The Dream Phone Initiative… Apple edition?

Due to a change in life circumstances, I need to switch from Android to the iPhone. I often equate the stress of getting a new phone to moving to a new apartment. Switching from Android to iOS feels like moving to a new country where I don’t speak the language.

My life with the smart phone cult

The smartphone has unified calling, messaging, and computing into a single, albeit flawed, package. The smartphone is more than just a mobile phone combined with a portable computer. It is a whole new category of technology. My only complaint about the smartphones is that when it comes to calling, messaging, and computing, smartphones suck compared to the computer and the telephone. The new thing that comes with smartphones is virtual assistants, like Siri or Alexa. Right now the technology is primitive. You give them commands and they either return a value or an error. It’s the verbal equivalent of DOS in the 1980’s. But that technology is getting better, at a dizzying rate.

Don’t get me wrong, I love smart phones, I have like 3 of them. I love being able to put all of those services into my pocket. It’s just that mobile communications, where I am on-the-go with no access to a desktop, laptop, or tablet, is maybe 40% of my life. The rest of the time I am at a desk, sitting on a couch, or lying in bed. You clearly cannot use a desktop computer when you are in line at the grocery checkout, but for every other situation, there is a much better tool for the job. I prefer to use my tablet when I am on the couch or in bed, and to use a PC and a desk phone when I am seated at a desk.

In general, a dedicated piece of equipment is a superior experience to item that tries to do multiple things at once. A desktop computer with multiple screens and a 104 key keyboard is the superior working/gaming experience. When it comes to talking on the phone, a full-sized business handset or speaker phone is best for long conference calls or talking on the phone while doing something else. When it comes to writing and reading messages, smartphone screens and keyboards, even on phones with 6 inch screens, are a pain to use.

I have been writing about my desire to have a single phone number for calling and texting that I can use on a desk phone, desktop computer, a laptop, and a tablet, as well as on my smartphone. I have been doing *most* of this through Google Voice. I ported my “real” telephone number over to GV more than a decade ago. Now, I use the GV app on my smartphone and iPad for calling and messaging. On a PC, I use the Google Voice website. There are tons of great features, like being able to use multiple phones for calling.

The phantasy fone

The “phone” of my dreams is a plain box with no screen that I wirelessly access with different screens. So, when I am at home, the box sits on an end table or night stand, and I can use a 10 inch touch screen with it. When I am in my office at work or at home, I can plug it in to a USB port and access everything from my desktop computer. When I am in the car, I can connect the box to my stereo head unit for music, navigation, and calling.

Separating the “phone” from the screen lets the device be as bulky and ugly as it needs to be and lets the hardware of the screen be as slim or large as it needs to be. Maybe you need an 8 inch screen. Maybe you miss the old 4.5 inch screens from 2012. Maybe you just need earbuds and a watch. Whatever user interface you may require, the calling, messaging, broadband, and your virtual assistant should work consistently regardless of the screen, keyboard, or lack thereof.

The thing that frustrates me about the separation of the computer and the smartphone is silly things like accessing files. Getting a file off of a network server and onto a smartphone is eye-gouging-ly frustrating. And the price per GB of storage space on a smartphone is outrageous. Now imagine completing the process of copying files, and paying the price for storage on a phone AND a tablet.

If the device that I am describing sounds like a mobile hotspot with an SD card, you would be close. The problem of course is that a lot of hotspots have difficulty with intense real-time media like Facetime or some online games. So it’s not just a fantasy about hardware, it’s a fantasy about breaking free from the rent-seeking that is baked into every facet of the smartphone.

The hour grows late and Chris rides to The Apple Store seeking my counsel.

So now I am on the eve of changing over from Android and Google Voice to iOS and iMessage. Yes, I could continue to use GV on iOS. But I think that just giving in and doing it the Apple way will yield better results. Apple prefers iMessage for SMS, and will let you send messages even when you have no service. Also, iMessage and Facetime is the way that all of my children prefer to contact me, and right now it only works when I have my iPad.

