A Dream of the Good Old Days Before Juneteenth was a Holiday

Just now, like many of us, I'm holding my breath that Agent Orange won't carry on to drop his COVID nukes in Tulsa. The day after Juneteenth. We celebrate today, for tomorrow we may die. I wish all my black sibs the happiest of Juneteenths, the newest Federal holiday!

I'm also trying just now to restart my entire read-through in Chinese of the Dream of the Red Chamber. This is a book which many Chinese count as their North Star for what it means to be human on the planet. I remember thinking that as well. Like reading Tolstoy, I don't quite remember why. I only know that it changed me.

And I remember very well driving out to Madison, Wisconsin as a grad student of classical Chinese literature. I was going to attend the first-ever international conference on "Redology." That's the term for academic study of this singular Chinese novel. 

Along the way, I dropped off my friend at the University of Iowa where he was attending the renowned writing program. His father, Parker Po-fei Huang, a well-known poet among Chinese, and a low-ranked but highly esteemed "native informant" at Yale, where language instructors were not professors - his father had told my friend that he had no business writing; he hadn't truly lived. I could relate. My own father was stern that way too. 

But we all loved Professor Huang. I guess we all have our less good sides. 

I was allowed to sit in on a class. I don't remember the notorious tear-down masculine ethos that got the program so many celebrated and mostly male authors. I do remember wistfully feeling that I was not of that crowd.

How well I also remember driving north to arrive at the beautiful campus on Lake Mendota at Madison. It was summer, and the coeds (code for women in those days) were sunning themselves on the grass all over campus. A northern and wooded grassy California beach. I was somehow shocked. Never had I seen so much brazen skin. This was not my conception of what 'midwest' means. Not my crowd either, for sure!

The opening reception was held on the panoramic top floor of a circular tower. All the younger westerners were glued to the windows, gazing out over the beautiful campus to hide our social awkwardness. Very few of us were expected, after all, to have some bit of expressive performance queued up for presentation on demand, as all Chinese are. All the senior Chinese scholars were looking inward toward friends, and new acquaintances they had already mostly read. 

In the buffet line for dinner I chatted with David Hawkes, the premier English-language translator of The Dream of the Red Chamber, or as he properly called it, The Story of the Stone. All of us were waiting with 'bated breath for his completion of this life's work. I was a bit star-struck. I chatted up a different professor who was into using computer technology to analyze classical Chinese literature (he confessed that he couldn't really read it himself). That was according to the dictates of the structuralism which was then in vogue. The science of literature. Looking for stable patterns across works. 

But what I wish to write about today is our economy. I'm old enough to remember the 'good old days' when the local hardware store was manned by knowledgeable clerks who raised families on their salaries. Our store stocked everything from model airplane engines to lawnmowers, and all the parts and tools in between.

Milk was delivered in heavy refillable bottles then, and Grandma would sometimes send one of the kids down to the ice cream store with a crock, reminding us to have them pack it tightly so that it wouldn't melt along the walk home. 

Now I buy things from Amazon, and watch the prices creep up to cover the free shipping, while the quality seems increasingly indifferent. Caveat emptor and read the editorial reviews. That old hardware store would never tarnish its good name the way that Walmart always does, or Home Depot, or Amazon, by allowing shoddy goods along their shelves. They couldn't afford to. What happens when all the minimum-age hardware helpers age out?

My friend, a structuralist himself, and brilliant professor of Chinese met us at the conference. He took me - well, I took him since he didn't drive - to visit his old college friend who lived just north of Madison. This was a talented young man who'd forsaken an academic life to start a business. 

He had designed a refined set of mountain climbing chocks, and had set up a very high-tech and sophisticated manufacturing process which he explained to me in detail. The process ended up with nicely anodized pieces which were color-coded for size and usage. They felt wonderful in the hand, and apparently - by virtue of angles, metallic composition and surface treatment - held wonderfully in the field. 

Again, who knows what such a business was doing in Wisconsin, but he enjoyed showing me all the steps, partly because I understood them, and likely mostly because I was so googly-eyed. I especially appreciated the step where the nearly finished pieces were blasted with glass beads to provide golf-ballish micro-divots.

Speaking of which, I've only swung a golf club once in my life, and that time the ball went exactly where I was aiming it, to my absolute horror. It sailed right across the neighbor's long back yard, across the street and over the next lawn right into the "picture window" of the hardware store owner who lived around the corner. This is a sin from which I shall never recover. It taught me to always fess up (which I didn't do that time). I was a natural Zen archer, I guess, as I remember the magnetic pull of window to ball. 

It definitely wasn't my doing, although come to think of it I got three bulls eyes the first time I held a bow and arrow and the first time I fired a .22 rifle. I should have known better. But then I was never able to repeat those feats. Story of my life. 

Anyhow this wonderful climbing hardware manufactory was set to go out of business before it even sold its first chock (I received a bag of them as souvenirs). The poor fellow hadn't realized that even the niche sport of climbing was controlled by the one large manufacturer who determined which products could be stocked on pain of withholding all the others. This was just when even sporting goods stores were turning Big Box, and before distribution channels got disrupted. 

Just as is now the case with movie theaters, R.I.P., it doesn't matter how good the product is if you can't get it on the shelf at eyeball level. Money changes hands, as I learned later in the beer retailing business. Smaller brands have got to cheat to win: You have to brazenly follow the big boys and swap the shelves when no-one's looking.

I hadn't heard of WalMart or maybe it hadn't gotten started yet, but I did get an education from that young entrepreneur near Madison about how "Wall Street Money" will pay to overstock shelves with goods sold at a loss for the sole purpose of forcing competitors out of business. I also learned that such practices were illegal in Germany, say, among other countries. 

Some long time later, circumnavigating the continent in all innocence on my little Harley, I happened into Bentonville, Arkansas, where I took a break in front of what looked like the old five and dime hardware store I grew up with. 

Inside, a very nice old man who looked the part gave me a kind of personal tour. It was a museum disguised as a store. I knew something was amiss when I saw a photo of Gerald Ford shaking Sam Walton's hand. Sam would get the Presidential Medal of Freedom later from George H.W. The same medal that Rush Limbaugh just got.

So we give out medals to those who destroy the very fabric of our society now?? People on Wall Street - investors - make a bet on what will be the next blockbuster. But it's really not a bet. It's a sure deal that an entire industry will be disrupted, which means destroyed, by predatory marketing practices. Along with the industry go unions, local ownership, and knowledge of the sort built up over years of purchasing decisions and getting to know the people. 

Gone now as the cost of doing business is so much else that we once did value. Local eateries. Doctors who make house calls. Packaging that isn't killing the planet. Short hauls from farm to table. Local craft beer. You know, the stuff that's coming back, if you're white and well off. At least we got the wholesalers out of the way. Hmmmm. 

Frankly I think black lives have gotten more and more marginal during my lifetime. Our celebrated progress with civil rights hasn't translated into main street lives simply because those aren't the kinds of businesses that we value anymore. 

When things are created digitally - where there is no marginal cost for each additional widget - mountains of investment will be piled into whoever gets the most eyeballs. The losses equal the mountains upside down until the existing players are fully destroyed to leave a sole monopolist. The monopolist is never guilty of the syndicate-style behaviors which anti-trust regulations were designed for. 

These are all nice and mostly white and mostly male youngsters who want to hit it big. Well sure, sometimes they cut corners and act ruthless. Young blonde women beware. Anyhow, the consumers fall like flies in their belief in falling prices. Those falling prices are themselves a temporary illusion, but life is short. 

And it's not as though Google is providing their services for free! Read Surveillance Capitalism, please! We are not the product. Our behaviors are. We all work for the Man for free now. Click to agree, and Yahoo!!

Eyeballs or ears, it's an easy bet that Rush Limbaugh or Howard Stern will get most of them. Pornography powered the Internet. Any hit to our most basic emotional plexus. And this is how we want to engineer our future? Well, I guess it is, now, isn't it?

Plastics, Benjamin, plastics.

You have to imagine a world without plastics to imagine a sustainable future. That's a fact. It's hard, but not impossible, to do. Wooden boats are more fun to own than the plastic sort. And they last longer. But you have to enjoy the actual work to own one. You don't need toxic paints - water based or oil - when you can use linseed oil and so forth.

Plastic bags were invented as a way to support the industry which would otherwise have been too expensive for the car companies. That's a fact. Black lives keep getting reinvented downward from slavery to jail (Watch 13th please!) so that we can have our capitalism and eat it too.

This is no way to live, people. We have to bring our economy back down to earth, and use the digital stuff to compute optimal infrastructures according to the data from our now fully instrumented planet. Sure, we need to have the entertainment side - the plastic baggies - to support that overhead, but it's already a done deal.  We just have it all upside down and backwards again is all.

Digital and plastics are fine in small quantities, so long as we pay up front for all their externalities. Short of that, bakelite is pretty good. Natural rubber and steel. Stuff that requires skilled workers to maintain. Writing on paper.

We will always require good writers. My apologies. I can fix a lot of things, but I don't seem to be able to fix my writing. Sorry!

Do The Right Thing With Digital

Let's think of it this way: we can never know ourselves as well as those who love us know us. There are certain kinds of self-knowledge that we really must resist if we are going to maintain our face to the world. The self requires a little varnishing. That's why ad hominem arguments should be expunged from our protestations. There is no better way to hit a brick wall, for the purposes of changing a mind.

I suppose that's why novelists often start with variations on their own lives. Sure I know that the reason I despise FaceBook, apart from its obvious political and organizational guilt, is that I've never felt comfortable on any social scene. People often assume I'm arrogant, perhaps just because I won't join in. As a small child, I would hide to nurse some small hurt, or perhaps just because that's how I felt comfortable. It would take a while before anyone was worried, and still I didn't want to be found out. I'm sure there's medical literature about such behaviors, but I'm not sure that I want to see it.

I'm one of those people about whom glancing acquaintances often say, in a nice way, that I'm trying to find myself. I'm more and more petulant with that. No, thank you, I found myself a long long time ago and now I have work to do. Frankly the whole notion of "finding oneself" has always struck me as a loser from the get go. What could it possibly mean? No wonder the sixties were co-opted by commerce.

I am quite certain that having myriad images, moving and still, and other forms of recording, sound or writing, will almost never allow anyone to know a person better than their friends do, even while you still might know that person better than they do themselves. Sure, it has changed me to see myself on TV, but it hasn't helped me to know myself. I just cringe and look away. Sometimes fascinated as by a train wreck.

Just imagine how unlikely Trump has ever been to know himself, and then just imagine him changing his mind. Why would he? As far as he can tell from his reflection (something he apparently never does) he's on top of the world, and can gather a crowd to his pleasing at any time, even as he warns others who know themselves better never to gather for any other reason. An edited and curated stint on reality TV must really mess with a person's self-image.

I've been trying my whole life to make sense of digital. Now it feels critical. And I still have no way to talk about the dangers of the digital revolution swamping us now. Most people blithely assume that it just another step in the long path of "progress." People seem to believe that, ultimately, this progress is what being alive and human is all about. 

