Tag: postaweek

Break a Leg!

Perhaps in the intervening days since leaving high school I have simply aged into a grumpy old man. Perhaps I have excessively high expectations. Perhaps it was that I was simply in a foul mood. Quite possibly all of the above; I won’t contest any or all of these charges. Whatever the case, the round of plays which were read at our local playhouse last week were all mediocre at best.

I should explain: Our local playhouse (that is, theater,) put on an event in cooperation with the local library and high school in which they solicited entries for original short plays, and had a number of them read by the school theater cast, which included my brother. Had I known about this, I probably would have entered. Alas, I did not know, and did not enter. Which is a shame, because most of the plays were just okay. I am reasonably certain I could have been a finalist.

Of course, it’s easy to throw stones without doing anything constructive. And I do endeavor to lead by example. And so I have taken it upon myself to write a short play, to prove that I can. In the grand tradition of those plays sampled earlier, mine is vaguely autobiographical, subtly (and not so subtly) caricaturing those closest to me, and lampooning those I feel have wronged me with satire and pretentious moralism. I don’t claim that mine is exceptional, or even good, merely that it is at least as good as those I saw.

Square Peg in a Round Hole

A short, vaguely autobiographical, but still fictional play by the Renaissance Guy.

Scene 1

The curtain rises on a bored English class waiting for last period to draw to a close. It is unseasonably warm for a Friday in October, and the temperature is producing a mix of agitation and sloth among the STUDENTS. TEACHER stands in front of the room, supervising.

TEACHER: Remember, if you don’t finish your write up for today’s discussion questions they’re for homework over the weekend. If you do finish, you can start working on edits for your college essays.

STUDENTS, BROOKE, and PAIGE groan.

TEACHER: Hey, you’re all upperclassmen now. You need to start taking personal responsibility. (Aside.) Not that that’ll help those of you who shouldn’t be in an honors class anyways, but that’s not my problem.

BROOKE twirling hair: Hey Max, did you get an answer for question four?

MAX: Yes. I’m just finishing the last one, and then I’m done. (Aside.) And then, god willing, I can be out of here before anyone notices I showed up today.

BROOKE: What’d you answer for number four?

MAX: These are, I understand, supposed to be our own opinions on moral issues. You can’t just copy my answers.

BROOKE places her hand over her chest, more for drama than actual indignation: I wasn’t going to copy. I already have my answer. I just want to know yours.

MAX: How about you tell me your answer first?

BROOKE: Alright. (Reading) If I were forced to choose to torture an innocent child in order to create a utopia, I would not do it. It is never right to harm an innocent, least of all a child. Even if this would create a better world, the ends do not justify the means.

MAX shaking his head: I disagree.

BROOKE: Oh? What’d you say?

MAX clears his throats and begins reading: Assuming for the purposes of this question that I am confident beyond a shadow of a doubt that inflicting torture on this child would indeed bring about the Utopian society promised, I would reluctantly agree to torturing an innocent in order to eradicate future suffering.
Indeed, I submit that such is the only moral course of action; for unless one is to argue that the current world is at all times entirely moral and fair by nature, which I do not believe for a moment, then it is accurate to say that innocents are already being tortured. Indeed, at this very moment there is already far more pain and suffering happening than could possibly be inflicted upon or experienced by a single mortal being, much of it experienced by innocents, all of it unnecessary in this scenario.
That this particular innocent sufferer happens to be visible, while the majority of sufferers are not, is not particularly important to the dilemma at hand. To claim otherwise is to claim that moral quandaries only really matter insofar as they apply to oneself, which in addition to being exceedingly selfish, assaults the foundational assumption of a universal standard of moral behavior, and is thus self defeating.

BROOKE applauds. PAIGE gives a thumbs down gesture, and BROOKE shoots her a glare, causing her to stop without MAX realizing.

MAX: I wasn’t done.

BROOKE: You wrote more than that?

MAX defensively: It’s an interesting question! And besides, our assignment is to give our opinions. My opinions all happen to be complex and multifaceted. Which naturally means they take up several pages.

BROOKE: Mm-hmm. And that’s why you’re the smartest guy in our class. (Aside) But goddamn if I can get him to stop paying attention to his work and start paying attention to me for five minutes.

The bell rings. MAX, caught off guard, begins immediately rushes to pack his things. PAIGE and STUDENTS exit.

BROOKE: So, are you coming to my party this weekend? It’s going to be themed after The Great Gatsby. You really liked that book when we read it for class last year, right?

MAX: Indeed I did, and still do. Alas, I have to get my transfusion later today, which usually pretty well tuckers me out for at least a few days.

TEACHER: Max! When you’re done, can you come over here for a moment.

MAX stops rushing to pack his things: Of course, just a moment. (Aside.) Curses.

BROOKE crestfallen: Oh. Well, if you feel better or whatever you should definitely try and come. If you’re up to it.

BROOKE pulls out a crumpled piece of paper decorated with doodles in colored ink, and a phone number: Here. Text me and I’ll give you all the details. Or even if you don’t feel up to coming and just want to chat.

MAX: Thank you. I’ll bear your advice in mind.

PAIGE steps in from offstage: Brooke, c’mon!

BROOKE: Coming!

BROOKE exits. MAX braces himself, standing alone against TEACHER.

MAX: (aside) Once more unto the breach. (To TEACHER) You wanted to see me?

TEACHER: Yes, Max. I’ve hardly seen any of you this semester. And it’s only October.

MAX: I can get a doctors’ note if you’d like.

TEACHER: I’d much rather see you in class. Or failing that, see the first draft of your college essay, which you were supposed to hand in last week.

MAX: I wasn’t here last week.

TEACHER: No. No, you weren’t here at all last week. Or the week before that. Why is that?

MAX shrugs: Lead guesses are either bacterial sinusitis or a garden variety coronavirus, but we haven’t definitively ruled out strep or a mild influenza.

TEACHER: Right. Look, you’re not the first kid to come in here with special needs, or an IEP. You’re not even the first to have… remind me, what’s your problem again?

MAX: Seventeen years and they still don’t know. There are some theories, but as yet nothing that matches all of the lab pathology and the symptoms. Though if you can figure it out, I’m quite sure there’s a doctorate in it for you.

TEACHER: …Right. Well, look, you’re not the first kid to come in with weird health issues. But all of those kids were able to put in the effort.

MAX: I am hopeful that the work I turned in today will show that I am indeed putting in my maximum effort wherever possible.

TEACHER: That’s a start. But I can’t grade you on just today’s in class assignment. You’ll need to complete the college essay for a start.

MAX: I will try. But I missed all the in class time that was spent on it, and as yet lack the stamina to work after school.

TEACHER: Christ, Max. You must have some free time. What’s your schedule look like?

MAX: Well, today I have to go get a transfusion.

TEACHER: Can you work on schoolwork there?

MAX: No. It drives up my blood pressure and pulse rate too much and makes the nurses nervous.

TEACHER: Okay… How about after?

MAX: After the infusion center is dinner. Then after that I usually spend another hour or so fighting to avoid throwing up dinner. Then my mother will sit with me and try and get me to take in some fluids to avoid dehydration.

TEACHER: Could you work on your essay then?

MAX: Not likely. The nausea tends to impair my ability to properly construe syntax. After that is bedtime. I usually sleep until around eleven, that is, unless I have a migraine, and then it’s more like two. And then it’s pretty much the whole meal-nausea-rehydration thing over again until the next day.

TEACHER (aside): I just don’t know what to do with this kid. I’m stuck between a state-led crackdown on kids slacking off, and a federal civil rights lawsuit waiting to happen. God knows I don’t want him here any more than he does. But God also knows the department will have me out the door faster than you can spell favoritism if I don’t put his nose to the grindstone. He can’t really be that sick all the time, can he?

TEACHER: Do you think this is going to get better later in the year?

MAX: That would be a pleasant change. It hasn’t before, though.

TEACHER: If you knew this was going to be a problem, why did you choose to take an honors course?

MAX gives an over dramatic shrug: I don’t know. The other course I had been interested in taking didn’t get enough signals and wasn’t offered so… I suppose perhaps I guessed it would be more interesting than the regular course on the days I was here? Maybe I was led to believe by my standardized test scores and my advisers that I needed to be challenged intellectually as well as physiologically? Or that an honors course teacher would be more invested, and in a better position to work with individual students?

TEACHER bristles, but does not respond.

MAX: Or my IEP committee flat out told me that I needed to take more honors and AP courses to look good for my transcript, and for their official records? No idea really. Why does any teenager do anything?

TEACHER: Just… just get your work done.

TEACHER exits. As soon as he is gone, MAX plunges his head into his hands in silent but obvious distress. He remains like this for several moments before the scene ends. 

Scene 2

Max’s MOTHER is picking him up in her car to drive to the hospital. The car is loaded with snacks, entertainment, and various other amenities that only veterans think to bring to the hospital, along with stacks and stacks of medical files and medication.

MOTHER looks anxiously at her watch.

MAX enters, apparently recovered.

MOTHER: Hey. How’s it going?

MAX answers slowly and in a soft voice: As my blood tests would say… equivocal.

MOTHER: Well, that at least beats terrible. How was class?

The car begins to pull away from the curb. MAX dribbles his index finger back and forth over his lips in answer.

MOTHER: That bad?

