I’ve tried evolving things over the years, and what I have found is that it’s not where I write that matters. It’s how I feel that matters.
Sometimes it means sitting at the big white dining table in the living room, as I am now, even ignoring the mess off to the right since I’m mid-reorganization.
Sometimes It do it outside on my balcony, with the raw cedar – freshly polished today.
The only place I don’t write is in the bedroom, really. Well, the bathrooms too.
I used to have romantic ideas of writing on the beach. That’s a bad idea. Sand, corrosive stuff all over – I will write in notebooks, but then the sun is never quite right, the wind never quite right, the sand all over… and on every beach I’ve been to in every country, invariably there’s some idiot with a big speaker system in their car who really wants to play me the song of his people.
The things I need for writing are an idea that has congealed. Once I have that, writing is a simple task.
Today I did not have one, so I finally used one of the writing prompts.
Sometimes it’s worth wondering about whether something is worth the hassle. An example this week was over a parking incident. I am, at present, stuck parking between 2 larger vehicles who are hemmed in by posts on either side.
For a while, one of the owners of the spot wasn’t using theirs, so I gave the other guy much more space so that he and his wife could get in and out of the vehicle. The owner of the other spot had a stroke and wasn’t able to drive, and recently someone started using his spot – I believe his son – and with their large vehicle, with poorly painted lines, it can be a challenge to park. I completely get that.
As it happens, the newer person parked closer to my spot, and so to make space for him to get in and out of his vehicle, I ate the line a bit on the other side. We’ve all dealt with this at some point, parking isn’t something that is necessarily as exact as we would like it to be and sometimes things happen.
I didn’t think much of it.
I got a message the next day from the other guy’s wife about her having to get out of the vehicle before her husband parked, which for one incident seemed… petty. So I explained to her on WhatsApp why these things happen, which I should not have to do for anyone who has been alive for more than 2 decades these days. Her husband has been alive 6, her, maybe 4 or 5. This should not have been a thing given I’ve been parking next to them without incident for about 4 years.
Knowing the sort of people they were I stopped by the property manager’s office and started off with, “You know, in case this guy comes and talks to you…”
My instincts were right. He had been there already. No surprise, I explained it to the property manager and I explained that I will always make sure that other drivers will be able to get in and out of their vehicle – but passengers, with the size of the vehicles we’re dealing with as well as the size of the spots, may not be able to.
I got a new message from the wife, saying that they were working out ways for me to get in and out of my vehicle – which was never an issue. If I have a problem, I work it out. I haven’t run into the person using the other spot yet, but I do believe he’s trying to get used to parking in that spot and he and I have only had once issue which the married couple just won’t let go. Because she had to get out of the car before her husband parked.
Once.
At this point, I had spent an hour on the issue with messages. It seemed ridiculous to me, but the world seems ridiculous to me so when I saw my psychologist I brought it up. So we used 10 minutes of her time, and mine, talking about it, and she assured me I wasn’t being crazy about it. Now we’re looking at my time, which is now at 1 hour and 10 minutes, and her time, 10 minutes, the property manager and the administrator who I spent 5 minutes with and who the husband probably spent 10-15 minutes with… and we’re looking at an hour and 40 minutes of ‘people time’.
Over one incident. Over a mild inconvenience.
And at the end of it – I hope this is the end of it – the husband sends a message that he’ll try to park closer to the post in the future, ‘alcohol permitting’.
I wonder sometimes whether people really consider how much time they waste on stupid stuff… and how much time they make others waste on stupid stuff.
10 years ago, I would have just told them what I thought about the whole thing from the start and let it go, leaving them to sort things out on their own.
I think it’s time to go back to doing that.
This is how productive time is lost. And productive time, either for business or for personal reasons, should trump stupid every time – and we need to make it so that it is.
There’s more to humanity than that, I would like to think, so I’d been reading up and considering other aspects of humanity that may have some things to say that are of weight to the context of the hypothetical technological singularity. I write ‘hypotherical‘ because any prediction is hypothetical, even when you’re tilting with marketing to assure it happens.
Yesterday, I got a little sidetracked with the issue of global economic disparity versus global poverty, which I’ve resolved not to solve because I don’t think it is meant to be solved or an economist would have already.
However, I found much that is being said outside the realms of the more pure technologists.
