We stand on the edge of summer, another summer, summer again. The longest day of the year will be past as you read this; as I write, the short night is passing, the long day about to begin.
My proclivities have never been particularly drawn to orthodoxy. I was a rebel kid. I'm a rebel adult. I'll undoubtedly be a rebel codger if and when I reach that lamentable and enviable status. I draw great strength from breaking molds and smashing icons, questioning authority and chaffing at restrictions.
But that hasn't prevented my acknowledgement of things bigger than me that I need to pay attention to. It's a somewhat scientific attitude to seek spiritual fulfillment in the workings of nature, but I find it quite, well, natural to do so. Certainly I'm in good company. Such religion as Albert Einstein had was bound up in his quest to unravel the inner workings of the universe, the "mind of God" as he termed it. Sometimes this leads to attempts at demystifying the Mystic. Of late, more than one physicist has spoken of trying to develop a theory of the origin of the Universe so complete that it renders the notion of an arbitrary creator unnecessary, a redundancy: no God in the details, just details, thank you.
My own metaphysical perceptions don't really coincide with science, though. I've never felt any need to prove the existence of the Cosmic Wha?, or to do battle with lesser versions of the One True Faith. I don't believe in G-d -- He or She or It or That is a precept in my world view. Do you "believe" in gravity, or oxygen?
Which of course is not to say that I care to invent too much personality for the Almighty. This way lies madness, or worse, sectarianism. As Lily Tomlin once said, when you talk to God, you're a saint, but when God talks to you, you're a schizophrenic. If a man claims that Martians have planted a radio control device in his head, he'll get locked up. Let him claim that demons are possessing his family and he'll get all the drama he can handle. Sometimes it seems the only difference between religious beliefs and rampant insanity is the approval of the church authorities, be it burning witches at the stake for Jesus or suicide bombings to the glory of Allah.
It's safer for a guy like me, whose imagination is active enough that I do my best to stay away from such pleasant popular entertainments as stalk-and-slash movies and grossout monster shows, to just stick to nice physical representations of the sacred. As a kid, I used to duck out of Sunday school (Unitarian Sunday school, yet) and go wander out behind the church and look at plants and bugs and rocks and things and feel the sunshine. Either I was a little saint or a little snit (likely a little both), but I was earnest. If you can't find the Divine in the manifest world, where can you find It?
A while back, I started getting interested in a notion I had of a shadow universe, overlaying the physical one we detect with our senses, a universe not of matter and energy and time and space, but of information. It has no physical reality, but it can be observed in the organization of the physical. Gravity is real. The Law of Gravity is information.
The attraction for me in this idea was the correlation between many of the features of the infoverse and those discerned by meditative scholars and internal observers throughout history as belonging to the Other World, or the Half World, or the Dreamtime, or the other nine hundred names given to the Realm of spirits and magic and general woowoo. Chief among them: the human spirit is the true gateway between the two worlds. Our bodies are matter, but our souls are information.
After some delving into the idea, I discovered that some scientists had also come to imagine a similar construction, notably physicist David Bohm's notion of "infolded meaning" as a component of physical reality. As frequently happens, I had a good idea, but I was just a little late to the post.
If I have any actual religious belief at all, it is that the information universe is the map of the Sacred in the random processes of the physical universe. By observing the realm of matter, we are given clues to the nature of the Divine, or at least permitted a closer glimpse of Its workings. All of the cycles of Nature, the Sun rising and setting, the tides, the endlessly complex shuffling of the deck of life, the clock of the seasons, all are signs, risible gateways to the essence of existence.
Happy Solstice.
(Geek Alert: this is a long post about my recent computer upgrade, a subject many find about as interesting as the contents of a random stranger's nasal passages. If so, feel free to skip directly to the Song o' the Week -- t)
I spent some time last night stripping my old computer. I yanked the hard drives and plundered the memory, but I also took the important part: fortune cookie messages taped to the front over the course of the four years I'd had it. Every time a good one came along, it'd ended up on the cover of my constant companion, to comfort and inspire me and personalize the beige box I sit in daily worship of.
