On Invention; I Am Become Irony, Interpreter of Worlds

By rights, this post should be in response to a question posed on Quora, asking about "invention." The asker seems to betray ambition to invent. Sometimes, when I'm not quite in my right mind, I take such bait, but not often. There are lots of questions like this one on Quora, and the ones I might be inclined to respond to generally imply, to me, utter ignorance in the context for the question.

No expert myself, I still feel qualified to comment on ignorance.

I am myself quite ignorant, of course, which is likely why I never respond to most questions. I would rather be thought a fool than to open my mouth and remove all doubt, sort of thing. 

Anyhow, those who do feel that they possess sure knowledge seem always to teach me something that I didn't know. I don't even know if there is a realm where I feel any sort of expertise. Competence, perhaps, but expert status, rarely!

But here I go, on what is, by far, a less public forum. Mine. I am the only expert here. So expert that no-one dares to comment.

The term "invention" always implies an individual coming up with something de novo and changing the world thereby. But even the roots of the word are more about discovery than invention, as the word "invention" is deployed in common usage. 

Discovery implies, of course, much ground being laid ahead of time by many many more people than the discoverer. Our fixation on fixing who's first and giving them a Name is much more about our particular Western ways of viewing history than it is about anything real. 

We value individuals and we value individualism, when we value anything at all. Our economy values individualism. Our constitution enshrines it. 

As I've commented here before, it is patently absurd for Jeff Bezos to call himself an inventor, and then to claim personal responsibility for all the value-added that he attributes to Amazon. Fine, give him credit and lay at this feet the cost of all the "creative" destruction that he unleashed by simply being that unbound by scruple of any sort. 

He certainly never thought of doing good for the world, unless one wishes to make those thoughts continuous with getting us to Mars. That would be abandonment. He is a garden variety capitalist marauder is all, writ a little bit more large, and with a little bit less concern for lives of his (ever temporary) workers. It would be hard for me to ascribe anything like genius to his moves. And harder still to find any value added. The world changed, and now we can't do without Amazon. Brilliant! Give me a patent on climate change!

Many ascribe the interstate highway system to President Eisenhower. But at least he warned us about the Military Industrial Complex that it subserved. The excuse for building it was to have a way to mobilise troops across our vast continental expanse, in case of invasion. 

Now try to imagine anyone succeeding in blocking such a massive public works. In hindsight, attempts to block it might be based on the environmental destruction that so many cars unleashed would wreak upon the land. But with military and economic imperatives aligned, of course there would be no way to succeed in any blockage. Indeed high speed limited access roadways have since covered the earth. They must have been inevitable. They surely made many of us enthusiastic about long distance car vacations, obsolete though those might be just now. 

In effect, that massive public expenditure offloaded onto the public the larger cost of the private vehicles and motive power. And we were happy to afford our cars - thanks Big Anti-Semite Henry Ford! - for the sense of independence they provided. Building high speed railways would surely have been cost-prohibitive and would never have provided the engine to the economy that family motoring would.

I descend from a line of inventors and players in these transformative developments, from both sides of my family. West Point, Westinghouse, the computer math behind miniaturized electronic circuitry, the limited access highway, radar . . . 

Guilty! I would be an inventor as well, except that invention has been exposed finally as fraud. Says me. Not quite so much credit should accrue to one just lucky enough to arrive first at a solution that looks inevitable in hindsight every time. 

And anyhow, it's always a mixed bag. The prizes should go to the ones who set out the best moral path to take in taking advantage of the inventions. I'm sure that Albert Einstein would take back his contributions to making the Bomb real, if he could. 

I would highlight the irony: That we celebrate the very thing that we deny. We deny that we can deflect progress, and see our advances as inevitable even as we celebrate individuals as though none of it would have come about without them. 

I declare that our own celebrated age of innovation is, in fact, stuck in a paradigm which should have shifted long ago. Indeed I can date the shift because I might have caused it my very own selfie-self. I failed to cause it. I feel guilty, truth be told. What an arrogant shit that makes me!

The trouble was and is that nobody wants this wonderful paradigm to shift; the one where individuals invent stuff and we celebrate those individuals with riches beyond imagining, and that is right and good and just. Even though it resembles the middle-ages for the power structures that we put back in place all over again. How much rent do you pay to the new rentiers, hein? You think it's free?

Truly no-one wants to listen to anything new which doesn't increase human agency; still against nature. Even though that agency is owned by so few. It's the principle that counts.

Responsibility for our inventiveness devolves to the people as a whole, and is by and large postponed on excuse of the incredible pace of improvements to knowledge and understanding. We shall be so much more ready to take responsibility in the future. We are still but children.

In fact we are afraid of choice. We want only agency, and our belief structures dictate - dogmatically - that our choice is subsumed by the agency afforded by our discoveries. There was no choice about the Bomb. There was no choice about the limited access highway system. There was no choice about radar. These things were just simply so intrinsically good that one could not get in their way. Hmmmm. Is there really any order to our operations?

And so the next great discovery will likely never happen until it's far too late. Global warming is a far far more terrible destroyer than the bomb could ever be. And we must shrug just as Ayn's Atlas does. I'll gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today!

None of our inventions have been ontologically inevitable. Not one. We choose what becomes real. That doesn't make us as gods. Gods make rules. We make choices. As George Will says celebrating the man who celebrates the man who signed my diploma.

