a cold and lonely street

Adventures in OkCupid Land: perspectives and hacks from the online-dating site

noreply@blogger.com (Ash Hibbert) — Mon, 14 May 2012 05:50:00 +0000

About a month ago[1] I set up and starting developing an OkCupid profile under the name JavaDraco, a mash up of two symbols of power: Dragons, and Coffee. As with many new activities upon which I embark, I approached it empirically (though, that's not to say thoroughly) – undertook a review of existing literature, maintained a logbook, and reviewed the performance of each experiment in communication. Now, if the result cannot be an interesting activity partner, casual sex, or a life-long thing, at least I will have a blog post to show for it.

Privacy and honesty

Perusing the profiles of both women and men on OkCupid, a couple of things became immediately apparent: people can actually be quite skilful at expressing themselves,[2] and the brave honesty of people’s profiles. For many an OkCupider writes extensively and un-ironically about where they are at in life, and provides nuanced and revealing explanations to their ‘answers’. Information that we would never consider putting on our Facebook walls (which are, ostensibly at least, only for the eyes of our friends and family) appears in length on public dating profiles.

This probably has something to do with how it is often easier to confess secrets to a stranger than our partners or parents; or, it could simply be that there’s just a lot more at stake with online dating compared to our social networking sites – e.g. the possibility of getting laid by someone really cool. Of course, there is also the obstacle of matching up a real life person with their respective online identities. With Facebook, Friending requires overt permission from both parties after having searched by their email address or whatnot. Yet on OkCupid, typically only those who recognize your photos (particularly if you happen to be Julian Assange) will be able to link them to your real life identify – emphasis on the ‘typically’.[3] In about the first fifteen minutes of browsing my ‘matches’ and ‘similar users’ list on OkCupid I had located one ex-girlfriend, one ex-housemate, one current housemate, and a couple of fellow alumni.

However, I think that the greatest barrier between our various online personas, and the rest of our lives, is one of convention. I could climb over a front-yard fence and peer through a neighbor’s window, but do not do so because of social norms. Similarly, I tend to draw a line between what I read about someone on the web (particularly if it was not intended for me), and what I might bring up in general conversation.[4] (At least that is what I expect people close to me do in relation to my more risqué blog posts). To use the expression, what happens on OkCupid tends to stay on OkCupid.

That said, I think the idea of online privacy is pretty much bull shit – and is one reason why I make my Facebook profile and OkCupid username public: anything else is just self-delusional.

Twenty thousand questions

Quizzes are addictive – few more so than those that OkCupid offers. I admit that I went a bit crazy with the revelations here, before pulling back and making many of my answers private (part of my effort of ‘sanitizing’ my profile for public consumption). Now I only have a little fewer than 2 000 questions - out of about 4 000 and counting – publically available, and 500 answers that are invisible to all but OkCupid itself … and to whomever OkCupid wishes to sell my consumer-profile …

The questions are an anthropological goldmine, and OkCupid knows it.[5] They are also tremendously entertaining – such as, ‘Which aspect of the salmon life cycle best corresponds with your current state in life?’ – and spilling over into the tragicomic. For instance, when asked, ‘How does the idea of being slapped hard in the face during sex make you feel?’ I could not help but answer ‘Nostalgic’.

I will also admit to having started out rather flakey, in the sense of trying to be all things to all men … or in this case, all women. I subscribed to many an opinion, but flagged none as particularly important. Similarly, I selecting agreeable answers that I hoped would ensure maximum compatibility. Constant nagging from the OkCupid bot, and my increasing awareness that I might be attracting some flakey people myself, meant that I started to get a bit more meticulous and strong-willed in my answers. What sealed it, though, was discovering that my match percentage with someone increased not only by giving the answers that they were after – but also marking that question with the same degree of seriousness as they had.

Time to go through all my answers again, I figured.

One particularly frightening (in retrospect) activity involved perusing the profile of someone that I liked the look of, answering questions as I imagined they would answer them, and then getting frustrated and confused when our answers were different. I reassured myself that in 20 hours time, I could go back and have another go at giving the ‘right’ answer – before I realized how twisted my reasoning had become. I had locked on to them because they appeared high in my match listing (me having, at that stage at least, answered questions reasonably honestly) – and then gone into a fit when their match percentage decreased. ‘Surely, we’re perfect for one another, right?’ I thought – and then paused, and took a deep breath, and pushed back from my PC for a long break.

The About page

Step 1: Earn more -

“We did a little investigating as to whether a person's stated income had any real effect on his or her online dating experience. Unsurprisingly, we found that it matters a lot, particularly for men … If you're a young guy and don't make much money, cool. If you’re 23 or older and don't make much money, go die in a fire. It's not hard to see where the incentive to exaggerate comes from.” - OkCupid

Their words, not mine.

Step 2: Remain silent -

“Write nothing about yourself. If she’s reading your profile in the first place, it means she’s already sold on your pictures. You have nowhere to go but down; your literary wit—as awesome as you think it may be—is overkill. Use your “Intro” to write precisely what you find attractive in girls—attitudes, passions, dreams. Keep it lighthearted. Does she like to travel or camp? Do you like girls who make faces? Do you dislike girls who say, “I know, right?” That kind of shit. Mention nothing about body parts. This intro should be no more than a paragraph. Anything more and you’re trying too hard.” – Dave Glenn

Step 3: Know what you want -

I should apparently give special attention to the final question (‘You should message me if’) in part because it is the last part of my bio that any OkCupiders will be left reading. It also serves a very important internal function, along with the Q&As, of helping me clarify my own wants and needs. As the amazing ChuckNox reminds us, “If you find that there’s confusion for you, around sex and dating … you need to take a step back and ask yourself, what are you a ‘Yes’ to, and what are you ‘No’ to, and just get clear about that.”

Step 4: Edit -

Most OkCupiders are going to encounter my ‘About’ passages on their Welcome page and match results – however, they will only see about five lines for each. It is probably worth me keeping each passage no longer than that – lest OkCupid truncate some important bit of context. Furthermore, brevity being the soul of wit, just enough is more. The Style Guide also allows limited formatting and linking – italics, bold, [[tagging]] interests, and other users. Tagging interests allows you to appear in people’s interest-filtered searches; if you are going to tag other users, it seems obligatory that you add ‘the awesome’ before their name J . It also probably helps to get their permission.

The photos

Most people, I assume, will turn to their Facebook albums for photographic inspiration. However, Google Picasa turned out to be a great resource for quickly locating photos of myself, using the dark magics of intelligent facial recognition, in what is an otherwise absurdly sized collection.

OkCupid’s own blog article has some good pointers on which actual photos to select; the tldr of it that men’s photos are apparently most effective when they look away from the camera, don’t smile, and include the following (in order of effectiveness):

An animal
Muscle - though this becomes less effective by age
(less so) An interesting activity
(and a very big drop-off) friends

AskMen – that reliable source of anxiety and self-doubt – recommends that when it comes to profile shots, quality is far more important than quantity: only have consistently good shots, as one bad one can negate the rest. Confirming the above list, AskMen also advises keeping the focus, literally and technically, on oneself – blur the background or ensuring it is otherwise uneventful.

In response to these points, I quickly resurrected a photo of my family’s Border Colley taken at my alma mater, scrapped the chummy shots of my housemates and I (sorry guys), and made sure I was frowning in at least a couple photos. Dark, mysterious air adequately cultivated, no?

The messages

My approach so far has generally been to work refer to my Match percentage list, starting at those I have the highest romantic and platonic compatibility, and working my way down. I recognize that the Match percentage is not the be all and end all – in fact, they mean very little.

One way that I can confirm this is that of the 23 women above 92 per cent, only two of them are still in correspondence with me.

My decisions on what to include in the first message again come from the OkCupid blog itself, which lists some terms whose presence in a message corresponds with high response rates. These include compliments such as ‘awesome’ and ‘fascinating’, non-traditional greetings like ‘How’s it going?’ and ‘What’s up?’; mentioning of specific interest like ‘bands’ and ‘zombies’ (wtf?); referring overtly to their profile with terms like ‘you mention’ and ‘good taste’; and being self effacing with ‘sorry’ and ‘apologize’. After working my way through these keywords in a dozen messages, I started to feel like one of the title characters in Clueless learning to expand her vocabulary: “I hope not sporadically!”

For guys, apparently the optimum length for a message 200-270 characters; however the key is that with less time spent sending single messages, I have to send a lot more – which leads conveniently into my closing remarks …

The long game

My time on this dating site, so far, has been brief. My impression to date – and one that the corresponding Reddit Community and its ‘evil twin’ Seddit seem to confirm – is that in spite of online dating sites existing in a virtual realm, it remains a jungle out there no less wild than RL. This meat market is subject to the laws of supply and demand like any[6] – a law that we could, if we wished, trace all the way back to the production rates of each gender’s respective gametes.

We all have our special first world crosses to bear: messages from creeps burden the majority of women’s inboxes, while most men struggle with the constant non-responses. I balance on the precarious border between light and dark, quality of message versus quantity – should I cultivate the patience of a nice-guy™ or the spunk of a game playing® alpha; and if the latter do I try to be the Al Pacino salesman or Alec Baldwin?

Decisions, decisions. Maybe I should I simply switch off and let the prey come to me – yeah, right.

Image by pablocomotion

Endnotes

[1] My delay in acquiring a dating-site profile is a source of embarrassment, but at least consistent with my ambiguous relationship with technology.

[2] This might sound rather patronizing, but understand that I grew up in a region far from the city where books were not exactly the best thing to be seen in the possession of, and where many a Year 12 English assessment piece was written the day it was due. I also did creative writing as a degree – and there is the temptation, as I am sure common amongst many professions, to perceive anyone without a relevant degree as being a commoner.

[3] With the wonders of Google images, one should be able to search the interwebs for matching photos – if the user has posted it anywhere else such as Flickr or Picasa, you will have a direct line to them.

[4] Okay, so maybe the parallel is not very strong – so maybe a better one is that we might casually glance through the window of a house and see a couple making out, but we typically will not stare, or hold it against them.

[5] The OkCupid blog certainly doesn’t help convince me not to try gaming the system. Within its pages, for instance, they talk of their massive data-mining efforts that have allowed them to a person’s likelihood to have sex on the first date. For instance, they found that people who like beer, would kill someone, find the prospect of nuclear war interesting, and would in fact initiate nuclear war themselves, all to have ‘implied odds’ of around 83 per cent.

[6] The predicament reminds me of job hunting – do I whore myself out to whichever placement bureau will take me, race to interviews at every recruitment agency, send out clever and carefully worded cover letters to accompany my high-gsm résumé, and max out my connections on LinkedIn; or do I explore the invisible date market of mutual friends and colleagues.

“The purpose is to experience fear. Fear in the face of certain death”

noreply@blogger.com (Ash Hibbert) — Sun, 13 May 2012 03:41:00 +0000

Each time that I play Mass Effect, I contribute to a collective study of morality. Between me and the other 3.5 million ME3 players, 2mil ME2 players, and the countless pirates, we have made close to every one of the numerous significant variations of Shepard’s conversation options. Think of it as a million monkeys working away not on a typewriter, but on a chessboard: resulting in a trove of anthropological insights not only on the choices people have made, yet (more importantly) what they have thought of their and others’ choices.

When exploring the different possibilities revolving around the Genophage Cure, for instance, I stumbled upon the following remarks:

“If you went through all the trouble of keeping Wrex alive in ME1 just to inevitably still kill him in ME3, then you have NO soul. Plain and simple.” … Or: “Did you seriously shoot Mordin? You asshole,”

… And in response to the decision to allow either the Geth or the Quarians fall in battle, rather than making peace between them, another player wrote: “You’re going to hell”.

Yet there are also beautiful, affirming exchanges – such as when a user thought that if they strip-mined enough planets in the second game they could pay a plastic surgeon to treat Garrus’ facial scarring. Little did they know that Greedy Shepard never shares, yet a player commended their good intentions.

Unfortunately, by policing each other’s in-game behavior, and applying our own RL standards, we are much less likely to explore the nuanced outcomes the game has to offer – like what happens if everyone dies at the end of ME2. Particularly now that the trilogy is at a close, and we can study the effects of choices made from the opening scene right through to the closing, hoards of gamers have proclaimed their intention to return to Eden Prime and make all the ‘best’ choices.

Note to self: do not kill the Rachni Queen in the first game, save the cure for the Genophage in the second, and court Liara for the maximum amount of booti in their pregame sexual liaison.

However, this negates an important aspect of the game: that we play a role of our choice, rather than simply satisfy prescribed notions of moral and immoral behavior – and that we live with those choices.

Following online advice – like how we should play ‘paragon Shepard’ before going on to replay with ‘renegade Shepard’ – means that we are likely to miss the nuance of character development and free will. It leads to a mode of roll playing that is, in its own terms, inauthentic. It means that we have trapped ourselves in either an ethical Skinner box – making decisions just so that we can gain the highest +1s of good/evil points flash up on our screen – or our own (usually unimaginative) habits. And it results in us ignoring one of the most important features of the game – its power to encourage us to think beyond our existing framework of morality, and our desperate desire (which in a computer game actually starts to feel like a possibility) of a perfect score.

