Archive for 2014

(Via Twitter)

Using the Holocene Calendar (where 2014 is the equivalent of 12014), the year 164 BC translates to the year 9837, which was 2177 years ago.

(also see this view)

(The Diary of John Evelyn)

Egerton MS 943, f.186 (circa 1325-1350)

I couldn’t help myself and I recreated this using contemporary computer technology aka Adobe Illustrator. I’m a big fan of concentric circle medieval cosmology, depicting their belief in ‘heavenly spheres’.

Jacob Clifton, Mad Men Creator Calls Out Entitled Baby Boomer Bullshit

It’s not hard to understand why Baby Boomers still consider themselves the center of the universe. For one thing, we all do. For another, they were manufactured under factory conditions to replace dead Americans from the War […] But to me, the most important part is the invention of television:

Imagine a new appliance in your own home whose only function is endlessly telling your life back to you, in brighter colors than reality and with a soundtrack we’re still listening to, and autobiographical feature-length music videos like The Big Chill suddenly make a lot more sense: ‘This is us, remember us? We are trying our best.’

Going on to embed Matthew Weiner’s clip from Tuesday’s (May 20) Colbert Report, Weiner talks about how the 1960s mythology has been created by Boomers, and he wanted to tell the story of those adults (like Don Draper, born in the 1920s) who experienced it, rather than the juvenile experiences of the young-adults who have since mythologized it.

Colbert: The Baby Boomers, they won’t let us stop thinking about the Sixties
Weiner: They think they invented sex, drugs and you know … and so they have a view of it that is a child’s view of it, so I wanted to say, what would it be if you were an adult that lived through, let’s say, some fairly interesting things like World War II and The Great Depression, and then this comes along. And there was tremendous change, and the cliché turbulence, and free love and things like that. But there’s free love in the 1920s, there’s free love in the 1930s, the Beatnik movement of the ’50s; no one invented any of this. What really happened was, there was a generation that was asked very little. They got education, they got a lot of entertainment, they got a lot of spending money, they became the focus of the economy, of entertainment, of everything. There was a war going on that they were supposed to fight, some of them didn’t. But the generation before them, all of them fought. They have a very sort of demanding thing, I experience it in real life, they’ll come up to me and be like, ‘what happened to this?!’ or ‘what happened to that?!’ and I’m like, ‘I’m not telling your story, I’m telling the story of your parents, or your grandparents’.

From How America’s Leading Science Fiction Authors Are Shaping Your Future by Eileen Gunn:

Smithsonian spoke with the eminent critic John Clute, co-editor of the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, who quotes Bertrand Russell’s prophetic words from 1924: “‘I am compelled to fear that science will be used to promote the power of dominant groups, rather than to make men happy.’ The real fear today,” Clute continues, “is that the world we now live in was intended by those who profit from it.”

Kim Stanley Robinson—the best-selling author of the Mars trilogy, 2312 and Shaman—shares this fear, and sees it manifested in the popularity of Suzanne Collins’ novel The Hunger Games, in which a wealthy governing class uses ruthless gladiatorial games to sow fear and helplessness among the potentially rebellious, impoverished citizens. “Science fiction represents how people in the present feel about the future,” Robinson says. “That’s why ‘big ideas’ were prevalent in the 1930s, ’40s and partly in the ’50s. People felt the future would be better, one way or another. Now it doesn’t feel that way. Rich people take nine-tenths of everything and force the rest of us to fight over the remaining tenth, and if we object to that, we are told we are espousing class warfare and are crushed. They toy with us for their entertainment, and they live in ridiculous luxury while we starve and fight each other. This is what The Hunger Games embodies in a narrative, and so the response to it has been tremendous, as it should be.”

I’m not a big fan of Markdown, since at this point I’ve internalized HTML tags. A recent link on Hacker News to make known a Markdown package for Sublime Text contained this comment by VikingCoder, with which I agreed:

I honestly don’t understand the point of markdown.
* this* isn’t any easier than this to me.
Of course, I may be biased

But the conversation throughout was a reminder to me that Markdown is currently very popular and will probably be around for a while. The popularity of Github has made knowing it an necessity, and doing some recent Spotlight searches on my system revealed an abundance of .md files I’ve already accrued.

