postaweek – Page 4 – Renaissance Guy

Why Vote?

Yes, this is a theme. Enough of my friends and acquaintances are on the fence on the issue of voting that I have been stirred into a patriotic fervor. Like Captain America, I have, despite my adversities, arisen to defend democracy in its hour of need. Or at least, I have decided to write about voting until my friends are motivated to get out and vote.

Why vote? In today’s America, why bother to go out and vote? Elections these days are won and lost not at the ballot, but on maps and budget sheets, with faraway oligarchs drawing boundary lines that defy all logic to ensure their own job security, and shadowy mega corporations spending more on media campaigns designed to confuse and disorient you to their advantage than the GDP of several small nations. The mathematics of first past the post voting means that our elections are, and for the foreseeable future, always will be, picking the lesser of two evils.

Statistically, you live not only in a state that is safely for one party or another, but an electoral district that has already been gerrymandered. Depending on where you live, there may be laws designed to target certain demographics, making it harder or easier for certain groups to get to the polls. The effort required to cast a ballot varies from place to place; it might be as easy as dropping by a polling place at your leisure, or it might involve waiting for hours in line, being harassed by officials and election monitors, all in order to fill out a piece of paper the effect of which is unlikely to make a major difference.

So why bother? Why not stay home, and take some well deserved time off.

It’s an older poster, but it checks out

Obviously, this logic wouldn’t work if everyone applied it. But that’s not a compelling reason why you specifically ought go to the effort of voting. Because it is an effort, and much as I might take it for granted that the effort is worthwhile, to participate in and safeguard the future of democracy, not everyone does.

Well, I’ll start by attacking the argument itself. Because yes, massive efforts have been made, and are being made, by those who have power and wish to keep it, and by those who seek power and are willing to gamble on it, to sway the odds in your favor. But consider for a moment these efforts. Would corporations, which are, if nothing else, ruthlessly efficient and stingy, spend such amounts if they really thought victory was assured? Would politicians expend so much effort and political capital campaigning, mudslinging, and yes, cheating through gerrymandering, registration deadlines, and ID laws, if they believed it wasn’t absolutely necessary?

The funny thing about voting trends is, the richer a person is, the more likely they are to vote. Surely, if elections were bought and paid for, the reverse would be true? Instead, the consistent trend is that those who allegedly need to vote the least do so the most.

The game may not be fair, or right, but it is not preordained. It may be biased, but it is not rigged. If it were rigged, the powers that be wouldn’t be making the effort. They are making an effort, on the assumption that they can overcome your will to defend your right to vote by apathy and antipathy. Like any right, your right to vote is only good when exercised.

The American Promise

One of my more controversial opinions regards the founding of the United States regards the circumstances of its foundation. See, having read the historical literature, I’m not convinced the colonists were right to revolt when they did. The troops that were stationed in the colonies were there to keep the peace while the colonies were reconstructed following the damages of the Seven Years’ War, while the Stamp Act actually lowered taxes from what they had been. The colonists were getting more services for lower taxes right after a war had been fought on their behalf.

The complaints about taxes mostly stemmed from enforcement; in order to abide by the terms of the treaties that ended the war, the British government had begun a crackdown on smuggling, which had previously grown to such a state that it was almost impossible for legitimate businesses to compete with the colonial cartels. This epidemic, and the ineptitude or collusion of local enforcement, was the reason for the extraordinary enforcement measures such as the oft-cited writs of assistance. Meanwhile complaints about land claims in native territory- that the crown was being oppressive by restricting settlers from encroaching on native land -are hard to justify with historical retrospect.

So the idea that the American Independence War was justified from the beginning by the actions of the British administration is nonsense. The British were in fact one of the most progressive and representative governments in history. The only possible justifications for independence lay in a total rejection of ordained authority, a prospect so radical that it made the United States comparable to the Soviet Union in its relation to its contemporaries; the idea that men hold inalienable rights, that defending these rights is the sole mandate of governments, and that these governments derive their powers from the consent of the governed.

And this is what really made the United States unique in history. Because republics, even systems that might be called democratic, had existed since antiquity. But these had always been a means to en end. Allowing the governed, or at least some portion thereof, to have a say in matters normally confined to kings and emperors was only incidental to the task of administration. This was already the case in Great Britain, and several Italian states. But the idea that power of government wasn’t an innate thing, but something that had to be willingly given, was revolutionary.

The problem, aside from the considerable logistical feat of organizing a heretofore unprecedented system of governance, is that this justification, if not necessarily retrospective in itself, is at least contingent on those promises being achieved. It is easy, not least from a historical perspective, to promise revolutionary liberation, and then not follow up. Indeed, depending on how one views the Soviet model as to whether it ever really came close to achieving the promises of revolution (which really depends on how one reads Marx, and how much one is willing to take Soviet talking points at their word), most of the revolutions of the modern period have failed to live up to their promises.

Washington could have declared himself King of America, either as a hereditary appointment, as a monarch elected by the states, akin to the Holy Roman Emperor, or even as a non-hereditary dynasty, like the Soviets, or the strongmen of the developing world. Most European states presumably expected this, or they expected the United States to collapse into anarchy. Instead, Washington set a precedent in line with the rhetoric of the USA’s foundation, with the intention of living up to the promises laid out in independence.

But while Washington certainly helped legitimize the United States and its promise, he didn’t do so singlehandedly. After all, he couldn’t have. The promise of the United States is not that those who happened to fight, or be present at the constitutional convention, be granted certain rights. No, the promise is that all are granted inalienable rights by a power higher than any government, and that everyone has the right to participate in the process of government. Notice the present tense. Because this is not an idea that expires, or will eventually come to be, but how things ought to be now.

The measure of this promise; the independent variable in the American experiment, is not the wars that were won, nor the words that were written on paper long ago to lay the foundation, nor even the progress that has been made since, but rather the state of affairs today. The success of America is not what was written into law yesterday, but what percentage are participating today.

The notion that, as the world’s superpower, America has already succeeded, and we need only sit back and reap the dividends of the investments made by our forebears is not only false, but dangerously hubristic and misleading. The failure of America does not require foreign armies on our streets, or a bottomed out economy; only complacency on our part. If we forget what our forefathers fought for, if we choose comfort over our values, indeed, if we decide voting isn’t worth the hassle, then we lose. And as a proud American, I believe both we, and the world, would be worse off for it.

