Category: Current Events

Personal Surveillance – Part 1

This is the first installment in a multi-part series entitled Personal Surveillance. To read the other parts once they become available, click here.

George Orwell predicted, among many other things, a massive state surveillance apparatus. He wasn’t wrong; we certainly have that. But I’d submit that it’s also not the average person’s greatest threat to privacy. There’s the old saying that the only thing protecting citizens from government overreach is government inefficiency, and in this case there’s something to that. Surveillance programs are terrifyingly massive in their reach, but simply aren’t staffed well enough to parse everything. This may change as algorithms become more advanced in sifting through data, but at the moment, we aren’t efficient enough to have a thought police.

The real danger to privacy isn’t what a bureaucrat is able to pry from an unwilling suspect, but what an onlooker is able to discern from an average person without any special investigative tools or legal duress. The average person is generally more at risk from stalkers than surveillance. Social media is especially dangerous in this regard, and the latest scandals surrounding Cambridge Analytica, et. al. are a good example of how social media can be used for nefarious purposes.

Yet despite lofty and varied criticism, I am willing to bet the overall conclusion of this latest furor: the eventual consensus will be that, while social media may be at fault, its developers are not guilty of intentional malice, but rather of pursuing misaligned incentives, combined with an inability to keep up, whether through laziness or not grasping the complete picture soon enough, with the accelerating pace with which our lives have become digitized.

Because that is the root problem. Facebook and its ilk started as essentially decentralized contact lists and curated galleries, and twitter and its facsimiles started as essentially open-ended messaging services, but they have evolved into so much more. Life happens on the Internet nowadays.

In harkening back to the halcyon days before the scandal du jour, older people have called attention to the brief period between the widespread adoption of television and the diversification; the days when there were maybe a baker’s dozen channels. In such times, we are told, people were held together by what was on TV. The political issues of the day were chosen by journalists, and public discourse shaped almost solely by the way they were presented on those few channels. Popular culture, we are told, was shaped in much the same way, so that there was always a baseline of commonality.

Whether or not this happened in practice, I cannot say. But I think the claim about those being the halcyon days before all this divide and subdivide are backwards. On the contrary, I would submit that those halcyon days were the beginning of the current pattern, as people began to adapt to the notion that life is a collective enterprise understood through an expansive network. Perhaps that time was still a honeymoon phase of sorts. Or perhaps the nature of this emerging pattern of interconnectedness is one of constant acceleration, like a planet falling into a black hole, slowly, imperceptibly at first, but always getting faster.

But getting back to the original point, in addition to accelerating fragmentation, we are also seeing accelerated sharing of information, which is always, constantly being integrated, woven into a more complete mosaic narrative. Given this, it would be foolish to think that we could be a part of it without our own information being woven into the whole. Indeed, it would be foolish to think that we could live in a world so defined by interconnectedness and not be ourselves part of the collective.

Life, whether we like it or not, is now digital. Social media, in the broadest sense, is the lenses through which current events are now projected onto the world, regardless of whether or not social media was built for or to withstand this purpose. Participation is compulsory (that is, under compulsion, if not strictly mandatory) to be a part of modern public life. And to this point, jealous scrutiny of one’s internet presence is far more powerful than merely collecting biographical or contact information, such as looking one up in an old fashioned directory.

Yet society has not adapted to this power. We have not adapted to treat social media interactions with the same dignity with which we respect, for example, conversations between friends in public. We recognize that a person following us and listening in while we were in public would be a gross violation of our privacy, even if it might skirt by the letter of the law*. But trawling back through potentially decades of interactions online, is, well… we haven’t really formulated a moral benchmark.

This process is complicated by the legitimate uses of social media as a sort of collective memory. As more and more mental labor is unloaded onto the Internet, the importance of being able to call up some detail from several years ago becomes increasingly important. Take birthdays, for example. Hardly anyone nowadays bothers to commit birthdays to memory, and of the people I know, increasingly few keep private records, opting instead to rely on Facebook notifications to send greetings. And what about remembering other events, like who was at that great party last year, or the exact itinerary of last summer’s road trip?

Human memory fades, even more quickly now that we have machines to consult, and no longer have to exercise our own powers of recognizance. Trawling through a close friend’s feed in order to find the picture of the both of you from Turks and Caicos, so that you can get it framed as a present, is a perfectly legitimate, even beneficial, use of their otherwise private, even intimate, data, which would hardly be possible if that data were not available and accessible. The modern social system- our friendships, our jobs, our leisure -rely on this accelerating flow of information. To invoke one’s privacy even on a personal level seems now to border on the antisocial.

My Experiences With Guns

Note: This post talks about guns, and some of my experiences with them and opinions about them, some of which are, let’s say, charged. This post may not be appropriate for everyone. Reader discretion is advised.

I have a few different stories about guns. The first come from Australia. Most Americans are vaguely aware that Australia has adopted fairly tight regulations around guns as a consequence of a mass shooting several years ago. It does indeed have tight restrictions, but it is indeed still quite possible to own guns in Australia. I know this because my mother shot competitively while we lived there. She applied and was granted a license to own and shoot pistols for sport. She was actually quite good at it.

The process involved plenty of paperwork and questions. It also involved having a new safe installed in our house under close supervision to make sure it was properly bolted to the wall, and couldn’t be accessed improperly. But even as a foreign immigrant and a mere amateur, her permit was granted. Of course, after she got her license, she had to use it often enough to prove that she was in fact shooting for sport. As a child I spent time at pistol clubs and shooting arenas watching my mother compete.

Occasionally we would be subject to police inspections to see that my mother’s pistols were being stored according to regulation. The officers were perfectly courteous about the whole affair, and often gave me and my brother tokens, like coloring pages and trading cards featuring glossy color photographs of police helicopters, and the off-road vehicles they used in the outback.

Not everyone was satisfied with the way things worked. Many of the people we met a the various pistol clubs grumbled about the restrictions, and more broadly, the vilification of their hobby. Several others, mostly schoolmates and friends of schoolmates, thought that the restrictions weren’t enough; that there was no reason for anyone outside of the military to have a gun (our local police, when they carried weapons, mostly used tasers when on ordinary patrol, and even this was widely seen as too intimidating for police), and certainly no reason to keep one at home.