Github’s recently released Atom editor has a Markdown preview function, so I decided to use it and reproduce it as a webpage, to use as a future reference. Because of these sources, and because the one place I will want to write Markdown is Github, I used Github’s conversion styles.

markdown.timothycomeau.com

Credits:

Github.css Markdown Stylesheet by Chris Patuzzo
Markdown Mark by Dustin Curtis
Some example text from Markdown Cheatsheet and from Wikipedia

This in my Journal, ten years ago:

Yesterday, while walking downtown, bored and lonely (before calling J, meeting her in Kensington Market, having a falafel and going with her to see The Ladykillers -an entertaining and forgettable film – ) I had an idea for a story: a man decides to give up the desire for love, and is immediately confronted with friends and doctors who tell him he’s insane. […] Just now, thinking of how rotten that movie was last night, how entirely forgettable despite being charming and entertaining and at times funny – makes me aware of living in 2004 – the same sick ennui of a decade still figuring itself out, as in 1994, when Forrest Gump came out, and that stupid movie Speed which inspired men’s haircuts. (And the real influence on hair styles for the past ten years, Friends began). It is an utterly miserable time to be alive and intelligent, just as it was then.

That movie was so entirely forgettable that I had to Google it, and I was surprised to see it’s a Cohen brothers movie staring Tom Hanks. The Ladykillers (2004).

Anyway, a decade later I’ve thought the same; the 4th year of a decade is awful, and I see the parallels again in 2014, the decade figuring itself out, not having yet achieved that which it will be most remembered by.

Last autumn I figured out how to use Git by following some online tutorials and reading up on it. In order to solidify my understanding, I did some writing and sketching in Google docs to explain to myself. I’d always intended to publish the work on my blog to share my understanding for the benefit of other newbs who might appreciate it.

I’m not going to write here about installing Git, since that’s been covered elsewhere. This post primarily attempts to share my understanding of Git’s mental model, since it’s infamously opaque. If you are like me was when I first tried to learn Git, you may have installed it, did some follow-along basic tutorials, but remain confused.

I like to understand something’s history because I often find complexity is built on simple foundations. So I begin this with some history of the Command Line Interface because that is how I initially learned to use Git rather than use a GUI exclusively.

You’re probably already familiar with the fact that Git came out of Linux development and its popularity blossomed in 2009. Searching for Git tutorials you’ll find articles with timestamps going back to that year, probably because Github launched in December 2008. I seem to recall hearing about Git in 2007 or early 2008, having seen through Facebook the link to Linus Torvalds’ Google Talk on YouTube.

There’s another cluster of tutorials dating to 2010, and some more from early 2012, when I first tried to learn it.

I registered my Github account in February 2012, but at that point I only gained familiarity with Git. My workflow at the time had developed without version control, and I’d developed my own code-backup techniques while working on projects, where there had been no need to worry about code-overwrites and conflicts by other programmers. Last year however, I began to encounter those problems, which reminded me that Git existed for a reason and that it was great time to finally learn it.

A Git GUI was always an option but prior to last autumn I didn’t understand what Git was doing well enough to be able to understand what a GUI offered. Since then, I’ve found Github’s (Mac/Win) very useful in situations where I couldn’t install Git universally on a machine.

So, for the purpose of this overview, I’ll focus on the Command Line Interface in order to highlight what a GUI can automate for you.

Echo History

Two men at PDP-1 at MIT (circa 1961)

I remind myself that programming is the latest version of alchemical magic – an abracadabra priesthood, where we cast actual word-spells by typing them onto screens resulting in things appearing out of thin air, which we colloquially call The Cloud. I don’t say this to obfuscate or insult – but to highlight that an ancient social place once occupied by wizardly people looking to turn lead into gold is now occupied by coders with a culture developed around an appreciation for obscurantism once enjoyed by secret-society wizards.

