Robot theology

While I'm on the subject of scholastics (I've just been listening to a lecture on the subject): had Ken Macleod been so minded, he could have found plenty o material in medieval theology to justify robot religion -- perhaps starting with ideas of grace. In Aristotle's conception, Grace is a form within the soul. That means it's a shape, a pattern. The material in which it is embedded is irrelevant, just as a pot is a pot whether wooden or ceramic. Grace in silico would not be inferior to Grace in vivo**: robots would be as capable as humans of faith, hope and love.

* bear in mind, this entire concept remains somewhat new and alien to me; I'm almost certainly butchering some carefully-considered principle. In all honesty, I don't much care.

** Doubtless you could concoct other arguments for robot inferiority, perhaps arguing that they weren't created directly by good, and so are merely a shadow of a shadow of his Goodness. After all, Christians have plenty of experience justifying racism; justifying discrimination against machines would be an order of magnitude easier.

Science Envy

"Science envy" and "math envy" are perennial problems across huge swathes of the academic world. Mathematics and the hard sciences are seen as having achieved great leaps forward in understanding the world, and thus become objects for emulation whether applicable or not. Greek symbols start to fill up journal pages. It doesn't matter if they demonstrate the argument more rigorously, they just need to look impressively sciency. Economics is currently the most seriously-afflicted discipline, although the other social sciences are rapidly succumbing as massive datasets become available online.

This is nothing new. As their name suggests, the social sciences have been built up by wave after wave of this imitation throughout the 20th century. Or even further back. The scholastic theology of medieval Christianity was largely a centuries-long case of 'logic envy'. Theologians discovered Aristotelian logic in the 12th century, and proceeded to apply it to the bible in mind-numbing detail.

The indian case is even more interesting. Here the discipline to be emulated was grammar, then far more advanced than any other branch of knowledge (and pretty damn impressive even in a modern context). Grammatical terminology and forms of argument cross over into most other disciplines.

Book: The Night Sessions

Ken MacLeod, The Night Sessions. Near-future Scotland, recovering from a post-9/11 replay of the Wars of Religion. Churches are allowed to exist only on a private level, with the state studiously ignoring their existence. So when Detective Adam Ferguson begins to investigate the murder of his priest, his attention -- and his superiors' -- is on the political and bureaucratic consequences almost as much as on the rapidly-escalating series of killings.

MacLeod's science fiction is, among much else, a vehicle for satire on the preset. Here it's most entertaining when confined to small details: Creationist theme parks, for example, or gangster-ridden "Capitalism with Russian Characteristics". His broader swipes on religion mostly fall flat. Towards the end there is a particularly ludicrous conversion as a True Believer is confronted with the contradictions of the bible* -- a shaky plot device on the biblical literalism which a certain kind of atheist shares with only the most extreme of protestant sects.

The science fiction elements are largely window-dressing, with the exception of the robots. Macleod's robots are superior not only in strength and intelligence, but in their ability to understand human emotion. They unnerve people, even though they are no longer given humanoid form to avoid this very problem. Police robots are loyal and devoted sidekicks to their masters, and the strength of this bond is one of the assumptions driving the plot. And, finally, there's the question of whether robots could be affected by religion.

These are all interesting questions, but the pace of the book prevents MacLeod exploring them. The Night Sessions is fundamentally a thriller and a police procedural, and theories of robotic personhood have to take a back-seat to that.

* ETA: later, it occurs to me that the nature of this is partly a comment on the human/robot comparison. The human is defeated in the same way robots are according to B-movie cliche: show them a contradiction, and wait for them to blow a fuse. Meanwhile the robots, emotionally advanced far beyond human level, have no trouble on this point.

Book: Generation X

Douglas Coupland, Generation X. An often uncomfortable book to read, because it's a good one. Simultaneous identification with, loathing for and jealousy of the characters doesn't make for a pleasant reading experience.

