Hard Fail; Accident

Pondering Elon Musk's playful idiocy, as he expends the resources only he can have to realize childish SciFi fantasies, I must return to the ground of accident that is the only ground that counts. Just like the electrical ground that I struggle truly to understand before I undertake the tough stuff on This Old House on which I labor. Accident is the only safe constant.

Elon is Trump's twin as he leads us down the road away from accident. Those who suffer accident are, in Trump's terms "losers." He is, of course, quite correct in that. His mistake is to consider himself beyond the reach of accident. As do all of us who remain alive, his evidence is that he hasn't really suffered many. Accidents, that is. Or at least, apparently, he hasn't suffered enough of them. A winner like him can only be the Fool.

The accident ratio, of course, leaves a person far better off if he is white and rich, which is itself demonstrably goad to idiocy; the idiocy of self-congratulation for one's superior merit. Narcissism by any other name.

But the Trumpsters are onto something. They embrace accident, especially the sorts of accident most likely to emerge from the barrel of a gun or the carbureted or electronically fuel-injected barrel of an internal combustion explosion-containment chamber. 

Now Ol' Elon champions the electrical kind of motive power, just as he seems to imagine that the brain is a complexly wired container for our selfie-self. Perish the notion! The ground for all of us is accident, and the future is precisely that which we can neither project nor imagine because it always overtake us by surprise.

As we work to protect our selfie-selves, or to deny reality - take your pick - during this pandemic, our selfish genes are surely doing their own thing by managing to persist. The choices are among cucarachas, viruses, and perhaps still for just a moment longer whatever it is that could be meant by 'human.' 

If Trump suffers - heaven forfend - some unfortunate debilitating accident (prior to his ultimate demise, which can surprise nobody who hasn't internalized some fiction of immortality here on earth), that will cause no permanent harm to his ilk. Trump-alikes are apparently as numerous as Republicans now. They are the efficient causes - the 'engines' if you will - of our continued evolution. I suppose we should celebrate them for that. Pardon me while I puke out my guts.

The ground, remember, is accident. Life is an accidental direction away from entropy. It simply cannot be directed. No matter how much intelligence gets mustered, accident will prevail, and life will move the way that life has done for eons, which is, of course, in the direction of love. That's what love means. 

Intelligence is fine when it gets used properly in service to the comfort of our fellow humans. So often it gets used to engineer warfare and the death of those we deem to be on some 'other' team. As Dawkins so reliably demonstrates, those contests are at best only metaphorically related to what happens at the level of life's evolution. To treat them as contests between life and death is to make a categorical error. Genes are always grounded. Contests at any higher level can only cause sparks. Sparks are not alive, though heaven knows they may instigate life from time to time.

Intelligence cannot express love. Intelligence cannot channel love. Intelligence cannot in and of itself provide any basis for merit. Intelligence can only serve love, which it must do on the basis of exquisite balance. Our way of life demonstrates that beauty is the more reliable token for merit. Just ask Trump. 

We have surely crossed a tipping point in service to an excess of wealth that is more grotesque than whatever the First Emperor of the Chin Dynasty arrogated in attempt to obviate his mortality. Now there's a loser's game! 

Well over half of my stored energy for retirement is held on my behalf in hazardous bets - they call them equities - about the future of our economy as presently construed. Now that interest rates have descended to near zero, cash is a fool's reserve, though I can only try to enjoy the sport of my future being whipsawed by the stock market. 

Still, it's only half. Right? None of us is more than half right. But the amounts that evaporate in any given instant are stunningly beyond what I might need to live on during any given day. And I'm talking a mere multiple of three of my life-time's highest annual salary, which is right about at the median of income where I live, which is no place you'd aspire to. You do the math. I'm in the 50 percent, though - mostly by virtue of whiteness - I am immersed in the social capital of the one percenters.

I try really hardly to share my wealth in ways that don't lead to my being a burden on my progeny. For some reason, I just hate to work for the man, but I also have to admit that I hate that a little less than I would hate to be the man. It's a tough balance lots of the time. 

So, I give away my labor freely, now that I'm too old to work. Ironically enough, the labor I give away is precisely the sort that underlies the presumption of the need for a retirement battery. My donations are mostly physical, aided by tools. The logic is not linguistic logic. I make bad mistakes if and when my 'mind' is clouded by emotional charge. I have to love and to focus on the object that I'm fashioning. Mostly by hand. Without distraction.

How very ironic that labor with and by means of my body feels less painful than laboring with and by and through language! Both sorts deteriorate badly, though in some sense I am doing my very best work now. I am more motivated, apparently, to handle the more literal tools. My mind and my body have become one. Thanks God for that! I have some sense that I once did lack. I hope.

I do now actually prefer an electric bicycle. Go figure! I hope never to drive a Tesla, praying for streetcars in their place. Apple's so-called AI battery management really sucks. The batteries in my little mobile house are dying as we speak. I'm winding down myself. 

I labor for love, despite the evident fact that my motive undermines any and all appreciation for what it is that I provide. That is an unfortunate accidental side-effect of the sort of rampant unregulated capitalism that we still practice in these United States. Troglodytes!

What sort of fool am I? I am a fool for love. So is Trump, but his definition for love has a very low denominator. I think Biden may be my kind of fool. There are plenty of people whose work I admire that I can't really much agree with much of the time. That's OK. I love them anyhow. 

At my age, I'm less afraid to fail, and I guess that's how it should be. I must nurture my genes which are now contained in my progeny, right? They are my betters, though I wish they'd take more of my advice about what would be good for the planet. Electric better. Trolleys better. Cars bad. Diversity better. Race bad. Winning is not possible in love. Only losing. Love must be tested to be true. Intelligence is no foil. Alone and bitter in touch with truthiness and an audience of one. Time to get to work!

An Ontology of Covid-19

We know it's real, and we know that it probably jumped the bat-human divide, and we know that it's our own immunological response which kills us. We must construct narratives, and they must be but some approximation of true. Truth, in the abstract, is but the old Platonic match of perceived pattern to ideal form. We now must move beyond that.

Far from one single truth, there are as many narratives as there are people in the world, past and present, and imagined future too. We have now been required (oh, passive cosmos, be not taxed) to match our narratives across the globe; to true them. 

Now in retrospect, it feels as though COVID was inevitable, and plenty of people are named for unheeded warnings (What really does go on inside Bill Gate's massive houses? We know what goes on inside his head because he tells us that his brain is a CPU.) 

The pandemic also takes place beside a host of other anxieties of our age. The most relevant linkage among all of them might be absence of trust. We don't really agree about who we want in charge, and how the machinery of power might work if we did agree. This is nothing but the struggle for the right narrative to take us forward.

