Lockdown, The Singularity, And The Idea of Post-Humanism

Back in 2010, when we were younger and more naive, a bunch of people were excited about something they called The Singularity, a time in the not-so-distant future when humanity would be replaced with ... something else. Post-humanity. A "superior intelligence that will dominate," so that life will take on a radically altered form that we cannot see and predict now.

Here at TKIN, I expressed my skepticism. Sure -- if you want to make an artificial liver or bionic limbs or whatever, awesome, I love it! But that's not post-humanity. It's the human experience, just somewhat improved. Longer, more fun, less painful, whatever. Beyond the human-upgrades interpretation, the suggestions get more radical but also more vague. We're going to meld minds and machines. We're going to upload your consciousness into a computer. You'll live forever, in some unforeseen Venn diagram overlap zone between virtual and real.

When I pondered this in 2010, I was like WTF, and now that we're in lockdown I feel even more like WTF. Aren't most the best pleasures of life embodied? In 2010 I listed sex, food, wine, sports, music, and dancing as things we like to do that are embodied, seemingly inaccessible to the computer-based post-human. And what's on the other side, on the post-human, singularity playlist? Math? Most people don't even like thinking about math.

I don't think I'm alone when I say that lockdown has made the importance of the embodied life even more vivid to me. We're sick of interacting through screens. We long for the touch of our family and friends. People are flocking to bake bread, grow plants, and acquire pets; the concept of "going for a walk to get some fresh air," at one time a symbol of a life lived quietly and meditatively, is now essential to the happiness of millions of people. I myself have taken care to notice the minute daily progress of leaves coming out on trees in my neighborhood.

I was mentally reviewing all the internet think-pieces I've read about what people are experiencing in lockdown, and the one disembodied activity now flourishing that I could spot was online chess. Touchingly, the New York Times places this news in the Sports section, where they are clearly dying for content.

Anyway, after writing that post in 2010, I expressed my doubts to some guys who were roughly in the robot-biz, and they smiled that guy-smile that comes up when a woman says something they think is stupid. It's not computer-based in that sense, they explained slowly to me. You'll still be able to do all the fun things. It's just that the whole system will be artificial, and therefore more permanent, less flawed, and better.

Fine, but as I've already said, I don't think that's post-humanity -- that's more like keeping your human self while being less susceptible to the world's problems: less vulnerable to injury, less in need of food and medical care, less dependent on others for your well-being. Our desires for life to be less difficult, less painful, less scary and less mortal are very human, and like the embodied pleasures, they have been intensified by the lockdown and the pandemic itself -- as we have all been reminded how vulnerable we are to illness and death, how challenging it is to care for others, and how fragile our little systems are.

Of course, in our radically unequal world, these things bear more heavily on some people than others, and awareness of our shared situation and our interdependence has been a bit of a wake-up call to some people who maybe used to imagine themselves as self-sufficient tech-oriented rich people.

I don't know what those people are dreaming of now, and whether it's still something like The Singularity or whether it's more like a walled city in New Zealand with a stockpile of ventilators. But whatever it is, I hope they'll remember it's not really post-humanism that they're hankering after. It's more like human life made less difficult and scary. And that dream is not only shared by everyone, it's also about the most human thing you could possibly have.

Dance Like No One Is Watching? The Existential Question Of Zoom Video

Before the lockdown I used to go to dance classes. Dance was something I had done as a young person and then didn't do for like ... thirty years or something. Then when I started up again it literally took me years to work up the nerve and motivation to go -- which could, itself, be the topic of another blog post whose conclusion would be something like "just because years have passed doesn't mean you won't do it eventually." I mostly do Contemporary -- but I also supplement that with classes in other styles like ballet and hip-hop.

It's an interesting question why dance class creates anxiety. The most obvious answer is that dancing well can be difficult, and class creates an atmosphere where people are together and naturally you worry that others are judging you. Or maybe you are judging yourself. I feel like one of the weird lingering effects of Anglo-Saxon culture is that there is something about dancing itself that feels especially vulnerable. But I wouldn't know how to connect those dots.

