Wednesday, September 21, 2011
Recapitulation theory ("ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny") puts forth that incubating humans act out evolution as they grow
from zygote to baby. This was a popular idea a century ago, but it's turned out the science isn't that simple. Yet the principle
holds that the dividing fetal cells are engaged in a kind of performance of all of evolution—from simple to complex, from
general form to specific form. The developing human loses its tail early, gains a cerebrum later.
Thus newborns are time boiled down, and every ounce gained is another 20 or 30 million years of life; they compress the three
billion years since abiogenesis into a nine- or ten-month performance that runs from conception to birth. By the time they arrive they have gone for rides on comets, teased dinosaurs with sticks, come down from the trees,
and run across the savannah.
The day before we were scheduled for our Caesarean I told the Internet that I was packing for a very long trip and wasn't
sure what to bring. People—friends and strangers—wrote with suggestions: Spare pants. A suitcase filled with books. Your wife.
Extra underwear and camping detergent; a hoodie and a flask. The head and <3. Can organic mixed nuts, first aid kit, cash
hidden in wallet belt, an extra pair ultra comfortable shoes. Carseats. Toothbrush. Multiple chargers. Take less. Pillows
and a blanket for you, easy snacks, every kind of memory-recording device. Bring a sandwich. Music. And patience. Half the
clothes and twice the money, and lots and lots of gin.
So a few days ago we packed everything and went to the hospital. And a few hours after we arrived the clock—our clock—reset
from 3.5 billion to zero.
Hello little girl. And two minutes later: Hello little boy.
People call me a lot and say: What is this new thing? You're a nerd. Explain it immediately.
I know it's confusing. But this is their competitor to Facebook basically. Except you can list your friends. That's the circles.
But it's easier to remember if you call them holes. Like I could have a friend hole and an acquaintance hole and a K-hole.
And they give you a list of friends and you stuff them in the hole, like Silence of the Lambs, except you are sending them images and text messages and hanging out with them on video chats. One of the things that can
happen, according to the press, is that you can, if you are very lucky, talk with one of the founders of Google, because he's
hanging out using the service too. And you can ask him about user experience, and show him your cat. Which sounds horrifying,
like having to pee next to Steve Jobs or playing touch football with Arnold Schwarzenegger. People rich enough to place phone
calls to order body organs, people who can afford to hide families, make me nervous. The only thing they could want me for
is harvesting.
Anyway, the new thing from the Gootch makes it really easy to sort people into the holes, which is good, because this lets
you divide people into clusters and lie to each group in different ways, which makes it easier to preserve the fictions that
make up our polite racist society. And it looks pretty sweet and works well so far, which probably means that there will be
a huge battle-in-earnest between the Gootch and the Books, between Circles and Friends. For example, I don't know if you saw
this but according to the New York Times Mark Zuckerberg is taking walks in the woods with people he'd like to hire. If he really wants you to work for him he takes you for a walk in the woods. It's gotten that serious. And this is a responsibility
of a well-educated American, to think about Mark Zuckerberg taking walks in the woods with multiple unnamed sources.
First, this means that there is a class of employees who were taken for walks in the woods and class that wasn't. That's how
that stuff shakes out. “Haha,” someone texts or comments, “sure we went for a walk in the woods, it's amazing that someone
is thinking to talk about that in a national newspaper,” but in their secret heart they are thinking, “I am woodsworthy.”
No one has yet come forth and said that they have not taken a walk with Mark Zuckerberg, perhaps because they are ashamed--but there is also the distinct possibility that it is
Zuckerberg's goal in life to take a walk with absolutely everyone on earth, and that's all that Facebook (which now has nearly
43 times as many users as there are unemployed people in the USA) is actually for.
Now that this article has appeared there will have to be even more thought given at Facebook HQ as to who gets a walk in the
woods, because now everyone knows that a walk in the woods is a thing. I plugged the current scenario into the spreadsheet
I use to determine things and came up with two likely outcomes: (1) People will go back in the woods and build a cave just
out of phone reception range and install a hermit, and everyone will go back and look at the hermit, who is not connected
to anything, from time to time, and say, “Makes you think, doesn't it?” Or (2) Most Dangerous Game. In this scenario one sunny day you're working on low-level NoSQL projects at the Gootch or wherever, and you get an email
from Facebook and you go for the interview and Zuckerberg is talking about scaling PHP and suddenly pauses, gets this look
in his eye, pulls his hoodie over his head and says “You have sixty seconds. You should be running.” Because engineers, as
we are often reminded, are the ultimate prey.
