Oblomovka

2022-03-11»

I’m halfway through a memo for work. I’m struggling a bit with the style, because it’s stuck between being broadly informative and terse, and rah-rah-inspiring, and I’m not sure which way to go with it.

It’s also the first bit of writing I’ve done for a while (and certainly the first since my heavy flirtation with Covid, which of course means I spend some of my time going “wait, is my inability to choose the right noun here due to novel holes in my brain?”).

The last year or so, since I left EFF, have been ingesting a huge amount of new information, hobnobbing with lovely new people, and, in terms of communicative output on my behalf, providing a great deal of hand-waving and anecdotalising in Zoom calls. (If you want the flavor of that last category, here’s a recorded version of said hand-waving that I gave at Protocol Labs’ Funding the Commons event last week. Don’t know if it’s interesting, can’t bear to watch me or my hair in it.)

Honestly, the change of career flavor been pretty nice. I’m delighted to be learning new tricks , and it’s charming to have a new audience for what transpires to be a near endless supply of slightly too long tales of the early Internet. I guess looking at my long line of irish uncles, I should have assumed I’d slowly transform into a barracking raconteur, but from the viewpoint of someone who was a awkward, shy teenager, it’s still a shocking development. I still have a constant refrain in my head of “perhaps it’s time to shut up now”, but my internal hearing appears to be going. This is how you become what you — well, not hate, but certainly eye-rolled at — in your own past. Would awkward teenager have hated me? Nah, I’d have been terrified of me, but with a sort of grudging respect. Like, huh, seems like a bit of an ass, but maybe an aspirational ass, too?

Time-travel paradoxes aside: But but, but, the writing. And worse, the public writing.

I have started to realise that I have now processed verbally so much new information that I really have some kind of obligation to blurt it out to a wider audience. Yes, this may also have come with the barracking, and possible the long covid dementia.

Does forcing myself on the body politic mean writing? Well, it does if I don’t want to change my t-shirt or comb my hair. I could do some more Youtube Videos, I guess, and have previously enjoyed my forays into livestreaming. (The podcasting, too, has been effective I think, though that’s not really been down to me, I’m just a cog there in a much smarter pod mechanism.)

Anyway, the challenge in all of these environments is less the creative act of writing, and more the orchestration of the personal brand. The last seven years at EFF, has involved in increasing subsumption of my voice into managing and guiding the EFF voice. This was something I found a bit frustrating when I first joined the org, because I HAD MORE THINGS TO SAY AS A HUMAN DAMMIT. But come the 2010s, and the replacement of the joie-de-vivre of blogging punditry with the dodging-velociraptors-while-escaping-over-a-lava-field-in-mid-meteor-strike that is the modern Internet landscape, my enforced personal radio silence gradually turned into constant background sigh of relief. Speaking as EFF was a regular terror, but at least people mostly didn’t judge me on that basis, and on a million different mutually contradictory axis, most of which I had no control over. I enjoyed to sinking into well-deserved obscurity, while watching my friends ascend into micro-celebrityhood, with all the pain and cancelling and damnation that now involves.

But now: god, do I have to gear up again? And if so, what is my personal punditry outfit going to be?

I still see the Internet, unavoidably, as a meta-medium. To my mind, it reamins a protoplasm that you can shape into different media, as different from each other as a book is from a newspaper, or a newspaper from a radio show. And I do feel very at odds with the current, limited menu of media that we are given from on high. Part of it is aging inflexibility, of course (no I do not think I am a born TikToker), but part of it is because I think to engage, is to try and construct your own format. And I’m still in mid-mull about what that format could be.

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2020-07-20»

Ever since I worked at the Guardian’s New Media Lab in the Nineties and it was my actual job, I’ve been thinking about how news media is produced.

A lot of my thinking was originally driven by just extrapolating out where things were headed. The increasingly high frequency of the news-cycle, for instance, was so blatant an issue when I was writing a weekly newsletter, because the collapse of the news-cycle meant we went from a news-breaking weekly, to a news summary weekly, to a news creating weekly. The obvious thing was to just slam the dial on that, and plot out what it meant for news to be on a minute-by-minute hype cycle. I think we’re probably there now, but it was a useful, Moore’s Law-like extrapolation to imagine what that should look like.

