That Bright Instrument

Blog move

2011-05-22T08:05:00.001-04:00

I finally bought Nick Novitski as a domain. It's nice to have an odd enough name that your first choice of brand is available to you. Although, if I were really smart, I would have gotten mylastname.com before that jerk in Texas did (just kidding man, congrats on the wedding).

Right now, it just mirrors my new Tumblr blog. Tumblr seems like a pretty good platform. I'm not using the social elements to their highest degree, but there's a lot of good integration with other services and devices.

The only thing missing is a tool to easily transfer my posts from here to there (though looking back makes me wonder if I really want to). Since I can download them as an XML file, though, I wonder if I could write one...

This blog will lay defunct, but as-is, until I formulate a complete transfer solution, at which point I'll set up an automatic redirect. But in the meantime, nicknovitski.com is my new home.

Money is Broken

2011-03-09T22:21:00.000-05:00

Jane McGonigal is about to ~~give a talk~~ have a conversation about her new book (Reality is Broken, available in fine bookstores everywhere, as well as my hot little hands).

The CHM is ridiculous. Mountain View contains concentrations of wealth that I have not encountered anywhere in my life, and that includes, say, the Hearst Mansion, or the mansions of those latter-day Hearsts who populate Highway 1 between Cambria and Monterey. Imagine what sort of museum such people would make about the field that curls so closely about their hearts.

I saw perhaps a quarter of it in two hours. Slide-rules, abaci, punch-cards, a bit of COLOSSUS. I will have to come back. Possibly I will have to become a member.

Home

2011-03-03T15:52:00.001-05:00

Here's the view from the living room of the jeweled treasure I'll be living in for the next month or three, anyway. Hopefully my father will have moved out of Miami by then.

There's a lot of work that it needs, and plenty more it would benefit from, but that only makes it better, in my opinion.

Morro Rock

2011-02-28T19:45:00.001-05:00

What I've been waiting for

2011-02-28T14:44:00.001-05:00

Let's never fight again, baby.

Read over breakfast while waiting for rush hour to pass

2011-02-28T12:00:00.000-05:00

I have a nice but small studio in the tenderloin. It is $625 a month with electric included. With dsl and cable it will be about $700 a month which means about $350 each. The only interior door is on the bathroom. It has a full kitchen and large refrigerator. There are two separate rooms and maybe a curtain could be put up for some privacy but the way to the bathroom is through one room and the way to the kitchen is through the other room. It has ten foot ceilings so it is possible to build loft beds but right now e way to the kitchen is through the other room. h the other room. It has ten foot ceilings so it is possible to build loft beds but right now I have no furniture. This will be a cramped living situation where the only real upside is that it is ridiculously inexpensive. It is a low income building so you must have a documented income less than 17,000 a year.

I almost want to email this guy just to see if we can ever hang out.

San Francisco~!

Trapped Like Beans

2011-02-28T01:34:00.000-05:00

I've spent the last few days in a La Quinta built inside a converted lima bean silo. Every room is perfectly hexagonal, with un-painted concrete walls. The rooms surround hexagonal spaces strung along the hallway like so many ben-wa beads. On the outside, delivery chutes stick out at least seven feet, so ostentatiously formerly-functional it becomes the height of a kind of luxury. I feel like I'm becoming two people, the bee that goes out to forage, and the larva that wraps himself in the honey and does nothing but think "Change! Change!"

Irvine, in general, puts me in mind of the malls, warehouses and empty spaces of the area around the Miami airport, but mapped to an expanded coordinate system, distances stretching out, like the expanding universe. Every second spent here seems to make everything else one second further away.

So, tomorrow I drive to Morro Bay. The day after that, the City By The Bay. From moving out of Falls Church to arriving in San Francisco, that will be just about 53 days. Maybe not an olympic record, but certainly a personal best, of a sort.

Oh, and Arizona. Arizona was a mixed bag. I'll let my mostly un-edited pictures explain.

arizona

2 for 1 night in Flagstaff

2011-02-19T00:41:00.001-05:00

Travelling alone stinks. I hope you make someone very happy, guinness number two!

Getting Lost

2011-02-15T23:02:00.000-05:00

So several decades ago, a TWA airplane crashed into a bit of the Sandia mountains that folks reasonably came to call "TWA Canyon." It's only a few miles out of Albuquerque, but the area was roadless, rocky wilderness, impassable to earthmoving equipment, so rather than collecting all the wreckage and taking it away to some warehouse somewhere, they just kinda shuffled it around so that it couldn't be seen by from the cablecar tram that passed right overhead.

