Avenues of Approach

[degringolade]

 

Two Pizzas: Six dollars

He got better on Saint Valentine’s Day. The agent that brought about this miraculous cure was as obscure as the cause of the disease itself. It certainly did not originate from the College of Physicians, for Daniel had used what energies he had to keep the doctors and their lancets at bay. It seemed to issue, rather, from a part of town that had not existed when Daniel had been a young man: a place, just up the road from Bedlam, called Grub Street.

Daniel’s medicine, in other words, was Newspapers. Mrs. Arlanc (the wife of Henry, an English Dissenter, and the housekeeper of Crane Court) had been faithfully bringing up food, drink, and new-papers. She had told visitors that Dr. Waterhouse was deathly ill, and physicians that he was doing much better now, and thereby stopped all of them from crossing his threshold. At Daniel’s request, she refrained from bringing him his mail.

Now, most places did not have newspapers, and so, if Mrs. Arlanc had not brought him any, he would never have known that they were wanting. But London had eighteen of them. ’Twas as if the combination in one city of too many printing presses; a bloody and perpetual atmosphere of Party Malice; and an infinite supply of coffee; had combined, in some alchemical sense, to engender a monstrous prodigy, an unstanchable wound that bled Ink and would never heal. Daniel, who had grown to maturity in a London where printing presses had to be hidden in hay-wagons to preserve them from the sledgehammers of the Censor, could not quite believe this at first; but they kept coming, every day. Mrs. Arlanc brought these to him as if it were perfectly normal for a man to read about all London’s scandals, duels, catastrophes, and outrages every morning as he spooned up his porridge.

At first Daniel found them intolerable. It was as if the Fleet Ditch were being diverted into his lap for half an hour every day. But once he grew accustomed to them, he began to draw a kind of solace from their very vileness. How self-absorbed for him to cower in bed, for fear of mysterious enemies, here in the center of a metropolis that was to Hostility what Paris was to Taste? To be so unnerved, simply because someone had tried to blow him up in London, was like a sailor in a naval engagement pouting and sulking because one of his fellows had stepped on his toe.

So, inasmuch as it made him feel better, Daniel began to look forward to his daily ink-toilette. Immersion in Bile, a splash of Calumny on the face, and a dab of Slander behind each ear, and he was a new man.

THE SYSTEM OF THE WORLD. Copyright © 2004 by Neal Stephenson.

So I am thinking about the nature of the physical/technological means that I use to maintain this little corner of the internet. My confusion and mixed feelings are genuine and I can’t say that they are invalid, just that they are a product of a long chain of changes that I haven’t come fully to grips with.

I suppose this all started back in ‘81. I was living up on the Avenues in SLC, doing the grad school gig, and living with roommates. My buddy had a Commodore 64 and used it to link to the school's mainframe and did all his work there. I had a IBM PC and did all my work on the beige box and carried my work to and from campus on a floppy disc.

Both sides had drawbacks, and as we were young and thought we were smart, we would have discussions concerning the benefits of either way of approaching the issue of computer use.  Most of the time, these were of the standard “I’m smarter than you and my way is better” that is so prevalent among men in their twenties. If you added alcohol to the mix, these would occasionally devolve into drunken, intemperate quarrels.

In a sense, I am still fighting this battle with myself. But currently, I am wondering just what I am doing with the plastic appliances with which I write these diary entries. I am down to two computers currently. Which for me is an amazing effort (my past history of purchase and hoarding of laptops is an established and rather embarrassing trait).

I have always despised Microsoft products. I won’t run down the list of Bill Gates' thought crimes and malevolence toward the world. Lets just say that if Bill Gates wants to do something, all one has to remember is that it is about Bill Gates and nothing else. So even when I have a stand alone I strip it of anything resembling Microsoft. So my stand alone boxes are Linux based.

But the bulk of this piece is going to be talking about changes that the appliance that is the itty-bittty $125.00 Chromebook that I am typing on now symbolize. I can’t for the life of me figure out why this thing bugs me because it really does everything that I want out of an appliance.  But, remembering my college days and the roommate arguments, I am wondering just what it is I really want out of a “computer”.

