Back when I was a young pup, before the world decided that it needed “mice” and “keyboards” and “editors” and “compilers”, we programmed by burning tiny holes in ribbons of paper tape with magnifying glasses, and then feeding them into Mastodon, our 80-ton Difference Engine. Mastodon was installed on a small island in the South Pacific — which, sadly, sunk under its weight long ago. But that was a real machine! It used to take us three really sunny afternoons and about twelve reams of calculator paper to write a Hello World program, but it was worth it. It felt like we really doing something. We cherished our hello worlds back then. We’d feed them into Mastodon’s input receptacle — and then, about two days later, it would shriek and shake and belch a giant black cloud of smog and spit out a response tape with the words “Hello Wor” on it (there wasn’t quite enough memory for the whole thing). It was quite a thrill. We’d put on an 8-track and crack open a couple of Tabs and set up tables in Mastodon’s giant shadow and have a little party. Those were the days.
I understand that a lot of you whippersnappers have two and maybe three “monitors” on your desk these days. Pansies, all of you. First of all, a “monitor” is nothing more than a hopped up piece of illuminated, color tape. And not very good tape, at that. When you children “scroll” in your “browsers”, what happens to all that text after it disappears off the top of your “windows”? It’s gone, isn’t it? Well, we didn’t have that problem with tape. Tape doesn’t go away. I still have the output of my first Hello Wor program, somewhere among the 54 metric tons of tape I store in my basement. I have the output of every program I ever wrote, in fact. Where’s the first Hello World you ever wrote, child? Oh, you don’t have it? Oh, it fizzled into the ether after you turned off your “monitor”? Isn’t that a shame.
And that reminds me: ASCII. I’ve never seen such a wasteful standard. Back in my day, we didn’t have your giant, sprawling “bytes”. We didn’t need 8 bits, ok? We made do with what we called “mincing rabbit nibbles”, which had two bits, and two was all we needed to represent our alphabet — which, last time I checked, was the same alphabet that you greedy little bit suckers are using. Sure, we had to eliminate all the vowels, and all punctuation, and, yes, every one of our bits had to represent 6 possible letters, but they represented them proudly! They weren’t ashamed, and neither were we.
And another thing: bits. Whenever I hear one of you higher-language infants sneering dismissively about “ones” and “zeroes”, it makes my blood boil. Because, for one thing, if all you have to do to add two numbers is write “number + number”, then you’re not really programming, are you? You’re just banging on your toy language’s giant color buttons, squealing in delight when the right numbers come out. Well, you may get the same answers we did, and you may get them several orders of magnitude faster, with 3000% less code, predictably, without having to rewire any circuit boards — but you’re not programming. Try building an air traffic control system with nothing but holes burned into a world spanning piece of calculator tape. Then we can talk.
Also, I understand that your newfangled, 21st-century bits have two states. Back in my day, we didn’t need two, ok? Wasteful! All we had was zeroes. Sure, it wasn’t easy programming when you had no way of registering (or generating) state — and, sure, arithmetic operations were more exercises in probabilistic reasoning than “calculation”. But we managed! I’d like to see any of you wet-behind-the-ears adolescents writing one of your “E-MAIL” programs with just zeroes! Good luck with that. And, when the world runs out of ones, don’t come crying to us, ok? It’s not like we didn’t warn you.
Just ran across a review of a book called Starbucked, which describes the mechanisms of Starbucks’ unlikely success. There’s a lot of focus-grouping involved in creating the Starbucks “experience”, apparently, and it grows out of a culture of new-age cookie-cutterism and aggressive homogeneity-breeding. This has the reviewer feeling a bit dyspeptic:
There is something ironic about a society that supposedly prizes authenticity and individuality buying in so readily to what is a patently ersatz experience: unlike the Italian specialty coffees that serve as their inspiration, Starbucks’s concoctions are produced by an automated process that removes any kind of artistry from their creation; all the barista has to do to pull an espresso or a cappuccino is to press the correct button on the espresso machine. (Clark slyly refers to this as the “bionic” Starbucks.) What Starbucks actually provides is not sustenance for the soul, but a carefully mediated, calculated, and replicated experience that is closer to the fast food template of McDonald’s than to the individualistic and highly idiosyncratic cafés of Paris or Milan. Schultz’s peculiar genius, as Clark shows, is in convincing us that we are being sold sophistication, when in reality we are simply drones in a giant corporate machine that grows ever more entrenched, at the rate of six stores per day.