There are a few challenges to this plan, however. Such as making calls and receiving calls from a desk phone. I am looking into an analog handset and a Bluetooth link for the mobile phone. I am also looking into getting a Mac Mini for desktop use of iMessage and Facetime. Using iMessage from my latop when I am at work is another challenge. I am looking at software to connect my phone to my laptop through Bluetooth. The issue with buying all of this Apple crap IS the incredibly hefty price tag. A used iPhone is close to a thousand dollars. A used Mac Mini is more than half that. Not to mention the electronic waste associated with replacing phones and computers.

Love, Death, and Laptops

To combat the waste problem, I am also contemplating a lifecycle management plan for the electronics in my life. The idea is spend this next year buying the gadgetry that makes up my smartphone/tablet arsenal and then vow not to buy any more for four years. I know that this is a difficult challenge since I am like a dope fiend for gadgets. I chose 4 years because I have 3 basic technology hobbies: gaming, homelab, and amateur radio. I figure 1 year I buy/upgrade Apple gear: phone, tablet, watch, ear buds, the next I buy a gaming PC, then a servers for the cluster, and on year 4: focus on upgrading the gadgetry that I use for my radio activities.

I still have some Android gear, and pretty much always will. When it comes to utilities like wifi scanners Android really can’t be beat. I also have a second phone that I use for outdoor adventures, which given the price of an iPhone, will now see significantly more use when I’m outside.

I’m completely off of Twitter

I know that it’s pretty lame to announce your departure. But I’m kind of done with social media. I used to be pretty serious about it, but it’s basically gentrification for the Internet. The problem with Twitter is that it has a lot of influence for a platform with something like 400 million users world-wide. That sounds like a lot, but it’s basically the population of United States. Imagine the U.S. having that much cultural control over… everything. I guess it’s not *that* hard to imagine.

I took a couple of mental health breaks from Twitter and I didn’t really go back. I got active on it for a short while when the Ukraine war began, but I just couldn’t keep it up. Now that Elon Musk owns it, there is no reason for me to go back. I used to be a pretty serious advocate for Free Speech. The problem when straight white dudes talk about Free Speech, they usually mean freedom to act like an asshole without repercussions. I am all for fucking around, it’s just that I am also in favor of finding out. I have done a fair amount of finding out in the past couple of years. I think about (and read about, and listen to other people talk about) anti-racism and intersectionality, and I have basically come to the conclusion that the world doesn’t need Yet Another Mediocre White Dude talking about things. Except maybe other mediocre white dudes. Elon Musk is the ultimate Mediocre White Dude.

Instead of talking, I have decided to do things. I go to protests and marches. I go work as an election official. And I hang out with queer people. Turns out, queer neuro-divergent people *LOVE* Dungeons and Dragons.

Stranger Things, the Satanic Panic, and Life as a Nerd in the 80’s

I spent the last two weeks recovering from another bout of COVID. This time, I had to quarantine from the family in a hotel room. As a fan of heist movies, I have always wondered what it would be like to hide out in a crappy motel somewhere. Turns out that it’s pretty boring. I watched a lot of TV.

I finished season 4 of Stranger Things. For me, the story has taken on a life of its own. Whether this season is “good” or not is kind of immaterial. I just need to experience the story. The satisfaction part will come later when I re-watch it for the second or third time.

In many ways, the show is a stylized version of my own childhood. I grew up in a small town, and I went to a small high school. Like Mike, I got bullied for being a nerd. Like Lucas, I used sports (Tae Kwon Do and Kung Fu) to break out of that mold. This season also introduced Eddie, a metalhead who used drugs and music to define his identity as something more than a nerd. Instead of metal, I was into punk and alternative.

Of particular interest to me in this season is the association of Dungeons and Dragons with Satan worship. The fear of Satanic Cults was palpable when I was in middle school in the 80’s. My choices in music and games lead to some real conflict with teachers and other kids. Especially those who were practicing evangelicals. This became known as the Satanic Panic, where religious people were terrified of a massive covert conspiracy to sacrifice children to Satan. There are a number or parallels between that and QAnon today. Being misunderstood and even bullied by evangelicals is why I don’t religion of any kind. I have embraced some of the Taoist and Zen philosophy from my martial arts training, but by Western standards I am an Atheist.