MAX chooses his words slowly: The English teacher apparently came to the conclusion that rather than reducing my workload of make up work, that I required a motivational speech on personal responsibility.

MOTHER: Again? I’ll call the guidance counselor. This is not acceptable. Your IEP is a federal document. “Essential work only” is not a suggestion.

MAX: You’re preaching to the choir again.

MOTHER: I know, I just… argh. You just need to remember that it’s not you, it’s them. You’re a square peg in a round hole, and if they can’t deal with that… well… we’ll make them deal with that. (Beat.) Was the discussion at least interesting?

MAX: Somewhat. I gain the distinct feeling that most of my conversations in that class are rather one-sided in my favor. Though whether for want of intelligent response, or for want of a modicum of interest, I cannot fathom.

MOTHER (laughing): I bet it’s a little of both. But it was interesting?

MAX: I suppose on balance. Apparently my points were warmly received enough to merit my invitation to another event.

MOTHER: What do you mean?

MAX pulls out the crumpled piece of paper: I was invited to a party this weekend. It is apparently to be fashioned after those thrown by none other than the Great Gatsby himself. Quite an ambitious aim; almost sure to disappoint. I see no particularly pressing need to attend.

MOTHER: Who invited you?

MAX: Brooke.

MOTHER: Who’s Brooke. A girl in your English class?

Max nods.

MOTHER: Is she nice?

MAX: Well, she has apparently insisted on fetching documents for me from the front table when necessary, and has made a point to be my discussion partner on multiple occasions. Granted, she sits next to me, and I strongly suspect she copies my work.

MOTHER: You should try and go if you’re feeling alright. When is it?

MAX: I don’t know. Brooke gave me her number and said to text her for details.

MOTHER smiles: She gave you her phone number?

MAX: Well, she said it was her phone number. I am familiar with cases of fake phone number giving, though I can’t think of any motivation given that she gave me her number unsolicited.

MOTHER: You should definitely try and go. You should text her now.

MAX: We’ll see how the infusions go.

Scene 3:

The party is in full swing. STUDENTS are dressed in a variety of attire, ranging from casual, to semi-formal, to 1920s themes. PAIGE and BROOKE both wear art-deco design fringe dresses and hair bands. George Gershwin’s Summertime plays in the background.

MAX enters, dressed in black pinstripes.

PAIGE: Well. He showed up. Guess I owe you twenty bucks.

BROOKE: Sh!

MAX: Good evening ladies. Quite a nifty little rub you’ve arranged. I dare say, you spiffied up nicely. You two looked like a pair of veritable choice pieces of calico.

(beat)

BROOKE: Huh?

PAIGE: I think he’s complimenting us.

MAX: Now you’re on the trolley.

PAIGE: Uh-huh. I’m going to go… what’s the phrase… see a man about a dog?

MAX: Sounds swell.

PAIGE exits.

MAX: I can tone it down if you’d prefer.

BROOKE: Maybe just a little bit.

MAX: I must compliment you on your choice of music. Though I’m slightly disappointed that you didn’t go with the Ella Fitzgerald version.

BROOKE: I can add it to the playlist if you’d like? I think this version is by a guy called Gershwin. He did the thing from Fantasia that was set in the city. It comes up in the new Gatsby movie.

MAX: I’m well aware of George Gershwin’s work. I’m quite partial to Rhapsody in Blue myself. My grandfather used to play his vinyls for me as a child, to make sure I didn’t just grow up knowing it as the United jingle.

BROOKE giggles affectionately. The music changes to a modern synth-pop dance track. The two stand in awkward silence for several moments.

BROOKE: Do you want to… uh… foxtrot?

MAX: Do you mean the actual dance the foxtrot, or just dance?

BROOKE smiles flusteredly: Um. Either? You’d have to teach me to do the actual foxtrot.

MAX: Sure thing. It’s actually deceptively easy.

MAX and BROOKE begin to dance a foxtrot, and other STUDENTS begin copying. PAIGE renters, carrying several liquor bottles.

PAIGE: Alright. Now to get this party really on theme: I’ve got the moonshine.

STUDENTS clamor towards PAIGE. Within moments almost all have a drink in their hand.

BROOKE: Come on. I think I could use a drink, how ’bout you?

MAX: Are you kidding?

BROOKE: What? You’re not one of those fundamentalists in class. It’s just a little ‘moonshine’.

MAX: More like coffin varnish. Aside from the fact that with all my medications I’d be better off drinking bleach than beer, this is all very illegal and dangerous, even without all my medical conditions. I’m sorry, Brooke, I really am. But I’m afraid I ought to take my leave.

BROOKE: You’re not going to turn us in, are you?

MAX pauses, hesitates: Unless I’m specifically compelled to testify, no. I’m not going to tattle. But I can’t stay here. If I passed out or had a seizure or something, and everyone else thought I was drunk because they had been drinking… I’m sorry, I have to leave.

MAX moves to leave.

PAIGE (shouting): Oh for crying out loud! Come freaking on, Max.

MAX pauses: I beg your pardon?

PAIGE: You don’t fit in as a student in class. You’re not an establishment kid, great. Now you’re claiming you don’t even fit in with us rebels? I mean, come on. You can’t have it both ways.

STUDENTS gawk and laugh

MAX exits.

BROOKE: Max, wait.

BROOKE exits.

PAIGE: You think you’re being edgy? You’re not being edgy. You’re just a loser. You’re just a square peg in a round hole.

Curtain falls.

End of play.

Parties interested in using this play may reach me by the Contact page to discuss licensing arrangements. This has been an amusing exercise, and one I may return to at some point.

The Professional Sick Person

This last week, I spent a bit of time keeping up my title as a professional sick person. I achieved this, luckily, without having to be in any serious danger, because the cause of my temporary disposition was the series of vaccines I received. I tend to be especially prone to the minor side effects of vaccination- the symptoms that make one feel vaguely under the weather without making one feel seriously at risk of death -which isn’t surprising given my immune pathology.

Enduring a couple of days at most of foggy-headedness, low grade fevers and chills, and frustrating but bearable aches is, if still unpleasant, then at least better than most any other illness I have dealt with in the last decade.

What struck me was when I was told, contrary to my own experience and subsequent expectations, that a couple of days would be in itself an average amount of time for a “normal” person to recover fully from an ordinary illness. That, for someone who has a healthy and attenuated immune system, it is entirely possible to get through the whole cycle of infection for a garden variety cold in a weekend.

This is rather shocking news to me. I had always assumed that when the protagonist of some television show called in sick for a single day, and returned to work/school the next, that this was just one of those idiosyncrasies of the TV universe, the same way characters always wear designer brands and are perfectly made up.

I had always assumed that in reality, of course people who caught a cold would take at least a week to recover, since it usually takes me closer to two, assuming it doesn’t develop into some more severe infection. Of course people who have the flu spend between three and five weeks at home (still optimistic, if you’re asking me), that is, if they can get by without having to be hospitalized.

This probably shouldn’t surprise me. I know, consciously, that I spend more time confined to quarantine by illness than almost anyone I know, and certainly than anyone I’m friends with for reasons other than sharing a medical diagnosis or hospital ward with. Still, it’s easy to forget this. It’s extremely easy to assume, as I find myself often doing even without thinking, that barring obvious differences, other people are fundamentally not unlike myself, and share most of my perspectives, values, and challenges. Even when I am able to avoid doing this consciously, I find that my unconscious mind often does this for me.

It’s jarring to be suddenly reminded, then, of exactly how much my health truly does, and I don’t use this phrase lightly, screw me over; apparently it does so so often and so thoroughly that I have to a large degree ceased to notice, except when it causes a jarring contrast against my peers.

Feeling slightly terrible as a side effect of getting vaccines has, on an intellectual and intuitive level, ceased to be an annoyance in itself. It is only problematic insofar as it prevents me from going about my business otherwise: my mental fog makes writing difficult, my fevers and chills compel me to swaddle my shivering body to offset its failure to maintain temperature, and my omnipresent myalgia gives me a constant nagging reminder of the frailty of my mortal coil, but these are mere physical inconveniences. Of course, this does not negate the direct physical impact of my current disposition; it merely contextualizes it.

Having long ago grown used to the mental feeling of illness, and without feeling poor enough physically to garner any genuine concern for serious danger to my long term health and survival, the fact that I am sick rather than well is reduced to a mere footnote: a status. In the day to day story that I narrate to myself and others, the symptoms I have described are mere observations of the setting, without any lasting impact on the plot, nor on the essence of the story itself.

I often call myself a professional sick person; a phrase which I learnt from John Green via Hazel Grace Lancaster. The more time I spend thinking about my health, the more I find this metaphor apt. After all, in the past decade of being enrolled in and nominally attending public school, I have spent more time in hospitals than in a classroom. My health occupies a majority of my time, and the consequences for ignoring it are both immediate and dire. I regard my health as a fundamental part of my routine and identity, the way most do their jobs. Perhaps most compelling: my focus on it, like that of a professional on their trade, has warped my perspective.

We all know of the story of the IT expert incapable of explaining in human terms, or of the engineer so preoccupied with interesting solutions as to be blind to the obvious ones, or of the artist unable to accept a design that is less than perfect. In my case it is that I have spent so much time dealing with my own medical situation that it is exceedingly difficult to understand the relative simplicity of others’.

