Posts on Spool-Five

On the Radio - Apr 2026

Wed, 08 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

When I was younger, I used to love following music developments. I went to a lot of gigs and festivals, mostly indie music, but also a lot of house/techno.

Then, at some point toward the end of my twenties/early thirties, I stopped caring. Now, when I do listen to music it’s mostly music from during that time.

However, ever since I was very young, I’ve loved listening to the radio. That is one habit I still do keep up. Mostly classical music radio stations such as BBC Radio 3 and WHRB these days. It order to encourage myself to listen a bit more ‘actively’, I’m going to try keep a record of any songs/pieces that stand out to me.

CATAMORPHOSIS by Anna Thorvaldsdottir

I heard this being performed by the London Philharmonic as part of a live BBC Radio 3 programme that focused on: “musical reflections on the natural world, from Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s CATAMORPHOSIS, which is inspired by the fragile relationship with have to our planet, to Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony. Plus Bruch’s ever-popular violin concerto, played by the star Danish violinist, Nikolaj Szeps-Znaider.”

The name of the piece is a play on “Catastrophe” and “metamorphosis”. I’d never heard of this composer before, but the piece was incredible. Reminded me of Xenakis a bit.

Listen on Bandcamp

Pictures at an Exhibition

A piece by Mussorgsky, performed by Ivo Pogorelich.

Another piece that blew me away. Reminded me in some ways of Glenn Gould playing Bach. I also came across an interesting ‘discussion’ on Pogorelich on the NPR website where the reviewers try to figure out what exactly is the meaning of his approach to performance (one reviewer tries to give him the benefit of the doubt, the other hates the approach).

NPR Review

Listen on Youtube

Small Web Feeds

Wed, 18 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I came across the 512kb club a long time ago, and it was very influential in helping me understand how websites work and the impact different kinds of assets or design choices can have on how pages load. As a fan of gemini, it makes sense to me that websites should be as minimal as possible.

Anyway, I’ve always enjoyed opening random sites on the 512kb club list of sites, so I decided to make an aggregated rss feed of posts from these blogs.

If you want to check it out, it is currently hosted at the link below. It is still a work in progress.

512KB Club Blog Feeds

Smallnet Protocols

Tue, 24 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I’m calling the protocols discussed below “smallnet protocols”, but actually I don’t know the right name for them…

The gemini protocol is great, I’ve been using it for five years now. I also browse gopher quite a bit. There have also been some other small internet protocols that have been developed over recent years, which are captured in this “Small internet protocol roundup” page:

Small internet protocol roundup (gemini)

Small internet protocol roundup (http)

I wanted to participate in these alternative protocols, but didn’t want to start writing whole new content for them. Instead, I created a script to translate my gemini capsule into different formats that work with these protocols. You can now find them at the links below.

Gopher Version

Spartan Version

Nex Version

The Lagrange browser already implements all these protocols, which is amazing. Converting to the different formats also wasn’t too difficult, a testament to the simplicity of gemtext formatting. I’m sure there are some errors, but they seem to be mostly functional for now.

Links for learning more about each protocol:

Web links:

Counting Capsules

Mon, 02 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A quick look at some stats about gemini capsules.

For those that aren’t aware, gemini is a largely text-based, minimal internet protocol. It is part of what is sometimes called the “smolnet”, an alternative to the mainstream web.

Gemini Protocol (Web)

Gemini Protocol (Gemini)

A “capsule” is the gemini equivalent of what we call a “website” on the http protocol.

Here, I will try to answer a few questions I had about gemini, such as:

How many capsules are there?
Is Gemini growing? At what rate?
Where are geminauts located?

The data is based on the following two sources:

Lupa Statistics

Kennedy Statistics

How many?

The Lupa crawler lists 3,273 capsules as of the end of January, 2026. By web standards, that’s pretty tiny! By Dunbar standards, it’s big.

We can use the Lupa archive to see how the number of capsules have changed over time.

The dates range from December 2020 to February 2026 (~5 years), and the counts are monthly snapshots.

A fairly steady growth, but nothing too dramatic.

We can also look at the individual changes for each month. As with the chart above, Lupa tracks both ‘active’ capsules, and ‘all’ capsules.

Interestingly, we see over the last year some very large peaks for “All” capsules in a few of the months, followed by sharp drop-offs in the following month. This looks like an increase in “spam” capsules that are added in bulk and then dropped.

We can also see more clearly from this that while there is still a steady growth in capsules, the years 2021 and 2022 seemed to have a much higher growth rate.

Here is a table that shows the average number of capsules added each month by year.

First, for the active capsules:

| Year | Monthly Avg Change Active |
|------+---------------------------|
| 2021 |                     +89.9 |
| 2022 |                     +60.7 |
| 2023 |                     +30.9 |
| 2024 |                     +26.1 |
| 2025 |                     +25.2 |
| 2026 |                     +32.5 |

And for all capsules:

| Year | Monthly Avg Change All |
|------+------------------------|
| 2021 |                 +110.7 |
| 2022 |                  +88.5 |
| 2023 |                  +51.8 |
| 2024 |                  +43.6 |
| 2025 |                  +32.3 |
| 2026 |                  +10.5 |

While in 2021 there were around 90 active capsules added each month, this dropped to around 25 in 2025.

What about the overall annual growth rate?


Active Capsules
| Year | Year-End Capsules | Percentage Growth |
|------+-------------------+-------------------|
| 2020 |               441 |               N/A |
| 2021 |              1541 |            249.4% |
| 2022 |              2251 |             46.1% |
| 2023 |              2635 |             17.1% |
| 2024 |              2912 |             10.5% |
| 2025 |              3246 |             11.5% |

All Capsules

| Year | Year-End Capsules | Percentage Growth |
|------+-------------------+-------------------|
| 2020 |               531 |               N/A |
| 2021 |              1854 |            249.2% |
| 2022 |              2988 |             61.2% |
| 2023 |              3421 |             14.5% |
| 2024 |              4246 |             24.1% |
| 2025 |              4747 |             11.8% |

We see huge growth in 2021, a sharp decline, but then a fairly steady growth rate over the last three years.

As a tangent here, I also tried to see if there was any link between the gemini protocol appearing on Hacker News and the monthly change in capsule numbers.

There were some posts prior to 2021, which aren’t captured here because the capsule counts don’t start until December 2020.

For the posts that are captured here, there appears to be no major correlation between a trending post on HN and people joining gemini.

For example, there was a post in mid-November 2024 with 216 HN points, but in the subsequent monthly counts, there was no noticeable change in the number of capsules (in fact, it looks like Gemini had one of its worst months, in terms of additional capsules added, in December 2024).

Capsules Today

Let’s now take a look at just a snapshot of the capsules (February 2026).

With a little help from my friends

The first thing that stands out in the data is the number of capsules that are hosted by some kind of public hosting service. Setting up your own server to host content isn’t always easy, so it is great that these services exist to remove the friction for people wanting to join Gemini. As a quick side note here, it is also worth noting that this data doesn’t capture any of the activity that takes place on the gemini bulletin board systems, which are also a great way for people to get involved and just start posting without having to buy their own domain, rent a server, etc.

In terms of these hosting providers, here is a breakdown of the number of capsules for each provider. To determine what counts as a ‘hosting provider’, I’ve just used a rough heuristic where if a domain has more than 7 subdomains, it is counted as one of these services.


|           Domain | Count | % Total |
|------------------+-------+---------|
|  flounder.online |  1087 |   33.2% |
|    yesterweb.org |   553 |   16.9% |
|         smol.pub |   308 |    9.4% |
|        srht.site |    62 |    1.9% |
|      pollux.casa |    46 |    1.4% |
|     midnight.pub |    34 |    1.0% |
|      e-worm.club |    21 |    0.6% |
|     capsule.town |    18 |    0.5% |
| archipielago.uno |    16 |    0.5% |
|      subnet.city |     8 |    0.2% |
|   hispagatos.org |     8 |    0.2% |
|    geminauts.com |     8 |    0.2% |
|            TOTAL |  2169 |   66.3% |

Looking at the table, it is quite surprising that 1 out of every 3 capsules is now hosted by flounder.online.

Also, it is very striking that only 1 out of 3 capsules are not on these services, i.e., “self-hosted”.

Where in the world?

We can also use the IP addresses of capsules to approximately gauge the geographical location of these spaces. There are lots of caveats about using IPs for geolocation purposes that I won’t get into here.

Looking at this geodata we get the following breakdown of capsules by region:

|   Region | Count | % Total |
|----------+-------+---------|
| Americas |  2008 |   62.3% |
|   Europe |  1169 |   36.3% |
|     Asia |    22 |    0.7% |
|  Oceania |    18 |    0.6% |
|   Africa |     6 |    0.2% |
|    TOTAL |  3223 |  100.0% |

However, as we saw above, flounder.online is potentially skewing the results here (the IP appears to be located in the USA). By only taking one location for each of the hosting service providers, we instead get the following table:

|   Region | Count | % Total |
|----------+-------+---------|
|   Europe |   574 |   62.1% |
| Americas |   308 |   33.3% |
|     Asia |    21 |    2.3% |
|  Oceania |    16 |    1.7% |
|   Africa |     5 |    0.5% |
|    TOTAL |   924 |  100.0% |

Hmm, it swung the other way! Whether including all the 1,000+ flounder.online capsules or not, the main takeaway here is probably that Gemini is overwhelmingly European/American, which is a pity. In terms of the individual countries, here are the top 5:

|    Country_name | Count | % Total |
|-----------------+-------+---------|
|   United States |  1969 |   61.1% |
|  United Kingdom |   433 |   13.4% |
| The Netherlands |   204 |    6.3% |
|         Germany |   188 |    5.8% |
|          France |   158 |    4.9% |
|         Finland |    45 |    1.4% |
|          Canada |    31 |    1.0% |
|          Russia |    25 |    0.8% |
|         Austria |    20 |    0.6% |
|           Spain |    17 |    0.5% |
|     Others (33) |   135 |    4.2% |
|           TOTAL |  3225 |  100.0% |

And, again with the capsule hosting services collapsed down:

|    Country_name | Count | % Total |
|-----------------+-------+---------|
|   United States |   271 |   29.3% |
|         Germany |   141 |   15.2% |
| The Netherlands |   120 |   13.0% |
|          France |    89 |    9.6% |
|  United Kingdom |    68 |    7.4% |
|         Finland |    37 |    4.0% |
|          Canada |    29 |    3.1% |
|          Russia |    20 |    2.2% |
|          Sweden |    15 |    1.6% |
|           Spain |    15 |    1.6% |
|     Others (33) |   120 |   13.0% |
|           TOTAL |   925 |  100.0% |

The image below shows all the capsule locations on a map:

As we saw with the tables above, most capsules are clustered around Europe/North America. However, it is still interesting to see that there are actually some capsules spread out in other parts of the world.

Using this geographical information, we can also get a list of capsules that have one or fewer “neighbours” within a 500km radius from their hosting location. Here is the list, feel free to go visit some of these trailblazers that are out on their own!

capsula.milangaelectronica.com.ar (0 neighbours)

capsule.chadobear.world (0 neighbours)

gemini.djph.net (0 neighbours)

norayr.am (0 neighbours)

ritesh.ch (0 neighbours)

ayushnix.com (1 neighbour)

clehaxze.tw (1 neighbour)

cyberespacio.novoa.nagoya (1 neighbour)

gemini.clehaxze.tw (1 neighbour)

gmi.zkbro.com (1 neighbour)

guie.welhaba.mx (1 neighbour)

lux.rip (1 neighbour)

nixgoat.me (1 neighbour)

old-home.faith (1 neighbour)

p.projectsegfau.lt (1 neighbour)

sanctum.geek.nz (1 neighbour)

Internet Providers

Finally, let’s have a look at the network operator companies that geminauts tend toward. There are over 200 distinct network providers, which is too much to list in a table below, so we will just take the first 10. To note, the column “As_org” stands for “Autonomous System Organisation”. Autonomous Systems are the networks that make up the internet, with each network having its own number (ASN).

|              As_org | Count | % Total |
|---------------------+-------+---------|
|              Akamai |  1559 |   48.4% |
|               Uunet |   559 |   17.3% |
|         High5! b.v. |   160 |    5.0% |
| Hetzner online gmbh |   140 |    4.3% |
|    Digitalocean-asn |    95 |    2.9% |
|             Ovh sas |    62 |    1.9% |
|            As-vultr |    57 |    1.8% |
|              Orange |    51 |    1.6% |
|         Netcup gmbh |    40 |    1.2% |
|              Amazon |    30 |    0.9% |
|        Others (191) |   470 |   14.6% |
|               TOTAL |  3223 |  100.0% |

Again, since Akamai seem to be the provider for flounder.online, we can have another version of the table with the capsule hosting providers reduced to one entry each:

|              As_org | Count | % Total |
|---------------------+-------+---------|
| Hetzner online gmbh |   104 |   11.3% |
|              Akamai |    89 |    9.6% |
|         High5! b.v. |    86 |    9.3% |
|    Digitalocean-asn |    75 |    8.1% |
|             Ovh sas |    54 |    5.9% |
|            As-vultr |    52 |    5.6% |
|         Netcup gmbh |    29 |    3.1% |
|              Amazon |    23 |    2.5% |
|    Oracle-bmc-31898 |    22 |    2.4% |
|            Ionos se |    18 |    2.0% |
|        Others (191) |   371 |   40.2% |
|               TOTAL |   923 |  100.0% |

We see that the infrastructure ‘market’ in the case of gemini capsule providers is quite diverse, and also differs from what a more mainstream version of this table might look like, i.e., we would be more likely to see Amazon, Cloudflare, Google, etc. dominating the top spot.

We also see that Hetzner appears to be the top choice when just looking at single capsules. For my own capsule, I use sr.ht for statically hosing my main gemlog, and Hetzner for the content on my dev.spool-five.com portion of the capsule. I think Hetzner offer a great service at a fair price, but part of why I went for them is also because they are a European alternative to the big tech offerings from the US. I wonder if this is also a sentiment shared by other geminauts?

For a quick sense-check in terms of the suggestion that gemini is more diverse than the ‘mainstream’ internet, let’s look at the Herfindahl–Hirschman index (HHI) of the Gemini network provider market. HHI is a score between 0 and 10,000, where anything above 2,500 indicate high market concentration.

As might be expected, when we take the initial list of capsules (i.e., the flounder.online dominated list), the market appears very concentrated with a score of 2,707. However, when only counting the providers by domain (the second table), the score is 480.7, which indicates a very competitive market.

Wikipedia Hirschman Index

For context, the Internet Society tracks these HHI scores for the web. In the case of the “Top 1,000” websites, the web hosting HHI score is 1,323, and for the “Top 10,000” sites it is 1,119. Using this metric, Gemini (when discounting the hosting by flounder.online and others) appears to be much less concentrated and more diverse than the average, mainstream web.

Internet Society Pulse

Conclusion

The main thing I was surprised about was how much of geminispace is taken up by capsule hosting services, which I think is an important lesson if people are interested in ‘growing’ gemini. These services provide an important on-ramp onto the platform.

On the other hand, higher concentration in a single provider can lead to a less resilient protocol. More research would have to be done on whether this ease-of-access leads to sustained participation and engagement. Do people just set up a “hello world” capsule out of curiosity and never return? I tried to look through some of these capsules when doing this, and I found a fairly even mix of ‘abandoned’ capsules, but also really fascinating journals and reflections. It would be sad if technical barriers were to keep those kind of writers from accessing this quieter, more private protocol.

Gemini has some great nomenclature that links it to the early days of the space age; the gemini program, lunar travel, circumlunar orbits, capsules, and so on. But, for this analysis I hope it was interesting to return to Earth and take a look at some of the more terrestrial infrastructure that holds it all together.

If you are interested in the data used for this, it is available below.

Historical Counts (csv)

February 2026 Capsules Data (csv)

2025 Highlights

Tue, 23 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Some notes on the year.

Movies/TV

Lots of TV shows this year. These are some of the ones that stood out.

Great

Andor
Adolescence
The Rehearsal - Season 2
The Pitt (probably my favourite of the year)
The Chair Company
Squid Game Season 3 (might be controversial to have this here, but I enjoyed it)
(movie) Jia Zhangke’s “Caught by the Tides”. Deeply moving meditation on time, love, displacement and process.
Long Story Short
(movie) No Other Choice
The Studio
I also went to a screening of Kwaiden (1964) this year and it was incredible.

Hounorable Mentions

The Eternaut
Pachinko - Season 2
Severance - Season 2
Foundation - Season 3
Dept Q.
Alice in Borderland - Season 3
Slow Horses

Disappointments

The Last of Us - Season 2
(movie) One Battle After Another - had its good points definitely, but I always have very high expectations for PTA and the last two let me down.
Alien: Earth - I did really enjoy this, but a lot of problems with it too (as an ‘Alien’ installment)

Books

Not too much reading this year, but my favourite was definitely “Every Living Thing” (Jason Roberts).

I also enjoyed:

Solaris
Pachinko
Drive Your Plough Over the Bones of the Dead
Delta V

Travel

Some for work, some for pleasure:

Japan (I visited many places in this wonderful country! Highlights - Kyoto, Naoshima Island)
Seattle
Baku

Programming

Continuing to learn more about clojure. I program purely as a hobby.

I participated in the first Scinoj Lite conference, which had some great talks. My project looked at ways of evaluating LLMs (from a very basic, almost ’naive’, perspective).

Write-up of my LLM evaluation project

Played around with the new clojure ‘flow’ libary.

Clojure Flow Blog Post Clojure Flow project

I started a webscraping project that is trying to map Irish-language content on the .ie domain.

Irish language webscraping project

I also enjoyed this year’s advent of code.

Advent of Code (clojure)

Clojure Flow - First Impressions

Mon, 07 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Clojure’s core async library recently added a namespace called ‘flow’.

Async Flow Announcement

Flow Docs

The point of flow is to provide abstractions for building easily composable systems where separate processes can be easily connected together. It is supposed to make these kind of stateful, ‘parallel’ type systems more ‘functional’, and therefore more easy to reason about and test.

The flow docs state that:

The fundamental objective of core.async.flow is to enable a strict separation of your application logic from its topology, execution, communication, lifecycle, monitoring and error handling, all of which are provided by and centralized in, c.a.flow, yielding more consistent, robust, testable, observable and operable systems.

I was curious to try this out, and I had also recently come across Zonestream, a project from OpenINTEL that has a kafka stream for real-time DNS zone changes.

Zonestream

I tried out flow for building a web page that would read newly registered domains from this stream and then group by things like tld, or the number of domains per hour. You can view the results at eoin.site/fl. Not sure how long I’ll leave it running for.

Domain Name Flow

The point of this wasn’t necessarily to gather useful or analysable data, it was more to try to create something ‘real-time’ that might fit well as a use case with flow. The data here is intentionally quite ’ephemeral’; I’m not saving or collecting anything.

Overall, I thoroughly enjoyed working with the new flow namespace. Once you understand the basic points about a process, it is very easy and intuitive to use.

One of the main things I really loved was how interactive development was. As someone who uses clojure a lot in hobby projects (I am not a professional developer), I am of course well used to a high level of interactivity through the REPL. However, this was like expanding that way of thinking to the level of a ‘system’ of separate, concurrent processes. Flow handles all of the backend plumbing in terms of managing channels, so you can easily “wire” different components together, and start/stop/edit them in real-time, without interrupting the overall “flow” of the system itself.

It is also great for thinking of ways to reuse signals and data from one process in other processes. Processes can be connected and interconnected quite seamlessly.

I’m not sure about how it compares to other approaches in terms of performance. I’m not particularly experienced with websockets or even webservers and I am sure there are so many optimisations missed and better design patterns that could have been choosen in my particular experimentation with flow. I was a also bit confused with how best to convert it to a java application to run in production (and if there is any way to retain the interactivity it in jar/production format?). I am sure there are lots of mistakes I made in terms of designing the ‘flow’, but this was just a first look, and I hope to explore it more in the future.

One or Many or Six

Mon, 12 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I dreamed that it is night and I am lying in my bed (the foot of my bed was under the window, and outside the window there was a row of old walnut trees. I know that it was winter in my dream, and night-time). Suddenly the window opens of its own accord and terrified, I see that there are a number of white wolves sitting in the big walnut tree outside the window. There were six or seven of them. The wolves were white all over and looked more like foxes or sheepdogs because they had big tails like foxes and their ears were pricked up like dogs watching something. Obviously fearful that the wolves were going to gobble me up I screamed and woke up.

The Wolfman’s Dream, from the History of Infantile Neurosis

A couple of years ago I wanted to write something about Sergei Pankejeff (aka The Wolfman, following Freud’s case study of him). Or, to be more precise, I wanted to write about the different ways that his dream had been interpreted, and something about the act of interpretation itself.

I never managed to finish it, mainly because something like this requires a lot of research, and my researching days are long since over.

I’ve come back to this to try to write a simpler, less informed version, mainly for the piece of mind of having started to think-through some of the questions and come to some kind of conclusion about it.

Back when I was a PhD student, I had to study a lot of Freud. More than this, I had to study a lot of the critiques of Freud, which often also mirrored the critiques of hermeneutics (the philosophy of interpretation), the field I was working in.

Freudian psychoanalysis is heavily dependant on certain presuppositions about language. Speaking, which is the core activity of analysis, is something that sets it apart from, for example, medicalized approaches to mental well-being, which may depend more on scientific methodologies and products like pharmaceuticals to help “cure” the “patient”.

Paul Ricouer was interested in Freud because he was thinking through the question of interpretation itself. That is, he was interested in the general role that interpretation can play in the sciences (given that Freud developed psychoanalysis along the lines of a scientific, rigorous method). At times, the act of interpretation itself is seen to be more enlightening than direct evidence or testimony.

For example, at the outset of Freud’s reflections on the wolfman case, he weighs up the alternatives of obtaining an account of a child’s neurosis directly from a child, with the alternative of obtaining the account (as Freud did) years later from the adult reflecting on their own childhood.

While the treating the case from the perspective of the adult “necessitates our taking into account the distortion and refurbishing to which a person’s own past is subjected when it is looked back upon from a later period”, i.e., while it may be less “convincing” to use Freud’s term, it is nevertheless more “instructive” and insightful. [ref: “From the History of Infantile Neurosis: Introductory Remarks”]

The psychoanalytic presumption, to simplify it a bit, is based on the idea that our words and behaviours are fundamentally opaque to us. Given the right setting and interpretations/, their connections to a deeper, inner life can be revealed. In these sense, it is a method for revealing the /truth behind words and behaviours which are opaque, confusing and often harmful to the analysand, and in doing so bringing forth some kind of therapeutic resolution. This translates more broadly to a presumption that there is some kind of method or technique that can be developed to get at the ‘psychological’ truth behind words.

There were two main critiques of this approach that I wanted to look at (which I will butcher in an attempt to paraphrase below):

(a) Deleuze/Guattari critique - “interpretation” sets itself up as getting at some “deeper” truth that lies beneath surface appearances. This is a myth; there is no “hidden depth” to things, no “thing in itself” that will be revealed through the right method. Instead of trying to interpret or understand a deeper meaning, we should be paying more attention to surfaces. The surface-meanings themselves already highly-differentiated and dynamic. I’m taking this way of framing the question from The Logic of Sense regarding Lewis Carroll’s /Alice in Wonderland/:

As one advances in the story, however, the digging and hiding gives way to a lateral sliding from right to left and left to right. The animals below ground become secondary, giving way to card figures which have no thickness. One could say that the old depth having been spread out became width. The becoming unlimited is maintained entirely within this inverted width. “Depth” is no longer a complement … It is not therefore a question of the adventures of Alice, but of Alice’s adventure*: her climb to the surface, her disavowal of false depth and her discovery that everything happens at the border. This is why Carroll abandons the original title of the book: *Alice’s Adventures Underground.

The Logic of Sense, p.9

The Freudian notion of interpretation and the corresponding psychoanalytic method relies on the kind of depth that we see deconstructed in Alice in Wonderland (for example). For Freud, the Wolfman’s dream is a surface reflection of a deeper trauma (witnessing his parents having sex), a deeper truth that can be decoded through careful (and suspicious) parsing of the language. But this model of thinking, which reduces the sign of a “wolf” into a signifier of some inner life, misses the detail of the text itself, which highlights that there was not “one” but “many wolves” that appeared in the dream. The dream is not reflective of a single event, but an expression of a multiplicity of potential meanings (and a multiplicity of identities within the Wolfman).

As Deleuze and Guattari famously wrote “A schizophrenic out for a walk is a better model than a neurotic lying on the analyst’s couch.” In other words, all of this business of digging deeper into the meaning of words/dreams, through the careful guidance of the ’expert’ analysis, is a model of thinking that denies the complexity and multiplicity of psychic life which is not simply about the ‘roots’ or ‘origins’ of desire, but about the way in which desire itself is a machine which produces effects. Effects are not signs of the past, but are their own creative processes that build new futures.

The approach of Deleuze and Guattari is also political. In Freud’s model, the analyst is the authority figure, helping to guide the analysand to discovery. In the alternative approach, the individual themselves are the authority. Dreams, words, meanings are significant at the individual level, they are signs and intensities for the individual to follow, not taxonomies to be situated within some kind of theoretical framework developed by an external authority.

(b) Deconstruction critique - Again, words do not have a single, fixed meaning which can be utilised to build up a picture of some ‘definitive’ truth. Instead, the meanings of words are elusive, conflicting and chaotic. The act of interpretation is not outside of this process, but another chaotic participant in the creation of meaning. It is not a process whereby a deeper truth is arrived at through careful reading, but a combatative negotiation process, where there is no ‘centre’ ground or resting place for meaning to lie. Like the approach of Deleuze, interpretation should also start with language itself as opposed to refering to some ‘method’. That is, language is not some ‘intermediate’ step on the way to meaning, language is its own complex tapestry which gives the effect or the impression of meaningfulness. If we want to understand meaning, we need to start by pulling on the threads of this tapestry until there is nothing left. These is no ‘psyche’ behind the meaning, the concept of the psyche is itself produced as an effect of the interpretation process.

For example, Nicholas Abraham and Maria Torok point towards the fact that the Russian Pankejeff was multilingual, and that in his native language, ‘pack of six’ (the number of wolves in the tree) is a “sixter”/shiestorka, which is a homophone of the Russian for sister (siestorka). Or, in other words, the text itself contains the trauma encoded within it, there is no need put forward some kind of expected scenario (under the Freudian method) based on the ‘symbolism’ of the word ‘wolf’.

So, is it one wolf, many wolves or exactly six wolves? Did the child Pankejeff witness some mysterious event (Freud), did his dream represent the multiplicity of the self and its connections (Deleuze/Guattari), or did it encrypt a trauma which could only be dug out through a careful deconstruction of language? Is language symbolic (pointing beyond itself), multiple (generative/creative) or cryptic?

As valid as the many critiques of Freud often are, I think that all of the approaches above, which take what the Wolfman said seriously are perhaps becoming a lost art. More and more I hear people who have attended therapy talk about how, for example, training oneself to speak, think and behave in certain ways is often the approach advocated (and, indeed, seems to have lots of benefits). Or, there is also the use of medication, which is still on the rise [1]. As ‘oppressive’ as Freud’s method seemed to Deleuze/Derrida, in its emphasis on the primacy of interpretation (a language-based activity) it still stands apart from approaches that reduce our psychology to an purely scientific ‘object’ of study and manipulation.

[1] https://www.euronews.com/health/2023/09/09/europes-mental-health-crisis-in-data-which-country-uses-the-most-antidepressants

I guess the only conclusion that could be arrived at is that all the thinkers above agreed that Pankejeff was in pain, and that language held the key to understanding his psychic journey.

Plaintext Weblog Posts

Sat, 25 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I use sourcehut pages for both my gemini and website. It is a simple, great service where you don’t need to worry about managing a server.

Sorcehut pages

One downside is that you are forced into a ‘static site’ mode of thinking about your content. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it means you can’t do much with the content on the server side. For example, I needed to use a separate server instance for the interactive/games content that is available at dev.spool-five.com.

Gemini games

Recently Kris Occhipinti posted a video where he demonstrates the cli-friendly nature of his website. His site serves the content differently if your client is curl/wget, and allows you to do things like searching the site without leaving the terminal. You can see for yourself:

wget -qO- "https://filmsbykris.com"

Kris Occhipinti Video

I loved this idea, but in the context of a static site hosted on sourcehut pages this isn’t really an option. So I wanted to try an alternative, which would at least help to make my site more ‘grep-able’. I didn’t necessarily succeed in that sense, but I ended up writing some scripts to generate plaintext version of my web content that could sit alongside the (more ‘bloated’) html.

It was a fun exercise. Like a lot of people on here I’m sure, I’ve always been curious about trying to build a static site generator myself, but have been dissuaded by all the great options that are already available. So this scratched that itch a bit by giving me a chance to write something that could at least generate a more stripped-down, portable version of the content that I’ve posted here.

The same ‘source’ content persists in the form of markdown, and the plaintext versions of the files are generated alongside them within the sourcehut actions workflow.

You can see an alternative ‘index’ of all the plaintext content at the link below.

Index of plaintext version of site

If you want to read this post in the terminal you can try:

wget -qO- "https://spool-five.com/pt/2025-01-25-plaintext_weblog_posts.txt"

While not as elegant as Kris Occhipinti’s cli interface, you can also use the ‘plaintext’ index of posts to filter for information using wget. Each line of the plaintext index is split into four sections with spaces: date, title, tags, link. The formatting of these lines uses something similar to the Denote emacs package, where title words are separated by dashes and tags are separated by underscores.

20250101 Title-of-post _foo_bar https://example.com

In this format, if you wanted to get the link for the oldest post that was tagged with ‘philosophy’, you would filter for ‘_philosophy’ and take the last entry:

wget -qO- "https://spool-five.com/pt/index.txt" | grep "_philosophy" | tail -n1 | awk -v x=4 '{print $4}'

Or, to print out a random page to the terminal:

wget -qO- "https://spool-five.com/pt/index.txt" | shuf | head -n1 | awk -v x=4 '{print $4}' | xargs -I {} wget -O- {} | less

The scripts for converting/building these features were written using babashka. I was pleasantly surprised at how simple it was to integrate into the sourcehut build process. I’m not a professional developer so I don’t engage with CI/CD much, but the sourcehut build instructions were quite clear and easy to follow.

Sourcehut builds

Babashka

Source code for the scripts

Technology and Privacy

Thu, 12 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?

The above quote is a famous philosophical riddle. It is intended to prompt discussion around the nature of perception and reality.

I suggest updating the riddle a little for the information age:

Imagine an uninhabited forest. Within the forest, there is a recording mechanism connected to a microphone and a storage device. The storage device retains data digitally as it is captured through the microphone. Finally, imagine that there are also strict regulations and governance procedures to ensure that no person can access or play back any of the recordings that are kept on the storage device.

If a tree falls near the recording device, does it make a sound?

What I am getting at here is a scenario where information is captured and handled in the absence of human perception.

More specifically, when private information is handled in this way.

For example, imagine you send a message via Whatsapp. As part of the process of relaying and delivering the message, Meta has algorithms and filters that inspect the metadata of the message and try to detect if it is spam. If the message seems suspicious, an algorithm also looks at the content of the message and inspects links, etc., to further confirm the message is fraudulent. It then blocks the message from being sent.

Within this automated chain, it is unlikely that a human will have to intervene and read the message (although maybe there are times when they will have to due to ambiguity).

In this case, is my user privacy being violated?

Or, think of another scenario. You are walking down the main street of your city or town. At most corners there is a little camera recording activity on the street. These cameras will generate an unwatchable (by a human) level of footage every day. They may record you walking and holding hands with your significant other, lighting and smoking a cigarette, talking with an old acquaintance.

In the event that a crime has been committed, police may examine the footage to help track down a visual image of a suspect. All the CCTV footage of you will likely go unnoticed and unwatched by human viewers (unless, of course, it was you that committed a crime).

Once again we can ask, is your privacy being violated?

I think that most of us would say that the measures outlined above are reasonable, that the trade-off in terms of public safety is worth it. After all, if you were a victim of repeated scam messages, or of a mugging in the street, wouldn’t you expect more from technology when it comes to preventing these kinds of crimes?

However, all of this is based on a fundamental trust that our governments and laws are protecting our privacy by ensuring that the usage of these technologies by powerful authorities (the police, major tech companies) is strictly regulated.

In effect, we are all now on the side of saying that if a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, it doesn’t make a sound. If I am being recorded and no one can watch it back because of state laws, then there is nothing to worry about.

Gemini Chess

Fri, 07 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve had a go at making a two-player chess game for Gemini. If you want to try it out it is available at the link below. There is also a version of wordle there, though I made this before I realised that there is already a much better wordle clone available on gemini, Wordo.

I was able to make these thanks to the Space Age gemini server, which is written in clojure and allows for fairly straight-forward development of these kinds of applications for gemini.

Chess & Wordle

Wordo

Space Age gemini server

By coincidence, as I was finishing this up Rob’s Gemini Capsule posted about retiring their ‘chess over gemini’ service. This was the first time that I had heard of that game! I was happy to see that we had both made similar design choices, such as including protable game notation (PGN), etc. I’m sure my version won’t be able to fill the hole that is left there, but it is nice to see how the universe works sometimes (one gemini chess closes, another opens!). This was also my first time coming across Rob’s blog, which I highly recommend (some great journal-like entries with photos).

Rob’s Gemini Capsule post about closure of chess

Reflections

This was my first time trying to make a gemini cgi-style app. In gernal I found it quite simple and easy to reason about, once I got the hang of how the protocol worked. In my case, the app state is all managed via a sqlite database. I’m not sure how others do this.

I only code as a hobby, so I can’t comment too much on the deeper questions around how the protocol works, but my own sense was that clojure, or any language that is more on the ‘funcitonal’ side, worked well for a gemini approach to state. At the end of each request, the state is sort of ‘cleared’, meaning that the functions and design can’t be too dependent on side effects or stateful data, which is exactly how you’re supposed to treat functional programming anyway.

Some things that I did feel were lacking (or that were messy in my case) were things like ui components. When working with html, people using clojure can use ‘hiccup’, which is a nice data-oriented way of expressing and manipulating html documents. In this case, I had a lot of ‘string/concat’ functions when it came to the UI and formatting the data at the user end.

I felt that there were certain repeating patterns in relation to user input and handling effects that it would be nice if they could be abstracted away. Gary Johnson (the author of Space Age) indicates that there is potential to use ‘middleware’-like scripts as wrappers for the main scripts. I didn’t look into this as much as I wanted to, but there could be some solutions here for developing a more elegant, clojure-like approach to handling effects and commen patterns like registering users.

This was primarily a learning experience for me, so my approach to writing the code was mainly just trying to find something that ‘worked’. At some point I’ll definitely have to go back an clean up a lot of the code.

I am also sure that there are likely a lot of bugs and missing features with regard to the chess. To be honest, I haven’t played chess myself since I was young! So, any feedback/suggestions are more than welcome!

OFFLFIRSOCH 2024 - Flights

Tue, 26 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

In response to Solerpunk’s 2024 OFFLine-FIRst SOftware CHallenge, I wrote a command line script for looking up flight ‘information’ offline.

Solderpunk post on OFFLFIRSOCH

My submission on github

As with all things Solderpunk related, I loved the general concept behind this and was eager to participate. A few things stopped me from engaging with it fully, however:

I went on holiday for a around 10 days in March
I struggled to make the chosen language (clojure via babashka) fully ‘portable’ in the way outlined by Solderpunk
Calculating flight times accurately is very difficult in a small-scale application like this!

In relation to point 2, I am still learning clojure/babashka, so I could not find a way to properly ‘package’ the script and sqlite database into something more portable. I might come back to that some day. To just run it in an expirimental sense, you will have to clone the repo, install babashka (with one line), and it should work from within the directory at least.

In relation to point 3, unfortunately the lack of robustness around the calculation of flight times makes this more of a ‘proof of concept’ than an application that could be actually used in daily life. Not that a fully robust cli tool for looking up the length of flights would be super usable in any case!

I enjoyed the challenge and it got me thinking about other, more useful applications that could be made ‘offline’.

The Undeath of the Author

Sun, 08 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Here lies One Whose Name was writ in Water

In 1967, Roland Barthes published his influential essay “The Death of the Author”. The essay was a key reference point in the structuralist and post-structuralist movements and called for the abandoning of the idea of the ‘author’ as the focal point for meaning when interpreting a text. According to structuralist theories of language, meaning arises through a variety of factors (grammar, culture, history, etc.). Seeing the meaning of the work as the product of a single mind (the ‘author’) misses this diversity of perspectives at the heart of language.

Structuralism was relatively short-lived, and the ‘death of the author’ never came to pass. We still rush to bookstores to buy the newest “J.K. Rowling” book, eager to explore the universe that only she can weave. We watch Youtube videos of interviews with authors, actors, and directors, hoping to gain a deeper insight into our favourite cultural works. Rarely, outside of academia, do readers or viewers conduct a structural analysis of Harry Potter books to trace the influences of Greek mythology, or contemporary post-Colonial politics on the work. These kinds of critical analyses do take place, but the public sphere debate is more likely to focus on J.K. Rowling’s pronouncement that this or that character is gay or not. Today, the author still often has the final say when it comes to revealing meaning in a text.

With the recent prominence of Large Language Models (LLMs), the question of the author is once again front-and-centre in the discussion of the value of a work. Only this time the question of ‘value’ is not some kind of academic or theoretical notion of ‘meaning’ or ‘semantics’. Instead, the focus is on the cold, hard value of money. Namely, if an author/artist produces a distinctive work, are they entitled to ownership and authority over this work, including over royalties?

This question is the subject of a number of cases taken against companies with products like Stable Diffusion, whose models have been trained on the work of real artists, writers, and creators. The models are so good that you can often simply request, for example, an image in the style of a particular artist, and the result will be quite close to what the artist themselves would have produced. There is a threat that we no longer need an actual author to produce the kinds of works we expect from authors and creators.

Was Barthes correct then that the meaning of the text is not located in the ‘authors’ mind, but rather is woven into the text, through language, available for anyone to mine and dissect? It certainly seems that LLMs were able to bypass any old notions that there was something quasi-mystical about the act of creation and the mind of the artist. Since the raw material for these models was simply text (and images), perhaps Derrida was right in that there is no ‘outside text’, no sacred authority who sets the meaning of a work. All that was needed could be found within the text itself, and with enough computational power it could be extracted and replicated.

The moment when written text could first be mass produced (the invention of the printing press) is often celebrated as a key moment of emancipation. Prior to people owning their own copies of the bible and learning to read it they had to depend on the interpretation of their priest. Once they owned their own copy, they now had their own authority over the meaning of the work. With digital computers and the internet, it also became possible for people to easily record and publish their own thoughts. Everyone became their own authority, their own creator, their own author.

Looked at in a certain way, this is a progressive movement from a situation where authority and power is centralised with those who were literate and had access to materials for writing (royalty, the wealthy , priests, etc.) to a situation where the masses have their own ability to read, interpret, and create.

However, as we know, it is not as simple as this. A key ambiguity of the situation is exposed with the lawsuits against LLMs. Yes, a visual artist today has access to a range of powerful tools for creation, and for disseminating and profiting off this creation. But, what happens when this very network of dissemination and democratisation is co-opted by a more powerful tool, which can take this data and use it to ‘imitate’ the work of the artists?

On the one hand, digital technologies have delivered on the ideals of structuralism by demystifying the notion of the ‘author’. Now, anyone can be an ‘author’ (you don’t have to be ‘born into it’), and furthermore, the thing that capitalists and markets have profited off for years (the ’name’ of the author, their style, etc.) has also been demystified through LLMs and their power to easily reproduce style. ‘Authorship’ is no longer solely located in the mind of author themselves, but is embedded in the semantics and patterns of the work they produce. On the other hand, real, living authors and creators are suffering because of this, especially those who are independent and live off their ’name’.

Arguably, the most ‘interesting’ thing (for now) about LLMs is precisely their ability to reproduce style and to appear human. This is both a source of amusement and wonderment for people, but also a source of fear and terror for those who depend on the uniqueness of their style for a living. It is ironic because, even as LLMs erode away at the notion of ‘authorship’, we are endlessly fascinated by it - “Write my email in the style of a Shakespearean sonnet…”

We continue to cling to notions of individuality and style, even as they are deconstructed before our eyes. In this sense, LLMs do not represent a ‘death of the author’, but rather a kind of ‘undeath of the author’, where the ‘author’ has, in a sense, been demystified and killed, but continues to live on in a kind of zombie state as we revel in our computer’s ability to imitate and replicate the things we previously took as all too ‘human’. The clearest representation of this is perhaps in science fiction where we see AIs ‘reanimate’ someone after they have died, by analysing their social media posts, etc. The person who has been ‘brought back to life’ is usually represented as something strange and foreign, more of a zombie than a human.

