Redshirts Review Up

I think it's probably wise (and kind) to not review books I don't like, especially if I ever hope to make friends that are writers, but I think Scalzi can take it. I have a review of Redshirts up at CMS. Theoretically it's right up my alley, but I ended up hating how meta it was. Going meta is a tool best used sparingly and with subtlety.

Blocked

I have a tangled mess of things I want to write about in my head, but I can't figure out which thread to pull first.  This coupled with poor self-discipline and a mental diet of candy for 15 years and a lack of practice in actually putting my thoughts together in a coherent or compelling fashion has left me, regrettably, a little blocked.

I do journal, and it's occurred to me I should just take a couple years to write in those without the need to put it online for all to see, at least until I establish some confidence and stop being embarrassed by how my words look when put all together.

But I would hate to regret not saying what I have to say before I die.  They'd send me back to do it proper I'm sure.

Consuming and Identity

So, I've finally finish Technics and Civilization, which I have failed to properly review here.  it's a dense, thought-provoking philosophical work by Lewis Mumford addressing the relationship of our society to the machine that, despite being written in the 1930s, still feels timely.  Partly because his thoughts were largely ignored by the movers and shakers of the world, so the problems he addresses have either continued in increased in the meantime.  I really which I could have done a better job than my goodreads review, but this is all I got at the moment.  I hope I can come back to it later for another read-through, because I think it's a work that merits a deeper treatment than I've given it here.

But in writing down some of the things I liked about it, I remembered one of my favorite parts.  Towards the end of the book he's listing things we need to change to put our society on a course more centered towards human happiness (for ALL humans) and steer it back from a societal over-emphases on machines and mechanistic thinking.  He seems to have very little use for the kind of consumerism where consumption is a substitute for personality and this was an idea I have never fully entertained before.  Consuming as identity and personality.

This is the idea the ad companies have been selling for at least 100 years right?  You're not a nobody, you're a Lexus driver.  You're not a wallflower, you wear the latest fashions at the gap.  Consumption as a substitute for personality.  At times I am maddened by the world and it this, exactly this, that drives me batty.  The substitution of consumer goods for a personality.  What do I need to know about you except that you listen to the right music, wear the right clothes, watch the right movies, eat at the right places, etc.?  

It's I think at the core of a lot of my complaints with geek culture especially.  I love geek things, I love nerdy imaginative things, but I could give a shit if you've played the latest releases are wearing the all the franchise merchandise, have all the right collectibles, etc.  Those things are not what make you you.  Those things aren't what make you (or me!) worth talking to.  They're just some crap anyone can buy.  I don't care.  Why do we care?

Maybe the kind of culture we get cobbled together from people who form identities based on consumer purchases and surround themselves with people who purchase the same things, more or less, so they can justify their own consumption isn't the strongest web of human inter-connection we can form.  Like maybe, right?

I know I get preachy about this shit, but the dominance of brands in our cultural landscape is just very frustrating to me.  It leaves so little room for meaningful ideas and meaningful people.  "Purchasers of the right things." is like the least interesting of all the possible people we can be.  I just wish we heard that more often instead of the opposite.

Hail Siri, full of grace

My outrageous thesis is we may have abandoned the idea of mindlessly worshipping gods, but not mindless worship itself.

— James Haus (@SoylentHHH) June 8, 2015

I'm trying to learn when to turn my tweets into a blog post.  This is one of those times, less for profundity and more for verbosity.

I remarked earlier today that the modern posture of tablet/phone/watch use is submission.  Which I meant in the most leftist, hippie fashion, where people are being subtly being trained to adopt a submissive pose, which leads to a more submissive society.  I believe there is actual research floating around out there documenting the biofeedback inherent in looking up versus looking down, at least as it relates to depression and happiness.  Is it actually true that phones are making us more submissive by instilling a reflexive submissive posture?  Hell if I know, but I'm running with the idea.

Interestingly, someone else thought I was referring to the posture as prayer-like.  I wish!  Prayer feels like a much more mindful, and thoughtful thing than bowing one's head in ritualistic response to the little glass gods we all carry around with us now.  To be sure, prayer can be a mindless thing, as a childhood in a conservative church taught me, but it can also be a thoughtful thing, which is something I learned from the same place.  Prayer is what you make of it.  Indeed, meditative prayer is  a genuine form of mindfulness meditation and has a strong tradition within the christian community.  My respect for anyone who meditates or prays mindfully on what he or she believes to be good is leaps and bounds greater than the bowed head that comes of a reflexive response to one's mobile tech.  "Oh, Siri wants me to stand now.  Yes Siri, I hear and obey."

After coming out of the closet I went pretty far into the atheist/materialist side of the spectrum, and while I am still angry about a great many things involving christianity and my time in the closet, I have slowly swung back around to an appreciation of the nuance involved in what we collectively worship and why.  I can't fault christians for wanting to worship God, nor do I think it cool to mock them for the desire, because "God" be he/she real or fictional embodies a nexus of concepts Grace/forgiveness/kindess/etc. that are an extremely important and necessary part of human civilization.  And while those concepts can be found and worshipped outside of the christian experience, I can't fault people for wanting to worship those concepts, even if they come bundled with some unfortunate extras such as homophobia/persecution complex/etc.  Especially since I don't believe those good and bad ideas are inextricably intertwined.

It's especially aggravating to watch people who clearly worship ideas such as technological progress and capitalism without much apparent thought turn around, and with great arrogance, mock other people for their unmindful worshipping.  Like, if you go to WWDC and you sit with a quite sense of expectation and excitement for the wonders about to be revealed, you are, in fact, having a church experience and you don't have room to mock the religious for their habits.  And if you bob your head mindlessly in deference to your tiny glass masters every time they ping at you, you certainly don't have room to mock the concept of mindless worship in other people.  You are them and they are you and we are all together.

