Born in a lost colony

Every now and then I tilt my head a little bit to the side and Christianity sounds like a science fiction story. A lost planet, originally under the rule of an alien empire with it's own laws, has gone it's own way, under the rule of a rebellious offshoot of the royal houses. An ambassador was sent to bring it back into the fold, a prince in fact, but was summarily murdered. One day, sooner or later, the emperor will arrive, crush the rebellion and reintroduce galactic law to this backwater planet. Christianity is the faction betting on the galactic emperor, and hoping adopting what it believes to be galactic law now will guarantee safe zones or evacuation when the emporer's battleships finally arrive in orbit.

Work harder, not smarter

Maybe the fucked-upedness of the world takes this shape:

Mind fuck #1:  The already rolling in it assert you too can be rolling in it if you just worked very, very hard for a while, as they assure you're they're likely to have done. Or their parents. Or their underlings. The point is, someone worked very hard to get them where they are now, so if you want to share in the wonder of rolling in it, you'd better get to working hard.

Mind fuck #2:  The typical american worker is generally NOT working hard, given the amount of time they spend on the internet when they should be working, and is too worried about being called out in their lack of productivity to put voice to the idea that plenty of people work hard and yet aren't rolling in it. Nor have they really tried working as hard as the rolling-in-its insist one should, to really confidently assert that the "work makes you rich" as a universal to truth to be empirically bullshit.

Mind fuck #3:  Everyone actually working hard enough to please the ones who roll but who, inexplicably to one who rolls, still do not have the money to afford people to tend to life for them so they too can spend their days rolling in it, are just too damn tired to deal with the nonsense inherent in mind fucks #1 and #2.

Dark Continuums

Canadian TV has blessed me with two out-of-the-blue SF shows on Netflix recently. Continuum, which I believe just wrapped up a final half-season that I have yet to watch, has been a pretty decent ride. I keep thinking the tech kid is Frankie Muniz though for some reason. But it's had some good material. I recommend it, for the most part.

Dark Matter I'm still a little on the fence about. Among the highlights are the FTL drive effect (and name).  If you're not shouting "launch all fighters!" in an SF show, I'll take "spin up the FTL!" Although they may have never actually shouted that. The android character is pretty interesting, although most plots involve her getting incapacitated because she's kinda the deus ex machina character and having her conscious trivializes most plots (which is a formula they may want to re-think for season 2). The CGI is spectacular for the most part, if infrequently used, presumably for budgetary reasons. And Stargate actors drop by once in a while!

The main downside is it has all the energy of a casual afternoon in the living room. I'm not sure what it is exactly but the tension is generally loose enough to play jump rope with and, especially in the first few chapters, boredom is a frequent problem, both ours and theirs. I don't know if it's that the hook really wasn't compelling enough to drive more than the first couple episodes or what, but the series drags frequently, until it gets to the episode with Stargate actors, and then it gets about 10 times better.

The last few episodes started to pull some kind of chemistry and momentum together, which it can hopefully roll into a solid second season, assuming it's getting one?  I don't know, I'm not a professional TV commentator so I don't really bother to look this stuff up before I talk about it.

Also, has anyone else noticed how much more violent TV has gotten in the last 10 years or so? I'm not complaining exactly, I always though television norms were a teensy bit too puritanical and over-obsessed with the possibility of some child somewhere seeing a boob or hearing a swear, but my god do action shows seem to be splatter-fests now.  Both in continuum and this people are getting shot in the head, sliced to pieces, burned to death, etc. I'm not sure what's driving it, but I find the change interesting.

Hey, what's this?

Oh my god, I totally forgot I changed the design of my blog. Was it a good idea? Hell if I know. I just like to re-arrange things every now and then. But truthfully, this blog has never quite been what I wanted. I either need to design a better one or find a better platform.

What I've learned about spacing between sentences

I have been getting the side-eye recently for using 2-spaces after the period that ends a sentence.  An inference, a subtle hint, that the cool kids don't do it this way anymore.  Here's the thing:  if you want to get me to change my habits, you need to give me a good reason why, and "it's not currently fashionable" is typically not a good reason why for me.