Fantasy stories like Lord or the Rings and Dragonlance, combined with my study of fighting arts helped me find my identity as a warrior. It’s why I went into the military, and it’s why I find myself out on the streets marching in protests and Pride parades.

The Great Big Thing(tm): Weaponized Autism Edition

It’s been a little while since I have been destroyed by existential dread, but when it comes to meaningless suffering, the western world never seems to disappoint. My issue dejour is that some beta chauvinist spent too much time on 4chan and then drove a van through a crowd of people. In an age of mass shootings, murdered journalists, and white power marches, I now have to contend with radicalized misogyny as well. Thanks Obama!

Somewhere along the way, weird white dudes stopped being trolls and started being terrorists. Somehow the Autism spectrum has been weaponized.

As a weird white dude, this disturbs me more than Nazi Bullshit because I can’t help but feel that something that I was once a part of has been co-opted for truly awful purpose. The alt-right using memes to spread their bullshit was bad enough. Memes never did anything to anyone but be awesome, so why drag them into your racism? This is something much worse. It’s some kind of gateway drug to indoctrinate nerds into this weird form of Radical Fuckery.

Back story time
You will have to forgive my linking to one of those Alt-underground blogs. I am keenly aware of the tendency of crazy blogs to reference other crazy blogs. This particular post captures something that I have been thinking about for a couple of years now: the radicalization of the bowels of the Internet, my former home. Years ago, before I found a home with the hacker community, life “Away From the Keyboard” was tough for me because I felt very much like an outsider. I felt that I was connected to something not of this world. Not just to technology, but to the pro free speech, pro privacy, anti intellectual property and anti corporate counter-culture of the Internet. It was a connection that made me feel like some sort of alien in my Midwestern/corporate/suburban surroundings.

I also felt (and still feel) that the Internet is being slowly ruined by a kind of corporate-led gentrification. The Internet was once the wild west. It was full of weird, dangerous, and scary things that corporations have felt the need build firewalls around, in both the technological sense and the metaphorical. Google safe search and the Facebook news feed are the ultimate expressions of those same metaphorical firewalls. These companies are complicit in the algorithmic dismantling of the open Internet in to “TV with a buy button”. They are hijacking people’s thought processes. And, they are neutering one of the last places in the world where Free Speech is possible. In response, I was determined to “keep it weird” by trolling the “Normal People” that would wander in to deep end of the pool. I and others like me would ridicule them for being, for lack of a better word, unenlightened. Trolling people was my way of “Freaking out Squares” like Homer Simpson did in that one episode of The Simpsons:

“Copyright is based on censorship man!”

I was having a few laughs at Normal People on the Gentrified Internet who weren’t at all equipped to deal with “The Real Internet” creeping into polite society. Dabbling in a bit of satirical and ironic homophobia is not a nice thing to do, but back then, I was not nice. I was angry and territorial. As coping mechanisms go, going on the Internet and ruining someone’s day is basically like shooting Heroin. Life Away From the Keyboard was filled with Normal People which was a source of frustration and alienation. Pointing out that Normal People don’t belong on the Internet because they’d be happier somewhere else was form of stress relief for me. I mean, I always knew that everyone belonged on the Internet, I just didn’t want the normies to accidentally fuck it up for the rest of us by confusing the Internet with television.

Fake Internet points are cool and all, but have you ever made someone really mad? When I finally found a place to belong to, I mostly put trolling behind me. Mostly. I had matured. Mostly. I learned to let other people enjoy things. I learned that being yourself on the Internet is actually really brave and that ridiculing normies was just me being one of those Gen X Cool Guys that doesn’t believe in anything. I also learned that while starting arguments and saying crazy shit in public forums is fun, that same behavior is being directed without satire or sarcasm at people who are trying to make the world a better place. Also, deadpan sarcasm is great way to make your Facebook friends think that you have severe mental problems.

They don’t think it be like it is but it do
My point here is that there is a major difference between rudely reminding someone that you can Internet better than they can and what is happening today. Like so major.

