I’d been flirting with the idea of doing a polyglot diary entry in English – it is another language after all – and today sealed it: I was writing, studying and thinking in Bulgarian so much today that I think I deserve a break! Anyway, I haven’t transcribed yesterday’s entry which also was in Bulgarian, which counts as a day of creative writing by the way, even if you as readers can’t know that yet.
I’m writing this on Noisli‘s text editor. This thing is awesome or what? Daphne has been my dealer of meditation-y stuff the past few weeks and it’s all been incredible almost to a point of fault. Daphne, who’s your dealer? I need to come in contact with the source. Unless it will be like flying too close to the sun. And when I wrote sun, the screen turned the colour of deep canary. Worthy of a toothy grin. I don’t know if it happened by mistake or if these people at Noisli are really clever.
While writing on top of these super-saturated colours that make me scream with pleasure inside, I’m also listening to the OST of Scott Pilgrim. We watched it with Vicente and Zanda (who predictably didn’t get most of it) a few days ago and, once again, several of its songs have been chewing on my mind through my ears – in a good way. It now ranks up with the movies I’ve watched the most times in my life, and it’s in small company, believe me. Especially being in an altered state of consciousness while watching it unlocks it in a way that makes it come close to being a different watching experience altogether. While I reckon the same could be said about many movies old and new, happy or sad, impressive or deep, funny or suspenseful, Scott Pilgrim this time made a particular impression on me, even it it wasn’t the first one I watched it while chewing on crunchy bubblegum. For one, I could catch a greater number of the small details, including the trademark visual gags and creative, playful direction that make Edgar Wright one of my favourite people working with film.
For example, when Sex Bob-omb play Garbage Truck and Young Neil is singing along, at some point he mixes up the lyrics: he says “oh no!” instead of “oh my!” This just hit, I can utterly and completely relate… The film is infested with such morsels of genious. Another thing was that I realised that it actually portrays human relationships at the deep, subconscious level quite accurately. Scott’s idiotic behaviour and responses to certain situations not only made sense, they suddenly made me realise that in fact I’ve had the same non-sensical assholey thoughts myself (or better put, thought patters and emotions) I just wasn’t conscious of them when I had them. Scott could be little more than our shadow self dressed in geek, which reminds me of Scott’s encounter with his own Nega Scott… *giggle*
OF COURSE the visualisations of the music and the fights and the special effects AAAH THEY WERE SO GOOD! The battle with the brothers and with Todd the vegan were small audiovisual orgasms!
The first time I watched Scott Pilgrim I wasn’t impressed that much, in fact I was slightly disappointed, but now every time I watch it it’s like a new film I enjoy more and more. Of course the crunchy bubblegum has something to do with it, but what if this can be explained by the simple fact that I’ve actually watched the movie more than just once – that I’ve given it the time it deserves? It could very well be like with me and classical music or Steven Wilson albums: the first time around, the first time they come in contact with my world, I’m mostly indifferent to them; they don’t make me feel anything special. It’s only after the second or third listen that I slowly become familiarised with them and finally come to love them.
Is, then, the key to the things we love simple familiarity – a dose of the right thing at the right time, with the key difference that sets it apart from other nice things that we don’t end familiarised with that it’s not limited to a single dose? Obviously there’s something more, a hidden ingredient, a pluck at an invisible or intangible string, that helps determine whether you’ll like or dislike something – that much is clear.
I have to ask myself, however: have I forgotten what it means to listen for a second or a third time? I’m afraid that I might have, at least to a certain degree. If love, proximity and the act – or ritual – of setting apart basically derive from familiarity plus something special (but mainly familiarity) then in my eternal and fleeting pursuit of the new, the elusive, the mysterious and the unexplored, in my futile attempts to quench the thirst of infinite novelty that often even ridicule the very concept of familiarity, I might have unknowingly and unwillingly sacrificed proximity, I might have sacrificed love. In analytical psychology terms, maybe it’s time I conquered my Ne to move on to my Si. In INFPs this transition comes later in life, of course, and I’m still not done with my Ne, but maybe the calmness of Si domincance is really what I need.