The choice between Kaiden and Ashley, for example, in the first game; or the choice between the Krogans and the Salarians in the third – these ‘impossible choices’ remind us that we cannot be 100% loyal to any dogma. In this regard, the Mass Effect games are very much like the Kobayashi Maru – a reoccurring simulation in the Star Trek universe – that tests the mettle of Star Fleet cadets.

You cannot win all the time; indeed, the most successful starship captains, basketball players – and probably people in general – are those whom are best adapted to failure.

Image by dkenobi

‘What we do in life echoes in eternity’ – Glory and Consequence in RPGs

noreply@blogger.com (Ash Hibbert) — Sun, 13 May 2012 03:35:00 +0000

The biggest features of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim are the vastness and detail of its world, Tamriel. Six months after pirating buying my own copy, I continue to stumble upon rich, self-contained stories on the path less traveled. The appeal in Mass Effect however is in the possibilities always in front of me. On any one day, I can choose to either punch reporters in the face or invite them to my cabin. The game invites me to search out Easter Eggs through conversation, interaction, and exploration.

Yet as with Schrödinger’s Cat, or Robert Frost’s own less traveled path, searching out each possibility voids all others.

To replay Mass Effect is to explore parallel worlds. Having played ‘paragon Shepard’ before embarking on ‘evil Shepard’, I was acutely aware of the variety of choices before me, and the importance of many of those choices. Their consequences echo forwards in time – through Shepard, I subtly shape the world around me. My squad mates, or their absence, remind me in their poignant and affirming ways of when I have either frakked up or done well.

In one scene Tali, intoxicated, describes (like many of the other characters) how the legacy of her parents haunt her. Yet I could easily rant to her about my own haunting, as I endlessly question the choices I made in previous games. Should I have let Ashley or Kaidan die in the first game? What would have happened had I let Morinth kill her mother, Samara, in the second game? If I had have told Kelly Chambers to change her identity in the third game, would she still be alive?

All too often in real life, I find myself feeling like the river of fate is carrying me along with it: while I can shift a bit to the left or to the right of centre, ultimately I am still at the mercy of the flow. Seeing the repercussions of my choices in the controlled environment of an RPG helps me appreciate the power of causation; the choices that I make do matter. They are one out of many – and I do own my life.

As Maximus Meridius remarks, ‘What we do in life echoes in eternity.’

Image by Kylie Inniatzo

Moral fortitude in Mass Effect

noreply@blogger.com (Ash Hibbert) — Sun, 13 May 2012 03:30:00 +0000

I recently finished replaying Mass Effect 3 (Insanity level / Sentinel) as a Renegade. Going ‘evil’ gave the game plenty of replayability but left me feeling dirty – case in point, fatally shooting Mordin, one of the coolest characters on the starship Normandy. One player describes Mordin’s murder as the “saddest moment in Mass Effect 3” – though I doubt it is quite as sad as Tali and Legion’s double-suicide, which I almost turned into a triple-suicide.

The fundamental wrongness of my actions haunts me – particularly since acting ethically often just requires a little more legwork.[1] Much as Shepard stares at himself in the mirror after having shot his friend in the back, so too do I stop and wrestle with my own choices:[2] is there a point in a war (or any struggle for that matter) where the moral compromises that I make start to negate the very thing for which I am fighting? Does the fact that I hate myself a little for what I am doing somehow redeem my ‘renegade Shepherd’ adventure?

As much as it is popular to think in the affirmative, I think not.

When faced with the choice of killing one’s idealistic friend in order save Earth from destruction, at least one player chose to sabotage the Genophage’s cure, yet did not lose sight of the bigger picture: when confronted by an enraged Wrex on the Citadel, for instance, their FemShep does not sugarcoat their decision. “The other Krogan aren’t like you, Wrex,” she tells the colleague whose vicious race she doomed. “They live for war. I couldn’t take that chance.” Later, when Garrus talks to Shepard about the cure, and Mordin’s ‘sacrifice’, their Shepard admits to having destroyed both and Garrus, to my great surprise, is okay about it: “A few years ago I would’ve said you’ve paid too much. But now … if there was a deal that could save Palavan [his own home world], I wouldn’t be so certain.” War, after all, is about sacrifices, moral compromises, and Shepard made a tough but necessary call that resulted in her friend’s death, but would help save Earth.

This above player actually made me feel quite ashamed of myself – after killing Mordin and sabotaging the cure, I play dumb with Wrex; when Garrus gives me an opening to confess, I am silent. I think that the moral here is that if you are going to be badass, do not shy away from what you did; do not cover it up. Be unambiguous in your beliefs. For if you are going to side with ruthless, you have to throw your whole lot in with them.

As Martin Sheen remarks in Apocalypse Now (sentiments that he echoes as The Illusive Man’s voice actor in Mass Effect 2 and 3) “Never get out of the boat unless you were going all the way.”

Image by Torley

Endnotes

[1] One of the big challenges in Mass Effect 3 is the challenge of doing the right thing, versus the efficient thing. How do I manage to be honest to everyone and save the most lives – but also accumulate the most war assets to bring to bear on the final battle? This is an extension of the one of the trilogy’s central themes – free will in ambiguous circumstance. However, as Shepard and a other characters iterate throughout the third game, many hard choices have to be made – including many sacrifices.

One answer of how to balance our desire to do good as well as increase our battle readiness is in the fact that we do not have to get every single bit of help available in the galaxy – we can actually choose our allies.

For instance, I could probably have honored my deal with the Krogans and cured the Genophage – thus loosing the support of the Salarians – yet as long as I did plenty of grinding, I could still managed to have scrounged up enough war assets elsewhere to get a ‘perfect ending’.

Similarly, when getting the mercenaries behind me with Aria’s help, I know that I did not need to have the Turian general killed in order to secure one of the mercenary group’s alliances. Instead, I could simply spend a bit longer searching the galaxy for historical artifacts with which to pay a black marketer, who will then give weapons to the general, and get him off your case.

In short, I can get what you want, and stick by your principles at the same time – I just have to work more.

[2] I felt particularly bummed out when I first realized that a panel of names confronting me on Deck 3 of the Normandy was a list of all those who had died - particularly when one of those names belongs to Mordin, who – unbeknownst to the rest of the crew - I killed.

Chariots of the Protheans

noreply@blogger.com (Ash Hibbert) — Sun, 13 May 2012 03:24:00 +0000

Bioware’s Mass Effect trilogy is part of a rich tradition of action, science fiction and horror narratives – the HG Lovecraftian elements of the Cthulhu-like Reapers, case in point.[1]

Then there are the healthy doses of anthropology - the idea, for instance, that the technological superior Protheans ‘guided’ the Asari, passing themselves off as gods, in their early cultural development is straight out of Chariots of the Gods?

As Javik, the last member of the ancient Prometheans, remarks – “We were here in the beginning, watching you grow. Athame [the Asari god] was us.”

This of course is not a novel exploration of the idea – Babylon 5 explores it quite a lot, in very similar ways: the Vorlon ‘gifted’ various races with telepathy, for instance, early in their evolution so that they could be used as weapons in an inevitable war with their long-standing ideological antithesis, the Shadows. The Vorlon ambassador takes on the appearance (when he is out of his suit) of an angelic figures – his face matching the species of whoever is looking at him. The Shadows, correspondingly, are our demons.

Nor is this to say that the Chariots of the Gods itself is an original, well-written or researched book - it has been debunked, and arguably the idea was inspired by the Cthulu myth (Lovecraft again). However, the hypothesis alone is a very intriguing one – and, well, the Reapers do look have Cthulu’s eyes.

Image by dkenobi

Endnote

[1] My arts degree gave me plenty of experience with writing about pop-culture artifacts with a straight face. In my literature studies major, for instance, we would happily discuss episodes of Hercules and Zena when talking about The Odyssey; Buffy would come up frequently in discussions of the nature of good and evil; and my writing classes was all about the latest Australian-Vogel award winner. Someday, we might well see games such as Mass Effect in a similar light as we now view The Iliad.

The hero with a thousand helmets

noreply@blogger.com (Ash Hibbert) — Sun, 13 May 2012 03:20:00 +0000

Whenever I watch, or read, or appreciate some story, I pool a bit of my own mind into that of the protagonist.[1] For a few hours while leaning over my eBook reader, I live in vicarious wonder; and at the Astor Theatre, or Malthouse Theatre, or around a campfire on the banks of the Murry, I again piggyback on the journey of my hero. Yet in these latter cases, so too is everyone else around me, disseminating fragments of us throughout the cast of the film, or play, or story. We psychically entangle ourselves with the figures on the screen or stage.[2]

In fully customizable games such as World of Warcraft, something else happens – for there, the hero is my own invention. My character becomes the vehicle by which I can manifest within, and explore, another plain of existence – my avatar, if you will.[3] I control the vertical and the horizontal – the way my character walks, the words that they talk. No one else lives through my avatar – unless I have someone is leaning over my shoulder in rapt attention, or I shared my saves online – for everyone is too busy leveling up their own.

In semi-customizable games such as Mass Effect, I see a hybrid of these two extremes. I play the game at home, and off line. I control and possess Shepard – not the other way around. Yet I have a very similar character template as everyone else who plays Mass Effect, and I am constrained to a set number of choices. I play a unique variation of a generic Shepard. I customize the hero archetype, imbuing it with different details of my own biography, and choose which parts of my psyche to explore. For instance, I might choose to be myself, or my persona, or I might want to explore the dark side of my psyche – my shadow aspect. If I am playing a contrasexual figure (for instance, when I, a guy, am playing FemShep) I am exploring my anima; yet when my female colleague and fellow-geek is playing male Shep, she is engaging her animus; and when Sharon Stone is playing, she can engage … Okay, I’ll stop now.

Such games allow us to explore what interactivity might mean for our understanding of the nature of ‘art’ – as well as to further our appreciation for what art can mean for ourselves and for our relationships with each other. However, before you accuse me of intellectualizing my excessive game playing by misplacing a first-person shooter under the category of ‘art’, note that the idea now has currency (at least in some jurisdictions). In June 2011, for instance, the U.S. Supreme Court voted 7-2 that “video games can be afforded the same constitutional protections as visual art, film, music and other forms of expression.” They continued:

“Like the protected books, plays, and movies that preceded them, video games communicate ideas—and even social messages—through many familiar literary devices (such as characters, dialogue, plot, and music) and through features distinctive to the medium (such as the player’s interaction with the virtual world).”

(Incidentally, the Supreme Court judges also explored the argument that violence in video games leads to violence in real life – and argued that if this was really a concern for regulators, we should start banning Disney as well.[4])

By extension, video games – particularly role-playing games such as the Mass Effect trilogy – have the capacity to serve as socially beneficial narratives.

The extent of RPGs’ interactivity, not the presence of interactivity itself, distinguishes them from traditional literature. For according to Reader Response Theory, I am never a passive recipient of even in the most traditional forms of narrative such as linear books.[5] I interact with texts, talk back to them – I interpret them in class, skip a boring paragraph, jump to the last page half way through, email the author, or even post some fan fiction to the web. I ‘take charge’ of my reading experience, eagerly engaging in the world with which the author presents me, or ‘reading around’ unsavory elements. Fan-fiction, mash-ups, slash-fiction; science fiction ‘cons’; coz play – the ways that I can take ownership of a story are endless. Some books, such as the ‘Choose your own adventure’ stories (that, incidentally, have sold a quarter of a billion copies) actively encourage this – but most of no choice in the matter.

While ‘talking back’ to a book is a challenge (particularly if I had been encouraged to accept a book wholesale) Role Playing Games actively encourage me to contribute to the narrative. Furthermore, by allowing me to choose from a selection of conversational scripts by which to interact with non-playing characters, for instance, they transform me into both reader and writer. Reader response theory explores how, by force of will, imagination, and my own individuality, I ‘create’ my own text inside my mind every time I start a new book. There could well be a ‘writer response theory’ developed to explore computer games – for with role-playing, this ‘text creation’ is not only a natural outcome but also welcome. My contribution to the narrative requires much less ‘force of will’: as soon as I began playing Mass Effect – in customizing my player’s appearance, for instance – I am encouraged to help build the story that my protagonist takes.

The idea of a ‘gamer response theory’ is burgeoning, yet I take for granted that as games become increasingly immersive (and take up more and more hours of our lives) some very sophisticated questions will need to be asked about the nuanced effects that artifacts such as RPGs can have on our conscience, and on our lives.

Image by Cliff Nordman

Endnotes

[1] Something very similar is described, very ostensibly, in the novella Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? , in relation to the ‘Empathy Box’, which users interact with to pool their conscience into that of Wilbur Mercer, a Sisyphean-like figure who is constantly pushing a boulder up a hill while having stones thrown at him.

[2] This collective, vicarious experience can have a very important social function, as they allow us (in quasi-Jungian terms) to synchronize our value system with an archetype. A good example would be Passion Plays – “a dramatic presentation depicting the Passion of Jesus Christ: his trial, suffering and death.”

[3] Speaking of avatars - in the film, Avatar, there is a dualism present between the Mech Warriors, and the bio-engineered avatars that the humans ‘pilot’. Clearly, in a classic nature versus technology pattern the story privileges the latter over the former. And yet they are both instances of disconnection from our ‘real bodies’ - even if the Mech warrior is clunky, and clearly designed for violence, the tall green creatures grown in a tank are a similar level removed from our real beings. The privileging that is offered for the biological avatars is that Sam Worthington’s character is able to transfer his conscience permanently to his avatar, and leave his old wheelchair-constrained body behind. Both instances - the Mech-warrior and the avatar - are transcendental, that is, they are a means of ‘escaping’ and going beyond our regular, native, physical form.

