awahl1138

A very quick note here. Most of my blog posts have had something negative in them about the service facebook.com. Just to mention that I do not take any sort of savage pleasure out of trashing them. I really, really want to like FB and I do love the idea of social media and of connection, which they do incredibly well, so credit to them for that. I'm just wary of them due to the lies they've told and an incident that happened to me personally (which I partially screwed up as well). And we have no idea what a non-FB internet would have looked like. You'd think that with the creativity, someone would have invented something just as good for discoverability. But we'll never know that, because they've been dominant, and pushed all the players out, sometimes or often via the force of coercion.

But to any of my friends reading this: I really try not to be a special snowflake. And I do love people and social interactions! I'm not some kind of grumpy cave dwelling gremlin.

I also wonder if I should keep apologizing for being critical or not. I am very self-critical, so there's that. I don't sit on top of my mental pile of gold, stroking my ego.

Life has an interesting selection of characters. We tend to divide it into good people and bad people. Those who are “really together” (nod to Hitchhiker's Guide, of course, as one must) and those who just kind of... fail. Nobody is saying it's a sharp, black and white division, but we do tend to see successful people as successful and those who fall through the cracks as sort of, well, failures, of some description.

An interesting thing happened in 2018. Anthony Bourdain, chef, writer, television presenter, world traveler, took his own life. No, that's not the interesting part – that's horrible, the interesting bit is what transpired from all this.

The reaction to Bourdain's death was unanimous. There were many tears of sorrow. The public collectively said that we lost a great man, which I agree with. Many credited him with being their inspiration.

And they wondered why he would do such a thing. To kill himself when he seemed to have it all.

The immediate guess was of course, a longstanding battle with depression. The brain is simply broken, we say. We say that this is a mental health issue that has to be treated and that sometimes, some people can't fight the demons any longer. It's a brain chemistry thing, you know.

And the thing was, it's a plausible explanation. It does happen with certain people. Some people do have a chemical imbalance and they need to take meds to be normal. That's one reason.

Crucially to the theme of this blog post, however, there's another reason: Anthony Bourdain was – according to society's standards – a fucking bastard for most of his life. Or to be less pointed, a bit destitute. He was a drug addict and possibly an alcoholic. He wasn't too much of a criminal, or anything like that, but he certainly belonged to the margins of society. The reason why many were shocked at his death is that he committed the act when, again, he seemed to have it all, but he went through what he went through before he became famous by writing Kitchen Confidential, so that must mean something, doubly so: you escaped the darkness only to end it all in the light and the glory.

That was why people were surprised. But it's not irrational to claim that the demons of depression never really leave, and his demons finally caught up to him.

Enter Asia Argento.

A few weeks – days? – after his passing, a story surfaced. Anthony Bourdain's girlfriend was cheating on him with another man, some French film star or director, I forget, Hugo Clement. Stories of them on Instagram surfaced, and around about the same time, Bourdain stopped posting to his social media, and took his life shortly thereafter.

Argento was wearing a shirt saying “you know who you are” and giving the middle finger to the camera.

What's interesting about all this is that she was a figure in the #MeToo movement, a Twitter hashtag which women used to indicate that they had been abused by men – molested or raped or something of the sort, I'm unclear on some of the details – and several celebrities did it, and it really raised consciousness of how many horrible stories there are out there. Bourdain was impressed by her, and was smitten by her generally, very much besotten. This was the general war going on at the time with Hollywood and Harvey Weinstein, where a few women brought forth stories that he had acted improperly. Bourdain was very attuned to the movement and very much against those kinds of predatory characters, and as mentioned all kinds of women have come out since then posting that hashtag, and it's a conversation starter, and hopefully the abuse doesn't happen in future.

But going back to the case of Bourdain, let's evaluate this. His girlfriend, who he was in love with, part of the #MeToo movement, was cheating on him. She's done this to other guys, as well. And Bourdain – though one can never be sure, but the evidence seems pretty conclusive – presumably killed himself out of a mixture of shame, grief, and humiliation.