Well, after this heartfelt little exposition, I guess it’s time to say what I actually did during the day. I am a little bit tired of the pretty colours and the too-deep-for-you words, though, so I’ll leave you with three brief sentences:
The simple fact of the matter is that I’m sick of the internet.
Got your attention?
I’ve been wanting to write this post for the past several days. It came to me when my laptop stopped working for a day, and I was somehow relieved that I had an excuse not to check my e-mail, my facebook, follow through with my obligations. In truth, I think I’ve wanted to write this for the past several years, but the time was never just right – or I was not ready to take things seriously.
Now the time is right. I know because I’ve had this heavy feeling in the greater area of my heart and stomach all day, the same bodily sensation I get every time I get the urgency to publish something important for me. In fact, it’s the exact same feeling I get before I ask a girl I like out, have an exam coming, or need to make a phone call to somebody I’ve never met before. It’s the flinch, but it’s funny how a simple sudden need to write something makes me experience the same physical reactions to insecurity, the knowledge of what’s to come, the question of whether it will be accepted or rejected (tell me again, which one’s worse?)
Before you say anything, I know. I know all that. All of it. I’ve had my life shaped by being online, guided by it. If there was a poster child for this brand new technology 30 years ago, I could have been it. I even studied the thing in university, both from a more theoretical, humanistic perspective and a drier, technical approach. The only reason I believe I might not be the most suitable person to talk about it today is that every day, to I’ put it politely, I’m becoming less of a fan.
To give you a rough idea of how long I’ve been a user, I have had access to the internet generally available to me since I was 8 years old – my father’s 28.8kbps with GroovyNet. That meant web surfing about twice a month on the weekends I used to spend with that side of my family. All I would search for on AltaVista or Yahoo would be related to Nintendo, Mario or Donkey Kong. I’m talking about 1997 here.
I’m not going to say more about my own personal history and milestones of net use (i.e. when I made my first e-mail address, when I first had a net connection of my very own, my first online game, my first download from P2P networks or my first social network account, even the first post on this very website), for the very simple reason that, for the majority of my life, these internet-related milestones had been so closely connected (heh) to my real-life history, that any attempt of recording or writing about them would be like trying to write something about my life the past 15 or so years in general. The boundaries between online and offline life would be arbitrary. It would be like a book no-one wants to read, because they have their own sitting right next to them.
I won’t go into details about how the internet is important today, either, but I will do a rough run down. We all know about it more or less: it’s the fastest growing (tele)communications technology in the history of our species, at least as far as we know; it has created new dynamics in virtually every field, accelerating change in unprecedented rates and paving the way for greater shifts yet; it has proven a disruption in the status quo, an experiment gone wild, an almost unharnessable beast with inner workings that global capitalist, democratic, free market societies weren’t prepared for and still don’t know how to manage.
For human communities and communication, it’s been the culmination of all human inventions to this point, the convergence of all human endeavours to create this network of everything, everywhere, a single entity that contains the entirety of our heritage and makes it available to all. It’s the connection of anybody with anybody else. In 20 years – less! – we’ve created this thing, this pulsing, vibrating cybernetic superconstruction that would make science fiction writers of just 30 years ago pee themselves with excitement and anticipation. We live in the future!
How do you, personally, feel about that? Do you realise what important times we live in? Speaking for myself, writing the above gave me a rushing sensation, just for a second there. It was surprising, to tell you the truth: the net nowadays has been making me little more than numb.
Which brings me to my initial point. I’m sick of it.
Rant incoming.
I’m sick of Facebook. Sick of everybody obsessing over themselves so much. Sick of selfies, sick of cries of attention which are answered by other, louder cries for attention. Sick of how our stupidity, our short-sightedness hasn’t been cured or at least lessened by our newfound ability to communicate more efficiently than ever, but instead we’ve inadvertently used these tools to make stupidity travel harder, better, faster, stronger.
I’m sick of having to think about checking my multiple e-mail accounts, their unusually high number explainable by my taste for playing around with nicknames and forever tranforming identities, and my peculiar distaste for comfortably centralising my communications. Call me also slightly paranoid – I’m sick of that too. I’m sick of having to worry about not replying as soon as possible, sick of “not having checked my e-mail” not counting as an excuse anymore. Who cares if I really don’t have a smartphone – for how much longer still unknown?