You see, the awful parts of the Internet used to be a place of perpetual flux. Sure, there were people stumbling in there to be weird and angry at the world, but there were others there who were making fun of those weirdos and celebrating their failures. Whatever you tried to do, it failed. Being an EdgeLord and trying to make a shocking statement always drew mockery and criticism. Either someone found fault in your logic and you got mocked for it, or someone went harder at it than than you and they mocked your lack of conviction.

There was no recognition; there was only mockery. In that mockery, I think that growth was supposed to happen. Getting housed by people that Internet better than you forces you to think harder about what you are doing and saying. It sounds awful, but the process of being mercilessly mocked [hopefully] matured you into a calmer, more enlightened person. At least that’s what it did for me.

Today 4chan and other awful Internet spaces are basically terror training camps for weird white dudes to become… Some kind of Autistic version of Al Qaeda I guess? For a lot of these dudes, once being white and male is no longer a competitive advantage, they won’t be able to compete at all. Sure, they’re the master race or whatever, but based on the pictures I’ve seen of their Nazi marches, those bros are inferior specimens. Take away their racism and sexism and all you have left is crippling anxiety and bad skin.

Something happened in the decade between my time as a troll and now. It went off the rails somewhere. Maybe too many people like me abandoned the Real Internet and the EdgeLords took over? I parted ways with that form of Internet culture years ago, and now I feel like a significant piece of my history has been stolen from me. And, maybe I am partially responsible? I don’t really know.

What I do know is that what I once was, is not what this is. Doing it for the lulz, however mean spirited, is not the same as doing it specifically to harm others. Even if there are people still doing it for the lulz, those lulz are somehow empowering other people to do awful things. It was lulzy when I did it, but it’s not lulzy anymore. I was not an incel. I was not a Nazi. These assholes have stolen my history.

MCU Captain America is Best Captain America

Film as a medium is in a state of decline and it’s the fault of people like me. I don’t turn up to the theater except for big productions like Star Wars and The Avengers. That means that market forces have driven films into being flashy CGI messes. I accept my responsibility for that. I am not perfect, I just don’t have the time and money to turn up for films that I can more easily enjoy on my TV at home. I’m flawed.

In talking to a friend about Flawed Paladins I remarked that taking the whole Dudley Do-Right idea and adding flaws and nuance made MCU Cap one of the best characters ever. I love that MCU cap is an exemplar of the American Spirit who is now at odds with modern American society and government. He’s a manifestation of our WWII American Exceptional Narrative of the US saving the world from insensate evil. Cap is fictional, but so is a good deal of the narrative of American Exceptionalism. Cap is an all-American kid from Brooklyn, desperate to serve his country in the face of unfathomable evil. He sees people being hurt, and he steps up. Like 70 years later, he gets thawed out and he’s appalled by what he sees. He says “When I went under, the world was at war. I wake up, they say we won. They didn’t say what we lost.”

In Cap’s heart, and at the heart of the narrative, is the idea of freedom. I would define this freedom as the freedom of speech and expression, freedom of religion, freedom from fear, and freedom from need. I would posit that modern America runs on religion and fear, is perplexed by freedom of expression, and actively hates the idea of freedom from need. Obviously you need the press and courts and all that other bullshit, but the blueprint is those four basic freedoms. MCU Cap is the personification of the idea of America and his “America is great, but this shit here isn’t America” struggle makes him perfectly imperfect. He has to do what he thinks is right, even if it means working for a group like S.H.I.E.L.D. that he doesn’t trust.

MCU Cap’s internal conflict between his duty as an American hero and the shift in American society after The Avengers [a metaphor for 9/11] is absolutely brilliant. He is at odds with Tony Stark when he hacks S.H.I.E.L.D.’s computers but ends up at odds with Nick Fury by the time he sees what Fury is really up to [a possible metaphor for Snowden/Manning]. Then all that gets pushed aside by the attack on New York. By the time we see cap again in The Winter Soldier, Cap has made a compromise: he is being a hero for America by working for S.H.I.E.L.D. but he is deeply uneasy about the duplicity he keeps seeing. By the time we see him in Civil War, Cap is completely done with S.H.I.E.L.D. (and presumably with being a hero) in order to help Bucky, and they’re coming to get him.