The balance struck by the law was a compromise. Very few were completely happy, but almost everyone agreed that it was preferable to one extreme or the other. Those who would shoot for sport could still do so, albeit with some safety precautions, and checks to prevent the notion of sport from becoming a loophole. Those who lived in the outback, and were in danger from wildlife, or too far away from settlements to rely on police, were still permitted arms to defend themselves. However, one could not simply decide to purchase a gun on a mere whim.

My second story, which is quite a bit longer, was several years later, on an unassuming Friday in December, almost four years after moving back to the United States. Like most days, I was sick, more reeling than recovering from a recurrent sinus infection that had knocked me off my feet for most of the first semester. I had slept through most of the morning, but after a hearty brunch felt well enough to try my hand going into school for the afternoon. My first sign that something might be amiss was a news alert; a national headline flagged for my attention because it was local. Police were responding to an incident at an elementary school in neighboring Newtown. There were no details to be had at that exact moment, so I shuffled out the door towards school.

My second sign that something was wrong were the police cars parked around the school building. I was stopped getting out of the car, by the police officer I knew from middle school DARE sessions. He shouted from where he stood behind the squad car, which was positioned between the curb and the school doors, as if to barricade the entrance, and told me that the school was on lockdown.

I hesitated, car door still open, and asked if it was about whatever was going on in Newtown. His face stiffened, and he asked what I knew. I explained the vague news alert. After a moment’s hesitation, he said that there had been an attack, and it was possible that there was a second gunman. Hence the lockdown. So far there had been no reports from our town, but we were close enough that even if the suspect had fled on foot, as was suspected, we were still potentially a target. Classes were still going on inside, but the school buildings were all sealed, and police had been dispatched to secure key sites around town.

I looked back to the car, then at my schoolbag, then at the school. I asked if I should go home, if he school was on lockdown. The officer hesitated for a long moment, looking me over, and then looking at the building. In a low, almost conspiratorial voice, he told me to go ahead in. He knew me, after all. He cracked a halfhearted joke, saying that I wasn’t the suspect they were looking for, and that I should move along. I chuckled politely.

Class was never so quiet and so disorderly at the same time. Any pretense of productive work had disappeared. Despite classes still nominally occurring, the bell schedule had been suspended; either because they wanted to minimize the number of students in the halls in the event that a full lockdown had to be initiated, or because students were already so distracted and distraught that it didn’t particularly matter if they wasted time in their classrooms for period six or period seven.

My teacher kept a slide up on the smart board with all of the key points from the lesson we had been supposed to cover, just in case anyone wanted to distract themselves with schoolwork. In the back of the room, students paced anxiously, awaiting phone calls or messages from friends and loved ones with news. In the corner, a girl I was tangentially friends with wept, trying every few moments to regain her composure, only to lose it anew in a fresh wave of sobbing. Someone she knew had lost a sibling. A few other girls, who were better friends with her than I, sat with her.

In the center of the room, a handful of students had pulled chairs together in a loose circle, and were trying to scrape together all the information they could between themselves, exchanging screenshots and headlines on cell phones and laptops. The idea, I think, was that if we knew what was going on, that it would make the news easier to take. That, and the idea that doing something, applying this familiar method or coordination and research, gave us back some small modicum of power over this thing being wrought upon us.

The teacher sent us home without any homework, and waived the assignments that would have been due soon. In a moment that reflected why he was one of my favorite teachers, he took a moment to urge all of us to look after ourselves first, to take time off or see the guidance office if we felt we needed to. The next day back, the guidance office brought in extra counselors and therapy dogs. Several dark jokes circulated that this level of tragedy was the only thing that could cause the teachers of AP classes to let up on homework.

The mood in the hallways over the next several days was so heavy it was palpable. It seemed that students moved slowly, as though physically wading through grief, staring either at the floor, or at some invisible point a thousand yards off. You would see students at lunch tables weeping silently alone or in groups. I remember in one instance, a girl who was walking down the hallway suddenly halted, and broke down right there. Her books fell out of her hands and her head and shoulders slumped forward as she started crying. One of the extra counselors wove his way through the stopped crowd and silently put a protective arm around her, and walked her to the counseling office.

Several days later, the unthinkable happened as, without any kind of instruction or official sanction, our school dressed up in the colors of our rival, Newtown High School. Even the cheerleaders and football players, those dual bastions of school tribalism, donned the uniforms of their enemies, not as a prank, but in solidarity. It was a bold statement covered in all the papers, and captured on local TV news.

Despite having memories of the period, it’s a bit of a stretch to say that I actually remember the attacks of September 11th. Certainly I took note of the marines stationed at the consulate, and the way they regarded even my infant brother with the kind of paranoid suspicion that is learned from loss. I recall how in the days after, people would recognize our American accents on the street, and stop us to offer condolences, solidarity, and hugs. But I don’t have enough memories from before that to form a meaningful context, at least not from my own experiences. Some bad people had done a bad thing, and people were sad and angry and scared, but I didn’t know enough to feel those things myself except as a reflection of the adults around me.

I imagine that people felt on September 11th the way we felt on the day of Sandy Hook. For that matter, I imagine that is roughly how those who lived through it felt after Pearl Harbor. We had been attacked. Our community had been attacked, savagely and deliberately, without warning, and without any apparent reason other than the unknowable agenda of a probable lunatic. A bad person did a bad thing, and now children and teachers were dead, and our whole community was grieving and looking for answers.

There was a caveat to our shared grief. Not a silver lining; it was an unadulterated tragedy, without qualification. But a footnote. We saw the media attention that this local tragedy was getting. We saw the world grieving with us. For my part, I had old friends half a world away, who didn’t didn’t know anything about US geography, but who knew I lived in the same general area as the places suddenly mentioned on the news calling me. We saw the massive reverberations, and we were comforted in the fact that we were not alone.