After my typically ignorant and unsubtle inquiries on twitter, @mattthomas gave me a link to this Slate article (which I recommend you read), which lead me to this rebuttal (which I also suggest you read). The comments in the Slate article were also helpful.

So what's my conclusion so far?  It's an aesthetic choice, a minor culture war blip amongst writing nerds, and it doesn't truly matter whether you use one or two spaces in your writing.  To hear it told from the Slate article, there is a conclave of typesetters who have determined the purity of the single space and there are rogue english teachers leading people astray due to a love of former teachers and a too-great attachment to mid-centure typewriter aesthetics. 

 Given the rebuttal and some other facts, I'm not sure this is an accurate assessment.  For one, I have not seen real compelling evidence that all typesetters believe in one space between sentences and for another there are plenty of style guides who ask for 2-spaces (the current APA style guides for instance) and others that don't have much to say on the matter.  I am sure there are typesetters and publications that prefer 1-space, but I see little proof that this is an industry-wide standard and I've seen little documentation to back up the insistence on 1-space as anything more than a fashionable aesthetic choice.  Even Manjoo admits that is exactly what it all boils down to, he's just arguing your aesthetic choice is bad because you aren't him and the typesetters he knows, whose opinion should be deferred to because of expertise. This is not the most compelling argument for an industry standard.

It may be possible that 1-space is more suitable for certain fonts and publications types and 2-spaces may be more appropriate for others.  This might be an okay scenario that we can all live with in harmony.

My advice, based on the evidence so far, is if you're looking to publish for a certain community or publication, simply look up and follow the style guides they have provided (and if they haven't provided a style guide they have no right to complain about style).  If it calls for one-space, use that.  If it calls for 2, use that.  CTRL-F (or command-F for you mac users) is your friend in either scenario.  Beyond that?  Use whichever spacing style seems most readable to you and doesn't get in the way of your writing flow. 

If advocates for either style want to enshrine either practice as a universal standard, they're going to need to make better arguments to more people (especially people who write style guides) than they have so far.

Starting to Take Stock

Careening out of coming out of the closet and the concomitant mid-life crisis, I have yet to right myself entirely. There has been progress, to be sure, but I still operate far too much on a fuzzy-headed  getting by in the day-to-day, rather than action with a clear purpose with even a short-term plan in mind. And frankly, I'm not quite where I want to be professionally and socially so simply getting by is increasingly intolerable.

So I'm entering the phase of feeling stuck in the mud when I'm sitting back, splashing a little, entering  a sort of radical acceptance of the situation.  "So, you're stuck.  What's this like then?" I'm asking myself. I'm taking stock in other words.

"So this is the situation you've created for yourself, what would you like to do now?"

I'm not sure.  I've been trying to organize myself with limited results, both professionally and personally.  I increasingly despise living in digital environments for so much of my day (work and then home and then eventually in my sleep once we have the technology I guess).  Plus, I just have a hard time of feeling attached and motivated by organizing file folders on a desktop or in an app?  So I bought a bunch of paper notebooks because writing with a pen, even if it's just kind of simple statements about the structure I want the day to have, has been very helpful to me.  Still, I haven't been able to devise a system on paper that feels sufficient to me. I have a "triage" journal where I go to write out what I need to do to salvage the day after generally procrastinating for the first half of it. I  have a work "to-do" to help me get through the priority work tasks for the day.  And I have a general journal for "I need some paper to write or draw some shit out so I can think about it more clearly."

For now these suffice, but ideally I'd have several notebooks organizing my work projects (because there are many happening simultaneously usually) and several organizing and detailing my writing projects, of which there are many ideas but few actualities.  Why I can't make the leap from my current system to a more organized system I can almost visualize, I don't know.

I want to blame ADD, but I feel like anyone willing to confirm that diagnosis is just going to throw pills at me like I should fuck with my brain chemistry as an ongoing experiment with a shrug and a "yes, thank you doctor."

I am currently very stubborn about reasoning and feeling my way to the psycho-emotional knot that holds me captive and unraveling it.  In other words I want to work through the source of my depression and dissociation and solve it rather than medicating the symptoms simply to function properly in capitalism. But sometimes, I feel like I'm just thinking myself in circles instead of accomplishing anything productive.  Is this madness?  Sometimes it feels like it.

