The past is another country

I had no idea this was ever a thing: apparently the question of whether a man could marry his deceased wife's sister had the political moralists of Britain in knots for centuries -- including recent ones. Kind of puts the gay marriage debate into some perspective:

The drama begins in 1835 – before which year marriages with deceased wive’s sisters were not void, but voidable by legal action. Henceforth they were illegal in Great Britain. From 1841 to 1909 there were 35 failed attempts to fire through Parliament successive shafts from a whole quiver of deceased wife’s sister marriage bills. ... 

From the Saturday Review, in 1876: "an example of the diseased craving for abnormal enlargements of personal liberty which is the seamy side of Liberalism." 

It would take a man more than a year, reading the equivalent of a book a day, to toil through the vast morass of literature inspired by the theme of marrying a deceased wife’s sister. Among the more engaging titles are those of the earlier treatises; for instance, Charles Blount’s To HisFriend Torismond, to Justifie the Marrying of Two Sisters the One After the Other (1695), or John Quick’s A Serious Inquiry into the Weighty Case of Conscience Whether a Man May Lawfully Marry His Deceased Wife’s Sister (1703) …

It was not until 1907 that this remnant of Leviticus (actually a misinterpretation of Leviticus, I think) was removed from British law.

Self-branding

[[I'm doing some housecleaning on the blog; this is a draft from over a year ago that I never got around to releasing]]

Here's a chunk I edited out of the Personae post, because it seemed a wee bit self-pitying:

The people who seem to thrive in this culture are those who are full-time extroverts, the kind of people who have constructed a persona for a particular purpose and/or audience and live it out 24/7. San Francisco is full of people like that, but I'm not one of them.

But danah boyd has a good rant on Facebook, in which she made essentially the same point and introduced a good term of art:

With this backdrop in mind, I want to talk about a concept that Kirkpatrick suggests is core to Facebook: radical transparency. In short, Kirkpatrick argues that Zuckerberg believes that people will be better off if they make themselves transparent. Not only that, society will be better off... if people make themselves transparent. And given his trajectory, he probably believes that more and more people want to expose themselves. Silicon Valley is filled with people engaged in self-branding, making a name for themselves by being exhibitionists. It doesn'™t surprise me that Scoble wants to expose himself; he is always the first to engage in a mass collection on social network sites, happy to be more-public-than-thou. Sometimes, too public. But that i™s his choice. The problem is that not everyone wants to be along for the ride.

Of course, she is a consummate self-brander and I am not, so even if we are saying the same thing, it ends up in quite different speech acts.

Personally, I hate being labeled and classified, it always seems limiting. This is a constant irritation, for example when recruiters ask me if I'm a front-end or back-end engineer (or even worse, a "Javascript engineer"). Fuck that, I'm an across-the-board engineer (or better, a software designer, at least that's what I aspire to), and just about everything I've built involves jointly created front- and back-end work. But that doesn't help them slot me into the slots they are trying to fill.

This shouldn't get my hackles up. People need to know what role you are playing if they are to interact with you. I often feel my attitude is some kind of leftover sixties romanticism, a belief that everyone drop their masks and interact authentically...which is a rather childish belief, but persists somewhere down in my subconscious.

For similar reasons I've never been able to fully adopt a political, philosophical, or religious belief system either. All my lame efforts at spiritual writing, for instance, comes from being unable to identify with any religion, but being almost equally repulsed by the smug scientific atheists. I am trying to find a truth that is not this, not that, because all the interesting things seems to lie in the lightly-settled borderlands between existing fields and existing systems.

During my time in academia, I was in a lab at MIT that was founded to be more interdisciplinary than the old AI lab (which was originally an interdisciplinary place, but was in the process of congealing into a settled discipline of its own around my time), and while there I managed to help invent a new subfield that was even more interdisciplinary than that. But I didn't manage to turn that into an intellectual home, so went on to other things. At some point the urge to be interdisciplinary starts to look like active resistance to discipline.

Or maybe it's just GrouchoMarxism: I don't care to belong to any club that will accept people like me as members. Anyway, for whatever reason, my thoughts and interests seem to actively resist categorization. Which I like to believe helps keeps them honest, fresh, original, and alive, but also makes them damn hard to describe to anyone else, let alone be stamped with a brand and put out into the marketplace.

[[Realized after posting that self-branding literally means "searing a symbol into your own flesh".]]

