life

I try to explain to him what it means and how it feels, and while I’m talking I wonder whether those two things are the same.

Imagine that you speak a language that only one other person in the world speaks. You don’t even think about it as a language - it’s just the world you inhabit together. One day you wake up and that person is gone, and that means that your language is gone, as if it never existed. You can’t capture or call it, and words start to fade from the pages of your memory. People tell you - there are other languages in the world. Losing this language - why, that gives you the opportunity to learn one of these other languages instead! It’s true, you can learn another language - but it won’t be the language that you’ve lost, and your tongue will still be silenced. The worst knowledge of all, though, is that as the language leaves you like rain soaking back into the earth, you’re also losing the memory of the person that you spoke it with, the one person who shared that world with you.

I watch his face to see if he understands, but it long ago ceased to matter. I’m dreaming of words that I will never hear again, and inside I weep for the voice that is gone forever.

Many technotopian scenarios can be described as “the geek will inherit the earth”. The most recent example of two rich white men wearing heavy-rimmed glasses pontificating about how indispensable they’re going to be after the apocalypse recently appeared on boingboing and worldchanging - two sites which have a lot to recommend them but also have a vastly inflated idea of their own importance. I’m going to quote a big chunk, because I like making myself angry.

What would it be like, we wondered, if folks who knew tools and innovation left the comfy bright green cities and traveled to the dead mall suburban slums, rustbelt browntowns and climate-smacked farm communities and started helping the locals get the tools they needed. We imagined that it would need an almost missionary fervor, something like the Inquisition (which largely destroyed knowledge) in reverse, a crusade of open sharing, or as Cory promptly dubbed it, the Outquisition.¹

Imagine these folks like this passing out free textbooks, running holistic programs for kids, creating local knowledge management systems, launching microfinance projects, mobilebanking and complementary currencies. Helping rural landowners apply climate foresight and farm biodiversity. Building cheap, smart, quality housing for displaced people (not to mention better refugee camps), or an Open Architecture Network for cheap informal rehabs of run-down suburban housing. Hacking together DIY windmills and ad hoc smart grids, communication systems, water treatment systems — and getting really good at adaptive reuses of outdated infrastructure. In other words, these folks would be redistributing the future at a furious clip.

Yeah, just imagine! Actually reading about how development works² would reveal that what they’re describing is one of Doctorow’s barely-readable novels rather than the real world. The model of sending out experts to tell the ignorant masses how to do things right (which the ignorant masses welcome with open arms, if they know what’s good for them, etc, etc) has been almost completely discredited as a vehicle for meaningful development since the early 1990s, making it deeply ironic that they would project their their self-aggrandising futurism onto such a retrograde screen.

1. This is a really uninspired, inaccurate and embarrassing title. [↩]
2. They could start with Duncan Green’s excellent From Poverty to Power, which is as good an overview of mainstream development thinking as you’ll find. [↩]

So while I was plastering around an electrical socket, I thought to myself, “Gypsum. I wonder what gypsum is”. Gypsum, my friends, is calcium sulfate dihydrate, a naturally occurring chemical with the chemical formula CaSO₄·2H₂O.

Calcium sulfate is also “The traditional and most widely used coagulant to produce Chinese-style tofu. It produces a tofu that is tender but slightly brittle in texture.” Wikipedia claims that “the coagulant itself has no perceivable taste”, but I still appear to be eating my own house.

This makes me sad.

Life would probably be much improved if we were all Super Deformed.

I grew up in Croydon, which was a cultural graveyard made only partly bearable by the fantastic Warehouse Theatre. (It’s still a cultural graveyard, but now with added Ikea and knife crime.) Music was my only outlet, but there was a serious lack of live music, so it was two turntables (and occasionally a microphone) for me. I spent an unhealthy proportion of my time hanging around in record shops, listening to 12″s that I couldn’t afford and waiting for something exciting to happen. Nothing exciting happened, so I got out of Croydon as soon as I could.

I vaguely recall Big Apple Records in Surrey Street being one of those record shops, purveyors of white labels so obscure that even I had no idea what they were - all shiny black sleeves and illegible marker pen. Now I discover that Big Apple Records was the spiritual home of dubstep in its early days.

Bastards. They could have told me they were planning a musical revolution.

I keep meaning to write something insightful about the Montenegrin economy, but frankly who wants to be blogging when the weather is this nice? However, sometimes they just write themselves:

28 May 2008 Podgorica : A man suffering from a psychiatric disorder directed traffic in Montenegro’s capital for about half an hour until he was caught by police.

The 36-year-old man, dressed in a police uniform, started directing traffic with a baton at a busy intersection in the centre of Podgorica on Sunday evening…

… Police discovered that the man was a patient at a local psychiatric clinic, who had committed similar offences before.

“I always wanted to be a policeman and finally got the chance,” the man reportedly told police.

This guy clearly wants to be a policeman really badly, so I say give him a uniform and let him have a go. He can’t possibly do a worse job at directing traffic than most of the rest of the Montenegrin police force.