To this end, group therapy has been an amazingly positive choice.  I can't recommend it highly enough. But there is more to do, especially with regards to exercise and some sort of disciplined mental/spiritual practice, which is a subject for a future post.

I definitely look back at where I was in Reno and where I am now and see progress I am happy with. But a side-effect about allowing yourself to know who you really want to be, is noticing you aren't quite there yet.

Ask your doctor is knowing yourself is right for you.

Template Changes

So this dynamic view is interesting.  I like the classic view a lot, but I'm not sure why it has a nav bar that's just looking at various modes of look at the same stuff?  Timeline is kind of interesting, but the rest, meh.  I might remove them manually.  I think I'd rather the nav bar be links to different kinds of content than different ways of looking at the same stuff.

This is approaching the simplicity I want though. Feels less like a geocities webpage and a little cleaner and less cluttered.  I like it so far, although I'm still planning to play around with wordpress and/or another blogging platform. Except Medium, because I'm not an earnest start-up entrepreneur in California.

Unbearably Vinyl

I started collecting records this year, against my better judgement. Not wanting to be another unbearable hipster in Portland, I had avoided it for some time. Of course, hating hipsters can be its own version of unbearable, and I eventually realized obnoxiousness is generally an attitude thing. I can enjoy records, and as long as I don't get all pretentious about the sound or otherwise be a dick to people who don't give a shit about records, it would probably be okay. As it turns out, giving less of a shit what people think about my hobbies is generally a good life choice.

The hobby has been more fun that I really could have possible imagined. Not because the sound is just so superior, although I quite like it. Not because the album artwork is large and pleasing. Not because the entire process, from bin searches, to handling the record to using the turntable is so pleasingly tactile in an age of touch screens (which are tactile, but only ever in one limited fashion as you're always just touching glowing glass).  Really, it's been fun just because I've discovered so much music I have never come across before.

Aside from a bunch of rock and roll favorites from the 70s and 80s, and re-buying Devin Townsend's stuff because I am a hopeless groupie as far as he is concerned, I've really been enjoying just browsing the large used record store distressingly near my apartment and finding gems from the past. Of particular note to me are Alan Parson's Project, Tomita, Electric Light Orchestra right now.  Although they are far from my only new favorites. I'm listening to full albums from old favorites I've never heard before (David Bowie and Elton John), I'm listening to albums I never got around to buying on itunes (Pink Floyd's Dark side of the Moon and Wish You Were Here) and I'm finally diving into classical music and getting to know Bach, Strauss, Brahms, Tchaikovsky and Mozart in ways I never really bothered to before.

So is this a passing phase? I don't know, I heard someone say that people who did vinyl the first time around are skipping this phase the second. I think for me a key to longevity will be letting go of records that I didn't end up enjoying that much or when I've simply listened to it as much as I'm going to. In other words, I don't want this to be just another pile of crap I lug around so maybe only keep the keepers.

In short, I've found a bunch of new music to love, I've found depth in artists I already loved, I listen to more of my music more often and I'm enjoying music overall much more than I was a year ago. What's not to love about vinyl?

thoughts in flux

I keep thinking about what I want to do with this blog. Well, about all my online presences really. I think my tumblr blog will be exclusively devoted to curating "things that are emotionally important to me for some reason." So not a lot of original content there, but a way to get a sense of the stuff that resonates with me.

 Twitter is where I'm most academic, although, notably, not about the things I'm professionally paid to be academic about. I tend to do most of my tech and anti-tech philosophy retweeting there. I try to stay away from the outrage of the day but occasionally get sucked in. More rarely over time I hope. I may conscious restrict the topics I talk about there in order to foster more conversational depth, but we'll see.

 This blog, I don't know. I could try and build a following but a) I'm a little embarrassed by the apparent age of the blogspot format, and b) I'm not sure my thoughts, such as they are, are really ready for prime time. I do like some of the new blog formats and I do want to create a new blog I maintain. The only question here is am I going to just switch to a more modern, flexible platform, or am I going to try and make one myself, for myself? The latter is less dubious, given my history of focus and discipline, but it's my ideal. The kind of blog I want to make, both in appearance and functionality is probably one I'd have to make myself. The existing social media platforms all have their strengths, but none are quite what I really want, and some are outright obnoxious. I just want and online presence that's not bullshit.

