How My Wife Creeps Up On Me And Then Hampers Me And Then Loves Me.
As someone who works at home, and likes stuff on in the background, I watch a lot of television – usually Netflix streaming. And slowly but surely, if the show is good, my wife takes over.
Because she’s not as picky as I am; left to her own devices, she works in silence. So I put on a show, and if it’s good I start grinding my way through it, episode after episode. And if it’s really good, then Gini will start making comments – “Oh, that was a nice moment,” or “That was a spectacularly well-written scene.”
This has been happening with Justice League, which is fascinating to watch, as Gini has zero familiarity with this mythology. I mean, she knows who Superman and Batman are, but has no clue where Wonder Woman came from or who this “Clayface” guy is. And for a so-called “kid’s” show, Justice League has some really solid plotting – it’s simple, yes, but it’s that much harder to pull off a simple plot. You can’t compensate with elaborate set design or complex characterization.
Yet somehow, Justice League boils these iconic heroes down to the raw elements of character, making purposeful tweaks to make them more interesting. Superman’s got a very angry streak, sometimes tempted more to murder than we’d be comfortable with. Batman’s secretive hubris causes conflict. The Martian Manhunter’s “my planet is dead” angst is occasionally a plot driver. It’s not enough to sap their heroism, but it definitely makes them interestingly flawed.
And so Gini is watching with me, and all of this is new to her. For me, Mongul is old hand, the Warworld is just another tweak. But to her, she’s never seen anything like this, so Mongul becomes an interesting villain in his own right. She has zero idea whether Doctor Fate is a villain or a good guy. She doesn’t remember Aquaman as anything but the prickly monarch of the underwater world. And she’s kind of excited to be getting this window into my world, hearing my commentary on what “classic” Green Lantern is usually like, but happy to finally see what Childhood Ferrett liked in a way that Grown-Up Gini can love.
But last night came the inevitable point of no return; we sat down and watched two episodes together when we weren’t working, just watching the show on its own merits. And I knew that Gini had claimed this show as her fiefdom, and I could no longer watch it without her lest I cheat on her in my heart of media-hearts. This had migrated from a “Ferrett can do solo” to “A couple activity,” which means that I get to watch far less of it. Gini leaves the house two or three times a day to meet with clients, defend people at courthouses, drop off paperwork. That’s cutting into valuable Justice League time.
It’s a loss, and a gain. My next few weeks will be a little draggier at work, because as I won’t have DC entertaining me while I’m refactoring this tangle of spaghetti code. But Gini and I will be able to share our reflections on the show, and when we’re walking outside and holding hands we’ll be discussing how we didn’t see that Superman being banished to the future would involve such a kick-ass moment with Vandal Savage.
It’s a loss, but the gain is so worth it.
Six Paragraphs To Explain Why Gun Control Never Passes.
“Name me the Senator or Representative who ever lost his or her seat because they voted against Gun Control.” – Mark Evanier
The reason gun control bills keep failing in the NRA – I mean, the Senate – despite widespread popular support is the same reason that effective environmental regulations rarely pass: the so-called support is pretty weak, but the opposition is vicious.
Which is to say that no Senator ever lost his job for voting down some green-friendly bill. People like the environment, sure, if you ask them…. but are they willing to fall on their swords over it? Will they hound Senator Traitor for months, make this weak-kneed failure on Mother Nature the centerpiece of the next campaign, elect someone who will protect the wetlands? No. That’s called “weak support,” in that the polls show a strong “Yes!” but the reality is a shrug.
Whereas if you vote against gun control, the NRA will magnify an already-vindictive opposition. They do remember. They will not forget come the next election. And you will be out on your ass if they can help it.
If this upsets you, well, you’d better take the same approach for gun control that the opposition takes against it. Remember who voted against the bill this day. Write them letters. Tell them you’re gonna vote them the fuck out of office. Better still, write your local representative the next time you hear about any sort of gun control bill floated, and tell them in advance that they’d damn well better support it, or you will not support them. Be proactive, not lamentably behind.
In case you need the help in remembering: Here’s the list of Senators who voted against it. If you’re as upset as you claim, and not just shrugging, then write to them today.
Writer Happiness Is….
….getting a note from the podcast that’s about to perform your work, telling you that the narrator – who is new to the lineup – is absolutely thrilled to be starting his career here off with “a Ferrett Steinmetz story.”
The happy-dance lasts for about three-point-two seconds before you think, “Oh, I hope they liked it then,” but it’s a weird reminder that you’re in the stage of your career where you do have fans. Of your fiction. Still weird.
I Do Not Matter, And Neither Do You.
The Internet has revealed that normal humans are way less predictable than we thought.
My favorite example of this is a brief time-travel trip to 1993, where you’re in the headquarters of Microsoft – the biggest software company on the goddamned planet. They control 90% of all operating systems, they control 95% of the word processing and spreadsheet market, and they have just decided to ram their bulk into the Encyclopedia Britannica and hip-bump it off the planet.
That’s right, bitches: Encarta is here. Tremble. Microsoft’s about to fling all of its mighty resources at it…
…and it is your job to tell them not to bother.
Why? Well, imagine sitting before Bill Gates in 1993 and saying, “Look, you’re gonna give it your best shot paying researchers to create content for you, but, uh, as it turns out, people would prefer to work for free. I know, crazy, but thousands of people will love writing huge-ass entries that will wallop your little video-clips in terms of quality and up-to-dateness. And yeah, you’d probably argue that trolls would deface that in a New York Minute, but hey. They’ll be an issue, but there will be more loyal people guarding their fiefdoms of Wal-Mart and abortion entries than there will be trolls. They’ll work harder than anyone you could possibly hire with all your money. And by the mid-2000s, Encarta will be a joke.”
