of my own.

In nearly ten months, I have yet to spend a night on the street. That day may yet come, and whenever it does, it will come too soon. But, while I will strive to avoid it, I feel I am now ready for it.

Until now, what might have been a dismal strait has been a wondrous and joyful adventure, all thanks to my amazing friends. You all know who you are, but I want to say explicitly and officially: thank you Ja, thank you D and A, thank you K and V, thank you E, thank you L, thank you S and G, thank you B and M-C, thank you Ju, thank you A and T (and D and B), thank you B and P (and F and U and E), thank you An. You've all been more than gracious hosts: you've been great teachers.

You've reminded me, each in your own way, of the depths of the human heart; of how simple joys are as compelling as elaborate ones; of how surrender can be a kind of victory. You have made the world my home.

If the day does come when I find myself in the street, the sky will be my roof and your love will be my walls. Meanwhile, your hospitality has made it far less likely that day will ever come. Thank you for sheltering me, and know that your shelter extends long past the duration of my stay with you.

Calling All Sofas, NYC Area, night of Sept. 13

2010-08-25T12:51:00.000-07:00

[Update 28 Aug 2010: Got it covered! Thanks to all!]

I'm soon off to visit old friends in Hudson, NY. I'll be returning to New York City September 13 for an unavoidable, unreschedulable appointment with a cardiologist. The morning of the 14th, I'm off to Washington, DC, to visit another bunch of old friends.

I'm looking for a sofa to surf for that one night, September 13. I can bring wine and do dishes. Also a few parlor tricks (but they're not very good). Or I can install a boat-load of really great open-source software on your favorite computer. You name it.

Please contact me if you can put me up (and put up with me) for that one night. Molto grazie!

Cool Tools: FeedRinse

2010-08-24T17:37:00.000-07:00

This post inaugurates a new tag on my blog. Henceforth, posts of mine tagged with Cool Tools will tell you about software, Web-based services, devices or what-have-you that I find helpful. There will be, inevitably, a mild geek bent to my selections, but I'll try to confine these posts to mention stuff of universal value or utility.

The first cool tool I'd like to mention is FeedRinse, a free service for filtering RSS newsfeeds.

As I mentioned in a previous post, I've been thinking a lot about how to manage the torrent of information available from newsfeeds and the Blogosphere. I've been writing code that analyzes RSS newsfeeds to distill posts I would consider "essential" out of the thousands that come in each day.

Whenever I work on a solution to a problem I do a great deal of homework to learn about existing solutions, or solutions to similar problems. I also do this because I like to become a user of the tools with which I might someday compete. There's no better way to learn a competitor's strengths and weaknesses that to become a customer.

I came across FeedRinse by searching for RSS filters. FeedRinse subscribes to a newsfeed you specify, on your behalf. You then apply inclusion/exclusion "rules" for the posts in that feed, creating a filter of only the posts you want. FeedRinse then lets you subscribe to the "rinsed" feed.

Here's my example use case. I was looking for work on FreelanceSwitch. It's just one of several dozen sites I monitor for possible work. I have to cast a very wide net for jobs because I'm always on the move, my skills are broad, I'm very smart, and I'm, uh, a little weird.

Yay! FreelanceSwitch offers an RSS feed of job postings. Boo! FreelanceSwitch does not offer RSS feeds for queries or searches against job postings. FeedRinse to the rescue:

Copy FreelanceSwitch RSS feed URL
Paste into FeedRinse "enter your feed" form
Create a rule for your filter: "title must contain word 'abracadabra'"
Copy URL for "rinsed" feed
Paste URL into Google Reader

Et Voilà! FeedRinse lets me read only the job posts I want. This becomes very powerful for monitoring narrowly-defined areas, e.g., "New York Times editorials, but only if they mention China."

Let the machines do what they do best, so you can do more of what you do best.

Getting ready to blog about music - the tune

2010-08-23T23:16:00.001-07:00

I'm getting ready to post some of my music to this blog. This is my test post, using a small bit of a tune I'm not quite done writing. The how-to for this modest hack is here.

Getting ready to blog about music - the hack

2010-08-23T22:37:00.000-07:00

Here's a terse geek narrative of how those 38 seconds of music got from my brain to your ears:

Stole a chord progression from a song I wrote six years ago
Watched a bunch of Andre Segovia videos on YouTube
Rearranged the chords and played them on my Cordoba Mod. 20 guitar, the cheapest guitar Cordoba made when I bought it (they no longer make this model)
Played into a Sony PCM-M10/R digital recorder (gain: 9)
Uploaded (via USB) into a vintage Toshiba Portégé R500 (a gift from my friend Raj) running Jolicloud 1.0 (Ubuntu Jaunty)
Trimmed and added brief in/out fades using Audacity 1.3.7
Saved as MP3 (2-channel, 44.1K sample, 128K encoding)
Posted MP3 file to box.net
Embedded in this blog post using box.net embed code (Flash player), after failing to get it working using Yahoo Media Player (which would have been better)
Got frustrated when the embedded MP3 player wouldn't show up on the home page, because Blogger "vanishes" the player in the teaser if I put a  teaser-break anywhere in the post.
Moved the MP3 and this how-to narrative to two separate posts. Problem circumvented!
You get to listen to this tune!

P.S. Please note no Microsoft or Apple products were used at any point in this process. Indeed, I have completely weaned myself of those two companies' products. I'm giving myself five years to wean myself of Google products. That may prove more difficult.

Getting ready to blog about source code

2010-08-21T23:07:00.000-07:00

I'm following directions from this excellent HOWTO for syntax-highlighting source code in Blogger.
This is a test post that I will probably delete once I have some real code to post and discuss.

if ($optDeleteRows && $errFound) {
 $dQuery = "DELETE FROM url_alias WHERE pid = " . $row['pid'];
 $dResult = mysql_query($dQuery);

 if (mysql_errno()) {
  print "ERROR: " . mysql_error() ."\nquery: ". $dQuery . "\n";
 }
}

OK! Well, that's looking pretty reasonable.

A Modest Proposal: Restocking the Oceans

2010-08-21T11:46:00.000-07:00

During my recent visits to Portland, OR I had many exquisite conversations with strangers. Some conversations have since led to friendships. Others didn't go past the one encounter, tiny monuments to serendipitous dialogue and connection.

The last such conversation was with a marine biologist who spent one-third of each year in Antarctica. I had recently watched Werner Herzog's Encounters at the End of the World, so I took full advantage of this unprecedented opportunity to ask one the McMurdough "locals" how much Herzog got right (not so very much, as it turns out -- but still, it's a visually stunning film).

I also put to him, for validation, an idea that has been rattling in my mind for the last six or seven years. Since he assured me it had some merit, I will share it here.

A war is raging on many fronts for the preservation of sustainable, diverse life on Earth. There are many factions in this war, long- and short-term alliances, disagreements large and small on, well, everything. There is no broad consensus on the scope of the problem, or even that there is a problem. Among the majority of those who acknowledge the problem, there are wide-ranging opinions as to its urgency and the best ways to address it. My little idea concerns one very tiny issue in this Great Debate. What I propose is (quite literally) a drop in the ocean.

I was inspired by a number of stories I read (like this one) documenting the invasion of the Great Lakes by Zebra mussels. Introduced by the ballast water of ships into lakes and waterways in which they had no natural predators, Zebra mussels have spawned out of control. They have become the aquatic kudzu of the American Midwest.

Unlike kudzu, which was introduced deliberately in the U.S. in 1876 by folks with a dim grasp of the Law of Unintended Consequences, the Zebra mussel invasion was an oversight. In a scenario typical of many industrial accidents, thoughtless neglect -- specifically, the failure to foresee the need to filter ballast water -- gave the Zebra mussel a free ride into the Great Lakes.

My idea is simple. Having stumbled upon the effectiveness of ballast-water discharges as a means to introduce an organism to a particular aquatic ecosystem, couldn't we do it on purpose?

Our oceans are running out of fish. While there are many contributing factors, it seems the single most significant cause is overfishing. We need to restock the oceans. Wouldn't it be great if we could do this quickly, in a controlled and responsible fashion, at minimal cost to taxpayers and to the private sector?

1. Get someone (government or private sector) to fund the development of a GPS-enabled fish-egg release device.

2. Offer incentives (such as tax credits) to maritime shipping companies to install these devices in their vessels to release fish eggs at key points along their routes.

