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The other day, checking Facebook I saw this:

and given that I’ve found my current key ring annoying, I clicked on it. It brought me to a website that did this, immediately:

So, I couldn’t even browse without providing an email address (which would undoubtedly start spamming me with “deals”) or without logging in with Facebook, so they could spam my timeline.

Ok, so let’s just check this product out on Amazon …

which doesn’t tell me much, but did give me some basic reviews.

So let’s just go to the company website:

Oh! A nice site!

Clean design!

Informative graphics!

More clean design!

More clean design!

Look at this form!

Look at how the form is pre-populated with my country and province, despite being an American company!

So of course I bought it, from the company, bypassing the both the Facebook advertising and the online-retail-default-juggernaut, Amazon.

And what’s really great, is that this is run via Shopify.

The negative is that their discount banner wasn’t really obvious enough, and I only noticed it in getting the screencaps preparing this, so I lost out on the 15% discount.

(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.

The next time I see faux icicle decorations I’ll think of power outages.

“She had brought her book with her. It was an old looking thing, cased in marbled covers. Inside were pages and pages of handwritten text. Her letters sloped to the right like windblown trees.

Chiku saw an omission on one page and touched the nib of her fountain pen to the vellum. The inked words budged up, forming a space in which she could insert the missing word. Elsewhere she struck through two superfluous lines and the text on either side of the deleted passage married itself together.”

— from On the Steel Breeze by Alaistair Reynolds.

Saw Hannah Arendt last night and then felt weird about having a book called "Don't make me think" on my shelf.

— Timothy Comeau (@timothycomeau) July 14, 2013

Steve Krug’s Don’t Make me Think is considered one of the canonical texts of web-design, and as such was introduced to me as part of my web design studies at Sheridan College, which I undertook during the 2011-12 academic year. The title alone had always been offensive to me, someone who enjoys both ideas and thinking, and I always chaffed at the mindlessness it encourages.

However, the education process I went through helped me become conscious of my web-browsing behaviour, and the book is narrowly contextual to those times when we are on a website for a purpose-driven reason. For example, when we go to a theatre’s site to buy tickets, or are on some other commerce site trying to find contact-info or a business’ opening-hours. Primarily, the ‘design philosophy’ behind don’t-make-me-think is contextual to commercial or other service-oriented websites.

In the film Hannah Arendt, we get a wonderful defense of thought as a human activity, and a explication that the evil in question (the Holocaust) was facilitated by classic, mid-century modernist bureaucracy, and especially the German version which was predisposed by an education system which taught obedience and discipline. The system becomes one which encourages people to disregard thought which (as Arendt says in the film) dehumanizes us by ‘making people superfluous’ to the system. In other words, the indifference of a bureaucracy toward the individual it is meant to serve means people end up serving the bureaucracy.

It’s worth noting that the German education system, as developed by the state of Prussia, was imported to North America a century ago to transform farmer-children into future factory or corporate employees, by teaching a tolerance for boredom and a willing and mindless obedience to managerial directives. (See John Taylor Gatto’s essay, “Against School”)

~

This decade incorporates the 20th-year-anniversaries of everything web-related. The World Wide Web was first released in 1993 as an app that ran on the Internet (then an academic and government modem network). Now the W.W.W. is synonymous with the ‘Net and the design principles promoted by Don’t Make Me Think have become so standardized that we recognize websites as bad when their straightforward principles are violated. We know how websites are supposed to work, we recognize header menus as such, and understand what ‘home’ means.

Krug’s follow-up, Rocket Science Made Easy was a second-semester text, and I found both books very hard to read because they are both so patronizing and because he’s continually stating what is now obvious. They were written for people for whom computers, and using them, were new. Now they feel more like historical documents.

Inasmuch as we have a ‘web 2.0’ nomenclature (which in itself is about a decade out of date) I find the language shift from the ‘Net’ to ‘The Cloud’ indicative of where we are: the interconnected network was about siloed websites and email – essentially network nodes and lines of communication.

The Cloud (as a “post-Net 2.0” term) speaks to our ever-present interconnectivity, where we can download data to our devices out of thin air, and where server farms behind our screens can run the necessary compression algorithms to apply filters to our photos as we upload them.

The novelty of this technology has been intoxicating, and myself I’ve found it fascinating enough to both want to understand it and participate within it professionally. But after 20 years, the novelty is beginning to wear off; and the inevitable transitions evident fifteen years ago have come to pass.

Physically, publishing on paper is in decline (in some cases rightfully) whereas digital publishing is established and growing. This echoes the transition between Mediaeval manuscript book propagation in favour of the printed book, and if Gutenberg’s invention in 1452 echoes Berner-Lee’s of 1989, we are in the equivalent of the 1470s, by which time Guttenberg’s press had spread to France, Italy, England, and Poland.

The model of book-idea production has lasted since that time, until our era when we’ve figured out how to fluidly use a two-dimensional surface through the manipulation of electricity and light.