Some of it was just futurist ideas that I couldn’t keep out of my head (reading about prediction markets in Extropy, for instance, and wondering how to actually guide columnists, journalists and commenters onto a self-correcting truth-seeking trajectory, rather than what I saw the current incentives being). Most of that hasn’t really played out — yet?

And some of it was just the regular frustrations of the early days of working within traditional media institutions. Newspapers, like any other institution, failed to seek to preserve their real value (their archives, for instance, or their research department), in the pursuit of what they and others thought was their value-add (their pundits, stature among elites or whatever). That problem seems to be ongoing, with the hand-wringing never stopping.

Anyway, I’d occasionally write up my thoughts in the form of a business-plan (when I was feeling ambitious), or a manifesto (when I was feeling righteous). The last draft was a couple of years ago, and rather than have it rust away in my drafts folder, here it is.

Feel free to steal these shadows of ideas. I called the product that I was hand-waving about, “spoolfeed”. It had four rules:

1. THE FUNDAMENTAL UNIT OF NEWS IS THE STORY, NOT THE ARTICLE.

A single article provides some insight into an emerging news story. But right now, the elements of that story are scattered across dozens of news services, thousands of witnesses and experts, millions of online participants on social media.

Gathering these threads requires as much work on the part of an involved reader as being a professional journalist: visiting dozens of sites, curating lists of experts, filtering and fact-checking opinions.

Imagine one page —- one permanent home on the Web, or within the searchable app space—for each news story. The majority of these pages could be  machine-generated: summaries, with links, to document clusters, together with other relevant indicators (associated hashtags, images or live streams near the source, links to TV reports whose closed-captions indicate deeper coverage.

But the biggest stories are individually curated, pulling together every accessible online source into a coherent and critically-appraised whole.

When you want to find out what’s happening ‘right now’ in a story you care about — and where to find out more— that page will be the place you visit, where you link to, and even where you contribute your thoughts or other comments.

2. A STORY HAS A PAST, A PRESENT AND A FUTURE

Until now, journalism has emphasised two aspects of the story: its present state, and future possibilities; reporting provides the now, editorial speculates on the next. With few meaningful exceptions, the past is lost to the archives.

Newspapers and other media organizations sit upon an unused and, in the main, inaccessible  ‘goldmine’ of previously collated information, resources and data, which moulders in archives and is buried from the public behind barely utilized  search boxes – either by the organisations themselves or their users.

Yesterday’s news is an invaluable resource to be integrated and exploited, not discarded.

Stories are far more long-running and timely than mere articles (the story page on the Turkish coup will still be seeing updates now; as does the story page on the 2008 economic crisis.) That means those pages become more than just a first draft of history: they become the most complete historical record (ever?) available.

A permanent place for a story should let readers see, and link to, what it looked like at any moment in time and from multiple entry points or perspectives.

3. THE ROLE OF NEWS IS TO DESCRIBE THE PAST IN ORDER TO ANTICIPATE WHAT IS TO COME

Q. Where’s the value in history? 

A. In predicting the future.

News services’ value exists entirely  in assisting their users to anticipate (or influence) the future. But they shirk the feedback loops that could sharpen their predictive ability. Failed predictions are buried in those archives. The churn of the ‘constant present’ means nothing much is learned — or revealed.

Others’ opinions can be aggregated, and turned into tangible bets. Probabilities can be attached to those predictions. An aggregated story page can record who got what right, and wrong, and adjust its priors for the next round of predictions accordingly.

In a future where prediction markets are legal, a story page could be the venue for the best of those markets. For the present, we’ll work to bring accountability back to the op-eds of news culture.

4. EVERY RELOAD, AN UPDATE

But the past and future may be how people use the news, eventually. But the impulse to seek it out is always driven by novelty. The audience for news wants to know what’s happening *right now*.

