is a blog by Brendan
Holy. If you’re on the Interweb, you’ve heard about the Wikipedia guy who said he was a professor and deleted everybody’s stuff and nobody could argue with him because he was an editor? But then, no, he was a liar and a college dropout and a tool? Right.
I went to school with that guy.
I wonder why that wasn’t in the alumni magazine. KENTUCKY.
Also: WIKIPEDIA.
Thanks to Maria’s parents Mike and Susie, Scott, DC and Beth. We owe you guys a hell of a lot more than those enchiladas.
So I understand why people like me like Portland, and part of it is that it really wants you to like it. It wants that so bad. It got itself a giant bookstore and really good pizza, and it rounded the edges off all the public iconography. It combined low but steady pedestrian traffic with worthwhile public transportation. It cleaned up the litter and slathered itself in wifi! It put flowers on its manhole covers just for you.
And the only real negative I’ve got to answer that is that it seems a hell of a lot like bait? I suppose that’s habitual post-hipster paranoia, but seriously, I’m waiting for the catch to spring. Maybe it’s just that if you live here you forget what black people look like. This place is whiter than a snow leopard eating ice cream off my butt.
Responses to my last post, saved from the feed:
Ben: “All this copyright nonsense gets worse, eventually spiralling into ‘The War on Information’.”
Josh: “Assuming that your parents are baby boomers, your parents’ generation were unique, the only generation in history to have been able to consume without responsibility. Unfortunately, it’s unlikely that any future generation will have that opportunity.”
Kevan: “I’m not sure how bad a thing it necessarily is, but the next generation being able to dig through their parents’ online diaries and data shadows is going to be quite big and strange. Reading unguarded entries about what their parents really thought of you when you were young, stocking up on ‘if you did this when you were my age, why can’t I do it now?’ ammunition, and being able to stalk some of your crushes or bullying-targets all the way back to birth.”
Catherine: “Also, the increasing dichotomy between rural and urban cultures. People from, say, Seattle can be a mite uncomfortable in rural Georgia. People from, say, Atlanta are often a mite uncomfortable in rural Georgia.”
All thoughtful, all excellent. Catherine’s response is closest to my own worries: that we will allocate greater bandwidth to strident, divisive, polemical speech than to speech that crosses boundaries. I’m not arguing for censorship of radicalism here–my own brand of radicalism is specifically anti-censorship–but warning against the rapid propagation of our trust networks through people who will tell us only what we want to hear. When you can find a thousand people who agree with you more easily than you can find one dissenter, you are on the road to becoming an instrument.
I think it’s widely accepted that my parents’ generation, or at least quite a lot of them, participated in a sexual and chemical revolution that they enjoyed at the time without foreseeing its consequences–STDs, a wasteful drug war, the embourgeoisment of all their good music, and a lot of boring retrospective movies. Hideous design themes. The backswing of the Eighties. I could go on.
Not that there weren’t benefits, of course, and I’m glad I was born after they became widespread. I think I’m well-suited for my own generation’s information revolution. But is any revolution on this scale without cost? What are we not foreseeing?
Guess who’s a big old jackass! The guy who washes his pants with his paycheck in the pocket. Why, that’s me!
That said, my current system of payment involves my issuing an electronic invoice, their cutting a check a week later, sending that check on a week-long 740-mile journey in a check-shaped envelope with a transparent window, and having me physically carry said check five blocks to the same bank every damn week. You’d think a company that is made of Internet could streamline this process somehow! I’m not denying my own culpability here, but that doesn’t mean I can’t call shenanigans on the system. The McDonald’s next door offers direct deposit, and my last employer required it, and my current employer should at least make it an option.
Update 1337 hrs: Spookily, right after I posted this, my boss called me to say that a) I’m now in the corporate bonus pool, despite being a consultant, and b) I just got a significant raise. All complaints withdrawn! Forever! Probably not forever.
I’m RIGHT HERE, GUYS
NEVER BUILD YOUR OWN COMPUTER. Thank fucking Christ I bought a backup system last month, and double thanks I bought it from Apple.
My purchase of a laptop justified itself today when the RAM in my tower exploded and lost me about six hours’ worth of work. Bad RAM! Literally, bad RAM! It would have cost me another day and a half if I didn’t have the little white rectangle on which I’m typing this. Cost-benefit ratio so far is about 9:2. At least it’s tax-deductible.