Category Archives: Miscellany

People as product

Last week in the thread “Notable Quotes, Excerpts, and Profound Lines” over at Mobileread, I read this quotation:

“The people who use sites like Google and Facebook are not those companies’ customers. They are the products that those companies sell to their customers. In general, if you’re not paying for it, then you’re the product. Sometimes you’re the product even if you are paying for it.”

—Bruce Schneier, Liars & Outliers: Enabling the Trust that Society Needs to Thrive.

It got me thinking about the ways I am product: at Facebook, on Twitter, on Google. The thought that followed on the heels of that one was, “As product goes, I’m not worth much.” Sell my personal information, sure. But use it to sell me something? Not likely. The concept of me-as-dataset is not troubling. Think it is gold? It is not. It is not me either.

A pitch is like an invitation to a dance. To be sold, you have to first agree to be waltzed around by the ones doing the selling. When you are young, you lack experience and find it easy to say yes. By the time you grow up, you are more discriminating.

From the days of people barking their goods on city streets to the present when they bark their goods online, we have not come so very far. We pass by with our own agendas, hopes, worries, dreams, pain, distractions, likes, and dislikes. These characteristics are not stiff and static as they are when extracted as data. Instead they are like leaping all over the place, like popcorn in a machine.

People are quirky and unpredictable product. That is because they are alive.

As an actual living person, you look down on ads from a great height. If you stop to pat the ad on the head and say “cute,” you might buy what the cute little thing is selling.  But  a cautionary note: be yourself. You are not your dataset. You never will be.

The power of story

Last week  I found an old college notebook and on one of the pages was this quotation from Jean Paul Sartre’s Nausea:

A man is always a teller of tales. He lives surrounded by his stories and the stories of others, he sees everything that happens to him through them; and he tries to live his own life as if he were telling a story.

Stories are nets we throw over reality to shape and tame it. Some stories have repeatable results: we call those stories “science.” Others make us see higher, deeper, and better than we could have seen on our own; we call those “art.” Others explain life, the universe, and everything else; we call those “religion.” Some stories give us respite and escape; those are entertainment. There are as many stories as there are people to tell them.

There was a scene in the movie Argo where some airport security thugs were enthralled for a few minutes by a man who used storyboards to tell them a tale that they wanted to hear. This scene surely was false to the reality of the escape, but it is true to the power of stories. They work that way.

Hardwired

I believe we are hardwired for story. Think of it. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is a story. So is the 23rd Psalm. Every ad tells a story, the purpose of which is to get you to buy what the ad is selling. The adage “change your thoughts, change your life” is another way to say  “learn to tell yourself new stories.”

Stories and violence

Do violent stories cause violent behavior? Good lord, no. Imagine how we would live if they did, with nine guns for every ten US citizens and supersized portions of violence and cruelty dished up every day in entertainment and the news. We would have to abandon public life entirely.

Never mind schools—people would not gather in public anywhere. No libraries or town meetings, no malls, no businesses, no bars or restaurants, no grocery stores. No movies, no shows. What provisions we needed we would order online, and these would be delivered by people wearing body armor, with an armed guard always present (remember: they are afraid of you, too). We would work at home. We would put on armor like we put on coats, and carry weapons always when we went out. If we went out.

A few businesses might survive. They would have TSA-like security at the door, and patrons could shop or eat or be entertained in the shadow of a banner saying “This is what makes us free.” Think of a combination of a police state and a lunatic asylum.

No, violent stories don’t cause violent behavior. A steady diet of stories that glorify and sanitize destruction (by “sanitize” I mean that it is consequence free; the violence goes over a cliff into the ether) would never turn me into someone who murders innocent people. I’d kill myself first, not last. But suppose you are the kind of person for whom those stories do take. Suppose there is a cancer inside—never mind where it came from—that grows because it is fed these stories. Cancer cells need food, the same as anything else alive. They can be starved, too.

It’s a lock and key relationship, the one between who you are and the stories that shape you. Some take. Others do not. Two people see the same movie and have opposite reactions. What is thrilling for one is boring for another and vice versa. This is not news.

