Cogito, Ergo Sumana for 2009 April

# 01 Apr 2009, 07:40AM: The Long View: Throughout Jody Procter's memoir Toil: Building Yourself, a diary of his work helping build one specific house in a small Oregon city, Procter aches for the weekend, feels hopeful and buoyant working through Friday afternoon, and buys himself little treats at the 7-11 on the Friday drive home. The rhythm of building tension and weekly release thrums over and over again. The end of the March 17th entry:

I have been taking my watch off or leaving it in the car to try to keep from looking at it. 10:56. 2:05. Seeing those dead hours in the middle of the day demoralizes me. Now, this afternoon, I put my watch on, the better to savor the slow pace of the last hour and a half of the week. The sun has disappeared. The clouds rolls in. A few sprinkles fall and the air is cool and fragrant with the budding flowers of spring and the moist, freshly cut grass of the golf course. I am happier and happier as the final minutes of the work week tick by.
On my drive home I think, if you could only bottle that Friday after-work feeling and sell it to people, you could make so much money you could stop work and then you would never have that Friday after-work feeling again. Unless you indulged in your own product. And probably, after a while, you'd get addicted to it, it would lose its kick, it would turn out to have negative side-effects and all would be lost and in ruins. You would lose your fortune and have to go back to work and then some Friday you would be driving home and you would have that Friday after-work feeling all over again.

Filed under: Reading Work

# (7) 01 Apr 2009, 09:17AM: New Awesome Work: Martin and I are co-founding a new firm to produce the PoTeaTo, a food-and-beverage convergence device targeted at the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland. Simply drop the PoTeaTo into a small pot of boiling water and watch the seam split, revealing two pre-blanched potato halves and one strong teabag! Boil them together and you'll have a meal and the drink to go with it.

Just kidding. Actually, starting in a couple of weeks, I'll be working at Collabora, an open source consulting firm. I'll be managing projects and helping them develop awesome tools like the Telepathy framework and the Empathy instant messaging/IRC/VoIP/video chat application. Yes, people are using the phrase "Skype-killer."

I'll get to telecommute (casual day every day!), advance the cause of Free/Libre/Open Source Software, and facilitate the work of dozens of geeky colleagues around the world.

Exciting! The PoTeaTo shall have to wait (in a dry, dark, cool place).

Filed under: Comedy Work:Management and Leadership Work

# (3) 02 Apr 2009, 08:35AM: If You Read This To The End You Get To See Inside My Marriage: I watched the interview Jon Stewart did with Jim Cramer a few weeks ago. If you're the kind of person who loves Jon Stewart's work, you probably heard about it.

Stewart's key critiques of CNBC:

Financial news that focuses on short term profits and stock tips is an unhealthy market force. Financial reporting has a responsibility to be skeptical of too-good-to-be-true profits and investigate companies and trends that produce them. Finance experts who know about a house of cards have a responsibility to tell the public. It's irresponsible to cheerlead unsustainable bull markets, persuading laypeople to invest in "responsible" retirement plans, then blame evil CEOs and weak regulators after the inevitable crash. Saying people can get wealth without doing work to create value is disingenuous and possibly criminal.

Salon followed up on many of these substantive critiques, not just following the blast and noise of Media Titan Confrontation. "On "Mad Money," Cramer back to normal": he was contrite on the Daily Show, then the next day he minimized the whole thing and kept on doing his normal schtick. More insidiously, "There's nothing unique about Jim Cramer: The mindless complicity in disseminating false claims is not aberrational media behavior; it is, as they acknowledge, the crux of what they do." Greenwald compares recent finance reporting to prewar Iraq reporting.*

Stewart's most controversial point, and one that hasn't been discussed as much in the mass media, is in the last part of my summary: cheerleading unsustainable bull markets, and encouraging investment rather than work as a way to wealth, is wrong. His words:

But isn't that part of the problem? Selling this idea that you don't have to do anything. Anytime you sell people the idea that sit back and you'll get 10 to 20 percent on your money, don't you always know that that's going to be a lie? When are we going to realize in this country that our wealth is work. That we're workers and by selling this idea that of "Hey man, I'll teach you how to be rich," how is that any different than an infomercial?

