Entries from June 2008 ↓

My story, Jimmy’s Roadside Cafe, just went up on Strange Horizons!

A cautionary video about fantasy dogmatism:

I have to say, though — I’m with Tim.

(via Greg)

Shorter John Yoo testimony:

Conyers: Is the president allowed to bury people alive?

Yoo: Evade hem haw evade bullshit evade.

Conyers: IS THE PRESIDENT ALLOWED TO BURY PEOPLE ALIVE?

Yoo: He probably wouldn’t want to do that anyway!

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.

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.

Update: Glen Greenwald:

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.

Most of what I do on this blog is bitch about stuff, which means that when I mention Apple or macs or iPhones, I’m generally complaining. Which is unfortunate, and misleading. I’m a fairly recent convert to the church of Jobs, but — like most people who come late to their zealotry — I’m about as die-hard an Apple fanboy as you’re likely to meet. To me, Apple doesn’t just make beautiful things: they represent a commitment to an aesthetic of fundamental, unstinting, pervasive beauty that’s pure down to its core. Do it right, all the way through, all the time. Find the perfect balance between artistry and practicality. Never compromise, and never settle for success, and keep your laurels barbed, so that you’re never tempted to rest on them for very long.

Steve Jobs is the core of that aesthetic. If you’d told me 10 years ago that one of the primary deities in my personal pantheon would be a CEO of a giant company, I would have tittered mercilessly at you. Nevertheless, it’s inescapably true that Lord Jobs has a palace (a tasteful, minimalist palace) on the upper slopes of my inner Olympus, and I don’t think he’s going anywhere any time soon. Which isn’t to say that I’m unaware of his flaws. Quite honestly, I’m not sure if I could take the pressure of actually working for the guy. But I fervently believe that he’s more or less the entire reason that Apple is the way it is.

If you were looking for a way to crystalize the Jobsian essence — the hubris, the hope, the drive — you couldn’t do much better than the commencement speech he gave at Stanford, back in 2005. Every so often, when I feel like my priorities have gone completely out of whack, I go back and listen to it. This is maybe one of the best speeches I’ve ever heard — and, if I wasn’t a member of the forgotten Generation X tribe, with all of the self-conscious irony-soaked doomed hipsterism implicit thereof, I’d call the core of it (which I quote extensively below) absolutely fucking inspirational:

Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn’t even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor’s code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you’d have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.

I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I’m fine now.

This was the closest I’ve been to facing death, and I hope its the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept.

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

Amen, Lord Jobs. Amen.

More bad news on the iPhone front today. Lord Jobs unveiled the latest iteration yesterday, faster and thinner and, if possible, even purdier than before. It remains one of the loveliest consumer devices ever to grace our narrow visual spectrum, but its unholy coupling with AT&T has just become more bindingly unholy. They now require you to register with AT&T when you buy the phone, so there’s no longer any easy way to take it home and exorcise its demons.

I’ve already ranted, at some length, about the problems that Apple is bringing on itself by hitching its wagon to AT&T, so I won’t go into all that again. But I will say this — they’ve just added to another level on inconvenience and crappitude to the buying experience, forcing you to spend a quarter of an hour signing your life away to a service that is guaranteed to sell you out to the first government agency that decides to turn its lidless eye in your direction. Seriously, Apple, what the hell? You put together this beautiful bouquet, sunflowers and roses and daffodils, as lovely as it is thoughtful, and then send it to us in a box made out of dogshit and pureed cockroaches.

Meanwhile, Starbucks, my home away from home, creeps inexorably toward its vile accommodation with AT&T, slowly pushing T-Mobile¹ out of the picture entirely. I guess sometimes the bad guys win.