"[baseball] would emerge stronger, however, for the commissioner’s office had come through a difficult test with its absolute powers affirmed, and the principle established that no man, no matter how exalted, was above the game itself. For Giamatti, the whole episode had been about two things: living by the rules, and taking responsibility for one’s actions….

Which rules might we live by now? Does all invention become insurrection, then? Now? George Will gets his digs in on the "Nanny State." He is, after all, 'to the manor born.' As was A. Bartlett Giamatti. As am I. Sort of. "Just the manor missed," as I quipped to my fellow elitist headmasters once upon a blatantly racist conversation. I was rather appalled. 

Our constitution has been misinterpreted to death, by the very partisan political processes it was meant to guard against and override. Can we ever repeal the Second Amendment, now that it's fully decontextualized? Will we cancel the First? Surely Donald Trump has been the Pete Rose of  our constitutional Game of Life. Is that what George Will is saying?

We will just keep on keeping on, until the shift is upon us. And we suddenly see that the Emperor has no clothes, while the inventor is long dead and gone and voiceless. It was a minor invention at best to see that reality is not a game. That winning is not everything. That the meek will prevail in the end. As we cry out meekly, "this is not fair."

The Story is Over, Really

I woke up today to a kind of paranoia. I'm certain that I had plenty of company in that. I woke up today to this notice from Quora.com. It adverted to a book "by Chinese colonels Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui, from 1999, Unrestricted Warfare: China’s master plan to destroy America." Conspiracy theories are always plausible. They just hide their premise; in this case that China wants to destroy the U.S.

The original book is easy enough to find on Chinese Amazon. There is no such subtitle. As far as I can tell, it's in a line of books, including books on non-violent resistance and the overall obsolescence of war, which have been written for a long long time. Destructive weaponry is, of course, the least likely way to defeat the US. That doesn't mean that China set up this current mess just so that they could take over the world, even if it ends up that way.

The more interesting story is only beginning.

I don't believe for a second that China plotted anything to do with what's going on right now. Nor do I tend to agree with some on Fox News - the real fake news - that we should (as if we could) disentangle ourselves from China.

But the Quora post was bracing, somehow. It was a reminder about how increasingly unlikely it is becoming that we will ever return to the way it was before COVID 19.

I doubt the virus will kill us all, but the economy will have collapsed. For the moment, it does seem obvious that China will come out on top.

I'm glad that people like Benjamin H. Bratton try to understand what's going on, and continue to deploy their superior brainpower for the sake of good. But I don't believe for a second that their good sense will prevail. I doubt that they do either.

We are much more likely to be taken in by a feel-good story which requires that we do nothing. Oh wait. That's the story we've been living. The one that's over. The End.

As one lively comic noted, we insist on democracy in governance when we go to work for corporations which are run the way that Genghis Khan ran his armies.

Well, we are hardly insisting on democracy now, but it would be hard to believe that Bernie's prescriptions are sufficient anymore. That sort of socialism was a long dream for those of us well-read enough to know that the story we have been living couldn't end well. We never could believe that such policy would be voted in.

Now we exist in a state of exception, and most of us are only wondering what those in charge are going to do. Will they think of eminent domain over empty hotels and motels so that we have enough sick-wards. Will they commandeer the negative pressure isolation units that we have been calling RVs, like documented private ships in times of war? Will they finally begin to test all grocery and pharmacy and delivery/postal workers and provide public notice of where infected vectors touch?

Will they even do the simply obvious? Our scientific community understands stochastic sampling. Combined with protecting those who deliver essential services, this should be easier than knee-jerk setting up of drive through testing which quickly has to be shut down.

Could we possibly do worse than the upside-down manner in which teams are being set up now? Can't we please place an expert in charge? I mean someone who knows how to run a team to get the best results. You have to allow team members to speak truth to power. I have this on the highest authority.

Apparently, we don't even have enough testing capacity for any but hospital workers and the very sick to be tested. The rest of the world has done better, though there is no point to complain about that now, any more than there would be any point to berate myself for not selling of my meager stocks when I knew they were flying too high.

Our financial choices won't matter because I don't think that our familiar economy is ever coming back. For one thing, if it does, it will still never be prepared for states of exception. I don't think China is the case to follow, though. Of course their authoritarian government was prepared. Of course we don't wish to emulate them.

I have quit plenty of jobs when my boss wouldn't let me do my work, but wanted me to be subservient to their orders. I have had plenty of other jobs where the decisions were made at the level of the knowledge, and I found those satisfying. There was never any distinction in the nature of the work, or even how nice the boss was.

Given the openness of our networks and the freedom of our speech, it seems unthinkable that we can't find a way to ensure that decisions about this virus are made at the appropriate level. Our leaders don't have time and likely aren't qualified to monitor the media and spread the best ideas. Their organizational training seems to be contrary to our aspirations for our politics. The literal idiots are in charge.

Some workers these days are made to be robots. Their productivity is relentlessly surveilled, and rewards are for efficiency. In my personal experience, such jobs would include account inquiry servicing, insurance claims evaluation, fast food servicing, shipping (driving and delivery), along with many many more.

The division of learning has meant that I've never had to endure such jobs myself, or maybe it's just that I've aged out from that economy faster than it's been virally spread.

There is a different trend that could be as good as it could be bad. The new gig economy encourages contract workers to own their means of production again, and manage how they accomplish efficiency. Just now, it seems to be devolving toward slave labor and the undermining of established businesses. But that doesn't have to be the was it always stays. The leaders of such businesses have been something less than inspiring. We seem to be letting them get away with something. They're too damned young.