The thing is we don't often agree about progress to what. I would call it progress if we were to preserve those high arts once reserved for the wealthy nobility, but open the doors to the masses of producers and appreciators. I feel like we've made good progress with that, taking a look at hip hop culture. We've done less well with the pleasures of nobility and wealth. Since our culture confuses pleasure with happiness, that part is problematical. 

I've placed up here the actual writing which brought me to an epiphany of sorts when I was a much younger man. My epiphany was rather like what Barbara Ehrenreich describes in her Living With a Wild God. I was trying to make sense of what becomes different in the world through the lense of the Chinese literary tradition, along with what has changed in the world along with the then-new standard model of physics.

One might say that I had two basic insights. The one that tipped me over the edge was by way of the paradoxes introduced by quantum physics and relativistic time-dilation. Now recently with the apparent creation of a stable instance of Bose-Einstein condensate under weightless conditions on the space station, I feel a further boost for my epiphany. But it also would not have been possible without my deep dive into Chinese ways of knowing.

The relevant paradoxes involve such things as Bell's Theorem, quantum entanglement, time dilation, and more. My basic insight is that no object anywhere can be in any kind of basic contact with any other object. Of course everything depends on what is meant by "contact." The real trouble for me and for Ehrenreich is that there is no scientific theory to be disproven by my actual lived experience. There is nothing that one might do with this kind of understanding.

Or, in other words, my insights do nothing for what we call human progress. Agreement with them is not obligatory in relation to any definition for physical reality. Of course I don't really believe that. I believe that these insights make all the difference in the world to our thriving as a world community. But they don't seem to make me any more persuasive in the face of the stubborn recalcitrance demonstrated by that approximately half of our voting population which firmly believes in static and, to me, impossible truths.

So my obligation is as an educator, and indeed I have spent most of my academic life studying education, even while discouraged by actually doing it. As it is for many people who study education, part of my problem is that schooling continues to diverge from education to some terrifying extent. I would be a humble teacher if I had my druthers, but that doesn't seem to have been in the cards for me. I won't go into the reasons here, except to say that my teaching project keeps growing as I grow older. That's what I can't abandon.

I do know myself enough to admit that I arrogate to myself the really big questions. Of course I have no business doing that, but I'm not trying to be in anybody's face. Only once in my life did I ever introduce myself properly as a cosmologist, then quickly demurring that "of course I make my living in other ways." You do hair, then?

Far better to devote one's life to something interesting, like battery technology or gaming. Make a living and be humble. But for the astounding size of transnational conglomerates, and the even more astounding size of a small number of personal fortunes. In no good world would we allow so much power to the likes of Mark Zuckerberg, even though I am grateful to him for introducing me to The Three Body Problem. His spoken Chinese is execrable, by the way. He sounds just like an American technocrat, all descended from Jobs.

The task to deconstruct the current order of things is just too massive. Of course global corporations aren't going to care that Black Lives Matter, but oddly they now seem to. Putting a good face on a corrupt body? Deeper change? Time will tell.

My insights involve the ways in which we are embedded in cosmos and not subject to it as object (I do love English for its tortured ambiguity, meaning, of course, that I love to torture English, even while I know that's not very nice to you, gentle reader . . .). I almost have to work backwards from our mistaken apprehension that computers approximate how our brain might work to get to what is wrong with digital. But that almost always seems to get me nowhere.

So let's start from the other end, shall we? Machines in general and digital machines in particular introduce structures which quite simply don't and can't exist "in nature." Sure, there is a continuum from our skeletal bodies as machines and through our hands to our tools as operators on the world around us, but it is at the inception of digital reality that we, literally now, lose touch. Recognizing patterns which are anomalously regular is how we recognize cognition out in the wild. We spend a lot of money on a SETI array to do precisely that. No dial-twiddling, digital requires only instruction.

In physics, of course, there is no actual touch between objects. Instead there are forces mediated by "particles" which define the interactions not of things, but of clouds of probability. Even our very own bodies can be described by those complex equations, though our accurate placement in any cosmos is hardly problematical at the scale of such huge bodily aggregations of smaller "particles." Our position scintillates, which is probably part of what it means to be alive.

We are working now on quantum computers which attempt to harness quantum entanglement for our next step in crypto. This apparently has nothing to do with breakthroughs in computational theory, but rather with the speed possible for certain types of computation. As I understand it, the speed is in turn a function of the fact that there is no time-delay for the transmission of "information" from one stateful cubit to its partner which is at some distance.

But of course, we are not talking about information so much as we are the definition for what may be considered a single "thing." The distance possible between "entangled" quanta has been experimentally shown to approach infinity. Touch "here" may be felt simultaneously "there." But what in the world does touch mean in that regard? Feeling???? Is there an emotional/physical divide too now? Yes!

I am less than an amateur with these matters. Of course, I would like to know more, but as with post-modern critical theory, there is simply not world enough and time. Each of us planes off at some point to focus on some very local problem that we find ourselves interested in. Well, if we're not black and if we have some social capital mostly. IF you're not forced to be a wage slave.

A cosmologist can't be too picky about what he chooses to study. The meanings could come from most anywhere.

I have been graced by resources not available to most of us, and feel a powerful reciprocal obligation to make something of that grace. But it is hard. I don't have the language to be native in any field. I can't get in the door. And I haven't worked hard enough for 'The Man' to be able to choose to retreat from the fray to just simply enjoy my wonderful life, although I do plenty of that. 

To simply enjoy life seems the most irresponsible choice at the moment in our history, and far worse than all the promise forsaken by my not choosing to embed myself in some one particular field. There are many kinds of regret now, aren't there? It's not that life is awful. We're not coming out of a World War. But it sure does feel like a tipping point.

As far as I know, people continue to search for some magic in the brain, as though it were the brain alone which makes us human. I am much more of a whole body (and whole earth) person. I can't separate any part from the whole. I have described elsewhere how and why I subscribe to Riccardo Manzotti's "Spread Mind" theory of consciousness. For me, it means that we are present in much more of the cosmos than the space displaced by our bodies can describe. The title for his book-form summary is The Spread Mind: Why Consciousness and the World Are One. We are not so separate, one from each other.

So the root of digital evil is that digital reality chops off the connection. Much of what we enact now in our history realizes this chopping off in the form of a very American sort of radical individualism. I don't mean that digital reality is causing radical individualism, though I'm sure that a case could be made for that. I'm suggesting that both trends realize the same underlying misapprehension about who and what we are and what is cosmos.

I speak in radically metaphorical terms in everything that I can say. That's because there terms can only be meant metaphorically. Of course physicists don't really deal with actual particles at the subatomic level, starting with the atom in one direction or the other. There is nothing very particular about anything there. And of course I can make only a metaphorical connection between the literal digital divide I'm talking about here and the other one I want to talk about. But the connection is no less real than subatomic particles are. 

I happen to believe that the American experiment is very much worth preserving. That's not because the radical individual is the way into the future, but because, despite our original sin, we are the only place where the arc of history has even a chance to bend toward the good. This is fundamentally because we are structurally not afraid of knowledge. That is a very good thing, indeed.

We still need to figure out how to decide what to do with the knowledge that we gain.

We are prevented from being a great nation (in moral terms) because of our radical individualism and the peculiar form of rampant capitalism which we've adopted as native. Our brand of capitalism tends toward the same results in relation to the open pursuit of knowledge that various forms of totalitarianism do. Even China's approach is better. In China, they're not so much afraid of knowledge as they are cautious about what can count as knowledge in the short term. My problem is that the short term is much shorter than anyone seems to realize. 

Sure, I'm talking about climate change or pandemics or species and planet extinction, but I'm not talking about what we need to do about those things. I think I'm talking more about what we need to stop doing, and I mean in our systems of knowledge and understanding, not even in our behaviors. Well, that's a chicken/egg kind of problem. The trouble is that we have to figure out how to change our minds collectively. The story of Jesus did that once upon a time. Relativity theory did that too, with a very brief sort of boom.

We've tended in the direction of disparaging mind against digital machine, just because signals along the neurons move so slowly. We confuse our mind with our brain. By our brain? By the way we think!

We can't possibly be as efficient in our rational calculations as a machine can be. Heck, we can't even rationalize the decisions we've already made quickly enough to claim to have made them ourselves, and we somehow think that might be infringing on our precious free will. Guess what, free will takes time. That thing that we're running out of.

Manzotti points out that we're conceptualizing how the brain works in the wrong way. It's not about speed. In fact it's about slowing down perceptual information even to the point of holding that information in a kind of near perpetual cycling so that we can perceive it again in the form of memory. 

I came at this realization myself lo those many years ago, but I was coming at it from the perspective of Chinese literature, which isn't so concerned with the inner person. The patterns on the surfaces are what counts, and of course, we know those we love much better than they know themselves. 

So the brain is a complex series of slowed down cycling messages and intersections. It can be repurposed if there are injuries, and the circuits are largely self-healing even as the neurons wither and die. Sleep perchance and death and dreaming are all essential for this all to work. Too much conscious attention just makes a mess of things. The brain largely wants to be autonomous. The cycling from birth to death is also an over-ordering of the brain until it just simply can't track, much in the way that I can't remember which digital article I read this morning, and no matter how good search is, I'll never find it again. 

Immortality, like literal infinity, would just crowd out every other. Not a good result.

Autonomous machines are different. Make enough racial profiling facial recognizing deadly force drones and we can end the world in a jiffy. Not by killing it off, but by the backlash disruption we've been causing to all those feeling the pain of collateral damage. It's the immune response which does the killing. That's what this moment in history means.

We have all been enabled to socially distance ourselves from trouble to the extent that we've won the lottery jackpot of disrupting someone else's industry. And we have all the right and good ideas as we amuse ourselves up to the point of death, which is inevitable in any case. That's what socially distancing social stratification means, and guess who gets left behind to pay our piper? The ones out in the streets now, being called terrorists by our terrorist in chief.

So, not only do we have to deconstruct and rebuild our policing on the model of Camden, New Jersey, but we have to do the same with our military. We create the terrorists and then, just like Vietnam all over again, they outwit us with their very human ingenuity. The end. 

Of course fascists love technology. It keeps the trains on time, and identifies everyone so that they (we) can be pinched in an instant the moment we cross whatever line they've drawn for us. We in these United States think its fine when it's done commercially, but now it's being done politically, and for sure militarily.

Of course Big Business loves technology. It allows it to grow and grow and then the business itself turns into technology, just like the economy turns into finance and a bunch of gig workers. Producing nothing of any value, no matter how pleasant it might be.

Even still the ubiquitous smartphones make it hard for the powers that be to lie. Except why then does our commander in chief get to lie out loud and often and still have his following? Well, duh, it's because of all those autonomous processes which run our newsrooms. I'm not only talking about how Facebook spoons up its newsfeeds to a level of complexity impossible for any human to keep up with. I'm also talking about the actual newsrooms which profit the same way from whatever grabs eyeballs, and then the aggregators who find out what you like to read by the same algorithms used by Google and Facebook.