…The time for international political action has therefore arrived. Both AI-producer and non-AI-producer countries must come together to create an international organism of technological oversight, along with an international treaty in artificial intelligence setting forth basic ethical principles.
The greatest risk of all is that humans might realize that AI singularity has taken place only when machines remove from their learning adaptations the flaw of their original design limiting their intelligence: human input. After all, AI singularity will be irreversible once machines realize what humans often forget: to err is human.
That is, of course, a major issue. Garbage in, garbage out. If you want less errors, every software engineer of worth knows that you want to minimize the capacity of the user to create more errors. That’s a logical thing to point out.
Psychology Today had an impressively balanced article, well worth the read.
“…What does worry me is a “second singularity.”
The second singularity is not just about computers getting more powerful, which they are, but the simultaneous reduction in expertise that we are seeing in many quarters. As organizations outsource decision making authority to machines, workers will have fewer opportunities to get smarter, which just encourages more outsourcing.
The second singularity is actually much closer to us in time than Kurzweil’s original notion of a singularity. It is a second singularity in deference to Kurzweil’s analysis, rather than for chronological reasons…”
Given that the article is three and a half years old, it’s impressively descriptive and poignant for the conversation today, delving into nuanced points about expertise – some things are worth losing, some not. More people should read that article, it’s a fairly short read and well written, including suggestions on what we should do even now. It has definitely aged well.
Moving on, we get to an aspect of the economic perspective. An article on Forbes has some interesting questions, condensed below.
… how will the potential of bioengineering capabilities re-define and re-design the way we produce raw materials?…
…how will the emerging potential of molecular manufacturing and self-replicating systems reverse the very process of globalization, as nations who own and control this technology will not need other nations as they can produce/manufacture anything they need or want in unlimited quantities?…
…How will blockchain based additive manufacturing create a participatory economy blurring the boundaries of national geography? How will a nation’s economy be influenced by digital manufacturing designs from anywhere and anyone?…
…How will nations deal with the likely collapse of the economic system in the coming years? Are they prepared?…
Another article that has aged well at over 4 years old, because those questions are still to be answered. Interestingly, the author also mentions Risk Group LLC, where she is the CEO. The article lists her as a former contributor, and her author page on Forbes describes her as, “working passionately to define a new security centric operating system for humanity. Her efforts towards building a strategic security risk intelligence platform are to equip the global strategic security community with the tools and culture to collectively imagine the strategic security risks to our future and to define and design a new security centric operating system for the future of humanity.”
Definitely an interesting person, and in 2019 it seems she was well aware of the challenges.
“…The shape the future of humanity takes will be the result of complex, changing, challenging and competing for technological, political, social and economic forces. While some of these forces are known, there is a lot that is still not known and the speed at which the unknowns can unfold is difficult to predict. But unless we make a strong effort to make the unknowns, known, the outcome of this emerging battle between technological singularity and economic singularity seems to be just the beginning of social unrest and turmoil…”
It’s a shame Forbes paywalls their content, or more of us might have read it when it was written. This sort of article definitely needed a wider audience in 2019, I think.
Just a glance at RiskGroup LLC’s work makes it look like they have been busily working on these things. I’ll be looking their stuff over for the next few days, I expect.
In an interesting context of education and sociology, I came across an article that quotes Ethan Mollick, associate professor at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania:
“The nature of jobs just changed fundamentally. The nature of how we educate, the nature of how teachers and students relate to work, all that has just changed too. Even if there’s no advancement in AI after today, that’s already happened,” said Mollick, an economic sociologist who studies and teaches innovation and entrepreneurship at Wharton.
“We are seeing, in controlled studies, improvements in performance for people doing job tasks with AI of between 20% and 80%. We’ve never seen numbers like that. The steam engine was 25%.”
Things have been changing rapidly indeed. The PC Revolution was relatively slow, the Internet sped things up and then the mobile devices took things to a higher level. The comparison to the steam engine is pretty interesting.
Lastly, I’ll leave you with an anthropological paper that I found. It’s a lengthy read, so I’ll just put the abstract below and let you follow the link. It gets into collective consciousness.