Evolution isn't just an idea, it's a force, like gravity. In the end, it gets us all, no matter how hard we kick and scream and drag our heels and file briefs (or poop them, for that matter). This week, it came in the form of the much admired and maligned homebrew computer upgrade.
It'd been a while. I purchased my last computer, Mr. Nine by Nine, in a yard sale in 1998. I paid $700 for a then only slightly obsolete Mac PPC 8100/80. It replaced a Quadra 610 I'd had about a year and a half, which had in turn bumped my previous dream machine, a SE30 with an upgraded processor. Before then, ugly crawling things wriggled in the slime.
9x9 was a sudden change, punctuated equilibrium if you will. Suddenly I had to eliminate all my old 680x0 applications, reinstall my system, sort out weird new extension conflicts. But the performance hit was extraordinary. It was worth it to be able to finally record more than two tracks of music to my hard drive and actually play them back! With effects! To apply Photoshop filters and not go out for coffee while they took effect! To actually hear streaming audio and view those cool Quicktime videos on the web -- even jerkily! Boy, this is some stuff!
That I had finally entered the digital media 90's about eight years late didn't bother me -- I've always thrived on retro-tech. It's cheap and the bugs are (mostly) already ironed out. And with the wonderful mechanism of cap-cap-capitalism charging down the innovation slalom run, newer and better junk is generated at a rate far beyond the capacity of the junkyard rats like me to absorb.
New equipment gave me new options for making music. I had soon helped Sandahbeth produce an album of what she termed "folk gospel" complete with one cut that boasted over fifty virtual tracks. Other jobs followed. I had a low-overhead shop and got a lot of cutrate work. Whether the 8100 paid for itself or not, it certainly mitigated its cost. Plus I could expense it on my taxes.
Then at the beginning of 2000, I landed a real job: office manager for the acapella quartet the Bobs. Suddenly, I began to feel strangely stifled by a mere 80 mhz machine. I was chasing email, surfing websites on a 33.6 modem and drumming my fingers waiting for the next page to load. I needed more oomph. I needed -- another hamburger!
One of the advantages of a truly high-end obsolete computer is an upgrade path. A 266 mhz G3 adaptor and a cable modem worked like a nitro injector in a Yugo. I bought them both on spec, ready to send them back if my skepticism wasn't immediately allayed. Ten minutes after I booted up and logged on through the cable, I was a believer. This wasn't a luxury, this was a dire need. For the first time, I experienced the true meaning of a productivity gain: it means you never get any sleep.
But Time marches on, as indeed it always does, and my computer couldn't keep up. A threefold increase in speed might indeed be inspiring, but by last winter I was getting the old hunger again. Another upgrade, this time to a near-double 500 mhz, somehow didn't have the same flavor. Even maxing out the memory in the box, to an awesome 264 megs, wasn't enough. I had memory problems, hard disk problems, extension problems, network problems. For all its noble qualities, the 8100 just wasn't a 21st century machine. I needed a new old computer. But what?
Genuine new wasn't even a tableable suggestion. I had no illusions about my eschequer: I had to go lean and mean and very used. Recent changes in the Mac OS had rendered everything but G3 and G4 processor based machines virtual pariahs, archeological artifacts in the great midden heap of techno history. But for exactly that reason, even the cheapest dumbest beigest G3's were out of my pitiful price range.
To my rescue rode RePC, an utterly astounding used computer stuff store here in Seattle with weird deals beyond count and attitude to match. In the world of slick, betterthantheotherguy weasel PC shops, RePC was a loud onion fart of DIY, replete with signs like 'If you need help understanding this item you probably don't want it' and 'for further assistance, see your local bookstore.' They had also set up a credible and quite charming microcomputer museum in one corner of their bargain barn, a collection of cuddly little protognomes and Commodore clones, along with many educational exhibits on the origins of the integrated circuit and the backgrounds of various historical figures.