How the hell can we even know what truth is? What the truth is? One lie is as good as any other, and so it comes down to the stories we like to tell ourselves. And these are nearly all impervious to being educated out once we call ourselves adults. Trust me, I've tried really hard for most of my life and it can't be done.

So, that's why I dig down to the basics. Particle physics. Quantum reality. Chaos theory. Getting rid of the mind/body subject/object dualisms. That's the only thing that can save us or else we're just not worth saving, sayeth Gaia or what-you-will. We are now in the process of stepping out from nature, and if we keep it up we will have succeeded once and forevermore. We will be as dead as an autonomous robot whose plug got pulled.

What then is the difference between the information being held in mind and the information being held in computer memory? I'm going with Manzotti's definition here for information, which is just the stuff which passes among objects which makes them perceptible. Which means to be in touch. Which means that physical information-carrying signals, in the case of animal minds, impinge on our perceptual apparatus. Which means to feel.

In a computer, or should I say for a computer, the information needs to be digitized which means conceptualized which means a static relation among conceptual objects. Ideal Platonic Numbers, say. Conceptual objects are things held in mind for the purpose of organizing perceptual objects. A kind of literal calculus takes place in and by computational representations of reality where conceptual slices are stacked together to form an approximation of actual fluid non-binary reality. 

Irony be my north star.

As with any mathematical calculus, digital reality can only be a very precise approximation of what is being measured. Again, as Manzotti would have it, there are no images in our heads any more than there are images stored in computer memory. Computers can't see. We can. And no matter how many pixels, the stored image can never be the same as the live one. The live one is felt directly.

Our brains don't store conceptual reality. They store perceptual reality, which is much richer. Since we store concepts so poorly, we must construct a narrative frame to hold them. The narrative frame of science is the best and most durable one that has ever been constructed, but it's showing its age already. It apparently can't overpower the Jesus frame. Both have been expropriated for use by the military industrial complex. We need a new frame!

Bill Gates has built his spaceship here on earth, which is the only place such a life would be viable. I'm sure it's more impregnable than Donald Trump's bunker, even given all the secret service, who might, after all, be carrying some kind of virus. The wealthy everywhere have escaped reality and deploy the police and the military to keep themselves safe. They might as well be on Mars, and good riddance!

Why not? If life is only about happiness and if you only have so much time on earth, then why not make that short time as pleasant as possible? Too bad about the marginal classes and the precariat. We'd love to have them join us for the cost of membership.

The trouble is the carrying cost to the planet though, right? 

In my book, conceptual relations are just as real as perceptual relations are. In place of information to define the relation among objects in motion, I talk of e-motion to describe non-forceful relations among objects in free-fall. Love moves through the eons in the direction of life, while hate moves toward stasis in the direction of the dead. The difference then is between the quick and the dead, and we have been moving toward the dead. 

I want to convince the likes of Bill Gates to live more modestly. The party is down in the engine room in the bowels of the ship and not up where you need black tie. 

My changes are definitional and not scientifically testable. That's a shame, really, because I won't be able to convince anyone by showing them what I'm able to do that couldn't be done before because of some new theoretical understanding which is experimentally demonstrably real. This theory requires a different kind of enactment. The kind we're watching (most of us, stuck off in some safe space in our wombs with a view) playing out right now out in the streets. 

There simply is no army powerful enough to quiet the people. That's what defunding the police state has to mean. To the extent that we hold our smartphones high, we still own the digital reality. We will depopulate our prisons by deconstructing our militarized police force. We will depolarize the world by deconstructing our obsolete notions of armed forces. We will jump back into the fray of nature be reconceptualizing what it means to be human, and we won't have to lose a thing about our humanity to do it. We won't have to become beastly. We won't have to forsake our art and our music and our dance and especially not our food and wine. These are what connect us. These are how we touch the cosmic forces. These are our expressions of love in return for the love which brought us this far.

These are the facts of life, fight them though we think Jesus wants us to do. That's not Jesus talking, that's The Man, and he only wants to grab your pussy. Defund the Church (oh, right, that's already happening), and Jesus will come to life again for real.

Numbers don't exist in nature. Numbers are an abstraction from nature, but it isn't only humans who know how to count. Humans learned how to tabulate, and that was the start of all the trouble. Tabulation led to writing as one thing leads to another and we find ourselves in over our head. We have to get it together, people!

Science can't advance without metrics. Metrics means numbers. Before science government needed metrics. Before government, agriculture needed metrics. But somehow we learned to separate the perceptual world from the world of the subject who was doing the observations and working the metrics to abstract theories which would enable ever more fruitful manipulations of the world around so that the subjects could live and rest more easily. 

But now finally we know that mind cannot be abstracted from matter; it can't be separated. We should be culturally grown up enough to know - woke enough to realize - that there is no personal God who's going to rescue us and take it from here. We should also know that we aren't even close to being equal to the complexity of the natural environment in which we live. Our science has barely gotten started, for chissakes!

Along comes digital reality to accelerate everything and we seem to understand that we're going off the rails. That we have failed morally in our development. Not only have we failed our fellow humans, but we're about to destroy the natural homeostasis that we depend on in the same way that all life depends on it. We're acting as though we can destroy nature with impunity. But nature's destruction is what happens naturally when one tries to order it. When one takes dominion. 

I think we need to rediscover balance.

These separations - heart from mind, subject from object, mind from body - they all enable a disconnect not just from life but from our neighbors. By forcing and enforcing social distancing - by wearing masks and building walls - Covid-19 and the various Donald Trumps of the world call the question; what if we were to join together? What if we were never to profit again from illness? What if we were never to prosecute a deal where someone has to be the loser so that we can win?

Numbers to enhance scientific understanding somehow transmuted into numbers to represent reality. We can't know intimately what we can only see on TV.  We can't have a discussion by texting and tweeting. Nobody even reads a long email anymore. What choice is there but to take to the streets?

Man, I sure do wish I could write more better. Well, not more. You know what I mean, by very definition.

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?

Swindled!

Last night, arguing with a very talented lawyer friend of mine (we like to posture adversarially, although it's not a fair match, since he does this professionally) I heard a sad and funny story.

We were arguing about Tiger Woods and Bill Clinton, and the Starr commission and framing and responsibility. For the sake of argument, let's say I was taking Clinton's side, excoriating (a word lawyers would never use in a courtroom) Starr for dispensing with procedural justice in his rabid pursuit of some truth with a capital T. It seemed to me that Clinton was simply maneuvered into a position where his answer was guaranteed, and that it would necessarily be at odds with the goods being held in reserve against him.

The other side of the argument in this case being that he was *out* maneuvered, and that Clnton was the one with the brains, the staff, the power to avoid precisely this predicament, and in the end he still lied to the American public, in whose service he had pledged to labor.

Clinton lied, perhaps, because it was a small matter. He lied, perhaps, because the consequences of telling the truth would cause greater harm to the public than the harm of keeping it from them. He'd been cornered, and perhaps he'd proved his mettle?

I don't much care about the proper answer. It makes interesting dinner conversation.

So, there was this judge, having an affair with a university professor. One night, they are caught on tape having "not-sex" (if you speak like Clinton) in the parking lot of a restaurant. There was a small accident - a fender bender in the process of backing out - which entailed a quick "no problem, officer" check written on the spot (not to the officer, to the victim, sorry!). There was a tale of drunken weaving on the skyway bridge, and an arrest for DWI.

You pretty much know which side you should be on, until you hear that the judge's wife was having him tailed, and that the DWI was a setup. A tipoff. The pictures were not captured accidentally. Who knows about the bumper bumping?

Apart from your envy that these participants in an illicit affair could keep it that hot after two years, it's not all that easy to tell where the justice is or should be. At least not for me.

The part that's hard to get beyond though, is that you do know that the scorned wife was the reason that the affair stayed hot. She was being used that way. You also know that these players probably knew that about themselves, and wanted to keep things that way for as long as they could. Well, you don't really know, but you can reasonably surmise.

I don't really know the end of the story, although I have to assume that a few lives were wrecked. Once public, these things make a hard time stuffing them back into the can. It's hard not to see the wife both vindicated and justified. But you don't really know the backstory. You don't really know anything about their homelife, what led up to things. Do you need to? So what if she was just a controlling bitch. Isn't that just a cliche to put down those who outmaneuver you?

I spent part of yesterday in the VW shop. My brakes were always on (take that Toyota!), and it was costing me lots of gas mileage. They'd just completed a total redecoration of their shop, which made the entire customer service experience much more lavish than it used to be. I hardly need to tell you that it made me nervous.

Now, I'm pretty loaded down with technology, and I tend to know how to use it. This was the first time that I remember their quote for the part being so far out of line with the "standard" price on the Internet. They'd suggested I should have the brakes replaced at the same time but I held off, on the reasonable argument that I'm still not working. I made some lame jokes about how they'd better not start serving Cappuccino or I'd start thinking I was among the wrong class of customer anymore. They assured me I'd have to bring my own. (the coffee was pretty good, oh, and I just rechecked and it must have been a fluke, like looking up prices on Travelocity before you move to commit. It no longer looks like they overcharged me.)

Of course it did turn out that there was more wear left "than we'd thought". I couldn't tell if that was said sheepishly. It wouldn't have mattered to me. I've driven this car nearly 300,000 miles, and all the service has been done at this shop, and I'm not about to stop loving them just because they made their showroom and customer waiting area look more like that rip-off place which serves Cappuccino, and which I, of course, eschew.

But there's more to the story, of course. Recently, in Toronto, on a Sunday, picking up my girls from the airport, one of my coils went out. (yeah, I thought there was only one too) The car made it home at potentially great expense to the car, and later on I found that the 'net is full of VW haters and flamers who post about this issue, and how VW sux. But when I'd taken my car in for the brake diagnosis, they just replaced all these coils, no charge to me, fixed the rattle with some duct tape arrangement, and told me how I could get reimbursed for the coil I'd bought myself, on the road, on a guess.

The coil I bought was too cheap to bother searching for its receipt (that plus the time to manage the paperwork). And I know the VW shop was eager to do this for me because the newly official recall would mean that they would be paid for charging me nothing. I'm not stupid. But it felt like I was being respected, treated well, favored. Any damage done to the car was by now ancient history. I mean that rather literally.

But now I have no way to tell which was the bigger factor in my lost gas mileage, and where the permanent injury is. An ambiguity I'll just have to live with.  I think the difference from Toyota is that there was never any danger to life and limb here. Just pocketbook risk. But they didn't exactly come clean about it ahead of time, and who knows if maybe the flamers on the 'net had something to do with forcing their hand.

Trust is rough. The temptations are all over the place - I'm sure the VW shop is hurting as much as anyone else for business.

***

Sorry, had to take a break. You know how it is when you stay out late, have a few drinks (I walked home!). You're ravenous the next morning.