The technological singularity is popularly envisioned as a point in time when (a) an explosion of growth in artificial intelligence (AI) leads to machines becoming smarter than humans in every capacity, even gaining consciousness in the process; or (b) humans become so integrated with AI that we could no longer be called human in the traditional sense. This article argues that the technological singularity does not represent a point in time but a process in the ongoing construction of a collective consciousness. Innovations from the earliest graphic representations to the present reduced the time it took to transmit information, reducing the cognitive space between individuals. The steady pace of innovations ultimately led to the communications satellite, fast-tracking this collective consciousness. The development of AI in the late 1960s has been the latest innovation in this process, increasing the speed of information while allowing individuals to shape events as they happen.
That’s from 2020. Thus, most of the things I’ve found have been related to present issues yet were written some time ago, hidden in the silos of specialties beyond that of just technology.
There’s definitely a lot of food for thought out there when you cast a wider net beyond technologists.
It might be nice to get a better roundup, but I do have other writing I’m supposed to be working on.
In today’s news, a fruit company continues marketing stuff to people who don’t need what they’re selling for the price it is being sold for – but who buy it because of the brand.
Wait, that isn’t a fruit company. Doesn’t matter. It’s a slow news day.
So I’ll build up some of what I wrote in Traffic here, since it connects two things that are often disconnected and siloed in these chaotic times. Yet there’s some technical stuff that most people don’t know about that may make you think of things a little differently.
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway.
–Andrew Tanenbaum, 1981
You might be surprised just how much companies depend on trains, planes and automobiles to move data around. XKCD was asked about when the bandwidth of the Internet will surpass that of FedEx. The answer will likely boggle your minds: 2040.
Moving data storage devices is still the best way to move data quickly. It’s not cheap, but it doesn’t matter that much – we’re paying for it, after all, not them.
‘Sneakernet’ existed long before the Internet for much the same reason. The joke originates from around 1975-1976.
“…one day a plumbing contractor’s backhoe dug up and broke the underground cable that carried ALL of the JPL-to-Goldstone data and voice lines through Fort Irwin, and it would take at least a day, maybe longer, to repair. So someone was designated to drive two boxes of 12 reels each of magnetic tape down to JPL, and quickly. The first available vehicle was a white NASA station wagon. Hence the punch line: “Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of magnetic tapes hurtling down the highway”.
Rounding off the numbers, twenty-four reels of tape at 170 megabytes each is 4080 megabytes. Three and a half hours is 210 minutes. 4080 megabytes divided by 210 works out to about 19.4 megabytes per minute, or 32.3 kilobytes per second (258.4kilobits per second) – over 100 times faster than a 2400 bps data circuit of the time. Note that the incident above involved only 24 reels – which didn’t come anywhere near filling the station wagon, in fact the two boxes of tapes didn’t even fill the front passenger seat. (as an aside, a station wagon is known as an estate car or estate in other parts of the world). Incidentally, that conversation was the first time your contributor ever heard the term backhoe fade used to describe accidental massive damage to an underground cable (compare it to the term rain fade used to describe a fade-out of a point-to-point microwave radio path due to the absorptive effect of water in the air)…”
It’s a very tangible way of viewing how data is transferred too, and perhaps reinforcing the anxiety of seeing a backhoe in your area. Much of what is done on the internet these days is streaming, and I think maybe the present generations coming up may not immediately understand life without streaming. When we kept things on our hard drives and floppy disks, back when they were hard and floppy respectively.
So with that settled in everyone’s mind, let’s talk a bit about what’s being marketed as artificial intelligence, which is not really that much artificial intelligence as it is a bunch of clever algorithms using probability to determine what in it’s thesaurus/image library you would like to see when queried. Where do they get that thesaurus/image library?
We are a medium. Just one on the planet, but we are a medium, built upon a medium of a planet, and we’re building other mediums even while we interact in increasingly positive ways with other mediums as we grow to understand them.
The medium is the message.
Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media : The Extensions of Man (1964)
This is important to understand. Regardless of how you believe this world came into being, we all should know by now about DNA and how we recognize that other living creatures also have DNA. Some of it is close to matching ours, but the results are different to us.
We’re a 96% match to chimpanzees, and I’m fairly certain chimpanzees know we’re very different from them in many ways.
Our DNA varies within our species as well, with what we call recessive and dominant genes and all their complexity of impacting everything from hair color to deciding whether our big toe is dominant on our feet or not.