I’m sick of the routine of it. Checking the same site again and again, the pointless refresh. If I’m going to do something in the morning, why does it have to be checking the false news of a false world on a website full of shills paid to swerve public opinion this way and that? Do I really need to know what’s happening, all the time, if I can only ever remember so little of it, talk about less of it and act on almost nothing of it? If the net is the most democratic medium we have, what happens when, after everyone and their grandmother has facebook and can make their comment and opinion public for all to see and be somehow influenced by, the same shit we experience in everyday life is copied to the web?
I’m sick of a web, a “democracy”, where trolls set the scene and have the upper hand, sick of pitiful little men that externalise their social anxieties and complexes in a space that can’t really harm them, being the driving force in some of the worst cybercultural phenomena we get to see online. But I wish it was just trolls: I’m sick of everybody’s self-centered non-trolling opinions, too. If we give everyone a voice online, we should be able to call the bullshit. But why do our bullshit detectors work so much less effectively online than in real life? Isn’t it a little bit like the mere fact that somebody’s doing something online, it’s given more validity than if it were done offline? Is that just the novelty of the medium that will soon pass? It’s no wonder @AvoidComments exists and that some sites have disabled their comments features altogether…
I’m sick of people smugly declaring they don’t have a television when asked if they’ve heard of the news on this or that celebrity, but they spend more time watching Youtube videos or TV series than they ever spent on watching classic old WeTube in the past.
I’m sick of writing “I’m sick of”, so I’m going to externalise and project a little bit here.
How do you feel about having to stack up against the whole world with your creativity? How many times have you had a great idea but did nothing to make it happen, because the thought that “somebody else must have done it already” killed it on the spot, and to make matters worse, you googled it just to be sure and somebody else had already executed it 5 times better than what you had even conceived of, sending you even farther down that internal pit? How does that make you feel? Why?
When was the last time you talked to each of those tens of Skype/MSN/whatever friends? Are you still interested in what they’re doing? Would you consider that the internet is bringing you closer to them?
How about reading? What was the best article you read the past week? The past month? No, you’re not allowed to look up your browser history. Go on, tell me what it said. What’s that? You can’t?
The pictures you have online, things you wrote a while ago, all that… Do you ever consider that people looking up your name have access to that and can paint a mental picture of who you are now based on who you were 5 years ago? In another 5 years or 10 years from now, these numbers will have skyrocketed. Do you want that? How does it make you feel? For me it used to be really stressful that somebody might have the wrong idea of who I am (I have some form of social anxiety IRL about being misunderstood and rejected, which translates in interesting ways in the webosphere) but there’s increasingly nothing I can do and I’ve just sort of embraced the fluidity. You can’t win them all anyway. I suppose you just have to live with your everything being public and always be appropriately mindful of your actions online.
All this makes it very hard to disown things you did and said in the past, however. We’re not allowed to purge, which is I think very normal behaviour we should be encouraging more, and neither are we allowed to change as people; if we change we instantly create inconsistencies across the various existing representations of us online. If I wish to stop using the name cubilone, for example, because I no longer identify with what the name carries with it, who will be the tens of cubilones you can find on the web?
Talking about public, have you been finding it more stressful to decide what you should be sharing and what not? I have been very bad with sharing lately, and don’t consider most details about my current life as worth sharing with others, including things I would definitely post here in the past. Remember, though: I’ve had the ‘mension for almost 7 years. Who’s not to change his or her habits in that time?
But no, I’m talking also about sites like Tumblr, Pinterest etc. Sites that force the whole damn interestnet (read that again carefully) down your virtual gullet before you’ve even had the chance to blink/chew. Tumblr especially is excellent at making you insensitive to beauty. Time and time again I’ve caught myself and others scrolling down the feed, giving a split second of attention to pictures that under different conditions would have made it to our desktop background. What happened? Have we forgotten to stop and appreciate? If we haven’t yet, I reckon we’re well on our way down that path.