I made myself an omelette. It was incredible. I don't know if you'd like it, or if it was just incredible to me. It was a garbage omelette, full of too much unmatched stuff that I had by the dregs. Beans. Chorizo. Olives. Broccoli. Brie. Salza. Little bits of stuff. I have no way to know if I liked it because I'm an easy sell, or because I was happy to find use for those dregs. Oh, I forgot to tell you about the potatoes fried in olive oil.

The one thing I do know for certain is that you would never be able to eat such a thing in any restaurant. That I know for certain. What I don't know is whether that is because there can't possibly be that much love in a plate for hire, or if no self-respecting chef would even think of that combination, or simply because there would be some guarantee of returns to the kitchen. All I know for certain is that you'd never get that in a restaurant.

I also know for certain that I'd never have satisfied my particular craving in a restaurant.

Anyhow, where was I? Oh, OK, sure, you're thinking this is pretty clever, right, trying to make it seem as though these things just happen and I don't orchestrate them, and that they will somehow magically fit right into the story?

I'm not that disingenuous. Please! I make shit up as much as the next guy. I edit. I revise. (the omelette story is true though, and even I know I'll have a hard time selling the notion that I revise. I'm not stupid)

I was going to speak, rather, about how, magically, on the news, as if I were the one to cause it, there are these seemingly coincident happenings. Well, their happening is not coincident, it's plain fact that they coincided. But the randomness of their apparent alignment, that's the seeming part.

First, there's Dick Cheney outing himself as a "big fan of torture." Then there's this guy over in England who pretty much confesses to murder right on TV; how he suffocated his "partner" suffering from terminal AIDS and lots of pain. How he thereby relieved the doctors and his lover all, of what he knew they could never do. And how he was interrogated for 30 hours against the likelihood that he was, in fact, guilty of murder.

Here's the shocker. I want to give them both a pass, both Cheney and the lover. Both of them had the decency to speak their "truths" out loud and in public. Now, you might say that they have little enough to lose. They're old, both of  them, on death's door for various reasons. But there's little enough of that truth telling out there. (there are few enough cars that even get that far!) I'd really like for Cheney to be interrogated, on the power of risking his life, but I'm tipping my hat that he at least says out loud what he's doing in private. When it affects us, I mean. I don't really give a damn what he does in his closet.

How are the rest of us supposed to make good decisions, when everyone's making up stories? How, when everyone's got an angle on everyone else's story?

That's my story, and I'm sticking with it. Really the omelette was incredible. I'm not about to open a restaurant, but still . . . .

Who Owns Me? Google does!

Google owns me, and I don't really mind. Yet. Once they fully team up with the NSA, I might have something else to say on the topic. But up against Verizon gaming me, I discovered rather lately  - as a techie it's embarrassing - that the once-free tool which Verizon had provided doesn't hold a candle to what Google allows me for free now.

OK, it's not all Google. It's Microsoft ActiveSync, but Google has opened up their email in ways that used to require an enterprise Exchange server, and it works better - much better - than Verizon imitating Blackberry. Which they now charge for??!!! It makes no sense. I save $15 bucks a month for something better that Verizon never told me about, and used to charge nothing for. Right, and I guess I should expect them to lower my rate, automatically, every time they lower it on to the general public! So what am I, you loyal customer, chopped liver??!!

And looking at my Google dashboard, I see that they store more information about me than even the credit-scoring services do. Well, not more, but it would make a scary complement to what the credit scoring services have on me. They track my youtube visits. They track whose blogs I follow. They cache my searching, but that part I'm not allowed to see, and I trust that they won't identify me with it either.

Except that they've already said that they will comply with the law if requested. Just like Verizon did when they tapped into the net on the request of the government, even though the request wasn't legal???

One has to wonder now if the law and the government are at odds again. The way they were when blacks and women coudn't vote, for instance. The way they are when corporations are declared to have the inalienable right to pursue your happiness; to drown out your voice and make your freedom of speech irrelevant.

I don't really care even if the NSA already had access to my searchings, which they probably already do even without Google's help. It's all noise, right? Until you say something edgy, which will just stick right out from the noise, and provoke someone to look a little bit more closely. And Google, happy lapdog, will just hand you right over in an instant, if the request is bona-fide and legal. Or at least if it's government sponsored.

But I am not the content of what can be known about me. And if I were a too-tightly wound nutjob ready to pop, they quite manifestly now, wouldn't know that either. Even if I were a radical Muslim high-ranking in the military. Even if I seemed nice to those around me, like that shooter recently here in Buffalo.

So, the excuse to keep our searches is just that. An excuse. We'd like to think it can and will help responsible people to know who's out to get us, but in the end it can't and won't. Unless, of course, someone goes the extra step to actually get to know someone, which can't really be done, in the end, virtually. Now can it?

And it can't be done just one on one. Someone would have to get to know your whole story, from lots of points of view, not just the on-line or phone conversation one, which will always be taken out of context. Always be dangerously unfair and untrue.

But you know if Google does succeed now with their experiment to bring ultra-high-speed Internet right into your living room, so that you can have the same telepresence "enjoyed" by corporate enterprises within their pecincts, then we might almost only exist online.

Which used to be thought a pretty terrifying prospect. Minority report. The Matrix. That Max Headroom old TV show. I could go on and on. I do go on and on, but I'll stop here today.

There is a clear trend here, and we should stop it before it's too late. The issue is word for word identical to the patenting of our genes. And just as important. If we allow ourselves to be considered identical to our "content" then we have already ceased to exist, and our suicide would indeed, just like life in Buffalo, be redundant.

Hoover Blanket, Inc., Launches Pikk.com

I've always wanted to write a manifesto, so here it is. This is what Hoover Blanket, Inc. sets out to accomplish. Hoover Blanket, by the way, refers to newspapers, which were all that some people had to keep themselves warm with back in the first Great Depression (this one's been "papered" over by newly minted electronic money, just as new Hoovervilles spring up all over again).

I'm lousy at memorizing things, but once you learn how to see something, you never can unlearn it. I think true learning forms a kind of permanent memory, which is helpful for people like me.

I sometimes wonder if a whole nation can learn anything. Surely if you wait long enough among people without historical memory, you can almost always pull the same stunts over and over, especially on folks sent to school for memorizing and training to be economic inputs!

When I was in school myself, I was apparently smart enough to pay attention to almost nothing that was being said. Not too much memory was required for passing multiple choice tests, and in the classes I liked it wasn't the saying that counted anyhow. So, I liked physics and math, and didn't pay a whole lot of attention to history. Literature was just intimidating, and those particular multiple choice questions had no connection whatsoever to what I thought I was reading.

Maybe I don't have all that much to unlearn about how stupid everybody else in the world is who's not American, and maybe I have yet to be convinced that partisan politics means democracy. Unlearning, as any teacher can tell you, is a lot harder than learning.

We got a lot of how stupid everyone else is in the naive anthropology of world culture and religion as it was taught. Somehow, though, I've retained a few principles about greed and robber barons and how rich folks always work things out to their ever more concentrated aggrandizement. Until everything crashes.

I also never did actually read the good stuff until college, because, well frankly the good stuff wasn't being advertised very well at school where facts and names were the focus. In college, the good stuff hit me rather like a ton of bricks, and so I had to drop out and back in several times before I hit my stride studying Chinese. Which involves lots and lots of memorization, so there you go.

And in China now, we like to call their form of market economics "capitalism" too, even though their one-party political system pretty much stretches to the point of breaking what we could possibly mean when we use that same term to describe outselves. Or are they really more similar than different, with our Coke and Pepsi parties who just make it seem like there's real choice being debated. Where the real choices get whittled right down to false alternatives among characterless compromises enforced on the party membership if they want to keep their seats.

Dad's losing his memory now. He reads and rereads the autobiographies that he's compiled. To be reminded of who he was and what he did. I guess you could call it dementia, but there is still a kind of shape to it, as he fades away and anon.

Maybe we should do the same with our own national history before we forget who we once thought we were. Questing for freedom, and away from aristocracy, we always said we wanted to give the least of us the same chances as the most powerful. Well, that's what we said anyhow.

I'm trying to establish a kind of credential here for your belief in what I want to say. I'm trying to whittle myself down to that little boy who points out that the Emperor is naked. I'm trying for something anybody could see, and I haven't got a mature voice yet. But I'll keep trying.

Among other things, Hooover Blanket hopes to bring back the news, so that we can stay warm in ways which don't require a Hooverville. We here at Hoover Blanket believe in ways to promote something other than the bottom feeding train wreck corporate press-release copy which passes for news reporting these days.

And we don't think it has to be inevitable that powers like Google can destroy what used to be a somewhat honorable dishonorable profession. Not that Google has any blood on its hands yet, except perhaps in their titanic grudge match against Microsoft. It's we who don't have time or won't pay for news that's fit to read. We're too busy driving, I guess, and it's not Google's job to pay reporters.

I learned about newspaper reporting over in Taiwan during martial law, back when America called them China. My Chinese professor had hooked me up with his sister (not that way - we didn't do that back then, or at least I didn't), the only woman reporter in Taiwan, and she in turn introduced me to these three old guys, who in turn invited me to drink down at the Temple of the City God.

I'd studied Taoism with a guy who converted from Jesuitical to Taoistic understandings right in those temple precincts, so I had a little sense ahead of time about what I would be doing there. Or wait, maybe I studied with him afterward. Hell, I can't remember.

I do know that the spirits we studied were made from sorghum, and tasted somewhere just this side of turpentine. After we were good and happy - me struggling to use Chinese - the cops would join us at our table, and then later on the local mafia.

These were the guys who knew what was really going on, and I think they had to drink hard at night just so they could publish all the happy horseshit which was all that was allowed in a place where telling the truth could get you pretty quickly killed.

Now that we've disgraced poor Dan Rather, our original Million Dollar Man, who must have been radicalized over there in Afghanistan just like Osama, all we seem to get any more is happy horseshit too.

Oh sure, we pay lots of attention when they expose scumbags, and over at Fox they've raised that to an art, where absolutely everybody is a scumbag except the person pointing fingers and shouting.

I think back in kindergarten they taught us about how many fingers point back to yourself when we're calling names. But I wouldn't remember.

The point is that there is too much money in shilling a bunch of corporate orthodoxy, and not nearly enough to staff the smoky back rooms where the real stuff might get written. And plenty of money in providing hits to your logo-ridden heart, which craves its news just as greasy as MacDonalds fries. Hits to your insecure ego, which likes to think itself that much better than those scumbags who run things.

The trouble being, of course, that the scumbags being pointed at and shouted about are only diversionary creatures to make sure you don't understand who's really distorting your world-view.

So, how is Hoover Blanket going to accomplish this on our wing and our prayer?

Very simply because we know something the big guys don't know. First of all we take it as an article of faith - it's right in our manifesto (the real one) - that computers make a lousy analog for how minds actually work.