Style is not an end in itself

We could think of the opposite of ‘undeath’ as ‘rebirth’. How is it that we can be reborn, reinvent our identity in an age when our identity can easily be encoded by a language model?

I think an important lesson from Barthes is that the ‘voice’ or ‘style’ of the creator, as revealed through a work, is not equivalent to the creator themselves. Our own voices and tastes are far more diverse and difficult to pin down than what is revealed in the work. As the philosopher Paul Ricoeur says, the act of writing (of creation) is one of ‘distanciation’. From that perspective it is absurd to think that a person could ever be fully represented by an analysis of their writing, paitings or social media posts.

One of my favourite artists to think about when thinking about the role of style in the work of art is Philip Guston. Guston first became known for helping develop a highly influential style of art - abstract expressionism.

At a certain point, however, Guston abandoned this and returned to representational works, painting ‘cartoonish’ pictures which sometimes contained - notoriously - clansman-like figures. At the time, many people in the artworld couldn’t understand the shift. As Michael Auping, a curator who organized a Guston retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art Fort Worth in Texas, puts it, “People whispered behind his back: He’s out of his mind, and this isn’t art. He could have ruined his reputation, and some people said he did.”¹

Yet, these new works, while not as easily ‘marketable’ as his experiments with the abstract expressionist style, would become his masterpieces, and are among the most puzzling and thought-provoking experiments of 20th century modern art.

This story is not unique. Across all types of art, you can find countless examples of artists who, no sooner than happening upon a defining style, continue to work to experiment with it and even break it all together. Art, by its nature, is both creative and destructive, and the same if often true for the artist’s own identity. The artist that clings too tightly to their own public persona often fails to grow and develop.

The point here is that capitalism (and an LLM) thrives on crude repetition. To fully be ‘human’, in a way that also resists technological determinism, is to embrace the creative adaptivity of the human spirit. Barthes’ lesson, as Derrida would later show, was not really about the author per se. It was about the error of placing any one thing at the “centre” of the text, the error of thinking that there is only ever one ’true’ way of understanding a work. Language (and text) is a dynamic, evolving medium. The same is true of our identities (if we accept the idea that much of our self is constructed through language). There is no ‘centre’ of our identity, no single voice or style that could be copyrighted or fully represented by any kind of static model, be it a LLM or otherwise. There is always an excess, a remainder that seeks real novelty and creativity.

Philip Guston’s KK Paintings ↩︎

Three Years On

Sat, 16 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0000

My website (spool-five.com) has now been online for three years. In the spirit of this anniversary, this is a quick look-back at some of the key points over that time.

First Months

Date	December, 2020
Size	112M
Files	52
Posts	6
Generator	Hand-written html

At some point in the summer of 2020, early in my linux journey, I watched some Luke Smith videos. He inspired me to start my own website. He had some useful guides on things like getting a domain, self-hosting and syncing your site with rsync. I still like his philosophy around it and the general guide I would have followed from his videos is now available on landchad.net. I also had set up a mail server for the domain, using Luke Smith’s tools. This probably ran for a year or so. In retrospect, I do miss this, I am completely tied to gmail now for everything.

Luke Smith’s guide to starting a website

At the beginning, I liked to think of the site as something for my future self. Some kind of window into my thinking at a certain point of my life. I had entered my 30s, and was starting to feel that a lot of my life had already passed me by and I didn’t have much to look back on. I always enjoyed discovering photos on old drives during the times when I actually did make some effort to take photos, and the feeling was always like “Oh yeah, I did do those things! I did actually exist back then and had a real life with events and people.” I think we are always doing more than we realise.

In the spirit of the above, the name I chose for my domain was ‘spool-five.com’, after the spool of tape that the protagonist of Krapp’s Last Tape listens to in that play about replaying earlier parts of your life.

Discovering Gemini

Date	August, 2021
Size	95M
Files	230
Posts	36
Generator	Blop

The first year of having my own website/blog was definitely the most active. In January 2021 I discovered gemini, and gemini://spool-five.com was born. At first, I kept the gemini part of the site more as ’loose’, journaling type space where I could post whatever I wanted, and kept the web portion for more ‘serious’, longform content. This only lasted a few months, however, and eventually I merged the two and they became mostly mirrors of one another. I also added in stories I had posted on cosmic voyage to the site.

I also switched from hand-written html to using ‘Blop’, a bash-script for static site generation. This meant I could now write posts in markdown, so much better! More importanly, it allowed for easy/smooth conversion of files between gemtext and markdown, making have both site be the same a breeze.

Learning git

Date	November, 2021
Size	118M
Files	279
Posts	43
Generator	Blop

In November 2021 I started using git to version control the files for my site. This is something I should have done from the beginning! I didn’t realise it until writing this post, but git makes it so easy to just checkout an old version, rebuild it, and see what it was like. All the data I have from before that is just from around 5 backups I had made over the previous years.

A more powerful static site generator

Date	July, 2021
Size	119M
Files	331
Posts	51
Generator	Hugo

In July 2022, I switched to using Hugo to generate the site. This solution was way better from a general workflow perspective. Now, I really don’t have to think about the workflow at all, I can just focus on writing things (it also helps that there is good integration between emacs/org-mode and Hugo with ox-hugo).

The downside, perhaps is that it is too easy now. There is often some debate online about people who spend so much time on their configs and never get around to actually doing anything. If the history of this site is anything to go by, the opposite seems to be true in my case! Back when I spent more time hand-piecing things together, I also wrote more posts. Of course, the correlation here is not necessarily causation. Back then, I probably just had more time to work on configs and the technical aspects (and by extension more time to write posts). This was the time of the pandemic, after all, when the whole world slowed down a little.

Today

Date	September, 2021
Size	212M
Files	420
Posts	61
Generator	Hugo

The other major thing I have added to the site over the past year or so is a section called ‘Box 3’ (the name, again, from Krapp’s Last Tape), where I have tried to keep personal notes on various topics. Even though I have written much less blog ‘posts’, I have tried to update box3 from time to time.

I have also been doing a lot more ‘hobbyist’ coding over the past year, and at some point a switched from using the amazing bash script by Fixato to my own clojure-based solution.

Blog post on Fixato (April, 2021)

Over the history of the site, I also switched from cloud-based hosting to hosting via sourcehut, which I also really love.

From a ‘design’ perspective, looking back over past iterations of the site has been useful, and I actually prefer some of the past designs to what I have now. In general, I hate questions of visual design/css, so I try to avoid this work and to keep what is there as simple as possible. I’ll probably have to rework that side of the site at some point in the future though.

What’s Next?

I have no major plans for spool-five. Maybe some tweaks around the design, as mentioned above. I would love to write more posts for the site. Looking back over previous iterations and posts as part of this exercise has showed me that the site was indeed fulfilling its original purpose, acting as a kind of record of my existence and giving me some insight into how I was thinking at certain points. I also learned that half the joy of looking back over the site is derived from recognising the efforts taken to actually make it and keep it running. In this sense, the real lesson is just to do more projects, make more things.

Screenshots

December, 2020
February, 2021
March, 2021
August, 2021
November, 2021
May, 2022
July, 2022
January, 2023 (dark)
January, 2023 (light)

‹

›

Legislative Compliance

Tue, 25 Jul 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws. - Plato

Last year, I wrote about Ireland’s sectoral agreements around its ambitious Climate Action plan (2021-2030).

Irish Climate Targets July 2022

Over a month ago, a report was published by the Environmental Protection Agency evaluating the government’s plan. The headline claim was that “EPA analysis shows that planned climate policies and measures, if fully implemented, could deliver up to 29 per cent emissions reduction by 2030 compared to 2018, a reduction of 4 per cent each year from 2022 to 2030. This is insufficient to achieve the ambition of 51 per cent emissions reduction in Ireland’s Climate Act.”

EPA Press Release

The important phrase here is if fully implemented. At this stage, indications are that the government will fall well short of even that 29 per cent projected reduction.

The Irish Green Party, the main environmental party, is part of the current government (albeit a minority in a coalition government). Partly due to their efforts, a law was passed in 2021 - the Climate Act.

Climate Action and Low Carbon Development (Amendment) Act 2021

In other words, the Irish state now must, by /law/, reach certain carbon budget targets at certain intervals in the future.

Since the publication of the EPA report, politicians have occasionally appeared on the media to answer questions about what their plans are to address climate change.

One question that baffled reporters often ask the politicians is something along the lines of “If the targets are not met, what happens to the government (legally speaking)?”

The confusion partly arises because the classic way of holding a government to account doesn’t apply here, i.e., you can’t vote the government ‘out’ along these lines, because failure to reach the targets by 2030 will most likely be the result of actions taken by successive governments. No one group of politicians will be ’to blame’.

The government can’t exactly fine itself (in a meaningful way), and no civil servants will lose their jobs. No one will go to prison. There will be no consequences for not meeting the targets (aside from the obvious environmental, social, and existential ones!).

Maybe there is some obvious answer to the question that I’m missing but, at a certain point over the last few months, people started to realise how meaningless passing the Climate Act was (a moment that gave some genuine hope - after all, the other citizens in the country work so hard to respect the ’laws’, surely the government will do the same?)

It was a fairly big call to action, but in the end the system just continued to stumble along as it always does.

Maybe it just takes some time for the new culture envisioned by the measures to settle in, and there certainly has been some progress. But, it’s probably more likely that later generations will look at all the efforts taken now (after all, it took a lot of work to write the legislation, agree targets with stakeholders from each sector, etc.) in awe at all the ways we found to run in circles while avoiding the real questions.

Rent or Buy?

Mon, 01 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

This is just a short post I’m leaving here for posterity.

I’m once again in the process of moving house, and still renting. I’ve lived in dublin for around 8 years out of the past 15 or so, and it had always been a struggle finding somewhere to live, and it keeps getting worse.

I found an interesting website recently, which tracks proerty in Ireland and lists it along with commute times, etc. It’s really useful. Anyway, it has a little slider where you can adjust between houses ‘for rent’ and houses ‘for sale’. It’s pretty depressing looking at the difference between the two! Of course, it would be great to buy somewhere, but, in spite of the apparent supply in properties for sale, the prices are still very high.

Gaffologist - website tracking property sales/rentals in Ireland

Properties to Rent, May 2023

Properties to Buy, May 2023

Everyday Games

Mon, 16 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000

It’s the beginning of a new year and I’ve dusted off an old smartwatch to help me with my new year’s goal of exercising and staying active more. I started to feel a bit guilty, relying on Samsung and Google’s proprietary systems to help me track things like heart-rate, time spent exercising, etc.

We all know the dangers of this kind of data. We’ve seen how it can be used to manipulate and market to us. I used to live in Dundee in Scotland, a hub for gaming app development, and I remember meeting people who had PhDs in data science, but whose job was now optimising feedback mechanisms in mobile games to maximise playtime, etc.

Yet, amidst all these negative attempts by corporations to control us through gamified interfaces, I still feel grateful towards video games for the educational role they have played in my life.

I am not a big gamer at all, but, like many others, some of my fondest childhood memories are of playing games like Zelda and Final Fantasy for hours during the school holidays. I think the point at which I first felt the impact of these games on my life was when I went on a cycling trip about 10 years ago. A friend and I cycled from Dublin, along the coast, down to Kerry. It was about 620 km over 10 days (including 2 days rest in Cork).

Anyway, neither of us were particularly seasoned cyclists, so it was not easy. But we were young and up for the challenge. I remember vividly the times when the distances we needed to travel seemed insurmountable. It was during those times that my experience with video games came to the rescue. I started breaking up the distances in my mind into ‘stages’ or ’levels’ and began to imagine myself as an adventurer in a game, trying to conquer each stage. For some reason, I even remember humming a song from Zelda in my head (one of the themes from the Forest). These techniques of imagination helped me and made the challenge of the journey seem fun.

It’s a bit of a trivial example, but it really did work.

Here are some other lessons related to my experience with games:

The relation between the local and the universal

When games are done well, we are subtly taught an important lesson about the way that individual experiences and skills ‘build’ and obtain universal significance. A lot of games will be broken into sub-areas or levels, for example a temple in Zelda. When we are playing we are totally focused on solving the problems or challenges of that particular level. Yet, quietly, the game is ‘rewarding’ our focus by adding to our skill-set. Maybe after conquering a particular area our character now has the ability to swim in water. We can now use that skill in different situations, or in some kind of ’endgame’. Many games have this dynamic of focused, localised development playing a role in building up the overall character. In life, too, we can learn from this, especially in today’s economy where all too often skills we build up in one area of employment can quickly seem to become redundant. Games teach us that all kinds of focused development and improvement can matter, even in totally different areas or levels. The skills I learn in one kind of job will stay with me even when I am forced to move because that industry declines, etc.

Observation/contemplation can be as important as action

I’m thinking about games like Dear Esther or The Witness here. But, in general this could apply to any game which puts a large emphasis on the role of the world in the game. Unlike with cinema, when playing a game our hands are always on the keyboard (or controller, mouse,etc.). We are poised for action. Yet, some games invite us to hold back on this impulse and spend some time simply contemplating or enjoying a world. Many games play with this idea that we are not as ‘central’ to the world of the game as we might expect to be, we are not the straight-forward ‘hero’ (Stanley’s Parable, Bioshock, Portal, etc.) Instead, we are immersed in a world which has its own logic and meaning, and which sometimes demands that we take it on its own terms. This is an important lesson for life, which we are all-to-often told is action-driven. Sometimes, the best course of action is to be ‘passive’, to listen to someone else’s story, to simply observe how things operate before diving in.

Frustration and failure are okay

Some games work to naturalise failure and frustration as a part of the experience. This may be games where we are encouraged to fail over and over (Celeste, Super Meat Boy, etc.), or games that more explicitly explore this theme like Anna Anthropy’s 2012 Dys4ia, which explores the everyday frustrations of living with gender dysphoria and having to fit everything into pre-defined boxes and categories. When we die or fail in these games, we are forced to restart and try again. The game doesn’t try to ‘punish’ or judge you for failing. Instead, it encourages you to learn to adapt through failure. This is an important lesson for life also. There are moments in life when we are under pressure to perform a task, say, interviewing for a job, and we make a mistake. Many people’s gut reaction will to place a lot of weight on this mistake. Perhaps a voice in their head will tell them how stupid they are. Indeed, the mistake may very well be costly - we may not get the job we were dreaming of - yet life goes on, just like the game. We can cling to our failure or learn to let it go, to adopt the kind of ’lightness’ that a player feels when sent back to the start of the level. Yes, they are frustrated and angry that they messed up, but they are ready and eager to jump back in and try it all again. In the case of Dys4ia, the message may not necessarily be to embrace failure/frustration, but the underlying point is the same - it teaches us how to notice and recognise frustration. In many cases, simply understanding that you are frustrated is already half the battle.

2022 - My Year in Review

Wed, 21 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000

A post about my own personal 2022 - financial situation, GTD, and downtime.

Personal Finances

The Tools

In March of this year, I started using ledger to track my finances. It works perfectly. Every Sunday, I spend about 15-20 minutes inputting my transactions for the week into a file. Using emacs/ledger-mode to do this makes the whole process very fast and streamlined.

Thanks to how lightweight and simple ledger is, I spent very little time actually worrying about or configuring this process. It’s literally only 20 minutes a week and the rest of the time I don’t have to think about anything.

The upside of this is that, now, at the end of the year, I have access to all this data about my spending habits for the year, and I can start making more informed decisions.

I’ve used Gnuplot to generate the graphs related to this data below. It’s another tool that is super convenient, albeit highly complex and extensible. Throughout the year when I wanted to have a quick look at my finances, I just used default gnuplot graphs and fairly simple inputs (ledger has a dedicated function for interacting with gnuplot - report). When writing this, I discovered an amazing blog post with some great scripts for shaping and styling the gnuplot output, and have used these to create the graphs. The blog post is available here

Finally, I’ve ‘anonymised’ the output a little by removing the actual figures from the graphs.

Insights - Slim Margins

I’m sure I wasn’t alone this year in feeling general anxiety about global inflation levels. I think I felt an even greater level of shock because I moved back to Dublin from Korea. In Korea, there is incredible variety and value in products. Dublin, in contrast, is overpriced and with, in a lot of cases, much poorer quality of service and products. You spend more in Dublin and you get less for what you spend. Even something as simple as the physical distances you have to travel in Dublin to find what you want is terrible compared to Korea, with worse public transport to boot.

As the year progressed, I felt less insecure about finances and inflation, and you can see this reflected in the graph. I knew, back in March/April, that I was barely making enough money to stay afloat. Or, rather, I wasn’t exactly ‘making’ any extra money.

However, I felt that this would be fine as long as inflation didn’t go into overdrive and I started actually loosing money. Luckily, things trended in the other direction as the year went on.

Thanks to the work of unions, I even received a 3% pay increase in October (with further increases to come next March). I am also in a job where my pay increases on a scale each year. So, I knew if I could just survive this year treading water, things would get better as time went on. Well, luckily I survived, and I do feel happy that things went in the right direction, growth wise. However, as you can see from the graph, my personal growth margin is still pretty slim. I’m surviving, but it’s not as if I’m in a position to change much in my life, from a financial perspective, i.e., I can’t really take on an extra expenses, such as a car loan, etc., that would start to eat into this margin.

Finally, the elephant in the room here is rent. There is a housing shortage in Ireland at the moment and, as a result, rent prices are crazy. I lived in Dublin for around 7 years back in the early-mid 2010s. I then left Dublin and lived abroad for around 6/7 years. When I returned, rents had more than doubled. Unfortunately, there’s not much I can do to address the problem here. For context, here is my cashflow, with the cost of rent removed:

Long story short, I’m still treading water, but at least I’m not drowning yet.

Expenses

Rent
Eating Out (includes lunch at work, and coffee, etc.)
Groceries
Dentist
Computer (repais, upgrades, etc.)

I generally don’t enjoy shopping or spending a lot of money on things. However, as is clear from the graph, I definitely have one major vice that I need to get under control - eating out! This was my second-highest expense, behind rent. I don’t feel too bad about this to be honest, because all those times eating out were with friends and it is something I really love doing. But yeah, it could be something to work on for next year.

I also spent a lot of money this year on dentist appointments. This is for two reasons: (1) it had been a long time since I had been to the dentist, so there was a bit of a backlog in terms of work I needed to have done (2) the costs of visiting the dentist in Dublin are huge.

Compared to the amount I spent on the dentist, I really didn’t have that much done. It was basically just a few fillings. The dentist also told me it would be worth maybe seeing a dental surgeon about removing one of my wisdom teeth which hadn’t fully come up. I said fine, and went to see the dental surgeon. I booked an appointment but, because he was so busy, I still ended up waiting over an hour to see him. The actual consultation was less than 10 minutes. He basically went through the procedure and the risks associated with it. And then got me to sign some forms saying that if I went through the procedure and it was messed up, he is not liable, etc. Anyway, like I said, it was less than 10 minutes. The price? 220 euro. If I had gone through with the surgery itself to remove the wisdom tooth (I didn’t, in the end) the surgery would have been another 400 euro. Even a regular dental check-up in Ireland is around 70 euro. So you can see how costs add up in this area.

Finally, here is my monthly income and expenditure, with and without rent. I started by current job at the end of April, and there was about 5 weeks between finishing my last job and starting that one.

Looking at my income and expenditure, as well as the cashflow graph, it really does seem that I’m walking a slightly precarious tightrope. However, one thing that these numbers don’t show is, of course, the non-financial aspects of the year. I don’t feel any drive to make huge amounts of money and I learned this year the value of free time and a good work/life balance.

Anyway, this is the first time in my life I’ve actually taken some time to examine my annual finances. I don’t have much context for interpreting it. Hopefully I can keep it up and compare this with something similar next year.

Getting Things Done

I wrote about implementing a new Getting Things Done (GTD) system last March. It turned out quite well in the end. I didn’t really tweak it much after I initially set it up, and I think that is a good thing. Again, I relied a lot on emacs to do most of the heavy lifting, especially functions like org-refile and custom agenda views.

As I wrote in my post, I had a simple script (using sed) which counted tasks ‘open’ and ‘closed’ for each month. The main reason for this was to have these displayed on polybar, so I could see at a glance when things were building up, or if I was being particularly productive that month. This script would just run once a day in the background, and I haven’t really thought about it since last March. A bonus of recording this data, now, is that I can see at a glace my yearly ‘productivity’ rate. I’ve used Excalidraw to produce the graphs below.

I’m not sure exactly how I would change the system for next year, but I feel like I should make an effort to tweak it a bit. I’ve started using syncthing and logseq to access my notes on my phone, so I think the next step is to maybe make the system more mobile.

Downtime

One of the best things about this year was that I started a job that permits a great work/life balance. Because of this I was able to spend a lot of time on hobbies and meeting people. Strangely enough, I probably didn’t spend a crazy amount of time this year watching/reading things. Perhaps this is because I feel less ‘drained’ after work, that feeling where you just want to switch off and travel to another world.

Below is a quick list of things I read/watched/listened-to, and which stood out for me. I’ve restricted my list to stand-out movies/tv shows/music from 2022 only. Probably the best movie I watched this year from any time period was Journey to Italy. I still can’t believe it took me so long to get around to watching it, it is absolutely mind-blowing. I always love those kinds of works which almost seem like a sole ‘origin’ for so many revolutionary things that come after (like the first Velvet Underground album, the works of Wagner, etc.) You can find the seeds of so much of mid-late 20th century cinema embedded in this movie.

Books

Amerika - Franz Kafka. Finally got around to reading this. It is wonderful. Still haunts me just as much as The Trial or The Castle.
Project Hail Mary - Andy Weir. Expert storytelling.
Buddha - Karen Armstrong. The perfect balance of highly-researched/academically fulfilling on the one hand, and meaningful and inspiring on the other.

TV-shows

The Rehearsal (Season 1)
Atlanta - Season 3. I haven’t had the chance to watch Season 4 yet.
White Lotus (Season 2)

Movies

Everything, Everywhere, All at Once
X/Pearl
Decision to Leave

Music

I can’t remember listening to many ’new releases’ this year. The main ones the stood out were:

Beyonce - Renaissance
Bjork - Fossora

Emacs Youtube

Thu, 08 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000

One of my goals for 2023 is to use YouTube as little as possible.

However, I still want to be able to watch videos occasionally, I just don’t want the ’time-suck’ element of youtube, where you end up with an endless stream of (admittedly interesting) content thanks to the suggestions provided by the algorithm.

There are lots of alternatives to visiting youtube directly, but I wanted a way to subscribe to channels and still watch videos from people I am interested in. As usual, Emacs provided a good solution.

Basically, I used a script (not essential, just because I’m lazy) to automate the process of getting the rss feed for a channel and append it to my list of elfeed subscriptions. It takes the url of a youtube channel page as an argument. I just wrote this so it needs a lot of tidying up/error checking, it’s supposed to be temporary anyway.

_elfeed_list="/home/eoin/.config/doom/elfeed.org"
_url=$1
_channel_id=$(curl -s "$_url" | \
    grep -o -P 'channel_id=.{0,24}' | \
    awk -F "=" '{print $2}' | head -n 1)

_rss_feed="https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=$_channel_id"
_channel_name=$(curl -s "$_rss_feed" |\
    grep "title" | \
    head -n 1 | \
    cut -d '>' -f 2 | \
    cut -d '<' -f 1)

echo "*** [[$_rss_feed][$_channel_name]]" >> "$_elfeed_list"

Then, I can see the list of videos in my elfeed view (all the channels are tagged :youtube: so can be easily narrowed with elfeed’s search). I’ve only just started adding subscriptions to it.

Finally, I added some code to my emacs config so that it opens youtube urls with mpv by default.


;; adapted from EmacsWiki/Browse-url https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/BrowseUrl

(defcustom youtube-viewer-program "youtube-viewer" "Progam path to youtube-viewer")

(defcustom youtube-viewer-args nil "Extra arguments for youtube-viewer")

(defun view-youtube-url (url &rest _)
  "Open Youtube-Viewer to browse the given URL."
  (interactive (browse-url-interactive-arg "URL: "))
  (setq url (browse-url-encode-url url))
  (let* ((process-environment (browse-url-process-environment)))
    (apply #'start-process
           (concat "youtube-viewer " url) nil
           youtube-viewer-program
           (append
            youtube-viewer-args
            (list url)))))

(with-eval-after-load 'browse-url
  (add-to-list 'browse-url-handlers
       (cons "youtu\\.?be" #'view-youtube-url)))

I used youtube-viewer as the default program to open the links since mpv on its own seemed very slow (connection wise). Presumably youtube-viewer works better because it uses an API key.

Now I have a simple way to watch my youtube subscriptions without actually going to youtube.

Bjork Tier List

Mon, 05 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve just finished listening to the Homogenic episode of Bjork’s new podcast series Sonic Symbolism.¹ Each episode of the podcast is a retrospective look at a Bjork album.

The series as a whole (so far) is a beautiful examination the way art mirrors life, the way that the spirit and time of the artist is woven into the artwork.

Having studied lots of post-structuralist philosophy, I have always been a bit too cynical about the extent to which the artist informs the meaning of their work. I’ve read too many pieces on how the names ‘author’ and ‘artist’ are just products of capitalist economics, and that it is always dangerous to reduce the meaning of a work to its author. ‘Damien Hirsh’ or ‘Stephen King’ are just names or labels, like ‘Nike’ or ‘Chanel’. Furthermore, focusing too much on the artists themselves can result in overly-‘psychologised’ explanations of a work, while a critical analysis of the social structures and means of production surrounding the work result in a more ‘progressive’ view.

This kind of critique can certainly be true. Think of recent controversies around J.K Rowling’s retrospective comments about the Harry Potter universe. They raise an important question about who has the most ‘say’ about the meaning of a work: the artist/author, the fan community, the literary critic, etc.?

However, the way that Bjork discusses the cross-currents of her life experience vis-a-vis her different albums reminded me how sometimes understanding an artist’s biography can provide a rich entry point into the work. Not in the sense of ‘so-and-so lived during X historical period and was friends with another famous so-and-so’, but in the sense of ‘at this period of the artist’s life their spirit was at a certain stage of evolution’ (teenage angst, grief, love, isolation, political upheaval, exile, etc.). These more ‘universal’ structures of experience can sometimes only be attested to through the voice of the artist themselves (or through reflection on their biography).

The most important wisdom/lesson from these podcasts is the notion that life proceeds by cycles of renewal and death. The self has various periods of sociality, introversion, retreat, confrontation, etc. Bjork’s albums, taken as segments within this whole, capture these moments wonderfully. Art, if we accept it as a very /human/ activity, cannot but reflect these cycles of the self in its structures.

Anyway, against the spirit of all of the above, which is about Bjork’s podcast digging deep into a work, I’ve provided a, very shallow, ’tier list’ of Bjork’s albums below! If you want a more comprehensive understanding of the albums, go checkout the fantastic podcast if you haven’t already.

|-----------------------------------------------|
|     |                                         |
| S   | Vespertine, Homogenic, Post             |
|     |                                         |
|-----------------------------------------------|
|     |                                         |
| A   | Debut, Medulla, Vulnicura, Utopia       |
|     |                                         |
|-----------------------------------------------|
|     |                                         |
| B   | Volta, Biophillia                       |
|     |                                         |
|-----------------------------------------------|

Bjork - Sonic Symbolism ↩︎

Offline Week July 2022

Sun, 07 Aug 2022 00:00:00 +0000

A week ago, I switched my life to being primarily ‘offline’. Or, perhaps it is better to say I took steps in that direction. I was still online during working hours, and I left the messaging apps on my phone online.

Still, being offline for that majority of my non-working time was, a little unexpectedly, a bit of a shock. The impetus for this little experiment was blog posts by Ploum and the software they’ve developed, Offpunk.

Offpunk is a command-line tool for managing/browsing http,gemini and gopher feeds. It enables you to download content to a cache, and subsequently browse this content while offline.

Every morning, I synced my feeds with Offpunk, and these kept me going throughout the day. There was always plenty of reading material.

The first thing I noticed was the disruption to my morning routine. As soon as I wake up, I reach for my laptop or phone and start browsing things like twitter, hackernews, youtube, etc. It’s amazing how much time is sucked in by this routine. In place of this, I would wake up, sync the Offpunk feeds, read through a couple, and then go on with my day. I still spend a decent chunk of my morning hours reading a screen, but that feeling of ‘infinite’ content was gone. It was nice.

Throughout the day, with the pull to return to the infinite content stream removed, my downtime was primarily made up of reading. I read a lot. Luckily I had started an engaging, easy-to-get-lost-in book (Project Hail Mary), so I never felt bored. I also tried to find other things that didn’t require me to be online, such as music production.

As I said, I didn’t go fully offline, but I do think I succeeded in disconnecting from the endless stream of entertainment and stimulation that comes from many online services. Removing yourself from this stream is quite rewarding. Unfortunately, it is something (in my case at least) that you have to forcibly remove yourself from. I know that I will go straight back to it soon.

One thing I did miss a lot, which can only really be done online, is playing bridge. In its place, I tried reading some bridge books, but it’s not the same.

Replacing the web with other forms of entertainment

It might be said that I’ve simply substituted one object that sucks attention (the internet, social media) with others (books, coding, music, offline video games). This is true in a certain sense. One thing that the internet prevents you from doing is actually /thinking/ very much and I have to admit that the kinds of activities I replaced it with were sufficiently entertaining to help me continue my avoidance of reality and the hard work of thinking.

The act of thinking is a strange thing. It seems to come on most strongly when we are bored, i.e., when our mind has no activity to latch on to. For example, while waiting for a train or walking. Personally, I do find that these times, which are ‘in-between’ normal activities, are the most creative times for thinking.

Entertainment is a way of avoiding boredom and, by proxy, being forced into having to think and confront ourselves too much. I certainly had no shortage of entertaining activities this week, in spite of being ‘offline’.

However, there were still two important differences:

The activities I substituted the internet with were /free from advertising/. I was reminded a bit here of when I quit smoking (eventually with the help of vaping). The feeling I get now when I sense cigarette smoke is a kind of ‘icky’, nauseous feeling. One day this week, while at work, I clicked on a tweet from out department and was brought to the twitter feed. I scrolled down a bit and the first advertisement I saw (it didn’t take long) gave me the same feeling I have about cigarettes. It’s was such a relief to be free from all these internet advertisements for a week. I’m not sure what this constant bombardment of ads does to our neurological structures, but it can’t be far off what smoke does to our lungs.
The internet is a source that encompasses many kinds of entertainment. Meaning that, once I am online, I am only a click away from some new kind of entertainment activity. In contrast, when switching from reading a book to playing around with music production, for example, there is a lot more downtime and space between the activities. Also, you have to spend some time actually thinking about what kinds of activities you /want/ to do. On the internet this whole process is streamlined.

Failures

Things I failed at going fully offline:

Sometimes, I wanted to find out something small (like the name of someone, the name of a book, etc.) and I would have to immediate urge to search for it online. Toward the beginning of the week I resisted this urge, but in the last few days I did use search engines to retrieve a few small bits of info. Did these bits of info improve my life much? No. But it is still handy to have search functionality for certain things. If I were to go fully offline (no searching) I would need a way to store some of these ‘questions’, and maybe allow myself 20 minutes in a day to search for them.
Maps and podcasts.
- While travelling, I still used google maps to calculate times and bus routes. I could figure out how to get to most places in Dublin by myself, I’ve lived in around 8 different places all throughout the city over the years. However, I would always fail against google maps when it comes to finding the best/quickest way somewhere.
- I still listened to podcasts via streaming. The podcasts would be easy to go ‘offline’ with, I’d just need a way to conveniently auto download the ones I always listen to. I’m sure there is a setting for this on the app. With the maps, however, there is a lot of amazing functionality there that would take a lot more effort to replace.

Snow Crash - Metaverses and Viral Culture

Fri, 05 Aug 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Snow Crash - A book by Neal Stephenson, published in 1992.

In 2021, the book came back into vogue following Facebook’s announcement that they were changing their name to Meta and aiming to develop a metaverse. The concept of a metaverse first appears in Snow Crash.

After actually reading the book, I find the link between Facebook and Snow Crash even more ironic than most journalists point out. Usually, it’s the case that Zukerberg’s vision of a metaverse is contrasted strongly with Stephenson’s.

However, the most relevant part of the book with regard to Facebook, for me, is its theme of ‘viral language’.

The theme/theory is elaborated quite a bit in the book, so I won’t try to cover it too much (actually, much of the theory it is a tad facile. I have to say I enjoyed Cryptonomicon a lot more than this book).

To try summarise:

Humans have a ‘base’ part of their brain, some kind of lizard-brain, linguistic sub-structure. On top of this, they have the language centers that process their mother-tongue.

At one point, all that humans had, by way of a linguistic environment, was the sub-structure(no mother-tongue), and it could be easily manipulated/controlled by certain laws/scripts. Primitive humans were a bit like computers in this sense. Law/programs were like viruses, in that the strongest survived through natural selection. For example, there was a set of steps for making bread. Humans who were exposed to this ‘virus’ fared better than those that didn’t, evolutionary-speaking.

Anyway, at a certain point a guy came along who could understand this sub-structure and wrote new programs which could exploit it (the proto-hacker, Neo-like figure, although this book was before the Matrix). His ‘gift’ to humanity was the same gift outlined in the Tower of Babel myth - humans were given their own individual languages and, since these languages could not be understood by those outside the group, the ‘spread’ of these viruses that targeted the sub-structure was stopped. Now, humans had to learn to think for themselves. Different cultures (demarcated by languages) develop different methods for making bread, and so on.

Babel led to an explosion in the number of languages. That was part of Enki’s plan. Monoculture, like a field of corn, are susceptible to infections, but genetically diverse cultures, like a prairie, are extremely robust.

This is all great for a while, even though the sub-structure of the human brain is tapped into in different ways throughout history,

We are all susceptible to the pull of viral ideas. Like mass hysteria. Or a tune that gets into your head that you keep on humming all day until you spread it to someone else. Jokes. Urban legends. Crackpot Religions. Marxism. No matter how smart we get, there is always this deep, irrational part that makes us potential hosts for self-replicating information.

But, eventually a guy comes along who can tap into peoples brains (another super-hacker) and he uses this power to build a giant raft in the Pacific Ocean, full of his brainwashed followers. Appropriately, the raft resembles a ‘web’ - there are lots of smaller boats tied together with multiple ropes - and becomes a little city filled with lots of diverse groups and societies, all united by their common ‘infection’ caused by the creator of the raft (the villain).

So, if there was ever a parallel between Facebook and this novel, its not in the common use of the term ‘Metaverse’ but in the parallels between Zuckerberg and the villain of the story. If we need a metaphor to understand Facebook it has to be a virus, an infection that threatens to erase the productive difference of language, and not a metaverse - a cool sci-fi concept of a place filled with hackers.

Irish Climate Targets July 2022

Thu, 04 Aug 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Last week (28 July), the Irish government reached an agreement on targets for carbon reduction across multiple sectors.

The background: legislation has already been passed stating that Ireland must reduce its carbon emissions by 51% by 2030. Think of the passing of this legislation as phase 1.

Phase 2 involved negotiating how that number would be reached, sector by sector (energy sector, transport, agriculture, housing, etc.).

Phase 3 will involve figuring out what measures and policies are necessary on a per-sector basis to actually reach these targets. In other words, nothing has actually been implemented yet. In fact, like most other countries, Ireland’s carbon emissions continue to rise, year on year.

The most contentious part of these recent negotiations was around agriculture. As I wrote about in a previous post, agriculture has become a touchstone for the climate debate in Ireland because it makes up 37% of our carbon emissions, while adding only around 1% to our GDP¹. It is a huge factor in making Ireland’s per capita carbon emissions higher than other countries. It also happens to be a highly symbolic way of life in Ireland, particularly since there is a longstanding cultural and political divide between Dublin and rural parts of Ireland. Coming from a rural part of Ireland myself (which is also the most economically neglected part of Ireland), I can understand the animosity aimed toward the government by rural communities. The have remained consistently underdeveloped for decades. Probably around 10% of people I grew up with still live in my hometown (anecdotal), with the rest forced to migrate to Dublin, or abroad, to find work.

In the government’s original action plan, they set out potential reduction ranges for each sector. Farming was between 22%-30%. In the end, a 25% reduction in farming emissions was agreed.

The compromise number seemed to upset all sides. Representatives for farmers felt it was too high, while representatives for environmental parties felt it was too low, leading to the burden for other sectors being unreasonably high to compensate.

Below are all the agreed targets:

Sector	Reduction	2018	2030 ceiling
Electricity	75%	10.5 MtCO2eq	3 MtCO2eq
Transport	50%	12 MtCO2eq	6 MtCO2eq
Buildings (Commercial and Public)	45%	2 MtCO2eq	1 MtCO2eq
Buildings (Residential)	40%	7 MtCO2eq	4 MtCO2eq
Industry	35%	7 MtCO2eq	4 MtCO2eq
Agriculture	25%	23 MtCO2eq	17.25 MtCO2eq
Other**	50%	2 MtCO2eq	2 MtCO2eq

**F-gases, petroleum refining and waste.

It is also important to point out that all these reductions don’t actually add up to the 51% cuts required by law. They only add up to 42%. The remainder? This will be solved with ’technological advances’ according to the government…

I wrote in my previous post that the symbolic conflict around farming and climate change policies is being leveraged by opposition parties and that this was unfortunate, since it doesn’t account for the real sacrifices in society that do need to be made.

However, I have since come around to the farmers’ position a bit more. After all, farming is a huge part of Irish identity and, if the industry is encouraged to die off, something of our cultural heritage will also be lost too.

This is a loss that could certainly be acceptable in the case that meaningful progress was made toward saving the Earth. However, this is not inevitable.

For example, imagine if farmers did indeed start to reduce their herds and shrink their output. At the same time, imagine very little progress is made across other sectors. In this case, in twenty years time we could still be in a horrifying dystopia, but with a part of our identity cut from us.

The points in favour of this second case occurring are:

(1) Just because farmers reduce production doesn’t mean consumption is reduced. Irish people may still choose to import beef from other countries, countries which may not have as progressive (in terms of animal welfare) farming practices as Ireland. In the global sense, Irish agriculture doesn’t contribute much. We are a small country. In any case, if we continue to consume the same amount of beef, the global carbon footprint associated with that remains the same.²
(2) It is still uncertain whether we can get anywhere close to 51% carbon reduction. There is still little in the way of concrete policies in this regard. And, where there are some strategies, they border on the absurd. For example, in the case of reducing emissions from transport, the current plan is to have 1 million electric vehicles on the road in Ireland by 2030. Ireland’s population is around 5 million. Around 100,000 cars are sold every year here. There are 8 years between now and 2030. When you start to do the math, the 1 million number doesn’t add up. The only way it could be achieved is if our population grows a lot (and, with it, car sales), and by making diesel and petrol vehicles prohibitively expensive, while somehow making electric vehicles affordable enough for even low income families. That’s the kind of political action that seems virtually impossible within the kind of system we currently have. To quote Jean-Claude Juncker:

“We all know what to do, but we don’t know how to get re-elected once we have done it.”

At least this discussion is now being had in the public sphere and I do believe solutions can be found.

I think that rather of talking about simply ‘reducing’ the size of agriculture, more debate needs to be had around different ways that it could be re-structured. The aim here would be to maintain tradition and respect the identity of these communities, but to re-imagine alternative practices that also respect the environment. Farmers in Ireland are among the chief stewards of our land, and they should be engaged with on that level, not simply treated as a homogeneous ‘industry’.

Worldbank - Irish Agriculture contribution to GDP ↩︎
I’m simplifying this a bit for the sake of argument. I’m not sure how it would work in practice, since perhaps if we want consumption to remain high, we would end of paying some kind of carbon tax on that, which could offset carbon output in other ways. For example, say we import beef from Russia, but pay our some carbon credits to a project for reforestation or something. ↩︎

re Communism Against Earth

Mon, 27 Jun 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Related to Idomdrottning’s post:

Communism Against Earth

Tug of war on the brink will lead to both falling over.

There are already many examples where capitalist institutions utilise environmentalist arguments in order to maintain hegemony. A common tactic seems to be creating some kind of division between ‘reckless populists’ who advocate for things like abolishing carbon taxes that adversely affect working people and the ‘sensible middle-class/elite’ who accept the need for ‘sacrifices’ to save the planet. Of course, those who are in favour of these economic sacrifices also tend to be the ones that can afford it.

