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?
A Petty Complaint About The Justice League: Stop Hitting The Flash!
Thanks to the glories of streaming Netflix, I’m now watching The Justice League cartoon (2001)… and it’s surprisingly thoughtful, for a kid’s show. In particular, I really appreciate how most of the shows subtly give one character more of a stake in the huge battles to follow – sure, the whole JL has to get involved, but they find ways so that really, this is Green Lantern’s arc, or the Flash’s problem, or Superman having to learn a lesson. Which is a good thing to learn for a writer with an ensemble cast, since unless you’ve got the space of a show like The Wire to have seventy characters bouncing around at once, you need someone to have emotional stakes aside from the generic “All of Earth is in danger, again.”
(Also, I love that there are no single-part shows. If you have an event that requires Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, The Flash, Green Lantern, and the Martian Manhunter, you damn well need an hour.)
But there’s one problem that shows up in the show, time and time again, and it really bothers me more with every episode:
Stop hitting the Flash.
Seriously. The Flash is the fastest man in the universe, and he keeps getting knocked out by gorillas. By slow knights in armor. By Aquaman’s waterguard. What the hell? The Flash should hardly ever be hit. If he looks up and sees it coming for one second, he should be able to zip out of the way.
I mean, this is endemic to the show, because there’s infinite shots of, say, a truck being thrown at someone in close to slow-motion, and someone yells “Look out!” and like three seconds pass, and then wham, Green Lantern gets flattened anyway. But come on, man, this is the Flash we’re talking about. Even if we assume that he’s not in Flash mode all the time, he should have at least figured out by now to enter Flash mode whenever anything startles him. And yeah, he’s the callow comic relief, but shit, man, how many times you gonna get clobbered before you learn to fight? Pain is a considerable incentive.
So yeah. Don’t hit the goddamned Flash. Or if you do, do it with something super-fast hurled by a superhero, or a bank shot, or something clever. Not a monkey.
Love Is Not What You Think It Is: On Internet Friendships
I have a regular date, every Sunday, for the next seven weeks. It is a very romantic date.
It is with someone I have never met.
See, I’ve known my friend K. for years, having friended her on LiveJournal, and we’re both big Game of Thrones fans. So when the Game of Thrones TV series began, we watched it together, texting each other snarky comments about the actors, asking whether that happened in the book or it’s an HBO invention, wondering what episode Character X is going to get knocked off. This started off as a “Hey, we’re both here,” and evolved into a weekly event where, after a late dinner where I missed Game of Thrones but missed K. more, the date has become unstoppable. Sunday at 9:00 is when I snuggle up in Gini’s lap and give my time to K.
And it’s very, and oddly, romantic. I’ve seen pictures of K., and she’s a cutie. (And not just the model-quality, posed photos – we have a habit of sending each other “Look at the hair I woke up with!” texts.) We text each other when we’re down, giving advice on romantic entanglements and career stuff. I’ve even got pre-approval to smooch K. should we ever meet, which seems unlikely, as she’s a thousand miles away and neither of us can really afford to travel (or at least I can’t afford the vacation time between cons and family get-togethers).
Yet K. and I feel very loving towards each other during Game of Thrones. We text hugs to each other during the week, but GoT is the one time of week where we’re completely synchronous – most of our interactions involve tossing out a text or email, to be read whenever, but come Sunday we’re both seated in the same space, as close as we can get to being next to each other.
I didn’t realize how strange this all was until last night, when K. missed our date because she was in the ER. Some kind of infection. She was too sick to text, nauseous, sad. And I worried about her the whole night as I would for any close friend, checking my phone at every buzz and waking up to instantly check Facebook for status updates.
She’s all right, thankfully. But the point is, K. is a closer friend to me than many of my real-life friends. I’ve certainly shared more emotionally with her than I have with a bunch of people I see on a semi-regular basis. I was deeply concerned with her well-being. And if she’d really needed me to, for some bizarre reason, I would have flown out to see her.
That’s not an Internet friendship; it’s a friendship.
And I think of all the people who go, “Well, you can’t really know someone until you meet them,” and maybe that’s just part of the way I communicate with people – but the folks who I’ve corresponded with extensively have inevitably been as I knew them. Maybe people are strangely fronting on the ‘net, or just drawn to the wrong people, but by the time I’ve emailed with someone back and forth for a year, I have a pretty accurate idea of what they’re like.
And I think of all those folks who think, “Well, they’re just internet friends, they’re not real,” and I feel very sad for them. What a small world they must live in, to have to touch and sniff someone to feel connected to them. To be restricted to such a physical, mundane quality before they can clasp hands and trust.