All that said, the writing topics have continued to pile up, overflow and fall down the memory hole. There is lots I want to write about but haven't been writing about. There's really only a limited window to do so before the thoughts that want to be expressed are stale and no longer emotionally resonant. So that sucks. I may try and knock out a few simple ones tonight. I am in the middle of another "taking stock" phase, which is important and usually leads to a big post, but which is also my least interesting writing as it is largely glorified navel-gazing. Although I suppose that's true of most of the internet right now.  I'm not sure the pizza rat topic from yesterday had much of deep importance about it but it still summoned a lot of words from people.

Beyond that, I'm not sure I ever want this blog to get "famous" unless I actually start producing some actually notable works of art or writing that would lead people to want to hear what I have to say. That seems like the proper route to me, in any case. And as always, I am all about proprietary.

In any case, dear reader who has no name, I hope you are well. And I sincerely hope to shape this blog, or something like it, into something worth reading in the near future.

Building Momentum

Three new, if short, book reviews on CMS today.  Which, by implication, means I've been developing a reading habit again! Yay, forward motion.

That's not funny

I remember being about 10-years-old and laughing my ass off at Bill Cosby. I had stumbled onto his bit about his kids thinking their names were "Damn It" and "Jesus Christ" because those were the two most common things he shouted at them.

"Damn it!  Get in here!"
"But dad, my name's Jesus Christ!"

Which, for all of Cosby's sins, is still one of the funniest comedy routines I've every heard. Even at 10 I couldn't stop laughing.  My mother, who came into the room just in time to hear the end of that, said only, "That's not funny, James."

And it wasn't, not to her. I doubt any modern lefty would care or agree, but Jesus Christ was a topic sacred to her and not only was it not funny, not only did she feel it was unfair mockery of her beliefs and lifestyle (what she might have called "punching down" today), but she didn't want to even hear the joke. I wasn't allowed to laugh at it, Cosby shouldn't have said it, she just wanted it to go away because she found it uncomfortable and hurtful.

This is the story that pops into my head every time I hear the endless "kids are too PC to get humor" thing that's still going around. It's a little different than what people are talking about. Cosby isn't intending to make fun of Christians, but himself, and while he is using my mom's sacred cow to do it, it's not with the intent to offend her, he just doesn't find taking the lord's name in vain to be much of a problem. There's definitely a difference between that and a humor intended to diminish, belittle and mock a given human stereotype or identity.  So should Cosby not be allowed to make that joke because people like my mother think it's punching down at them? I think a large part of the problem is we're conflating too much in this conversation. Not all humor comes from the same place, with the same effect and for the same purpose.

So is making fun of Christians punching down, even if they have privilege?  What is the clearly delineated hierarchy of suffering by which we can universally determine what humor is punching down and what is in good fun? Can we make fun of conservative christians with whatever unkind mockery we like because they have historically operated from a place of privilege? What if they report back that they don't feel that way, and that the humor feels unfair? Who gets to decide that? Can we unilaterally declare ourselves off limits to jokes because we have suffered?  If so, how much suffering do we need to endure before we are safe from ridicule?

I think rather than focus on making sure no one is ever uncomfortable, which is both unworkable and unwise (sometimes people may need to point things out about us that are uncomfortable but important to hear), it's better to focus on intent. Some jokes are intended to be absurd, and maybe play too carelessly with people's sacred ideas.  Some jokes are pointedly meant to shock and skewer sacred ideas because the teller feels it necessary. Some jokes are meant to simply uphold power and privilege and dehumanize the already demonized. Those scenarios all need to be handled differently.  If an absurd joke would still be funny if they characters all had their identities switched around or changed for others, it's hard to get too worked up about it. Irreverent sacred cow skewering will always be controversial, but there's room for disagreement when it's institutions and ideologies being attacked instead of people.  Humor meant to demonize and dehumanize can simply be met with a flat, "that's not funny."

The mistake generally seems to be declaring topics off-limits, regardless of intent.  Or, from the other end, trying to pretend jokes that were clearly intended to dehumanize and demonize were "just a joke" i.e. absurdist.  It's fair to point out the intent and quality of a joke can be critiqued. It's fair to  point out you don't get to declare yourself off-limits from criticism or critique, whether it comes in the form of humor or not.