Like all his books, it's set in an all-too-real world. The cast are young Americans, raised on marketing and branded aspiration, with every possible gestrue of rejection, independence or individuality already anticipated and commodified by the marketing industry. The plot developments are incidental; the action is in the stories and fantasies of the Generation Xers, mostly of where they find love and beauty within small moments of their lives:

"inspired by my meetings of the Alcoholics Anonymous organization, I instigated a policy of storytelling in my own life, a policy of "bedtime stories," which Dag, Claire and I share among ourselves. It's simple: we come up with stories and we tell them to each other. The only rule is that we're not allowed to interrupt, just like in AA, and at the end we're not allowed to criticize. This noncritical atmosphere works for us because the three of us are so tight assed about revealing our emotions. A clause like this was the only way we could feel secure with each other."

Coupland's happy-ever-after endpoint, here as elsewhere, is for this circle of friends to find a shared language, a common aesthetic in their savviness and semi-rejection of the world, and so an ability to share their perfect moments. The problem is that they aren't really "tight assed about revealing [their] emotions". Once the storytelling device clicks into place, they're all able to talk in the style that is Coupland's trademark, cannily picking apart the brands and marketed aspirations from which they've built their inner lives. The emotional fluency isn't developed over the book; it's present from the start, as plot device.

Not only is the endpoint present from the start, it's also deeply unsatisfying in itself. We can't leave any mark on the world, he seems to be saying, so should content ourselves with occasional brief moments of beauty and communication. This is both accurate, and sufficient reason to fling yourself off the nearest cliff.

Books on Italy

Currently reading Tobias Jones' The Dark Heart of Italy. So naturally I glance online to see what others have made of it. Equally naturally, I find they're strongly suggesting I find better books on Italian politics. Noting their suggestions, in preparation for the next time my thoughts take a turn bootward:

Paul Ginsborg, Italy and Its Discontents, a history of Italy 1980-2001 (following an earlier book covering the period to 1980):

the 1980s were years of "cynicism, opportunism and fear" – the conditions in which corruption could flourish, and from which Berlusconi would benefit.

Much of the blame lies with the Communist Party. Rather than serve as gatekeeper, filtering Autonomy's contributions, the party co-operated in the suppression of groups to its left. The result was a weakened political system, the left avid for respectability while the right operated without constraints. If the Italian left is to regain the initiative, it will need to open itself again to influences like those of the autonomists.

. CT comment:

I’d recommend anyone interested in post-war Italy to read Ginsborg; his previous book on Italy from Liberation to the 1980s is also excellent, and his short book on Berlusconi is good. Ginsborg’s weak spot is that he doesn’t devote much attention to the conspiratorial side of politics. In that respect David Lane’s book on Berlusconi (the book of the Economist feature) is surprisingly good – he turns over quite a few stones. Philip Willan’s The Puppetmasters is the conspiracist account of post-war Italian politics in English; God only knows how accurate it is, but it’s extremely suggestive. The Dark Heart of Italy… meh. I enjoyed it (Tobias Jones writes well), but it’s a bit Orientalist. [links added]

SeaIceland

It's a truism (and true) that exising globalisation fails by being limited to capital (and perhaps ideas), with labour excluded by law, and land land excluded by definition. Hence No Borders takes pride of place in the alterglobalisation movement, both logically and practically.
Perhaps this desired expansion of globalisation across the factors of production will lead to the development of other havens analogous to tax havens. A return, if you like, to safe havens as pirate islands, refuges for the stateless and hte outlawed.
Or, as with Iceland, we could have 'free speech havens', outposts where data can be sent and stored, and can sally forth to break through the restrictions of established nations. The ideal espoused by Cryptonomicon and Sealand, finally brought to fruition.

Kings is better off dead

My recent excitement at Kings, a modern, alternate-reality dramatization of chunks of the Old Testament, became disappointment when confronted with the reality of watching it. My main problem with it is how they've destroyed the character of David. He's wet, naive, passive, and utterly devoid of ambition -- pretty much the exact opposite of the biblical David. One of the most ruthless, scheming and driven OT personalities becomes a corn-fed Midwestern ingenue. All the sharp edges -- all that is attractive or morally dubious -- is stripped off him, and he -- like all the other characters -- is reduced to a standard American archetype. Hard to keep paying attention beyond that point.

In retrospect, I can't quite understand my anticipatory excitement. Bible dramatizations are hardly new and, like anything else, have no guarantee of turning out well. That's even without the problem of other people's interpretations of stories with which you already have some emotional relationship.

