Is reality overrated? I'd have to say so, although it surely does matter what you mean by "real". A long time ago I remember reading some line in The Razor's Edge about how if you could believe something then it would be real, but you'd have to really believe it, like the ground beneath your feet. In the context of that book, or of that age, it did seem to be a powerful statement, although I'm certain it just sounds fluffy here.
Of course at the tender age when I and everyone else was reading Somerset Maugham, I hadn't yet experienced insanity of the sort where you really do inhabit a world of your own creation. Only once, thank goodness, have I been hoist by my own narrative petard out of sensible reality. It wasn't fun like drugs, although there was a certain similarity, I'd have to guess.
I'm pretty nutty in the choices that I make, but lots of people actually think that I'm the paradigm of solid grip on reality when it comes to making sense of what I interact with. Honest!
Sure, I have lots of trouble with career and women choices, but who does that distinguish me from except for movie stars and really rich people, and hasn't anyone ever watched Citizen Kane?
Just look around you and you'll see lots of love affairs defined by irresistible looks, or aspects or whatever else can support projections of fantasy love. You'll see people reaching after fantasy homes and kids too. I wonder if it works for them. We've given a real shot now at material comfort to more people than ever before in the history of mankind. But we sure haven't brought reality up for the masses of mankind.
As a pretty left-leaning thinker it isn't much of a stretch for me to blame the ever more massive immiseration of the population of our planet on the cultural uprootings accomplished by the blue-jean imperialism of America the Beautiful.
But if I fall off the leftward edge into a kind of Libertarian idiocy, I also know that there is something pretty dreamy about what we've represented. Lots of people happily leave behind their magical belief systems in favor of something so demonstrably real. Ordinary people living in virtual castles and driving cars. Based on engineering can-doism based in turn on science.
The extremist flag wavers want to have us as innocent as our tear-streaming songs about ourselves. The other ones, like me, want us to wake up to how much actual and deliberate harm we've caused to nascent people-power in the name of our corporate interests. Think Pinochet, and Iran Contra, and then think CIA.
But there is one thing undeniable about this true American Dream. To the extent that we base our gettings together on science, there really is some reality to the good part. That's the basic horror right there in so-called Creation Science, since there is no way short of coercion to get people to agree on what is so patently a crazy notion. That all the evidence for earth's true age was planted by a trickster God? That's just nuts!
Scientific agreements are nothing more or less than the ones with the greatest chance of getting the most people to agree. And that right there is a truly wonderful thing. No matter, truly, that there can be collateral damage along the way; when what we agree to falls a little bit short since it's always still a work in progress.
And too bad that things like politics and economics can't be so grounded in science. I mean really, way too bad!
For sure the one thing that absolutely must drop out from scientific reality is the possibility of a personal God. Or does that just throw a baby out with some bathwater . . . .
I'm pretty sure that one may be a difference without a distinction. If scientific thinking limits you to the very razor's edge of what it is about yourself which is distinct from everything else out there - if that's all the room there is for choice, then OK that's also all the room there is for God's intervention too. I'm not sure the problem survives the thought experiment. That's really plenty of room.
Let's say, just for instance, that pikk.com tanks. Hey, it could happen! But maybe someone likes the name and offers us a million dollars. Then would we have done all that hard work just as a kind of lipstick on our pig. Like makeup for a Saturday Night Date, would it make any difference how the connection got made?
I haven't a clue most any minute of my life what I really want the next. But I do know what I'm missing, and it's almost always people. My sweetheart, my daughters, my friends. The rest is so I have that space for the missing, I guess; so that I can have some security against the daily buffetings of life.
That's what compelled me to rebuild my old sailboat too. It was the metaphor, I guess. A warm cabin down below in the face of stormy weather. It's where I could and would and did feel most alive. No need to really brave the wildest oceans, just a taste was all I needed. And I did love it best alone.
Now I can easily imagine lots of improvements to life on planet Earth. If we'd all stop clambering over one anothers' backs to get to some very top, we could dial back our load on the planet and begin actually to enjoy one another. We really could.
But in the meantime, in almost precisely the way that our now so antiquated automobiles allowed the redefinition of our landscapes, there is a more powerful transformation afoot which can really wreck havoc to our collective reality.
At the very farthest reaches of our collective scientific agreements must be by very definition the realm of physics. That's what digs down to the really hard stuff, upon which everything else must ride. We all know that physics is almost done and the really interesting stuff now will come from the life sciences; genetics, bioengineering, bioinformatics, that sort of thing. Maybe nano-technology if you can stand Neal Stephenson any more.
But at their root, these are all what Thomas Kuhn called "normal science" which fills in the gaps to our theoretical picture of the world. These are not paradigm shifting realms unless and until they come up with new mechanisms to understand mind, say, or inheritance of characteristics, say, or how to assert perfect corrections to our imperfections.
But so far as they are mechanisms, they will still depend on physics, and anyhow it's the nature of paradigms that they are pretty soup-to-nuts. So, when the life sciences folks "discover" that mind really does matter, the same thing will have happened in physics. It's just a Somerset Maugham chicken/egg problem to which there's no real way out other than to shift the whole darned paradigm.
So now on our quantum edge, as I keep saying over and over and over until you feel like you're hitting your head on bricks (I know, I know), waiting excitedly for our newest particle accelerator to find the last one, it really is time to wake up and smell the, um, delusions? I wonder what delusions smell like. Let's smell the coffee!
So, do this little thought experiment. Ask yourself what links together all the little pieces which make up the story of your life. If you're a little bit too sophisticated like, ahem, I am, you'll already know that there are only constructed narratives of your life's history. You can prove this easily enough by rubbing off some of your memories of yourself with those who know and love you.
I would never go so far as some nutty post-modernists, who would say that all reality is constructed, leading up to the really big Grand Narrative of Normal Science, which is really just a tale of raw power. I would never do that. I am way too tied to reality, as I've already told you.
But anyhow, even the parts of your own story which won't rub off - the ones which stick in every single version, the skeleton if you will - this narrative frame still depends on all sorts of emotional connections being made. Even if mom was just a flash in the pan, dad probably liked her for at least a moment. And someone had to care for you before you could learn to speak (which "they" now find out starts already in the womb, duh!).
And the words you use are all about getting together with other minds. The shouting and warnings and pushings back, these are all things which define who you interact with, and then they in turn define you too.
And that right there is a whole slew of non-physical reality, well, unless you are just a bag of invasive germs because you can't stop wanting to have physical contact all the time with everyone, which is perfectly understandable, but a little gross.
I mean if everyone remains available that way, then we're all just beasts, right? Doesn't a kind of sameness come over every connection as if we ourselves were just undifferentiated sub-atomic particles? Well, obviously, I can't speak for you.
But anyhow, what do you really care about? Would you like those things to be separated from reality? Can you live on only your dreams?
It's long since plenty clear that at the very most extreme reaches of our abstract thinking, we can't really tell if reality is hard or just a kind of probability wave propogated in literal nothingness. We even have real experiments which prove that you can't pin down the smallest particles - that all you can do is approximate their position until you collapse them into reality by rubbing them off on some of their partners. That's called perception.
But until that happens, these sub-atomics (funny name, that) only exist as a cloud. And that cloud, while real, is also truly conceptual until the moment of its perception. I'm not making this stuff up, it's in any physics text book. The probability cloud quite literally cannot be perceived, but it's reality is trivial (well, relatively) to prove. It's not in your mind, but it's also not quite in reality. It's a kind of conceptual reality that's 'out there.'
So if, at the limits - at the razor's edge - there is a kind of conceptual reality which is provably not "in" the mind, but "in" reality, then one might wonder about the connections between and among the pieces of this conceptual reality. If, by definition, there can't be a physical, perceptual connection, then perhaps there is some other kind. Perhaps emotions are also provably 'out there.'
They are certainly harder to measure, these emotions. They don't have any kind of physical distance metric, right? But as a human being, I know you know what I'm talking about. And at the limits of our physical understanding of the cosmos, what if it did turn out that these subatomic particles, which after all provably can't possibly inhabit the same physical universe as one another, because they don't even perceptually exist yet, are only connectable by a kind of emotional relation.