I look forward to dissecting humor until it stops moving with all of you in the coming months.

College Humor and other oxy morons

I don't know why I'm bothering to wade in on the "college kids are too PC to understand humor anymore," pseudo-controlversy, but there are a couple things I want to parse.

First, the idea of humor as necessary counterweight to one's own pride and hubris seems to be a little bit dead on certain segments of the left. There is this sense, especially among lefty types who seem grimly determined to have a firmer grasp of "what's going on" than everyone else, that it is known who the villains are (them) and it is known what is punching up (punching away from them) and what is punching down (punching down towards them) and that comedy acts should then comfortably re-affirm what it is they already know to be true. The kind of people who love the Onion until it hits too close to home in other words. So I do agree that there is kind of a generally obnoxious sense that for the educated left, the court jester could not possibly point out something uncomfortable that they are already not keenly aware of and have formed all the opinions that everyone has all decided are correct. Leaving me to wonder if comedy on campus is supposed to be something not so much laughed at as nodded along with sagely.

Yes, those are the sins of corporations. Yes, those are the sins of patriarchs. Yes, those are the sins of the majority and a rigged system.  Well done comedy man, you checked all the right boxes.

Which is all to say, of course some members of the left are sometimes over-the-top in their preening self-regard, lack of personal humility and generally annoying "know-it-all" self-righteous attitude. Hey, it happens to the best of us. The good news is it's a nice reminder how much we have in common with the right sometimes!

That said, some caveats.

One, I'm not sure how much of a plague this really is.  While yes I think the left could use some kind of lessons in not repeating the sins attributed to conservatism without the slightest hint of self-awareness, this certainly isn't all leftists and may not even be enough people to warrant the press coverage.  There are lots of very nice liberal types who are willing to entertain a comedian who doesn't 100% line up with their values.  The left contains multitudes. My "sense of things" written out above is just that, "a sense of things" and should not be considered worth more than the paper it's printed on. But I certainly don't think it's a dire emergency, I just want some people to tone it down with the self-righteousness and the un-ending purity crusades from time to time.

Two, it's not really true that kids these days hate comedy. Louis C. K. is filthy and pushes all kinds of boundaries and college kids love him.  True, he generally seems to punch in the direction they want to see comedians punching, but that doesn't make his work sometimes very challenging (see his most recent SNL monologue for some of that! Ooph, that was hard to sit through). But, "comedians" contains multitudes too. And it IS true that some comedians are hacks who rely on tired stereotypes that more and more people don't find too funny anymore. There is a growing sense of extreme exhaustion with the traditional lack of accountability for sexist, racist, and seemingly unaccountable patriarchs who all remain firmly at the helm of so much of our civilization and so comedy that just seems to reinforce the idea that "boys will be boys" (i.e. unaccountable to anyone else) is getting less and less play. And I can't say I blame anyone for being tired of a lot of those tropes.

I don't know if I have the wherewithal to parse this much further tonight, but there does seem to some mic grabbing going on, as who gets to define what is and isn't funny. And I get it, there is power in humor. There is power in who gets to decide who and what is worthy of ridicule and therefore who it is acceptable to treat poorly. Humor is a powerful tool in normalizing cultural stories about who the heroes and villains are in a given age. True power is exposed in who and what are considered beyond the pale to joke about. So while I understand the urge to keep comedians from punching towards oneself and one's allies who are perceived as vulnerable, and therefore to be protected, a movement that can't laugh at it's own foibles is in really dangerous territory.

Maybe we should focus less about laughing at other people, and focus more on laughing at ourselves.

A Festivus for the rest of us!

My thoughts on Alain de Botton's Religion for Atheists are here. Short version: I loved it. The questions he asks are important.

Do You Even Lift?

I’m kinda at this point where I need to embrace some body positivity about myself, but also kind of want to start exercising again because it helps me stay sane and evens out the peaks and valleys of my emotional roller-coaster.