[4] “Psychological studies purporting to show a connection between exposure to violent video games and harmful effects on children do not prove that such exposure causes minors to act aggressively. Any demonstrated effects are both small and indistinguishable from effects produced by other media. Since California has declined to restrict those other media, e.g., Saturday morning cartoons, its video-game regulation is wildly underinclusive, raising serious doubts about whether the State is pursuing the interest it invokes or is instead disfavoring a particular speaker or viewpoint.”

[5] Reader-response theory recognizes the reader as an active agent who imparts "real existence" to the work and completes its meaning through interpretation. Reader-response criticism argues that literature should be viewed as a performing art in which each reader creates his or her own, possibly unique, text-related performance. - Reader Response Criticism, Wikipedia

Will the real Commander Shepard please stand up?

noreply@blogger.com (Ash Hibbert) — Sun, 13 May 2012 03:15:00 +0000

Bioware, the makers of both Dragon Age and Mass Effect, named our hero after Rear Admiral (Deceased) Alan Shepard – the first American in space, and the fifth on the moon. The two Shepards appear to share some strong parallels: adventurer, pioneer, and comedian.[1] Our Shepard is essentially a jock, though (s)he can surprise[2] – for instance, (s)he is also openly and confidently bi-sexual.[3]

Much of the story of Shepard is about helping others realize their full potential, and get past their fears and complexes.[4] Shepherd is a spiritual adviser and matchmaker.[5] The characters in her/his squad thank him/her for having helped him grow – and reaching such points can either ensure that they survive to the final battle and beyond (as with Cortez), or provide Shepard with their bonus power.

(S)he is also a matchmaker between species, a diplomat, forging unforeseen alliances – between the Geth and Quarians, the Krogan and Turians, and even between his ship and pilot, EDI and Joker.[6]

(S)he is the hero with a thousand faces[7] – and those faces belong to everyone who plays Mass Effect.

Compared to most other roll-playing games, Mass Effect is highly prescriptive about what kind of character I am role-playing. I may choose Commander Shepard’s pre-service history and their psychological profile from one of three options for instance, yet these seem to have minimum impact on the game[8] – and nothing compared to the ‘back story’ that I can construct in the aptly named Dragon Age: Origins.

There are, of course, many opportunities in which I can ‘determine’ Shephard’s behavior. Yet there are not many in which I can radically alter their character. His/Her response to situations – such as giving advice to crewmates – appears to be more reflective of how I am feeling at the time, though the choices are usually consistent with his rather unchanging temperament. There are exceptions to this – for instance, the more ‘renegade’ and ‘paragon’ points that I build mean more dialogue/action choices available in certain conversations. If I have lots of practice being evil, apparently, I can more convincingly pull off my ‘bad ass’ act – and similarly for being good.

All of which means that the moments really stand out when I do appear to shape Shephard’s very feelings . For example, in the prelude to the final battle, when Shepard talks individually with their crewmates, Tali asks him how (s)he’s feeling. Shepard can express either fatigue or anticipation – the choice is mine, and either choice sounds sincere.

Maybe a better example though would be one of the more intense conversations with a crewmate – Mordin, on the verge of curing the Genophage. Initially, I played paragon – warning him of the sabotage to the cure he was championing. However, on my next play I did everything to ensure the cure’s subtle failure (including killing the good doctor), in order to secure an additional alliance of the xenophobic Salarians. Yet it turns out that under very particular circumstances, I can actually sabotage the cure, without having to kill either of my friends – and all that I need is good debating skills and truth on my side.[9] In this outcome, what is particularly curious is that Mordin – who previously was all too willing to take a bullet in his back for his principles – tells me in his typically stilted speech: “Thank you Shepard. Too eager to atone. Would have compounded error. Glad you were here.” Mordin, Wreav, and their respective military might are all then available for the final battle against the ultimate foe – all because I chose consistently badass options throughout the three games.

Mordin is typically a cold, confident and rational Utilitarian – which is why his seemingly fickle behavior comes as such a surprise. Yet rather than seeming unrealistic – and consequently, contaminating the realism of the other possible conversation paths – I saw in it an important lesson of how nuanced people’s motivations are. I can dig through Mordin’s complex feelings on the matter and find that what is really motivating him: the guilt of having caused the degradation of Krogan culture, and the enslavement of their females, and not the desire to serve the greater Krogan cause. Rather than doing what is ultimately right, he comes to appreciate that he was more concerned with trying to dispel that guilt, even – or particularly – if it means dying.

Thankfully, Shepard is there to bring him back onto the straight and narrow.

Circumstances do indeed shape us, we waver in our convictions when confronted with a mirror, can choose to respond to our successes with either cheers or contemplation, and can opt to face death with either false bravado - or a smile.

Image by Ten

Endnotes

[1] “Shortly before the launch, Shepard said to himself: "Don't fuck up, Shepard..." This quote was reported as "Dear Lord, please don't let me fuck up" in The Right Stuff, though Shepard confirmed this as a misquote. Regardless, the latter quote has since become known among aviators as "Shepard's Prayer."

According to Gene Kranz in his book, Failure Is Not an Option, "When reporters asked Shepard what he thought about as he sat atop the Redstone rocket, waiting for liftoff, he had replied, 'The fact that every part of this ship was built by the low bidder.'"” -- Wikipedia

[2] Watching Shepard say ‘keelah se'lai’ [vid] to Tali, and the Quarian admirals, sounded particularly un-jock-like, and having him attempt some multicultural, bilingual endeavor - communicating either the sincerity of his feelings towards his love interest, or to the admirals - seemed grossly inconsistent with his character.

[3] This is regardless of the sexual preference upon which the player wishes him to act. For instance, he can have a relationship with Cortez at the end - though one character had to mod things out to let Shep have a relationship with Kaiden.

[4] For instance, having drinks with Cortez is what keeps him alive in the end. “Thanks for making me believe again,” he says in the final conversation. “It helps to have reason to live again.” We help him get over his late husband’s life, even if we choose not to sleep with him.

[5] I disagree with MrBtongue’s argument that the ‘third way’ that we can choose at the end of ME3 (synthesis - merging organic and synthetic life) is completely unexpected. Arguably, the entire third game has been about reconciling differences, and finding common ground. The Salarians, arguably, should not be allowed to get their way (sabotage the Genophage cure) because they are completely unwilling (apart from Mordin) to find that common ground. As one of the characters remarks, the Salarians are alone. The Quarians, if you play your cards right, are even welcoming the Geth into their suits to help speed up their re-adaption to their home planet’s atmosphere, and life exposed to the elements. The Krogans are the equivalent of the Geth, in that they were ‘created’, and uplifted, by a space faring race - and yet rebelled (like the Geth) to define their own fate. Yet the Turians and the Geth, old enemies, make good - fighting alongside each other on both the Turian and Krogan home worlds.

[6] This final partnership is highly representative of the ‘Synthesis’ ending, where organic and synthetics merge – and is reflected in the closing shot, where EDI and a cybernetic Joker stand together, side by side, in their new Eden.

[7] “A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.”

[8] You might get a variation of bonus mission, and some different conversation topics. However, the most prominent effect of your background choice is in your starting renegade/paragon points. Hint: if you want to be good, be a Spacer War Hero, and if you want to be bad, be an Earthborn Ruthless

[9] The difference, I think, is whether Wrex is in charge and if Eve survives - if they are/do, then Mordin would probably be right to think that the Krogans can redeem themselves and live peacefully; otherwise, he can be convinced that a true cure would be a dumb idea, and go along with the deceit. He mentions these in his argument - that if Eve were alive, everything would be happy. Otherwise, if Wrex’s brother is the leader of the Krogans, and Eve dies - because you didn’t keep the cure data in the previous game - Mordin will agree that an empowered Krogan is not a good thing for the galaxy.

The Apollo Program, the Saturn V rocket, and the end of history

noreply@blogger.com (Ash Hibbert) — Fri, 27 Apr 2012 01:55:00 +0000

This year marks the 40th anniversary of the last manned Luna landing, demarking the history of high-earth orbit to a previous generation.

Yet the Apollo program continues to hold a strange and powerful hold over my imagination – and, I am sure, the imagination of most of my peers. Cameos by Buzz Aldrin feature in films such as Transformers: Dark of the Moon [trailer | clip] and the closing scene of Mass Effect 3, and ‘Moon Shots’ has now become a byword for ‘game changing’ investments.

However, marking those four decades can also make me feel that, as a race, our best days are behind us. This is uncharacteristic – one of my favourite authors is David Brin, who favours Science Fiction over Fantasy because of its belief in the “possibility of learning and change.” Even after walking through the ruined splendour of the Colosseum and the Roman Forum a couple of years ago, I comforted myself with the knowledge that western civilization can emerge from virtually any darkness.[1]

Yet now, early 21st Century, I begin to suffer from Gernsback syndrome – obsessing over a vision of the world we could have had, but have failed to create.[2] In the face of all of the environmental destruction we have wrought,[3] I am starting to feel that our opportunity is past.

Strangely, I do not even believe we should waste resources on any space program[4] – so why then do I take the Western world’s effective abandonment of the moon[5] so personally? I think the answer lies in what this reflects about our societal drive: our technology has clearly increased magnitudes, and yet our priorities[6] have shifted from the ambitious to the decadent.[7] The United States’ space program has gone in effectively the opposite direction than what it should have[8] – from putting a man on the moon, to what should be a humiliating arrangement where we rent seats and luggage space on Russian launches.[9]

Yet this is not just about any particular space program. The moon landings represent a great achievement – however, there are numerous other manned and unmanned missions from which to choose.[10] Most of these require some heavy lifters. The problem is, however, that we do not have any.

The changing strength of the rockets we are using reflects the changing strength of our collective will. Since Skylab, which used up the last of the Saturn V series – the launch vehicles of the Apollo Program, and absolute powerhouses compared to the puny Shuttles (one planned version could have installed the International Space Station with only a single launch) – we have built no stronger rocket.

It is also worth noting how much the Saturn V has helped us achieve – even after it delivered and returned the crew of Apollo 11:[11]

the J-Missions – Apollo 15 to 17 – where the astronauts spent up to three days on the surface of the moon, often speeding around on a lunar buggy
launching an inhabited satellite
rendezvousing with the crew of a Soviet mission

Finally, there are the amazing plans for the Saturn V that NASA never realized: such a permanent base on the moon.[12] With a steady stream of unmanned Saturn V rockets sending supplies and some manned missions providing relief crews, we might be instead be celebrating the fortieth anniversary of our Luna colony – and not the fortieth anniversary of the Saturn V’s retirement.

Image: Apollo 17

Endnotes

[1] Having said that, when asked by a reporter what he thought of western civilization, Mahatma Gandhi replied, “I think it would be a good idea.”

[2] I was reminded of this recently in Haruki Murakami’s novel 19Q4, where, in the parallel universe in which one of the characters finds herself, there is a joint Soviet-American base established on the Luna surface.

[3] Cases in point: ecolocide – the destruction of ecosystems, of which coral reefs will be the first casualty – and resource depletion, from which no superhero can save us,

[4] As the Dalai Lama remarked: “Still much work to be done here, on this Earth. Until there is no poverty, no illness. Once everything is okay on this planet – no further problem – then we’ll need a holiday!”

[5] The People’s Republic of China, Iran, and even the civilian sector has proposed manned missions to the moon.

[6] Of course, much of this is due to resourcing – in 1966, NASA commanded 4.41% of the federal budget, yet since 1975, it has generally commanded no more than 1%. (Curiously, right at the time of the ‘We are the 99%’ movement, there is a growing movement to boost/maintain NASA’s budget.)

[7] “As far as I am concerned our civilization peaked with the Apollo missions and it has pretty much been downhill ever since. Modern astronomers typically prefer small robotic satellite missions over human space flight. The claim is that robots can do what humans can do only better and more effective. The reason is that robots do not require the complex life support systems that humans do and that robots can be built to measure parts of the spectrum that humans can’t see.” - Jacob Lund Fisker

The following tweet, however simplistic and patronizing, adequately sums this up: “Your mobile phone has more computing power than all of NASA in 1969. NASA launched a man to the moon. We launch a bird into pigs.” -- @GeogeBray

[8] I actually disagree with Jacob. I understand his romanticisation of space travel - that the universe is collectively improved and enriched by having a handful of souls see the planet from orbit, or from another cosmic body such as the moon. However, I also think of the immense cost of such indulgences; I figure that robots can also accomplish much in space, and the presence of men on the international space station, or on the moon, was purely an ego trip. Case in point: the Soviets collected rock samples from the moon and bought them back without putting any one’s life at risk. The Dalai Lama’s remarks about travelling into space only once you have succeeded in feeding anyone - these sound a lot smarter to me than Jacob’s remarks.

[9] “It’s now been some 40 years since mankind set foot on the moon. No astronaut has visited the moon in my lifetime. As a kid I used to read books about space from the 1960s and 1970s depicting lunar colonies, Mars colonies, interplanetary space travel and even interstellar space travel. None of this has come to pass. Priorities are such that we no longer even have an operating shuttle program. Humanity’s vision has turned inward. These days we’re more concerned about whether some 13 year old sings well enough to win American Idol.