I’ve talked and written about the web and infinite novelty before but, as you can see if you click on that link, I wasn’t able to limit my susceptibility to it in the 7 months that have passed since the post above. It’s a dangerous thing that can silently devastate a mind such as mine that feeds on new ideas and connections and is always on the lookout for the novel and the untried. Indulging myself in infinite novelty feels right, more or less because surrendering myself to it is one of my strongest habits, but at this point I think it’s time I admitted that it’s poisonous for my creativity and my ability to concentrate; it’s detrimental for my already distracted personality constantly spread thin, and it’s bad for my mental health, my relationships and happiness in general.
Does any of this resonate with you at all?
Good. It’s time we did something about it, don’t you agree?
I’ve decided to do it the hard way, since everything else I’ve tried to this day has more or less failed. I will use the internet less – I will force myself to use it less. Everything: skyping, downloading, facebooking, e-mails, checking up on that book I learned about earlier in the day, writing on the blog, working on my sites… Everything.
At this point, I want to make it clear that I don’t think the internet is all bad. It’s an extremely powerful tool that can be used to do incredible things, spread world-changing ideas or just help people keep in touch, and it’s very practical, too. I’m not saying we should forfeit all the great things the internet has brought in our lives – at this point we can hardly turn back, anyway. What I’m trying to say with this post is that the power of the internet has to be harnessed. One has to be smart about using it and not surrender oneself to its siren song. I believe that by dramatically limiting my access to it I will be in the position to use it more purposefully, and I believe so would you.
My internet access days will be Wednesdays and Saturdays. I might add another day or two for emergency Skype calls that can’t be avoided, but generally, this will be it. I will keep it up for at least the next 24 days, the duration of the rest of my 7×7 challenge, but I aim to keep it up past that point.
This is a personal experiment, but I wish to find other people to join me in this quixotic quest. Will you take a stand with me, friends?
Remi Coulom (left) and his computer program, Crazy Stone, take on grandmaster Norimoto Yoda in the game of Go. Photo: Takashi Osato/WIRED
Wired article on the state of things in developing a Go-playing program that will beat the grandmasters, something that apparently might not only be farther off than we thought, but also more difficult.
I was surprised to hear from programmers that the eventual success of these programs will have little to do with increased processing power. It is still the case that a Go program’s performance depends almost entirely on the quality of its code. Processing power helps some, but it can only get you so far. Indeed, the UEC lets competitors use any kind of system, and although some opt for 2048-processor-core super-computers, Crazy Stone and Zen work their magic on commercially available 64-core hardware.
[…]
Many Go players see the game as the final bastion of human dominance over computers. This view, which tacitly accepts the existence of a battle of intellects between humans and machines, is deeply misguided. In fact, computers can’t “win” at anything, not until they can experience real joy in victory and sadness in defeat, a programming challenge that makes Go look like tic-tac-toe.
This book was the first one I finished on my new Kindle, a fact which, in combination with its contents, makes me feel kind of tainted, like knowingly eating dolphin meat or something; posting a sincere review of it here after reading about Goodreads and what happened a few months ago feels in turn like I’m writing about my experience of eating dolphin meat while giving it a star rating. But I’ll go through with this, because it’s not dolphin meat.
I knew that Amazon acquired Goodreads last year from the moment it happened. From the first second I knew what it would mean for Goodreads as a website, as a social network, as a resource. But I didn’t budge. I’ve seen this happen so many times before: great websites or ideas turn “evil”, my beloved CouchSurfing being the most prominent example I can think of right now; I went on, for what could I have honestly done as a single person to stop things, change things, make the guys at the head of CouchSurfing or Goodreads realise that what they had done meant turning on their community, the people they owed all their success to? Should I have changed my profile and alerted people of the fact? Shold I have jumped ship?
I’m still very far from being sure about what the best course of action should be, the perfect balance between convenienve and idealism, both in my offline and online lives. I have wanted to join BeWelcome, the best alternative to CouchSurfing, for example, but I feel as if I have invested too much time to the latter to make a change like that. At the same time, CouchSurfing has become so bad that it has naturally lost me as a user, something Goodreads hasn’t achieved -yet-, but then I’m not a social user of the site and I’ve never felt part of any community in it, unlike most of the people who contributed to this book and were alerted to and alarmed by the changes mostly because of that involvement.