You can hike right there! Or so I've heard. Today I tried, but didn't quite manage it. I wandered around for a bit, and greatly enjoyed it, but the trail in question is not marked, because, reasonably enough, the land managers don't want their trust known for such ghoulish amusements.

I mean, it's not like I wanted to go because 16 people lost their lives on the spot. It's just that, for reasons I haven't figured out, I really really like sites and scenes of industrial decay, and I think the wreckage of a plane is something I really want to see, even if it was just in some warehouse somewhere.

But as I said, it's strewn across untrammeled wilderness along the side of a big mountain. Which is it's own bonus, as well as adding a bit of frisson to the image. So I really wanted to see it!

It was a gorgeous day, perfect t-shirt weather, and I love scrambling over rocks and trees and mud like you wouldn't believe. But I gradually became less and less certain that I was in the right canyon. Frequently, I questioned whether the trail I was following was used by anything besides deer and snowmelt. So after a few hours, I decided to turn around. No biggie, it was just an awesome hike. I'll see the rotting wreckage of our once-glorious civilization another day.

Sandias Hike

A short story in pictures

2011-02-14T17:28:00.000-05:00

Yesterday Morning

Yesterday Afternoon

Get to know people better, faster

2011-02-12T23:32:00.000-05:00

Don't ask people what they do for a living. Who gives a shit? What insight will that give you? What are the odds that what they do all day is something they really want to talk about?

It's only helpful to know if they have a particularly low or high status job, so you can know if you should be imperious or obsequious to them. So basically, only if you are a spineless/arrogant noodnik.

Instead, ask them what they do for fun. They'll like talking about it, it'll tell you something significant about them, you can learn about something interesting. And if they have no real answer, you'll know that they're boring and can safely leave them alone.

On the off chance that they do love some activity that they also earn money from, they may mention it.

"Mockridge owns the Minotaur, but what's as high as an elephant's eye?"

2011-02-11T23:34:00.000-05:00

Steak for dinner and for breakfast tomorrow. Low carb lets you lose weight without counting calories, because the calories you eat are so damn filling. I see that there's a microwave in the hotel room, and immediately think I could make bacon if I had a plate and some paper towels (and some bacon). Meals on the road tend to be raw. Hotels don't give you the tools to cook, they force travelers into nearby restaurants. Pitcher-plant-style symbiosis.

Speaking of carnivorous lures, I passed by a housing development populated by duplexes that seemed to be 80% garage. Of course: survival out here requires a car, even before food. Maybe even a truck? The day felt warm, but slush and ice were spattered everywhere. Stopping for lunch in Little Rock, I hesitated before stepping into the diner, until I was sure I wasn't going to be impaled by a falling icicle. The same latitude as Atlanta, but something puts an edge on the weather, something that demands four-wheel-drive and space to haul hay-bales.

On the radio today, between Egypt updates, proposed budget cuts were discussed. A program that gives heating fuel to people who need it. That is, they can only afford a big house in the frozen wastelands where humans should not live unless they are paid (cf Antarctica, Alaska). Or else it's a family tradition to die in Maine. Or else they're welfare queens or whatever ridiculous straw-man we've come up with now.

I can't tell if I'm still losing weight, or if my perceptions are being shifted ("expanded," you could say) by the people I see in the restaurants, the lobbies, the gas stations, the rest areas, and especially behind the wheel.

Oh, right. All the rest areas in Arkansas were originally built segregated. Two sets of Male and Female bathrooms. Now they just keep one closed until it's time to clean the other one.

Looking over my route again, I just calculated that Las Vegas is actually about half an hour out of my way. Hmm! Though of course if I went there, I might stay for more than one day.

I still haven't made the phone calls I should. There's always tomorrow, until there isn't.

True Journey Begins

2011-02-11T08:45:00.000-05:00

Arrived in Memphis yesterday. Hope to reach Sallisaw, OK today. Then Amarillo tomorrow, and Albuquerque on Sunday. Fair progress after spending, what, two weeks in Virginia and three in Atlanta?

Both were relaxing stays with friends. Too relaxing. I've gotten soft, become reliant on rolling out of bed and having real humans to talk to. Or at least dogs.