We are in the final throes of an absurd belief that it is possible to understand everything by way of the scientific method, and to therefore, by agency, make everything alright. For sure, that is as crazy an assumption as are the various ones about some personal God. It's not so hard to imagine the vacuity of a world of perfect understanding. These are the preoccupations of all philosophers down through the ages. If perfect understanding is the end, then we are already finished.

We are confused just now about the differences between happiness and pleasure, when in fact and in deed the two have little to do with one another. Sure the wealthy can enjoy pleasures beyond our imagining, though it is quite apparent that there is nothing of fundamental happiness there. Still, one can endure indefinitely in a state of pleasure. 

Happiness becomes but a distant dream in the throes of addiction, and it's never the right time to go sober.

We can all agree that there is no such thing as a happiness machine. Pleasure machines abound, of course, and it would be trivial to invent an un-happiness machine. There is no cure for the challenges that nature will always pose. 

Happiness may inhere in simple homeostasis, and it may be fleeting. That is a physical fact of physical life.

Me, I find my happiness in the deferred pleasure of after death. No, I don't mean that kind of literal eternity. I mean that my self never did end at my skin, and my mind has always been distributed in the world around me. If happiness is a function only of what you can accomplish before you die, then I'd say you've already pushed happiness off to eternity. You only want pleasure.

The virus doesn't listen to no stongman, it listen to a lady. This is a test of the emergency social agency system. The strongman ain't no use. He talk to hisself and to his bros. They gonna get sick too.

I was young when I babysat Michael Harrington's children (no relation!). He was a good friend of the artist whose children I took care of in return for room and board and a little closet bunk bed in a loft near Washington Square Park. I was introduced to the notion of an artist's loft, art that is challenging, and fine food and wine. It has been my lame attempt at humor to remark that Harrington was an aficionado of fine wine. As though that revealed a contradiction. 

Still, it's hard not to find it a tad ironic, but then irony be my God. George Carlin be my priest. Science knew irony when its workings gave us the Bomb so quickly, and still it has nothing to say about love. Well let me tell you that I am the genius of emotion, and that is likely because I have some handicap in that regard. Sometimes it takes a blind man or an innocent to point out the obvious.

Now Michael Harrington is resurrected all over again. There have always been two Americas from the very start with the Federalists and the anti-Federalists, the slave states and the free. It seems to be how we are built. But we have now moved beyond even 'truths that are self-evident,' and can't share even the bedrock under our feet. Even the New Yorker from New York can not be trusted, if you trust the New York Times.

I cannot be resigned to Trump again, and yet I must be. Diseases are never eradicated, though they may be displaced. Bedrock truth will always be beyond us. That is how the world spins. Trump is but the pustule on the Nation. Popping him will do nothing but gross us out. Love him and we might be immunized. That is really hard to do. You'd have to give up on narrative truth altogether.

My body is a colony. It has a story. My asshole is far from my mouth, and sometimes I just have to jump in the nearby shower when the toilet paper doesn't cut it, or I run out. I live in a sea of memes, and I can't even handle a good story ark [sic]. My curves are all flat. As though that told the story of the virus. 

I read William S Burroughs as a kid; his Naked Lunch. I had no idea from drugs. I just knew that it described my real world. I only recently learned that he was descended from the wealth of typewriters And now I learn of Iceberg Slim, by way of this Chinese humorist who doesn't know irony, and then back to Bratton, who seems to, but maybe doesn't. And so how could I know that Iceberg Slim articulated the seventies, my formative years.

He was a pimp, and we are all the pimp's whores when our world is so constricted that we need some boss to lord over us with threats so that we do, for our sustenance, what he wants us to, just because his world is somewhat larger. We are all of us wage-slaves and dependent on the water pipes the sewer pipes the pipe dreams of our betters. Better bettors, though they may be.

Why, oh why did I decide to spend so much of my life swimming in sea of Chinese words? It doubles the cosmos that I'm not competent for. This Chinese dude was a technician for the broadcast industry in Beijing and he liked to write. The English version is so much less interesting. He knows how to write fairy-tales, and so do all of our leaders. It's what we need and want to hear. He's my age, but much funnier, and surely easier to read.

They have an entire tab in the Kindle store on Chinese Amazon for the Three Body Problem. Don't they have any other writers? I mean he's good, but not THAT good. He's a nuclear engineer, fer chrissakes. Dharma Bums across the universe. 

Trust is what's required for social agency. Otherwise we have strongman agency, at a time when we can only grab for truth, and when we read only on the surface. 

Half of us neither understand not believe in genetic truths. The virus is defined by genes and pools of genes. Easy to deny. You can't even see them. But there you go!

Science, among other things, is the language of trust.That trust is also broken.

Half of us trust only in what we want to hear. We stop at The Word. And why is it so nearly always halfway always. Can't we write a better story? Our homeostasis is always so ready to explode, held in check by mere balanced anarchy, loosed upon the world. 

Red and Blue, the primary hues, purple and green the story machine.

And yet we use our smartphones, buy our goods on Amazon, and generally know that cities are full of glass and stainless steel and fully automated underground trains, and high speed internet that works, and still half of us believe in creationism. This is just weird! Or is it just Occam's razor? We will do whatever you tell us to, Iceberg Slim.

History has been plagued with plagues, but this is the first time we really know what a virus is. That doesn't seem to have made a difference. Our behaviors haven't changed. Has science jumped the shark now too, Fonzarelli? 

Well, why is there news now about those nasty Chinese trying to steal our valuable intellectual property about vaccines? Shouldn't that be public domain? Do we really want someone to make money by fighting the virus? How can we even think in those kinds of incentives?

The good news and the bad news both is that we do share beliefs. In action, we believe in technology as what brings scientific understanding down to earth. In words, some of us believe in whatever the strong man has to say. But do we really think our high tech guns and shooter games are made by God? Ah, no, those get to be mankind's inventions. Right.

An accident or a rogue player might loose the nukes, and an earthquake could hit at any time - not only along the San Andreas, but farther north where the tsunami might be a lot worse, or inland. 

There are plenty of things we haven't prepared for, but we don't even really believe in agency at the social level. We believe in an invisible hand of capitalism, and we believe in some mystic crowd wisdom for democracy. But undergirding these is a culture of zero-sum gaming, and the politics of adversity borrowed from the adversarial justice we practice in the courtroom.

This all goes on behind the new overlays to our living, which have become so natural. The Stack, as Bratton would call them. The overlays are the overlords at least as much as the virus is. We believe (in?) the virus because we know what it can do. The Stack is as remote as God. We deny what it is doing.

We don't even know whether to thank the fates that so much of our lives had already moved online so that we could isolate without quite being cut off, or to curse them for shrinking the globe so much that we are truly all in the same boat now. Whatever the case, our response seems not much different from that during the flu that ended the First World War, or even the Plague that Daniel Defoe wrote about.