"Our wealth is work...we're workers." I asked Leonard to help me figure out why, when a political candidate praises work and workers, it sounds like cant, but Stewart's phrasing felt subversive. He pointed out that the word "workers" and identification with the working class remind people of Marxism. Oh yeah, that. Also, "wealth" usually means earnings and/or capital -- cash, real estate, securities, some financial instrument or an item that can be sold in the open market for cash. But Stewart is saying that our wealth, the prize that we've earned, isn't money, but our ability to earn money. Our asset is the ability to create assets.

Again, identification with the working class. But it's a short step from that to rabble-raising populist demagoguery, which Stewart and Colbert make fun of. A lot. Possibly while engaging in it.

'You say ... I want to keep this homicidal fury forever!' [side-annotation: Hysteria, Our Only Growth Industry] 'But, Stephen, your Thunderdome idea will kill all the CEOs, and there'll be no one left to force through the man-sized paper shredder!' But I say: we will never run out of scapegoats. Because if we focus on pitchforks and vengeance, instead of the fundamental problems that got us here, soon, we'll have plenty of new criminal banks and irresponsible CEOs to start all over again. And we can cry 'Off with their heads!' -- and we'll never have to keep ours.

I get annoyed that the TDS/TCR audience cheers so loud, gilding the lily at every punchline. But sometimes their silence is a tell. When Stewart tossed off that key phrase, "our wealth is work," and when Colbert made his point about scapegoating, the audience was too stunned to clap. This reminds me of a similar moment from Colbert's interview with Daniel Gilbert, happiness expert, June 27, 2007, about 3:45 into the interview:

DG: "It turns out that kids have a very small effect on people's happiness, and the effect tends to be negative. But you'd be happy to hear-"
SC: "Wait wait wait..."
DG: "Well, it means that people with children tend to be a little less happy than people without them, and the more children they have, the less happy they turn out to be."
SC: "Now, are you confusing happiness with the feeling of the sublime? Because children are a pain in the ass. Okay, I'll grant you that. But the feeling that comes with children, I have found, is a feeling of -- that is superior to happiness."
DG: "Yeah, of course."
SC: "That is the sublime feeling. And the sublime comes from beauty."
DG: "The happiness that children give you is a little like the refrigerator light. Every time you look, it's on. Every time you think about your kids, you're happy. The problem is, they're a pain in the ass more often than you're thinking about them."
SC: "Well, that's interesting."

So this is a big shaggy dog story where I end up trying to convince Leonard, who enjoys Colbert but doesn't like to watch the interviews, to start watching the whole show. Because sometimes stuff like that comes out, where you see the real Colbert peek through, this witty improv-loving geek with a background in Catholicism and Tolkien. Basically, it's the Brendan Leonard show!

* Salon, ProPublica, New Assignment, and similar ventures are trying to do good journalism that avoids the inherent blindspots of traditional mass media. In a similar vein, I'm fond of Fred Clark's suggestion that a Work section replace the Business section.

Filed under: Comedy Work

# 02 Apr 2009, 09:13AM: Me In Other Media: The Thoughtcrime Experiments anthology, which Leonard and I are finishing up now, got me into Your Favorite Thing About The Recession from The Morning News. It's also a big reason Sharon Panelo interviewed me about free culture. It's paraphrased, but includes me talking about DRM pain points and the GEICO "Tiny House" ad.

Filed under: Reading

# (3) 03 Apr 2009, 09:58PM: Happiness: Leonard and I got to hang out with Jed Hartman, an editor of Strange Horizons, this afternoon! We talked about scifi and editing and his magazine and our anthology. Then he left, then Aaditya came over to Astoria and we went to Sparrow, the great new indie restaurant just northeast of the Astoria Blvd. N/W station. We've come home and played some DDR, and watched some web videos, and now they're talking about video games and Guster is playing, and Leonard just made peanut butter chocolate brownies and they're cooling on the rack. Leonard just told Adi about robotfindskitten.