Apart from Colossal Squid, I am also a huge fan of Airwolf, and have long been an advocate of the use of Airwolf as an adjective (RIP Young Dave).

Unfortunately that just didn’t fit with WFP’s corporate vision, the losers, so I survived in the Airwolf underground for years. However it may not be possible to conceal my true allegiance for much longer, as I am about to place a bid on a full-size Airwolf Replica.

The full size Airwolf replica was made with an existing Bell 222A airframe. The side panels, nose panel and refueling port were all made from the specs from the original Airwolf and are exact. The ADF pod and chainguns are not included in this auction, but will be available if anyone is interested.

You’re damn right I’m interested in the chainguns. For all those pundits wringing their hands about what can be done to help the people of Burma, the answer is a single word - Airwolf.

if:book meditates on the nature of libraries private and public:

There’s a pessimistic view of human behavior embedded in library construction and the watchfulness of the sentries who guard them: if we, the public, could get at the books, we would most certainly destroy them.

There was the expectation that the barriers would be torn down with the coming of electronic libraries, that once the book’s spirit left its object, it would likewise escape its economic shackles. Certainly it makes sense: an electronic text isn’t degraded by copying in the same way that every reading is an infinitesimal destruction of a physical book.

Is this “infinitesimal destruction” - the sense that an artifact being degraded by those who value it the most - embedded in the nature of a book? I find electronic books ghostly and unsatisfying; the Kindle is a ouija board for the stillborn soul of a book, a mausoleum rather than a library. Is it wrong to want the world to collapse slowly around me while I collapse back into it?

Just as compulsory primary education created a market catered for by cheap dailies and weeklies, so the spread of secondary and latterly tertiary education has created a large population of people, often with well-developed literary and scholarly tastes, who have been educated far beyond their capacity to undertake analytical thought.

- Peter Medawar

(HT: Cosma Shalizi)

While reading this post, you should be listening to Superfly.

Rupert and family are moving from the wilds of London to the far more civilised Vancouver Island in Canada, which I believe used to be part of the British Empire until they had their membership revoked for being too close to the US. (Geography fact: Vancouver Island has a larger population than Montenegro.)

I’m proud to say that I knew Rupert before he became a big vlogging star and sold out to The Man - he directed our award-winning (ahem) short film “Tracks”, back when we were in short trousers. For a while I was worried that he would drop out of film-making completely, but he came back from a completely unexpected angle - using his mobile phone camera to shoot and edit short films about his life.

Video-blogging can easily turn into navel-gazing, but he managed to avoid this when he started out by posting what were essentially comedy sketches about a movie geek trapped in a dull office job in his dad’s company. The fact that Rupert was in fact a movie geek trapped in a dull office job in his dad’s company only made the sketches funnier. And sadder. But mainly funnier.

Now he’s all growed up - married to Kate, father of Amy, and no longer working in the dull office job - and his vlogs focus on his real life as opposed to his fantasy life. It’s great stuff, mainly because his slightly manic delivery makes for compelling viewing, but he’s also just a great bloke. Witness one of his recent posts, where he laments the annihilation of the local Post Office and interviews his local PO manager Mrs Patel.

The Minute wishes him the best of British in the New World. Please do keep videoblogging - I would join you, except my cellphone is nowhere near as flash as yours.

My life: a goat and a bag of cement.

Please, no obscene jokes.

Cranmer is more than a little irritated by … bland and oblique moralising

Oh crikey. When Cranmer gets a little irritated, property gets damaged, so imagine that carnage that will ensue now that he’s more than a little irritated. Your Grace, what’s got you so riled up?

While Cranmer agrees that the decriminalisation of suicide in 1961 made a modicum of sense insofar as one could never achieve a successful prosecution of the successful and ought to express compassion toward the unsuccessful, the liberalisation of the law on euthanasia would be a dangerously amoral development, as the Lords Spiritual asserted when the issue was last presented to Parliament.

Aha, euthanasia - always a good way of telling the religious person from the secular. Along with abortion, it’s the last area where the faithful believe that they have the right to impose their views on everybody else in our society. Unfortunately Cranmer is not content to assert that his particular faith group is against suicide / euthanasia - he wishes to demonstrate that

Opposition to ‘do anything which is destructive of life’ is one of the few general rules which unites all of the world’s religions

as well as apparently being against the principles of Enlightenment secularism. Unfortunately the quotations he provides demonstrate exactly why the world’s religions are in no position to dictate what the individual does with their body. Read the rest of this entry »

I recently disengaged from Facebook. It was fun for about two months, but then the endless round of trivial “applications” became oppressive and the irritating whimsy of the interface made me uneasy. Facebook didn’t represent my life in any way - it didn’t even represent my online life in any way. While I’ve kept my account, I no longer respond to invitations to “Become a Vampire” or “SuperPoke” anybody - and if you try to get me to play Scrabulous, I will fight you (offer extends to real life only).