Most news services are surprisingly static in how they present the news. Headlines may be tweaked, new articles added, but the fundamental view of the day’s stories stays constant. TV news repeats on the hour; front pages of sites settle for all but breaking stories.

An aggregator of sources will never be the first with the news. But it will always be the second — *in* seconds.

When people come to see the news, they come to see something new. We bang on reload on Google News, Reddit, Twitter and our own email because we want to see it change.

The goal of a story page should be this: every page reload, an update. That may be an impossible goal, but it’s the beast we’ll seek to feed, because that’s what the news audience wants.

(And your back button will take you to what you remember seeing, but forgot to bookmark or share.)

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2019-02-21»

I know the world is going to hell in a futuristic handbasket — I know this because All Media Tells Me So, and who am I to question all the signals. But I can’t help but note that I’m really happy at the moment. I guess I’m always fairly countercyclical in my weltanschaung vs the zeitgeist: others have noticed how much I perk up at the sign of a recession. I don’t remember being exactly happy after the financial crisis, but I wasn’t that gloomy either.

Anyway, things are pretty calm for me. I’m recently, cheerily, married. My work and co-workers continue to amaze me. I’m — even as I type — livestreaming my screen and blurred, nighttime webcam face onto Twitch, which as I mentioned below, seems to work wonders for my sanity, if I’m not too jittery and nervous to do it. I like the quiet companionship of the world right now.

It’s all hubris, of course. Just writing this is inviting the Gods to trash my backups, evict me from my home, and smother me in my own just world fallacy. But that’s always going to be the case. I can be hubristic with my mouth shut. I can be hubristic with a half-smile.

How are you?

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2019-02-17»

I had a list of new year’s resolutions this year, which I wrote and then forgot about, but at some level have been trying to complete ever since. Let me dig them up; hold on. Ah, here they are.

Well, I’m not losing any weight, but I am managing to live stream pretty often. I share a weird corner of the streaming world, where amateur programmers show strangers their screens and their faces while they do random coding. Mostly it happens on Twitch TV, which has cornered the market in esports and mass live video demonstrations of gaming prowess. Twitch TV also streams the long tail of what it used to call “Creative” — enthusiasts building PCs, drawing pictures, messing with clay, and growing chickens. After a mixed beginning (where you could see Twitch trying avoid turning into a video sexworker marketplace, or just troll central), Twitch has clearly developed a fondness for these corner cases. Maybe it’s because they hark back to when it used to be Justin TV, and people showing you things they did was all it had.

Anyway, I’m hovering at the bottom of the “Science & Technology” category(!), a long way away from the 13 million followers of gamers like Ninja, and honestly a fair bit below popular coders like Al “The Best Python Teacher I Know Of” Sweigart, game developers like ShmellyOrc, and even other Lisp-exploring streams like Baggers and the mysterious algorithmic trader Inostdal. It’s okay though. I’m doing this for my own entertainment and sanity: livestreaming, for reasons that I’m still trying to understand, snapped me out of depression a year ago. (It’s not called Code Therapy for nothing.) Plus I’ve always enjoyed playing to small rooms, if they’re full of good people.

Anyway, as they say, subscribe and follow, follow and subscribe. Set it up to notify when I’m streaming, and come sit with me sometime. We’ll have a safely mediated chat, through protocols and stacks and obscene amounts of bandwidth.

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2019-02-15»

Liz is BLOGGING LOUDLY next to me, inspiring me to write in her wake. I do have plenty to say, but most of it is wrapped around work, and consequently needs to bake a little before I reveal it to the world. I love my job, but there’s a part of me that’s sad at how little I can talk informally about. Law firms are taciturn places by nature, and my own work is so … frequently diplomatic. Oh well, it all appears eventually, in some form or another.

Meanwhile, in real life, I continue to hack on my guile ‘n’ guix constructed machine. I submitted my first guix patch! My approach to this laptop is to make only the most incremental of changes when I absolutely feel I need to do them. So, for instance, I wanted to submit that patch, so I set up mail — but only outgoing email. I admit to some fripperies: I’ve just discovered that recent Xft/cairo/fontconfig/something support color emojis, and so I splashed out on fonts. But otherwise, it’s interesting cobbling everything slowly from scratch.