With the lockdown, dance classes are happening online, some through Zoom. It works OK, but I have had a hard time articulating to my friends why dance class via Zoom is such an impoverished experience for me compared to dance class in person. Zoom works OK for me for fitness: the instructors says to do a lunge or a burpee and I do a lunge or a burpee. It's not the same as being in person, but I get a workout and have some echo of the experience of working out with other people.

But with dance? It's just not the same. Part of it is communicative: in class, there is a back-and-forth between the instructor and the students with respect to what students are getting or not getting and how they're feeling about what is happening and what the instructor has in mind for the choreography. In addition to obvious things like "oh you're supposed to turn to the left, do it this way," there is also a complex interplay about the mood and the feeling of the dance. I guess it's not impossible for some of that mood to pass through the internet. But it's not easy.

A more significant factor more me seems to be just the essential pleasure between dancing-with-people -- even for something like Contemporary which is not, on the face of it, what we'd call a "social dance."

And that pleasure brings me to the great question of dance-via-Zoom: video on, or video off? For students, video-on is optional. And I feel like we're still working that out. I've been to classes where almost no one has video on, and I've been to classes where almost everyone has video on. Even though I'm seeing everything through a MacBook Air-sized screen, which means that from the recommended 6-8 feet away I can barely see anything, it is still way better for me when people have their videos on. It's a far cry from being together in a room, but at least there's the feeling of interaction and dancing-with-people.

It's an individual thing of course, and people have all kinds of reasons for choosing video off. I chose it myself recently for a ballet class that I feared was above my level (and it turned out I was right). But I feel like there is definitely a social norm aspect to it. Like, if you log on and everyone has their video off, you think "oh I guess I should too" -- it's embarrassing to be the only one putting yourself out there. But if you log on and everyone has it on you're like "oh ok, we're doing this? I guess I will too."


So I feel like livestream has changed a situation that was necessarily collective -- you're all in a room together, you all have to suck up the vulnerabilities -- to one of those weird individual versus group things where you have to ask yourself whether everyone is doing it and if not whether you're willing to put yourself out there as the only person doing it or what. It's a little sad.

Anyway, unless I have reasons, I try to always turn the video on for dance class, and I always hope that everyone else will too. Even though it's "optional," I was happy to hear a recent instructor admonishing the class to "clean up your room next time" so you can have the video on. Meetings are something else altogether -- but when we're dancing? I miss seeing y'all when your names appear in those black boxes.

I had never really thought much about that thing people say of "dance like no one is watching." I get it -- you're supposed to go all in or something. But one thing I have learned from lockdown is that, like a lot of inspirational quotes you find on coffee mugs and placards, it's not really solid advice when you take it too literally.

Coronavirus, Capitalism, and the Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas

Content warning: this post gets a little dark by moments, so if you're not in the right frame of mind, maybe read it later, or don't read it at all.

The pandemic crisis is prompting a lot of reflection about the dysfunctions of a capitalist system, which I guess is a good thing, though I'm pessimistic about much in the way of positive change. The richer classes are finally like -- "wait -- my food and well-being depends on these people! Are they OK? What if something happens to them?!"

Often when I think about the dysfunction of capitalism, I think about the short story "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas," by Ursula Le Guin. The story describes a beautiful well-functioning town in which almost everyone is well and happy, but in which all the good things depend on the utter misery of one small child -- a child who is forever locked in small basement room in squalid conditions and constant suffering.

People talk about the various justifications and injustices of capitalism in many ways, but one common one has to do with overall prosperity: more wealth is created by capitalism than in alternative systems, it is argued, and this wealth improves people's lives. Here the details get a little fuzzy, about whether that wealth has to improve everyone's lives or what exactly.

From a practical point of view, I think it's fair to say that if actual contemporary western capitalism creates wealth, it is doing so in a system that relies on horrible and exploitative conditions for many. It's never been a secret that agricultural workers, people who work elsewhere in the food supply chain, cleaners, gig economy workers, and others work long, long hours in sometimes brutal conditions for little pay -- often working multiple jobs. One of the wake-up calls of the pandemic has been that carers in nursing homes are working multiple jobs at various homes, just to make ends meet, thus increasing the likely spread of disease. And we've written on this blog of the way that modern electronics production relies on getting minerals in exploitative and violent conditions.