I just know that there are far better cooks and salespeople and delivery people and inquiry responders than the ones now treated so poorly by their overpaid managers working for massive Wall Street backed brand names.

Now might be the time to take back our lives and write our own stories. We have to start by putting sensible laws in place. None of us should be characterized by the surveilled behaviors of a slice of us we can't control.

Badges for the immunized - and the immune by virtue of recovery - wouldn't be a bad idea. They should not become permanent is all. The tech can help with that. The behaviors captured would be in the category of no-fault behaviors.

Now that they have dominated our economy by predatory methods backed by Wall Street speculation, the giants of Amazon, Walmart, Google, Microsoft and Apple, among many lesser gods, will do the right thing. That example will encourage the rest of us to take heart.

And then we need to reconstruct our government so that such predatory behemoths are never again allowed to appear. The destruction of creativity in the name of creative destruction has been unfathomable. We never took proper warning from the collapse of Wall Street back in 2008ish. It was not different from what is happening now.

The earlier collapse of our economy is framed similarly as an act of nature; something periodically inevitable if we wish for capitalism to work. But we never did ferret out the forces of evil represented within that system.

The evil was benign, in the sense that those perpetrating it must have largely talked themselves into feeling that what they were doing mattered only locally. From earth's perspective, the COVID 19 virus is benign as well.

Sure Daniel Defoe's Journal of the of the Plague Year might be as much a novel as true reporting. But it's still instructive to note how little has changed. Work for Amazon - cart off the dead bodies - until you can get your jobs back.

But it's different this time. The difference is that we are globally aware. The angels of our better nature are about to take flight. Even the obscenely rich know that the incentives are misaligned. That know that Wall Street needs tweaking. They know that massive socioeconomic divides will spell their own doom. They know that chief executives have to stand for something good and not just the short-term bottom line.

We are not yet the best America that we can be. But we cannot let this experiment fail.

I have to say that I find China to be a largely benign force. But they define themselves in recialist fashion, have largely closed borders, and don't have anything near the freedom of speech that we do.

Our trouble is that in net result, we don't actually speak. We drown out thought that matters, much of the time. I don't believe for a second that China suffers any absence of freedom of thought that's much different than ours is.

Consider this: On Chinese Amazon there has been a dedicated tab for the Three Body Problem for well over a year (likely much longer, but I haven't been paying that close attention). It's a fabulous book, and full of challenging thought (I haven't read the English translation). But what is going on with that? Can you even imagine one single author with such dominance here? Can you imagine a leader for life?

I hope not.

Still Trying to Find Myself

No, not that way. I gave up that jejune exercise a long time ago, although I think a lot of people I know remain unconvinced. I mean I really have a hard time finding the self that is mine. I'm not so concerned with finding the essential me which might be expressed by style and a life's work leading to accomplishment. I just have a hard time actually believing that there's anyone me at home here.

There's been a lot written lately about traumatic brain injury survivors following on the Gabrielle Giffords shooting. It almost seems as though a shot to the head is not the quickest way to kill someone, despite assumptions we've all fostered on TV. Or to put it another way, there are lots of critical systems in the body, but there is also a lot of redundancy - proven by our ability to remain alive despite all sorts of outrages to the body - including in the brain.

The brain's analog would be a hologram, whose information is distributed throughout the substrate, but the more substrate, the sharper the image. So, with the brain, it turns out that we can still be ourselves despite radical attenuation of the brain's substrate. Naturally, there are critical regions and parts without which nothing much goes right.

As I was ruminating the other day, much of the brain's activity is alien to that self I seek. It seems to operate more quickly - the subliminal level seems to throw things up faster than I can process them. So this organizing principle, or is it principal, which makes some kind of sense out of all that random sensation seems closer to me. Some process of the brain, but not the brain itself. Maybe we stop being when the ratio tips upside down to where there is some sort of stalling in the information to be ordered.

I mean, if you think about it, we know that sensory deprivation leads to hallucinatory insanity - we seem to need the relative stability of a relatively unchanging world outside our heads. But on the other hand, if there is no motion there is no perception either. Our eyeballs bounce around to construct a stable and seamless reality "out there" and our brain fills in the gaps to where the seeming is still more enhanced.

We need to learn to see. "Above" seeing we need to learn to organize what we see, much of which will remain invisible until we have some kind of category for it. Eventually, we need some language to smooth our raw insights to some sort of conformity with those held by everyone else. And as we learn, many of these tasks move to someplace "beneath" our conscious attention, so that we can deploy that for higher order ordering.

It's funny (or NOT) how much of what gets called education relates to making conscious all that stuff which works better when it remains unconscious. Well, OK, so let's say someone has a lot of musical talent. If they want to play the violin, there's lots of technique to be focused on until the point where it can be fogotten and the focus is on the music.

But what waste for someone without musical talent. Well, unless you're a Chinese Tiger Mom, and then you might want to push the technique anyhow. And the very success of such efforts might do a lot to disprove certainties about "native talent."

But learning is about conforming what you can do to the way it's being done by others, and to the technologies which have evolved to enhance what you could do without them. Silent reading was impossible not so long ago, but now we've pushed those voices well back beneath our vocal apparatus.

It turns out that brain trauma survivability is partially a function of the mental power of the victim before the accident. For sure, we know that anyone who works out will look and be more physically fit. But being mentally fit is not always such a popular pursuit in American society, where anti-intellectualism often engenders a kind of inverse association between mental and physical virility.

