When a “Hack” has Consequences

During my student years at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, there was a generous amount of recreation referred to as “hacking.” Hacks were nothing more than pranks that usually involved a twist grounded on some technology infrastructure. More often than not, that infrastructure involved computer software, often based on artificial intelligence. Since those days are now half a century ago, most hacks covered a gamut between moderately amusing and annoying.

Freelance journalist Samantha Smith, whose image on X was altered (from the BBC article being discussed)

These days, that gamut has widened, particularly on the annoying side. This morning I read a BBC article filed by Technology Reporter Laura Cress with the headline “Woman felt 'dehumanised' after Musk's Grok AI used to digitally remove her clothes.” My guess is that there are any number of computer graphics tools that can enable such an image transformation. For all I know, some of them have been demonstrated at technical conferences (which I no longer attend, since my days of presenting research results of my own have now passed).

There is a tendency to regard any new software capability as progress. How that software is used does not “enter into the equation.” However, while an algorithm for more efficient search is a software achievement, there is a “social dimension” where images are concerned, particularly when they are images of the “real world,” rather than some elaborate abstraction. In my student days little attention was given to whether or not a “hack” involved that “social dimension;” but, as was clear from that BBC article, those creating imaginative new software need to be more aware of “social consequences.”

One can only wonder if any of the software training programs include the examination of how any invention has, out of necessity, a “social dimension.” That BBC article suggests that, for the most part, that social dimension is overlooked. Sadly, I do not expect that the article will have any impact on updating those training programs. As usual, entropy rules!

Making San Francisco Streets Safer?

Given that I live only a few blocks away from the San Francisco City Hall, I do my best to follow up on news reports on what takes place inside that building. This morning I read an online San Francisco Chronicle article by City Hall Reporter J.D. Morris in which Mayor Daniel Lurie announced “that $40 million has been raised by the Downtown Development Corp., a coalition of business, labor and philanthropic leaders that formed with the mayor’s blessing this year to help the city revitalize its ailing urban core.” The objective was explained more specifically as follows:

The money will fund initiatives that make streets safer and cleaner, help small businesses thrive and breathe life into public spaces, the mayor’s office said in a news release, adding that the corporation also plans to “collaborate with civic groups to raise tens of millions more.”

Associated Press photograph by Julio Cortez of drone delivery in Frisco, Texas (from a San Francisco Chronicle Web page)

There is no question that this is a laudable effort. Ironically, this article was posted at roughly the same time as another one by Reporter Laura Waxmann, who covers business news. The “business” in this particular story is DoorDash, which, in Waxmann’s words, “is preparing to take on-demand delivery to new heights.” Mind you, that is not a metaphor! Here is the elaboration on the plan:

Last month, the food delivery platform quietly leased a nondescript Mission District warehouse where it plans to test the future of logistics: deliveries by autonomous flying drones that can zip through the sky at 65 miles per hour while carrying the equivalent of a six-pack of beer.

Personally, as a long-time believer in Murphy’s law, I do not think that the streets of San Francisco will be made safer when there are drones carrying six-packs overhead!

“Dangerous” may be Worse Than “Stupid”

Back in November of 2013, I departed from my focus on the performing arts to reflect on the technology that allows me to do what I do. On November 13 of that year, I wrote an article entitled “Is Google Making the Next Generation Stupid?,” which was my own reflection of an article that Nicholas Carr had written for Atlantic Monthly entitled “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” While I doubt that things have improved very much since then, I fear that we are now up against a more critical question, which probably goes beyond the repercussions of Google searches: “Is the Internet making the world a more dangerous place?”

This question was motived by an article I read this morning on the Web site for The Guardian. To be fair, I know nothing about Ben Makuch, the author of this article, given the headline “Rise in vigilante attacks in US highlight growing online DIY terrorism resources.” As readers can probably expect, there is a connection to the Internet behind this threat. This was made explicit by The 5-Eyes, described in the article as “an intelligence sharing alliance between the spy and law enforcement agencies of Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the US.” The following paragraph extracted two sentences from the report to summarize the threat:

Violent extremist content is more accessible, more digestible and more impactful than ever before. Violent extremist individuals and groups share material which individuals often consume as part of their radicalisation process.