I think you'd then have to say that emotion really is out there in the cosmos, as the kind of improbability glue which holds all this non-perceptual reality together.
That's good enough for me to count as a kind of personal God. You know, as a kind of aspirational entity which doesn't, you know, actually have to, like, really, um, exist.
So leaving that big can of worms alone, I sure do wish you could see how this changes everything. I sure do wish you could see that the gravity-hadron - the "force-carrying" particle which might put the final nail into the standard physical theory's coffin, ahem, is purest chimera. It's both a figment of our imagination and real, and while it might be findable, we still might not be able to find it, by virtue of cosmic twists of fate.
I'm fine either way. Gravity and physical love make another fine distinction without a difference for me. You can't really have one without the other, I mean physical and emotional love, at least not beyond a single life-time if you want to be a nun or priest or something else really out there. Or maybe you never even want to see the kids you sire? Well, I guess you could have test-tube babies certified high IQ or something, like the magic synthetic oil which makes my car run forever. I wonder, would you have a trade-in policy on those kids? If there were some sort of genetic mixup?
I'm glad for the stuggle with and against my physical impulses. I'm glad that science never ends. But most of all I'm glad for love, and for that I don't really care what turns you on, gentle reader, I really don't. Because it won't be real unless it's real for you too.
OK, so I do care. You're wrecking my cosmos by your not caring, and damn it, I'm rather attached to it, my little cosmos!
Saturday, November 7, 2009
Friday, November 6, 2009
Pikk.com Launches!
Press Release November 6, 2009
For Immediate Release
Buffalo, New York
Pikk.com (http://www.pikk.com) officially launches today and offers a platform for users to take sides on important and not-so-important issues of the day. Pikk works like Digg where users submit stories to vote on, but gives users two choices, such as "Smart or Dumb" or "Yes or No." Pikk can be used to ask questions, get opinions on stories of many different varieties, and bloggers and publishers can use Pikk to embed polls in their web pages. The most voted on stories make the front page, so interesting stories naturally rise to the top.
Pikk also offers social features, such as allowing your friends to see how you voted. Friends can send messages back and forth to each other and discuss how they voted on different stories, and nudge each other to vote on stories of interest.
Submitting a story on Pikk is as simple as filling out a form, and there are a few useful utilities available, including a tool bar add-in that allows users to easily submit stories from their web browser, and a blogging plug-in that automatically adds a poll to blog posts.
Inquiries can be directed to Rick Harrington, EVP Product Development
For Immediate Release
Buffalo, New York
Pikk.com (http://www.pikk.com) officially launches today and offers a platform for users to take sides on important and not-so-important issues of the day. Pikk works like Digg where users submit stories to vote on, but gives users two choices, such as "Smart or Dumb" or "Yes or No." Pikk can be used to ask questions, get opinions on stories of many different varieties, and bloggers and publishers can use Pikk to embed polls in their web pages. The most voted on stories make the front page, so interesting stories naturally rise to the top.
Pikk also offers social features, such as allowing your friends to see how you voted. Friends can send messages back and forth to each other and discuss how they voted on different stories, and nudge each other to vote on stories of interest.
Submitting a story on Pikk is as simple as filling out a form, and there are a few useful utilities available, including a tool bar add-in that allows users to easily submit stories from their web browser, and a blogging plug-in that automatically adds a poll to blog posts.
Inquiries can be directed to Rick Harrington, EVP Product Development
Gene Patents, Healthcare Debates, and Information Technology
I just watched David Koepsell up on Grit TV do an excellent interview about the important questions which must be posed before we continue to allow existing patent practices to govern incentives for genetic research. New technologies may require new laws, as we so lately learned about our financial economy! Laws conspire for our common good, and we really wouldn't want to live without them.
Genes continue to be isolated and their "purposes" catalogued, even as the science of genetics poses new questions about any strict code-to-expression correspondence between genotypes and their phenotypic expression. So at least one of my problems is that the thing getting patented already has a problematical relation to its potential uses.
I think if you patent a light bulb, and I want to use it in my Easy-Bake Oven, then I owe you a royalty, if I don't have to buy the light bulbs from you. But if I use the light bulb's glass bulb, say, to make my mini-terrarium, then I think I can go ahead and patent that terrarium and owe you absolutely nothing in return.
Patents on genes are based on a temporary theoretical construct which would have them actually relate-able, directly, to their uses in possible treatments. Now these treatments, perhaps, ought to be patentable, but not each and every ingredient in them surely.
My instincts are with Dr. Koepsell that there is something fundamentally wrong, and against both the spirit and the letter of patent law, with granting monopolies on all products which can be created based on something each of us contains naturally, in our genetic encodings. Not only is it like patenting gravity, but it's like patenting gravity for the purpose of doing hopscotch.
What scintillates in my overtaxed brain though, is that it may also be wrong to parade "victims" of patent monopolies when the very thing these victims seem barricaded away from might not have existed if the owner of the patent wasn't allowed to claim exclusivity in its development. I think that might be the core of the defense argument in favor of patenting genes.
We're talking life and death here, but just because you die in the first days of a stupid war, is your death any more just if they turn it into a good war after your fact? If you get polio before the vaccine, then is there more tragedy because you could have avoided it if only you'd come in contact later? I guess it feels that way, but we shouldn't make too much of emotional appeals against the facts, right?
I can be as hard headed as the next guy about tough breaks. But I think Dr. Koepsell is on the right track that we really need to look beyond the surface of these debates, beyond the application of the law as it currently exists, to the assumptions underneath these laws.
There should be no question that if money is available in one direction, then people won't be looking in some other direction. That's the gold rush mentality referred to in Koepsell's book. If the money weren't there, there might be a rush in some other direction.
In the public interest, we might want to guide things in directions other from the ones which have the most profit potential. Or we might want certain things to remain protected within our commons, even though there is no natural law which puts them there. Things like highways, parks, the view.
Especially if and when it becomes the case that private profits come along with free rides on publicly born "externalities", we might have to make public adjustments to how patents are granted. Such things as mining public lands, or bringing carbon dioxide out to breath along with the fossil fuel you mine need to be brought inside the price the public charges for the franchise.
We know that there are plenty of diseases which just will never make the corporate top ten because there is either too little incidence or the people affected are beyond some safety barrier of race or geography or, yes, poverty.
Patent monopolies are comfortable when they are granted over widgets of want - things we really don't need, but which would make our lives nice if we could afford them. Granting patents over needs feels a lot like enclosing our commons, and too bad for the peasants which used to graze their cattle there.
Well, so what if we could step ahead in time a beat, to where either all the basic miseries of life have been remedied, and the only tragic deaths are the ones where someone wasn't looking when the train was coming. Up against this fictional time we'd have to pose, for certain, a dystopian alternative where the miseries have been remedied only for those who can afford them, and everyone else is left out in the cold.
From either of these futures, we should be able to look back at the current arrangements for healthcare, say, and find in them something as medieval and grotesque as the insane asylums where we used to "care" for the deranged among us. We will see extravagant and medieval-seeming procedures offered against theoretic certainties of happy endings.
Where once those endings were up in heaven, and therefore we could concern ourselves only with the souls we preserved whatever their screaming present, we now have brought those pleasures seeming down to earth. With strategic silicone implants or chemical pumps for erectile blood, we can even give you the simulation of perpetual youth.
When nothing in the end can really protect us from the certainty of life's ultimate, well, ending.
The dystopian only looks that way because of problems with distribution. And these problems in turn only exist because we hold out the promise of something better. And that something better is only available to the very wealthy. Who, in turn, eat away more of the commons in resources and expertise and, well, care.
I would say that we have already passed that point where it can be demonstrated that most of the impact to collective longevity can and should and must be attributed to nutrition and education and lifestyle and environment. That no matter how much more we spend, we will not change the overall statistics any appreciable amount, and in fact the more we've been spending the more we might be moving in the wrong direction.
In America, we already slip from top spots in longevity, infant mortality, life-style morbidity; and our intense mis-schooling drops the bottom out from educational outcomes. Might it be that in that many aspects of our arrangements the whole is now being destroyed in the interests of a very few?