There was no silver lining. But the caveat was that the same tragedy that had touched us personally had set things in motion on a larger scale. Our world had been shaken up, but things were righting themselves, and in doing so it seemed like there would have to be consequences. The adults seemed to agree that this was a tragedy, and that it could not be allowed to happen again. The outcry seemed to demand change, which we took to mean that those who had lost would not have lost in vain, and that there would be new laws so that we could put this incident behind us, and feel safe again.

We waited for the change that seemed so inevitable that most hardly even bothered advocating for it. It seemed so blatantly obvious that we needed to update our laws to keep guns out of the hands of madmen. Perhaps because we were children, we took it as given that all those adults who had sent their hopes and prayers would realize what was painfully, tearfully obvious to us: that the current balance on gun control had failed miserably, and needed to be renegotiated. As the police and then the media dug in to the details of which loopholes and lapses had been exploited to create this tragedy, we assumed, perhaps naively, that our leaders would take note, and close them.

We waited in vain. The promised reforms never came. As the immediate sting faded for those who hadn’t been close enough to see any kind of firsthand, or even, as in my case, secondhand, consequences, people stopped asking questions. And those who did, instead of focusing on questions like why a madman could access unsecured weapons of war, or why such weapons exist in abundance among civilians in the first places, focused on other questions, like why a school isn’t build to withstand a literal siege, and whether the people who are stricken by grief because of this are even real people at all.

Instead of a safer society with fewer possibilities for mass murder, our government helped to fortify our school, replacing the windows and glass doors we passed through each day on the way to our classrooms with bulletproof glass and reinforced steel, under supervision of increased police and armed security. More dark jokes circulated through the student body, comparing our building to a prison, or a Maginot fortress. A handful of brave students and other adults did speak out, gathering signatures and organizing demonstrations, but they faced fierce backlash, and in some instances, came under attack from conspiracy theorists who accused them of orchestrating the whole tragedy.

For many people I knew, who were motivated by grief and a need for closure, this broke them. To have the worst day of their life scrutinized, torn apart, twisted, perverted, and then thrown back in their face with hostility and accusation was simply too much. The toxicity of conspiracy theorists and professional pundits, coupled with the deafening silence of our leaders, broke their resolve. And so the tragedy at Newtown became just another event in a long list of tragedies mentioned occasionally in passing on anniversaries or during political debates. The camera crews left, and life went on, indifferent to those of us still grieving or looking for answers.

Many of the people I knew who were most passionate about seeing change in the immediate aftermath eventually let up, not because their opinions changed, but because they lost hope. New mass shootings, even school shootings, happened, pushing our local tragedy further and further into distant memory. Nothing happened, or at least, nothing large enough on a large enough scale to shift the balance from the current decidedly pro-gun stance, happened. Those of us who waited after Newtown, or whatever other tragedy touched them personally, as there have been so many, still wait, while those of us who have seen other systems work, possibly even work better, silently lament.

It is perhaps worth reiterating explicitly what has been mentioned previously: any conclusion on gun regulation will be a compromise. This is not merely a realistic view of politics, but a matter of reality. No country, even those cited as having overly draconian laws, has completely outlawed firearms, for essentially the same reasons that no country has completely outlawed painkillers. Every country wants to ensure that sportsmen (and women) can hone their craft, that serious hunters can enjoy their hobby, and citizens can defend themselves, even if they disagree to what extent these activities themselves ought be regulated.

Every solution is a compromise; a tradeoff. And naturally, the balance which is best suited to one country may not be as effective in another. I do not suppose that the Australian system, which despite its ample criticisms, did mostly work for Australia, could be copied wholesale for the United States, at least not without serious teething issues. Yet I also think it is obvious to all that the current balance is untenable. With so many unsecured weapons in so many untrained hands, there are simply too many points of failure.

Perhaps the solution is to focus not on restricting firearms purchases, but on training and storage. Maybe this is an issue of better an more consistent enforcement of existing laws. There is also certainly a pressing need for improvements in mental health, though the kind of comprehensive system that might conceivably be able to counterbalance the inordinate ease of access to weapons; the kind of system that can identify, intervene, and treat a sick person, possibly before they have any symptoms, probably against their will, would require not only enormous year to year funding, but the kind of governmental machinery that is fundamentally inimical to the American zeitgeist (see: American attitudes towards socialized medicine).

Every solution is a tradeoff. Some are better than others, but none are perfect. But one thing is clear: the current solution is unacceptable. Scores of children murdered is not an acceptable tradeoff for being legally permitted to buy firearms at Walmart. If ensuring that students of the future do not have to cower in ad-hoc shelters means eliminating some weapons from a hobbyist’s arsenal, then so be it. If preventing the next soft target terrorist attack requires us to foot the bill for extra police to get out into the communities and enforce the laws before the next crisis, then so be it. And if preventing these tragedies which are unique to our country requires the erection of a unique and unprecedented mental health machinery, which will cost an inordinate amount as it tries to address a gun problem without touching guns, then so be it. But a new solution is needed, and urgently.

2018 Resolution #3

2018 Resolution #3: Get back to exercising

Around spring of this past year I began, as a means of giving myself some easily-achievable goals, a loose program of regular exercise, chiefly in the form of regular walks. Although this simple routine did not give me, to borrow a phrase from the magazines I pass at the checkout counter, “a hot summer bod”, it did get me out of the house at a time where I needed to, and help build my stamina up in order to withstand our summer travel itinerary.

Despite my intentions, I fell out of this new habit after mid-November, and have not managed to get back into it. In my defense, my normal walking route from my house through town lacks sidewalks, and the lawns which I normally walk through are covered in snow. Our house is populated and organized in such a way that even if I possessed proper exercise equipment, there would be no place to put it.

Going to a gym does not strike me as a practical alternative. To put it simply, there is not a gym close by enough to drop by under casual pretenses. This is problematic for two reasons. First, an intense routine on a set schedule that requires a great deal of preparation and investment is more or less contraindicated by my medical situation, which has a distinct tendency to sabotage any such plans.