How long have we been rolling the dice and hoping to be surprised by joy? I won.

Filed under: Apartment Life Memoir

# (1) 06 Apr 2009, 07:06PM: Sagacity: Leonard and I are watching Carl Sagan's COSMOS, which is astounding. Also, if you're doing impressions, two parts Obama plus one part Woody Allen will give you an okay Sagan.

# (1) 07 Apr 2009, 01:23PM: Five Books (With A Little Cheating): Years after Zed and Rachel C. (Update: and Erica Olsen!!) tagged me with fairly similar book blogpostmemes, I respond. Hugo Schwyzer did a similar one once that I'm taking this opportunity to link to, and I've posted other book recommendation lists elsewhere.

Number of books I own: This is one of those that blurs when you enter into a book-sharing household/partnership. We share, for example, all the Neal Stephenson. I have about 400 books, not including the hundreds of Amar Chitra Katha comic books and other such single issues, and then Leonard has bookcases more.

Total number of books I've [ever] owned: Probably a thousand. I know I left a lot in California.

Last book bought: I think that's the 1962 Cherry Ames "annual" I saw while walking by a bookstore in Cambridge, UK. It was in those one-pound boxes outside the door, in the front of the stack, and it instantly caught my eye. I thought, Rivka Might Like This! But it turns out she doesn't want it, so I'll be BookMooching it or something.

Last book read: Reread: I just reread several chapters of the great Vikram Seth book A Suitable Boy. I can always reread Haresh's battles in the shoe industry, the harrowing aftermath of Maan's and Firoz's confrontation at Saeeda Bai's, Professor's Mishra's scheming around Pran's promotion, Lata, Amit, Mrs Rupa Mehra, Kalpana, oh look I just reread another hundred pages.

Fresh read: started Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars ebook.

Last book finished: Reread: an old Cat and Girl anthology. Classic, funny, incisive.

Fresh read: I read and finished the ebook of Scott Sigler's novel Infected, which was more horror-y than I like in scifi.

Five books that mean a lot to me:

Children of the River by Linda Crew. I read it my freshman year of high school, as an elective in our Romeo and Juliet unit. A Cambodian girl who was perfectly happy in Phnom Penh adjusts to life as a farm laborer and student at an Oregon high school. Her aunt and uncle, her foster parents in the States, want her to study hard and avoid boys. One comes easier than the other. There's a passage where she can tell that a guy's gaze across the classroom means that he could watch her all day with affection and awe. I wrote in my Double-Entry Journal for class that I simply couldn't imagine that ever happening to me. My teacher asked, "Why not?" and I had no answer. And the relationships between Sundara and her aunt, her brother, and her Khmer community helped me get perspective on my family and their friends.
Special shout-out here to the similarly themed nonfiction oral history Bamboo & Butterflies, which opened my eyes substantially. There's an anecdote about an abortion and another about punctuality that still stay with me, fifteen years later.
Imzadi by Peter David. I adored Star Trek and when I was a teenager this was one of the best Trek stories I'd ever watched or read. And there was graphic sex! SO COOL.
The Mahabharata. In comics or in prose or in drama or in critical essays or in any other form. There's so much there. One reason I never really got into the Epic Fantasy Tolkien/Jordan/Martin stuff is that I already had a mythology, stranger and larger and more exciting than anything a single author could spin out.
American Taxation, American Slavery by Robin Einhorn. I took an American History class with Prof. Einhorn my first year at Berkeley, and felt stupid and astonished when she used the changing price of slaves to inform her explanation of pre-Civil War economics. Her influence led me to consider grad school in tax history. American Taxation, American Slavery, which came out a few years ago, is dense and academic and brainbending. It prepped me to read Adam Hochschild's Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire's Slaves. It gave me a tremendous respect for the importance of institutional competence in government agencies. And it refuted damaging "taxation=slavery" rhetoric, not least by diagnosing it as projection by slaveowners.
Special shout-out here to academic texts The Social Animal by Eliot Aronson, the most lucid textbook I've ever read, and The Psychology of Computer Programming by Gerald Weinberg, which has informed my management style substantially.
Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson. I read it in college, in that first apartment with green carpet and fake wood panelling on the walls, first in little random chapters, then -- maybe, finally, years later -- cover to cover. Just reread most of it on Saturday. I've been interrogating the pro-startup, anti-employee bent of my tech culture recently, and rereading Cryptonomicon reminds me that Randy cofounds a startup and gets to have awesome adventures! A zillion Stephenson phrases and images and metaphors and scenes have made themselves part of me. The ending of In the Beginning...Was The Command Line (Seth gave me my copy) stands next to the opening of the original GPL as a clarion call. How can I express how deeply Cryptonomicon is constitutive in my identity?