The Social Media Embargo

I have previously mentioned that I do not frequently indulge in social media. I thought it might be worthwhile to explore this in a bit more detail.

The Geopolitics of Social Media

Late middle and early high school are a perpetual arms race for popularity and social power. This is a well known and widely accepted thesis, and my experience during adolescence, in addition to my study of the high schools of past ages, and of other countries and cultures, has led me to treat it as a given. Social media hasn’t changed this. It has amplified this effect, however, in the same manner that improved intercontinental rocketry and the invention of nuclear ballistic missile submarines intensified the threat of the Cold War.

To illustrate: In the late 1940s and into the 1950, before ICBMs were accurate or widely deployed enough to make a credible threat of annihilation, the minimum amount of warning of impending doom, and the maximum amount of damage that could be inflicted, were limited by the size and capability of each side’s bomber fleet. Accordingly, a war could only be waged, and hence, could only escalate, as quickly as bombers could reach enemy territory. This both served as an inherent limit on the destructive capability of each side, and acted as a safeguard against accidental escalation by providing a time delay in which snap diplomacy could take place.

The invention of long range ballistic missiles, however, changed this fact by massively decreasing the time from launch order to annihilation, and the ballistic missile submarine carried this further by putting both powers perpetually in range for a decapitation strike – a disabling strike that would wipe out enemy command and launch capability.

This new strategic situation has two primary effects, both of which increase the possibility of accident, and the cost to both players. First, both powers must adopt a policy of “Launch on Warning” – that is, moving immediately to full annihilation based only on early warning, or even acting preemptively when one believes that an attack is or may be imminent. Secondly, both powers must accelerate their own armament programs, both to maintain their own decapitation strike ability, and to ensure that they have sufficient capacity that they will still maintain retaliatory ability after an enemy decapitation strike.

It is a prisoner’s dilemma, plain and simple. And indeed, with each technological iteration, the differences in payoffs and punishments becomes larger and more pronounced. At some point the cost of continuous arms race becomes overwhelming, but whichever player yields first also forfeits their status as a superpower.

The same is, at least in my experience, true of social media use. Regular checking and posting is generally distracting and appears to have serious mental health costs, but so long as the cycle continues, it also serves as the foremost means of social power projection. And indeed, as Mean Girls teaches us, in adolescence as in nuclear politics, the only way to protect against an adversary is to maintain the means to retaliate at the slightest provocation.

This trend is not new. Mean Girls, which codified much of what we think of as modern adolescent politics and social dynamics, was made in 2004. Technology has not changed the underlying nature of adolescence, though it has accelerated and amplified its effects and costs. Nor is it limited to adolescents: the same kind of power structures and popularity contests that dominated high school recur throughout the world, especially as social media and the internet at large play a greater role in organizing our lives.

This is not inherently a bad thing if one is adept at social media. If you have the energy to post, curate, and respond on a continuous schedule, more power to you. I, however, cannot. I blame most of this on my disability, which limits my ability to handle large amounts of stimuli without becoming both physiologically and psychologically overwhelmed. The other part of this I blame on my perfectionist tendencies, which require that I make my responses complete and precise, and that I see through my interactions until I am sure that I have proven my point. While this is a decent enough mindset for academic debate, it is actively counterproductive on the social internet.

Moreover, continuous exposure to the actions of my peers reminded me of a depressing fact that I tried often to forget: that I was not with them. My disability is not so much a handicap in that is prevents me from doing things when I am with my peers in that it prevents me from being present with them in the first place. I become sick, which prevents me from attending school, which keeps me out of conversations, which means I’m not included in plans, which means I can’t attend gatherings, and so forth. Social media reminds me of this by showing me all the exciting things that my friends are doing while I am confined to bed rest.

It is difficult to remedy this kind of depression and anxiety. Stray depressive thoughts that have no basis in reality can, at least sometimes, and for me often, be talked apart when it is proven that they are baseless, and it is relatively simple to dismiss them when they pop up later. But these factual reminders that I am objectively left out; that I am the only person among my peers among these smiling faces; seemingly that my existence is objectively sadder and less interesting; is far harder to argue.

The History of the Embargo

I first got a Facebook account a little less than six years ago, on my fourteenth birthday. This was my first real social media to speak of, and was both the beginning of the end of parental restrictions on my internet consumption, and the beginning of a very specific window of my adolescence that I have since come to particularly loath.

Facebook wasn’t technically new at this point, but it also wasn’t the immutable giant that it is today. It was still viewed as a game of the young, and it was entirely possible to find someone who wasn’t familiar with the concept of social media without being a total Luddite. Perhaps more relevantly, there were then the first wave of people such as myself, who had grown up with the internet as a lower-case entity, who were now of age to join social media. That is, these people had grown up never knowing a world where it was necessary to go to a library for information, or where information was something that was stored physically, or even where past stories were something held in one’s memory rather than on hard drives.

In this respect, I consider myself lucky that the official line of the New South Wales Department of Eduction and Training’s official computer curriculum was, at the time I went through it, almost technophobic by modern standards; vehemently denouncing the evils of “chatrooms” and regarding the use of this newfangled “email” with the darkest suspicion. It didn’t give me real skills to equip me for the revolution that was coming; that I would live through firsthand, but it did, I think, give me a sense of perspective.

Even if that curriculum was already outdated even by the time it got to me, it helped underscore how quickly things had changed in the few years before I had enrolled. This knowledge, even if I didn’t understand it at the time, helped to calibrate a sense of perspective and reasonableness that has been a moderating influence on my technological habits.

During the first two years or so of having a Facebook account, I fell into the rabbit hole of using social media. If I had an announcement, I posted it. If I found a curious photo, I posted it. If I had a funny joke or a stray thought, I posted it. Facebook didn’t take over my life, but it did become a major theatre of it. What was recorded and broadcast there seemed for a time to be equally important as the actual conversations and interactions I had during school.

This same period, perhaps unsurprisingly, also saw a decline in my mental wellbeing. It’s difficult to tease apart a direct cause, as a number of different things all happened at roughly the same time; my physiological health deteriorated, some of my earlier friends began to grow distant from me, and I started attending the school that would continually throw obstacles in my path and refuse to accommodate my disability. But I do think my use of social media amplified the psychological effects of these events, especially inasmuch as it acted a focusing lens on all the things that made me different and apart from my peers.

At the behest of those closest to me, I began to take breaks from social media. These helped, but given that they were always circumstantial or limited in time, their effects were accordingly temporary. Moreover, the fact that these breaks were an exception rather than a standing rule meant that I always returned to social media, and when I did, the chaos of catching up often undid whatever progress I might have made in the interim.

After I finally came to the conclusion that my use of social media was causing me more personal harm than good, I eventually decided that the only way I would be able to remove its influence was total prohibition. Others, perhaps, might find that they have the willpower to deal with shades of gray in their personal policies. And indeed, in my better hours, so do I. The problem is that I have found that social media is most likely to have its negative impacts when I am not in one of my better hours, but rather have been worn down by circumstance. It is therefore not enough for me to resolve that I should endeavor to spend less time on social media, or to log off when I feel it is becoming detrimental. I require strict rules that can only be overridden in the most exceedingly extenuating circumstances.

My solution was to write down the rules which I planned to enact. The idea was that those would be the rules, and if I could justify an exception in writing, I could amend them as necessary. Having this as a step helped to decouple the utilitarian action of checking social media from the compulsive cycle of escalation. If I had a genuine reason to use social media, such as using it to provide announcements to far flung relatives during a crisis, I could write a temporary amendment to my rules. If I merely felt compelled to log on for reasons that I could not express coherently in a written amendment, then that was not a good enough reason.

This decision hasn’t been without its drawbacks. I am, without social media, undoubtedly less connected to my peers as I might otherwise have been, and the trend which already existed of my being the last person to know of anything has continued to intensify, but crucially, I am not so acutely aware of this trend that it has a serious impact one way or another on my day to day psyche. Perhaps some months hence I shall, upon further reflection, come to the conclusion that my current regime is beginning to inflict more damage than that which it originally remedied, and once again amend my embargo.

Arguments Against the Embargo

My reflections on my social media embargo have brought me stumbling upon two relevant moral quandaries. The first is whether ignorance can truly be bliss, and whether there is an appreciable distinction between genuine experience and hedonistic simulation. In walling myself off from the world I have achieved a measure of peace and contentment, at the possible cost of disconnecting myself from my peers, and to a lesser degree from the outside world. In the philosophical terms, I have alienated myself, both from my fellow man, and from my species-essence. Of course, the question of whether social media is a genuine solution to, or a vehicle of, alienation, is a debate unto itself, particularly given my situation.

It is unlikely, if still possible, that my health would have allowed my participation in any kind of physical activity which I could have been foreseeably invited to as a direct result of increased social media presence. Particularly given my deteriorating mental health of the time, it seems far more reasonable to assume that my presence would have been more of a one-sided affair: I would have sat, and scrolled, and become too self conscious and anxious about the things that I saw to contribute in a way that would be noticed by others. With these considerations in mind, the question of authenticity of experience appears to be academic at best, and nothing for me to loose sleep over.

The second question regards the duty of expression. It has oft been posited, particularly with the socio-political turmoils of late, that every citizen has a duty to be informed, and to make their voice heard; and that furthermore in declining to take a position, we are, if not tacitly endorsing the greater evil, then at least tacitly declaring that all positions available are morally equivalent in our apathy. Indeed, I myself have made such arguments on the past as it pertains to voting, and to a lesser extent to advocacy in general.