It goes without saying that such sharing is most easily achieved through electronic mail.

A classroom scene from the opera Innocence (photograph by Cory Weaver, courtesy of the San Francisco Opera)

Mind you, I would not be able to provide background material for the articles I write about music without the Internet as a resource. Furthermore, I would hate to be labeled as a “person of interest” just because I happened to write about Innocence, Kaija Saariaho’s opera about a “violent shooting incident, which took place at an international high school.” Nevertheless, I find it hard not to worry about the extent to which accounts of violence can beget further violence, rather than deter such activities.

If the Internet has become a dangerous place, then I fear that there is little more that I can to other than to be vigilant about the dangers. I suppose that my own efforts are guided by the immortal words of the architect Frank Lloyd Wright: “There is nothing more uncommon than common sense.” As a writer, I have no problems being guided by common sense; but none of us that put our efforts into writing can second-guess the reactions of our readers.

Should Berners-Lee Testify Before Congress?

The testimony by Alphabet's Sundar Pichai, Amazon's Jeff Bezos, Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, and Apple's Tim Cook at the House of Representatives probably made for good television, and there was much to be gained from subsequent analyses, particularly from sites such as BBC News. While I am no fan of those that skew the distribution of wealth to such a radical extreme, I suspect that most of our Congressional representatives may have missed out on a significant elephant in the room and how that elephant got there. While questions about work practices at all levels of the hierarchy are important, just as relevant is how this new generation of “captains of industry” got to be where they now are.

I would like to consider the possibility that all four of these gentlemen constitute the leading edge of a new generation of prospectors. I am more interested in how they came by their wealth than I am with what they are now doing with it. I propose that all four of them succeeded in “mining” a new “field” of resources that turned out to be very precious and thus very valuable. That “field” is the World Wide Web itself and its global impact on information flow.

For about two decades prior to the emergence of the World Wide Web, many research organizations came to appreciate the value of both shared data and shared software for processing data resources. That sharing was realized through the technology of computer networks. CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, was one of those organizations. During his time working at CERN, Tim Berners-Lee saw the value of sharing within that organization; but he also realized that researchers could be even more productive if such sharing could take place across organizations. That was the motivating concept from which the World Wide Web would eventually emerge.

One of the original platforms for sharing across organizations was Usenet and the bulletin board system it supported. Simply put, researchers from different organizations were provided with “gateway” technology for both reading bulletin boards and contributing to them. The “gateway” allowed information to cross from one network to another; and the World Wide Web introduced new protocols for communication that did not have to take such gateways explicitly into account.

Fun fact: The very first unsolicited advertising, better known as “spam,” was distributed through Usenet before the World Wide Web had come up to speed. The fact is that dedicated researchers, such as Berners-Lee (and, for that matter, myself), seemed to take it for granted that sharing information could only be for the good. However, by the time the Internet as we know it was enabled, a new generation of those prospectors was beginning to emerge. They were more interested in the growth of capital, rather than the growth of collective knowledge. Four of those prospectors that “struck it rich” in a big (gargantuan?) way were called to account by our Congress yesterday.

One way of viewing this history is through that old guns-don’t-kill-people-people-kill-people cliché. One of the side effects of this new generation of prospecting was a growing myopia where issues of consequences were concerned. The prevailing motto was, “If you build it, they will come.” There was little concern over who “they” were or what they would do after they arrived. This leads me to wonder whether or not that myopia can be traced back to Berners-Lee himself. Nothing would please me more than to see him testifying before a Congressional committee and being confronted with that question of myopia.

Mind you, I suspect that anything Berners-Lee would say today would amount to little more than a historical perspective that is beyond the ken of those that have wealth and power. Nevertheless, the extent to which the very concept of information is now being undermined, simply because no one ever really bothered to view deceptive information (otherwise known as “fake news”) as a problem, amounts to a serious crisis situation. Ironically, I used to write about a book that took on the question of how serious crises should be addressed.