I'd say there's pretty good evidence.
I don't doubt that there are and will continue to be wonderful and massive paybacks for medical breakthroughs which save lives. These will have no statistical relevance to the overall longevity of the population, unless by funding them, we ignore the less profitable but more impactful changes we should and must make for the good of the whole.
That is to say that fixing the few who suffer from trainwreck diseases, or imagine that they do when old age gets likened to a trainwreck, will not have much impact on the statistics of the whole, and also that fixing these few cannot be done at the cost of the wellbeing of the many who are otherwise healthy.
In the arena of energy, we are slowly coming to realize that cheap oil is subsidized by the potentially catastrophic externalities of global warming, perpetual warfare, and good old fashioned pollution, all of which must be born on the back of the general public.
There is some reason for hope that Information Technology will be both capable to and get deployed for the purpose of bringing some of these externalities into the cost of energy at the point of its purchase. So, you will pay less at night to keep excess capacity humming, and way more for things which carry massive public costs on their backs. And you will be glad to do so because if the price is accurate, then the overall cost to each is brought way down in line with reality.
The derivatives gurus won't get filthy rich anymore at the cost of overall collapse. The owners of the mines won't get filthy rich at the cost of everyone's environment. The sick rich people won't make plastic surgeons filthy rich at the cost of everyone's healthcare expertise, and the plastic surgeons can be re-deployed to help the burn victims and sufferers of genetic disease who really need them.
Simply because the primary care physicians earn the most of all. As do the schoolteachers. In my dreams, of course.
We become jaded by now that there are any economic arrangements which can assure these outcomes. Liberal youth reliably become conservative codgers after we wake up to the fact that grand schemes never work. A bit of greed is fine, I'll agree, so long as the entire house of cards doesn't collapse. Until it does.
Unlike many of my wealthy compeers, I feel pretty optimistic. I think there's actually less corruption in government than there used to be. I think business people tend in the direction of wanting to do good as well. I do think we have a problem with size, as I've indicated plenty of times elsewhere. But I hardly think it's hopeless.
Obama is the first master of the television age. I think he's given the lie to the inevitability of actors becoming presidents, though we still have to work on the beautiful people part which got its start with JFK. These morality plays get writ too large, with Mr. Nixon looking his ghoulish part against the Howdy Doody of Reagan-Bush.
Information Technology will play its part, just as soon as we liberate it from dreams of artificial intelligence. The computer has never been a very good metaphor for the emotive mind. Real minds make all sorts of choices among background noise, and pay attention according to felt tendencies. This is what determines our collective plotlines too, and so we have, right now, the final chance to become authors of our own lives.
So, imagine this: The meter at your house will help you to set the time to warm your heatsink. You can do it yourself with windmill or solar panels, and pump some back into the grid when you're feeling flush. The closer you are to the point of generation, the cheaper the price can be, since that much less gets lost along the heated transmission lines. And ultimately the entire grid will rearrange and reorganize itself according to what makes the most sense.
The same can and will happen with medical technologies. Some people will always want to make frankenstein monsters of themselves, for fear of losing love. Most people, when provided the right information, will understand that love is not transmitted that way, and that its simulation is pretty short lived too. Expensive treatments can be put in some context, and provided always to the train-wreck victims among us. It will incrementally cost almost nil to each of us.
This, I think, is a future worth aiming for. I have no doubt that one day soon we'll all collectively realize that so-called "single payer" healthcare is the only way to go. We will get over the ridiculous notion that healthcare can be construed as a "good" just like other widgety things. And we'll stop altogether granting patents over what is common. No doubt at all.
That day will come when Google, Inc., has been reabsorbed back into our commons where it belongs. Meantime, they're on the right track, with cloud technologies for medical records, investments in the smart grid, and plays to de-anonymize you. It's almost like what government should be doing.
Genes continue to be isolated and their "purposes" catalogued, even as the science of genetics poses new questions about any strict code-to-expression correspondence between genotypes and their phenotypic expression. So at least one of my problems is that the thing getting patented already has a problematical relation to its potential uses.
I think if you patent a light bulb, and I want to use it in my Easy-Bake Oven, then I owe you a royalty, if I don't have to buy the light bulbs from you. But if I use the light bulb's glass bulb, say, to make my mini-terrarium, then I think I can go ahead and patent that terrarium and owe you absolutely nothing in return.
Patents on genes are based on a temporary theoretical construct which would have them actually relate-able, directly, to their uses in possible treatments. Now these treatments, perhaps, ought to be patentable, but not each and every ingredient in them surely.
My instincts are with Dr. Koepsell that there is something fundamentally wrong, and against both the spirit and the letter of patent law, with granting monopolies on all products which can be created based on something each of us contains naturally, in our genetic encodings. Not only is it like patenting gravity, but it's like patenting gravity for the purpose of doing hopscotch.
What scintillates in my overtaxed brain though, is that it may also be wrong to parade "victims" of patent monopolies when the very thing these victims seem barricaded away from might not have existed if the owner of the patent wasn't allowed to claim exclusivity in its development. I think that might be the core of the defense argument in favor of patenting genes.
We're talking life and death here, but just because you die in the first days of a stupid war, is your death any more just if they turn it into a good war after your fact? If you get polio before the vaccine, then is there more tragedy because you could have avoided it if only you'd come in contact later? I guess it feels that way, but we shouldn't make too much of emotional appeals against the facts, right?
I can be as hard headed as the next guy about tough breaks. But I think Dr. Koepsell is on the right track that we really need to look beyond the surface of these debates, beyond the application of the law as it currently exists, to the assumptions underneath these laws.
There should be no question that if money is available in one direction, then people won't be looking in some other direction. That's the gold rush mentality referred to in Koepsell's book. If the money weren't there, there might be a rush in some other direction.
In the public interest, we might want to guide things in directions other from the ones which have the most profit potential. Or we might want certain things to remain protected within our commons, even though there is no natural law which puts them there. Things like highways, parks, the view.
Especially if and when it becomes the case that private profits come along with free rides on publicly born "externalities", we might have to make public adjustments to how patents are granted. Such things as mining public lands, or bringing carbon dioxide out to breath along with the fossil fuel you mine need to be brought inside the price the public charges for the franchise.
We know that there are plenty of diseases which just will never make the corporate top ten because there is either too little incidence or the people affected are beyond some safety barrier of race or geography or, yes, poverty.
Patent monopolies are comfortable when they are granted over widgets of want - things we really don't need, but which would make our lives nice if we could afford them. Granting patents over needs feels a lot like enclosing our commons, and too bad for the peasants which used to graze their cattle there.
Well, so what if we could step ahead in time a beat, to where either all the basic miseries of life have been remedied, and the only tragic deaths are the ones where someone wasn't looking when the train was coming. Up against this fictional time we'd have to pose, for certain, a dystopian alternative where the miseries have been remedied only for those who can afford them, and everyone else is left out in the cold.
From either of these futures, we should be able to look back at the current arrangements for healthcare, say, and find in them something as medieval and grotesque as the insane asylums where we used to "care" for the deranged among us. We will see extravagant and medieval-seeming procedures offered against theoretic certainties of happy endings.
Where once those endings were up in heaven, and therefore we could concern ourselves only with the souls we preserved whatever their screaming present, we now have brought those pleasures seeming down to earth. With strategic silicone implants or chemical pumps for erectile blood, we can even give you the simulation of perpetual youth.
When nothing in the end can really protect us from the certainty of life's ultimate, well, ending.
The dystopian only looks that way because of problems with distribution. And these problems in turn only exist because we hold out the promise of something better. And that something better is only available to the very wealthy. Who, in turn, eat away more of the commons in resources and expertise and, well, care.
I would say that we have already passed that point where it can be demonstrated that most of the impact to collective longevity can and should and must be attributed to nutrition and education and lifestyle and environment. That no matter how much more we spend, we will not change the overall statistics any appreciable amount, and in fact the more we've been spending the more we might be moving in the wrong direction.