The argument goes that social media is the modern equivalent of the colonial town square, or the classical forum, and that as the default venue for socio-political discussion, our abstract duty to be informed participants is thus transmogrified into a specific duty to participate on social media. This, combined with the vague Templar-esque compulsion to correct wrongs that also drives me to rearrange objects on the table, acknowledge others’ sneezes, and correct spelling, is not lost on me.

In practice, I have found that these discussions are, at best, pyrrhic, and more often entirely fruitless: they cause opposition to become more and more entrenched, poison relationships, and convert no one, all the while creating a blight in what is supposed to be a shared social space. And as Internet shouting matches tend to be crowned primarily by who blinks first, they create a situation in which any withdrawal, even for perfectly valid reasons such as, say, having more pressing matters than trading insults over tax policy, is viewed as concession.

While this doesn’t directly address the dilemma posited, it does make its proposal untenable. Taking to my social media to agitate is not particularly more effective than conducting a hunger strike against North Korea, and given my health situation, is not really a workable strategy. Given that ought implies can, I feel acceptably satisfied to dismiss any lingering doubts about my present course.

Song of Myself

Music has always played an important role in my life, and I have always found comfort in it during some of my darkest hours. In particular, I have often listened to songs that I feel reflect me as a person, regardless of whether I like them a great deal as songs, during times of crisis, as a means to remind myself who I am and what I fight for. This has led me to what I think is an interesting artistic experiment: putting together a playlist that represents, not necessarily my tastes for listening to today, but me as a person through my personal history.

To put it another way: if I was hosting an Olympics, what would the opening ceremony look, and more importantly, sound, like? Or, if I were designing a Voyager probe record to give a person I’ve never met a taste of what me means, what would it focus on?

I could easily spend a great deal of time compiling, editing, and rearranging a truly epic playlist that would last several hours. But that misses the point of this exercise. Because, while my interest in listening to my own soundtrack bight be effectively infinite, that of other people is not. The goal here is not to compile a soundtrack, but to gather a few selections that convey the zeitgeist of my past.

This is my first attempt at this. I have chosen four songs, each of which represents roughly five years of my life. I have compiled a playlist available for listening here (Yes, I have a YouTube account/channel; I use it to make my own playlists for listening. Nothing special). The songs and my takeaway from them are described below.

1997-2002: Rhapsody in Blue

If I had to pick a single piece to represent my life, it would probably have to be Rhapsody in Blue, by George Gershwin. This piece was my favorite musical piece for a long time, and I remember during our visits with my grandparents when my grandfather would put on his classical records, and I would be thrilled when this song came on.

Rhapsody in Blue is perhaps best known as the United jingle, which is part of why I loved it so much. It represented flying, travel, adventure, and being treated like a member of high society as we flew in business class. I also reveled in knowing the name of a song that everyone else knew merely as a jingle. The energy and strong melody of the piece still captivate me to this day, and remind me of the feeling of childhood delight with each new adventure and horizon.

2002 – 2007: Pack all Your Troubles Arr. Mark Northfield

Aside from being one of my favorite arrangements of any song, this particular arrangement captures many of the conflicting feelings I have towards the first part of my schooling. I was indeed happy to be in a learning environment where I could soak up knowledge, but at the same time I often found the classes themselves dreadfully dull. Additionally, while I was initially quite happy with my social group, within a couple of years I had gone from being at the center of all playground affairs to being a frequently bullied pariah.

This song juxtaposes the cheerful, upbeat World War I song with a musical soundscape of a battlefield of the same time period, becoming more chaotic and pessimistic as time goes on. This also reflects my general experience in primary school, as my social life, my overall happiness, and my physical health all deteriorated over this time from a point of relative contentment to a point of absolute crisis. (2007 was the first year in which I genuinely remember nearly dying, and the first time I was confronted with a bona-fide disability.)

2007-2012: Time, Forward!

If 2007 was a breaking point in my life, then the years following were a period of picking up the pieces, and learning how to adapt to my new reality. Time, Forward, by Georgy Sviridov, captures much the same feeling, which makes sense considering it is frequently used to represent, the Soviet 20s, including at the Sochi games. This period in my life was chaotic and turbulent, and of the things I have come to regret saying, doing, or believing, most of them happened during this period. Yet it was also a formative time, cementing the medical habits that would ensure my survival, and meeting several new friends.

During this time was when my family moved back to the United States. With a fresh start in a new hemisphere, and several new disabilities and diagnoses to juggle, I was determined above all not to allow myself to be bullied and victimized the way I had been during primary school. I threw myself into schoolwork, and tried to avoid any display of vulnerability whatsoever. This, I discovered, did not make me any more popular or liked than I had been during primary school, which yielded a great deal of angst and conflict.

2012 – 2017: Dance of the Knights

You’ll notice that this song is both pseudo-classical, in the same vein as Rhapsody in Blue, while still being known as a work of Prokofiev, a Russian, and later Soviet, composer. In this respect, it is somewhere between the 2007-2012 period, and the 1997-2002 period, which I reckon is a reasonably accurate assessment of the past five years. The great highs and lows between late primary and early high school, which often involved grave medical threats to my life, have thankfully (hopefully) given way to a more predictably unpredictable set of obstacles; not only medically, but socially and psychologically, as my friends and I have grown up and learned to handle drama better.

The commonalities between the earlier pieces also reflect the change in priorities that I have worked very hard to (re)cultivate after seeing the distress that my existentialist focus on schoolwork brought me. I have in the past few years, begun to reprioritize those things that I believe are more likely to bring me happiness over mere success, harkening back to the things I held dear, and found so intriguing in Rhapsody in Blue in early childhood. At the same time, the piece, partly as a result of its context in Romeo and Juliet, has a distinctly mature, adult air to it; something which I struggle with internally, but which I am nevertheless thrust into regularly as I age.

If anyone else is interested in trying this project/challenge, please, go ahead and let me know. I can imagine that this could make a good group prompt, and I would be very interested to compare others’ playlists with my own.

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.

Bretton Woods

So I realized earlier this week, while staring at the return address stamped on the sign outside the small post office on the lower level of the resort my grandfather selected for us on our family trip, that we were in fact staying in the same hotel which hosted the famous Bretton Woods Conference, that resulted in the Bretton Woods System that governed post-WWII economic rebuilding around the world, and laid the groundwork for our modern economic system, helping to cement the idea of currency as we consider it today.

Needless to say, I find this intensely fascinating; both the conference itself as a gathering of some of the most powerful people at one of the major turning points in history, and the system that resulted from it. Since I can’t recall having spent any time on this subject in my high school economics course, I thought I would go over some of the highlights, along with pictures of the resort that I was able to snap.

Pictured: The Room Where It Happened

First, some background on the conference. The Bretton Woods conference took place in July of 1944, while the Second World War was still in full swing. The allied landings in Normandy, less than a month earlier, had been successful in establishing isolated beachheads, but Operation Overlord as a whole could still fail if British, Canadian, American, and Free French forces were prevented from linking up and liberating Paris.

On the Eastern European front, the Red Army had just begun Operation Bagration, the long planned grand offensive to push Nazi forces out of the Soviet Union entirely, and begin pushing offensively through occupied Eastern Europe and into Germany. Soviet victories would continue to rack up as the conference went on, as the Red Army executed the largest and most successful offensive in its history, escalating political concerns among the western allies about the role the Soviet Union and its newly “liberated” territory could play in a postwar world.

In the pacific, the Battle of Saipan was winding down towards an American victory, radically changing the strategic situation by putting the Japanese homeland in range of American strategic bombing. Even as the battles rage on, more and more leaders on both sides look increasingly to the possibility of an imminent allied victory.

As the specter of rebuilding a world ravaged by the most expensive and most devastating conflict in human history (and hopefully ever) began to seem closer, representatives of all nations in the allied powers met in a resort in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, at the foot of Mount Washington, to discuss the economic future of a postwar world in the United Nations Monetary and Financial Conference, more commonly referred to as the Bretton Woods Conference. The site was chosen because, in addition to being vacant (since the war had effectively killed tourism), the isolation of the surrounding mountains made the site suitably defensible against any sort of attack. It was hoped that this show of hospitality and safety would assuage delegates coming from war torn and occupied parts of the world.

After being told that the hotel had only 200-odd rooms for a conference of 700-odd delegates, most delegates, naturally, decided to bring their families, an many cases bringing as many extended relatives as could be admitted on diplomatic credentials. Of course, this was probably as much about escaping the ongoing horrors in Europe and Asia as it was getting a free resort vacation.

These were just the delegates. Now imagine adding families, attachés, and technical staff.

As such, every bed within a 22 mile radius was occupied. Staff were forced out of their quarters and relocated to the stable barns to make room for delegates. Even then, guests were sleeping in chairs, bathtubs, even on the floors of the conference rooms themselves.

The conference was attended by such illustrious figures as John Maynard Keynes (yes, that Keynes) and Harry Dexter White (who, in addition to being the lead American delegate, was also almost certainly a spy for the Soviet NKVD, the forerunner to the KGB), who clashed on what, fundamentally, should be the aim of the allies to establish in a postwar economic order.