The story of NASA in many ways resemble my space dreams in reverse. We’ve gone from buying passage on other countries rocket launches, to having a space shuttle, to having a space station, to sending probes to other planets, to landing men on the moon.” – Early Retirement Extreme

[10] Even Buzz Aldrin has argued that we should forget about trying to reclaim past glories, and instead focus on the installation of an L1 Gateport - or, we could just mine asteroids; the options are endless.

[11] It’s also working keeping in mind that NASA didn’t satisfy JFK’s proclamation when Neil Armstrong landed – but when the crew of Apollo 11 actually arrived safely back on Earth.

[12] Such settlement would naturally include constantly upgraded technology, much of which would be, out of necessity, far superior to what we have now.

Planning for failure while shooting for the moon

noreply@blogger.com (Ash Hibbert) — Fri, 27 Apr 2012 01:15:00 +0000

I studied the Challenger shuttle disaster as part of my Masters degree on Applied Ethics. I am no stranger to the project management – and, as it turns out, occasional project mismanagement – of NASA and its contractors. Yet in researching a recent blog posts, I also came to appreciate how seriously they endeavoured to learn from, and anticipate, their mistakes.[1] NASA’s conservative approach, and the success of that approach, is testimony to the benefits of planning for failure.[2]

After each incident, NASA did not simply limit its response to hardware redesign – they also redesigned their very organisation. The mission guidelines for Mercury – one of the stepping-stones to Apollo – reflected their zero scope-creep tolerance, and their outright reject of unnecessary risk.

“Existing technology and off-the-shelf equipment should be used wherever practical, the simplest and most reliable approach to system design would be followed, an existing launch vehicle would be employed to place the spacecraft into orbit, and a progressive and logical test program would be used.”

The following Gemini program saw trial-dockings that, once perfected, would be used in the Apollo missions when the lunar and control module reconnected. NASA could have had confidence in their theories, in the simulated expertise of their astronauts, and simply crossed their fingers. Instead, they repeatedly trailed out dockings in low orbit – with cheaper rockets, less lives on the line, and less political kudos at risk if things went wrong. This testing payed off – the Lunar Module was the only component of the Apollo/Saturn systems that did not fail in a way that affected its mission, and in fact saved the lives of the Apollo 13 crew.

Consider also the thoroughness of testing of the emergency procedures, and their infrastructure, in the lead-up to the Apollo 11 missions. During this time, the pressure was on – the Space Race (and the Cold War) was in full swing. In any other organisation, there would have been an enormous amount of expectation to simply ‘bypass safety protocols and engage the warp core.’ Each pre-landing Apollo mission was an experiment that integrated lessons learned from the previous missions, introduced new variables, and then tested concepts in new conditions to ensure their trustworthiness.

These seven Apollo missions (the unmanned Apollo 4, 5 and 6 missions, and the manned Apollo 7 to 10 missions, which did not actually touch the surface of the moon) were testimony to an incredible conservativeness and valuation of human life. NASA spent an enormous portion of its budget double-checking systems that they actually hoped they would never use, such as simulating an abort of the Apollo Lunar Module descent.[3]

What makes these even more note worthy was that most of these test flights and confidence builders required the same (incredibly expensive) payload deliverer system: the Saturn V rocket.

Such thoroughness seems – particularly in hindsight – excessive.[4] However, contrast this to the Soviet manned lunar programs, whose rocket of choice failed catastrophically in one instance, destroying the launch complex and delaying their program for two years. Consider also that the Shuttle program has claimed more lives than the Gemini and Apollo programs, which managed to deliver a dozen people far beyond low-orbit, and back from the surface of the moon.

Image: Apollo 11 launch

Endnotes

[1] “Immediately after the fire, NASA convened the Apollo 204 Accident Review Board to determine the cause of the fire. Although the ignition source was never conclusively identified, the astronauts' deaths were attributed to a wide range of lethal design and construction flaws in the early Apollo Command Module. The manned phase of the project was delayed for 20 months while these problems were corrected.” – Wikipedia

[2] Of course, NASA focused its preoccupation with testing on where it would be most relevant. For instance, Apollo 7, the first manned mission after Apollo 1, was 10 days. Yet it was not as if their entire staff and all their contractors, in all of their buildings, had to perform a two-week fire drill.

[3] In the context of a large-scale software system rollout, for instance, this would equate to making a simulated rollback (to the legacy system) an essential part of implementation.

[4] Apollo 10, for instance, was described as a ‘dress rehearsal’, where they did everything except actually land on the moon, and came within 10 000 feet of the surface.

Europe 2012

noreply@blogger.com (Ash Hibbert) — Thu, 26 Apr 2012 04:39:00 +0000

I will (hopefully) be traveling to the UK in late August for about three weeks. If you have any suggestions of places I should visit and things I should do, please feel free to add them to my google map (with a brief explanation, and your name if possible).

Alternatively, you can just email me your ideas.

View Europa 2012 in a larger map

Wedding Reflections

noreply@blogger.com (Ash Hibbert) — Fri, 13 Apr 2012 02:45:00 +0000

Friday dusk and I wander through my old high school, past cyclone fencing, CCTV cameras, and contemporary stranger danger posters. Being here in these grounds still accelerates my pulse – old memories of the place induce temporal vertigo as they warp to meet reality half way. It is not the first time I have tried to make peace with this place. Groves of native trees and bushes maintained by my permaculture teacher, and which once inspired my green introverted teen-self, are gone: maybe to make supervision easier – maybe because they sacked the permaculture teacher.

I cup hands against the glass of office windows – unmarked papers continue to obscure teachers’ desks, but at least they replaced the Macintoshes.

The clichéd sensation that is smaller than I recall is clearly irrational – how much could I have grown since I was 15? Then again, for four years, almost every weekday, this was my world for six hours – it probably just got big in my mind.

Now on top of the temporal vertigo is an ontological disorientation – to think that I emerged from this ... hovel ... this nest. I did an internship across the road at Monash’s Gippsland campus; I ran on the shores of the nearby lake in a cross-country race – before the council installed duck walks above the mud. I, a bookworm, took pride in living in this, a university town, though I also knew it to be limited and limiting – the school a small collection of cold buildings, a handful of 486’s in the library, and a two-hour train ride separating us from the city.

However, with trees replaced by video cameras, and throughways with fences, yes – I accept that it could have been worst.

A parallel comes to mind: looking at a woman’s abdomen and realizing – I came from such a space.

However, to paraphrase Tony Wilson/Steve Coogan – 'This is not about me; it’s about the wedding.'

The house

Evening arrives. I leave my alma mater and walk back along the lakeshore to my other 'nourishing mother's' countryside house. Her home has several (typically vacant) bedrooms, plasma screen in the lounge, coffee machine in the kitchen, and newly mowed lawn (replete with flowerbeds) that rolls down to the nearby creek – sharp contrast to my semi-detached abode in the city. The rooms are a curious recreation of those belonging to our earlier house – the same books on the same shelves, and the same torturously small mattresses. They remind me of Captain James Cook’s Cottage in Fitzroy Gardens, or the Goethe House in Frankfurt am Main: agnostic shrines maintained in anticipation of their previous occupant’s return.

C

On this weekend though, the shrines have succeeded. Over dinner, my mother, brother (C), and sister-in-law (N) wax sentimentally about C’s high-school struggles that secured him second place in his final year’s cohort and a place in a chemical engineering course.[1]

C left to Germany when he was the age I am now – in order, ostensibly, to make use of his MBA. At the time, I had only recently returned from a year abroad. Our other brother, B, had been living in Perth for a year, after having worked in the UK for two. C, I assumed, felt the need to get with the program and do his own stint overseas.

In the past five years, I have succeeded in growing my student debt, written 350 articles pro bono, and improved my personal best on the treadmill. C, on the other hand, has since won the record for foreign residency in our family, probably earned more money than god, and is back in Australia for a couple of weeks with N, his French wife, for their reaffirmation ceremony.

Sublimation is the transition of a solid into a gas without it first becoming a liquid – as well as the psychological transformation of base instincts into spiritual, cultural, or otherwise artistic forms; C is an expert at both. Engineering the elaborate delivery of his (by-no-means immodest) proposal to his partner of several years was a project in much the same vein of his professional work. He ordered a customized ring from a jewellery store encountered in his travels, and planned holidays to candidate locales. I easily imagine him discreetly setting up the tripod and timer for his camera, falling to a knee before N in genuflection, and raising a ring pinched between both hands before asking her if she would marry him.

N

Her reply would have probably been something along the lines ‘Well, duh!’

J

A knock at the front entrance – I answer, greeting my niece, J, for the first time in two years. I crouch to her level, let her come to me, say ‘hello’ but do not stare.[2] She hides behind her dad’s legs and promptly bursts into tears. B picks her up and we head to the lounge, from which the others are emerging. J’s crying finds a new note.

I stand aside and take a seat, but am unable to stop staring at this human being. Her grandmother, aunt and other uncle join in with her role-playing and ad hoc Ikebana without reservation. She calms down.

By weekend’s end, we are friends.

Spending time with J is like hanging out with a senile relative with a prognosis of full recovery: each time we meet, the stronger her mind will have become, the more she will remember – and the greater the weight of our interactions. I am teaching my baby niece the word ‘balloon’ but already she is way ahead of us. I may work alongside social media rock stars – yet just as I retire from IT, she will likely be shopping for the jetpack, robotic companion, and nuclear powered levitating home for which I always wished. I jokingly suggested to N that we get our niece a Facebook page.[3] We laugh – and decide to wait another year.

She is, however, also two hours behind us – thanks to a flight across time zones. She looks around, slightly stunned, and her dad prepares grapes and other bite-sized portions from his meal for her consumption, encouraging her gently to sample the orange juice. Afterwards, he brushes her teeth for her, helps her rinse, then continues with the brush on his own.

The wedding

The following day, N and C’s re-wedding – the ‘lite’ version of their French provincial ceremony – is hitch free, in a manner of speaking. My role for the ceremony is modest – ring-bearer, reader of Springsteen’s ‘If I should fall behind’, and parking attendant.

The sky is clear and my face sore from a chuffed smile: after three days of non-stop preparations, the ceremony is seamless, the following speeches are unambiguous, and my work here is done. Slumped in a chair beneath the canopy of one of the trees I watch the catering staff drift between guests, and enjoy my beer, doubly spent.

Later, I bus among the slowly thinning entourage.

The trappings of a stable, conventional life – which all of the attendees bar I seem to possess – have started to stand out, and to bug me. C’s vast social sphere contrast to my relatively minute circle of friends; the recent public commitment between spouses is at bitter odds with my recent breakup; and the ghosts of theoretical children – the ones I could have fathered, were I not so possessive of my bachelor freedoms – haunt me as J puffs at her giant bubble maker.

The Jordan almonds, mainstays of any wedding dragée, strike me as exceedingly relevant.

The housewarming

The chairs stacked, the caterers departed, and a small circle of tribal elders the only guests remaining, I eagerly join J and B to a housewarming, away from here.

In attendance are many of B's peers as well as some of my own – none of whom I had seen since graduation day. In the darkly lit garage, joints are in circulation, rum and coke are in abundance, and the esky is a bath of glacial run-off. I start chatting with a circle of my own alumnus, one a companion on several outdoor ed. excursions. To bridge the passage of the years I recount a story he told me about milking his neighbour’s cows early one morning – a job he had performed since his early teens. After a heavy night out, he’d explained, he settled down to work in the cold dawn – only to be brought to by the bovine’s owner who had came out to discover him, half asleep, fondling the cattle’s udders.

He insists he had manufactured the story in jest – yet our wide-eyed audience continues to howl mercilessly.

A friend of B’s, and member of the local cricket club, thumbs through pictures on his proffered iPhone, illustrating his recent cage diving trip off Port Augusta. He insists that the half hour behind bars, surrounded by fearsome White Pointer sharks, was the best experience of his life – well worth the $2 000 price tag.

I wander around the brilliant work-in-progress house – chrome galley kitchen, a plasma screen that makes the lounge look like a mission control centre, and an unmanned romper room successfully entertaining the hood’s supply of toddlers. Outside, older children take turns patrolling the unlit street on their plastic trikes, swerving between parked cars.

B and I strap an indignant J to her seat in the rear of the rental, and I drive us home while B remains. I reach back and gently squeeze my niece’s foot as she slowly calms down. The lights of the town quickly disappear behind us, and Kids FM keeps us company in the darkness. By the time we pull into the driveway at home, she is asleep. I carry her inside, where her family readies her for bed.

The day after the wedding

In Melbourne, I throw my stuff in my room and head straight back out to our local. Companions, housemates – one an old friend, the other quickly turning out to be a new one – chew on their kangaroo burgers while I sip my lager. I have arrived. I relax – and engage – in their company. Friends are, after all, the family you choose for yourself.

Three o’clock in the morning, my mind buzzes, and I stare at my bedroom ceiling. The four days of wedding preparation, the one day of repacking, and all the business in between has left me too tired to sleep. Like most introverts, social engagement is like a workout session, leaving me simultaneously enriched and exhausted. There is one other thing with which to contend: my mothers’ remarks, to my brothers and me as we pulled out of the driveway, regarding a substantial offering – an ‘early inheritance’ that would derive, in great part, from the financial remnants of our late father. Part of me was disappointed that, in some re-enactment of King Lear, she did not first ask us for proof of who loved her the most; my siblings could play Goneril and Regan, while I could be the blunt but authentic (and promptly disinherited) Cordelia. Instead, the offer is unconditional.