In the interest of encouraging discussion about voting, this post is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

Close Paren

Classes continue to go apace. I have had some trouble parsing classes and where they fall on the difficulty spectrum. On the one hand, the readings are, if not necessarily challenging themselves, then at least, reflective of an intellectual stature that seems to foreshadow challenge in class. On the other hand, classes themselves are unnervingly easy; or at least, the level of engagement by other students makes it distressingly easy to appear capable by comparison.

This unnerved feeling isn’t helped by my schedule. The downside of having a very light course load, which requires from me really only two afternoons a week, plus however long it takes to accomplish homework, is that my brain doesn’t seem to really cycle between periods of productivity and downtime. I haven’t seemed to slip into a daily cadence which allows me to intrinsically know what day of the week it is, and have an intrinsic perception of the events of the next several days.

I say this is a downside; in truth I don’t know. It is unexpected compared to how I expected to handle things, but at least so far I have continued to handle things, which I suppose is sufficient for now. It may be that my old notions of how I viewed the week were solely a product of my high school schedule at the time, and that in time I shall develop a new perspective tailored to the present situation. If so, I expect this will take some time to develop.

One sign that this is happening is that I have begun to pick up old projects again. In particular, I have taken to toying around with the modding tools on my Hearts of Iron IV game, with the end goal of adding the factions from some of my writings. Although I have used some tutorials in this process, it has mostly been a matter of reverse engineering the work of others, and experimenting through trial and error. Despite being totally out of my depth, in the sense that this is a matter of modifying computer code files more than writing alternate history, I consider myself talented at throwing myself into learning new things, and have made great strides in my programming efforts, despite setbacks.

I am still tickled by the image of staring at computer code in an editor, making tweaks and squashing bugs in the code. It strikes me because I am not a very technically savvy person. I can follow instructions, and with a vague understanding of what I want to do and examples of how it can be done, I can usually cobble together something that works. That is, after all, how I built this site, and how I have managed to get alternate history countries onto the map of my game; though the cryptic error messages and apparent bugs tell me I’ve still got a way to go. But even so, I’ve never considered myself a computer person.

What’s funny is that I fit into the stereotype. I am a pale, skinny, young man, I wear glasses, t-shirts, and trousers with many pockets, and I have trouble with stereotypical jocks. When I volunteer for my favorite charity, which provides free open source software for medical data, people assume I am one of the authors of the code. I have had to go to great lengths to convince people that I don’t write the code, but merely benefit from it, and even greater lengths to convince the same people that when I say the process by which the code is made operational is easy, I am not presupposing any kind of technical knowledge.

In any case the last week has been not necessarily uneventful, but focused on small headlines. There are other projects in the pipes, but nothing with a definitive timeframe. Actually that’s an outright lie. There are several things with definitive timeframes. But those things are a secret, to be revealed in due course, at the appropriate juncture.

My Time Management Problem

I have issues with time management. That sentence is ambiguous, so let me clarify: my issue isn’t with the management of my own time. Sure, I have plenty of flaws in that field, but I think I make it work most of the time, and am reasonably happy with my situation in that respect. I mean to say that I take issue with the field of time management; with the idea that through a combination of log keeping, filling in schedules, rigid prioritization, and large volumes of willpower, it is possible to reclaim every moment of one’s existence.

The problems with this line of thinking should be readily apparent. Humans control only a fraction of the circumstances that affect their time, even moreso on an individual scale. Traffic, weather, infrastructure failure, logistical issues, and even acts of god can throw even the best laid plans into chaos. In most cases, it is not even possible to know which factors will present a challenge. For example, even if I have an inkling that traffic will be a problem, I cannot know with certainty what the weather conditions will be. A plan that does not factor in weather risks being unraveled by a snowstorm, while a plan that does so needlessly is inefficient, and hence, redundant.

But plenty of time-management moderates acknowledge this, and so I’m willing to let it slide for the sake of argument. My problem with these people is that they tend to assume everyone has a routine, or at least, that their needs and tasks are predictable and consistent. It is also assumed, usually not even aloud, but by implication, that one’s abilities are predictable and consistent. This gets my goat, because it’s not true, certainly not in my case.

The reason I try as hard as possible to avoid schedules, and where necessary to accomplish tasks, resort to prioritized checklists rather than set times, is not a decision made for my own satisfaction, but an acknowledgement of a reality over which I have no control. The reality is that my medical condition changes on a minute to minute basis that the most advanced predictive algorithms can only make guess ranging half an hour or so into the future, and only with flawless biometric data coming in live. This is a very recent improvement over the previous status quo, whereby people with similar conditions were known from time to time to quite simply drop dead without any warning whatsoever.

I understand that this is a fairly difficult concept to internalize, so let me provide a slightly more tangible example. Suppose every fifteen minutes you exist, whatever you’re doing, whether awake or asleep, a twenty-sided die is rolled. You can see the results of this die so long at you remember to look at it, but it won’t do anything to inform you of its result. If, at any time, the result of the roll is a one, you have to, let’s say, do jumping jacks for ten minutes while singing the alphabet backwards. If at any point, you fail to do so, after ten minutes your vision will get progressively blurrier until you become legally blind. Some time after that, let’s say, thirty minutes after the initial roll, if you haven’t finished your jumping jack alphabet routine, then your heart will stop.

Now, one in twenty isn’t a lot. At any given moment, you’re more likely than not to get away with doing noting. But this happens every fifteen minutes of every day. That’s ninety six times a day. If the one in twenty holds true, odds are you’ll spend somewhere in the ballpark of fifty minutes of each day dealing with this issue. You won’t know when. You might have to wake up in the middle of the night to do jumping jacks, or make a fool of yourself in front of friends or colleagues to prevent your heart from stopping. You don’t even know with any certainty whether you’ll have to spend fifty minutes, several hours, or no time at all on a given day.

Now try to imagine what this does to a schedule. Obviously, it rules out a very tight regimen that makes use of every minute, because you need to have the time available in case you wind up doing jumping jacks for hours. But more than that, it makes even light schedules difficult to follow. Because even if you have only one thing on your agenda, if that one thing happens to be the moment you need to do jumping jacks, if that thing is something big, like an appointment with a busy person, or a flight, chances are your plans won’t work out.