Spoiler: That guy on the right is going to keep coming up.

Everyone agreed that protectionist, mercantilist, and “economic nationalist” policies of the interwar period had contributed both to the utter collapse of the Great Depression, and the collapse of European markets, which created the socioeconomic conditions for the rise of fascism. Everyone agreed that punitive reparations placed on Germany after WWI had set up European governments for a cascade of defaults and collapses when Germany inevitably failed to pay up, and turned to playing fast and loose with its currency and trade policies to adhere to the letter of the Treaty of Versailles.

It was also agreed that even if reparations were entirely done away with, which would leave allied nations such as France, and the British commonwealth bankrupt for their noble efforts, that the sheer upfront cost of rebuilding would be nigh impossible by normal economic means, and that leaving the task of rebuilding entire continents would inevitably lead to the same kind of zero-sum competition and unsound monetary policy that had led to the prewar economic collapse in the first place. It was decided, then, that the only way to ensure economic stability through the period of rebuilding was to enforce universal trade policies, and to institute a number of centralized financial organizations under the purview of the United Nations, to oversee postwar rebuilding and monetary policy.

It was also, evidently, the beginning of the age of minituraized flags.

The devil was in the details, however. The United States, having spent the war safe from serious economic infrastructure damage, serving as the “arsenal of democracy”, and generally being the only country that had reserves of capital, wanted to use its position of relative economic supremacy to gain permanent leverage. As the host of the conference and the de-facto lead for the western allies, the US held a great deal of negotiating power, and the US delegates fully intended to use it to see that the new world order would be one friendly to American interests.

Moreover, the US, and to a lesser degree, the United Kingdom, wanted to do as much as possible to prevent the Soviet Union from coming to dominate the world after it rebuilt itself. As World War II was beginning to wind down, the Cold War was beginning to wind up. To this end, the news of daily Soviet advances, first pushing the Nazis out of its borders, and then steamrolling into Poland, Finland, and the Baltics was troubling. Even more troubling were the rumors of the ruthless NKVD suppression of non-communist partisan groups that had resisted Nazi occupation in Eastern Europe, indicating that the Soviets might be looking to establish their own postwar hegemony.

Although something tells me this friendship isn't going to last
Pictured: The beginning of a remarkable friendship between US and USSR delegates

The first major set piece of the conference agreement was relatively uncontroversial: the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, drafted by Keynes and his committee, was established to offer grants and loans to countries recovering from the war. As an independent institution, it was hoped that the IBRD would offer flexibility to rebuilding nations that loans from other governments with their own financial and political obligations and interests could not. This was also a precursor to, and later backbone of, the Marshal Plan, in which the US would spend exorbitant amounts on foreign aid to rebuild capitalism in Europe and Asia in order to prevent the rise of communist movements fueled by lack of opportunity.

The second major set piece is where things get really complicated. I’m massively oversimplifying here, but global macroeconomic policy is inevitably complicated in places. The second major set-piece, a proposed “International Clearing Union” devised by Keynes back in 1941, was far more controversial.

The plan, as best I am able to understand it, called for all international trade to be handled through a single centralized institution, which would measure the value of all other goods and currencies relative to a standard unit, tentatively called a “bancor”. The ICU would then offer incentives to maintain trade balances relative to the size of a nation’s economy, by charging interest off of countries with a major trade surplus, and using the excess to devalue the exchange rates of countries with trade deficits, making imports more expensive and products more desirable to overseas consumers.

The Grand Ballroom was thrown into fierce debate, and the local Boy Scouts that had been conscripted to run microphones between delegates (most of the normal staff either having been drafted, or completely overloaded) struggled to keep up with these giants of economics and diplomacy.

Photo of the Grand Ballroom, slightly digitally adjusted to compensate for bad lighting during our tour

Unsurprisingly, the US delegate, White, was absolutely against Keynes’s hair brained scheme. Instead, he proposed a far less ambitious “International Monetary Fund”, which would judge trade balances, and prescribe limits for nations seeking aid from the IMF or IBRD, but otherwise would generally avoid intervening. The IMF did keep Keynes’s idea of judging trade based on a pre-set exchange rate (also obligatory for members), but avoided handing over the power to unilaterally affect the value of individual currencies to the IMF, instead leaving it in the hands of national governments, and merely insisting on certain requirements for aid and membership. It also did away with notions of an ultranational currency.

Of course, this raised the question of how to judge currency values other than against each other alone (which was still seen as a bridge too far in the eyes of many). The solution, proposed by White, was simple: judge other currencies against the US dollar. After all, the United States was already the largest and most developed economy. And since other countries had spent the duration of the war buying materiel from the US, it also held the world’s largest reserves of almost every currency, including gold and silver, and sovereign debt. The US was the only country to come out of WWII with enough gold in reserve to stay on the gold standard and also finance postwar rebuilding, which made it a perfect candidate as a default currency.

US, Canadian, and Soviet delegates discuss the merits of Free Trade

Now, you can see this move either as a sensible compromise for a world of countries that couldn’t have gone back to their old ways if they tried, or as a master stroke attempt by the US government to cement its supremacy at the beginning of the Cold War. Either way, it worked as a solution, both in the short term, and in the long term, creating a perfect balance of stability and flexibility in monetary policy for a postwar economic boom, not just in the US, but throughout the capitalist world.

The third set piece was a proposed “International Trade Organization”, which was to oversee implementation and enforcement of the sort of universal free trade policies that almost everyone agreed would be most conducive not only to prosperity, but to peace as a whole. Perhaps surprisingly, this wasn’t terribly divisive at the conference.

The final agreement for the ITO, however, was eventually shot down when the US Senate refused to ratify its charter, partly because the final conference had been administered in Havana under Keynes, who used the opportunity to incorporate many of his earlier ideas on an International Clearing Union. Much of the basic policies of the ITO, however, influenced the successful General Agreements on Tarriffs and Trade, which would later be replaced by the World Trade Organization.

Pictured: The main hallway as seen from the Grand Ballroom. Notice the moose on the right, above the fireplace.

The Bretton Woods agreement was signed by the allied delegates in the resort’s Gold Room. Not all countries that signed immediately ratified. The Soviet Union, perhaps unsurprisingly, reversed its position on the agreement, calling the new international organizations “a branch of Wall Street”, going on to found the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance, a forerunner to the Warsaw Pact, within five years. The British Empire, particularly its overseas possessions, also took time in ratifying, owing to the longstanding colonial trade policies that had to be dismantled in order for free trade requirements to be met.

The consensus of most economists is that Bretton Woods was a success. The system more or less ceased to exist when Nixon, prompted by Cold War drains on US resources, and French schemes to exchange all of its reserve US dollars for gold, suspended the Gold Standard for the US dollar, effectively ushering in the age of free-floating fiat currencies; that is, money that has value because we all collectively accept that it does; an assumption that underlies most of our modern economic thinking.

There’s a plaque on the door to the room in which the agreement was signed. I’m sure there’s something metaphorical in there.

While it certainly didn’t last forever, the Bretton Woods system did accomplish its primary goal of setting the groundwork for a stable world economy, capable of rebuilding and maintaining the peace. This is a pretty lofty achievement when one considers the background against which the conference took place, the vast differences between the players, and the general uncertainty about the future.

The vision set forth in the Bretton Woods Conference was an incredibly optimistic, even idealistic, one. It’s easy to scoff at the idea of hammering out an entire global economic system, in less than a month, at a backwoods hotel in the White Mountains, but I think it speaks to the intense optimism and hope for the future that is often left out of the narrative of those dark moments. The belief that we can, out of chaos and despair, forge a brighter future not just for ourselves, but for all, is not in itself crazy, and the relative success of the Bretton Woods System, flawed though it certainly was, speaks to that.

A beautiful picture of Mt. Washington at sunset from the hotel’s lounge

Works Consulted

IMF. “60th Anniversary of Bretton Woods.” 60th Anniversary – Background Information, what is the Bretton Woods Conference. International Monetary Fund, n.d. Web. 10 Aug. 2017. <http://external.worldbankimflib.org/Bwf/whatisbw.htm>.

“Cooperation and Reconstruction (1944-71).” About the IMF: History. International Monetary Fund, n.d. Web. 10 Aug. 2017. <http://www.imf.org/external/about/histcoop.htm>

YouTube. Extra Credits, n.d. Web. 10 Aug. 2017. <http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLhyKYa0YJ_5CL-krstYn532QY1Ayo27s1>.

Burant, Stephen R. East Germany, a country study. Washington, D.C.: The Division, 1988. Library of Congress. Web. 10 Aug. 2017. <https://archive.org/details/eastgermanycount00bura_0>.

US Department of State. “Proceedings and Documents of the United Nations Monetary and Financial Conference, Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, July 1-22, 1944.” Proceedings and Documents of the United Nations Monetary and Financial Conference, Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, July 1-22, 1944 – FRASER – St. Louis Fed. N.p., n.d. Web. 10 Aug. 2017. <https://fraser.stlouisfed.org/title/430>.

Additional information provided by resort staff and exhibitions visitited in person.

Afterword to Incremental Progress

Unless I am struck by a pressing need to add something in the next few days, I reckon that part 4 of the Incremental Progress series will be the last, at least for now. I may add to it in the future, or restart it after the next conference, but for the time being I have no plans to add to it.