However, there also seems to be a trend in the other direction too. Socialist political movements/parties sometimes use environmental initiatives to set themselves up as protectors of the ‘victims’ (farmers, truck drivers, etc.)

This conflict has been playing out for a long time in France, and has recently become more prominent in Ireland where Sinn Fein, the main opposition, has become the most popular party. Sinn Fein will often take a ‘populist’ stance against government regulations around environmental issues (carbon tax, peat restrictions, etc). They will claim that these measures unfairly disadvanatge lower-income groups. For example, when the government sought to ban the sale of peat/turf in order to conserve Ireland’s rapidly dwindling boglands, Sinn Fein’s opposition on the basis that such an initiative would disproportionately affect rural communities successfully postponed the ban. Those in power - who also happen to be rapidly losing this power - will simply say that Sinn Fein are not responsible enough when it comes to the planet. On the other side, Sinn Fein and rural independent TDs will use proposed environmental regulations as proof that the current government does not support working people and rural communities, that it is more concerned with ‘global image/representation’ than the people of Ireland, etc. The environment becomes a wedge issue. A polictical theater is set up where you are either on the side of rural communities and working people, or you are on the side of the ‘global agenda’ around climate change.

As I said, Sinn Fein are the most popular party now. Suggesting that people aren’t buying the government tactic of painting Sinn Fein as environmentally irresponsible. In economically challenging times, people don’t care about the environment.

As much as I agree with the spirit of Sinn Fein’s approach, the sad thing is that the policies the government are advocating are sacrifices that we probably do need to make. And, yes, rural communities in Ireland may be disproportionately affected. For example, 37% of Irish greenhouse gas emissions are from agriculture. Agriculture and the communities around it are a huge part of Irish identity, and play a role in energising the nationalist streak in Sinn Fein’s support. It’s doubtful that Sinn Fein would have the political courage to go against this identity, even though there are so many ways it could work to re-imagine it in more progressive, environmentally-conscious ways.

What does this have to do with communism though? Sinn Fein are not a communist party, nor are many other socialist parties that get branded as ‘communist’ by the right wing. This is maybe part of the problem.

In an ideal, communist, sense, the very division that is being exploited by both the ruling elite and the socialist Sinn Fein would be dissolved. Communism, in theory, is a system which would be beyond this kind of idological conflict, a conflict that is fueling climate inaction in Ireland.

This is perhaps a case where pursuing communism would be preferable to pursing an environmentalist/anti-doomsday agenda. From a communist perspective, the ideological situation of capitalism places restraints on what can meaningfully be achieved through political discourse. Before we can even talk about the environment in a way that actually brings about change, we need to change the framework of communication and discourse.

Now, history also has plenty of examples of communist movements themselves descending into divisive factions leveraging wedge issues for power, so maybe communism is not necessarily the ‘savoiur’ in this regard. But, I do think that before we can solve the environment-problem, we need to solve the systemic issues and ‘divide and conquer’ strategy of the ruling class that communism at least points to.

Or, perhaps the kind of commitment to the planet that idomdrottning beautifully expresses can become the foundation for a new politics that is ‘post’ this kind of divisive discourse that we now find in Ireland.

Spacing Out - Gangnam Style

Sat, 07 May 2022 00:00:00 +0000

I’m writing this in response to the May 6th entry on Ran Prieur’s, always-lovely, blog:

May 6. I’ve quit meditating. Instead, I do nothing. The practice is basically the same but the framing is totally different. Meditation is something that highly driven people do to improve themselves; nothing is what lazy people do whenever they get the chance. Meditation is a chore; doing nothing is a relief. While meditating, you focus on your breath in order to still your thoughts; while doing nothing, you focus on your breath because breathing is the only thing you can’t not do.

It took me back to my time in Korea.

To be perfectly honest, at least part of the reason why I initially moved to Korea was some kind of desire to discover more about Buddhism, Confucianism, and Taoism. I wanted to move to a society that had been shaped by these historical movements in the same way I believed my own had been shaped by Christianity (specifically, Catholicism).

While I did indeed learn more about these traditions and the subtle influences they can have on social order, the predominant social force I learned the most about was, of course, capitalism (and also some even more dogmatic forms of Christianity!).

In place of ‘meditation’ I learned all about ‘spacing-out’. This is a common ‘practice’ in Korea where you literally sit and do nothing. I’m sure everyone is familiar with the feeling of just staring into space and zoning out. Well, in Korea, it is basically considered a past-time. I was even teaching an English class to some middle school students about ‘hobbies’ where the term came up. The first kid said their favourite hobby was playing video games, the second said going to the mall, and the third said ‘zoning-out’.

They have famous annual ‘spacing-out’ competitions in Korea. The winner is whoever can go the longest without falling asleep or moving. Sometimes these competitions get covered in Western media, and are often framed with terms like ‘zen’ and so on.

But, the point of all this is to say that this practice is most definitely not linked to any past histories of religious meditation. It’s linked to capitalism. It’s linked to being overworked, over-stimulated, and over-tired. It’s a survival mechanism.

GloPoWriMo - It's a wrap!

Sun, 01 May 2022 00:00:00 +0000

I participated in this year’s global/national poetry writing month and I actually managed to write a poem a day! Now, in the case of a lot of the poems, I did end up spending only around five minutes on them. This was on days when I was particularly busy. Still, it shows that it is possible at least. I had every written any poetry before, so it was quite an experiment for me.

I would say that the experiment was a success. Not in terms of the poetry output, but in terms of the process. There is something so therapeutic and cleansing about the simple act of being “creative”. One thing I realised in this process was the need to find more outlets for expressing creativity.

What I had hoped to achieve throughout the process was a deeper understanding of the form of poetry itself. I did manage to expose myself to a lot of different ways of thinking about poetry, mostly through the daily prompts from the website napowrimo.net, but I still don’t really understand how to write “better” poetry. This doesn’t bother me too much, though. As I said, the real goal of the exercise turned out to be simply unlocking some creative impulses.

I feel that we, or at least I, tend to think about creativity in terms of projects and production. Sometimes, it feels like it is not enough to just sit down and write. I always have to contextualise writing in some kind of broader agenda - producing a novel or short story, a blog post, etc. The problem with these kinds of project-oriented works of creativity is that a lot of the joy and satisfaction that is gained from completing a creative act is deferred (usually indefinitely). Sure, if you want to be successful with your creation you also need to put in a lot of time and work. But, this experiment has shown me that even ‘micro’ acts of creativity can go a long way. Going forward, I will try teach myself to practice this kind of creativity more often in my daily life.

I posted the poems on my gemlog and weblog every day. If you’re on Gemini, you can view them on my poetry page, or you can view them with more context/explanation on my weblog.

God and Climate - Lent 2022

Sun, 17 Apr 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Disclaimer - I am not really a practicing Christian, but I have always been interested in all kinds of religions. If I were to classify my beliefs, it might be as something like ‘anatheistic’ - a term used by the philosopher Richard Kearney to describe a point between theism and atheism.

This year for lent, I decided to try to read and write a written response to a part of the bible every day. I mostly used the standard daily gospel readings. Some days I just picked random verses.

As a final reflection on that process, I wanted to write up some of the main themes that kept coming up for me.

The things we find interesting in a text are always shaped by contemporary and personal concerns, so I should not have been surprised to find that a lot of the readings I did could be interpreted in terms of climate change (admitedly, just my own, skewed readings-into the text.)

The two main things that stood out to me were: (1) God is ‘unknowable’ and (2) nature, in its allignment with God, is also ‘unknowable’.

God is unknowable

This seemed especially true in the Hebrew Bible readings. Attempts to coerce God ultimately fail, the only way to be in tune with God is to resign yourself to God’s will.

This is not surprising to find in a religious text, since the key thing which sets a religion apart from other practices is the centrality of /faith/. Knowledge and understanding will only get you so far, at a certain point you just have to believe in and bow to the will of a higher power.

This is also the feature of religions that can be misused so easily - don’t question, just believe. But, I think outside of a strict, religious tradition, the emphasis on the need for faith at the limits of reason can be a useful lesson. It’s something that, for example, existentialist thinkers like Kierkegaard knew - ‘reason’, when pushed to its limits can often become non-sensical and even violent. We should always be willing to step outside our own rationality and act spontaenously.

One recurring case where we see the limits of knowledge and understanding is in the kind of ‘justice’ God dispenses. I’m not sure how to categorise it, but it is something like a justice of the ‘present’. God is not reliable and predictable, their mood can change quickly. The only option is to kind of always act ‘well’, just in case they are watching. It’s not wholly unlike some kind of Big Brother situation. At the same time, though, God is infinitely forgiving.

For example, one of the passages I read was Ezekiel 18:21-28. Here, God says that if a wicked man renounces all the sins he has commited and becomes law-abiding and honest, then he will live forever. All his past sins will be forgotten. However, if a righteous man takes up the habits of the wicked man, all his past integrity will be forgotten and he will die. So, our personal ‘histories’ don’t matter much to God, what matters is the here and now. This is both hopeful and terrifying.

The other famous case of God’s perverse sense of justice is Job. Job is the most righteous person living, but God allows Satan to take everything from him, just to prove a point - his faith does not waver. Some wise theologians try to explain to Job that there are reasons behind why he lost everything, that “God works in mysterious ways”, etc. But, in the end, God appears to Job in the form of a whirlwind and tells them that, no, Job was right, there is no deeper reason behind his suffering, it just /is/. This makes the figure of Job all the stronger, because his faith stays strong even in the midst of profound, reasonless suffering.

Nature, by proxy, is also unknowable

Talk of God and whirlwinds leads us to the second point - God is often identified with natural phenomena and, therefore, what we learn about God we can also apply to our understanding of ’nature’.

There were many readings that I came across that identified God’s will with forces of nature, especially destructive forces of nature. Most of these people will be familiar with - plagues, floods, droughts, and so on.

But, God’s will was identified with /regenerative/ forces of nature too. For example, in Isiah 55 the word of God is likened to the rain and snow which water the earth and provide food for people. It also brings order/harmony to nature:

Instead of the thornbush will grow the juniper,
and instead of briers the myrtle will grow. \

I listened to some talks about horticultural societies recently, so it’s also not surprising that I read into the first book of the bible in that vein (the story of the Fall is one of those stories that can mean so many things). Anyway, we can read it as a narrative about the movement from a horticultural, garden-based civilization to an agricultural, ‘scientific’ civilisation. Agricultural society, then, would be a kind of punishment, with the sin being ‘knowledge’.

Cursed is the ground because of you;
through painful toil you will eat food from it
all the days of your life.
It will produce thorns and thistles for you,
and you will eat the plants of the field.
By the sweat of your brow
you will eat your food
until you return to the ground,
since from it you were taken;
for dust you are
and to dust you will return. \

Genesis: 3: 17-19

Isn’t the above a kind of premonition about agricultural, industrial society? We work harder for our food. We transform the land into wasteland through overfarming (“It will produce thorns and thistles for you”). In the end, we become what we live off - dust. Those final lines, in particular, conjure up images of the dustbowl drought, and the harms of industrialisation.

So, we have recurring ’threats’ from God, if you sin your city will be destroyed by floods, your knowledge leads to cursed land, and so on. What is the solution? Well, similar to the section above, there is no ‘solution’ really, only faith. In this case, though, our faith would be placed in nature. We would have to bow down before the environment and obey its will. Climate gives and takes away. Nature, which has the power to destroy, also has the power to regenerate:

This is what the Lord says—
he who made a way through the sea,
a path through the mighty waters,
who drew out the chariots and horses,
the army and reinforcements together,
and they lay there, never to rise again,
extinguished, snuffed out like a wick:
“Forget the former things;
do not dwell on the past.
See, I am doing a new thing!
Now it springs up; do you not perceive it?
I am making a way in the wilderness
and streams in the wasteland.
The wild animals honor me,
the jackals and the owls,
because I provide water in the wilderness
and streams in the wasteland,
to give drink to my people, my chosen,
the people I formed for myself
that they may proclaim my praise.

Just as climate can shift and turn everything to ashes, so too can it “make a way in the wilderness and streams in the wasteland”. It reminds me of Heidegger’s famous use of a Holderlin quote to talk about technology:

But where the danger is, grows the saving power also

This could be a contemporary motto for the fight against climate change. The goal is not to ‘master’ or ‘harness’ nature, to bend it to our will - that kind of thinking resulted in our current catastrophe. Instead, the goal should be to forget much of what we think we know, and to enter, again, into a dependant, senstive relation with a process (climate, nature) which is higher than us and which is the source of eternal life.

Gemtext and Image

Thu, 14 Apr 2022 00:00:00 +0000

One of the most noticeable things about Gemini is that it is text-based. Sure, it can support images but, depending on the client, these are mostly left hidden. Gemini gains a lot of its identity from this emphasis on text. One of the first things you’ll notice if you compare an average web page and a page on Gemini is that one is filled with images and highly visual, while the other is just a wall of text.

Does this mean, then, that gemtext is somehow anti-image? That it is some new, iconoclastic medium which attempts to break free from the seduction of images on the web? In some ways, yes, but in my experience browsing Gemini, it’s not as simple as that.

The Photograph - A Message Without a Code

Roland Barthes proposes a way to think about the difference between text and images in his essay “The Photographic Message”. Here, Barthes considers the interplay between the two in news publications. He suggests that both represent different structures of communication, so it is not the case that something like, say, the front page of a newspaper, is a homogeneous surface, but is rather comprised of different communications “channels” - a linguistic channel (the text) and an analogical/photographic channel (the images).

The text channel is structured according to the common semiological codes of languages. The photographic channel differs due to the nature of photographs - they posses an analogical relation to the object they represent. In other words, we have something like the old digital-analogue dichotomy; text is symbolic, images are analogical.

The word “tree” is entirely different from an actual tree, it becomes a signifier of the tree-object only through its relation to other linguistic signs within a structure. A photograph of a tree, however, can be mapped, to an extent, onto a real tree. For example, an alien society would be able to reconstruct an actual tree using a photograph, but not with the letters ’t-r-e-e’ and the sounds they produce.

Barthes calls the press photograph a “message without a code.”¹ Whereas linguistic codes accompany a text, press photographs demand we take them as literal, or purely denotative, representations of the objects they depict:

Of all the structures of information, the photograph appears as the only one that is exclusively constituted and occupied by a “denoted” message, a message which totally exhausts its mode of existence. ²

However, the photographic channel is also paradoxical. It is not wholly different from a tree, like text, but it is not wholly similar to a tree either. There are still connotative procedures in place - trick effects, pose, choice of objects, photogenia, aestheticism, syntax (Barthes’ list). These we are all pretty familiar with and, given that the world is vastly more image-saturated than it was in the 60s, most audiences would be able to recognise the ways in which, even press images, are highly constructed and ‘coded’. The combination of these connotation processes, and the “analogical plentitude” of the photograph produce the paradoxical effect. It’s as if two channels are overlaid on one another, the ‘pure’ analogical channel of the image, and the coded, sign-based channel of the connotation effects.

Again, nothing new here. We all know how photographs can be manipulated and ’encoded’ in various ways. Barthes’ most significant contribution to the discussion, though, comes in his claim that it is the text accompanying a press photo which contributes much of the connotation effect. Barthes even goes so far as to describe the text as “parastic” upon the image.

Firstly, the text constitutes a parasitic message designed to connote the image, to “quicken” it with one or more second-order signifieds. In other words, and this is an important historical reversal, the image no longer illustrates the words; it is now the word which, structurally, are parasitic on the image. The reversal is at a cost: in the traditional modes of illustration the image functioned as an episodic return to denotation from a principal message (the text) which was experienced as connoted since, precisely, it needed an illustration; in the relationship that now holds, it is not the image which comes to elucidate or “realize” the text, but the latter which comes to sublimate, patheticize, or rationalize the image. ³

In what Barthes calls “traditional” modes of illustration, the image acts as an “episodic return” to an alternative mode of communication (the denotative). In the case of a newspaper or magazine cover, for example, the situation is inverted. Here, the image - analogical - channel is subsumed under the rationalising effect of the text. As I mentioned above, Barthes identifies a newspaper/magazine cover as a non-homogenous surface, comprised of different communication channels. In effect, however, the governing codes and structures of a language and culture work to produce a homogenized, rationalised surface. Barthes describes the ways various pieces of text work to frame and sublimate the image-channel, most notably the headline, the article itself and the caption.

Barthes broader point is a sociological/philosophical one. If we want to learn about a society, simply looking at its artefacts or images isn’t enough. We also have to look at how these objects are integrated into social structures and communication media. Or, as Barthes ends the essay, we need to examine the procedures that “transform the unculture of a ‘mechanical’ art into the most social of institutions.”

The Photograph Today

Arguably, the photographic paradox has only become more pronounced today. For example, how else can we explain things like constant photographs and videos of humans suffering and dying at U.S. or European borders, while anti-immigration sentiment rises? ⁴ Text and ideology sublimate these horrific images and direct them towards ‘rationalised’ and ideological ends.

Furthermore, the difference in communication channels is even more pronounced in a modern web page. The text elements of the page are stored as one filetype (typically html), while the image-elements have their own separate filetypes (jpg, png, etc.). Beyond this we also have movie files, scripts, and so on. The end result, though, is not wholly different from the layout of a newspaper or magazine page, in that it is presented as a seamless, homogeneous surface. The only difference is that the rationalization and sublimation tools are even more powerful thanks to the modern web’s capacity for handling and manipulating information. Once multiple modes of communication - text, images, voices - can be reduced to ones and zeros, anything is possible in terms of combining and structuring them to serve particular ends.

As a side note, perhaps the main difference between today and Barthes’ time is that the medium of ‘propaganda’ or the ‘rationalizing effect’ is not simply the text elements of the page. For Barthes the text was ‘parasitic’, but this was probably because it was the most efficient way of expressing discourse and ideology at the time. With the modern web page, there are a host of other tools to help with this. The web page is infinitely more dynamic than the magazine cover or newspaper page. It will literally change itself in real-time, based on your browsing habits and other things you’ve visited. Furthermore, visiting a web page itself impacts the other pages you visit. This helps ensure that we stay, for the most part, within a network which reflects particular ideologies and tastes. A frame or context is created around all communication that is filtered through the page, be that a photograph or a blog post. In this sense, was can say that, today, the modern web is parasitic even upon the text, in the same way the text in Barthes’ time was parasitic on the image.

This is where gemtext comes in. It might, at first sight, appear that gemtext is even more ‘parastic’ upon the image. After all, it reduces the image to a link, which may or may not be displayed and/or opened. It goes even further than the ‘caption’ which Barthes’ talks about as having the most rationalising effect - it translates the image into a string of characters that is primarily intended to be read by software. What could be more ‘rationalizing’ and ‘parasitic’ than this?

However, this is where we arrive at a kind of counter-intuitive conclusion. When we write in gemtext we substitute visual pleasure for textual fidelity. Yes, our files are populated with language that is in-human (#, =>, /directory/structures/, *, etc.) and, yet, in this way it is more reflective of the structural reality that we largely operate in as a society (machine-mediated information). Of course, it is still far removed from the underlying symbols and machinary which will reduce these texts to something transmissible over copper, but it is probably as close as we can get to engaging with that reality in a functional and truthful way. In a kind of twist, gemtext becomes almost like how Barth saw the photograph - it possess an analogical relation to the underlying communication structures, and in this sense is more ‘plentiful’ than, say, the interface of Microsoft Word, which rationalizes and conceals the reality of the medium.

Furthermore, although gemtext represents the image as a symbol (a hyperlink or directory path), it does so in an upfront and transparent way that actually ends up presenting images more accurately than the web. This is true both in a technical and an experiential sense. The times when I do come across Gemini articles with illustrations or someone’s photo gallery, there is something significant about the act of opening the image in a new window and considering it as an image, apart from the text. It’s almost as if the image has once again become an “episodic” movement away from the text, just as it was in old storybooks and illustrations. You can even think of gemtext’s approach to images as following a Brechtian mode of thinking - it lays bare the various contradictions and ideologies of the modern web by separating out and simplifying its component parts.

Gemini and the Press Image

So, is Gemini ‘iconoclastic’, then? Does it fetishize text over images? Well, as I mentioned above, even if it did fetishize the text, it would only be to ‘reclaim’ the text from the filtering and contextualising effects of the modern web page. I think most browsers of Gemspace will agree that it does a very good job in that regard. The question of images remains more difficult, however. There is something very ‘comfortable’ and nostalgic about Gemini’s treatment of text. A familiar remark on Gemini is that it feels like the early days of blogging, or the even earlier days of the internet (Gopher, BBSs, etc.). Its choice to handle text the way it does is nothing particularly revolutionary. It’s also clear that text-based communication is, for now at least, the central focus of much of Gemini. In this sense, it does seem to push images aside and even to become, once again, ‘parasitic’ on the role that images play in discourse.

However, to return to the Brechtian point, by separating out and deconstructing the familiar elements of networked communication ⁵, Gemini takes an important step in at least freeing up the image again for new, unexpected uses. One nice example I can think of are the ‘plants’ in astrobotany. Personally, I find the ascii-art representations of plants (especially the ‘animation’ when harvesting a plant), far more compelling than the graphics you might find in a hundred farming-sim games. Maybe that is just a question of personal taste.

Images are certainly more visible and ubiquitous on web pages, but their significance remains obscured by the various modes of coding and rationalising them. Sometimes, as Barthes writes, in order to ‘see’ a photograph well, we need to ’look away’ from it. Isn’t that what gemtext allows us to do?

Ultimately — or at the limit — in order to see a photograph well, it is best to look away or close your eyes. ‘The necessary condition for an image is sight,’ Janouch told Kafka; and Kafka smiled and replied: ‘We photograph things in order to drive them out of our minds. My stories are a way of shutting my eyes. ⁶

Regarding the use of ‘press images’ in Gemini (one of the main subjects of Barthes’ discussion), well the jury is still out on that front. But, it’s not hard to imagine, sometime in the future, Gemini becoming more useful in the dissemination of news (perhaps some people already use it in this way). In this case, the images accompanying news articles might indeed take on more significance than they do on web pages. From the creator/journalist perspective, it’s certainly seems much easier to upload images with Gemini (and not have to worry about things like aligning/resizing it for example).

From Smolnet to MinorNet

I haven’t come to much of a conclusion yet, and I don’t think there is one for now. I’ve tried to write something about the role of images on Gemini, but it’s hard to write something concrete when images are still so sparse here. Perhaps that’s the point, they are like little treasures, burrowed away behind links.

There is a famous concept by Deleuze and Guattari of “minor literature/philosophy”. The prime example of ‘minor’ literature for them is Kafka. It’s a comprehensive concept, which I won’t go into much here, only to say that some of the defining features of a minor literature is that it is a subjectless, deterritorialisation process which precedes by way of things like burrows, holes, side-streets, a multiplicity of doorways, and so on.

“The Castle has many entrances…The hotel in America has too many doors for us to count.” Among these entrances, none seems privileged; no sign over the entrance announces that this is the way in. The reader of Kafka’s work will choose an opening and map the passage he finds himself following. The map will change if a different entrance is chosen. ⁷

It is political by nature, since it takes place in cramped spaces where politics is unavoidable (not unlike the Gemini mailing list!).

The second characteristic of minor literatures is that everything in them is political … its cramped space forces each individual intrigue to connect immediately to politics. ⁸

In Kafka’s terms, the goal of a minor literature/philosophy isn’t “liberty”, but “escape”. In this sense, Gemini (and Gopher, etc.) aren’t ways of freeing ourselves from the web, they are more like little, cramped burrows on the underside of the web which may, or may not, offer opportunities for escape. Using this metaphor, it seems appropriate that images are also stuffed into little drawers and cabinets - out of sight - not because they are not deserving of eyes, but because a ‘minor’ space doesn’t have the same ‘real estate’ as a major one. If viewing images on the web is like visiting some gigantic, constantly shifting, postmodern gallery, viewing images on Gemini is like visiting a friend’s cramped apartment in secret, down some strange route in the city, and sitting in silence together, while looking at their holiday pictures.

Roland Barthes, The Photographic Message, in A Barthes Reader, p. 196. ↩︎
Barthes, The Photographic Message, p. 197. ↩︎
Barthes, The Photographic Message, p.204. ↩︎
I started writing this before the current crisis in Ukraine. I think the current reception of the horrific images underlines Barthe’s point - images of Ukrainian cities in ruin are received differently than images of Syrian cities in ruin. I’m not making a judgement on that either way, only pointing out how much a role the ideological context plays in transforming the raw, analogue images of a camera into processed/contextualised. There is nothing new in this point, it goes all the way back to the “medium is the message”. I think Barthes’ main contribution here is to link structuralism (language) to the analysis of the ‘medium’ and how it differentiates the ‘message’. ↩︎
The most obvious things it separates are text and other media (images, music, etc.), but another point here that I only thought about when watching Tomasino’s great video about CGI applications on Gemini, is that ‘applications’ are also deconstructed on Gemini. Each application ’exchange’ has simple, human-understandable response codes, and from the user-perspective, they have to manually manage (to an extent) things like certificates (which are handled behind the scenes on the web). ↩︎
Roland Barthes, Camera Lucidia - Reflections on Photography. ↩︎
Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari, What is a Minor Literature, Editor’s Note. ↩︎
Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, p. 17. ↩︎

New GTD System

Wed, 02 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000

First, a disclaimer. I know very little about the original Getting Things Done system. What I do know is mainly taken from Gemini posts by idomdrottning.

GTD basics

“Good” is the enemy of “perfect”

Calm Notifications

Deep Work, No Work, and GTD

Better enough

GTD overview

Supposedly simpler than GTD

GTD bad paths

Anyway, a while ago I set up a basic system in org mode. It worked pretty well for the most part. I had four org files - an inbox file, a projects file, an actions file, and an archive file. I also made a custom org agenda for displaying the relevant entries in these files.

The main problem I encountered was with ‘categorising’ things into actions and projects. Both of these files started to grow a bit messy and both ended up being practically interchangeable. This wasn’t a problem with the system at all, though, just with my implementation of it.

Another problem was the ‘inboxing’ system. One thing that worked well was when I added an entry that could be done immediately. Instead of refiling it I would, well, just ‘get it done’. But, when it came to longer actions, I would refile them and sometimes they would just sit in the projects or actions file until I eventually moved them to a ‘someday’ section.

I recently left a job in order to move to a new one. The job I left was an IT based job (my first and possibly last!). I really loved the job and it was my first time working within a ’trouble ticketing’ system. For those who don’t know, it’s basically a system where there is a queue of ’tickets’ (problems that need to be solved), from which employees can assign tickets and work on them. The job was at a data centre and there were always a lot of tickets, as well as a lot of people to be in competition with for completing tickets. Of course, you weren’t really supposed to focus too much on the ’numbers’, but there was always a bit of friendly competition between us. I found the system very motivating. The prospect of ‘clearing’ the ticket queue was always incentive enough to work a bit harder.

I get the same feeling with my normal email inbox. If a bunch of emails come in, I feel the need to either delete them or deal with them quickly, just so I can get rid of that little, bolded notification which says there are ‘x’ amount of unread emails.

Long story short, I decided to apply the same incentivising techniques to my GTD system. I scrapped my assortment of org TODO tags that I had used to categorise actions and narrowed them down to two: ‘PROJ’ (for projects) and ‘TT’ (for ’tickets’). Also, I decided that projects were strictly long-term things. It turns out I didn’t have very many. A nice side effect here was to try think of more long-term goals and projects that I could work on.

So, now my ‘actions’ file is kind of like a ’ticket queue’. If I need to sort and categorize things further, I use org tags (e.g., :scheduled:). Next I wrote a very simple script that uses grep to count how many active ’tickets’ there are, as well as how many I have ‘completed’. The script just runs when I turn on the computer, so every morning I can get a reading of the ‘queue’. I also added these numbers to my polybar to further motivate me.

What I’ve basically done is reduce my action-items to a number. It’s the same logic applied by our bosses at work. It’s supposed to be manipulative and reductive. There could be lots of debates about the dangers of focusing on ’numbers’ and statistics in work-contexts, but I hope to have at least appropriated the good aspects of this approach. Only time will tell.

Finally, I’m not sure I can actually call this a GTD system since, in many ways, it goes against one of the core features of the GTD system (as far as I can tell). In the GTD system, the act of moving things out of your inbox and into their proper place is supposed to free you from the kind of paralysing anxiety that can occur when a todo list/inbox starts to fill up. Personally, though, I felt that I needed some of that anxiety back. So, as a middle-ground, I do refile things away, but I also display a number to let me know there are things there, waiting to be done. Before I even look at the list of actions I need to do, I think to myself “let’s try knock one or two numbers off the list”, then, with this thought in mind, I look through the actions list. I find this extra step a bit better than going straight to the list and trying to figure out what to do next. Now, I just decided what to do next based on what can be done, i.e., what can be ‘closed’ and increase my stats for the day.

The Linus Tech Tips Conspiracy

Wed, 01 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000

The recent Linus Tech Tips series on ‘gaming’ in Linux seems to have sparked a lot of controversy and discussion¹. It was genuinely heartbreaking to watch PopOS fail so miserably. I primarily felt bad for the PopOS team themselves, who probably work tirelessly contributing to an open source ecosystem, only to be ‘shown up’ in front of millions of viewers, for a mistake that, come on, wasn’t really their fault.

One of the major reactions to the video seems to be more calls for ‘user friendliness’ in linux distributions. There are many problems with this. Even taken in its most literal, well-meaning sense, it is problematic. Here, though, I just wanted to raise a ‘conspiracy theory’ about the more insidious elements behind the call.

Okay, okay, this isn’t really going to be a ‘conspiracy theory’. But, it’s something similar to a famous idea by Noam Chomsky that is often carted out in debates about free/corporate media. Noam Chomsky, a staunch critic of corporate media, and the role it plays in serving corporate interests within a democracy, was asked by a representative of said corporate media if he really believes that there are some shadowy figures pulling the strings of mainstream media figures, sending them briefs of what to say (and what not to say), and so on. Chomsky replied, of course not, it doesn’t work like that. It’s much simpler; mainstream journalists are in the positions they’re in because they don’t ask the right questions. That’s how you get paid the big money. It’s simple market incentives doing their job. No one needs to whisper into anybodies ear or hold conspiratorial meetings about agendas, and so on. It’s all just built into the system from the get go.

So, how does this relate to Linus Tech Tips? Let me first say that I am actually a fan of the channel. It’s well produced and entertaining (it can also be educational). It encourages millions of viewers to delve deeper into the hardware of the technologies they engage with every day. That can only be a good thing.

That’s also why I was shocked at Linus’ total lack of understanding about linux as an ecosystem. It’s not as if package managers are that foreign of a concept (we have app stores for God’s sake). And surely, from time to time, he’s had to engage with Powershell or the Windows Command Line. I’m sure he grasps the idea that there are difference ways of interacting with the OS.

But, for whatever reason, he didn’t understand any of that. Now, some part of me would like to say that he intentionally feigned ignorance. That he is some kind of master of social media and knows how to get things buzzing. But, it’s more likely the case that what we have here is something similar to what Chomsky talks about. Linus is in the position he’s in (a wealthy one), not in spite of his ignorance about linux, but because of it. How would ignorance of Linux on the part of a major tech YouTuber benefit the ‘system’ though? Well, here we would have to turn to people like Cory Doctorow, the warnings behind things like ‘walled-off gardens’ and the dangers of keeping users as far away from the details of the systems they engage with every day.

Now we have some calls from disappointed linux ‘fans’ to make better app stores on linux, to ‘childproof’ it around the edges and so on. I’m all for user-friendliness, but if we follow it to its logical conclusion, then it means closing off all access to key parts of the system.

The issue in the LTT video was a bug. Open source projects aren’t as well-funded as corporate ones. There will be bugs. That’s okay. No matter how polished an interface is, there will be things that sometimes don’t work. The alternative is commercialising linux, paying more people to ensure there are no more sharp edges. That’s the price. That’s also something that, not so coincidentally, would serve the interests of corporations like Microsoft and Apple.

As long as linux is free and open source, no matter how polished it gets there will always be things that fail. We shouldn’t try to shield users from this. It isn’t the right mindset. Instead, if people understand that the price of their freedom means doing some work and engaging with the technology at a deeper level, I’m sure they won’t care that much about the rough edges.

Linux is wonderful because it breaks. I don’t know about others, but it’s one of the most effective educational techniques for me. Sure, sometimes you can just try take the quick way out (as Linus did) and just copy-paste commands from Stack Exchange into a terminal. But, pretty soon you learn that in order to fix things and learn more about your system, you need to start to really understand and engage with it. Sure, it’s a slow, sometimes painful, process, that certainly impacts productivity (when taken in a market sense), but the result is a word that is thrown around a lot in the linux community and that I hesitate to use - freedom.

Freedom, in the case of technology, is rarely easy, and is best understood through its inverse -a sleek, seamless GUI.

Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.

The video in question (YouTube link) ↩︎

Gitlog Client

Wed, 27 Oct 2021 00:00:00 +0000

This is a short followup to my previous post.

Gitlog on Port 9418

The more I think about Solderpunk’s idea, the more I love it. I also really loved this recent post by mntn, which seems to provide a good solution to the question of linking:

A Proposal for a Git Link Url

I realised that a possible ‘client’ already exists for such a thing - magit. I quickly checked, and magit does indeed have functions for managing multiple repositories (things like ‘magit-repository-directories’ and ‘magit-list-repositories’).

Here’s what the interface looks like for a directory containing repositories when you invoke ‘magit-list-repositories’:

Not all that different from a news feed. It even sorts them by date. Not everyone uses emacs, but it’s still interesting to see how these tools already exist.

Gitlog on port 9418

Tue, 26 Oct 2021 00:00:00 +0000

This post is written in response to the fascinating post by Solderpunk:

Solderpunk - Low budget p2p content distribution with git

It’s a long post, but riveting. I just wanted it to keep going and going. There is so much to think about, even though it’s such a simple idea.

I won’t talk much about the idea here, because Solderpunk explains it so well (just go and read the post). But, it’s basically a proposal to start thinking about how to use git as a content-distribution protocol.

The concept, as I understand it, needs to be grasped against the background of ‘sustainable computing’, or whatever you want to call it. ‘Sustainable’ not only in the environmental sense (although, that is of course key), but also in the personal and social senses.

Anyway, like I said, just read the post.

Here, I just wanted to document the process of my attempt to participate in this little idea-experiment. My further thoughts/reflections on the process are at the end in section 4 (if you already know how to do all of this).

At the moment, I have a version of my gemlog as a ‘gitlog’. To see it:

git clone git://spool-five.com/spool-five-gemlog

I am not particularly computer-literate. I’ve been using GNU/linux for over a year now and that has certainly done a lot to educate me, but I was curious about how feasible it would be for someone with average knowledge to implement a little test ‘gitlog’ (or whatever it will be called in the future).

It turned out to be pretty simple. I consulted the git manual, and that was about it. I did need to turn to the git manual though, because when I searched for things like “serve files with the git protocol”, etc., there are mostly just articles about the usual uses for git - sharing/collaborating on code. Solderpunk is right in that regard, it’s a very simple idea, but not many people have seem to caught onto it yet. Anyway, these were my sources:

Git protocols overview

Git daemon overview

Git daemon manpage

In the documentation, there is a discussion of the several possible protocols for serving git directories (local, http, ssh, etc.). Here’s what it says about the git protocol:

Finally, we have the Git protocol. This is a special daemon that comes packaged with Git; it listens on a dedicated port (9418) that provides a service similar to the SSH protocol, but with absolutely no authentication. In order for a repository to be served over the Git protocol, you must create a git-daemon-export-ok file — the daemon won’t serve a repository without that file in it — but, other than that, there is no security. Either the Git repository is available for everyone to clone, or it isn’t. This means that there is generally no pushing over this protocol. You can enable push access but, given the lack of authentication, anyone on the internet who finds your project’s URL could push to that project. Suffice it to say that this is rare.

To test it out, I used my gemlog directory. Here’s what I did to set it up:

1. Create a bare git repository

First, you need to create a bare git copy of the git repository you want to serve.

In my case, I just initialised a git repository in my separate ‘gemlog’ directory. (I also added a .gitignore file for the non-gemlog files that were in that directory.)

Then, I made the git-bare/shareable repo:

git clone --bare gemlog spool-five-gemlog.git

I added the ‘spool-five’ prefix to the bare git directory. I came back and did this later. I think something like this is necessary under Solderpunk’s model, since otherwise, the pulled git repo is just a folder named ‘gemlog’ (or ‘gitlog’ or whatever). If you have multiple people’s repos called ‘gemlog’, not only would they conflict during the pull, but you wouldn’t have a way of distinguishing them. This is where a ‘metadata’ model that Solderpunk talked about would come in I suppose. For now, I’ve just manually named it as something unique.

2. Put the bare repository on a server

I just used rsync

rsync -av spool-five-gemlog.git git@server/path/to/public/directory

I also then added that as a remote source for the gemlog git directory, so I could just commit/push to it from now on.

3. Serve the files with the git daemon

This part was the trickiest for me. I had to fiddle around with the syntax a bit. Really, though, it’s just one, short line.

First, you have to allow the git daemon to export your files. You do this by simply creating an empty ‘git-daemon-export-ok’ file in the git directory.

touch /repo/directory/git-daemon-export-ok

Then, just serve the files with something like the following command:

git daemon --reuseaddr --base-path=/srv/git/ /srv/git/

This was the part that took a bit of fiddling. The way I have it now seems to work. I have my git directory in a directory called ‘public’, within the ‘git’ user’s path. So my exact command was:

git daemon --resuseaddr --base-path=/home/git/public/

Then, if I run the following command from anywhere, it fetches the git repository:

git clone git://spool-five.com/spool-five-gemlog

That’s it!

3.1 Make it more permanent

To make it more permanent, you can set up the git daemon via systemctl (or whatever your system supports).

Create the file /etc/systemd/system/git-daemon.service and place the following in it:

[Unit]
Description=Start Git Daemon

[Service]
ExecStart=/usr/bin/git daemon --reuseaddr --base-path=/srv/git/ /srv/git/

Restart=always
RestartSec=500ms

StandardOutput=syslog
StandardError=syslog
SyslogIdentifier=git-daemon

User=git
Group=git

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

I took this straight from the git docs which I linked above. The main parts which will be different are the ExecStart command, and the User/Group.

Then, just do the usual ‘systemctl enable git-daemon’ (to have it start at startup), and ‘systemctl start git-daemon’ (to start it now).

4. Questions/considerations:

Linking?

A very open question. There’s probably a good solution, but it’s not for me to figure out.

Protocols?

I’ve used the git protocol in this example, but not sure if it’s the best one. It seemed the simplest to me (for just sharing text files, no collaboration, etc.), but it’s the only one I tried out. I wonder which one Solderpunk had in mind? He does mention just using local git clones (for example in the ‘sneakernet’ model) and also mentions the benefit of the git protocol for older computers with no crypto support. But, since I don’t know the ins-and-outs of TLS, etc., I really don’t know what’s right here.

Authentication?

I played around with ‘signing’ some commits. It’s pretty simple and, as Solderpunk pointed out, built right into git from the get-go. The only question I have here is about what to do with the public key for verification? I don’t know if one of the main keyservers is the best option. I guess there could be some kind of ‘smolnet’ keyserver for ‘gitlogs’, but then that would be something centralised/maintained. I’m a bit lost on this part.

Structure/format?

This maybe isn’t a pressing question. Obviously, a strength here is that the repo/text files can have any kind of structure at all. People could be creative with it. One thing I did wonder about though is the old ’text wrapping’ question. Is it better to have gopher-style hard wrapping or gemini-style soft wrapping? I really have no idea! Also, I guess there could be some kind of ‘meta’ pages, with information about the ‘gitlog’, etc.

Enagagement Tools?

Would there be a dedicated client for this kind of thing? Or, just whatever text editor is at hand? One thing that really drew me to this proposal was the concept of using your own tools/methods to interact with the text (searching, building local databases, etc.)

Weightyness?

This one I had to think about for a while, because my initial reaction to setting up a ‘gitlog’ was one of ‘uneasiness’ at the thought of a blog being permanant in a certain sense.

Artists, software developers, musicians, and so on, are all used to people have their work stored locally. But, for bloggers/phloggers/gemloggers, or any social media users really, we’ve been kind of integrated into a system that (in appearances at least) simulates ’ephermality’. Posts, comments, pictures, are all just bits of infomation that echo into a void, bounce around for a while, then fade out. There is something comforting about this. It gives a sense of ‘freedom’ and ’lightness’; I can say whatever I want, because it will be lost in an endless stream of bits eventually. Coming from that kind of environment, the thought of your writing/confessions existing on someone’s USB twenty years from now feels unnerving and a bit too weighty.