How the denizens of modern capitalism frame their faith in overall prosperity with the existence of this suffering and violation of rights has always interested me. The situation is obviously complex, but I think one possibility has to do with the ways that various values create small shifting zones of coherence and acceptability. Inside these little zones things seem to work OK, which makes us forget that things are really not OK at a deeper level.

For example, with respect to the social contract in modern capitalism, I expect that many people who believe in the importance of prosperity/overall GDP/economic growth also endorse some informal version of the following: those who work hard at a full-time job should be able to support themselves or maybe even a family; those at the bottom of the socio-economic ladder should be able to improve their situation with care and hard work; wages should reflect a fair wage for the work involved. Put more abstractly: people care not only about prosperity but also about fairness, equality, and expressions of mutual respect.

One thing that happens in everyday capitalism, I think, is that in certain small zones and in the experience of certain people, the system seems to make these values come together. If your parent came to the US from a life of poverty in Europe in the early 20th century and worked hard to send you to good schools, and you prospered from the contingencies of the 1950s to rise up to the middle-class, then from one perspective it looks like it all comes together: the society's prosperity goes along with the opportunities that the individual takes advantage of; rewards follow.

As is often discussed, this little zone of coherence is just that -- a little zone. For many people, it doesn't work this way at all. They work harder and harder and wages drop; ill health brings catastrophe despite best efforts; racism and discrimination radically diminish options and possibilities.

In this sense, the middle class and those who are even more well-off are somewhat like the denizens of Omelas: we're in a good situation made possible by someone else's horrible situation. Some defenders of capitalism are even kind of explicit about it, arguing against universal basic income on grounds that poor people will then be less motivated to do the crappy jobs that society needs someone to do.

When I talk about capitalism being morally dysfunctional in this way, sometimes my interlocutors are shocked, and they point out to me the horrors of alternative systems. But I think the one doesn't exclude the other. Even if capitalism is the best system out there, it can still be radically unethical. Sometimes in life you have no good options. And even if it is the case that other systems are worse -- then it's even more important for us to talk about the wrongnesses of our system so we can at least try to mitigate them or something.

In the Le Guin story, the residents all learn about the existence of the child in misery during their adolescence, and some go to see the child in person. Most weep and rage but realize they can't do anything about it and go back to normal life. Others, though, do not go back to normal life. What they do is walk away. Le Guin says, "The place they go towards is a place even less imaginable to most of us than the city of happiness. I cannot describe it at all. It is possible that it does not exist. But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas."

Like Le Guin, I can't imagine what it would mean to walk away from modern capitalism. In most basic literal terms, an alternative physical space would either be engaging in more capitalism, by buying up land, or infringing on the rights of other people whose land it is. In my darker moments, I fear that to walk away from Omelas would require ending my existence altogether.

But I try to remind myself: we're not in a fictional story land where the fates have decreed that our well-being and our failings are locked together forever, with our happiness inherently resting on others' suffering. We're in the real world, where things are complicated and confusing and can often be changed.

As the pandemic forces people to confront the situation of essential and vulnerable workers, let's remember that there are a lot of people for whom capitalism leads not to opportunity but to misery. Let's keep in mind that caring about overall economic growth and prosperity means facing up to this fact rather than getting to ignore it.

I fear that keeping these things in mind is going to get harder and not easier in the near future, as economies contract, business close, and times get tough. But we have to do it -- because unlike the people in the story, we don't have the option of walking away.

What You Want To Do And What You Should Do: Lockdown Edition

I was sitting around at home on a weekend day feeling dispirited and trying to figure out what to do next. Someone suggested that I might think about what I wanted to do as opposed to what I should do, and do that. Don't worry: this suggestion was socially distanced.

It sounded so plausible as advice. But I had trouble putting it into action. I had no problem coming up with things that seemed immediately appealing, but most of them were things like sleeping and snacking that I knew would make me feel more dispirited in about twenty minutes. I certainly had tasks of various kinds waiting to be performed, but those all seemed like things I should do, not things I wanted to do.