While this mini-series has been fun to write in some respects, it has also nearly driven me to abandon it, and possibly even take a break from writing entirely and fall back on my buffer of prewritten posts to avoid losing my postaweek credentials. Having a preselected topic and an idea of when and how I want to release stuff has some upsides, certainly, but creatively, it’s a double-edged sword.

These frustrations are amplified by my aversion to constraint. Part of this aversion is based on the unpredictable nature of my handicap, as I have described at length elsewhere, but this also cuts to the heart of my technique. My creative process, if you can call it a conscious process, is generally one of waiting for inspiration to strike me, and then writing for precisely as long as it sticks with me. This usually produces somewhere between 0.9 and 2.1 posts per week, only about 1.4 of which are truly coherent enough to be considered for publication, and my loose versions of editing and scheduling cuts that down to a nice, predictable one post per week.

My capital-P Professional author contacts tell me that this frustration is a normal part of the writing process that sets in during any suitably large project that involves deadlines and staying on topic, which is to say, any project much more extensive than a casual blog. The good news is that allegedly getting through these frustrations is a large part of what separates the true masters of the art from the amateurs. That, and, you know, getting paid. But allegedly it’s the former that enables the latter down the road. I can’t really testify to that part, at least not on my own behalf.

All that said, I’m glad I decided to do this. I think it has helped me flex my writing muscles a bit, so to speak, and I am reasonably satisfied with the end result. I made the decision to split up my thoughts on the conference and structure it like I did because the alternatives would have been cutting down dramatically to only one or two subtopics, or waiting several weeks until the whole thing could be compiled and posted at once; an approach which had historically been less successful.

Starting today I will be setting off on a new set of adventures, starting with a family expedition into the White Mountains, and followed shortly by a tour of the Midwestern United States, which is expected to include reunions with several local relatives, and an attempt to view that astronomical event which has been recently dubbed by the papers as “the Great American Eclipse”.

Though I will, as always, try to maintain my habit of posting, it seems quite likely that I may miss a post or two, even after I return. I do not know whether I shall come back from these trips with new experiences to write about at length, similar to last month’s conference at Disney World, or whether the stresses of another family trip will push me over the brink and sap my creative abilities for some time.

I appreciate all the support I have gotten from this series, and hope to continue to work on similar projects in the future.

Incremental Progress Part 4 – Towards the Shining Future

I have spent the last three parts of this series bemoaning various aspects of the cycle of medical progress for patients enduring chronic health issues. At this point, I feel it is only fair that I highlight some of the brighter spots.

I have long come to accept that human progress is, with the exception of the occasional major breakthrough, incremental in nature; a reorganization here paves the way for a streamlining there, which unlocks the capacity for a minor tweak here and there, and so on and so forth. However, while this does help adjust one’s day to day expectations from what is shown in popular media to something more realistic, it also risks minimizing the progress that is made over time.

To refer back to an example used in part 2 that everyone should be familiar with, let’s refer to the progress being made on cancer. Here is a chart detailing the rate of FDA approvals for new treatments, which is a decent, if oversimplified, metric for understanding how a given patient’s options have increased, and hence, how specific and targeted their treatment will be (which has the capacity to minimize disruption to quality of life), and the overall average 5-year survival rate over a ten year period.

Does this progress mean that cancer is cured? No, not even close. Is it close to being cured? Not particularly.

It’s important to note that even as these numbers tick up, we’re not intrinsically closer to a “cure”. Coronaviruses, which cause the common cold, have a mortality rate pretty darn close to zero, at least in the developed world, and that number gets a lot closer if we ignore “novel” coronaviruses like SARS and MERS, and focus only on the rare person who has died as a direct result of the common cold. Yet I don’t think anyone would call the common cold cured. Coronaviruses, like cancer, aren’t cured, and there’s a reasonable suspicion on the part of many that they aren’t really curable in the sense that we’d like.

“Wait,” I hear you thinking, “I thought you were going to talk about bright spots”. Well, yes, while it’s true that progress on a full cure is inconclusive at best, material progress is still being made every day, for both colds and cancer. While neither is at present curable, they are, increasingly treatable, and this is where the real progress is happening. Better treatment, not cures, is from whence all the media buzz is generated, and why I can attend a conference about my disease year after year, hearing all the horror stories of my comrades, and still walk away feeling optimistic about the future.

So, what am I optimistic about this time around, even when I know that progress is so slow coming? Well, for starters, there’s life expectancy. I’ve mentioned a few different times here that my projected lifespan is significantly shorter than the statistical average for someone of my lifestyle, medical issues excluded. While this is still true, this is becoming less true. The technology which is used for my life support is finally reaching a level of precision, in both measurement and dosing, where it can be said to genuinely mimic natural bodily functions instead of merely being an indefinite stopgap.

To take a specific example, new infusion mechanisms now allow dosing precision down to the ten-thousandth of a milliliter. For reference, the average raindrop is between 0.5 and 4 milliliters. Given that a single thousandth of a milliliter in either direction at the wrong time can be the difference between being a productive member of society and being dead, this is a welcome improvement.

Such improvements in delivery mechanisms has also enabled innovation on the drugs themselves by making more targeted treatments wth a smaller window for error viable to a wider audience, which makes them more commercially viable. Better drugs and dosaging has likewise raised the bar for infusion cannulas, and at the conference, a new round of cannulas was already being hyped as the next big breakthrough to hit the market imminently.

In the last part I mentioned, though did not elaborate at length on, the appearance of AI-controlled artificial organs being built using DIY processes. These systems now exist, not only in laboratories, but in homes, offices, and schools, quietly taking in more data than the human mind can process, and making decisions with a level of precision and speed that humans cannot dream of achieving. We are equipping humans as cyborgs with fully autonomous robotic parts to take over functions they have lost to disease. If this does not excite you as a sure sign of the brave new future that awaits all of us, then frankly I am not sure what I can say to impress you.

Like other improvements explored here, this development isn’t so much a breakthrough as it is a culmination. After all, all of the included hardware in these systems has existed for decades. The computer algorithms are not particularly different from the calculations made daily by humans, except that they contain slightly more data and slightly fewer heuristic guesses, and can execute commands faster and more precisely than humans. The algorithms are simple enough that they can be run on a cell phone, and have an effectiveness on par with any other system in existence.

These DIY initiatives have already caused shockwaves throughout the medical device industry, for both the companies themselves, and the regulators that were previously taking their sweet time in approving new technologies, acting as a catalyst for a renewed push for commercial innovation. But deeper than this, a far greater change is also taking root: a revolution not so much in technology or application, but in thought.

If my memory and math are on point, this has been the eighth year since I started attending this particular conference, out of ten years dealing with the particular disease that is the topic of this conference, among other diagnoses. While neither of these stretches are long enough to truly have proper capital-H historical context, in the span of a single lifetime, especially for a relatively young person such as myself, I do believe that ten or even eight years is long enough to reflect upon in earnest.

Since I started attending this conference, but especially within the past three years, I have witnessed, and been the subject of, a shift in tone and demeanor. When I first arrived, the tone at this conference seemed to be, as one might expect one primarily of commiseration. Yes, there was solidarity, and all the positive emotion that comes from being with people like oneself, but this was, at best, a bittersweet feeling. People were glad to have met each other, but still nevertheless resentful to have been put in the unenviable circumstances that dictated their meeting.

More recently, however, I have seen and felt more and more an optimism accompanying these meetings. Perhaps it is the consistently record-breaking attendance that demonstrates, if nothing else, that we stand united against the common threat to our lives, and against the political and corporate forces that would seek to hold up our progress back towards being normal, fully functioning humans. Perhaps it is merely the promise of free trade show goodies and meals catered to a medically restricted diet. But I think it is something different.

While a full cure, of the sort that would allow me and my comrades to leave the life support at home, serve in the military, and the like, is still far off, today more than ever before, the future looks, if not bright, then at least survivable.

In other areas of research, one of the main genetic research efforts, which has maintained a presence at the conference, is now closing in on the genetic and environmental triggers that cause the elusive autoimmune reaction which has been known to cause the disease, and on various methods to prevent and reverse it. Serious talk of future gene therapies, the kind of science fiction that has traditionally been the stuff of of comic books and film, is already ongoing. It is a strange and exciting thing to finish an episode of a science-fiction drama television series focused on near-future medical technology (and how evil minds exploit it) in my hotel room, only to walk into the conference room to see posters advertising clinical trial sign ups and planned product releases.

It is difficult to be so optimistic in the face of incurable illness. It is even more difficult to remain optimistic after many years of only incremental progress. But pessimism too has its price. It is not the same emotional toll as the disappointment which naive expectations of an imminent cure are apt to bring; rather it is an opportunity cost. It is the cost of missing out on adventures, on missing major life milestones, on being conservative rather than opportunistic.

Much of this pessimism, especially in the past, has been inspired and cultivated by doctors themselves. In a way, this makes sense. No doctor in their right mind is going to say “Yes, you should definitely take your savings and go on that cliff diving excursion in New Zealand.” Medicine is, by its very nature, conservative and risk averse. Much like the scientist, a doctor will avoid saying anything until after it has been tested and proven beyond a shadow of a doubt. As noted previously, this is extremely effective in achieving specific, consistent, and above all, safe, treatment results. But what about when the situation being treated is so all-encompassing in a patient’s life so as to render specificity and consistency impossible?