There will be no artificial intelligence, ever, and so it looks to us like a colossal and somewhat dangerous waste of time, money and power, for corporate giants like Google to catalog and cache and data-mine the entire Internet. Which, if you were to try it at home using your really really fast broadband connection would take maybe 65 years and several petabytes worth of storage just to list the pages by their url. (I read that somewhere on the Internet, so it must be true.)

But there is no intelligence in any of that data. There is power, though, for so long as Google is getting most of the clicks when you go searching for stuff. They can hand you up what you want, prearranged according to how everyone else is searching (like someone rearranging your refrigerator the same way they arrange stuff on the shelves over at Wegman's, putting the high-paying stuff right at your sweet spot) and then serving up some nicely targeted ads, in case you weren't aware of something out there you might just like to buy.

I'm not saying, by the way, that they are really doing what Wegman's does (and Wegman's is the nicest supermarket in the nation, so I pick them on purpose here). They have their code of honor. No-one can pay them for search results to make it to the top. And they don't mix in the paid ads with the other search results the way that Yahoo! and Bing do (well, OK, so there's a new distinction without a difference - they've merged, surprise, surprise! - and we might be the collateral damage in those cloud wars).

But there is a kind of simple vicious cycle which happens here, since by promoting what everyone else is looking at they are, indirectly, bringing all the logoware right up front, and letting other things disappear somewhere down in among those bejillions of other hits on pages etcetera. There's lots and lots of money involved in all this indirection.

Let's say you're a crazy guy like me, and you want to find the five or six other people on the planet who think like you do, so that they will buy your book. (I still don't get why people only buy books they agree with though)

You pay Google to pop up an ad to those folks who use your words while emailing their sweetheart, say, and it really really works. You get a sale for maybe $20 and Google automagically calibrates the click rate so that it will be worth it for you to keep paying out maybe $19 for every sale. But that's better than nothing, since you aren't even paying for paper. Except that Google's getting a pretty darned good commission. Unless you're the size of the New York Times, in which case your commission is pretty small. You get how this can work.

Well, my buddy, the brains behind Hoover Blanket (I couldn't code to save my life, well OK, I exaggerate, but not by much) got an actual bona-fide Ph.D. (I tried several times, but I just don't have the patience for it) devising ways to model living tissue for virtual reality palpations of the body.

You can't do this by old fashioned engineering means. Living tissue is just way complex compared to bridges and skyscrapers and spaceships and other things at the limits of our computing power to model. And even some of these come crashing down in ways we never could have predicted.

Living tissue - and I have to apologize here because my buddy needs to stay in the closet a little while longer, so I might be getting some of this wrong - living tissue has to be modeled in the way that cellular automata get modeled.

Think of flocks of birds or schools of fish, which seem to move as if they were one mind, but really only relate to the one next to them, in some kind of overall similar context they can all relate to.

Cellular automata are little computer googlies which only know how to react to the ones nearby, and they end up moving around like schools of fish, as if they had a mind to, too. It makes me think of those fractal creations, which look so much like living patterns, except they depend on diminutive and trivial little formulas for their computation.

So, my buddy tells me, that's how you can model living tissue. You give properties to its parts - some being more dense and some more elastic - and then you put those parts into relation with one another, and eventually the doctor at the far end of the wire can actually palpate the virtually real body and find the tumor. Cool!

So that's how the Hoover Blanket brand of search is going to work. You don't need to store the whole darned internet. You only need to store the urls and the connections to the ones nearby, and then you let the people catalog them by their clicks.

I know it sounds real simple, but trust me if it were, all those smart folks over at Google would have come up with it by now. Well, unless they're just making too much money by leaving things alone.

Fact is, I think they just can't see it, because they're so blinded by their power. I think it's pretty much exactly like Columbus' ship on the horizon being invisible to the unschooled natives on their once pristine shores. They didn't have any categories for it, and so it was just an hallucination on the horizon, along with so many others they might have still known how to see.

There is actually no need to catalog the Internet, or any very large data set. You only have to look at things in their contexts, and the magic of degrees of separation will get you very quickly to where you want to be.

So long as the degrees of separation are defined by human discernment and not by machine extractions, you will reliably find what you're looking for not because someone else has been looking for the same thing, but because you will guide the search yourself according to paths which can reveal themselves among the forest of keywords.

We have a prototype up, and it works beyond your wildest dreams. But, built on bubblegum and paperclips, it won't exactly take your load, and is depending on someone else's keyword store. But it works. It's trivial.

We also have a way to distinguish people from computers which doesn't depend on fuzzing up letters for you to type. It depends, very simply, on people making things which only other people will recognize, and then letting people type the simple recognition.

Like how you know your friend at 100 paces in Beijing, say, even though you can't believe he's there. But your attention was pulled, first, since he stuck out from all the non-milk drinkers, and second, by the recognition, and third, yep sure is. Wow.

I know homeland security and probably the NSA think that computers can do that better than us, but they also end up profiling my Mom when she crosses the Peace Bridge, just like they tried not to do with that poor Muslim down at Fort Hood. Computers can be really stupid, unless it's the people behind them.

But sure, so called Artificial Intelligence can give you a leg up, just like all those cool spy movies, for sorting among all sorts of noise, or zooming in to the right spot if you have really high resolution cameras. And even just the threat of that can keep people honest if you put cameras up on street corners.

But it doesn't do so well at keeping out all the spam, which now overwhelms legitimate email by something like an order of magnitude. Making it that much harder for Google to give you what you want. Although, for sure, they do a pretty darned good job.

Some of us might be fine with only allowing people who could actually read a CAPTCHA (those squiggly thingies to slow down "bots" on forms) to send us email instead of the mass-emailing machines which do.

Gamers of any system, mortgage derivatives, gambling, spamming, voting, any of that stuff, will always be working a flim-flam against your trust. The Internet makes it trivial now to try it out on millions of people, and you only need one to click. Your grandma, maybe, who doesn't know any better.

Yeah, OK, another quick digression, about my other friend who knew signal noise like no-one's business, working on radar in lead shielded offices over lead shielded wire, who tried to turn his considerable prowess against the stock market, as so many before him have done. "It's all noise, Rick. All noise."

But it's not noise if you can game it. You know, like sending spam around which is guaranteed to spike some stupid little stock, and so the people who get the spam can know that it will be a spike, even though they know it's spam. They just try to buy it quicker than the next guy. Or if you hide authorship and get your news to seem legitimate. Or if you blow into the balloon, and keep quiet about its limits because then you'll get accused as the one who popped it. Even Greenspan had to eat some crow this time.

You're being gamed, folks. There isn't only one way for history to play out. There really aren't technical solutions to all our people problems. There really isn't only one reliable source for all your news.

We here at Hoover Blanket aim to make sure that the little stuff also makes it to your top. If it's real and true and nicely peer reviewed. Because we have it on good authority that there are only maybe 2% of you out there who have no conscience. And that the rest of you, whether you are corporate titans or pornshop lowlifes, would love the chance to make your livings more honestly.

We don't think things have to be organized the way they are. And we're not about ready to allow the planet to run on autopilot.

There, that's my manifesto. I hope I don't get in trouble with the boss over this.

The Global Anti-Trust Battle Over Google's Library

The Global Anti-Trust Battle Over Google's Library

You would think that I could find better things to blog about than what the core of the Main Stream Media writes about. After all, most everything I write goes toward unsettling our collective assumptions about what is true, and what we really must hold sacred.

But given so little time to read or search or get any good sense of what's up in the world, I still do find that I value those who are paid to do it for me. And for whatever reason, I think Time Magazine has figured out a pretty good mix to stay in business and on my screen.

Every day, they mail me a summary of the news of the day. Every week, they mail me my paper copy, and I find that I have already read many of the stories, or at least have glanced at them. I worry that the heft of their paper copy just seems to shrink and shrink. But on the other hand, it also doesn't make it into the recycling bin in pristine condition like my Nation Magazine often does.

Come to think of it, the Nation would really like me to switch from paper to digital, and they are really mad at Time Inc., and other major publishers for orchestrating a postal rate squeeze on minor publishers via the major publisher's lobbyists. The postal service has consistently offered its best discounts to the glossy rags with wider audiences, effectively handing the smaller publishers a massive budget hit every time the rates get raised.

The smaller publishers are being muscled out of any possibility to get their word in circulation, and bigger and bigger becomes the only way to stay in business. As in so many sectors of our economy.

This right here is the problem with what Google proposes.

As I've said in this space many times now, it doesn't matter the motivations or purity of heart of the current stewards of the Google empire. What matters is their scale.

If there is only one company with the size and reach to index the entire Internet real time - never mind the collected wisdom of all mankind as it gets written down in books - then we will have mortgaged our future to an unaccountable and therefore inevitably heartless corporate power. 

From a kind of laziness, we make these smallish compromises every day, but we must increasingly be aware of the direction toward which they all, collectively, trend. At some point our little compromises of today will have destroyed any chance for transformative input to the future we will become. At some point, only the money making stuff will be in circulation.

Why must this be so? Because anything too big or powerful becomes necessarily monstrous. We'll call this Rick's law. I always wanted to have a law named after me.

After a certain point, there really can be no "heart" to an overly massive organization. All of the minions make their little compromises out of a kind of fear of separation, or a desire to move closer to the center, and ultimately the very spirit of the place has become inhuman in the quest to become ever larger.

This is inevitable. Any organization requires stern leadership, a constitution, a kind of mission statement, and, most importantly, a positive desire to hear and receive input from the least among its constituted members.

The largest ever, and certainly most persistent organization must be the Chinese empire. It has struggled in as see-saw motion for over two thousand years between the poles of tyranny and civilization.

Companies which focus on their product, and which remain passionate about it, say, tend not to be evil. Conglomerates which focus on making money tend to promote a kind of evil. Ultimately, they don't really care who they take down along their inexorable path toward growth.

But when passionate companies get too big, whether they are soda pop companies, or banana companies, or toy companies or booksellers, they all do the very same thing, sweeping over the peoples and cultures and petty grievances which stand in their way of growth.

It can often feel good to blame the CEO, but he or she is most often systematically misinformed in internally focused propagandistic fashion only about what would be good for the organization.

And it isn't enough, as Google claims to do, to be guided by a simple slogan, like "we're not evil". That can be nineteen eighty foured in a heartbeat.

If we are to survive as a species - or maybe even if life on the planet is to survive at all above the complexity of the cockroach - we will develop global systems of governance which prevent organizations from turning monstrous.

The decision making which will inform such systems of governance will not be so terribly hard to make, so long as information flows freely, and education doesn't get perverted to prevent the masses of people from learning how to read.

During its best of times, the Chinese system of governance practically depended on a system of exclusion from the practice of reading. Very much like the Latin-restricted Catholic Church. But the best of time for preservation of the organizational spirit also often turned out to be the very worst of times for excluded peoples. Both the Catholic Church and the Chinese bureaucracies were behind rapacious, wanton and corrupt destruction of smaller so-called native cultures. They still are.