As I should have known, I could have looked to this very blog to understand the source of my confusion. I have often written here about the weirdness of the typical desire-decision matrix of western popular culture. I see it is in 2010 -- ten years ago! -- that I wrote about the lost art of desire-management -- the way we treat our desires as if they are immutable and random forces of nature instead of responsive responses to habit, social context, and our own previous choices -- and thus, things that can be directed and managed.

One of the most destructive elements of that cultural desire-decision matrix is the bifurcation that splits everything into distinct categories of pleasure-yum-love and those of obligation-task-force-yourself-to-get-on-it. Or -- as I described it in 2014 -- that there are things you want, and there are costs to getting them, and the whole question is how much you're willing to "pay" to get your preference satisfied.  

I don't know how this bifurcated perspective got so entrenched in our way of thinking, whether it's a trickle-down from formal thinking and rational choice theory, or whether it's just the metaphors of capitalism creeping in everywhere, or whether it has something to do with the neoliberal entrepreneurial self, or what. But it is not good.

Among its more disturbing aspects is that it leaves out a huge category of things crucially important: the things that are difficult, voluntary, and worthwhile. Like making art, or writing something, or learning new things, or reading what for lack of a better term I'll call literary novels. You don't have to wake up with a burning desire to practice scales to make learning to play the piano a cool and worthwhile thing to do. No one finishes breakfast and discovers they're just dying to get on with re-editing the draft of the writing thing they've been working on and not getting anywhere with.

We don't even really have a good adjective to describe the positive subjective feeling that comes with engaging with these types of activities. "Satisfying" is about as close as I can think of, but that is such an oatmeal kind of word and doesn't really capture it.

The resulting perplexity is, I think, one reason that "goal" culture has so totally come into its own in modern life. If you set a goal, then somehow you're able to communicate -- to yourself and others -- why you're doing a thing and why it feels good to do it, even when it is difficult and motivationally challenging. But for me, anyway, the idea of a "goal" distorts the whole thing. I don't write because I need a badge celebrating ten years of continuous blog writing. I write because it's -- worth doing, or satisfying, or whatever the word is that we don't have.

I feel like lockdown has raised new challenges for these complicated pleasures of life that we don't have a name for. To me, one of the small sadnesses of the culture of lockdown is that this amorphous category has somehow formed a weird locus of interpersonal antagonism. First there were the people who said "Hey, you could use this time to learn something!" Which is true. Then there were the people who said "Speak for yourself! Some of us have kids and and chores and jobs!" Which is also true. Then it was pointed out that even if you don't have other demanding obligations, lockdown is hard, so if you want to eat a cookie, just eat a cookie ffs. Which is also, of course, true. 

I'm the kind of person whose general life sadness comes from the Pointlessness of Life demon rather than the Fear and Anxiety demon. So the answer to my weekend conundrum ultimately consistent in remembering that just because I didn't want to do a thing didn't mean it wasn't worth doing, and that even in lockdown, I had to keep making myself do stuff. Just because there's a global pandemic on doesn't mean I'm off the hook for doing stuff I don't feel like doing. So -- it wasn't really what I wanted to do or what I should do but something else altogether.

As always, your mileage may vary.

My 400-Mile Public Transit Experience: A Multifaceted Analysis

Last weekend I went to a conference at Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana. Because I've been learning about the contribution that flying makes to climate change, I decided to travel to the conference by alternative means. Here is my story.

The trip:
I took a train from Kitchener, ON to Windsor, ON leaving around 7:15 on a Thursday after class, changing in London, and getting to Windsor around midnight. I stayed over in Windsor, then got up Friday and took the cross-border Detroit-Windsor tunnel bus. I got off that bus and walked about 20 minutes to the Detroit bus station, then at 1:05 pm I got on a Greyhound that got into South Bend around 6:30 -- which should have been time for exercise but which I took to be time for wine and food and rereading Lucky Jim at one of the seventeen Irish themed pubs nearby.

The conference was all-day Saturday and in the morning, Sunday. Then I did basically the same thing in reverse, except I took a taxi instead of the tunnel bus and I had to catch the train from Windsor at 5:30 Monday morning.