Snippets of music

I don't understand music well enough to write more than a few lines about most songs. Seems a shame, though, to let them pass without any note. Start with tracks recommended by Troy, as 'intensely passonate about unlikely topics':

Numerology - These New Puritans (who really, really want to know what your favourite number is.)

That's...surprisingly aggressive. I can kind of imagine being cornered in a dark alley by a gang of numerologists (triads?) and given this grilling. Somewhere between Tarantino and Monty Python. On a related topic, I give you a number romance. [do have a poke around on that site; I suspect at least some of it would appeal]

Fifty On Our Foreheads - White Lies (who are on a spaceship to the sun, and all going to die.)


ah, there's nothing quite like an inexplicable science fiction dystopia. Questionable Content at one point had a motivational poster saying "Work harder, or we will fly you into the sun". Now I know what they meant :)

Leechwife - Rasputina (cheating, as I already gave this to someone else, but on the other hand it really is intensely passionate about leeches)

I want to slip this into a school/university careers service, see if anybody takes up the suggestion.

Johnny On The Monorail - The Buggles (who are surprisingly intense for a song from that long ago. you know, about a monorail.)

oh, this is _fantastic_. I've spent most of my underground journeys this year in a state of inexplicable temporary bliss; now I have a soundtrack for it. Certainly my favourite of the five.

My Boy Builds Coffins - Florence & the Machine
Nice. I'd somehow avoided hearing any Florence & the Machine; I like. Had thought "hell, getting passionate about coffins, that's hardly unusual". Turns out it s.

LibCon

I'm not wild about having a Tory government, but less distraught about it than most of my friends seem to be. It's sure as hell better than a Conservative minority government. Yes, the Tories will destroy anything not nailed down in the coalition agreement, and probably a few things that are. Yes, both parties will band together to shit on the poor, and we'll eventually start wishing we had Blair or Brown.

As for Labour: this is the only time I can remember being on the side of the Labour leadership, against belligerent backbenchers. Particularly irritating were the attacks on the SNP -- a party who, even if not in a coalition, would be relied on by lib-lab in any vote of confidence. Tribalism is a double-edged sword, I guess: good when aimed at the Tories, hopeless when when directed at the SNP. Difference: the Conservatives deserve.

George Scialabba

The Mr. Bean film sees the eponymous hero, a hapless museum attendent, foisted on a foreign museum under the pretence that he is a visiting expert. Grilled about his critical methods, he answers that "I sit and look at the paintings". The museum officials, impressed by this back-to-basics approach, immediately hire him.

Beyond the world of farce, there's always a bubbling undercurrent of non-professional intellectuals, independent scholars by choice or implication, sometimes producing work of staggering quality but entirely lacking in professional ambition. Over the years, they build up devoted, if rarely large, audiences -- people cutting their essays out of whatever small magazine they can get published in, stashing away otherwise-forgotten gems, like the cluster of music geeks hovering around that promising local band which never quite gets a CD out. The internet makes it much easier, of course.

George Scialabba seems to be one of them, according to this review by Scott McLemee.

It also, incidentally, provides a more positive view of Opus Dei, as a form of social innovation more suited to the young and devote than traditional orders:

"For several hundred years," he told me, "a small minority of Italian/French/Spanish adolescent peasant or working-class boys -- usually the sternly repressed or (like me) libido-deficient ones -- have been devout, well-behaved, studious... the bright ones become Jesuits; the more modestly gifted or mystically inclined become Franciscans..."

Instead, he was drawn into Opus Dei -- a group trying, as he puts it, "to make a new kind of religious vocation possible, combining the traditional virtues and spiritual exercises with a professional or business career."

Red Toiry

I like Jonathan Raban, and I've not read Phillip Blond's Red Tory. Still, I'm more than a little dubious of the former's critique of the latter. It seems to be mainly based on a cultural affinity for the city over the country, and on a disbelief that institutions run by stodgy and self-isolating small-c conservatives can ever do social good.

what meaning they might have for people on sink estates or in sprawling, ethnically diverse conurbations, like those of the Midlands and the North, is beyond comprehension. Like his literary predecessors, Blond, when he thinks of England, sees mainly its church-spire-haunted countryside.