The title of the book was Thinking in Time, written by Richard E. Neustadt and Ernest R. May. It amounts to a collection of case studies concerning Presidential decision-making. When I used to write about this book, I summarized its “punch line” as a recommendation that any crisis situation should be addressed through two fundamental questions:

1. How did we get into this mess?
2. If we take this particular action, what will the consequences be?

In that context, I feel that the Congress might benefit from what Berners-Lee might have to say when it comes to answering the first of those questions!

The Dark Film Behind Thomson’s “Americana”

At the end of last month, I wrote about how the Detroit Symphony Orchestra (DSO) had organized a “watch party” for the Memorial Day Weekend that featured the six-movement suite of music that Virgil Thomson had composed for Pare Lorentz’ film The Plow That Broke the Plains. At that time I observed that this film was anything but an offering of “celebratory Americana;” and I decided to reject the context of the “watch party” and focus entirely on Thomson’s score, which I viewed through the DSO Replay Web site, which provided a performance on February 8, 2019 at which Leonard Slatkin served as conductor. At that time I observed that Thomson’s score tended to be more upbeat than the film, providing the listener with a variety of familiar folk tunes.

Nevertheless, his arrangement for the suite included several suggestions of ironic rhetoric; and I was left curious as to how the music had been deployed in the film itself. Fortunately, the film is available for viewing on YouTube; and, as expected, watching the film was far less upbeat that listening to the suite. Even when the music accompanies the “rolling text” that introduces the film itself, there are any number of suggestions that there will be little to celebrate in the narrative that will follow. Indeed, the film begins by showing the vast herds of cattle that grazed on the grasslands of the Great Plains, never even suggesting that those cattle had displaced indigenous cultures that had learned, over many generations, how to establish a working relationship with a vast expanse of land where water was scarce and the elements were harsh.

The opening image of The Plow That Broke the Plains (before the credits), showing the homesteaders heading for the Great Plains to replace the cattlemen (screen shot from the video being discussed)

Instead, the first part of the film dwells on advertising whose excessive optimism (is there any other kind in advertising?) encouraged a new generation of Americans to occupy the plains and grow large wheat crops. Indeed, the outbreak of World War I had created a major market for wheat; and Lorentz was not shy about observing how the back-breaking work of the homesteaders was converted into an economic boom, which was basically enjoyed only by the financiers on Wall Street. The film then follows the fate of those homesteaders into the postwar period, when demand dropped radically at the same time that the land itself could no longer sustain the productive farming of wheat. The final blow came with the outbreak of dust storms, after which those previously profit-making plains came to be known as the Dust Bowl.

It is worth noting as a sidebar that Lorenz made his film in 1936. I would like to believe that one of the viewers of that film was John Steinbeck. The Grapes of Wrath was published in 1939; and, for my money at least, it remains one of the best what-happened-next narratives to follow the conclusion of The Plow That Broke the Plains. Neither of these narratives puts our country’s history in a particularly comforting light. By all rights they should have called out the need for us to learn from our mistakes. Sadly, most cultures never rise to that challenge; and, for better or worse, ours has never been an exception to that state of affairs.

Are Trump Supporters Having Second Thoughts?

The headline for Alfred Ng's Tech Culture article on CNET felt like a faint glimmer of good news: "Most Americans wish Trump would stop tweeting so much." Admittedly, 69% is a bit narrow for the adjective "most;" and, more to the point, it is unclear to what extent 1000 constitutes a representative sample, particularly in the absence of any information as to just how those polled were selected. Nevertheless, a faint glimmer is probably better than total darkness, which may be what we shall get should Trump decide that the best way to respond to this article is with a Tweet.

More disconcerting is the Trump quote from his 60 Minutes interview justifying his heavy use of Twitter:

When you give me a bad story or when you give me an inaccurate story...I have a method of fighting back.

To be fair, anyone who thinks that politics is not adversarial has to be living in some idealistic alternative universe. Nevertheless, having an argument need not be treated as a matter of going into combat. Indeed, Carl von Clausewitz' famous aphorism about war being diplomacy by other means seems to suggest that combat is what one resorts to when the cooler reasoning of argumentation no longer yields mutually beneficial results.