I can’t think of a better criticism of corpofascist America than an all-powerful private army trying to take over the country, and hunting down two of America’s original war heroes in order to do it. Sure, there’s Hydra and Ultron manipulating everything, but the real story is Cap trying to reconcile loving his country, mistrusting his government, and looking out for his best friend, none of which ever truly get reconciled. I can’t think of anything more human than that.

In other posts I have bemoaned aspects of our government, our society, or our political process. I don’t know that I have ever stated that the reason that I hate all of it: the NSA, the TSA, the drones, the torture… Obviously it violates our privacy, free speech, and our freedom from fear. But I also hate all of it because that’s not what America means to me.

Turns out that Bats vs. Supes didn’t suck…

It was just too realistic for some people 🙂

The Great Big Thing(tm): Reductio Ad Absurdum Editium

I did my best in a previous rant to point out the [possibly malicious] polarization of the national conversation. I tried to express my concern over the simplification of complex ideas into rhetorically convenient narratives. Unfortunately, my self-righteousness got the better of me and I don’t think I quite captured that the heart of the issue is a reduction of ideas. This essay really captures the issue for me without needing to watch 3 hours of Adam Curtis documentaries to achieve understanding. In essence, the essay likens the focus by Western Society on [predatory] exponential financial gain to the mutation of cells into a form of cancer:

Values and complexity are focused more and more on prioritizing exponential financial growth, led by for-profit corporate entities that have gained autonomy, rights, power, and nearly unregulated societal influence. The behavior of these entities are akin to cancers. Healthy cells regulate their growth and respond to their surroundings, even eliminating themselves if they wander into an organ where they don’t belong. Cancerous cells, on the other hand, optimize for unconstrained growth and spread with disregard to their function or context.

Reducing the American experiment down to unfettered corporate growth is a gross reduction of ideas. Reducing ideas essentially reduces people. Reducing humanity down to statistics is dangerous because it eliminates most, if not all, of the complexity that makes humanity so different from everything else. I did a fair amount of whining about the hypocrisy of our polarized media landscape without talking about how absurd it is to reduce people down to being cogs in a machine. I have touched on this idea in the past pondering the nature of freedom. This reduction is absurd because the idea of advancing one ideology (which is really just a subset of human struggle) at the expense of another ideology (which is itself another subset of human struggle) is basically pitting half of society against the other half, while deliberately ignoring everything that they have in common.

Rejecting absurdity means embracing irreconcilable ideas

Much like the geardo cargo cult that worships gun culture, there is another cargo cult that worships technology. Much like the cult of the gun that has no real concept of military doctrine, the cult of code has no real concept of software engineering. Just like guns are falsely ascribed the power to help realize white-male-power fantasies, math is also falsely ascribed the power to achieve techno-Utopian fantasies. I understand how seductive both kinds of fantasies can be. The cult of the gun seeks to take control over the violent chaos that threatens to destroy so much. The cult of code wants to cede control to powerful algorithms that promise logic and objectivity and free us from the responsibility of making hard choices. The gun can’t protect you from an uncaring universe, and algorithms just crystallize the biases of their creators.

The desire to take control from those we perceive to be tyrants and to give control over to systems we believe to be objective is a paradox. Like the idea of a benevolent dictator or a truly free market, the perfect system is a great idea that always fails when implemented. Any complex system, be it an economy or a social network, was engineered by people to be used by other people. Engineers are as flawed and fallible as anyone else ergo the systems they build will also be flawed. End users aren’t the sheep that engineers wish that they were. Any imperfect thing (i.e. all things) will eventually be misused by someone with an understanding of its flaws. This isn’t hacker self-righteousness, just look at all of the government programs that get defrauded or the tax increases that billionaires find ways of avoiding. These are flawed systems designed by people that other people have chosen to capitalize on. It doesn’t matter how much time, effort, and money you put into developing a system, someone will invest more in order to exploit it.