Well, yes, but so what? If Blond can get rural tory do-gooders actually doing good rather than tut-tutting over the neighbours, I'm all in favour. Let's make a more radical urban variant, and build an odd-couple alliance of urban anarchists and rural reactionaries.

GTD repeating

I'm an intermittent fan of GTD. That is, I tend to ignore it for a while, and then

This largely depends on what's happenign in my life; there are long stretches where I only need to deal with one or two large projects. Since GTD is optimized for managers needing to track a large number of small tasks, it's not much use for me. But then live spins out of control, and I return to David Allen for some imitation of control.
Within GTD, the big problem is that it doesn't handle big tasks very well. Often a project consists of "Do this. Then do it another 850 times, over the next 3 moths". Sure, I can keep adding each chunk to my next actions, but it doesn't really help. What I need is something to remind me that I need to work on the task, show and recognize the work I'm putting into it, and otherwise keep out of the way.

So, I took a look round online to figure out how to deal with the problem. Turns out there isn't one; everybody has bolted her own system onto it. Sucks, really it does.

Kings (U.S. TV series) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This seems too good to be true. In fact it was, and got canceled pretty sharply.

Kings is a television drama series ....loosely based on the Biblical story of King David, but set in a kingdom that culturally and technologically resembles the present-day United States

Long-grain pontiff

I'm less than overwhelmed by Michael Bracewell's book England is Mine. I do have to admit, though, that he has a nice turn of phrase -- even if it is in a style that must have landed him in Pseuds Corner:

So pop, despite itself, became arty. English society, high on the new convenience foods, allowed English culture to develop a kind of boil-in-the-bag popism as the successor to the beans on toast of social realism. [80]

[slightly less entertaining on re-reading, when I realise that "boil-in-the-bag popism" probably means music rather than the Bishop of Rome]

Sasha Frere-Jones on Patti Smith's autobiography:

It’s refreshing to read a memoirist so dedicated to telling a version of her life that is more about ideas than bedpost notches, though sad to think that only someone like Smith could push this past her editors. The New Irony: only a rock star has the moxie to be a prude now.

Naturally, though, I'm more inspired by what the other Sasha finds in it:

It’s a love story, in every sense; not only an account of a love affair, but of a connection that goes beyond sexuality and familiarity into true understanding and devotion....
he pair were the cutting edge of late 60s and early 70s creative New York, and the energy and belief and idealism surrounding them practically wafts off the page.

Widows

Widowhoood is one of those facets of historical experience that I can't really grok. Widows throughout pre-modern history have been subject to such a weird mix of fear and acceptance, left a socially precarious position but also one in which they have more freedom than married women. Biblical examples would be Ruth and Judith; historical ones can be traced through land and tax records. Laurence Fontaine argued in a recent issue of Esprit that widows in France had more access to markets:

Dans la France de l’Ancien Régime, le droit des femmes évoluait selon leur statut social et les phases de leur cycle de vie ; les veuves étant, par exemple, plus libres que les femmes mariées qui restaient soumises à l’autorité des maris. Toutefois, la charge qui leur incombait de s’occuper et de nourrir la famille leur a donné un accès au marché.

What I can't figure out is how much this peculiarly, perversely privileged position of widows was general, how much just a situation which enabled a few personally strong widows to run with it, while the majority ended up in much more difficult circumstances, practically and socially.

[as is probably obvious, this is mainly a marker for a topic I find interesting, but which has presumably already been the subject of multiple books, and which I don't anticipate having anything new to say about]

I love that this article questioning the opening-up of Belarus is all about dubious industrial figures, with nothing about it being a repressive police state.

Johann Hari on good form:

something stranger still is happening in The Election That Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Every day in this country, two big forces artificially drag the British government way to the right of the British people, making it enact policies that benefit a small, rich elite at the expense of the rest. We are not supposed to notice this, never mind try to change it. Yet suddenly, in this election, those forces have been exposed.

Comment on post-election PR in the UK:

I’m afraid that this has been predicted in every close-looking election since … well pretty much since Labour rose to power a century ago, without ever coming close to occurring.