But surely this much is true: we are now one world and we can see what is happening all over. Except that the flood of imagery means we see nearly nothing other from what we want to see. That's how the media makes its messaging now. Is there even the remotest possibility to make sense through all the noise?

I wonder how we can remain so much as we were, given how fundamental we thought the changes have been. 

What is it that hasn't changed? What are we stuck on?

Now that we trade selfies globally, try to emulate the same superstars in looks, money, personality or whatever, or in the other direction to create our most authentic selfie self? What hasn't changed?

We have global time automatically adjusted for any relativistic warpage, linked to the multi-national global positional satellite orbiters. We are about to send a new generation of privatized astronauts out in the direction of those satellites. What is it that hasn't changed, I ask!? 

Well, death for one.

But really, what is a social animal? Do we, collectively, resemble more a beehive? A termite nest? A school of fish. A swarm of bird flu? The best antiseptic for this plague would be a wholesale wiping clean of those in power in these United States. Start with the Republicans, please! And so the question is, how did they get there? Why aren't the proper people in charge? Where are they hiding?

Another thing that clearly hasn't changed is that we believe that each of us individually is special. That's a nice thing too, like our personal God, Lord Jesus, wants us to know. And yet our new notions of how special we are seem highly mediated by our, well, media. Instead of a president, we have a narcissist in chief. I mean, he does channel us as we are, doesn't he?

We are glued to our screens just like Plato's denizens in the cave. So, we haven''t changed at all? We remain at a remove from reality, in our wombs with a view. Now we're stocking our caves with guns. Is this our return to frontier days?  Is there no other story to tell?

The trouble really is that we never quite stopped believing in Plato. We think we have ideas in our heads. We think only humans have them. And we think creativity is ours alone, too. Generating ideas is like getting something from nothing, as though there were no interactions with our media ahead of time. We don't believe in an uncarved block that feeds back as we work on it. We believe in spontaneous generation inside our empty heads. We don't even have a germ theory for consciousness. 

The screens we have are now the real screens - the Dao that can be spoken is the eternal Dao - and they've brought into being what we only thought before. There must be some screen inside our head. We still think that God is out there if only we get the pixels in alignment. Surely they will show us the ideal world as it was meant to be!

I have no license to think, nor certainly to write. I am a handyman. I have fixed some very big and complex things, and many of them remain fixed, though some were beyond my simple means to preserve. A school, a massive distributed computer network, houses, parts of houses, a boat, cars and cycles. I am emotionally attached to my tools, and when I sharpen them, I am attached to the sharpeners. It is like a caress. It makes me happy.

Now, I've given most of them away. I make do.

I maintain that absent belief in God, there is no sense of irony. I mean this in the most ironic way! I've proven this to my own satisfaction by asking an expert in China, where the plague was caused by a routine pun, which got turned into food as medicine. The bat, after all, is an auspicious "sign" in so many ways in Chinese, so why wouldn't they eat it? They have no sense of irony. They only laugh at puns. 

The selfie stick was invented in China, or at least found mass appeal there. The irony is that so was the software which will transform your selfie into something much closer to the ideal look for a black-haired Chinese lass with almond eyes. The miracle is that it will still be recognized as you. Just a better, more ideal, you. Beats makeup!

The other becomes us!

I hold in my hand now the most wonderful tool of all. After my original iPhone 6 - which had as many lives as a cat - started taking me more time waiting than finding, I bought the new one. It's not so much the piece of jewelry the 6 was, but it has the same feeling in my hand. I bought a case as cheap insurance, and it wasn't perfect. I bought another and endured the wait for the Amazon delivery man, wondering if they would go on strike first. Just like Christmas, the new one was a disappointment. I need it to charge wirelessly, to stick to the magnet in my car, and to not add weight. I know I'm asking a lot. But I finally got it!

As if life were going back to normal. As if I even want it to.

I was disappointed that the new case from Canada was also made in China. I was only disappointed because I might have been overcharged. As though I wasn't already overcharged by Apple. 

One is black and military style. It feels confidence-inspiring, It was cheap - no bones about China! But it's magnetic disk interferes with the wireless charging The other feels almost slippery, but it works with the wireless. But when I plug in my cable so that I can stream to a bigger screen, its flaw is revealed. The video plug won't make it through the case.

No problem. I like to fix things right? I shaved the cable plug ever so slightly, and here I am having formed a new cathexis - that magical capitalistic transference of my self onto some object. I've had that so powerfully with motorcycles, bicycles, cars, boats, houses, and most of all with my tools. I look at them and feel warm in the recognition. And still, I've given them all away, or have allowed them to transmogrify. My self is in the process of contraction. Death be not proud.

Too bad the road is closed to my tiny house.

My old iPhone was drowned and replaced by one identical. Then it was traded for my daughter's, which had more memory. New battery, then full stop. Now I have an entirely new one, but it feels the same. Like the USS Constitution, which is the iconic Ship of Theseus, I don't want it to change. I was among the first to use a smartphone, and I would have kept my first one if it would have carried the burden. It was very cleverly designed - nothing like it since! It had a keyboard and a stylus!

I don't like the world of digital reality. I feel it accelerating our demise as a civilization. I shall continue to try to find the good in it. Plato doesn't have to be all wrong. Philosophy is not a zero-sum game.

The most exciting book that I'm reading just now is called The Spread Mind, which exposes the fallacy of our seemingly ingrained belief that we have a mental life apart from the life we experience as physical bodies out and about in the world. I find the thesis utterly convincing, while strangely hidebound in certain ways. The author, with whom I've communicated a bit, seems dogmatically bound to a kind of physical causality which is manifestly not true. 

I agree with him that cons-truing time or temperature as the metric for real destroys the real experience we have of time and temperature. Sure, we like to true our experience against the shared standard, but we know that there is also a deviant 'subjective' time which feels very different from the scientific 'true.' Indeed, meteorologists have had to invent the 'feels like' temperature to guide us about going outside. That takes into account things like wind and relative humidity, though it still replaces what we feel with a new external standard for what's real.

The thing is that Riccardo Manzotti complains about scientists with instruments getting in the way of our 'real' at the same time that he wants to do away with subjective experience altogether. I mean, I just simply find that ironic. Mainly because he won't entertain my modification of his theory. He's acting like the scientific authorities that he himself complains about, who would rob us of our authentic experience. 

But there is no subjective experience. Our experience is, literally, one with the objects of our perceptual experience. He and I agree about that.

Where I start parting company with Manzotti is when he makes the claim that it is our experience which defines the 'real' time. We experience change and we are embedded in a physical causal universe and therefore we experience the flow of time. 