The transit experience:
The main thing about the transit experience is wtf is with putting train and bus stations way out in the middle of fucking nowhere? To get to the Detroit station you walk past blocks and blocks of concrete and fences and nothing. There's no coffee or food in the station, or visibly near the station (though I did use Apple Maps to make my way eventually to "King Coney" Coney Island Diner which turned out to be awesome). Right, because what long distance bus traveler needs food or coffee?

I thought Detroit was bad, but then the South Bend bus station is at the airport. Literally -- it is inside the airport. Thus forsaking, for no gain, the main benefit of public transportation, which is that you normally don't have to make some special trip in some special expensive taxi or something to get to the station, because in a normal city, normal people put the station in the middle of the city where the people are.


I realize the aim is to optimize. And that the little bus-taking needs of little bus-taking people just don't add up to anything. But come on -- it's supposed to be a station, not a distribution center. We are people, not boxes of Cheerios.

The personal experience
The main thing about the personal experience was the number of small exchanges I had with people that involved small exchanges of generosity and how surprisingly life-affirming that was. On the bus to South Bend, a woman asked me for a mirror, revealed that she didn't have a phone, then ... I don't want to tell her story even anonymously, but let's just say it turned out she was on her way to a different city for one of those things you do when nothing else in your life is remotely working in any way. She needed to call a place, she needed to transfer prescriptions. We chatted and I loaned her my phone. And she called the place and talked to the people. And she called Walgreens. And then she called her friend. And by the end of the trip the planning and the prescriptions were all sorted out.

In South Bend someone let me share a cab at the very last minute, after a hotel concierge said to me slowly "We find Lyft and Uber are fastest. Don't you have Lyft and Uber?" In Detroit, I went back into the station to use the ATM because the taxi driver was like "Uh, yes cards but I could really use the cash so I could get gas today." I don't know how to describe it, but being able to move cooperatively through these small obstacles with other people made some of the world's other awfulness seem momentarily less bad. And I don't know why driving and flying never seem to have that texture for me, but for whatever reason, they don't.

The pointlessness of the gesture experience
When you take a long bus trip that you could easily have avoided with a pleasant flight from the cute Island Airport via straight shot to Chicago, you have a lot of time to ponder the pointlessness of your choice. People are flying to other cities for destination bridal showers, FFS. I know that in context, my individual sacrifice does not contribute to a solution in any measurable way, and that solving the climate crisis is going to require more than individuals making individual choices.

Still, It didn't feel pointless. Generally, I am disturbed and weighed down by the degree to which for middle-class people on up, the lifestyle leading to climate catastrophe feels so easy and seamless. It freaks me out when I'm in the airport and the easiest thing is to buy heavily packaged snacks and use thirteen single-use plastic containers in a row and pay twenty dollars for a sandwich. I know it is capitalism's job to make me feel this ease, and I bristle. So I found weird small comfort in the idea of a 400-mile trip feeling difficult, like yes, it's a 400-mile trip for a person, which is a difficult thing, and it felt difficult. Plus there were water fountains in all the stations for my reusable water bottle.


More relevantly, it feels to me like between now and some hopeful imaginary future in which things work better, things are going to have to change, and we have to start somewhere changing what we think of as normal activities. Some things I'm not so good at, but taking the bus? As we know, that is often within my wheelhouse.

I've talked to some friends and colleagues about the flying thing, and I got a variety of thoughtful responses, including the idea that individual choices aren't the crux of the matter, which is, in some sense, true. But some people also have said "Well, we're doomed anyway. So." and that one I have trouble with. I mean, yes, probably. But even if that is true in the long run, doesn't it matter whether the coastal cities are flooded in 50 years rather than 30? Or whether kids who are five now get a reasonable world when they're 50? Isn't a slightly less bad climate crisis better than a slightly worse one?

I haven't stopped flying, and I'm going to fly to California to see family, a trip that seems non-negotiable to me in terms of having a life because I love them and need to see them. But I'm taking the advice to make each trip count, and I'm going to do more things there and see more people. Partly this will involve a roughly twelve-hour transit trip from the Bay Area to SoCal. I'm checking out the Flix Bus. I'll keep you posted.