And society wept for him. And here was an example of hypocrisy, someone (Argento) who claims liberal ideals while proceeding to just do whatever she wanted. And someone suffered for it.

Yet the person who suffered also had a sordid history of drug abuse and questionable behavior, found a new life at the age of 44, traveled the world, and became a comforting voice and presence to millions.

Is anyone blame-free? Are there any saints? Or are we all just fucked up in different ways?

Of course, I don't want to play any moral relativism games. Certain behaviors are wrong and we should call them out when we see them. Some are more toxic than others.

But it's interesting when we do see screwed up people. How many of them could become the next Bourdain, becoming an inspiration? Or when we look at someone, on the other hand, who appears to be respectable: could they become the next Asia Argento, seeming to be on the right side of history yet only doing things for her self gain?

Over the past few months I read Elton John's autobiography – again, very famous, much loved – and he spends essentially half the book talking about his substance abuse, selfish things he's done, violent mood swings. At any point he possibly could have gotten killed or bankrupt or – as he admits in the book – contracted AIDS, Elton John being a gay man and having unprotected sex throughout the 1980's, like Freddie Mercury did, who actually did get AIDS and die of the disease. Yet Elton is still here and Mercury is not (and Mercury never did the same things and was according to his friends a very nice person, proving that life isn't always fair).

John Lennon was also much loved, and wrote Imagine, and became a figure of the peace movement, and he and Yoko shared a deep love. His assassination in 1980 caused some real grief as well. Lennon is celebrated, and remembered.

And yet Lennon abused his women physically and (reportedly) treated Julian, his son, quite badly, in terms of neglect. Yoko banished him away in the early 1970's for reasons I don't remember. When he came back to Yoko I assume things were better, though there were rumours that around the time he died they were no longer together and were putting up a facade for the general public, or at least Yoko was; the story goes that a few days after his death, she moved in with her boyfriend.

So what do we make of all this? The scar marks on otherwise pristine pages? I don't know, but it's interesting. Counter examples exist as well, seemingly good people who in reality are quite bad (though if you've read up to this point the question will occur to you, “Are they much worse than the ones who are celebrated?”): Henry Kissinger, the war criminal, is quite celebrated, Mother Teresa had a saintly image yet glorified the condition of being poor. Bill Clinton is possibly a rapist and, while I do not like Trump and would have preferred a better president, Hillary has some skeletons in the proverbial closet as well. “Crooked Hillary” and “Lock Her Up” is pretty rich coming from a president who fills the swamp rather than drains it, but given her history? It's not entirely wrong. People voted for Trump because they were tired of the lies and business as usual politics and were disheartened by what they'd come to expect from politics.

And I'll just briefly mention Facebook: you'd expect them to care much more about privacy than they do, considering a) Zuckerberg did not start Facebook to meet women (in contrast to The Social Network movie), he was already dating Priscilla Chan at that time, b) Sheryl Sandberg is a women's rights advocate and you would expect her to take a strong privacy stance given the stalking of women that does occur and c) Peter Thiel sued Gawker because they ran a story about his homosexuality – bad enough, but he was also in Saudi Arabia when they did it. And it's a company that says over and over again that transparency and privacy are important... but they don't exactly carry that out.

And how about that Bell Let's Talk campaign that we have here in Canada when they can't even treat their own employees well? I digress.

This is all just to say that we should examine our own behavior and see if there's any hypocrisies there, but just generally, to be aware of what happens behind the curtain. And be curious, and learn, and never stop learning, and infuse more creativity into life rather than be in the cultural gutter. And try to be a good person.

But I also don't like things that end with a moralistic conclusion of “One must strive to do X.”

So I won't.

I just think it's an interesting situation we find ourselves in.

Also, I just realized I had the blog set to “unlisted” before. Oops! At least I figured it out in the beginning of its lifetime

This will be a shorter post -

It's Zuck's world and we're all just living in it. I'll post more anti-FB stuff in later posts but for now I'd just like to clarify the situation for all those who think all social media is equal and who don't think about the companies or personalities that run the services they use to talk to their friends. I love social media – this, write.as, is a form of social media – but not all of it! I don't wish to be anti social, I love people and connection. But the way FB does it is... less than optimal.