In a similar vein, Solderpunk writes:

If you change your mind about something you wrote ten years ago and want to change it, you can do so - but everybody “subscribed” to your repository will be notified of this fact and will be able to see both the before and after versions. This kind of publishing is, by necessarily, radically long-lasting and radically transparent in a way that people aren’t used to and many may not be ready for.

However, and as Solderpunk points out, there are also some problems with that kind of thinking. Below, are my own thoughts on it.

Firstly, the simulated ’ephermality’ which underpins a lot of online social discourse, doesn’t exist at the concrete level. Or, rather, in only exists in a certain sense (for the end-user). I would say that a lot of the meaningful substance of online social interactions are indeed ephermal and fragile. They can be easily ’erased’ or ‘forgotten’ (when a server goes down, when you’re censored, when you opt-out of a service and lose access to contact infomation, etc.). But, the ‘monetizable’ aspects of social interactions get captured within processes which circulate them around for longer periods of time (basically, ad/tracking networks). They are anything but ephermal.

The trend of social media is actually toward permanently preserving this level of ‘social’ interaction. For example, when Twitter/Facebook first launched, their timelines were structured in ‘real-time’. Tweets/Facebook posts would pop up as they were written, and then disappear. There was something genuinely ephermal about this process. Not only were you ‘forgetting’ past posts/thread, but so too were Facebook/Twitter (to a degree). Over time, however, those companies took it upon themselves to capture/store/index the content, and arrange it in a particular mode. To the extent that social media as a whole trends in similar directions, the internet becomes more and more ‘weighty’, even if a simulated effect of ephermality still persists. The ‘weightyness’ in these cases is a monetary weightyness. The data is structured so that it is economically valuable (both in terms of providing information about markets/consumer, and in providing information/strategies for how to capture and hold user’s attention). Genuine social connections and interactions do remain ephermal, though, because you, the user/client, do not have the any of the necessary access/resources/tools to store and organise the data in a way that reflects your personal understanding of meaningfulness or social connection.

Secondly, even if ‘gitlogs’ became a thing, their ‘weightyness’ has to be taken in a certain sense. Degrees of ephermality and anonymity would still exist. In fact, it could be even more ’ephermal’ than mainstream social media, because the capture/store/index tools would be decentralised and fragmented. Even if your writings/musings exist at multiple points on a decentralised network, it’s not as if everyone will be constantly reading them and tracking them and violating your sense of privacy.

Still, though, I think there would undoubtedly be a ‘weightyness’, and it is one that we should spend time reflecting on. I don’t think it has to be unnerving (despite my initial, misguided reaction). For you, the end-user (and content creator), it would exist at a more genuine, social level. You might have to slow down a bit more, think more about what you say. This, in my opinion, is not a bad thing. It just feels scary, because we’ve been indoctrinated (via social media) to act otherwise.

So, from the perspective of end-users, social media companies are ephemeral from a technical standpoint; you have no technical control/say over your personal connections and interactions. A git-distributed system is the exact opposite. This isn’t a bad thing.

You have more power over your online social interactions, but also more responsibility.

Finally, the responsibilities that are encouraged, as I see it, are not only the responsibilities of discourse (writing/thinking in a meaningful, more permanent way), but also things like digital consciousness (everyone becomes a part-archivist), security consciousness, and, most importantly of all, environmental consciousness. At the end of the day, the true power of this format is in the ability to ‘disconnect’ at the network level, while still remaining ‘connected’ socially. In my opinion, that freedom in itself immensely outweighs the simulated freedom of being able to say whatever you want (whenever you want) in a YouTube comment section. It’s worth thinking more about.

Journal - Petty Academia

Sun, 24 Oct 2021 00:00:00 +0000

I talked with an old friend recently. She is now on the academic ‘job market’ after finishing her PhD over a year ago. I was in a similar situation to her a few years back and I know how incredibly stressful and all-consuming it can be.

So stressful, in fact, that I pretty much gave up on it after around a year and a half (probably a similar point to where she’s at now). I still don’t know if it was the right decision or not. After all, you spend around four years researching/writing intensely, going to conferences, teaching, etc. That’s a lot of experience and work to just throw out the window. And that’s essentially what you’re doing because, aside from the usual corporate-speak about ’transferable skills’ etc., in truth your experience and expertise is rooted in a tiny area that maybe a few dozen people on the planet care about.

At least, that was true in my case. I found that, afterward, I pretty much had to let go and forget a lot of what I knew. Of course, so much of it does carry on and is useful in subtle ways, but the details about your field, the things that you become so wrapped up in when writing a PhD, are lost to the wind. It’s not like I can even bring them up in casual conversation, never mind a job interview. They are really gone.

The thing was, I felt so relieved to be out of it. Whenever I wonder about whether it was the right decision or not, I cling to that feeling. Maybe it’s just a sign of weakness on my part, but every now and then I do get reminded of all the reasons I gave up on it.

In our conversation, my friend told me that during the summer she had decided to email her C.V. and a covering letter to a bunch of universities in the hope that someone could at least throw here a few part-time teaching hours. It sounded like a good idea to me. In most fields it would demonstrate a bit of initiative and drive, surely the same is true in academia? Turned out, it wasn’t. One academic reported her to their HR department, and she received and email from them saying how inappropriate her query was.

One thing I remember about the whole academic job-search process was the silence. You can spend a week working to tailor your C.V. and portfolio to a specific organisation’s needs or an on-going research project, and then never hear anything from them. And then you do it another 20 times, and you maybe get one response just stating that you’re not successful. I never received a single piece of feedback, positive or negative, even after the couple of interviews I had. Nothing. Just silence. That silence can be terrifying. It makes you constantly question yourself, constantly revise what you think, how you present your work to the world, until eventually you’re not really an ‘academic’ or a ‘researcher’ any more, just a thing that is trying to fit into some kind of mould, any mould will do, as long as it has an institutional affiliation.

So that silence, while probably a practical necessity from the perspective of departments receiving hundreds (sometimes thousands) of applicants per position, can be so damaging and counter-productive (from the broader perspective of research and higher-education). It doesn’t help produce good academics or good job candidates.

As bad as the silence is, however, I really couldn’t believe a university academic/HR department had the nerve to write to her and tell her that her application was ‘inappropriate’. It’s cruel and petty. At some level I can understand it; there isn’t much room for solidarity in a field where most are struggling to keep their head above the water. And HR departments aren’t staffed by academics (at least, not yet), so maybe they don’t fully understand all that goes into academia and the gruelling job search (although, it’s not like gruelling job-searches are unique to academia, so they probably should still have cut her some slack). The academic, though, should have known better. They could have at least ignored the application, just pushed ‘send to trash’ on their email client. It would be so simple.

The whole story makes the silence feel like a blessing in retrospect, which is just sad.

OpenBSD Experiences

Wed, 20 Oct 2021 00:00:00 +0000

A short post to talk about my experience with OpenBSD. It’s not a guide or anything, just some rough thoughts. Somehow, working with OpenBSD gives me the same comfortable, distraction-free feeling I get browsing Gemini.

I installed it on my laptop (a Thinkpad X230) a few weeks ago. So far, it has been working great.

Installing

Installing the system, to my surprise, was very straightforward. It didn’t take long at all. There is just a series of command-line prompts, most of which you can just choose the defaults. It took about 10 minutes. It’s the easiest and fastest operating system I’ve ever had to install. There is a key reason for this, which I’ll go into more below.

Configuration

I’ve installed arch a few times, on a few different systems. It’s also pretty straightforward, but can be a bit ‘opaque’ in some ways. The process of actually partioning/mounting the drives, chrooting, etc., all makes sense, and you can get your head around it after some time.

I always struggle, however, with what comes next. Once you have the linux kernel installed and the system up and running, you have to make some choices. You have to choose things like your display manager, desktop environment/window manager, login manager, different utilities, etc. This total freedom and choice is great in so many ways. But, for someone like me, who isn’t that well-versed in all the intricacies of all the different environments and tools, you basically end up on the web, jumping between the arch wiki, stack exchange, etc., reading about random people’s configurations and systems. I usually just blindly install package after package (with dependency after dependency) until everything starts to fit together. It usually works fine, but I’d be lying if I said I had anything beyond a surface understanding of all the different parts and how they fit together.

So, the configuration process for arch can take a long time, depending on the system you want running.

If you didn’t know, OpenBSD differs from GNU/linux in that the ‘slash’ from GNU/linux doesn’t exist. That is, the kernel and the system utilities are all developed together under the same umbrella. When you install OpenBSD, most of the utilities you will need are already present. This approach feels far less ‘hacky’, which is both a good and bad thing. On linux, I do love that if I need my computer to do something, I can just look it up online and usually there will already be some kind of amazing script or software someone has written for a similar task or service. Sometimes, I can even just enter a keyword into the aur manager, and something will pop up. Still, all these scripts and tools add up and make the process of ‘rebuilding’ the system each time take longer and longer. That feeling of ‘stitching’ things together is absent on OpenBSD (so far, at least). What I get in place of that instant access to tons of amazing programs is peace-of-mind and a kind of ‘slow’ computing.

One of the things mentioned so often about OpenBSD is that the documentation is incredible. It’s true. When you want to understand how to use something, you read a manual that doesn’t just list the possible arguments for the commands, it also provides some context and a general explanation of the tool. Reading the manual pages in OpenBSD is to reading the Arch Wiki as reading Gemini posts is to browsing the web. They encourage slower, more careful parsing of the language.

Because of this, I opted to stick mostly with the built-in system utilities. I use CWM as the window manager, and KSH as the shell. I have around 150 packages installed on OpenBSD, and usually around 1200 on my arch-based computers.

Security

OpenBSD is also known for its security. It has lots of fancy things that I’m not going to even try to understand, like re-linking the kernel on each reboot( KARL), pledge, privilage separation, and unveil.

I remember early on, I was writing something in emacs org-mode. Org has an export feature that lets you export to html and then view the output in your browser (it automatically opens the html file in a browser). I exported some markdown text, but when the preview opened in the browser (Chromium), it had a ‘file not found’ error. I tried opening the html file directly, and it still wouldn’t work. I think I gave up on it after that.

Anyway, not long after, I realised that the Chromium in the OpenBSD package repository is specifically ported with an additional feature - Chromium can only access the /home/user/Downloads folder on the filesystem. Sure enough, I moved my org-exported html file to the Downloads folder it worked just fine! I was impressed with the thoroughness of the systems security and the way that permissions are divided up so well.

I’m not sure if it’s a media-hype thing, or if cyber attacks are actually becoming more persistent and severe, but somewhere at the back of my mind I have the feeling that learning more about OpenBSD and trying to use it every day more is akin to those people building a bomb shelter during the cold war. Probably shouldn’t be the main reason to use OpenBSD, but you never know…

Journal - Melancholy

Sun, 22 Aug 2021 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been experiencing moments of melancholy and nostalgia over the past months. Nothing too intense, just notable. It’s an old, familiar feeling, but one I hadn’t felt in a long time.

It’s not difficult to diagnose its source - I will soon been moving back to Ireland from Korea. I’m probably not alone in feeling melancholic during periods of life-transition. When I feel sad or melancholic about leaving, it’s not only Korea I think about, but all periods of my past life that I miss or long for. I think the first time I noticed those kinds of feelings was when I first left home to go to university.

Melancholy is typically understood as a failure to properly mourn - to become too attached to or desiring of the lost object/person/place, rather than accepting its loss in a healthy way. The philosopher Slavoj Zizek, however, points out that melancholy shouldn’t be compared to the work of mourning like this. Melancholy doesn’t represent an ‘unhealthy’ desire (for a lost thing), but instead represents a recognition of the absensce of desire (the loss of the subject themselves):

Say, a person who, all his life, was used to live in a certain city and is finally compelled to move elsewhere, is, of course, saddened by the prospect of being thrown into a new environment—however, what is it that effectively makes him sad? It is not the prospect of leaving the place which was for long years his home, but the much more subtle fear of losing his very attachment to this place. What makes me sad is the fact that I am aware that, sooner or later—sooner than I am ready to admit—I will integrate myself into a new community, forgetting the place which now means to me so much. In short, what makes me sad is the awareness that I will lose my desire for (what is now) my home.

Source of the above quote at lacan.com

The lost object (a city, person, time) is not ‘gone’. It is still possessed by the melancholic (through memory, etc.), it’s just that the desire for the object is gone, or will soon be gone. This is why we feel sad or disappointed.

This description reminds me of something from Kafka’s Blue Octavio Notebooks. Actually, I haven’t read them, but sections from them are read aloud in Max Richter’s Blue Notebooks album. Here is the text:

When Thomas brought the news that the house I was born in no longer exists
Neither the name, nor the park sloping to the river
Nothing
I had a dream of return
Multi-coloured
Joyous
I was able to fly
And the trees were even higher than in childhood
Because they had been growing during all the years since they had been cut down\

In this fragment, the narrator longs to return to their, now totally destroyed, childhood home. The fantasy of return brings joy (indeed, melancholy and nostalgia are often perversely joyous, just look at Vapor Wave ), but is also marked by the curious detail that the trees are even taller now, in the dream, than they were in childhood. Contained within the very wish to return, to traverse time, is the recognition that time doesn’t work like that. The line is both uplifting and sad. The trees continue to grow, even in the fantasy-space, nothing is ever at rest.

Even though there is something sad about this passage (perhaps it’s because it is in the context of a very sad/melancholic album), there is also a sense of acceptance and delight. The subject is lighter now (he was able to fly). The absence or loss of attachment is also a moment of freedom. The destruction of the childhood home is an opportunity for things to continue to grow, even after they have been chopped down.

This is what melancholy feels like to me, a recognition that there is no rest, no stasis in life. Even memories and the past are victims to the effects of time. It’s a scary and sad feeling, especially since we are generally taught that we are always working toward some kind of fixed ‘goal’ - the perfect career, the perfect family, a stable financial situation, heaven (if you’re religious), etc. We are always promised rest, stasis, stability, but, in my experience at least, life isn’t really like that at all.

Still, you don’t have to look far to find joy and intrigue in the ever-changing nature of reality. Philosophers like Heraclitus, Nietzsche, Bergson, Whitehead, etc., all demonstrate this. These days, I try to think of melancholy in the way that Catherine Pickstock describes the identity of the person. Throughout our lives, our identities, personas, etc., shift and transform. What we call a ‘self’ is just a loosely held-together frame around these transformations. Our movement through these transformations follows the pattern of a snake - in order to move forward, the snake first turns slightly backward, then turns forward again, then backward, etc. This ‘serpentine motion’ is mirrored by us in moments of nostalgia and melancholy. We look backward, longingly, and with heavy hearts, but this backward-looking is also a way of propelling us forward.

Journal - Smart Kids

Wed, 11 Aug 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Prior to teaching kids English, I had zero experience working with children. I was so surprised and relived to find that the kids I teach here are very smart and well-behaved for the most part.

Still, though, they can be difficult. At first, the difficulties were the expected ones. Some kids would be disruptive, and my own lack of experience in classroom management was an opening for them to become even more so.

After a couple of months I got the hang of things and those initial classroom management problems went away.

But, the kids can still be hard-work sometimes. Surprisingly (for me), it turns out that the most difficult kids can actually be the ‘smart’ ones.

When I say ‘smart’ here I mean it in a certain sense. Not the kids who can do their work well or who are good at English, because most of the kids are smart in that way, and it’s what makes teaching so easy on the whole. It’s the kids who are smart in those extra ways, who have a deeper psychological and intellectual understanding of things.

For want of a better word, these kids tend to be the ’neediest’. Teachers naturally reward and love very smart students. You can always turn to them for answers and engagement. This also means that they are more sensitive when they are neglected or when things are moving too slow.

Even though being super ‘smart’ in Korean schools is a little different to Irish schools, in that it is much more respected and encouraged by peers, smart kids still suffer the age-old problem of social exclusion/conflict. Being extra-clever means being different. It means having different priorities. It means putting studies before socialising. Certain types of very smart students will become anxious if the class becomes too ‘conversational’, they want to return to the book. Even though learning a language means learning to communicate well in it, they are smart enough to understand that they aren’t really there to learn a language, they are there to learn a set of rules and practices for doing well in language-exams.

Smart students will punish themselves more for mistakes. After all, their whole identity depends on their ‘smartness’. This is what their parents and teachers love about them. They might think that if they aren’t ‘smart’ any more, this love will be withdrawn. And, to be honest, they are probably right about that. Thinking back, I do find myself being tougher on the good students when they make mistakes. Some part of me feels that they ‘can take it’, even that they ’need’ it, that true brilliance needs to be constantly challenged and pushed harder than the rest. This is how I instinctively react, but I know, in my heart, that this is not fair at all. In fact, these students need more of a break than anyone else.

We think of these students as ‘gifted’, that intelligence is something bestowed upon the lucky ones, through genetics or the grace of God. But, of course, any smart kid worth their salt worked their ass off to get to where they were. Yes, maybe certain aspects of studying come more ’naturally’ to them than to other students, but being ‘gifted’ entails a host of other kinds of labour. There is a famous book on this point; The Drama of the Gifted Child by Alice Miller. I read it years ago, but its insights have always stayed with me. In the case of the book, ‘gifted’ doesn’t necessarily mean ‘intelligent’, it means the ability to ‘hide’ or ‘mask’ ones difficult/negative thoughts and feelings. The gifted child emerges under the shadow of an insecure parent or parents. The child, a hyper-sensitive being, can sense when the parent is ‘upset’ or ‘disappointed’ and they do their best to avoid this situation by developing behaviours that ‘please’ their parents and shield them from negativity. They try to act ‘positive’, hiding their anxieties or doubts, lest it trigger negative reactions in the parents. In short, the child becomes a sort of ‘care-giver’ to the parent, when it ought to be the other way around.

But what does it mean to care for a child? We all know the classic arguments about how certain pursuits later in life - becoming an international concert pianist for example - demand rigorous, early training. Parents who understand this and want the best for their child push their children hard to attend lessons and work hard. This is understandable. After all, consider the alternative - a four year old child cries and wants to stay at home watching Youtube instead of attending his piano lesson. The parent, who cares deeply for their child and can’t stand to see them in pain, reluctantly gives in. The child then spends hundreds - potentially thousands - of hours of their childhood watching Youtube, playing video games, etc. Later in life they become angry at their parents for not pushing them harder and for letting them waste their childhood on predatory technologies.

We can agree that a parents responsibility lies not only in providing for the child and their needs, but also in training the directionality of these needs themselves. Encouraging good habits, discouraging the bad. This can only go so far, a child will pick up all kinds of habits from all kinds of sources.

However, it is also important to think about the limits of ‘smartness’. This is where a more ‘spiritual’ form of care enters. For example, there is a well-known story told by David Foster Wallace, arguably one of the ‘smartest’ writers - and people - of the past many decades. Early in his career, he was hospitalised for alcoholism (among other things). He reflects on this experience and draws an important lesson from the AA adage - “my best thinking got me here.” For Wallace, the complex, academic ’truths’ he had been brought up around and which he could express so magnificently, could only take him so far ‘spiritually.’ What ‘saved’ him - temporally at least - were the banal, simplistic truths of AA. These were truths that could not be understood through intelligence, but only through experience and suffering.

How can we teach children this lesson, a lesson that underscores the limits of smartness when put against the simple fragility of being a human being? To be honest, I have no idea. As a teacher, all I can do is my job which, in my case at least, means preparing students for exams.

Perhaps the real lesson of David Foster Wallace’s AA experience is that truth is found in unexpected places. For Wallace, who was highly educated, the banal and un-academic truths of AA were different and novel. They were messages from outside of his lifeworld and experience. Perhaps it’s simply this that we should strive for; encounters with otherness - different ways of life, different traditions, different modes of thinking. Encounters which take us outside of ourselves. These kinds of encounters can certainly be achieved in the classroom. The struggle is finding ways to make these encounters genuine, resisting the contextualisation of them as simply food for good performance in exams or increased ‘smartness’.

The problem is that when you are very smart, to the point where your whole identity revolves around this ‘smartness’, it takes time to learn the value of being ‘wrong’ and being ‘vulnerable’. The smart kids who are already psychologically robust don’t care when they make mistakes. They just want to learn. Learning comes in many forms, and they understand this. They understand that making mistakes now means avoiding them later. They understand a classroom can be a space for experimentation and continual adjustment. The smart kids who are less psychologically secure are the opposite. They tend to fall back on established patterns when something goes wrong. They choose familiarity over genuine discovery. They perform well, but lack initiative. They rely on a system of authority for validation, and when that system doesn’t give them what they want they act out.

Anyway, this is getting far too long. All I really wanted to say is that over the course of my, admittedly short, time teaching kids, I learned that being in a classroom means being in a complex, dynamic environment (duh), where you are lucky if your only worry is identifying ‘good’ and ‘bad’ kids. That’s pretty much how class seemed to me when I was a kid. There were the ‘bad’ kids, who were funny and entertaining but who seemed like they wouldn’t go far, then there were the ‘smart’ kids who seemed to do so well with little effort. Most kids, like me, were in the ‘middle’ - Just showing up and trying to do our best while surviving.

I always thought that a teacher’s job, in terms of classroom management, revolved around the two poles of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ kids. They developed strategies to ‘control’ and ‘punish’ and ‘save’ the bad kids, and they loved and adored the good kids (the teacher’s pets). In my experience on the other side of the equation, it isn’t like that at all. There is no clear graph of good and bad kids, the picture is constantly shifting. Children’s needs are vast and unpredictable. The psychological/spiritual work involved in being a teacher is never-ending. There is nothing as heartbreaking as a dedicated, ‘smart’ kid suddenly loosing their drive and ‘giving-up’, just as there is nothing as uplifting as a ‘bad’ kid surprising you and turning everything around (turns out that doesn’t just happen in the movies). Then, the next week it happens all over again. The reversals are endless. All you can do is try your best to be their for them regardless of how they are behaving on any given day. To strive to be at least a stable and welcoming presence in their ever-shifting experience of life.

Org Roam V2

Mon, 02 Aug 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Edit - 21/08/21

I’ve been using Roam V2 for about a month now. After actually spending some time with the new system I really love it. It is much faster than the previous version when it comes to loading/indexing the notes at startup (it’s pretty-much instantaneous).

There is also a package called org-roam-ui that enables even better graphing functionality. The only thing I still don’t like too much is the backlinks buffer, but I don’t use it as much any more and I don’t miss it too much.

Anyway, it did take a while and some tweaking to get used to the new version, but it was worth it. The original post I wrote (below) was a rant caused by the frustration of having to switch-up a familiar and effective workflow, just because a developer decided to change everything. But, I’ve since learned an useful lesson; sometimes it is important to defer to the wisdom of the developer, especially if it is a trusted one.

Original post:

I really love Org Roam. I started using it recently and it has transformed the way I think about note taking and writing in general.

The principles behind it are nothing new, but they were new to me. So, I’m not entirely sure if its the software I’m in love with or the general methodology it reflects.

As software, though, its features are:

Inserting links to notes and finding notes is fast. I don’t really know of a faster way. It’s not only fast in the sense of the interface and backend but, since it uses the Zettelkasten philosophy, it’s also ‘mentally’ faster. You don’t have to think about directory-structures/paths, or things like categorization. You just think in terms of ‘concepts’ or ‘ideas’, org-roam does the rest. All the files are stored in one location, without subtrees (though, you can have these if you really want), so you are just adding to this collection, then creating links to other notes on the same level. It is so liberating to not have to worry about where to ‘store’ something. The org-roam database does all the storing and categorization you really need.
Nice integration with org-mode.
The ability to generate/integrate more academic modes of note-taking, via org-roam-bibtex. Using this, I can easily search through a .bib file of references, and either (a) insert a citation, or (b) generate a new ’note’ where I can record thoughts on that book or article. The notes will then be associated with that citation and I can easily access them when referencing that work again. Within emacs, I can even view/markup/link the pdf of the citation, and have all those notes gathered under the same citation tag.
A ‘backlinks’ window/buffer. This is just a side panel that shows all the notes that link to the one you are currently viewing.
You can view a visual representation of the overall structure of your notes using the built-in ‘graph’ function, or the additional org-roam-server package. With org-roam-server, you can even click on the different nodes and they will open in your current buffer.

There are probably many more things I’m not mentioning here, but these are the things that stand out to me.

Anyway, recently, org-roam switched to ‘Version 2’. V2 is a complete rewrite/redesign of org-roam. The underlying principles are, of course, the same. But the implementation is quite different. It seems like the ‘ontology’ of the system has changed. Notes are no longer a collection of ‘files’ linked together using org-roam links, they are now a collection of ’nodes’, linked together using org-mode’s ID system. A node can either be a file or a heading within a file.

So, the general design of the database has changed.

Aside from this, the backlinks buffer has also changed. It is built using something similar (the same?) to the magit buffer. Because of this, there are some extra ‘features’ (folding headings, etc.)

The ‘graph’ functionality is gone, as is the org-roam-server comparability. So, no more visual representations of all the notes (admittedly, this was a bit of a ’novelty’ aspect of org-roam, but there is still something satisfying about watching your ’network’ of notes and links grow and develop).

The ‘search’ interface also changed. In V1, results were organised with their ’tags’ in parentheses at the start of the filename, now the tags are separated and to the right. They remind me of how org-mode displays tags.

Overall, the design changes means org-roam is even more integrated with org-mode, and therefore is easier for the developer to maintain.

I did try switching to V2 for a while this week. You have to covert all your pre-existing notes to the new format, since the V1 forms of metadata (tags, links, etc.) are obsolete. Luckily, they include a nice script for doing this with V2. It was relatively painless.

I have to say, though, I really didn’t like V2 in its default state. The new backlinks buffer seems overly complex now, and it opened horizontally by default. When you visit a link in it, it opens within the same window. In V1 the default behaviour was that it opened in the workspace you were already working in. The V1 backlinks buffer was more of its own thing, an extra little navigation pane for viewing links. Now, it just seems like a whole additional emacs window. I also didn’t like the new tag layout for the search.

The main metadata for a node (the ID) is included at the very top of the file, under the org-mode :PROPERTIES: tag. This does give the files a bit of a cleaner look, since the tag folds away nicely by default. However, when using Deft, the file-previews, which show the first lines of a file, are just populated with these ‘properties’ tags and their strings of unique-ids. As far as I’ve seen, this is quite easy to fix, you can just configure Deft to ignore that line, but it’s still a bunch of extra lines of configuration that I really didn’t want to have to insert.

Anyway, I know I could configure all of the new things (backlinks buffer, search previews, Deft previews) to look and behave more like I’m used to and I might end up having to do that. But, one of the main things stopping me from switching over to V2 is the general shift in design from ‘files’ to ’nodes’.

As I said above, a great thing about org-roam is that it removes a lot of the ‘mental’ effort that goes into figuring out where notes should go, what categories they fall under, etc. Now that ’nodes’ can be both files and headings, that whole ‘mental’ organisation-process gets re-introduced. How are you supposed to decide whether a ’node’ should be a ‘heading’ or a separate ‘file’ of its own? You have to think up a whole new set of organisation criteria, not totally unlike the kind you might consider when thinking about directories. Doesn’t a ‘file’ node become something like a ‘directory’, with ‘headings’ nodes acting like files nested within it? When searching nodes, they all do appear on the same ’level’, but there is still something disconcerting about it.

Either way, if I were to use V2, I would probaby never use the ‘heading-node’ functionality. But, if that is the case, then why switch to V2 at all? I would love if I didn’t have to. But, I have anxiety now that at some point in the future I will have to switch. All future development and discussion will be around V2.

I’ve switched back to V1 for now, but I would love to find some better reasons to embrace V2. I didn’t give it much of a chance, so I’m probably missing something. If anyone out there is using it, I’d love to hear your thoughts (eoincarney0@gmail.com).

Cruella

Sun, 13 Jun 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Thoughts on Cruella (2021, Craig Gillespie)

I watched this last weekend and thoroughly enjoyed it. It has plenty of obvious flaws, the biggest being that it doesn’t make any sense as a prequel. But, as a standalone film it is worth watching.

As great as the music selection was, it was probably over the top. As audience goers, we all know that movies are mostly about money, and we know a lot about how the money works in movies (it constantly gets reported on). It is a separate, interesting question to consider how this affects an audiences appreciation of art. Anyway, I, like a lot of others I imagine, spent less time actually enjoying the music and more time anxiously trying to figure out how much it actually cost to licence it. That said, the inclusion of I Wanna Be Your Dog and Sympathy for the Devil were perfect and worth every penny.

The CGI dogs were also a bit annoying.

It has already been compared to Joker (2019) and I think that comparison is appropriate. There are important differences though.

Joker is obviously a far more intense and violent movie. There is little ambiguity at the level of character. Joker is more like a force of nature, a storm. The emotions and psychology are complex, yes, but not ambiguous. This lack of ambiguity - lack of ‘goodness’ in the old-fashioned, moralistic sense - highlights Cruella’s innocence and not necessarily in a good way. Since we are supposed to view Cruella as ‘vicious’, ‘bad’, etc. her innocence is more of a weakness in character than a strength. Yes, she does break free from her petit-bourgeoise identity (“tea at Regent’s Park”, private schools, etc.) when she ditches her ‘Estella’ self and her adoptive mother to flirt with ’evil’, but she also avoids the truly dark parts of her character - skinning dogs for clothes.

Yet, if Joker shows up Cruella for it’s relative tameness, Cruella also highlights a flaw with Joker. Both movies share a common thread - the link between socially-defined ’evil’, aesthetic expression and iconography. Both Cruella and Joker become ‘fashion’ icons (there are scenes in both movies where the ‘crowd’ has adopted their respective personas). Both are out for revenge against a class system which they feel has left them behind and failed to recognise their genius. Both tread a fine line between revolution and resentment. Through Cruella, we see how Joker is also a movie about fashion, and about the cult of personality that appreciation of fashion seems to engender.

The worst flaw of both movies is how they co-opt actual, historical images of class struggle to produce their own brands of visual pleasure. In Cruella it is counter-cultural movements like punk and no-wave of the 60s, 70s and 80s, in Joker it is the image of street protests. However, this is nothing new in the history of cinema. Mainstream cinema has always struggled to represent the ‘masses’ since we are so used to focusing in on individuals. Think of The Dreamers (2003) - we spend the whole movie submerged in the bohemian decadence of the threesome, and in the final moments are thrust into the ‘street’ - actual history - which in that movie is represented in corny slow-motion and close-ups of the main character’s faces as they are swept up in the ‘authentic’ moment.

There is certainly an argument to be made for the revolutionary power of fashion, but I have doubts about the revolutionary power of personality. I think revolutions must necessarily be iconoclastic, lest they run the risk of populism and things like Stalinism/Maoism. At the same time, there is always an aesthetic element to every mass movement - especially in modern, media-driven times. Images, videos captured by by-standers (like in the case of George Floyd), songs, graffiti, revolutionary personalities (Bobby Sands, Che Guevara, etc.), and so on, always seem to have more power to drive social change than abstract arguments. In this sense, Cruella and Joker are tapping into an important element of revolutionary process. Yet, it is also important to think about resistance that isn’t image-driven, that isn’t ’televised’.

I did begin this by saying I enjoyed Cruella, and that was true. I enjoyed both Cruella and Joker a great deal, and I think that is because they enjoyed themselves. That is probably their greatest character strength - the capacity for joy, even in the face of oppression.

Journal - Fake Plastic Trees

Sun, 13 Jun 2021 00:00:00 +0000

I currently live in what you could maybe call a ‘suburb’ of Seoul. I guess when you think of suburbs you think of sprawling streets with houses and lawns. So, in that sense, my town is not a suburb. But, if you imagine stacking all those houses on top of each other - stretching between fifteen and thirty stories - and imagine all the green lawns as ‘communal’ gardens, then, yes, it is a suburb.

It certainly serves a similar function to conventional suburbs - it allows families to remain close to a metropolitan area (for work), whilst also providing a safe, quasi-utopian space in which the family can dwell, play, attend high-performing schools, eat well, drink lots of coffee, go camping, bike together, and, well, most anything ‘wholesome’ you can imagine doing together as a family.

When I first moved to Korea I lived in a city close to the airport for a month. It was my first impression of the country. The city was tiny, but tall and densely packed. You could walk across the whole thing in 30 minutes, but it had everything you needed. Anyway, I really liked it and was eager to see more of Korea.

I soon learned that the look and feel of this initial city was not unique. The city that I eventually moved to (my current one) was very similar, and so were so many other ‘suburb’ areas I had visited. At first, this was great. All the restaurants and shops I had gotten used to in the first month also existed in the new city and looked identical. I had no problem navigating and living in the new place. It seems like 90% of all businesses in Korea are franchises (don’t quote me on that number). So, most commercial areas end up looking alike. However, even more striking than this is that the general ’layout’ of places is quite similar. There are usually tallish building ‘blocks’, around 10 stories high, that are filled with all kinds of businesses and services. Then there are even taller residential apartment buildings. The buildings themselves all look alike architecturally. Travelling from suburb-city to suburb-city is a bit bizarre, there is a lot of repetition.

It’s not like going from high-street to high-street in Ireland, for example, where you will also see the same businesses over and over again. The scale of the cities in Korea make the repetition far more striking. Another common sight is apartment buildings that are ‘in-progress’. The ’edges’ of the suburb-cities aren’t really edges, they are just zones where new suburb-cities are constantly being built.

The city I’m in now is much newer than the fist place I stayed. I still hesitate to call them ‘cities’ - they are small in terms of walking/traversing, but still busy and decked out like cities. When I knew I would be moving here I looked up my address on google maps, and switched to the street view. All I saw was empty fields. When I actually got here, there were dozens of tall buildings in that spot. I also learned at this point how useless google services are in Korea - they have all their own replacement services for maps, email, etc.

Anyway, the point is, it’s still new. Coming from Europe, it’s pretty weird to live in a city that’s probably less than a decade old. At first, the ’newness’ felt sterile and artificial. My first association was a memory of playing Final Fantasy 8 as a kid - at the beginning there is a training centre or something that looks a bit utopian and futuristic. Not only did the buildings and parks seem new and uniform, but the people did too! Perhaps Covid added to this effect a bit - only being surrounded by ‘masked’ faces can perhaps produce a sensation of dehumanisation/uniformity. I realised just how ’new’ the place was pretty quickly by the fact that all the trees were tied together for support. On the way to work a few weeks ago, I spotted several, much larger, trees in the process of being planted. I tried to get a quick picture, but I didn’t want to feel too rude/creepy taking too many pictures of places where families were all making their way to school.

That evening, on the way home from work, the trees had all been planted and they actually looked great. If you didn’t think about the fact that they had just been planted and were all tied to one another, they gave the impression of ‘age’ and ‘grandeur’ to the buildings they surrounded.

The artificiality of the place never bothered me too much though. I could appreciate it what it was for - a safe, happy place for young families. I’ve always preferred either open countryside (similar to where I grew up), or else more ‘grimy’ urban settings, where things are busy and lively and a bit chaotic. But, as lukewarm as this city is, it definitely grew on me over the past year.

Recently, though, I’ve started appreciating it for a new reason. There’s something about how and why it was made that is important at a deeper level.

How it was made: it was built quickly and efficiently - it provides high-quality dwellings and services to a huge number of people. I don’t know how they did it exactly, but it must take a lot of knowledge, organisation, money etc.
Why it was made: I’m not sure how ‘urgent’ these suburb-cities are, but judging by how busy they are, and how more and more keep being built, it seems there is plenty of ‘demand’.

There have been numerous stories recently about the effects of climate change at the local level. Towns and entire cities are becoming more vulnerable to things like floods and fires. People have started to think about the question of the mass migration and mass resettlement that will be needed when certain places become near-uninhabitable.

This is where the practical knowledge that went into constructing the ‘fake plastic city’ I live in will come into play. Whose to say that this kind of setup isn’t one that will become the default in the future? Or, perhaps only a certain portion of resettled people will be able to afford to live somewhere like this, maybe the rest will live in things like ’tiny-homes’, or shanty towns, or live nomadically.

Or, perhaps people will never give up their ’land’. That is something you don’t get here - no garden, no land, little ‘personal space’. The space is shared, highly-communal. Outside your apartment, there is nowhere really to be ‘alone’. No fields to wander or quiet roads to cycle. Even going hiking here is a bit bizzare - there are hundreds of other people around, and you can buy coffee and beer at many summits. Still, though, you get used to it. Maybe there will be no choice in the future.

There is a scene in the HBO miniseries Chernobyl when the people of Pripyat have to be evacuated. They are all forced into buses and shipped off to neighbouring cities. I remember listening to the podcast accompanying the series at the time, and the creator said that the Soviet government actually built another version of Pripyat, about 100km away. It’s hard to imagine 50,000 Americans or Irishmen being bused off to a newly built version of their city. But, maybe, when the time comes, there’ll be no choice. I just hope I’ll be bused somewhere with a Daiso nearby.

Folding Beijing

Sat, 05 Jun 2021 00:00:00 +0000

A note on Folding Beijing by Hao Jingfang (translated by Ken Liu)

A simple, beautiful story about economics and class. I came across it after finishing the Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy by Liu Cixin and noticing that Hao Jingfang had won the Hugo award for it the year after him.

What really drew my attention to the story was the fact that, according to Wikipedia at least, it was first published on a BBS! Yet another testament to how vital the smolweb still is.

It’s an amazing, piercing parable of class. In that sense, it reminds me of Parasite and classics like Bicycle Thieves. Works that are sincere and not afraid to be. They are beyond superficial political questions (left vs. right, etc.), and are instead about the concrete politics of everyday life.

The image of a folding city, one that segregates and hides away its workers, is both beautiful and terrifying. I hesitate to call it a ‘metaphor’, because it isn’t. The city really does fold (some reviewers on goodreads seemed to have problems with the believability of this central mechanism in the story!). It’s a real, concrete machine, one that sorts and orders. Modern urban planning and economic organisation are, of course, not as well-ordered and baroque as all that, but they still function much in the same was as a machine does. And, they are still mostly dictated by the chosen few at the top.

The story was written a few years ago now, but its central economic premise - a solution for ‘underemployment’ - seems even more relevant today in the quasi-post-covid climate. Who knows, perhaps our governments will find ways to ‘fold away’ those who are messing with unemployment figures and supposedly raising the risk of inflation. In fact, things like stimulus checks and Universal Basic Income are related to the solutions in Folding Beijing. That’s what’s interesting about the story, there is something humane and touching about the solution, even while it is horrifying and monstrous. The ‘alternative’ to the folding city model is presented by the official at the conference - get rid of millions of workers and replace them with automated/technological alternatives. So too is there something humane and noble about proposals for UBI, shorter work-weeks, etc. But just like the folding city, they don’t solve the real problem; the social segregation and inequality produced by a system where the means of production are controlled by a select few. Should we really rejoice if our current social system supplements us and allows us to work less hours? Does this matter if so many people find their jobs meaningless?

Anyway, it’s a great story, and short, so you should go check it out. Or, just wait for the movie, which will be coming out later in 2021 or 2022.

Folding Beijing

Journal - Korean Books

Wed, 02 Jun 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Wed 2 Jun 23:18:06 KST 2021

Dear Gopherspace,

I still haven’t gotten the hang of journaling. Perhaps my life isn’t eventful enough. I imagine journals to be writings you look back over later in life to trigger memories of places, times, people, feelings, thoughts, etc.

The best journals go into quite a lot of detail about daily activities and moods. I would like to be able to express myself in that way, because I have a terrible memory. I rarely think of past times, but when I do, it’s often when I feel low, and then waves of memories wash over me. I try my best to cling to them and live with them for a while, but they are usually fleeting.

It becomes frustrating to try to cling to the past, and all I can do try to accept that it is gone and try to keep moving forward. But, I would still like some of those times back, in some kind of form. Oh, well.

Anyway, the point of this post was to mention something I wanted to remember about Korea. Something small and insignificant that I’d probably forget later. It’s to do with the kinds of books people read here. More specifically, the kinds of ‘western’ books. First, there is Herman Hesse. People love him here. Everyone seems to have read Demian. Maybe it is prescribed reading in high-school or something. Even BTS references it. This was surprising to me, as he certainly isn’t a major author in Ireland, outside of people who really care about 20th century literature of course. Here, it’s not just literary types who love him, it’s more general. I’ve only ever read Steppenwolf, and it was incredible, so maybe the Koreans are onto something with this one.

The second two are more obvious - The Selfish Gene and Sapians. Those books are popular everywhere, but here they are on the front stand of every bookshop I’ve been to. Even my school’s tiny library, which consists of tiny kids English books, has a couple of token ‘serious’ books (which very few - if any - of the 9 year old Korean kids will ever read). They are, the first Harry Potter book and Sapians. It seems like if you want to appear ‘cultured’ or ’educated’ in polite society here, you have to have an opinion about those books (usually about how wonderful they are). I don’t like either of those writers, though, admittedly, I’ve never had the patience to read the entirety of either book.