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2019-02-06»

I feel like my political and cultural inclinations are slowly but determinedly turning into proto-retirement hobbies. And I can’t even imagine that I’ll ever have enough money to retire! It’s another one of those Pak Protector transformations, where our versions of what it is to be older are a mixture of strange new instincts, and aping what we can glean from role-models.

(It’s pretty easy to deduce what roles Lizzard and I are aiming for here; I believe us to be successfully morphing into eccentric-looking, reasonably approachable benign cultural fossils with Something To Relate With Colour For Your Neighbourhood. Expect us to pull up in your small seaside town in our wooden maker car and start setting up a retro-computer repair shop any decade.)

Anyway, the primary obsession for 2019 so far has been, as I may have mentioned, Lisp! Or rather, LISP. I have now moved back in time, past my brief flirtation with Plan 9 and Bell Laboratories’ UNIX™ fundamentalism, into the AI labs of the fifties.

Last week, I spoke at Stanford at EE380, which was a regular weekly talk that I loved to attend when I first came to Silicon Valley (well, actually, I mainly loved reading the emailed announcements, which as ever were just as good if not better than leaving my house.) I did not have enough insight into the generational strata of the valley to recognise that EE380 was primarily run by old school AIers and their colleagues; I stuck in a few McCarthy references into my talk just because I wanted to convey some sense of long stretches of chronological time, and only belatedly realised the audience was full of people who’d lived through all that history. They kindly took me out, and scattered entertaining gossip my way, including the fine, fine tradition of Les Earnest claiming, convincingly, to have invented everything. Anyway, it’s always a little embarrassing to garnish your talk with references to the Glorious Past, when the Glorious Past are in the room, still fresh with the injustices and the memories of an eternal moment of youth.

(Video of my talk is now online; it’s a bit all-over-the-place, even for me, but as a confused snapshot of how I think the international regulation of technology is going, it’s got some value. I’m playing my part in the historical archives, which are really something and probably a better use of your video-watching time.)

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2019-02-03»

I am constantly, delightfully surprised by how gung-ho and ungrumpy I am online. I can’t really be anything else, honestly, because my absolute determination to be ungrumpy, against all odds, prohibits me from exhibiting any other kind of emotion. This means that in my normal life, I scowl constantly, and am forever punching people on the nose.

j/k!

Well, maybe? The policing of mood online does rather mean I’m boxed in. I’ve grown more and more sensitive to other people’s tirades — not just the ones aimed at me (or variants on the theme of me), but just venting in general. I mentally suck my teeth whenever someone turns on someone else. It’s a family trait, I’ve noticed. My family loves personal stories and anecdotes and tales, but they must be either at the expense of the teller, or at the very least, full of generous concessions to the antagonist(s). You can be really quite cutting, but if it is not from a self-declared place of love, we will scowl constantly and punch you on the nose. (You are not expected to live in perfect tolerance; that place of love can be cheaply rented by the hour).

I know many people who vent online, and they are okay in real life. Even the ones who are convinced the other people who vent online are monsters, are themselves not monsters. Well, not full-time. I’ve been randomly monstered (and seen monstrosities perpetrated on others) by so many different kinds of people I now try not to extrapolate. I have fallen back on my family’s default of “they probably have some horrific back-story, one that will not be as funny as the stories we are telling each other now about them; we should at worst leave them to be trapped in their sad story for the rest of their lives, that is their punishment, which is undeserved.”

I pondered briefly about this, in an online place which I frequent which is pretty much defined by being bitter. They’ve been bitter there since about 1986. They commented about how gung-ho and happy and optimistic they are in the rest of their lives, and I wondered how much that was true generally. Are we all participating in some strange, pissed-off masquerade?

Are we all, in our own ways, happy?