I'm not an expert in fish reproduction. But I gather that the basic mechanics are built around the Law of Large Numbers: many, many eggs are fertilized by a relatively small number of male fish, and the eggs are left to gestate in relatively unprotected conditions. A very small percentage of fish eggs become fish. But if you introduce more eggs, they can be fertilized by the existing male fish populations, and you can increase the number of fish births in a manner conducive to linear prediction. That is to say, you can guess pretty accurately how many more fish you'll get based on the number of eggs you release.

The whole process could be automated with a fairly straightforward drop-in system. I envision something along like this:

A sealed unit is installed next to, on top of, or inside a ship's balance tank (whatever's easiest to retrofit without interfering with normal ballast functioning). The unit consists of one or more "egg dispenser" tanks and a GPS + PC assembly -- for our purpose, a programmable consumer-grade GPS device such as a smartphone will do fine.

A program -- either preloaded or remotely loaded and/or updated -- on the GPS/computer thing releases a predeterrmined amount of "fish egg solution" from the appropriate tank when the ship is reaches specific latitude/longitude coordinates -- within some reasonable "margin of error" distance, so the system can still function properly if the ship needs to make course corrections. The system can log its activity, and the logs can be transmitted wirelessly or retrieved for analysis when the ship reaches port.

I'm not an electrical engineer, but my common sense tells me the system could be designed to "flush" eggs into the ocean along with, or entirely separate from, ballast water. Because the unit is entirely autonomous once programmed, it would require no maintenance or supervision from the ship's crew -- they would be free to carry out their usual activities. And no one aboard would need to be trained in the use of the system. If it doesn't work on a particular voyage, it can be repaired when the ship reaches port, and reset for the next trip. Since overall egg-release is logged and monitored, no harm done.

So we can build a system that drops measured amounts of fish eggs in the ocean at specific places where ships happen to go. The next question is: do the ships go where the eggs need to go? Here's a map (found on this page) showing worldwide maritime shipping routes:

And here's a map showing (in blue) 63% of the global ocean fish catch in 2003:

(The latter map comes from this page describing the Plymouth Marine Laboratory's QUEST-Fish project).

I see some promising alignment between these two maps -- hardly perfect, but enough overlap to warrant further investigation. I'm not a marine biologist, but my common sense tells me fish eggs probably gestate for the most part within the continental shelf. That would mean our egg-dropper would likely do most of its work toward the beginning and end of each transoceanic journey.

Even within my limited understanding of how all this works, I see a number of potential problems with my proposal, for instance:

Ships may not spend enough time traversing the zones where the eggs need to go;
Dropping eggs along shipping routes could cause traffic jams, with fishing ships dropping nets closer to shipping routes.

I'm assuming the fish, once hatched, are going to swim around as they see fit, mitigating the second problem. The first problem is best addressed by people smarter than myself in such matters.

I've been sitting on this for years because this is not my field and hey, what do I know? But with the blessing of an anonymous marine biologist, I'm putting this idea out in the world, to see what comes of it.

If you find this idea interesting and you have the knowledge and skills to help validate it, or better y bet, actually do it, I have the skills to help build and program the egg-dispenser device itself. But with zero oceanic know-how or credibility of my own, I can't really run off and write a grant proposal for this.

Contact me if you think this is worth doing, and you want to help make it happen.

For those of you wondering why oceanography and marine biology matter so much, I urge you to read Lives of a Cell and/or The Medusa and the Snail by Lewis Thomas -- arguably among the greatest science writers of the twentieth century.

With Demise of Net Neutrality, Internet Gets Existential

2010-08-20T14:29:00.000-07:00

I frequently get strange ideas for t-shirts. Some of them are good, but rarely good enough to warrant making actual t-shirts. So I'll post them here, with the t-shirt tag.

If you want to make a t-shirt out of one, just grab the image and go here. Remember to give me credit.

git Best Practices - From the Guy Who Wrote It

2010-08-20T01:45:00.000-07:00

Fed up with the limitations of existing source-code version-control systems (VCS), Linus Torvalds took matters into his own hands. He had to. It was a matter of self-preservation. The de facto merge-master of the Linux kernel source tree was working way too hard to merge all the patches into a clean build.

Thus git was born. git is just similar enough to previous version-control systems to lull veteran users of PVCS, SourceSafe, CVS, Suberversion, Mercurial and the like, into a false sense of familiarity. Because git is a whole new bread of VCS. It makes branching and merging of source code the central focus, where all previous systems treated these like special cases (albeit, expected ones). git was also built for open source development, where you never know who's going to help nor for how long. The git repository model is entirely distributed: there is no central or master repository.

Moving to git successfully requires more than learning new command syntax: you need to change the way you think about source-code version control. I'll admit that after two years, I'm not quite there yet. so I was doing some late-night reading, to "learn up some" as they used to say in the Southwest.

Buried in a comment in Linus's blog is this gem of a summary of two key "principles of restraint" (git, like Linus, is very Aristotelian) that leads to the successful use of git as a version-control system for distributed teams. Below, Linus's comment in its entirety, for those who don't have time to click:

it's basically a matter of finding the right balance on a couple of different axises:

"clean history":

Balancing the need to clean up after mistakes (aka "rewriting history") using tools like 'git rebase', but then not doing it so much that you actually rewrite other peoples commits or lose all sight of the important history (like the fact that you tested one particular test, and if you then rewrite the history, all your testing is now dubious).

"Merging too much vs too little":

Merging is nice, because if you have concurrent development, a merge will tie the two branches together and allows you to test and develop on top of both changes.

But the downside is that merging too eagerly means that two separate branches that are for two different features are now tied together, and you can never separate the two (at least without re-doing the whole history).

So merging too much results in a very messy history, where you can't see what the actual different "topics" were. And it results in a tree where upstream (that is - me) can't review and pull the features one by one.

There's a few rants and rules about this that I did on the mailing lists last merge window. See for example rant.

(Yes, the rant-link at the end is also well worth following).

From Hypertext to Hyperidentity, Part 2

2010-08-17T15:33:00.000-07:00

This thought-thread began when I read a Tweet from Mitch Kapor about Ted Nelson, and took umbrage at John Perry Barlow's reply. But now the meme has snow-balled: this is no longer about oligarchies mis-molding the Web, or the tragedy of Xanadu's unfulfilled promise. This is about (with apologies to Walter Benjamin) Identity in The Age Of Digital Distribution.

This seems a good place to mention that I thoroughly enjoy Barlow's tweets, even when (not very often) I disagree with them.

In Part 2 of this thread I will:

Argue that the Xanalogical "docuverse" will come to pass, out of sheer necessity, although not as soon as its partisans might wish;
Explain how present threats to the freedom of documents will migrate (the process has already begun) to threaten the freedom of persons.

In Part 3 (did I mention the snowball thing?) I will describe how the fragmented architecture of the Web, particularly social networking sites, contributes to the fragmentation of human identity.

This may come as a shock to many who know me, but I'm actually on the fence about net neutrality. For sure, corporate interests are nibbling away at the Internet's immune system -- particularly with artificial-scarcity monopolies over the domain-name system, and with Internet Service Providers undermining net neutrality in the "final mile" (where street equipment connects to individual subscribers). That immune system has permitted equal access to experimentation and innovation online for 25+ years. It's been fun and good.

But we humans, especially when acting collectively, only make big changes when we are "shocked" into doing so. The fear of Peak Oil remains primarily a frontal-cortex thing -- no one viscerally feels the gun against their head, save perhaps for the few playing this wonderful alternate-reality game. Our civilization installs traffic lights at intersections after the first collision. It's how we do.

As dumb-headed as it seems at first glance, I suspect the collapse of the net-neutrality principle may have long-term effects decidedly not in the vested interests of those now laboring to end it. A few days ago a net-neutrality protest at Google HQ drew a mere 100 people. I see that event as commensurate with an apocryphal "Decrease Fossil-fuel Dependence" marched staged in 1956.

A very large population has experienced the exploration-meets-entertainment thrill of the Internet in its current form. As that form fades with the demise of net neutrality, people will react to restore whatever's taken from them. I don't mean marches with torches, pitchforks and tear gas: I mean innovation.

Expect private concerns to develop and market net-neutral alternate networks. Expect a resurgence of online-service diversity, eerily reminiscent of, but utterly unlike, the online world before the Internet went public. Expect some of these startups to offer fundamentally different infrastructures from the Web -- with the obligatory "gateways" to allow coexistence with Web content (My older readers may remember when the first Web sites and browsers offered gateways to browse Gopher content).

