Honing and Cleaning

There was a moment during the reconstruction of my boat when I discovered how much more quickly the project would go if I were to sharpen my tools routinely. When you get really moving on a project - when you get a nice rhythm going - it's hard to stop.

You want to keep pushing along and getting stuff done, and watching the thing take shape as you are working on it. I'm the sort of person who often skips a meal or forgets the passage of time if I'm buried in some project. This is true while writing, and certainly while solving network issues or writing code for an application.

But if you don't take a break to sharpen your tools, pretty soon you're pushing and pushing and getting nowhere. In the case of wood-cutting tools, the progress slows to a crawl, and acrid smoke might start to curl away from the wood and into your eyes. The strain on muscles and electric motors, not to mention the propensity for catastrophic accident, multiplies exponentially. I have scars on both hands to prove this.

OK, some of the scars are from when I was learning how to sharpen the blades. I slipped. Damn, ouch, and then the work really grinds to a halt. So quiet care is also important, as is knowing when you don't have it.

Ever since that time, when I realized how many cuts of hard white oak my saw could take before it needed a break and a file, I've enjoyed the sharpening work almost as much as the actual work itself. It can be a sort of meditation. A focusing of the mind.

I also enjoy cleaning paintbrushes, and still own some of the ones I used the very first year I owned the boat. I was a very young man back then. My hands show the cost of that exercise too, but still.

When I was paid to do network troubleshooting and design, I would feel a little guilty taking "company time" to read, study and research. There was always too much work to do, and well, to tell you the truth it's a big part of the reason I had to quit. Too many people pushing really hard and getting almost nothing done.

I may not be the sharpest tool in the shed, as the saying goes, but at least I took some time out now and then to hone in on the best solution to balance all the competing needs, demands and expectations.

Driving often afforded the meditative time for this, when I wasn't on the phone. And also, to tell the truth, when they weren't even paying as much as I was saving the company right off the bottom line, it was time to even up the score. My personal boundary against charitable donations to the workplace was being enroached upon.

Enough whining! What I really want to take notice of is how the blooming of Information Technology in general destroys all metaphors for honing and cleaning.

In general, any tool you buy will probably not only seem less and less efficient as time goes by; just according to a kind of relativistic principle in comparison with what's coming out that's faster. But it will also actually be slower as the code gets fatter and fatter. This is true even if you're capable to resist the newer versions, since nearly each and every day your computer will demand to be updated against the near certainty of hacks and exploits against you.

This is all pretty much the opposite of sharpening your tools. It would be as if you had to change saws and not just sharpen the blade each time you started slowing down.

Of course lots of people I know can't be bothered to sharpen anything, and are attracted to the disposable version of all sorts of blades - not just the razor blades. Come to think of it, somewhere along the way, reading the stuff no-one actually reads which came with my prescription for blood thinner, I read that I wasn't supposed to use a sharp razor. I was supposed to switch to an electric one.

Sorry. I use an electric toothbrush because it keeps my gums pink. I like the nice feedback from the nice dental hygienist. But I draw the line at electric razor. It's too much trouble, takes too long, and is just another thing to worry about keeping charged. Not to mention which, I like the sound of the barber's strop, and am a tiny bit put off by the disposable straight razors the new guy uses.

On the boat, I learned that handplanes are actually just as quick - and much easier to control - than the powered kind. I learned that a sharp scraper offers a quicker job and much better control than a powered sander. The surface stays hard and true. There is no time saved in trolling around for nearby parking spots either, when you can just as quickly walk.

The nice thing about network applications "in the cloud" is that the speed factor has less and less to do with the machinery you run on. Prices reflect this too, as magically a new order of magnitude price drop appeared for network devices recently. Even my Kindle will surf the web in a pinch, and there's nothing fast about it. Its virtue is the long life of its battery, and the paper lightlessness of its screen.

And my book purchases subsidize the carrier costs for downloading, just as advertizing will one day again subvent the cost for Internet. Or, in precisely the way that newspapers only used to charge for the paper, maybe we'll still pay for Internet and the hardware will be loaned out for free the way our phones used to be. Maybe, when localized ads become useful again, and not just annoying globo-logo-boosters.