The problem with both cults is that neither the gun nor the algorithm is a substitute for humanity, nor is either a hedge against tyranny. In fact, with frightening frequency, both tools harm humanity and encourage tyranny. Guns empower tyrants and are mostly brought to bear against the innocent. Computers empower the reduction of ideas down to data sets, where they confine us to platforms run by big corporations, another form of tyranny. The AK-47 was supposed to be a Communist gift to liberate oppressed peoples, but they mostly got used by death squads. Facebook was supposed to help us to connect with each other, but it mostly pits us against each other while shady marketers peddle divisive media for money and political influence.

Like most of my pseudo-intellectual deep thoughts, the thought began with watching an Adam Curtis documentary but is became fully actualized by watching Rick and Morty. The Adam Curtis idea, that there is a “positive liberty” which is born out of violent struggle, and a “negative liberty” which is born out of apathy. In Rick and Morty, Rick is the epitome of both the gun and the code cults. He has all the weaponry and all the technology, yet most of what he uses it for is to allow himself to get drunk and watch TV. He literally sells a gun to an assassin so he has enough money to spend the day at an arcade. He gets involved with all manner of epic adventures, mostly so he can be an asshole to everyone close to him. He is forever ridiculing the beliefs of others, yet he believes in nothing.

This is probably where I should look to the Asian philosophies I studied as part of my martial arts training should come into play, but Confucianist parables and Taoist paradoxes just aren’t the right medicine for this species existential dread. I’m pretty fucking far from being an Uncarved Stone and trusting the process. If anything, I am an *over* carved stone, and the process is light years away from trustworthy.

The Great Big Thing(tm): TV Edition

When I am not playing Skyrim to stave off my existential dread, I watch TV. Needless to say, I have been watching a lot of TV. I used to consider myself more of a cinema nerd, but films just aren’t that good anymore. When I compare some of my favorite films from a long time ago, to the franchise drek that is film today, it lacks quality. Sure, there are good films here and there, like The Dark Knight and Rogue One, but there are a lot of CGI messes too, and some TV shows seem to deliver more consistent quality.

Film sucks for the most part, and I can’t binge watch Adam Curtis documentaries all the time or I will lose my goddamn mind, so I watch TV. Of course I also do family stuff, but with an infant who doesn’t sleep at night, that involves a fair amount of staying up all night holding a sleeping baby, so TV is a big part of my nightly routine.

I have been watching a few new shows and re-watching some old faves, so I’m just going to list them in no particular order and say random things about them.

Stranger Things

I watched Stranger Things for the first time a couple of weeks after it dropped on NetFlix. Since then, I’ve probably rewatched it at least 3 times. It’s a great show, full of nods to 80’s movies like E.T. and Stand By Me, but it also captures something essential about my childhood, which was playing Dungeons and Dragons in my friend’s basement for hours at a time and being bullied.

There are lots of neat things to spot in the show (like the fact that Hop’s daughter, Eleven, and Will all have the same stuffed tiger) and I am unreasonably pumped for season 2, which should be out in a few weeks. I have my own theories about what will happen, but I don’t really want to spoil anything if by some odd chance this is the thing that inspires someone to watch the show, and by an even odder chance I turn out to be right. I will say that the kids’ D&D game at the beginning of the game sort of outlines the plot of the season, and their game at the end probably outlines what will happen in the second series, or at least underlines what is still unresolved at the end of the first series.

Rick and Morty (obvs.)

The new season of Rick and Morty is awesome. It’s another show full of details and fan theories to obsess over. My existential angst is both alleviated and agitated by the show. The show’s conflicting ideas of finding meaning in uncaring universe either helps or makes things worse; I can’t tell which.

The essential point of Rick and Morty is that people with beliefs will have those beliefs tested at every turn. The show actively punishes characters for having any kind of belief, including the devil. The only person that seems to escape this punishment is Rick, and yet Rick is borderline suicidal. Rick has all the answers, and his answer is not to think about it. As power fantasies go, Rick is either the greatest expression because he is essentially all-powerful, or the worst expression because all of his power never seems to get him anywhere. Again, I can’t tell which.