Beacon in 2007. Your company literally just got started, then you do things like that?

The fact Zuck took the idea of FB from the Winklevosses, or Aaron Greenspan. Sure people will say “well, FB is huge now, therefore Zuckerberg was right” but you don't really know what else would have transpired in history. It's a shame that we haven't had an alternate timeline to discover where social media developed naturally instead of Zuck running it from the onset (he's a pathological liar). You can say “well, that was then, he's learned now”. Except that he later bullied the Instagram founders and Whatsapp too, and literally lied about acquiring Whatsapp saying the data would be unable to be shared between servers. Silicon Valley has a long list of people who have rubbed up against Zuck's dishonesty.

The shifting privacy settings and expectations, what people signed up for is not necessarily what they have now.

The closing off of protocols. Want to send someone a Facebook message? You need Messenger and a Facebook account for that. No federation here! You used to be able to read your messages via email. No more of that! Gotta go on Facebook. Ads are all that matters. Want to read friends' posts off of Facebook, like via RSS? Can't do that, either.

I will remind you by the way this is a company that talks about “connecting the world”. Fuck right off, you and your horseshit.

The fact they make it addictive as possible. Endless notifications. You're informed when someone has read your message, with a little checkmark. Better sit there refreshing that for 9 hours!

Facebook takes our privacy “seriously”? Don't make me laugh.

This all coming out of a company founded in 2006. Just as the internet was taking off. The fact that it's popular doesn't say much about its technical merit. People joined because it was better than Myspace – which it was. The interface was cleaner, before they stuffed it with bullshit (speaking of which: algorithmic feeds! Want to see posts in chronological? You have to click a separate button for it. And who knows whether that's all your friends' posts, anyway?) And yes, the shifting goalposts over the years (private profiles! You want those? Too bad, Facebook now makes you unable to be unsearchable or have inaccessible profile pages to the public).

I love people. I love social interaction. I don't like Facebook, how much it cares about “privacy” (funniest joke I've ever heard), that it crushes its competition. The rosy public image it portrays compared to what it actually is (why can't companies just be honest?). The internet is wide and vast and there's so much to do in life, so many real connections to make, other ways to contact people. Or you can sit on Facebook and refresh your notifications 99999999 times a day.

I know which one I prefer.

From my vantage point, I think the internet is one of the most fascinating things around. And from a productivity standpoint, it's obviously true that it holds some value. That's sort of trivially true. But it's kind of like looking at a piece of art and declaring that it's useful “because it attracts people to the art gallery so you have a bunch of people in one place to stand around and socialize and drink”. Though that seems like a noble thing in itself.

But the actual power of the thing, what you can do with it, the virtual life you build (which I think is a lost art, the early net was full of small spaces where people got very close on a social level; small communities have their charm) and the topics of exploration is all very exciting. It both piggy backs off of the existing world – when one researches a topic like a volcano erupting or the politics of Russia, those are things in the real world external to the net – and creates worlds of its own as people map out their own existence.

It's unprecedented in the way we have access to information, surely, but it's also unprecedented in terms of expression. And in terms of private identity (which can be an issue with social media, more on that in future posts). And really, in terms of shaping the world. We remember how the Arab Spring owed a lot of its successes due to the existence of the net.

So we have a dynamic, powerful tool, space, etc, that is worth exploring and defending the principles of.

This all makes me... depressed is the wrong word (though that's becoming frequent), but it's quite startling to juxtapose what is possible with the internet to what actually passes for mainstream use.

To be less subtle, in a wider sense, I think culture is somewhat being destroyed.

It's a sort of universal principle and doesn't apply solely to the internet. A society may be more intelligent if its culture is participatory and engaging. And critically, does not attempt to coerce. I understand the value of commerce, but I don't think you can infinitely squeeze blood out of a stone and try to make true what isn't. Over time, things seem degraded, unless you keep your ear to the ground and sense the cultural vibrations: where is everyone going, are they happy here now, if they are not then what happened and is the situation likely to improve?