I think mass murderers almost always commit suicide afterward because they know that reality is coming fast. And they won’t like the story it has to tell.

Life stories

Do you think stories have no effect on you? Think again. When you watch television, what shows do you choose? What about movies? Books? Games? And don’t stop with fiction. Has a news story ever gotten to you? Why? What about the stories told by relatives, coworkers, bosses, neighbors, friends, and enemies?

When someone says “that’s the way I roll,” what are they talking about? We live and die by stories.

Little, Big

I know people who get tens of thousands of  hits a month on their blogs, but I am not one of them. Barring some freakish celebrity, this will not happen. Should I stop blogging, knowing this?

Sometimes it is claimed that numbers below a certain benchmark are equivalent to “nothing” or “nobody.” (This benchmark is determined arrogantly by those who have a stake in believing it.) But in blogs, as in so much else in life, small can be beautiful. The people I reach and who reach me through Writer’s Rest are—believe me—a very, very, VERY far cry from nobody. I learn from them and they from me. The campfire that is my blog has attracted some choice readers.

This is not nothing. It is not even small. Considering that every act reverberates forward, we don’t know (and often would not believe) the scope of our influence.

This came clear when I was thinking about, of all things, sewing. A woman from another time who sewed beautiful things for her family and friends would not be on board with the suggestion that she was sewing for “nobody.” She would not consider her numbers to be inadequate. Nor would they reflect on the quality of her work. The recipients of her gifts got to feel lucky. Especially lucky.

Everyone loves to discover something the greater world has not tuned in on yet. A little restaurant. A great store. An inn that flies under the radar. This is the world I live in, and it is a good place.

***

What small things make big differences in your life?

Advantage: Mother Nature

The Big Blow named Sandy (aka, FrankenStorm’s monster) was so ogreish in its size and slowness that its effects extended all the way to the Midwest. One of the oddest scenes I saw on the Weather Channel was guys in wet suits surfing Lake Michigan in Chicago. Pretty good surfing on that lake, too, on October 29.

Eight million have no power for who knows how long, there are billions of dollars in property damage, there are massive work and travel disruptions. More than one hundred people (so far) will never see another sunrise.

Here is southwestern Pennsylvania, there is some flooding but on balance we got off easy. If FrankenStorm’s monster had turned west instead of north, the world would be seeing footage of Pittsburgh under water.

In Snowshoe, West Virginia, they got eleven inches of snow. (Eleven inches was on the mild side; in Preston County, West Virginia, they got three feet.) While snow is familiar to residents of Snowshoe, a ski resort town, it was reported that they were shocked to realize that an East Coast hurricane could cause a blizzard in Snow Shoe, which is not—believe me—part of the East Coast.

Here is a photo of the storm taken from space by the NASA GOES Project:

The old wild mother

Intelligence has its uses. One can always refuse to be stupid. For example, if your plans on October 30 included a trip on rural mountain interstate 68 in western Maryland, where a blizzard is raging, you could choose not to believe in your personal blessedness—not to mention your personal immortality—and cancel the trip. You might as well. It was closed after many accidents. A bad bust-up occurred near a little town called Finzel.

Nature, The Old Wild Mother, holds all the trumps. That she does not always play them is no particular tribute to intelligence, human or artificial. She can wait.

One is drawn to images of storms—the pity, the shock, even the beauty (some photos are astonishingly beautiful). Most people still have sense enough to pay attention to the weather. In the utopian world some believe artificial intelligence is going to enable, there will still be weather.

Here is a slideshow of some damage from Sandy.

We stand upon the shoulders of first responders, workers, and technicians who know how to do something we don’t: keep the power flowing, put out the fires, clean up the most spectacular damage, risks their lives to protect us. These are privileges, not rights. And we hold to our old wild mother, because we have no choice in the end.

Yes, you can call it luck.

The Zone: an update

In 2009 I tried writing about the Zone. This blog is another try.

The Zone is that place where the road is wide open, and all the lights are green. Time fades out and doubt disappears. Anyone wholly absorbed in a task can find themselves in the Zone.