"We're struggling because the most visually adaptable medium in history is undermining print! Fire the photographers!" – Chicago Sun-Times

— Taylor Dobbs (@taylordobbs) June 28, 2013

I spent a week last July helping put the finishing touches on a corporate website to publish a company’s annual report. Twenty years ago, the report would have been a booklet and print designers and typesetters would have been hired to produce it. As the novelty of working with computers is wearing off, and as our economy has shifted to incorporate them in our offices and studios, it is now obvious that this digital economy is essentially that of publishing: websites, apps and ebooks. It is supported, as it always has been, by ad money. And the big sites like eBay and Amazon represent the Platinum Age of mail-order. I grew up with Roch Carrier’s famous short story about a hockey sweater ordered from the Eaton’s catalogue. A future generation will probably know an equivalent that replaces Eaton’s with Amazon.

As I worked during that July week it occurred to me that in 200 years I would not be described as front-end developer, nor a web-designer, but perhaps just a publisher, in the same way that Benjamin Franklin is described as a printer, not a pamphlet designer, nor a typesetter. “To earn money he worked in publishing” – may be all that need to be said, for by then, publishing will be digital by default, and will have been for two-hundred years.

Last week at FITC Screens 13 I got to try Google Glass for the first time. Tom Emrich was there as part of the Xtreme Labs Lounge and I tried his device for about five minutes, long enough for him to show me how to use it and go through some basic commands.

The screen was a little out of focus, but it wasn’t important to me that it be perfectly fitted and adjusted. I took a picture, swiped, tapped, looked at the New York Times’ app, and had it read it to me.

Here is a mock-up I made to record the general impression:

The rectangle was smaller than I expected, and the fact that it was back-lit / transparent-black gave it a bit of a purple, out of focus sheen. It’s a see through screen hovering at your eyebrow, and I was thinking of this later when I tweeted:

Google Glass is a useful hallucination prosthesis, basically. #SCREENS13

— Timothy Comeau (@timothycomeau) October 3, 2013

I wrote that while sitting in Mike DiGiovanni’s Google Glass presentation, and watching him onstage I now understood the gestural language he was presenting: not that of someone with a neurological disorder, unable to focus on what’s in front of him, with eyes rolling upward, but someone who was experiencing a prosthetic hallucination in the right corner of his visual field.

The thing about something like Ggl Glass is that you're not aware of what it looks like to others. In that way it's somewhat sociopathic.

— Timothy Comeau (@timothycomeau) October 3, 2013

I used the word ‘sociopathic’ specifically: a social pathology, that is a social illness, where one behaves in a manner that is either offensive or unfriendly and unsociable.

Human interaction requires at least two people, but Glass is not a device meant for two people. It’s an internalized, private experience. When you’re wearing one, you are meant to forget that it’s on, in the same way that traditional corrective eyeglasses become forgettable to the wearer.

New word suggestion for mobile: "isolationist" as in, "Google Glass is very isolationist." #SCREENS13

— Timothy Comeau (@timothycomeau) October 3, 2013

All the pictures we’ve seen are of other people wearing glass but of course this is because of how difficult it is to show the subjective experience, which is really what the product offers.

Google Glass is a beta product, and is the technological equivalent of 1990s cell phones with retractable antennas. In the 90s, owning a cell phone was a little offensive, because it signaled that you were either a busy-body big-shot or you were narcissistic enough to think that you were as important. (I remember telling someone in 1999 that I didn’t want a cell phone because I wouldn’t want to be bothered when I was away from home).

However, the utility of a cell phone soon meant that by 2005, almost everyone had one. By 2007, the year Apple released the iPhone, the executives and managers of the world were already carrying Blackberries and other email-capable cellphones, and I was used to seeing these people staring at their little machines while in line for coffee. It occurred to me then that the Blackberry was the wand of the overclass, and I wondered what their jobs were that they had to be checking email while in line. (At the time I carried a basic Nokia).

Now, people everywhere can be seen looking down at something they’re holding in their hands. This is such a common sight that you can find examples on Google Streetview:

For this argument I’ll refer to this posture – or more specifically this behaviour, as “digital attention behaviour”.

In 2007, in line at coffee shops, the future wasn’t yet evenly distributed, but now this digital attention behaviour has spread wide and become normalized.

Part of the normalization is that looking at a rectangle displaying digital messages isn’t that much different than looking at a pad of paper. We were already used to seeing people read things silently, which in itself was a revolution centuries ago, when reading was usually done aloud.

The rolling of eyes may eventually become a normalized digital attention behaviour, but right now, absent the even distribution allowing the rest of us to relate, it still looks strange and offensive.

Unintentionally, Google Glass manifests the Western narcissistic ego, where private experience on public display happens without care for how it affects others. The selfishness of Glass is expressed when the Other cannot tell if a picture is being taken or if the time is being checked. With a smartphone, a glance can tell you if the person is emailing, texting, web browsing, or playing a video game. The information leaks, and this information is valuable in contextualizing our person-to-person interaction.

Because the Ggl Glass experience is so personal, it seem like it should interfere with our Theory of Mind. #screens13

— Timothy Comeau (@timothycomeau) October 3, 2013

Rendered completely private, this interferes with our Theory of Mind, our ability to imagine what others are doing and be able to relate to them. We can’t empathize without sufficient contextual clues. Inasmuch as Glass is a prosthetic for hallucination, it may also be a prosthetic for autism.