I wasn’t even aware of the censorship before I stumbled upon an abandoned “beacon” profile which had most of its details replaced with anti-Goodreads messages and promotion of Off-Topic. You could say that it was an efficient strategy, because the message eventually reached me, the oblivious user – or I should say, I reached the message.
Having now read the book, I realise I’m supposed to do something with this information, right? But is there anything I can do which would mean anything? Should I make my small revolt against Goodreads, when it was on myKindle where I read this book – complete with Amazon-powered Goodreads integration that doesn’t work as I had imagined it would? Should I move my reviews to BookLikes, like some people did? Why use a social network at all, if I’m ready to give up the convenience of the site for some vague ideology? And at the very end, if to enjoy a free service online, you become the commodity, can there be any escape at all from the sudden-death ToU?
I have sadly become cynical over the years, especially about online activism. I see a lot of people being very sensitive and idealistic on the web but with a seemingly loose grasp of reality. They think that because CS or GR seem friendly and tailored to their own needs – social networks are made to give this impression, after all – that they, alone, can make a difference, just by spreading the message. Often, but not always of course – because there are some people whose character is such that they react very strongly to things like that from all sides – cyber-activists can double as happy, obedient citizens/consumers with a straight face, which boggles my mind. When people get so worked up about these changes that they actively quit sites, I don’t know what to think. On the one hand, their determination and bullheadedness is admirable – it really is. On the other hand, I don’t see what kind of alternative they’re imagining and, most important of all, how they can make sure that their alternative can remain as pure, idealistic and humble as they imagine their perfect social network to be. How they can make sure that the new place will stay better than Goodreads before the natural moral entropy of the web forces them to find their new digital Zion.
But I’m grumpy today. A storm in a teacup can bring about good things and I’m grateful that there are people out there who don’t overanalyze themselves out of any sort of action, meaningful or not.
I have the rational intelligence to be a scientist, but it’s not in my personality to fill in cracks in established mental models. I seek anomalies that open cracks.
Jimmy Wales’ statement is as revolting as the discussion under it. I would suggest that you read it, but only if you have the stomach for tens of “skeptics” parrotting the mainstream opinions about woo, parapsychology etc, claiming the truth and the high ground of knowledge as they usually do. Even the article itself is taking clear sides without shame.
Do these people know anything about the subject? Does Jimmy Wales know anything about the subject, he who with one broad swath pigeonholes so many people as lunatic charlatanes? I don’t know whether this technique in particular has had successes, explicable or inexplicable, in doing what it says it does, I haven’t looked into it to be honest, but I’ve seen the same discussion surrounding “pseudoscience” too many times to count.
Why this hate? Why this elitism? Why this aversion to exploration of the fringes? When did science become all about defending what’s already known? I thought the opposite was the main idea. Is materialist science, peer-reviewd journals, wikipedia, Richard Dawkins and the rest, parts of a bulletproof world theory anyway?
No, they’re not. Far from it. And if you want to know why, you should absolutely read The Science Delusion (title insisted upon by publisher) by Rupert Sheldrake. His main idea is that science and the scientific method are generally good at giving answers about our world, but, just like organised religion 500 years ago did, it has become too inflexible, too bulky, too dogmatic, too rid of assumptions, too sure of itself and too dismissive to be of any real use today. Meanwhile, it’s hindering research that could further our understanding of the world in unimaginable ways.
What’s interesting is that Sheldrake in this book provides us with -what’s normally considered as- hard evidence for a world that cannot be explained materialistically. That includes results of real peer-reviewed experiments that point to the reality of things like brainless memories, statistically significant telepathy and many more chin-stroke-worthy phenomena that truly test mainstream science’s beliefs of what should or shouldn’t be possible.
After reading the book, I checked Rupert Sheldrake’s Wikipedia entry just to see reactions to his work from the scientific communituy. Not surprisingly, the discussion was not much more sophisticated than what I witnessed in the link at the top of this review: accusations of pseudoscience, charlatanism etc pervaded the articles, indications that the skeptics hadn’t really comprehended the criticism aimed at their methodology and worldview, didn’t follow up on the bibliography, plainly assuming that there must have been something wrong with it (confirmation bias), or that they simply didn’t even read the book. Richard Dawkins has said, after all, that he doesn’t want to discuss evidence when it comes to inexplicable phenomena, raising questions about whether he’s really interested in the truth or not – in my personal experience, most skeptics do not have furthering their understanding of our world at the top of their priorities.