As the homogeny of the Internet becomes hegemony, people who liked it better the way it was before -- or who have been itching to get out from under some of the Internet's more unfortunate technical axioms -- will get very busy.

The less free the Internet becomes, the greater the motivation (and market incentive) to create Internet alternatives that are free.

Of course (and thus I come at last to my first point), expect a few of these offerings to be deeply Xanalogical (Xanadu-like) in their architecture and in their capabilities.

For me, there is a quality inherent in Ted Nelson's ideas that prevent them from being realized in his lifetime. He's been compared to Nikola Tesla (a comparison he's encouraged), but I think a more accurate doppelgänger is Galileo. Minus the Inquisition.

Like Nelson, Galileo had a series of experiences that led him to specific insights and beliefs; and he felt the evidence so unimpeachable that he could not renounce those beliefs even when he found himself opposed by a unanimous consensus.

Like Galileo, Nelson is ahead of his time -- a simple truism. But ahead of which time? Galileo died in 1642. The Church lifted the ban on publishing Galileo's work partially in 1718... but a partial ban remained until 1835, or the year of Galileo's 271st birthday.

In Against Method (one of my favorite books about science), Paul Feyerabend wrote

The Church at the time of Galileo not only kept closer to reason as defined then and, in part, even now; It also considered the ethical and social consequences of Galileo's views. Its indictment of Galileo was rational and only opportunism and a lack of perspective can demand a revision.

The Truth, I find, is best understood in agricultural terms: the best seed cannot grow if planted in a desert. Galileo's insight was anathema to the fundamental organizing principles of the society of his time. Nelson and his defenders (myself among them) can jump up and down all they want, but cannot change, accelerate or magically bring about the historical and social circumstances that would prove fertile for Xanalogical ideas.

What are those circumstances? The most critical prerequisite, I think, is frustration with the inflexibility of extant schemes of organizing information. And that frustration must reach a boiling point to elicit Xanalogical Desire, as it were.

The ascendancy of Android as a smartphone platform despite the phenomenal success of the Apple iPhone is a possible microcosmic example of such a boiling point. Fed up with the limitations of a closed-architecture device and locked-in calling plans, people become willing to try something new. But we have not yet reached the singularity that will make Nelson's ideas inevitable.

The present phase of the Internet's evolution -- Social Networking sites, Web 2.0, blogs, newsfeeds, multiple logins, and the experiential split across one's computer and phone -- has turned many of us into information workers, even if it's not our day job. For work, advancement, education, leisure, or out of sheer boredom (think Farmville), we're pushing pixels.

The historical progression is clear: we pushed plows, then rivets, then pencils, then pixels. What is new is that never before have we pushed anything for leisure. Those on the creative front lines of the information economy -- designers, musicians, filmmakers, performing artists, software developers, animators -- deeply feel the sting of our tools' inadequacy. But they have to eat, and live in the world, and so (for the most part) they muddle through with the instruments at their disposal. It takes a very particular temperament -- which Nelson has in abundance -- to forsake one's art in order to develop better ways of making that art.

We're frustrated, but not to the boiling point... yet. The vast majority of people who now manipulate electronic information as part of their daily lives, but who are not artists, are also frustrated. They're just not frustrated enough to seek or demand change. To paraphrase the "darkest before the dawn" sentiment, things in the digital world will have to become much more ridiculous before they can become beautiful.

In a deeper ontological sense, Nelson was right and is still right. Being right has not done him a lot of good, and in a strange "no good deed unpunished" kind of way, it has actually hurt his cause.

But the fundamental dissonance remains. We have successfully reduced nearly all forms of information representation to streams of bits -- sights, sounds, even smell and touch. But we have failed to unify these representations structurally. From the often laughably-stupid interplay of thousands of territorial gambits in the history of computing ("control the operating system," "control the desktop," take your pick) has emerged a cacophonous heterogeneity of systems and standards. The emergence of the Internet as a leveling and unifying substrate put a dent in this grandiose mess, but only a dent. I know this first hand. I've made a (sometime quite decent) living fiddling with data to move it out of one container into another.

By proposing storage, linking and sharing of information using universal and unifying principles, Nelson's system offers a level playing field for innovation. The same argument is being used daily -- by many who've ignored or opposed Nelson -- to defend the Net Neutrality principle for the Internet. I relish the irony. Net Neutrality provides the same level playing field for communications and information access as Xanadu offers for the information itself.

To put this in terms of an SAT analogy we can say: Net Neutrality : Internet :: Xanadu : Documents

If you've read this far, you're expecting -- indeed, you have earned -- the epistemological plot twist. What does any of this have to do with freedom? And how does the freedom of documents relate to the freedom of persons?

If the most basic, uncontroversial definition of freedom is I can do what I want, then the current plethora of systems, standards and vendors in the digital world is a cognitive prison, like the Matrix, or the geocentric consensus of Galileo's time. We have to jump through hoops on fire to do what we want online; often the effort is too great, and we give up in disgust. Or more likely, the structure of present systems so limits our imaginations that what we want seems a pipe dream, beyond the boundaries of the possible.

Internet access (regrettably) is not a basic human right. But once you have access, you are limited only by knowledge, creativity, determination and stamina. Amazon.com may have more resource and more money than me, but still cannot do anything qualitatively different on the Internet than I can. This equality is the core of the net-neutrality principle.

Xanadu is a system in which my ability to manipulate documents would be similarly neutral and untethered. Now my creativity is at the mercy of Adobe, Microsoft, Oracle, the W3C... in essence, the tyranny of a flawed consensus.

But this concerns inventors and digital creators like Daniel, you say. This lack of freedom, these shackled document and data formats, don't concern the vast majority of people.

You're right, they don't concern you... until those formats are used to store your Facebook profile. Or your medical records. Then, suddenly, the constraints on access and manipulation caused by this or that database or proprietary file format become a very real concern. The decisions made (often long ago, before Facebook and even before the Web) by the developers of those formats have become an implicit, unintended and unforeseen addendum to your Privacy Policy.

I have already written about my concerns that data-privacy issues could be misused by those intent on bending intellectual-property law to better suit their own interests. What I'm trying to say here though is much more basic.

Information-storage technologies such as data structures and file formats make unwitting, unaccountable contributions to

Privacy policies
Data-security policies
Data-retention policies
Intellectual-property policies

that are rarely factored in to the corresponding explicit policies.

This is not a small problem. The music and film industries are in traumatic upheaval as a direct consequence of just one facet of the above observation. Millions of acts of credit-card fraud have occurred as a direct consequence of another facet. Thousands of classified documents recently became public, illustrating yet another facet.

Identity theft is not (yet) the literal theft of your ego, or your sense of who you are. It is a theft of documents and data. These thefts, and this class of problems generally, is gravely exacerbated by the absence of unifying principles (such as those proposed in Xanadu) for document and data storage. Unifying principles will not solve these problems -- but they will make the problems tractable.

So remember, you read it here first: a day is coming when your freedom, indeed your personal safety, will require Xanadu, or something very much like it. The greater the digital portion of our lives, the greater the risk.

I hereby invite, nay challenge, anyone to debate with me on this topic. But you might want to wait until I've posted Part 3.

Call for Collaboration: Blogosphere Analysis, Visualization, and Reducing "Knowledge Creep"

2010-08-15T17:14:00.000-07:00

Software designers (and users) often speak of "feature creep" -- a once-reasonable application becomes bloated and unwieldy as features are added without rethinking its cohering principles. In software project management, we speak of "scope creep" -- the tendency for the target feature-set to change and grow as development progresses. Alvin Toffler's phrase "information overload" has been applied to the challenge of navigating Internet information flows, but I think a more accurate phrase would be "Knowledge Creep."

I have started a new coding experiment, resulting from recent discussions regarding the difficulty most advanced digerati (AD) have in keeping up with the daily tsunami-like output of blog and news feeds.

By "advanced digerati" I don't necessarily mean anything terribly special or commendable. If you use Google Reader or a similar interface to keep up with many blogs and feeds; and if you have subscribed to more than 30 feeds; then congratulations, you qualify.