Having said all this …

I am nevertheless excited by the idea of Glass as both a prototype and an attempt to get us away from current digital attention behaviour, so that we can benefit from the data cloud while also being able to interact with one another as we did in the past. The irony that Glass is at present such a private experience that it interferes with human-to-human interaction, and is one of the bugs that needs to be resolved.

I like to think of Glass a pathfinder project to get us to causal augmented reality, via “smart”-eyeglasses, contact lenses, and/or eventually implants, such as described in Alastair Reynold’s Poseidon’s Children novels, the second of which (On The Steel Breeze) has this scene:

“Wait, I’m hearing from Imris again.” Her face assumed the slack composure of aug trance, as if someone had just snipped all the nerves under her skin.

In that world of implant-enabled augmented reality, an aug trance is something everyone can relate to, and fits into everyone’s Theory of Mind. It is not disturbing to see, and is an understood appearance.

Having said all this, I suspect that a product like Glass will be successful. Again, its current design is reminiscent of the first cell phones. We know from the movies that portable radio-phones were available during World War II.

Original 1960s Star Trek communicators were more skeuomorphic of the walkie-talkie than a phone, but when Motorola marketed the StarTAC phone in 1996 the reference to the fiction was obvious.

In the 2009 Star Trek movie, Simon Pegg as Scotty is seen wearing an eyepiece:

And in 1991, Star Trek The Next Generation featured holographic eyewear which took over the minds of the crew:

Which exemplify that the idea of a heads-up-display is an old one, but Google decided to build it, tether it to an Android phone, and begin to market it. I don’t doubt something like it will eventually be successful.

What is especially interesting is how such a simple idea and device turns out to have complicated social side effects, but these side-effects would never have become apparent if Google hadn’t taken the chance to implement this old idea to begin with.

Twenty years ago in September 1993, I was a fresh-faced frosh at Saint Mary’s University in Halifax Nova Scotia. I had visited Halifax on weekend family trips while growing up in the province, but this was the first month of what turned out out be a six year experience of living there.

With some free time, I took a walk downtown. The path tended to be: Inglis to Tower Rd to South Park, to Spring Garden Road. From here, I ended up walking to Barrington St.

I remember protests regarding Clayoquot Sound around this time, being held across the street from the library at Spring Garden and Grafton but I’m not sure if they were visible on this particular walk, wherein I found myself further down into the historic properties.

I found a Subway sandwich shop, and stopped there for lunch, and recall being surprised when I was offered both mustard and mayo as a topping, a combination of which I had never encountered before.

Unbeknown to me, I had wandered onto the grounds of NSCAD, the art school where I would begin classes three years later. Occasionally while at NSCAD, I would look down from the library at Subway at the intersection and recall that first walk when I began to discover my new city. For that reason I took its picture.

The Subway, as seen from the NSCAD library in 1999

Eight years later I began to be interested in computer programming and the web. Using books I began to figure out how to build web pages, and I was reading Slashdot everyday. There was also a website called NewsToday® (later rebranded to QBN) which aggregated news items of interest to designers, and if I remember correctly, it was through that that I found YoungPup.net, where Aaron Boodeman (youngpup) had posted “the best way” to generate a pop-up window in Javascript. (I found the posting with the WayBackMachine, timestamped Sept 19 2002). From what I recall through his blog, through a link or a reference, I learned about Aaron Straupe Cope. Through his posted online resume, I learned that we shared NSCAD as an alma mater.

“If anything I studied painting but I am mostly part of that generation for whom everything changed, and who dropped everything they were previously doing, when the web came along.” – Aaron Straup Cope (Head of Internet Typing at the Smithsonian Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum), in his post Quantified Selfies

While I was eating my sandwich twenty years ago, he was probably in the building next door taking Foundation courses. His online resume also tells me that he was around during my first year, graduating at the end of term.

Twenty years ago the future both lay before us in a tapestry of September sunshine, but just as the future of twenty years from now is being invisibly incubated, nothing was then evident. It was the first year of the Clinton Administration and Jean Chretien’s Liberals were about to win the general election. The 90s were effectively beginning.

When I first started reading Aaron’s blog about ten years ago, he was living in Montreal. Later through his blog I learned he was in Vancouver, and later still, he was in San Francisco. I imagined CDs bought at Sam the Record Man on Barrington St that may have accompanied these travels. Reading his blog, I understood he was at Yahoo!, working on a site called Flickr.

Seventeen months ago, the Google Streetview car captured the corner as it then appeared. Here it is, posted to Flickr.

So I reflect now twenty years later on how a website like Flickr (which was big in its day and which now lingers on as an established presence) became part of the world that did away with typewriters for my generation and younger, and was in a way present at the GPS coordinates where I ate a Subway sandwich twenty years ago.

At the end of August my friend Byron Hodgins & I went to High Park and he painted me.