In any case, I find the accusations against Sheldrake, and this book in particular, hollow: The Science Delusion has close to 40 pages of notes and bibliography of actual experiments to back it up and Sheldrake’s style and prose themselves are lucid as well as restrained. Even in the parts in which he discusses the inability of science to interpret the phenomena, where he proposes his own theory of morphing resonance as a possible explanation -the parts I enjoyed the least because I cannot exactly grasp the concept of morphic resonance-, he does so without conviction, but rather with the spirit of the curious researcher. A true scientist in my book. The skeptics’ reaction to his work seems to disregard all of this completely; they treat him like they would any old fraud.
But I understand: scientists are also people. What would it have been normal for them to do in the face of rejection of their entire lives’ work plus a few hundred years of tradition? Accept their failure? Accept their dogmatism? Just as scientists are people, science is also a human activity, and as most of human activities do, it also suffers from the same problems human beings generally have, only in a larger, more chaotic scale.
Finally, one more reason I appreciated this book so much was that it was… tender. At the other side of the raging skeptics and this blind rejection there is investigation, there is respect, there is a belief in a state of things that resonated deeply with me. Maybe it’s because Sheldrake’s main field of research has been biology that he shows such love for plants, animals and life in general. For whatever reason, it warmed my heart and made me think that if I ever was a real scientist, Sheldrake would be my rold model: a fighter for truth against the faux fighters for truth, the romantic gardener who everybody calls a hippie but he alone sees what everybody else is too blind to see.
Great article on how TED makes people hungry for innovations they’re not willing to follow through with making a reality, and how the ruling class, willingly or not, likes it this way. But TED is so cool…
I just came across this website among all this Flappy Bird talk and read this brilliant article by Mattie Brice, Our Flappy Dystopia.
What role does capitalism play in what is and what is not accepted as a game by the mainstream games culture? What does it take for a title to become an indie darling? What kind of segregation is at play here?
She mentions three games as examples of atypical indie titles that push the boundaries while at the same time making people sift awkwardly in their seats: dys4ia, Problem Attic and Analogue: A Hate Story. I have only played the first one and hope that the other two are as intriguing as it. I won’t say more, you’ll have to try it for yourself – it will only take you 5 minutes.
Alternate Ending as a whole is quite a find. Brice’s criticism on games and gaming culture are coming from a different and unusual place, but one that I’d definitely like to hear more often from, however: minority sexuality and social injustice.
“The year is 2051. CONTROL, the government of Europe, keeps everyone happy in a virtual reality. This is a world where it is too hot to go out, and where wonderful music made by dolphins gives everyone pleasure. It’s a world which is changed forever when music critic Saul Grant discovers what makes dolphins sing and sets out to free them.”
Wouldn’t this back-cover tidbit catch your attention immediately if you stumbled upon it while browsing through used books? I know it caught mine. It was in the open-air book market in front of Sofia City Library, where I’m doing my EVS. If anything with either 1) dolphins, 2) the Web or 3) dystopian sci-fi is easy enough to pique my interest on its own, imagine my face seeing them combined.
The book itself is only 96 pages long and, regardless of the simple language because the book was written specifically for EFL students of around FCE level, I found it to be quite enjoyable and engaging; not pretentious yet interesting; simplified in language but not messages, and quite relevant ones, too.
To tell you the truth, I find telling a story in the easiest words possible quite charming. Something in the style just makes my heart softer, like ice cream with warm cookies. It’s like watching children’s cartoons and being able to appreciate the simple beauty of it just because you’re an adult. If a universal truth were spoken, I’m sure it would be closer to such language than to the kind reserved for high philosophy. They say that life is complicated; that’s true, but it’s also fantastically simple.
For what it is, Dolphin Music is really good. I started off by giving this book three stars but writing about it made me happier. I can’t see what should stop me from giving it four.