Oh, right. In Atlanta, I stayed in a studio with a 7-month-old labrador puppy named Gracie. Things she destroyed of mine:

Electric Dragon 80,000V, a mildly rare artsy Japanese film. DVD, case, soundtrack CD: all shredded.
How To Cook Everything, an awesome cookbook. Slipcase destroyed, index chewed.
40 Blinks Bucky Eyemask, devoured.
Vibram Fivefingers KSOs, munched.

She was a good dog, though.

Driving through Mississipi and Alabama in one day helped me realize how our current circumstances determine our Apocalypses. I kept seeing signs for the exits..."Food" it would say, with a perfectly blank hi-contrast expanse below. "Gas", and then "nothing besides remains / the lone and level roads stretch far away." Hence The Road, an exurban Apocalyps, where people become so distanced from each other and so cut off from resources, they have no way of productively dealing with one another. Compare with the rural Japanese Apocalypse of Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou, where life has just slowed down, with fewer kids in the village every year, and the beach slowly reclaiming the parking lots.

So-called "Dystopias" are Apoclypses as well, of course. The world changes dramatically, the true nature of humanity (or of whatever you're afraid will constrain or warp it) reveals itself, is seen not through a glass darkly. I keep on thinking that they'll make a Snow Crash movie, that it's yet to be made irrelevant, that it can be condensed into a dayglo meditation on gated communities and franchise restaurants. And katanas, second life, wearable computing, and statutory rape, of course.

McDonalds even have free wi-fi now, nearly as convenient and necessary as a bathroom. The future is like a low fire that a map of your life has been thrown onto: the edges burn first, but occasionally more mundane spots, closer to home, blacken and swell.

O let me stand next to that fire!

Yesterday, I stopped at a McDonalds to piss, and when I came out of the bathroom and headed to the door, someone on the staff sarcastically thanked me. A few seconds later, I reeled from social vertigo: I hadn't even thought them worth enough consideration to turn and fully face them before scoffing. I'm beginning to see why gypsies think it's okay to rob from non-gypsies. People tie themselves to one place, one job, one lover, expecting to be rewarded for...what? Self-doubt? Fear? Unquestioning service? They're like the blacksmith from the Borges story who wrapped his son in chains so that when he died from the weight, he could fly in heaven.

Graduation, lay-offs, the death of a close family member...I'm overdue for throwing my life away on a crazy plan. Every day is a new opportunity to say "The Journey Begins Now." Initiation never ends.

Super Bowl Post-Mortem

2011-02-07T12:41:00.000-05:00

Detroit fans shouldn't be too disappointed: better that Roethlisberger throw two picks, and therefore the game, than he get yet another entirely undeserved ring. Now we can finally throw him under the bus, right? And once that's over with, we can talk about your sickening dependence on moribund for-profit companies that are destroying America, and how they think this is the economic moment to spend your benefits checks on Eminem and the most expensive advertising spot in the world to promote Detroit as a luxury brand. Luxury?! If you offer a car "imported from Detroit," it better be from our feral-city future. It better have all-wheel drive, armor plating, a flamethrower, and be driven by Robocop.

My Menu for the evening was primarily Buffalo Chicken Meatza (dark meat, stir-fried, store-bought sauce), with mozzarella, parmesan and bleu cheeses. This went over well. We also had some extra mozzarella, so I cooked bacon and made some dead-simple quesadillas from low-carb tortillas. Cooked in the pan with a dash of olive oil (we didn't have a neutral one), they tasted like fucking pancakes. Fuck you, Taco Bell.

Adventures in Dietary Lifestyles

2011-02-02T22:18:00.001-05:00

Part of the cool thing I'm doing now is reducing my carbohydrate intake. After a period of adjustment, I decided to reduce it even further. It certainly has helped me loose weight without doing any exercise besides pacing when on the phone.

Though that isn't enough. Resistance training is the missing piece. A good man once said "If you're 6'2", and 215lbs or less, you don't need a weight loss program, you need a 'get strong enough to fight bears' program."

At any rate, the low-carb approach is helping me discover all kinds of strange new feeding options. One of which just came out of the oven.

Mix 2lbs of ground beef with two eggs, and whatever seasoning you like. Spread it into a baking pan. Cook at 450 for ten minutes. Cover with sauce, cheese, pepperoni, whatever the fuck else you want (no potatoes I guess), broil it for like, 2 minutes.