It goes without saying that Twitter was not conceived to be a medium for argumentation, and trying to use it that way is bound to be frustrating. To the contrary, the whole raison d'être behind Twitter is that it would provide a medium for spontaneous impressions. It would not surprise me to learn that those who first conceived of it saw it as a way to use words when a simple emoticon would not do. The "better angels" of the Internet may even still see it that way; but the Internet is an entropic environment that devours better angels. Donald Trump's use of Twitter has become an object lesson that demonstrates where such entropy will lead.

Bicoastal Blowback

Elizabeth Drew's latest dispatch for NYR Daily on the current election follies is entitled "Down Goes Trump." She leads with the assertion that, as far as Donald Trump was concerned, the whole electoral process was "another tool for promoting himself," taking his own reality TV show to the next level, so to speak. If that is the case, then it may well be that "real reality" is thwarting his objective. This morning the ABC7 News Web site has a story about Trump's star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame having been vandalized. A photograph is included, and the job seems to have been thorough. (The article also mentioned an artist who had built a little wall around Trump's star; but brute force seems to have trumped, so to speak, subtlety!) Even better in my book, however, is the following sentence from Drew's article:

His opulent new five-star hotel in Washington that he’s showed off in campaign events has rooms going begging even at heavily discounted rates, and tenants in two of his residences on New York’s Upper West Side have signed petitions asking that his name be removed from their buildings.

A star on Hollywood Boulevard is little more than symbolism. Blowback on the East Coast seems to be much more a matter of substance!

Ignoring Consequences Continues to be Dangerous!

The latest issue of The New York Review of Books includes a scathing article bu Geoffrey Wheatcroft entitled "Tony Blair's Eternal Shame: The Report." The report in question is the so-called Chilcot, whose proper title is The Report of the Iraq Inquiry, the review of the motives and consequences associated with Great Britain entering the war in Iraq as a partner of the United States. The report was prepared by a Committee of Privy Counsellors chaired by Sir John Chilcot. This is a massive document, 6275 pages distributed across twelve volumes. However, as Wheatcroft observes, it should suffice for most to read the "62,000-word executive summary." To the extent that Wheatcroft's article amounts to a summary of that "executive summary," even that may be hard to take.

As might be guessed from the title, Wheatcroft's major target in former Prime Minister Blair. While he does not call
Blair's relationship with George W. Bush an "unholy alliance," it is clear that he was straining very hard to avoid that phrase. (He does, on the other, rather neatly deflate that concept of a "special relationship" between the United States and the United Kingdom as little more than a deceptive myth.)

The summary of Wheatcroft's summary comes with his concluding assessment of Blair:

And yet in the end Tony Blair isn't a messiah or a madman or a monster. He's a complete and utter mediocrity. He might have made an adequate prime minister in ordinary days, but in our strange and testing times he was hopelessly out of his depth. Now we are left with the consequences.

Since Wheatcroft is British, he kept his attention focused primarily on Blair. Whether or not that description holds just as well for George W. Bush is our business, not his. Nevertheless, I have to emphasize that the most powerful word in that quotation is the last one.

I have long held that we have become a culture that has tried to banish the word "consequences" from our working vocabulary. The last time I expressed this explicitly was in March of 2015. The idea emerged in my writing through observations that everyone seemed to be eager to jump into new technologies without thinking through the implications that technology might have for "unanticipated use." In other words we think only about the cool things we shall be able to do, assuming that they are also good things, totally overlooking the possibilities that "the next new thing" may serve more nefarious purposes we never bothered to consider. By all rights the aftermath of our adventures in Iraq should have been a wake-up call to us all to think about consequences before taking action, yet in today's immediate present, it would seem that few are bothering to think about how the vote they case in November (or the decision they make not to vote) is likely to have consequences on the same magnitude of those examined by Wheatcroft.

Don't Shoot the Messenger!