I want to say first off that it is my emotions which first determine my sense of lived time, and second that my emotions are as much out there in the world as are my physical, perceptual, experiences are. I asked Riccardo if he had come across the work of Mark Solms, who locates consciousness in the affective regions of the brain stem. I think that question is what ended the communication, though I can't be sure. I probably just sounded nuts. By definition, I always do! No, I'm not nuts. I just sound nuts because I'm not writing or talking like everyone else. And still I feel like I'm in good company.

According to Solms, emotion is the inception of agency. The survival value of acting as near instantly as possible in the face of recognized danger is patently obvious to me. That means acting thoughtlessly. Another way to put it is that we must act automatically, in almost the way that we breathe. We don't have that much room in our conscious mind, and so we use the shorthand of 'stored' memories of similar experiences, and match them up to successful actions. The relationship is felt, emotively. That's what emotion means, in my vocabulary.

Riccardo seems afraid of reifying Platonic ideals, and therefore dances around the existence of a lion in our minds which might help us to deal with the one just now in front of us. I don't see the need for any ideal form of a lion. I only see the need for the shorthand of generalization, which must have happened in the animal realm long before and apart from human consciousness. The brain must engage in a game of pattern matching, which would help it to put away perceptions according to category. Else what would a mind be for? What would be its survival value?

That's what pattern recognition does, and that's what narrative is. It's how we get by. The brain trues the world by fantastic approximation of reality. There is no truth, and numerical control is useless for lived life, no matter how wonderfully it might enhance our perception.

I know that I can find my memories in my lived environment, and especially in those things I made and in my tools. Traditional proponents of neurologically-based consciousness would take issue with my location of memory in things outside me, but Manzotti would not. If our senses are stopped, we hallucinate. Of course I must exist in and with some world apart from me.

As I drift through the landscape, it's pretty clear what's present and what's immediately past. The past quickly merges with the imagined future for vagueness, and then sometimes there's an emotive charge and you might have some enduring image. It's not hard to conceptualize memory as just this preservation from the flow past 'present' into the less urgent past (and future). I see no need to think of memories somehow 'contained' in or by the brain, and have an easier time now just to imagine actual direct perception (no internal images) and a sort of quick falling off of the aftereffects due to variable attenuation, punctuated by a moderate number of "permanentized" impressions kept running in a nearly endless loop.

This strikes me as the great evolutionary value of a complex brain; first, the ability of the organism to project a wise and complex course of action, and second with the outering of words, to allow engagement with other organisms for the purpose of learning, social organizing, and long-range planning. Written words may be memorable in the same way landscapes are.

I look at the world and I find things to be familiar. I find familiar things. That is what generalization means in this context. If you have a proper name, and I know you, then there is only one of you. If you are a type, well then I generalize. This happened long before naming. Reptiles do it. Some things they bite, and some they run away from. Some they screw. (I don't know much about reptiles, but I'm still pretty confident to this extent)

Our sense of what is present in what Manzotti calls the spread NOW, is those perceptual objects that we can interact with. I would go further and locate the now among those perceptual objects on which we can act. It is our ability to act which informs our sense of time, and not just our ability to interact as thoughtless percepts. He seems to want the chicken/egg question about agency to be left open, while I want to preserve some of my own.

It doesn't seem a stretch to locate pleasure in homeostatic motion, and perhaps to locate happiness in a sense of agency about such motion. To be in control and to be surrounded by loved ones does seem to constitute happiness. Well, that plus being able to sit around a mesmerizing fire, sipping wine, perhaps, and smoking s cigar.

In just the sense that my future is constrained, I can know the future in a way similar to how I can know the past. I project onto it a whole host of generalizations to locate where my degrees of freedom lie. If I'm in a building and I have to get out, I'll have to go through the door, unless the catastrophe which meant my exit opens up a wall. If it does and if it's safe I'll take it!

This is no different from the 'reverse' causation of the double slit experiment in particle physics. I disagree with Riccardo Manzotti that time is not a physical dimension like all the others. All of our behaviors are conditioned by realistically available futures. Without agency, evolution goes nowhere and is like the world Riccardo imagines where time stands still. He is right that there would then be nothing; that such a state is not even conceivable. 

For photons, the double slit represents a timeless relation. Manzotti denies relations as real. He's wrong about that. I think it's also wrong to consider quantum entanglement to be about information. It's really about identity. The scale of separation in quantum entanglement just indicates something about the perceptual object. Information relates to perceptual relations between objects.

In my quirky cosmos, emotional relations are less about information and more about timeless matching as a felt prognostication.

Manzotti seems to miss that boundaries between objects are always fractal. Causation becomes predictable only when objects are rather large in time and space. At the scale of our perception without the enhancement of numerically calibrated instruments, predictions are highly reliable. We feel safe much of the time, even while at the wheel of an automobile hurtling along the highway.

But even billiard balls are subject to the butterfly effect, beyond a certain trajectory. Physically linked levers are subject only to accident, or wear and tear for their reliability. Only a fool would push too hard on a rusty lever. Only a fool would play dice with life. But lived life is reliably predictable up to a point.

On the scale of social agency, meshed time and temperature seem to work. If we could but trust them, Google and Apple could end this pandemic almost instantly, provided that usage of their devices saturates our population to the level of herd immunity, which it probably does. And provided that enough people who have such devices would decide to do the right thing. 

This is what my good friend Benjamin H. Bratton would advocate. He won't correspond with me either. I gotta say it baffles me when the stars diss their most enthusiastic fans. It must be that just like Trump, you can't really disagree with them very much. Maybe being a star goes to your head somehow.

Well, who really would want to be in any position of influence in this fucked up world? Trump, that's who, and if we're honest with ourselves, he's only there because we sure as hell don't want the job. We're the ones asleep at the switch here, waiting for our lovely white lives to come back.

OK, here's the real ontology of COVID-19. The virus is money. If you have it, you don't need agency. You can buy your pleasure, even if you can't buy your happiness. The viral qualities of money were never evident before information technology. Once upon a time, money was used to exchange value, in much the way that the brain delays ("stores") perceptions. 

Our mythical narratives would have us believe that there is some relation to the value of a person according to how much money they might amass. Trump certainly believes that (His world is winners and losers - in that we agree. We disagree about the moral valence of being a winner in his terms). That's what the perverted version of  'work ethic' means. By "perverted," I just simply mean when we assert absence of work-ethic where racism is at work. Our economy has become a lottery, and young white males like it that way.

We have to find ways to trust our institutions again, we have to find ways to trust our neighbors (defined by Žižek as those who smell [bad]) and we have to find ways to trust even our enemies. If they demonstrate they can drive a bus and have self-interest in keeping the bus on the road, then we should let them drive the bus. China has demonstrated that it can drive the bus of Covid-19, and we should learn from them rather than to vilify them.