Finally, there is another curious one - Bernard Werber’s “Ants” books. I had never heard of these before coming to Korea, but I’ve met a couple of people who’ve read them, and I’ve seen the entire set in a few bookshops.

Anyway, my selection is probably biased based on my own experience, but its something I’d never considered before moving to a distant country - western cultural hegemony can ’express’ itself in different ways in local contexts. Imitations of western cultural canons will produce their own variations, peculiarities. This phenomena is, of course, most evident in the case of K-pop, which to me at least (I’m not a fan), sounds like a blatant imitation of US/UK styles of pop/hip-hop, but also sounds totally different and unique. It’s the same with the Western literary cannon here.

Switching to Emacs

Sun, 09 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000

The majority of ‘mainstream’ technology is awful. I lived for thirty years without ever really understanding what is possible with computers. The one exception to this was maybe my experience with music production software. I used Logic for a long time on a friends Mac (I’ve never owned a Mac), when we were recording stuff in his garage. I’ve also used Ableton a lot. Anyway, both those pieces of software amaze me. I’m sure there are ways to criticise them, but I really found them so empowering.

Aside from that though, most of the software I used was the default stuff. Basically just whatever comes through a web browser. I wrote an entire thesis in Microsoft Word.

Then, last year, I started using Linux full-time after my laptop broke. I had just moved to Korea, so I tried to buy a cheap replacement. I didn’t know the language at all and ended up selecting an ‘OS-less’ version on the website. When it arrived, I decided to just install linux (Pop-OS) on it instead of paying for a Windows key. I had played around with Linux in the past, but always on a dual-boot setup. When I was actually forced to use linux all the time, I started diving into it more.

I discovered vim pretty soon after that. Discovering vim, especially for someone who had to spend so much time in Microsoft Word, was like the way Bruce Springsteen described first hearing the opening snare-hit in Like a Rolling Stone (as “kicking in the door to [my] mind”). I also felt incredibly frustrated that I had waited so long to discover it. I felt frustrated that most mainstream users of technology, like me, are sold the worst kind of garbage and told that we are lucky to have it. You can’t imagine how painful it is to manually write out hundreds of bibliographic references, only to later discover the citation functionality of Latex (and Markdown) and .bib files.

Anyway, I really, really love vim to bits. However, recently I started using Emacs. I don’t know why exactly. Emacs is equally incredible. It’s definitely different. Even though I am using Doom Emacs, which uses Evil/vim key bindings, there are still plenty of differences in how to ’think’ about the editor more generally. The thing that made me want to stick to Emacs for a while is org mode. It changes everything about my workflow. It makes it more centralised, more manageable.

Eventually, I’ll have to ditch Doom and try go deeper into the guts of Emacs. I still don’t really understand what’s going on a lot of the time. Still, though, most things are easier on emacs than on vim. I do miss vim’s help system and some of the features of command mode.

The only thing that bugs me about Emacs is that I still don’t know enough about it to properly troubleshoot it. For example, some of my .org files no longer automatically open in org-mode. I have to manually set it after opening the buffer. Also, I’ve started using Elfeed, but I can’t figure out how to update the feeds without first reloading the doom config. There are probably incredible simple solutions to these problems, but I’m not sure where to start.

The reasons I’ll stick with Emacs (over vim) for now:

Org-mode - Probably the best thing about emacs for me now. I love everything about it. One tiny thing that’s amazing is that you can open up different sections in a new buffer. Great for distraction-free writing. There are so many small things like this that make it so good. Org-mode also has amazing export options.
Everything seems more ‘integrated’. This is especially the case with file/buffer navigation. With vim, I did use fzf a lot to open new files, but I’d always have to keep track mentally of what directory I was in, and then figure out whether to search the entire filesystem (much slower) or if I could just search within the project directory (super fast). With emacs, there seem to be a lot more in-built options for hopping around. I use the bookmark feature a lot, and the fast auto-complete functions when just searching for the file with the filename ‘bar’ make it easy and simple to find things. I still mostly use the ‘c-^’ function from vim to switch between buffers in emacs (I rarely need to hop too much between more than two). I can’t put my finger exactly on why yet, but there’s just something about emacs’ filesystem/buffer management that feels easier and faster. I still miss fzf sometimes, but not much.
Elpher - I use this all the time now instead of Amfora
Elfeed - I’ve ditched newsboat for it.
Snippets - I did use snippets a lot with vim too, but writing snippets within Emacs (yasnippets) is really fast/easy. I don’t use emacs for coding (I don’t code), but even for general writing tasks, snippets come in handy.
writing-modes - I had these set up on vim too (goyo, vim-pencil, limelight), but on emacs they feel less buggy (maybe because its GUI emacs). I’m still switching between a couple at the moment (writeroom, zen). I love the ‘fullscreen’ feature of zen.

And so much more.

Even so, most of my joy from writing these days still comes from the vim-based keybindings/functions. If I were to just use vanilla emacs I probably wouldn’t like it as much.

Both are amazing in their own way. I just wish I could go back in time and tell myself that.

Journal - Christina's Five Questions

Thu, 06 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Christina’s Five Questions for May 2020

This is my first time participating in this. I think it’s a great idea and I love reading other people’s answers.

Home of the Five Questions

What’s on your bedside table?

It’s a bedside chair.

A cup of coffee, a vape device, a little remote-control thingy for turning off the lights, a kindle (currently reading The Dark Forest by Liu Cixin)
Five items you “can’t” live without.

Nothing that I’m proud of - the vape pen, some kind of container with coffee, my computer (not this computer specifically, but just access to some kind of computing device), my glasses, some form of money. I’m sorry, I couldn’t really think of ‘personal’ forth or fifth items. When I was young and had to go travelling somewhere, my mother always had a minimal check-list: passport, money. Anything else that we forgot could always be purchased with the money. This is especially true where I’m currently living - South Korea. You barely have to walk half a kilometre to find any other ’essential’ items in some kind of store. I realise now that this is quite sad. I have no ‘unique’ or personal items that I’m attached to, I’ve fully (and unconsciously) embraced capitalist/consumerist culture where everything is substitutable. The upside of this is that less attachments to things makes it easier to travel.
What are some words or phrases specific to where you live?

I don’t speak the language much (Korean). And I’ve had to work to change language I do speak (English) quite a bit, since everyone teaches “American” English here. So, I now say “elevator” instead of “lift” and “apartment” instead of “flat” (the first example that came to mind, since there are so many lifts and flats around here).

In terms of Korean words, there is a specific word for “spacing out”/just sitting doing nothing. It’s 멍 때리다. It’s a popular activity here (people work a lot here). During a class on ‘free-time activities’ a middle school student even said that was his favourite hobby. They even have spacing-out competitions where a bunch of people just sit in a park. If you check your phone or fall asleep you’re disqualified.

There are hundreds of unique words/phrases from where I grew up - Donegal, Ireland. Again, I’ve had to suppress most of them. The two that sometimes slip through are “grand” and “good luck”. We say “grand” all the time to mean ‘fine/good’ when someone asks “How are you?” or “How was it?”, and we say “good luck” instead of “good bye”.
What are your healthiest habits?

Another embarrassing one for me, I don’t have many. I go cycling whenever I can, but not in a ‘habitual’/routine way. I just go because its fun, not as exercise. I usually go on really long cycling trips at the weekends. If I wanted to be healthier about it I would go on shorter, more intense, trips daily I suppose. I’ve been thinking about doing that, but I’m always so tired from work in the evenings. I’m always able to get a lot of sleep. I can fall asleep easily. I have to get up early for work, but I still manage around 8 hours a night.
What are the rewarding aspects of your job? (if you have a job quashing your will to live, I provide a bonus sixth question for you)

I don’t really have a high opinion of ‘work’ in capitalist societies, I’ve seen too many friends destroyed - mentally/spiritually - by awful bosses and working conditions. Having said that, I’ve been mostly lucky in that regard. It helps that a lot of my ‘work’ so far in life was as a grad student. Currently, I work teaching kids. I know it is a cliche, but teaching kids really is so rewarding. Maybe just because they’re a little bit more ‘chaotic/unpredictable’ than adults. Just when you think you have them figured out, they surprise you. I think surprise/novelty in an important ingredient in work (and most other things). They are endlessly kind and endlessly funny.

Journal - Centralised Learning

Tue, 04 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000

I’m fairly apolitical by nature. I’m not sure where this comes from. It’s probably form my father.

I grew up in a rural area of Ireland, near the Northern Irish border. When I eventually discovered Marxism through the Communist Manifesto (I was around 20), I was blown away by its clarity and precision. I still believe its the only analysis of political economy that makes sense. I’m generally not a fan of ‘grand theories’, but if there was ever a case for their validity, it lies in Marx, not Einstein, or Hawking, or anyone else. I still go back and read some Marx every so often, and it continues to astound me. I get the same feeling reading Freud. Even at the level of style, I love their works.

Anyway, as convincing as I find Marxism from a philosophical/analytical perspective, it’s never really ’taken hold’ with me as a political ideology. When I was young and getting excited about Marx and Brecht and Godard and ‘revolutionary’ thinking, I would sometimes try discuss it with my father. He would always talk about the history of the ’troubles’ and the realities of revolutionary violence. I knew better than to try argue against that.

Still, even though I’m not political, if I was I would be communist. In particular, I’ve always actually liked ideas about centralised planning. For example, I really loved the idea of the A.I. computer in The Dispossessed, the one that allocated work assignments. In the last few months, however, my ideas about centralisation have been thoroughly put to test.

Our school recently switched its ‘franchise’ (remember, private schools in Korea are more like ‘businesses’ than traditional schools). Previously, the curriculum was set by our boss. Now, its set by some office in Seoul that also administers to hundreds of other academies in the same franchise. We all access a common file-system (just a cloud based storage system like dropbox), and the syllabai/schedules are uploaded there every month. Also, there is a strong ’e-learning’ aspect to the syllabus - every night the students will have to log on to a the franchise’ site and complete digital exercises. The daily schedules correlate with their online exercises. For example, we might have to cover a page of the book on ’names of rooms in a house’, and that night they will have some kind of online activity quiz/game based on that content.

So, we have to stick exactly to the centralised schedule. The main reason for this, as it was communicated directly to us, is that we have to prepare the students well for their online tasks, because their parents will probably be present during those. In private school culture in Korea, the parents are the real boss. 90% of your job is simply keeping them happy and paying their monthly fees.

At first, it was kind of nice having everything pre-organised by the central office. All you have to do is stick to the schedule and everything is fine.

Problems started arising due to the ‘complexity’ of the curriculum. A business as big as the one we’re currently under naturally tries to cover as many bases as it can, provide curricula for all ages and levels. However, our school is pretty small, and in the past there wasn’t any kind of ‘management’ layer. Even the boss was incredibly laissez-faire. So, now it’s mostly down to the individual teachers to manage any inconsistencies or quirks in the central scheduling.

The problem, though, isn’t really with the lack of management structure, it’s with the centralisation itself. We’ve become slaves to some learning software that the kids do for homework.

I worked in a university for a while and, even though the structures are different, there are similar problems. Universities these days, at least in the U.K., are economic powerhouses and require a lot of management and oversight. As with my current situation, most of the administrative and managerial tasks are actually given to lecturers. Even though there is a huge management structure above the academics, those people mostly deal with things like admissions, outreach, accommodation, funding, etc.. In other words, getting people in the door and taking their money. Those people are also seen as much less ’expendable’ than the actual lecturers, as I witnessed first hand during a period of cuts at my previous university (of course, I myself was never in danger as an ‘adjunct’ teacher, my ‘margins’ were already so wide. I did however, know some really good, more senior, academics that lost their job).

The actual day-to-day tasks of organising courses, assessments, etc., is left to the departments themselves. The academics who are in charge of these things (for example, a ‘head of department’) do not receive extra compensation for their work. At best, their servitude simply makes them a better candidate for promotion later on (to ‘senior lecturer’, ‘professor’, etc.). This is mostly taken on faith. At the end of the day, you could easily be outpaced by someone with a better research profile but no administrative experience. In academia, however, you’re rarely in a position to say ’no’ to these kinds of extra work.

Long story short, our little school now seems to need some dedicated organisational/management roles. But, I don’t think this would make things better. I hate management systems. What I love is flexibility and freedom in what you do. In the context of education, especially, I feel it’s a necessary ingredient in productive learning. We’ve been on the new system for just over two months now. It was fun at first. Now, I feel that even the kids are succumbing to the monotony of the new schedule. It feels like we are on rails. Some days I have to push the kids so hard because we are a few pages behind due to a lack of internal communication within the school. They are definitely learning in a more intensive and structured way than they were in the past, and maybe this will benefit them in the long run, but I also feel they can only be pushed so far, as can the teachers. The thing is, even if you sense they are going too fast or too slow, there’s not much you can do to change course, to adapt to individual students’ needs. You have to keep chugging along.

Complexity can’t be managed centrally. That’s why, I think, so many Marxists are happy bedfellows with anarchists. Marx himself was against the idea of a centralised ‘state’ at all, aside from maybe as an mid-point between capitalism and communism (the proletariat would take control of the state and gradually decentralise it). True complex, organic growth can only really take place at a localised level. Yes, in cases of education there need to be standards and centralised bodies of knowledge and research. But, at the end of the day, I feel these should serve more as ‘repositories’. Individual organisations and teachers should also feel free to experiment. It might seem that, in a post-enlightenment era, ’education’ is settled matter. But, I think that there is still a lot of room to discover new methodologies, new practices. Especially ones that can resist the increasing technolgization of the classroom.

Shell Script - Crosspost

Sun, 02 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000

In previous posts, I mentioned how I’ve started trying to learn a bit more about shell scripting in my free time.

First attempt

Second attempt

This was due to the simplicity of Gemini, and the ease of working with Gemini files in the command line. Gemini encourages this kind of tinkering and play with its surrounding apparatus (as can be seen by the many clients/servers). The second script was an example of something to improve my workflow. As it turned out, someone else found my post and showed me a much better/more sophisticated way to achieve what I want. I still use his solution all the time to compile my gemlog index.

Fixato - Writing an Index of Gemini Files

Anyway, in search of further optimisations to my workflow, I’ve tried to write another simple little script to automate crossposting my gemini posts to the web. Admittedly, most of the heavy lifting here is done by two other scripts, “Blop” and “gmi2mkd” by Drew/uoou/friendo and Tidux respectively.

Gemini to markdown at Gitlab

Blop at Gitlab

My main focus is Gemini/Gopher posts these days. So, I basically wanted a way to automatically add the gemini post I’d finished writing/publishing to my html website.

The Header

The website is generated from markdown files using Blop. Each markdown file has the following yaml-style header:

    ---
    title: 
    date: 
    ---

Blop then uses that information to print a header and date for each html post.

The Script

The script I made just adds this header to the gemini file, deletes the first gemini heading (otherwise it would be printed twice), and uses the gemini heading in the ’title’ field. It also then changes the ‘footer’ from a link to the ‘gemlog’ index, to a link to the ‘web’ posts index.

Next, I used the awk function from the ‘gmi2mkd’ script to change all the links from gemini syntax to markdown syntax.

Then, it changes the file extension from “.gmi.md” to just “.md”. This part had me scratching my head a bit. I’m sure there must be a simpler way to do it.

Finally, it asks whether it should recompile the website (run Blop). I just copied this section from a tutorial on how to use “yes/no” prompts in bash. I have no idea what it going on here with the parentheses.

Of course, the main thing it can’t do is fix the links to internal places on the site/capsule, like media links. That’s okay though, I don’t mind manually changing those for now.

#!/bin/sh

dest=/path/to/markdown/folder
head=/path/to/headerfile/header.txt
file=$1
title=$(head -n 1 "$file" | sed 's/\#\ //')
dt=$(date +%Y-%m-%d)

# Do the stuff. '5d' removes First Gemini Heading.
# Awk section from gmi2mkd script
cat $head "$file" |
    sed -e "s/\Shell Script - Crosspost/$title/" \
        -e "s/\2021-05-02/$dt/" \
        -e "5d" \
        -e "s/index\.gmi/\.\.\/archive\.html/" \
        -e "s/All Posts/All\ Posts/" |
    awk '{ if ($1 == "=>") {
        URL=$2;
        $1="";
        $2="";
        sub("  ", "");
        print "[" $0 "](" URL ")\n";
    }
    else {
        print;
    }
}' > "$dest/$file.md"

#Change file extension
for file in "$dest"/*.gmi.md ; do mv "$file" "$(echo "$file" | sed 's/\.gmi//')" ; done

# Run Blop
read -r -p "Recompile Weblog? [Y/n] " input

case $input in
    [yY])
        echo "Running Blop..."
        cd /path/to/webdir || exit
        blop
        ;;
    [nN])
        echo "Bye!"
        ;;
    *)
        echo "Invalid input..."
        exit 1
        ;;
esac

Gone Baby Gone

Sat, 01 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Dir: Ben Affleck, 2007

Gone Baby Gone, released in 2007, was Ben Affleck’s directorial debut. It’s a crime/noir film about a missing child.

I enjoyed the film a lot. It gets to the heart of one of the central tropes in a lot of classic noir films - the moral ‘purity’ of the P.I. The ending is notable (I won’t spoil it here). Even though the film has plenty of satisfying plot ‘reveals’, in accordance with its genre as a crime movie, it gets them out of the way before the ending proper - a Sophie’s Choice moment for the main character. A core question - “What does it mean to save a child?”

In this way, it becomes more of a ‘meta’ crime film, or a crime ‘parable’, focusing on general questions of morality and integrity. The classic moral system it explores is the Kantian one. Kantian, or deontological (‘deon’ coming from the Greek for ‘duty’), morality rests on the famous imperative:

Act only according to that maxim by which you can also will that it would become a universal law.

In the movie, Patrick Kenzie (Casey Affleck), embodies this principle. The characters around him, especially the members of the police, all embody its traditional inverse, found in utilitarian/consequentialist systems. They act according to the rule: “The ends justify the means”. This is a pretty common dichotomy in films dealing with crime and police (more about this below).

At the end of the movie, we see the contrast laid bare, in the form of two opposing speeches given about the right course of action. Again, I don’t want to spoil the ending too much, but this form of presentation, almost resembling a Socratic dialogue, makes the movie quite unique and self-aware. It reminded me a little of the films of someone like Osmane Sembene. Those films, about various moral questions in Senagalese society (e.g., Moolaade - the practice of female genital mutilation, Xala - capitalism and post-colonial politics), were intended to be highly ‘public’ - screened for a local community, for example, and then followed by a discussion about the moral/political themes. The films serve as a way of aesthetically presenting difficult, ambiguous questions for the community, questions which are often better explored in a narrative mode than, say, a political or policy-driven speech for the public. In general, this is a common trope of what theorists once called “Third Cinema” (Hollywood/entertainment cinema is “first cinema”, European/arthouse is “second”). This movement recognised the political core of all cinema, and harnessed this power to spark public discussion and action.

After the movie, we have to ask ourselves who we would ‘side’ with, based on a crude, but true, moral opposition. Of course, most of us will side with Patrick Kenzie, because we are aligned with him as the main character of the film. But, we are forced to recognise the difficulty of this position - the type of courage it takes to represent it - as well as our complicity with the inverse position - a corrupt policing system.

Another standout moment in the film is the bizarre plot tangent when Patrick discovers the lair of a paedophile. This whole sequence surreal and nightmarish - he is drinking at a bar, supposedly ‘after’ the initial plot mystery is resolved, and his associate tells him to go for a ride with him. From there, things get weirder and incredibly horrifying. Even though this sequence has nothing to do with the plot, it’s still central to the film. It reminded me of the sequence from True Detective - you know the one - in episode three. It’s hyper-real and hyper-violent. We follow the action through the eyes of Patrick, almost like in a videogame. In both True Detective and Gone Baby Gone, the main character becomes almost ‘superhuman’ in these sequences, running into the line of fire and navigating it like a trained professional.

Visually/cinematically both sequences are stunning, but I’m still trying to figure out what their deeper purpose is. I think that they basically serve as a ‘simulation’ for the viewer; a way to more ‘directly’ experience the horrors of the underworld that Patrick and Rust have sacrificed so much to explore and fight against. It is only in film/TV that you can get that kind of aesthetic ‘directness’, the feeling that you are strapped to a roller coaster and you are forced to experience something. I think the feelings of disgust and terror are important in both these, highly-moralistic, stories.

Finally, the main flaw with the film, aside from the point of Patrick’s girlfriend in the second half, doesn’t really come from the film itself, but from its genre. The setup is too familiar, especially today - a mostly-good-intentioned-but-corrupt police force exists, and an ‘outsider’ (usually a P.I., but can also be a ‘rookie’ for example, like in Training Day, or a superhero, etc.) enters the scene and makes sure that ‘justice’ is restored. Many Hollywood films like to cling to this myth that the lone ‘individual’ with moral integrity will come along and save the day. The problem with this is that it is too ‘cathartic’; it absolves the film-goer of the need for collective responsibility and collective action.

Instead, we need to see more films that envision collective, systemic change, especially as it relates to policing. Of course, it’s not Hollywood’s job to fix political problems, but I think there is a case to be made that these kinds of narratives, at the very least, can lull audience members into a false sense of security. Yes, I’m sure there are plenty of ‘good apples’ trying their best every day to fix justice systems, education systems, political systems, etc., but they are not winning. Perhaps because they remain hopelessly alone, like Patrick at the film’s end. All they have to comfort themselves is their conscience. At least that’s more than most of us have.

Nomadland

Sun, 25 Apr 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Dir: Chloe Zhao - 2020

A beautiful and sad film about grief. It’s kind of a ‘revisionist revisionist’ western. The main character, Fern (Francic MacDormand), leaves her home following her husbands death and the literal ‘closing down’ of her mining town after the mine shuts its doors. She travels America in her van, leading a ’nomad’ life.

The revisionist period of Westerns begins in the 60s (although maybe even earlier, depending on how you want to categorize The Searchers, etc.) with films like The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence (1962), and continues throughout the 70s and 80s (MacCabe and Mrs Miller, Pale Rider), and probably reaches its peak with Unforgiven (1992). Though, the tradition doesn’t stop there. Films associated with this movement attempt to break apart the iconography and mythology of the Western genre in order to reveal a different vision of the West, one which takes into account the deeper questions around violence/murder, masculinity, race, and so on. There are many, many films and TV shows in this genre.

Sometimes, though, presenting a more ‘adult’/‘realistic’ portrayal of the West is simply a way of ’re-branding’ a genre, of making it more appealable to a new audience. For example, many contemporary ‘superhero’ movies franchises do the same thing. I always hear people trying to explain how the ‘D.C.’ universe is far more raw/gritty than the ‘Marvel’ one, as if knowing the nuances here, and choosing the more ‘realistic’ mode of representation is supposed to signify ’taste’. Yes, some of those films can be quite good, but at the end of the day, those friends who harp on and on about the psychological depth of this or that character, also will have a figurine of that character, or will get ‘hyped’ up for the latest release.

I’m not trying to say that people shouldn’t get excited about movies or merchandise, everyone is free to do as they please. But I think we need to be honest about how we are still in highly ‘commercial’ territory. The revisionist Westerns are also commercial. That’s the thing about movies. They are expensive, they need to make money. I still think movies like MacCabe and Mrs Miller or TV shows like Deadwood are infinitely better and more complex than any superhero film, though I do accept that it may just be because of a personal bias against the superhero genre, and a deep love for Westerns. Nevertheless, in light of more recent approaches to the Western genre (Riders, First Cow, Cowboys, Leave no Trace, etc.), those classic ‘revisionist’ Westerns still seem bound to the genre conventions they are pushing so hard against. It’s like the old Nietzsche warning - “Beware that when fighting monsters, you yourself do not become a monster.” The revisionist Westerns established their own ‘iconography’ in place of the one they were trying to destroy, and it’s an iconography that directors like Quentin Tarantino and the Coen Brothers are still profiting off.

Anyway, *Nomadland *and those other recent films, have been returning to Western iconography, but in a different sense than the revisionist Westerns. It’s as if all the ugliness of the West had been purged during all these decades of revisionist Westerns, and now a host of new directors are seeing again the tenderness, natural beauty and comradery that was always inherent in the Western genre.

The movie is a masterpiece in the sense that it manages to convincingly communicate two very conflicting things at once:

America is fucked.
America is still the home of freedom and a certain mode of naturalism.

America is fucked. We all know this of course, but yeah, here we see so subtly but powerfully all the inherent problems of capitalism. It’s better just to watch the movie and listen to the characters’ stories than for me to go on about them here.

Toward the end of the film, the famous, iconic ending of The Searchers is reproduced, but with a twist. The Searchers ends with the familiar John Ford image, the cowboy framed in the doorway, on the threshold between civilization and wilderness. In both The Searchers and Nomadland (and all Westerns really), the cowboy only dwells a moment in the doorway, and then wanders out again. In The Searchers, the inside of the house, where the camera is shooting from, is dark, while outside it is bright and beautiful. The door closes, leaving us in civilisation, safe. Chaos had been conquered and tamed by the cowboy, the girl was home safe, and the people could get to their job of building the country.

In Nomadland, the camera also shoots the scene from inside the house, only this time the house is abandoned. Not only that, but the whole town is abandoned. It is a part of ‘Empire’, a real life Gypsum mining town that was established in 1923 and literally closed down in 2011. We are at the other end of the cowboy’s dream now; the civilsation, the garden in the wilderness, was built up, and people came to settle there and start families, just like the cowboys had promised. Then, that dream was outsourced to China, and the people in the towns were left with nothing.

In the Nomadland scene, the camera, instead of remaining inside, follows Fern out, embracing the beauty of the landscape, fleeing from the decaying American mining town.

This leads us to the second point the film communicates so forcefully - the power of nature. Even though there is lots of ’natural’ beauty in the movie, as with all Westerns, what I mean by ’nature’ is more like a process of continuous death and renewal. The process of grief, in particular.

In terms of the actual representation of the natural landscape, the movie seems to be doing something very determined and interesting. There are moments of beautiful evening skies, and roaring seas, and snow-covered hills, but these moments are balanced with moments of purple/gray and coldness. When those moments of natural beauty do appear, they feel powerful. Their aesthetic function becomes one of rejuvenating the viewer, making them see the same gray desert setting in a new light, over and over again. The alternation between the different modes of nature is gentle - like casually walking though a gallery of landscape images - but it is also ceaseless. There seems to be an infinite energy to the cycles of nature.

This ceaselessness and this constant alternation between the beautiful and the mundane, the powerful and the weak, is mirrored in Fern’s experience and in the lives of humans she encounters. There are many moments of repetition and renewal throughout the film. The image of rocks/jewellery/knick-knacks is repeated a lot, perhaps a testament to the human spirit’s ability to endlessly chip away and shape hard matter. The image of Fern going to the bathroom is repeated (and, indeed, is part of the opening sequence). The same people are left and re-encountered over and over again, a motif summarised movingly in the speech by Bob about his son’s suicide. In the end, everything returns and is made new again.

In one scene, Fern encounters a young man for the second time. The first time, she had given him a lighter, and now he gives her one to return the favour. He tells her about a girl he likes and writes to, and she gives him a poem to include in his letters. The poem was her wedding vow. I really like this scene because it reinforces the motifs of renewal and return, but it also hearkens back to the film’s Western roots. The poem is a Shakespearean sonnet, and any fans of classic Hollywood Westerns will know that Shakespeare was a common source of entertainment and beauty in the lonely frontier towns. The same old ghosts return again and again, a poem can have many lives, many settings. In classic Holloywood Westerns, the setting for Shakespeare is the music halls of the frontier towns - spaces for settlers to bring with them the culture and history of the lands they were fleeing. In Nomadland, the setting is an abandoned roadside shared by two homeless people smoking cigarettes. The civilisation ‘projects’ began by the first settlers seems to have failed somewhat, but the spirit and ghosts live on in strange places of exile and abandonment.

The philosopher/theologian Catherine Pickstock has written about the concept of identity using the idea of ’non-identical repetition’. In modern society, we are subjected to endless, brutal ‘identical repetitions’ (products, events, technologies, etc.). But, the true nature of things is to repeat ’non-identically’. She uses the image of a snake to illustrate the point further - to move forward, the snake first turns back on itself, but then turns back the other way again, and so on, and so on. This ‘serpentine motion’ represents our journeys as selves. We never simply move forward in a ‘straight’ line. Things pull us back - memories, nostalgia, grief - and things pull us forward again. This movie is full of instances of ’non-identical’ repetitions. Objects (the rocks, lighters, camping chairs, etc), landscapes, people, return again and again, but never quite in the same way. This is perhaps why a film like this could only take place ‘outside’ or on the edges of society. Non-identical repetition depends on chance, contingency, exposure, vulnerability. Those kinds of things seem to be less and less present for us today.

The film succeeds, though, because it never ‘romanticises’ this space. It manages to provide both a forceful critique of the conditions that lead to this life and a convincing portrait of the human ability to transcend those conditions through continual renewal and reinvention. It’s an intriguing and moving film. Highly recommended, especially for fans of Westerns.

Journal - Lovely message and Lonergan movies

Sun, 18 Apr 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Dear Gopherspace,

It’s been a while since my last update. I’ve been busy at work.

I received a lovely email from gopher user f6k about how my phlogs about teaching in Korea reminded them of their own time teaching abroad. It’s so nice to feel there are others out there with similar thoughts and similar love for this wonderful protocol.

f6k’s gopherhole (in French and English):

=> gopher://shl.huld.re

I watched Manchester by the Sea for the first time last week. It’s an incredible movie. Years ago, I watched Margaret, by the same director/writer. I really, really loved that movie too. Both movies deal with the theme of ’tragedy’, although Manchester By The Sea is more direct about it I think. It’s a difficult movie to watch. The chemistry between Casey Affleck and Lucas Hedges makes the movie something exceptional.

I can’t remember Margaret too well, but I feel it was a totally different vibe. I definitely want to go back and re-watch it soon. I remember it being a lot more ‘cryptic’ than Manchester by the Sea was. In Manchester, the tragedy is clear and brutal and there’s no turning away from it or no way to come to terms with it. It just ‘is’. But with Margaret, the tragedy seemed a little more ‘classical’ (Greek). Maybe it was just due to the editing/structuring of the film (I’m pretty sure I saw the ‘shorter’ non-directors-cut version), but there were more ellipses, more empty space, more of a sense of something ’larger’ at play, just out of reach of the characters’ understanding.

I remember at the time being fascinated with the main character, and her lack of an ’entry* point in terms of trying to understand her. I mentally made a list of some other female leads that were similarly inscrutable:

Morven Callar from Morven Callar
The alien from Under the Skin
Victoria from Victoria

These are all fairly recent movies, and I feel there is something quite contemporary about these kinds of representations of female leads. They seem to reject both classical cinema’s objectification of women, but also modern, ‘progressive’ attempts to portray uncomplicated/powerful/liberated female leads. There were similar, inscrutable women in classical cinema too, like Jeanne Dielman, etc. But, again, there also seemed to be something political going on in those representations. There is a book by Stanley Cavell called “Contesting Tears” that I’ve been told deals with this topic. I’ll have to read it at some point.

Site Updates

Sun, 18 Apr 2021 00:00:00 +0000

I decided to update the structure and content of this site a bit.

I basically just merged the content of my Gemini capsule with the material here. It didn’t make sense to have two separate spaces any more. Most of what I do here is just writing text files. Gemini allows me to do that much easier and more effectively. So, I’ll primarily be working with Gemini and mirroring the files here every now and then. The only real ‘additional’ content here is the music page.

I’ve also added some extra sections to the site:

Fiction - Maybe best not to visit here…Fiction-writing is still an area I’m new to. Just doing it for fun.
Academic Work - A brief overview of my output as a philosophy PhD student

The more I think about it, the less ‘benefits’ I see to running a html-based blog. One of the main ‘pros’ is you have much more power over formatting/styling the text, which is especially useful for kinds of content which require a rigorous, user-defined style structure, like longer academic writings or CVs. Even then, you could just upload pdfs to Gemini.

The main reason for keeping a html-based blog is for ‘directing’ other people towards it, since visiting a Gemini page will require downloading additional (albeit tiny) software. Also, a lot of people ’expect’ sites to look quite ‘styled’, as opposed to finding just text and links. Having said that, I never actually direct people to this blog really, or link to it. In fact, my gemini capsule is far more ‘visible’ in many ways. It’s mostly on gemini/gopher that I’ve actually had people reading/engaging with the material.

Anyway, the basic point is that this site is pretty much redundant with regard to my personal needs. I hope that Gemini grows more as a blogging space. It is such a pleasure to write using it.

Auto-Making a Gemini Index

Sun, 11 Apr 2021 00:00:00 +0000

A few days ago on Mastodon, I came across a very useful toot by Fixato. He had provided a comprehensive shell command for updating you TLS certificates in light of the recent update to the agate server. He also kindly helped me troubleshoot additional issues I had.

Fixato followed me back and came across a recent post I made on automatically updating my gemlog index page via a shell script. I’m new to shell scripting, so my solution had lots of room for improvement. To my amazement, Fixato took up that challenge and wrote a wonderful response to my post:

Writing and index of gemini files

I know it’s a cliché to people already using Gemini, but the ‘socializing’ potential of Gemini, the smolnet, and the floss community in general never ceases to astound me. I was so happy that somebody else, a total stranger, could happen upon my attempt to solve a technical problem and offer a far more elegant and effective solution. Of course, this is how open source and free software has always developed, it’s just nice to be reminded of that. Like many others, since discovering Gemini, I’ve ditched things like twitter for the most part, and I don’t miss them at all. In fact, I am angry at myself for allowing applications like that to take of so much of my time in the past without delivering anything tangible in return.

Needless to say, I will be incorporating Fixato’s script into my workflow. He points out in his post that his solution may not fit my needs exactly, since I was manually inputing a date separate from the file. That was due to my own inexperience working with archives/data. I can see now that it is indeed much more efficient to include the date somewhere in the file. As Fixato mentions, this is especially that case when considering posting the material elsewhere. For now, I’ve just changed the filenames of my gemlogs to include a date, but in the future I might work more on structuring the files themselves more rigorously, with dates and tags.

In the same vein, I also like how Fixato’s script takes the ’title’ for the index listing from the actual file heading. Before, I was inputing the titles manually, and that tended to lead to discrepancies in the index title/file title. I far prefer this, more consistent, method (and it involves less typing!).

Moving forward, I’d like to adapt Fixato’s script to also generate a ’tag’ index page. This is really the best thing about responses like Fixato’s - they are opportunities to learn and grow. His background, I presume, is in tech, so I can learn so much from his solution to my problem. I’ll have to learn more about how functions work in bash, but using his script as a template I think I can get a lot closer to that.

The Three Body Problem

Thu, 08 Apr 2021 00:00:00 +0000

I just finished reading The Three Body Problem. It’s a fantastic book, I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Below are some rough thoughts on the book. Probably only relevant if you’ve already read it.

It seems to have been born of two weighty lineages. The first could be said to originate with Dostoevsky. In particular, the famous Grand Inquisitor section from The Brothers Karamazov, or something like this:

Dostoevsky Youtube

Other books in a similar vein might be Brave New World or The Time Machine. In short, a tradition which speculatively considers the question of human freedom in relation to the question of the (im)possibility of ‘utopia’. Theses books consider the question from a more ‘universalistic’ perspective.

The second lineage of the book places it more firmly in late-twentieth century works which reflect, more concretely, actual 20th century histories of colonisation and genocide.

I’ve called both of these strands ’lineages’, but I’m just making this up as I go along. I’d say that, to me at least, the first group of texts - Dostoevsky, Huxley, Wells, etc. - represent studies/explorations of the general psychology of the human. The second set of texts, which might include works by people like Herzog (Fitzcaraldo, Aguire) or Bela Tarr maybe (Satantango), still aim at developing a general/philosophical portrait of the human, but do so against the backdrop of real 20th Century horrors and contradictions. The difference between the two traditions might be most strongly felt in the difference between the original context of the Flight of the Valkyries (the Ring cycle) and the use of it in Apocalypse Now. Wagner’s Ring cycle is arguably the most dense and complex cultural text ever produced in the West. But, compared to the real-life historical, political, geo-political, moral, psychological, etc, contradictions of the Vietnam war, the Ring Cycle seems like a fairy tale. The use of the piece in the film is like some kind of cultural-political short-circuit; too much is happening - the aesthetic apex of Western history is grotesquely and triumphantly overlaid on a horrific scene of mass murder carried out by the U.S. state. Indeed, the philosopher Jean-Francois Lyotard (of The Postmodern Condition fame) cited the Valkyries helicopter scene as an ‘acinematic’ moment - a moment of extreme material intensity that sort of ‘breaks’ the surrounding text/form.

Of course, it’s impossible to really evaluate/understand The Grand Inquisitor, for example, in a context where we haven’t witnessed first-hand the depths and depravity of the ‘free’ human spirit in the 20th century. For us, The Grand Inquisitor is extremely terrifying because of what it appears to foreshadow. So, maybe it’s not right to separate it from texts like Apocalypse Now or Satantango. Although these texts consider similar questions against a more visceral historical background, the Dostoevsky text also probably has this background implicitly factored in for contemporary readers.

Anyway, the point is that The Three Body problem seems to utilise both forms. On the one hand, it uses the horrors of the Cultural Revolution to ground a lot of its claims about humans, but on the other, it is also highly speculative and thought-experimenty like Dostoevsky or Huxley. This mix produces a strange effect.

I’ve only just finished the first book of the trilogy, so I’ve no idea where it goes (I intend to read the remainder as soon as possible), but this book, taken on its own, is extremely pessimistic. It’s pessimistic both in the same way that Dostoevsky is pessimistic (the pessimism that arises through rigorous philosophical reflection, also found in Schopenhauer) and also in the way that Apocalypse Now or Satantango is pessimistic (simply presenting the historical facts of the actions of both the U.S. and communist states in the 20th century). And, I guess it is also pessimistic in a third way - there is no ‘outside’ point to escape to, no benevolent civilisation or eden-like planet to travel to. Come to think of it, it is pessimistic in a fourth way too - even science cannot save us. This point is indirectly felt in the scene where the Solarians are testing their particle accelerator. This, quasi-magical, scene is like the supreme ’endpoint’ of science - absolute mastery over matter. Yet, the scene is framed in such a strange way. The ‘miracles’ produced by the experiments are simply inconveniences on the way to the true purpose of the science - paralysing and conquering another species. Even something like discovering a ‘sentient’ life-form/life-world within a single particle is taken up as a potential propaganda point - civilisations are destroyed all the time.

As a side note, I really loved how the booked framed scientific progress in terms of our relation to matter. Like, how stone tools and computers are all on the same interpretive/scientific level, since they operate on the bases of a simple model of a particle. Qualitative differences/leaps only occur once matter itself is ‘unfolded’ or unravelled more.

Anyway, this isn’t much of a review of the book. There is so much more that could be written about it. I just wanted to jot down my first impressions. One thing that I could say, maybe, is that the comparisons I’ve made, to Dostoevsky, Herzog, Coppola, Bela Tarr, etc., highlight that, even though the book is of course reflective of and woven of the cultural/historical fabric of China (the footnotes are so useful in this regard), its ‘form’ borrows a lot from ‘Western’ traditions. I may be wrong about these comparisons though. But, if the novel indeed borrows a lot from Western canons (which of also contain the majority of ‘classic’ science-fiction texts), then this may also explain its extreme pessimism. For example, both Fitzcaraldo and Apocalypse Now (via Heart of Darkness) deal with the question of the European colonisation of Latin America. They do so through the eyes of the ’enlightened’/‘free’ Western ‘man’. The result is a nihilistic, almost self-pitying portrayal of the European post-enlightenment ‘project’. But texts which deal with the same historical facts from an alternative (non-Western) perspective often do better in salvaging a kind of ‘hope’ from these situations. For example, Zama, by Lucrecia Martel, has a similar protagonist (the European, ‘free’ man) in a similar context, but here his contradictions are more clownish, more baffonish. The hope lies in the death of this ’type’ - due to their irresolvable contradictions - and the opening for alternative voices and perspectives on ‘freedom’. The history of Western civilisation has produced many aporias, as has the history of the modern Chinese state (The Three Body Problem also dramatises many aporia’s of contemporary civilisation) but, an aporia is not simply an ’end’ to thinking, it can also be a beginning of a new, non-programmatic from of thought.

Perhaps, in this sense, The Tree Body Problem is a little too ‘sincere’ about the death of human civilisation. At the end, it’s represented in the form of a ‘sunset’, a beautiful, but problematic, soul passing away into the universe.