You can see how that wouldn’t go over well. But that’s how the Internet works, man. These words you’re reading? Published entirely thanks to the benefit of open-source software, Apache and mySQL, a piece of web server that’s ridiculously complex and stable and used nearly everywhere, yet staffed almost entirely by volunteers.
And here’s the crazy bit: I don’t know anyone who volunteers time on that.
I mention this because the repeating motif of complaints from yesterday’s theorizing on the future of news was entirely “I”-centered: I wouldn’t contribute news. I didn’t see anything interesting on my feed. I wouldn’t be interested in that.
That’s the thing: you don’t have to be, and yet it can happen anyway. The question is not “you,” but rather “Would enough other maniacs want to do this?”
What the Internet has shown is that if you bring enough people into the same space, a significant submass of those people can create profound change. As I said, I don’t know anyone who contributes patches to Apache. But I use it daily. Because it works. And Apache is used on about 80% of web servers, edging Microsoft out of the business yet again.
No, maybe you don’t use Twitter, or didn’t see any good news on it… But a lot of people did. And those people, even if you don’t know a goddamned one of them, even if you don’t think Twitter is worth anything, are still causing news corporations to go, “Crap, we’re slow compared to this onslaught, how can we transform ourselves to be more relevant?”
Are the majority of people getting their news from the Internet? No! Is that enough to fuck newspapers up heavily, and to force CNN to start acting in more Internet-friendly ways? Absolutely. The future does not require everyone to wear those snazzy silver suits and shave their heads, but if enough people do it then it’ll hit the fashion industry, and perhaps to the point of collapse. It’s not about everyone getting on board, but enough.
When you imagine the future, you have to imagine more than just your preferences. Because if I did that, I’d imagine a world free from Instant Messaging, which I absolutely loathe, it’s distracting, it bothers me, I never ever want to do it, and every time someone puts up a “bleep” when I’m trying to write or program I want to throttle them no matter how helpful they’re being. If I did that, I’d imagine a world free from Twitter, where everyone wanted to write big gouty blog-posts like this and ramble on, and not realize that what most people have to say can, yes, fit in a Facebook “How ya doing?” box with room to spare.
Yet when I think about what the world will become, I must be bigger than myself. I must realize that people want this feature, and may want more of it, and how is that going to impact? I’m going to be wrong a lot, of course… but holding the world to your preferences is no longer a possible thing for futurists. You must look around, and see what others are doing, and view the other subcultures that are evolving and creating and building….
…and it’ll tell you that you’re wrong. Would I contribute to Wikipedia? Hell no. I’d find that tedious. As would, say, 49 out of 50 people. But to ignore that 50th person’s pleasure is to be Bill Gates, sinking millions into a project meant to capture the future and instead becoming a relic of the past.
That’s the fun of riding the future. Realizing that it’s not just you, but everybody.
What Function Will News Serve In The Future?
There’s no piece of news reporting that can compete with the speed of Twitter and Facebook. That’s because the reporters are an intermediary layer, having to push it through a level of bureaucracy, whereas all someone has to do is Tweet “There was an explosion at the Boston Marathon finish line!” and wham, 10,000 Retweets later, the news is disseminated.
So anyone sane has pretty much abandoned the idea of getting breaking news from CNN. Anyone who’s watched a major event unfold in real time knows that the official news outlets are often fifteen minutes, a half-hour, beyond the speed of actual events.
What CNN and Fox and the NYT have become, in effect, are the reality check. Were you to have followed the Boston Marathon tragedy yesterday, you would have seen all sorts of crazy snippets of “news,” many of which turned out to be false. Savvy net-users knew to take everything with a grain of salt until an “official” news source covered it… which is why, when a major source like the New York Post erroneously reported that a Muslim guy had been taken into custody, people got furious. The news outlets don’t provide the news any more, they certify it.
Which makes me wonder how long that will happen. It seems to me that eventually, there’ll be a way of certifying individual sources – i.e., “How trustworthy is Ferrett, anyway?” You could look over my history and have people vote on how reliable I am at providing information, and in turn have that truthiness-percentage be a way of gauging how trustworthy my ratings for my friends are, and soon enough you would have a personal rating of how reliable a particular news item is.
I can easily envision a future where Fox News does nada – but an aggregator does some mighty complex calculations to say, “The volume of Tweets/Facebook posts about this Boston Marathon event have hit a critical mass, enough to bring it to my user’s attention with an 74% reliability rating.” Reporters Tweeting directly from the scene would probably have more reliability, natch, but that wouldn’t be related to a news organization per se – it’d be that people had tuned into them before and trusted them. Users with little experience online probably wouldn’t get a whole lot of traction right away, so if someone’s first post was “Check this video I took of the explosion,” it wouldn’t have much of an impact – but hour by hour, as other news sources came in and confirmed their post, that video would rise to the top of the news posts.
Eventually, the idea of “news” would go away, replaced by a large-scale network of personal probability calculations. Maybe people would subscribe to groups of especially trustworthy people, making for erzatz news sources – but you could still get really good information just by sifting through people’s sources. In many cases, more accurate than the stories that could only bubble up through a news department’s bureaucracy.
And when we can get news quicker and validate it on our own, what function will the news serve? Will they wither away, or will such a movement force them to actually do what they’ve failed to do for years, and weigh in-depth reporting over trivial questions? Or is our need to see random victims interviewed so strong that news will fall to the simple function of shoving a microphone into someone’s face?
And yes. I know this new algorithmically-based methodology of news would only serve to deepen biases, for those you mark trustworthy are often those who you agree with politically. But hey. You think that’s not happening already?