In America, we already slip from top spots in longevity, infant mortality, life-style morbidity; and our intense mis-schooling drops the bottom out from educational outcomes. Might it be that in that many aspects of our arrangements the whole is now being destroyed in the interests of a very few?
I'd say there's pretty good evidence.
I don't doubt that there are and will continue to be wonderful and massive paybacks for medical breakthroughs which save lives. These will have no statistical relevance to the overall longevity of the population, unless by funding them, we ignore the less profitable but more impactful changes we should and must make for the good of the whole.
That is to say that fixing the few who suffer from trainwreck diseases, or imagine that they do when old age gets likened to a trainwreck, will not have much impact on the statistics of the whole, and also that fixing these few cannot be done at the cost of the wellbeing of the many who are otherwise healthy.
In the arena of energy, we are slowly coming to realize that cheap oil is subsidized by the potentially catastrophic externalities of global warming, perpetual warfare, and good old fashioned pollution, all of which must be born on the back of the general public.
There is some reason for hope that Information Technology will be both capable to and get deployed for the purpose of bringing some of these externalities into the cost of energy at the point of its purchase. So, you will pay less at night to keep excess capacity humming, and way more for things which carry massive public costs on their backs. And you will be glad to do so because if the price is accurate, then the overall cost to each is brought way down in line with reality.
The derivatives gurus won't get filthy rich anymore at the cost of overall collapse. The owners of the mines won't get filthy rich at the cost of everyone's environment. The sick rich people won't make plastic surgeons filthy rich at the cost of everyone's healthcare expertise, and the plastic surgeons can be re-deployed to help the burn victims and sufferers of genetic disease who really need them.
Simply because the primary care physicians earn the most of all. As do the schoolteachers. In my dreams, of course.
We become jaded by now that there are any economic arrangements which can assure these outcomes. Liberal youth reliably become conservative codgers after we wake up to the fact that grand schemes never work. A bit of greed is fine, I'll agree, so long as the entire house of cards doesn't collapse. Until it does.
Unlike many of my wealthy compeers, I feel pretty optimistic. I think there's actually less corruption in government than there used to be. I think business people tend in the direction of wanting to do good as well. I do think we have a problem with size, as I've indicated plenty of times elsewhere. But I hardly think it's hopeless.
Obama is the first master of the television age. I think he's given the lie to the inevitability of actors becoming presidents, though we still have to work on the beautiful people part which got its start with JFK. These morality plays get writ too large, with Mr. Nixon looking his ghoulish part against the Howdy Doody of Reagan-Bush.
Information Technology will play its part, just as soon as we liberate it from dreams of artificial intelligence. The computer has never been a very good metaphor for the emotive mind. Real minds make all sorts of choices among background noise, and pay attention according to felt tendencies. This is what determines our collective plotlines too, and so we have, right now, the final chance to become authors of our own lives.
So, imagine this: The meter at your house will help you to set the time to warm your heatsink. You can do it yourself with windmill or solar panels, and pump some back into the grid when you're feeling flush. The closer you are to the point of generation, the cheaper the price can be, since that much less gets lost along the heated transmission lines. And ultimately the entire grid will rearrange and reorganize itself according to what makes the most sense.
The same can and will happen with medical technologies. Some people will always want to make frankenstein monsters of themselves, for fear of losing love. Most people, when provided the right information, will understand that love is not transmitted that way, and that its simulation is pretty short lived too. Expensive treatments can be put in some context, and provided always to the train-wreck victims among us. It will incrementally cost almost nil to each of us.
This, I think, is a future worth aiming for. I have no doubt that one day soon we'll all collectively realize that so-called "single payer" healthcare is the only way to go. We will get over the ridiculous notion that healthcare can be construed as a "good" just like other widgety things. And we'll stop altogether granting patents over what is common. No doubt at all.
That day will come when Google, Inc., has been reabsorbed back into our commons where it belongs. Meantime, they're on the right track, with cloud technologies for medical records, investments in the smart grid, and plays to de-anonymize you. It's almost like what government should be doing.
Monday, November 2, 2009
This is the Day
My Day. This is my day. I woke up an hour early, squandering the extra hour I was granted yesterday at the close of silly "daylight savings." I crunched across the frozen grass, facing the full moon, overhung by twinkling stars which would not be flooded out. I gathered in my load of firewood, and now the house is warm again.
Outside, toward the road from my garage, is the cocoon from which I molted over 25 years ago now. My old wooden boat which has sat under tattered cover these last 6 or 7 years. I'd thought that I could or would find the time to complete its reconstruction. But my work days grew overlong, and my weekends were full of shuttling daughters back and forth to their weekday home in Buffalo nearly two hours away by car.
Eventually, the ambition was worn away, and now I would really like only to give the boat away. Craig's List, that beautifully primitive site, brings me surprising numbers of passionate wooden boat enthusiasts, but I fear none of them will take my burden from me. Perhaps my passionate descriptions of this boat's qualities, which I want them to have for free, are that far too improbable. I fear I shall have to hire someone with a chainsaw.
And I still do remember living aboard well into the coldest winter on Connecticut's record. Waking to my own frozen breath, and racing then to get the tiny coal stove cheering red again before the stiffening pain in fingers and toes would overwhelm me.
Sometimes the wind would reverse the flow down the far-too-short chimney stack, and I would be choking from impossible fumes. Sometimes the early arriving mechanic at the boatyard would run down the dock to see which boat had caught fire at the root of all that black smoke. Most mornings I would win the battle, and then sit back with rough percolated cowboy coffee and another unfiltered cigarette to start my day.
I loved the rocking. I hoped for storms. There was a small propellor suspended under my hull to keep the frozen Connecticut River at some remove from this eggshell which protected my tiny envelope of warmth. It sent up unfrozen water which gave my sleep a gentle burbling rocking even without any wind.
That was when I started to write. One day when the ice was broken up by howling winds and rain, and I had to go out in bare feet to push the block away that had wedged itself between my boat and the much larger one next dock. I still remember standing on my bowsprit, the rain so hard that it ran over my toes on deck. I remember waking up.
I was at some limit then as now, beyond which there had to be something different. I went below and started writing. I didn't stop for very many hours. I didn't stop until I'd actually solved, through writing, the puzzle in my brain. I hadn't expected that at all. I hadn't even been aware that I'd been praying.
Poor Peter, awakened at maybe 3 AM. I'd thought somehow it was a more reasonable hour, but he could see that I needed in. Magically, he set me up with bed and word-processor; one among a very few then on the planet I'm pretty sure.
And then I went slowly back to sleep across the years of marriage and teaching and a little bit of leadership. Very little. I knew that what I'd discovered was the very same thing that all writers discover only in their writing. I spent a fair amount of time then, reading. I knew that I had and have none of that talent which true writers have. I am more the scientist, but the burden to write out in scientific prose that thing which I discovered was still further beyond me than the more artistic style of writing I still so much admire.
I have been that confident that someone else more talented and harder working, would express in better words than those I had found to cobble together, what it still is that needs to be said out loud.
But now, here I am, still absurdly holding on to the shuckings from my awakening. You know, I've sailed that boat in storms and wind which make me shudder still though they didn't at the time. I've had all the life-long pleasures that so many toil after, and feel that they were all granted to me, very nearly without cost at all. This makes me feel blessed, and hardly proud. OK, I'm proud beyond words of my two daughters, but I credit their Mom with that.
And here I am again, without ability to carry on in my current manner. And in the meantime, as if for my very own purposes, this weblike cloud has cocooned our very earth which promises also to transform into its butterfly promise.
And though there are many many authors now, and filmmakers and poets and musicians and more who would present the world and do that very same insight which I had that day, they present as does my friend and former student at his Subversive Theatre, to a diminutive audience of those few who've already seen their light. Still Pete Seeger strolls along with banjo, awaiting the moment serenely when his fingers cannot pluck.
But I search and cannot find my simple insight. I have even had search engines built for my very purpose, and there is nothing out there saying this terribly simple thing. So I must and shall pick back up my thread, and try it all over and over again.