Secondly, such a routine would clash with the lies that I tell myself. In executing my more casual routine, I have found in motivating myself, it is often necessary, or at least, helpful, to have some mental pretext that does not involve exercise directly. If I can pitch getting out of the house to myself instead as a sightseeing expedition, or as a means of participating in town society by means of my presence, it is much easier to motivate myself without feeling anxious.

Accordingly, my resolution for the coming year is to exercise more later in the year when I can. Admittedly this is a weak goal, with a lot of wiggle room to get out of. And I might be more concerned about that, except that this was basically the same thing that I did last year, and at least that time, it worked.

2018 Resolution #1

2018 Resolution #1: Standardize to 24-hour time

A year or so ago, one of my resolutions was to finally iron out the problem of writing dates. For context: I grew up in Australia, where the default is DD/MM/YY. But in the US, where I now live, the default is MM/DD/YY. Now if I had to pick one of the two, I would probably lean towards the former, since it seems slightly more logical, and more natural to me personally. But since everyone around me uses the latter, taking that avenue would only cause more confusion in my life, perhaps not for me, but certainly for those around me.

For a while I would switch between the two systems depending on what purpose I was writing the date for. Items such as school assignments would be dated in the American fashion, while things for my personal consumption would be done in the commonwealth manner. Until after several years I started going throug my own files of schoolwork, particularly artwork, and encountering dates such as 9/10. What does that mean, in the context of a pencil marking in the corner of a sketch, jotted down as an afterthought? Does it mean the tenth of September, or the ninth of October? Or was it completed during the month of September, 2010? Or perhaps it is merely the ninth piece of a series of ten? Or perhaps it received a score of 90% that I wanted to record for posterity.

I knew that the dualistic system was untenable, but I also knew that I would likely fail in the mental self-discipline necessary in forcing myself into either of the two competing standards; especially given that there remain certain contexts where it is necessary that I use each. I therefore decided to adopt a whole new system, based on ISO 8601.

Henceforth, where I was given the choice, I would record all dates in YYYY-MM-DD format. This would make it abundantly obvious that I was recording the date, and the format I was using. It was also different enough that I would not confuse it. Where compelled by outside forces, such as stringent academic standards for school assignments, I would continue to use the other formats, but there it would be clear which format I was using.

Despite skepticism from those around me, this system has worked out quite well, and so I am expanding the project to include having time displayed on my devices in 24-hour time.

Thoughts on Steam

After much back and forth, I finally have a steam account. I caved eventually because I wanted to be able to actually play my brother’s birthday present to me; the game Cities: Skylines and all of its additional downloadable content packs. I had resisted, what has for some time felt inevitably, downloading steam, for a couple of reasons. The first was practical. Our family’s main computer is now reaching close to a decade old, and in its age does not handle all new things gracefully, or at least, does not do so consistently. Some days it will have no problem running multiple CPU-intensive games at once. Other days it promptly keels over when I so much as try to open a document.

Moreover, our internet is terrible. So terrible in fact that its latest speed test results mean that it does not qualify as broadband under any statutory or technical definition, despite paying not only for broadband, but for the highest available tier of it. Allegedly this problem has to do with the geography of our neighborhood and the construction of our house. Apparently, according to our ISP, the same walls which cannot help but share our heating and air conditioning with the outside, and which allow me to hear a whisper on the far side of the house, are totally impermeable to WiFi signals.

This fear was initially confirmed when my download told me that it would only be complete in an estimated two hundred and sixty one days. That is to say, it would take several times longer to download than it would for me to fly to the game developer’s headquarters in Sweden and get a copy on a flash drive. Or even to take a leisurely sea voyage.

This prediction turned out, thankfully, to be wrong. The download took a mere five hours; the vast majority of the progress was made during the last half hour when I was alone in the house. This is still far longer than the fifteen minutes or less that I’m accustomed to when installing from a CD. I suppose I ought to give some slack here, given that I didn’t have to physically go somewhere to purchase the CD.

My other point of contention with steam is philosophical. Steam makes it abundantly clear in their terms and conditions (which, yes, I do read, or at least, glaze over, as a general habit), that when you are paying them money to play games, you aren’t actually buying anything. At no point do you actually own the game that you are nominally purchasing. The legal setup here is terribly complicated, and given its novelty, not crystal clear in its definition and precedence, especially with the variations in jurisdictions that come with operating on the Internet. But while it isn’t clear what Steam is, Steam has made it quite clear what it isn’t. It isn’t selling games.

The idea of not owning the things that one buys isn’t strictly new. Software has never really been for sale in the old sense. You don’t buy Microsoft Word; you buy a license to use a copy of it, even if you were receiving it on a disk that was yours to own. Going back further, while you might own the physical token of a book, you don’t own the words on it inasmuch as it is not yours to copy and sell. This is a consequence of copyright and related concepts of intellectual property, which are intended to assist creators by granting them a temporary monopoly on their creations’ manufacture and sale, so as to incentivize more good creative work.

Yet this last example pulls at a loose thread: I may not own the story, but I do own the book. I may not be allowed to manufacture and sell new copies, but I can dispose of my current copy as I see fit. I can mark it, alter it, even destroy it if I so choose. I can take notes and excerpts from it so long as I am not copying the book wholesale, and I can sell my single copy of the book to another person for whatever price the two of us may agree upon, the same as any other piece of property. Software is not like this, though a strong argument can be made that it is only very recently that this new status quo has become practically enforceable.

Indeed, for as long as software has been sold in stores by means of disks and flash drives, it has been closer to the example of the classic book. For, as long as I have my CD, and whatever authentication key might come with it, I can install the contents wherever I might see fit. Without Internet connectivity to report back on my usage, there is no way of the publisher even knowing whether or not I am using their product, let alone whether I am using it in their intended manner. Microsoft can issue updates and changes, but with my CD and non-connected computer, I can keep my version of their software running how I like it forever.