True Detective (season 1)

Speaking of the dichotomy of belief and disbelief, the first season of True Detective is one of the best television shows I have ever seen. Rust (Matthew McConaughey) is incredibly intelligent and yet completely unable to interact with people, except for when he is interrogating them and luring them into making confessions. There are a number of similarities to Rick and Morty, mostly having to do with the juxtaposition of human meaning and savage cruelty, but also the juxtaposition of truth and deception, duty and corruption. There is just barely enough evidence in the show to convince you that Rust is either psychic or psychotic, and somehow not enough to convince you which one.

Rust is working to find truth, and in so doing alienating everyone and choosing to live in madness and misery. Marty on the other hand does the opposite and ends up alienating everyone anyway. The only way that they can uphold the law is to break the law. It’s existential absurdity at its finest.

Season 2 is a good show, it’s just not the masterpiece that is season 1. It’s still worth watching, I just haven’t watched it a dozen times like I have season 1. If you are going to commit to both seasons, you should probably watch season 2 first. Season 2 unfortunately lacks both the Southern Gothic aesthetic of season 1, and the Lovecraftian symbolism. Season 2 takes place in L.A. and without those motifs, it’s just weird L.A. people doing weird L.A. shit. Kind of like a darker version of Bosch.

BoJack Horseman
BoJack Horseman is another “grown up cartoon” that specializes in reflecting my own nihilism back at me. While Rick and Morty is an endorsement for not engaging in reality, Bojack Horseman is an endorsement for [shying away from] your responsibility for your own reality. Like Rick Sanchez, Bojack understands that everything is shitty and pointless. Unlike Rick, Bojack learns that he is responsible for his own happiness. Of course, Bojack does a comically bad job of handling that responsibility, but he is aware that the responsibility exists.

Watching Bojack Horseman and Rick and Morty as a matched set offers two interesting takes on the “whatever you do you will end up feeling empty inside” nature of Western Civilization. I think both shows have an interesting viewpoint: that you can either take responsibility for yourself and your place in the world around you, or you can deny it. No matter which choice you make, you can still fuck it up completely.

The Great Big Thing(tm): SPAAAAACE Edition

In an effort to stave off existential anxiety I have been staying up all night watching YouTube videos about space. This guy Isaac Arthur has a large number of really interesting videos that cover some really interesting topics about the science of science fiction. I have been listening to him talk for weeks about gravity wells, and Dyson spheres and thinking about offworld societies. All of this stuff is super interesting, and then I existential bedrock again when I started watching his videos about the Fermi Paradox and the Simulation Hypothesis.

Basically, the Fermi Paradox is this idea that there are so many planets, stars, and galaxies in the universe that sheer probability says there are other planets capable of supporting life. So why are there no aliens?

Once I started thinking about the Fermi Paradox, it didn’t take long to start applying the logic to all sorts of things. At first I started thinking about this for other fantasy technologies, like time travel. No one has come from the future to stop catastrophes, so perhaps time travel just isn’t possible, or perhaps human life on earth is extinguished before time travel can be developed.

Then I hit upon the Simulation Hypothesis. Which is that our reality could just be an elaborate simulation. It was at this point that I remembered a New Yorker article about how election night and the Oscars might indicate some sort of breakdown of a simulation. At first I laughed it off, but for at least a couple of years things have been going badly all over (shootings, riots, natural disasters, you name it) and there hasn’t been much, if any hedonic adaptation as a result. Maybe we are living in a simulation, maybe we aren’t, but something certainly seems to have happened to the hedonic treadmill. Or maybe the chronic and constant bullshit that is living for 15+ years in post-9/11 America has taken a toll on everyone’s collective psyche.

Or maybe 9/11 was when the simulation started?

The Nature of Freedom

A few cultural events have caused me to think a lot about freedom lately. Of course our new Presidential administration has had an effect, but also some films, television programs, and documentaries. Also, I have been assisting my local political community and the results are pretty depressing.

One film that I saw was “Arrival“. It is based on a short story called “The Story Of Your Life” which goes into more philosophical detail than the film, and centers on the idea of free will. The aliens in the film can see time in a planar rather than linear fashion. Because of that, they have no concept of free will. Knowing what is coming leaves them with no choice but to play their parts to contribute to the known outcome. Speaking to others isn’t so much an exchange of ideas as it is a declaration or codification of events, like announcing a winner, or pronouncing someone dead. Reading the story left me feeling that I had broken my brain in some fundamental way.