My brothers and I may have lowered our father into the ground – and yet to me, even ten years after the fact, the idea of taking the money feels like a feast of ashes.

Later, I will write to my brothers explaining why I am declining the offer. However, I will tell them that I want take full credit for where I get financially in life, and that I am not ambitious like them – I have no mortgage to service, no children to support, no partner to pamper.

Yet the truth is that I am ambitious; I do have my plans. I just realize that a relative deficiency of money is not what holds me back from realizing them. The country house, the marriage of my oldest brother, the daughter of the middle brother, their friends, their enthusiasm for a family, and the money – that fucking money – have all inadvertently taunted me. Yet these things have already been on the table before – and I have declined, or opted not to pursue, all of them. Sometimes it has been out of fear, sometimes out of laziness[4], mostly however it has been out of a preference of the alternative.

I love people; however, I have struggled to maintain more than a handful of close friends for longer than an academic year. I hope my brother and sister-in-law can realize their life-long commitment – though it is no secret that I am sceptical about the whole institution of marriage. I get gooey over my friend’s offspring – yet I am happy to be a reproductive dead-end myself. I spent much of the first eighteen years of my life planning my escape to the big city where I now live, far away from lakeside estates. Moreover, tonight, I decided not to take an offer that would have allowed me to put a substantial deposit on a new, grown-up house, and move out of my bachelor/ette pad.

Maybe that is just what I like to tell myself. Maybe I am just trying to make a virtue out of my current ‘necessities’. Or maybe I believe happiness is worth any inconvenience.

Endnotes

[1] I did pretty well myself – good enough, at least, to get into a one-of-a-kind writing program. Yet discussions of tertiary entrance ranks can be like kids boasting of their solo trip to the toilet: praise-worthy, but not exactly table conversation.

[2] I have come to realize that I approach children in the same way that I have learned – well intended – to greet pets.

[3] A bit crazy - but as Bill Clinton remarked, “When I took office, only high energy physicists had ever heard of what is called the Worldwide Web.... Now even my cat has its own page.”

[4] “What are these barriers that keep people from reaching anywhere near their real potential? The answer to that can be found in another question and that's this: Which is the most universal human characteristic: fear, or laziness?” -- Louis H. Mackey, Waking Life

I suppose I should be flattered ...

noreply@blogger.com (Ash Hibbert) — Wed, 11 Apr 2012 05:04:00 +0000

The Reddit community ShitRedditSays recently informed me that I was banned from their forum as it does not "exist for deep, intellectual discussion on a matter." One of their members may have caught sight of my post on MensRights, (I'm a karma whore, all right?) which is under heavy scrutiny by SRS, and decided that I was ineligible as a candidate for their public shaming program.

I think that this is what a backhanded compliment looks like.

Retired Husband Syndrome, ransacked super funds, and a possible alternative

noreply@blogger.com (Ash Hibbert) — Mon, 09 Apr 2012 05:21:00 +0000

Japanese marriage laws changed dramatically in 2007 by allowing house-spouses access to their breadwinner’s pension fund. At the time, many media pundits expected this to result in a skyrocketing of divorce rates: that housewives – sickened by the prospect of their Salaryman husbands actually living with them – would opt to take the newly available money and run.[i]

The number of unhappy Japanese homemakers, and their loveless marriages, should serve as a warning against making money a cornerstone of a relationship. For doing so may obscure the possibility that the person you are living and breeding with really just wants a patron.

However, maybe they are entitled to a patron – raising children, maintaining a white-picket fence home, and servicing a mortgage do not come cheap. All require both time- and money-rich participants, and often there are strong divisions of labour separating these roles. Furthermore, stay-at-home partners – many of whom have put their own career on hold – are entitled to a kind of profit- and benefit-sharing of the partnership; even should the relationship itself go south.

Yet part of me empathized with the person who felt compelled to engaged in an (admittedly spiteful) binge of prostitutes and gambling, spending much of their $100k in superannuation in the process, rather than let their ex-spouse have any.[ii] Surely the idea that someone is suddenly entitled to half of our superannuation niggles everyone’s sense of just deserve. After all, super is our sacred cow: even the government only taxes voluntary contributions at 15%, yet it turns out that ex-spouses are entitled to tax us at up to 50% on top of that – even if they have no plans to spend their retirement with us (while there is no escaping government).

I would like to suggest an alternative to our model of child and ex-spouse maintenance – one with a certain fantastical, Scott Adams vibe to it, I admit.[iii] This model would bring child and ex-spousal support more in line with taxation, which has the duel benefits of being equitable[iv] and lacking any surprises. Currently, spousal payouts occur from the termination (potentially after a few decades) of the marriage – while our government taxes us on a fortnightly basis. If we were to force couples to ‘budget’ for such a break-up early on, it might avoid a lot of the angst and tension that can arise when they must subsequently divide the goods.

Breadwinners would put their dependents on salary from day one, paying their children’s into a trust fund (for education for instance); parents and spouses would effectively salary package these payments as a portion of their own gross income. In addition, couples would not have separate super funds – instead, they would contribute to a joint super account from the get go. Each could continue to maintain the individual super fund that they had before they married (or began cohabitating) with their partner – yet they could only make new payments to them were the partnership to end.

The government could promote this model as a kind of compulsory ‘divorce insurance’. However, I would favour it over the existing model for the simple reason that it lets everyone know where he or she stands. When we pay our taxes, for instance, we never ‘see’ the money that pays for universal healthcare, roads, and national defence. Yet our legal system continues to encourage the misconception that our wealth – aside from any agreement we have reached with our partners – is not actually ours; that we are not simply its temporary custodians.

The possibility of one’s spouse taking ownership of half of one’s retirement fund, upon separation, would instead be evident from the first post-marriage pay-cheque. Neither husband nor wife would attach themselves as emotionally to their pension or any other assets like Mr Weirs – now in jail for nine months for his super spending spree – meaning that they would likely react with a little less malice.

Just as high taxes can de-incentivize the well-to-do, making couples super-conscious that their money is never exclusively theirs would very possibly de-motivate them to save for their future. This would be disadvantageous for both spouses – regardless of whether they remain until death parts them. Yet, at the very least, it would be more honest.

Image by jcoterhals

Endnotes

[i] While this has not actually happened as predicted, this could be due to the GFC having devastating pension funds.

[ii] It is worth noting that all their children were over 18, so that ongoing child support was not an issue.

[iii] I’ll leave the question of alimony alone, except to suggest that, if the purpose of alimony is in part to compensate people for putting their careers on hold for the sake of their family, then maybe the federal government could provide scholarships for disadvantaged divorcees.

[iv] Like Marx, I believe that the better off should pay more money to support the people and infrastructure of their country, which made their own ascent to wealth possible.

Cascading kudos: a new way of 'liking'

noreply@blogger.com (Ash Hibbert) — Sun, 08 Apr 2012 05:12:00 +0000

Cascading Kudos is a kind of ‘pyramid scheme of aggregation’, where the creator of content – such as a comic strip, or an article, or photo – continues to get recognition for their work no matter how many people distribute, and redistribute, and re-re-distribute, ad infinitum, their creation.[i] It also ensures that those distributors – including those who frame it in a new light, or add their own commentary to it – also acquire recognition for their curating skills, as people down the line re-post their re-post. Even a thousand re-posts later, everyone upwards – the previous re-poster, all the way to the creator – will still be getting virtual ‘points’. For kudos, like money, always flows up.

Under the Cascading Kudos model, everyone wins: creators, talent-finders, cool-hunters, editors, as well as the countless people on Facebook, Twitter, and so forth who ‘share’ a post, link to an article, or ‘Like’ something that is subsequent reshared, retweeted, or ‘reliked’.

However, it also ensures that the creator of the content gets more credit than the reposter, who may have simply figured out a clever title to use when sharing on social bookmarking sites such as Reddit or Digg.

Cascading kudos also maintains a ‘continuity of credit’ across systems. For example, even if a link to a review (let’s say, on the New York Times’ Book page) of a book (published by a Random House imprint) is posted on Facebook, and the link receives many ‘likes’, both the original reviewer, as well as the author of the actual book, would still get recognition.

A description of the exact formula used to distribute the ‘kudos’ between creators and curators is beyond the scope of this post. However, a simple version would be that Creators get one kudos point no matter the number of times their work is mentioned down the lined; the first reposter gets half a point for every time their post was subsequently reposted any point down the line; the second reposter would get a quarter of a point; and so on.

One of the closest and most popular model that is being used, and which comes to mind, is ‘PageRank’ – though unlike Google’s model, in which pages form a non-linear network of pages, Cascading Kudos is much more hierarchal, like a mind map.

Image by rdy4ever

Endnote

[i] Incidentally, the Cascading kudos model does not actually exist – at least to my knowledge, and at least under that particular name. If you like the idea, you're welcome to implement it - just make sure I get some kudos at the end :)

The stupidity of the crowds

noreply@blogger.com (Ash Hibbert) — Sun, 08 Apr 2012 01:08:00 +0000

Last year I had an experience that left me questioning whether technology can enhance our decision-making abilities – or whether it might actually handicap it.

I was on a group wine tour Albury-Wodonga-way with some friends. Our group consisted of CSS and SEO experts, as well as bankers, cyclists and runners, and a geek vibe pervade us all – I was the only member of the group, for instance, who lacked a smart phone, and no one else was afraid to use theirs. Our over-reliance on such tech, however, would quickly prove problematic.

Driving from Melbourne to the wine region, for instance, I sought assurances that we were on the right road. Yet none of my three passengers – all of whom were leaning over their GPS-enabled devices – managed to provide a definitive answer.

Eventually I pulled over, glanced at a hard-copy map, and after scanning the next few intersections, turned onto a minor road that eventually joined up with the correct freeway.

Simple, yet by this point I was well and truly ready to chop someone’s fingers off. In perhaps another demonstration of the dangers of an overreliance on technology, I had already come very close to doing so by absent-mindedly closing the electric windows – when one of my passengers had their hands hooked over the glass. His reflexes were fortunately sharp enough however, and he kept all his digits, to text another day.

Morning of Day 2 and we drifted on foot along the main street of the wine festival’s busy hub. After grabbing some awesome pies from a renowned bakery, we split up and drifted past the various market stores. Soon exhausting our interest in doilies and duck mobiles, however, we were eager to beginning our wine tasting. First, though, we needed to defragment our Diaspora – and so my companions turned to their smart-phones.

It turned out however that the area lacked good reception – which did not actually matter, though, since between us we lacked everyone else’s numbers. Nor did we even have a precise sense of how we were going to proceed from vineyard to vineyard. None – myself included I’ll admit – possessed the will and confidence to drag those nearby out from the crowds to a bus – and subsequently the closest bottle of Shiraz. We were as if stranded Borg drones cut off from the collective, and all we could do was stare at our mobile devices, waiting for Google to show us the way.

Eventually, we reverted to shouting out to any familiar faces that we caught sight of, and progressing towards the ad hoc bus bay. Like quicksilver blobs of the melted T-1000, we slowly coalesced back to our original form, and struck out in a common direction to commence our intoxication. A quick text message to our waylaid friends, keyed out on my phone’s primitive keypad, ensured we were whole again by the next vineyard.

We ended the day of revelry with plenty of bottles on order, bellies full of cheese, and laughs under our belts. Yet the lesson remained: that rather than helping facilitate easier communication and quicker decision making, our technology – or at least our overreliance on it – had actually dis-empowered us. Our smart phones were only as intelligent as we were, and we had witnessed not the wisdom that crowds were capable of, but their stupidity.

Image by KairosOfTyre

Let them haz cheezburgers?

noreply@blogger.com (Ash Hibbert) — Sun, 08 Apr 2012 00:47:00 +0000

There is a growing sentiment that technology will save us socially – from first world problems such as boredom, mediocrity and loneliness – and politically, from isolation, repression and exploitation. In a recent article in The Age, for example, Tim Van Gelder discusses his grassroots political site YourView, arguing that crowd-sourcing (facilitating by his site) will help politicians make better-informed decisions.[i]

I have already documented some of the risks of using mobile devices to cure our impatience with RL[ii] – yet there are even bigger dangers in expecting the web to solve global injustices and disharmony. There is a pervasive idea amongst the West, for instance, that we helped make the Arab Spring possible with ‘our’ technology. Do we really have the impudence to claim that social networking, video hosting, and microblogging platforms such as Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter stood down American-manufactured tanks, rather than incredibly courageous Muslim men and women?[iii] It appears so.

How much technology really facilitates civil rights movements is debatable,[iv] and certainly beyond the scope of this post. However, such a focus on the weapon rather than the wielder reflects both an unhealthy degree of autoerotic back patting, and a perverted sense of priorities. It is as if we think we could mitigate all of the world’s suffering just by giving everyone a Facebook account and infinite lolcat images.[v] Even worst is the hypocrisy of imposing liberal online values on other countries at the exact time we are behaving autocratically within our own. Like modern day Marie Antoinettes, we surf the internet in our air-conditioned cubicles, drinking our caffè latte, and reading about the deficiencies of the world – and all we can think to say is ‘Let them haz cheezburgers.’