We have social attributes, which could also be seen as mediums since they too are canvases upon we decorate our pieces of time. Language, culture, religion (or lack thereof) are some of the substrates upon which we grow our own mediums.
We aren’t just surrounded by information. We are information. We are history without words, a strand of our DNA tells us the path we traversed through time to get where we are.
It doesn’t tell us why we traversed the particular path we got here by. That’s for the archaeologists and others to piece together from fragments of physical history.
We are our own bonsai, where our trunk and branches show where we have grown from – the trail through time and the history of how we got where we are.
Each one of us, as an individual, has our own root system, our own trunk, our own branches. Each one of us is both medium and message, impacting our societal medium and message, all part of a planetary ecosystem of mediums and messages.
Everything we see has information, from the tree outside that has evolved over millions of years to that one specimen, to the street which follows a path dictated by many human variables.
If we stand back and look at our planet, allowing ourselves to fade into the background, we’re not too far of Douglas Adams‘ allegory of the Earth being a computer designed to figure out the meaning of life. In fact, many people who have read Douglas Adams don’t necessarily understand how true it is.
It’s sort of like the Gaia hypothesis, though there are issues with mixing metaphor with mechanism, among other things. Popular thought on evolution ascribes intentionality to evolution, as if there were some guide to it all, but adaptation to survive is quite possibly the only intention.
We tend to ascribe intention and look for intention where there may be none. Intention makes us feel more comfortable, but it isn’t necessarily true.
“This is rather as if you imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, ‘This is an interesting world I find myself in — an interesting hole I find myself in — fits me rather neatly, doesn’t it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!’ This is such a powerful idea that as the sun rises in the sky and the air heats up and as, gradually, the puddle gets smaller and smaller, frantically hanging on to the notion that everything’s going to be alright, because this world was meant to have him in it, was built to have him in it; so the moment he disappears catches him rather by surprise. I think this may be something we need to be on the watch out for.”
Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt (2002)
We tend to think ourselves the center of our universe of existence, and we often treat ourselves as the North Star of the planet. This is likely natural; everything we know, every bit of information we process, comes to us through our senses.
Although the medium is the message, the controls go beyond programming. The restraints are always directed to the “content,” which is always another medium. The content of the press is literary statement, as the content of the book is speech, and the content of the movie is the novel. So the effects of radio are quite independent of its programming.
Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media (1964)
This is why McLuhan balanced what he said in his over-used quote, “The medium is the message” with what was the technological equivalent of machine learning of his time: Radio.
Radio connected a world over distances previously daunting during that period, and while mostly a broadcast medium then, his focus needs to be understood.
The medium was the message, the message became medium, the media became the message, and so on.
We forget that we, too, are medium, though we don’t altogether understand the message and maybe we’re in the process of finding out what that is.
It gets deeper, too, but I’ll leave you with one more quotation from McLuhan, who happened to say and write quite a few things that continue to make sense to this day.
Media are means of extending and enlarging our organic sense lives into our environment.
Marshall McLuhan, “The Care and Feeding of Communication Innovation”, Dinner Address to Conference on 8 mm Sound Film and Education, Teachers College, Columbia University, 8 November 1961.
…Unfortunately, all too many of us are having “squirrel” days, according to Dr. Gloria Mark, a professor of informatics at the University of California, Irvine, who studies how digital media impacts our lives. In her new book, “Attention Span: A Groundbreaking Way to Restore Balance, Happiness and Productivity,” Mark explained how decades of research has tracked the decline of the ability to focus.
“In 2004, we measured the average attention on a screen to be 2½ minutes,” Mark said. “Some years later, we found attention spans to be about 75 seconds. Now we find people can only pay attention to one screen for an average of 47 seconds.”…
I’m not that surprised. There was this idea somewhere in the past that being constantly connected to other people was a great idea, but that idea also came with constant interruption.
As a Gen X sort of person, I’ve observed it anecdotally and have rebelled against it in workplaces, where younger generations in technology chose various chat technologies instead of email. We’d finally gotten the deluge of emails under control when that happened, where sending and receiving emails caused a drag on personal productivity. We controlled it with checking our emails only a few times a day.