Steam, however, takes this mindset that has existed in theory to its practical conclusion. You do not own the games that you pay for. This is roughly equivalent to the difference between buying a car, and chartering a limo service. Now, there’s nothing inherently wrong with this approach, but it is a major shift. There is of course the shift in power from consumers to providers: rather than you getting to dispose of your games as you see fit, you can have them revoked by Steam if you misbehave or cheat. This is unnerving, especially to one such as myself who is accustomed to having more freedom with things I buy (that’s why I buy them- to do as I please with), but not as interesting as the larger implications on the notion of property as a whole.

I don’t think the average layman knows or even cares about the particulars of license transfers. Ask such a layman what Steam does, and they’ll probably answer that they sell video games, in the same way that iTunes sells music. The actual minutiae of ownership are a distant second to the point of use. I call my games, and digital music, and the information on my Facebook feed mine, even though I don’t own them by any stretch of the imagination.

This use need not be exclusive either, so long as it never infringes on my own plans. After all, if there were a hypothetical person listening to my music and playing my games only precisely when I’m not, I might never notice.

So far I have referred to mostly digital goods, and sharing as it pertains to intellectual property. But this need not be the case. Ridesharing, for example, is already transforming the idea of owning and chartering a vehicle. On a more technical level, this is how mortgages, banknotes, and savings accounts have worked for centuries, in order to increase the money supply and expand the economy. Modern fiat currency, it will be seen, is not so much a commodity that is discretely owned as one that is shared an assigned value between its holder, society, and the government backing it. This quantum state is what allows credit and debt, which permit modern economies to function and flourish.

This shift in thinking around ownership certainly has the capability to be revolutionary, shifting prices and thinking around these new goods. Whether or not it will remains to be seen. Certainly it remains to be seen whether this change will be a net positive for consumers as well as the economy as a whole.

Cities: Skylines seems to be a fun game that our family computer can just barely manage to play. At the moment, this is all that is important to me. Yet I will be keeping an eye on how, if at all, getting games through steam influencers my enjoyment, for good or for ill.

Television Bubbles

So there’s a new show on Disney that allegedly follows the cast of That’s So Raven some decade after the show itself ended. This isn’t news per se, considering the show launched in July.

This is news to me, however. For some reason, the existence of this show, it’s premiere, any hype and marketing that may have surrounded it, and generally anything about it, managed to come and go completely unnoticed by me. I learned about this by accident; I happened to recognize the characters on a screen in the back of a burrito restaurant. At first I thought I was watching a very old rerun. But I was informed by other members of my party that, no, that’s part of the new show. Didn’t I know about it?

I have been wracking my brain trying to I ever heard anything about this. The closest I can come up with is a very vague recollection of someone making an offhanded remark in passing that such a concept was under consideration. This would have been probably in February or March. Thing is, I don’t actually remember this as a conversation. It’s just as possible that in trying to remember that I must have heard of this at some point, part of my brain has fabricated a vague sense that I must have heard of this at some point.

In retrospect, if I were going to miss something like an entire television series entirely, the chronology makes sense. May through early July, I was buried in schoolwork. I began Project Crimson, which by my count eliminated some half of all advertising that I see at all, in late April. By July, my whirlwind travel schedule had begun. I stayed more or less up to date on the news, because there were plenty of television screens blaring cable news headlines wherever I went, and because when it is likely that I will meet new people, I do make an effort to brush up on current events so as to have all the relevant discussion points of the day, but this really only applies to news headlines.

So it is possible to imagine that this series premiere happened somewhere further down in my news feed, or in a news podcast episode that got downloaded to my phone but never listened to. I find it slightly odd that I was at, of all places, Disney World, and had no exposure whatsoever to the latest Disney show. But then again, their parks tend to focus on the more classic aspects of the Disney culture. And who knows; perhaps they did have posters and adverts up, or were putting them while my back was turned, or whatever. Clearly, it’s possible, because it happened.

Here are my two big problems with this whole fiasco. First, this is something I would have liked to know. I would understand if some story about, say, sports, or celebrity gossip, slipped under my radar in such a way. I don’t watch a whole lot of TV in general, and I don’t really watch anything related to sports of celebrity news. My online news feeds respond to what I engage with, giving me more stories I am likely to digest, and quietly axing pieces that my eyes would otherwise just glide over. Though this makes me uncomfortable, and I have criticized it in the past, I accept this as a price of having my news conveniently aggregated.

Except that here, I honestly would have liked to know that there was a new That’s So Raven series in the pipes. I would wager that I’m actually part of their target audience, which is part of why I’m so surprised that I wasn’t very aware of this. That’s So Raven ran, at least where I lived in Australia, at roughly the opening of when I was old enough to follow and appreciate the slightly more complicated “all ages” programming. And while I wouldn’t rank it as my favorite, its stories did stick with me. Raven’s struggles against racism, sexism, and discrimination, introduced me to these concepts before I had been diagnosed with all of my medical issues and experienced discrimination firsthand. Raven’s father’s quest to build his own small business, and Corey’s dogged, (some might say, relentless) entrepreneurial spirit, inspired me.

Moreover, the spinoff show Corey in the House, while often cringeworthy at the best of times, even more-so than its predecessor, was the first exposure that I had to, if not the structure and dynamics, than at least the imagery and phraseology, of US politics. This, at a time when I was forbidden to watch cable news (all that was on was the war on terror) and many of my schoolmates and their parents would routinely denounce the United States and its President, as the Australian components of coalition forces in the Middle East began to suffer losses. Naturally, as the token American, I was expected to answer for all of my president’s crimes. Having a TV show that gave me a modicum of a clue as to what people were talking about, but that also taught that America and American ideals, while they might not be perfect, were still at least good in an idealistic sense, was immensely comforting.

All of that is to say that I hold some nostalgia for the original series and the stories they told. Now, I have not seen this new show. I don’t know whether how close it is to the original. But I have to imagine that such nostalgia was a factor in the decision to approve this new series, which would suggest that it is aimed at least partly at my demographic. Given that there are trillions of dollars involved in making sure that targeted demographics are aware of the products they ought to consume, and that I haven’t been living particularly under a rock, it seems strange how this passed me by.