I mean please, this is a pretty mild catastrophe that nature has tossed us. It's a slow pitch, and we should figure out what to do. For trivial starters, how about a $2K universal basic monthly income for the duration. Yay Democrats! 

And if we don't want to institute universal healthcare (which would be so much cheaper than to keep the economy closed because of the chaotic ways that poor people have to access healthcare) we could at least mandate that nobody gets charged (I'm talking money, but you can leave the pun in if you will) in any way for Covid-related testing and illness. 

Ditto immigrants whether with or without papers. Do we really want people hiding from the law now instead of feeling protected by it? Do we want people ducking exposure (more puns) because they need to go to work? Are we nuts? The illegals have always been essential workers. What choice do they have? What choice do we have?

So yes, I don't see Covid-19 as some external menace. I see it as yet another natural challenge in the non-zero-sum game of evolution for our planet. These 'emergencies' will continue to escalate until we get a clue. That's just how the game works. 

Prayer won't help, and science won't help either so long as it's subject to the virus of money. How much trust should we have in science now that funding for research is motivated by profit? How much confidence should we have that the price is right when Wall Street money is deployed to destroy an industry in order to monopolize the business and ultimately set the price however they want. 

Walmart is established on that crime, as are, obviously, Uber, or Doordash. Instead of the public spending money on research that we really need, we now practice sugar daddy science.

Money wasn't viral before the Internet. Who even remembers that now? When big pharma couldn't advertise and neither did lawyers. Being able to afford shelter and rent with whatever lousy job you wanted to do was better than a universal basic income. I've never been happier than I was as a minimum wage bike mechanic! I had a very nice penthouse apartment, furnished with comfy things of my own making!

I do believe that we are at the end of Science as a way to know or to control our lived environment. I don't believe in social agency on the China model, and I've lost my faith in social agency on the model of the United States. But I still recognize the promise at our inception.

I think it's time to reinvent ourselves all over again. This will surely mean getting away from our various screens and engaging with the real real again, not the fake real of represented reality. As Manzotti says (I know, that's even more rude than to use his first name), we cannot have experience of a representation. We experience only the screen. Information defines only the interaction between our bodies and some distant object. It can't inform our minds. And yet we still act on it. 

Get me an alarm on my phone (for proximity to proximity to COVID-19 infection) and I will act. But not until you do too. I'm ready to come out and play. Covid-19 is a natural goad to social agency. We should thank the gods for it. Without it we would already be back to normal, which has long been the most dangerous way to be. Of course that's self-serving of me!

Covid-19 is pure information. It isn't even alive. Viruses have always been with us. They fuck with the plans. There is no plan for our minds, unless and until we start acting like robots. Which we did at about the same time that the robots started acting like people.

It's time to open our eyes and wake up. Hello World! I've been asleep at the switch. Sorry! Knowledge doesn't inhere in information (I love what you can do to mangle English!). Our brains don't store information. Our brains mediate familiarity and agency, and by means of consciousness, to promote the survival of our selfish genes. 

And once we had a written language to turn our words into durable objects for perception, we could think (Jaynes was almost correct). And once we could think we could share our thoughts. And once we started to share our thoughts and science took off, we started up an hyperbolic curve which can never be flattened. 

That sort of narrative is very exciting, but it doesn't end well.

We have to accept that there are limits to what we can know. These are limits in principle and not only practical limits. Our interaction with the cosmos is not only perceptual. It is conceptual and driven by emotion. This things are real and out in the world just the way that percepts are.

In order to go back to living, we have to let go of certain fantasies. We have to be in touch with the world as it actually is and not how we wish it were. There is no ideal world, no utopia, no final understanding. There is only growth and decay, and I am rooting for growth to the whole. Personal decay is always a done deal.

OK, so I have to get back to work. I sure do wish that I had ever learned to write a story. But I do know that if we cure the money virus, all the other ones will fall into line.

HOLLYWOOD (the sign) Won't Go Away!

I first saw the sign "in person" after climbing up a long set of steps from the walk of stars in Hollywood. The steps took me inside what I think was a shopping mall, but I'm not so accustomed, yet, to the strange inside/outside mix that is Southern California.

Although there weren't many people gawking the way that I was, it did seem as though the architecture of this place was designed to frame the iconic sign up in the hills. It also allowed a view out the scruffy back door of the place, and I suppose the sign itself isn't that big a draw anymore.

You'd think there would be an exclamation mark on the actual sign. (Oh! There almost was!) It stays put though, as though the place might prove as ephemeral as its productions were it to stop promoting itself. It was never a planned thing; having been erected by a real-estate developer, it used to say "HollywoodLand."

I just witnessed our annual mass-mediated (not massive enough this year is what I hear) contest to sort out who's best among those who've already won  at the Oscars. I gawked along with the rest of us who are certainly not in the game. But it's not like an Olympic contest. I could do what they do, right?

This is ground zero for style in the midst of all the uplifting story-lines of the year. People are crying out against dictators "enough already!" Rampant capitalism is chastened by oil spills and media exposes of direct harm caused to people by careless scrambling after winners' gold. Even in China. The usual stuff.

The Oscars are all about style - even in our choice of what to watch in the documentary department. Michael Moore is out, Banksy is in. It's not quite cool to promote yourself on the backs of real social issues. It's cooler to remain Anonymous (losing must have been part of his plan) and just to poke fun at the process of sorting out the cool. Everyone gets punked, especially if they think they're talking to the Big Studio Director (you've always gotta watch out for sleepers from Buffalo).

I'm still looking for a good replacement for the term "po-faced" to describe the bizarre condition of someone in an ironic posture to the world who feels himself in earnest. This is the condition of religionists being indistinguishable from satirists, or like that Kung-fu special I saw on the "Iron Crotch" school, where you train yourself to lift weights with your penis. Hey, you really can't make this shit up!

The thing I really want to know though, is how come we're all so obsessed with contests? Technology in service to winning?

Our economic system is organized around winning, a contest of value and production. This all starts in school where standardized testing helps to predict who might be a winner, and funnels them to the most privileged position at the head of any class. Which is fine as far as it goes, and as long as you don't have to sleep with the producer to get there, but what about the rest of the students who really just need some feedback about what they need to work on?

Well and so the world is being neatly divided between people with an ironic posture on everything and the rest who are either Born Again, Republicans, Chinese Communist party hacks, Chinese elite Nationalist students in America, Singaporeans, or just plain old machines. No irony.

See a machine would never be able to equate gold with poison thus:

ROMEO

There is thy gold, worse poison to men's souls,
Doing more murders in this loathsome world,
Than these poor compounds that thou mayst not sell.
I sell thee poison; thou hast sold me none.
Farewell: buy food, and get thyself in flesh.
Come, cordial and not poison, go with me
To Juliet's grave; for there must I use thee. 