Me? I feel blessed in that I can use my intellect to find wonderful people and connect to them with this intensity through nothing but words. I have many, many wondrous friends within a dinner’s reach of me in Cleveland – and that is a delight, as Cleveland is full of so many grand people that I can’t possibly hope to see them all with the amount of time they deserve, and so I spend my days constantly feeling that I should be getting out more. I remember the days when I was stuck in an apartment in Ypsilanti with no real-life friends, and remember how isolated and lonely that made me feel, having only words for friends.
But I also have a lot of friends who are pretty much only available to me through words – and yes, I may meet up with my sweeties periodically, but they live in different towns. And so what tethers us is flurries of texts and emails and silly pictures. That’s real. That’s real enough to cheer me up when I’m down, to rouse my ardor with the right set of beautiful words, to share happinesses in way that have me jumping for joy. And my life would be so much poorer if I could only get that joy through being within five feet of them physically.
I’m not saying that a texted *hug* is more comforting than a real hug – that’d be foolish – but I am saying that sometimes the advice I’ve gotten through these typed words has helped me in ways that only a real friend could do.
In the meantime, I live a strange life. Half of me is here, typing on a keyboard. The other half is in Florida, standing by K.’s bedside, it’s in Michigan, standing in a lawyer’s office as she works, it’s in Wisconsin in a house I’ve never been in but have seen pictures of the new kitchen, it’s in a cheap bar in France, it’s in a new apartment in Oregon, it’s in a hundred different places with wonderful friends who I may have only seen digitally, but dammit they count.
And that’s a privilege and a pleasure. I feel a deep, deep sorrow for those who don’t get it. Because I fished a wonderful wife out of nothing but words, which evolved into the deepest and greatest and most satisfying love of my life…. and that love was every bit as real when we were just emailing each other back and forth on Compuserve as it is when she sits next to me in our living room.
This is real. And this digital life is as painful as so-called real-life friends, and as loving, and as complicated, and as messy, and as happy. And I thank everyone who contributes to that with an email, or a text, or a comment, because I know more of you than you think, and I think about you more than you know.
Message ends.
Dumbness On A Saturday: The Answer
So yesterday, I told you three truths and a lie, and asked you which was the lie. I thought my fib was obvious… but from the comments, it’s clear it wasn’t that obvious. (Gini got it, though.) So which were the truths?
1) I once had sex for eight hours straight. It was not pleasant.
Status: True. In fact, it’s one of my more infamous entries. Looking at it almost a decade later, I’m even less proud of this tale, but… there it is.
2) I saw Star Wars fifty-seven-and-a-half times in the theater when I was a child.
Status: True. There were a few comments along the lines of, “No child could see a movie in the theaters fifty-seven times! Especially in the 1970s! What parent would take him?”
Ah, but the same stubbornness that has gotten me where I am with my writing career was present in Tiny Ferrett as well. I bugged my parents every time Star Wars was playing. I bugged my Uncle. I bugged my friends to go, so they’d take me with them. I was obsessed with Star Wars, and by God every time it was playing, I saw it at least once a weekend, and sometimes more.
The half? Here’s how bad I was: my grandparents agreed to take me to see it one more time, even though they could have cared less. We misread the movie time and arrived an hour early. I talked them into going into the theater to watch the last hour of Star Wars, sit through the credits, and then watch the next showing.
That reminds me: I need to call my Grammy.
3) I have never seen a movie in the theater more than fifty-eight times.
Status: False. This one was a gimme to me for two reasons:
a) Given that one of my more infamous talents is that I led a Rocky Horror cast and dressed as Frank N. Furter, I think it’s reasonably obvious to anyone with knowledge of that fact that just over a year’s worth of showings would push me over the top. I helmed for two years, and was a sporadic attendee for years afterwards. I know I broke a hundred RHPS attendances before I lost track.
b) If the other items are all true, given that I met my wife in a Star Wars chat room and have not been unenthusiastic about my Star Wars love in the past, what are the odds that I would have seen Star Wars fifty-seven-and-a-half times in the theater as a child… and then not seen it once on any of the subsequent rereleases? Logically, if #2 is true, #3 has to be false.
But alas, it was obvious to me and a handful of ahead-of-the-curve people. The rest of you debated
4) I have seen a ghost, precisely once, when I was a child.
Status: True. We did not have any furniture when we moved into my childhood home on Clinton Avenue. So my first night was spent curled up around my mother, on a sleeping bag, in a strange new place, in the living room. I remember being unable to sleep, wriggling a lot.
Just as I was drifting off, the bathroom door just off of the kitchen slammed once, twice. I remember the door shutting, because I needed to have the light on.
My mother did not wake up.