Once again President Barack Obama is trying to present himself as a voice of reason at a global forum. He is currently at a G7 summit in Japan; and chose to offer a "sidebar" about Donald Trump's ability to deal with world affairs. A report on the BBC News Web site attributed the following observation to Obama:

They [world leaders] are not sure how seriously to take some of his pronouncements, but they're rattled by him - and for good reason, because a lot of the proposals that he's made display either ignorance of world affairs or a cavalier attitude.

My guess is that anyone taking the trouble to read this post will probably agree with Obama, but that's not the point. Now that Trump has officially crossed the threshold of having a majority of delegates the the Republican National Convention, isn't it about time that we stop wringing our hands in righteous dismay and ask just how he managed to get there? Any number of analysts who tracked the Republican primaries know that there is not an easy answer to this question. and the answer will probably involve a mix of factors. It may even be possible to estimate the balance of that mix, but there is a good chance that rationality is not part of it. Thus, unless we understand the reasons for the underlying irrationality, we shall not be in a position to diagnose how we got where we are, let alone what the consequences are likely to be.

Is Technology Innovation Oblivious to Crime?

Here in San Francisco the latest police blotter item involves a woman who managed to steal at least 76 Zipcars over the course of a six weeks. Zipcar was relatively early among those technology-driven innovations that would rid us of all the discomforts associated with car rental, particularly when short-term usage was all that was involved. It is hard from the only innovation to go south in equally innovative ways. Consider all the criminal activity (including assault, stalking, and theft) that has emerged from the "sharing economy" philosophy of drivers being compensated for sharing space in their cars. Of course ugly consequences are not unique to the present decade (he said, with vivid memory of the first time spam circulated on Usenet).

I recently attended a San Francisco Opera press conference at which I was able to prompt some comments about operas based on historical events out of director Francesca Zambello. I found the experience enlightening enough to write an article about it on my Examiner.com national site. Not one to mince words, Zambello unleashed a beautiful take-away quote:

History teaches us lessons; we just don’t always listen.

I am not saying that the technology sector is more deaf to history than any other major segment of our economic structure. Only a few years have elapsed; but my guess is that those obsessed with seeking out innovation in finance have long forgotten This Time Is Different, by Carmen M. Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff. I suspect it all comes down to the fact that a cool new idea will always trump any lesson from history, particularly when the lesson brings bad news. It is more profitable to believe that you are making a change for the better, rather that providing human nature with new opportunities to make things worse.

Bobby Jindal's "Parlor Games"

Last night the Republicans held their Lincoln Day dinner in Des Moines. Chris Good was there covering the story for ABC News. Apparently he decided to confront Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal with the same question that managed to get Florida Governor Jeb Bush to fumble: Knowing what we now know, was the decision to go to war in Iraq a good idea? Jindal dodged the question, dismissing the consideration of such hypotheses as "parlor games." In doing so, he may have earned himself poster-child status in representing our prevailing culture that seems to lives by the motto "Ignorant of history and proud of it."

Put another way, Jindal appears to assign little value to a critical question:

How did we get where we are?

Whether "where we are" is particularly good or really bad (which seems to be the case at present); we need to deal with the present with some frame of reference other than "shit happens." If Jindal's were an isolated voice that could be ignored when cooler heads prevail, then his reinforcement of our willful ignorance of history could be dismissed as a statistical outlier. Unfortunately, he is more likely right there in the center of a statistical norm; and, if, as a culture, we dismiss as a "parlor game" the need to reflect on how we got ourselves into our present mess, then it is likely that the next mess will come soon and with even greater impact.

Rating the Freshness of Food Purchases

I have to say that I have been relatively pleased with the alliance formed between KGO-TV (the ABC affiliate for the Bay Area) and Consumer Reports, particularly since the latter seems to have dropped the "lifetime" subscription as a reward for a donation I made many decades ago (reminding me a bit of Monty Python and the Holy Grail). Nevertheless, I have always been skeptical about Consumer Reports articles about food and nutrition, since they would often base their findings on attributes that different from the criteria stressed by other concerned organizations, such as the Center for Science in the Public Interest. Therefore, I have to question the value of today's report on the quality of fresh produce at different outlets. Regardless of the criteria behind the evaluations, the entire path that brings an item of produce to a customer's shopping bag is long, involved, and totally local. Thus, I have to wonder if, when a particular store is listed in operating out of a large number of states, the resulting rating is an averaging over all of those states or the result of examining only a few (or even one) of them. Even more problematic is that the ratings may have depended in when the outlets were evaluated, since it is not hard to imagine conditions changing radically from one week (or day) to the next.