This is the day the cocoon breaks apart, my dearest reader. This is the day when light pours through that crack. (this is the first sunny day the whole darned summer, it almost seems) This is the day, entering into winter, when the peepers perversely sing because there is no more time to wait for the springtime warmth.
I have nothing other than crudest words. My tools are poorly made and cheap. My boat also should not have sailed this long (take her, please!).
But before that large Hadron collider wastes its breath, I must tell you again and again and again that there is no further need to look in that particular direction for more answers. I have no opinion, by the way, about what will get discovered when that collider finally runs. I only know what already has been.
I have no desire to pull any rugs out from under world-class scientists who are my truest heroes all. I have a far simpler desire, to outline what has already resolved itself into my view, so that you may see it too.
This is not some new conjuring from nothing of something there only in my designing mind. I have no inventive powers. This is a paradigm shifting, properly, which will place into better perspective all the scientific labors which we still must bring to bear on life's issue. And I'm very afraid that there is not a moment to lose.
But I am no longer terrified.
The thing is simply this: that mind and matter both must be seen to coexist, neither one nor the other taking precedence.
There has been much misconstruing of the physics of quantum electrodynamics (I've always wanted to throw that term around, but quantum mechanics would work just as well) to promote or refute the notion that the measuring mind has actual impact on what gets measured.
That's wrong. That's a misconstruing of the problem of Schroedinger's cat. It is not our perception which collapses the probability wave. It is the rubbing together of all such waves, such that they already exist, these supposed particles or strings, in the conspiring together of so unthinkably many of them. One alone would fill and be the entire cosmos. But one alone could exist only in some mind.
We have brought our minds to the very brink of abstraction now, which is itself an enactment of insanity, to determine what in essence, minimally, must be the smallest unindividuated parts to the cosmos in which we find ourselves. We hope and pray that we do not find a mere figment of our imaginings. That we are not left hopelessly in charge of our reality. Even as so many of us still fight to take over God's prerogatives. Especially those who say they worship at that Name.
To be sure, I am no believer in any God that can be named. So don't get worried that I would like to spring on you some new religious fanaticism. I am talking purest science here, of the sort which requires no new experimentation, but which, in proper theory, resolves all the data which we already fully have in our possession.
This is the day when I must call the realtor, the lawyer, the water test company and order up my storage pod, so this is the day beyond which I will have no more time to write.
Just as on that day those many years ago now, when I had run through all my money. When I had spent perhaps a week with seemingly terminal diarrhea and vomitting, sleeping in the hull in its cradle up on land in the boatyard among all the other abandoned husks. It was toward the end of the summer and everyone else with viable boats had been sailing the full long season. I would sneak out each night to empty my body's stinking load.
And in the morning white-haired Nick, whose hair had turned that way one single night in Viet Nam, would climb my ladder to see if I was still breathing. He would later agree to come out sailing, and I consider it my proudest moment that, while heeled over with waves coming in over our rails, he never did panic although he'd said he would.
And then finally, they nearly dropped it, lowering my boat into the small creek from maybe 50 feet in the air, or so it seemed. The old crane had a clutch worn shiny, and it would slip and catch, in mockery of my heart. The water poured in through the stuffing box which I had neglected to tighten.
And then we motored out, Dad and I - he had driven to Connecticut from Buffalo from some truly strange compulsion, since there was only a shaking head in response to my ridiculous project - to pass under the low railroad bridge as the tide was reversing its flow, giving us scant time to race out into Long Island Sound.
At full tide, there was no room for even the boat to pass under that bridge. And as I watched my long wooden mast being lowered into that hull, there were four or five boys in line along the railroad bridge, waiting for the train's whistle to test their courage. And still today I see that final boy's face, whose toes still touched the tie beyond the moment when he could force his body to be more horizontal. The whistle would have drowned his screams. Gravity won, thank goodness.
That is the face I wear today, internally.
When I first raised my jib, I had to crawl on my belly out the bowsprit. I later learned to stand with but a finger touching the forestay, bounding into whatever weather, the boat and I all one.
And Dad will soon be moved to a memory unit in the home where he now lives. He wonders "now, where did you go to school" though only weeks ago he would brag to my Mom's mortification, about how many times I'd dropped out of Yale. And Mom finally wants nothing more to do with him, which is her triumph in the end. He was that verbally abusive, and bound her to his money.
So, this will be my last salvo for a little while. This desperate claim that I have something to say that you should want to hear.
What I have to say is trivially simple. There is no need to look for arcane mechanisms in the brain to prove the quantum implications of our thinking. I'm not saying it wouldn't be interesting, and that I won't want to read about them when they're found.
But already we can understand that emotions are real and not just some distraction from what's hard. Already we can admit that these are the true organizing principle to what it is that we can resolve with our instruments, no matter how cleverly or massively or orbitally deployed. No matter how much energy we inject into their production.
These emotions are what turns our attention this way or that, and not, by far, some merest accident. Because at the farthest remove from our control is always accident. That's what we mean by random.
But what gets held close, what informs our dumb and stupid matter to something approaching life that we can love, that must be informed by something better than accident. Something more than random.
When we destroy the life by too much design, it will inevitably leave us. When we approach it with love, it will return that love with the same reward which my old wooden sailboat has returned to me, while underway and powered by just this freest wind.
So, I am done with bodily pleasures. I have no more need to smoke or drink or eat the bloody stuff (though, trust me, I won't refuse it when it's offered, well, except for the cigarettes - they're just gross). I'm done with passions directed toward things. I'm reentering the world as naked as they day when I was born, and born and born again.
Hello World (I've always wished I could be that much of a programmer too, come to think of it)!
You see, the thing is that you've already responded to me, dear reader, and so I don't feel all that alone any more. I'm OK with how much longer it still must take to get it right. I'm pretty sure I can make my simple argument hold water. And then we can go sailing, you and I, across the ether.
Which also, by the way, doesn't really exist, as has been proven now over and over again, except in the mind as blankest conceptual space between all the hard stuff. It's the emotional connections which count to set our direction, and not only the magnetic compass.
Outside, toward the road from my garage, is the cocoon from which I molted over 25 years ago now. My old wooden boat which has sat under tattered cover these last 6 or 7 years. I'd thought that I could or would find the time to complete its reconstruction. But my work days grew overlong, and my weekends were full of shuttling daughters back and forth to their weekday home in Buffalo nearly two hours away by car.
Eventually, the ambition was worn away, and now I would really like only to give the boat away. Craig's List, that beautifully primitive site, brings me surprising numbers of passionate wooden boat enthusiasts, but I fear none of them will take my burden from me. Perhaps my passionate descriptions of this boat's qualities, which I want them to have for free, are that far too improbable. I fear I shall have to hire someone with a chainsaw.
And I still do remember living aboard well into the coldest winter on Connecticut's record. Waking to my own frozen breath, and racing then to get the tiny coal stove cheering red again before the stiffening pain in fingers and toes would overwhelm me.
Sometimes the wind would reverse the flow down the far-too-short chimney stack, and I would be choking from impossible fumes. Sometimes the early arriving mechanic at the boatyard would run down the dock to see which boat had caught fire at the root of all that black smoke. Most mornings I would win the battle, and then sit back with rough percolated cowboy coffee and another unfiltered cigarette to start my day.
I loved the rocking. I hoped for storms. There was a small propellor suspended under my hull to keep the frozen Connecticut River at some remove from this eggshell which protected my tiny envelope of warmth. It sent up unfrozen water which gave my sleep a gentle burbling rocking even without any wind.
That was when I started to write. One day when the ice was broken up by howling winds and rain, and I had to go out in bare feet to push the block away that had wedged itself between my boat and the much larger one next dock. I still remember standing on my bowsprit, the rain so hard that it ran over my toes on deck. I remember waking up.
I was at some limit then as now, beyond which there had to be something different. I went below and started writing. I didn't stop for very many hours. I didn't stop until I'd actually solved, through writing, the puzzle in my brain. I hadn't expected that at all. I hadn't even been aware that I'd been praying.
Poor Peter, awakened at maybe 3 AM. I'd thought somehow it was a more reasonable hour, but he could see that I needed in. Magically, he set me up with bed and word-processor; one among a very few then on the planet I'm pretty sure.