Exeunt

And crazy people all over the place are still wondering what will happen when machines become conscious. Sheesh! Look around!! You don't need the Hollywood hi-tech special effects version. You don't think it's humans wrecking the earth, do you?

The Trouble with Computers

Against my better judgment, I recently agreed to "help out" at a local non-profit which was having trouble with computers. It was pretty clear that there was some sort of infestation. I explained that I wasn't really looking to do this sort of work anymore, but agreed to help, setting a price that we could both feel good about - something like a quarter of the going rate - about what a gardener might charge.

The recommendations were easy enough, and the emergency patch up was smooth except for that one computer. There's always one, maybe the Executive Director's, maybe the volunteer workstation (in this case), but the general rule is that 90% of the issues/machines/whatever take 10% of the time, and then there is that 10%.  This isn't a precise rule, but you get the idea. It gets called the Pareto Principle generally, and I find that I'm no longer the only person who seems to have heard of this rule.

The temptation is always to just get rid of the 10%, but the way it works is that it's the rule, not the machine, and so you pretty much have no choice about this. There will always be the 10%, just like work will always expand to fill the time available for it. It's why computer techs after the briefest trial by fire become really arbitrary and dictatorial about standards. Without them you spend 90% of your time getting nothing productive done. And when you're "helping out" with an unmanaged network for a not-for-profit, you know that going in, which is why I agreed to such a low rate.

Well, then the Executive Director, without so much as a nevermind, went ahead and ordered a Mac into the mix. Now if I had the dough, I'd definitely have a Mac for home use, but you can see what happens to the whole idea of standards. It just doesn't make sense in a network which needs to be managed.

Which got me thinking about how the trouble with computers is that they are both tools and desirable objects in and of themselves. That is to say that people want these things still, if you can imagine that, pretty much the way they want all libidinously invested objects, which is what capitalism is all about after all. If there weren't any of that sort of desire, we'd all drive Ladas or identical Beetles, and our computers would still be black and white and look like little file cabinets the way my first one did. Way back when the excitement was in the magic that this new tool could do, and not how it looked or felt.

Steve Jobs, of course, understands this about machines. You'd be nuts not to want a Mac more than a PC. It's just cooler, which is pretty much what cool means. Libidinous investment.

And even in the work place, people can't avoid playing with these attractive machines. Hell, a Windows machine is pretty libidinously invested these days too, especially after Windows 7. It's fluid, slick and cool, but still manages to do that within the "confines" of being more straightforward to deploy as a tool. But in an unmanaged state, it really still is an attractive nuisance for workers' free time, or for volunteers to play with, especially before broadband was ubiquitous in the home. This is why techs are so arbitrary and dictatorial about management and locking things down against being toyed with.

This volunteer computer today just plain defeated me. The more infestation I ripped out by the roots, the more that was revealed, lurking, being contained by the thing I'd ripped out. The thing is that many of the bits of what we in the business call "spyware" are themselves pandered as configuration assistants, spyware destroyers, and system tweakers. Everyone with a home computer has a favorite that they swear by. And sometimes the more the merrier.

I pretty much decided that this particular computer had a "root kit" by which is meant something so intertwined, as it were, "beneath" the actual OS that you can't even tell in principle that it's there and the only real remedy is a system rebuild. Which, in the absence of standardized setups and cataloged software licenses and media becomes a necessarily destructive process. You can see why I consider this gig to be against my better judgement.

But here's the thing. I can't go so far as to bemoan the capitalist system and what it does to trick us into relationships with our tools instead of what those tools can do for our actual work. I'm not a big fan of Amish furniture, for instance. I think it's ugly and represents the work of people who are doing it for God, or something extrinsic to the beauty of what they produce.

I think you can convince yourself that it's somehow beautiful, and perhaps sometimes it is, in the manner of naive untutored "vernacular"  art. But frankly, I prefer the self-consciously beautiful stuff, even when it will obviously go out of style shortly. Anyhow, the Amish stuff confuses something about either the tool or the one who's meant to be pleased or both. You use basic tools to create objects which are themselves only meant to be purposeful. Yuch.

But there is no craftsperson on the planet, or artist I imagine, who doesn't form a kind of relationship with his particular tools. Tools are, not incidentally, those things which according to Marx, the capitalist system expropriates from the worker. Not only can't you form a relationship with your tools in the manner of a journeyman craftsperson once you work for the system, you can't select them or care for them, or become attached to them in any way.

I hope you see where I'm going with this.

Hell, maybe someday real soon, when all the work is in "the cloud" it really won't matter what tool you bring to bear on your work. Maybe you'll bring your own, the way I once did when I worked as a bicycle mechanic. The young turks I worked alongside made fun of me because my tools were all Craftsman/Sears which is all I could afford. But I have them still, and they served me well enough.

Anyhow the "knowledge workers" who use computers to get their work done are generally of the managerial class. They directly serve the capitalists, maybe like chambermaids or something. The "administrative assistants" who serve the managers have a much greater tendency to form something approaching an emotional relationship with their machines, calling them things like "'puters" or maybe even naming them. It must be part of what they look forward to each day.

And, of course, at the very top you get to use whatever tool you feel like using and the techs had better make it OK.

I have no real point here, except that it should be obvious to anyone that the PC (here I use the term to encompass Macs, probably smartphones, and certainly the iPad) exists at an interesting intersection in our history of labor. It is, in fact now, the universal tool and as such crosses boundaries between work and play, home and office, right along with its making those boundaries more porous and much less meaningful.

Anyhow, it's why I can't do tech work anymore; at least not on the level of PC support. I could easily enjoy guiding the work of others. I'd be arbitrary and dictatorial and insist that if workers were to use company machines, then they will have little to no choice about their configuration. At the same time, I'd be working to move all the applications into the cloud, for access from strictly sandboxed (insulated from whatever workers do with these things in their play-time) secure and company deployed browsers.

Then the workers could take their own machines home, like a company car say. Or maybe they'd just be responsible to bring their own tools to work. Well, it's a thought.

Meanwhile, I think we should disinvest the objectified female form a bit. Now that should be an interesting project. But seriously, this is where capitalism really does go too far. Because human value should not be determined by relative anything; wealth, beauty, intelligence. These things can be allowed to spread as much as is comfortable, but wouldn't it be cool if we could disentangle actual love from economic relations?? I mean, good luck with that and everything, but stranger things have happened.

What Should Microsoft Do?

I haven't read it yet, but this is meant to riff off "What Would Google Do?". Which is meant to riff off "What Would Jesus Do?" I'm thinking. Which is meant to be guidance for life.