I figure the statute of limitations is under three years, so I won't tag anyone and coerce them into posting with this template, but I bet my in-laws would enjoy doing this if they haven't already!

Filed under: Reading

# 07 Apr 2009, 07:17PM: A Tiny Anthology: If you liked my most recent poem (the Linton Johnson one about BART), you might like these:

on my right pinky finger (near the end of the page)
on chess
"Consistency Bias," on coercion and memory
on buildings and the ephemeral
on watching journeys from a window

Most of these are sonnets on various schemes.

Edited 25 Nov 2010 to add my Garrison Keillor event introduction.

Filed under: Reading Deliverables

# 07 Apr 2009, 08:01PM: "Also airport bathrooms.": As Leonard and I read submissions for the anthology, we compiled some tips for writers. Leonard has them up on his site.

Filed under: Reading

# 10 Apr 2009, 09:58AM: The Latter Link Includes Dick Van Dyke Non-Pun Joke: Today, looking at the tax documents, I saw Leonard's name next to mine and felt awe again that we're really seriously married. Mega-married! proclaimed Leonard. We conjectured that maybe the government should let same-sex couples get married but reserve MEGAMARRIAGE for heterosexuals couples. This is in keeping with John Holbo's thinking. By the way, here's a great comment in that thread that explains the rhetoric of same-sex marriages "contaminating" the shared marriagestuff pool.

And one of my new favorite blogs does a good Sarah Haskins impression in taking apart advertising narratives for laughs:

Oh, and do complete the circle of gender obliviousness, let's not forget the countless "home security service" ads pitched, hard, on men's programming about how your hot-looking but down-home wife is by herself in your big house with all the glass windows and no curtains and she's lovingly wiping invisible crumbs off the some-kind-of-expensive-substance counter and there's a man behind her, and because she's cleaning the kitchen with no lights on it's too dark for her to notice, and he's got ropes, or an ax, and he's really big and the music's getting all dumm-dumm-doom-y... and... oh if only you had locked her inside a secure perimeter before you went... wherever it was in that big SUV and/or first-class plane seat and you keep dialing and dialing to warn her about the big guy who's right behind her right now only she's deaf and... and...
And meanwhile on average women are safer when there aren't men there to protect them. Because ... the number of 911 calls about home-invasion injuries is dwarfed by the number of plain old-fashioned domestic violence calls.

Filed under: Reading Religion

# 11 Apr 2009, 07:50PM: This Retrospective, In Retrospect, Has A Theme: An abbreviated diary of the past few days, mostly for future Sumana's use:

Wednesday I went to Supper and the Sci-Fi Screening Room with a journalist who opines that it's his God-given right to drink scotch at his desk when he's on deadline.

Thursday I saw Tim Wu, Stuart, Jena, and Hailey as we hashed out next steps and plans for AltLaw. I stopped by Midtown Comics after; Hal had put aside the new Ambush Bug compendium for Leonard.

Friday night: Matt Weinstein, an old Berkeley pal, came to town, so I met him and some friends of his at The Silent H, a shockingly good Vietnamese place in Williamsburg. At Queensboro Plaza on the way there, I talked to a guy who was reading Cryptonomicon on the platform, and envied aloud that he's on his first reading. At the restaurant I met a Captain-Hammer-shirt-wearing friend of his who cemented his worth by trading Cryptonomicon references and quotes with me for twenty minutes.