The argument made by Alfred Loos in Ornament & Crime a century ago (1908) was essentially racist: a European aesthete equated ornamentation with primitive barbarism. Eighty-four years later, art anthropologist Ellen Dissanayake pointed out how the West’s value of simplicity was unique; that people all over the world use ornamentation as an expression of their humanity (Homo Aestheticus; 1992). In other words, the Western/European strain of thought has derided ornament for a long time, but this is a rejection of what the rest of the world appreciates.

As architectural criitc Nikos Salingaros stated in a recent interview (speaking architecturally):

Ornament generates ordered information. It adds coherent information that is visual and thus immediately perceivable on a structure. Successful ornament does not stick something on top of form: instead it spontaneously creates smaller and smaller divisions out of the whole. Just like biological life, which is all about information: how to structure it, how to keep it together as the living body, and how to replicate it so that the genetic pattern is not lost forever. But without ornament, either there is no information, or the information is random, hence useless.

The loss of ornament is the loss of vital architectural information. Ever since that fateful moment in history, there is little life in architecture. Unornamented forms and spaces are dead, sterile, and insipid, defining a sort of cosmic “cold death”: an empty universe where no life can exist. But for a century, this empty state has been the desired aim of architects: to remove information from the built environment.

A century of thought by sophisticated individuals has resulted in Minimalism as an aesthetic trend, affecting the built environment, designed spaces, and designed objects. It is part of the story that includes not only Alfred Loos’ contribution, but also that of asceticism. Minimalism seems to be one of David Martin’s Christian ’time bombs’ that went off during the Industrial Revolution.

Martin’s argument is that Christianity (which we can say began as a cult in Roman occupied Judea) spread throughout the Roman world and for the past two thousand years has survived through weekly repetition of its repertoire of ideas. These ideas slowly transformed what was once Roman society — shepherding civilisation through Rome’s collapse, then preserving knowledge until Europe could restore itself in subsequent centuries. Along the way, Christian ideas have gone off like time bombs, such as human equality, and the abolition of slavery.

Minimalism would seem to be a contemporary expression of the asceticism taught to the West through the Christian tradition, and thus the contemporary minimalist practitioner might see themselves as practicing a form of spiritual sophistication, through what they consider to be “good taste”.

However, minimalism is very future-orientated as well. In Ian MacLeod’s Song of Time (2008) the narrating character (reflecting from a future perspective of a century from now) says of our present early 21st Century:

There were so many things is that lost world. Our house overflowed with Dad’s old tapes, records and CDs, and Mum’s ornaments, and both of their books and magazines, and all of our musical impediments, and my and Leo’s many toys, which we never played with, but still regarded with totemic reverence.

This implies that the future world is largely Thing-less and decluttered. Of the minimalised future, consider how it is parsed by Lindsay Jensen in her essay on Oblivion:

“The flannel-wearing hoops-shooter is Jack Harper (Tom Cruise), a high tech drone repairman who lives in a futuristic compound (that more closely resembles a sterile medical lab that a cozy cottage) […] Despite the destruction of the Earth’s surface, Jack and Victoria’s home – in a tower high above – displays not a speck of dust or clutter, only gleaming chrome and glass. Even Victoria herself seems a piece of this decor, impeccably dressed in sculptural shift dresses … signifying Victoria as an integral element of this environment — serving the same semiotic function as her hyper-futuristic touchscreen computer, or the meals that appear as anonymous squares of surely nutrient-dense edibles served from individual vacuum-sealed pouches. These objects – of which she is one – loudly and obviously declare this as the future: a different, cold, and calculated environment in stark contrast with the relaxed authenticity of Jack’s cabin. The latter is a hideaway whose existence Jack keeps secret from Victoria. She is too much a part of one world to venture into the other one he has (re)-created.”

Oblivion in fact displays the temporality of contemporary expressions of Sophistication. On the one hand, we get the minamlised dust-free future. On the other, we get Jack’s cabin, his secret retro-world, filled with the archeology of Oblivion’s Earth. Here Jack wears a New York Yankees ball cap, checked shirt, and listens to vinyl records. Old, weather-warped books rest on rough-hewn shelves. The cabin world reflects our “Dream of the 1890s” and the other hipsterisms our present time – the Sophisticated Retronaut who has curated their life as if it were the decade between 1975-1985, with a vinyl record collection, gingam shirts, and the usual as displayed on Tumblr.

Sophistication seems to lie on the spectrum between the Retro Past or the Austere Future, and the display of its corresponding taste. For either one curates objects of “warmth” or those that are “cold”, while “sentimental” responds to “calculating”.

Concern for dress goes along with concern for one’s bearing and manner, and these reflect the self-control and civility that humans from the earliest times seem to have deliberately imposed on their ‘natural’ or animal inclinations and regarded as essential to harmonious social life.