That said, this image is preceded by the image of the persistent ’locusts’, the ‘remainders’ that can never fully be mastered/understood through science and technology. In this metaphor, perhaps, there is an alternative path for human civilisation. I can’t wait to see which path is pursued by Liu Cixin in the rest of the story.

How to live

Thu, 01 Apr 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Below are a series of entries on ways to live. It might seem presumptuous to write something like this, but they are intended to be a kind of personal archive of thought/ideas I’ve picked up and that seem to circulate in my mind and guide my action and judgements.

Caveat: These entries are not scholarly in nature, even though they deal with fields which can arguably only be approached in a scholarly mode, i.e., fields where precision/exactitude in interpretation is important. For example, I reference Daoist thoughts. I can only hope that my ignorance of these fields is in fact a virtue that allows for a more flexible reading, but it is more likely the case that I’ve misinterpreted these teachings.

On Education and Knowledge

I’m currently a teacher, and before that I was also a teacher somewhere else. Before that, I was a student. The only professional experience I’ve had is in education. So, I thought I’d start with that.

The wise person knows that they know nothing.

The classic Socratic paradox. May or may not have actually originated with Socrates. The best way to see the truth of this is to observe its inverse.

Unlearn what you already know.

Something I’ve picked up for cursory readings of Taoism and prolonged readings of Ursula K Le Guin novels!

I can’t remember where I came across it, but there is a story that illustrates the difference between a Confucian and Taoist approach to knowledge. Two people find a boulder blocking their path. The first, Confucian, analyses the situation carefully - they calculate the mass of the boulder, and apply their learning to constructing an apparatus which will lift the boulder from their path. The second, Taoist, observes that the boulder is also blocking a stream, which forks around the boulder. The Taoist sits back happily. They cannot move forward for now, but they can see that after 1,000 years the stream will have eroded the boulder and unblocked the path.

In both cases the boulder is removed. In the first it is through calculated action, in the second it is removed through inaction. Both cases are equally effective on a long enough time scale.

Knowledge, especially highly-specialised knowledge, can lead to many beneficial practical applications. It can also conceal a lot from us.

Educational Advice from John Cage

Ten Rules for Students and Teachers

On Relationships with Others

The key term here is not ‘relationships’ but ‘others’.

I am that I am

And God said unto Moses, I am that I am

Exodus 3:14

Who are you?
I am that I am, let me be, go on with your business.

This is the correct way to interpret this I think. It’s God saying that what she ‘is’ is already established through simple existence. We should apply this well to both our attempts to ‘know’ God (i.e., don’t attempt it), and to our attempts to ‘know’ others. The other is knowable only in part to us, any attempt to fully ‘define’ them is a kind of violence. This may sound frustrating at first. After all, if it’s our wife, our child, our father, we may really feel the need to ‘know’ them fully, we may expect them to always act in a familiar way. Really, though, the impossibility of fully knowing the other, what they’re thinking, feeling, doing, is a form of freedom.

God is saying you can never know me beyond knowing my existence. This means that we can never fully know what God really ‘wants’ of us. Similarly, we can never fully know what the other person expects or wants of us. In this way, God gives us the freedom and responsibility of interpretation. Our relationship to God/others shouldn’t be one of ‘calculation’ but of spontaneity.

Hospitality

In a similar vein to the above point, Jacques Derrida has written on hospitality in relation to the unknowable other. Hospitality only really becomes hospitality in the absence of ‘calculation’ about the other person’s desires, motivation, etc. He famously says that the guest who arrives at your door may be coming to shower you with gifts and gratitude, or may be coming to murder you. Hospitality can only exist against this background. This is why it is one of the most difficult practices, and one which should be celebrated when done well.

In a Different Voice

I don’t really know why, but the book “In a Different Voice” by Carol Gilligan has always stayed with me. It’s a book on moral psychology, and is notable, scientifically, for how it countered a prevalent theory of moral psychology at the time. This theory was by Lawrence Kohlberg and claimed there were six ‘stages’ of moral development:

Obedience and punishment orientation - How can I avoid punishment?
Self-interest orientation - What’s in it for me?
Interpersonal accord and conformity - Social norms, good boy/girl attitude
Authority and social-order maintaining orientation - law and order morality
Social contract orientation
Universal ethical principles

Your moral psychological ‘development’ is reflected by which stage matches your motivations for action, with 6 being the highest.

Anyway, in Gilligan’s research, she found that women consistently scored ’lower’ on the moral scale.

This wasn’t because women were less psychologically ‘developed’ than men, it was because the scale is ridiculous. (there are lots of other actual reasons too, just read the book)

It’s a beautiful scale, in its own way, and I would love if moral psychology could be so elegantly mapped out, defined, taught, and so on.

But it can’t. There is no map or fixed guide for navigating our relationships with others or for codifying our motivations.

The alternative ‘scale’ proposed by Gilligan is vague, but also that’s probably the point:

self-oriented
other-oriented
self-other balance

These aren’t the exact terms Gilligan uses, but it’s how I think of it. The first ’level’ of moral development is self-interest. We put our own values and opinions before others. Think of the husband who demand his wife stay home and mind the children so he can go out and become the best architect or whatever - very morally under-developed.

The next ’level’ is prioritizing the other too much. In the same scenario above, the wife who loves and cares for her husband, and who decides to sacrifice her own needs to serve his, is more morally mature than him, but we can still see there is something wrong here.

The final level is a balancing of the self-other relationship, but I don’t really know what that means.

That’s why I like it as a theory of moral development. It leaves it up to you, but it does advocate working towards a ‘middle’ position, which I think is the foundation of morality. Sometimes people scoff at the ‘middle’ ground, seeing it as akin to ‘sitting on the fence’, but it is precisely in the middle, on the fence, where you have the best view of the whole field and can therefore make the soundest judgements.

On Raising Children

This is really not something I’m qualified to talk about. However, I wanted to include one thought by Hans-Georg Gadamer which is also relevant more generally.

Gadamer writes that we may try to spare children from this or that experience but that,

experience as a whole is not something that anybody can be spared.

This is true for our own, adult selves too. We may try to avoid difficult or unpleasant experiences, we may retreat into familiar comfort zones or into addictions or bad habits, but what we are trying to ’escape’ from can never be fully escaped from. We can never avoid the simple fact of existence and all the joy and suffering that it entails.

Another way of saying this is found in the movie Inside Out. The main character, Riley, when confronted with difficult, negative experiences (moving across the country as a child) begins to ‘shut down’. She enters a depressive phase, her ‘personality centers’ are forcibly stripped from her unconscious, since these are the features of her self that define her existence in the world. In other words, she flees from existence.

The lesson at the end of the movie is that her ‘sadness’ is an integral part of her identity. Sadness and negative experience are (if you’re lucky like her, I guess) what build community, since when others sense sadness and negativity they reach out and form connections.

For Gadamer, the self is formed through negativity. When things are going normally, we are ‘invisible’ to ourselves. We behave automatically (indeed, Riley’s unconscious is a well-oiled machine, aside from that niggling character Sadness). It is only when things fail, start to break down, that we are forced to turn inward and reflect on ourselves. In this way, our self first ‘appears’ to us, as a self, through these negative experiences. Through this reflection we learn and evolve and grow.

This cycle of negativity and growth is a natural feature of experience, and one we should struggle to embrace instead of pushing it aside with ‘distractions’.

On Perfection

There is a crack, a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.

Leonard Cohen

Related to the previous entry on raising children, the message here is that perfection, even if attainable, isn’t desirable. It is the cracks and faults in a thing that help illuminate it for us.

Ever tried. Ever failed. No Matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.

Samuel Beckett

In a reality where cracks and faults remain with us and haunt us, failure is an inevitable feature of existence. The task then is not to avoid failure - a futile endeavour - but to learn how to ‘fail better’.

On Death

If I am, then death is not.

Why should I fear death? If I am, then death is not. If Death is, then I am not.

Epicurus

For Epicurus, ’life’ is a sensory experience. Death is the absence of sensation, and therefore it is not a feature of life.

But, you may argue, death is not simply the absence of sensation, it is also the cessation of sensation.

Well, to worry about that points us to another problem.

Let’s try to think about our sensory experience as a kind of waveform or signal. Our general experience will have a ‘baseline’ or ’natural’ waveform. The shape of this waveform is dictated by our bodies and their interactions with the natural environment. For example, when the light changes due to the motion of the sun, we may begin to feel more or less sleepy. When we work, our bodies use-up energy and we feel the need to eat. Our natural signal does fluctuate, but the fluctuations are patterned, periodic. Like the patterns of the seasons there is a regularity and familiarity to them.

However, beyond these ’natural’, periodic variations in sensation, we have found endless ways of modulating the signal. Imagine gorging on a particularly delicious piece of cake. All of a sudden, our baseline waveform spikes higher than we ever could have imagined. Soon, it returns back to its natural baseline and we feel dissatisfied. We crave another piece of cake to stimulate our sensations again. But, this second piece doesn’t modulate the signal quite as much as the first one, so we feel even more dissatisfied.

Fast-forward hundreds of years of ‘modern’ civilisation and our daily ’natural’ baseline is totally corrupted. We are constantly bombarded by signals that modulate and stimulate our sensations. If we’re materially fortunate, we can continue to artificially stimulate our pleasure and avoid really ‘coming down’. Eventually, though, something puts and end to all this noise - death. This is why we fear death today. Not because of something intrinsic about death itself (after all, it is a natural, essential feature of biological milieus), but because it signifies an end to our enjoyment.

So, learning to not fear death means also learning to pay more attention to how we experience pleasure in life. As I said, our natural signals are periodic, like sine waves, (as opposed to the ’noise’ signal of artificial stimulation), pleasures come and go. We feel hunger. This hunger can be satisfied by anything which eases this hunger - a simple slice of bread. Then, our hunger disappears, and returns again later. In which time we can again enjoy the bread. Accepting these cycles means accepting their end too.

Finally, when it comes to a question of the many forms of natural, extreme suffering we will still encounter, such as periods of illness, Epicurus says that nature has also provided a faculty to counter-balance these kinds of suffering - memory. In times of illness, Epicurus encourages us to remember and reflect on the good times we’ve spent with friends and family.

On Achievements

There is a well-known Buddhist parable about a man and a raft. I’ll try to paraphrase it:

There was a man who was on a journey somewhere. He was travelling through a forest. He came across a great river in his path. In order to cross it, he began to gather together materials from the forest and constructed a raft. The man was able to cross the river using this raft. On the other side, he stood admiring his creation and its success. He wondered about what to do with the raft now that he had crossed the river. He was proud of its craftsmanship and its beauty, so he decided to carry it with him. Weighed down by the raft, he was never able to complete his journey and died in the forest.

I’m not sure if I’ve retold the story properly, but this is how I remember it at least. I think its usually told as a way to understand various Buddhist ’techniques’ and ‘practices’ for attaining enlightenment. Once you’ve reached ’enlightenment’, you can then leave those techniques behind, like the man should have left the raft behind.

I usually think of this story when thinking about my ‘achievements’ or ‘failures’. Especially in the case of ‘achievements’ though. If we become too attached to our achievements, we become weighed down and defined by them. It is much lighter to leave them behind and move happily to the next thing.

I find that learning to let go of my ‘achievements’ is good practice for also letting go of my failures.

On Neighbours

Luke 10:25-37

On one occasion an expert in the law stood up to test Jesus. “Teacher,” he asked, “what must I do to inherit eternal life?”

“What is written in the Law?” he replied. “How do you read it?”

He answered, “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind’; and, ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’”

“You have answered correctly,” Jesus replied. “Do this and you will live.”

But he wanted to justify himself, so he asked Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?”

In reply Jesus said: “A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, when he was attacked by robbers. They stripped him of his clothes, beat him and went away, leaving him half dead. A priest happened to be going down the same road, and when he saw the man, he passed by on the other side. So too, a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side. But a Samaritan, as he traveled, came where the man was; and when he saw him, he took pity on him. He went to him and bandaged his wounds, pouring on oil and wine. Then he put the man on his own donkey, brought him to an inn and took care of him. The next day he took out two denarii and gave them to the innkeeper. ‘Look after him,’ he said, ‘and when I return, I will reimburse you for any extra expense you may have.’

“Which of these three do you think was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of robbers?”

The expert in the law replied, “The one who had mercy on him.”

Jesus told him, “Go and do likewise.”

One of the most famous parables in the bible. I’m not religious, but I always find this story so useful.

In order to understand it, we have to remember who the ‘Samaritans’ were to the audience here. They were one of the most hated, mis-trusted groups.

I’m pretty sure that every group or community or nation of peoples have their own version of ‘Samaritans’, not matter how ’enlightened’ they are. It seems to be an integral part of human social dynamics. A group is always defined by what it is ’not’. From my own experience, in Ireland and the U.K., for example, often Muslims are the mis-trusted group. In Ireland, specifically, it’s also the Irish Traveller community. The list of groups/identities we mis-trust or see as enemies is endless.

So, when thinking of the good Samaritan story, it’s helpful to imagine the Samaritan being someone who you are instinctively wary of. For me, maybe it’s right-wing groups in America, or TERFs.

Anyway, the point it that, if I were to fall and become injured, and another Irish person, or a communist, or even my father, without recognising me, all passed me by and avoided me, but then a TERF stopped to help me, then, my real ’neighbour’ is the TERF.

And, of course, vice-versa, I am only a good ’neighbour’ when I can reach out an help a fellow human, not matter who they are or what they stand for.

It’s a pretty big ask in these days of identity politics, but its exactly why I try to remember this story all the time. It helps me look beneath ‘identity’ to something more fundamental - neighbourliness.

On Happiness

Today, someone asked me about when I feel happy in life. I didn’t know what to answer at first. It’s not a question I usually ask myself.

For her, it was moments of intimacy, with a romantic partner, friends, family, etc. That’s a pretty good answer, but it’s not true for me.

In the end, all I could come up with as an answer were moments of ‘aesthetic’ beauty, both natural and created. For example, I really love cycling, especially when I am cycling somewhere unknown. I love to discover random pieces of natural beauty. I also love walking and hiking for similar reasons. I equally love ‘social’ modes of aesthetic beauty, both in the form of art and also in the form of human stories - I love listening to people talk about their lives. So, in the end, most of my ‘happiness’ comes in moments of relative passivity - listening to people talk, listening to music, watching movies, observing landscapes. She said that, for her, the problem with travelling somewhere, even somewhere beautiful, is always that you remember people you left behind and miss them. I never feel that way.

Thinking more about it now, I guess the happiness I feel in aesthetic beauty is more linked to the sense of ‘discovery’ than the specific aesthetic qualities. So, ’new’ things make me happy. Hmm, that’s possibly a symptom of growing up in a consumerist society (as a kid I really loved Christmas, the expectation of receiving something new and shiny). But, I hope it’s also a sign of a deeper human need for novelty and creativity. Discovery is a wonderful thing, and it can be endless.

In the end, though, my initial response to the question, which was the absence of a response, reflects my true opinion on happiness. It’s really not something worth thinking too much about or paying too much attention to. I feel it’s something that comes and goes quickly. We have to be thankful when it’s there, but also patient when it is not.

Second Shell Script - Autolog

Thu, 01 Apr 2021 00:00:00 +0000

I joined Cosmic Voyage a while back. I really love the system there for updating you ship’s posts. You type ’log’ at the command line and you are presented with a series of options for logging your entry.

This morning, I decided to try out something similar for logging gemini posts.

I did look at the script for the Cosmic Voyage log command, but it was a bit too complicated for me (!).

So, I tried to just put together something as simply as I could (I am still so new to the shell and I have no technical experience outside of linux).

The script just:

asks for a title, appends that title to the gemlog index,
then, asks for a ‘commit’ message, appends that to my nanolog file
finally, asks for a ’tag’, and adds the post to the tag page.

It seems to work okay. It was really useful learning how to search for a string with sed, and then add the entry to the next line.

Still to do:

Better user feedback, but the ‘interactive’ aspects of shell script still seemed too advanced for me
At the moment it searches for a ‘month’ string in the gemlog index, and then adds the post below that. So, I have to manually add the ‘month’ title to the index (e.g., have to add ‘April’ before I can post the first April post). It would be great if it could automatically do that if it was missing, and even if it could sort the posts into month/year directories. I did find someone who did something like that with their gemini capsule, but I haven’t figured out how to integrate it yet:

(https://www.hughrundle.net/how-to-write-a-static-site-generator-in-30-lines-or-less/)

In general, I have to make it more ‘flexible’. I’m not sure how it handles incorrect input, etc.

Anyway, here is the script if anyone’s interested:


#!/bin/sh
DIR="/home/eoin/gemini/"

[ -z "$1" ] && exit
echo "Title: "
read title
# Inserts log entry in index, under current month
sed -i "/\\$(date +'%B')/a => $1 $(date +'%Y-%d-%m') - $title" $DIR/gemlog/index.gmi

echo "Commit Message:"
read msg
# updates microlog
sed -i "9i## $(date +'%a %d %b %Y %H:%M %Z')\n$msg\n" $DIR/micro.gmi

# Inserts entry in tag section of gemlog
echo "Tag:"
read tag
[ -z $tag ] && exit

if [[ "$tag" = "Meta" ]]; then
  sed -i "/\# Meta/a => $1 $title" $DIR/gemlog/tags.gmi
elif [[ "$tag" = "Reading" ]]; then
  sed -i "/\# Reading/a => $1 $title" $DIR/gemlog/tags.gmi
elif [[ "$tag" = "Scavenge" ]]; then
  sed -i "/\# Scavenge/a => $1 $title" /$DIR/gemlog/tags.gmi
elif [[ "$tag" = "Journal" ]]; then
  sed -i "/\\$(date +'%B')/a => $1 $title" /$DIR/gemlog/tags.gmi
fi

Gemini Capsule Update

Wed, 31 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Nothing much to report here. I updated the capsule structure to try make it more minimal and even easier to manage.

Now, I only have one page (Gemlog) for all my posts. I also introduced a ’tagging’ page for attempting to sort the posts be category as opposed to date. I kept the nano log separate.

The reason behind this is probably already obvious to people already very familiar with Gemini/Gopher, but took me a while to notice. I was still thinking of the capsule in ‘html/css’ terms, i.e., trying to mimic a blog/webpage. However, after spending a couple of months browsing gemini/gopher, you really start to realise how content-driven the experience is and how style-resistant it is. The best capsules/gopherholes seem to be the least flashy and are literally just a directory with files inside.

I really love that. Maybe its just fetishism related to a love of the linux terminal, but it’s so nice just browsing around for ‘files’.

Yes, it’s definitely possible to add a lot more ‘features’ to a gemini capsule, and there are some amazing capsules experimenting with all kinds of information types and modes of presentation, but something about this format seems to reward a ’less is more’ approach. The protocol really tries to be as unobtrusive as possible. It does take some adjusting to, but it is so rewarding.

Also, I added my ‘journal’ posts from gopher to this capsule. I guess this is related to another ‘adjustment’ thing for people trying gemini for the first time. Once you start having multiple ‘spaces’ (http,gopher,gemini) you also have to start mentally compartmentalizing the different types of ‘content’ that matches each of these spaces. I don’t really like that.

So, I’ll have this gemini capsule be my main ‘place’ on the smolweb, and the http site be the main place on the web. This division of content makes more sense to me than the division I had between gemini and gopher. The web/html seems more suited to long-form types of writing. I could be wrong about that though.

Reading Note - Heidegger and Technology

Thu, 25 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Heidegger: Heraclitus: The Inception of Occidental Thinking, Logic: Heraclitus’s Doctrine of the Logos

p. 174 - “modern technology…”

modern technology cannot be transposed into a few sentences. Only one thing can be indicated given even minimally attentive thinking: namely, that the sciences of inanimate and animate nature, and also the sciences of the historical and its works, are ever more clearly developing themselves in a manner akin to how the contemporary human uses explanations to gain mastery over the ‘world,’ the ‘earth,’ ‘nature,’ ‘history,’ as well as all else, in order to then use these explained sectors according to plan (or need) for a securing and bolstering of the will to become master of the world in the sense of ordering it.

Anyone familiar with the philosophy of technology will probably be overly-familiar with what Heidegger has to say on the subject. However, even though what he has to say can be broken down into a few points - technology as enframing (Gestell), technology as the late-stage of a Western ‘history of being’, etc. - there is still something so puzzling and intriguing about it.

There is something almost paradoxical about its core - it is about ‘Technology’ with a capital ‘T’, but this does not mean it is about what we generally call ’technologies’ today. Heidegger famously opens his essay “The Question Concerning Technology” with this point:

Technology is not equivalent to the essence of technology. When we are seeking the essence of “tree,” we have to become aware that That which pervades every tree, as tree, is not itself a tree that can be encountered among all the other trees.

Yet, at the same time, it is, almost solely, pertinent to questions about ’technologies’, in their manifold forms. And, as technologies and their capabilities grow, multiply, diversify, his thinking seems more and more relevant. But, again, at its core, it is not really about technologies.

The way to resolve the paradox, as I see it, is to accept that technologies are, firstly, things. Only secondly are they ’technologies’. Or, rather, their ’technology-ness’ is something that we project onto them.

When we see a technological device, we have a set of presuppositions about what this thing can do. These presuppositions aren’t merely cultural or social, they originate in a particular way of viewing or questioning ’existence’ (Being).

We see a device as a thing that does something for us, and as something that allows us to extend our reach and control over our environment. It’s not as if we consciously think like this, these pre-understandings are built into the very way we are oriented toward existence. Through this lens, technologies offer massive potential, they can (and have) transform human society through industrialisation, they can bridge any distance through communication networks and complex flight paths, they allow us to map and edit our genes and cells with great precision, etc., etc.

But all of these ‘applications’ of the things we call technologies originate in us, in a particular mode of thinking and being. When we actually use technologies, however, a whole other set of elements are put into play. There arise from the things themselves. Technologies usually work in ways we didn’t intend/foresee. We usually chalk this up to a slight deviation from a larger path of ‘progress’. The next iteration of the software or device will correct the errors, or build upon them to form new technologies.

But, what if these deviations and unexpected outcomes are telling us something else about technology? Namely, that its potential lies beyond its mere ‘capability’ (if we understand capability in the sense of power to transform, to control, to index, to account for). As to what that capability might be, there are other philosophers who write about this (Simondon, Stiegler), here though, it is enough to say that Heidegger might want us to think less ’technologically’ about technology, and to listen closer to the things themselves.

In the opening quote of this post, we have Heidegger’s typical formulation of the question of science/technology as a question of ‘mastery’ and ‘will’. The quote continues:

This will is the ground and essential domain of modern technology: a will which, in all planning and examining and in all that is willed and attained, only wills itself, all the while equipped with the ever-increasing possibility of this self-willing. Technology is the organization and the enactment of the will to will. The varied forms of humanity, peoples, and nations—these groups and the individual members of whom they are comprised are everywhere only what is willed by this will, and not themselves the origin and caretaker of this will. Rather, they are merely its often unwilling enactors.

A “willing that wills itself”, another famous formula. Simply put, we are like the ‘sorcerer’s apprentice’ in that Disney movie (Fantasia?), we take hold of a great power, first in the form of philosophical thinking (Plato) and later in the form of technologies, but this power ends up turning us into its slaves.

Anyway, as I said, these formulations are already familiar to anyone who has read Heidegger’s most known works on Technology. More interestingly, in this lecture, on Heraclitus, he also talks about the question of ’logic’:

p. 144 - Logic thinking vs. the ’logic’ of the thing.

The human ‘thinks’ often and about many different things: however, the thoughts thus produced are not necessarily reliable. True thoughts, which are quite rare, do not arise out of self-produced thinking, nor do they reside in the things themselves, like a stone in a field or a net in the water. True thoughts are thought toward the human and directed toward him, and only when he is in a correctly thoughtful disposition—i.e., when he is in a state of practiced readiness to think what approaches him as the to-be-thought.

The term ‘logic’ therefore reveals itself to us through a strange ambiguity. On the one hand, it means the logic of thinking; on the other hand, it means the logic of things; on the one hand, it refers to the regulatory dimension of the conduct of thinking; on the other hand, it refers to the structure of things themselves. Initially, we do not know from where this ambiguity of ‘logic’ and the ‘logical’ arises, nor in what sense it became necessary and why it has established itself as something common and familiar in which we scamper about thoughtlessly, tossed this way and that. In most cases, certainly, we understand the term ‘logic’ exclusively in the sense of a doctrine of forms and rules for thinking.

For Heidegger, there is no real dichotomy between ’thought’ and the ’logic of the thing’. Both the ’thing’ (with its logic) and the thinker co-arise (to use the Mahayana term). The essence of the thing is also our own essence, and vice versa. ‘Understanding’ something is not a question of finding the right ‘formula’ to match the essence/properties of the thing. Understanding only emerges out of a practical, and practiced, relationship with the thing to be understood. And, even then, what you are really understanding is not the ’thing’ itself, but the thing as it appears authentically to you within a certain context of existence.

How does this relate to technology? Well, Technology (with a capital T) is the supreme example of a mode of thinking (logic) which denies this fundamental practical relation between the thing and the thinker. The most simple and obvious example of this is the effects of modern science (including economic science) and technology on the climate. A technological mode of comportment sees the ’thing’ (the ’environment’ in this example) as a kind of ‘resource’. Something that can be ‘known/studied’ and then ’transformed/utilized’.

From a certain perspective, this in entirely ’logical’. Science does know what it studies so well. Our modern technologies are excellent and efficient at extracting oil, heating the globe, making plastics, generating wealth, and so on. Their thinking is entirely ‘correct’ when taken on their own terms.

But, from a hermeneutic perspective, their thinking is totally blind. There is a great cost in what is achieved by ‘correct’ and ’logical’ thought, and that cost is what is ‘hidden’ from view in the process. What is hidden is both metaphysical - an alternative mode of existence - and practical - the global and irreversible destruction of the planet.

In this sense, the ‘way out’ of the problem of technology isn’t to try to think more ‘correctly’ about technology, be that in the form of reforming it, abstaining from it, and so on. We can neither engineer nor philosophize ourselves out of our dilemma.

What, then, is the solution? Well, to think that there is a ‘solution’ is already to think technologically about the problem of technology. The only clue Heidegger gives is in relation to the ‘work of art’. The true work of art is an inaguration, a gathering together of many disparate elements - mortals(the social), divinities(the transcendent), earth(materials), sky (context) and a presentation of these elements as work. A work is a making, a ‘bringing-forth’.

If we think of technologies as ‘works’ in this sense, their hermeneutic potential will always exceed their simple ‘functionality’.

Maybe re-using and re-cycling old machines expresses this. When I reboot, revive, an old ‘obsolete’ laptop to browse the web in a minimal way, for example, I circumvent the technological protocols that pervade contemporary patterns of computer and network engagement. Old thinkpads, prime ’executive’ machines in their day, become hacky stations for writing and scripting. Windows, iOS are forcible deleted, the machine takes on new life. This meaning and potentiality was always present in the machine, it was just eclipsed by other business and computing practices which hold sway. Now, old thinkpads are cultural symbols of alternative forms of computing practices, when once they sat on executive desks or, worse, in military bunkers.

The most radical expression of this ‘alternative’ use of the ’thing’ would be having a thinkpad or old computer as a utility in a household, with its presence being similar to an oven or a fireplace. Computers today are hyper-visible, persistently present. Having a minimal computer, capable of only maybe sending emails/sshing/browsing via lynx, etc., i.e., severely ‘restricted’ in its technological capabilities would be to deny the ’technology-ness’ of the thing, in the name of bring-forth and alternative significance. The device would become one piece within a broader, alternatively-organised life, one which denies constant connectivity, constant digital consumption, attention economies, and so on.

Actually, when I was growing up, this is how computers seemed. We had a ‘computer room’, a kind of ‘office space’ for my parents. When we wanted to do something computery, we went to this room, maybe disconnected the phone to use the internet, and when we were finished, we left the computer where it was.

The philosopher Albert Borgman has criticised technology by contrasting modern ‘devices’ with traditional notions of the ‘hearth’ in the home. The hearth, typically in the kitchen, was a central ’node’ for the household. It demanded something of the household. Someone would have to chop the wood, tend to it. When it was lit, it became a gathering place for the household, a place to chat, eat, tell stories. The ‘kitchen’ stood in contrast to the more austere dining room. ‘Devices’ on the other hand, are more ‘invisible’ in some ways, but more ‘present’ in others. An electric heating system, for example, no longer demands the same kind of labour as the wood-burning stove did. But, it is difficult to imagine a family gathering around a radiator in the evenings. Its ‘presence’ is felt in what it pushed away - traditional modes of gathering and socialising. Microwave dinners make the chore of cooking easier, but the result is a family eating silently around a television, instead of gathering together at a table.

A stripped-down computing set-up, however, might achieve a similar effect to a hearth or a meaningful household utility. This could be a non-technological use of a technology. The computer wouldn’t be a tool for making things easier (entertainment, communication), although it could, at times, serve that role. Instead, it would be a kind of curiosity, a point in the household for looking-in on the global state-of-affairs. It could be logged into for a while in the evening, and then left on its own most of the time.

To return to the Heidegger quotes (God, this has gotten off-track), the ’logic’ of the computer, the thing, is found not only in what it can enable us to do, but also in how it can be integrated into various kinds of practices. In other words, its ’logic’ is highly flexible. This is Heidegger’s simple point, I think. We tend to think of ’logic’ as something fixed, something you learn in a textbook, but ’logic’ can refer to the ‘way’ of the thing in relation to the ‘way’ of human action/practice (caveat - the term ‘human’ here is un-Heiddegerian).

Anyway, this has gotten much too long to be a simple ‘reading note’. That’s the thing with Heidgger, his thought is very encompassing. It’s really difficult to talk about Heidegger without going in many circles (spirals). I haven’t really done justice to even a fraction of what he says about technology.

I’ll try boil down the message I’ve gotten from these Heidegger quotes: Do more with less. That is, stop letting technology run your life, even though it is so good and effective at it. Restrict the power of technologies, and try discover the hidden potentials in micro, localised applications of technological things.

Journal - Staying Longer in Korea

Wed, 24 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Wed Mar 24 19:58:04 KST 2021

I mentioned in my first post here that I am currently living in Korea, but that I would soon be returning to my home country, Ireland.

Well, today, I signed on to stay in Korea until September. It’s not too much longer, but it was still a difficult decision to make.

I really love teaching here, even though the hours are pretty tough. I teach at a ‘Hagwon’, which is like a school/academy kids go to after their regular school. There are many kinds of Hagwons - art, English, math, taekwondo, and even ‘jump-rope’ Hagwons. Technically, they are ‘private’ schools, but most kids will attend multiple Hagwons, so there isn’t the same ’elitist’ connotation to the word ‘private’ as there is back in Ireland, for example. If you are a high-school kid here, you will typically be in school from 9 in the morning until 10 at night. The only reason you ’leave’ your high-school is if you are attending classes at a Hagwon/private academy.

My particular school teaches kindergarten in the morning and elementary school kids in the afternoon, so my hours are 9am-6pm. Of that 45 hours, technically 5 are for lunch, but that was recently cut shorter (40 min lunch breaks now), and the rest of the time I’m teaching, save for the 5 min breaks between classes, and an hour and a half break on Tuesdays and Thursdays (my co-worker doesn’t even have that though). So, it’s basically around 38 hours of actual teaching a week. When I was teaching at a University, I taught around 10 hours per week, so this was a big jump!

Apart from those really intense hours, though, the teaching itself is not too bad at all. The kids here are well-behaved and studious for the most part. There are usually a handful of classes per week that I’ll dread, but the majority of classes are a lot of fun.

Another great thing about my job are the co-workers and boss. There are some horror stories about teaching in Hagwons in Korea, but I’ve built a really good relationship with the other Korean teachers here, and the boss is really nice. She’s not really a ‘boss’ type at all, just a very poised and graceful human being, she is very easy to be around and very understanding.

Recently, a new teacher joined the school, from the U.S.A. I’m usually someone who gets along relatively easily with most people. But, already, it’s been so difficult working with her. From the outset, we didn’t get along at all, and now we can’t stand each other. This is a new experience for me. I’m used to having laid-back and easy relationships with co-workers, so I’m really not sure what to do about her. I’m just trying to ignore her for now.

If I had come here when I was a bit younger, I definitely would have stayed for a long time. But, I’ve been feeling some urge to get back to Ireland and get my ’life’ started. That was why I initially planned to leave. They were having trouble finding a replacement, though, so I decided to stay a bit longer. At the very least, I thought, I’ll get to enjoy another hot Korean summer, in place of a wet, likely-unemployed summer in Ireland.

This post is a bit rambley, so I’ll stop soon.

I’ll end by saying that a huge plus for staying in Korea was that this is where I first discovered Gopher/Gemini. Of course, that’s not directly related to Korea at all, but I do enjoy a job where I can just clock the hours, get paid, and then go home and play around with other things easily. This kind of thing was impossible in academia. It always seemed like that was a 24/7 type of job, because even in your ‘free’ time you had to be working, somehow, on research projects, job applications, grant applications, etc.

I guess the best sign that staying was the right decision was that I feel happy and relieved now. I’m really looking forward to lots of cycling here this summer.

Comitium and Gopher

Sun, 21 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve added a new ‘feed’ section to my capsule. It uses ‘comitium’ by alex/nytpu.

Alex’s Capsule Comitium

The timing of comitium’s release was perfect. I have recently been browsing gopher a lot more and I was missing the ability to subscribe to feeds. I really love the way you can do it in Amfora.

So, I was trying to figure out a solution for tracking both gopher and gemini feeds without having to constantly switch between browsers. Also, I was just trying to figure out how ‘feeds’ worked in the first place (I’m still a bit clueless about the technical aspects of them). Anyway, comitium seems to be able to solve all those problems.

The only thing I haven’t figured out yet is how to get the ‘proxy’ feature of Amfora working properly. I’ve downloaded the agena python script that solderpunk developed for serving gopher content on gemini, but I can’t figure out the right syntax to get it working with Amfora.

Today, I’ve just been using Lagrange for a change. I don’t like the look/feel of it as much as Amfora, but it’s not bad at all.

I also have a gopherhole now. It’s at:

gopher://sdf.org:70/1/users/loopdreams/

EDIT - 27 March - Gopher proxy on Amfora

Okay, I figured out how to get the agena server working! Thanks to this post:

gopher://republic.circumlunar.space:70/0/~grimmware/gopher_to_gemini_proxy.txt

I’ll re-post the steps below, since the information wasn’t that easy to find (gemspace.info got me there in the end! grimmware had also mentioned writing the post on gemini, so the gemspace.info search had indexed that. I couldn’t find said post on gemini, so I check their gopherhole and there it was).

I guess it is probably straight-forward if you’re already familiar with these kinds of things, but I wasn’t.

Download the Agena script:

Agena at tildegit

Generate a certificate for agena on localhost (here, I deviated from grimmware’s post above and used the method I was already familiar with. I’m not sure about the pros and cons of either method):

  openssl req -new -subj "/CN=localhost" -x509 -newkey ec -pkeyopt ec_paramgen_curve:prime256v1 -days 3650 -nodes -out cert.pem -keyout key.pem

Run agena.py
Add the following to the amfora config, in the proxy section:

   [proxies]
   gopher = "localhost:1965"

Launch Amfora and you should be able to browse gopher!

I’m so happy I got this working because I really, really love Amfora!

Journal - Covid Test

Sat, 20 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Sat Mar 20 14:11:33 KST 2021

I had my first covid test this morning.

I wasn’t symptomatic, nor had I been in contact with anyone who had tested positive. Nevertheless the test was mandated.

This was because I am a foreigner in Korea. More specifically, I’m a foreigner in the Gyeonggi-do province in Korea.

A couple of weeks ago, the governor of Gyeonggi-do, Lee Jae-myung, ordered that all 85,000 foreign workers in the province had to get tested for coronavirus within a 2 week period, or face fines of up to $3000.

In February, a screening of foreign workers at a factory in Gyeonggi-do returned a high covid-postitive rate (around 19%), so there were fears about a new spread among foreigner communities.

Earlier this week, a similar policy was adopted within the Seoul province (the Gyeonggi-do province surrounds Seoul), but was retracted on Wednesday because of international opposition on the basis of its discriminatory nature.

The test itself was fine and the testing site was well-run. I had seen other stories about very long wait-times and unpleasant experiences on Reddit groups for other English teachers in Korea. But my experience was mostly positive.

As far as I’ve heard, the governor is a bit of a ‘populist’ type figure, and that would indeed explain this kind of directive.

Even though, of course, the policy is incredibly discriminatory and probably grossly counter-productive, I didn’t feel too put-out by it.

I moved to Korea right as covid started to first spike in Wuhan, in January 2020. I remember listening to the story on the radio on the way to the airport. The entirety of my covid-experience has taken place in a country that has been extremely pro-active about fighting the virus. I’ve been so thankful for that. I’m not an epidemiological expert, but from the perspective of someone living in Korea, covid seems so ‘manageable’. The ‘sacrifices’ I’ve had to make are tiny in the grand scheme of things. I, and everyone around me, wear a mask constantly. When I go cycling, I wear a mask. I pass hundreds of other cyclists on the weekends, I’ve never seen one without a mask. Children all wear masks everywhere. People are cautious about gathering in large groups. Business have stayed open, but take simple precautions. For a couple of weeks in September, and a few weeks over Christmas, our school switched to online classes as the country’s restrictions increased. But those restrictions also eased relatively quickly. They were introduced quickly and they worked. Everyone follows them.

I know it’s a gross generalisation, but Korean society is quite ‘collective’/‘communal’. For example, one of the first culture shock moments I experienced here was the sharing of food. I used to hate sharing food. But here, people can go out and all eat from the same central dishes. Anyway, maybe this ‘collectivist’ spirit is important in fighting covid.

Or maybe it’s how efficient and developed a lot of its infrastructure is. Internet is great here, and so are the various ‘services’ that can only emerge in a well-connected, well-organised society. Home delivery is easy and predominant. You barely have to walk 100m from your apartment to find most things that you need. It’s easy to ‘quarantine’.

Or maybe it’s simply the masks. There was a story here during the last spike in cases (around Christmas). A Starbucks had about 20 (maybe 40) cases over a weekend. It turned out, though, that all those infected had been on the upper level of the store, working on their computers or studying. They had been in the store for a long time, eating, drinking coffee, etc., without masks. People who had just come in for a quick coffee, and even all the people working at the Starbucks, and wearing masks, were all fine.

It’s so hard for me to understand why people don’t adopt this very simple practice more wholeheartedly in many ‘Western’ countries. Even in my home country, Ireland, I learned recently that anyone under 13 years old, doesn’t have to wear a mask. I can’t understand that. I teach 4 and 5 year olds who have no problem wearing a mask for the 5 hours they’re with us in the mornings.

Maybe there’s more to the story than simply wearing masks and being generally compliant, but I keep racking my brains about it, and that’s all I really see when I look around. I could be missing something.

Anyway, I didn’t mind having to go for the test. Yes, I minded being singled out on a basis that wasn’t scientific or rational, but suspicion toward foreigners is a more general problem within Korean society.*

*That’s not to say that Korean people aren’t welcoming or hospitable. On the contrary, they remind me a lot of Irish people in that sense. And I love them to bits. It’s just that, if there is ever any reason to suspect ‘foreigners’ about something, people tend to jump on it quite quickly.

Smolnet

Sat, 20 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Adventures in the smolnet

When I first started this site/blog, I really wanted to update it at least once every month. So far, I’ve been pretty much keeping to that schedule.

However, as I wrote about previously, I’ve been spending more and more time on things like gemini and gopher lately.

Which means I haven’t really dedicated any time to write something for this site.

In lieu of a proper post, I’ve decided to post a few things that I’ve written for those other places.

‘Other places’…I’m not really sure what to call them. I see the term ‘smolnet’ used a lot to refer to them, so I’m using that here. A quick search for the term returns Alex Schroeder’s Gemini Wiki containing the following quote:

There’s a nascent movement offing, I think. Retrotech started it, hacker culture and tech, natch, but it’s incorporating new stuff like Gemini. Textnet, “slow internet”, I call it smolnet. People are tired of the corporate behemoths and cacophony. Demimondes like SDF provide a respite from all that, and a forum for some resistance and development apart from the bloat and blather. There’s a demotic tinge to it all in the hacker tradition, but without necessitating 1337ness.