And then I went slowly back to sleep across the years of marriage and teaching and a little bit of leadership. Very little. I knew that what I'd discovered was the very same thing that all writers discover only in their writing. I spent a fair amount of time then, reading. I knew that I had and have none of that talent which true writers have. I am more the scientist, but the burden to write out in scientific prose that thing which I discovered was still further beyond me than the more artistic style of writing I still so much admire.
I have been that confident that someone else more talented and harder working, would express in better words than those I had found to cobble together, what it still is that needs to be said out loud.
But now, here I am, still absurdly holding on to the shuckings from my awakening. You know, I've sailed that boat in storms and wind which make me shudder still though they didn't at the time. I've had all the life-long pleasures that so many toil after, and feel that they were all granted to me, very nearly without cost at all. This makes me feel blessed, and hardly proud. OK, I'm proud beyond words of my two daughters, but I credit their Mom with that.
And here I am again, without ability to carry on in my current manner. And in the meantime, as if for my very own purposes, this weblike cloud has cocooned our very earth which promises also to transform into its butterfly promise.
And though there are many many authors now, and filmmakers and poets and musicians and more who would present the world and do that very same insight which I had that day, they present as does my friend and former student at his Subversive Theatre, to a diminutive audience of those few who've already seen their light. Still Pete Seeger strolls along with banjo, awaiting the moment serenely when his fingers cannot pluck.
But I search and cannot find my simple insight. I have even had search engines built for my very purpose, and there is nothing out there saying this terribly simple thing. So I must and shall pick back up my thread, and try it all over and over again.
This is the day the cocoon breaks apart, my dearest reader. This is the day when light pours through that crack. (this is the first sunny day the whole darned summer, it almost seems) This is the day, entering into winter, when the peepers perversely sing because there is no more time to wait for the springtime warmth.
I have nothing other than crudest words. My tools are poorly made and cheap. My boat also should not have sailed this long (take her, please!).
But before that large Hadron collider wastes its breath, I must tell you again and again and again that there is no further need to look in that particular direction for more answers. I have no opinion, by the way, about what will get discovered when that collider finally runs. I only know what already has been.
I have no desire to pull any rugs out from under world-class scientists who are my truest heroes all. I have a far simpler desire, to outline what has already resolved itself into my view, so that you may see it too.
This is not some new conjuring from nothing of something there only in my designing mind. I have no inventive powers. This is a paradigm shifting, properly, which will place into better perspective all the scientific labors which we still must bring to bear on life's issue. And I'm very afraid that there is not a moment to lose.
But I am no longer terrified.
The thing is simply this: that mind and matter both must be seen to coexist, neither one nor the other taking precedence.
There has been much misconstruing of the physics of quantum electrodynamics (I've always wanted to throw that term around, but quantum mechanics would work just as well) to promote or refute the notion that the measuring mind has actual impact on what gets measured.
That's wrong. That's a misconstruing of the problem of Schroedinger's cat. It is not our perception which collapses the probability wave. It is the rubbing together of all such waves, such that they already exist, these supposed particles or strings, in the conspiring together of so unthinkably many of them. One alone would fill and be the entire cosmos. But one alone could exist only in some mind.
We have brought our minds to the very brink of abstraction now, which is itself an enactment of insanity, to determine what in essence, minimally, must be the smallest unindividuated parts to the cosmos in which we find ourselves. We hope and pray that we do not find a mere figment of our imaginings. That we are not left hopelessly in charge of our reality. Even as so many of us still fight to take over God's prerogatives. Especially those who say they worship at that Name.
To be sure, I am no believer in any God that can be named. So don't get worried that I would like to spring on you some new religious fanaticism. I am talking purest science here, of the sort which requires no new experimentation, but which, in proper theory, resolves all the data which we already fully have in our possession.
This is the day when I must call the realtor, the lawyer, the water test company and order up my storage pod, so this is the day beyond which I will have no more time to write.
Just as on that day those many years ago now, when I had run through all my money. When I had spent perhaps a week with seemingly terminal diarrhea and vomitting, sleeping in the hull in its cradle up on land in the boatyard among all the other abandoned husks. It was toward the end of the summer and everyone else with viable boats had been sailing the full long season. I would sneak out each night to empty my body's stinking load.
And in the morning white-haired Nick, whose hair had turned that way one single night in Viet Nam, would climb my ladder to see if I was still breathing. He would later agree to come out sailing, and I consider it my proudest moment that, while heeled over with waves coming in over our rails, he never did panic although he'd said he would.
And then finally, they nearly dropped it, lowering my boat into the small creek from maybe 50 feet in the air, or so it seemed. The old crane had a clutch worn shiny, and it would slip and catch, in mockery of my heart. The water poured in through the stuffing box which I had neglected to tighten.
And then we motored out, Dad and I - he had driven to Connecticut from Buffalo from some truly strange compulsion, since there was only a shaking head in response to my ridiculous project - to pass under the low railroad bridge as the tide was reversing its flow, giving us scant time to race out into Long Island Sound.
At full tide, there was no room for even the boat to pass under that bridge. And as I watched my long wooden mast being lowered into that hull, there were four or five boys in line along the railroad bridge, waiting for the train's whistle to test their courage. And still today I see that final boy's face, whose toes still touched the tie beyond the moment when he could force his body to be more horizontal. The whistle would have drowned his screams. Gravity won, thank goodness.
That is the face I wear today, internally.
When I first raised my jib, I had to crawl on my belly out the bowsprit. I later learned to stand with but a finger touching the forestay, bounding into whatever weather, the boat and I all one.
And Dad will soon be moved to a memory unit in the home where he now lives. He wonders "now, where did you go to school" though only weeks ago he would brag to my Mom's mortification, about how many times I'd dropped out of Yale. And Mom finally wants nothing more to do with him, which is her triumph in the end. He was that verbally abusive, and bound her to his money.
So, this will be my last salvo for a little while. This desperate claim that I have something to say that you should want to hear.
What I have to say is trivially simple. There is no need to look for arcane mechanisms in the brain to prove the quantum implications of our thinking. I'm not saying it wouldn't be interesting, and that I won't want to read about them when they're found.
But already we can understand that emotions are real and not just some distraction from what's hard. Already we can admit that these are the true organizing principle to what it is that we can resolve with our instruments, no matter how cleverly or massively or orbitally deployed. No matter how much energy we inject into their production.
These emotions are what turns our attention this way or that, and not, by far, some merest accident. Because at the farthest remove from our control is always accident. That's what we mean by random.
But what gets held close, what informs our dumb and stupid matter to something approaching life that we can love, that must be informed by something better than accident. Something more than random.
When we destroy the life by too much design, it will inevitably leave us. When we approach it with love, it will return that love with the same reward which my old wooden sailboat has returned to me, while underway and powered by just this freest wind.
So, I am done with bodily pleasures. I have no more need to smoke or drink or eat the bloody stuff (though, trust me, I won't refuse it when it's offered, well, except for the cigarettes - they're just gross). I'm done with passions directed toward things. I'm reentering the world as naked as they day when I was born, and born and born again.
Hello World (I've always wished I could be that much of a programmer too, come to think of it)!
You see, the thing is that you've already responded to me, dear reader, and so I don't feel all that alone any more. I'm OK with how much longer it still must take to get it right. I'm pretty sure I can make my simple argument hold water. And then we can go sailing, you and I, across the ether.
Which also, by the way, doesn't really exist, as has been proven now over and over again, except in the mind as blankest conceptual space between all the hard stuff. It's the emotional connections which count to set our direction, and not only the magnetic compass.
Sunday, November 1, 2009
The Global Anti-Trust Battle Over Google's Library
The Global Anti-Trust Battle Over Google's Library
You would think that I could find better things to blog about than what the core of the Main Stream Media writes about. After all, most everything I write goes toward unsettling our collective assumptions about what is true, and what we really must hold sacred.
But given so little time to read or search or get any good sense of what's up in the world, I still do find that I value those who are paid to do it for me. And for whatever reason, I think Time Magazine has figured out a pretty good mix to stay in business and on my screen.