RePC's resident Mac guru was happy to dicker down and blow me out a stripped 9500 tower, one of the last of the sub-G3 PPC's, still sporting the older inputs and outputs all my peripherals were compatible with plus a chart-topping six PCI expansion slots. This with a G3 vroom card looked like just my style: modern architecture, room to grow, all the amenities, great view. I'll move right in. That I was trading a Neanderthal for an Old Stone Age Cro-Magnon frankenstein was hardly an issue -- I like cave paintings. Head bolts, too.
At this point, I'm no novice at the jack-the-mac game. I was ready for a quick and easy refit. But while the spirit is willing, the silicon is frequently recalcitrant. I immediately set out to reproduce my old setup, complete with a round of memory DIMMs and a closeout PCI audio card. But the all-important G3 upgrade, ordered by Federal Express from a national warehouse, came, saw and refused to boot. Troubleshooting tips and several days of tinkering had no effect. I was faced, apparently, with a dead board.
The company assured me my product would be replaced. I returned it and waited anxiously through ten days of UPS Ground-enforced idleness, staring moodily into the silent circuitboard guts of my overpriced paperweight. By now, nearly a month had passed since I sank my leftover mortgage money into the upgrade, assuming I could turn my old computer over to compensate, and I was still sitting on half an ambition.
The appointed day of arrival came and went. I returned to the maelstrom of Customer Service. Several clueless emails later, the warehouse ponderously determined that my order had been inadvertently canceled. Back to square one, Mister Kluge, we don't like your kind around here.
Right about then, a techie pal tipped me that the legendary firm Newer Technology, an early leader in the G3 upgrade market that had lamentably gone into receivership, was back in business, selling off old inventory at trailing edge prices. Newer's cards had more street cred than all the other contenders rolled together. Obviously, the Gods were on my side on this one. I quickly squelched the warehouse deal and ordered up an older Newer, which arrived at my door with commendable speed via good old Priority Mail.
It was an anxious moment when I stuffed it into the processor slot and powered up. Was this my future, my key to wider vistas of computer creativity? Or was it just a terrible mistake, a delirium of misplaced desire, of lust for powers better left to the employed and financially secure? Lordy lordy is dis de end of Rico?
It worked. It worked great. The whole machine did everything my old one did, only faster. Features in my audio software that had refused to implement on my previous rack popped right up and smiled at me. The web snapped. Photoshop rocked. It was a most auspicious conclusion to a ridiculously protracted process. Imagine my relief.
I've filed the fortunes away, ready to start a new collection on the pristine face of my latest acquisition. Apart from some rearrangement of my desk, I'm back in business. With, of course, a certain additional productivity, which I fear probably equates somewhere to Boxer's slogan "I will work harder." How much more productivity do I need?
One of my recurrent themes of meditation in this, the Today that was Yesterday's Tomorrow, is the old sci fi prediction that in the future (all of you who've heard this already can sing along) robots will do all the hard work while we sit around and play canasta. Or whist, if you prefer. Cha cha cha. Now, admittedly, it hasn't worked out like that. Nobody realized that automation would be putting us out of work, and instead of sitting around playing canasta (or whist, if you prefer) we'd all be sitting around in the welfare office whining about the big mean robots stealing our livelihood. IT'S NOT FAIR!
Well, fair or not, it's real. And one of the few ways around it is the acquisition of robots of your own to exploit, even if all they do is amplify your own abilities. O'course, that means you're really just exploiting yourself, but what else does any self-employed person do?
By the way -- anybody wanna buy a used Mac? My old one, I mean. You can have my latest one when you pry my cold dead fist off the mouse.
It may be just my own impinging future shock, but I sense the human race getting a lot harsher in its rhetoric of late. All over the world, it seems, there's an epidemic of tough talk and extreme positions, of kneejerking and stonewalling and deaf ears. And while it may be making the Evening News With Dan Blather that much more entertaining to an audience gone numb and anesthetic on a steady diet of boomboom movies and gangsta videos, it doesn't do much for the state of human affairs.