Meatza.

I'll call it a tentative success. Which is good, because I was making it tonight as practice for the Football Festival this weekend.

On my mind

2011-01-26T11:29:00.001-05:00

So far I'm setting no land speed records. It took me a week to leave Virginia, and now it's looking like two weeks to leave Georgia. Or is that two and three? The luxury of having no deadlines: dates fade into unimportance, and you seek daily and seasonal rhythms. The Modern Nomad. The Lazy Savage.

My father's finally given me something of a deadline, though. The closing on his new houseboat will be some time in March, and since he will almost certainly be in Sausalito around then, so should I, because I love him and love that he's getting a houseboat.

Right now I'm staying with Hiro, a friend from college. He has convinced me to teach him and a couple of our common friends to play one of my hippy fiction games, shock: social science fiction. Can't wait to see what awesome ideas they/we come up with. That'll be this Saturday, and then I'll be travelling again as soon as Monday.

At six hours of driving a day, that'll be about a week's travel. Though I might like to stay an extra day here or there.

My old bank's card expires in February, and they have no branches in California anyway, so I'll probably close my account before leaving Atlanta, and travel on my stomach, so to speak. My new bank failed to send me my card before I started traveling, and won't send it to a PO Box, and I really should have called them weeks ago to send it here, like I planned...but as it happens, I may not get it for a while yet.

At a bar recently, I mentioned to our server I was only passing through town. "Oh!" she said. "I can see the gears turning," I joked, "you're thinking 'So is he a serial killer, or...?'" "Well, as long as you don't pay in cash," she laughed. And then I did, of course, and it looks like I will be paying for everything in cash for a while yet. I knew it was a good idea to keep my security belt!

It's hard enough to find single-month rentals when you're actually in the city where they're located. I can't wait to start calling people in San Francisco today and say things like "Hello, I'd like to send you a check to hold a room open for me sight unseen for just the month of February. I'm currently crossing the country Clampett-style and...hello? Did you just drive into a tunnel?"

update: Half at Hiro's insistence, half of my own choosing, it's looking like I'll wait here for the card to be sent to me via my father. So another two weeks in Atlanta, perhaps.

That New Self Smell

2011-01-01T00:00:00.007-05:00

Last night, I dreamt that I was washing clothes in a sink (after I had killed several bad people, perhaps ninjas). A few whites, including a cotton polo shirt. I was some kind of security personell at an embassy or similar estate. I was suddenly embarrassed, looking at my clothes, realizing how chintzy they and I looked, compared to the people I lived with/was employed by/basically owed my purpose in life to. Not that they held it against me, but why was I being such an asshole to them?

Pretty basic stuff: I long to be as rough and tumble as I idealize my father to be (he's the only person I've ever seen wash clothes in a sink), or even more so, but this causes friction between us, since we differ on what good manners requires of us, and I am ashamed of how I don't feel capable of being someone he can have unalloyed pride in.

The Japanese say that the first dream of the new year is lucky if it contains hawks, eggplants, or mount fuji. The Japanese, apparently, have really fucking boring dreams. Who gives a shit what you see? The interesting thing is always who you get to be. (He said, trying to make an elegant point about his own motivations to have a motile identity, constantly shifting to the better, though he was too tired to allude to the point, and simply stated it flat.)

Yesterday (for it is tomorrow), I said "good bye" and "I'm sorry" to my father, and drove here from Miami. Along the way, I saw a cloud of buzzards so large that I was forced to re-estimate how many buzzards there are in the world. To look into their swirling number was to invite madness. So I did, of course. But I didn't have my camera, of course.

Thanks to a late start, and a relaxed driving pace, I passed the arbitrary turning point of the year-increment standing outside the locked door of an apparently empty hotel lobby, wondering what from my car would be the most polite object to use as a crowbar.

This is the first time in memory I've been alone on New Year's Eve. I would usually be with my mother, who would be with her mother, the whole matrioshka set of us. But they both died this year, so here I am in Waterboro, driving to DC, there to collect all of my worldly possessions that can fit in my Jetta station wagon, then to drive them to San Francisco, because goddammit that's what I decided that I would do.

More to follow, because it's easier to post the illucid details for all the world to see than to send individual emails to all the people who say they want to know about what I'm doing.

Alan Moore on Magic

2010-11-12T11:42:00.000-05:00

In the same tone, I might have said "Oscar Wilde on Socialism" or "Charles Foucault on cultural analysis".