I'm not making any predictions. But tinkering with your PC, interesting though it might be, is not the same as sharpening up your useful skills, unless you're a professional like me. And even then, there's not all that much about it which is interesting any more. The machines have become transparent, and like the hotrods of yore, remain intersting only to retro-buffs.

OK, I will make a prediction. I predict that the skills which require honing will make a comeback. Local productions of live content will increasingly better the multi-media shows of the superstars. Designer life in skyscrapers will come back down to earth. People will get better at communication across the various divides of nation, agency, race and class.

This prediction is trivial; it will happen because it has to. The earth, eternally, will call back her own. But there will also be something more important which underlies this change. People will discover that the word "information" has lost all sense. Proliferation of shapeless bits, or shapely bits without meaningful content, or piling on of words and pixels and the beauty of natural worlds gone by has almost nothing to do with knowledge.

And so Information Technology, while it can empower mass literacy on the productive side, just the way the Gutenberg press signalled mass literacy on the receptive side, has almost nothing to do with the human ability to discern patterns among ceaseless noise. That requires a quiet mind. An ability to read slowly. Some refinement to taste.

Without those refinements - those honings - Information Technology can only enable acceleration in the concentration of capital, and massive bloomings of misery among geometrically exploding populations of humans reduced to beastliness.

The solution has always been recognized to be a matter of distribution, and not of capacity. Rates of reproduction slow as dreams move in to sight. And the center of gravity for dreams is not a slumdog win at the lottery. It's for life, liberty and the pursuit of that sort of happiness best represented by the local thrill of rooted dance.

I know from the proliferation of specialties in the medical industry that I have been both effectively removed from the process of improving care, and made the only person in any position at all to pull the pieces together. Economic imperatives have meant that my private physician will never visit me at home or at the hospital. My nurse will never bathe me or change my sheets. Even my temperature is taken by a specialist for that.

And nowhere is there any time for me to describe the quirks of my existence to someone well-enough trained to put these together with the mountains of research writings she must master to form some sense of what is really going on. Who knows? There may be new insight to be gained from some patient attuned enough to his own body to notice changes other from those which are clinically symptomatic.

But the cost to, say, set a bone now is so far away from reason that someone without insurance might reasonably be urged to get someone practiced in butchery to do it at home. Pay maybe 10 times the income the butcher might get from cutting meat on the assembly line. Sure, there are lots of things to check for using high-tech equipment. But really, the process has grown strange.

The economic logic which leads to overspecialization and endless outsourcing is not designed to lower your cost. It's designed to maximize profits as they become concentrated in the holding entities which will always deserve and get the bulk of government rescue funds. No matter the scope of the flood you might get caught in.

You and I don't need to live in palaces any more wonderful than the ones we already enjoy. We don't require 3D television to extend our wonder at the real world all around us. We don't need to push away the risks of living beyond the point of diminishing returns; to where there is no life worth living to be preserved. And we're certainly not interested in the perpetual me me me me me so loudly promoted by the fear-mongering religionists, the perpetual youth industry, nor the geek rapture techophiles. We find our me in relation. We let it go in time.

Catalytic Marketing

I like this term "Catalytic". I like it better than "viral" which has been used to describe the way that Youtube videos make their way around the Internet. I've watched it in action, when, say, college kids find a really engaging video and pretty soon it's all over campus. Pretty much like a virus.

It quickly becomes necessary to have seen the videos that everyone else has seen, almost reminiscent of the old days when there were only a few networks on TV and everyone had basic familiarity with the lineups. And then they become quaint and impossible to appreciate, because they made the next thing possible.

Of course, I never did have that basic familiarity with TV lineups say, so I don't feel so left out now either. I never did quite engage with popular culture, and even now, when people are getting their flu shots, or when they urge me to take some over the counter drug, I get that huh?? look in my mind, wondering what they're talking about or why they would say such things to me.

I pretty much assume those messages are for other people. I do watch the advertisements, but I guess as a subcategory of my lousy memory, they never stick with me. Although it does seem as though it's yet another case of the permanent memory of learning. I taught myself some ages ago that propaganda is all lies and that only stupid people pay attention to it.