Half a cheer for libertarianism

Ron Paul is having his moment and as a result everyone is examining his particular brand of libertarianism, in general finding it pretty odious what with its fairly strong connections to neocofederate racists and whatnot. All these libertarian-haters-come-lately annoy me, since I've been doing this for decades! So in order to go against the current, I thought I'd say a few words about what I like about libertarianism.

If there wasn't anything there that I found attractive, I would not bother with attacking it so much. Or in other words, my attacks on libertarianism are a reflection of an internal argument between different aspects of myself.

Up until a few years ago, I thought libertarians were basically just misguided nerds, who had fallen in love with the formal elegance of free-market theories and mistaken this abstraction for a viable system of government. This elegance may be hard to understand by those who are neither geeks nor libertarians, but for those who are one or the other, it exerts an almost metaphysical appeal. Markets are wonderful because nobody is in charge. Prices represent condensed chunks of information about supply and demand, and adjust themselves automatically, with no Central Bureau of Price Control. Money does in fact encode human needs and abilities into a readily exchangeable form, and that's a good thing.

That's the positive vision of libertarianism, and it's something that I can appreciate a bit, despite being aware of its limitations. The negative aspect of libertarianism, something I can also get behind, is their healthy distrust of government, authority, and centralization. Such tendencies are found on the moderate left too, but generally run into the problem that the moderate left wants to do things for society, and you can't do things without an institutional structure, and that generally means a government.

So the libertarian starts out with a couple of appealing ideas. The problem (or so I thought until recently) is that they just don't think them through enough, they don't understand that corporate power can be as damaging to freedom as government power, they don't understand that some centralization can be a good and necessary thing, they don't understand that society will be ordered one way or the other and refusing to acknowledge the machinery of society just lets others run away with it. But despite the manifest flaws, at least there is some underlying idealism.

But my picture of the libertarian movement turned out to be incomplete. Present-day libertarianism seems to involve at least four major threads:

1. idealists motivated by the above vision, generally infused with some fictional support from Robert Heinlein or Ayn Rand;
2. big-money corporate interests fighting regulation (see Kochtopus); 
3. neoconfederates, racists, and the usual extreme-right whackjobs;
4. leftover anti-communists from the cold war era.

The relative role of each of these is an interesting question that I don't know enough of the history to answer. My personal encounter with libertarianism happened through MIT and the early Internet, which has heavily biased towards (1). Recently I've become more aware of the other two motivating forces, which are probably more important politically since the appeal of (1) is limited mostly to nerds.

Ron Paul, on the other hand, is fatally compromised by his roots in (3). This manifests very noticably in his policy proposals. For instance, rather than opposing all drug laws as s strict libertarian would, he wants to devolve the issue back to the states, as if only the Federal government is capable of infringing on liberty. That particular view are easy to trace back to the so-called "state's rights" movement and general racial backlash.

It's a pity that the only candidate who opposes the American imperium is fatally contaminated by this kind of stench.

Blogyear 2011 in Review

Time for a year-end retrospective of the blog. Mostly this filters out the posts that are of just passing interest. There seem to be more posts included than in past years, so I guess I'm getting more profound. This has been a hell of a year in so-called real life, so I'm probably just diving more deeply into concept-space in order to escape.

As usual, the categories are somewhat arbitrary, and if there is any value at all in my writing, it lies in how it cuts across these groupings.

Media, Technology, Computation

Occupy Computation
Not Everything is Free
Pouring Thoughts into New Vessels
Performing Ourselves
Lispitaph

Politics, Violence, Authority

On Political Violence
St. Augustine, O.G.
The Pointy End of the Spear
Gay Marriage Impacts Everyone
Babylon is Nothing But an Infinite Game of Chance

Rebellion, Anarchy

Inanearchy
A Furious Egalitarianism
On OWS
Be Your Government
Transgression

Causality, Conspiracy, Group Agency, Leadershit

Philosophy of Conspiracy
Loci of Knowledge
Don't follow leaders, watch the parking meters
Blame Game
Working Toward Steve Jobs
The Great Man Theory

Latourishness

Argument as the Basis for Thought
Visible Strings
Morlocks and Eloi
The Potato Chips Did It
Elan Vital

My brilliant career

Unauthorized Expertise
Report from Inconsistency Robustness 2011

Libertarianism

Ron Paul R[love]ution (suddenly more timely)
Volunteered Slavery
Libertarians for Slavery
Libertarian Bizzaroworld
Libertardian
[I got so tired of this topic, and my inability to leave it alone, that I started a new microblog for it]