While the examples at this part of her book focused on clothing and dress, they serve as scaffolds to extrapolate from: our concern for ornament is a human appetite, a way that we express our supra-animal minds. Dissanyake closes the chapter in question (“The Arts as Means of Enhancement”) by narrating a brief Western art history:

For the past two hundred years… the formality and artificiality that universally characterize civilized behaviour have been suspect. Wordsworth praised the beauty to be found in the natural rustic speech or ordinary people; since his time, poetry has moved further and further away from the characteristics that marked it as poetry for thousands of years [while] 20th Century Western artists have typically been concerned with making art more natural (using ordinary materials from daily life or depicting humble, trivial, or vulgar subjects) and showing that the natural, when regarded aesthetically, is really art. […] In this they both lead and follow, absorb and reflect postmodern Western society which is the apogee of the trend I have been describing where now the natural is elevated to the cultural, where nature and the natural viewed as rare and “special” are deliberately inserted into culture as something desired. I have pointed out that most cultures like shiny, new-looking, bright, and conspicuously artificial things. […] But we prefer the worn and the faded because they look natural and authentic.”

The Minimalised future is shiny and new and special, and thus in tune with our human natures. Yet it is also austere and cold, speaking to a sense of self-control and discipline, which is acquired … that is to say, civilized. Our flourishing Retro hipsterdom is the late 20th Century’s postmodern concern for authenticity spoken of by Dissanayake. But maybe it is also way for our culture to digest the records of the previous hundred years and decide what should be considered timeless, what should we formalize into the artificiality of culture which our human appetites desire.

(top image: Fuckyeahcooldesigns Tumblr)

The King Baby was born on Monday July 22nd. Today they announced his name was George.

Let us suppose future historians will be able to say that the Second Elizabethan Era lasted the second half of the 20th Century and a quarter of the 21st (a reign of seventy five years). Thus:

As Elizabeth’s mother lived to be 101, this is quite feasible. Let us then be generous and assume all future monarchs will live to be 100.

Note: Wikipdia states that Charles has considered reigning under the name George, which may be unlikely now that his grandson has been given the name. Nevertheless, were he to do so, presumably King Baby George would reign as either George VIII or follow his grandfather’s example and us another name.

If Prince William lives as long as his grandmother that would mean he'd be 102 in 2084. So today's news is a big deal in the 2080s.

— Timothy Comeau (@timothycomeau) December 3, 2012

“What conditions would allow a sophisticated and civilized society that has space travel to turn inward and no longer see what it’s doing to itself?” he adds. “We likened it to a feudal, hyperconservative kind of society that no longer believes other planets were worth visiting and mothballed those fleets. Ancient, doddering old fools running society and paying no attention to science or more enlightened minds.” – Alex McDowell

(Sounds basically like the USA and Canada)

This french fry is this Go Train car’s Red Wheelbarrow.

These two images from National Geographic‘s Found Tumblr are currently my Desktop backgrounds:

“Did you ever hear of the 5.9 Kiloyear event?

“I thought not. It was an aridification episode, a great drying. Maybe it began in the oceans. It desiccated the Sahara; ended the Neolithic Subpluvial. Worldwide migration followed, forcing everyone to cram around river valleys from Central North Africa to the Nile Valley and start doing this thing we hadn’t done before, called civilization.

That’s when it really began: the emergence of state-led society, in the 4th millennium BC. Cities. Agriculture. Bureaucracy. And on the geologic timescale, that’s yesterday. Everything that’s followed, every moment of it from Hannibal to Apollo, it’s all just a consequence of that single forcing event. We got pushed to the riverbanks. We made cities. Invented paper and roads and the wheel. Built casinos on the Moon. […]

But this global climate shift, the Anthropocene warming – it’s just another forcing event, I think. Another trigger. We’re just so close to the start of it, we can’t really see the outcome yet. […]

“The warming was global, but Africa was one of the first places to really feel the impact of the changing weather patterns. The depopulation programmes, the forced migrations … we were in the absolute vanguard of all that. In some respects, it was the moment the Surveilled World drew its first hesitant breath. We saw the best and the worst of what we were capable of, Geoffrey. The devils in us, and our better angels. The devils, mostly. Out of that time of crisis grew the global surveillance network, the invisible, omniscient god that never tires of watching over us, never tires of keeping us from doing harm to one another. Oh, it had been there in pieces before that, but this was the first time we devolved absolute authority to the Mechanism. And you know what? It wasn’t the worst thing that ever happened to us. We’re all living in a totalitarian state, but for the most part it’s a benign, kindly dictatorship. It allows us to do most things except suffer accidents and commit crimes. And now the Surveilled World doesn’t even end at the edge of space. It’s a notion, a mode of existence, spreading out into the solar system, at the same rate as the human expansion front.”

From Blue Remembered Earth by Alastair Reynolds (p.150-151). The character Eunice, speaking in 2162, is explaining the development of the global Mechanism that watches over and protects the population. This is what I’ve been thinking about this week in light of the NSA revelations.

I myself don’t go into bookstores very much now. They have become archaic, depressing places. […] How many bookstores close, as a direct ratio of hours spent with electronic devices?

I’m sure there’s some direct relationship there. And it’s not a dark conspiracy. I happen to be quite the Google Glass fan.

In fact, I’m even becoming something of a Sergey Brin fan. I never paid much attention to Sergey before, but after Google Glass, Sergey really interests me. He’s filling the aching hole, the grievous hole in our society left by the departure of Steve Jobs. With Jobs off the stage, Sergey’s becoming very Jobsian. He wears these cool suits now. He’s got much better taste in design than he did. He’s got these Google X Moonshot things going on, they’re insanely great, and so forth.