AD tend to read newsfeeds on a variety of topics. They might organize feeds into meaningful subgroups or categories based on their proclivities, and the capabilities of their feed-reading system. But problems develop over time with high-volume blog and feed-reading, along the lines of the frog-in-the-boiling water trope. As we find new feeds of interest, we slowly, incrementally increase the volume of information we must process, until we have unwittingly made it unmanageable. People who accumulate many Facebook friends over a few years experience the same problem: their "Wall" becomes an intimidating stream of info tidbits more aptly named "Trivia Tsunami."

This is similar to the oft-discussed problem of information overload. Subscribed blogs and news feeds, however, offer interesting (arguably unique) opportunities to address the problem:

The information is highly-structured. Blogs and newsfeeds use RSS, Atom and other content-syndication standards that make it easy to computer-automate content processing and analysis.
Blogs and Feeds were among the very first parts of the Web to adopt Web 2.0 technology, in the strict Tim Berners-Lee sense of identifying semantic elements using XML to facilitate computer manipulation, a.k.a. the Semantic Web.
The Blogosphere is particularly, annoyingly locacious about itself. For instance, I subscribe to Slashdot, Gizmodo and EnGadget, and often find myself reading essentially the same story thrice. That means the feed-reading process, by design, adds the insult of needless redundancy to the injury of information overload.
It is fairly straightforward to write software to "spider" or "crawl" blogs and feeds -- as Google does for indexing Web sites as well as news -- to obtain high-value metadata other than that which would be needed for content search.
To date, the design thinking of most Internet Applications (among which I would include the Web itself) has dramatically neglected the impact of time on usability. Interfaces dealing with datasets that grow geometrically and independently from the individual user need to apply an entirely different set of design metrics than for, say, a word processor. Call it "History Creep."

For these and a host of other reasons, I've been writing some code to spider-crawl news feeds. I plan to extract some interesting data that could be of immediate practical value to a lot of people, particularly the aforementioned AD.

I know the foregoing is vague, and I don't mean to sound coy. But I think I'm on to something very interesting, and I'm loathe to tip my hand quite yet.

I'm not the first person, by far, to ponder these problems and possibilities. mSpoke in particular was doing very interesting things for its FeedHub service. However, following mSpoke's acquisition by LinkedIn, it's not clear how, nor in what form, that technology may resurface.

There are some interesting opportunities here. If this is an area of interest for you, and you have the time and desire to collaborate, and especially if you're already involved in a project working along similar lines, please contact me. It's a rich, complex problem-space, and I'm gonna need all the help I can get.

From Hypertext to Hyperidentity, Part 1

2010-08-04T01:05:00.000-07:00

Ted Nelson pointed the way with hypertext. But that isn't his greatest contribution. The game-changing piece of the Xanadu vision was (and is) transclusion -- the ability to include all, or any part, of one document inside another, without copying anything. Nelson's approach guaranteed that any derivative work, or any document that merely quotes another document, grants the reader access to the referenced work in its entirety, by design.

The Web is evolving further away from that design premise every day. And the further it evolves away from that, the less freedom we'll have. To my shock and consternation, John Perry Barlow doesn't seem to understand this.

As any tinkerer, inventor or hacker will tell you, the meme that wins in the marketplace of ideas is not always the best meme from an engineering standpoint. The forces of the marketplace are neither designed nor Darwinian. These forces shape ideas to produce the best result... for the marketplace. And the marketplace embodies a value system: profit is good, risk is bad and so on.

Markets don't always work in the way we'd like. Markets involve every living person on Earth, to varying degrees. So markets are subject to sociological effects, behaviors that can be measured only stochastically or statistically, when they can be measured at all. When people speak of the "Laws" of the market, they are employing a euphemism.

So, we cannot reliably predict how the marketplace will treat one idea vs. another; and an idea that succeeds in the marketplace might not do so well when measured against a different set of values... say, improving the human condition.

Nelson had a singular, coherent vision, wherein the method used to link and interconnect digital information was a natural extension of the way that digital information was stored. His attempts to realize this vision have been quixotic. His defense of his point of view has been impassioned, righteous and aggressive. In short, the delivery of the ideas was not optimized for the marketplace. But its failure in the marketplace doesn't make the idea any less elegant, nor any less right.

What has happened, in practice? The World-Wide Web, technically speaking, is an extraordinarily fragile house of cards: HTML, XML, CSS, Flash, JavaScript, TCP/IP, HTTP, JSON, REST... to name but a fraction of the Babel-icious terms and acronyms involved in delivering one Web page from its host computer to your eyeball.

These standards and technologies were not invented by one person, nor even by a group of people working together. They were developed by many groups of people, often with conflicting or directly opposed interests, often working at cross-purposes. To this day, it only takes one person to step out of the consensus, pull one thread of this fragile fabric of subsystems, and the whole Web unravels. The Internet itself, the underlying communications network, is considerably more robust -- its components having been designed and built by a relatively small group of people, working together.

I say this with all due respect to Tim Berners-Lee who, in creating the Web, initially set out to solve a very different set of problems than those Nelson has long pondered. In terms of intellectual and design coherence, the wheels came off the Web-wagon very quickly, just as soon as other stakeholders became involved (see this page, documenting the origin of the IMG "image" element in HTML, for a good example of this).

Why do I rant on thus? Well, earlier today John Perry Barlow tweeted the following:

This remark saddened me three ways. First, there's the cast-off quality of the remark -- from a man particularly qualified to take to heart Horace's warning that "A word once let out of the cage cannot be whistled back again" (and a tweet, a fortiori).

Second, the knee-jerk cyberlibertarian quality of the remark (has anyone yet had cause to say or write "knee-jerk cyberlibertarian"? I suppose it was only a matter of time). Barlow often gets thrown in with the cyberlibertarians, primarily because he co-founded the Electronic Frontier Foundation, but I'm not entirely sure he is one. His tweet about Xanadu notwithstanding, Barlow strikes me as a man naturally suspicious of pigeonholes and labels.

Third, and this one stings: Barlow is wrong. Indeed, he is precisely, diametrically wrong. It is the Web in its current form that is Sovietic. Xanadu (or more generally, a Xanalogical system) aligns far better with a freedom-centric worldview, particularly with respect to property rights and net neutrality.

The word "Sovietic" summons the notion of a centrally-planned, centrally-managed system. But one means this operationally. The word is less descriptive when referring to the design of a system. And in the case of Xanadu, one can speak only of its design: save perhaps for a mysterious few who downloaded the source code and managed to get it running, it is not operational anywhere.

There is nothing Sovietic, no tyranny to be found, in the near-global resemblance of automobile tires, bifocals, mouse traps, electric outlets and the like. It's just good design, iterated and honed over centuries. There's Always More Than One Way To Do It, to be sure -- but not all ways have equal value.

The word "Sovietic" should also summon visions of the chaos that can ensue when small groups hoard power and impose their plans or policies on larger groups that were given no opportunity to consent. That vision aptly characterizes the medieval maze of technologies, corporations, standards and governing bodies that now define the Web. And that kind of chaos brings its own special form of tyranny.

Most of the Web today remains an open system, in the same way that a submarine still contains breathable air just after a fatal torpedo hit. The openness was protected by a delay effect: big media companies initially ignored the Internet altogether, then made misinformed or half-hearted attempts to create an online presence. Those companies ultimately figured it out, or were destroyed or acquired by companies that did. The inherently anarchic, cool-kids-only phase of the Web's evolution had ended.

The Internet, the series of networking protocols that underpin the Web (and Skype, and other global non-Web applications), has a little more time before its torch gets snuffed. That's because the original design of the Internet -- the "no center" topology intended to let the network heal quickly after a nuclear strike -- had systemic, structural protections against any attempt to concentrate command-and-control at a specific point. It was purpose-built to have no center. Once use of the Internet grew beyond the military, what was once a survivability feature became an implied social contract.

We may never know to what extent the early builders of the Internet -- Vint Cerf, Jon Postel, many others -- appreciated the inherent ideological skew of their design decisions. Nevertheless, the result has been one of the more beautiful examples of memetic engineering in human history.

Nelson's Xanalogical vision constituted, wittingly or not, a memetic-engineering plan of similar scope. Nelson proposed a document-storage system worthy of Rousseau. He said, in effect, "store your information thus, and use this scheme to address and point to bits of information, and you will enjoy the following myriad benefits and avoid this long list of vexing problems." Xanadu would offer systemic, structural protections against the misuse of intellectual property; against the loss of knowledge; and against certain "Orwellian" manipulations of historical data.