In a sense, I have to finally admit that I have no real need for an actual computer. My days of programming and maintaining databases and keeping everything secret are behind me, and good riddance. So my needs have changed and I am thinking that it is time for me to sit down and establish just what it is I am looking for from these awkward and sort of necessary conglomerates of differing plastics.

What started all this series of tangents is that I was annoyed by the fact that a Chromebook requires you to have an active internet connection in order to be able to use the device. This is both a bug and a feature. I do like the idea of having everything stored away safely. I don’t need to worry about losing things, It is all there and the time required for maintenance is simply gone.

But I am bothered by the dependency on an internet connection to even start the computer, let alone use the little plastic box. With the Linux boxes, I can use the computer offline and the data is saved just fine, but if I am feeling especially paranoid (a state which is coming around to visit entirely too often) I can disconnect from the internet and still use a word processor and a spreadsheet.

So my thoughts are simply this. The chrome book is by far the most convenient way to not think about what you are doing when you decide to “cruise the internet”. That convenience comes with a trade off in privacy and serious limitations on what you can do and what is available. Simply put, a Chromebook is “internet for dummies”. You are living in a garden there where things are served for you and the folks at Google can most certainly watch what you do. Remember, they have put a shit-ton of time and money into the operating system behind this thing and they didn’t do it to be nice guys, they did it to have access to your data…the same thing goes for android. So Google is just in the same place of controlling and monitoring the ones and zeros that are the current technological means of communication and propaganda as Microsoft and Apple.

Now all of this controlling and monitoring of information by big corporations brings up a bunch of questions. The reason is that the big corporations are about making money. When they put the energy and effort into providing a “quality browser experience” and then give the fruits of that technology away for free, when you install it, you my friend are the product, not the consumer.

That is where the situation gets fuzzy and my past history and the history of communication and information gets truly conflicted. It makes me look at the nature of advertising and propaganda and how ubiquitous it is in my life.

I watch television, granted that the only thing that I watch on the boob tube is football and the television stays unplugged from February (Super Bowl) to September (after preseason). I don’t have cable and I get to watch what comes to me free over the air. But I pay for the privilege of watching football by frequent commercials trying to sell me things that I don’t need. So again, I am the product here. The network news follows a similar principle for its content and paying the inflated salaries of the bimbos with teeth that lipsynch the content. But all I can take from this is that I firmly resolve to not buy anything that is advertised on television.

So then I think of newspapers, these have been romanticized into an unrecognizable artifact, but in the ancient past (pre-2000 A.D.), they were sold cheaply and peppered liberally with advertisements and were low tech and pale imitations of the current advertisements engendered by technology. Again, it was a commercial enterprise that digested and spit out curated (read here censored) information to sell advertising space.

Magazines were a little different.  In the dark ages you had to pay more and the frequency was weekly/monthly, they were also heavily ad-dependent, and they were even more carefully controlled by the ideologies of their owners and their advertisers.  I have maintained some of my subscriptions, and while I am pleased with the loss of relative advertising space, I have noticed that all of those magazines that I have subscriptions for have become more ideologically rigid.  I think that the magazines themselves have become more indicative of the views of the political extremes.  The choices made by wanting to maintain maximum ad revenue are now replaced by the choices needed to maintain and pander to a specific ideological mindset.

All of this ties together to just one point.  Our claims of understanding and judging the events of the world are not ours alone.  Even if one is a contrarian such as your humble servant the information being provided for you to make your own judgements is mediated by technology.  The technology itself is increasingly being owned and controlled by organizations that have their own interests at the center of their being and control the information provided to you in support of those interests.

Advocatus Diaboli is a very old concept.  The church hijacked it for use in conveying honors onto dead people.  But they never, ever used it on their day to day activities, let alone on their dogma.

If you really want to understand the world, you have to first understand that your information isn’t in any way direct, it is filtered to convey the needs of organizations that represent above all else their own interests, and is only as accurate and complete as required to serve their own interests.