Heh. I'm also a little baffled by the love of Betahaus, which in the end is Just An Office. But even stranger is the terror people seem to have at absolutely safe parts of Berlin:

Das Betahaus liegt zudem abseits neben einer Autowerkstatt und ist eine ansonsten unvermietbare (imho) GSW Immobilien. Absolut keine Gegend wo man Abends alleine durchgehen möchte (Kottbuser Tor ist nicht weit).

ACTA text due for release today:

Overall, therefore, there was a general sense from this session that negotiations have now advanced to a point where making a draft text available to the public will help the process of reaching a final agreement. For that reason, and based on the specific momentum coming out of this meeting, participants have reached unanimous agreement that the time is right for making available to the public the consolidated text coming out of these discussions, which will reflect the substantial progress made at this round.

It is intended to release this on Wednesday 21 April.

The end of the world as we don't know it

Ken Macleod:

"Global warming is real, it's happening and it's serious, but it's certainly no reason to believe there's more than an outlying possibility of the world coming to an end in this century."

Charles Stross:

I've lately been trying to project possible futures that don't include any kind of singularity, be it a minor one (like the steam engine) or a massive one (strongly superhuman A.I.s that are to us as we are to cats and dogs). Mostly they require either a malthusian collapse, or repressive legislative/political forces. So, to that extent, any SF that doesn't try to address the issue is either a dystopia or a fantasy.

Takedown downfall fail

A worrying example of how brittle and centralized a lot of our culture is:

A recent wave of takedowns affecting many of the Hitler “Downfall” parody videos has resulted in their removal from YouTube.

Wang Hui and plagiarism

I've previously mentioned Wang Hui, as a particularly interesting Chinese intellectual. Now he's being accused of plagiarism -- which might be politically-motivated, or could be a gase of someboy finding him with his pants down. Or both.

A great many things keep happening

Since hearing it mentioned on In Our Time, I've been entranced by the start of Gregory of Tours' History of the Franks:

A great many things keep happening, some of them good, some of them bad. The inhabitants of the different countries keep quarrelling fiercely with each other and kings go on loosing their temper in the most furious way. Our churches are attacked by the heretics and then protected by the Catholics; the faith of Christ burns bright in many men, but it remains lukewarm in others; no sooner are church buildings endowed by the faithful that they are stripped again by those who have no faith. However, no writer has come to the fore who has been sufficiently skilled in setting things down in an orderly fashion to be able to describe these events in prose or in verse.

Alas, that seems to be more-or-less an invention of the translator. The Latin text begins:

Decedente atque immo potius pereunte ab urbibus Gallicanis liberalium cultura litterarum, cum nonnullae res gererentur vel rectae vel inprobae...

Which This translation renders more literally

With liberal culture on the wane, or rather perishing in the Gallic cities there were many deeds being done both good and evil

ah, well, it's still a glorious opening line, regardless of authenticity.

I'm going through a period of over-the-top enthusiasm for unconferences -- they're just at that confluence of anarchism and practicality where you can imagine the possibility of improving the world by worming our way out of the zombiefied social rituals which usually trap us. Apparently, actually attending one that doesn't quite live up to the ideals isn't much of a damper on this.

Just wish I could find a calendar for the things...

predicting open-source community development

Here's a thought. If you're developing something that relies on an open-source project, one of the big uncertainties is what is going to happen to the community in the future. Is this project going to wither away next year?

We could gather a lot of data on this. Mailing list use, code commits, blogposts, google hits, etc, etc, etc. Then we can try to see characteristics which are correlated with growing/declining projects, and develop a quantitative prediction of the likely future of a project.

not just datamining

Currently at the Berlin Open Data Hackday. Mentions David Eaves, who has just launched a Canadian government data transparency project

The Three Laws of Open Government Data:
1. If it can't be spidered or indexed, it doesn't exist
2. If it isn't available in open and machine readable format, it can't engage
3. If a legal framework doesn't allow it to be repurposed, it doesn't empower

I'm not entirely convinced by this focus. Data-mining is good, but there are plenty of other important areas that will only be identified by a competent journalist or activist asking the right questions.