I think Barlow has simply been misled by Nelson's regrettable, but understandable, adversarial posture towards the design underpinnings of the Web. Just because the creators of the Web didn't actually say "my way or the highway," doesn't mean our freedom to create or innovate has been any less constrained.

[This thread continues in Part 2]

Gained in Translation?

2010-08-03T15:50:00.000-07:00

This via LanguageHat, a blog I read with regularity and reverence.

Today's entry, KOTLOVAN, is a discussion of the writing style employed by Andrei Platonov in The Foundation Pit (NYRB Classics, 2009), and how it was beautifully translated by Robert and Elizabeth Chandler. I was struck dumb by the unsentimental sentimentality of this passage:

A dead, fallen leaf lay beside Voshchev's head; the wind had brought it there from a distant tree, and now this leaf faced humility in the earth. Voshchev picked up the leaf that had withered and hid it away in a secret compartment of his bag, where he took care of all kinds of objects of unhappiness and obscurity. "You did not possess the meaning of life," supposed Voshchev with the miserliness of compassion. "Stay here—and I'll find out what you lived and perished for. Since no one needs you and you lie about amidst the whole world, then I shall store and remember you."

I'm always a little surprised when something translated succeeds in grabbing my gut.

One of those moments

2010-07-25T12:12:00.000-07:00

9 June 2010

"I'm a friend of Laura's," I said softly.

The kindly old man in the basement thought I was Peter. I gently corrected him. He considered that for a moment.

"But... Peter is a friend of Laura's."

"Very much so," I replied approvingly (Peter is, in fact, Laura's boyfriend).

"OK. Make sure you lock the gate."

"I always do, certainly," I said in the most reassuring tone of voice I could summon.

Seemingly satisfied, he went into his apartment and locked the door.

I turned my attention back to Laura's garden, and to my cigarette. I took another drag, inhaled deeply, and blew smoke at the stars. Large billowy clouds hurtled eastward, with the same fervent haste I was once again feeling in my soul. It's been a while.

Eyes fixed on Polaris, I attempted an inventory of the day. But my mind was resistant to chronology, and wouldn't bend to any catechism of events. Unsorted feelings and images bubbled up to the plane of my awareness: the joy of waking up, the smell of coffee, the precipitous inhaling of a cheeseburger; the ghostly, yet strangely believable, light in Sisley's paintings; the good weight of a raw yam in my hand.

Then I thought of Slim. And in thinking of her I thought of code, since I had been working on her Web site. A brief shadow of sadness passed over me. I have the skills, certainly; I am able and eager to serve in this capacity. But code is not love. Code is a terribly rational instrument, and even in the most inspired, wonder-filled, sleep-deprived, epic coding sessions I've known, there's no escaping its fundamental character.

I've written code that rhymes; code that made monkeys dance; code that induced giggle fits. But no code I've ever seen can rival the emotional tsunami of a Chagall; the heartbreak of an arm bent just so in a ballet; or the depth of longing induced by a favorite song.

This, then, will be my new asymptotic aspiration: to write code that transcends code, something that by the beauty of its effect causes jaws to drop and tears to fall. Code that triggers one of those Copernican shifts of perspective, and returns technology to its rightful place as a servant to other forms of artistic endeavor.

All this flickered through my mind in an instant, like a supersonic ticker tape. Then I thought of her again, and I just felt blessed. Because she is magnificent, and she makes me want to be magnificent too.

Of carry-ons and checked luggage

2010-07-21T10:38:00.000-07:00

My recent experiences with air travel have been quite different from those I've had in the past. Before this year, every flight was a means to a well-defined objective: a business or vacation destination. Now, I'm floating from friend to friend, from one home to the next. It's about living one more day, not about getting to any particular place.

Where airports, check-in, security and flying itself were once grave annoyances, hurdles to be overcome then forgotten as quickly as possible, they were now experiences in their own right, as tangible and as full of revelation as the most exquisite sunset, the perfectly ripe pomegranate, the passionate kiss.

I started to notice things. Resignation as the default facial expression, more pronounced on airport staff than on passengers. How flight attendants' cheerfulness seemed forced in this context, even though in nearly all cases it was sincere -- they've built up an immunity to the resignation, from years of spending most of their time in the air-travel ecosystem. How children recognize the delights of moving through this mini-city where no one lives -- the quality that makes airports feel so much like theme parks without a theme.

On my last flight I was reading Pattern Recognition by William Gibson, a book I might eventually review in another entry. I mention it here because of Gibson's marvelous depiction of jet lag: your body arrives but your soul lingers at the point of departure, linked to your body by a thin tether of spiritual ether spanning thousands of miles. After a few days body and soul are reconciled.

With that lovely metaphor in mind, and with the newfound perspective of air-travel-as-experience instead of air-travel-as-annoying-prerequisite-to-experience, I started recasting my endless introspective babbling in terms of air-travel memes.

In air-travel ontology, from the passenger's point of view, there are only three classes of things: self, carry-on and checked. There's a natural hierarchy to these three: stuff on your person is most accessible, but you're very limited (TSA regulations, pockets, weight) in what you can carry. A carry-on offers greater capacity with somewhat reduced convenience. And of course checked luggage can be quite spacious but is entirely inaccessible mid-flight.

These concentric spheres of access, these plateaus of capacity/convenience trade-offs, form a natural model of mental activity. But far more interesting (to me anyway) is how pockets and luggage can serve as a litmus test for what we value, and how much. A variant if you will on the "Desert Island Playlist" trope.

Try it. Make a list of everything and everyone you value. Assume each person and each value is roughly the size of a brick, and weighs a pound (450g). Now, pack. Who and what goes into a checked item? Or relegated to the overhead bin?

I've not yet entirely played this out in my mind, but my first thought is this: once you're all packed, in this little thought experiment, whatever's on your person is your real life. Those are the values and they are the people you simply cannot go without. They are, to your sense of your own identity, and to your personal compass of What Really Matters, the equivalent of the passport, keys, wallet, mobile phone.

I'm going to post this half-baked thought since I haven't posted in a while; but I'm leaving it half-baked because I really need to run off, into the world, and put some of these insights to the test. And find a nice sandwich.

Of Personal Legends, Impersonal Myths, and Interpersonal Salvation

2010-06-04T13:36:00.000-07:00

As any of you who've read it can guess from the title of this post, this will be a review of The Alchemist by Paul Coelho (Harper San Francisco, 1998). It will also be a diatribe against delusional formulations of destiny.

So there's this boy, see. He's a shepherd in Andalusia, because he likes to travel. But he has this dream that keeps bothering him, something about finding a treasure. And he's go to follow his dream to fulfill his Personal Legend. In the process he learns how to listen, and speak, to the Soul of The World.

Everyone on his path helps him achieve his goal, although not always in ways that seem helpful at the time (he is, on occasion, robbed, beaten, in peril of his life etc.). Most important, and here is where I feel the whole book falls down, the connectedness of the events leading to his goal is clear only in retrospect. This is a regrettable case of Visible Scaffolding. The author didn't hang a "Pardon Our Appearance" sign on the book, but he should have. He knew how the story would end. He posited a world in which a boy successfully follows his destiny, and -- behold! -- the boy fulfills his destiny. I find it difficult to be inspired (let alone surprised) by a predictable outcome in a work of fiction.

You find me grinchful? I now seem to you like an unrepentant Ebenezer Scrooge bursting into midnight mass with a Kalishnikov? You are mistaken, I assure you. Please try to be impatient a little while longer.

I am well aware that Coelho's works, and The Alchemist in particular, have been described as life-changing, and have inspired millions. But this knowledge saddens me. How terribly dark and banal and prison-like these people's lives must have been, to find such a tale uplifting! How thirsty they must be for any plausible path out of their private existential morass, to find solace -- nay, salvation -- in this spiritual equivalent of high-fructose corn syrup!

Judging from anecdotal observation, I must assume that a fair share of the millions who found hope, or enlightenment-substitute concentrate, in The Alchemist, continue to plug their ears with iPod earbuds, cutting themselves off from so many opportunities to find Omens in their own lives; I have to imagine they continue to read TIME, or Newsweek, or similar forms of journalistic pornography, as if they contained real information; I infer that the most-played tune in their combinatorially-unique but content-ubiquitous stream-of-consciousness playlists remains the worry about the rent or the mortgage or the next pair of Manolos. If 65 million people truly felt their lives changed after reading this book, if nearly 1% of Earth's population had dropped everything to pursue their Personal Legends, I think we would have noticed.