If or when I get the flu and die, you can mock me out (we talk like that in Buffalo) about it, after the fact for certain.

At that school for gifted kids which I headed for a brief time, we expended a lot of effort to bring the kids up to a level of reading which would immunize them to all sorts of tricks of writing. As good readers, they were all able to catch the tricks which would push them toward unsubstantiated conclusions. It was always a little bit alarming to realize how many, if not most, of the naively-schooled kids when they started were utterly defenseless against such things. It took a lot of work to expose shoddy arguments. And then it would become second nature.

I think that Twitter is a case of viral marketing. Somehow it became a thing that everyone just had to do if they were going to be paid attention. And, yes of course, I still don't get it. I have a Twitter account, but I don't have very many followers. I guess I have a few, and I was supposed to return the favor and follow them back on the assumption that we all want exposure.

But I still really really don't get how it works. It seems as though it's a rapidly flowing stream of little messages, from among which how the hell would you pull the ones you're interested in? It's just another way for those at the top to rise further still, as far as I can tell, which makes it a part of that same vicious feedback loop which keeps the spammers spamming.

Well, someday someone will explain all this to me. Meantime, I'll just keep trying to get attention by making sense. Which, of course, I do realize I'm pretty clueless about also.

I think I must be missing some big chunk of feedback loop myself. When I write, I know perfectly well that I can't sense how someone else might read me. But it's not that easy to fix it up. At least it's not for me.

I think we all look with curiosity in mirrors as we pass them, to check out how we might look to the world. But I never really do get a clue. My curiosity is never satisfied. I look to myself like some Cubist construction which can't possibly make any sense.

No sense of style, a geek's sense of clash, I remember once - I still cringe at the memory - going out to the theater in really old clothes I'd found in a relative's attic. This was an elderly gent who needed help getting around, and I was a student who needed a cheap place to live. And somehow he still had in his closet his old finery from days long gone by.

Among old things in his attic, were some really well tailored clothes from another era, which fit me perfectly. He'd said I could, of course, take them, and I thought they looked really cool.

Now, given my sense that all advertisements are meant for other people, you can easily imagine how I thought I didn't look any more silly than people who sport wildly colored and striped running shoes, no matter what else they're wearing. Or sports clothes in general, for that matter, which I would plainly be too embarrassed to wear. It's funny how loud colors and bold racing stripes can make you disappear. They make me feel conspicuous. Go figure!

But I knew then, but was bullishly obtuse about it, that I was raising eyebrows with what must have looked like a theatrical costume. The waist was high, there were buttons instead of a zipper, elaborate cuffs and pleats, and a broadcloth wool flannel shirt.

As it happened, I actually think that look came into style a little later, but I was just a plain ass and cringe to think about it still. I think that's the way I write too. I can be so far inside the words sometimes that I have absolutely no sense of how someone else might read them. Only much later, or as the result of someone's offhand comment, can I be jarred into seeing it like it is. Like when you overhear or oversee someone caricaturing you, and you suddenly realize some little thing. Ouch.

It's all moderately painful. But also, maybe, related to what I'm trying to call "catalytic marketing" as differentiated or opposed, maybe, from "viral marketing".

Someone has to be a trendsetter. In the world of ideas, or the world of science, there is often a race to be the one out front. And if the discovery can be trued, then very quickly everyone's sense of style begins to quicken in that direction.

This is a catalytic process, and its results are fairly permanent. Unlike viruses, which kill off a bunch of hosts and then fall in to the background themselves once the population has made its adjustments.

I'm reading this book now, written by the former Chinese leader Zhao Ziyang, who ran afoul of party orthodoxy upon the events at Tiananmen square back in 1989. He was placed under house arrest for the rest of his life, but still managed to secrete and smuggle out his thoughts by overtaping childrens' cassettes. It's a fascinating look inside the pinnacles of power.

He likens the corruption which China so famously unleashed during the time of first opening of their economy, to a kind of inevitable virus against which there were no institutional defenses. There was simply too much power in the hands of the government officials who had been in control of state run industries, and too much money in the hands of newly liberated businesspeople. Across that disconnect was a kind of undeniable voltage, which would inevitably lead to corruption.