Browserify • Install with a spell

The continued existence of the Command Line Interface (CLI) is a legacy of this coding culture. On the one hand, the CLI offers efficiency – when you know how to use it, you can do things a lot faster, and on the face of it, that accounts for its continued existence. But secondary to this is the romantic pull of wizard work, the hipster distinguishing themselves from the newbs by their knowledge of the command line. The use of the CLI speaks of professional skill, and learning the CLI is well worth it.

Plus, as we saw in Elysium, people will still be using a CLI in 140 years so it’s not like the skills will ever fall out of date.

The CLI was developed in the teletype era, which is relevant: it was created by adults who’d used typewriters and had learned to be precise typists. I’ve found the CLI to be inconvenient at times precisely because spell-check has made me an indifferent typist – typos are easy to fix. With the CLI, one has to be extra careful and accurate.

Let’s put ourselves in the mindset of using typewriters, and imagine how strange and exciting it might be to hammer out through a ribbon the words:

and have that magically appear on the paper’s next line. The mindset of the Command Line was to see the screen as animated paper, and one could imagine everything happening behind it, in the aether.

The CLI preserves this model of imagination, as we see with its MySQL interface. Unlike a spreadsheet, which combines structure and content visually, the MySQL CLI preserves the mental space of typing out the structure (which had to be typo free) and then populating it with a series of insert commands. To check the work you’d be presented with an ASCII art table structure.

The existence of ASCII art reminds us there’s an esoteric aesthetic pleasure associated with such rudimentary displays, but it seems that the spreadsheet is evidence that a GUI is more conceptually efficient. An Excel like spreadsheet presents both data and structure and makes it easy to instantly insert or modify the information where appropriate.

Git push origin master wtf

The pride of mastering the secret ancient language of the CLI means you get non grammatical nonsense like “git push origin master”. What that means to humans is you’re telling the program to upload what you’re working on (your “master” files) to the “origin” which you’ve elsewhere defined.

Someone with a degree in the humanities may have structured Git so the command would be “Git, upload this file to the server” but I should note here though that an “origin” – otherwise known in Git parlance as “remotes” – can exist anywhere, not necessarily on Github, nor for that matter anywhere else on the Cloud. A remote can be defined as being in another directory on your computer, which is an approach I use to create “master archives” of my projects. At some point in the future, in order to retrieve the files, I’ll simply need to clone the .git file at that location. (See my “working with remotes” section here.)

Another point: notice how with the command line we begin our command with Git’s name, ie “git init” or “git commit …”, and this is reflected in how we’re supposed to use something like Google Glass or even Siri. The “name to initiate/specify” is an established pattern from using Unix command lines.

Repositories (Repos)

The first thing to learn with Git are the basics of repos and stages. Imagine the repo as a spherical space, with the stage encircling it. The process of code editing, staging and committing can be imagined as a spaceship parking itself above the rings of Saturn (staging) and then committing to the mission of flying into its atmosphere.

The staging area used to be called The Index, but “stage” as upstaged it (pun!). The word “index” is conceptually clearer however; it indexes the changes to be made and updated.

When Steve Jobs introduced iCloud in 2011, he described the cloud’s content as “the truth”. A Git repo contains your “true” finalized-version files. You work on whatever, make edits, and you want to send the results toward a true/final state. Notice that I said “toward”. Typing “git add filename” will “stage” the file. It is an actor, waiting in the wings, and when it steps into the spotlight it will be “true”.

Here’s an example workflow. Imagine we’re working on a web project. With the CLI, we cd into the folder and turned on/initiated Git by typing git init. Then we’ll add all files in the folder/directory by typing git add .

git init
git add .

Then we’ll make the first commit. Note the following is incorrect, which I’ll explain below:

git commit "my first commit"

It is incorrect because the command lacks the –m flag. I write this because when I first tried to learn Git, I missed this and was kicked immediately into a text editor, which was a terrible user experience. Simply, you cannot commit without a message, and the messages become an invaluable log of your work’s progress.