The tragedy of The Alchemist lies in this: it points vaguely in the right direction, but it doesn't point far enough, and thus falls into the already-rather-full basket of Life-Changing-Best-Selling Books. The Personal Legend becomes an Impersonal Myth. Our lives are not like the shepherd boy's; reading the book doesn't tell us how to change that. So after a brief post-coital high, the story leaves us a little more alienated, and our world a smidgen gloomier. Belittled and ashamed (and nine bucks poorer), we return to iPad lust and worrying about our jobs.

Unless... you already knew before reading it how to speak to the Soul of The World. In that case, you probably only read the book because you intended to review it, or because a friend asked you to read it: because you knew before opening its covers that language is a singularly inappropriate vehicle for this sort of knowledge. You knew before your fingers stroked the dust jacket that there is no discernible difference between finding your Personal Legend and forging it with your bare mind. What is found is made; what is made, found. You might have remembered, as you scanned the sycophantic introduction, that legends are not personal, they are shared. It might have occurred to you that no Personal Legend can be fulfilled, let alone conceived, without the help of many people.

You may have remembered the last homeless person you refused when they asked for spare change, the I-cannot-really-help-them-but-wait-yes-I-can knot in your gut as you continue to walk away with quickened pace, and the growing, sickening yet all-illuminating realization, like a sunrise in your mind: it is often hard to see, but we all really are in this together.

If Coelho understands all of this, perhaps it vanished in the translation. Lead into gold, indeed.

Journal transcript: Boundaries of Experience

2010-06-02T12:06:00.000-07:00

Since I began my nomadic life in February, I've had a notebook and pen with me at all times. I've already filled a few notebooks. They contain not so much a diary as random piles of ideas, notes, observations, and others' suggestions of what I should read, what I should eat, what I should do. Few of these ideas are fully-formed; even fewer are well-written. But, for reasons I don't understand, I feel the time has come to transcribe some of these thoughts into this blog. Here then is my first journal transcript.

29 March 2010

It is in our nature to confine our lives into a sort of trough, a path of least experiential resistance. Two major influences at once concentrate and amplify this tendency: the City, and Electric Media. Both rely heavily on the repetitive and the combinatorial to achieve their efficiencies and provide their benefits.

While they owe their fundamental logic to their conceptual ancestor -- mass production -- they alter consciousness in a way the ancestor never could. Prolonged exposure to this combinatorially-defined and reduced spectrum of experience will lead inevitably to a sort of observational atrophy, and thus eventually to a literal inability to experience, see or feel anything that lies outside of the prescribed spectrum. We are unwittingly yet voluntarily handicapping ourselves. By dwelling in limiting environments, we are limiting the range of environments in which we can function. We are engaged in a protracted and escalating cold war against change.

It seems to me that, in order to overcome this confining influence, one must meet it with an equal and opposite force, namely, a willful embrace of the entire range of possible human experience. One must aspire asymptotically to dual infinities in this regard: first, the infinity of range (extremes); second, the infinity of the interstitial (subtleties).

Evaluation of experiences must be value-free, subject only to the limits of the senses and of human endurance. One cannot favor joy over pain; sky-diving over quiet conversation; intense over barely-observable; and vice-versa for all the foregoing. An honest and unbiased search for the plenitude of human experience seeks balance, but not harmony. That would be a different endeavor altogether.

The Trail of Tarnas

2010-05-31T19:59:00.000-07:00

I have just finished reading The Passion of the Western Mind by Richard Tarnas.

The book is, to say the least, an ambitious project: to summarize the history of Western thought, from the Presocratics to the Postmoderns, in a single volume, while erring neither toward oversimplification (a sin of many summaries of this scope) or obscurantism (a sin of many Western philosophers). This goal Tarnas has resoundingly achieved, with a further benefit -- particularly to those who have studied Philosophy in-depth -- that perhaps Tarnas himself did not foresee. I must warn you that this review contains spoilers -- how cool is that, that I need to say this about a history book?

My mentor often said that all documents reliably have two attributes: an author, and a point of view. History itself, Tarnas will point out when he reaches late Modernism, is a consensual narrative. The Passion of the Western Mind is no exception to the "Point of View Rule." Indeed, it would be a form of hypocrisy to have the title begin with The Passion and then write dispassionately about the subject.

What is particularly interesting about Tarnas's point of view is its altitude, and herein lies the "further benefit" I mentioned above. I studied Philosophy close to full-time for six years. In that time span, my focus was invariably on a specific period or thinker: what did Plato mean with those shadows in the cave? Why did Descartes have to doubt in order to be? And so on. It was, metaphorically speaking, a low-altitude experience of Western thought. I was standing at sea level on a great conceptual world which, without further evidence, I might easily surmise was flat, and at the center of the universe.

The single greatest insight I got from this book was the inevitable change in perspective that occurred when I read in three weeks, eloquently summarized as if watching History from some great height, what I had studied and pondered for six years with (almost literally) my nose stuck at sea level, usually in the spine of some book. Reviewing Western thought through a telescope, as it were, instead of a microscope, makes evident certain patterns in the evolution of that thought.

Tarnas leads the reader quite nimbly through the pre-Socratics; the Ancient Greeks and Romans; the rise of Christianity; the Reformation; Medieval Scholasticism; the Renaissance; the so-called Copernican revolution; the Enlightenment; the bifurcation of Science and Religion in the Modern era; the many attempts (Hegel, the Romantics) to reconcile the two; coming at last to the resigned, even self-important, skepticism of the Postmoderns. For 420 pages, Tarnas delights with expository prose that is thorough without ever becoming ponderous. Then in the final 30 pages he smacks us down hard with the tragic impasse of the Postmodern worldview, and in his epilogue, the glimmer of a path out of the quagmire.

Tarnas would have us believe the philosophical Quest was felled by the triple blow of Copernicus, Descartes and Kant: we don't matter, the Universe doesn't care, and we can't really know anything. He leads us into a sort of epistemological dystopia. This sets up his Epilogue nicely: he has established Science, Religion and Philosophy as a tripartite damsel in distress, thus, in need of rescue. Actually, if Tarnas is right, the damsel may well be the heroine rather than the would-be victim.

Spoilers follow... The Epilogue, which you can read in its entirety here, posits three key breadcrumbs on the trail out of the Postmodern thinkers' labyrinth: the development of depth psychology, particularly the work of Carl Jung; the research of Stanislav Grof in the use of LSD and aggressive non-drug therapies, particularly to summon birth-trauma regression; and the emergence of the Feminist voice in the currents of contemporary thought.

So, let's lay our victim on the tracks. The Reformation, Renaissance and Enlightenment combined to break the hegemony of the Christian church. Throwing baby out with bath-water (as we humans are often wont to do) people disillusioned with Christianity choose no Religion over finding (or inventing) a new one. So, nix Religion. Einstein's physics and the resulting cosmology pull the rug out from under Isaac Newton's, which had been a lynch-pin of the Rationalist, particularly the Kantian, view. Meanwhile, the foundations of the Scientific Method seem a bit shaky in the face of quantum-theory lab results on the experimental side, and the writings of Kuhn and Feyerabend on the conceptual side -- so, nix Science.

Efforts from other viewpoints -- Rousseau, Hegel, the Romantics -- to reconcile the human condition with the indifferent, unknowable universe are met with (occasionally benevolent) skepticism. And the postmodern intelligentsia kick the ass of any remaining coherence all over the schoolyard. Ironically, the post-moderns are not immune to their own approach, and (perhaps unwittingly) eat their young, perfecting the cul-de-sac of 3,000+ years of Western Philosophy. No Exit, indeed.

Now let's follow the crumbs. Deprived of both Revelation and Empiricism as credible instruments of epistemological progress, Tarnas suggests the search turned inward, with Freud and (later and more significantly) Jung showing the way. Once mental activity was recognized as part of nature, and thus, itself susceptible to scientific observation and investigation, Jung's Archetypes (echoing the a priori mental structures in Kant's theories of cognition) suggested a new way to reconcile "Man" with "Nature" in a manner that might prove persuasive to all factions.

Tarnas then describes Grof's work in advanced alternative therapies:

...Grof found that the deepest source of psychological symptoms and distress reached back far past childhood traumas and biographical events to the experience of birth itself, intimately interwoven with the encounter with death.