Image by Crethi Plethi

Endnotes

[i] This is an instance of the ‘wisdom of the crowds’ idea: the belief that the more opinions you can gather, the more accurate a picture you can form – much like applying the law of large numbers to ideas.

[ii] In a study of ‘stupid, hyperaddictive games’ for instance, journalist Sam Anderson describes his plans for an iPaddle. This would be “a little screen-size wooden paddle that I would slide in front of [my wife’s iPhone] phone whenever she drifted away, on the back of which, upside-down so she could read them, would be inscribed humanist messages from the analog world: ‘I love you’ or ‘Be here now.’”

[iii] Other candidates include Wikileaks and The Guardian – being an Assange-fan-boy, however, I don’t mind these as much.

[iv] One recent article quite blatantly argued that a new laptop worth $150 a unit would terrify repressive governments the moment it hit the market. This is because it would allow what David Brin refers to as sousveillance – citizens turning the tables on their totalitarian governments by recording and distributing proof of human rights violations. “‘The soldiers inside this Trojan horse are children with laptops,’ said Walter Bender, a computer researcher who served as director of the Media Laboratory.”

[v] This is indicative of a deeply held sentiment amongst the West - that suffering as a result of human rights violations is far worst that suffering as a result, say, of preventable diseases. It is as if the population of the developing world is drifting down a river on a flotilla of overcrowded boats. Lunatics are at the helm and disease is rampant. Meanwhile, the developed countries are lounging on the banks, occasionally glancing to the centre of the river where they ensure the boats remain, and prodding them if they get too close to the shore. Occasionally, some of the crew on the boats will start ‘violating the human rights’ of the passengers - maybe beating them, maybe mocking them, maybe just preventing them from talking to one another. If that happens, the civilized residents on the shore throw their hands up in horror, and strike down at the oppressors. Yet in the mean time, it is completely acceptable for the boat to float along, with its passengers starving and dying.

A similar analogy has been presented:

"Think of a stretch limo in the potholed streets of New York City, where homeless beggars live. Inside the limo are the air-conditioned post-industrial regions of North America, Europe, the emerging Pacific Rim, and a few other isolated places, with their trade summitry and computer-information highways. Outside is the rest of mankind, going in a completely different direction." -- ‘The Coming Anarchy’ by Robert Kaplan, The Atlantic.

Eating the menu, sucking eggs, and the Five Ws

noreply@blogger.com (Ash Hibbert) — Wed, 07 Mar 2012 02:17:00 +0000

I recently read an article by Nick O’Neill on his website called ‘How Forbes stole a New York Times article and got all the traffic’. O’Neill examines the comparative successes of the same article published in two prestigious papers under different titles - predictably, the one with the more grabbing title (the Forbes version) did significantly better in terms of hit rates than the other (New York Times) article.

Targeted as the article was to bloggers, I felt this to be a lesson in egg sucking; naturally, I appreciate the importance of the inverted pyramid whether as a media writer, or a blogger.[1]

Over the last year, I have come to increasingly appreciate, and capitalize on, these opening elements and teasers – heading, lead paragraph, thumbnail, tags, pull quotes, and even the use of bolding and italics when linking to from Google+. Yet a part of me is fundamentally at odds with such preoccupations – the part of me that believes in confident, carefully built, and heavily referenced arguments – typically drawn from dead people who knew their shit. The same part got me excellent grades during my literature and philosophy majors, for instance.

Yet the same part that got my excellent grades in literature and philosophy got me into lots of trouble in my professional writing major. For journalism and reportage asks for the voices of the alive-and-well “man on the street”.[2] Journalism asks for sentiment rather than theory, and entertainment instead of information. Journalism is often the airport novel of serious writing.[3]

In practical terms, writing for literature studies and philosophy aims for an upright pyramid: the meat is in the body, and while they promise little, they strive to deliver. Journalism and web writing, on the other hand, typically form one very lopsided, narrow pyramid – more like a spinning top or dreidel. This is a natural for a medium when, chances are, my reader will not even pause at the page. Yet the frequency and popularity of posts and articles whose highpoint is the headline unsettles me: what comes next is typically a ten-point bullet list like some vertical ellipsis, trotting out a cannibalized ream of factoids and throwaway remarks.

Media writers, both online and off, are increasingly resembling the hollowmen of the ABC show: chasing whatever is trending, being reactive rather than proactive, constantly worrying about tomorrow’s headlines or, at best, next week’s.

I have come to value and respect of the importance of each approach when it used appropriately to the medium, subject matter, target audience, and so forth. However, the two approaches recall the old dichotomy between Form and Content – for example, ethereal packaging versus a product with substance.[4] When we focus excessively on the form – when we are excessively concerned with titillating its readers with simulacra than in providing in-depth, honest analysis – we risk doing what Alan Watts and Björk refer to as ‘eating the menu’.

Scouts taught me that the best way to cook damper – or heat up marshmallows – was not with a raging inferno but rather above a bath of gently pulsating hot coals. Similarly, to really warm our core temperature of our soul, and feed our minds, we must build a fire not for its flames, but for its self-sustaining, imploded remnants. Most people – given enough coke or red bull – can throw literary gasoline on a matchstick and brag about the subsequent mushroom cloud. Yet writers who want to leave a legacy will carefully construct a log cabin or tipi of kindling and branches, that, when lit, will prove a match for the thickest of logs, and cut through the coldest of evenings.

Image by PetitPlat - Stephanie Kilgast

Endnotes

[1] One of the differences between the two, however, is that as the owner of my blog – with a psychic commission earned from each hit/visitor - and knowledge of precisely how many people are reading (as well as ‘liking’/+1ing/up-voting it) my article – I have an added incentive to hook reader for as long as possible. As a blogger, with access – and interest – in my site’s statistics, I know exactly when I succeed, and when I fail.

[2] However, as Sid Vicious remarked, “I’ve met the man in the street. He’s a cunt.”

[3] No wonder my undergrad left me in a state of intellectual and creative schism – I was trying to writing short stories for my philosophy assignments, and a thesis for my non-fiction class; maybe my decision to triple major was not such a smart idea after all.

[4] Two extreme examples come to mind – a PhD candidate who talks about their work only upon publication, and a film director who creates the trailer before the film.

... Because 'doubleplusgood' is so 1984

noreply@blogger.com (Ash Hibbert) — Wed, 07 Mar 2012 00:27:00 +0000

In Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell gets stuck into the impoverishment of our language - how we're replacing nuanced adjectives like 'awesome' with 'double-plus-good'. This advertisement on Elizabeth Street in the city struck me as a perfect example: we're no longer saying "this anti-perspirant and deodorant is powerful shit" - instead, we're saying 'double strong'.

Chimera and Bellerophon on the big screen

noreply@blogger.com (Ash Hibbert) — Thu, 01 Mar 2012 06:41:00 +0000

In the interests of full disclosure, I first learned about the mythical figures Bellerophon and the Chimera through (the rather disappointing) Mission Impossible II. In the film, biochemist Dr. Nekhorvich splices together “strains of influenza to create a cure for all influenzas.” Like the authors of Greek Mythology, he needed to engineer the ultimate enemy – a super-bug named Chimera – to let their greatest hero – the vaccine, aptly named Bellarophon – shine: “Every search for a hero must begin with something that every hero requires; a villain. Therefore, in a search for our hero, Bellerophon, we created a monster Chimera.”

Nekhorvich’s analogy is a telling examination of the interdependence of protagonist and antagonist, whether it is in the context of medicine, folk lore, Science Fiction, or Hollywood cinema. Every protagonist needs their evil twin to prove their mettle.[1]

According to the awesome Writing Screenplays that Sell, every good film has the following:

a protagonist
an antagonist
a companion
and a love interest.

A topical example is Inception, where Dom Cobb battles to reunite with his children. Within the world of Inception, it is natural to assume that Dom’s antagonist is Robert Michael Fischer (played by Cillian Murphy of ‘Scarecrow’ fame); similarly, that his love interest is Mal (played by Marion Cotillard of Un long dimanche de fiançailles fame). However, Fischer is actually just a pawn in Dom’s whole journey, and his love-interests are his children – more important to him than the question of whether he is actually awake.

It is ‘Mal’, or rather the manifestation of his guilt regarding his wife’s suicide, that is his enemy, and whose slaying marks his victory:

“I wish you were [real]. But I couldn’t make you real. I’m not capable of imagining you in all your complexity and ... perfection. As you really were. You’re the best I can do. And you’re not real.”

What allows Dom to conquer his foe and reclaim his family is his realization that his wife is dead and that her ghost is a product of his own guilt – thus subject to his will. Dom has met the enemy and realized that he is it. Like Labyrinth, where Jennifer Connelly’s character vanquishes the Goblin King, he understands his wife’s shade has no power over him.

We don’t need another (super)hero

However, a similar motif of particularly speculative fiction really bugs me. This is where superheroes spend all their time fighting other people with similar superpowers – effectively nullifying their productivity, and leaving little time for any other civic duties. A classic example is the television series Heroes. The Indian narrator, Dr. Mohinder Suresh, predicts that the emergence of a new strain of humanity will allow us to solve problems that our modern democratic institutions, armed with 21st Century technology, cannot:

“Look at what’s happening to our planet: over-population, global warming, drought, famine, terrorism - deep down we all sense something’s not right. My father always talked about how an entire species will go extinct, while others no more unique or complex will change and adapt in extraordinary ways- He had a romantic take on evolution ... [But there is] a disease which threatens to eradicate them all. And in doing so deprives our species of its evolutionary advancement. Without this advancement, the challenges of the modern world – global warming, terrorism, diminishing resources – seem almost insurmountable on our thin shoulders.”

Yet in the first season of Heroes, and for at least the first half of the second season (by which point I gave up in disgust), the various protagonists focus their magic powers against each other and themselves; as with Peter Petrelli almost nuking New York City by mistake. In Heroes, the emergence of superpowers appears to result in no positive gains for society or the world at large – certainly none of the benefits predicted by our optimist Dr. Suresh.

When a cosmic energy cloud impacts a space station, rather than helping mitigate climate change, or reduce world hunger, the five astronauts whose evolution has been accelerated end up battling it out in grand style in ‘Fantastic Four versus Doctor Doom’.

Alternatively, in Lord of the Rings, Gandolf the Grey struggles against Saruman the White – one of the three wizards created to protect Middle Earth from Sauron, yet who eventually becomes Sauron’s ally.

Each rescue remedy itself becomes something from which we need rescuing.

Yes, a hero and their nemesis are only enjoyable to watch if they are of evenly classed. This also carries strong thematic and character development importance, as it allows us to isolate the essential differences between good and bad guy.[2] Yet the world of the superheroes and super villains increasingly resemble that of tribal militias, venting their petty squabbles in third-world countries, amidst civilians who – like the peasants in Monty Python and the Holy Grail – find the exact name of their current dictator irrelevant.

We might well drool over the Jedi in the Star Wars universe. Yet a closer look at its broad history reveals the following, eternal cycle, with countless civilians caught in the crossfire:

Sith getting their revenge
Jedi return triumphant
Sith get their revenge again

Even after the original Star Wars trilogy, I wonder how the Force actually helps the cause of freedom and justice in the galaxy:

At the end of Episode 4: a New Hope, Luke Skywalker uses his sixth sense to guide a torpedo into the exhaust vent of the first Death Star, destroying the planet-killer in the process. Yet Death Star I is commanded by Darth Vader, a lord of the Sith – the Jedi’s embarrassing evil twin – who also happens to be [spoiler alert] Luke’s father, and responsible for a large part of the Great Jedi Purge that brought the Old Republic into darkness.
In Episode 5: the Empire Strikes Back, Luke takes down the giant AT-AT at the Battle of Hoth – and then spends the rest of the film screwing up.
In Episode 6: the Return of the Jedi, Luke levitates RT-D2 in front of the Ewoks, exploiting the innocent superstitions of a pre-Contact species and clearly violating the Prime Directive. Furthermore, he hinders the Alliance infiltration group by giving away their position to Darth Vader.

By the conclusion of the original trilogy, Luke has gained a moral victory over the Emperor, and saved his father’s soul – which, strategically speaking, means diddlysquat. For had he capitulated to the Emperor, killed his father, and joined the dark side, the Millennium Falcon would still have just blown them all up. Even the great Yoda could not even hang around for a few more days for Round 2 of Jedi Master versus Dark Lord of the Sith. The Ewoks aided the Rebel Alliance far more than any Force wielders – risking their species and their planet in the process.

In fact, if we asked those in that galaxy far, far away, who endured a Sith-led military dictatorship brought upon by with the full-cooperation of the Jedi,[3] whether they would abolish the Force-wielding Jedi and Sith alike from the galaxy, I think we can guess what they would say: ‘Order 66 for the lot of you.’

Image by DetroitVideoDaily

Endnotes

[1] As Anthony Hopkins’ character tells Hunt – “This isn’t mission difficult, it’s mission impossible. “Difficult” should be a walk in the park for you.”

[2] These differences usually include a loyal team, compassion, or – as illustrated in The First Avenger – humility and good old fashion American values:

Red Skull: What makes you so special?
Captain America: Nothing. I'm just a kid from Brooklyn.