Where is this piledriving disguised as discourse coming from? More and more, I see reasoned, nuanced arguments being abandoned in favor of The Beeg Gun of screaming invective. There are no moderates left in the world, and if there are they're being hacked to bloody bits and fed to the pigs by berzerkers disguised as pundits. At the very least, their calm, dispassionate tones are drowned in the howls of the pack.
In part, it may be the amoral equivalent of war in the realm of words. In a talk on terrorism that he gave soon after 9/11, Noam Chomsky opined that the chief reason why people use fear and force on each other is that it works. The same is true of forceful self-righteousness in debate. It may not be fair. It may not be honest. But wowsers does it win. We even see the killer-ap version in the current administration's incessant "Criticizing the government in time of war is treasonous" vaudeville routine, although they've made the mistake of one too many times to the well with that one.
But this whole trend appears to be going a lot deeper than just a bunch of politicos and opinion-farters looking to keep their soap boxes intact. The mood of opposition is in the general population as well. The Oregon Citizen's Alliance made a fat living during the 90's walking into lovely little rural Oregon towns of 200 and leaving them bomb-cratored warzones divided into two violently engaged camps of 100 each, one on each side of the gay rights issue. There's gold in them thar divisive tactics. Not just here either -- every night the tube brings us yet another 600 or 2000 year old grudge match brought back to bloody hellish life in yet another starved and overpopulated corner of the globe. There seems to be no end to it. Or, as in the case of India and Pakistan, there's all too obvious an end to it that it would be really REALLY nice to avoid.
Now, oddly enough, there's plenty of evidence that suggests that this kind of didactic, my-way-or-the-highway thinking is not the native processing mode of human intelligence. In a series of studies, regularly referenced by enthusiasts of the branch of mathematics ineptly named fuzzy logic, it was demonstrated that much of human thinking utilizes models of things and processes and situations with built-in slop, an implicit understanding of the condition that my friend Scott Peterson acknowledges by responding to an arguement that he might not agree with by saying, "Well, there's something in that." The primary tenet of fuzzy logic, that everything is true or false to a degree, which degree may indeed be absolute but is certainly not limited to it, is mirrored in our ability to apply ideas like "kind of" and "in a way" and "to a point" to the welter of everyday experience and still make meaningful conclusions. It's possible that it is this flexible mode of thought that differentiates us from the rest of the critters hereabouts and makes the gawdy catastrophe of our civilizations possible.
But it appears that we unhappy shaved apes also have some thought processes left over from our simian ancestors, processes far less subtle and discerning. It's clear to me that these modes of thought correspond to our strong emotional responses, fear and anger and probably sex as well. They're worthless for straining flyspecks out of pepper or unraveling secrets of nature, but they're darned useful for figuring out whether to climb a tree right now to escape the wolves on your trail. Unfortunately, they may also be useful for other, darker purposes.
One of the key inadequacies of representative government is the necessity for consensus. With the normal state of human reasoning running to "Well, there's something in that," it's durn near impossible to get all the cats headed in the same direction. Only in times of extremity can a leader kick in the body politic's limbic thinking and actually get something done. At such times people get the mistaken impression that a magnificent unity has descended upon them, a nobility free of partisan backbiting and shenanigans. This is a perilous delusion for a people to contract. It leads to empires, to massacres, to pograms and crusades and world wars. But it can also lead to fabulous wealth and power for those in charge who can invoke it and ride the tiger they've conjured up. And the rulers themselves are all too suseptible to the same disease of mind.