Historically, the answer has been to impose restrictions on patients’ lifestyles. If laboratory conditions don’t align with real life for patients, then we’ll simply change the patients. This approach can work, at least for a while. But patients are people, and people are messy. Moreover, when patients include children and adolescents, who, for better or worse, are generally inclined to pursue short term comfort over vague notions of future health, patients will rebel. Thus, eventually, trading ten years at the end of one’s life for the ability to live the remainder more comfortably seems like a more balanced proposition.

This concept of such a tradeoff is inevitably controversial. I personally take no particular position on it, other than that it is a true tragedy of the highest proportion that anyone should be forced into such a situation. With that firmly stated, many of the recent breakthroughs, particularly in new delivery mechanisms and patient comfort, and especially in the rapidly growing DIY movement, have focused on this tradeoff. The thinking has shifted from a “top-down” approach of finding a full cure, to a more grassroots approach of making life more livable now, and making inroads into future scientific progress at a later date. It is no surprise that many of the groups dominating this new push have either been grassroots nonprofits, or, where they have been commercial, have been primarily from silicon valley style, engineer-founded, startups.

This in itself is already a fairly appreciable and innovative thesis on modern progress, yet one I think has been tossed around enough to be reasonably defensible. But I will go a step further. I submit that much of the optimism and positivity; the empowerment and liberation which has been the consistent takeaway of myself and other authors from this and similar conferences, and which I believe has become more intensely palpable in recent years than when I began attending, has been the result of this same shift in thinking.

Instead of competing against each other and shaming each other over inevitable bad blood test results, as was my primary complaint during conferences past, the new spirit is one of camaraderie and solidarity. It is now increasingly understood at such gatherings, and among medical professionals in general, that fear and shame tactics are not effective in the long run, and do nothing to mitigate the damage of patients deciding that survival at the cost of living simply isn’t worth it [1]. Thus the focus has shifted from commiseration over common setbacks, to collaboration and celebration over common victories.

Thus it will be seen that the feeling of progress, and hence, of hope for the future, seems to lie not so much in renewed pushes, but in more targeted treatments, and better quality of life. Long term patients such as myself have largely given up hope in the vague, messianic cure, to be discovered all at once at some undetermined future date. Instead, our hope for a better future; indeed, for a future at all; exists in the incremental, but critically, consistent, improvement upon the technologies which we are already using, and which have already been proven. Our hope lies in understanding that bad days and failures will inevitably come, and in supporting, not shaming, each other when they do.

While this may not qualify for being strictly optimistic, as it does entail a certain degree of pragmatic fatalism in accepting the realities of disabled life, it is the closest I have yet come to optimism. It is a determination that even if things will not be good, they will at least be better. This mindset, unlike rooting for a cure, does not require constant fanatical dedication to fundraising, nor does it breed innovation fatigue from watching the scientific media like a hawk, because it prioritizes the imminent, material, incremental progress of today over the faraway promises of tomorrow.

[1] Footnote: I credit the proximal cause of this cognitive shift in the conference to the progressive aging of the attendee population, and more broadly, to the aging and expanding afflicted population. As more people find themselves in the situation of a “tradeoff” as described above, the focus of care inevitably shifts from disciplinarian deterrence and prevention to one of harm reduction. This is especially true of those coming into the 13-25 demographic, who seem most likely to undertake such acts of “rebellion”. This is, perhaps unsurprisingly, one of the fastest growing demographics for attendance at this particular conference over the last several years, as patients who began attending in childhood come of age.

A Hodgepodge Post

This post is a bit of a hodgepodge hot mess, because after three days of intense writers’ block, I realized at 10:00pm, that there were a number of things that, in fact, I really did need to address today, and that being timely in this case was more important than being perfectly organized in presentation.

First, Happy Esther Day. For those not well versed on internet age holidays, Esther Day, August 3rd, so chosen by the late Esther Earl (who one may know as the dedicatee of and partial inspiration for the book The Fault In Our Stars), is a day on which to recognize all the people one loves in a non-romantic way. This includes family, but also friends, teachers, mentors, doctors, and the like; basically it is a day to recognize all important relationships not covered by Valentine’s Day.

I certainly have my work cut out for me, given that I have received a great deal of love and compassion throughout my life, and especially during my darker hours. In fact, it would not be an exaggeration to say that on several occasions, I would not have survived but for the love of those around me.

Of course, it’s been oft-noted that, particularly in our western culture, this holiday creates all manner of awkward moments, especially where it involves gender. A man is expected not to talk at great length about his feelings in general, and trying to tell one of the opposite gender that one loves the other either creates all sort of unhelpful ambiguity from a romantic perspective, or, if clarified, opens up a whole can of worms involving relationship stereotypes that no one, least of all a socially awkward writer like myself, wants to touch with a thirty nine and a half foot pole. So I won’t.

I do still want to participate in Esther Day, as uncomfortable as the execution makes me, because I believe in its message, and I believe in the legacy that Esther Earl left us. So, to people who read this, and participate in this blog by enjoying it, especially those who have gotten in touch specifically to say so, know this; to those of you who I have had the pleasure of meeting in person, and to those who I’ve never met but by proxy: I love you. You are an important part of my life, and the value you (hopefully) get from being here adds value to my life.

In tangentially related news…

Earlier this week this blog passed an important milestone: We witnessed the first crisis that required me to summon technical support. I had known that this day would eventually come, though I did not expect it so soon, nor to happen the way it did.

The proximal cause of this minor disaster was apparently a fault in an outdated third-party plugin I had foolishly installed and activated some six weeks ago, because it promised to enable certain features which would have made the rollout of a few of my ongoing projects for this place easier and cleaner. In my defense, the reviews prior to 2012, when the code author apparently abandoned the plugin, were all positive, and the ones after were scarce enough that I reckoned the chances of such a problem occurring to me were acceptably low.

Also, for the record, when I cautiously activated the plugin some six weeks ago during a time of day when visitors are relatively few and far between, it did seem to work fine. Indeed, it did work perfectly fine, right up until Monday, when it suddenly didn’t. Exactly what caused the crash to happen precisely then and not earlier (or never) wasn’t explained to me, presumably because it involves far greater in depth understanding of the inner workings of the internet than I am able to parse at this time.

The distal cause of this whole affair is that, with computers as with many aspects of my life, I am just savvy enough to get myself into trouble, without having the education nor the training to get myself out of it. This is a recurring theme in my life, to a point where it has become a default comment by teachers on my report cards. Unfortunately, being aware of this phenomenon does little to help me avoid it. Which is to say, I expect that similar server problems for related issues are probably also in the future, at least until such time as I actually get around to taking courses in coding, or find a way to hire someone to write code for me.

On the subject of milestones and absurdly optimistic plans: after much waffling back and forth, culminating in an outright dare from my close friends, I launched an official patreon page for this blog. Patreon, for those not well acquainted with the evolving economics of online content creation, is a service which allows creators (such as myself) to accept monthly contributions from supporters. I have added a new page to the sidebar explaining this in more detail.

I do not expect that I shall make a living off this. In point of fact, I will be pleasantly surprised if the site hosting pays for itself. I am mostly setting this up now so that it exists in the future on the off chance that some future post of mine is mentioned somewhere prominent, attracting overnight popularity. Also, I like having a claim, however tenuous, to being a professional writer like Shakespeare or Machiavelli.

Neither of these announcements changes anything substantial on this website. Everything will continue to be published on the same (non-)schedule, and will continue to be publicly accessible as before. Think of the Patreon page like a tip jar; if you like my stuff and want to indulge me, you can, but you’re under no obligation.

There is one thing that will be changing soon. I intend to begin publishing some of my fictional works in addition to my regular nonfiction commentary. Similar to the mindset behind my writing blog posts in the first place, this is partially at the behest of those close to me, and partially out of a Pascal’s Wager type logic that, even if only one person enjoys what I publish, with no real downside to publishing, that in itself makes the utilitarian calculation worth it.

Though I don’t have a planned release date or schedule for this venture, I want to put it out as something I’m planning to move forward with, both in order to nail my colors to the mast to motivate myself, and also to help contextualize the Patreon launch.

The first fictional venture will be a serial story, which is the kind of venture that having a Patreon page already set up is useful for, since serial stories can be discovered partway through and gain mass support overnight more so than blogs usually do. Again, I don’t expect fame and fortune to follow my first venture into serial fiction. But I am willing to leave the door open for them going forward.

Incremental Progress Part 3 – For Science!

Previously, I have talked some of the ways that patients of chronic health issues and medical disabilities feel impacted by the research cycle. Part one of this ongoing series detailed a discussion I participated in at an ad-hoc support group of 18-21 year olds at a major health conference. Part two detailed some of the things I wish I had gotten a chance to add, based on my own experiences and the words of those around me, but never got the chance to due to time constraints.

After talking at length about the patient side of things, I’d like to pivot slightly to the clinical side. If we go by what most patients know about the clinical research process, here is a rough picture of how things work:

First, a conclave of elite doctors and professor gather in secret, presumably in a poorly lit conference room deep beneath the surface of the earth, and hold a brainstorming session of possible questions to study. Illicit substances may or not be involved in this process, as the creativity required to come up with such obscure and esoteric concerns as “why do certain subspecies of rats have funny looking brains?” and “why do stressful things make people act stressed out?” is immense. At the end of the session, all of the ideas are written down on pieces of parchment, thrown inside a hat, and drawn randomly to decide who will study what.