Momentum is the great killer of this type of flexibility. It takes time to stop, evaluate, and then (potentially) shift. Particularly if it means you'll lose what you've gotten to this point, if you've decided on a certain direction.

Moving on, the question of taste is an interesting one. Because it begs the question of intuition. There are said to be good cultural forms and bad cultural forms, or rather good and bad cultural products. Music is subjective. Or is it? Is a good song subjectively just the random assortment of neurons in the listener's mind? Or is there something bigger?

Here's my theory, to answer my own rhetorical questions. I think people are basically drawn to the same things. I think we're all similar. I don't know why that's true, but it is. There's some music I'm not a huge fan of, but that's a minor variation. But it goes beyond simple taste.

I would say, specifically, that good cultural forms are ones which are honest. A little effort put into the process, but not too much. To the extent that creativity pours out, and then not covering it up with ridiculous restrictions like having to pay the piper of commerciality. Again, you can't squeeze blood out of a stone.

How does intuition and basic creativity without too much unnecessary effort (which leads to the degradation of culture) play out? Well, to list just a few specific examples...

Television is a big one. A hammer blow – symbolically – against what proper culture should be is the idea that the History Channel should run shows like Ancient Aliens which of course has nothing to do with history. You know why they do it: to make money. And as with all examples in making money, yes I do think people should be able to put food on the table (though I think more companies and employees should stand up for their principles strongly) but this is clearly wrong. And it's wrong – beyond the obvious – for the reasons all the other examples of forcing monetization is wrong, that it takes the normal flow of ideas or culture and creates a very specific, forceful definition of what it should be, propped up by an institution. In other words just that I think information itself is basically freely available, but that the executive decisions to create a freeze dried, ready-for-consumption product is a way of forcing the issue to the degradation of culture.

On the subject of TV, good interviews barely exist now. The Dick Cavett show was a wonderful show. The people who he had on the show – artists, who dropped their facade and showed the humanity underneath; more on that in future posts – had the chance to actually speak, uninterrupted, and take their time. It's a far cry from the 8 minute segments of today followed by 9 commercial breaks. And so, culture declines. We don't have proper cultural products like that to rely on, which is to say, simply done, no overcompensation.

I've described one domain. You can probably think of numerous other examples in other domains.

The internet is of course another one. When we log on to Facebook or Twitter (you shouldn't), do we get a clean page, one that encourages exploration? You do not. And much of the internet is also going in that direction. “But that's just subjective taste!” in fact, it isn't. It “feels” ugly. I think 90% (minimum) of the population would agree. The other 10% is reserved for the marketers (Bill Hicks may have been exaggerating when he said to the marketers in the audience at his standup show to kill themselves, but in trying to make a point, he wasn't that far off in expressing frustration) and people who think it's okay for things to be as ugly as possible as long as they make money.

This all goes back to what I said at the start about the internet being fascinating and a place to explore. There needs to be more of that, not less. I don't want to talk about the Facebooks of the world because it deserves its own post but I will just say for now that it does absolutely fit into the category of “destroying culture”.

But in general, all these things I could list are in the same category. You start with something simple, it works, it's fine, if it ain't broke don't fix it, and then they think (what made them popular in the first place, by the way...) it's not enough, do more things to it. And then they go against their intuitions and ruin it.

So we live in an ugly world where websites that rhyme with acebook and witter employ psychological warfare to steal as much attention from you as possible (a precious resource, I might add), television is marketed to the lowest common denominator, radio is the same, grocery stores have copies of Gossip Magazine rather than the classics of literature. The world doesn't feel like “ours” any more. It doesn't feel organic, you feel like you can't explore it as well as, say, the early days of the internet, when things really were done according to principles of freedom and unfettered inquiry.

We can take it back, but it requires an understanding of what the problems are, and unfortunately it's difficult to focus on every news cycle to see whether certain corporations really care or if their PR departments just repeat the same bullshit as every other corporation who does something unethical but claims to have the interests of the public at heart. If we don't, we'll never reach our potential. Reject culturally abusive things. But how to get there? It feels tiring to fight the world all the time.

Listening to intuition is a good first step.