Every day, they mail me a summary of the news of the day. Every week, they mail me my paper copy, and I find that I have already read many of the stories, or at least have glanced at them. I worry that the heft of their paper copy just seems to shrink and shrink. But on the other hand, it also doesn't make it into the recycling bin in pristine condition like my Nation Magazine often does.
Come to think of it, the Nation would really like me to switch from paper to digital, and they are really mad at Time Inc., and other major publishers for orchestrating a postal rate squeeze on minor publishers via the major publisher's lobbyists. The postal service has consistently offered its best discounts to the glossy rags with wider audiences, effectively handing the smaller publishers a massive budget hit every time the rates get raised.
The smaller publishers are being muscled out of any possibility to get their word in circulation, and bigger and bigger becomes the only way to stay in business. As in so many sectors of our economy.
This right here is the problem with what Google proposes.
As I've said in this space many times now, it doesn't matter the motivations or purity of heart of the current stewards of the Google empire. What matters is their scale.
If there is only one company with the size and reach to index the entire Internet real time - never mind the collected wisdom of all mankind as it gets written down in books - then we will have mortgaged our future to an unaccountable and therefore inevitably heartless corporate power.
From a kind of laziness, we make these smallish compromises every day, but we must increasingly be aware of the direction toward which they all, collectively, trend. At some point our little compromises of today will have destroyed any chance for transformative input to the future we will become. At some point, only the money making stuff will be in circulation.
Why must this be so? Because anything too big or powerful becomes necessarily monstrous. We'll call this Rick's law. I always wanted to have a law named after me.
After a certain point, there really can be no "heart" to an overly massive organization. All of the minions make their little compromises out of a kind of fear of separation, or a desire to move closer to the center, and ultimately the very spirit of the place has become inhuman in the quest to become ever larger.
This is inevitable. Any organization requires stern leadership, a constitution, a kind of mission statement, and, most importantly, a positive desire to hear and receive input from the least among its constituted members.
The largest ever, and certainly most persistent organization must be the Chinese empire. It has struggled in as see-saw motion for over two thousand years between the poles of tyranny and civilization.
Companies which focus on their product, and which remain passionate about it, say, tend not to be evil. Conglomerates which focus on making money tend to promote a kind of evil. Ultimately, they don't really care who they take down along their inexorable path toward growth.
But when passionate companies get too big, whether they are soda pop companies, or banana companies, or toy companies or booksellers, they all do the very same thing, sweeping over the peoples and cultures and petty grievances which stand in their way of growth.
It can often feel good to blame the CEO, but he or she is most often systematically misinformed in internally focused propagandistic fashion only about what would be good for the organization.
And it isn't enough, as Google claims to do, to be guided by a simple slogan, like "we're not evil". That can be nineteen eighty foured in a heartbeat.
If we are to survive as a species - or maybe even if life on the planet is to survive at all above the complexity of the cockroach - we will develop global systems of governance which prevent organizations from turning monstrous.
The decision making which will inform such systems of governance will not be so terribly hard to make, so long as information flows freely, and education doesn't get perverted to prevent the masses of people from learning how to read.
During its best of times, the Chinese system of governance practically depended on a system of exclusion from the practice of reading. Very much like the Latin-restricted Catholic Church. But the best of time for preservation of the organizational spirit also often turned out to be the very worst of times for excluded peoples. Both the Catholic Church and the Chinese bureaucracies were behind rapacious, wanton and corrupt destruction of smaller so-called native cultures. They still are.
As a practical matter, Google is taking over our commons. That means that government will have already relinquished its proper franchise and will nevermore be in any position to arbitrate public good from public evil. It has already happened long past for the industry of health insurance, and so government can only run a damage control operation against an industry which has incrementally gained all the government's proper prerogatives.
So it isn't the concept of what Google proposes that needs to be stopped. It is the particular agency which is being proposed to realize the concept. Google is at least as far apart from government sanction as its arch-rival Microsoft has so often proven to be.
As were the railroads, this digital library can seemingly only be built by private funds rendered up by the smallest purchase decisions of each of us. The government will be hoodwinked by earnest tycoons representing honest ambition. And we will spend the next century disentangling ourselves from the wreckage of our granting so much of our commons to the rapacious Huns among us. It seems the government as presently constituted could never render up a decision to do this kind of project in the public interest.
While it might seem that this is the way it always must be, the world is that much different now, this very very brief hundred and fifty years after globe spanning transportation and information transmission got their starts. After the capitalist apology underpinnings of "survival of the fittest" made their heretical way into print over Darwin's name.
We should be wiser now. We should understand that our margins for the Huns to rampage have nearly disappeared. We are in fact united as a single people on a single planet, and the impulse to spread information freely should not be a private one. There should be no profit motive. The planet can't sustain it.
The "information superhighway" and the cloud on which my writing now depends, should be the very last privately funded additions to our commons. These need to be re-appropriated into our commonwealth. They will be, or we will not survive.
Our renewed Constitution needs to make that direction clear. Our impulse to destroy the railroads by building public highways on the pretext that they were required for the national defense, was the right one or the wrong one depending on which way we turn now. These highways freed up immense charges of private energy. And now they stand to destroy us for so long as we allow the passion for private vehicles to overwhelm the collective necessity to get over it.
The same thing is true for the commons of the cloud.
I like Time Magazine just fine. They have smart and earnest editors, who pick out for my reading things I really should know about. They're not part of Murdoch's empire yet, and they don't seem bent on feeding me gut candy just to make them rich. Well, OK, I guess the conglomerate, Time Inc., has other divisions for that.
I still think the Nation Magazine is the far more important publication. They're the ones who will get my devotion and my donations when I have them. They're the ones who break the really important stories, which it must be in Time Inc.'s mission statement never ever to do.
And some day, again, I'll start reading the Nation preferentially. Some day I'll have the resolve to let them stop paying to send me the paper version which goes straight to the recycling bin that often without having been properly read.
The fact is that Time Magazine takes that much less effort to read, and like the rest of you, I have only so much time to devote to keeping up with the rest of the world.
I have absolutely no doubt in my mind that the proper direction is to stop Google from having any kind of monopoly on what can or will be published for our collective reading. I don't think it will mean the end of the world either way, but I'm far less certain about that than I am about stopping Google from being our unitary publisher.
If I can be called an author, I've already taken my stand that what I write should be freely available to any and all who want to read it. Some day when I have something good enough to put a price tag on, you can call me out on this stand. But I'll always hold out hope that there will be other ways to make a living than to pander to mass tastes. That people with marginal, but possibly game changing, points of view will also be able to make a living.
I simply can't trust a proprietary cloud to ensure that this will always remain true. And in that, I'm a lot less worried about who can avoid flipping burgers while working to save our planet, than I am about what thoughts will simply be overwhelmed by the sheer overwhelming power of profit motivated mass mediation.
You would think that I could find better things to blog about than what the core of the Main Stream Media writes about. After all, most everything I write goes toward unsettling our collective assumptions about what is true, and what we really must hold sacred.
But given so little time to read or search or get any good sense of what's up in the world, I still do find that I value those who are paid to do it for me. And for whatever reason, I think Time Magazine has figured out a pretty good mix to stay in business and on my screen.
Every day, they mail me a summary of the news of the day. Every week, they mail me my paper copy, and I find that I have already read many of the stories, or at least have glanced at them. I worry that the heft of their paper copy just seems to shrink and shrink. But on the other hand, it also doesn't make it into the recycling bin in pristine condition like my Nation Magazine often does.
Come to think of it, the Nation would really like me to switch from paper to digital, and they are really mad at Time Inc., and other major publishers for orchestrating a postal rate squeeze on minor publishers via the major publisher's lobbyists. The postal service has consistently offered its best discounts to the glossy rags with wider audiences, effectively handing the smaller publishers a massive budget hit every time the rates get raised.
The smaller publishers are being muscled out of any possibility to get their word in circulation, and bigger and bigger becomes the only way to stay in business. As in so many sectors of our economy.
This right here is the problem with what Google proposes.