Those who already know why they should read this lengthy hitherto unpublished article by Mr. Moore may feel free to merely do so, and skip the rest of this article, which is less of a reaction than a justification for people who might be confused by someone advocating discussion about magic at all.

When I feel the need to explain who Alan Moore is to people who have never heard of him at all, I have to stop and collect my thoughts, both on him and on the people I need to explain him to. "What will they have the patience to hear?" I wonder. "What do I have the confidence to describe?"

I didn't use to be so hesitant. "A very hairy man," I told my mother once, "who writes very hairy comic books."

When I was between colleges, I worked at a comic book store. I had already read Watchmen and V for Vendetta, of course, and heard the oral history of the Swamp Thing relaunch. While I was working there, the collected From Hell came out, which remains a sadly unvisited monument in the landscape of historical fiction, despite being a fucking masonic key to its landscape. As well, his venture into having his own publishing line had just started: the perfectly titled "Americas Best Comics" line was dedicated to channeling comics from an alternate universe where superheroes had never been invented, and all comics were culturally sensitive and scientifically thoughtful re-launches of the Jungle Man, the Science Hero, the Strong Man, or all three, in the case of square-jawed flagship, Tom Strong.

Americas Best Comics also published Promethea, which is nothing less (perhaps nothing more) than a digestible primer of magic for the modern comics fan, which ends, in fact, with the eponymous heroine addressing the reader directly, asking them to pay attention, because life will be a test.

All these helped me understand him better, and more importantly, to sell him better. But what really swayed me was something we did not sell: a spoken word album. Alan Moore sounds like he looks, and he looks like a Nazorean Piltdown Man, who happened to go to a very rigorous but obscure college. Alan Moore is what you get when Aleister Crowley gives up shocking people, has an open marriage, and (oh yes right there was something else what was it) takes up writing comic books.

But he isn’t a comic book author. Or a writer of graphic novels. If you look on his business card, it says right there, clear as day: magician. And I knew this was not a joke, because that spoken word CD was, even to my doubting neo-masonic ears, a magic fucking spell.

If I say that some people believe in magic, it is like saying some people believe in Communism: the issue remains debatable, the claim adds nothing to your understanding. But to say Alan Moore believes in magic is more like saying that Joseph Stalin believes in the Soviet Union: when you hear him talk, it takes shape behind your eyes, and you realize the iron inevitability of its existence. In Alan Moore’s mind, the existence of magic is no more (or less!) controversial than the existence of the NASA space program: he feels no need to defend it, no need to advance it’s cause. People who don’t believe in it are being pointlessly silly, and will either come around in the end, or won’t, no loss, to each their own, it’s a funny old world.

Alan Moore treats magic as if it continues to exist if you stop believing in it.

But why?

If you’d like to know the answer, you should read this article. If you want to know why I, a reasonably intelligent person, think that he, an unreasonably intelligent one, is worth listening to on the subject, you should read this article.

It's an movingly impassioned and dizzingly erudite plea for reuniting magic with art, and art with magic. The two disciplines (if they really are two) are repeatedly held up as distinct from religion and science, fields born from magic in their own way.

Moore claims that magic is an art of individual subjective experience, which remains inexplicable to science. And claims it artfully enough to be worth reading, but there is a sadness to this kind of talk. “Science can do many things, but it cannot account for X, which is my field’s particular domain!” Well, you have named your terms, and bounded your achievements: your field’s irrelevance will begin on that day when science achieves a better understanding of X.

X has been many things over the years. Celestial cycles. The motions of life. Ethics. It is a few things today, most notably the full accounting of consciousness, which Moore seems to have seized on. He has placed his bet: scientific inquiry will never manage it! Magic will live forever, a king of infinite space bound in a cranial nutshell!

Forgive me if I bet on science in the long run, but for the time being, we're stuck with more than a bit of magic, and it’s still a ripping yarn.

(It’s also a long one, but be sure to read the whole thing, including part II, where you may hear Alan Moore say: “Jean Cocteau be all over D.W. Griffiths’ scrawny Imperial Cyclops ass like a motherfucker!”)

Idealism Friction

2010-11-09T22:56:00.000-05:00

When a dear old friend of your departed sainted mother tells you about how terrible it was that some anonymous wit wrote somewhere on "the internet" that she should not be given any jobs with children "or small animals," it's very difficult to repeat the free speech party line "No one has a right to not have their feelings hurt."