As a practical matter, Google is taking over our commons. That means that government will have already relinquished its proper franchise and will nevermore be in any position to arbitrate public good from public evil. It has already happened long past for the industry of health insurance, and so government can only run a damage control operation against an industry which has incrementally gained all the government's proper prerogatives.

So it isn't the concept of what Google proposes that needs to be stopped. It is the particular agency which is being proposed to realize the concept.   Google is at least as far apart from government sanction as its arch-rival Microsoft has so often proven to be.

As were the railroads, this digital library can seemingly only be built by private funds rendered up by the smallest purchase decisions of each of us. The government will be hoodwinked by earnest tycoons representing honest ambition. And we will spend the next century disentangling ourselves from the wreckage of our granting so much of our commons to the rapacious Huns among us. It seems the government as presently constituted could never render up a decision to do this kind of project in the public interest.

While it might seem that this is the way it always must be, the world is that much different now, this very very brief hundred and fifty years after globe spanning transportation and information transmission got their starts. After the capitalist apology underpinnings of "survival of the fittest" made their heretical way into print over Darwin's name.

We should be wiser now. We should understand that our margins for the Huns to rampage have nearly disappeared. We are in fact united as a single people on a single planet, and the impulse to spread information freely should not be a private one. There should be no profit motive. The planet can't sustain it.

The "information superhighway" and the cloud on which my writing now depends, should be the very last privately funded additions to our commons. These need to be re-appropriated into our commonwealth. They will be, or we will not survive.

Our renewed Constitution needs to make that direction clear. Our impulse to destroy the railroads by building public highways on the pretext that they were required for the national defense, was the right one or the wrong one depending on which way we turn now. These highways freed up immense charges of private energy. And now they stand to destroy us for so long as we allow the passion for private vehicles to overwhelm the collective necessity to get over it.

The same thing is true for the commons of the cloud.

I like Time Magazine just fine. They have smart and earnest editors, who pick out for my reading things I really should know about. They're not part of Murdoch's empire yet, and they don't seem bent on feeding me gut candy just to make them rich. Well, OK, I guess the conglomerate, Time Inc.,  has other divisions for that.

I still think the Nation Magazine is the far more important publication. They're the ones who will get my devotion and my donations when I have them. They're the ones who break the really important stories, which it must be in Time Inc.'s mission statement never ever to do.

And some day, again, I'll start reading the Nation preferentially. Some day I'll have the resolve to let them stop paying to send me the paper version which goes straight to the recycling bin that often without having been properly read.

The fact is that Time Magazine takes that much less effort to read, and like the rest of you, I have only so much time to devote to keeping up with the rest of the world.

I have absolutely no doubt in my mind that the proper direction is to stop Google from having any kind of monopoly on what can or will be published for our collective reading. I don't think it will mean the end of the world either way, but I'm far less certain about that than I am about stopping Google from being our unitary publisher.

If I can be called an author, I've already taken my stand that what I write should be freely available to any and all who want to read it. Some day when I have something good enough to put a price tag on, you can call me out on this stand. But I'll always hold out hope that there will be other ways to make a living than to pander to mass tastes. That people with marginal, but possibly game changing, points of view will also be able to make a living.

I simply can't trust a proprietary cloud to ensure that this will always remain true. And in that, I'm a lot less worried about who can avoid flipping burgers while working to save our planet, than I am about what thoughts will simply be overwhelmed by the sheer overwhelming power of profit motivated mass mediation.

Do You Digg Fraudd??

Like all the social networking sites which have eaten up capital to gain an audience, digg.com now turns to the business side of their engaging enterprise. There have been a series of articles leading up to the big question mark launch of advertisements mixed right in with the rest of the votable copy.

The idea is simple enough; let advertisers submit their "stories" for the digg community to poll up or down. The advertisers get a read of the response of this grizzled jaded audience to how they tout their goods. The digg community gets more grist to their voting mill. It's like wine tastings where the purveyors value the outspokenly critical palates the most.

The big question mark was how the community might react. Would they regard this as contamination, and just vote down and bury each and every ad? Or would they reward the corporate sponsor of their playground, and just let themselves go ahead and respond to a few catchy ads.

The early word is that this technique is working like a charm. Digg is lowering the price per click for advertisers whose ads get voted up, and effectively therefore penalizing the ones which get buried.

It feels win-win, since if no one sees it, no one clicks, and so there's no risk to advertisers for costly duds, and users are essentially voting the ads right into their viewscreen. I'm sure digg, like Google, protects its secret sauce as to how the balance works between floating up and in or down and out.

Word is that the revenue is starting to flow.

But what does Digg do when gamers game their system, as gamers always will? Do they discreetly spirit away the votes they count as fraud? What about their own motives, then, to disappear enough counts to increase the costs per click? How would we know the difference? Trust us, digg and Google say, we would never do you wrong.

But this is real money we're talking about now. How will you really ever know what gets promoted to your screen and why? Perhaps you don't really care. Perhaps you're happy to pay attention only to what the corporate sponsors want you to pay attention to. Except that you were drawn to digg in the first place because you thought that maybe the crowd would get to decide what gets raised to prominence, and that it might not be the same as what the Main Stream Media wanted you to know about.

Check out these simple screen shots. They are cookies-cleared sequential takes of tallys up on digg.com. But you don't have to trust the sequence. It's the context which tells the story. Look at the differential among the three stories on the screen and see how it changes, relatively speaking.

 

 

 

So, has digg started paying attention to the business side of digg, or have they changed what voting means?

Transparency anyone? This looks like fraud to me!

The Cloud Wars

So this time I simply want to tell a story. I want to tell how I came to work with computer networks, and how I've made that also part of who I am and what I want to write about.

I now exit Information Technology work after what has been for me the extravagant commitment of two consecutive sabbatical stretches. I'm talking about seven year spans, each as long as I've stayed in any one full-contact relationship.

So, even though you will have to agree that I'm the consummate dilettante, objectively speaking I'm more a techie than anything else I've ever been. I call myself a "Microsoft drone" to the people I run into high up in the Company, just to be sure they know who's bringing in their honey.

You might say my heart isn't in it anymore. I just honestly don't find the technology all that cool, or even, truth be told, very useful the way it often gets deployed. I mean, sure it's useful, but as its prices drop and the hype hyperbolizes, a question gets begged about a corner turned.

I'm not convinced in the end that the actual inputs to our economy go toward better living, as much as toward bubbly froth. In that, I'm reminded, of course, of how the recent sub-prime mortgage meltdown happened.

Technology feeds its own expansion, and will and can and must end only with our terminal boredom.

For sure the work that I would prefer to do could be done as well with pen and paper. But as the medium has changed, the message changes too. And it's not all bad.

It ought to be the case that these words might strike some sympathetic harmonic in you. Our connection could never occur in other past universes I've known.

The way I write cannot be identical to penned words prepared for publication. My audience can be as diminutive as only myself and still it seems worth my while to write as if for you. My writing has been whittled down from publication form, through and past once formal epistolary manners. I blew right by, as we all did, the highly personal letters we might have written, now so thoroughly destroyed by e-mail.

And while I have learned to make personal contact by emails, with those few people who have the patience actually to read, it is this new form which still draws my actual labors. The others are so purely pleasurable, and informed as though spontaneously by my feelings.

This would all be narcissistic if I cared what you thought of me, or if I thought there was something all that charming about the me whose being here provides the evidence for what and how I think. Sure I fear that narcissism, but I think the connection might also prove to be that much closer to personal. I like this medium fine.

It's true, I don't distinguish very well between my life's story and who I am, and I'm never certain which is writing whom. I strive for truth, and marvel at my own very good fortune. So blogging suits me, you know, almost as though I'd have had to invent it if it didn't already exist.

And sadly, my handwriting has atrophied now to where I can't even read it myself. Blame it on information technology, starting with the keyboard.

Effectively used by trained engineers, computers are clearly awesome. But, it's also pretty clear that these effective users of computing power could never afford to do their work if it weren't for the subsidy from the rest of us, releasing our minor passions through our purchase decisions. Phenomena like the blogosphere get created as byproduct. And maybe IT is important after all.

For me, between or among careers, I got my start with a need to master statistical calculations for the social sciences. My career path would have required geographic mobility, which my divorce stopped in its tracks. So naturally, I ended up going back to school.

I'd been intrigued early on by word-processing, by the excitement of virtualized commitments to textual experimentation. It felt quite liberating, up against the literal cutting and pasting I'd had to do, last minute of course, to graduate from college. And then the mouse!! I was transported. Sitting at a word-processor keyboard, I almost felt that my thoughts were flowing from the very world around me.

This was a proper "computer" and not one of those early "dedicated" word processors, which could do only that one thing the designers had in mind. I doubt anyone would take the counterpoint that it is their very universality which makes the computer interesting at all. It seems that you can make it do almost anything done by any other machine in the house now! No wonder they have to subsidize the dedicated gaming machines so that they can sell you their lucrative cartridges.

I do have to tell you though, that the very first true computer-based word processor I used had almost no hard memory, and so it had to store my texts right on the huge and actually quite floppy spinning disk. The next one, which I actually bought myself, had a "hard-drive" equivalent, extravagantly, to some 100 of those floppy disks. The much higher RPM hard disk made the swapping in and out from texts that I might scroll through a little quicker and less noisy than the spinning up and down of the slowly turning floppy drive.

The actual code underneath the text up on my screen was also just plain text, using "control" characters almost exactly like the hypertext markup language underneath these web-pages. HTML. There was no human unreadable binary "code". That was all stored away, "compiled," in the program, and not listed right along with my typed words.

So, if you wanted to, and I often did, you could look under the covers to see the actual guts of what you were working on. That was especially useful when things went wrong, as they often do, and the screen got a little scrambled. Now I can't even remember the name of the program - I think it was called PC-Write - but it was free way before open source got fully defined, and got me all the way through graduate school.

But when I bumped against SPSS, the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences, which I was required to master in order to pass a course, my old machine was no longer adequate. I'd paid well over $5,000 when that was real money. When I also was, not incidentally, earning an actual living wage as I've seldom done before or since.

So now, as a graduate student, and having to fund child support payments, I had to find a way to make my old PC work.

I could have used the "mainframe" for SPSS, but it was so darned cool to be able to load up my own computer with huge datasets from the world bank or some other global agency. I could play with the numbers to my heart's content, way way into the night. I wanted my regressions fast. I wanted them completely within my control.

I have to admit that I was having fun. I discovered that I could buy a new "motherboard" cheap, and then I discovered that I had to buy a floating point co-processor to handle the statistical math, and then I discovered that I would need more memory.

I remember well that price - a whopping fifty bucks per megabyte after laborious bargain hunting - dirt cheap at the time. Now you can get more than a few thousand times that much for the same nominal money.