This morning: breakfast and The Met with Anne and her sister Sarah, Anne being a woman I met online when I sought WisCon attendees who'd let me sleep on their floors. We got along great and I'm sure I'll learn a lot about scifi fandom from her. At my place, this evening, I did some career coaching with my friend Rebecca and helped her improve her LinkedIn profile.

In conclusion, dorkiness got me everything I adore in my life.

Filed under: Reading Work

# (9) 12 Apr 2009, 01:14PM: Bluths as Bartlett's: Some lines from Arrested Development stick in my mind as incisive embodiments of some less-acknowledged fallacies, afflictions, and distinctions. To wit:

Should the Fünkes try an open marriage? Tobias notes that many couples he counseled thought it would work for them, even though it never works, and indeed it didn't work for those couples either. Beat. "But it might work for us!"
Michael disengaging from Marta, his brother's girlfriend. "This is wrong...not hot wrong, regular wrong."

"Illusions, Dad! You don't have time for my illusions!" has a nice little critique of missing-the-point nitpicking, but it's not as strong an association for me. Any other candidates?

Filed under: Comedy

# (1) 13 Apr 2009, 02:24PM: On Realizing That I Am A Veritable Switchboard Of Buttons To Be Pressed: As Father Brown would say: "Lord, what a turnip I am...Lord, what a turnip."

# (1) 13 Apr 2009, 07:10PM: Words And Constraints: I am not yet ready to publicly join the conversation on cultural appropriation in fiction. However I wish to draw your attention to Rachel Chalmers's warm, smart, funny book reviews, which she posts in a LiveJournal community whose members seek to read more books by people of color. 1, 2, 3, 4 so far. The Atlantic should get Rachel to replace whatever they have Hitchens doing.

Psychological complexity of the kind I look for in books is an artefact of the bourgeois novel tradition as an outgrowth of an emerging leisure class almost by definition....
You could read it [Octavia Butler's vampire story Fledgling] as a provocative and extremely effective satire on venture capitalism, if you were, say, me.

Today's my last day before the new job starts. I spent part of it in a park working on a poem that rhymes and scans.

Filed under: Reading

# (5) 13 Apr 2009, 09:13PM: Nearly-Modern Superstitions: Am I the only person who finds it especially auspicious when a person's first and last name combined count 8 or fewer letters, since then they could use it in an 8.3 DOS-style filename? (example: makohill.bat)

# 15 Apr 2009, 08:31AM: Well, this anxiety is a familiar bouquet.

# 17 Apr 2009, 08:43AM: Joke, Joke: Perhaps wearing my oldest, most beat-up Electronic Frontier Foundation shirt to a party full of new-to-copyright law students is not as effective a dominance/status display as I'd hoped.

Filed under: Comedy

# 18 Apr 2009, 08:04AM: Ramping Up: In my first week at Collabora, I've learned that I can stand to poke at .conf, .rc, and similar files for at most two hours out of my working day. I've also learned that the Ubuntu version of Firefox doesn't give me a warning if I hit Back after typing form data on a webpage; not sure how to fix that. The Lenovo x200 ThinkPad is light and small, and I'm adjusting well to the nub-mouse, but there's a dedicated Back key right where my fingers think the left arrow key is, which gives me a few "arrghs" a day. I may dedicate some fiddling time next week to disabling that key. And I renew my grief that IRC is not a common feature of every office environment.

As lead project manager I'm to keep on top of all the work we do, for clients and for the community in general. So this week I've been drawing diagrams of technology stacks and who's doing what, and memorizing thirty real name/IRC nickname pairs. If I were Juanita from Snow Crash I would be developing face-based avatars for all my new colleagues, but since I am not perhaps I should get a bunch of Dungeons & Dragons figurines and set them up on a campaign map representing VoIP, embedded Linux, mobile, etc., etc.