Furthermore, if a series of unusual events has caused me to miss this event this time, I am quite sure that I would have picked up on it earlier five years ago. Even three years ago, I would have within a few weeks of launch, seen some advert, or comment, and investigated. In all probability, I would have watched this show from day one, or shortly thereafter. However, the person who I am and my media habits now have diverged so much from the person that I was then that we no longer have this in common. This rattles me. Even though I understand and accept that selves are not so much constant as changing so slowly as to not notice most days, this is still a shock.

Which brings me nicely to my second problem in all of this. This new series, in many respects represents a best case scenario for something that is likely to cross my path. Yes, there are confounding variables at play: I was traveling, I have cut down how much advertising I tolerate, and I had been mostly skimming the headlines. But these aren’t once-in-a blue moon problems. There was a massive, concerted publicity effort, in behalf of one of the largest media and marketing machines on the planet, to promote a story that I would have embraced if it ever came across my radar, while I was at one of their theme parks, and while I was making a conscious effort to pay attention to headlines. And yet I still missed this.

This begs an important, terrifying question: what else have I missed? The fact that I missed this one event, while idly disappointing, will likely not materially impact my life in the foreseeable future. The face that I could have missed it in the first place, on the other hand, shows that there is a very large blind spot in my awareness of current happenings. It is at least large enough to fly an entire TV series through, and probably quite a bit larger.

I am vaguely aware, even as a teenager, that I do not know all things. But I do take some pride in being at least somewhat well informed, and ready to learn. I like to believe that I some grasp on the big picture, and that I have at least some concept of the things that I am not paying attention to; to repeat an earlier example, sports and celebrity news. I can accept that there are plenty of facts and factoids that I do not know, since I am not, despite protestations, a walking encyclopedia, and I recognize that, in our new age of interconnectedness and fractally-nested cultural rabbit holes, that there are plenty of niche interests with which I am not familiar. But this is in my wheelhouse, or at least I would have thought.

It is still possible, and I do still hope, that this is a fluke. But what if it isn’t? What if this is simply one more product of how I currently organize my life, and of how the internet and my means of connectivity fit into that? Suppose this latest scandal is just one more item that I have missed because of the particular filtering strategies I use to avoid being overloaded. If this best-case scenario didn’t get my attention, what are the odds that something without all of these natural advantages will get to me?

How likely is it that I am going to hear about the obscure piece of legislation being voted on today, or the local budget referendum, which both affect me, but not directly or immediately enough that I’m liable to see people marching in the streets or calling me up personally? How often will I hear about the problems facing my old friends in Australia now that I am living on a different continent, in a different time zone, and with a totally different political landscape to contend with.

For all of my fretting, I can’t conceive of a realistic path out of this. The internet is to large and noisy a place to cover all, or even a substantial number of, the bases. More content is uploaded every second than a human could digest in s lifetime. Getting news online requires either committing to one or two sources, or trusting an aggregation service, whether that be a bot like Facebook, Google, Yahoo, and the like, or paying a human somewhere along the line to curate stories.

Going old fashioned, as I have heard proposed in a few different places, and sticking to a handful of old-fashioned print newspapers with paid subscriptions and a set number of pages to contend with, is either too broad, and hence has the same problem of relying on the internet at large, or too specific and cut down. TV news tends to fall somewhere between newspapers and social media. And crucially, none of these old fashioned services are good at giving me the news that I require. I want to hear about the scandal in the White House, and the one in my local Town Hall, and hear about the new series based on the one that aired when I was young, and what the World Health Organization says about the outbreak in Hong Kong, without hearing about sports or celebrity gossip, or that scandal in Belgrade that I don’t know enough about to comment on.

Figuring out how to reconcile this discrepancy in a way that satisfies both consumers, and society’s needs for a well informed populace, may well be one of the key challenges of this time in history, especially for my generation. For my part, the best I can figure is that I’m going to have to try and be a little more cognizant of things that might be happening outside of my bubble. This isn’t really a solution, any more than ‘being aware of other drivers’ is a solution for car accidents. Media bubbles are the price of casual participation in current events, and from where I stand today, non-participation is not an option.

Reflections on Contentedness

Contentedness is an underrated emotion. True, it doesn’t have the same electricity as joy, or the righteousness of anger. But it has the capability to be every bit as sublime. As an added bonus, contentedness seems to lean towards a more measured, reflective action as a result, rather than the rash impulsiveness of the ecstatic excitement of unadulterated joy, or the burning rage of properly kindled anger.

One of the most valuable lessons I have learned in the past decade has been how to appreciate being merely content instead of requiring utter and complete bliss. It is enough to sit in the park on a nice and sunny day, without having to frolic and chase the specter of absolute happiness. Because in truth, happiness is seldom something that can be chased.

Of course, contentedness also has its more vicious form if left unmoderated. Just as anger can beget wrath, and joy beget gluttony, greed, and lust, too much contentedness can bring about a state of sloth, or perhaps better put, complacency. Avoiding complacency has been a topic on my mind a great deal of late, as I have suddenly found myself with free time and energy, and wish to avoid squandering it as much as possible.

This last week saw a few different events of note in my life, which I will quickly recount here:

I received the notification of the death of an acquaintance and comrade of mine. While not out of the blue, or even particularly surprising, it did nevertheless catch me off guard. This news shook me, and indeed, if this latest post seems to contain an excess of navel-gazing ponderance, without much actual insight to match, that is why. I do have more thoughts and words on the subject, but am waiting for permission from the family before posting anything further on the subject.

The annual (insofar as having something two years in a row makes an annual tradition) company barbecue hosted at our house by my father took place. Such events are inevitably stressful for me, as they require me to exert myself physically in preparation for houseguests, and then to be present and sociable. Nevertheless, the event went on without major incident, which I suppose is a victory.

After much consternation, I finally picked up my diploma and finalized transcript from the high school, marking an anticlimactic end to the more than half-decade long struggle with my local public school to get me what is mine by legal right. In the end, it wasn’t that the school ever shaped up, decided to start following the law, and started helping me. Instead, I learned how to learn and work around them.