I hope Sergey’s not taking a lot of acid and living off vegetarian applesauce. But other than that, well, now we have this American tech visionary millionaire who’s a Russian emigre. It’s fantastic! There’s something very post-Cold-War, very genuinely twenty-first century about that. It’s super. Sergey’s like my favorite out of control, one-percenter, mogul guy, right now.

[…]

Since the financial panic of 2008, things have gotten worse across the board. The Austerity is a complete policy failure. It’s even worse then the Panic. We’re not surrounded by betterness in 2013. By practically every measure, nature is worse, culture is worse, governance is worse. The infrastructure is in visible decline. Business is worse. People are living in cardboard in Silicon Valley.

We don’t have even much to boast about in our fashion. Although you have lost weight. And I praise you for that, because I know it must have been hard.

We’re living in hard times, we’re not living in jolly boom dotcom times. And that’s why guys like Evgeny Morozov, who comes from the miserable country of Belarus, gets all jittery, and even fiercely aggressive, when he hears you talking about “technological solutionism.”

“There’s an app to make that all better.” Okay, a billion apps have been sold. Where’s the betterness? – Bruce Sterling’s keynote at SXSW 2013

(the ending of 2006’s Children of Men)

So the Reinhart-Rogoff fiasco needs to be seen in the broader context of austerity mania: the obviously intense desire of policy makers, politicians and pundits across the Western world to turn their backs on the unemployed and instead use the economic crisis as an excuse to slash social programs.

What the Reinhart-Rogoff affair shows is the extent to which austerity has been sold on false pretenses. For three years, the turn to austerity has been presented not as a choice but as a necessity. Economic research, austerity advocates insisted, showed that terrible things happen once debt exceeds 90 percent of G.D.P. But “economic research” showed no such thing; a couple of economists made that assertion, while many others disagreed. Policy makers abandoned the unemployed and turned to austerity because they wanted to, not because they had to.

So will toppling Reinhart-Rogoff from its pedestal change anything? I’d like to think so. But I predict that the usual suspects will just find another dubious piece of economic analysis to canonize, and the depression will go on and on. – Paul Krugman The Excel Depression

I wonder sometimes if Morozov’s disinformation campaign is a deliberate sabotage, an attempt to discredit those who are actually working to achieve the participatory ideal that he claims to be protecting. […] I don’t mind Morozov’s petty mischaracterizations of my motives; it’s what he does to garnish attention and I make a convenient target.

-Tim O’Reilly responding to Annalee Newitz’s overview of Evgney Morozov’s attack piece

Faust audiobooks conjure Mephistopheles doodles

Lord Beaconsfield cigar box.

This drawing seems appropriate for Easter.

This was my elementary school.

A doodle from the end of January when I was listening to a podcast about King Solomon.

Found this idea in some old papers – I used to want to brand Canada as a place of thinkers but then Harper won and there’s too much hockey.

Like I said
(src)

The DJ booth is a repurposed pulpit.

That’s Dan Turner aka Sex Helmet at The Founatain on Dundas.

One ends up drawing economical-line Prosperos while listening to The Tempest audio book

The romance of alchemy in the artistic festishization of jars.

(from my Twitter; related to my Timereading photo series)

I was finally able to download my Twitter archive yesterday, and I’ve posted it online. I plan on updating it every month or so.

http://timothycomeau.info/tweets/

I’ve always wanted to try a Segway so today @owlparliament & I did the Segway tour at the Distillery District. It was super fun. I loved floating along on that thing.

Field trip to the Water Treatment Plant with @owlparliament

I watched the remade Total Recall over Christmas. This is Commerce Court in Toronto’s downtown core.

Today I began work next door and after took a walk over to see it. Instead of an information kiosk, we have illuminated trees.

The church in Bathurst New Brunswick where I was baptized. The baptism itself looked like this:

The priest was my father’s uncle, Noel Cormier (died in 2010) and with my mother are my maternal grandparents. My grandfather died in 1993, and my grandmother is still alive at age 100. It was for her 100th birthday that I was in New Brunswick when the church photo was taken.

Part of a larger project

Sam Beckett’s New Mexico Driver’s Licence, issued in 1995, as imagined in the 1993 series finale of Quantum Leap.

From Weyland Investors Tumblr

I haven’t been that interested in the Pussy Riot trial, except to say going to jail has made their protest far more successful than it would have been if they’d been ignored. We’ve gotten used to ‘radicals’ doing something offensive and disappearing, but these girls performed a song, pissed off people enough to get arrested, forced Western journalists to compare their story to Soviet show trials, and ignited sympathetic protests around the world. When they get out of jail in two years they’ll be free-speech darlings and will probably have a widely successful global tour. If the point of their action was to highlight that Russia is intolerant of protest, then this whole story exemplifies that wonderfully.

However, Russia doesn’t care that Western people under the age of 40 who Tweet think this is outrageous. Reuters reports:

Valentina Ivanova, 60, a retired doctor, said outside the courtroom: “What they did showed disrespect towards everything, and towards believers first of all.”