Meanwhile, I ended up with a kind of monster computer which, like the U.S.S Constitution, has maybe one board in it from when it was first built. It still gets to be called the original ship because it has persisted as such through all the repairs and upgrades. I think my computer had the original power supply in the end. Maybe. And I never added up the total cost, although it sure felt cheap.

So I had a skill, and the university had a need, and I jumped ship again myself at some point, feeling very very tired of being quite so broke. Professors were moving around too, leaving me behind, and I just wasn't being turned on by my academic work anymore. I know what you're going to say, that it's not all about being turned on, and no that isn't why I left my wife.

But I started working in the newly created "distributed computing" infrastructure, to support the School of Education, among other graduate and professional schools. The University had just then gotten ether-netted, and was pretty near the cutting edge of the new and great big 'net. This was back in the day when there was no commercial use. Either because no-one had thought of it, or because it was a University franchise.

Computer support at the big U. had previously been premised on a centralized service which ran "big iron" mainframe computers whose disk drives were about the size of a Model T once upon a time.

Through various central computing services, some of us learned to hyper-link across continents using a text-based program called Lynx, as I recall its name. It was pretty exciting. No pictures. Just text.

And the professors were starting to find uses for inexpensive PCs right on their desktops, especially once color and graphics became universal. And their own grant funding was paying for them, having nothing at all to do with central anything.

As a suggestive and possibly meaningful aside, I remember visiting my uncle Roger once, in his office at Syracuse University. I had no idea then, and I have a dim one now, about how important he has been in the development of the electronics from which computers, ultimately, descended.

I think he was more a radio frequency than a digital guy, but he developed the method by which components in an electronic circuit which are idealized in the schematic can be brought into close and miniature proximity, such as had to be done for integrated circuits, for instance, descended from those cute transistor radios we were all so excited to have when I was a kid.

He'd gotten his start in crystal radios, tube-type amplifiers, and other things which geeky kids back then would play with. My own dad went into the law, which was the family tradition, but number two was liberated to do his own thing. In case you didn't guess, my older brother's a lawyer, and I'm pretty um, yeah.

Anyhow, real things don't behave the way the idealized ones do on the schematic. I'm pretty sure that with tubes and their high power brute force circuits having lots of real distance to separate the parts, you can safely ignore or guesstimate the interactions among the components. But as you miniaturize these things, and multiply them, they start to interact in sensitive ways far beyond the power of schematic designers to either represent or account for.

A kind of math would be required to compute those interactions. It can't be done on paper in a human lifetime, and no answer can be gotten in theory. You have to whittle down the interactions by high-speed computational machine to get your answer. Pretty much the way your mortgage gets calculated. So the older art of tuning became the high-speed calculus of miniaturization.

Anyhow, my Uncle Roger was excited to show me the calculator on his desk, and marvel that it contained as much computing power as had the mainframe on which he'd developed his 'method of moments,' as I think it is called. He had an Apple II on order. You and I can't fathom his excitement.

Now that's what computers are really good for. But computers are also good for all sorts of things they weren't intended to be good for.

I still do remember, among the early adopters for dialup from home to the University network where my work increasingly was, learning how to squeeze pictures from plain text. Now that, if you ask me, was way cool!

It wasn't unrelated to how you could get Chinese written characters to reify from simple pairs of Western letters. You probably already fully understand that the basic set of characters as used in my first Word Processor - the ASCII set - is roughly descended from what a typewriter is good for. Or a teletype machine. It's rationalized almost like the periodic table of the elements, and it is truly a beautiful thing when you grok it.

But there are a radically limited number of "characters" which can be represented each by 7 bits of data. The first 30 or so were never meant to be "printable," and could be exploited as control characters to provide effectively many more combinations than a mere 7 bits could determine. In the case of my word processor, these could be things like font or italics or spacing.

You wouldn't want to use a Chinese mechanical typewriter, which includes trays and trays of somehow organized Chinese characters, descending in order of frequency, just like the Querty keyboard doesn't do (it was designed to avoid collisions among the flying hammers).

You can imagine the pressure to keep your writing within the top tray. And always a toolshop to create the ones you rarely use, or you could just handwrite them in. Who could ever afford the full 50,000 or so blocks of metal type which would be needed to compose the full set of distinct Chinese written characters..

So, early on, there had to be a way to combine two ASCII characters to come up with code for how Chinese gets written. You could display Chinese easily enough by heading off these strings of letters with the same kind of control character my word-processor used. These could be taken as a kind of trigger - the control characters - not to be taken literally and printed up on the screen. And then, provided you had a graphics-capable display, you could retrieve the Chinese character graphic from its trivially indexed store.

You could do the same with pictures. I think the idea is to imagine being able to transmit only text, just like in the days of teletype so far before the fax machine. In the early days of on-line connections, we were transmitting only text as well.

Text was all that was supported on the various media for exchanging words, scholar to scholar. It was a matter of cost and efficiency, also descended from those early teletype machines which were all that could be planted on each end of the wire.

People will innovate. Just as much as you can squeeze Chinese written characters out of the ASCII code, so you can squeeze out full color pictures, which plenty of clever people seemed plenty motivated to do. You can tell them not to, and they will still build tunnels beneath your walls.

And so the pictures, which were composed of binary code, had to be sent as big long strings of text, chunked up according to the limits conventionally imposed, for a single message, say; to be decoded once you'd chunked them all back together on the other end.

At first you'd have to strip off the leading and trailing padding, pasting these long meaningless messages into a single massive textual body. Eventually, still more clever people would devise ways - and generally distribute them freely - to make this happen auto-magically.

There is something irretrievably exciting about that first picture I successfully decoded. A semi-famous Harley Davidson from some post-modern virtual Hell's Angels club. The denizens of doom I think they called themselves.

Sure there were other pictures I drew the curtains on. There's an almost addictive allure to that kind of reproduction; the conjuring forth from the ether of something made only of indecipherable-by-mere-humans machine-code letters.

Kind of makes you want to believe in teleportation. That there's nothing we can't encode. That no matter what the limitations at first envisioned, or the proper uses of the medium, clever people will figure out how to make it do new tricks. It very much does seem as though there might be no limit to what can come about, especially if the infrastructure is fundamentally open.

I remember, again back at the University, when students, especially foreign students without a lot of money, figured out how to send their voices across the Internet "cloud," to be reassembled on the other end. The chunking apart and back together this time was of very much more finely grained packets than my earlier rendered pictures were, but it's not a fundamentally different process.

I remember how the University IT "suits" - the ones with perfect hair - were up in arms about the bandwidth - the precious bandwidth - and people were encouraged to consider this kind of exploitation of the open-ended possibilities of the technologies to be some kind of abuse.

That was way back when Al Gore was talking about how the government would have to build the "information superhighway." Back when he had perfect hair too, come to think of it. Now whole businesses are converting their phones to take advantage of the free transport of this cloud.

So, that's what got me started. I'd missed the boat in its season, as I always must and do. I'm quite literally surrounded by folks my age who got right into the proper geek pursuits and rode that wave right to its top. I'm guessing none of them really have to work any more.

Sad to say, I do. But I'm happy to take a moment out here to tell you all about myself. Aren't we all?

So anyhow, my first real IT responsibility was to manage the first Local Area Network - or LAN - for the Graduate School of Education, where I had been a student. These early central storage and distribution PCs which were the "file servers" which formed the core for Local Area Networking. They were first developed by a company called Novell, still very much in business.

Novell developed the technology for file "redirection", which simply means that you can fool your desktop PC into thinking that files on the network - in the "ether" or over the wire - were actually on a floppy disk or your local hard disk.

Bill Gates' near monopolistic Disc Operating System for desktops assigned letters, as did nearly everyone else, to the floppy, conventionally written with a colon after it so: a:. There were often two floppies in the early days, one to store the Operating System itself, and a second to store the data you were working on or with. So, if there were a hard disk, it would typically be called c:.

What Novell did was to work within evolving standards for signal propagation over wires, the most versatile to be called Ethernet, and then to develop some code so that your local PC could access "drives" say f: through z: as if they were just a large collection of separate disks.

And then on the other end would be a file server which would keep track of whether your particular account was allowed to access a set of files, and if so, what you could do with or to them, and then provided the access was all good, you would see these just as if they were "locally" available.

I turned out to be really good at getting professors' desktop computers to be able to connect over the wire.

And on the file-server end, I had a pretty good knack for understanding the logic of permissions, file attributes, and even what might be wrong with the hardware if things weren't going right.

Early on, we got into a bit of a mess, as groups of people do, with all the technical staff construed as equals. It was a too many-spoons-in-the-pot kind of messy stew, and so I elbowed others out as the guy who should and would take direct responsibility for keeping the network "up," which it tended often not to be if there were too many, um, chefs in the kitchen. Or strange things would happen in ways different from the promises you made to professors about nobody else being able to see their stuff.

Now Novell, the company, had a training and certification program which was truly a marvel. You might almost say it put the University itself to shame with its exacting standards for competency, and its well thought-out teaching protocols.

I, of course, availed myself of none of that, exercising my perpetual prerogative as a very smart person to make of myself an exception to everyone else's need to have their understandings certified. Besides, it was really expensive, and the departments certainly weren't offering any funding. We were supposed to be a cheap and local kind of dirty alternative to frustrating bureaucratic access to centralized services.

So when I pulled the ticket to head up the project to replace the Law School's file server, there was some perfectly understandable concern from the Centralized Services network engineers who had set it up in the first place. These folks had certifications up and down their sleeves - I think Centralized IT services had funding for that sort of thing, or maybe salaries were high enough to make self-funding worth the prospect of advancement.

First, there was the plain fact of competition for work. We were encroaching on what had been their territory. Next, there was genuine and honest concern that we would screw things up. Lawyers, in a cosmos of prima-donnish professors, tended to be even a little bit more so - after all they could easily point to viability outside the Ivory Tower - and so there might have been concern for our well being and even sanity as well.

The Law School network was a marvel. There were, I believe, well over 100 professor workstations, each running a version of the still fairly new Microsoft Windows 3.12 (if memory serves, which it might not, at least not so efficiently as the File Server I'm about to describe). These machines had no local hard-drives, booting instead from a clever little device which enabled them to redirect right during the boot-strap process to the file server instead of to their local floppy or hard disk drive.

In those days, a graphical user interface, just like Windows sported, was still a pretty new thing, and it required a lot of computing power just to "paint" its screen. And it didn't always work smoothly, depending on how much tinkering might get done to each individual installation.

The goal here was to develop a highly standardized "desktop", centrally managed for ease of configuration, maintenance, and backups, but also to reduce the overall cost of the computing infrastructure.

These basic principles have remained pretty much the same from then until now, with debates still raging about standards and centralized vs. distributed repositories for data, configuration, security and the rest.

Somehow, and I'm really not sure how, we were allowed in the end to have our day in the spotlight. How well I remember the handoff. The old server was stuck in a small closet to which Central Services had the key. Now this machine, "containing" over 100 running desktops, had a total load of 16 MB of RAM, which your phone would laugh at today. It's disk space was far less than the smallest netbook now has, and it's computing power was probably in line, also, with your phone.