I made a quip or two about how, now that I can no longer be blackmailed with grades, I could publish my tell-all book. In truth, such a book will probably have to wait until after I am accepted into higher education, given that I will still have to work with the school administration through the application process.

In that respect, very little is changed by the receiving of my diploma. There was no great ceremony, nor parade, nor party in my honor. I am assured that I could yet have all such things if I were so motivated, but it seems duplicitous to compel others to celebrate me and my specific struggle, outside of the normal milestones and ceremonies which I have failed to qualify for, under the pretense that it is part of that same framework. Moreover, I hesitate to celebrate at all. This is a bittersweet occasion, and a large part of me wants nothing more than for this period of my life to be forgotten as quickly as possible.

Of course, that is impossible, for a variety of reasons. And even if it were possible, I’m not totally convinced it would be the right choice. It is not that I feel strongly that my unnecessary adversity has made me more resilient, or has become an integral part of my identity. It has, but this is a silver lining at best. Rather, it is because as much as I wish to forget the pains of the past, I wish even more strongly to avoid such pains in future. It is therefore necessary that I remember what happened, and bear it constantly in mind.

The events of this week, and the scattershot mix of implications they have for me, make it impossible for me to be unreservedly happy. Even so, being able to sit on my favorite park bench, loosen my metaphorical belt, and enjoy the nice, if unmemorable, weather, secure in the knowledge that the largest concerns of recent memory and foreseeable future are firmly behind me, does lend itself to a sort of contentedness. Given the turmoil and anguish of the last few weeks of scrambling to get schoolwork done, this is certainly a step up.

In other news, my gallery page is now operational, albeit incomplete, as I have yet to go through the full album of photographs that were taken but not posted, nor have I had the time to properly copy the relevant pages from my sketchbook. The fictional story which I continue to write is close to being available. In fact, it is technically online while I continue to preemptively hunt down bugs, it just doesn’t have anything linking to it. This coming weekend it slated to be quite busy, with me going to a conference in Virginia, followed by the Turtles All the Way Down book release party in New York City.

The Laptop Manifesto

The following is an open letter to my fellow students of our local public high school, which has just recently announced, without warning, that all students will henceforth be required to buy google chromebooks at their own expense.

I consider myself a good citizen. I obey the traffic laws when I walk into town. I vote on every issue. I turn in my assignments promptly. I raise my hand and wait to be called on. When my classmates come to me at the beginning of class with a sob story about how they lost their last pencil, and the teacher won’t loan them another for the big test, I am sympathetic to their plight. With education budgets as tight as they are, I am willing to share what I have.

Yet something about the rollout of our school’s new laptop policy does not sit well with me. That the school should announce mere weeks before school begins that henceforth all students shall be mandated to have a specific, high-end device strikes me as, at best, rude, and, at worst, an undue burden on students for a service that is legally supposed to be provided by the state at no cost.

Ours is, after all, a public school. Part of being a public school is being accessible to the public. That means all members of the public. Contrary to the apparent belief of the school board and high school administration, the entire student population does not consist solely of financially wealthy and economically stable families. Despite the fact that our government at both the local and state level is apparently content to routinely leave the burden of basic classroom necessities to students and individual teachers, it is still, legally, the responsibility of the school, not the student, to see that the student is equipped to learn.

Now, I am not opposed to technology. On the contrary, I think our school is long overdue for such a 1:1 program. Nor am I particularly opposed the ongoing effort to make more class materials digitally accessible. Nor even that the school should offer their own Chromebooks to students at the student’s expense. However, there is something profoundly wrong about the school making such costs mandatory.

Public school is supposed to be the default, free option for compulsory education. To enforce compulsory education as our state does, (to the point of calling child protective services on parents of students who miss what the administration considers to be too many days,) and then enforcing the cost of that education amounts to a kind of double taxation against families that attend public schools. Moreover, this double taxation has a disproportionate impact on those who need public schools the most.

This program as it stands is unfair, unjust, and as far as I can see, indefensible. I therefore call upon my fellow students to resist this unjust and arguably illegal decree, by refusing to comply. I call in particular upon those who are otherwise able to afford such luxuries as chromebooks to resist the pressure to bow to the system, and stand up for your fellow students.

Duck and Cover

“Imminent” you say? Whelp, time to start digging.

I have always been fascinated by civil defence, and more broadly the notion of “home defence as it emerged during the two world wars and into the Cold War. There is, I think something romantic about the image of those not fit to fight in the front lines banding together to protect cities and families, shore up static fortifications, and generally pitch in for the cause of one’s people. In everyone “Doing Their Bit”. In the commonwealth, this is usually summed up as the “Blitz Spirit”.

I haven’t found an equivalently all-encompassing term in the American lexicon (hence why I’m using “defence” rather than “defense”), though the concept is obviously still there. Just think of the romanticism of the Minuteman rushing to defend his home town, or of your average apocalypse story. Like all romantic images, however, I fear that this false nostalgia over Civil Defence may be out of touch with reality.

This probably wouldn’t have been an issue for one such as myself who grew up well after the age of nuclear standoffs. Except somehow, while I was off in the mountains, what should have been some minor sabre rattling from North Korea has now become a brewing crisis.

Now, there is still a chance that all of this will blow over. Indeed, the opinion of most professionals (as of writing) is that it will. Yet at the same time, numerous local governments have apparently seen fit to issue new preparedness advice for citizens living in potentially targeted areas. The peculiar thing about these new guidelines: they’re almost word for word from the civil defence films and pamphlets of the previous century.

Some areas, like Hawaii, have even gone so far as to reactivate old emergency centers. Seeing new, high definition pictures of bureaucrats working on tablets and computers amid command bunkers built in the 1950s is not just sobering, it is surreal. Hearing modern government officials suggesting on television that citizens learn how to “duck and cover” would be comical, if this weren’t honestly the reality we’re in.

Just out of morbid curiosity, I decided to follow some of the advice given and try to locate likely targets in my area so that I might have some idea of what level of apocalypse I’m looking at. The answer depends on what kind of strike occurs, and also which set of numbers we believe for the DPRK’s capabilities. Let’s start with a rather conservative view.