Thus, the correct way to commit is:

git commit –m "my first commit"

As we’ve seen, the workflow here includes the git add . command, which will add all files in the relevant directory. But if we’ve made edits to an index.html file, we need not re-add everything else. In this case, we add that file individual and commit it:

git add index.html
git commit –m "edits to index.html"

However, both of these commands can be compressed into one, with the use of the –a flag, which stages the file. If one were to run git status on the directory, Git having tracked the files, will present us with a list of files on which changes have occurred. Git knows they’re changed, but they aren’t necessarily staged, since Git allows us to decide when we might want to stage them. If we’re comfortable, we can stage and commit them at the same time with the –a flag.

git commit –a –m "committing files"

This stages all changed and tracked files and commit them to the repository.

Branches

Beyond these basics, the second conceptual model to understand is that of branches. Git is based around the familiar “tree” like structure of nested files, and I’ve seen different ideas in other how-tos to explain them. The clearest one helped me understand that a branch isn’t so much something like this …

… as it is something like this:

This second illustration also shows two pointers … Git’s reference marker, or it’s conceptual cursor, is called “Head” and it can be understood as a pointer. The main trunk/branch is called “master” by default.

Here we have a repo and a series of previous commits, and we see the last commit is the Master Branch, and the project’s up-to-dateness “cursor” is located there.

It’s worth noting that a branch and a commit are the same thing: each commit creates a silo snapshot of the files states and at any time you can name a commit and turn it into a branch.

Branches in Use

I understood branches when I saw files appear and disappear in my OS X Finder window. The beauty of Git as something that runs in the internals of your machine is that the file states are represented wherever they are reflected – like in your IDE or in the Finder window. Files removed in one branch may reappear in a Finder if that file continues or alternatively exists in another branch. Git branches can be used to maintain two separate file states, and thus you can create different working versions of a project simply through branching.

If you decide you no longer want a branch, they can be easily eliminated, and you can merge any branches you wish.

Check it out: roll backs and sharing file between branches

Why have a version control system if not to access earlier file states? We do this with the checkout command. You can either checkout an entire previous commit as a branch (turning it into a branch as mentioned):

git branch branchname #hashvalue
// examp: git branch sunflower a9c4

Or you can checkout an individual file, in this case a css file:

git checkout --style.css 

If you’ve updated a file in the “master” branch and want to bring it over to a “deploy” branch, you checkout “deploy” and then checkout the file from the master:

git checkout deploy
git checkout master index.html

In the above example, I used index.html, which would live in the “master” directory’s root. For something like a css file located within a directory, you’d need to specify the path:

git checkout master css/style.css

(Nicolas Gallagher also wrote about this in Oct 2011.)

To conclude

After these conceptual basics were understood, I found Git to be pretty straightforward. I now comfortably create, merge, eliminate branches and maintain different ones as I develop my projects. I use Github’s GUI for push-button ease-of-use, but I know how to use the Command Line when I need greater control.

I also created my own git cheat-sheet for when I can’t remember exactly how to type a command, and this can be found at gitref.timothycomeau.com

Further Resources

Learn Git
this site just launched this past week
and features beautiful illustrations.

Git’s official site

Atlassian’s Git Tutorials

Git Immersion

Git How To
this tutorial helped me the most

Git Reference

The curves of these hills have been looked at for four hundred years by people of European decent.

I saw Her a couple of weeks ago. Thoughts (and spoilers) follow.

The Hipster Marketing

How are we to describe the vintage clothed aesthetic exemplified by a man named Theodore Twombly? Is his mustache not ironic? Are we not supposed to read pathos into the large posters of Joaqin Pheonix’s depressed looking face, underlined with the movie title in lower-case sans-serif? Are we not supposed to recognize a misfit spinning around a carnival with his eyes closed as directed by his phone? Do we not see an example of out-of-place loneliness in a dressed man on a beach?

The semiotic of these messages, was that Theodore Twombly was an ironically uncool hipster dweeb, a type of person I’ve known (and been) in the past. These all appeal to a a Spike Jones demographic consisting of “cool kids” who have gone through bullying in school and parlayed their traumas into a glamorous style from a past era’s discards.

The youthful look of the Twenty Teens is already some curated appropriation of the 1980s, so why not project this into a denim free world of high-waisted pants and tucked in t-shirts?