Intelligence is so commonly thought to be a fixed attribute. Indeed the studies of brain trauma survival which indicate that brain power predicts speed and quality of recovery depend on the intelligence assessments conducted by the Army, thus producing a massive pool of data for Vietnam War brain trauma survivors.

But who knows where the mental desire which leads to fitness is first engendered? In the womb? In the genes? In the family constellation? There are so many chicken-egg type problems to sort out, since surely curiosity of any sort is where real learning starts. Who would ever start by wanting to know how to answer multiple choice problems. Who would start wanting to know how to do arithmetic? But it isn't so hard to imagine starting with music. Or with being able to build a durable house.

I have experienced several kinds of near death. The two most acute both involved loss of breath,. In the first instance, by drowning, my conscious knowledge of impending death against which I could and did swim with all my resources, induced that storied sensation of my entire life passing before me. In the second, a pulmonary embolism where there was nothing I could do, I only felt a fairly calm and actually serene sense that I was checking out. That this would be it, and afterward nothing at all.

Learners who already know that they have no "native talent" must also stimulate nothing at all to arise in the brain, and so the thoughts become flaccid. But you know, given a sharp enough sensation of impending end,  combined with some real swimming and breath-holding ability, the result may also be a kind of eternal life, if time is compressed toward the limit of zero.

It must be this then, in which consciousness consists. This compression ratio where the information coming in does neither over nor under whelm its organizer. Where there is just enough to stimulate the forward motion, but not so much as to stun the self into massive hallucinatory chaos.

Just so, consciousness has not always been an attribute of human animals. And its origins must be not unlike that memory I have of writing my name for the first time, on a paper bag with a pencil. Right up there with where I was when JFK was shot, or when the Trade Towers came down. No real mystery to it at all. And no real moment of inception.

Paying Attention to TV

In my former life, which I now inhabit temporarily, I'm a holdout for plain-old over-the-air pre-HD TV. Which means I petty much don't watch TV, except for rented movies. But when I do watch, I'm struck with the ads for upgrading your viewing experience. It's not just the 3D, which I witnessed over at Sears and which actually works about as well as at the movies, but it's the various ways to stream the Internet directly to your big screen, or to have the show follow you from room to room, or device to device even onto the diminutive screens we hold in our hands. 

Some of the ads show happy people chasing fight scenes room to room, or waiting in the doctor's office delighted by some romance in ones hand, or maybe waiting for the little woman to finish shopping and cheering for his favorite sports team. You can even leverage your purchase of copyrighted shows and have them boosted out across the Internet for your watching from somewhere else.

In among this noise, I'm reminded yet again of my uncle's memorial service up at SUNY Oneonta, where they now have an annual media summit named for him. I was at the first so-named summit, and remember the earnest pleas from panelists to students to please don't steal this content. There was almost a panic that once the genie was out of the bottle there would be no way to contain and charge for it. And that without pay, there would be no more good stuff to watch or read or listen to. 

Which might be true for all I know, but one does have to question how good any of it really is. And anyhow, the price for entry keeps going up and up, doesn't it? These big flat screens, especially the ones with 3D, aren't exactly free. We still pay for Internet. It doesn't seem a matter of protecting content so much as it does a matter of distribution of the profits. As always, it's not the authors getting the lion's share. Anyhow, the schlockier it is the more likely the distributor will pay you to watch it somehow, either by providing feeds free to the distribution channel, or by ads or whatnot, or just by making the content as lurid as Jerry Springer or Maury Povitch, who are just really really gross.

This all does a pretty decent job of burying the good stuff beneath the noise of commercial distribution. How many really good bands you might catch at a bar get known? How much good writing makes it beyond the Harry Potterish drivel (and they are so greedy they won't even let you read it on your Kindle!)? How many good TV shows? 

Well, I wouldn't know since I don't watch it. I guess there is some really really good TV out there. Mostly, it has a subversive theme, like living off pot sales, or maybe making fun of undertakers. I've heard of such things, but every time I try to watch it I get bored out of my skull since I might have written it myself. 

I like to watch stuff like Mongolian Ping-Pong, which is nothing like anything I could ever imagine all on my own. I don't really like to watch people like me anymore, or sports where you pretty much already know someone's going to win. It isn't that thrilling to laugh at someone who makes jokes like I would make if I could make jokes. Anyhow, being famous seems to make one rich just in and of itself, vis Kardashian (I've heard), and so I really don't see what all the fuss about copyright is. People should just want their stuff all out there all the time. And then they'd be famous and then they'd be rich. 

Well, what do I know?

No Brainer

I tend to be contrarian, which is perhaps another way to say I'm jealous of people who get credit for saying things I've wanted to say. I find the ways that they are just a little bit wrong. Take this guy, for instance, who talks about how books will disappear beneath reading as a social activity. He goes way further than those who worry that electronic publishing will ruin the book culture by undermining the economics of it, just as has already happened to news media.

I own a Kindle now, and even gave one to my daughter who also didn't want to like it. Even at her tender age, she worries about nice things going away. But the thing I differ with Bob Stein about is that what will change will not be the nature of reading. It will be the economics of reading, along with everything else.

Words worth reading, after all, represent the intense investment not just of time, but of one's self and cumulative learning. They are by their nature static and permanent, and in most ways represent the better part of oneself. The part that is edited and better than sincere and rendered up with care that others might enjoy it. Well, except for narcissistic blogging, which is just plain uncivilized. Sorry, but it's true.