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2019-01-05»

I’ve been futzing around with LISPs. See how we say LISP like that, all in caps? That’s how I think of Lisp; it has this vague aura of pre-1980s aesthetic where capital letters where either teletype-obligatory, or an actual indicator of futuristic COMPUTER WORLD.

Case in computing is a funny thing, like a binary signal in the ebb and flow of fashion. When and why did Unix (UNIX™) shell commands adopt that lowercase chic? I still write my email address in lowercase, even on government forms that request all caps, out of a defiant alt tone — DANNY@SPESH.COM stinks of AOL, Compuserve, and doing it wrong.

Common Lisp, forged in the eighties, expected, like Lisp itself, to be timeless: Common Lisp has CAPITALS all over it. Not exclusively, though. I guess when you’re Guy Steele and you’re trying to bind together futuristic AI and McCarthy fifties experiments, smashing together upper and lowercase is the least of your temporal concerns.

Will upper case make a come back? MAYBE IT ALREADY HAS.

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2018-02-01»

I love this articleby Christine Peterson about her coinage of the term “open source”, not just for the story (which I’d known about, but never heard in detail), but for the tone of the piece. It’s written in what I generally think of as “Geek Old Semi-formal”: this precise, slightly low-affect, somewhat wry tone that seeks to depict the maximum number of factual points, in a simple but almost shockingly accurate way.

In pretty much everything I’ve done, I’ve fought with the hellish triangle of being readable, entertaining, and truthful. Sometimes you end up flexing the absolute clinical truth for one of the others: for instance, I don’t really “generally think” of Christine’s tone as “Geek Old Semi-Formal”. I just made that term up on the spot. I didn’t quite confess that earlier, because it sounded funnier to imply I’ve used this name, even just internally, for years.

Compared to just describing the tone flatly,  I did very mildly better on the entertaining axis (at least in my own mind), probably just as readably, but really not as true. (It was also easier to write — because a term like that is actually exactly what I need for a title. Great, I’ll paste that into the title box up there, and maybe that will become the hook for others who reblog this.)

Anyway, where was I? Right: so, actually honest documents are rare, mostly unentertaining and largely unreadable. We rarely optimise for the absolute truth, because either one of “readable” or “entertaining” is more immediately valued, and rewarded.

Geek Old Semi-Formal is readable and true, at the expense of some of the fripperies of language that we associate with entertaining speech. It’s this beautiful upgrade of technical writing to convey conversation, stories, anecdotes, and the communal trivialities of our lives.

As part of my Plan 9 binge (did I tell you about my Plan 9 binge?), I’ve been reading lots of old Unix papers, which all aspire to this style. As the New York Times said in its obituary of Dennis Ritchie:

Colleagues who worked with Mr. Ritchie were struck by his code — meticulous, clean and concise. His writing, according to Mr. Kernighan, was similar. “There was a remarkable precision to his writing,” Mr. Kernighan said, “no extra words, elegant and spare, much like his code.”

I don’t want to say that computer geeks got this from Kernighan; I think that there’s a wide set of folks involved in factual-seeking professions and hobbies that hold similar aspirations, and end up admiring and adopting the same style.

This morning, I opened a mystery package delivered by the “browsing ebay auctions at 3AM”-fairy. It was a paper copy of this February 1980 issue  of MICRO: The 6502 Magazine purchased for reasons of unstoppable nocturnal nostalgia.

I think even the august editors of MICRO would concede that the writing skills of its contributors were pretty variable. The year 1980 seems to be a seller’s market for 6502 periodical literature: There’s a full-page advert pretty much begging for people to write articles. (They’re paying $50-$100 a page, too, if you want to go back in time.) But for me, that variability is just a great opportunity to watch the Geek Old Semi-Formal style fail and crumble in different ways. The feigned jocularity! The laundry lists! The science paper formalism! I won’t point fingers, but you can flick through this copy of MICRO to see for yourself the rich panoply of Geek Old stylings.