This is bad enough that you’re probably going to be a bit skeptical of major time management programs. But there’s another part of the equation that’s important to consider. Because yes, there are people who have variable time commitments. New parents, for example, can’t very well pick when their children cry and need to be fed and changed. Most of these people will agree that rigid schedules under such circumstances are for the birds. But some people, a small subset of seemingly superhuman go-getters are able to make the Herculean sacrifices necessary to live according to a timetable despite such handicaps.

The missing piece here is variability in ability as well as task. Because there are plenty of things about my medical issues that won’t directly threaten my life, but will make actual productivity difficult. So going back to the earlier hypothetical, let’s suppose that in addition to having to do jumping jacks on a roll of one, on any roll below three, you get a headache for fifteen minutes.

A three gives you an annoying, albeit mostly manageable headache- a four or five on the standard 1-10 scale. Working through such pain is possible with some added concentration, but you’re a little slower on the uptake, it takes you longer to do things, and you probably won’t have any million dollar ideas. It’s definitely a handicap, but the sort of thing you can usually tough out quietly. If you roll a three while asleep, you won’t stir, but you may not feel as rested as normal.

Rolling a two is more serious- a five or even a six on the 1-10 pain scale. The kind of painkillers it takes to make the pain truly go away are the sorts of meds that don’t let you operate machinery. Keeping your focus on anything for too long is difficult, and your ability to complete anything more cognitively taxing than an online personality quiz is badly impacted. You can slog through rote work, and with great effort you can keep working on something you’re writing, provided you’ve already started it and are just following up, rather than trying to make new points, but in either case, it’s not your best work, it’ll take you far longer than usual to accomplish, and if what you’re doing is remotely important, you’ll want to check it back when you’re feeling better to make sure it’s up to snuff.

This obviously isn’t a realistic scenario. Real life medical issues don’t obey strict rules or even consistent probabilities. It’s difficult to explain that the reason I will never have control of my time is that I don’t have control of me; my needs and abilities to meet those needs change minute by minute. Well, it’s easy to explain, but difficult to appreciate.

One Week Smarter

Maybe it’s too soon to jump to conclusions, but I feel like the last week has been a step backwards. I’m not worried yet. This isn’t unexpected. Starting classes is a big step bound to overwhelm. But I had reckoned that once I hit the beaches, so to speak, even if I was scattered on the landings, that I would be able to quickly regroup before the battle, and I don’t feel like that’s happened.

I wouldn’t say I’m on the back foot. I’ve been on the back foot, and I’m not there yet. But I also wouldn’t say I’ve hit the ground running. I’m still in a reactive mindset, when I should be in a more proactive one. Maybe I simply haven’t had time to readjust back to a school schedule. But is this something that I’ll get the hang of in due course, or is this something I need to be consciously focusing on now? Is thinking about this problem needless anxiety, or do I need to think about it to pull me head out of the sand before it’s too late? I don’t know, and the uncertainty only makes me more nervous.

The feedback from those around me has been well meaning, but not always helpful. On the one hand I have people trying to congratulate me, when I’m reality this is the last thing I want.

For one thing, the path I am taking is not my first choice, or my second, or even third. I say that I’m going to a local community college; this ain’t quite true- it’s technically a state university, albeit a small one. But it isn’t where I planed to go, where I expected and was expected to go. It doesn’t reflect my talents or aptitudes, even if it might reflect my abilities. I’m not ashamed of the institution that I find myself at, but I am certainly ashamed of how I wound up here.

And yes, I know that for those sympathetic people who know my whole story, there is no shame in it. But aside from relying on the sympathy of others, a thing which I endeavor to avoid, it still doesn’t jive with the story I want to tell about myself. It isn’t the person I want to be, and that discrepancy makes me uncomfortable, especially when it is publicized.

For another, I have been trying to downplay this step to myself and others, partly to whitewash my shame, but also partly as a strategy to mitigate any future failure and play down the stakes to avoid psyching myself out. Whether or not I am the worst of my current enemies, I am certainly one of them, and the more I hear about how this is a big step, the more I question my own abilities to follow through. The more I question myself, the less sure I feel, and the less inclined I am to make myself vulnerable to failure by giving a full effort. So I downplay the importance of my actions, and take the official line that I don’t care. Or, as Epictetus wrote in the Enchiridion, “Whoever, then, would be free, let him wish nothing, let him decline nothing, […] wish things to be only just as they are, and him only to conquer who is the conqueror, for thus you will meet with no hindrance. But abstain entirely from declamations and derision and violent emotions.”

On the other hand are people who seem to expect me to be able to handle everything from here, as though in completing the walking through the gates ceremony I was imbued with psychic logistical, scheduling, future-reading and long-term planning abilities. All of a sudden, because I am, at least nominally, a college student, I am supposed to be able to handle all of my own affairs, despite no precedent of doing so. All of a sudden people who previously assured me it was fine to not know where I’m headed in life are berating me for not being better organized and having a plan. This leaves me feeling somewhat like I’ve had the rug pulled out from under me.

These concerns are compounded by the fact that they’re coming from people upon whom I am relying for the course of this endeavor, and whose insistence on moving forward along a more conventional, if not necessarily orthodox, path of starting college classes rather than, say, traveling or starting a small business, was a major motivating factor in the decision to pursue this path, despite considerable hesitation. The main justification, in so many words, for going to a local college instead of a perhaps more prestigious one further away, was the desire to avoid fighting on multiple fronts at once. The assumption was that by remaining as a commuter student, the dynamic outside of school, by which the processes of maintaining my day to day health are carried out, and the logistical issues inherent in college are handled, would not be essentially different. The prospect, therefore, of any change in this area is especially troublesome.

I desperately want to be successful in my classes. My experience in high school was awful, and I want to be able to prove, to myself as much as others, that this is not how things are destined to go. But after learning through long years and bitter tears that oftentimes adults who are charged with overseeing my success do not actually care, and do not feel an obligation to honor promises, morals, common sense, or indeed the law, it is difficult not to feel wary of the future.