In conclusion, Groupon.
By Paul Ford
So in 1993, BoingBoing tells us, a group called Mondo Vanilli made an art-prank album on Trent Reznor's Nothing label, but it was not released until now.
The members of the group were “RU Sirius, founder of Mondo 2000 magazine, composer Scrappi DuChamp, and performance artist
Simone Third Arm.”
After listening to a few songs (the album itself sounds a great deal like Meat Beat Manifesto) I decided to find out more
about Simone Third Arm and found this article from 1995. It opens with a skink voiding on Simone's chest. Then:
Fortunately, cleaning up piss and poop is nothing new for Simone. It is her business. For the past eight years, her performance
art and videos have featured the timeless, classic elements of urine and feces--peeing into buckets, shooting cranberry enemas
onto a canvas. Somebody's got to do it.
The only clue to her bizarre trade in the apartment, however, is a toilet seat mounted on the wall, with stirrups wired on
either side. On a shelf, another toilet seat boasts circuit boards glued all over it.
“That's the commodem,” says Simone.
Emphasis added; also, oh no. And that is where the trail ends. I had two thoughts: (1) It's really good to have an “art name,”
like “Third Arm,” especially if you ever plan to date online or deal with general population; and (2) How do you make a living
when your poo art days are over? Like if you are going, perhaps gently, perhaps not, into your early thirties, followed by
your middle-early thirties, then your middle thirties, early-later thirties, and finally later thirties? (People really slice
up their thirties even though younger people don't care and older people just laugh.) Then I remembembered: You work as a
project manager at a web development firm. I've met a lot of people who recognize in me a certain comfort level with weird
personal histories and say things like, hah, yes, I used to work in blood porn, and I say, let's keep going with these wireframes.
Actually no I totally don't; I go, let's talk about that.
Why privacy mattered.
On a Sunday morning before her soccer practice, not long after my daughter's tenth birthday, she and I sat down on the couch
with our tablets and I taught her to respond to lawsuits on her own. I told her to read the first message.
“It says it's in French,” she said. “Do I translate?”
“Does it have a purple flag on it?”
“No,” she said.
“You don't actually have to worry about it unless it has a purple flag.”
She hesitated. “Can I read it?” she asked.
“If you want to read it go ahead.”
She switched the screen from French to English and read out the results: “'Notice from the Democratic Republic of Congo related
to the actions of King Leopold II.'”
This was what I'd been avoiding. So much evil in the world and why did she need to know about all of it, at once? But for
months she'd asked—begged—to answer her own suits. I'd told her to wait, to stop trying to grow up so fast, you'll have your
whole lifetime to get sued. Until finally she said: “When I'm ten? I can do it when I'm ten?” And I'd said, “sure, after you're
ten.” Somehow that had seemed far off. I had willed it to be far off.
“Honey,” I explained, “you'll get a lot of those kinds. What happened is, a long time ago, the country Belgium took over this
country Congo and killed a lot of people and made everyone slaves. The people who are descendants of those slaves, their government
gave them the right to ask other people for damages.”
“I didn't do anything. I thought you had to do something.”
Where do you start? Litigation-flow tariff policy? Post-colonial genocide reparations microsuits? Is there a book somewhere,
Telling Your Daughter About Nanolaw?
“You know,” I asked, “how you have to be careful about giving away information?”
She did. We talk about that almost every day.
“So this is why you have to be careful,” I said. “They buy a whole lot of files. So in this case, they could purchase, like—when people do
genetic testing to learn about their families? They'd buy all the records and see who is from Belgium. Or if you watched a
soccer game with Belgium in it, or you have just one Belgian friend on your network. They take the records for billions of
people and put it all together and do math.”
She nodded, but couldn't get past the fundamental problem: “Why me?”
“If you're going to answer suits by yourself, you have to understand that to these people, you aren't you. You are stuff they found in a box.” I considered for a moment. “Remember two years ago, you bought the code dog for Griffin
Village?” God knows I remembered. Each of her 100 Griffin Points, when earned, was heralded by a shrill trumpet noise, and
my daughter's even more shrill cries of joy. The dog had been named—Wallace? Waffles? No, it was Willie, and she used her
100 Griffin Points to buy a Billy Cat. Which caused more shrieking. Those were long months. “Maybe Willie Dog was programmed
by Belgians? Or maybe Griffin Points is backed by a bank in Belgium and we never knew. The people in Congo might not even
know. It might not even be the people in Congo but instead people in Italy doing it and they'll give money to the Congo people
if they win anything. It might be that their computer thinks it's possible. But ultimately their government thinks that it's
fair for these people to demand some of your money.”