Tarnas describes the structure of these perinatal regression sequences in some detail, to better underline:

the uncanny mapping of the dream-like regression sequences to Jungian archetypes;
the similarity of the perinatal recollection to the three phases (thesis, antithesis, synthesis) of Hegel's dialectic;
the resemblance between the key "plot points" (so to speak) of the perinatal sequence with the historical trajectory of Western Thought itself;
Grof's hypothesis that male sexism could be explained as a form of post-neonatal traumatic stress disorder.

On a parallel track, Tarnas remarks that, until very recently, the main veins of Western Thought had been developed entirely by males, with the unsurprising result that it has a decidedly masculine character in how it constructs, destroys, deconstructs and rebuilds its various realities:

...The crisis of modern man is an essentially masculine crisis, and I believe that its resolution is already now occurring in the tremendous emergence of the feminine in our culture: visible not only in the rise of feminism, the growing empowerment of women, and the widespread opening up to feminine values by both men and women, and not only in the rapid burgeoning of women's scholarship and gender-sensitive perspectives in virtually every intellectual discipline, but also in the increasing sense of unity with the planet and all forms of nature on it...

Leaving aside my concern that Tarnas might be here committing a Random Act of Syllogism, this seems a good place for me to point out that Tarnas lived for over ten years at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California, where he was initially a night guard and eventually director of programs and education; that he studied with Stanislav Grof at Esalen; that Passion was written in the years 1980-1990; that Tarnas got married in 1982, and left Esalen the following year. Before Esalen, he was travelling; before that, he was studying psychology (primarily Freud and Jung) at Harvard; and before that, he was attending a Jesuit high school.

The philosopher in me cannot help but remember the oft-repeated caveat of my beloved high-school Philosophy teacher: it is the curse and conceit of all great thinkers to see themselves as standing at the center of history. The scientist in me cannot overlook the deep isomorphism between the Tarnas "prescription for the future" and the events and people in his life precisely in the period in which he penned The Passion: he gives pride of place to Grof and to Feminism, despite Grof's so-recent joining in to the Great Conversation, and without a nod to the greater weight Tarnas the newlywed might be inclined to grant the Feminist view.

My aim is not to reduce the Tarnas Epilogue to a semi-autobiographical artifact. I've read my Proust Against Sainte-Beuve, and I don't believe an author's life necessarily provides useful insight into the author's work. Moreover, my gut (or if you prefer, my Dantian or "second brain") tells me Tarnas is right: if not in the specifics, then at least in the path he proposes we walk.

But you need not agree with him. A book of this scope succeeds if it merely gives you access to a new point of view, and in that respect The Passion succeeds abundantly. If you enjoy the oft-overlooked genre of Mental Action & Adventure, you will find much to enjoy in Tarnas. Even, perhaps especially, if you studied Philosophy or the History of Science, you will find it a suprisingly enjoyable high-altitude stroll down memory lane.

Property Law to Protect Personal Privacy: Path to Perdition?

2010-05-18T19:30:00.000-07:00

I must preface this post with the caveat that I have no training of any kind in law; I am just a slightly-bemused, slightly-alarmed observer and layperson asking "what if" questions.
I was catching up on some old reading and found this quote in a very old issue of The Economist, in a Special Report about Information Management, in this sidebar story:

Privacy rules lean towards treating personal information as a property right.
(Emphasis in the original)

At first glance this sounds reasonable, but within this logic lurks an insidious trap.

In the marketplace of ideas -- that is to say, the many industries related to the packaging and distribution of created works included publishing, the film industry, the music business and so on -- you are considered a rabble-rouser if you say "Intellectual Property is an Oxymoron." The sad irony for the vestigial remnants of the pre-Internet information economy is that this phrase is literally, legally true.
The legal framework for the protection of created works -- copyright and patent law -- is essentially a grant to the creator, usually by a government, of a time-limited monopoly over distribution of the work. In the hypothetical chronology of an intellectual or creative work, at no time is the work itself considered property. In the U.S., since the original Copyright Act in 1790, the duration of this protection has gone from 28 to 120 years (It's worth noting that the 120-year duration only protects works for hire, that is to say, works "owned" by corporations. Works by mere mortals are protected for 70 years after the author's death).
The phrase "Intellectual Property" dates back to 1888, but its earliest usage didn't denote private property. Quite on the contrary, the phrase invariably referred to institutions entrusted with the administration and stewardship of created works -- initially, protection of the creator's time-limited right to benefit exclusively from distribution of the work; then later on, facilitation of public access to the work once the protection expired. Current usage of the phrase, however, reinforces the mistaken notion that creators of intellectual and creative works own those works. They don't. They "own" a lease on dissemination of the work, that they may profit from it and thus be encouraged to create more.
A campaign is being waged -- not by the creators of works, but by those who profit from them -- to establish an ex post facto notion of "intellectual property" as a genuine property right, so that non-rivalrous goods (anything that can be duplicated, including information in nearly all its forms) can be owned just like one can own a car or a house.
Why is this bad? You wonder. Well, treating intellectual property like real property will create a number of unhappy results, the worst of which, in my view, is the reduction of intellectual and creative works -- inventions, discoveries, literature, music, films -- to commodities. This will severely undermine the original intent of copyright, which was to promote creativity (to the benefit of all) by providing a mechanism to compensate the creators, and precisely avoid a scenario in which wealth could be concentrated in third parties (who create nothing) through arbitrage.
OK... but what does this have to do with my personal information? Fair question. Yes, I suppose that was the topic of this post. As I mentioned, a campaign is being waged. To some extent, it's a campaign to change hearts and minds, but ultimately its goal is to change the law. Two critical issues looming on the scheduling horizon of every law-making body on earth are Electronic Privacy Rights and Intellectual Property Reform.
Say you're a lobbyist for the Recording Industry Association of America. You realize most folks don't perceive the downloading of free music as theft. But you see them getting in a huff about Facebook taking liberties with their personal information. Leaving aside for a moment the sad reality that Facebook has no victims, only volunteers, personal data privacy is an issue that affects everyone. The co-option of copyright law in favor of corporate rights-holders (rights-hoarders?) is an issue that affects musicians, artists, writers, filmmakers -- a minute percentage of the population. So you schedule your meeting with Senator Dudley Doright and impress upon him (for the most part, senators are still him's) that defining personal information as a property right could be that crucial first step to address privacy concerns in this age of gynormous data collection, identity theft, and yada yada.
The senator calculates (correctly) that shoring up privacy law will ingratiate the near-totality of likely voters. So why worry that using property law to enforce privacy paves the way to reforge copyright and patent law to become more like real property rights? Such a move would only compromise the artistic goals (not to mention the livelihood) of an infinitesimal fraction of the senator's constituency -- namely, individual artists and creators trying to sell their own works on their own account. Oh, and it would utterly undermine the original intent and purpose of these laws -- namely, to encourage and ensure an ever-growing commons of intellectual and creative work products, free to all to learn and enjoy, after the "decent interval" during which creators enjoy compensation. Details, details.
Defining personal information as property also sets the stage for a terrific boomerang effect. If it's property, it can be traded or transferred; so it becomes conceivable that you could lose (or voluntarily transfer) ownership of your personal information to another party. Facebook (or similar) could end up owning your name, in which case, to continue using it, you would have to license it back from Facebook. The potential consequences of forfeiting (or selling) your personal genome sequence are at once more hilarious and more frightening.
But don't you worry about any of this. Clearly I'm daft, and none of this could ever come to pass. We're too smart to let anyone ever pull the Web over our eyes. After all, if it weren't for Law, the title of this post would be a quintuple alliteration.

A quick update

2010-04-24T18:43:00.000-07:00

A few items in random order:

I bought the cheapest laptop I could find, so I'm back online and hacking again. My blog posts will remain sporadic, but should be more frequent henceforth.
I got a clean bill of health from my oncologist. I am in "complete remission" -- which as far as I can tell, means my certainties/uncertainties about my mortality are now roughly the same as everyone else.
I am enjoying a much-needed "Hiatus From Everything" in the Pacific Northwest. I'll probably be heading South within the next 2-3 weeks. I continue to look for work, places to stay, and above all, friends to visit.

More soon. A lot of half-baked ideas on the stack.

Going offline

2010-04-02T11:11:00.000-07:00

I will be online only sporadically from today until who knows when. To reach me, send me email, or (better) text or call me at my mobile number.