Religion

Counting the Omer: Compassion (and following in series)
Why do Religion?
How to Avoid the Singularity
Random Rosh Hashana Religion Ruminations
This Embarrassment

Vaclav Havel

Vaclav Havel has died. I always had an odd sort of affinity for him, perhaps because he looked a bit like my father, who was also a native of Prague. Here's some of his writing that seems very apropos of the events of the day:

... That week was an experience I’ll never forget. I saw Soviet tanks smash down arcades on the main square and bury several people in the rubble. I saw a tank commander start shooting wildly into the crowd. I saw and experienced many things, but what affected me most powerfully was that special phenomenon of solidarity and community which was so typical of that time. People would bring food and flowers and medicine to the radio station, regardless of whether we needed them or not. When Tríska didn’t broadcast for a couple of hours, the station was bombarded with telephone calls asking if we were all right. ... I have no intention of romanticizing that period either. I only think that, taken all together, it made for a unique phenomenon which to this day, as far as I know, has never been analyzed in any depth sociologically, philosophically, psychologically, or politically. But some things were so obvious you could understand them immediately, without any scientific analysis. For example, that society is a very mysterious animal with many faces and hidden potentialities, and that it’s extremely shortsighted to believe that the face society happens to be presenting to you at a given moment is its only true face...None of us knows all the potentialities that slumber in the spirit of the population, or all the ways in which that population can surprise us when there is the right interplay of events, both visible and invisible.

And more:

Or the question about socialism and capitalism! I have to admit that it gives me a sense of emerging from the depths of the last century. It seems to me that these thoroughly ideological and often semantically confused categories have long since been beside the point. The question is wholly other, deeper and equally relevant to all: whether we shall, by whatever means, succeed in reconstituting the natural world as the true terrain of politics, rehabilitating the personal experience of human beings as the initial measure of things, placing morality above politics and responsibility above our desires, in making human community meaningful, in returning content to human speech, in reconstituting, as the focus of all social action, Ihe autonomous, integral, and dignified human "I," responsible for ourselves because we are bound to something higher, and capable of sacrificing something, in extreme cases even everything, of his banal, prosperous private life-that "rule of everydayness," as Jan Patočka used to say-for the sake of that which gives life meaning. It really is not all that important whether, by accident of domicile, we confront a Western manager or an Eastern bureaucrat in this very modest and yet globally crucial struggle against the momentum of impersonal power.

Friday night funk comes on Thursday this week

I had some unutterably profound thoughts this morning about the reconciliation of religion and science, the nature of existence, and the origins of political order but decided to spare everyone and put up this instead:

 

From the Treme soundtrack album which is quite worthwhile.

Occupy Computation

The title slogan popped into my brain this morning; now I have to figure out what it means. I have a pretty solid idea of what computation is and I hope you do too, so this will mostly explore the meaning of "occupy".

Really it's what I've been trying to achieve for most of my career -- making computational worlds visible, controllable, buildable, and habitable by the people who need to interact with them. Often this manifests as some form of end-user programming language, but there are other ways to do it. Spreadsheets, for example, succeeded because they created a tactile, habitable way of interacting with data.

Occupying a computational (or virtual) space is different than occupying physical space, of course. Easier in that there are no logistics to overcome, none of the scarcity and commitment that defines our physical world. On the other hand we have highly evolved tools for dealing with physical reality; our methods for dealing with computational worlds are primitive and difficult to use in comparision.

Virtual Reality always seemed to me like a crude, overly-literal way to have people live in computation. So I've not spent much effort on 3D graphics and goggles, instead I'm more interested in coupling more modest user interfaces technology with complex worlds like bioinformatics, animal behavior, programming in general. So I've built visual programming systems, tactile interfaces, spreadsheet-like systems, and the like, all in an effort to lower the barrier between mind and the structures in the computer.

 Part of occupying computation is erasing the class barriers between developer and user. in this world, users are the 99%, developers like me are in the 1%. Other people have noted that the word "users" is in itself somewhat demeaning*; "the only two industries that call its customers users is the computer industry and drug dealers." The word encodes a kind of passivity which needs to be challenged. Users need to become programmers. There have been many attempts to extend programmability to the non-expert; I've worked on quite a few such projects. I don't think any of them were wildly successful, partly because either they come from programmers who think everyone should think like them, or they come from non-programmers, in which case they are messy and inelegant.