That's how well optimized the Novell Network Operating System was.

Very early one morning, as we were going to have to bring this server down to do some necessary maintenance along the way toward replacing it, my colleague and I were waiting for the Central services folks to show up. We had a smallish window before the very demanding professors would show up to work. The lock looked small. Way back when I was a bike mechanic, my buddy had explained to me the principles of lock picking. It was shockingly trivial, and well, thank God nobody asked any questions.

So, we were off! Not only were we going to run the risk of leaving 100 workstations out of service, but we were performing an upgrade to the actual Network Operating System, so at some point, the changes we had drilled and practiced were going to be a one-way street, with no going back possible within reasonable time limits.

I'm pretty sure it took us an entire night, but I'm happy to say that we pulled it off (and I spent an entire sabbatical cycle together with my colleague in a, um, full-contact relationship, but you're not going to hear any more about that here!)

Now already by that time we in our little "node" were swimming against a mighty tide. Windows had just come out with its first viable network operating system, called Windows NT. There was a lot of grousing at first because techie types noticed that the network operating system which was pretty expensive, was code-identical to the desktop operating system, which was much cheaper.

I guess there might have been a single line in what's called "the registry" to distinguish them, and as I recall, Microsoft made a good case that because it was intended to be used and supported differently they could and should charge differently for it.

We in our area were already grizzled network engineers and administrators by that time, having pulled off a fairly complicated migration to new hardware and a much more complex network operating system. We'd seen how efficiently it would run on how little hardware, plus we had gotten a flavor of the lively esprit de corps which comes along with a fully professional cadre of workers.

Windows was proposing something completely different. Their operating system was meant to be more intuitive to install and configure. This, naturally, caused concern rather than excitement, at least for me, because it was a pretty open invitation to let lots of chefs into my kitchen, and to allow for as many different combinations of creative configuring as experimental amateurs might like to come up with.

To compound things, Microsoft could in no way replicate the quite sizable pool of professionals who had become well seasoned in the Novell offerings. Which would mean that they would have to play catch up by a combination of financial and ease-of-entry lures into Microsoft's version of Certified Network Engineer.

Traditionally, becoming a Certified Engineer really meant something, and the exams were designed to weed out cramming and memorization of texts. You actually had to have some hands-on smarts before you could expect to get your nod.

But none of this was about to slow the already mighty Microsoft marketing machine. No matter that Windows NT was almost primitive in terms of networking protocol support, cobbling together its support for Novell's routable network "stack" (think ability to go from building to building in a campus, across routers which were located according to physical distance constraints for signal propagation).

No matter that when you mistook a server for a workstation, which it practically invited you to do, the load of the graphical interface would use up most of the actual computing resources. No matter that it could serve up files more slowly than a single elevator with a sleepy attendant could serve up a skyscraper full of workers.

Microsoft was selling a vision of a kind of seamless network ecology, made up of limitless nodes, all sharing code and processing in a fabric of interconnection, defined and held together by a near-limitless distributed network.

I remember the Central Services UNIX guys coming back from a trip to Redmond where they attended a briefing designed expressly for people like them. "We aren't in Kansas any more" was pretty much the sum of their report to the rest of us.

To some great extent, Microsoft has delivered on the vision they set out to sell. I really don't know what their strong-arm and soft-soap sales techniques actually were, but it was pretty clear that this tsunami was going to engulf everyone and everything in its way.

Getting most PCs sold to businesses to ship pre-loaded with the Microsoft OS pretty much meant that having the Windows Network Operating System at the core of your management planning was going to be the best way to leverage your investments in workstations.

Naturally, Microsoft was not motivated to help companies like Novell interact quite so effectively as Microsoft itself could with the Windows desktop ecology. Although, to be truthful, Novell did a pretty darned good job. But you don't sell to the engineers in the field, you sell to the decision making "suits" and they were all pretty much drinking Microsoft's water; even at a place like the university, where the world was also divided between suits and the rest of us. Well, that's just the laity who support the place. I'm not talking about the clergy here.

So, this tension between power and control at the center, and distribution of computing power throughout a kind of ecological grid has persisted throughout the entire span of the surprisingly recent IT revolution. It's become so much a part of our lives that it can also seem as if we've had these things forever.

Clearly there are plenty of people who can and likely have written up this history from the basis of considerable and deep expertise, which I don't have. I'm writing up my impressions as someone who has observed society from, perhaps, a rather more broad perspective from that of those who might be completely enamored of or embedded in the technologies I describe.

At the same time, I've done enough hands on work, much of which I'm quite proud of, to feel that my sense is accurate in at least the broadest outlines.

So, what's the point of all this? Well, as I recall the head of Novell when I was into it was none other than Eric Schmidt, now CEO of Google. I'm pretty sure he was the one who bought WordPerfect in an attempt to go head to head with Microsoft in the soup-to-nuts world of network design and application delivery. On the merits of the products it was not a bad wager.

Plenty of heavy users of word processing software were wildly enthusiastic about WordPerfect, even especially up against Microsoft Word. It had more features, was better thought out, and was designed to appeal to its principle users; professional wordsmiths, rather than to the mass of occasional users like students and professors and lawyers who might want or need to do their own typing once secretaries became obsolete.

In any case, without a prayer of significant market share for a desktop operating system, and given Microsoft's marketing muscle, Novell's was a dream destined for failure. And I don't think, again, that Microsoft was especially helpful when WordPerfect turned the corner to the Windows graphical user interface. Lots of companies were hit with crash and hang peformance, including Microsoft, but not all of them were equipped to make it through.

There is a good enough analogy between Novell's Network Operating System and WordPerfect on the one side, catering to professionals as their core target user group; and Microsoft's Windows and Office, which aimed to become ubiquitous, on the other.

So Google now, interestingly (at least to me) wants to turn your computer into a kind of dumb terminal again, pretty much like those law school desktops I used to support. It won't have to do much other than to boost itself onto the network, which is all that the new Chrome OS will be designed to do.

Ideally, Chrome will be quite similar to the hypervisor OS "shim" which is used to host the latest "virtual machines" where everything about the computer Operating System is abstracted from any particular hardware configuration. The hypervisor shim emulates a universal hardware machine, and the operating system talks to this virtual hardware. The actual "machine" you count on to get your work done is a software file, and can be physically located, virtually, anywhere. It's pretty darned cool stuff.

For the Google vision, in place of the operating system will be a very "lightweight" Internet browser, also called Chrome, which can run applications, analogous to WordPefect, or Excel or what you will, which are actually hosted somewhere in what now almost universally gets called "the cloud". I'm pretty sure it was originally the Microsoft engineers which started calling it that.

Now we in the trenches of IT are pretty used to thinking of Microsoft as "evil". Even though we make our money, indirectly, from their monopoly, we all kind of wish there were more choices, and that we could specialize in the various stuff which might turn us on, or capture our enthusiasm because it works the way we think it should.

That will, of course, be different for different people, but that's the very point. So, Microsoft is "evil" because it pushed or crowded out all the competition, to the point where we all do the same thing almost the same way almost all the time. Whether we work in a bank or in a university, the design considerations are almost identical.

Yes, Apple also has a network operating system, but it's pretty hayfoot-strawfoot compared to where Microsoft's has evolved. And then there's Linux, another story entirely, which I will get to in a minute.

And to tell you the truth, Microsoft's ubiquity is a large part of why I just can't do it any more. Don't get me wrong, there are still plenty of decisions to make, and plenty of competing companies which ride on top of the basic Microsoft ecology. There are gargantuan ranges of pricing and features, and lots of ways to make a complete ass out of yourself with the wrong decisions.

But the big picture is pretty much shaping up to be Microsoft's vision of a distributed ecology of computing power vs. a seemingly much more distributed version of accessibility.

I now really don't care what machine I use. In most instances, I prefer the Linux OS because it's actually less fussy to load and get going, and is a lot less fussy about the hardware it rides on. It's a little more fussy to use, but not enough to make a difference.

All my documents are somewhere in Google's cloud, as is this blog, as is my email. I'm reasonably confident that it will be there whenever I need it from whatever machine I'm stuck with. There are no features that I find missing, and I'm happy to leave the heavy duty spreadsheeting, or complexly formatted word-processing or databasing to and for users who want to fuss with those complicated and bloated locally installed and expensive programs.

But there's a pretty big catch to all of this. There's pretty much only one company big enough to index and replicate the entire Internet real-time. It's not just a matter of computing power, it's also the electrical power to run and cool the computing power as well as the extremely expensive bandwidth to keep in touch with the vast reaches and every corner of this World Wide Web.

Plus, when I sign on, it's not like I'm always getting my stuff from the same place on the same machine which serves it up to me across this "cloud". My own work is replicated throughout Google's complex infrastructure, such that if the particular machine I'm working on or through or with bites the dust, I won't even know it since my work will be rerouted to another copy.

Even still it does go down from time to time. So these days some people like to have a backup email service if they use Gmail principally. And they might like to take a copy of their work down to their own PC just in case Google is unavailable when they need it, or God forbid, Google decides not to give them access because they violated some arcane section of the Google terms of service. Yeah, like anyone on the planet actually reads those things you click to agree to.

So, I want to know, who's good now, and who's evil? My Linux-loaded laptop seems to crash just about as often or as seldom as my Windows machines used to. Every single day I must consume bandwidth just to keep it up to date. To keep out the bad guys who I guess are always trying to horn their way in to catch a password and maybe steal my identity or my bank account.

I'll be happy when my computer really is a shim up in to some cloud which is freely maintained on my behalf. But that's a pipe dream. Not the cloud, which is already real. The "on my behalf" part.

I don't kid myself that once people get wind of what I'm really saying here, the plug will be pulled on my saying it. There are no terms of service which can allow Catalytic Narratives to crystalize a web of lies into its inevitable thunking.

Meanwhile, I write freely and with plenty of abandon, confident, as you should be too, that these essentially evil empires will be overcome by the goodness of the people who are their workers.

One day, Google's money-printing apparatus will be overrun by the clear superiority of low power ways to organize our blessed Internet. These will depend not at all on massive replication and indexing of everything that's out there. Instead, machines will resolve actual human clicks into virtual spaces which represent connections among people and things and ideas and places.

Machines will be quieted down, and people who want to teach them to think will do so in universities where they belong - harnessing the surplus power which will otherwise clog our landfills.

Real people don't need or want our machines to do our thinking for us. Real people aren't afraid to expose their identity in ways to make it impossible for someone else to impersonate them. Real people aren't terribly embarrassed by our most private fantasies.

Real people are connected by their actions and words and even clicks, and it is this kind of networking which can result in a kind of automatic indexing, by simple calculation of degrees of separation, of those people and words and things which crystallize our desires; our wants and our needs.

So, that's what I'm working on, while you all (well, not you, but you know who I mean) continue to be fascinated by the fireworks displays of too much light and noise and power.

Peace out dudes.