I hope that this week is a “two steps forward, one step back” sort of deal. Despite all of this wariness, I remain cautiously optimistic on the whole. Whether or not I can take them in stride, I still reckon I can handle the challenges of my classes so far. But then again, I thought that starting high school.

Mr. Roboto

I’m a skeptic and an intellectual, so I don’t put too much weight coincidence. But then again, I’m a storyteller, so I love chalking up coincidences as some sort of element of an unseen plot.

Yesterday, my YouTube music playlist brought me across Halsey’s Gasoline. Thinking it over, I probably heard this song in passing some time ago, but if I did, I didn’t commit it to memory, because hearing it was like listening to it for the first time. And what a day to stumble across it. The lyrics, if you’ve never heard them, go thusly:

And all the people say
You can’t wake up, this is not a dream
You’re part of a machine, you are not a human being
With your face all made up, living on a screen
Low on self esteem, so you run on gasoline

I think there’s a flaw in my code
These voices won’t leave me alone
Well my heart is gold and my hands are cold

Why did this resonate with me so much today of all days? Because I had just completed an upgrade of my life support systems to new software, which for the first time includes new computer algorithms that allow the cyborg parts of me to act in a semi-autonomous manner instead of relying solely on human input.

It’s a small step, both from a technical and medical perspective. The algorithm it uses is simple linear regression model rather than a proper machine learning program as people expect will be necessary for fully autonomous artificial organs. The only function the algorithm has at the moment is to track biometrics and shut off the delivery of new medication to prevent an overdose, rather than keeping those biometrics in range in general. And it only does this within very narrow limits; it’s not really a fail-safe against overdoses, because the preventative mechanism is still very narrowly applied, and very fallible.

But the word prevention is important here. Because this isn’t a simple dead man’s switch. The new upgrade is predictive, making decisions based on what it thinks is going to happen, often before the humans clue in (in twelve hours, this has already happened to me). In a sense, it is already offloading human cognitive burden and upgrading the human ability to mimic body function. As of yesterday, we are now on the slippery slope that leads to cyborgs having superhuman powers.

We’re getting well into sci-fi and cyberpunk territory here, with the door open to all sorts of futurist speculation, but there are more questions that need to be answered sooner rather than later. For instance, take the EU General Data Protection Regulation, which (near as I, an American non-lawyer can make heads or tails of it,) mandates companies and people disclose when they use AI or algorithms to make decisions regarding EU citizens or their data, and mandating recourse for those who want the decisions reviewed by a human; a nifty idea for ensuring the era of big data remains rooted in human ethics.

But how does it fit in if, instead of humans behind algorithms, its algorithms behind humans? In its way, all of my decisions are at least now partially based on algorithms, given that the algorithms keep me alive to be able to make decisions, and have taken over other cognitive functions that would occupy my time and focus otherwise. And I do interact with EU citizens. A very strict reading of the EU regulations suggests this might be enough for me to fall under its aegis.

And sure, this is a relatively clear cut answer today; an EU court isn’t going to rule that all of my actions need to be regulated like AI because I’m wearing a medical device. But as the technology becomes more robust, the line is going to get blurrier, and we’re going to need to start treating some hard ethical questions not as science fiction, but as law. What happens when algorithms start taking over more medical functions? What happens when we start using machines for neurological problems, and there really isn’t a clear line between human and machine for decision making process?

I have no doubt that when we get to that point, there will be people who oppose the technology, and want it to be regulated like AI. Some of them will be Westboro Baptist types, but many will be ordinary citizens legitimately concerned about privacy and ethics. How do we build a society so that people who take advantage of these medical breakthroughs aren’t, as in Halsey’s song, derided and ostracized in public? How do we avoid creating another artificial divide and sparking fear between groups?

As usual, I don’t know the answer. Fortunately for us, we don’t need an answer today. But we will soon. The next software update for my medical device, which will have the new algorithms assuming greater functions and finer granularity, is already in clinical trials, and expected to launch this time next year. The EU GDPR was first proposed in 2012 and only rolled out this year. The best way to avoid a sci-fi dystopia future is conscious and concerted thought and discussion today.

Time Flying

No. It is not back to school season. I refuse to accept it. I have just barely begun to enjoy summer in earnest. Don’t tell me it’s already nearly over.

It feels like this summer really flew by. This is always true to an extent, but it feels more pronounced this year, and I’m not really sure how to parse it. I’m used to having time seemingly ambush me when I’m sick, having weeks seem to disappear from my life in feverish haze, but not when I’m well.

If I have to start working myself back towards productivity, and break my bohemian habit of rising at the crack of noon, then I suppose that summer was worthwhile. I didn’t get nearly as much done as I expected. Near as I can tell, nothing I failed to accomplish was vital in any meaningful respect, but it is somewhat disappointing. I suppose I expected to have more energy to tick things off my list. Then again, the fact that nothing was vital meant that I didn’t really push myself. It wasn’t so much that I tried and failed as I failed to try.

Except I can’t help but think that the reason that I didn’t push myself; that I’m still not pushing myself, despite having a few days left; is, aside from a staunch commitment to avoid overtaxing myself before the school year even begins, a sense that I would have plenty of time later. Indeed, this has been my refrain all season long. And despite this, the weeks and months have sailed by, until, to my alarm and terror, we come upon mid-August, and I’ve barely reached the end of my June checklist.

Some of it is simple procrastination, laziness, and work-shyness, and I’ll own that. I spent a lot of my time this summer downright frivolously, and even in retrospect, I can’t really say I regret it. I enjoyed it, after all, and I can’t really envision a scenario where I would’ve enjoyed it in moderation and been able to get more done without the sort of rigid planned schedules that belie the laid back hakunnah mattata attitude that, if I have not necessarily successfully adopted, then at least have taken to using as a crutch in the face of looming terror of starting college classes.

But I’m not just saying “summer flew by” as an idle excuse to cover my apparent lack of progress. I am genuinely concerned that the summer went by faster than some sort of internal sense of temporal perception says it ought have, like a step that turned out to be off kilter from its preceding stairs, causing me to stumble. And while this won’t get me back time, and is unlikely to be a thing that I can fix, even if it is an internal mental quirk, should I not at least endeavor to be aware of it, in the interest of learning from past mistakes?

So, what’s the story with my sense of time?