“I never got anything from Belgium.”
“They think you did,” I said. “And see, they could be right. They have to be a little bit right to file in the first place
and have it go out through a suenet without getting filtered. Maybe it's not Griffin points. It could be anything.”
“But that's amazingly stupid,” she said, forgetting now, I saw, how badly she'd wanted to do this. She had imagined that we were denying her access to
some adult mystery, not shielding her from drudgework. That's a lesson too, right? Or was it a mistake to let her try? She
already did her own laundry and had a bank account. Other girls had been answering lawsuits since they learned to read, lawyers'
kids especially. “It's just part of life,” I said. “You have to think about yourself not as a person but as data.”
My daughter was first sued in the womb. It was all very new then. I'd posted ultrasound scans online for friends and family.
I didn't know the scans had steganographic thumbprints. A giant electronics company that made ultrasound machines acquired
a speculative law firm for many tens of millions of dollars. The new legal division cut a deal with all five Big Socials to
dig out contact information for anyone who'd posted pictures of their babies in-utero. It turns out the ultrasounds had no
clear rights story; I didn't actually own mine. It sounds stupid now but we didn't know. The first backsuits named millions
of people, and the Big Socials just caved, ripped up their privacy policies in exchange for a cut. So five months after I posted the ultrasounds, one month before
my daughter was born, we received a letter (back then a paper letter) naming myself, my wife, and one or more unidentified
fetal defendants in a suit. We faced, I learned, unspecified penalties for copyright violation and theft of trade secrets,
and risked, it was implied, that my daughter would be born bankrupt.
But for $50.00 and processing fees the ultrasound shots I'd posted (copies attached) were mine forever, as long as I didn't
republish without permission.
Of course I consented, going to the site-of-record and tapping the little thumbs-up box to release funds. And here we were
ten years later, thinking of Belgium.
I asked my daughter: “How much do they want?”
She looked down at the screen. She is quiet and serious when working. “Two euro cents.”
“Normally one like that I'd just go ahead and pay, except it doesn't have a purple flag. The purple flag means our government
said they could sue people here in America. But if it's from another country without a purple flag you can ignore it.”
“So I'm not actually in trouble?”
“You're never in trouble. You didn't do anything wrong. You're just named. And in this case they can't actually claim damages.
Trash it.”
She looked relieved. The rights of the Congolese were not her problem this morning. Her mother called from the other room:
“Soccer soon.”
“Okay,” we both yelled back.
“How many are left?” I asked.
She looked at her tablet and said: “Fifty-seven.”
“We can handle that,” I said. I walked her through the rest: Get rid of the ones without flags. Pay those a dime or less by
hitting the dime button. How many now? (Only six.) We went through the six: Four copyright claims, all sub-dollar and quickly
paid.
She opened the penultimate message and smiled. “Dad,” she said, “look.”
We had gone to a baseball game at the beginning of the season. They had played a song on the public address system, and she
sang along without permission. They used to factor that into ticket price—they still do if you pay extra or have a season
pass—but now other companies handled the followup. And here was the video from that day, one of many tens of thousands simultaneously
recorded from gun scanners on the stadium roof. In the video my daughter wore a cap and a blue T-shirt. I sat beside her,
my arm over her shoulder, grinning. Her voice was clear and high; the ambient roar of the audience beyond us filtered down
to static.
It had been only a few months, but already she seemed older than the singing girl. Soon, we had been warned, she'd demand
a cryptographic shield for her diary. “It's terrible,” said one friend whose daughter is thirteen. “I think, what if she's
abducted and I need to read her messages, and the police can't read them? What if she runs away but all of her logs are locked?
How do I keep her safe with all of those secrets?” But our family is not yet there. If I ask her politely, my daughter will
look left, then right, then squash her nose into my cheek and whisper her Griffin Village password. I would never tell.
Watching the video I thought that it was wise of Major League Baseball to combine this sort of sentimental moment with mass
speculative litigation. It kept brand values strong. I felt strangely grateful that I could have a moment to remember that afternoon. Surprised by the evidence of both copyright violation and father-daughter
affection.
I told my waiting daughter to go ahead and pay the few dollars, just part of the latent cost of a ticket. She tapped and the
tablet made its cash-register sound, and the video was irrevocably destroyed so that it could never again be shared. She opened
the final message.
“What's a mutual-risk paternity?” she asked.