Color of money

In the 1986 Martin Scorsese movie The Color of Money, Tom Cruise plays Vincent Lauria, a kid with a gift for playing pool. Paul Newman plays Fast Eddie Felson, who is trying to teach Vincent to be a pool hustler.

One night Vincent rebels against Fast Eddie’s lessons and starts playing the way he knows he can. For about 3 minutes, The Color of Money is about being in the Zone.

biogofstory

Shirley Jackson must have been in the Zone when she wrote The Lottery.

She conceived the story one spring morning while pushing her toddler daughter uphill in a stroller also laden with groceries. She was pregnant with her third child. After she put away the groceries and settled her daughter in the playpen, she started writing. By the time her oldest child came home from kindergarten, she had finished her masterpiece.

She describes the experience in “Biography of a Story”:

I found that it went quickly and easily, moving from beginning to end without pause. . . . The story I finally typed up and sent off to my agent the next day was almost word for word the original draft. This, as any writer of stories can tell you, is not a usual thing. All I know is that when I came to read the story over I felt strongly that I didn’t want to fuss with it. I didn’t think it was perfect, but I didn’t want to fuss with it.

Her agent didn’t like “The Lottery” but sold it to The New Yorker, which didn’t like it either but published it to a firestorm of controversy in 1948.

She often was asked how she came up with the stark, shocking plot. “It was a warm morning and the hill was steep,” she said unhelpfully.

As Jackson’s comment proves, the Zone can be hard to explain. For some reason, listening to John Mayer’s “Waiting on the World to Change” helps me get to it while writing. No idea why.

The other day I heard “Wild Night” by Van Morrison: “Everything looks so complete / When you’re walking out on the street / And the wind will catch your feet / And send you flying.”

“Zone,” I thought.

When have you been working on something and found yourself in the Zone?

What movies, books, art, or music come to mind?

The funniest show in the world

When I make a list of things that make life worth living—and gratitude has been upmost in my mind recently—there is a permanent place for  Mystery Science Theater 3000. When it was firing on all cylinders,  it was the funniest show in the world.

The premise was simple: show bad movies and shorts while wisecracking about them. They were good at it.

Two hours of helpless laughter on a weekly basis. It would be something to do that once. The folks at Minnesota-based Best Brains made it happen over and over.

I don’t remember how I found MST3K, but I do remember the first episode I saw: Monster A Go Go. The smiling effects from my chance encounter with that appalling movie continue to this day.

The heart of Deep 13

I found MST3K in the mid-1990s, which meant that the glory days of the funniest show in the world coincided with the start of the personal computer revolution.  MST3K used to ask viewers to send letters (on paper! in envelopes! with stamps!). But it also ran in the early days of social media.

On CompuServe was a Special Interest Group (SIG) for fans called Deep 13. That SIG had some powerful mojo. Because of it, friendships formed that endure to this day. Marriages happened.

Last month I went to Chicago to see two friends I met originally in Deep 13. We saw some bad movies, and we had ourselves some laughs.

Now playing: Cinematic Titanic and Rifftrax

The people who made the funniest show in the world continue to do what they do. They split into two groups: Cinematic Titanic, created by Joel Hodgson, the original creator of MST3K; and Rifftrax (“we don’t make movies . . . we make them funny”).

Rifftrax is live in movie theaters several times a year. In Chicago we saw the Rifftax crew—Kevin Murphy, Mike Nelson, and Bill Corbett—riff  Manos, The Hands of Fate. Manos might not be the worst movie ever made, but it is a contender.

Restoration comedy

In 1998 I was seriously ill. Thanks to a friend in Deep 13, the folks at Best Brains sent me a get well card.

My message to them in September 2012: Guys, you’ve still got it. And I am doing fine.

Looking for the heart of . . .

The news about artificial intelligence on August 22, 2012, is that a startup  called Vicarious has gotten $15 million to search for the key to artificial intelligence. Their motto:

We’re building software that thinks and learns like a human.

The overall goal is to build “a truly robust set of intelligence algorithms, as opposed to an industry specific algorithm that leads to limited artificial intelligence — some kind of idiot savant.”