A poll of Russians released by the independent Levada research group showed only 6 percent sympathized with the women and 51 percent found nothing good about them or felt irritation or hostility. The rest could not say or were indifferent.

our generation has no Chomsky, no Jameson, no Derrida, no Adorno, no Cixous, no Foucault, no Woolf, no Nietzsche, no Deleuze.

— _ (@soundb0mb3r) July 27, 2012

I tend to think that our generation does in fact have such thinkers, only they’ve been hampered by structures designed to celebrate such already “brand name” established figures. Also, this generation’s thinkers are less likely to go through an academic publishing route, given the opportunities for self-publishing today.

Hints of “the Mechanism” in Alaistair Reynold’s Blue Remembered Earth appear until it actually becomes a plot element, where we learn precisely what it is. Essentially, by 2162, people have been enhanced, and interact with the data cloud via retinal implants and augmented reality. There is a major political system called the United Aquatic Nations, where people live in under-ocean cities, swim a lot, and where some have even undergone surgeries to make them into living mermaids. These people still use buttons and screens, as we do, but it seems this is mostly a necessity of their lifestyle choice.

Because of the constant, internalized connection, people generate a massive amount of data which needs to be indexed (via posterity engines), while it is also being monitored. The Mechanism is the set of algorithms which constantly monitor the data stream, and intervene if signals indicate a certain action is underway, or about to be. When Geoffrey, a main character, gets so angry we wants to hit someone, the Mechanism recognizes this and strikes him with an instant debilitating headache. (p.283) The incident is logged, and he is then scheduled for a visit by a risk-assessment team to determine the seriousness of the matter.

It is known as The Surveilled World.

Twenty-five years later, I visited the Cloisters, the reconstructed (and frankensteined) medieval complex in New York. Throughout we see little heads gazing down from sculpted elements – these essentially are the medieval version of our black domed cameras, a reminder to the monks of eight-hundred years ago that they were constantly being watched, by a security apparatus of angels.

It seems then, that we have some social need to construct surrogate parental oversight. That a society without watchers – a secularized society that doesn’t believe in spiritual spies and one without CCTV cameras (essentially the Western world for about a hundred and fifty years) cannot exist without engendering existential angst (as seemingly happened).

Speaking of the social upheavals of the mid 21st Century, the character Eunice describes its development:

The warming was global, but Africa was one of the first places to really feel the impact of the changing weather patterns. The depopulation programmes, the forced migrations … we were in the absolute vanguard of all that. In some respects, it was the moment the Surveilled World drew its first hesitant breath. We saw the best and worst of what we were capable of Geoffrey. The devils in us, and our better angels. The devils, mostly. Out of that time of crisis grew the global surveillance network, this invisible, omniscient god that never tires of watching over us, never tires of keeping us from doing harm to one another. Oh, it had been there in pieces before that, but this was the first time we devolved absolute authority to the Mechanism. And you know what? It wasn’t the worst thing that ever happened to us. We’re all living in a totalitarian state, but for the most part it’s a benign, kindly dictatorship. It allows us to do most things except suffer accidents and commit crimes. (p.150)

The quote continues:

“And now the surveilled world doesn’t even end at the edge of space. It’s a notion, a mode of existence, spreading out into the solar system at the same rate as the human expansion front. But these are still the early days. A century, what’s that? Do you think the effects of the 5.9 kilo year event only took a hundred years to be felt? These things play out over much longer timescales than that. Nearly 6000 years of one type of complex, highly organized society. Now a modal shift to something other. Complexity squared, or cubed. Where will we be in a thousand years, or six thousand?”

This is worth quoting in full since it hints at Alastair Reynold’s larger project: Blue Remembered Earth is merely the first novel of a planned trilogy, reported to span into the far future. I imagine the next book will take place centuries ahead, and be part of the answer to this speculation.

The referred to 5.9 kilo year event was a period of intense desertification occurring circa 3900 BCE which triggered worldwide migration to river valleys, from which emerged the first complex city-states. The character is suggesting that present climate-change is a similar event, which will drive us into new ways of living. In the book, one of these new ways is that of globalized surveillance, complete with a thought-control mechanism.

However, there is an area on the Moon that exists outside the Surveilled World, and Geoffry visits his sister Sunday there early on. They strolled through a market while Sunday explained social theories regarding crime as a necessity for innovation and social health. The chapter ends with Geoffrey reaching into his pocket for his hat, and finding it missing …

The hat, it began to dawn on him, had been stolen. The feeling of being a victim of crime was as novel and thrilling as being stopped in the street and kissed by a beautiful stranger. Things like that just didn’t happen back home. (p65)

The Mech then, is an interesting possibility about where we might be headed. The consequences of it are that, by 2162, there are no police forces and no jails. In the novel a news item is mentioned in passing about the demolition of the planet’s last jail, a facility in Mexico.

(via someone’s Tumblr)

Last week, the Cloud Atlas trailer was released and it has reportedly driven up sales of the book on Amazon.

It’s an interesting effect, given that books have begun to have trailers produced by their publishing houses.