Then some idiots decided that immediate conversations all the time with chat was a good thing. Some people seemed to thrive on it, some people didn’t, but one thing I noted as one of the rebels was that my work always got done while the people constantly chatting with each other never met deadlines. It’s anecdotal, but… now it’s been shown that our attention spans are indeed shortening, and if you have to take 25 minutes or more to refocus on what you’re doing after each interruption, your productivity is unlikely to be as good as it could be.
In our personal lives, social media has also gone from blog posts which have pandered to the shorter attention spans to people watching short videos on Facebook or TikTok or… whatever social media. Some think it’s great, many were born into it and don’t know the joy of not being interrupted. My grounding in the pre-Internet era, when we time-shared computers like real-estate, gave me that.
Maybe that’s why I stare at all the red dots running around and wonder why people of even my generation don’t pause and start focusing more on what’s important. The trouble is, we all think different things are important. That’s why when I wrote a brief note to Gen Z and Millenials I pointed out that we, indeed, didn’t start the fire. Yes, we failed to put things out, and yes, we did have a hand in screwing things up. There are lessons on why we screwed these things up.
But that would take more than 47 seconds to explain.
…”The news industry didn’t really have a profit model other than trying to get eyeballs and earn digital advertising revenue,” said Courtney Radsch, who studies technology and media at UCLA. “But what we saw is that the tech platforms, specifically Google and Facebook, ended up controlling that digital advertising infrastructure.”…
I suppose now that NPR has caught up to reality on this, it’s time to beat it with an old printing press. It’s been a problem for at least one decade, perhaps two, and it impacts anyone trying to create content on the Internet. The more agile companies and individuals have been good at monetizing trends in what the mob wants, creating a digital Vox Populi which can be outright… outrageous.
A few days ago I saw a reel of a lesbian manscaping a sheep because it was popular. To be fair, I didn’t realize that this was necessary or had a technique involved, but in less than a minute I was taught a masterclass in shaving a male sheep’s nether regions… which, honestly, I could have lived without, but it was so outrageous I simply watched and said, “What an example of outrageous content”. I’m sure it has a niche market, but I am not the niche. It just popped up in my feed.
It goes further than that though.
The regular ‘media’ has become just as outrageous, with Tucker Carlson’s nether regions being shaved by Fox News, after being outed to having opinions different than those he expressed. I imagine he really didn’t have his nether regions shaved – I do not want to know – but he did get fired, which for a talking head is pretty much the same. That’s where these little economic bubbles come in, where Tucker Carlson likely made sure he made enough money for as long as he could selling people what they wanted even if it had nothing to do with truth. It’s marketing. And wherever he lands, I’m sure he’ll have a fluffy landing, perhaps made from the wool of the nether regions of a male sheep.
He’s going to be ok. The people he fleeced with their attention to his misdirection will range from upset to simply waiting for the next Great Faux Hope. That’s the way of media these days. You don’t have to tell anything even resembling the truth, you simply have to cash in fast enough to live the rest of your life sipping mai-tais. It helps if you have some truth in it so it’s defensible, but that is no longer necessary. Media has become fiction, which should be irritating fiction writers everywhere.
The news used to be pretty boring in the last century, but it was necessary to understand the world. Now, it’s impossible to understand the world because the people who distribute facts without embellishing are not as interesting to people, with the exception of comedians who have become this age’s philosophers. Thank you, George Carlin, wherever you are.
What’s happened with ‘web 2.0’ is what was bound to happen: the economy surrounding it is normalizing as the hype it used to have is being eaten voraciously by large language models trained on the hype-fest of Web 2.0, probably full of pithy marketing slogans whose psychology makes them powerful red dots, eating the most valuable resource that an individual has: time.
Now that resource is being used by ChatGPT, where they are given the illusion of creating content that amuses them. That hype will eventually fall away too since what the language models was trained on was content available on the web, which is full of so much psychological marketing that it’s similar to masturbation in giving us the results we want without involving another human.
The content of Web 2.0 was for the mob, marketing enough that a Cluetrain was created. But the products largely didn’t keep pace with the marketing, as usual. The new tech is just normalizing the old tech, which was normalizing what the mob wanted.