If you can buy at state controlled prices and then sell on the market, of course you will, because there's too much money to be made. Zhao was confident that the institutional structures would catch up. But the rest of the cabal in power could not abide his speaking out of step against their absolute authority, and so he was silenced almost completely and almost permanently.

You have to assume that one day pretty soon, a kind of catalysis will take place in China. Where certain kinds of information will make it through the censors, and power structures will start to break up in their brittleness.

Or maybe not, since the intellectuals there now have so thoroughly internalized a kind of patriotism which is for all the world reminiscent of Confucian quasi-religious honor toward their Center.

The patriotism of Chinese intellectuals is an almost perfect analog to our own intellectuals' commitment to "democracy" as an ideal which is almost perfectly tarnished inside the intellectuals' academies themselves. Where everything is rank-order and politically correct. Honor in the breach, I guess. There would be no place at all in any academy for people who talk and think the way they do around where I live. I'm not saying there should be. I'm just pointing out the obvious. And scholarship is not just a matter of the cultivation of taste and style. There are much more serious things at stake than that.

And so we ourselves, in these United States, as lots of smart people understand perfectly well, have perfected state control by a kind of drowning out by the noise of commerce, the dangerous thoughts of anyone who would rail against our system. It's almost as if the more clearly you are able to state you case, the more marginalized you become, to any political party. Think Noam Chomsky or Ralph Nader. Speaking straight will get you alienated from all strategists, no matter which side they're on.

However poorly our economic system does to provide for equitable distribution of wealth, it surely does a better job, for us inside our borders, than most systems which have been imagined. It would be crazy now to undermine the basics of free markets. Except at the extremes of size and power, there is no more rational way to line up supply with demand.

Which leaves us only to consider the optimal political arrangements for generating agreement about how to resolve the really big problems so that we can keep the market magic working.

Almost no-one on this continent would favor the Chinese methods. We celebrate free thought far too much, even while we throw sticks and stones at it. But as Tom Friedman and many others point out very effectively, we don't show any real promise about getting our act together to resolve the really really big issues, like global warming, or energy effectiveness, or healthcare.

Our political arrangements tend almost inevitably toward do-nothing compromises such as the one we're about to get with healthcare. We attempt to prevent harm to the bulk of the major franchises, to the point where no real forward motion is possible, and we end up with the same old same old, still tending toward catastrophe.

But a kind of catalysis can still occur. It happens all the time with marketing. Someone sees an actual use for something new, and it just catches on. I'm thinking of the really big things like telephones, and railroads, and automobiles, each of which was an abomination for many, or extremely improbable, but each of which very quickly became a fundamental necessity.

It's almost unbelievable to me, walking the streets of New York, how many people have Walkmans - whoops, I meant iPods - stuffed into their ears. I can't tell if it's a matter of style now, or if it really makes these people happy. Very few of them look happy, I must say, Perhaps they're getting the daily news.

This is the way our thinking will change too. And it will change, because it must. You really don't own your own mind, no matter how much you value free-thinking. Your mind is and will always be a function of commerce in so-called ideas. Your certainties can always be upset by someone more expert than you. If you're open minded, they must be.




Does "catalytic marketing" fit better than "viral marketing"?

Last year's man

 oooh, very very oooh. Mmmm. Not sure.

I just now for the first time reached out to the blogosphere and touched someone. Scary business, this. Very scary. I was very me, as in saying something so opaque that it could be rejected without implication. But then I wanted to know. I needed to know. I was suddenly really afraid that I'd crossed some line I didn't understand. That I'd get blocked and yuched. (The topic of the blog I came across, really quite excellent, was to relate sex to blogging. Very insightful and funny. And I learned this trick about titles for my links)

So this blogger got me, which is so way cool. As in I'm the shy one at some orgy. EEEEEeeee. cringe. Bolting for the door here. I still can't work up the courage to "friend" that person I still can't quite remember from highschool. It was so damn long ago . . . 

Back to work!