I did not technically see the ghost, but seeing what it did counts for me. Was I dreaming? I don’t think so. I have very non-visual dreams, and I can’t recall another instance in which I confused reality with a dream. But I was a young child. Nothing like it has ever happened again.
Now, those of you who’ve followed my bios have seen a reference to “the friendly ghost” I live with, and thus concluded this was the lie, since I’ve lived here as a grownup. I will never blog about the friendly ghost. If you want to know, ask me in person. But I have never seen the ghost in our house, nor do I think I ever will.
Dumbness On A Saturday
I was playing the “Three Facts And A Lie” question with a friend the other day, which is a fun get-to-know-ya game: you give three strange facts about your life, and one that is a lie, and the person has to guess the lie.
I gave what I considered to be a gimme for the first round, but she did not get it. I’m curious to see how long-term readers would spot the falsehood here. Lemme know which one you think is fake, and why. No cheating and reading the comments first, which will doubtlessly have the answer in it long before I get to it.
1) I once had sex for eight hours straight. It was not pleasant.
2) I saw Star Wars fifty-seven-and-a-half times in the theater when I was a child.
3) I have never seen a movie in the theater more than fifty-eight times.
4) I have seen a ghost, precisely once, when I was a child.
Hrm. Typing this out, I think it’s easier than I thought, as there’s two independent methods of arriving at the correct answer… but you go.
Why The Fuck Did You Follow Me On Twitter, Anyway?
I think, before I can blog one word further, I need to discuss the definition of “self-promotion.”
The reason I do this is because Seanan McGuire has been accused in some quarters of “excessive self-promotion,” by which people apparently meant “she mentioned that she had fiction eligible for various nominations.” Not a whole lot, mind you: twice.
Twice, among a welter of probably seventy lengthy blog posts and literally a thousand silly Twitter statuses.
And then, when I talked with her on Twitter about the irony of seeing her blog post linked everywhere but from her Twitter status, she said, “I know, I just feel …ishy and wrong tweeting everything I say on LJ. I try to do it only on special occasions.”
Which, as someone who followed her on Twitter, struck me as being insane. I clicked that “Follow Seanan McGuire!” button because I specifically wanted to hear what she had to say. It’s not like Seanan followed me home, broke into my laptop, and signed me up against my will for the Spammin’ McGuire around-the-world newscast – no. I’d liked reading two of her books, was curious about her as a person, and so I said, “Hello, Seanan, please tell me about yourself.”
Is Seanan telling me what Seanan is doing in the Seanan-specific area of the Internet self-promotion? I say thee nay.
I call it providing the service people signed up for.
Now, if Seanan was running around forums posting “YOU KNOW WHAT POUNDS THE PISS OUT OF MARTIN’S LATEST DOORSTOP? MY NEWSFLESH SERIES, AVAILABLE FOR A MERE $3.79 ON KINDLE,” then I’d have a problem. Or if she was shouting down panels to say, “You know what happens in my book? Something way better than that Neil Gaiman shit you’re yammerin’ on about!” But no. I specifically went to the Seanan McGuire Museum of Fine Filk and paid my entry fee, and by God I expect to see some fucking Seanan McGuire.
Which is how I treat my blog. I cross-post most of my entries to Twitter because I learned a while back that about 70% of my Twitter and Facebook followers don’t read my journal regularly. It felt weird, but I came to think, “Well, they followed me on Twitter because they presumably wanted to hear what I was writing about, so… here’s what I’m writing about.” And people have responded positively. Traffic’s been up. I suspect many former blog subscribers actually prefer the Twitter service, because this way they only get the entries I deem significant.
Is that self-promotion? I guess, in some sort of saggingly flabby definition of the word. But my logic is, people asked specifically to tune into the Ferrett Channel. They did so because they want to hear what I’m doing – which includes my fiction, my blogging, my polyamory, and my personal life. And maybe after it turns out that they don’t actually like all of that, at which point they can feel free to unsubscribe without one whit of malice from me. (I’m a depressive. I hate myself two months out of the year. Why should you be any different?)
So I’ll say it here: telling the world what you have done is not self-promotion in the world of Twitter. Or blogs. It is when you go abroad to other places to tout yourself, or to beg your followers “Please RT” a billion times, or to carve your bibliography into the flesh of willing fans. But mere informational service? Fuck that. People signed up to get a glimpse into your personality. And maybe if you do Twitter or your blogging wrong, then your personality is nothing but a stream of “HAY GUYS I PUBLISH DIS,” in which case the problem will automatically solve itself as people wander away, in which case you’ll be promoting yourself to an increasingly smaller subset of disappointed people.
But for the rest? Please, Seanan. Talk. It’s why I showed up.