Statistics, Randomness, And My Misspent Youth

I've just been reading Nassim Taleb's Fooled by Randomness. It is a fun read, but at the risk of sounding intellectually immodest, I feel like it is full of things I already knew. Rare, unexpected, and often bad things can happen. It is easy to be fooled by statistics. It is easy to be fooled by life in general. You never really know what's going to happen. Plan accordingly.

Taleb's main target audience is traders and others who think they're succeeding and failing because of skill and insight or lack thereof. He says they are often just the victims of survivorship bias and other forms of bad reasoning. Survivorship bias is when you look at the winners and assume that whatever they did made them winners, while failing to look at the losers and what they were doing. Everyone might be throwing darts at the Wall Street Journal stock pages. Some might be winners, and tautologously, some will be winners relative to others. If you focus on the winners and blindly follow their strategy or their stock picks, you'll be SOL.

More broadly, the book is about unpredictability and how unexpected and surprising things can derail your life. This is something I knew from a young age, mostly because it features prominently in both fiction and reality. You might study for years then develop a brain tumor. You might train as an athlete then get hit by a car. You might raise your kids on organic food and still one of them might die -- from food poisoning, or a really bad flu, or ... anything, for god's sake. If I hadn't had the predictability of unpredictable events hammered home to me enough by the time I was fifteen, I definitely absorbed it when my father died suddenly -- and unexpectedly! -- from a heart attack at that time. He was forty-eight years old.

So I absorbed the epistemological lesson early. From a practical point of view, Taleb says that in the face of uncertainty, a reasonable response is to be risk-averse, and I completely agree. As I understand it, for a trader this means seeker smaller steadier gains, but to be honest I sort of zoned out on that part of the book because I am almost aggressively uninterested in thinking about investment strategy.

At this point you may be wondering: So, Patricia, did you become a risk-averse young person? Why yes -- yes I did! I skipped class, stayed up late drinking with friends, majored in two abstract and relatively useless majors (math and dance), drove around in my mom's ancient and poorly maintained VW Rabbit, and engaged in various activities we won't describe here but that are usually represented as paradigm cases of adolescent devil-may-care behavior.

To me, these were risk-averse activities. My reasoning -- which I stand by today -- was that the pleasures of impulsive behavior have an excellent chance of working out in the immediate moment, while the pleasures of planning and carefulness are distant in time and thus far less likely to actually work out.

The pleasures of hanging out with friends with you should be in class, eating cake for lunch, drinking and smoking, dancing at parties, spending a beautiful sunny day with a romantic interest instead of writing papers, etc. -- when you're a bright-eyed eighteen year-old, these are very dependable pleasures in the short-term run. Sure, they often lead to unhappiness in the long run. But whatever -- the long run is unpredictable. That is the whole point.

To forego these pleasures in the moment to get better grades, avoid lung cancer at middle-age, or even just try to live a longer period of time seemed to me like a crazy and extremely risky strategy. What if you followed all the rules and got hit by a bus at age 20? FFS. To me, my life strategy was based on getting while the getting was good -- a paradigm example of risk-averseness if ever there was one.

Over time, I stopped being so impulsive. Partly it was because the pleasures of short-term pleasures got less intense for me as I got older (as they do for so many people), and I started getting bored. Partly it was because I started to experience the negative effects of doing whatever I wanted to do in the moment: my health declined, I worked at shitty jobs like waitressing, and I had no health insurance. Partly it was because I formed close relationships with people who wanted me to flourish in the long term, which made me want to flourish in the long term as well.

For whatever it's worth, none of these reasons has to do directly with the kind of caring about the future me that is supposed to characterize rational risk-averse thinking in the standard model of human decision-making.

When people talk about risk-averseness and the rationality of overcoming impulse, I feel like there are assumptions in the background: that what it makes sense to do is plan for the future, store up your chestnuts for the winter, try to live to a ripe old age. But from the unpredictability-of-life perspective, those assumptions are peculiar and it's more the other way around. When you do whatever thing you want to do in the moment, that pleasure -- even if it's just the pleasure of a desire immediately satisfied -- is yours, and no one can take it away from you. It's a sure thing. Whereas the long term? You never really know what's going to happen.