It’s also a style I really have come to enjoy in face-to-face interactions too. There’s just something deeply comforting about sitting and talking slowly and precisely with someone, each of you carefully constructing entirely accurate sentences with little overall variation in tone or pace. Especially by contrast to the usual chit-chat of slapdashing word-sounds together and slinging them out your mouth in order to fill time and show off, between gurning physical expressions  and uncontrollable emotional explosions.

Not that it doesn’t also work for emotions, too. I think of all the times someone I know has flatly, compactly and desperately clearly conveyed their experiences: remaining calm, grammatical and short-sentenced even as the tears stream down their face, and their life fell apart.

I wonder, too, why I associate it with older geeks (older than me, for sure). It smacks a little of the repressed-fifties model of male scientist, though I don’t think of it as entirely gendered; in real life, it seems as strange on men as women. And I see people younger than me adopting it, often comically until they get it right. It’s definitely a bit on-the-spectrum—but I’m not on-the-spectrum and I use it, and aspire to it.

Well, now I’ve felt it so strongly in Christine’s great piece, I’ll start looking for it more, in words and in conversation. And now I have a name to call it!

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2018-01-23»

I’m 48 years old now, and I’ve never learnt to drive. When I was 17, on a deserted street with big ditches either side, my dad and I discovered that I needed new glasses more badly than I needed to learn driving right then.And since then, the time has never seemed right. Brief windows of driving-opportunity have opened and closed around me.

For most of my twenties, I think the collective income of all my housemates could not have paid for a car, and besides, in London, where would we put it? In the sink with the dirty dishes? The move to California was the obvious opportunity. I figured somehow that it would be easier here, and that my people’s collective knowledge of stick shift might give me a head start.

My first American driving instructor simply didn’t believe someone as old as me could not drive. If you’ve ever seen Richard Herring’s Driving Instructor sketch, it was the same, but with a 70 year old J.D. “Boss” Hogg. “Don’t you even know how to drive?”

I suppose he thought that if he insisted I drive back from the car-lot, I’d finally snap out of my charade. He held himself in horror as I immersed myself in the role of someone who could not drive — only now I was improvising the not-driving extremely quickly and at random things within sight of the El Camino freeway. I think I was his cue to retire.

After that, I even avoided driving videogames. In 2010, I looked up a San Francisco driving school that specialized in fearful, phobic or just unnaturally old non-drivers. This instructor was much nicer, and would tell me inspiring stories of previous incompetents who had finally got it together under his guidance.

With his careful stewardship, I failed three times, the last time (I swear this is true) before I’d even pulled out of the DMV. The Californian provisional license actually expires if you fail three times, as if you were playing Donkey Kong or something.

Really, the only thing all this car-learning got me was enough to understand that car-driving is madly dangerous,  barely within the capabilities of a baseline human to master. I’d sit in the passenger seat and watch the driver, like Ripley and the marines watched Bishop play the knife game.

At some point, I gave up my dreams of buying a pickup truck and claw back all rideshare debt I’d built up. Instead, I’d tell people that I’d chosen never to learn to drive. Basically, I said, at fifteen I’d anticipated self-driving cars and was just a bit out on the timing. I don’t think I really planned that far ahead — though I did believe as a child that tooth decay would soon be a solved problem, and declined to listen to a bunch of future unemployed doctors tell me to waste years of my life flossing obsolescent teeth. But I  convinced myself of this rationalisation when autonomous vehicles began to be a thing. After that DARPA Grand Challenge footage, I knew I was never going to face my demons. I’d be carried to the doors of heaven by obedient robots.

I’m not entirely rejecting the idea I could learn one day. It feels kind of wantonly ignorant to defy learning to drive. Plus, I’m learning the ukulele, and it can’t be more difficult than that, right? Actually some of my new skills, like managing a chord change while not dropping the instrument, might even be transferable into the motoring context.

But mostly I’m getting pretty good at just accepting my fate, and taking a lot of cabs. Also, I found out on one of those shifty-looking, FDA-unapproved DNA analysis sites, that I actually have a gene which is associated with, scientifically, not being able to get it together in any physical activity more complicated than hopscotch. So if the carbots doesn’t pan out, maybe CRISPR will get me there, faster.

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