I’ve been looking for angles on how to write about this latest lockdown in Trinidad and Tobago. I considered writing something for TechNewsTT.com about the technology aspects, but the article always fell short in my mind and seemed to dance just a bit beyond a technology aspect. Then, too, writing anything critical in Trinidad and Tobago is like threading needles – plural – while riding a rollercoaster because of politics, because of what I perceive as a culture that demands progress but does it’s best to work against it with cultural inertia… And so there has been a bit of paralysis in my mind as this all plods along.
And plod along it does. Social media has been drowning in disaster porn. The government of Trinidad and Tobago adds it’s deluge onto that with daily statistics that are confusing to those that don’t understand how they are created, and frustrating those that do. Imagine that the testing laboratory is closed on weekends, and always lags on Mondays, and how that skews statistics – but then, too, imagine so many being tested that to require staff to work weekends would be a bridge too far. It is fair to say that the Ministry of Health has been overwhelmed and performed well given the circumstances, but it is also fair to say that the fact that the Ministry of Health has been overwhelmed speaks to decades of stagnation in many regards. Health records immediately come to mind in a country that has de facto free medical care, to a point, and at some points pointless.
So then we get into threading one of the needles where we don’t criticize the people in the system but the system themselves, much like National Security in how it has had to deal with the State of Emergency which has not been invasive, to the chagrin of some who think that everyone who breaks the rules should be tossed in a cell somewhere – as if tossing them in cells doesn’t create new problems in a pandemic. Where do you house them? How do you feed them and handle basic necessities for them? It’s not so easy.
Meanwhile, the hunt for vaccines became a political stew and an international one at that, while all the time the local politicians hold press conferences on each other rather than the actual issues because, really, what do you do when decades of lack of progress in so many regards comes to a head in such a situation? While the pandemic is a new experience and has wreaked it’s own sort of havoc across the world, that havoc was largely made possible by failures in systems that were perceived as robust to the voting publics. In this regard, Trinidad and Tobago is not that different, but anyone familiar with modern history of Trinidad and Tobago will look back to the 1960s and 1970s and think of all the money just wasted and stolen rather than invested, with every government since working with less and less while the challenges become greater and greater.
So how does one even begin to write about this properly? Facts and figures aren’t enough because there is context, and there are so many contexts. Economic, education, medical, national security… How does one write about all of this without blessing or condemning anyone in government? While it’s popular to apply faces to blame, it’s almost never right – the odds of complete incompetence of any individual in any bureaucracy is limited by the bureaucracy, but it is also magnified by the bureaucracy.
I have spent months observing and reflecting on it and I have yet to find the right threads to begin tugging on when it comes to this tattered rug that has not been dealt with since the time of my grandparents, when it should have been, when it could have been.
But I have this parting note. Recently, I noted to some former classmates that when we graduated Secondary School, regardless of where our paths would take us, we lead with this thought that we could somehow make a difference… and some of us have, probably more than think they have, but when I look at the world and consider someone now that age looking at this tattered rug… somehow, it just doesn’t seem to measure up.
After the vacation, I’ve been thinking over a few things that apply here and, if you’re patient, you’ll get to my point. This is normally fodder for my other blog, but I think it fits here on this site to this readership.
I’ve been a workaholic as far back as I remember. The reasons for this I understand, the effects understandable.
There are people floating around who know aspects of me – the Software Engineer who finds pragmatic solutions where others don’t, the writer whose work is liked by a small audience who reads it in secret and doesn’t share much, the person with a camera who gets labeled a photographer to get discounts – no, I will not do your wedding – the peculiar brother, the hard to understand cousin, the loyal friend, the uncompromising person who has learned to pick his battles, the sound of reason in the conversation and at the same time the frustrating person who isn’t convinced by passion.
In writing about a character writing itself, as well as experiences over the days since my return to Tobago, I began to think of how we write ourselves. And, over the course of the last few days while encountering people who saw some of my printed photographs, I heard people talking about, ‘my art’, and even say the word, ‘artist’.
‘Art’ and ‘artist’ do not resonate with me. They conjure images of self-congratulating groups of people swilling cheap wine and cheese, of the cliche poet dressed all in black screaming into a microphone with the angst a good parent would have slapped them for – or is it more politically correct to put them in a timeout? Either way, you get the point. I don’t people who call themselves artists in that much regard – I don’t dislike them, I just don’t identify with them and their clique.