Well, yes. I can see all that, I suppose, but it’s kind of a narrow view of things. Granted, I’m not exactly an impartial witness here — it’s 8:30 in the morning, and I’m writing this from my second Starbucks of the day — but it seems to me that, while there’s certainly something to be said for quirkiness and individuality in your haunts, it’s also important to have a place that’s comfortable, staid, and familiar enough to serve as a launching pad for your own brand of quirkiness. That’s something Jeff Vandermeer told us, once: find stability and routine in your life, and you’ll have a platform steady enough to release the unfettered chaos you need to make art. 1
So I don’t really care that everything from the color of the walls around me to the music playing above me is carefully tuned to offend as few people as possible, and replicated more or less verbatim in thousands of other Starbucks, all over the world. Ubiquity and conformity aren’t necessarily bad things. Starbucks works.
I went my dentist the other day with swollen gums and walked out with a murdered tooth. He called it a root canal, but that’s just what passes for euphemism in the dental community. This was an execution.
How could this happen? Well. Apparently, some portion of the inside of one of my molars got sick and began to die — and, in a macabre process of creeping necrotism, infected the rest of the tooth. Until all I had left were thin canals of undead tissue, rotting slowly. My dentist went in with little filaments and scraped it all clean, so now the tooth is just a lifeless husk — robbed of nerves and a blood supply, it’ll get weaker and more brittle over time, until it eventually shatters, or falls apart.
It’s all very sad. Sadder still is the other tooth, in the bottom of my mouth, that has also been quietly, undemonstratively dying for some time now. The doc discovered it in an x-ray: same deal, a shambling zombie tooth, in its death throes, cannibalizing the tissue around it.
There’s nothing especially rare or tragic about a root canal, I suppose. Happens all the time, and — modern dental technology being what it is — I’ll end up with two fake but largely impervious super-teeth. So no big deal. But the thought of two pieces of me dying silently over a period of years, going quietly mad in their enamel tombs, gives me the willies.
If there’s any silver lining to the outrageous FISA bill that the Democrats rammed through congress today, it’s this: we now know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that the government doesn’t give a shit about our privacy. That doesn’t go for everyone in government, of course1, but the don’t-give-a-shit contingent is almost always larger than the give-a-shits, and they almost always win.
The bad guys here are split into two basic camps: (1) the ones who consider the right to free, unmonitored communications a fairly trifling thing, easily sacrificed on the altar of political expediency; and (2) the ones who consider that right an existential threat that must be suppressed at all costs.
We saw both of those forces at work today, I think: thuggish Bush/Cheney sycophants deathly afraid of the notion of free, unfettered networks, and craven opportunists who don’t much care either way, but will happily throw our rights overboard in exchange for perceived political safety (I’m looking at you, Stenny). Either way, the effect is the same. A network that grows more regulated, and less free, every year. The original, anarchic promise of the internet stillborn. It’s depressing as hell.
But at least we know. The only way we get a free internet is if we wrest it from the hands of the government that regulates it, and the corporations that run it2. This country was founded on a fundamental mistrust of power, and a clear-eyed understanding of the monster that power will always become if it’s left to its own devices. The system the founders put in place to keep that monster at bay seems to be unraveling, though, with its three co-equal branches often acting more like chummy old golf buddies than the checks and balances they’re supposed to be.