Difficult, but not impossible, it turns out!

But there are some victories no one should be proud of; every person annoyed by the truth is another failure on my part to be sufficiently inoffensive.

I think that reputation management services will be the next growth industry to target the elderly in the way that identity theft protection services did. In the same way, they will be small, fly by night operations of questionable utility, whose reassuring commercials play constantly between network news segments.

Currently Listening To

2010-09-11T19:24:00.000-04:00

An old Radiolab episode, "Words." Convincing scientist argues correspondence between what we call "language" and what we call "thought." Language isn't just a tool for cooperation, but also enables abstract relations. Children of five years can't remember which corner of a room an object was left in based on the color of the walls, or describe it as being "to the right of the blue wall." Descartes was half-right: of course thought is not fundamental to existence, but language is fundamental to identity.

As I hear this, I am tearing through my mother's papers. She wrote constantly. Plans. Idle thoughts. Notes and reminders that she never re-read. The rarest and most wonderful treats: letters that she didn't send, written for conscious communication, because they can actually be understood by another human being.

Those we save, the rest is pulp. It doesn't matter how much of her inheres in them, if it doesn't speak to the rest of us. Half-illegible, whole-unorganized, they served a logical purpose for her in the writing, and an emotional purpose in the refusal to face their accumulation, refusal to abandon her past. Like the rest of us Novitskis, she preferred to face forward and live positively, but regretted almost every decision, every home she abandoned, every friend she lost regular contact with.

In what turned out to be our last month together, she said that her year-long struggle with her own deceased parents' belongings had changed her. After a lifetime of becoming hurt and angry at our insistence of the clear uselessness of the shit that crammed the rooms and hallways of house in Miami, like so much plaque clogging her veins, now (she claimed) she was ready to let go.

"I could clear out that house in a month," she said.

"Yeah, we'll see," my father said, when I told him this. We both laughed, but of course, we didn't see.

We didn't see, and so I'm stuck, when remembering her now, remembering her as the person she had told me she no longer was. Every time before, when my father and I tried to do what we are now doing, we knew that she would do nothing but get in the way. Move herself physically to block our path, manipulate us emotionally to abandon the attempt.

"How could you throw this away," I can hear her exclaiming.

"It's my math homework from the sixth grade."

"Oh, you were such a smart kid, and Ms. Onorati knew it!"

"You don't need to keep this to remember that."

"You'll understand," she would frequently say to try to close the conversation, "when you're older."

We'll see.

gamescriticism.jpg

2010-08-29T10:45:00.000-04:00

Where we're going, we don't need "plans"

2010-08-24T12:51:00.000-04:00

I jokingly told my mother on Sunday, while we were driving from Dutch Flat (look it up) to San Francisco, that I would have to make a blog post with this title soon. I even explained the joke, since she hadn't seen or didn't remember seeing Back to the Future. I further explained what it meant to me personally, though she more or less understood that part, since it was the context the subject had come up: I wanted fewer things tying me to a particular place, to a particular job. I'm selling most of what I own so that I can more effectively bum about for a while. This shocks her, child of a more enlightened time.

Anyway, today she (my mother) is unconscious in a hospital, so to anyone who reads this who I had made some kind of plans with: sorry, the deal's off, the flight's canceled, etc etc.

I try not to let personal tragedies shape my perception of the wider world, but I can't help typing "We are living in the post-plan era."

Bits of Ghost in the Shell I Enjoy Quoting Too Much

2010-08-23T03:51:00.000-04:00

"A lifestyle based on consumption is the ultimate violence against developing countries."

"Your effort to remain what you are is what limits you."

"If you want to play at sniping, you can always shoot an elephant at 500 miles with a miniature cruise missile."

"This room is a Faraday cage."

"Ah, the net is vast and infinite."

"Life perpetuates itself through diversity."

"I can't prove that I am alive. After all, neither modern science nor philosophy can define life."

"Bye bye, terrorist."

Pretort, and bile it inspires

2010-08-13T13:52:00.000-04:00

But who says innovation is dead? Here comes news of a daring new way to monetize live music: sue the people who will record it, before they do, before they can, because the festival hasn't happened yet!

A lot of effort has been put into developing a series of more and more sophisticated legal instruments for siphoning and restricting the flow of money from the designs of things which can be sold (a song can't be sold, but it's most of the design of a CD which can be), at the cost of neglecting the implementations of those designs.