[3] The so-called heroes of The Clone Wars, such as ‘General’ Kenobi, were fighting a war that was just a ploy by their power-hungry Chancellor come Sith-lord to consolidate power. Put simply, the Jedi were tools, and there is nothing redeeming, or glorious, in depicting them getting so used. While such labels may appear easier in hindsight, it should have been exceedingly evident that accepting into your ranks a few million clones, manufactured by some mysterious entity without your consent, was clearly dumb.

This is reminiscent of Mass Effect’s ‘Citadel’, which is a giant space station conveniently placed in the hub of galactic throughways. Numerous space-faring races use the Citadel as the centre of their shared governance, unaware that a malevolent AI race – intent on eradicating all organic life every few thousand years – planted it as a giant booby-trap. Do no other advanced sentient species have the equivalent expression ‘Beware of Greeks bearing gifts’?

Adventures in Facebookland

noreply@blogger.com (Ash Hibbert) — Tue, 28 Feb 2012 23:47:00 +0000

I recently went on a binge of uploading and tagging photos to the Facebook. For many years, I have been reluctant to do so.[1] However, a person’s Wall/Timeline is now the first place I go to for the low-down on someone in whom I am interested – platonically, physically or romantically. It is my storefront, my brochure, my catalogue, and my perennial report to the world.

Like a front yard garden, a Facebook profile is what most people see in the moments before they knock at my door, yet it requires constant vigilance lest it becomes home to an army of weeds or squatters. This is why I gave in: I wanted to promote an image of myself as someone who has, and has had, a rich social network and many an adventure locally and abroad, and who is happy and able to celebrate the good times of others. That may or may not be complete bullshit, but it is the impression I would like to give.[2]

I was very selective about the photos I chose to put up – none that, in spite of the years, would be clearly awkward, such as a schoolmate dirty dancing with another guy at our Year 10 formal. Nor have I uploaded any photos of people with whom I fell out. I also put a note in every album stating that I would oblige anyone featured in any of the photos who wanted their image removed.

Overall, I uploaded some 300 photos across a range of 17 years: from a bike tour and student exchange in Year 10, to living on campus, teaching in Japan, and in Melbourne. I found that those photos featuring the most number of friends together received the most attention. People extended comment threads while bonding over group-photos, such as a photograph of several close friends and I after our end-of-Year-10 excursion. I was impressed with how quickly people starting suggesting tags for others, which spread the news about my postings.

As for whether any of the photos will manage to support my off-line social networking strategy, perhaps the best indication so far would be a chance encounter with an old friend. In spite of not having chatted for over a decade, I soon discovered that he had been following the Facebook uploads – and my blog – with great interest, and he was eager for a hardcopy of one of my books. In addition, I think that my current practice of posting a photo from each weekends’ adventures has provided a useful talking point with friends.[3]

The most significant outcomes from this exercise, though, have been unexpected.

One poignant moment was having the 14-year-old daughter of one of my ex-school mates – who is married to one of my old neighbors – commenting on a photo of her mother, then 16-years-old. “You look so cool…,” she writes, and I think of how busy my peers have been getting married and having children, and how long it has been since high school; long enough that, a child born at its conclusion is now a teenager reflecting on a photo of their mum at an almost identical age.

Having omitted all of the purely landscape photos, it also became quite apparent how my life has had photographic ‘blackouts’ – looking at the online albums for a few of those years amidst the last 17, there is the strong impression is that I have done very little. I might write books, mix music, and cycle up mountains, yet I still look to my photos as the annual report of my productivity.

After all, unless we do something with friends, it is as if we might as well not have done it, right?

Yet those years were not necessarily lonely, or sad, or wasted – often very much the opposite. Many were years of simple routine – spending my evenings either dining in with a partner and a bottle of wine or leaning over my course reader. They were years where I rarely stepped out of my mind space long enough to think, ‘This would make a lovely photo.’ Others, admittedly, were indeed dark, however, the years when I have tried to be everyone’s friend and taken the most photos have also been the times that I have also ended up feeling the most alone – so go figure.

I imagine archaeologists must frequently experience what this photographic retrospective has left me feeling: viscerally reminded of how much we have achieved, as well as achingly awareness of how much we have lost. [4] For I look back at the photos, grouped according to chronology, and feel the heft of the years on my mind, each with varying psychic tax rates. I realize the extent that I am subject to the ebb and flow of history – my own and that of my time. I resist the idea that I am the mercy of events around me – and yet I find, in these Facebook photos and others, a record of a person caught up in the world.

Endnotes

[1] For starters, I prefer to store my photos online through Picasa, and I do not want to do so on yet another site. I am also very wary of Facebook in general, and the thought of giving them even more of my stuff has been off-putting. Finally, I hold out from throwing my lot into new technology or social networking services, but once I do, I generally embrace it with vengeance.

[2] Other, rather sneaky objectives have included increasing my Klout score – which has been dropping at an alarming rate – as well as encouraging people to ‘friend’ me on Facebook – since I Facebook have already chastised me for being a ‘friend’ whore.

[3] Did I succeed in my other objectives? By the crudest of metrics – my skyrocketing Klout score – the answer would be yes. However, no old high school or university friends or acquaintances ‘friended’ me. In fact, very few existing Friends messaged me directly at all – which again goes to show the disparity between ‘Friends’ and friends.

[4] Once more, I feel like John Oldman in Man from Earth who after years of wandering has lost every tool he has used and every person he has loved, and now with nothing to show for himself except the fantastical story he tells.

The joy of the peloton

noreply@blogger.com (Ash Hibbert) — Fri, 24 Feb 2012 04:18:00 +0000

There are few times when I ride beyond my comfort level than when I am in a group of other cycling enthusiasts. I usually start my weekend ride once most cyclists have finished theirs. However, on rare occasions I manage to join up with a peloton. This happened a few Sundays ago – a furiously gusty day in which every direction I turned seemed to present a head wind. After a double espresso and toasted HCT croissant, I coalesced with a couple of different teams and a few other soloists, and for maybe half an hour – from Black Rock to St. Kilda – we bunched up tight in double-file and stayed above 30kph in spite of the gale.

Those at the front of the peloton take turns, each swinging out every five minutes to rejoin the pack via a gap that instantly forms to accommodate them. The guy to my right and upwind explains that his deep-rimmed wheels are presenting too great a profile. He drops back a bit so that he isn’t blown into me. We hit a few sets of traffic lights, where everyone sculls down a few mouthfuls from their water bottles before pushing off again. Hand signals cascade down the line, warning of parked cars and slow-going cyclists. We proceed like this until we pass Brighton, where members of the peloton begin breaking off in pairs and individually. Finally, solo once more, I pull off onto St. Kilda beach to fill my bottle, and enjoy the view.

We were as if a group of refugees coming together in spite of our competitive spirit, sheltering from our shared enemy: the elements. I find that one of the ironies of cycling, and sport in general, is that it can be a tough day to ride, and yet we all do so voluntarily. (It is much easier to drive or catch the train to Frankston from the city than to cycle, for instance.) It can take a particular kind of temperament to volunteer ourselves for situations where we must struggle just to stay afloat.

However, I also think that this can be true for professional work, as well as for sport – after all, we do not actually need to buy houses or round-the-world flights any more than we need a trophy for running a marathon, or to cycle around Port Philip Bay. For some strange reason, though, we seem more eager to confine ourselves to the walls of our work place for eight hours a day than we are to a gymnasium for eight hours a week – go figure.

Image by Robert Couse-Baker

Postscript
A few other parallels between cycling and professional work come to mind:

A team is only ever as fast as its leader. We can always jettison the slowest, but the leader is the one that usually shields the rest of the group from the political head wind.
Uniforms have an impact. I might like the idea of living in a meritocracy, but I have often noticed that when riding around the city, I’m a lot less likely to try to overtake someone wearing spandex than in casual clothing (and I figure that a jeans-clad hipster on their fixie is more likely to surge ahead when the lights flick to green.)

The danger of getting too comfortable

noreply@blogger.com (Ash Hibbert) — Fri, 24 Feb 2012 04:00:00 +0000

“If you strive for comfort all the time, you just end up becoming less comfortable in general,” young survivalist Jaimie Mantzel argues - clad in a mail armor suit, and doing pull-ups from the ceiling of the dome house he hand-built[1] - to justify why he makes his life a constant challenge.

According to both secular and Buddhist teachings, all progress emerges from dissatisfaction. Similarly, life hacker and author Tim Ferris argues that comfort can be a trap: “It’s worse to tolerate your job than to hate it because, if the pain is painful enough, you’ll make a change,” he says.

I like to apply this same philosophy to both cycling and living. While I think that a ride, like life, should ultimately be enjoyable, I also believe it important to make both a little difficult: if I have the choice of doing things the hard way, or the easy way, I often go for the former, and not just out of a sense of masochism.[2]

I love to exert myself – not to the edge of pain, but to the edge of fun. Unless I can draft behind a fellow cyclist, for instance, or I am winding down from a long ride, I avoid just cruising along. Admittedly, going slower means I enjoy the scenery more. However, it also means that I am not getting any better.

Furthermore, I try to judge my output not by how much I have traveled, but by how well I have traveled. Whether I am faced with a strong head wind, or burdened by a weighted-day-pack, or riding a clunky set of wheels, I try to put in the same amount of effort.[3] I also try to be realistic about what I can – or, more importantly, should – try to achieve. I then endeavor to rate my success in relation to the tools at hand at the conditions in which I find myself. This avoids a couple of equally destructive scenarios:

one, in which my handicaps such as head wind, heavy load, and/or crap bike slow me down so much that I get so disheartened that I just give up;[4]
the other, in which circumstances are so favorable that I get by just by cruising along.

None of this is to say that I am always putting in my all. As I have written before, not only is trying to give 100% all of the time unrealistic – it is actually counterproductive. Nor is it to say that my conditions have absolutely no effect on my riding style: for instance, I will often go up a few gears when I start climbing a rise and stand up, just to get the incline over and done with. Furthermore, when I have a great tail wind, there is often a real thrill in peddling like mad and ‘setting all the sails’. Alternatively, when doing interval training, going downhill is a great opportunity to ease back and recover from the climb.

Mantzel also explains in his video cast: “While you’re exercising, it might feel horrible. But you spend half an hour wearing yourself down, and then you spend the next three days like you’re high.” Often, I do not even have to wait until the next few days. On the return legs of many of my 50km+ cycles, when the caffeine from espresso breaks is kicking in and my endorphin production is peaking, I start to get my second wind – a point where keeping above 40kph feels so easy that I feel like checking my chain is still on. The state of mind is much like what Jeff Bridges’ character describes in Surf’s Up!, “Once you get inside, you never want to get out.” That is a comfort achievable only through hard work.

Image by clumsy_jim

End notes
[1] “When you exercise, it just makes you feel better all the time … While you’re exercising, it might feel horrible. But you spend half an hour wearing yourself down, and then you spend the next three days like you’re high. Not caring about being comfortable all the time makes life so much better. Because you get people who just want to be comfortable all the time, and they whine, and they complain about everything. And someone who doesn’t care about comfort that much, they’ll be having a great time. They’ll be going swimming. ‘Oh, the water’s cold, I can’t go in.’ That person’s not having fun. The person who has fun is the one who says, ‘Yeah, the water’s cold, I don’t care, I’m going to have fun anyway.’ Not to mention that when you strive for comfort all the time, it becomes harder and harder to achieve. Like, if you sit on the couch, that’s comfortable, but if you sit on the couch for twelve hours straight, it gets really uncomfortable. And then it gets harder to stand up and do things … If you strive for comfort all the time, you just end up becoming less comfortable in general.”

[2] Part of this is out of a sense of ambition - undoubtedly instilled by my parents. My main motivator, however, is probably brand differentiation: doing things the hard way, particularly when no one else was willing to do so, meant that I could distinguish myself from everyone else, especially the slackers.

This made a lot of sense when I was a teenager – which is, after all, a period of individuation. (which usually means latching on to some – any – pre-existing sub-culture to use as a template for our own new identity.) However, in my case I suspect it started a bit (or a lot) earlier than that – and I have not stopped.

When I have looked around and seen everyone else was doing things the hard way, I switched to looking into how I could do things the smart way. It was only when I left my small hometown and entered university, where everyone worked both intelligently and industriously, that I started to slack off, since the only way to distinguish myself in third year was to be the person who winged it.

[3] I do not like being a letting the weather dictate the effort I put in while cycling, just as I do not like circumstances dictating my productivity or lifestyle. Consequently, I have always found it important to keep busy even during the down times. In early high school, this might have meant playing the turn-based strategy game Civilization every afternoon after school - undertaking a few millennia of civic development over several days or weeks – or working on a reforestation project on the weekends. After graduating from a Bachelor of Arts and quickly realizing that I was not yet quite ready to face an office job, I spent the next twelve months rewriting my creative work and researching feminist literature for my planned honors thesis.

[4] For instance, when riding along the Rhine River in Germany on a less than ideal mountain bike and a couple of days-worth supplies on my back, I quickly accepted that I wasn’t riding my racer (“High-performance engineering blended with endurance design. Make every climb a little easier, every sprint a little faster”) – but a workhorse, and I adjusted my pace accordingly.