Neil Stephenson’s 2009 Anathem had a trailer…

…as did my latest favorite book (of which I’ve been writing about lately), Alastair Reynolds’ Blue Remembered Earth:

While B.R.E.’s‘ helped me understand what the book entailed, I was convinced by the Amazon Kindle’s sample chapter.

(For that matter, I bought Cloud Atlas at the end of December when I saw the concept art on io9.com, and got hooked by the sample chapter as well).

I have no information with regard to the trailers produced by the publishing houses having any impact. However, if they wanted to produce 6 minute masterpieces like the Cloud Atlas trailer (a distillation of imagery from a reported near 3-hour movie) then the form would come into its own.

This unintended effect generated by the Cloud Atlas trailer may convince them to do just that.

I love the idea of the mini-film being constructed out of choice scenes, of the quality that suggests an excerpt from a larger cinematic work.

Kind of like Franceso Vezzoli’s 2005 art-video, Trailer for a Remake of Gore Vidal’s Caligula

(Gotta love the Gladiator soundtrack. Also, how has this been on YouTube for two years?)

I tweeted this last week, but I should note it here:

Bing, DuckDuckGo, Yahoo, and Google are Search Engines.

Wikipeadia is a Find Engine

I wrote something on Posterity Engines.

Today, all the talk is about “Search” and databases are being built up on ‘search behavior’. Google has a zeitgeist listing that tells us what people have been lookig for, and one result of this database is its prediction algorithm, which guesses what you might be searching for, or tells you what other keywords match a search phrase.

If the conversation shifted to ‘finding’, what then? We have Yahoo! Answers and Wikipedia, and all the other websites in the world. Google’s dominance began with the quality of their ‘finds’ – the websites they suggested best matched your search.

If we shifted to analyzing ‘find behavior’, we would begin to build up a database of what sites we’re being accessed most often … and yes, this is already happening, and essentially drives Google’s algorithms. The site at the top is most likely to be the one you’ll want because others have chosen it as well.

Essentially, I find the use of the word ‘engine’ to name these processes of indexing databases curious, and found it especially interesting when coupled with the word ‘posterity’. It began to make me think about the data we are creating, and how it might be archived, accessed, and named. We are currently living under a ‘search’ paradigm but the future will inevitably complicate this, until ‘search’ will no longer be an adequate word.

Beginning in November of last year (2011) I began to experiment with responsive design on a new blog site – the ultimate goal of which was to move my blog from timothycomeau.com/blog (where it had been for years) to it’s own dedicated url: timothycomeau.info.

Over the course of the winter (and while I was studying Web Design at Sheridan) I hacked away at it using it as a playground to try new ideas and further my understanding of WordPress, and especially Responsive Design.

Unfortunately, by the time I came to graduate, I was caught with a mangled site which was only half-developed for what I’d then intended: not only have it as a blog, but also an archive of my previous web content. The archive part wasn’t done, and unresolved.

At about the same time, I began to look into the sites on Themeforest.net, and in order to learn more about how they were built and functioned, bought one, which I put on the site in May. I was asking myself questions: how does this theme work and, does my content stand up to its design?

However, I soon grew frustrated with the implementation. That theme was designed for portfolios mostly, and I wanted the site to function as a blog primarily. It was evident that it should be scrapped.

About a month ago, I hacked together a very simple theme for my localhost WordPress Journal. As a Journal, the end that needed to be served was reading and so design wise it needed to emphasize and encourage that.

Essentially, I ported that design over into this one. I wanted something as simple & clean as words on a page. With the basic structure in place, I think I’ve reached a final version.

Any Human Heart: the story of a 20th century man, published in 2002, written in the late 1990s, and with the fictional lifespan of 1906-1991.

A Human Heart: the story of a 21st Century man, published in 2102, written in the late 2090s, and with a fictional lifespan of 2006-2091. What story then awaits today’s 6 year old?

Both today and I week ago I got these strange emails from women with M & J initials which seem to come from ambitious young writers. Je ne comprends pas.

I suspect it’s some new kind of bot, & perhaps these emails are an intelligence test? AKA let’s see how many people we can fool into responding.

(I admit that I responded a week ago).

Monday, August 8th, 2011 @ 11:00 AM
BA1160 (Bahen Building)
University of Toronto
40 Saint George Street

“INFORMATION IS QUANTUM”
How physics has helped us understand what information is and what can be
done with it.

Biography:

Charles H. Bennett received his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1970 for molecular dynamics studies (computer simulation of molecular motion).

Following graduation, he worked at the Argonne Laboratory for two years. Since 1972, he has been at IBM where he has played a major role in elucidating the interconnections between physics and information. He developed a practical system of quantum cryptography in collaboration with Gilles Brassard and John Smolin. As well, he is also known for discovering “quantum teleportation”. Other research interests include algorithmic information theory and the physics of computation. Bennett is known as one of the founding fathers of quantum information theory.

Bennett is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and a member of the National Academy of Sciences. He was awarded the 2008 Harvey Prize by Technion and the 2006 Rank Prize in opto-electronics.

For more information, please go to http://cqiqc.physics.utoronto.ca/ .