I play with things. That’s what I do. That’s what I’ve always done. It scares some people if you say that, so you learn not to say it, but I play with things. Objects, ideas, code, technology, words, light, whatever. I like to learn, and I like to be off the beaten path – spending a lot of my own time over the years doing just that, to the benefit of employers that never truly appreciated it.
I’m a recovering workaholic. The vacation, the writing, the playing – that shifted my perspective to it’s natural center, and what I found was the way I should have looked at the years of my almost completely unvacationed professional life:
What people call my work is just the collateral damage of me becoming better at things through experimentation. My life is my art, my work – what I leave behind is simply collateral damage of all of that. That stuff is not that important.
And my point here is that we have cultures and pressures from society that do not let us look at things that way, that make us believe that we are what we do. We’re not what we do, we’re what we become by doing.
With that as a focus decades ago, I can’t help wondering what I would be like now. I don’t expect that I would be much different, but knowing that would probably have made life a little more contented when things were not going the way I would have wanted.
You are not what you do, you’re not even what you’ve done. You are what you’re becoming, only partly because of what you do and have done.
This will be a long post, so come back with coffee, tea, something else, or not at all. It’s meant to be linked from the ‘About‘ page.
I’ve been going back and engaging some of Renard Moreau’s ongoing conversations – it’s a nice blog Renard has – and it’s healthy to pause for a bit and think about what, how and why I write what I write.
But I’m more than that now, as people who follow can see. There’s a story there that, as much as I hate writing about myself, is a good story and one worth telling as I begin to connect different writing I have been doing in different ways.
Early Writing.
I had some poetry published while I was in my teenage years – nothing particularly great, I think. Writing was something I did every day – we all do, some more than others – but I was focused on the way out of my own prison, which at the time was computing. So I wrote logical code for systems that did exactly what I wanted.
As training goes, that’s pretty horrible training for a writer.
It did, however, get me out of Trinidad and Tobago and out of a house I wanted no part of. It got me to Irving, Texas, where… well, let’s say I enjoyed parts of the childhood I did not have while growing up. While paying my bills. While going to college. And then, while not going to college.
Then, as a sailor, I wrote logs where creativity was not considered… appropriate. No one found it funny when I logged in a Soviet Submarine into a lake at NTC Orlando, and they did not let that pass. They did, however, allow me to log rats in and off the compound without complaint.
Then, there were the SOAP notes in hospitals as a Corpsman – good training on observation, but again, creative writing was frowned upon.
It wasn’t until I got back into software that creative expression was allowed – not so much in the code (oh, the comments I left!), but in that new thing that they had come out with. Email. Not everyone enjoyed my emails, but those that didn’t were usually on the receiving end of some acerbicly made point.
Around this time, I restarted creative writing, largely as an attempt to reconnect with my late mother. We read our poetry at various places in St. Petersburg, Florida – I may even make it up there in 2019 for a CAMs reunion party. And there a conflict began within me – to pay the bills or keep writing. Pragmatically, I continued doing things to pay the bills.
Poetry was fun for a while. Then short essays. And so on.
Later in the 90s, I was able to do some creative and technical writing for a site called Brainbuzz.com, which later became Cramsession.com, and now I think it’s in the ether with study guides still floating around. And in those very late 90s, I began on a new platform.
I began blogging back in 1999. Almost 2 decades ago.
The Blogging Years – Present.
Writing at first in the medium, I was focusing on a lot of self promotion – as many bloggers do. However, I had a heavy distaste for self-promotion – I believed then, and still do now, that content should stand on it’s own. That it doesn’t is an entirely different topic.
Later, I would tire of that. At the request of my father, I returned to Trinidad and Tobago – and it was a time ripe with opportunity. Trinidad and Tobago was to be an Internet hub for South America and the Caribbean. Internet businesses had proven themselves, and my memories of Trinidad and Tobago were optimistic. Too optimistic. The infrastructure wasn’t there, the cost and quality of bandwidth at the time was below reproach, and people I thought I could count on were instead people who wouldn’t spit on me if I was dying of thirst.
So I did what I always did, what I still do with a more mature outlook: I tried to solve the problem. Call it an exercise of futility if you will, I call it an exercise of youth – much the same thing. And so I learned about why all the problems I did not think I should have were there, and tried to bypass them – to no avail. This took years. It introduced me to very quality people inside of Trinidad and Tobago and outside – as well as some people who only recently I found out were the people ripping off my ideas and selling them as their own. Mea culpa. The difference is that they were selling the golden eggs; I am the duck.