If I were a true blogger, I'd write about stuff I was already known for, or knew enough about that I would be worth reading on a given topic. Then I'd be moving in the direction of social reading, building up my cred and becoming noteworthy enough to be able to make a living on my persona. I could give talks or publish books or get appointed to a nice college, or get paid by a periodical. Instead I'm just another narcissist.

Social reading is so much like conversation - it's here and now and current. Its promise on the positive side is that it might take away the copyright privileges of bogus institutions like the Ivy Leagues, say, which reserve such outrageous right to predetermine who is worthy of attention. People can become known as worthy of attention even without credentials. Which, of course, has its bad side too.

I was taken a bit aback the other day when a young fellow of my acquaintance announced that he would be getting his textbooks at some grey-market site whose name I can't remember, quipping something which amounts to "copyright is theft." Or maybe that's just the way that I would put it. Surely in the case of college textbook publishing, it sometimes seems the case. I'd love to know if his position is well thought out, or just some sort of street-smarts credo. The trouble is that lots of young people don't seem really to enjoy the kind of heavy conversation I'm still into. Even talk is social now to the point of shorthanding predetermined responses.

But imagine if, as Bob Stein predicts, the value of text actually does decrease to zero. What will be the harm? We will move in the direction where China remains and always has been. Those who take the trouble to reproduce texts make a little bit of money on the product, whatever form it takes. Readers pay attention to authoritative sources. Authors get nil, other than position in society, which has been a function of literacy for as long as there has been China. Prove yourself in writing, and we'll give you position. Not bad, actually.

Wouldn't it be nice if we stopped rewarding beauty so extravagantly, or sports prowess, or even intelligence of the sort analogized by computers. Rewarding actual work wouldn't be so bad. Paying writers to write, based on their demonstrated ability might be a better model than to reward the popularity contest of the publishing market as currently construed. Do we really think that music is better by virtue of the recording labels? There are only a few bestsellers, and the rest of the writing world can just go pound salt. Really!

If the value of text reduces to zero, the value of actual writing may skyrocket in ways quite different from those in evidence right now. Which puts me in the mind to talk about healthcare, but I'll spare you that for now . . .

Role Playing Games

Of all the strange things! I end up watching Fellini's 8 1/2 right after watching the Social Network and then end up listening to some talk on NPR about that suicide from Rutgers. Not so strange? Lots of you were doing the same thing? The only strange thing is that I will weave a thread among goings-on so utterly disparate that they shouldn't have threads woven through them. Well, that's what I do. I have a track record to keep up.

So here's what's bugging me. The assumption during the discussion on NPR is that this guy is "gay." Apparently, it would be entirely wrong to suppose that maybe he doesn't see himself as gay, and that's the problem. As painful as it must be to be gay in "our society," I'm pretty sure that lots of people have sex with all sorts of genders and still fall short of self-classification in one category or another. Lots of people want to project roles which, if the truth were told, don't entirely become them.

And then the "Obama Administration" gets tagged with pushing for enhanced wiretapping powers and I get this powerful feeling of cognitive dissonance, like what? Hunh? Isn't that more characteristic of the Bush Administration? Isn't Obama the friend of civil liberties? It reminds me of an other thing the "Obama Administration" tried to pull off maybe a year ago, about executive privilege or state secrets or something like that. I wish my memory were any good.

I remember talking myself down then, that he (whoops, I said "he" and I really meant the "Obama Administration") was trying to bring something into the light of day; to engender debate about something which was being kept in the dark, purposefully, so that it could be exploited under the radar. Maybe it was a posture? Maybe it was a careful and clever political move; announce yourself on the side of your adversaries just to stimulate the right kind of above-board debate.

I'm sure the old wire-tapping law needs updating. But the way the debate was being framed made it sound as though they wanted to enshrine in principle the idea that no kind of information technology should be developed which it would be impossible for the government to pry into. Hunh??

Just because it was fairly trivial to tap into a circuit-based phone conversation doesn't mean that the government has some sort of fundamental right to keep that avenue open. What went from aligator clips on the very circuit which carried your voice, had to be abstracted to catching your conversation at the point of connection among increasingly complex and highly virtual switching equipment so that the encrypted and segregated digital stream between you and your interlocutor can be patched out to a government sanctioned eavesdropper.

But it was easy enough to do, and we already knew that the phone company kept track of how many minutes we had talked and to whom. It's the only way that we can trust them to bill us accurately. But now what about when talk is not only cheap, but utterly free??!!! Why would we want them to track us at all? Maybe so that we can remember who we talked to and what we said? I sure could use some of that.

On some television discussion, I heard the proposed expansion of the law likened to the notion that all bathrooms should be constructed with a built-in peephole for government use only, and only with a court order. Yucky, creepy, disgusting and ridiculous. If some important criminal or terrorist plotting is going to get done in a bathroom, let the government spooks go to the trouble of installing surveillance equipment, please! And then make them document its removal so that we may go about our business in privacy again. Just be careful about your roommates!

Same with any kind of digital communications developments. Let them break into your house or your computer and install the same kind of spyware which terrifies us all now, because it might get onto our computer by some kind of web-site drive-by, or some phishing expedition we fell prey to. The government doesn't need some kind of company-provided way in.