One of the conversation I remember most vividly of my childhood was about how long an hour is. It was a sunny afternoon late in the school year, and my mother was picking my brother and I up from school. A friend of mine invited us over for a play*, but my mother stated that we had other things to do and places to be.

*Lexicographical sidenote: I have been made aware that the turn of phrase, “to have a play” may be unique to Australian vocabulary. Its proper usage is similar to “have a swim” or “have a snack”. It is perhaps most synonymous with a playdate, but is more casual, spontaneous, and carries less of a distinctly juvenile connotation.

I had a watch at this point, and I knew when we had to be elsewhere, and a loose idea of the time it took to get between the various places, and so I made a case that we did in fact have time to go over and have a play, and still get to our other appointments. My mother countered that if we did go, we wouldn’t be able to stay long. I asked how long we would have, and she said only about an hour. I considered this, and then voiced my opinion that an hour is plenty of time; indeed more than enough. After all, an hour was an unbearably long time to wait, and so naturally it should be plenty of time to play.

I would repudiate this point of view several months later, while in the hospital. Laying there in my bed, hooked up to machines, my only entertainment was watching the ticking wall clock, and trying to be quiet enough to hear it reverberate through the room. It should, by all accounts, have been soul-crushingly boring. But the entire time I was dwelling on my dread, because I knew that at the top of every hour, the nurses would come and stab me to draw blood. And even if I made it through this time, I didn’t know how many hours I had left to endure, or indeed, to live.

I remember sitting there thinking about how my mother had in fact been right. An hour isn’t that long. It isn’t enough to make peace, or get over fears, or get affairs in order. It’s not enough to settle down or gear up. This realization struck me like a groundbreaking revelation, and when I look back and try to put a finger on exactly where my childhood ended, that moment stands out as a major point.

That, eleven years ago, was the last major turning point; the last time I remember revising my scale for how long an hour, a day, and so on are in the scheme of things. Slowly, as I’ve gotten older, I’ve become more comfortable with longer time scales, but this hasn’t really had a massive effect on my perception.

Over the past half-decade there have been occasions when, being sick, I have seemed to “lose” time, by being sick and not at full processing capacity as time passes. Other occasions it has been a simple matter of being a home body, and so the moments I remember most recently having seen people, which are in reality some time ago, seem to be more recent than they were, creating a disconnect. But this has always happened as a consequence of being unwell and disconnected from everyday life. In other situations, time has always seemed to match my expectations, and I have been able to use my expectations and perception to have a more intrinsic sense of when I needed to be at certain places.

In the past few months this perception seems to have degraded. Putting my finger on when this started being a noticeable problem is difficult, because much of the past few months has been spent more or less relaxing, which in my case means sleeping in and ignoring the outside world, which as previously noted does tend to affect my perception of how much time has passed. The first time I recall mentioning that time had passed me by was in May, at a conference. I don’t want to give that one data point too much weight, though, because, for one thing, it was a relatively short break in my routine, for another, it was a new conference with nothing to compare it to, and finally, I was jet lagged.

But I definitely do recall mentioning this feeling during the buildup to, and all throughout, our summer travels. This period, unlike previous outings, is definitely long enough that I can say it doesn’t fall into the category of being a homebody. Something has changed in my perception of time, and my sense of how much time I have to work with before scheduled events is degraded.

So what gives? The research into perception of time falls into the overlap between various fields, and is fraught with myths and pseudoscience. For example, it is commonly held and accepted that perception of time becomes faster with age. But this hypothesis dates back to the 1870s, and while there is some evidence to support a correlation, particularly early in life, the correlation is weak, and not linear. Still, this effect is present early in life, and it is plausible that this is part of my problem.

One point that is generally agreed upon in the scientific literature regards the neurochemistry. It seems to be that the perception of time is moderated by the same mechanisms that regulate our circadian rhythm, specifically dopamine and a handful of other neurotransmitters. Disruptions to these levels causes a corresponding disruption to the sense of time. In particular, it seems that more dopamine causes time to go faster; hence time seeming to pass faster when one is having fun. This would explain why the passage of time over my vacation has seemed particularly egregious, and also why jet lag seems to have such a profound effect on time perception.

Both of these explanations would go a ways towards explaining the sensorial discrepancy I find. Another explanation would place blame on my glasses, since eye movement seems to also be tied to small-scale passage of time. Perhaps since I have started wearing glasses in the last couple of years, my eyes have been squinting less, and my internal clock has been running subtly slow since, and I am only now starting to notice it.

With the field of time perception research still in relative infancy, the scientific logic behind these explanations is far from ironclad. But then again, it doesn’t need to be ironclad. For our purposes, the neurobiological mechanisms are almost entirely irrelevant. What matters is that the effect is real, that it isn’t just me, nor is it dangerous, and that there’s nothing I can really do about it other than adapt. After all, being blind without my glasses, or giving myself injections of neurotransmitters as a means of deterring procrastination might be a bit overkill.

What matters is that I can acknowledge this change as an effect that will need to be accounted for going forwards. How I will account for it is outside the scope of this post. Probably I will work to be a bit more organized and sensitive to the clock. But what’s important is that this is a known quantity now, and so hopefully I can avoid being caught so terribly off guard next summer.

Works Consulted
Eagleman, David M. “Human Time Perception and Its Illusions.” Current Opinion in Neurobiology, vol. 18, no. 2, 2008, pp. 131–136., doi:10.1016/j.conb.2008.06.002.

Friedman, W.J. and S.M.J. Janssen. 2010. Aging and the speed of time. Acta Psychologica 134: 130-141.

Janssen, S.M.J., M. Naka, and W.J. Friedman. 2013. Why does life appear to speed up as people get older? Time & Society 22(2): 274-290.

Wittmann, M. and S. Lehnhoff. 2005. Age effects in perception of time. Psychological Reports 97: 921-935.

Unreachable

I suspect that my friends think that I lie to them about being unreachable as an excuse to simply ignore them. In the modern world there are only a small handful situations in which a person genuinely can’t be expected to be connected and accessible.

Hospitals, which used to be a communications dead zone on account of no cell-phone policies, have largely been assimilated into the civilized world with the introduction of guest WiFi networks. Airplanes are going the same way, although as of yet WiFi is still a paid commodity, and in that is sufficiently expensive as to make it still a reasonable excuse.