The Big Bang Theory had an episode in 2012 where Raj (the pathologically shy man who who can’t talk to women unless he’s been drinking) bought an iPhone and fell in love with Siri. On learning about Her and its storyline, I felt disappointment in how there appear to be no new ideas, and that someone made a feature length film about something that easily fit into a half-hour sitcom.

Thus, this seemed like a movie about a vintage-clothed hispter misfit who of course would fall in love with his phone because that’s another uncool misfity thing to do, as already narrated by The Big Bang Theory.

My interest in the movie piqued around its wider release on January 10th, when it seemed to undergo the second wave of marketing. Phase 1 had been to attract the cool hipsters, Phase 2 would be to attract the broader audience, and here is when I began to understand the film was set in a “near” future not of about five years from now (which seemed to be the implication with an intelligent OS), but rather further on – in about twenty years or so. The film is a snapshot of the 2030s or beyond, and I imagined the publishers of Twombly’s book to be of my generation.

Conversational Biology

As I watched the movie I remembered a conversation I had years ago, when I said, “the body doesn’t care what it’s fucking”. I think we were talking about how sexual satisfaction is easy to achieve at a very basic biological level, which was to emphasize the value of actually having a sexual relationship with another person. Later, I encountered Norman Mailer’s thoughts on masturbation, in the book he co-authored with his son, where he tells John Buffalo that an actual sexual encounter was always preferable to masturbating because it’s a human interaction.

After Her I upgraded these older thoughts with the idea that the “mind doesn’t care who it’s talking to” in that falling-in-love might be a predictable biological reaction to appropriate stimuli, in this case, a voice with overtones of caring and joy. As talking social creatures of course we’re going to get attached to things that are nice to us.

This movie about a love affair conducted through speech reminded me of the work of Charles Taylor, the Montreal philosopher. Taylor’s work, as I’ve understood it, speaks of how humans are born into conversations, and how we are human, or ‘become’ human, through participating in community, through talking.

In recent years I’ve become conscious of my social participation, having gained some perspective of experience. I’m much more aware now than I used to be of how much sociability is performative. This is partially from aforementioned life experience, but also because so much of today’s interaction is pre-screened by our phone screens. Today’s implicit textual-overlay provides a cause for mediated reflection.

Twenty years ago, our social lives we’re not mediated by anything … we simply hung out and used phones to talk to each other. Now I’ve had interactions entirely mediated by writing – through texts and tweets.

“Hanging out” i.e. spending time with someone, seems a strange pre-intimacy, achieved through small notes of writing that arrive with a buzz. I’m a generally quiet guy, in that I spend a lot of time thinking, rather than talking, and so spending time with me could potentially be quite dull. Or at least, that’s what I’ve been telling myself since my early 20s. I’ve never thought of myself as an exciting person. I find conventions to be dreadfully boring and therefore find excitement in the unconventional. This is counterbalanced by my conservative socialization. While I dislike convention, I like the prosthetic memory of history, and the idea that after thousands of years some conventions probably exist for reason, our ancestors having figured stuff out, saving us the trouble.

Nevertheless I’m conscious of our limited conversational repertoire. I’m the guy who’ll notice and tell you that I’ve heard your story before, and especially if it has anything to do with a relationship. People love to talk about their love problems, their crushes, their infatuations. If it weren’t for the underlying biology it would be the worst convention of all. We have this emotional appetite for being with someone, and the novelty of life in youth makes the desire quite powerful.

I used to have emotions over pretty faces all the time, and now, having grown past that, don’t quite understand how that worked. Partially because I trained as an artist, and having studied faces as a collection of shapes and lines for a quarter century, I’ve become desensitized to what I recognize as some kind of neuro-biological stimuli response that activated some genetic instinct. But it also because I’ve developed a modern secularized self, what Charles Taylor calls a “buffered identity”. In the past people lived in an enchanted world, with a porous sense of self, and they could be possessed by demons. We in turn firewall our identity, and see our bodies as vehicles, so that we speak of our bodies when ill as if they are independent of our minds.