“It doesn't apply to you,” I said. “It's for boys.”
“But what is it?”
“Later,” I said. I felt like I had done enough fathering for the morning. “Just trash it so you're not late for soccer.”
A final chime.
“Good work,” I said.
She squinted at the screen. “I can do this now,” she said. “I can do it on my own.”
“You have to check it every day,” I said. “Time, tide, and law wait for no man.”
She looked at me and rolled her eyes (like her mother, her eyes are brown), dismissed the arbitration client and swiped the
tablet to sleep.
She asked: “Can I sue people?”
This surprised me. “Yes,” I said. “Most people don't but if you have a good reason you can sue anyone.”
“Cool,” she said. Off she went to find her shin guards.
I was of a generation where one group sued and a much larger group was named. But perhaps her generation sees this as part
of the traffic of daily life, a territory to explore. Every one a little lawyer.
My wife was on patrol, repeating the time, pointing out when asked where to find a water bottle, where to find a jacket, where
to find a hair scrunchy. Finally my daughter had her act together. I watched them leave.
Here is how it would go, I imagined. Daughter and Mother would walk together to the park. They would talk about this morning's
conversation. Mother would confirm that handling your own suits is a serious responsibility, that you can't let them pile
up or that will send the signal that you were susceptible to liens.
Mother would explain what liens are. Daughter, well-intentioned, would half-listen and send messages to a dozen friends as
they walked, each message another flash on the map. Mother would ask Daughter to please keep her wits about her crossing the
street, and threaten to take away her phone. (I make the same empty threat many times a day.) Mother and Daughter would arrive
at the field in the park, late but not very.
Then would come the game. Cameras in the phone of every parent. Sensors on the goals; sensors in the ref's whistle; in the
ball; in the lamps that light the field. Yellow cards, goals, offsides, all recorded from many angles and tagged with time,
location, temperature, whether for the memories or to limit liability—the motion of 22 bobbing ponytails transformed into
lines of light.
One team would win; another team would lose; or they'd tie; or it would rain. All would go home. And days or decades from
now, someone will find a way to cull, to merge, to bend the bobbing ponytails to their own ends and use them in some scheme.
They will steal that light as if were nothing, as if it were not life itself.
By Paul Ford
It's immediately clear to me now that I'm writing again that I need to come up with some new forms in order to have fun here—so
that I can get a rhythm and know what I'm doing. One thing that works for me are time limits; pencils up, pencils down. So:
Fridays, write for 30 minutes; edit for 20 minutes max; and go whip up some images if necessary, like the big crappy hand
below that's all meaningful and evocative because it's retro and zoomed-in. Post it, and leave it alone. Can I do that every
Friday? Yes! Will I? Maybe! But I crave that simple continuity. For today, for absolutely no reason other than that it came
unbidden into my brain, the subject will be Photoshop. (Do we have a process? We have a process. It is 11:39 and...)
When I was 13, around the time Photoshop was off being born, I was moving pixels around on our home computer, which was a
surprisingly advanced machine called the Amiga 1000. We were partial to it because the headquarters of Commodore, its manufacturer,
was in our hometown. A task upon which I spent many hours: Taking a scanned image of Cybil Shepherd and Bruce Willis and switching
their heads around. I remember it took careful cutting of the heads with the mouse and then quite a bit of smoothing. I used
a program called Deluxe Paint, a program so profound in its weird touches that people still get wistful thinking about it
(it has been lovingly semi-cloned as Grafx2.
There was no reason for me to do this other than that I could. The image came to me on a blue floppy that I purchased for
$4.00 from the Downingtown, Pennyslvania, users group meeting. In case you are young, Bruce Willis was only just getting famous
and even had an album of bad music, and Cybil Shepherd owned his detective agency, and thus was the TV show Moonlighting born, and our entire nation became tense and even angry waiting for Bruce to give Cybil a weenus. I enjoyed watching even
though it was beyond me, even though it featured a Macintosh computer, and once, in a guest role, Jeff Jarvis. I was against
the Macintosh because being 12 and 13 I was a tribal creature and I understood that my parents had listened to two full years
of my raw begging and spent more than we'd ever spent on a car to get the computer, and when you spend that much money there are certain ley lines, certain powers that emanate from the expensive object, and
certain obeisances required in order that it might preserve its value. The Mac, simply by existing, threatened to destroy
the order I sought. So I switched the heads of Bruce and Cybil for no good reason. I did a lot of stuff like that. About seven
years later, after some weird wanderings, I ended up at a little college somewhere, and there at the college newspaper someone
showed me Photoshop, on a black-and-white Macintosh. You'll like this, he said. (The guy who said it was a really, really
weird dude into breaking glass and stuffing it down his parachute pants and I'm sure he has three kids and an SUV now.)
