I once read a statistic, that more content is produced each year than was created in the previous five thousand years. At first blush this seems like an improbable feat, but delving into some of the available statistics about the internet and it doesn't seem impossible. Take YouTube for example, I understand 300 hours of video are uploaded every minute. That is 9,460,800,000 hours of video every year. Content is indeed king, but for all the volume, does quality suffer?
If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants. – Isaac Newton's letter to Robert Hooke
Newton knew a thing or two about sight, in his book Opticks he was the first to use a diagram of a prism as a beam expander. But for all his original ideas, his letter to Hooke is important as it underscores the reality of creative endeavours and original research: that each new work builds on that which went before. A theme on which the FOSS community relies heavily. Take my operating system of choice, Pop OS. It stands on the shoulders of Ubuntu, Debian and GNU. This is a heritage of which I am proud to take part (view the source code of this page to see the design inspiration).
It is Sunday and I feel the weight on my shoulders of the week just gone and the week that is to come. Perhaps this sensation is why many cling to the Biblical notion:
Six days thou shalt do thy work, and on the seventh day thou shalt rest. – Exodus 23:12
Whatever the trigger, it is in such moment of struggles that I feel most acutely how laborious it can be to commit to #100DaysToOffload. In pondering if I could take a leave pass, it got me to thinking about recent headlines in which I have seen politicians from different areas of the world face a pummelling in the press for taking some 'downtime.'
In his seminal 1920 book Liberty and the News, Walter Lippmann warned:
[those] who have lost their grip upon the relevant facts of their environment are the inevitable victims of agitation and propaganda. The quack, the charlatan, the jingo . . . can flourish only where the audience is deprived of independent access to information.
In a sense this is both self-evident and the justification for journalists and whistle-blowers the world over. Though countless bottles of ink, or in the digital age countless bytes, are routinely spilled in support of this notion, it bears revisiting. Not from the standpoint of 'independent access to information' but from the standpoint of the 'quack, the charlatan, the jingo.' The reason is this: history tends to be written by the victors and sometimes the victors are charlatans who seek to re-write history so the facts fit their political objectives.
Sound. It pervades my every waking moment. From the soft patter of the rain as I type, to the grating audio of hideously mixed music and vocals in the latest bit of social media garbage the talentless insist on inflicting upon us in a vain attempt to become 'influencers.'
A young poet once said to Mallarmé, “I had the most marvellous idea for a poem this afternoon.” “Oh dear,” said Mallarmé, “what a pity.” “What do you mean?” said the young poet, stung. “Well,” said Mallarmé, “poems aren't made of ideas, are they? They're made of words.”
Though an apocryphal tale, it is nonetheless useful in understanding the challenges of blogging, particularly on as regular a basis as #100DaysToOffload.
In a New York Times book review in 2016, Michiko Kakutani delivered an assessment of Volker Ullrich biography of Hitler which was perceived as drawing a comparison between Trump and der Führer. One does not need to know much about the rise of Hitler and the NSDAP to see that even though Kakutani never mentioned Trump by name, the comparison was so thinly veiled as to be positively naked. While the approach is but one of a long line of 'historical' comparisons which pervades political discourse, what is of particular interest is that while many historical comparisons are used to normalise a present event or set of choices, comparisons involving Trump leverage history to abnormalise him.
In the early 1990's, Daniel Bernstein, a Berkeley mathematics PhD student, wanted to publish the source code for an encryption algorithm he had written along with an accompanying mathematics paper. In the age of Github, such an event would go largely noticed. Particularly if the author is a student, who usually struggle to get their professors to read their work, let alone anyone else. But in the 1990's, this was groundbreaking. This is because until what became known as Bernstein v. Department of Justice,' the US government designated encryption as a 'munition,' classifying it along with a range of deadly weapons and thus subject to export restrictions.
In around 1140, a Spanish Jewish philosopher and poet, Judah Halevi (יהודה הלוי), wrote perhaps his most famous book. The Kuzari, or to give it its full title The Book of Proof and Evidence in Support of the Abased Religion, took the form of a dialogue between a rabbi and a pagan. The central theme of the work was the existence of a 'God of history' rather than an abstract 'God of the philosophers.' The work explicitly rejected the neoplatonism which suffused the milieu in which Judah Halevi lived and advocated for a God of the Jews and a God of Islam. Part of the answer to the problem for which Halevi was trying to solve was a defect in the language used to talk about God.
In the modern age, we are also experiencing defects in the language used to talk about privacy.
A lament I often read in the Fediverse is that too many people flock to a handful of mega instances, a process which steadily centralises a platform designed to be decentralised. Yet for all its noble goals, can the Fediverse break free of becoming yet another example of a Pareto distribution? A phenomenon Robert K. Merton termed the 'Matthew effect' – link to PDF of his 1968 article:
For unto every one that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance: but from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath. -Matthew 25:29