Pipi Le Pew, flushed down the loo

Hebrew/greek confusion:

In Hebrew the word YHWH looks like this: יהוה — read from right to left. But by the time of Jesus Hebrew had become virtually a dead language even in Israel. Someone encountering this Hebrew word in a Greek text might well have thought it looked like the nonsense Greek word πιπι — read from left to right, that’s pipi. According to St. Jerome this is exactly what happened

Kyrgyzstan: 2005 reloaded

Sean Roberts, unsurprisingly, has a decently-informed take on Kyrgyzstan:

The news coming out of the country looks all too similar to that which we saw in Spring of 2005, only more violent. In general, the events of the last several days taken together with those of March 2005 suggest two things about this country in the twenty-first century – 1) that the Kyrgyz people, unlike most former Soviet citizens, are unwilling to allow a corrupt government to stay in power through its control of the political system and are ready to risk personal safety in order to prevent this; and 2) the elite of Kyrgyzstan has yet to demonstrate that it is capable of establishing a viable government that meets people’s demands and moves Kyrgyzstan’s development forward.

The ultimate weapon

Last night, to a reading by Catherine Hales. [a few of her poems -- some of which she read -- are online here, here, here, and here.

Back, and unsure about the whole enterprise. Hales seems to be pretty good at what she does -- as far as I can tell, the poems work pretty well on her own terms, and the reading went much more smoothly than I would have expected.

But it makes me realise just how adrift I am when it comes to poetry. I go to readings from time to time, hoping to find something that will describe, explain or enrich the world. Instead I just end up feeling baffled, stupid, underread, and resentful about the entire enterprise.

Partly, this comes down to my old grumble that poetry would be much improved by footnotes. When I don't understand the origin of a quotation, or the significance of an allusion, entire sections devolve towards being just patterns of meaningless words. There's little way to know what you're missing; just a requirement that you spend a lifetime reading the language whose fragments are regurgitated into the poetry. This I won't do, any more than I'm willing to inhale the canon of Star Wars and Doctor Who so I can follow in-jokes on Livejournal.

It's a different feeling of stupidity to what comes from not understanding science. There, every moment of ignorance has a solution; understanding some area is mainly just a matter of reading textbooks and papers until it makes sense. Maybe it'll take more time than I'm willing to put in, but I always know that the answer is out there.

Whereas, poetry? [I mean, this kind of poetry, academic poetry. Poetry that gets listened to by non-poets is a different matter] I have the sense that the only way to understand it is through slow cultural acclimatisation, spending years bouncing around the English department of some anglophone university. And I have plenty of ways to waste my life already, without going down that route.

This shouldn't irritate me as much as it does; I should be able to accept that poetry is just an enclosed, self-referential world, that I can amicably sidestep in the same way I do Warcraft players. But I can't; I'm somehow still hooked by the cultural status, by the feeling that I *should* be able to grok poetry, by the wariness that people are doing things with words that I can't even work out how to comprehend.

The saving grace is the knowledge that, even if I did acquire understanding, perhaps through years of rigorous training in some remote poetry-temple, it still wouldn't do me any good. As CH describes her work:

‘Look in vain for (linear) narrative, for anecdote, for epiphanies, for messages, for making-the world-a-better-place: the world is a mess and language is messy and the world is language and any attempt to tidy it up with poetry is falsification. There is no utopian vision…’

But what is the use of a book (or anything else, for that matter), without epiphanies and making the world a better place? I'm well aware of the messiness and meaninglessness of the world; the challenge is to tie it into some kind of plausible structure, to give yourself a reason to carry on living. Catherine Hales, by her own aims, isn't going to do that.

So, in the end, I turn back to rabble-rousing slam poetry. Not only is it easier to understand, but it hints at the possibility of a life not based on continual self-doubt and self-examination, where it is possible to change the world rather than just passively complaining about it. I prefer my poetry weaponized:)

England is Mine

Bracewell's "England is Mine" turns out to be excellent page by page, but a bit of a letdown overall. He's taken as his basic thesis something entirely vagye and anodyne, namely nostalgia for the countryside within English culture and pop music. He calls this "Arcadia", although it's unclear what makes this a peculiarly English form different from the adoration of an imagined countryside that is present in just about every country in the world. Likewise, the breadth and commonness of the subject makes it hard to trace any intellectual ancestry for the views he describes: who is to say whether different longings for "Arcadia" are directly related, or just parallel expressions of the same common human urge?