But the implementations are the things with root value, and their sale is the source of the money being contested. If we were to draw music as a food web (and let's do), the things that people buy would be the autotrophs, the foundational organisms that don't need anything but the sun (or the human creative impulse) to grow. Artists graze on these. Publishers graze on them. And then comes the final level, those hoping to be predators or parasites (functionally identical) on top of this edifice, scrambling as high up the trophic ladder as they can.

Maybe they think they make it them strong or beautiful? Large predators are often photogenic, and culturally identified with celebrated qualities. They embody a cruel strength, that takes and does not see fit to give. Like parasites, but with better presence.

The flourishing of corporations built on equally mad pyramid schemes - from the ones that send letters demanding out-of-court file sharing settlements to people concerning whom they had collected no evidence of file sharing, to the ones that collect patents so vaguely worded they might describe the powers of golden age super-heroes so that they can sue every market leader and their uncle on a regular basis - brings out the curmudgeon in me. They can't last: there's too many links in the chain between them and the actual value. Only one thing needs to change to invalidate their model, and they're all going to change. They call it the trophic ladder because the higher you climb, the less stable it gets.

Maybe it's time to found a vegetarianism when it comes to creative work, to avoid giving money to the highly complex publisher-organisms purely on principle, out of concerns for cruelty or sustainability, or even for reasons of mental health, if books on the NYT best-sellers list are found to be less nutritive than those we buy direct from the source.

What Open Source Warfare owes to Open Source Software, and why that debt will be repaid in blood

2010-08-12T03:39:00.001-04:00

I'm happy to no longer be working for a government contractor, because it makes me more comfortable to post whatever falls under the ever-seeking eye of John Robb, OSW maven, which is in this case an article in Wired about the IED countermeasure innovation gap. As Johnny Mnemonic said, "When they think you're technical, go crude."

“I can take $600, go into a bazaar, and make a device,” says one senior Jieddo officer. “And I can tie up $1.2 billion to $2 billion of US money by doing it.”
...

Late one afternoon in April, Llamas shows me the latest device they’ve been working on, just in from Afghanistan. A neatly made plywood box about 8 inches high and 5 inches square, it has a length of replica detonation cord emerging from the base. Llamas pulls the box open, revealing a layer of soft foam and a wooden plunger attached to the lid. When stepped on or driven over, he says, the foam is compressed and the tip of the plunger, which is saturated with a chemical, descends into a chamber at the bottom of the box. That chamber contains a second substance, and when the two chemicals mix, a pyrotechnic reaction ignites the end of the detonation cord, which leads to an explosive charge.

The box is the logical conclusion of years of reverse evolution in insurgent weapons technology. Without a power source, a blasting cap, or a single piece of wire or metal contact, it has no electromagnetic or metallic signature. Linked to a charge mixed up from odorless homemade explosives, packed beneath a dirt road, it would be all but impossible to detect: a Flintstones land mine.

I would say something like "this is the new nature of jihad heroism, to make a cheap and simple thing that will bring your inconceivably out-sized enemy low, to turn centuries of industrial development into a disadvantage"...

...I would say something like that, but only if I was living in an ivory tower that reached the mesosphere. When was the last time heroism meant something else? And what changed?

About ten years ago, I read an article (perhaps even in Wired) that attempted to lay out the case for technology.

Don't laugh! Many intelligent people can be made concerned by new devices that they feel enable behaviors that even you would find distasteful, and hold the technological developments which enabled them guilty, as if they were the direct cause. Telecommunications enables ubiquitous surveillance, so it's a sinister omnipresence. Radio enables Microwave Area-Denial Weaponry, so it's a tool of bloodless oppression. Ammonium nitrate enrichment enables cutting the beaks off factory farm chickens, so it's a font of cruelty, rather than a horn of plenty.

So, for those people, this article calmly explained why many folks feel that the benefits outweigh the drawbacks, or rather, that the old problems being solved outweigh the new ones being created. Rather than enumerate each technogenic complication, in the classical style, a large number of them were gathered into a moderate number of types, raised as objections attributed to the opposite view, and serially dispatched.