We need them to help us keep the bad guys out, and the bad guys always seem to find a way to use those built-in peepholes, and everybody mistrusts the government these days just as much as they do the so-called bad guys. But do you trust your spouse? Check with Fellini on that one.

If we can be comfortable that even the government can't get into our private and confidential information, then I think we can be a lot more comfortable about conducting our businesses by means of electronic technologies. The government should be helping us to get that done, and not getting in cahoots with the bad guys who want to sneak into our private affairs.

So, back to that poor supposedly gay fellow at Rutgers. I don't think we exactly want to ascribe the ability to make a person commit suicide to anther party apart from oneself, do we? Precisely the same societal confusion would attend this fellow if he were gay or if he were afraid of being considered gay when all he desperately wanted was to be attractive to the hot females who were immune to the charms of a violinist.

Back in my day, sexual experimentation was almost a political mandate. Now, you have to be committed to your role, even when you won't commit yourself for more than a night to your sexual partner-in-crime. Does anyone else see something wrong with this picture? Is it all just role play? Is actual leadership even possible?

Obviously I know nothing and want to know even less than that about this particular case. I'm not outraged at the breech of privacy - it seems fairly inevitable, given the gender-role extremes which our culture gravitates toward. Hotness in women is now some kind of imperative. Or has it always been? Fellini depicted a world-class film director capable to have any among the starlets he might cast. The Social Network depicted a callow nerd coder not allowed in to the network of cool. So he took it over, this network of cool, and then he had the sense to make himself sexually exclusive. Cool!

With the unerring radar of the socially autistic which we celebrate so severely now in our economic arrangements, Zuckerberg sat back and observed the animal behaviors of the best and brightest among us at Harvard. He heard what they said about themselves, and then observed their behaviors and placed his bet with the stuff which they, embedded within the social imperatives from which he had been excluded,  could not admit to themselves about themselves but were allowing themselves to be driven by anyhow.

I've made the case elsewhere that J.D. Salinger was precisely that kind of autist. Bill Gates surely is, as is his understudy Steve Ballmer. Steve Jobs, the lot of them, all make plays on the stuff we can't admit to ourselves about ourselves, and then they marvel that we allow them to accrue so much power. Imagine the amazement the ragheads (I wonder what nice things they call us?) felt when they saw the trade towers come down. How could it have been that easy? It couldn't have been that we built the towers that much too tall with that much excess hubris?

I suppose it could have been an administration plot, but why bother looking for that when you have their behavior all on record. The actions of 18 or so uneducated plotters were "allowed" to divert the national agenda of the most powerful economy on earth? Or is this what the power brokers had in mind all along? Come on people, it's not that complicated!

Anyhow, it makes me nervous now when all the educated and enlightened and politically correct people start calling for the prosecution of these college freshman for the commission of hate crimes. They all sound like Glenn Beck, sanctimonious about our collective values, while overtly talking about sending people to hell and back for transgressing them. I hate to see that kind of thing among liberals, but there you go!

I have to wonder why we can't get our act together. Why we can't be reasoned and reasonable and why the ones at the pinnacle of our society still want more and hotter and newer every day all the time. Why we want to have strong opinions about stuff we not only don't have any way to know all the facts about, but which we wouldn't be able to understand even if we did. I wonder, will we ever be able to trust our steroid soaked leaders, or will we always suppose that they are just the same as we would be with that much good fortune?

And anyhow, someday soon, not only will we take our privacy back, and not allow the Googles of the world to store that much private stuff about us to tempt the powers that be into snooping them. They posture against the Chinese so-called Communist single-party government which is all hepped up on conflating the sexual and the political as a way to keep people scared about exercising liberties. Maybe we will actually figure out how to trust one another. Yeah someday real soon. Meantime, let's all keep yelling at each other about how stupid and narrow minded you are.

Power, Control, Metaphors and I'm Beat

President Obama came to town the other day. I wanted to mount my bicycle and ride over to check out the crowds, but instead I learned that Mom would be out for the afternoon, giving me my chance to do the family's bidding and get Dad's car keys from him. I'd taken him to the doctor on Monday, after having gone driving with him several days before, and the verdict was clear.

This was not fun. It felt about like murdering someone you love, who is using every single non-violent tactic in the book to get you to stop. We drew a truce. He gave me the keys just to get me out of his face. I had the legitimate threat to have his license revoked to make me unanswerable. It wasn't exactly a fair fight.

Now I've just returned from a trip to Albany where I hope that I was helpful to a fellow traveller in the game of divorce your feelings. Home again, I notice that the Preakness stakes are about to run, and having somehow gotten snared by the Kentucky Derby, I'm snared again, rooting, of course, for the winning horse and jockey combination; hoping for the odds-defying triple crown. Not to be.

I read of a fellow China watcher, who also watches the blogging and freedom of speech scene in China, who observes that the nature of Chinese blogging is the same as blogging all over. Lots of self-disclosure, blah blah blah.

Of course, I engage in lots of self-disclosure, and it would seem I'm just another Lonely Girl, wanting people to pay attention to my life. But, of course, I prefer to think that I'm developing yet another form of performance art, where the random happenstance of my every day is disclosed as some sort of context for the events of the day on the larger stage which I feel compelled to write about. I say compelled, because, honest, I wouldn't be writing if it weren't that I feel that I have something of some importance to say.

That doesn't mean that I'm saying it here and now and that there's something wrong with you if you don't see it. It means that I feel the need to practice, to work it out, to learn how to write, and, I suppose, to develop what I hear gets called a "voice" to my writing. I'm not sure it's going too well.