As I've said in this space many times now, it doesn't matter the motivations or purity of heart of the current stewards of the Google empire. What matters is their scale.
If there is only one company with the size and reach to index the entire Internet real time - never mind the collected wisdom of all mankind as it gets written down in books - then we will have mortgaged our future to an unaccountable and therefore inevitably heartless corporate power.
From a kind of laziness, we make these smallish compromises every day, but we must increasingly be aware of the direction toward which they all, collectively, trend. At some point our little compromises of today will have destroyed any chance for transformative input to the future we will become. At some point, only the money making stuff will be in circulation.
Why must this be so? Because anything too big or powerful becomes necessarily monstrous. We'll call this Rick's law. I always wanted to have a law named after me.
After a certain point, there really can be no "heart" to an overly massive organization. All of the minions make their little compromises out of a kind of fear of separation, or a desire to move closer to the center, and ultimately the very spirit of the place has become inhuman in the quest to become ever larger.
This is inevitable. Any organization requires stern leadership, a constitution, a kind of mission statement, and, most importantly, a positive desire to hear and receive input from the least among its constituted members.
The largest ever, and certainly most persistent organization must be the Chinese empire. It has struggled in as see-saw motion for over two thousand years between the poles of tyranny and civilization.
Companies which focus on their product, and which remain passionate about it, say, tend not to be evil. Conglomerates which focus on making money tend to promote a kind of evil. Ultimately, they don't really care who they take down along their inexorable path toward growth.
But when passionate companies get too big, whether they are soda pop companies, or banana companies, or toy companies or booksellers, they all do the very same thing, sweeping over the peoples and cultures and petty grievances which stand in their way of growth.
It can often feel good to blame the CEO, but he or she is most often systematically misinformed in internally focused propagandistic fashion only about what would be good for the organization.
And it isn't enough, as Google claims to do, to be guided by a simple slogan, like "we're not evil". That can be nineteen eighty foured in a heartbeat.
If we are to survive as a species - or maybe even if life on the planet is to survive at all above the complexity of the cockroach - we will develop global systems of governance which prevent organizations from turning monstrous.
The decision making which will inform such systems of governance will not be so terribly hard to make, so long as information flows freely, and education doesn't get perverted to prevent the masses of people from learning how to read.
During its best of times, the Chinese system of governance practically depended on a system of exclusion from the practice of reading. Very much like the Latin-restricted Catholic Church. But the best of time for preservation of the organizational spirit also often turned out to be the very worst of times for excluded peoples. Both the Catholic Church and the Chinese bureaucracies were behind rapacious, wanton and corrupt destruction of smaller so-called native cultures. They still are.
As a practical matter, Google is taking over our commons. That means that government will have already relinquished its proper franchise and will nevermore be in any position to arbitrate public good from public evil. It has already happened long past for the industry of health insurance, and so government can only run a damage control operation against an industry which has incrementally gained all the government's proper prerogatives.
So it isn't the concept of what Google proposes that needs to be stopped. It is the particular agency which is being proposed to realize the concept. Google is at least as far apart from government sanction as its arch-rival Microsoft has so often proven to be.
As were the railroads, this digital library can seemingly only be built by private funds rendered up by the smallest purchase decisions of each of us. The government will be hoodwinked by earnest tycoons representing honest ambition. And we will spend the next century disentangling ourselves from the wreckage of our granting so much of our commons to the rapacious Huns among us. It seems the government as presently constituted could never render up a decision to do this kind of project in the public interest.
While it might seem that this is the way it always must be, the world is that much different now, this very very brief hundred and fifty years after globe spanning transportation and information transmission got their starts. After the capitalist apology underpinnings of "survival of the fittest" made their heretical way into print over Darwin's name.
We should be wiser now. We should understand that our margins for the Huns to rampage have nearly disappeared. We are in fact united as a single people on a single planet, and the impulse to spread information freely should not be a private one. There should be no profit motive. The planet can't sustain it.
The "information superhighway" and the cloud on which my writing now depends, should be the very last privately funded additions to our commons. These need to be re-appropriated into our commonwealth. They will be, or we will not survive.
Our renewed Constitution needs to make that direction clear. Our impulse to destroy the railroads by building public highways on the pretext that they were required for the national defense, was the right one or the wrong one depending on which way we turn now. These highways freed up immense charges of private energy. And now they stand to destroy us for so long as we allow the passion for private vehicles to overwhelm the collective necessity to get over it.
The same thing is true for the commons of the cloud.
I like Time Magazine just fine. They have smart and earnest editors, who pick out for my reading things I really should know about. They're not part of Murdoch's empire yet, and they don't seem bent on feeding me gut candy just to make them rich. Well, OK, I guess the conglomerate, Time Inc., has other divisions for that.
I still think the Nation Magazine is the far more important publication. They're the ones who will get my devotion and my donations when I have them. They're the ones who break the really important stories, which it must be in Time Inc.'s mission statement never ever to do.
And some day, again, I'll start reading the Nation preferentially. Some day I'll have the resolve to let them stop paying to send me the paper version which goes straight to the recycling bin that often without having been properly read.
The fact is that Time Magazine takes that much less effort to read, and like the rest of you, I have only so much time to devote to keeping up with the rest of the world.
I have absolutely no doubt in my mind that the proper direction is to stop Google from having any kind of monopoly on what can or will be published for our collective reading. I don't think it will mean the end of the world either way, but I'm far less certain about that than I am about stopping Google from being our unitary publisher.
If I can be called an author, I've already taken my stand that what I write should be freely available to any and all who want to read it. Some day when I have something good enough to put a price tag on, you can call me out on this stand. But I'll always hold out hope that there will be other ways to make a living than to pander to mass tastes. That people with marginal, but possibly game changing, points of view will also be able to make a living.
I simply can't trust a proprietary cloud to ensure that this will always remain true. And in that, I'm a lot less worried about who can avoid flipping burgers while working to save our planet, than I am about what thoughts will simply be overwhelmed by the sheer overwhelming power of profit motivated mass mediation.
Saturday, October 31, 2009
Goodreads Review: The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind: Creating Currents of Electricity and Hope by William Kamkwamba
The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind: Creating Currents of Electricity and Hope by William KamkwambaMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
I haven't had much time to read lately - this book was a gift, in every possible sense.
Here is the first person story of a boy who had to learn how to build his electricity generating windmill by re-inventing each principle along the way toward its construction. Of course, he couldn't have done it without books to demonstrate the possibility and to provide hints for his experimentation. He couldn't have written this book either without his partner who coaxed the author's own voice to the written page.
But for the rest of us who take our understandings as grants already fully processed, and only assume that we understand what we really take on trust, here is someone who created his understandings pretty much from scratch, despite being told that he couldn't or shouldn't. We have never proven even to ourselves what we think we understand. We might be able to pass an academic test, but we can use what we say we know to change our world?
This is a truly humbling story. What then are we waiting for? Why do we let our schools destroy genius when there are so many who are starving for their resources. Why do we persist to measure what students don't know? Why do we sift out, instead of embracing in?
What William Kamkwamba has done is to demonstrate for the rest of us where true genius must always be engendered. His started in a kind of refusal to be told what is true, whether by poverty or poor scores to prevent schooling, by famine to prevent basic living, by corrupt and ignorant government to prevent basic security, or by the collective magic every one else still lived by. Here is a person who always insisted on discovering his own limitations for himself against truly staggering odds. We'd have given up at boo.
And he truly does believe and makes the reader believe as well, that what he did for his own village can be done for all of Africa. Bring light to the night, water to the fields, sanitation to the living, strong upright sanity to where magical thinking invites corruption. But more than that, he provides his example for what we might do if we also were to ignore the certainties which represent our own powers that be. If we were to overcome our own beliefs in corrupting magic.
We also must unlearn as much as William had to unlearn before we will release our own still hidden genius. Let's not be too sure of the certainties which have been granted us.
I doubt any of us understand anything as well as William understands what he does. And what he understands is not the mechanisms which he realizes, so much as the prior impulse which got "magically" engendered in him by a loving family and community, but also and mostly by William loving himself. Forgiving himself. Being himself.
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