International travel used to be a good excuse, but nowadays even countries that don’t offer affordable and consistent cellular data have WiFi hotspots at cafes and hotels. The only travel destinations that are real getaways in this sense- that allow you to get away from the modern life by disconnecting you from the outside world -are developing countries without infrastructure, and the high seas. This is the best and worst part of cruise ships, which charge truly extortionate rates for slow, limited internet access.

The best bet for those who truly don’t want to be reached is still probably the unspoilt wilderness. Any sufficiently rural area will have poor cell reception, but areas which are undeveloped now are still vulnerable to future development. After all, much of the rural farming areas of the Midwest are flat and open. It only takes one cell tower to get decent, if not necessarily fast, service over most of the area.

Contrast this to the geography of the Appalachian or Rocky Mountains, which block even nearby towers from reaching too far, and in many cases are protected by regulations. Better yet, the geography of Alaska combines several of these approaches, being sufficiently distant from the American heartland that many phone companies consider it foreign territory, as well as being physically huge, challenging to develop, and covered in mountains and fjords that block signals.

I enjoy cruises, and my grandparents enjoy inviting us youngsters up into the mountains of the northeast, and so I spend what is probably for someone of my generation, a disproportionate amount of time disconnected from digital life. For most of my life, this was an annoyance, but not a problem, mostly because my parents handled anything important enough to have serious consequences, but partially because, if not before social media, then at least before smartphones, being unreachable was a perfectly acceptable and even expected response to attempts at contact.

Much as I still loath the idea of a phone call, and will in all cases prefer to text someone, the phone call, even unanswered, did provide a level of closure that an unanswered text message simply doesn’t. Even if you got the answering machine, it was clear that you had done your part, and you could rest easy knowing that they would call you back at their leisure; or if it was urgent, you kept calling until you got them, or it became apparent that they were truly unreachable. There was no ambiguity whether you had talked to them or not; whether your message had really reached them and they were acting on it, or you had only spoken to a machine.

Okay, sure, there was some ambiguity. Humans have a way of creating ambiguity and drama through whatever form we use. But these were edge cases, rather than seemingly being a design feature of text messages. But I think this paradigm shift is more than just the technology. Even among asynchronous means, we have seen a shift in expectations.

Take the humble letter, the format that we analogize our modern instant messages (and more directly, e-mail) to most frequently and easily. Back in the day when writing letters was a default means of communication, writing a letter was an action undertaken on the part of the sender, and a thing that happened to the receiver. Responding to a letter by mail was polite where appropriate, but not compulsory. This much he format shares with our modern messages.

But unlike our modern systems, with a letter it was understood that when it arrived, it would be received, opened, read, and replied to all in due course, in the fullness of time, when it was practical for the recipient, and not a moment sooner. To expect a recipient to find a letter, tear it open then and there, and drop everything to write out a full reply at that moment, before rushing it off to the post office was outright silly. If a recipient had company, it would be likely that they would not even open the letter until after their business was concluded, unlike today, where text messages are read and replied to even in the middle of conversation.

Furthermore, it was accepted that a reply, even to a letter of some priority, might take some several days to compose, redraft, and send, and it was considered normal to wait until one had a moment to sit down and write out a proper letter, for which one was always sure to have something meaningful to say. Part of this is an artifact of classic retrospect, thinking that in the olden day’s people knew the art of conversation better, and much of it that isn’t is a consequence of economics. Letters cost postage, while today text messaging is often included in phone plans, and in any case social media offers suitable replacements for free.

Except that, for a while at least, the convention held in online spaces too. Back in the early days of email, back when it was E-mail (note the capitalization and hyphenation), and considered a digital facsimile of postage rather than a slightly more formal text message, the accepted convention was that you would sit down to your email, read it thoroughly, and compose your response carefully and in due course, just as you would on hard copy stationary. Indeed, our online etiquette classes*, we were told as much. Our instructors made clear that it was better to take time in responding to queries with a proper reply than get back with a mere one or two sentences.

*Yes, my primary school had online etiquette classes, officially described as “nettiquete courses”, but no one used that term except ironically. The courses were instituted after a scandal in parliament, first about students’ education being outmoded in the 21st century, and second about innocent children being unprepared for the dangers of the web, where, as we all know, ruffians and thugs lurk behind every URL. The curriculum was outdated the moment it was made, and it was discontinued only a few years after we finished the program, but aside from that, and a level of internet paranoia that made Club Penguin look lassaiz faire, it was helpful and accurately described how things worked.

In retrospect, I think this training helps explain a lot of the anxieties I face with modern social media, and the troubles I have with text messages and email. I am acclaimed by others as an excellent writer and speaker, but brevity is not my strong suit. I can cut a swathe through paragraphs and pages, but I stumble over sentences. When I sit down to write an email, and I do, without fail, actually sit down to do so, I approach the matter with as much gravity as though I were writing with quill and parchment, with all the careful and time-consuming redrafting, and categorical verbosity that the format entails.

But email and especially text messages are not the modern reincarnation of the bygone letter, nor even the postcard, with it’s shorter format and reduced formality. Aside from a short length that is matched in history perhaps only by the telegram, the modern text message has nearly totally forgone not only the trappings of all previous formats, but indeed, has seemed to forgo the trappings of form altogether.

Text messages have seemed to become accepted not as a form of communication so much as an avenue of ordinary conversation. Except this is a modern romanticization of text messages. Because while text messages might well be the closest textual approximation of a face to face conversation that doesn’t involve people actually speaking simultaneously, it is still not a synchronous conversation.

More importantly than the associated pleasantries of the genre, text messages work on an entirely different timescale than letters. Where once, with a letter, it might be entirely reasonable for a reply to take a fortnight, nowadays a delay in responding to a text message between friends beyond a single day is a cause for concern and anxiety.

And if it were really a conversation, if two people were conversing in person, or even over the phone, and one person without apparent reason failed to respond to the other’s prompts for a prolonged period, this would indeed be cause for alarm. But even ignoring the obvious worry that I would feel if my friend walking alongside me in the street suddenly stopped answering me, in an ordinary conversation, the tempo is an important, if underrated, form of communication.