Facebook claims to be “a social utility that connects you with the people around you”, but it doesn’t feel much like that to me, and Tom Hodgkinson smacked that claim down in his Guardian comment last week, With Friends Like These. Hodgkinson is a grumpy bastard Luddite - the column starts with the words “I despise Facebook” and gets more vitriolic from there - but he nails some of the deep and unpleasant realities behind Facebook’s founders and language:

Facebook is a well-funded project, and the people behind the funding, a group of Silicon Valley venture capitalists, have a clearly thought out ideology that they are hoping to spread around the world. Facebook is one manifestation of this ideology. Like PayPal before it, it is a social experiment, an expression of a particular kind of neoconservative libertarianism. On Facebook, you can be free to be who you want to be, as long as you don’t mind being bombarded by adverts for the world’s biggest brands.

Nobody has enunciated my concerns as well as Giant Robot, a Finnish electro group (and awesome Finnish group, by the way), in their track “Public=Shopping”. Now this track is about the commodification of urban life, but it resonates quite heavily with Facebook:

Public = Shopping
(Internet to make you shop)

Office = Desktop
(Internet to make you work)

Home = Bed and TV
(Internet to make you sleep)

Encourage to consume
Encourage to produce

We know what Facebook is (social utility, blah blah blah), but what is Facebook about? The simple truth is this: Facebook is about other people making money from your friendships. That’s not something I want - how about you?

There wasn’t much to do in Kabul back in the day, so in our spare time we re-staged events from contemporary Afghan politics. Now, thanks to the wonder of the Atari 2600 Labelmaker, these are available in game form! Ladies and Gentlemen, experience the pulse-pounding excitement that is:

I knew that there were a frightening number of cellphones here in Montenegro, but I had no idea that there are more cellphones than people.

Montenegro has a population of around 620,000 citizens — with an average monthly salary of 326 euros. According to the Telecommunication Ministry, the number of mobile phones in use in the country numbers around 700,000… This growing phenomenon shows that to Montenegrins a mobile phone is not just a phone, it is a status symbol… Instead of trying to afford the newest Mercedes, Renault or Peugeot every several years, a cell phone can be switched every few months for a lot less money.

All very interesting, but what I want to know is why the entire population of Montenegro has entered an arms race to find the most offensive ringtone available and then play it as loudly as possible.

Via Freesteel, Cory Doctorow is roasted over hot coals for peddling techno-porn. No, not the sort of techno-porn where Bjork robots make out with each other, but the kind which

subscribe(s) to the usual techno-myth of a future in which we become immortal beings after our brains have been uploaded into computers for back-up, emulation, and pleasure-seeking downloads into other meat-puppets.

As Julian points out, this is an “interesting” future only insofar as it’s the only future that would let us avoid having to actually live in the future:

Now folks, there are two kinds of futures we can talk about; there’s the fake one which we like to imagine, where our grandfather gets cured of cancer at the hospital and lives forever, and then there’s the real one which we will all eventually be living in, whether we like it or not.

Doctorow stands accused of talking the talk but not walking the walk - touring the planet to preach the gospel of webtopia with a carbon footprint the size of Guatemala. Hell, he’s guilty as charged - but then so am I. In the pay of “humanitarian organisations”, I fly around the world on a regular basis just like Doctorow, paying into the same engine of climate change that is going to be paying out a lot of future disasters.

The irony is that the entire humanitarian sector is pretty much dependent on jetting around the world without much thought for the environmental consequences - and often without a thought for the environmental causes of the problems we’re trying to resolve. It’s not as if we can teleconference in our response to the Indian Ocean tsunami, but if we just invested more in local capacity we probably wouldn’t need to, at least not as often as we do.

Enough of my wailing and gnashing of teeth. Read the whole post for a scabrously funny flight-by-flight analysis as Cory Doctorow

does what he can to make the listener feel inferior and envious of his life, and of the way he can give the same speech over and over again which people want to hear, get passes into secret clubs in Disneyland, and generally have a cool time jet-setting around a world where everybody loves him.

I want to live in the real future, not a webtopian fantasy. Where do I sign up?

Search engines will eventually be used for no other purpose than nostalgia. We’ll browse them like we would an old photo album, laughing and crying at the searches we requested in our youth, and occasionally rediscover sites and documents that were once important to us. We’ll share our searches with our grandchildren, who won’t understand what we’re talking about, since their entire memory set will already be fully indexed.

Here’s a case in point (and a useful segue) - I was searching for the string ‘tyranny’ and (re-)discovered the script of El Minotaur Blanco by Van Chootijaram.

It’s hard to describe El Minotaur Blanco. It’s a work of genius, but not the kind of genius that you’re thinking of. It’s postmodern, but in a postmodern way, which suggests that it may not be postmodern at all and I just don’t understand the word. It’s a western, but only in the way that Pearl Harbour was a classic (i.e. it wasn’t).

You can’t see this film, because it was never made (I hope). You can’t even read it, because you don’t know how to get in touch with Van Choojitarom (unless you email him like I did). You can’t even imagine it, because you’re only human (I’m making a lot of assumptions here). All you need to know is that this film contains - if he can be contained - one of the greatest characters I’ve ever read.
Read the rest of this entry »