I don't mind giving Microsoft advice, because, pretty much like giving Attila the Hun advice, he's just going to look at it, maybe with a kind of curiousity and then carry on raping and pillaging, because, like the scorpion on the frog's back, it's what monopolizing corporations do.

But clearly, it's all about rugged multi-touch. It's all about holding in one hand. It's all about free access to the Internet. It's all about easy reading and easy input. In other words, there's something to be made of a combination of the Kindle, the iPad, the iPhone, the netbook. I mean, think of the opportunity. The iPad has staked out a $600 slot for a $300, max, product (judging against the netbook market). The Kindle gives you internet access for free, slanting heavily in the direction of buying their reads. The Kindle is as easy as reading a book. The multi-touch is a no-brainer, because, well, it takes not brains, and no instruction, to make the machine do what you think it should do.

And the only thing in the way of Microsoft entering this market is their greed. Obviously, they can't let go of the revenue stream from Office and Windows, and that means that they will remain wedded to the absurd notion that people still have to or want to or can be tricked into getting that kind of functionality for a price when it can be had so trivially for free.

They want to retain the software hardware divide, when there is none anymore. It's all machine vs. human, with the software/hardware on the same side of the diff-e-q. The machine is a photo-reproduced schematic, plain and simple (what, you thought they engineered these things the way that they once did railroads and spaceships??). And you need a machine to design it, because it's too damned intricate for humans to draw. Expand out the schematic so you and I could see it and it would fill football fields now.

But no machine can, any more than can a corporation, do human. It's just not possible. Any more than a scorpion can refrain from killing when it has the opportunity. Even when the killing drowns itself. I'm standing by for your call, M$, whenever you want to know how to repair your fortunes. But, you'll have to cede control, power - the greed thing - and actually want and need to compete on a level playing field in the open market which has never, so far, existed. And with all your money, I am betting you're far far too chicken. You're afraid you can't win on your merits, because you know you never have. You're like all the rich people now, afraid that they will be exposed for having won the lottery instead of earning the slot by honest work.

Best wishes, though. Really. It's not like I'm rooting for Google. They're just plain evil.

Downsizing Fallacies

Youth, they say, is wasted on the young. I'm pretty sure that's why Viagra is one of the best selling products of all time. Is there data out there about if it's the men or the women who really want and demand the stuff? I mean for the men to use, since I guess women find it useful on themselves too, off label. Anyhow, it, sort of, levels the playing field between old and young, right?

And, well, the trouble with level playing fields is that they presume some such thing as fair competition. The desire for a level playing field pretty much presumes your outrage - you the fandom - if someone on the field is doping. But they handicap sailboat races, to rule out the hardware differences, so that the skills and talents of the sailors are the thing that gets tested.

As far as I can tell from the comments I get here, the only people who read this, or likely any other thing up on the web are the folks who would pander Viagra, Cialis, porn, internet ponzi schemes, that kind of thing. Or are they just bots? Yeah, I guess they are just automated commentator machines, pretty much like the talking heads on TV now that I think about it. There doesn't really need to be any intelligence behind them, because we'd be shocked right off our butts if they were to say something unexpected. Anyhow, it's a pain in the butt every day to have to remove them all. Like barnacles growing on my hull, these comments keep appearing.

For lots of sports, if we were to handicap the players according to past performance, that might eliminate the outrage about the doping, but the trouble is that for most contests, it's both the physical conditioning and the ability to drive that body which is in the game.

Of course, who's doing the driving anyhow? Can you drive you? Physical conditioning presumes a kind of dedication that you and I don't have. We wouldn't even get started if we didn't have the skill. So, there's a kind of feedback loop which goes way back to some start, and in the end we, the fans, enjoy watching contests among the very best. Handicapping them would make the whole thing really frustrating to watch, don't you think?

Wednesday afternoon sailboat races among handicapped boats are probably more fun for the racers, who pretty much know where they stand, than they would be for any audience. Audiences require some clear and present contest, and not one in their mind. You need to be able to see, like in a Nascar race, which car is ahead of which. And it just blows the whole thing if it turns out that one of the cars was hiding some secret supercharger. Some horse had gotten an injection. Some stone was stuck into the horseshoe. Or some Madoff was, you know, making off.

So, we apply these terms to the economy, guessing, I guess, that we've borrowed them from the way that evolution works - survival of the fittest. It's capitalism's best apology. But as everybody knows who's ever watched some apes (Have you ever watched apes? I sure haven't, but I've read about such things), while the alpha male is pounding his chest, the rest of the guys are acting, well, depressed. Kind of like the way that school kids act once they learn that they're out of the contest.

There's this really hot woman driver now in Nascar, who I only know about because she's the spokesmodel for the company which sold me my domain name, Catalytic Narrative. She's an anomaly, right, since, generally speaking, we're used to seeing men behind those wheels. But how hot is that now, to see some woman driving the fastest cars, and I've gotta say, she's really truly hot. Hot wheels.

Kinda gets your motor going. But we wouldn't expect to see her driving her actual body against the men in, say football. Or to be even a little bit less grotesque, we'd be awfully surprised to see her playing soccer, or even running against the men, and if we did, she'd pretty much look like a man, and then we'd accuse her of secretly being a man. You know the drill. She'd only get to be hot metaphorically.

Now, at the deepest level of the secrets we may hide - and you've gotta admit that this is interesting at least metaphorically - is our DNA. Our genes. As if those might be the only proof of whether or not we are cheating. It's how rapists prove they didn't do it, but also how competitors of any kind can prove their gender. And it's that same secret code which drives the survival of the fittest.

Of course, it turns out that on the fringes (and you know I'm really only intersted in the fringes) things are never quite as clear as you'd wish. There are children born with ambiguous genitalia, and even if they aren't there is the subjective experience of being a man, say, or more likely a woman when you're genetically not, and all sorts of experiences in between. I guess the fandom hopes that these folks will just stay out of the competition, so that things can remain black and white and simple. But then there are those people who combine two complete and distinct set of genes within a single body. A kind of milkshake twin, which divided and then recombined during gestation, so that the person could, you know if he were to want to, get away with murder, say. Or skip a paternity rap.

My equipment doesn't work so well as it once did. You know, I have to jot more things down, take my time, eat differently and all the rest if I don't want to accentuate more than necessary the comparative consequences of getting old. The hair, well forget about the hair, and pretty much forget about athletic competitions, unless it's in some "master's" group. I won't even mention the unmentionable stuff.

But at least my body's no longer driving me. Well, OK, that's just not true, since every once in a while my body seems to take me to the emergency room for something I could easily have gotten away with in my youth. But in my youth, I was only focused, you know, on that one big charge of taking things right to the edge, and still it was never good enough.