I ran across the phrase "habitable systems" awhile back, although I can't remember where (ah, OK, it's from Richard Gabriel's book Patterns of Software (big PDF)). Gabriel is, non-coincidentally, a Lisper. Habitability, in his writing, is linked to the idea of piecemeal evolutionary growth -- designing software systems so that the inhabitants can modify them based on their day-to-day changes in experience and needs:

I think this should be the goal for computer science practice. Most programming languages are excellent for building the program that is a monument to design ingenuity—pleasingly efficient, precise, and clear—but people don’t build programs like that. Programs live and grow, and their inhabitants—the programmers—need to work with that program the way the farmer works with the homestead.

Habitability is great -- but the point of an Occupy Software movement is to demand habitability, to find ways to force systems to be habitable. It's a more active form of the concept.

Lisp environments are (for me, and many others) the quintessence of a computational habitable systems. Lisp combines several properties -- interpretability with a read-eval-print loop, a basic data structure that is simple to serialize and deserialize, a unity between programs and data -- to make an environment where you can touch what's going on. This quality is so important, and so missing from standard languages (although this is changing). The very first thing I did when encountering Java was to write a small Lisp, not to actually program in but for the REPL loop, to give me a way to inhabit the computational world.

 One of the keys to the web's explosive success (taken for granted these days, but in no way inevitable) is that its standers were open, and its contents were open -- for any web page you see that does something interesting, you can click on View Source and see how it did it. So many non-technicals learned web building in this way. But that only gets you so far.

The Free Software Movement started out as a political effort to resist what was effectively an enclosure of the commons -- what was open research software, habitable by anybody with sufficient technical skills, was being converted to proprietary code that locked most people out. This has been amazingly successful in creating occupy-able systems, but only for hackers. Ordinary people don't have access. So the software is only sort-of habitable.

A hacker is someone who knows how to inhabit a system, who wants to inhabit it so much that they will do anything to force their way in, (in some meanings of the term) will go so far as to use illegal techniques to overcome barriers set in his way.

The Maker movement is another cultural push in the direction of habitability. All these motions are efforts to make everybody an insider -- whether this is practical or not, it's enormously appealing; the inclusivity of it very much in the American mold.

As an example of a non-habitable system, take iTunes and its genius feature (which generaates music playlists based on a starting example). This works rather well, and I use it a lot, but lately I've been irritated at its repetitiveness -- the same songs from my collection keep coming up again and again until I'm sick of them. Presumably there is some parameter hidden in there, but I can't change it because the geniuses at Apple didn't see fit to create a UI affordance for it.

If it was open source, then in theory I could go study the code, find where this parameter is, and alter it. In practice I'd be unlikely to do so (for one thing, it's probably written in a language I don't program in every day, and thus the overhead to figure it out would be pretty large). So an imagined inhabitable music player would not only be open source, but have its rules encoded in some accessible way, so that you don't have to be an expert to modify it.

So, this is what occupy means to me -- a declaration, both individual and collective, that I/we have a right to inhabit this world, this space, this society. To live in it, make it habitable, to share it, to humanize it. And that these rights are not handed out by some authority, but must be taken. Spaces under the control of systems that are not life-enhancing must be occupied and transformed. That's the impetus behind the main movement of OWS -- the shared recognition that the financial system is a life-sucking vampire squid and needs to be replaced -- with what, nobody knows, but that is, for now, beside the point.

As I went walking I saw a sign there
And on the sign it said "No Trespassing."
But on the other side it didn't say nothing,
That side was made for you and me.
                    -- Woody Guthrie, This Land is Our Land

Now the occupy meme is starting to spread. There are many things I'd like to occupy, areas that seem closed where they should be open. Occupy music, occupy language, occupy religion, occupy your own mind... This blog itself is an act of occupation, my little insistence that my voice is out there and part of the public discourse. There are people with orders of magnitude more impact than I have -- doesn't matter, much. It is the act of occupying that is important.

One last note: The future is going to be a network of smart, networked objects and algorithmic policy engines. Our lives will be only become more inextricably bound up with software. It is critically important that these systems not be closed off, that ordinary people retain a measure of control. We will be living in these systems whether we like it or not, but there is a difference between mere living and occupying.