Of these, the point that stood out to me, or at least that I still remember with unusual clarity, was that technology disproportionately benefits the rich. New things, such as have never been seen before, cost too much even for most people in the first world, much less most of the world as a whole. So all this internet stuff, for instance, is at best a waste of time, in humanitarian terms. To quote a character from Cryptonomicon (who, just to be clear, was being held up as an idiot): "How many schools will be torn down to build the information superhighway?"

But that isn't the whole story, the article explained. Technology benefits people who can't afford much, or even any of it. When I visit cities where it snows, cheap salt production help me get around. When I live in settlements with other humans, herd immunity protects me from Scarlet Fever.

Most of all: a lot of technological development, rather than making entirely new stuff, makes the stuff we already had much cheaper. So all the brand new fancy things eventually become the tired old commonplaces that anyone can have if they want to, if they have a use for them. Poor folks today have access to things the richest and most powerful people of long-since-past could not have, be it advanced metallurgy or instantaneous long-distance communication.

The author positioned technology not only as a net benefit to the global poor, but even as a disproportionate benefit to them. People with less benefit more from these advances, relative to what they had before, compared to the rest of us, who just get a new toy to misunderstand, be distracted by, and eventually ignore as unfashionable.

So a biologist might have said that rats benefited more from the Age of Sail than Europeans did, because after the humans went to all the trouble to build ships to search out new life and new markets, all the rats had to do was hitch a ride. And like the biologist, the author meant to be even-handed, not patronizing. "It's even better for you than for us, and man is it great for us!" he cries.

"You yourself have said it," as Christ said when asked if he was the King of the Jews, at the climax of the great western terrorist monomyth. Unless you enforce widespread technical illiteracy (extant techniques: patents, copyrights, reifications of "Consumers" and "Providers") or provide widespread contentment, trickle-down technology will eventually empower the bottom of the pyramid to be right murderous bastards to you. They're already used to going without; now they just need to cut you off, to make you go without, make you extend your reach in uncomfortable ways.

In the Napoleonic metaphor, they live in Russian winter all the time, and all they need to do to win is to pull you in - or, if you're that stupid, to have you follow them in - rather than let you crouch in a bordering country lobbing cruise missiles at them (in which case neither you nor they win, but we'll see whether we can ever return to the blessed time of the US not needing to invade anything just to be as rich and powerful as we know we deserve to be).

You were probably around back then, probably heard all that bombast of there being a new era coming, of ideas and ideals, the electronic frontier that would level all the steep and awful oppressions of the Old Ways? It didn't work out that way, because though these prophets were doing all this complaining, were nearly professional complainers, they had nothing to complain about (so the modern internet is their legacy in more ways than one). The world wasn't going to change to the way they thought they wanted, because they didn't know from want. They didn't know from need.

But I still congratulate them, because they paved the way for everyone else, and that some of these elses turn around and use their sophisticated free software & entertainment distribution systems to trade ideas on how to cause maximum property damage and loss of life, again and again, until their demands are met...well, that's what the prophets of information technology said they wanted! Democratization, freedom, an end to the staid networks of power that they could feel pushing them into locker after locker, at their meaningless school, at their degrading job, with every good toy that got a warning label and every good show that Fox canceled.

What they (including I) wanted was trivial. What they (meaning only they) have achieved is not: a burgeoning population hungry to take and use their every good idea.

As an American, I'm contractually obligated to believe in some version of the second amendment (the Constitution is now muddling through its third century, and like Christianity in that stage of its life, heresies are flourishing). I propose this perspective to other Americans: that people destroy our butter when we use our guns on them is a good thing, because it is the second amendment writ large across the face of the world. Tyranny, even our own, becomes more and more expensive as technology develops. Which is good! Hegemony is tough, to say nothing of being morally fraught.

And this formulation should be recognizable to Open Source advocates. Every advance of Linux raises the bar, next to which there is a sign which reads "Your product must be at least this good to compete" and another which says "Your product can be at least this good, for free." The cost to enter the market lowers, but the cost to dominate the market raises.

Like an IED, no matter what you do with Linux, no matter how you refine it, it still follows its original purpose. It still expresses the will which fed and animated its originating phenomenon, to the point that we needed an acronym for it. They aren't "bombs," and it isn't "a Unix-like Operating System." They are both a kind of ordinance aimed at the heart of overfunded, overextended competitors. Easy targets, in other words.

Let the lessons of Open Source be two-fold: always celebrate the achievements of the like-minded, and never let yourself become an easy target.

Welcome to the future we wanted.