Second, money is extracted from the public at large by showing people on the street pictures of cute, sad looking children being held at needle-point by an ominously dressed person in a lab coat, with the threat that unless that person hands over all of their disposable income, the child will be forced to receive several injections per day. This process is repeated until a large enough pile of cash is acquired. The cash is then passed through a series of middlemen in dark suits smoking cigars, who all take a small cut for all their hard work of carrying the big pile of cash.

At this point, the cash is loaded onto a private jet and flown out to the remote laboratories hidden deep in the Brazilian rainforests, the barren Australian deserts, the lost islands of the arctic and Antarctic regions, and inside the active volcanoes of the pacific islands. These facilities are pristine, shining snow white and steel grey, outfitted with all the latest technology from a mid-century science fiction film. All of these facilities are outfitted either by national governments, or the rich elite of major multinational corporations, who see to all of the upkeep and grant work, leaving only the truly groundbreaking work to the trained scientists.

And who are the scientists? The scientist is a curious creature. First observed in 1543 naturalists hypothesized scientists to be former humans transmogrified by the devil himself in a Faustian bargain whereby the subject loses most interpersonal skills and material wealth in exchange for incredible intelligence a steady, monotonous career playing with glassware and measuring equipment. No one has ever seen a scientist in real life, although much footage exists of the scientist online, usually flaunting its immense funding and wearing its trademark lab coat and glasses. Because of the abundance of such footage, yet lack of real-life interactions, it has been speculated that scientists may possess some manner of cloaking which renders them invisible and inaudible outside of their native habitat.

The scientists spend their time exchanging various colored fluid between Erlenmeyer flasks and test tubes, watching to see which produces the best colors. When the best colors are found, a large brazier is lit with all of the paper currency acquired earlier. The photons from the fire reaction may, if the stars are properly aligned, hit the colored fluid in such a way as to cause the fluid to begin to bubble and change into a different color. If this happens often enough, the experiment is called a success.

The scientists spend the rest of their time meticulously recording the precise color that was achieved, which will provide the necessary data for analyst teams to divine the answers to the questions asked. These records are kept not in English, or any other commonly spoken language, but in Scientific, which is written and understood by only a handful of non-scientists, mainly doctors, teachers, and engineers. The process of translation is arduous, and in order to be fully encrypted requires several teams working in tandem. This process is called peer review, and, at least theoretically, this method makes it far more difficult to publish false information, because the arduousness of the process provides an insurmountable barrier to those motivated by anything other than the purest truth.

Now, obviously all of this is complete fiction. But the fact that I can make all of this up with a straight face speaks volumes, both about the lack of public understanding of how modern clinical research works, and the lack of transparency of the research itself. For as much as we cheer on the march of scientific advancement and technological development, for as much media attention is spent on new results hot off the presses, and for as much as the stock images and characters of the bespectacled expert adorned in a lab coat and armed with test tubes resounds in both popular culture and the popular consciousness, the actual details of what research is being done, and how it is being executed, is notably opaque.

Much of this is by design, or is a direct consequence of how research is structured. The scientific method by which we separate fact from fiction demands a level of rigor that is often antithetical to human nature, which requires extreme discipline and restraint. A properly organized double-blind controlled trial, the cornerstone of true scientific research, requires that the participants and even the scientists measuring results be kept in the dark as to what they are looking for, to prevent even the subtlest of unconscious biases from interfering. This approach, while great at testing hypotheses, means that the full story is only known to a handful of supervisors until the results are ready to be published.

The standard of scientific writing is also incredibly rigorous. In professional writing, a scientist is not permitted to make any claims or assumptions unless either they have just proven it themselves, in which case they are expected to provide full details of their data and methodology, or can directly cite a study that did so. For example, a scientist cannot simply say that the sky is blue, no matter how obvious this may seem. Nor even can a scientist refer to some other publication in which the author agreed that the sky is blue, like a journalist might while providing citations for a story. A scientist must find the original data proving that the sky is blue, that it is consistently blue, and so forth, and provide the documentation for others to cross check the claims themselves.

These standards are not only obligatory for those who wish to receive recognition and funding, but they are enforced for accreditation and publication in the first place. This mindset has only become more entrenched as economic circumstances have caused funding to become more scarce, and as political and cultural pressure have cast doubts on “mainstream institutions” like academia and major research organizations. Scientists are trained to only give the most defensible claims, in the most impersonal of words, and only in the narrow context for which they are responsible for studying. Unfortunately, although this process is unquestionably effective at testing complex hypotheses, it is antithetical to the nature of everyday discourse.

It is not, as my colleague said during our conference session said, that “scientists suck at marketing”, but rather that marketing is fundamentally incongruous with the mindset required for scientific research. Scientific literature ideally attempts to lay out the evidence with as little human perspective as possible, and let the facts speak for themselves, while marketing is in many respects the art of conjuring and manipulating human perspective, even where such perspectives may diverge from reality.

Moreover, the consumerist mindset of our capitalist society amplifies this discrepancy. The constant arms race between advertisers, media, and political factions means that we are awash in information. This information is targeted to us, adjusted to our preferences, and continually served up on a silver platter. We are taught that our arbitrary personal views are fundamentally righteous, that we have no need to change our views unless it suits us, and that if there is really something that requires any sort of action or thought on our part, that it will be similarly presented in a pleasant, custom tailored way. In essence, we are taught to ignore things that require intellectual investment, or challenge our worldview.

There is also the nature of funding. Because it is so difficult to ensure that trials are actually controlled, and to write the results in such a counterintuitive way, the costs of good research can be staggering, and finding funding can be a real struggle. Scientists may be forced to work under restrictions, or to tailor their research to only the most profitable applications. Results may not be shared to prevent infringement, or to ensure that everyone citing the results is made to pay a fee first. I could spend pages on different stories of technologies that could have benefited humanity, but were kept under wraps for commercial or political reasons.

But of course, it’s easy to rat on antisocial scientists and pharmaceutical companies. And it doesn’t really get to the heart of the problem. The problem is that, for most patients, especially those who aren’t enrolled in clinical trials, and don’t necessarily have access to the latest devices, the whole world of research is a black hole into which money is poured with no apparent benefit in return. Maybe if they follow the news, or hear about it from excited friends and relations (see previous section), they might be aware of a few very specific discoveries, usually involving curing one or two rats out of a dozen tries.

Perhaps, if they are inclined towards optimism, they will be able to look at the trend over the last several decades towards better technology and better outcomes. But in most cases, the truly everyday noticeable changes seem to only occur long after they have long been obvious to the users. The process from patient complaints with a medical device, especially in a non-critical area like usability and quality of life, that does not carry the same profit incentive for insurers to apply pressure, to a market product, is agonizingly slow.

Many of these issues aren’t research problems so much as manufacturing and distribution problems. The bottleneck in making most usability tweaks, the ones that patients notice and appreciate, isn’t in research, or even usually in engineering, but in getting a whole new product approved by executives, shareholders, and of course, regulatory bodies. (Again, this is another topic that I could, and probably will at some future date, rant on about for several pages, but suffice it to say that when US companies complain about innovation being held up by the FDA, their complaints are not entirely without merit).

Even after such processes are eventually finished, there is the problem of insurance. Insurance companies are, naturally, incredibly averse to spending money on anything unless and until it has been proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that it is not only safe, but cost effective. Especially for basic, low income plans, change can come at a glacial pace, and for state-funded services, convincing legislators to adjust statutes to permit funding for new innovations can be a major political battle. This doesn’t even begin to take into account the various negotiated deals and alliances between certain providers and manufacturers that make it harder for new breakthroughs to gain traction (Another good topic for a different post).

But these are economic problems, not research. For that matter, most of the supposed research problems are simply perception problems. Why am I talking about markets and marketing when I said I was going to talk about research?

Because for most people, the notions of “science” and “progress” are synonymous. We are constantly told, by our politicians, by our insurers, by our doctors, and by our professors that not only do we have the very best level of care that has ever been available in human history, but that we also have the most diligent, most efficient, most powerful organizations and institutions working tirelessly on our behalf to constantly push forward the frontier. If we take both of these statements at face value, then it follows that anything that we do not already have is a research problem.

For as much talk as there was during our conference sessions about how difficult life was, how so very badly we all wanted change, and how disappointed and discouraged we have felt over the lack of apparent progress, it might be easy to overlook the fact that far better technologies than are currently used by anyone in that room already exist. At this very moment, there are patients going about their lives using systems that amount to AI-controlled artificial organs. These systems react faster and more accurately than humans could ever hope to, and the clinical results are obvious.

The catch? None of these systems are commercially available. None of them have even been submitted to the FDA. A handful of these systems are open source DIY projects, and so can be cobbled together by interested patients, though in many cases this requires patients to go against medical advice, and take on more engineering and technical responsibility than is considered normal for a patient. Others are in clinical trials, or more often, have successfully completed their trials and are waiting for manufacturers to begin the FDA approval process.

This bottleneck, combined with the requisite rigor of clinical trials themselves, is what has given rise to the stereotype that modern research is primarily chasing after its own tail. This perception makes even realistic progress seem far off, and makes it all the more difficult to appreciate what incremental improvements are released.