That said, I'm only on page 37; all this could well be resolved later.

Speed

If we aren't quite living through the End of History, it's safe to say that it's taking a tea break. In Europe at least, there are no huge socio-politico-cultural movements flinging themselves at the organs of power. Whatever's interesting is happening in small pockets on the edges, or within the closed-off worlds of science and technology. Developments in Asia and the South are regularly noted as Big and Dramatic, but don't attract our daily attention.

And yet, despite all this, you can still find any number of writers obsessed with the speed of culture, even arguing that "Speed...has become the definition of the present" [Gil Delannoi]. "Internet speed" made some sense in the first dot-come boom, but has lingered as a concept even while the pace of online change has slowed to a crawl.

Where there is speed, it can be not an expression of change, but an alternative to it. So with twitter, which fetishes speed while limiting the possibilities of expression to little more than phatic self-stereotyping. Maybe this is the same as what is happening everywhere; fetishise speed to avoid noticing the (lack of) content.

And none of this is new. Both sides have been around since at least the Industrial Revolution -- the one fetishizing speed as a symbol of modernity, the other criticising its emptiness, how it robs us of the ability to appreciate the world. So some of the current obsession with speed (exemplified by this issue of Esprit) has a weirdly retro-futuristic feel to it. It's like a faint echo of Futurism ("A speeding car is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace." ) -- but stripped of optimism, anger and enthusiasm.

Legal abuse of statistics

On April 14, the most spectacular miscarriage of justice in years is coming to a conclusion in the Netherlands. The nurse Lucia de Berk was given a life sentence back in 2004 – and in NL that means life – for 7 murders and 3 attempted murders of babies and earlier of old people in her care. After a long hard fight the trial has been reopened and now it is nearly over. All the deaths and incidents appear to have been completely natural. [from comments]

Or, as Helen puts it: Your goal for this election period is to challenge apathetic non-voters. This has got to stop being a socially acceptable position to take.

remember, every time Cameron talks about disillusionment with politics, what he's really saying is "lefties, don't bother coming out to vote". I'd bet money that this is a conscious strategy to keep the left home on May 6th.

Why have I never previously encountered Pynchon as essayist:

historical Ned Lud was well absorbed into the more or less sarcastic nickname "King (or Captain) Ludd," and was now all mystery, resonance and dark fun: a more-than-human presence, out in the night, roaming the hosiery districts of England, possessed by a single comic shtick -- every time he spots a stocking-frame he goes crazy and proceeds to trash it.

Accelerando

Rereading the start of Charles Stross' Accelerando. It's exhilerating, because of how familiar it is: each year, the CCC is filled with proto-Macxs -- Stross is just giving the present a shot of narrative adrenaline. And lovingly mocking reality while he's at it -- samba-punk, clothing tics and all.

The later chapters are also good, but I stop caring when it stops becoming recognizably human. Guess I'm a near-future kind of guy, for the same reasons I'm a reformer and not a revolutionary: the utopia that appeals is the one attainable by nudging the present in the right way.

Prospect gives Richard Florida a healthy battering:

Florida does not ignore the downsides of the shifts he describes; he just accepts them with a Panglossian shrug. Is income inequality increasing? Well, that's because the upper echelon benefits from "creativity," when in fact Florida's "creative class" is defined to include essentially everyone in the highest-earning third of the work force -- including the titans of finance, whose "creativity" has turned out to be deeply destructive. Are good factory jobs melting away? Sure, but that just means the country needs to make service jobs better paying and more fulfilling.

Dealing with shrinking cities in eastern Germany:

One of the IBA's more radical ideas is that of "city islands" in Dessau-Rosslau. The planners have "kind of disassembled the city into pixels and put it back together again using a cut-and-paste method," as Brückner explains. According to the concept, Dessau-Rosslau would abandon the model of a more compact central city, leaving only islands of houses. "Buildings will be cut out and in the empty spaces we will insert countryside," Brückner explains.