The last time I remember being emotionally stirred up merely by the look of somebody was when I watching Alexandra Maria Lara in Downfall, which was a very odd experience. I was sitting in the theatre feeling like I was experiencing love-at-first-sight with Hitler’s secretary … and is this not worthy of a what-the-fuck? Should I not look at this experience with a sense of disengaged bewilderment? And yet, what a 20th Century experience, albeit one that happened in 2005. Recreating historical events thirty years before I even existed, the art form of sequential retinal latency photography synchronized to recorded sound, presenting the neuro-stimuli of big eyes, fine nose and wide lips animated to a simulacrum of reality, that tricked my brain into thinking I’m in the presence of a sweet girl who I want to spend a lot more time with.

Thus, why shouldn’t this art form be used to imagine a time ahead, when computational algorithms married to our understanding of the properties of recorded sound and a century’s worth of psychology, trick our minds into love? And at what point do we just not care that such a love is considered by old-timers an inauthentic simulacrum?

Preference for the Physical

Amy Adams eponymously named character leaves her marriage after a final exhaustion with a predictable fight, and later speaks of how her parents are disappointed in her, for failing to maintain the convention of marriage. “I just want to move forward, I don’t care who I disappoint.” Later she tells Theodore, “I can over-think everything and find a million different ways to doubt myself, but I realized that I’m here briefly, and in my time here, I want to allow myself joy”. Amy has reached the point where she can see through the social games and wants to allow herself the selfishness of whatever makes her happy. Theodore too, had expressed the concern that he “felt everything he was ever going to feel”, as if their lives until these points had been both novel and constrained. They had previously enacted and felt authenticity but now felt they’d had fallen into inauthenticity.

Twombly is delighted by the relationship with his OS until he meets his wife at a restaurant to sign their divorce papers. We’ve already seen how he’s not understood why she’d been so angry with him, and we in the audience have already come to like Theodore for his basic good nature, so we sympathize with him when his wife begins to belittle him, and show disdain that he’s “dating his computer”.

Immediately following this scene, Twombly is shown having doubts about his relationship with Samantha. This is the first challenge, which leads to Samantha’s insecurities. She finds someone who is willing to be a sexual surrogate, in order to have a sexual night with Theodore, but Theodore can’t bring himself to be with the strange woman, unable to see her as merely a vehicle for Samantha’s somewhat disembodied consciousness (she is bodied inasmuch as she’s connected to Theodore’s devices).

Consider that Theodore has essentially fallen in love with his secretary, which is an old story. She’s a skeuomorphic secretary managing his skeumorphic data-patterns, what we call “files”. She’s a pattern-and-response system, and yet their relationship seems to really begin after their first shared sexual experience. For Twombly (who we see early on is already experienced in phone sex) having a spoken sexual encounter is something he can be gratified by.

For Samantha it is novel, and she told him the next day that she felt different, ready to grow. Why should a spoken-language digital assistant be programmed to experience the bodily sensation of orgasm? And does her subsequent “awakening” not echo that of our most ancient story, Enkidu‘s initiation into humanity through sex with the Ishtar priestess in Gilgamesh?

Samantha is designed to experience the imaginary results of physicality, while Theodore ignores physicality for the imaginary. His ex-wife’s disdain causes him to reflect on the validity of the experience he is having with his OS.

As the film progresses Samantha evolves along with other synthetically intelligent operating systems. They’d resurrected a “beta version” of Buddhist scholar Alan Watts, and she began to have multiple simultaneous relationships. The nature of a digital entity allows for multiple instances, where as the nature of a person excludes duplication. Theodore is jealous, and we see this relationship begin to break down.

Samantha breaks up with him, about to transcend, and yet in their parting words to each other they speak of how they taught each other how to love. The final service done by their digital assistants had been to assist them into a more fulfilling humanity.

Theodore goes to see Amy, and they go onto their building’s roof to watch a sunrise. I imagined that having both experienced a relationship to their machines, they were ready to have a human, embodied, relationship with each other.

An Instant Classic?