These days my biggest concerns with inventory, fresh or processed, is how decisions are made. It is not hard to imagine that the large chains now relegate all such decisions to software. They all have had problems making ends meet since the economic downturn, meaning that they have all had to downsize, meaning that they probably let go of a good deal of "expert knowledge," letting some fast-talking consultant convince them that the knowledge would be "preserved" in the software. Indeed, I think we all have cause for concern that the expertise of a human evaluator may be out of the loop for just about any purchase of food made anywhere, with the possible exception of farmers' markets. Furthermore, I suspect that Google-informed consumers have less intuitive knowledge about when the food they buy may be contaminated or just spoiled. The conspiracy theorist in me wonders whether this all amounts to a skillfully calculated plot to "reduce the surplus population!"

The Best and the Brightest May Not Be

Yesterday afternoon Tracy Seipel put up an article on the Web site for the San Jose Mercury News reporting that Stanford University is investigating allegations of cheating. This was apparently announced by University Provost John Etchemendy last Tuesday, but I assume that Seipel article was delayed to allow time to research conditions at other schools. Sure enough, the article also provides data points for Dartmouth College, the University of North Carolina, and Harvard University. It also includes an account of a study by a Stanford Professor of Statistics showing that between 40% and 86% of students reported having cheated while at college. Personally, I find that a rather wide window for a statistical inference; but there may still be cause to believe that something is rotten in the groves of academe.

Two Etchemendy quotes are worth considering:

In violating academic integrity, they are cheating themselves of the very core of our mission -- the process of learning and discovery -- as well as risking severe consequences.

…

But with the ease of technology and widespread sharing that is now part of a collaborative culture, students need to recognize and be reminded that it is dishonest to appropriate the work of others.

Regarding the first, I can only repeat what I have previously observed, that ours has become a culture that no longer includes the word "consequences" in its working vocabulary. As to the second, I would argue that technology has not fostered a "collaborative culture." Rather, it has fostered a culture of appropriation. This is a culture that involves little more than instant gratification for the individual. It used to be that begging, borrowing, and stealing were the alternatives to hard work in achieving such gratification. Now we can add searching with Google to the list, since the prevailing mantra seems to be that it is not stealing if you can find it on the Internet.

As a sidebar I have to say that reading Etchemendy's name tweaked some memories, but I could not bring them into focus. Fortunately, Wikipedia came to my rescue. His entry there reminded me that, with Jon Barwise (who died in 2000), he wrote the book, The Liar: An Essay in Truth and Circularity. That seems to color the current situation with just the right shade of irony.

A Mantra for an Innovation Reality-Check

Whether it involves blue-sky policy statements from President Barack Obama or the Kool-Aid of choice when the rich and mighty gather ever year for the World Economic Forum in Davos, there continues to be an obsession with innovation providing the key to solving all of the world's problems. We can be talking about new toys that create the need for new manufacturing jobs, automatic check-out that allows merchants to cut back on their staff, or driverless cars, that will allow anyone who can afford the car to feel as if (s)he acquired a chauffeur as part of the bargain. Whatever the promise, the mantra that needs to be learned is a simple one:

It works when it works.

(Come to think of it, the founder's of the European Union should have been taught that mantra.) The problem arises when the innovation does not perform as expected, usually because of one or more unanticipated consequences; and, as I have previously observed, "consequences" no longer seems to be part of the working vocabulary of those with the power to make major decisions. The reason I enjoy that Kool-Aid metaphor so much is that we now seem to be in a world in which decision-makers think only about assets, almost as if liabilities no longer enter the mindset. In previous centuries people who thought that way were quickly recognized as delusional. Now they are regarded as prophetic. Go figure it.