And it’s weird to phrase it this way, but if I get fit, it won’t be so much a warm embrace of fitness culture so much as hate-fucking it with a “yuck” face.  Which is a phrase or idea I’ve never liked, and I kind of hate to use it, but it’s the closest I can come to describing my sense of unease with the fitness industry.  There’s just something cult-ish and unbearably smug about fitness culture as a whole.

For one, there’s kind of this constant mind fuck around attitude that I understand is just an attempt to push me past my bullshit and do the thing, but still, the kind of single-minded zealousness people work themselves into around the gym is very off-putting, especially if you grew up in fundamentalism and are now currently allergic to anything remotely resembling it.  And I think there might be such a thing as fitness fundamentalists.  I can barely go to yoga, even though I like the basic experience of it, because they so rarely seem to be able to leave well enough alone without bringing in some new agey bullshit around the whole endeavor, especially the yoga gurus, who conveniently have a book I can buy.

The other thing that bothers me about “the fit” is this bizarre protestant/capitalist work ethic angle where if you put in the time and the work into shaping your body into something generally regarded as pleasing by modern tastes, you shall be rewarded, and indeed perhaps owed, a relationship with someone possessing a body of equal or better well-shaped pleasingness. On some level, I understand, this is just how humans mate, typically by selecting someone a lot like them, but …. still.  It just makes the whole thing seem so superficial and a little yucky. 

If the over-whelming takeaway message was, “we want you to be healthy and live a long, happy life” I might be able to swallow it better.  But, I don’t know, that’s just not the over-whelming message that seems to shine through the brightest.

Post-trip realization

I have no idea where i fit in the world anymore, nor the faintest idea what I'm doing.

I've basically found no place that makes sense to me since leaving my religion and I'm not going back.  My religion was structured and purpose-filled but dystopian in its fundamentaist authoritarianism. The secular world is freer, but chaos, with an anti-pathy to purpose beyond capitalism and self-interest.

 Who do you think you are to struggle with existential questions and doubt in any way other that alone, in quiet desperation?

So everyone scavenges for purpose and community as best they can.

I don't understand it.  I don't understand my place in it. I don't like the sense of helplessness that inspires.

I don't like how much I don't try to change things.

I'd walk the earth, but I don't know Kung Fu.

So there's that awkward fact about me.

Defining Adventure Down

I think I'm finally narrowing down my strong antipathy to "must love adventure" crowd on dating sites and, uh, almost everywhere else (I know this is a weird thing to obsess over, but here I am).  It comes down to a couple things for me.

First, it seems like a completely mindless capitulation to the current advertising push in all sectors. It's an adventure to buy a coke, it's an adventure to buy a car, it's an adventure to choose your brand, etc. Every ad now is that ubiquitous stadium anthem music dreck and free spirits waving their arms about while they buy shit they don't need. I understand our bland, consumer-driven lives might need some punch, this does not mean going to the mall is now an epic of homerian proportions. We don't have to accept "participating in the economy" as the definition of "adventure" just because the soulless and sad Don Draper wannabes tell us to.  For god's sake have some pride.

Second, it defines adventure away to mean everything and nothing.  Much like the Louis C.K.'s bit on "everything's amazing and nobody's happy.", once you use adventure to describe going to the mall with your friends, or going on an easy hike 30 min out of town, what' s left to describe reporting in a war zone?  Hacking your way through the amazonian jungle in search of new species?  Going to space in a rocket? If adventure is a glorified "leaving the house" then adventure is the definition of normalcy and tedium.

Third, has it really come to this?  Has modern life beaten us down so much that having the bravery to leave the house is now adventure-level status?  Do we need it to be such an epic to even summon the motivation? I'd like to think we can make it a norm again, and not the extraordinary act of extraordinary people. Like maybe it's possible to perform the basic responsibilities of adult life without creating a grossly inflated and narcissistic mythology around how wonderful and meaningful everything we do is simply by virtue of it being us that's doing it, you know? It's delusional, and it's the kind of delusion that only benefits advertisers who want everyone to share in the delusion that brand engagement and an obscene focus on brand preference is an important and meaningful part of life.  It isn't.  It never will be.

It's an adventure for a toddler to leave the house.  It's an adventure for an adult to leave the country, or in a few notable cases, the planet.  You don't like adventure, you just like leaving the house.

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.