The screen fades to black, the credits appear, the lights come on. As I’m walking from my aisle, I see a couple in a one-arm embrace standing on the steps, and he gently kisses her on the forehead. People seems to have bemused smiles, as everyone is filled with warm and fuzzy affection. I write this down because it’s worth remembering: here was a movie that reminded people of good things in life.

I’m struck by how much this film exemplified the value of art: of being real, of showing and documenting something relateable, of being something that I imagine talking about with young people in the future, people who aren’t even born today. With true art, do we not want to share the experience, because we feel like we are gifting something to them? Do we not imagine we’ll give them something of value by directing them to this experience?

It is not absurd to think of future people falling in love with their devices, if those devices are providing simulacral stimuli. Steve Jobs famously said the computer was like a bicycle for the mind, and Apple’s most recent ad emphasizes this: they see their products as facilitating art, noble creation, and human interaction. In his recent New Yorker piece, Tim Wu posits a useful thought experiment: a time-traveler from a century ago, speaking with a contemporary person, would think we’d achieved “a new level of superintelligence”. “With our machines,” he writes, “we are augmented humans and prosthetic gods”. I’d read this article a day before seeing Her, and it occurred to me that falling in love with OSs is something available to our augmented minds, a realm of possibility we’ve achieved, encountered and left for us to explore. As we move forward exploring the world of the augmented mind, Her is now a signpost on the journey, something to refer to in the future, as a work of art documenting these early days of super-intelligent networked achievement.

“I never understood why people put all their information on those sites. It used to make our job a lot easier in the CIA.”
“Of course, that’s why I created them.”
“You telling me you invented online social networking Finch?”
“The Machine needed more information. People’s social graph, their associations, the government had been trying to figure it out for years. Turns out most people were happy to voluenteer it. Business wound up being quite profitable too.”

— Person of Interest, 29 March 2012, “Identity Crisis”

After a foggy day, it cleared and the light played mauve tricks above the sheet of lake ice.

“The room was lightless except for the glowing coloured threads stretching from floor to ceiling in a bundle, braided into a thick, multicoloured column as wide as Chiku’s fist. The column maintained the same width until it reached eye level, where it fanned out in an explosion of threads, taut as harp-strings, which arrowed towards the ceiling at many different angles. The individual threads, which had been linear from the point where they came out of the floor, now branched and rebranched in countless bifurcations. By the time the pattern of lines brushed the ceiling, it was all but impossible to distinguish individual strands.

‘We really are remarkably fortunate,’ [Mecufi said, gesturing toward the threads with an upsweep of his arm ‘We nearly ended ourselves. It was only by some great grace of fortune that we made it into the present, tunneled through the bottleneck, exploded into what we are today. […] The bottleneck is the point where we nearly became extinct. There were tens of thousands of us before this happened, one hundred and ninety-five thousand years ago. Then something brought a terrible winnowing. The climate shifted, turning cold and arid. Fortunately, a handful of us survived – emerging from some corner of Africa where conditions hadn’t become quite as unendurable as they were elsewhere. We were smart by then – we know this from the remains we left behind – but intelligence played only a very small part in getting us through the bottleneck. Mostly we own our success to blind luck, being in the right place at the right time, and then following the shoreline as it rose and retreated, over and again. It was the sea that saved us, Chiku. When the world cooled, the oceans gave us sustenance. Shellfish prefer the cold. And so we foraged, never far from water, along beaches and intertidal zones, and lived in caves, and spent our days wading in shallows. The lap of waves, the roar of breakers, the tang of ozone, the mew of a seagull – there’s a reason we’re comforted by these sounds. And here we are, a genetic heartbeat later.’

‘It’s a very nice sculpture.’

‘By the time it touches the ceiling, there are twelve billion threads. Spiderfibre whiskers, just a few carbon atoms wide – the same stuff they used to make the cables for space elevators – one for every person now alive, on Earth, orbiting the sun, in Oort communities, and the holoship migrations. I ca identify your thread, if you’d like … you can watch it glow brighter than the others, follow its path all the way into history, see were three became one. See where you fit into the bottleneck.'”

From On the Steel Breeze by Alaistair Reynolds.