Most scenarios in the past have assumed that any conflict with North Korea would play out as “Korean War II: Atomic Boogaloo”. That is to say, most conventional and even nuclear strikes will remain focused within the pacific region. With as many artillery pieces as the Korean People’s Army has stationed along the DMZ, it is likely that most of the initial fighting, which would entail a Northern push towards Seoul, would be primarily conventional. That is, until the US began moving reinforcements.

Busan and other South Korean ports, as well as US bases such as Okinawa, Guam, Pearl Harbor, and Garden Island would all be major strategic targets for DPRK nuclear strikes. Most of these targets have some level of missile defense, although reports vary on how effective these might be. It seems unlikely that North Korea is capable of reliably hitting targets much further than Hawaii, though this isn’t guaranteed to stop them.

A strike on the naval base in San Diego is possible, though with the difficulty of hitting a precise target at that range, it seems equally likely that it would miss, or the North Koreans would opt for something harder to miss in the first place, like a major city. A city with major cultural importance, like Los Angeles, or a city near the edge of their range, like Chicago, would be possible targets.

While this isn’t a good outcome for me, I probably get out of this one relatively unscathed. My portfolio would take a hit, and I would probably have trouble finding things at the stores for a few months as panic set in. There’s a possibility that we would see looting and breakdown in a fashion similar to immediately after Hurricane Sandy, as panic and market shocks cause people to freak out, but that kind of speculation is outside the scope of this post.

I might end up spending some time in the basement depending on the prevailing winds, and I might have to cash in on my dual citizenship and spend some time away from the United States in order to get reliable medical treatment, as the US healthcare system would be completely overloaded, but barring some unexpected collapse, the world would go on. I give myself 80% odds of escaping unscathed.

This is a (relatively) conservative view. If we assume that the number of warheads is towards the upper bound of estimates, and that by the time judgement day comes the North Koreans have successfully miniaturized their warheads, and gotten the navigation worked out to a reasonable degree, we get a very different picture.

With only a limited number of warheads, only a handful of which will be on missiles that can reach the east coast, there will be some picking and choosing to be done on targets. Here’s the problem: Strategically, there’s not really a scenario where the DPRK can strike the US and not be annihilated by the US response. They lack the resources for a war of nuclear attrition. So unless Kim Jong Un decided his best option is to go out in a suicidal blaze of glory, a massive first strike makes no sense from a military standpoint (not that such concerns are necessarily pertinent to a madman).

There are a few places near me that would almost certainly be hit in such a scenario, namely New York City. This would almost certainly require me to hide in the basement for a while and would probably derail my posting schedule. Based on estimates of DPRK warhead size, I’m probably not in the blast radius, but I am certainly within immediate fallout distance, and quite possibly within the range of fires ignited by the flash. While I do have evacuation prospects, getting out safely would be difficult. I give myself 50% odds .

On the other hand, if the US is the aggressor, the DPRK does officially have mutual defense treaties with China. While it’s hard to say whether China’s leadership would actually be willing to go down with Pyongyang, or whether they would be willing to see the US use nuclear force to expand its hegemony in the region, if we’re considering East Asian nuclear war scenarios, China is an obvious elephant in the room that needs to be addressed.

While the US would probably still “win” a nuclear exchange with a joint PRC-DPRK force, it would be a hollow victory. US missile defenses would be unable to take down hundreds of modern rockets, and with Chinese ICBMs in play, mainland targets would be totally up for grabs. This is the doomsday scenario here.

Opinions vary on whether counter-force (i.e. Military) targets would be given preference over counter-value (i.e. civilian, leadership, and cultural) targets. While China’s military size, doctrine, and culture generally lend themselves to the kind of strategic and doctrinal conservatism that would prioritize military targets, among nations that have published their nuclear doctrine, smaller warhead arsenals such as the one maintained by the PLA generally lean towards a school of thought known of “minimal deterrence” over the “mutually assured destruction” of the US and Russia.

Minimal deterrence is a doctrine that holds that any level of nuclear exchange will lead to unacceptable casualties on both sides, and to this end, only a small arsenal is required to deter strikes (as opposed to MAD, which focuses on having a large enough arsenal to still have a fully capable force regardless of the first strike of an enemy). This sounds quite reasonable, until one considers the logical conclusions of this thinking.

First, because “any strike is unacceptable”, it means that any nuclear strike, regardless of whether it is counter-force or counter-value, will be met with a full counter-value response. Secondly, because it makes no provisions for surviving a counter-force first strike (like the US might launch against the DPRK or PRC), it calls for a policy of “launch on warning” rather than waiting for tit for tat casualty escalation. Or occasionally, for preemptive strikes as soon as it becomes apparent that the enemy is preparing an imminent attack.

This second part is important. Normally, this is where analysts look at things like political rhetoric, media reaction, and public perception to gauge whether an enemy first strike is imminent or not. This is why there has always been a certain predictable cadence to diplomatic and political rhetoric surrounding possible nuclear war scenarios. That rhythm determines the pulse of the actual military operations. And that is why what might otherwise be harmless banter can be profoundly destabilizing when it comes from people in power.

Anyways, for an attack on that kind of scale, I’m pretty well and truly hosed. The map of likely nuclear targets pretty well covers the entire northeast, and even if I manage to survive both the initial attack, and the weeks after, during which radiation would be deadly to anyone outside for more than a few seconds, the catastrophic damage to the infrastructure that keeps the global economy running, and upon which I rely to get my highly complicated, impossible-to-recreate-without-a-post-industrial-economic-base life support medication would mean that I would die as soon as my on hand stockpile ran out. There’s no future for me in that world, and so there’s nothing I can do to change that. It seems a little foolish, then, to try and prepare.

Luckily, I don’t expect that an attack will be of that scale. I don’t expect that an attack will come in any case, but I’ve more or less given up on relying on sanity and normalcy to prevail for the time being. In the meantime, I suppose I shall have to look at practicing my duck and cover skills.