The Pointlessness And Paradoxes Of Responsible Consumerism: Apple Edition

I woke up this morning and one of the first things I saw was this headline "Apple’s New Proprietary Software Locks Will Kill Independent Repair on New MacBook Pros."  

This is bad. It's bad for sustainability. It violates the "right to repair." It put small repair shops out of business. It's bad for schools, who fix computers at large scale, and people in rural areas who are not well-served by Apple's own technicians. 

I had one of those vaguely admirable but ultimately ignorable impulses toward responsible consumerism, and I started thinking about breaking my Mac habit. I had long been toying with the idea of learning to use Linux, as a small way bucking the consumer tyranny of the big tech companies. And I thought this could be the moment, the thing that set all that in motion. I felt the momentary warm glow you get when you see some disturbing news item and form some half-baked plan to Do Something.

To learn Linux, I thought, I might buy a used or cheap laptop to learn on. The only computer I have now is my work computer, and for all kinds of reasons I didn't want to use that one. Already my plan was going the way so many responsible consumerism plans go, where you start off wanting to save the planet and you end up buying something. But whatever.

To think about what kind of laptop would make the most sense for this project, I went to iFixit.org. This great site not only has guides for how to fix things, they also rate products with respect to how repairable they are.

I quickly found ratings for phones and tablets, but they didn't have one for laptops. What they did have, though, was a link to Greenpeace's guide to greener electronics.

At the guide, I learned that no consumer electronics company gets an "A" for environmental impact. The only company that gets a "B" or above is Fairphone. As we've discussed before ("I Went Down The Ethical Cell Phone Rabbit Hole,") Fairphone is just phones and they're not even available in North America.

After Fairphone, the best company for environmental impact was ... Apple, with a "B-."

It's a testament to the power of consumer culture how powerfully it hit me that I might be able to satisfy my impulse to responsible consumerism by actually buying something I wanted. I could get a used Mac, and use it to learn Linux. I could even tell myself that this plan was most rational, because if I did ultimately shift over to using Linux all the time, having a Mac would allow me to access the documents I've created in software like Pages, which is Mac only. 

I went to the Apple website to check out what refurbished laptops they had. The have no refurbished MacBook Airs available -- probably because these are affordable and reliable and everyone wants one. What they do have is MacBooks, the fancy high end super thin no-ports machine. I had wanted a MacBook when they came out. Hmmm...

I don't know what to say about the ridiculous of starting with an I'll-show-you-Apple Mac-avoidance plan and ending with MacBook shopping, except that it doesn't feel like a one-off to me. It feels sort of like an experience I have all the time.

I guess the moral of the story is that when you live in a society where people are paid millions to convince you that shopping is the answer to your problems, you tend to think that shopping is the answer to your problems.

This Blog Is Shifting Gears

This blog is going to change from regular once-a-week posting to occasional, irregular posting when I have something to say. If you want to stay connected, you can sign up to subscribe to the blog by email using the feature on the right hand side, or you could just check in occasionally when you feel like it.

The main reason is that I seem to lack the mental energy for regular blogging right now. Maybe it will come back at some point. Thanks for being awesome readers : )

My Favorite Beatle: Past And Present

When I discovered the Beatles I was eleven years old. I know because I found out about the Beatles by going to see the Bee Gees movie Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, and some older person must have taken pity on me and kindly explained that in fact, those songs weren't really the Bee Gees, they were, in fact, this other band.

I got really into the Beatles between ages eleven and thirteen, and even though I don't listen to the Beatles any more, I'm happy for this phase of life, which I feel was an appropriate introduction to the world of English Language Pop Music.

Given my age, it was inevitable that I would form deep opinions about My Favorite Beatle, and also that My Favorite would basicall correlate with the one I thought was Cute and Attractive and Someone I Would Like to Date.

For me, that Beatle was Paul McCartney.

I know that people like me are supposed to like other Beatles best. Intellectuals and politically savvy people are supposed to like John. Non-conformists and introverts are supposed to like George. I'm not sure who has Ringo as their favorite and maybe I'm not alone: this quora question says "Who is your favorite Beatle if it is Ringo explain why" and none of the answers are "Ringo." But Paul is considered the sillier choice, the obvious choice, the lightweight.