To take an extreme example, suppose one person asks another to marry them. What does it say if the other person pauses? If they wait before answering? How is the first person supposed to feel, as opposed to an immediate and enthusiastic response? We play this game all the time in spoken conversation, drawing out words or spacing out sentences, punctuating paragraphs to illustrate our point in ways that are not easily translated to text, at least, not without the advantage of being able to space out one’s entire narrative in a longform monologue.

We treat text messages less like correspondence, and more like conversation, but have failed to account for the effects of asyncronicity on tempo. It is too easy to infer something that was not meant by gaps in messages; to interpret a failure to respond as a deliberate act, to mistake slow typing for an intentional dramatic pause, and so forth.

I am in the woods this week, which means I am effectively cut off from communication with the outside world. For older forms of communication, this is not very concerning. My mail will still be there when I return, and any calls to the home phone will be logged and recorded to be returned at my leisure. Those who sent letters, or reached an answering machine know, or else can guess, that I am away from home, and can rest easy knowing that their missives will be visible when I return.

My text messages and email inbox, on the other hand, concern me, because of the very real possibility that someone will contact me thinking I am reading messages immediately, since my habit of keeping my phone within arm’s reach at all times is well known, and interpreting my failure to respond as a deliberate snub, when in reality I am out of cell service. Smart phones and text messages have become so ubiquitous and accepted that we seem to have silently arrived at the convention that shooting off a text message to someone is as good as calling them, either on the phone or even in person. Indeed, we say it is better, because text messages give the recipient the option of postponing a reply, even though we all quietly judge those people who take time to respond to messages, and will go ahead and imply all the social signals of a sudden conversational pause in the interim, while decrying those who use text messages to write monologues.

I’ll say it again, because it bears repeating after all the complaints I’ve given: I like text messages, and I even prefer them as a communication format. I even like, or at least tolerate, social media messaging platforms, despite having lost my appreciation for social media as a whole. But I am concerned that we, as a society, and as the first generation to really build the digital world into the foundations of our lives, are setting ourselves up for failure in our collective treatment of our means of communication.

When we fail to appreciate the limits of our technological means, and as a result, fail to create social conventions that are realistic and constructive, we create needless ambiguity and distress. When we assign social signals to pauses in communication that as often as not have more to do with the manner of communication than the participants or their intentions, we do a disservice to ourselves and others. We may not mention it aloud, we may not even consciously consider it, but it lingers in our attitudes and impressions. And I would wager that soon enough we will see a general rise in anxiety and ill will towards others.

Packing Troubles

Sometimes I am left to wonder whether I might not secretly be a closet fashionista, based mostly on how long it takes me to pick outfits for important events and while packing. Well, I say outfits. Mostly I mean t-shirts, since that’s really the only part of my default outfit that changes.

I don’t think this is the case. I think if I secretly cared about fashion, I would be able to read a magazine about the subject without my eyes glazing over, and would put more stock into outfits and appearance instead of just one piece. I also reckon I would feel more compelled to care for my hair and skin beyond the bare minimum of hygiene.

More to the point, I think I would have more of a sense of style. To be fair, I have a decent enough idea of what clothes I personally think look good on others, and I have acquired, through years of art classes and amateur illustration, a sense of composition that can be pressed into service to call together an outfit which I enjoy, but I lack the sort of intuitive sense of capital-F Fashion that naturally occurs to me for things like physics, medicine, or language.

I can mimic and iterate on styles I have seen, and I can cobble together styles through experimentation, but I cannot come up with a design or outfit that is, or better yet will be, trendy any more than I can predict tomorrow’s weather in a random city without consulting meteorological data.

All of this puts me squarely in the middle of the pack, particularly among my male peers, and none of this is news to me. I continue not to care what is hip and happening any further than the broad trends of the decade, which I heed only insofar as they permit me to carry on without confusing passers by. But if I do not care about fashion or style, why do I care about which t-shirts I bring on vacation? Why does the debate between iron man and Loki t-shirts keep me awake while I am trying to sleep the night before my departure?

The reason, I think, is that while I really don’t care very much about fashion itself, I do care somewhat about impressions. I care a great deal about communication. I value my ability to communicate above most else, and I endeavor to make what I am able to communicate count.

Whether fashion is closer to a direct form of communication, like hand gestures or literature, or the kind of cyclical competitive art that is mostly contained to others who practice it, fashion choices can and do serve to communicate. I studied this while in art class. Clothing is one of the best and most enduring examples of color psychology at work. Despite varying by culture and region, everyone knows that a red cocktail dress communicates a very different message than a conservative black dress.

It seems only natural, then, that I incorporate this means into my message. There are just two problems. First, as previously mentioned, I lack the intuitive grasp of fashion that I would require to communicate with the same level of subtlety and finesse with which I endeavor to wield language. To me, perhaps the only fear greater than not being able to communicate is to have my message be misinterpreted against me; to come across as hostile when I mean to be peaceful, or helpless when I seek to project strength. So I keep my arsenal limited- I have fairly normal standards for trousers, footwear, jackets, and so forth, and concentrate on the one or two elements that I am well versed in- t-shirts with strong, simple color schemes and intuitable messages.

Second, and this is where my indecision starts to truly become self-defeating: frequently, I do not know what my message will be. For all my studying of colors and shades, for all my collections of t-shirts with subtle variations on common themes, for all of my trying, I remain unable to predict the future. I can’t predict how I will be feeling, and whether or not I will feel sociable (brighter colors with bold features) or more introverted (muted colors and simpler designs). I can’t know whom I might meet, and what impression I shall want to leave them with.

So this, like so many of my problems, comes back to trying to divine the future. If I meet person C, and become engrossed in subject Y, is it more likely that I shall take position Δ (delta) and need to persuade them by using shirt א (aleph), or the opposite?

The answer, of course, is that I don’t know. I can’t know. I am asked to choose a vocabulary without even knowing with whom I will be speaking, much less what I shall want to say. It’s no wonder this makes me anxious.

Esther Day

About a year ago now, on October 10th to be exact, I received a gift from a mother on behalf of her dead daughter. Perhaps the peculiar power of that sentence explains why this small lime-green wristband, valued by market forces at approximately five dollars, has quickly become one of the most thought-about objects I own.