The New and Improved Yorker

2010-03-08T10:50:00.001-08:00

Today I find myself wondering why the verb yorking has not yet, to my knowledge, been coined. I propose the following definition:

York-ing (v.) 1. To engage in an urban lifestyle fraught with peril of social mortification for offenses as trite as wearing the wrong pair of shoes; to consume a disproportionate share of resources in pursuit of said lifestyle.

Or something along those lines.

Need a place to crash 28 Mar - 10 April (approx.)

2010-03-05T07:28:00.000-08:00

I need to get out of Jane's way -- she's probably going to sublet her apt. starting in April, and that will be much easier to do without me in it.

But... the earliest my friends out West will be ready for me is April 10.

So I'll need some SSA (Sofa-Surfing Assistance) roughly 28 March thru April 8, to bridge the gap.

If you know of any such possibles, kindly please email me directly.

Muchas gracias!

Feeling very Disraeli

2010-03-02T16:25:00.000-08:00

I'm alive, just gathering my wits. Nothing to say at the moment -- or rather, too much to say, and I want to get the wording just right.

My present circumstances and frame of mind remind me of Benjamin Disraeli's first speech in the House of Commons (1837) which, as he was shouted down by other MPs, ended thus:

I will sit down now, but the time will come when you will hear me.

Sisyphus climbing Maslow's Pyramid

2009-11-03T11:15:00.000-08:00

My second chemo treatment went relatively well, although it's taking me a bit longer to recover than from the first one. I'll report more of that medical tedium in another post in the near future.

Right now I want to commit to writing an introspective rant, while the thought is still fresh.

Reflecting upon my life up to the present day -- which I've had ample time, and opportunity, to do lately -- I see a repeating cycle of rising and falling fortune. The cycle is sine-wave shaped as my fortunes -- material, emotional, spirital, social, creative -- rise, and sawtooth- or staircase-like as they fall. I'm oversimplifying to be sure, but the pattern is undeniable.

The image that best captures the pattern for me is that of Sisyphus, the character of Greek myth condemned to push a boulder up a steep slope, only to have it fall back to the bottom at the end of each day. Except I'm not pushing a boulder up a mountain -- I'm pushing it up Maslow's Pyramid.

Abraham Maslow articulated a hierarchy of human needs, arguing that needs at the "base" of his pyramid had to be satisfied before an individual could meet, or even aspire to, the needs in the next level of his hierarchy. The base includes fundamental physiological needs: food, shelter, clothing, that sort of thing. From there, one can move through higher levels: Safety, Love, etc. until one reaches the highest level, self-actualization, at which true artistic expression (among other pursuits) becomes possible.

I have been far more fortunate than Sisyphus, in that I can recall many moments where I was able to pause at the summit of Maslow's Pyramid, my boulder tucked under my arm and thus prevented, for an always-too-brief shining moment, from rolling back down. At such times, I have come excrutiatingly close to being an artist -- or rather, to give those moments an even broader and yet more accurate description, close to creating something genuine.

I am also tickled to note that in any fair assessment of my joys and travails thus far, I cannot credit my strengths or abilities with aiding my rises in fortune, nor my weaknesses or errors in judgement for the times when my fortunes fell. It hasn't been random, exactly, but the recurring moral of the story (or at least, the moral I choose to distill) is that I'm not in control of my life, and that there are other forces at work here. Forces worth trying to understand and appreciate.

In mulling over all this, something I do far less than this post would suggest, I find my thoughts accompanied by a background noise, a muffled mantra, or perhaps, a weakened but still sonorous battle cry: I'm not done yet.

Need accomplice to bust outta chemo

2009-10-26T17:17:00.000-07:00

My next chemo treatment is this Friday, October 30.

I'm pretty sure they won't let me leave without an escort, and Valerie can't do it that day.

So I need someone to help me bust out of there circa 3:00 pm. Any takers? Email me, if so.

Misc news, mostly good

2009-10-25T14:43:00.000-07:00

Random items that came up in the past week:

Dr. Martin, my oncologist, visited me a few times while I was captive in my adjustable bed in the hospital. He told me that he finally received the complete report from my second biopsy. I have diffuse B-cell lymphoma, a.k.a. the "aggressive" kind of non-hodgkin's lymphoma. This is good news for several reasons. First, it makes it likely that we caught this earlier than previously thought (but that's still to be determined). Second, it means the chemo regimen I'm undergoing, selected based on an "educated hunch," is in fact exactly the correct regimen for my specific condition. Third, since the operating principle of chemotherapy is to attack fast-growing cells, "aggressive" lymphomas are more susceptible to the treatment (since the cells divide faster than in slow or "indolent" lymphomas).
I did some homework on IRS-allowed exemptions from the 10% "early withdrawal" penalty, and I qualify for 4 of the 8 exemptions (including one for unemployed people paying their own medical insurance, and another for out-of-pocket medical expenses). So I'll call the bank Monday and I expect to soon have a modest slush fund, which should make any number of things easier in the short term.
I'm starting to feel angry about my situation -- normally this would be bad news, but in this case anger may prove a valuable motivator.
Arguably the best news of all: I found my mobile phone charger, which henceforth will be in my pocket every single time I leave this house, guaranteeing that I will never suffer again from unscheduled information or communications blackouts. Ironically, the charger was exactly where it should be in my storage system, in a clear plastic box full of other chargers. Its being exactly where it was supposed to be is what made it so devilishly hard to find.

Many new beginnings, scrunched together

2009-10-23T15:03:00.000-07:00

A great many things have happened in my life recently which compel me to once again indulge my compulsion to communicate. I also have a need to share practical news and updates with a small group of friends, and email is unwieldy for doing that.

So, this blog. I make no representations or promises that anything posted here will ever be interesting to anyone. Indeed, I anticipate that many posts will be little more than crazed, confessional, self-indulgent rants -- in other words, precisely the kind of exhibitionist-diary blogging against which I have railed my entire adult life.

But no matter. This is for myself and a small group of close allies. If you are not one of them, dear reader, and you find anything of value here, rest assured it is entirely accidental.

Home again

2009-10-22T18:46:00.000-07:00

Just a quick note to all to say I was discharged from hospital this afternoon.

I am now safely at home sitting down to dinner.

Please DON'T call that 212-535-NNNN number as you will only wake up another patient probably far worse off than I was. My cell phone is recharging and should be fine by morning.

Big thanks to you all for the calls & moral support + extra big thanks for Jane for being the star quarterback of the medical establishment.

Love all around - help yourselves.

Post-chemo # 1

2009-10-15T16:45:00.000-07:00

2 days after my first chemo session i feel wobbly and tired but otherwise normal. The worst side effects have been quite bearable.

My last consult with Dr. Martin (oncologist) I learned that the bone marrow biopsy was negative (no lymphoma). This means my ability to restore my own white blood-cell levels is intact. Very good news. Also the fluid removed from near my lungs was also lymphoma-free.

Still no news on the second tissue biopsy. I'm being treated for an "aggressive" lymphoma as a precaution. Since I'm taking the treatment well, I anticipate we won't change the regimen / dosage / schedule even if my lymphoma proves "indolent" (slow-growing). In short, faster = better.

The only remaining major short-term risk factor is the periocardial effusion. This is fluid, similar to the one that was blocking my lungs, but that's caught in my periocardial sack. Worst-case scenario is the fluid accumulates there faster than the periocardial sack can expand, creating a high-pressure zone around my heart that exceeds the strength of my heart muscles. In the extreme case this can cause cardiac arrest.

The first chemo treatment has probably reduced the lymphs enough to let this problem correct itself. I have another echocardiogram 9am tomorrow (Friday) just to make sure. Then a meeting with the social worker to review housing options, then a review w/ Dr. Martin. I won't need any help or escort for any of these meetings, and I have enough cash to cover round-trip taxi fare.

Last item: my cousin David Schechter, freshly Barmitzvah'd (muzeltov!) has volunteerred to join Team Daniel Recovery. You can reach David at 999-999-9999 or via email at xxxxxxxx. How can you not love a man who still uses an America Online email address? Welcome David to our merry crew. I think you know nearly all the existing players.

I'll try to limit this missives to 1ce/weekly. I'm also hopeful the ratio of fun stuff to medical stuff will increase with each passing week.

One more time, special big thank you to Dani for the amazing job cleaning the house, and to Valerie for the brilliant way you individually wrapped the pizza slices. You both show great artistic potential in the tiniest things you do.