My radical thesis is that if we repeatedly practice the age-old postures of submission and subservience, we will by measure over time, find ourselves more submissive.  To our phones, or the people who make them, to the algorithms they run, or to whatever I don't know.  Just more submissive.  My suggestion is that we maybe do that less.  Don't assume the people who make apps are smarter than you and know what you need better than you do.  Don't offload reasonable adult responsibility onto your phone like it's a manufactured parent or master.  Turn off as many unnecessary demands for your attention as possible.

My dad used to tell me this story of him and his dad.  My dad loved to watch old movies late on Saturday nights.  And inevitably, he said, his father would knock on the door to his room, about half-way through the movie and just ask the question, "Does the TV control you, or do you control the TV?"  And he would stand there until my dad turned the TV off and went to bed.  I used to think this was the height of unreasonableness.  Now, I think my grandpa was maybe a wise man.

Do you control your tech?  Or does your tech control you?  Raise your head if you understand.

Both Wicked and Divine

I think one of the most humbling aspects of aspiring to create anything is the knowledge that it's not all that unique.  I'm a little stucky in a not-to-great place creatively where I read some amazing authors with wonderfully bonkers ideas and instead of being grateful for the experience, I'm instead envious and mad at myself for not participating in the construction of such wonders.  These feelings are only magnified when the material in question is perilously close to ideas I've been sitting on forever, but have yet to get over my own bullshit sufficiently to explore.

This weekend I bought a number of delightfully imaginative graphic novels, that more or less read like an organized acid trip and I'm grateful once again for comics as a medium, where borderline hallucinogenic ideas can be explored so shamelessly just for the fun of it.  In that lot were Trees by Warren Ellis and Jason Howard, who still delights with the unexpected, the new Prophet reboot by Brandon Graham and Simon Roy, volumes 2-4 of Saga by Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples and the Wicked and the Divine by Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie.

Trees is about giant alien pillars that crash into the landscape and proceed to ignore us for 10 years, and is a slow burn towards revelation that I couldn't put down.  Prophet is a glorious acid trip that really takes off in the closing story, in which Rob Liefeld's silly 90s character is reborn into a long-abandoned earth, seeking to restore the human empire, while navigating alien settlements teeming with death and slime.  There's more to it than that, but a large part of the enjoyment of the story is a series of ever-more-interesting twists that lead to promising cliffhanger.

Saga, as most people seem to agree, is wonderful, if crass.  A bananas new concept or image every issue or your money back kind of thing.  I can't say anything more than a million people haven't said already, but it's worth your time, if you're into weird alien odysseys.

The Wicked and the Divine blew me away, and prompted the need to write about it all.  It's the story of the pantheon of gods (a mixture of all regional pantheons apparently) who reincarnate every 90 years, inspire the world with their over-the-top antics for a couple years and then die horribly.  The story frames itself around Lucifer, who defies the mysterious rules of the gods by using divine powers to destroy some would-be assassins, and who is later framed for killing the judge at her trial.  It's maybe not a story for everyone, but if you like any sort of mythology, it's worth a look.

I got a sick feeling while reading that last though.  Not because it isn't good, it is, but because it's so perilously close to a story I've been dragging my feet on where the gods are re-incarnated as children periodically (although the set-up and the overall themes/direction are fairly different).  Which is a silly response on a number of levels.  It's not like this author is the first to write about gods incarnate. It's not like I can't write my own take on it anyway as long as I'm forthright about the similarities and don't lift anything wholesale and claim it as my own.  It's not like I imagine I'll ever actually be the kind of writer that people will pay human dollars to read, so there's really not competition here.

But I'm still getting that, "Oh god, I've procrastinated too long and now the moment has passed me by," kind of feeling, which I get a lot, and I'm maybe getting tired of it.  Both in a, "there's no reason not to write my crappy stories" kind of way and in a broader more philosophical, "nobody really owns an idea, man" kind of way.

Which is true right?  There's no such thing as "my ideas," there's just ideas I've discovered on my own, or have been expressed to me by other people and I discard them, or incorporate them or champion them to other people as shiny golden wonders.  But I certainly don't own them, and I can't take credit for them and I shouldn't feel bad when someone takes an idea I stumbled across roaming free and snaps them onto other ideas they also find pleasing and calls it a story and tries to share it with me, right?  I mean, what are we if not idea-processing machines who snap thoughts together like lego into what we consider pleasing shapes and then share with other people?  If that's ownership, then it's the kind of ownership strengthened and validated when shared as far and wide as possible I think.  Especially since there is no artificial scarcity involved.  Ideas are an infinite resource that can be replicated as many times as there are sentient minds to do so.

And we should do that.  I should do that.  I should make little lego-idea objects to send to you, which you should examine as a whole and then pick apart and reassemble incorporating any lego ideas you've managed to hold on to in your time here.  Or not, if that doesn't seem like a good idea to you.

Maybe it doesn't matter who touched an idea first, how long it's taken me to piece mine together, how many people care to receive it, maybe it's just the ideas that are important, and championing the ideas that seem particularly important in the here and now.  Maybe I can just get out of my own way for once.

I am not unique.  I am not original.  I do not create or own ideas, there is no artificial scarcity in idea-space, I am not the first to swim here and I will not be the last.  And that's all okay.  Because ideas are fun.  Creativity is fun.  And I only have so much time to play with them.  Why waste that gift on petty jealousy over a thing that no one can own?