Watson can defeat Jeopardy champions

Much was made of IBM’s Watson AI project when Watson played Jeopardy champions and won, but how momentous was that victory compared with an ordinary day, or even an ordinary hour, in the life of a person? At the very least, we are efficient multitaskers, which Watson is not.

In a July 18, 2012, article titled “Does Thinking Really Hard Burn More Calories” in Scientific American, Ferris Jabr compares the energy required by the human brain with the energy required by Watson:

So a typical adult human brain runs on around 12 watts—a fifth of the power required by a standard 60 watt lightbulb. Compared with most other organs, the brain is greedy; pitted against man-made electronics, it is astoundingly efficient. IBM’s Watson, the supercomputer that defeated Jeopardy! champions, depends on ninety IBM Power 750 servers, each of which requires around one thousand watts.

But Watson can’t find the heart of Saturday night

Last weekend I was in Chicago, and last Saturday I was drifting up and down North Wells Street with many, many other people.  I thought of a song I had not heard in a long time: Tom Waits’s “The Heart of Saturday Night.” It has been recorded several times, but this is the version I know:

Urban drifting involves a lot of thought. Crossing and recrossing the street without hit by a car; reading signs; taking (or not taking) a side street because it looked (or did not look) interesting; finding the pulse of the crowd so that it is possible to drift without colliding with anyone; seeing the colors and sounds of the city while feeling the effects of a glass of zinfandel.

Watson would destroy me in Jeopardy. But he couldn’t find the heart of something so complexly beautiful as the crowd scene on North Wells Street last Saturday night.

My favorite ax murderess, Or the pitfalls of public opinion

I haven’t read a new book new for months. The only question I consider this summer is :”Did I like it when I read it before?”

Which explains how I happened to reread a book I bought for 25 cents at a long-ago sidewalk sale in central Pennsylvania: A PRIVATE DISGRACE: LIZZIE BORDEN BY DAYLIGHT by Victoria Lincoln. It was a well-spent 25 cents; a clean first edition such as the one I have sells now for north of $200.

Victoria Lincoln is smart and observant, and probably never suffered a fool gladly in her life. Also, she grew up in Fall River, Massachusetts, where the murders were committed. Lincoln got out of there young—with gratitude for the escape—but she remembers.

A note: A PRIVATE DISGRACE is the only book I’ve ever read about Lizzie Borden. I am not interested in the case. I just like Lincoln’s book.

Did Lizzie take an ax?

By Lincoln’s account, no question about it.

The murder weapon was found concealed in a place no stranger would have known about. Lizzie was seen burning a dress a couple days after the murders. She lied repeatedly during the inquest. A key witness, the Bordens’ maid, probably was bought off. Lizzie had means and opportunity. The question of motive is murkier. It was obvious that something had to happen in the Borden house soon before it spontaneously burst into flames.

Like the jury in THE PRODUCERS, Lizzie’s jury could have said, “We find the defendant incredibly guilty.”

But they did not. They acquitted her in an hour and a half.

So how come Lizzie was acquitted?

The short answer: Lizzie had a better lawyer than the one prosecuting the case. She was rich: she could buy the best. His name was Mr Robinson and he was, in Lincoln’s words, “an image maker.” The prosecuting attorney, Mr Knowlton, comes across as a decent, unimaginative man devoted to truth, logic, and reason. He was not good at working a jury; Robinson was.

After Robinson got Lizzie acquitted, he presented her with a bill for $25,000, quite a chunk of change in 1892. Lizzie objected to the fee, a fact that  Victoria Lincoln notes with amusement.

The public had an opinion, too

In 1892, the term “media circus” was unknown, but Lizzie was in the center of one all right.  Lincoln writes:

We Americans like a cause, or, as we say nowadays, a commitment. The world was running pretty smoothly in 1892; our problems in Venezuela were small potatoes, really. We had a lot of free-floating commitment to use up. Lizzie got it.