I was sort of indifferent to it, to be honest. I'd seen all this before, in bold vibrant color. Early Macs were limited machines.
And yet I recognized in Photoshop a sort of kinship. I felt the same way with its cousins Quark XPress and Illustrator. They
were all variations on themes that I had never heard directly--riffs on Xerox's work and on Ivan Sutherland's Sketchpad tool;
they were also the ancillary products of so many graduate degrees. But there was a sort of thread that ran between the tools,
resonances that comforted me. So I played and pushed pixels around, and nodded, and there we were. This was now a thing, I
realized. Everyone could push pixels around. It wasn't going to just be me the pixel-pusher. How many pixels, you have to
wonder, are out there in the world?
I've had different relationships with different features of Photoshop year-to-year. When I was 22 I discovered the smudge
tool and realized the plasticity of a few bits of color daubed onto the screen. You could make a face, a moon. Later as digital
cameras became proper I was able to start making collages and manipulating images. My work now usually involves me resizing
things, shaving pixels, adding a border, rotating something. Whereas before I wanted to collage and create, now I mostly concern
myself with color, adding it or taking it away. The pixels themselves are less fluid.
I have a good memory for menu items; so does my wife (she can talk you through any option in Quickbooks from memory); so,
in fact, do an awful lot of people who really use the hell out of these things. So, so many of us know Photoshop. We know
its flaws, its terribleness, and the fact that Adobe has instead of offices a druid-pit ensconsed with redwoods into which
users are thrown and burned alive, but not before every single bit of money is ripped from them. It is unavoidable and successful.
Why is it successful? What features make it successful? Why does it succeed when other tools have exactly the same offerings?
Is it merely familiarity? I don't know.
Maybe it's not the features at all, not what it does exactly, as other things do the same key things in different ways, but
that it has become a language. A sort of semi-commercial creole, like a slang we share. Back in the day there was great effort
expended on simulating natural media. Look, it's exactly like painting with an oil brush! Or a charcoal sketch. Fractal Painter
was one such program; it was actually sold in a paint can. That never caught on. But here, in Photoshop, is this program that
is good for print and web and and for making stupid memes. It gives those people a way to talk about work. And pictures are
a huge part of how we communicate.
When I work with my design partner, with designers in general, I know exactly how to speak Photoshop. I can figure out why
he made his layers the way he did. It's my job to make the site, to chop things up or extract the odd widget. I love building websites still, even though if I had a proper careerist
bent I would have outsourced all such work, but you can put on TV and watch someone chatting with someone else and cut out
tiny rectangles from one place and translate them into another place.
I only have five minutes, so I'll wind this down. There's a lot more to say about Photoshop. The question I have for myself
is not what to say but how to say it. That is, I can list features; I can go out into the world and find out who invented/discovered
Gaussian blur and how it got into the system. Features are important and have genealogies and etymologies. I'm sure I'd find
that just like human language the "language" of a piece of software is expressed with words borrowed from many, many cultures;
just as you can hear Latin and French in English, you can see cultures clashing and resolving their differences inside of
software--the triumph of the desktop metaphor; the great plugin expansion; the age of layers. Those cultures thrived, but
other strange historical artifacts, the craquelure filter, for example, agglomerated and remain, part of the language but
archaic.
It seems that it's really two things, Photoshop--a set of features that share a history and each have a history of their own,
but also a sort of shared psychic territory. We understand this with web applications, we understand it with great novels
or popular films, but it doesn't come up as often that if you and I both use Photoshop on a regular basis we have a sort of
peculiar, perhaps unwanted, but possibly genuine psychic bond. We might have something to teach each other; we definitely
have something to talk about, as you will find whenever you are in a room which a graphic designer and either (1) a new version
of the Adobe suite is released; or (2) the issue of software pricing arises. So maybe it's not just a pile of features, not
a tool, but also a place, a piece of software like that.
Postscript: It occurred to me that this is why some people are partial to the emulation of old and decrepit computer systems.
Technology moves forward but you still have so many synapses dedicated, irrevocably, to speaking old languages. There's a
certain comfort and sense of resolution when you can go back and think in older terms, like hearing a beloved song from your
childhood. Also, I spent 30 minutes editing this (but checked Twitter a few times). There was some cheating; judge away.
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