It’s from @Shufei’s Mastodon account. A cursory glance at Gemini and Gopher definitely reinforces that idea that they are something other than hacker/retrotech culture. There is a lot of techy stuff there, yes, which goes over my head, but there is also a lot of simple ‘writing’. In its many forms. I like the term ’textnet’ that @Shufei uses here, that’s what it feels like. Maybe it feels similar to the early days of blogging and podcasting, before podcasts became so commercially successful, and before there were things like Medium. There are no comment sections on Gopher/Gemini, so there are no ’trolls’. There is no way to monetize content, or track ‘user engagement’. It changes how people write.

Anyway, here are a few of the things I’ve written in those spaces this month:

A post from Gemini - On a conversation between John Cage and Morton Feldman
And one from Gopher - A diary entry on technologies of the self
Another from Gopher - A diary entry on my first covid test

And, finally, I’ve also created an account on the tilde server Cosmic Voyage, administered wonderfully by Tomasino. Both my shell account on that server, and my one on the sdf.org server have been a lot of fun.

Cosmic Voyage is a science-fiction writing platform/experiment. Users post simple text files that are styled as fictional ’logs’ sent via a QEC (Quantum Entanglement Communicator) from various ships/outposts/colonies. All the communications are aggregated as a single feed, and it’s quite enjoyable to read. If you want to check it out, I’d recommend one of the most popular stories: Voortrekker.

Since the stories are all written within a ‘communication’ format, it introduces interesting restrictions. I was attracted to it because of these challenges. It reminded me of This Is How You Lose The Time War, since it’s just a series of letters, announcements, diaries, etc. Anyway, I tried to start writing something for it. The story isn’t very original, nor the writing good. But it’s fun writing it.

You can find it at this mirror of cosmic.voyage (though, it’s better to just go to Gemini/Gopher to read it): Orestes

Journal - Technologies of the Self

Wed, 17 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Wed Mar 17 22:35:27 KST 2021

I used to study philosophy. Specifically, the philosophy of technology and hermeneutics. In the philosophy of technology, there has recently (recently in academic terms at least) been an increase in interest in Michel Foucault’s late lectures. In these lectures he continues his examination of power, but turns toward a more ‘appropriating’ sense of power. To do so, he returns to an ancient Greek understanding of ’technologies of the self’. Of course, the term ’technologies’ is a bit ambiguous here.

It could also be rendered broadly as ’techniques’ of the self, or ‘practices’ of the self. Nevertheless, through philosophers like Peter-Paul Verbeek, it has indeed been applied to how we conceive of modern technologies.

It is also related to the question of hermeneutics (some lectures are under the title ‘hermeneutics of the self’). Hermeneutics is the study of interpretation.

So, putting all this together, we could say that Foucault’s late lectures are about how the self comes to know/interpret itself though various technologies/practices/techniques.

The twist is that the ‘self’ is not a fixed thing, or really a ’thing’ at all. So, in the same way that Foucault linked ‘knowledge’ to ‘power/production’ in his more famous works, the question of knowledge of oneself here is also linked to self-production. All the self is is a kind of history/record of the tools used to produce it

By interpreting/examining myself, I am producing a certain kind of self. Interpretation is always a qualitative procedure, not a quantitative one.

One of Foucault’s main examples here is the classic Greek dictum ‘know thyself’, a founding thought for western philosophy and science.

Foucault points out the context for this kind of command is usually missed. It can be linked to the practice of visiting the oracle at Delphi. Before going in to ask the oracle a question, you had to first examine yourself and discern the most potent question.

In other words, self-knowledge/self-examination was linked to the broader practice of caring for oneself and directing oneself. You never just tried to ‘know’ yourself for the sake of ‘science’ or ‘knowledge’, there was always an ulterior motive.

This, of course, is how self-knowledge functions in modern society, it’s just that sometimes we take ‘knowledge’, especially the kind produced by the sciences, in an overly-neutral sense.

For example, in a positive way, Verbeek has used Foucault’s sense of ’technologies of the self’ to frame the introduction of birth control into society in the 70s. Medical/anatomical/chemical knowledge produced this simple technology which, in turn, led to a radical transformation of women’s freedoms.

In the negative sense, knowledge of your browsing patterns by major corporations like Facebook and Google can lead to many practical consequences too. Maybe you spent to long browsing the Steam store and now that perfect job-advertisement doesn’t pop up on your screen because you’ve been marked ‘undesirable’. And so on…

In short, self-knowledge is always about self-transformation. Furthermore, self-knowledge/transformation is always about power and the process of subjecting yourself to a power (we become a ‘subject’ through ‘subjectivation’). The ethical task is to appropriate this process. Instead of subjecting ourselves to major tech corporations, and becoming their subjects, we should instead harness the power of technologies to produce a self of our own making.

In even shorter terms, this post is supposed to be a journal entry. I’ve been avoiding the question of self-examination by going on about the philosophy of self-examination. Hopefully, this is just preparation for the actual self-examination.

One of Foucault’s common ’techniques of the self’ is keeping a diary. The simple act transforms how one thinks and acts in daily life. That’s why I started talking about him here. I was also wondering about what kind of ’technology of the self’ gopher/gemini are?

I will try harder in the future to talk more about myself. I think too much about other things and not enough about myself.

Signing off.

P.S. Happy St. Patrick’s Day!

Journal - First

Sun, 14 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Sun Mar 14 16:28:16 KST 2021

I’m not really sure what to put in this gopherhole.

I have a Gemini capsule now, and a regular old http site, and I don’t really see the point of repeating the same content over and over again.

Like a lot of people out there, I’m sure, I post content not so much from a desire to monetize it or to become widely ‘known’, but from some kind of compulsion, some kind of desire to echo information into the fabric of modern communication infrastructures. I don’t think it’s a narcissistic impulse necessarily (at least, I hope it isn’t) but, rather, a way to simply experiment with writing and with modes of exchanging writing. There is some kind of pure joy in that sort of activity.

Anyway, for now at least, I’ve decided to use this Gopherspace as a kind of journaling space. I’ve never kept any kind of diary or journal before, but it’s never too late to start.

I don’t really like talking about myself much, so I’m not sure how ‘personal’ a journal it will be.

For now, I’ll just say that, in March 2021, I am living in Korea, working as an English teacher at a Hagwon (an English ‘cram school’). I’ve been here for over a year now, but I’ll be returning to my home country, Ireland, soon.

I’ve really loved it here, and would like to write more about it now, but I think I’ll try to keep these posts short. Perhaps in the next few posts I’ll write more about the experience and the country.

Signing-off

Blop

Sat, 06 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000

‘Blop’ is a small *sh script by Drew/uoou/friendo.

Blop at Gitlab

It is a sort-of ‘static site generator’. I came across it when looking into things like Hugo and Jekyll (neither of which I ended up trying, so my only experience with ‘static site generators’ is blob), through a video by HexDSL on ‘workflow’.

It seems like the opinion on markdown across gemini is mixed, but, as a non-technical person, I love writing in markdown, especially in conjunction with pandoc. It feels so powerful and simple.

So, the blop script seemed perfect. I could just write everything in markdown and the script would do the rest.

But, then I realised it does so much more than that! It automatically updates an rss feed (I hated doing that), and it allows me to only have to edit a couple of html files if I’m making changes across the whole site.

I’m sure there were already so many ways to do all of these things automatically anyway, but I really love the simplicity and elegance of a short shell script that can do everything.

The instructions on gitlab are also super-clear and easy to follow. It didn’t take long at all to switch my entire site over to this method. I really appreciate all the time and effort that went into the script and to these instructions.

In short, thank you Drew/uoou/friendo for the great work!

Cage and Feldman in Conversation

Sat, 06 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000

The 4 hour conversation, available on youtube: Cage & Feldman

I originally wanted to upload this here so that I could talk about some of the topics that Cage and Feldman discuss. I realise now that that would be a futile task. This isn’t a conversation that can be ‘summarised’ or ’talked about’ very effectively.

I used to listen to this when going to sleep. It was uploaded to Youtube (that particular version has since been taken down), so I would just skip to random points and let it play. It is that kind of conversation (or series of conversations). You can just listen in at any point and things will make sense. It’s like an endless conversation, the best kind. Well, in a way, all dialogues are endless/remain ‘unfinished’. This one just leans into that even further.

The philosopher Hans Geog Gadamer once wrote about a common phrase regarding conversations. We sometimes say ‘we conduct a conversation’. But, Gadamer argues, the more genuine a conversations is, the more it ‘conducts us’. Once an idea or subject matter begins to take shape between two partners in dialogue, it starts to take on a life of its own. Soon, we find ourselves saying things we’ve never even thought before, new ideas are conjured before our minds as if by magic. We are caught, to use Gadamer’s sense of the term, in the ‘play’ of language.

Just as any kind of game can compel you to act or express yourself in new, unforeseen ways, a genuine dialogue can do the same. In play, it’s as if we become ‘someone else’, someone a bit separate from who we usually are. We may become more aggressive, more affectionate, more shrewd; some other part of our self is unlocked, but only for the duration of the game. The ‘play’, where we ’loose ourselves’ is, paradoxically, the only time we are most like ourselves, according to Gadamer at least. This is because the ‘self’ is something that is, in its essence, dynamic, creative, playful, and, most importantly, only really \itself\ when it is confronted by another self, a partner, be it in conversation, in play, in love, etc.

The conversations on tape here exemplify this kind of play and self-discovery. The best conversations are open to interruptions. They are flexible enough to allow tangents, changes of venue, unanticipated ideas, even changes in context. We not only find these conversational virtues at work in these recordings, but they are also reflected in the work of the artists themselves.

For example, and maybe most famously, the dialogue opens with a discussion of the “intrusions/interruptions of culture”. Morton Feldman had recently visited a beach, and was plagued by the racket of multiple transistor radios. This, of course, is a universal experience that occurs to any person who is part of a culture. Culture evolves, changes, and does so with plenty of noise. Today, people using Gemini might feel similarly ‘intruded upon’ by the harsh ’noise’ of the modern web - the trackers, the adds, the scripts, the styling. This is especially the case if all you want to do is simply read some text. Feldman, too, just wanted a peaceful walk on the beach.

Cage, however, counters with an alternative perspective. What if we, the ‘irritated’, ‘intruded-upon’ ones, are the actual intrusion (both in a positive and negative sense). He references Satie, who said that he wanted to write music “which would not interrupt the sounds of the environment”. Our desires (to go for a quiet walk, to simply read some text) are internal, our /reality/ is the environment we exist in (even if it is an environment populated by transistor radios and tracker bots).

Cage’s response to the dilemma was to try to find the intrusions ‘interesting’. And by doing so, he created art (his piece “imaginary landscape No.4 for 12 radios”)

The piece mentioned above, performed by students of Hunter College (NYC): Imaginary Landscape No.4 The broader point here is that, as reflected in both Cage and Feldman’s work, they are open to many perspectives, to intrusions and tangents, and this makes them great conversationalists.

Below, is information about the recording, taken from archive.org:

Information about the recordings:

Archive.org

John Cage / Morton Feldman: Radio Happenings I - V Recorded at WBAI, New York City, July 1966 - January 1967

John Cage and Morton Feldman recorded four open-ended conversations at the studios of radio station WBAI in New York. These meetings spanned six months between July 1966 and January 1967, and were produced as five “Radio Happenings”. Both were at transitional points in their music. Cage had completed Variations V in 1965 and Variations VI and VII in 1966, and would publish “A Year from Monday” in 1967. Most of Feldman’s important work was yet to come. These conversations between two old friends, relaxed, smoking, and throwing out ideas, are full of laughter and long ponderous silences. They form an incredible historical record of their concerns and preoccupations with making music, art, society, and politics of the moment.

In 1993 these conversations were transcribed and published as “Radio Happenings I-V” by Edition MusikTexte in Cologne, Germany, with a German translation and a preface by Christian Wolff. However, the printed page loses so much that can only be experienced by hearing these two speaking together again - even those long, meaningful silences.

I: July 9 1966

On intrusions - is it reality or culture? The role of the artist - deep in thought. Is it possible to avoid the environment around us? Being constantly interrupted? Larry Rivers, Bob Rauschenberg, Franz Kline, Schoenberg, Stockhausen, Boulez, Black Mountain College. On boredom and Zen, Buckminster Fuller.

II: July 1966

Governments, modern music, freedom from being known. Writing for large or small ensembles. Boulez and Stockhausen’s reactions. Writing for Christian Wolff and electric guitar. de Kooning. Lukas Foss. Cage comments on Feldman’s soft sounds. Having stamina to make an action. On working alone. Working “at home”. Being asocial and the telephone. Edgard Varese. The question of death.

III: 28 December 1966

There is so little talk these days. Talking in England. The ICA lectures. Kitaj. David Sylvester. English pompousness. Cardew. Compositions as “work-in-progress”. Thinking about Mozart. Webern and other possibilities for new music. Differences between Boulez and Stockhausen piano pieces. Varese and process. Space, silence, notation, scales. Finding the vertical. Grandeur of Varese. Stockhausen’s refusal. Looking into the future. Buckminster Fuller’s ideas on ending war.

IV: 16 January 1967 (Part 1)

Design in a disposable world. How our sense of time has changed. “How do we spend our time?” Conversation as enjoyment. Impermanence and music. “Do you prefer the composition, or hearing the music?” Feldman working on “In Search of an Orchestration”. Composers silent on Vietnam. Painters are not. Protests in Europe. Fuller’s views and World Resources Inventory. Global Village.

V: 16 January 1967 (Part 2)

Varese or Webern? On Boulez. On an upcoming concert in Cincinnati. Problems, stories of performances. “Why do you continue to compose?” Creating new notation. Students making compositions. The way things are done nowadays. Things are “less narrow now”. Children, and the Middle Ages. “If we apply ourselves to the social situation… as composition rather than criticism, we’ll get somewhere!”

First Shell Script

Mon, 22 Feb 2021 00:00:00 +0000

After only a month of exploring Gemini, it’s already leading me, happily, outside my comfort zone.

This evening I finally sat down to learn a (tiny) bit of sed, in order to create a script that would update a ‘quote of the day’ section on my homepage.

It’s a very simple task, but I’m happy that I got it working without too much effort. I’m sure it’s incredibly inefficient. But it works! (or seems to, at least).

If anyone comes across this, maybe they’ll point me in the direction of a better solution:

#!/bin/sh

# Pull a random quote from a quotes file and insert it
sort -R ~/path/to/quotes.txt | head -n1 >> /path/to/index.gmi &&

# Delete current quote
sed -i '/^>/d' /path/to/index.gmi &&

# Add quote 'tag' to new quote
sed -i '$s/^/>/' /path/to/index.gmi &&

rsync -aP -e /path/to/index.gmi user@server:/home/gemini/gemini/index.gmi

However, I’ve still not managed to get it fully automated with cron, since the rsync command requires a ssh passphrase to execute. Will have to figure this out another time.

For now, I’m just happy that gemini-space has encouraged me to expand my horizons a little :)

Edit

Thanks to a suggestion by kelbot, I was able to easily set up the cron job by adding a passwordless ssh key :) Gemini people are great!

Problems with Gemini 1

Sun, 21 Feb 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Problems, in the best sense

Much of the Gemini ‘content’ I’ve found so far, at least, some of the most engaging and unique, centers on technical questions about Gemini itself - how to set it up, navigate it, write in it, etc. These questions are usually accompanied by musings on what we can then do with this new protocol or about what Gemini ‘means’. Neither the answers to the technical questions, nor the accompanying speculations, are fully concrete. This is because both how Gemini works and what it can do remain somewhat vague. Yes, the broad brush-strokes have been laid down, but the smaller details have yet to be filled in. This is not a bad thing at all. Gemini is still in its very early stages. Much of its appeal stems from its huge potential.

How can we define this potential? Let’s leave aside the question of how Gemini does what it does (the most important question) and start with what Gemini can do,i.e., its meaning or its existential aspects.

Gemini offers a real alternative to socialising via the web. Community-building seems to be an unavoidable anthropological trait, a point proven to the nth degree by the web. Whether its a business trying to grow a consumer base, the YouTube recommended video algorithm, or a reddit group sharing ideas on blenders or grand conspiracies, much of the web infrastructure exists to grow and to contain rigorously defined communities.

Once a community can be defined, it can be analysed and targeted (for advertising purposes, for example). Identities can be endlessly reinforced both organically (via other members of the community) and nefariously (the coordinated spread of misinformation). Although, arguably, the former is more prevalent. Even though we sometimes fantasize about ‘bad actors’ (the Russian government, etc.) who come in and spoil the party, the truth is web communities are the way they are for much more ‘mundane’ reasons.

One reason lies, of course, in the ‘gatekeepers’ of these communities, the giant corporations who profit off the information that is exchanged. Other reasons may lie in questions of human nature and the ‘scale’ of these communities; perhaps they are simply too big. It becomes impossible to - at a cognitive level - ‘wrap your head’ around the nature of your actions and discourse in the midst of such a swarm. We fly blindly, simply mimicking as close as we can the movements of those around us, lest we be cast astray from the group. But, I am not an authority on ‘social media’, ‘human behaviour’, or any such specialised fields of study, so these are just speculations.

For the sake of argument, however, let’s assume that a large part of the ‘reason’ for the current state of socialisation on the modern web lies in the underlying infrastructure itself. Again, I’m no expert on html and its host of associated protocols and applications, but one key difference between html and Gemini is clear to any user. That is, Gemini is heavily text based. Of course, at its core, html is also text-based, but there is something very significant, I think, about having text as the primary front-end media. I will write more about that another time though.

For now, I will say that Gemini solves the ’existential’ side of the web via the technical. It offers a new form of community by changing the underlying structures that enable networked socialisation. This is what is exciting about it. This is why it is not simply another socialisation ‘application’. Maybe its just for people who enjoy experimenting with technology (*nix, foss enthusiasts, etc) but I don’t think so. I think most people care about the tools they engage with - about reshaping them, augmenting them, personalising them - at least, when they are not busy being distracted. I think it is a core existential concern, just as language is.

However, in spite of all its promises, Gemini remains quite problematic. It is the ‘problematic’ nature of Gemini that I want to discuss here. To be clear, I mean problematic in the most productive sense possible.

I mean it in a similar sense to the philosopher Gilles Deleuze. To completely butcher his sense of the term, a problem is a set of, primarily virtual, relations and states. It consists of elements that have to be worked-through: assembled, connected, reconnected, engineered - before becoming fully concrete or ‘actual’. Ideas are problems. Problems are dynamic, in flux, not yet settled. Gemini, I feel, is problematic in this sense. Problems spur inquiry, invention, encourage unusual linkages.

To use Deleuze’s oft-cited image; the structure of a tree is actual, concrete, well-defined, while the structure of a rhizome - the subterranean mycelia below the tree - is virtual, problematic, chaotic. The strength of a rhizome compared to the tree is its modularity; it can connect to anything and travel anywhere, while the tree remains fixed, bloated.

The first ‘problem’ I’d like to talk about here is that of navigation. You can read about it in the following post.

Part 2

Problems with Gemini 2

Sun, 21 Feb 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Part 1

A problem:

ephemerality: content seems less ‘solid’ than on the web, less well mapped out and less defined.

A corresponding idea:

‘Maps’ are ways of drawing boundaries, of creating identities. Mapping will always, inevitably occur, the difference that matters lies in the form of map-making. How are well-defined, solid maps drawn on the web?

One way, as we know, is through sheer computational power, afforded only to the most wealthy and largest in scale. Do we, the ‘users’, have a choice in the shape of these maps? To an extent, but not a very large extent. The roadmap, the layout of the web, is like our gps. We can input destinations and even set some quasi-meaningful markers (‘home’, ‘work’) that help ‘personalise’ our gps, but not much else. Our gps is extremely efficient and effective at getting us to a desired destination. Nevertheless, we have to wonder whether our very human desire is really so uni-directional. What if, instead, we took responsibility ourselves for the task of map-making? What if we develop our own tools? These tools will inevitably be less powerful, less precise. But, isn’t that the point?

There’s that old story, recounted by Simone de Beauvoir, about Pyrrhus and Cineas, where one asks the other what he will do next. ‘Conquer Rome’. And after that? ‘Expand the territory, conquer the northern part of Europe’. And after that? ‘Then, the east, Turkey, etc.’ And after that? And so on and so on, until finally, he answers, ‘Then, I will go home and rest.’ To which Cineas replies, ‘Well, why not just rest now?’ (Disclaimer: I can’t recall the exact details of the story, but this is the gist)

For de Beauvoir, the story illustrates a point about existentialism and a frustration with reductio ad absurdum approaches to the question of projects. There will be absurdity in any case, so the choice becomes an individual one - which kinds of absurdity do you want to throw yourself toward? If you’ll allow me a crude interpretation of the story; the web’s map is like Pyrrhus’. Wide and not-a-little colonial in scope, with the end point being something like, well, what is it? Something absurd. Gemini is equally absurd, but at least it is an absurdity one can choose freely, one that one can become passionate about through experimentation and expression. One whose progression is not that of an army marching through Europe, but of a band of wandering players, ala the Angelopoulos film, trying their best to find a moment of repose amidst a crumbling civilisation.

In this case the rigidity and reliability of the map doesn’t matter as much. In fact, its permeability allows for increased exposure to something genuinely new and interesting. You are forced to abandon the car in favor of a leisurely stroll. In this, more nomadic, mode of exploration, we drift from ‘capsule’ to capsule, never fully knowing where we are or where we are going. We must fall back on our instincts, our curiosity, those fundamental human traits that become so dulled by the force-fed diet of the modern web. Deleuze and Guattari write that, for the nomad, “every point is a relay and exists only as a relay.” This is the case on Gemini too. Whereas sites on the modern web tend to be designed to suck you in, keep your attention and time hostage, in Gemini you are encouraged to move freely, to never stop too long at one place.

That is not to say that the experience of exploring Gemini is somehow less ‘serious’ or willful. Our commitments and priorities shift, they don’t disappear. Gemini, and low-tech/alternative forms of computing in general, can also become pursuits that suck your time from you. There is endless configuration to be done, endless ways to connect this node to that, to tweak a little here, trim a little there. But, ’time’, in this crude sense at least, is maybe something different than ‘freedom’.

An artisan who spends their whole life perfecting a single craft can often achieve higher levels of freedom than someone who dabbles in this and that. This is because, perhaps, ’experience’ has more to do with ‘understanding’ than with simple ’experiences’. The modern web offers near infinite possibilities for all kinds of ’experiences’, but it does little to promote a deeper understanding of these experiences. You are quickly funnelled to the next distraction. They can be exciting, funny, genuinely moving, but they are also often transitory (like the old phrase “been there, done that, got a t-shirt”).

Another sense of experience is found in authentic understanding. For example, you might spend your whole life reflecting on and revisiting a novel or piece of music you experience as a teenager. With each recollection, each re-encounter with the work, your understanding of it deepens and grows, organically. That Led Zeppelin solo might sound different now, blaring from your son’s room, than it did as a teenager. In German, there are two words for these senses of experience - Erlebnis - referring to an experience of something, and Erfahrung - experience in the sense of ’life experience’. Does the modern web offer something akin to ’life experience’? (Disclaimer #2: I don’t know German well, this distinction is taken from the work of the philosopher Nicholas Davey)

In other words, although there can be a perceived ‘cost’ to Gemini or other alternative forms of communication, especially in an age when communication is supposedly so easy and things like Gemini can seem so ‘pointless’, the potential gains in terms of understanding and real experience outweigh the investment we make in time.

The Leftovers - Part 3

Sun, 13 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Lindelof, HBO, 2014-2017

Part 2

Part 1

What’s Next

As I mentioned in the initial post, the show persistently subverts the audience’s perspective by portraying both sides of a divide - between the religious and the secular - as being both ‘right’ and ‘wrong’. At the outset, this divide is staged in a heightened, dramatic fashion. The Guilty Remnant, dressed in white, literally clash, in a public space, with the ’normal’ townspeople. Again, although the trope is familiar - an ‘outside’ force encroaching upon a small community and threatening its order - its presentation is not. The initial, visual distinctions between ‘believers’ and ’non-believers’ soon gives way to ambiguity, introduced primarily through the shows central conceit - that 2% of the world population have mysteriously disappeared. If this is the case, then why should we side with the townspeople who try to continue as if nothing has happened? Why should we buy into secular forms of rationality and explanation, when they can’t account for the event that has just occurred?

A similar dynamic is established in Lost. John Locke, the ‘believer’, and Jack, the modern, ‘secularised’ figure, clash over the meaning of a series of mysterious events which are undeniable and visceral. However, whereas in Lost, much of the plot is driven by the gradual ‘demystification’ of these events and ‘monsters’, The Leftovers takes a different approach. Right up until the final moments of the show, we are encouraged to take the disappearance of 2% of the worlds population as a simple fact. It’s not what is happening that is important, it is how the characters interpret it. And, with an event as ambiguous as the ‘departure’, a multiplicity of interpretations become viable.

So, as viewers, we are left disoriented. In this way, we build a natural allegiance with the only character who is similarly disoriented - Kevin.¹ Most of the other major characters claim to know something. They have certainty. The certainty of believers - whether it is belief in a secularism or religious belief. They judge. Only Kevin has no belief and does not judge. He does not have belief, because, for him, belief is not something you really have, it is something you do, something which shapes your path, almost unconsciously (it is important that many of Kevin’s actions in the first season are carried out ‘unconsciously’).²

Kevin is supremely ironic. Generally, ‘irony’ is taken to signify a master/meta form of ‘knowledge’. But it can also be taken in the opposite sense. Irony can be an expression of extreme un-knowing, of the impossibility of knowing at all. Or rather, of the pointlessness of ‘knowledge’ in the face of reality. Kafka, for example, is ironic in this opposite sense. This kind of irony is also very comedic. Justin Theroux plays this side of Kevin so well. His reactions to events tend to be tangential, non-sensical, in ways that subvert and diffuse their seriousness. For example, in the final episode of Season 2, where he arrives back at the ‘hotel’, his reaction is hilarious. He is bound to no set of conventions, neither those of the secular, those of believers, nor even those of the ‘after-life’. What, then, is he bound to?

It’s hard to say. The best template for understanding Kevin, in all his ironic and sincere glory, is Kierkegaard’s famous ‘Knight of Faith’. This rare figure, according to Kierkegaard, has miraculously established an authentic relation with God, though there are no outward signs to show this. He goes about his daily business, like everyone else, but he has achieved the highest level of human freedom through his absolute dependence on God. There is, of course, irony and humor here, but also extreme sincerity. Freedom means, like Abraham, being able to sacrifice your child without reason, because you were told to. Kevin, too, is like this. He follows the strange signals of those around him (for example, drinking poison, pushing Patti down a well, instantly forgiving John for shooting him, etc.) in an almost ‘blind’ way.

The knight of faith, who is no genius, no great theologian, is highly absurd, since they have a foundational relation to and understanding of the infinite yet find endless pleasure and peace in the finite. The infinite just is, it is no great mystery to them. Unlike all the other characters in the show, who long so desperately for some glimpse of infinite understanding and wisdom, Kevin experiences it directly (by dying in Season 2). Others are amazed and perplexed, like John who finds him still alive hours after shooting him, but for Kevin it is totally natural. Kevin’s concerns remain constant; even in the face of the infinite, he seeks always to return home to his family. Here is Kierkegaard on the absurdity of this figure:

[H]e does not do even the slightest thing except by virtue of the absurd. And yet … this man has made and at every moment is making the movement of infinity. He drains the deep sadness of life in infinite resignation, he knows the blessedness of infinity, he has felt the pain of renouncing everything, the most precious thing in the world, and yet the finite tastes just as good to him as to one who never knew anything higher, because his remaining in finitude would have no trace of a timorous, anxious routine, and yet he has this security that makes him delight in it as if finitude were the surest thing of all. And yet, yet the whole earthly figure he presents is a new creation by virtue of the absurd.

- Soren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling , p. 40

This is the irony. Even though the ‘Knight of Faith’ knows the “blessedness of infinity”, they remain, outwardly, the same as “one who never know anything higher”. In other words, all those things that religions or discourses on ‘higher purposes’ (secular forms also) tend to promise have nothing to do with this kind of faith. Since, even the one who has achieved it (Kevin), remains the same as anyone else. There is nothing special about the knight of faith, at least in conventional, narcissistic senses.

It is faith in the present, in the finite, rather than faith in a kingdom to come. Most characters in the show are waiting for something or promising/prophesying something. This point is most bitingly summarised by the bestseller book that recurs in the show, titled “What’s Next”, “without the question mark”. Kevin alone is committed to the present (signified, primarily by his care for his surrounding ‘family/community’). Abraham, too, was like this. After all, Isaac represented God’s promise to Abraham, the promise of a future community, vaster than the number of grains of sand on a beach, with Abraham as the father. Abraham could not have cared much about this if he was willing to sacrifice it so easiliy:

Abraham had faith, and had faith for this life. In fact, if his faith had been only for the life to come, he certainly would have more readily discarded everything in order to rush out of a world to which he did not belong.

- Soren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling , p. 20

Kevin affirms the radical uncertainty of life, and especially of the future and acts in accordance with this affirmation. Unlike the other characters, he isn’t seeking an escape from the suffering the world, he isn’t really seeking anything which is beyond his understanding, and that is why his sphere of agency and experience within the show is the most encompassing and free. Anything goes in Kevin’s reality, both the possible and the impossible, and each are affirmed equally by him, as if there is no division at all.

If I, acting, am truly to venture and truly to aspire to the highest good, then there must be uncertainty and, if I may put it this way, I must have room to move. But the greatest space in which I can move, where there is space enough for the most rigorous gesture of infinite passion, is uncertainty of knowledge with regard to an eternal happiness, or that choosing it is lunacy in the finite sense-see, now there is room, now you can venture.

- Soren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, p. 426-27

Finally, one of the major themes of The Leftovers is that of place, and this ties deeply to the themes of orientation and understanding. On the one hand, the show is constructed heavily on the concrete nature of place - the town of Mapleton, the town of Jarden, the Australian outback, etc. On the other hand, these places are also abstracted from and challenged in a number of ways. Transition spaces are just as important - hotels, bridges, ferries, piers. We are both oriented and disoriented as viewers. Places are temporary and temporal. They are fluid. Cardinal directionality no longer makes sense, everything is connected and interconnected. This conceit is summarised best by the Job verse quoted at Patti’s grave, which begins by outlining the futility of mapping space in relation to the question of God:

But if I go to the east, he is not there; if I go to the west, I do not find him. When he is at work in the north, I do not see him; when he turns to the south, I catch no glimpse of him.

- Job 23:8-9 NIV

Job, like Kevin, is nevertheless able to follow in the path of God:

But he knows the way that I take; when he has tested me, I will come forth as gold. My feet have closely followed his steps; I have kept to his way without turning aside. I have not departed from the commands of his lips; I have treasured the words of his mouth more than my daily bread. But he stands alone, and who can oppose him? He does whatever he pleases. He carries out his decree against me, and many such plans he still has in store. That is why I am terrified before him; when I think of all this, I fear him. God has made my heart faint; the Almighty has terrified me. Yet I am not silenced by the darkness, by the thick darkness that covers my face.

- Job 23:10-17 NIV

This is that challenge of faith, the challenge that only Kevin is capable of acknowledging.

Kevin is extremely disoriented, he acts always in the dark, with little regard for the future. It is this embrace of disorientation and unknowing that enables him to overcome grief and loss in a more convincing way than the other characters. In Kevin, all the contradictions of the show exist without question. He is able to rise from the dead, run into burning buildings, lead people in a quasi-mythical way, yet, he does so with no creed, no claim to any answers, no supreme knowledge. He is vulnerable, fallible, humorous. In contrast, all the characters around him are seeking - they claim to know, claim to have answers, claim to be able to predict the future. It is these claims and this relationship to reality that causes them endless suffering, since the result is an oscillation - between the extremes of hope and hopelessness. Kevin simply acts.

Before Patti dies she offers a mirror text to the Job text above. This becomes important for understanding how Kevin is not simply a religious figure. Yes, his way is religious, in the Kierkegaardian sense, but his commitment, his absolute self-grounding relation, is somewhat more secular. At least when read in light of the shows ending. The text that Patti offers, from memory, is recited to Kevin, as a way to get him to finally understand:

O vanity of Sleep, Hope, Dream, endless Desire,
The Horses of Disaster plunge in the heavy clay:
Beloved, let your eyes half close, and your heart beat
Over my heart, and your hair fall over my breast,
Drowning love’s lonely hour in deep twilight of rest,
And hiding their tossing manes and their tumultous feet.\

It is from a poem by Yeats, and it is about the restfulness found in the arms of the lover. This, too, will also be Kevin’s final resting place (at least, as far as the show is concerned).

Patti skips the beginning of the poem but, in light of the Book of Job passage, it must have also been in the mind of the show’s writers:

I hear the Shadowy Horses, their long manes a-shake,
Their hoofs heavy with tumult, their eyes glimmering white;
The North unfolds above them clinging, creeping night,
The East her hidden joy before the morning break,
The West weeps in pale dew and sighs passing away,
The South is pouring down roses of crimson fire:\

- W.B. Yeats, He Bids His Beloved Be At Peace

As with Job, we have a vision, a hallucination, unfolding within the cardinal points. This movement, this chaos, is what the lover soothes in the second half of the poem “hiding their tossing manes and their tumultuous feet.”

Kevin is paradoxical. He is supremely disoriented, to the point of humor. His decisions are non-sesnsical, ill-advised, and often carried out unconsciously. He knows nothing - except that he has to be there, be present, for his community. He doesn’t know exactly how, and his mode of presence is often misunderstood and misjudged by those around him, but somehow, as if by divine will, he manages to always be in the right place at the right time. And this is where the paradox arises - through his extreme disorientation, his buffoonery without pretension to anything else, he becomes the most oriented character of the show. We trust him, we follow him, even as we laugh at him or are at a loss to explain his actions. He is like Alice as she explores Wonderland, all logics, all realities are equal, are one, because all are finite (or, finitude and infinitude collapse onto one another - anything is possible as long as it is happening now). His character, and Alice’s, don’t waver, they “come forth as gold”. There is no terror, no hope, only freedom. This is the secret of faith.

Kevin humbly places his faith in the finite, in the endless possibilities of reality to produce novel, miraculous configurations, and he is rewarded for it. This comes at the end of the show and is anticipated by Patti’s quoting of Yeats. But this ‘reward’ is not really important, it wasn’t the point. It is incidental. He could have ended up with anyone. But, there had to be someone, some community (two lovers are also a community, a tradition). For Kevin, a wanderer in the finite, God has to become concrete. Romantic love, and the tangible commitment it implies, is perhaps a fitting place for Kevin’s journey to end.

Conclusion

Over the course of these three posts, I have focused on only a handful of aspects of The Leftovers. I have tried to choose the most general themes - orientation, faith, knowledge, miracles. Of course, there are so many small moments of beauty in the show that I have completely overlooked. This is the thing about modern television shows. Given their length, their scope, much of the pleasure we gain from them are in the micro moments, the single exceptional episodes. The Leftovers has these small moments and exceptional episodes in spades. Yet, it also does the larger questions better than many other shows.

This is why its ending, in my opinion, is much more satisfying than many other shows. Somehow, as if by magic, the creators manage to beautifully and symmetrically tie everything together. There is a twist, though. The final 'explantion', which grounds everything that came before it so wonderfully, is delivered by Nora. It is entirely spoken, without flashbacks. We see her face and hear her voice. We listen to a story. We don't have to believe her but, after witnessing everything that the show had to offer in the preceding 27 episodes, we do believe her. We believe her because, now, we believe in the power of storytelling. We believe in the endless possibilites it offers.

The show which, as I said, depends so heavily on the concept of place, fittingly ends in the middle of nowhere. And yet, even this ’nowhere’ place is real - it took Kevin many years of real searching and sacrifice to find it (two weeks every year during his vacation period). By the end, we still don’t really understand Patti, or Evie, or Meg, but we’re not supposed to. If we’re supposed to have learned anything, it’s that faith is inscrutable, just like the show. Somehow, after following Kevin and Nora accross continents and accross different realities, that seems okay.

You think you’re destined for some greatness and this isn’t enough. You aren’t, and this is enough.

- Kevin Sr.

Nora, to a certain extent, follows a similar path to Kevin, but with a different - and no less important - ‘mood’. Her character also stands ‘outside’ many of the others, as is shown by her frequent willingness to be combative and hostile on matters of principle. Yet, it is precisely these principles that make her path different to Kevin’s. This point is acknowledged by Nora herself in the poignant moment in which she tells the story of the beach ball at the baseball game in Season 3. She is longing to embrace chaos, yet something stops her. Kevin, on the other hand, is entirely chaotic. Yet, both are much deeper, more unpredictable and complex than the other characters. ↩︎
Here, ‘unconscious’ doesn’t mean ‘asleep’ or ‘unenlightened’ (unless we take ’enlightened’ in the sense of modern and secularised, in that case ‘unconsciousness’ can be taken as an ironic gibe at that kind of ’enlightenment’). ↩︎

The Leftovers - Part 2

Fri, 11 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Part 1

Lindelof, HBO, 2014-2017

No Miracles in Miracle

When I was an undergraduate, I took an English Literature class. One section of the module was on Macbeth, and the lectures were given by the Donegal playwright Frank McGuinness. He opened the series of lectures by announcing that Macbeth begins by asking us a single question: Do you believe in magic?

This question was shocking to me at the time. It is a simple question. Simplistic, even. We are so often taught to read Shakespeare as highly symbolic, heavily layered, heavily metaphorical. Shakespeare is about all those grand, human subjects - power, politics, love, revenge, jealousy, etc. We receive Shakespearian texts with weighty histories of interpretation and dissection. Rarely, as students at least, are we asked a simple, direct question like whether we believe literally, in the action of the text. You’re just not ‘supposed’ to read it like that. In general, criticism is supposed to be performed in the absence of belief.¹

Yet, this question, in its simplicity, opened a whole avenue of new ways of understanding and engaging with the text. Of course it is a play about magic. Before it is about ambition - all too human ambition - it is about a wider series of processes and effects, magical, supernatural. We empathise with Macbeth, not only because we see ourselves, our darker sides, mirrored in him, but also because we see our own relation to fate and destiny and magic mirrored in him.

The Leftovers does something similar, it asks us: Do you believe in miracles?

In both Macbeth and The Leftovers the question remains a question. Yes, you can take the witches and their magic as signs of something else, something more rational - the movement of human history (which will always throw and overthrow rulers, regimes, economic systems), the inner psychological workings of a manic mind, etc. - but we can also take it literally, or as literally as possible at least (it is often difficult for us moderns to actually think magic non-ironically), and see the witches as a supernatural force, one unaccounted for, and unaccountable by, any history or science of the human. A bubbling up of matter in a cauldron, a descending fog. They lie outside science, outside conventional understanding.

Luckily for Kevin, the supernatural forces of The Leftovers are slightly more benevolent. But they are no less indecipherable, when taken literally.

As with magic, miracles are inhuman. Supernatural phenomena, whether it be eyes of newt mixtures, rising from the dead, or the quantum effects of radiation, are grounded in indeterminate processes. They are chaotic, unpredictable, entropic, at least from our, admittedly limited, perspective. Magic is typically presented more as an ‘art’ than a science. There are ‘masters’ of magic, but no magic ’experts’. As with anyone learning a dangerous craft, say bull riding, apprentices are taught to respect and bow to the force they are dealing with. They must rely on their intuition, their instincts. All those parts of the human that haven’t been fully regulated or acculturated. The same is true of miracles. You bow down to them, revere them. They are signs of danger and grace, of greater, unknowable - and therefore unpredictable - powers.

The ‘human’, by contrast, is defined by order, negentropy, hierarchy, predictability. Humans, too, are the result of processes - biological, social, existential - but they are individuated processes. There are determined, regular, bound by certain laws. At least, in most cases.

In The Leftovers, we are asked to believe that some humans, like Kevin, are part of a different process. They can die for 10 hours and come back to life. Kevin is both human and inhuman. He is bound by similar laws as the other characters; he is a family man, his job (police chief) is to literally enforce social laws, he suffers, he makes mistakes, he is a prisoner to biological processes (addiction - smoking, sleepwalking). There is nothing magical or miraculous about him on the surface. And, indeed, it isn’t as if he becomes magical or miraculous in the show. He doesn’t change. His character remains constant, whether alive or ‘dead’. It is simply that his path is more miraculous than the other characters.

There are, of course, many other ‘magical’ characters in the show, those who claim to have become miraculous. In the first season there is Wayne, who is able to ’take peoples pain away’ with hugs. In the second season, there is the man who can commune with the dead by using hand-prints, and in the third season there is Kevin’s father, who is convinced he is the only one who can stop an oncoming flood.