Filed under: Work

# (4) 23 Apr 2009, 06:45AM: Learning: In the last two weeks, I have learned rather a lot about configuring and troubleshooting usage of Empathy, Telepathy, Synaptic, PPAs, git, TeX/LaTeX/dvi, gtimelog, IRC and bip, RSA SSH, and XMPP. Well, it was a lot to me.

I've also learned that if I want to get up around 6am consistently, I have to go to bed around 9 or 10pm consistently, and that if I work in a windowless rented office then I won't know till I leave that it's raining. So I'll just be making a cameo at the io9/Tor.com shindig tonight, and I'm trying to pay attention to the weather symbols in the clock gadget in my taskbar.

Filed under: Work

# (1) 23 Apr 2009, 11:58AM: Two Thoughts on the Role of Scrum Master:

"Each week. On This American Scrum. We have a theme. And ask three questions based on that theme. Question One: what did you do yesterday? Question two: what will you do, what do you aim to do, today? And question three: What obstacles, barriers, and predictable -- or wholly unpredictable -- problems are you facing. That are blocking you. From achieving those very same goals."
Scrum Mistress! Corset, whip, and small achievable goals.

# (2) 25 Apr 2009, 08:20AM: Out-Of-Context Quotes Of The Moment: "Pretend you're in a giant teacup." "Why?!" "You just are."

"It's like you have an 'it's complicated' in Facebook with yourself."

"You should delicious that tweet - NOOOooooooo....."

"Riker's so boring I'm falling asleep just talking about him."

Filed under: Comedy

# 25 Apr 2009, 07:56PM: Translation Of A Truth: I reread much of Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon a few weeks ago and found this passage:

"We're businessmen," Avi says. "We make money. Gold is worth money."
"Gold is the corpse of value," says Goto Dengo.
"I don't understand."
"If you want to understand, look out the window!" says the patriarch, and sweeps his cane around in an arc that encompasses half of Tokyo. "Fifty years ago, it was flames. Now it is lights! Do you understand? The leaders of Nippon were stupid. They took all of the gold out of Tokyo and buried it in holes in the ground in the Philippines! Because they thought that The General would march into Tokyo and steal it. But The General didn't care about the gold. He understood that the real gold is here--" he points to his head "--in the intelligence of the people, and here--" he holds out his hands "--in the work that they do. Getting rid of our gold was the best thing that ever happened to Nippon. It made us rich. Receiving that gold was the worst thing that happened to the Philippines. It made them poor."
--p. 858, paperback

"Our wealth is work," the man said.

More decade-old Stephenson analysis coming later tonight.

Filed under: Work

# 25 Apr 2009, 11:27PM: Hiro-ics Don't Scale, They Say: Now I'm rereading Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash bit by bit. Spoiler ahead:

The important thing is, Hiro, that you have to understand the Mafia way. And the Mafia way is that we pursue larger goals under the guise of personal relationships. So, for example, when you were a pizza guy you didn't deliver pizzas fast because you made more money that way, or because it was some kind of a [expletive redacted] policy. You did it because you were carrying out a personal covenant between Uncle Enzo and every customer. This is how we avoid the trap of self-perpetuating ideology. Ideology is a virus. So getting this chick back is more than just getting a chick back. It's the concrete manifestation of an abstract policy goal. And we like concrete -- right, Vic?
pp. 349-350, massmarket paperback

There's a lot going on in this paragraph.

For one thing, the speaker makes the same tripartite distinction that my ex-boss does. How do you get peons in an institution to act in the organization's interest? Financial incentives, military-style unthinking policy compliance, or a relationship that comprises part of the employee's identity. That last one is most interesting. Fog Creek, the Mafia, some religons, really elite military units, Joss Whedon fan clubs, open source, sports cheerleading, political activism and nonprofit work are all activities or groups that go from "something I do" to "something I am."