Calling it a personal gift might be a bit much. I never met the daughter, Esther, in life, and had only had peripheral contact with the mother, Lori, twice before; once seeing her onstage at a conference, and once online, and never properly meeting in a way that we could be called acquainted. I received this gift because I happened to heed a call for a Nerdfighter meetup. Everyone there who didn’t already own a wristband was given one.

Still, I wouldn’t call it a giveaway; not in the sense of the mass, commercial connotations of the word. It was a gift given to me, and the others who received identical gifts, because I was, by virtue of being there at the time and being enthusiastic about it, was part of the Nerdfighter community, which Esther was a part of and had found immense joy in. Because Nerdfighters that show up to gatherings should have Esther’s wristbands as a matter of course. Because I needed one, and it would be rude to make a friend pay for something they needed from you.

Perhaps you can start to grasp why this small action and token have given me so much cause for reflection, especially given that I consider wristbands to have a special meaning to them. Clearly this one is a token of sorts. But of what? I wouldn’t call it a reward; the manner in which they were given doesn’t bespeak a reward, and I certainly haven’t done anything to merit this specific one. As a symbol of fraternity and comradeship? Possibly, but though I may believe that Esther and I would have been friends had I known her, we weren’t, and it’s a stretch to say that I’m friends with someone I never knew existed while they were alive.

I have gotten a few hints. The first comes from John Green’s remarks regarding Esther, both in his videos, and in his speech at Nerdcon: Nerdfighteria. He talks about her, at least partially, in the present tense. This is echoed in the literature of This Star Won’t Go Out, the foundation set up in her honor which manufactures and sells the bracelets in question. Esther may be gone, but the impact she had on their lives during hers continues to reverberate.

This talk is familiar enough to me. It comes up at the conferences I attend; how we have an impact on each other, on others, and in terms of advocacy, on policy and the world. The wristband pulls at those same strings, and so feels sentimental beyond the story behind it. It reminds me of stories I’ve heard a hundred times before, from tearful eulogies to triumphant speeches, in soliloquy, and in song. It reminds me of the stanza from In Flanders Fields that always stops me in my tracks.

Take up your quarrel with the foe

To you from failing hands we throw

The torch: be yours to hold it high

If ye break faith with us who die

We shall not sleep, though poppies grow

In Flanders’ fields, in Flanders’s fields

I am always drawn to this stanza, particularly the second and third lines. Because yes, it’s a sad song, but those two lines hint at something more. The torch isn’t lost; on the contrary, it continues to be held high. There is tragedy, but there is also a chance for something like redemption. Not revenge; it’s the wrong kind of song to be a proper up and at ‘em fighting song. Rather, a chance at making some good come out of the situation. Yes, this group failed to finish what it started, but all is not lost so long as someone picks up the torch. It’s a sad song, but it also has hope in it.

So the torch, or in this case, the wristband, is mine. Now what? How do I hold it high in this situation? More crucially, how can I make sure I don’t break faith? How do I ensure that this star doesn’t go out? If I had ever met Esther, or even known her online when she was alive, instead of only in past tense, I might know how to do that. And from what I’ve been able to gather, she made it clear that she had no desire to be remembered only in past tense (hence my very careful wording, and focus only on my own perspective).

Luckily for me, I once again have several hints. I know the causes she championed, and those which others close to her have championed by her inspiration. Many of them mirror the same ideals I hold. Indeed, some months after that day in October, I received some feedback on a pitch I had made to This Star Won’t Go Out regarding a Project Lovely idea, essentially telling me that while my idea wasn’t quite what they were looking for at that moment, that my head and heart were in the right place. The message seems to be that I am expected to carry the torch / keep the Star shining simply by continuing to have a positive impact, or in Nerdfighter parlance, by not forgetting to be awesome, and decreasing worldsuck, through whatever means seem best to me, at my own discretion.

The wristband, then, is a symbol of that mission. It is a good mission, and a mission I was probably going to try and accomplish even without a wristband, which is probably why it seemed so natural that I should get one. Perhaps I shan’t accomplish it in my time, in which case it shall be my turn to throw the torch from my failing hands, so that others in turn shall wear wristbands. There is a comforting poetry to this.

All of this has a special relevance today, since, for those who haven’t figured it out, today, August 3rd, is Esther Day. When John proposed to make her birthday a holiday in Nerdfighteria, she responded that she wanted it to be about love and family. This has been interpreted as being a sort of Valentine’s Day for non-romantic love. In particular, the tradition is to tell others in so many words that you love them.

This is difficult for me, for two reasons. First, the obvious: I’m a guy, and an introvert at that. Guys are only ever expected to voice love towards others under a very narrow range of circumstances. So I’m squeamish when it comes to the L word. And secondly, I have an aversion to dealing in absolutes and making commitments I can’t guarantee I’ll be able to keep absolutely. This is learned behavior, ingrained by years of having medical issues wreck plans, and uncompromising administrators hold me to the letter of my commitments despite extenuating circumstances making those promises all but impossible.

Even now, typing words out, I find myself backpedaling, tweaking phrases to avoid putting things plainly and opening myself up. But I’m going to suck it up. Not for Esther, because I never met her, and it isn’t fair for me to do things in her memory since I don’t actually have a memory of her. But for Esther Day. For the things she set in motion. For the trust that the people she trusted put in me.

I love my brother, despite bitter arguments. I love my parents, who enable me to live probably more than my doctors. I love my friends, both old and new. I won’t name them, despite convention, for their own privacy, but you know who you are, and you have open license to confront me and demand to hear the words personally over the coming days. I love the Nerdfighters and Tuatarians I have met, both in real life and online, who proved that whether or not the world at large is cruel, there are pockets of kindness all over. I love my disabled comrades, who give me perspective and inspiration. I love my doctors and nurses, who keep me alive, and indulge me when I value things above following medical advice precisely as given.

I know I’m supposed to say, now that I’ve said it, it wasn’t so hard. But, actually, no, that was terrifying, for all the reasons I outlined above, and it’s still terrifying to know I’ve said it, let alone to leave it up. But I’m going to leave it up. Because it’s the thing to do. Because even if others don’t follow my example as is the tacit understanding, having a world with more love and appreciation in it, even a small amount, is a good thing.

Happy Esther Day.