More and more of late, it seems, leaders who should have more sense have begun to instill a state of emergency into those they lead, the better to induce shared purpose in populations increasingly fragmented and destabilized by a hundred dividing agents, from religious belief to economic status, and by an information sphere tending to a confusing maximum. Torn between McDonald's and their forefathers' ways, beset by a legion of snakeoil peddlers, they're ripe for a little certainty. And every time some downtrodden, bewildered group of people start beating the plowshares of their common sense into the double-edged swords of certainty, heads roll, both others and their own. And that just makes things worse.
An odd little line that I picked up somewhere has stuck with me: "Whenever you get angry, there's something you don't understand." Perhaps most specifically, that something is the redeeming virtue of the concept of maybe, of the truly fluid nature of the stream of life that cannot be stepped into twice in the same place. Reliance on absolutist thinking is armor as much a prison as a defense. Can wisdom redeem the endangered humans from their own dark knights? Search me. All I can say is, I sincerely hope so.
The currently-becoming -fashionable web fad of blogging looks a lot like the kind of democracy the technosnoids were predicting long about the dawn of the Age of Web, say 1990 or so. Let a hundred flowers bloom, let a hundred opinions contend, let a million nasel passages be clogged with the pollen of unbridled opinion.
Ahhhh CHOOO! It's getting a shade cloggy out here in Infospace. The principle of universal discourse has its merits, o'course -- the rights of any individual to put in his/her/its $.02 plain (with a little chocolate) and have at least a white man's chance of being actually heard.
But the danger is implicit in the medium: universal declaiming and no listening. Or, perhaps worse, universal point-counterpoint, the entire spectrum of human information exchange reduced to two syphalitic cacophones nitpicking each others' arguments into disfunctionality while the audience switches to WWF for a higher level of repartee.
And the more immediately accessible dialog centers of the Web, the chat rooms, aren't much better. My few personal experiences in trying to develop meaningful dialog there were squashed like kayaks between the dualing icebergs of Obdurate Fanaticism on the one hand and Off-Topic Licenciousness on the other. Those who were not busy sermonizing were just as busy hustling ass. Maybe I just caught a few wrong days.
The actual fear I have concerning all this, if fear is the right word (the phrase "STOP THE WORLD!" comes to mind), is that modern communications protocols, so far from increasing the amount and quality of human discourse, are doing just the opposite. The entire spread of web-based opinion is in danger of degenerating into a digital CB radio spectrum -- forty channels of indigestible white noise, with nary a clear spot in sight.
It is at this point that the possibility of artificial intelligence becomes not so much a desirable pipedream as a dire necessity of the information avalanche. The question becomes, except for your own forty friends, who's gonna read all this stuff? And the answer is, Mister Roboto. Employing massive supercomputing agents or a thousand ganged G4's or G5's or linux boxes or Whatever, somebody's gonna have to cause to be digested all these conflicting spews and come up with some kind of a consensis report. It's the only way we'll ever have any idea of what's really being thought. Give it another few years and we'll have it right down.
Until then, though, to annotate Leonard Cohen, "Democracy is coming to America. FLEE!"
Well, it's back to the trenches. Here I am imagining empire again, trying to put my mouth where my mouth is.
For all my old pals, welcome back. For the unwary newcomers amongst you, welcome in. This is my own private grist mill, the Thaddeus Gazette, which started as a weekly email sent to my friends back in 1996 (cast your minds back... now go pick them up, you litter bugs). In truth, I've been in hiatus the past three or so years due to unseemly amounts of familial medical huhu. Hopefully I'm back to stay, episodically at least.
My new notion of this little funhouse is to post the same ol bogus essays I always have, plus branch out into other nifty stuff like soundclips and graphics and cartoons. I've got more space on my new server and the website format makes it easier to post bigass files without wasting bandwidth. With any luck, these will include Joke of the Week (webjunk) and Song of the Week (my own) over on the left there. Plus, there's links to the Amber Tide and Bard's Cathedral websites (must be seen to be appreciated) and a pdf version of the old TG anthology Fresh Meat, Same Old Can for the naive and unwary to investigate.
In this main space, though, I'll concentrate on blowharding. Stay tuned.