So, basically, the network needs to be a force of nature — an irreducible, uncontrollable constant, like gravity. It’s possible to use gravity to do bad things, of course — drop pianos on people, say, or throw them off of buildings — but you can’t control it. You can’t suspend gravity, you can’t bend it to your will. And that’s the key. A free internet will still be subject to many of the same outrages that we see today — the RIAA monitoring P2P networks and issuing automated lawsuits against hapless grandmothers; criminals sniffing packets off of wireless streams; corporations spying on employee email — but it won’t be vulnerable to the ultimate outrage, total control. It won’t be possible to install snoops in data centers that filter all incoming traffic, or shut down access to sites that your ideology rejects, or build a surveillance wall around an entire country.
I don’t know if it’s possible to create a free network — and, if it is, whether it’s at all feasible any more. But one thing is abundantly clear — without it, the entire notion of privacy is a farce.
In particular, the newly-christened representative of my district, Donna Edwards, voted with the angels. Yay Donna! ↩
I realize that the distinction between government and industry is rapidly becoming a quaint anachronism, but the old fogy in me still likes to pretend it’s there. ↩
Congressional democrats are about to cave in again, and this time it’s serious. They’ve apparently come to a “compromise” on the telecom amnesty bill, which gives the telecommunications companies who have been spying on us for the last six years — listening to our calls, reading our emails, monitoring our browsing, all at the government’s behest — complete immunity from prosecution. In exchange we, the American people, will get absolutely nothing.
It’s pretty clear that political reality has evolved beyond the old, tired, definition of the word “compromise”. Time for a new one:
Compromise (com-pro-MIZE): See capitulation.
Just to be absolutely clear: this is a congressionally-approved get out of jail free card, which not only absolves these criminals of all wrong-doing, but also clears the way for future privacy-killing accords between government and industry. They’ve apparently installed some sort of pathetic speedbump on this road to amnesty, a rubberstamp from a district court, but I doubt that the machinery of the police state will even slow down when they hit it. There are rights to be trampled, by god!
This approaches terrifying. The one thing that we really need to be afraid of in this country is collusion between the corporations that have been quietly, steadily insinuating themselves into our lives and the government that’s supposed to be protecting us from them. They’re not in bed yet, but they’re sitting together on the porch swing, holding hands, gazing dreamily into each others eyes.
Time to pry these monstrous lovers apart. Call your representative.
So all the Attorney General has to do is recite those magic words — the President requested this eavesdropping and did it in order to save us from the Terrorists — and the minute he utters those words, the courts are required to dismiss the lawsuits against the telecoms, no matter how illegal their behavior was.
That’s the “compromise” Steny Hoyer negotiated and which he is now — according to very credible reports — pressuring every member of the Democratic caucus to support. It’s full-scale, unconditional amnesty with no inquiry into whether anyone broke the law. In the U.S. now, thanks to the Democratic Congress, we’ll have a new law based on the premise that the President has the power to order private actors to break the law, and when he issues such an order, the private actors will be protected from liability of any kind on the ground that the Leader told them to do it — the very theory that the Nuremberg Trial rejected.
Update 2: Well, it happened. A bill negotiated in secrecy, revealed in a sideshow magician’s cloud of euphemism and outright lies, then hastily rammed through the next day. This stuff makes a mockery of the whole notion of democracy.
Update 3: Obama weighs in, at last, with his own carefully-parsed, mushy-mouthed capitulation. This this gets sadder and sadder.
One of the reasons I find the Adam and Eve myth so odious is the role to which it implicitly consigns women: second-fiddle organisms made out of the master sex’s cast-off rib parts. That’s one interpretation, anyway — but, given the way that women are treated in the rest of the Bible, it’s almost certainly the intended one.
However, there is another way to look at this. When you study the male form — with its various unsightly protuberances, its poor attention to design, its pitiless sublimation of form to function — it becomes clear that men were basically a little bit of divine throat-clearing before the main event. Which is to say: if you interpret the arrival of womankind as the introduction of Homo sapiens 2.0, with the worst design decisions corrected, and the unsightliest bugs excised — then the myth becomes a little more palatable, and a lot more accurate.