Three cycling philosophies

noreply@blogger.com (Ash Hibbert) — Fri, 24 Feb 2012 03:42:00 +0000

I have ridden with friends on numerous day-trips – along the Lilydale to Warburton Rail Trail, up Mount Dandenong, over to Emerald Lake, through Cranbourne’s Botanical Gardens, and beyond Williamstown to name a few. I have found that each of my friends has very different approaches to being on a bike, seeing cycling as one of the following:

an aesthetic activity – as an opportunity to tour a gorgeous environment;
an ascetic activity – as a means to an ends; for instance, it’s all about reaching the top of the mountain or doing the full extent of a rail trail (if you don’t succeed, the ride was a failure) and suffering is part of the package;
a hedonistic activity – as a precursor to a rewarding meal and a pint of beer.

I am not going to claim that the above motivations for cycling are not legitimate, nor that I have not shared them myself:

one of my favorite cycling experiences to date was a tour through the Flinders Ranges, where we never exceeded 40 kilometers per day, and spent most of the time walking around or hanging out in our tents;
I can be certainly be stubborn when bush walking, for instance, and be infuriated if I have to turn back before the summit;
I am as partial to an ice-cold glass of Guinness after a big ride as the next person is.

Since I get enough riding done by myself – I solo ride 40 kilometers virtually every day to work and back – I feel like I can ‘indulge’ other people’s riding philosophy when I ride with them. However, I do think that my own ‘riding philosophy’ is comparatively moderate.

I enjoy cycle between tram tracks in the inner city, in winding mountains roads, and on unsealed paths through paddocks. I am exhilarated whether I am flying through the forests of Dandenong Ranges National Park, or weaving between pedestrians and drivers in downtown’s morning traffic.
Often the only destinations that I have in mind when I cycle are particular coffee shops that serve a good espresso. Should the sky turn grey, or my muscles tire, I have little problem with doing a ‘uey’ and starting back home.
I cannot help but think of pain or fatigue as signs that I am doing myself damage. In addition, since I often think of long tours on foot and on the saddle as logistical challenges, I tend to see a dry mouth or hunger pangs as indicating inadequate preparation. I am happy to stop cycling to munch on a muesli bar every fifteen minutes, or trek with several liters of water on my back, since it means that my body will have all it needs to keep me going for longer.

I suspect these differences in how I ride compared to how others ride sheds some light on my worldview:

Everything in this world is part of this world.
A city is no less ‘natural’, and possessing in beauty and sophistication, than a forest. (If anything, a paddock in the country is probably less ‘alive’ than most urban centres.) I have felt as energized and at peace while walking around Tokyo on New Year’s Eve as I have from trekking through Wilsons Promontory. Businesspersons shouting into their phones on a tram, or intoxicated jocks stumbling out onto Swanston Street in front of taxis, are as much a part of the texture of the world (and Australia in particular) as the outback.[1]

The journey is the destination.An ends, no matter how amazing, is generally not enough to motivate me – I have to find sufficient satisfaction in the process. I admit that such an attitude means that I probably deny myself many opportunities. For instance - studying a difficult degree to secure a promotion; going along with friends to do or see something I am not that interested in but which they really enjoy; or making an effort to socialize with heaps of different people on the off chance that I will make one or two friends. Yet I have an aversion to postponed gratification and martyrdom – as Ayn Rand writes, “the world is perishing from an orgy of self-sacrificing.” [vid] Or, as Ursula Le Guin writes in The Left Hand of Darkness, “It is good to have an end to journey toward; but it is the journey that matters, in the end.”

(Related to the above) I try not to rate my achievements by how spent I feel afterwards.Fatigue is a subjective thing, open to interpretation: maybe my aching muscles or mind are from a productive workout, either at the gym or the library – but they could just as easily be from bad form in my bench presses or a lack of coherency in my studies. Furthermore, the moment that tiredness becomes the new measure of our success, it can become the ends unto itself, and we become more preoccupied with working hard and hurting ourselves than in working smart and strengthening ourselves. Sure, it can be great to reward ourselves for a semester of studies, or a hundred kilometer cycle, with a vacation or a big breakfast; however, I would rather think of my projects as being like a F1 race: striking an important balancing act of sprints, and pit stops.

Image by Gary Hayes

Endnote

[1] As the great state of Michigan reminds us, ‘If you seek a pleasant peninsula, look about you.’ We can find many of the same wonders we seek abroad right here in our homeland, if not in our own minds.

The invisible hand of our pasts

noreply@blogger.com (Ash Hibbert) — Sat, 11 Feb 2012 02:30:00 +0000

Try this for a thought experiment. Imagine you were able to ‘teleport’ instantly anywhere in the world, a la Star Trek. Here is the rub, however – doing so involves having an exact replica of yourself created at your destination, yet the transporter destroys your ‘original’ body in the process. So by all appearances, a perfect ‘clone’ of yourself – with all the memories, all of the hopes and aspirations you had before stepping onto the transporter pad – is now lounging under the Eiffel Tower or gawking up at the Great Pyramid of Giza while your ‘previous’ body is now vapour.

Would you still be the first to say, ‘Beam me up, Scotty’?

I have devoured numerous science fiction stories about protagonists resurrected through cloning, or cybernetics. I have wallowed in fantasies of the power and potential and prospects of immortality that such transformation promises. Surely, then, quasi-religious preoccupations with identity and ‘soul’ would not trouble me. I doubt, for instance, whether my teleported self would suddenly weigh 21 grams less than my pre-teleported self. Yet confronted with the above thought experiment, I am suddenly self-conscious. The person that would come into being in Paris or Egypt would not be ‘me’ – in fact, they would represent the end of me, and my own annihilation. As a casual user of such teleporting technology, they would indeed have opportunities that I, otherwise inhibited to expensive and time-consuming technologies such as jet airliners, would not. Certainly, they would have my memories – and thanks to such free and instantaneous teleportation, far more experiences on top of that. Yet I would be dead, and this perfect copy would be running around, living my life and enjoying the world.

The closest parallel that comes to mind – funnily enough – is having kids. (Such thinking is probably why I would not make good father material.) I imagine that the empathy I could share with my ‘teleported clone’ would be similar to that as between a parent and their child. I could feel a kind of responsibility, and even ownership, towards my clone, just as I could with a child – both being derived from my own genes and imbued with many (if not all) of my own life stories and values. Both would also promise some quasi-immortality, a chance to rewrite history, and have ‘all the opportunities that I never had’. A sense of benevolence would encourage me to partake in such an ontological experiment - I would create life at the cost of my own, so that such being could gain experiences otherwise denied to me. However, they would not be me. In fact, I would remain even more disconnected from my clone in the transporter scenario, compared to my hypothetical children, since we would never really meet.[1]

Welcome to the human race

Yet is this not the very condition of existence? Am I not being constantly ‘thrown’ into the world - to use Heidegger’s description - every moment of every day? Isn’t it only a creative artifice allows me to join my past self to my future self?

“You know that thing Benedict Anderson says about identity? Well, he's talking about like, say, a baby picture. So you pick up this picture, this two-dimensional image, and you say, "That's me." Well, to connect this baby in this weird little image with yourself living and breathing in the present, you have to make up a story like, "This was me when I was a year old, "and later I had long hair, and then we moved to Riverdale, and now here I am." So it takes a story that's actually a fiction.” – Waking Life

Much of our ‘success’ in life is determined by our ability (or willingness) to empathise with our future selves – in other words, how good we are at manufacturing this ‘continuity of self’.[2] This is tough work: faced with decisions like, ‘Should I eat that burger, or go to the gym?’, or ‘Should I buy that stereo or invest in my superannuation?’ the only reason to choose the latter options is out of deference to someone else: a person that we have not yet (and my in fact never) ‘become’.

And these are just small-fry decisions – there’s also the bigger deals, like whether I should take the leap of faith required to dedicate three years of my life doing a PhD, or twenty years of my life raising a family. Making such sacrifices for someone else, even if that self is ‘me in five (or fifty) years time’, requires as much an imaginative leap as being willing to step on that transporter pad and leave my old life behind. (After all, we could all be like Sam Rockwell’s character in Moon – slaving day after day so that we can inherit a prize that does not exist.)

In light of the above, maybe stepping on the transporter pad is not such a revolutionary leap after all.

Postscript

I must have been a little over 11 years-old when I bought Tom Maddox’s book Halo (now out of print but available online, and on my bookshelf). At the conclusion, a computer gains sentience yet comes to appreciate its own limitations and propensity for self-delusion. His remarks are pertinent:

“An uncertainty equal to death's hovers over everything I do. My own prior self stands behind me, pulling strings that I cannot see or feel, a ghost that haunts me without making itself seen or heard, a ghost whose presence must be inferred from nearly-invisible traces. So I went to Toshi, who is interested in such things, and I told him my story, and I said to him: "I am controlled by the invisible hand of my own past." And he laughed very hard and said, "Welcome, brother human."

We sacrifice ourselves for our future – and yet the past will have its way.

Image by JD Hancock

Endnotes

[1] Other parallels that come to mind are Blade Runner’s Rachel, who possesses the memories of is Elden Tyrel’s neice yet is actually a replicant, and Zoe’s avatar in ‘Caprica’ whom has the personality of Zoe proper. One important difference, though, between these two examples is that in the former, the original – Tyrel’s neice - is presumably still alive, while in the latter, Zoe died in a horrific explosion. Furthermore, it is not clear whether Tyrel’s niece gave her uncle permission to imprint her memories onto a replicant – while for Zoe, that was the whole idea. Part of the anxiety surrounding such copies, then, might have a lot to do with how much we perceive them as ‘intruders’, like a Doppelgänger. For a good study of this, see the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode ‘Second Chances’.

[2] Analysing my obsessions with literature, and journaling, and storytelling, only reinforces this notion that I construct identity (mine and other people’s) through ‘fictions’. Journaling particularly is, I think, a distraction from ‘authenticity’ (if there is such a thing). Every diary entry lets me condition myself into believing a more palatable version of events. I write creatively out of a desperate need to re-envision reality. My professional preoccupation with technical writing emerged from my own struggles to operate in the office environment. Similarly, my interest in creative writing reflects a struggle to operate by the shared narrative that most people take for granted. (The sick, it appears, become experts on healing; I find it interesting that it is the same friends who have had personal brushes with mental illness who have also expressed an interest in studying postgraduate psychiatry.)

Wake up Sheeple! The Anna Karenina principle and the domestication of people

noreply@blogger.com (Ash Hibbert) — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 05:13:00 +0000

I was going through the Wikipedia page of the very fascinating Professor Jared Diamond, American scientist and author, when his use of the Anna Karenina principle grabbed my attention. According to Professor Diamond, animals need to satisfy all of a number of criteria in order to be candidates for domestication (regardless of their other advantages, which otherwise doom them to failure).

These criterions entail that they:

be easy to feed
have a high reproductive turn-over
breed well in captivity
possess a pleasant disposition
refrain from panicking
belong to a well-defined social structure.

Going through this list, the cynical part of my brain wondered whether our own culture applies these same criteria to its members. Has socialization meant that we have cultivated the same traits amongst humans as we have in animal domestication? Consider the following, for instance:

I might live in a cosmopolitan city, yet I find it exceedingly difficult to find a low-carbohydrate meal. I have also been a vegan, and I remember similarly having to wander from restaurant to restaurant in search of something I was ‘allowed’ to eat.
Not very long ago in the West, and particularly amongst the more religious population, most people were under (a lot more) pressure to breed early, and quickly.
The amount of literature and media relating to sex – the billboards, glossy magazines, and soap operas – illustrates how sex is still a highly prescribed and regulated activity particularly in this age of so-called sexual liberation. This might sound paradoxical, yet think of it this way – by flooding the airwaves with marketable forms of sexual expression, our culture is drowning out personal variety. For instance, the orgasm has become the be-all and end-all of sex, when for many it is incidental or irrelevant; and the prevalence of rather outlandish forms of visual pornography means that people are getting further disconnected from the real thing – a good argument for why we should be more trusting of our own imagination. Also, think of how we expect many people to be transparent about their relationship status: to display their spouses (Facebook relationship status, ringed finger, stickers on the back of their car) and to have a designated piece of furniture on which to have sex. Occasionally we revolt against this regulation (albeit in very stereotypical, structured ways): we escape on romantic escapades to the coast or upon a cruise-ship, or hook up with other backpackers in some third-world country’s youth hostels.
Anyone who enjoys the television series ‘Dexter’, or felt sympathy for Hannibal Lecter M.D. in the third movie, or laughed in Gross Point Blanke, serves to illustrate how it is better to be a serial killer with a grin in this society than a pacifist who grimaces. QED – A pleasant disposition is more valuable than a virtuous mind.
Perhaps the best measure of how far socialization has come to resemble domestication is in the extent that we have traded our freedoms for safety: the more that we are willing to fit in to our particular culture, better that culture rewards us, and the more mobile we can afford to be. Stockholm syndrome is merely the extreme example of how easy we find it, in times of crises, to imprint on our masters – another, more readily available example would be George W. Bush’s rise in popularity following the September 11 attacks. We yearn for hard love, it seems, even when it is lacking in real love.

The path of least resistance certainly inclines us to go with the flow, and accept what is easily available to us. We constantly ‘sell liberty to purchase power’. Yet it is hard not to occasionally comprehend that our ancestors and peers have ‘bred’ us to be as accommodating and as passive as possible, making us animals no less captive than the cats and dogs whom we in turn keep.

Images by Think-N-Evolve and xkcd