We say "drink the Kool-Aid," not just because we know loyalty will kill you, but also because the ingestion metaphor sounds right to us. You are what you eat. Mike Daisey has a moment in at least the book version of 21 Dog Years: Doing Time at Amazon.com that touches on that. He writes a letter to Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, detailing a dream in which he cuts off Bezos's left hand and runs away with it:

You're all behind me, spilling out of the building like so many ants, but I'm running too fast for anyone to ever catch me. I'm out on the lawn, eating your hand, hungry like I've never been in my life. I eat the whole thing, chew through the bones, and now I own part of you, just like you own the best part of me. I wake up so indescribably proud.

The speaker in Snow Crash, however, doesn't just value loyalty for sentimental reasons. The Mafia rescue Y.T. because she is a friend of Uncle Enzo. If they don't rescue her, then her relationship with Uncle Enzo means nothing, and the value of the personal relationships that structure the Mafia is suspect. That's the policy goal: to maintain the currency that is a friendship with a Mafia executive. Per existing real-life Mafia scholarship, organized crime aims to replace government, to become the main way people and households and businesses relate to each other and get their needs met.

This is why bureaucracy is a good thing: because otherwise it would be personal relationships that decided whether you could or couldn't get a license, or buy that car. No such thing as a sticker price without bureaucracy, incidentally.

But what is an institution that only comprises specific personal relationships, one that eschews ideology? Is it a family? Is it a tribe? Is it LinkedIn? It seems like a rather fragile thing to me, like the structures from "World of Goo," liable to fall over under their own weight, or when people find another social network with better swag. Thus L. Ron Hubbard's apocryphal line that the real money is in starting a religion. Ideology is a virus, sure, but it's also a trellis for the vines to grow up, to comfortably trap them.

Anathem is obviously about an institution (the monastery system) that has thought very hard about how to perpetuate itself over the thousands-of-years long term. But Snow Crash and Diamond Age are about institutions, too, and specifically about the challenges of building and leading multigenerational or world-changing institutions. Enzo, Y.T., Jason "Iron Pumper," the terra-cotta-blazer Mafia kids, and L. Bob Rife could make for a pretty entertaining "Management Secrets of Snow Crash" presentation. Maybe I should write it.

Filed under: Work:Management and Leadership

# (1) 27 Apr 2009, 06:40AM: Thoughtcrime Experiments Anthology Is Up: Nine new original stories, five new original artworks, and an essay on how and why we did it. Read it online, download the PDF, or (soon) buy the print-on-demand book. Link, download, read, and remix away -- it's all Creative Commons-licensed.

There isn't a theme, really, just "what we like." It turns out that we like political satire and family drama and detective thrillers and fables and fable deconstructions and the mysteries of debugging. It's all good stuff and we hope you like it.

Filed under: Deliverables

# (11) 27 Apr 2009, 10:29PM: Fan Dances And Leafblowers: The other day, Leonard and I were brunching with Adi. We got to talking about the little superstitions you make up when you're a kid, like "if the digital clock shows a time that repeats a digit 3 times in a row, you can make a wish, but you have to make it before the time changes."

I mentioned how, when I was a teen, and I wanted to tell a guy I was attracted to him, or make some other such irrevocable scary confession, I would look at my watch, and tell myself that I only had till the next time the seconds hand hit zero, or half-past. Then I'd blurt it out at that moment. Because I'd regret cowardice, the loss of that opportunity, more than the loss of face. What face did I have to lose anyway? "And, of course, I almost always struck out," I told Adi, laughing.

Adi didn't get it. "What do you mean you struck out?"

The guys almost never responded in kind, I explained.

And then I had it explained to me that the average teenage boy really doesn't know what to make of a girl directly telling him she's romantically interested in him. And he might stammer and deny and cut off the awkward moment, and regret it ever after.

The girl might think she'd struck out, but in fact she was pitching, and the guy froze at the plate instead of swinging.

This is a revelation to me. Seriously? I look back at all those tableaux, the community college bench, the bus ride back from the debate meet, I can't even remember them all. Am I now to rewrite all that narrative?

If you grew up a heterosexual male, I'd be interested in knowing how you've reacted to girls' interest in you, and whether frankness put you off. I've been straightforward about these things, thinking guessing games were a waste. Was that actually less efficient, in terms of throughput, than playing coy would have been? Crap!