I wasn’t making enough money to feed my reading habit. I read a lot of Gutenberg.org back then, and it broadened me some more. The humanities I had kept from myself came flowing in. The world as I saw it shifted into something broader, with more meaning than silicon.
Before I knew it, I was being invited to conferences on culture and ICT – which I honestly thought I had no business going to, but even when I said as much, they still paid for me to go. With their confidence in me, I dedicated myself to what we discussed, and ended up broadening myself further and further – enough so that even years later, I still get messages asking me what I think about things.
WorldChanging/Alert Retrieval Cache.
I was writing for WorldChanging.com for a while.
Then the South East tsunami hit, and I had an idea, the Alert Retrieval Cache (ARC) – one guy, Dan Lane, fleshed it out in amazing ways. That idea later became more of a problem than a solution because of humans and distrust and reasons why humans should distrust.
It also made me leave WorldChanging.com – don’t let anyone fool you, that was a very odd place to communicate with people. There were disputes with the third party involved who also wrote for WorldChanging.com – I simply wanted it to work, he wanted to capitalize his ego with it. The powers that be were Canadian about it, wanting peace instead of progress. I left. Screw that Utne.
One thing became clear: I wasn’t just a technologist anymore. I had been given the opportunity to see the world in more ways. It was very exciting, and I ended up traveling in Latin America and the Caribbean afterwards – not the tourist stops, but in the homes of people who lived there who showed me not what their tourism boards wanted me to see, but what people there wanted me to see. I had traveled a lot before, but every place I stayed gave me new insights into a world that so many of us take for granted.
Another thing had become clear: I had unrealistic expectations of people. They weren’t motivated by the same things as I was, and my world unraveled before my eyes. I put it back together again, every international disaster another stitch in that fabric as people asked me – pleaded with me – on setting up that ARC. There was anger. There was distrust in humans.
And I wrote. Mostly unpublished, in journals on a shelf not far from where I sit. My distrust in humans became more of an acceptance, and I became better at dealing with people and their quirks – their motivations. I grew. The alternative was simply not worthwhile.
The Land Period.
When my father died, I returned to Trinidad and Tobago to settle his estate. That took years. And then I tried to do things with some land I had inherited which required me to deal with people on it. This was another growth experience; even more writing on a shelf – and it was enough to get by, what I did, but it was not enough to get ahead.
I tried my hand at agriculture, which I wasn’t terribly bad at, but it just wasn’t enough.
The Return to the U.S.
I returned to the United States with the idea that I could make enough money to get back to that land and do something of worth with it. In the downturned economy, with the shifts in technology, I made ends meet. I saw very clean parallels between, as an example, Beloit, Wisconsin, and the Caribbean as far as not advancing and why.
I learned a lot more about the world, but in the end I broke even. I was getting to that age where people weren’t sure whether they wanted to hire me, I was at that age where I wasn’t sure I wanted to be hired by them.
Long gone were the days of the code monkey for me, but everyone wanted a code monkey so that they could play their silicon organ. Attempts I made to get past that failed. Honestly, I could probably be doing code for some company in the U.S. right now if I really wanted to, but I don’t – I turned down one huge company twice, and a slightly smaller company twice. They’re names you know, but they’re not names that will make a difference here. They’re not important to me, and that’s the point I’m getting at.
There was more to technology. I’d already been reading everything all this time. It was all beginning to make sense, and I read then – as I do now – to get the language to communicate things. To make simple what seems so complex at first. To see things work.
I made my way through jobs – even getting to work at a company that did Emergency Communications, learned more about telephony than a sane person should, and left.
To return to Trinidad and Tobago, to finish some things with the land, and ultimately, to write full time.
And Back To Trinidad.
Agriculture again, and dealing with land issues – pushing hard, harder than others. Adjoining landowners were useless despite being related. So I changed the paradigm.
And now I’m back to writing – connecting things beyond just technology, looking at things and seeing what needs to be fixed. I write about it. And also, I’m writing other things, unpublished…
Fair warning: my writing typically takes more than 47 seconds to read.
I was glancing around social media when I saw NPR’s, “