It's my sense that "self-disclosure" might lend a kind of credence to what I'm writing about. It tells both why I'm paying attention to what I pay attention to, and relates myself as microcosm to the larger scene. My feelings, after all, count toward my slant on the events on the large stage, and I figure that if I disclose those feelings, and in particular how they might relate to what's going on in my life, then what I write about will be less contrived and abstract and ideological.

Needless to say, I'm not a great believer in logical "truth", truth in any kind of abstract, nor in understanding as an even possible outcome of argument or study or dialog or discussion. I'm disturbed by the certainty which people seem to lead by, as they enter into arguments, take positions. It seems clear enough that there is almost never any grounds for certainty on ideological or scientific or depth of preparation grounds.

There might be, however, grounds for certainty on various emotional grounds. I'm reasonably certain, for instance, that we should stop raping the earth. I'm certain that I would prefer that there weren't so many miserable people on the Earth, and I'm pretty certain that the lack of imagination among those of us with the power of choice have a lot to do - at the very least by our omissions - with the plight of so much of humanity.

The means for amelioration are very very debatable, and I'm always amazed at the certainty displayed by so many people about what means are best. Especially in the face of what is clearly the randomness at the root of most historical sequences.

So, it seems clear to me that my Dad need not attach so much significance to his ability to drive a car. It is clear to me that if he were still reasonable, he would be able to stand beside himself, as it were, and agree that it's just not a good idea. He would do that if he were blind. But in this case, it's his cognitive abilities which are lacking. Plus some real deficits in what might be called reaction time. There is some horrific Catch-22 at work here. He hasn't the sense to discern the irrationality of his demands.

For Europeans and Americans north of the equator, and increasingly for people everywhere, to own a car means to be a free agent. There is no way that the Earth can support this collective compulsion toward such an extreme manifestation of such personal freedom, but each of us who has it seems loathe, ever, to give it up. The very economy is organized to make it seem as though our vehicular freedom not only makes economic sense, but is even economic necessity. You can't even get to the first square of making a living without one.

So, in that sense, we are, as a people, as irrational - as embedded in our own personal Catch-22 - as is my Dad. He isn't 'with it' enough to understand why he must not drive. He only knows that something very important is being taken away from him. He also knows that he's a good driver. In terms of body memory, that remains true. But he can't find the right pedals if he thinks about it. Only if he doesn't.

Now, I know you think I'm going to attempt some kind of environmentalist case about how each of our cars must be prised from us in the same way that Dad's was from him. But I'm not. I wouldn't give that enterprise a snowball's chance in hell.

No, what interests me now is how certain we all are that the Chinese, for instance, are just simply dead wrong in their censorship of what we call "free speech." We are certain that such censorship will doom their form of capitalism, just as we labor to bring them fully into the Western regime of intellectual property protections. They not only censor free speech, but they tacitly encourage theft of intellectual property, in the form of industrial knock offs, but most prominently, in the form of software theft. Media theft. General laxity about copyright and copy protection

Perhaps this is just as evil of them as their artificial pegging of their currency to the dollar, instead of letting it float freely according to market forces. I guess that they like to manipulate the directionality and quantity of import/export flows. It all just seems unfair. As though they are able to get for free what the rest of the world must pay for., As though they have inputs to their economic engine which they have not properly earned.

Well, no-one earns their winnings. No one earns the natural resources they are lucky enough to find under their ground. No-one earns their smarts of the social capital they started their schooling with.

Just today, I learned from the radio, some on this side of some great divide are celebrating this new piece of stealth software which is being deployed by hand to hand combat in Iran against the totalitarian regime which our American narrative insists that they have. I'm certain that theirs is a god-awful regime, but I'm not entirely sure about how this software achievement should be received.

For a long while, there have been ways to skirt around firewalls and censors by going through anonymizing proxy sites, and by using encryption. But this product offers to go a few steps further, so that you don't even have to go so far as to disclose your intentions in the first place by heading over to that wrong part of the Internet town.

Since it can't be downloaded, for obvious reasons having to do with the censors spoofing or infiltrating the download site - in the target country, the censors presumably  have privileged access - the idea is to distribute this software hand to hand from trusted person to trusted person. They were very public about making Iran 'target regime number one.' They were coy about which country would be number two, but only a fool wouldn't bet on China. (Although you can easily see why naming China as a part of any 'axis of evil' would get a little dicey really quickly, since, well, they hold all that debt of ours)

OK, so even apart from the liklihood that dissident Iranians (or Chinese, for that matter) will actually trust that this software is somehow pure, coming as it does from the U.S. of A. Hell, even apart from the liklihood of you or I trusting that it hasn't somehow been concocted by our own government's secret services as a stealthy way to infiltrate and co-op the friendly to the U.S. ranks of these targeted countries. I mean, who really knows about the viruses attacking the Afghani opium crop, you know? And even apart from the simplicity with which the target regime could insert their own stealthy code for use in rounding up the usual suspects (that's a hack so trivial, even I could accomplish it)

Even apart from all that, what I want to know is why this kind of software is any different from all the various techniques now out there to aid and abet the criminals among us who would steal digital property by sharing files and keygen cracks and pictures and music and all the rest. It's the use to which the software is put that gets celebrated.