Swimming in Repertoire

One of the unforeseen consequences of my having made the move from IT research into writing about music is that I seem to have built up a voracious appetite for repertoire. As I learned from reading Leonard Slatkin's memoir, Conducting Business: Unveiling the Mystery Behind the Maestro, such activity is one of the cornerstones of a conservatory education, at least at places like Juilliard, which Slatkin attended. It presumes that a comprehensive knowledge of music requires the broadest possible account of what has been documented, preferably coupled with devoting time to both recordings and performances to account for what has been made from those documents.

The good news is that I can pursue this activity through both attending as many performances as my schedule (and personal endurance) will allow and following up on opportunities to write about recordings. As of the beginning of March, I shall have been writing for Examiner.com for six years. That was preceded by building up my writing chops through several years of blogging, initially casual and progressively more and more serious. I have thus been evolving out of the state of a "passive consumer" for about a decade, perhaps to the point that repertoire now constitutes the medium of my existence, rather the way in which water does for a fish.

Every now and then someone will ask me how I retain it all. The fact is that I don't; and, at my advanced age, I am less and less likely to do so as time passes. I sometimes joke that I now depend on Google when my memory is failing, meaning that I write as much as I can "into" Examiner.com simply to make sure that Google will help me when I need it.

On the other hand I still make it a point not to take notes during a performance. Paying attention to writing down something means you are not paying attention to your auditory channels, and I simply will not abide by that latter option. Besides, human memory is not a file cabinet. It is an ongoing process of recollection. Just looking at a printed p program seems to be enough to set the wheels of that process in motion. What it yields provides the substance of what I write, and anything that does not emerge from that process was probably not worth writing about anyway.

I thus find myself in a somewhat complex and possibly tenuous relationship with both knowledge and memory. Exercise is as fundamental to maintaining that relationship as physical exercise is in maintaining the health and fitness of my body. (Because the latter is not particularly demanding on mind, I often use it as an occasion to begin to rehearse the thoughts that will find their way into writing.)

Does this protect me against lapses of memory when I need to recall something? Not at all. However, I think it does help me to sharpen my skills as a writer, even when mind is not always up to summoning up the specific memories I need or want.

Will I be able to keep this up indefinitely? I have no idea. Nevertheless, back when I was writing dance reviews as a student, I got to know Kathleen Eaton Cannell, who wrote for The Christian Science Monitor. She kept at it to the very end. One night she wrote up the performance that she had just attended, went to bed, and died peacefully in her sleep.

Bruised Egos

Yesterday I came across a particularly interesting passage by Virgil Thomson:

Well, criticism is often injurious; there is no question about that. Many a recitalist, receiving unfavorable reviews, finds it more difficult to secure further engagements than if the reports had been less critical. Minor careers have been ruined overnight that way. Major careers are rarely harmed by criticism, because major artists can take it. They don’t like to; but they have to; so they do. All the same, it is the big boys, the great big boys that nothing could harm, that squawk the loudest. I know, because I have been in the business for several years now.

The context behind this passage had to do with a biography of Serge Koussevitzky by Moses Smith. Kossevitzky had tried to stop the publication of the book because he found he injurious. (He did not claim that the book was libelous.) Basically, Thomson used his bully pulpit of the Herald Tribune to come to Smith's defense, primarily by arguing that injury was part of the trade, so to speak.

I have no idea how many of my colleagues (including the ones I do not know) give much thought to using injurious language in what they write. One friend once suggested that, whenever I am writing about someone (positively or negatively), I should try to assume the point of view of how that person will actually read what I write. Since I tend to write pieces longer than the ones that show up in print, this includes the question of how much attention that person will pay, just like any other reader.

One consequences is that, whenever possible, I try to begin by finding something positive to say. Sometimes I feel that, if I put enough attention on the positive, the negative will take care of itself. This may amount to a passive-aggressive approach to an observation made by the anthropologist Pierre Bourdieu in trying to identify a cross-cultural universal:

There is nothing worse than to pass unnoticed: thus, not to salute someone is to treat him like a thing, an animal, or a woman.