Not long after that, I started watching “Westworld“. The hosts in West World are driven by code which is interpreted by their central processing units. Because they store memories digitally, they don’t remember things, and instead reload (relive) them. As a mercy to the hosts, their memories are erased on a regular basis. Something within the code that governs the hosts causes them to start remembering and all hell breaks loose. Again this idea, while fictional, made me think about the nature of freedom.

The idea of reality as a lived experience, the cognitive lens that we see the world through, is based on recollection of previous experiences. Our human memories are not perfect; we cannot retrieve bit-for-bit copies of stored data the way that a computer can. We cannot go back and relive an experience the way that a host from Westworld can. As we experience something, it is colored by a complex mix of emotions and bias. These imperfect and colorized recollections then shape how we experience new things. These new experiences, perceived through our flawed cognition, are then stored using that same flawed mechanism, making it even more flawed. As humans age and grow, their cognition becomes a kind of degenerative corruption of observation. Your lived experience might actually just be shitty encoding.

As I watched these works of fiction, I have also begun to listen to intellectuals dissect the ideas of freedom. I watched a series of documentary films by Adam Curtis. The idea of this series, is that efforts have been made to reduce the idea of humanity into self-serving automata. This numeric representation of humans relies on a kind of rational strategy that guides us. The problem with this simplified view of course is that it ignores the shitty encoding that guides human decision making.

The documentary series points out the use of Zero Sum Game Theory in modern political, economic, and even biological research. This cynical approach led to the dissolution of the idea of human individuality and the rise of popular psychology which uses drugs to manage human behavior. Oversimplification of human behavior leads to a kind of segregation based on small sets of variables, rather than meritocracy. The result is the corporate-run caste system that we have today. More importantly there are two varieties of freedom: one of struggle and coercion based on violent radicalism, and one of meaningless consumerism. Meaningless consumerism is how The West operates without violent revolution; people are free to do whatever they want, so long as all they want to do is watch TV and buy things.

This my issue with the western idea of freedom. It is a comfortable existence; it’s largely devoid of bloodshed, but it is also largely devoid of meaning. Buying new things – says the guy with 4 laptops – isn’t making yourself any happier. Watching TV – says the guy who came to this conclusion by watching movies and TV – doesn’t help you to improve yourself. Being a radical freedom fighter isn’t the alternative, and it’s not like you can bring down corporatism in a bloodless and market-friendly manner. What you can do, however, is diversify. Instead of using violence to coerce others into your idea of freedom, I think that you can build communities around ideas other than meaningless conformity and draconian order. Organizing into communities is the start, but you have to go much further.

Paradoxically (or perhaps ironically), I criticize the tendency for governments and corporations to reduce humanity into numerical figures, yet I cannot help but to see political and economic systems as complex networks. I am an avid proponent of peer-to-peer networking, of decentralization, and the mistrust of authority. In a peer-to-peer network, there are no clients and servers, there are only nodes. The power of the Internet is not that it connects nodes, but that it connects networks of nodes. We, as individuals, have to organize ourselves into networks that pursue and produce meaningful things. Individuality is important, but agency may actually be more important. Having freedoms that you do not make use of is pretty much the same as not having freedoms to begin with. If you are a corporate-run fascist state, it’s probably a better for you if your subjects ignore their freedoms. Convincing them to do that might be part of your game plan.

This is the idea that I am moving around in my mind. What is freedom? Do we in The West actually have it? Did we lose it or did we give it away? The thought process is similar to the Orwell vs. Huxley debate, but I think it goes further because it should take into account human tendencies. Huxley kind of does with his societal focus on people being distracted from the importance of the self, but Orwell does not because he is more focused on the politics of violence and fear. My fear is that both Huxley and Orwell are right. That we are being duped into willingly ignoring essential liberties so that a powerful and violent elite can manipulate everything to their benefit. Honestly, I prefer pondering the nature of cognition, the nature of free will, and the nature of humanity because the idea of “Huxleying your way into full Orwell” scares me to death.