Over the years since, I have occasionally thought about the Beatles about my interest in Paul as my favorite Beatle. For a while I was very dismissive of my former self. I wanted to like Wings, but I couldn't even get interested. OK, maybe "Live and Let Live," but you know what I mean. Meanwhile, John was making art with Yoko Ono and being Mister Interesting. While I have always agreed with the sentiment that when it comes to Silly Love Songs,  sure, "what's wrong with that?" I also felt like "Really, is that all you got?"

Then for a long time I didn't think about the Beatles, as I got obsessed with The Cure (not embarrassed to admit this), T. Rex (still think they are the best), The Velvet Underground (talk about obsession) and Pavement (not trying to be pretentious, just like their music).

Then around the time that Linda McCartney died (in 1998), I remember thinking: maybe I wasn't crazy to have Paul as my favorite Beatle, at least if I was thinking in terms of romance. I mean, this guy got married to an interesting woman, Linda Eastman, who was an artist and activist, and stayed married to her for 29 years until she died of cancer. OK, things didn't work out with Heather Mills, but then immediately after divorcing her he married Nancy Shevell. Paul seems to enjoy family life and spending time with his wives and kids. I thought to myself: "Paul could have actually been a good person to be in a romance with. He seems like kind of a romantic guy."

Lately, though, I've soured on the idea of Paul as a favorite Beatle. Paul is boring, and the older I get, the more I feel like boring is not OK. This sentiment was reinforced when Paul appeared on the WTF podcast, which I listen to obsessively. Usually, Marc's interviews get people to talk about some things that are painful, or conflictual, or that they just feel weird about. Paul's interview, by contrast, was like a PR plug that went on for an hour. Crushingly dull.

With respect to the other Beatles though, I'm not sure. John's particular brand of humorless activism feels kind of smug to me, and George is still a cipher. Ringo, perhaps? Songs like Octopus's Garden are weird, amusing, and lighthearted -- and isn't weird, amusing, and lighthearted in short supply these days? On the other hand, as one of the manifestations of the weirdness of modern life, I just learned that Ringo is a Brexiteer.

Maybe the moral of the story is that the more you know about pop idols, the less they can be pop idols -- something that seems obvious once you think about it a bit, but something the emotions of fandom never wanted me to admit.

I Was In Hannover Germany

I didn't have time to write a proper blog post this week, and one reason is that I was giving a paper at the joint conference of the ENPOSS (European Network for Philosophy of Social Science) and the Philosophy of Social Science Roundtable. The conference was good: I was reminded how in areas like philosophy of social science (or philosophy of science more generally), there's something to talk about beyond philosophy. I mean, in ethics, it's often just you and your arguments and I sometimes feel like convincing people is partly force of personality. But with philosophy of science, there's ... science!

One of the things that struck me about Hannover was that there was a fair amount of graffiti. I had trouble interpreting or classifying or understanding the graffiti in Hannover, which seemed to cross a lot of genres in ways that were opaque to an outsider. I tried to talk to a Parisian about it, and he said "Oh, there's a lot of graffiti all over Europe, isn't it like that in North America?" and I said "No, not exactly, there are areas with a lot of graffiti and then areas with none." Then I asked him if he thought the graffiti in a place like Hannover was more created by disenfranchised or poor people expressing their discontent or whether the form was somehow broadened so that more people participated. He said he didn't know.

I don't know either. Some graffiti seemed to me like what I'd think of as conventional tagging. Some seemed more explicitly political, like anarchist signs. Then a lot was just -- impossible for me to classify, with words or style that I couldn't understand.

Here are two pictures of graffiti in Hannover -- both of these pictures were taken right near the University building where the conference was held. In the first, you see a range of styles. In the second, you see words -- "iron," "reset," "Mandy." WTF?

 I really don't know, so if you have interpretations, I'd be interested to hear them.

One other interesting visual thing I encountered in Germany was at the airport, where I saw this sign that said "Keep off this plain!" Sure, the word "plain" could just be a bad translation. But a bad translation for what? What is this?

I guess it's good there are still some mysteries in the universe. See you all next week!