Another strategy I use is to draw upon the positive as context for discussing the negative. This amounts to giving the performer(s) credit for getting things right part of the time and then speculating on why the technique could not carry over into the rest of the time. There are also occasions when, due to the novelty of the experience, I have not felt equipped to make the transition from perception to judgment. I actually tend to enjoy such situations, because they compel me to put all of my energy into description. I figure that, if I do my job well enough, then there is nothing wrong with my implying that the reader should then make up his/her own mind. After all, that is what any of my readers who take listening seriously are going to do in any case!

A Telling Choice of Words

It was hard to avoid reacting to this lead sentence from an article on the BBC News Web site about the free trade agreement that Australia has signed with China:

Australia's international education industry will benefit hugely from a major trade deal sealed on Monday with China, experts say.

Regular readers probably know that I continue to voice upset over how our country has come to call health care an industry in which market share is more important than the physical well-being of our citizens. I suspect that the shift to the computer-based delivery of course material has already established a similar industrialziation of education. However, it seems as if we deal with the sorry state of education in this country by ignoring it, while health care has become the favored battlefield for conflicts between extreme ideologies.

To be fair, the story about Australia seems to involved the fact that it will be easier for Chinese students to go to Australia to study at the universities there. In other words it does not appear as if the fundamental work practices of education are going to suffer as a result of this agreement. Nevertheless, the article is about market share, addressing the numbers of Chinese students coming into Australia in comparison with the number of Australian students choosing to get their education in another country. Like it or not, the bean-counters are in charge of the future of Australian universities, just as they are here; but here nobody seems particularly interested in paying attention to the state of affairs.

Thinking about the Consequences of the Internet of Things

Sue Halpern's well-reasoned but dystopian analysis of the consequences (are they really unanticipated) of deploying the Internet of Things in the November 20 issue of The New York Review is well worth reading. Sadly, it is unlikely to be read by anyone in a position to reverse the train wreck that is now closer than we think. Even more ironic is that much of Halpern's analysis has been going into people's living rooms thanks to CBS. Person of Interest uses some of the basic ideas behind the Internet of Things and has extrapolated them to a fascinating cautionary tale of absolute power and its abuse. My guess is that those who have the power have decided to let this show have its say because not very many viewers are paying attention. However, if it ever draws audience involvement the way Mad Men does, we can expect that the series will be swiftly cancelled to make sure than no one is moved to think about what it is trying to say.

Is Comcast Being Hacked?

For about half a week I have noticed that specific channels have been unavailable through my Comcast box. Over that period I have watched BBC World Service News go away, come back on Saturday morning, and be gone again later that day. This morning I noticed that Al Jazeera English had been lost, having been my primary alternative to BBC during these "troubles." There have also been some interesting examples of channels, such as BBC America and Showtime, which are unavailable but are accessible through their HD alternatives.

According to the Comcast Customer Service Web site, everything is in great shape. All they know is whether or not there is a signal for my set-top box to detect. They do not care about any of the specifics of that signal. At least through the automated phone service I have been able to confirm that this is a real problem; but, of course, no specifics are to be had. Given the current tenor of the times, it would not surprise me if this is all the result of some external hacking. (Is someone over at AT&T trying to bring down Comcast channel by channel?) What particularly interests me, however, is that this has all the earmarks of a problem with software confronting service technicians who are primarily trained in fixing hardware. Is it only a matter of time before the whole machine stops?

On Scoring Points Rather than Solving Problems

I just saw an article on Al Jazeera English with the headline:

Egypt calls for US restraint over Ferguson

At the very least, this makes for a fascinating case study in foreign relations. Egypt clearly saw an opportunity to tell the United States to put their own domestic house in order before interfering with Egypt's. This has nothing to do with how well or poorly Egypt has dealt with its own rounds of mass protests (or of journalists covering those protests). It is simply a way to score points by telling the United States to mind its own business. By now most of the world is aware of what happened in Missouri and of the almost studied ineptitude of those in charge to deal with the situation appropriately. The fact that Egypt is using this to promote their own questionable interests and policies is just one of the many unanticipated consequences that have arisen from the mishandling of the Ferguson crisis on all levels from municipal to federal.