Lizzie’s jail cell was full of flowers. In jail she was treated her with kindness and given her special privileges. Ministers preached sermons on her innocence. Even the Women’s Christian Temperance Union had something to say about the case; they wondered how could a teetotaler have committed such an awful crime. Aided by Lizzie’s lawyer, newspapers invented a young woman pleasing to their readers—a loving daughter bullied and persecuted by the police and the district attorney.

How could this demure-looking woman in comfortable circumstances go berserk one day and murder her parents with a hatchet? No one wanted to believe that. Of course they didn’t.

When she was acquitted, The New York Times wrote that the jury did “express . . . somewhat of that justice with which God governs the world.”

What if Lizzie had been tried by a jury of robots?

Victoria Lincoln wrote coolly, “The human race has a remarkable ability to select and interpret facts according to its emotional needs.”

What would jurybots have done, faced with the same evidence? As robots are not generally programmed to disregard reality, they would not have done so. Based on the information Lincoln presents, they would have found her guilty faster than her human judges found her innocent.

Jurybots would weigh the evidence—all of it, including what Lincoln called “the sea of sand” of Lizzie’s testimony. They would not disregard the parts that contradicted what they want to believe. They would not want to believe anything. They would not, of course, be a jury of her peers.

Written conversation

These days, we are a nation of typists. More written conversations are going on than at any time in history, if only because there are so many ways to have them. Email. Texting. Social media. Blogs and comments on blogs.

Medium matters

Writing is shaped by the medium in which you write.  That has always been true. Pen and ink,  typewriters, and word processors all affect the words that get said, or not said. A letter written on notepaper with a fountain pen is a different letter than the one written on a computer, if only because editing is easy on a computer.

On Twitter you get in done in 140 characters or go home.

Even something as slight as clicking the Like button on Facebook is a flicker of conversation. “Hey, what you posted—that was good.”

A conversation over the phone is not the same as one done by instant messaging, even when they cover identical subjects. And neither of those conversations is the same as one had face to face.

People sometimes used to say, “We can’t talk about this on the phone.” I assume they were afraid talking on the phone would result in something important being omitted or misunderstood. I wonder what they would have thought of texting.

But different is not worse

I’ve been doing social media since the mid-1990s. (Anybody remember CompuServe? Some people I met there are friends to this day.)  Maybe because of this, I am skeptical of claims that computers and the internet have degraded conversation. As if we always are honest and aboveboard in person or on the phone.

Truth to tell: the opposite can be true.

Zero gravity conversation

A long time ago I thought talking on the Internet was like learning to move around in zero gravity. (Or as Vernor Vinge put it, “agrav.”) At first everything you do, you overdo. You don’t always get where you mean to go.  Then you get accustomed to this weightless medium (weightless in the sense that it leaves the body behind). You learn how to say what you mean and understand what others mean.

Computer games: a naive perspective

The Imagination Engine

The May issue of Wired has an article titled “The Imagination Engine: Why Next-Gen Videogames Will Rock Your World.”

Go look at it, if for no other reason than the spectacular screen captures.

The subject is UE4—the fourth iteration of a game engine wonderfully named the Unreal Engine, created by the North Carolina company Epic Games. Its abilities are epic, too:

UE4 represents nothing less than the foundation for the next decade of gaming. It may make Microsoft and Sony rethink how much horsepower they’ll need for their new hardware. It will streamline game development, allowing studios to do in 12 months what can take two years or more today. And most important, it will make the videogames that have defined the past decade look like puppet shows.

It is obvious even to me that UE4 is a brilliant invention.  But—low-tech soul that I am—I wonder whether the power of UE4 will result in better video games or only better-looking ones.  Will “armored demons, dancing sparks, and rolling balls of light” continue to dazzle when they are no longer new?

The question occurs to me because the best computer game I ever played is one whose name I have forgotten. It was on the first computer I owned, a Mac Plus, and the game must have been very simple because I could play it and win every time. This Mac Plus was the computer that taught me how to use computers, and this little game was the confidence builder I went to at the start of every session.

No matter what else happened, I could win that dumb game. It mattered at the time..

 Gamers: what rocks your world?

My perspective on videogames is naive (my perspective on computer games is not much better). I could be wrong about the role played by the dazzle.

What makes a good game?