However, all these ‘magical’ men leave death and destruction in their wake. The suffering caused by Wayne’s cult is self-evident, the man who can read hand-prints tells Meg something that leads her on a path that will cause the deaths of many people, and Kevin’s father’s quest leads to the death of an elder Aboriginal man (as well as leading him to drown his own son in a bathtub).

And, of course, there is the place of Miracle. The town that was ‘spared’ from the departure and is a source of hope for so many people. Even here though, things are tricky. While perhaps some miraculous things do occur in the town (Mary’s ‘reawakening’ from her coma), the characters (like Matt) who mistake this coincidence for some deeper truth about the place, end up destroying their happiness. The strong belief in the magical powers of the town creates a militaristic border around the town. Evie and her friends also show how vulnerable this kind of belief can be when they turn it to chaos.

If anything is clear from the stories of the purported ‘miracle-men’ and the town of Miracle, it is that miracles are not answers. They do not cure. But in the show, they do happen. So what are they?

The show gives us three possible ways of reading its miracles:

As magical (Kevin’s journey to the realm of the undead in Season 2).
As deus ex machina moments (Kevin’s journey to the same realm in Season 3).
As a result of the effects of quantum mechanics (Nora’s story at the end of Season 3).

In the first case, as explained by John’s father, Steven, the ‘place’ that Kevin goes to in Season 2 is a space to “do battle” with your demons. The show does portray this to be truthful, since after Kevin pushes Patti down the well, he is indeed ‘cured’ of his visions of her. In this case, the ‘miracle’ of The Leftovers is close to our understandings of magic. Strange rituals are performed in order to enact a desired outcome. I’m using the term ‘magic’ here in a very loose sense. We must not confuse it with the concept of magic that we are familiar with in many fantasy-based works (Steven makes this point clear when he ironically jokes about being a “magical black man at the edge of town”). Instead, magic just means supernatural, in a more formal sense - unexplainable by recourse to ’natural’ law. This type of magic or miracle allows the text to introduce and play with different, more free, forms of logic and relation. Its effect is of producing an indecipherable, but alluring, mystery or non-sense, like in Alice in Wonderland.

In Season 3, however, the ‘undead’ realm becomes symbolic. This is markedly different from its meaning in Season 2, where it remains quite literal. In Season 2 there are no quasi-scientific explanations (for example, it isn’t a ’near death experience’ like in the T.V. show, The O.A.), nor is it a ‘dream’ sequence. It is mostly continuous with (or at least parallel to) the reality experienced by the other characters. In season 3, however, it is repurposed as more of a plot ‘device’. It becomes a dramatic space where all of Kevin’s contradictions and struggles are resolved, in particular his need to stray or ‘adventure’ which causes friction with his need to ‘settle down’. There is a ‘moral’ or lesson he is supposed to learn (“We messed up with Nora”). This familiar trope (particularly in Westerns) does indeed find an interesting, and quite visceral, mode of representation in the parallel ‘dead’ space, but its miraculous nature is quite different.

In season two, the miracle remains a proper miracle, in the more traditional sense. It is an event which is unexplainable, but which impacts and shifts the reality of those it touches. In season three, the miracle is different - it is the miracle of deus ex machina. Lindelof co-opts the miraculous, mysterious space to produce a satisfying ending for Kevin’s story.

It the history of cinema, it is difficult to find examples of the truly miraculous. That is, events which are religiously-tinged and unexplainable by recourse to the laws inherent in the world of the text. Typically, films that have fantastical elements will provide some kind of grounding for them, in genre conventions or the ‘rules’ they establish. The truly fantastical is something different. It is indeed *similar* to the effect of deus ex machina, a trope which is often seen as lazy storytelling. A strong example of the miraculous might be the end of Dreyer’s Ordet (Denmark, 1955). Even though the event - a character rising from the dead - could be seen as a deus ex machina moment, it can also be seen as the opposite - the questions and contradictions (of faith, of the movie) produce a dynamic context in which the miraculous emerges spontaneously or stochastically, i.e., it is not as if this moment is simply ’tacked on’.

The difference here is slight, but important. In one case, where miracles are ’lazy’ examples of storytelling; the claim is that things that contradict cannot be resolved logically, so we turn to magic instead. And here, ‘magic’ means make-believe or child’s play. ² In the second case, logic is understood differently. The non-sensical is a necessary feature of sense. It is the aporias and paradoxes inherent in logical thinking that spur genuine decisions and actions. One thing is not necessarily following from the other, but that is the point. Without a clear, easily unravelled end-point, all that is left is freedom. The freedom to jump between life and death, for example, with the aid of a Simon and Garfunkel hit.

When comparing the excursions to the undead realm in Season’s 2 and 3, the former examples seem to express more deeply the questions of faith, miracles and paradox. The focus on Kevin’s inner conflict in Season 3 moves closer to the understanding of deus ex machina as a ’lazy’ way to resolve conflict.

In Season 2, the ’explanation’ (getting rid of Patti), isn’t really an ’explanation’, since we don’t really know why Patti is there in the first place, nor how pushing her in a well in this mysterious zone really gets rid of her. We are just asked to believe it. Kevin does. Unquestionably. If we do believe it, what does this belief signify?

As in the case of Ordet, one would think that the first thing we turn to in order to explain a character rising from the dead is some kind of concept of God or religion. After all, historically, religious or theological discourses are the primary modes in which the question of miracles have been addressed.

However, at the beginning of Season 3, when the first reaction to Kevin’s miraculous rise from the dead is for Matt, John, and Michael to write a ‘Gospel’ about his life, this exercise is shown to be futile and misguided. Religion is not the answer here. So, if Kevin’s rise from the dead is not supposed to tell us something about God, what is the point of it? Is it simply a case of “spooky action at a distance”, as with the shows final explanation for the disappearance of the 2%? This doesn’t seem to fit either, since Kevin’s journeys to the ‘dead’ place seem purposeful in some sense, they are brought on by a ritual, they are not totally chaotic. Nor are they simply manifestations of Kevin’s unconscious, since he really does die, and the show reinforces this point by providing multiple witnesses.

Their lack of clear meaning is, of course, the point. And this is why they, like the miracle in Ordet, stand as exemplary cases of miracles in film/television. Even though we can’t explain them, we find them *convincing*. The are puzzles, paradoxes. To understand them, we have to understand better our very relation to paradox. The key to understanding this is Kevin, and this will be explored further in the next post. Here, though, it is enough to say that Kevin’s indifference to the miracles hold the key to their answer.³

Finally, the show does provide an account to tie together its central miracle - the departure event. Or, rather, in the final moments, this event is finally revealed not to be a trauma but to, in fact, be a miracle. This is because what is revealed is that this reality is the ‘blessed’ one. The shock of losing 2% of the world population is nothing compared to losing 98%. This ‘miracle’ points to yet another way of interpreting the shows mysteries, which I will not go into here. This third way is in terms of quantum physics. While this ’explanation’ might do more to satisfy the more ‘secularly’ minded viewers, we should also no forget its dependence on a certain kind of magic. In the words of Arthur C. Clarke: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”.

Part 3

Part 1

Of course, as students, we taught the technique of ‘suspending our disbelief’ in order to engage with the text. But, I took McGuinness’ question to be asking something different. Yes, you can ‘suspend your disbelief’ when you read Alice in Wonderland, for example, and play along with the idea of a talking white rabbit and a secret world of strange creatures. However, belief is something different; there is no ‘suspension’. This is the case when Deleuze takes Alice seriously and literally, as expressing its own, unique and very real kind of logic in his book The Logic of Sense. ↩︎
A common example of this, derogatory, understanding of deus ex machina is in cases when children try to write a story and, because of their lack of ‘craft’ or rationality or something like that, they will give up toward the end and just write: “and then I woke up”. Of course, as a child, this can also bring great pleasure, since there is an experimental link being made between reality and dreams. But from a purely ‘craft’ point of view, it is supposed to be ‘bad’ storytelling. ↩︎
"Indifference" here means both his ‘casual’ attitude to the miracles, and the fact that he is not ‘differentiated’ by the expriences; they don’t change him. He doesn’t go around preaching their truth. ↩︎

The Leftovers - Part 1

Wed, 09 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Lindelof, HBO, 2014-2017

The Horses of Disaster

Indroduction

The Leftovers is about a lot of things. Too many things to write about here, unfortunately. Nora is my favorite character in the show, and Season 3 was my favorite season the first time I watched it. In attempting to write these posts, though, I ended up focusing mostly on Kevin, and on Season 2. Actually, much of the content for this review derives from the end of Season 2, when Kevin’s ‘dies’ two times. So, maybe this should just be called ‘an account of that really weird moment in that one American TV show’.

That episode, the first time Kevin dies, along with several others, like Nora’s episode in Season 1 (“Guest”), and the cruise-ship episode in Season 3, make The Leftovers exceptional. But, really, the whole way through, everything fits together so beautifully, even if it is pretty-much impossible to clearly see the larger pattern.

Below, and in two more posts to follow, is my attempt to make sense of those moments when Kevin dies and rises again. The first part, here, deals with the questions of ‘understanding’ and of ‘genre’. The Leftovers depends on many genres without really having one itself, and it depends on the need to understand, in both its characters and viewers, without providing any answers either. So, from the beginning, it is playing with us. Yet, this absence of a reliance on a single genre or a single ‘answer’ leaves the show a lot of room to experiment with its storytelling.

The second post will look at the question of ‘miracles’. The show is quite unique in its portrayal of the ‘miraculous’ or ‘fantastical’. A lot of this comes from what will be discussed more below; the shows absence of a clearly definable genre. As The Leftovers blurs the line between the religious and the secular, we are not really sure how to read the scenes in which Kevin miraculously rises from the dead. Are the miracles in the show simply examples of ’lazy’ storytelling? Or, is something deeper being expressed about our relation to mystery and paradox?

The final post will deal directly with Kevin’s character. Unlike the other characters in the show, whose arcs oscillate between moments of suffering and hope, between feeling lost and temporary relief in false promises, Kevin’s characters path is twisted, labyrinth-like. There is nothing dialectical about his journey, which can’t be said for the other characters, whose internal contradictions and hypocrisies are laid bare. Instead, Kevin’s journey embraces non-sense and the paradoxical, like Alice in Alice in Wonderland. In a show that is, at least partly, about faith, Kevin’s character will be taken as illustrative of a very particular kind of faith, one that stands against most modern understandings of the term, and reaches back, instead, to Kierkegaard, Abraham and Job.

You Understand

The Leftovers is a difficult show to talk about. Toward the end of both season one and two, we are presented with a directive from members of the Guilty Remnant - the cult that has emerged in response to the sudden ‘departure’ of 2% of the world’s population. The directive is simple: You Understand.

In season one, it is delivered by Patti as she lies dying in Kevin’s arms after committing suicide. In season two, Evie scrawls the message to her mother on the bridge that separates the quasi-paradise space of Jarden/Miracle from the rest of the ‘fallen’ world. In both cases, of course, we are supposed to empathise with both Kevin and Evie’s mother, who are completely lost and have zero understanding of what is happening to their families and their reality.

Do these moments serve as an absurd meta-joke on the part of the makers of the show? Are they commanding the audience to understand, while also presenting them with no way to sensibly piece together the various threads that incorporate, so beautifully, the fantastical-religious and the ’everyday’? Perhaps. Perhaps any exercise in trying to make sense of The Leftovers is just playing into their hands. But, it is also equally true that the directive to “understand!” can be taken sincerely. Not in the sense that there is really one, central thing to understand about the show, but in the sense that the quest to understand, even in absence of a concrete end-point, is itself the meaning of the show.

I don’t mean this is the clichéd sense of the journey being more important than the destination. Instead, in order to grasp what it means to “understand” without recourse to ’end’ or ‘object’, the best place to turn to is one of the shows own central textual references - The Book of Job. This book is an extreme challenge to anyone who is faith-oriented. Job’s conviction stands as an exemplary form of faith because it works without any full understanding. It is the faith of someone who has been abandoned. It is the faith of someone in exile - between knowing and unknowing. It is a faith without recourse to explanation or platitudes. This kind of faith produces an ‘understanding’ that emerges only when shrouded in darkness.

This may sound strange to most speakers of the English language. How can we ‘understand’ without knowing? If you ask me whether I understand The Leftovers, I will instinctively say “yes”. If you then ask me what it is about, I will say “I don’t know”. If you ask me to explain it, or categorize it, I won’t be able to. So, what do I mean when I say I “understand” it?

Imagine, one night, as you sleep, a thick fog descends on your neighbourhood. You wake up the next morning and get ready for work as usual. You step outside and feel the chill of the air. You cannot see far in front of you. Your familiar surroundings have been transformed into a labyrinth. You follow the footpath as best you can. Peer intensely through the fog to identify familiar, orienting, signs - traffic lights, bus stops, shop fronts. Luckily, civilisation has provided you with these markers so that it is difficult to get too lost. But, for a moment, you feel the sense of being just slightly lost within your own home, your own space. Perhaps it is a thrilling feeling, discovering anew a familiar place, perhaps it is simply an annoyance on the way to your difficult job. Either way, for a moment you have moved from having a pre-understanding of your environment, to needing to understand it all over again. The act of deciphering, of re-orienting, in the full sense of these being acts (i.e., dynamic, process-like), is the type of understanding that the show is attempting to explore.

Understanding, then, is something you do, not something you have. You can, of course, have an understanding of something - a subject area, your spouse, your daily tasks at your job. But, as experience so often teaches us, these understandings are fragile, and can easily be overturned and rewritten, again and again. Understanding, in a deeper sense, is simply this process and experience of re-writing, re-adjusting, endlessly re-orienting ourselves. In modern language, understanding is not only about the ‘object’ (what is understood), but also about the ‘subject’.¹

One of the greatest challenges to understanding the show is the genre of the show, or lack thereof. If this were some kind of supernatural fantasy, or show about religion and God, then the more confusing parts would make a lot more sense.

In lieu of a ‘genre’, the show has a ‘premise’, a proposition. The premise itself is not original, but its mode of presentation is new. A number of people on earth have ‘departed’, presumably to heaven, leaving everyone else behind to question their own fitness and standing in the eyes of God. This is, of course, an already-established trope within Christian genres. The difference here is that this show does not take place within these genres. Instead, the show borrows from both Christian traditions/genres and classic, more conventional T.V. and movie genres (Westerns, family dramas, spy thrillers, etc.). In many ways, The Leftovers is much more conventional than, say Lost (ABC, 2004-2010) or Watchmen (HBO, 2019), the other two Lindelof juggernauts. Both those shows lean far more heavily into the fantasy aspects of Lindelof’s storytelling.The Leftovers remains rooted in contemporary Americana.

Still, it stands apart from those genres too. In essence, it is sui generis. In this sense it feels more Christian than other Christian stories that deal with the theme of the rapture, since, as with the Bible, it is not concerned with addressing a particular type of audience, but with exploring deeper questions of faith, loss, etc., using whatever discourses and styles are necessary.

Along with these, more biblical, questions, it incorporates questions that dominate the medium of television (U.S. Television) - family, madness, seriality, community. Modern television shows, simply through the scope afforded to them by time, tend to incorporate broader casts of characters, locations, themes, than cinema does. The Leftovers takes the freedom and scope seriously: it is international, intercommunal, interracial, intergenerational. It follows in the footsteps of the oldest ‘series’ - the Odyssey - each season ends with a ‘homecoming’ scene, which somehow is meant to root all the chaos of the journey that preceded it.

Its two major stylistic strands, the religious and the ‘conventional’, create a central dynamic in the show. The ‘religious’ constantly pulls characters away from their familiar, mostly gloomy, realities (Nora - especially her encounter with Wayne in Season 1 - Laurie, Patti, the woman who is ‘rescued’ by Laurie in Season 2, Tommy, Evie, Matt, etc.). Many of these characters end up returning to their everyday lives and their traumas without having learned much. Instead, their religious excursions are mostly shown as lapses in sanity. This is the case, for example, for both Nora and Laurie. Nothing is really solved or gleaned by their detour. Some characters, however, can’t return, most notably Patti, Meg, and the woman from from Laurie’s support group in Season 2. Instead, these characters opt for particularly destructive forms of suicide (Patti kills herself in front of Kevin, taunting and terrorizing him, the woman from Season 2 drives her family into oncoming traffic, and Meg takes a whole ‘chapter’ of the GR with her.)

In these cases, we can say that the show is deconstructing contemporary forms of faith and belief. Belief, or even simple hope for something better, deeper, some relief from grief and suffering, is shown to be misguided and destructive. At its heart it is narcissistic - the characters who seek answers in religion and alternative ideologies are constantly reminded that their beliefs are hurting those around them, but they choose to ignore this. Belief systems, funneled through cults, churches, etc., are shown to close us off to rationality and empathy. This is most visceral in the case of the Guilty Remnant.

Yet, at the same time, the show also deconstructs contemporary American life and its own, secular, forms of ‘rationality’ and empathy. Because, we do understand these characters who stray. Their protest is simple - shit has started to go really wrong, and no one is even acknowledging this reality. Instead, people just continue playing their roles and consuming their products. This kind of complaint, as ‘adolescent’ as it perhaps is, can’t help feeling more and more real as the world hurtles toward, to name just one example, climate catastrophe. Also, beyond these broader, social concerns, the we are also shown the depth of grief, for example through Nora, and the genuine need to be rescued from it, especially in the case of a society that doesn’t offer many means of processing this grief in an effective way (aside from hiring prostitutes to shoot you).

Amidst this conflict, we are asked to try to understand something. To try to understand those who ‘stray’, who seek alternative answers to the meaning of existence. Yet, we are also shown, unambiguously, the dangers and destructiveness of these ‘quests’. The tension here is summed up perfectly toward the end of Season 3, when Nora tells a story about a beach ball being thrown around by the crowd at a baseball game.

The story beautifully illustrates the structure of the show. There is deep grief (Nora and Matt have lost their parents tragically), which is temporarily eased by the opportunity to ‘play’ and embrace spontaneity. Then, an external, ‘policing’ force emerges which puts and end to the play. Finally, the reason for this regulating presence is made clear; there would be “fucking chaos” on the real field of play without it. Who are we supposed to side with here? There is no clear answer. There is also no clear way to understand who we should side with in the show either; those trying to invent new ways to deal with legitimate grief, or those whose lives are being disrupted by these efforts?

Standing outside this cycle of suffering, this endless oscillation between (false) belief and consignment to the mundane and problematic, is Kevin. He is, of course, suffering too. He has lost his family in serious and tragic ways - his wife to a cult, his son to yet another cult, his father to mental illness - and he is undergoing his own trials of sanity. However, in contrast to all the other characters, he does experience the miraculous. Why is this?

Part 2

The modern terms ‘subject’ and ‘object’ can be useful here, but must be contextualised properly. Understanding is firstly a relationality. To conceive of this relation, it is incorrect to presuppose the existence of a ‘subject’ and ‘object’, separated from one another. Instead, it would be more accurate to say that, understanding, as an activity, produces the concepts ‘subject’ and ‘object’. So, these concepts are derivatives of the process of understanding itself, rather than vice versa. ↩︎

Satin Island

Sun, 25 Oct 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Tom McCarthy. Alfred A. Knopf, 2015

Writing the Malaise

Incomprehensible, except when read as a footnote to Remainder. Then, it becomes an author’s expression of his own struggle with feelings of inadequacy in an (academic-literary) milieu dominated by cults of personality.

I was looking forward to reading this book. I loved Remainder (Paris: Metronome Press, 2005). It’s probably been ten years since I’ve read that book, but it has stayed with me. With Remainder still in the back of my mind, Satin Island ended up feeling like a massive disappointment. It’s nothing like Remainder. At least, at first glance.

Something else that adds to the sense of disappointment is the way that McCarthy seemed to frame the book prior to its release. For example, in an interview with The Guardian, he says it is a book about “pollution”, but “in a good way”. A book that, as the acknowledgements section states: “gestated” while “projecting images of oil spills onto huge white walls and gazing at them for days on end”. Knowing McCarthy’s thematic interests, and in particular his interest in 20th Century Continental Philosophy, I expected this book to focus more heavily on this central image of oil, and its potential associating meanings (concepts of pollution, auto-immunity, marginal phenomena, etc., etc.).

There are a few sections that do explore the theme of oil, and they seem to be the most important of the book (given the meaning of the book’s title), but they sit amongst several other ‘strands’ that appear to have nothing to do with the question. Furthermore, the main ‘discourse’ on oil occurs in a scene where the protagonist, U, imagines giving a presentation to an academic audience. The scene is exaggerated and ironic. It mocks the act of disseminating knowledge in an academic forum by presenting it as an exercise in personality and individualism. As insightful as the actual descriptions of oil-spills in this scene are, its framing hints that this book is actually about something else. If it is not about oil-spills, then, what is it about?

There is no meaningful (in the sense of in any way interesting) structure to the book. The three primary strands that are operational on the plot are: the phenomena of oil spills (particularly the anthropological-materialistic significance of them), a parachutist’s unexplained death, and the main character’s casual sexual relationship with a woman named Madison.

These strands are loosely woven together by the protagonist’s quest to produce a ‘grand report’ - an anthropological study that would map the entirety of contemporary culture.

What became clear by the end of the book is that it is most interesting when placed alongside Remainder, as a kind of limping addendum to the majesty of that tale. Remainder is a relentless look at projects - their mechanics, their joy and terror. Satin Island can also be read as being chiefly concerned with the phenomenon of projects, but this time from the no less important standpoint of something like the melancholy of projects. Oil spills and pollution become, not a complementary concept to that of a remainder or residue, but the sign of an encroaching melancholy or depression arriving from within and preventing the possibility of meaningful projects at all. In this sense, the book, through its own failure, manages somehow to express its central idea.

Ego Ideals

I suggest that the two key terms for understanding both Remainder and Satin Island are failure and matter. These terms shouldn’t be controversial for someone familiar with McCarthy’s work. The interesting thing about Satin Island is how the meaning of these terms shifts.

Remainder dramatizes what McCarthy himself calls “failed transcendence”. The protagonist’s obsession with perfection, seemingly to be achieved through ritualistic repetition, is persistently thwarted by matter. The desire to attain a perfect or transcendent choreography is one engine of the story. But, an engine is meaningless without something to act upon, without some friction. In Remainder the friction is produced by the machine itself, by its remainder. The remainder, in turn, becomes a second engine which propels the first into a new phase, a new attempt at reconfiguration, and on and on the cycle goes.

In short, failure is the engine of progression. So far, there is nothing too novel about this idea. However, each successive failure provokes reflection, revisions, and, most importantly, expansions. This is what is so beautiful about the story. In contrast to say, Waiting for Godot, another text about repetition and failure-as-engine, the successive attempts at transcendence in Remainder continually expand in scale and scope. This representation of the phenomena of repetition seems more accurate and interesting. After all, if the cause of failure or break-down is the failure to account for something (a remainder), then, the logical step is to expand the set of variables, to reach out further in the hopes of incorporating, expecting, those missing pieces that tripped us up.

Most importantly of all, though, is that no matter how wide the horizon grows, how many variables are counted, how far into the future we plan, there remains an essential blindness to that fact that the counting, planning, predicting, and so on, are the very activities producing the remainder. Or, in other words, even though the relation between a desiring-machine (the protagonist) and matter (the remainder) is autopoietic and produces novelty and expansion, it remains incapable of self-reflection. Or, self-reflection in a very specific sense. Because, of course, a kind of self-reflection occurs with each failure - the system learns what it did wrong and what not to do again - but it is incapable on reflecting on its own impossibility, on its own otherwiseness, in the Levinasian sense.

That is not to say that this, second, kind of self-reflection would produce a more ‘productive’ or ‘successful’ result. On the contrary, this kind of self-reflection can lead to paralysis and melancholy. This is what we get in Satin Island.

If Remainder dramatizes failure as a kind of engine, Satin Island dramatizes it as a spectre. The possibility of failure haunts and paralyses the protagonist throughout the book. Remainder is beautifully modernist in spirit, Satin Island is wallowing and existential. The protagonist of Remainder is a classic man-without-qualities, while the protagonist of Satin Island is narcissistic, egotistical, pathetic. Remainder is about the momentum and dynamics of projects, Satin Island is about the inability to begin projects.

Technological Insecurity

Both, in their own way, touch on questions of modern technology. Both are concerned with questions of systems and their effects. Remainder, as an expression of iteration and counting, portrays an ideal (albeit flawed - with the flaws as part of the ideal) technological machine. The protagonist is almost a cipher for a neural network, each time his program runs he can do more and account for more. And, like a neural network, he is incapable (and unconcerned with) directing this capacity toward any kind of internally-defined ’end’, be it humanistic or otherwise. Satin Island, on the other hand, portrays the contemporary subject of such a vast technological system or network - fragile, ego-laden, procrastinatory. All that U is concerned with are ends and, in this case, consideration of ends is what paralyses the subject. The ends being considered are primarily narcissistic - fame, recognition, admiration. U only wants to work in order to achieve the same lofty status as Levi Strauss or Deleuze. Yet, he believes this is impossible due to the shift in reality produced by the capability of modern technologies - in particular, their capability to record and count. He laments that we (the contemporary ‘we’) are not even afforded the ‘struggle’ of being ‘slaves’ to technology:

The truly terrifying thought wasn’t that the Great Report might be un-writable, but—quite the opposite—that it had already been written. Not by a person, nor even by some nefarious cabal, but simply by a neutral and indifferent binary system that had given rise to itself, moved by itself and would perpetuate itself: some auto-alphaing and auto-omegating script—that that’s what it was. And that we, far from being its authors, or its operators, or even its slaves (for slaves are agents who can harbour hopes, however faint, that one day a Moses or a Spartacus will set them free), were no more than actions and commands within its key-chains.

The narrator of Remainder, due to his accident, was estranged and detached from the world around him. Here, it is the opposite. U is fully integrated into the world, not only through his technological devices, but, more importantly, through his ego, through the gaze of others (with the ‘others’ for U being primarily academic audiences it seems). He imagines, and fetishizes, a way out, a return to a primal/original state that is represented by oil and pollution (and other ‘remainders’, like the 5th borough of New York). In this mythical place, represented by the chemical properties of oil, oneness and connectivity is not defined in a binary or countable way, as it is in U’s technologically-conditioned world, instead it is defined simply as negation - negation of everything. In the case of oil-spills, the dynamics and patterns that so fascinate U are produced simply by its fundamental opposition to water. Oil has no fixed, identifiable ‘place’ to be (it is not ‘countable’ nor ‘accountable’ in the same way as variables in a gigantic database are, or as U himself, an academic, is), it simply moves to negate being in the same place as water. Because of this it can spread anywhere and produce endless variations on itself. This freedom, this ‘outsideness’, of oil-spills is what U wishes he could attain.

What are we to make of this quest? Ultimately, as I mentioned at the outset, U’s, and perhaps McCarthy’s, initial fascination with oil as an outside phenomena, an mystical origin, gives way to parody and melancholy. By the end of the book, oil, ‘Satin Island’, pollution, and so on, are transformed into a grotesque side-show. Are U’s final steps, away from his destination, supposed to make us condemn or admire him? Is this U retreating from his ego-fetishizations of ‘origin’, or is he retreating more into himself, learning to stop worrying and love the bomb?

This book, perhaps, presents a more accurate reflection of the contemporary persona under technology than Remainder. Remainder, in a sense, plays with the classic ‘fears’ about how technology will transform us into unthinking ‘cogs’ - the narrator is devoid of personality, he becomes simply a script for executing operations that he doesn’t really understand or care about. But, in contemporary practices is that really how we behave with technology? As Remainder shows, this would actually be a very interesting way of interacting with technology - taking it on its terms, burrowing deeper into the logics of the machine. Instead, today we witness the opposite - a rise of ego, a rise of the need to be seen more, to escape more, to be loved more, etc., etc.

All these are perhaps symptoms of what both Peter-Paul Verbeek and Luciano Floridi (and probably many others) have called a “fourth blow to human consciousness”. Following Freud’s analysis of the previous three blows - Copernicus’ proof that we are not the centre of the universe, Darwin’s that we are not the centre of our environments, and Freud’s that we are not the centre of our conscious life - technology represents a ‘fourth blow’ that reveals how we are no longer the centre of our actions. Instead, we outsource decisions, processes, entire chains of actions to machines and software. In this sense, we no longer have a ‘place’ in the world - we are not the centre of the universe (not divine), not the centre of the natural world (not an ’exceptional’ species), we are not the centre of our thoughts (not ‘masters’ of thinking - slaves to unconscious drives), nor are we the centre of global decision-making and patterns of action (not ‘chief’ organisers of the planet). So, then, what are we? What is our purpose? Why even study or reflect upon ourselves when machines are already doing the task much better than we ever could? This is the impasse that U reaches. His solution - return to the city.

Paving Stones

Finally, one of the most depressing and deflating aspects of U’s choice to never actually complete the project is perhaps Madison’s influence. Her story, about the failure of a protest and the sheer absurdity and unpredictability of the system that they are fighting against, is the last thing we hear before U decides not to go to Satin Island after all.

As I read it, if Satin Island is saying anything, it is saying that, today, we are more closely aligned with U than with the protagonist of Remainder. That is, the modernist and progressive impulses from the 20th Century have given way to a seeping melancholy and narcissistic paralysis. Even though McCarthy claimed the book was about pollution “in a good way”, it’s difficult to see what is interesting about this ‘way’ from the book. Are we supposed to find the scene with Madison performing strange choreography outside the protest movement interesting? Here, her movements mirror the movements of oil and pollution, they are aimless and unaccountable. Her actions are mysteriously guided, haunted by children’s yells, directed by radio technologies, semi-perverse - as ambiguous as oil spills. These movements are placed in contrast to the famous May ‘68 slogan mentioned earlier in the book - “beneath the paving stones - the beach!” After mentioning these protests, U has a dream about tarmac and its resemblance to oil spills:

This coat was unrolling as I glided forward: unrolling more and more, decking the boulevards and avenues and alleyways in soft, black oblivion.

This motif, of a blackness ‘spreading’ (the oil is also compared to toffee) acts as the image of a seeping melancholia, a hole silently opening beneath the fabric of reality. This quote continues:

Occasionally, as I passed such-and-such a spot, I’d be made half-aware that some historical event, some revolutionary episode, had taken place just there-but even as the knowledge flashed up it was extinguished, buried beneath the tarmac.

In the end, U chooses the paving stones, the endless networks of black, oily tarmac, in favour of the act of rebellion, or any act at all. Are we, too, condemned to this free-floating, aimless dance? And are we condemned to this dance with the sense that a rip-cord is always available to us, to pull when we need a safety net (only to find that it has been mysteriously sabotaged)?

This is How You Lose The Time War

Fri, 25 Sep 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Amal El-Mohtar & Max Gladstone. Saga Press, 2019

And Through All the In-Betweens

To be sensitive to signs, to consider the world as an object to be deciphered, is doubtless a gift. But this gift risks remaining buried in us if we do not make the necessary encounters, and these encounters would remain ineffective if we failed to overcome certain stock notions. The first of these is to attribute to the object the signs it bears.

- Gilles Deleuze - Proust and Signs, p. 26-27

Disregard the 'story' elements of the story. A tale of two lovers and their apprenticeship of signs. That old trope of learning to see the world new again, applied to the dilemma of being so high above time,above the battlefield, that everything becomes levelled and mundane. A reflection of our current tech-malaise, and a humble suggestion forgetting back on track - read more and write more letters...

To begin, the ending of this story doesn’t matter. It follows a common trope in stories about time - a character turns out to be a double, or triple, of themselves and all these versions have been playing the story out with one another the whole time, but you only realise this at the end. Of course, this motif can be done so well, as in films like Timecrimes (2007) or Primer (2004), but here any satisfaction gained from the ending is short-lived. A simple reversal of the title’s premise, a validation that, yes, they can trust one another and, yes, they are smarter that everyone else after all. But, was that what the story was really about?

The story starts in a more interesting way, by creating a null point where a beginning is supposed to go, but where there is now only paradox: “Burn before reading”. The lack of beginning will likely frustrate many readers. There is no context, no explanation for what is actually happening in the story, for who these people are (are they even ‘people’?).

As the story progresses, we do get a sense of a central opposition; between Garden and Agency, between ‘organic’ and ‘artificial’ modes of life, an old opposition that underpins so many visions of the future. But these oppositions and histories still do not fill in much of the context of the story. All we know is that there is a war, and there are two personalities - red and blue.

This isn’t a story about beginnings or endings. It’s a story about being in the middle of things. In the middle of a war, the middle of a correspondence and in the middle of a negotiation disguised as a seduction.

The Seductive Pleasure of Duration

A letter is always in the middle. It is always ambivalent. The two time-agents are seduced by the letter in the same way that we would probably be today. At the outset of the text, they exist outside of time. They are exiles of time. This is what allows them to manipulate and wield history so easily. We, too, in an age of ICTs, of instant messaging, instant updates, and so on, are exiles of time. History is constantly being made around us, while we stand apart, as observers. At most, like the time agents, we do our best to weave together various strands - a murder at a protest in Wisconsin, a blocking of an acquisition in China, a slump in the middle-east oil market. We compile these events together with ’threads’; newsfeeds, aggregated content, searchable databases, a summary of the news headlines at the hour, tune out after the A-block, no time for context. We weave these strands together (or, some AI weaves them together for us), and to what end? To win a war. Red versus blue. Left and right. Political signs that are laughable in their inter changeability, blue for left here, red for left there. We build our bubbles, the red side and the blue, and we war with one another.

If, by chance, an old friend sends us a postcard, or a letter, we feel its warmth. We are thrilled. We have once again been placed ‘in-time’,within a process that extends beyond us and extends us. This is what happens to the agents in the book. The are re-situated in time after a lifetime of exile. They become slaves to the time of the letter. The become apprentices of the signs of the other. The book is about watching this process unfold. The process is a correspondence-process, bound to the time of the letter and all the modes of encoding that it entails.

Apprentices of Signs

The philosopher Gilles Deleuze can help understand what it means to be an apprentice of signs. In his little book Proust and Signs , he discusses how signs are exchanged between lovers.

A sign can be many things. Our reality is filled with signs (and, indeed, in terms of process philosophy, our reality is made through signs - via signals exchanged between processes, be they organic or techno-logical). We are adept at reading signs. After all, our lives and livelihoods depend on it. Weather it be the various protocols that govern traffic networks or the subtle body language of a sales agent toward a potential customer, we constantly operate in a milieu of shared meanings and modes of exchanging these meanings. We are all ‘worldly’ in this sense, we are all experts at understanding, decoding, recoding the signs of our various milieus. Words, too, are signs; “Words are abstraction, break off from the green; words are patterns in the way fences and trenches are. Words hurt.”

This all changes when the lover enters. All of a sudden, we are presented with a radically new set of protocols. A set of signs which is totally alien to us, and therefore demands our full attention, admiration, suspicion. What was he thinking about when he looked away from me just now? Why does her voice sound so unique? It totally disorients me! How is it possible for someone to be so beautiful?

In contrast to the signs which construct and shape the majority of our reality and are public and recognisable as such, the signs exchanged between lovers are private ; they are secret, encrypted, special. This is also what explains the phenomenon of jealousy. Jealousy is just the suspicion that the encryption protocols of this private network, this walled garden of pleasure, have been breached. Secrets have been shared with the enemy. Jealousy is looking at the other, watching how she smiles at you in that special way, and wondering: “Has she smiled like that for someone else too?”

In spite of the suspicions and jealousy (and maybe because of it), the signs of the other whom we love are utterly compelling. We become an apprentice of this new private network of meaning. As the clichés go, we begin to see this person everywhere, we hear them subtly coded into generic love-songs.

For Deleuze, jealousy - or simply ‘suspicion’ in this story - is what initiates the lover into an apprenticeship of signs. Whereas the everyday exchange of signs operates under the regime of ’truth’ or objectivity, where the sign only serves as an indication for an ‘objective’ truth, the jealous lover seeks in signs the lie. In this book too, the signs are being sent from the ’enemy’ side. Each side doesn’t seek objective understanding of the other from the letters, but only the signs that would indicate their safety, betrayal or hope.

Love’s signs are not like the signs of worldliness; they are not empty signs, standing for thought and action. They are deceptive signs that can be addressed to us only by concealing what they express: the origin of unknown worlds, of unknown actions and thoughts that give them a meaning. They do not excite a superficial, nervous exaltation, but the suffering of a deeper exploration. The beloved’s lies are the hieroglyphics of love. The interpreter of love’s signs is necessarily the interpreter of lies. His fate is expressed in the motto To love without being loved.

- Proust and Signs, p. 9

The book shows this apprenticeship so well. This is also why the ‘story’ element of the story does not really matter. What we are concerned with, via the protagonists, is not the ’truth’ of what is going on (what kind of world is this?), but with the signs of the world themselves . We, along with the protagonists, are caught up in the affair: the suspicion, the danger, the love. We, like the protagonists, begin to notice the traces of blue and red in objects around us. Through the book, we, even for a moment, learn to re-code and re-read signs. This, after all, is what all good literature encourages us to do. This is what the letters do for the protagonists. It is no coincidence that the letters contain so many sprinklings of literary references.

Literature, according to Wolfgang Iser, is parasitic on everyday language and meaning protocols.¹ It is like a virus that recodes our environments by introducing different interpretive strategies into our consciousness. The characters in the book, also, fall victim to this effect. They abandon their loyalties, their families, their selves, all for the sake of a stranger who appears only through coded, private messages.

Of course, all of this is not new. Indeed, the story’s literary references makes sure you know that this isn’t supposed to be a ’new’ story (Romeo and Juliet, Heloise and Abelard, all ‘forbidden’ romances). Nor is it supposed to be a ‘bricolage’ or postmodern exercise in recompiling old threads (after all, this is the boring ‘dayjob’ that the characters are trying to escape from). Instead, it is an echo. It’s an abstraction of previous forbidden love stories. It deliberately obscures context, histories, names, so that what we are left with are two things - letters and processes. The letters are the catalyst - “read by bubbling” - and the processes are the transformations of self provoked by letters. In this way, it is no longer a story about the psychology of characters, nor the social or historical conditions (as may be the case in other stories about forbidden love). Instead, it is a story about letters and their effect. Their effect is global. The world is transformed through a correspondence, a negotiation, a seduction, and through many, many missed encounters. It is not a coincidence that the book is peppered, almost solely, by letters and missed encounters. A letter only works in the absence of encounter.

The process the book describes - falling in love through letters - is a delicate one. Even more delicate than the task of ‘rewriting history’, which comes so easy to the protagonists. The real challenge remains seducing the other, trusting the other. An other that is only ever present through their traces. The process involves the delicate writing of words into nature, and allowing nature to grow around these words as they form (in the trunk of a tree, the belly of a seal) and, most importantly, having the patience ( endurance ) to withstand these changes.

You Who Never Arrived

Finally, as mentioned above, what are we to make of the fact that the two never meet (aside from one ‘meeting’ which only really occurs for Red)? Again, this reinforces the idea that this story is not really about beginnings, endings, character arcs, and so on. All the characters have are the letters of the other, and that’s enough. It should be enough for us too. In absence of encounter, the other is reduced (or,rather, expanded) to their ‘colour’, and these colours span and fill each of their private worlds. After all, a colour is not an object - as with the ‘sign’ - it is the reflection of the relational state of beings. The lover is not an ‘object’, it is a relation, a series of thrilling close encounters. In the book, the lover is never present, but they are never far either. They shadow and hunt, they announce themselves in a multitude of ways, without ever fully revealing themselves.

Perhaps the same bird echoed through both of us
yesterday, separate, in the evening…

—Rilke -You Who Never Arrived (Translated by Stephen Mitchell)

Wolfgang Iser, The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response, 57. ↩︎

A Brief Introduction

Wed, 16 Sep 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Here I end this reel. Box—(pause)—three, spool—(pause)—five. Perhaps my best years are gone. When there was a chance of happiness. But I wouldn’t want them back. Not with the fire in me now. No, I wouldn’t want them back.

- Samuel Beckett - Krapp’s Last Tape

We record our thoughts all the time.

By thinking, we are writing. We are recording. We are etching meaning onto the fabric of our bodies. We are re-ordering our unconscious, re-directing our drives. Our mind is a recording machine. A piece of wax upon which we write and rewrite the process of living. Eventually, the wax melts.

This site arrives out of the frustration with the recording-mind. It is an attempt to exteriorise a thinking-process, so that, through monologue, a new process is formed in a host-machine. The site is named after Krapp, with the full knowledge that external recording media -tapes, bits, switches - also decay and melt over time.

Recording is risky. It invites ghosts. Recordings return when least expected. Maybe it won't happen this time.

I have also included here, in the spirit of tapes, selections of music from my since abandoned work as Loop Dreams.

Contact

For enquiries, comments, or conversations email: eoinc [at] posteo.com.