OK, sure I still like to take things right to the edge. I live on the edge, right? In that liminal zone where all the evolution actually does take place. Except that I'm white and well capitalized, socially if not financially, and still have pretty good job prospects, which kind of eliminates any edginess to me.

See, that's the thing. Most people focus their attention on what they're afraid to lose. After twenty-something, you've lost the contest for the alpha spot, and so you settle on some specialty where you can shine a bit, or you set your sights within your rank and you compete for self-esteem right there where you, well, belong.

I do have to wonder, though, if there's a different kind of contest possible. No, I mean I really have to. I'm not getting any younger, after all, and there must come a point where the Viagra or pump implants or whatever people do just hurt way more than they would be worth. Like that guy who looks like an old head photoshopped to a younger body, but apparently isn't, except that why would he want to torture himself like that? I just wonder. Is he still cruising bars at his age? Would he be welcome among the competition?

At a certain point, you turn away from the game toward other pursuits. Your contest might be with yourself, for instance, so that when things come at you from directions you might not necessarily approve of, you test, first, your ego, to see if you might be blocking out whole aspects of reality. You might learn to try things on, what they call "ideas" (a ridiculous notion if ever there was one), for instance, to see if they might work better than the old habits you've grown used to.

Young people supposedly have the advantage here too, right? They can be more frivolous, fun-loving, experimental, and have so much less to lose. Which is funny when you think about it, since the old guy has already, by definition, lost. So, why not get a little frivolous? It's not like you've got any genes in the game anymore.  You've lost your energy to raise kids anyhow. I mean it's no mistake that they're handing out the food in Haiti to the women now, since the men all want to fight about it, taking care of their loved ones. But age can be as big a cure as gender.

So, what could it be then, to replace the dog-eat-dog competition which drives our marketplace? What could be the compensation in old age, for what you had in youth? Especially if you've jettisoned all the fruits of youthful competitive winnings. No wife, the kids live with their Mom, no retirement account. Some insurance against the ever-increasing likelihood of death, disease and accident. You were at least that careful. That careful, at least.

Apart from facility with words, which even there, is a contest which goes to youth. Because they're the only ones without a big investment in the contest as it used to be played, and so they can innovate, and push the novel, say to new limits. Do surprising things with words. No one ever wrote anything great who didn't accomplish it before, say, 28. No one ever made any great discoveries after that.

Which is a pretty broad kind of generalization, but it holds about as well as the mainstream against the fringes of sexual orientation, say, or the liklihood of women taking over football or even the sport of Nascar racing. It could happen, but the drive to compete seems to be a male dominated thing, no matter what the sports entitlement laws might try to do in recompense.

Or, wait, is that the thing then? That women want to compete just as badly as men do, but have always been knocked out of the competition because of man-made expectations? Could be!

We're only ever watching for the point. The winner. The one out front. The conclusion (I'll bet you just can't wait!). But there's an awful lot which must go on in the pit, at the training table, strategically jockeying for position in advance of the final sprint; the final charge to the finish.

And most of these contests still require some sort of stimulus-response. There is no audience. There is only one another, and mostly you're glad to be out of the limelight, since there's so damned much pressure there. So much expectation to perform. I doubt a watchmaker wants to do his work on a deadline. I doubt a painter does either.

And even in the field of evolution, I still wonder if we're paying attention to the wrong thing. Since it's the matings on the fringes which really change the game for eternity. The ones which cross the species boundary, for instance, or push the limits of what might be attractive. That's what Alfred Kinsey was exploring, taking a detour from his study of wasps. Having made his case there that there're no such things as "Ideal Types". The ones in the center supposedly duking it out for point.

I guess what that might mean is that the ones in the center, fighting for reproductive prominence (that's the fact, after all), get to champion the species as it is but have almost nothing to say about the species as it will become. As it will evolve. That gets accomplished on the fringes, metaphorically, or analogically, or whatever, the way that the geeks and nerds have suddenly moved into reproductive advantage once they could buy their Porsches just like the hardbodies always could. Or, well, you get rich, and then you get the Porsche and it won't matter how hard you are. You get the idea.

And there's even expensive stylin' wardrobes, you know, glasses and bling, designed to move the erstwhile geek to center stage. Some of it even celebrates what once got called "gay." Which might even have some influence, in the end, over what gets to be called an epithet. Driving home a point here.

So, the pit crew moves in a different direction now than it once did, and style defines a different alpha. But you know, I'm just not that certain that the contests which count are the ones which generate the most enthusiasm. (Did I really miss the Super Bowl again?! I hate to miss those commercials). The contests which count might always be the ones which take place on the fringes, off to the side, away from everybody's spotlight.

And I'm just not sure it's the apes we want to, um, ape, you know? Why should we make them our model, especially since it seems we never really did "descend" from them. They're modern too, just on a different, parallel, path. What are those other human-like species, Jane Goodall? You know, the ones where love is shared. The Bonobos!

These guys are genetically closer to humans, and they engage in all that behavior we'd like to keep in our closet. A matriarchal society, there's lots of girl on girl, promiscuity, sex for resolving conflicts if not for having fun. I guess these guys are out of the closet enough now that you can name a pants company after them. Maybe Banana Republic - you know that place where I'm afraid to shop because it's so, well, um, gay . But I do, and there's nothing wrong with that - Maybe Banana Republic paved the way. OK, I'm probably too old for Banana Republic, sorry.

Bonobos in captivity act a lot like other apes, and a lot like humans. When humans are being inhuman. The males become aggressive and even kill one another. But even when they're not in captivity, the males can be aggressive to outsiders to protect their own community.

I'm no Bonobo expert, but it does seem that here's another metaphor. And I'm not advocating free love, quite, you know the way it gets practiced by the decadent nerds and geeks among us (slipping in a little slander there to distinguish myself as a proper mensch here). But it might be nice if we could come down a bit off the extremist competitions we stage for ourselves. The winner take all kind of stuff, which just accentuate who you're not when you're a loser.

That's the kind where even if you're really really Brangolina hot (did I spell that right?), you're still going to get old or at least go out of style, fat lips, and then you too could be made into an object, as if you weren't already, and be among the most unlikely to find abiding love. It's all about abiding love here, right? Well, at least between parent and child it is. Anyhow, I'm certainly not suggesting we should ape any apes, no matter how much nicer they are than we are.

It's just that we could stand to back off a bit about the ownership thing; the sex as mortally serious all the time thing, the performance thing, the hotter is always better thing. I get so tired of seeing lives ruined by people who get treated as objects. The real contest is not always the one with the biggest audience is all.

OK, that's pretty self-serving, but you know what I mean, right? There are other ways to organize our economy. Downsize this, make my day, because, you know, I never really did pin my identity on your logo. There! I feel better now.