Fact is, of course, that the reason we sell so much more software around here than gets stolen is purely ideological. Well, OK, there might be a little bit of fear of getting caught thrown in, but our narrative about why the Chinese don't speak freely about their government would have it only because they are afraid to do so. Even while we marvel at how fully co-opted the Chinese intelligentsia have become, we seem to think they would speak freely if only they weren't afraid to.

Supposedly, the Chinese self-censor because they are afraid of government sanctioned consequences, and it is this fear which tones the language well on the inside of some kind of shifty and only partially discernible barrier.

But is it fear which keeps us honest, or some kind of true belief in the fundamental validity of intellectual property law? If we win, we want to be able to keep our winnings. If we come out with something first, then we want to be able to lay claim. Even though this approach, like all and every one of us owning a private powered vehicle, will doom us all collectively. We equate intellectual property rights to the chastity of our spouse, the inviolability of our private space and the ownership of our bank accounts. Well unless our stuff is ill gotten, in which case, all bets are off.

Let me ask you. Do you think it's fair that farmers who don't police their land to be sure that no stray patented seeds are taking root should be sued for patent infringment (our courts do)? Do you think that someone surfing for adult pornography should be held accountable when some site slips in child porn which is then discoverable on that hapless lonely person's hard drive? Do you think that users of health insurance should be accountable to understand all the rules before getting sick, on threat of being financially accountable for expenses incurred as ordered by expert health care practitioners (I have stories to tell)?

The Chinese arrange things a little differently is all. I imagine they never did learn anything about the inviolability of private space, and chastity was always more about pledges than romance, and well, as to the bank accounts, until recently, private wealth was never a real possibility.

My guess is that the most dangerous move the Chinese government has ever made was to open the possibility for personal ownership of automobiles. This was as calculated risk, since the automobile has been the engine of vibrant economies the world over. And it would be hard to stop it without stopping the exuberance of the Chinese economic miracle altogether. But the danger of the automobile is that it will embed notions of personal autonomy, the inviolability of personal and private space, and the priority of individual rights and possession over all else. Demands for free speech will follow, right?

It's not, in other words, that the Great Firewall of China won't be able to keep up with the quest for freedom of thought and speech craved by the newly wealthy and emboldened citizenry. Rather, it is that the citizenry will forget about its individual responsibility to labor in concert with the interests of the whole. It would be as though the entire U.S. populations collectively and suddenly decided it would be alright to "steal" digital property. It would be like the futile exercise of trying to get people to stop smoking dope, or before that, to get them to stop drinking alcohol. Not gonna happen.

OK, so I've got to find some way to wind this up. Over here, we are getting all exercised that Google would sneak up on us, Facebook would give away our privacy rights, ignorant that it's all a grudge match against Bill Gates' company, because of what he once did to the leaders of these newer upstart companies. They have tried and tried to brand themselves as something other than the goon-squad of Microsoft's marketing engine, and in the end look rather, well, evil.

But this stuff is trivial and almost meaningless up against what agribusiness does in defense of their patents over genetically modified crops. This is as nothing against the consequences of our mono-culture when the bee population risks collapse, and global starvation is one virus away from a genetically neutered food production regime. The powers of natural evolution have been stopped dead in their tracks by the American Intellectual Property regime, which has ensured that most of the food the world over is dependent on both petroleum and a very very few genetic lines. Not quite as few as were allowed for stem cell research or as get used for cancer research, but you get the idea.

Nature requires diversity in the face of stresses. Especially such global stresses as are being applied by humanity against the entire planet. Intellectual property law now is like Nature rewarding the winners of some evolutionary contest with rights in perpetuity against all possible variants. Sure, the intellectual rights are termed, and I can read my Melville free, but for Monsanto or ADM, they have all the marbles, and are pretty much guaranteed to be able to keep improving their patented varieties of whatever mono-cultural corn is most effectively produced on the back of cheap oil. The term never runs out for so long as there is "innovation" once you have the monopoly. Another Microsoft lesson.

So here I am very nearly favoring Chinese censorship over freedom of speech, for so long as freedom of speech is constrained by copyright and intellectual property law. I do so for the sake of the planet. Of course, only an idiot ever really believed that there is any such thing as free speech. Speech is one of the most dangerous tools at our disposal. Just try talking your Dad out of his car keys. But wait until he's too old to hurt you.

Meanwhile, if they had any sense, good farmers everywhere would do the bidding of the patent holding companies. They would boycott agribusiness altogether, plant biologically diverse crops using proven techniques for combatting pestilent hoards of insects and smaller organic enemies. We would all refuse to purchase any digital product that is copy protected, or protected by any sort of digital rights management. We would disclose our full identity and particulars over the Internet, just like the Chinese make their citizens do. And we would work assiduously within the constraints of powers deployed against us to be sure that we are never ever placed in the position of utter powerlessness to know which actions of our own are consequential and which are not.

I'd say it's a toss up which regime is more dangerous in that regard. As I drive, I must remain ever vigilant of the tricky speed limit signs. As I submit my written work to the academy, I must somehow first use the same tools my professors will use to check for snippets which might, by happenstance or perhaps by some workings of my subconcsious, match those of published authors from whom I will be assumed, by default, of stealing.

Google now will do this for me, and remove from exposure anything I might have seemed to cut and paste. Will they soon learn to discern the idea that was never mine in the first place, and remove my very thoughts? Or will I learn to game their system, submit my writings first to the 'hand me in' engines, change a few phrases until I pass, and then fool the professors into thinking I'm that much smarter than I am. Catch me if you can . . .