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Why are nine out of ten movies uninspired and formulaic? Because it's hard to make masterpieces, obviously, but why do we buy them? We don't buy music like that. We slowly collect music that we personally consider exceptional and listen to it over and over again. Yet we equally buy superb cinema and commercial dross and see it only once or a few times. We buy games like music and books like films. Is this something about the cost of production or about the wiring in our heads? Is it an essential feature of the media, or an accidental like conventional length. If discovery is the discriminating factor, is this extricable from narrative, and are there substitutes? To what extent is consciousness needed to create the discoverable, or to imbue it with value? Can the cycle between creation and discovery be reinforced, and can it be sustained by subconscious rather than arduous or constructivist creation?
* * *
So, we have a racist party in Greece. How, ummm... modern. Their acronym spells out the word for nation and stands for "national orthodox alarm". I kid you not. They managed to elect ten representatives. So far they have not blamed any fires on the communists. At least you cant blame Greeks for racism, we learn it as school: Evil Ottoman this, glorious Slav-cleansing emperor that, greatest nation of own arse.
* * *
Everyone in Greece talks of how political parties did in the elections as if they were appendages of their leaders. Did one party lose the election because the man in charge was too feeble? Should they pick this other guy to put in charge who has bigger balls? If that's really how the people think I propose they should use an alternative method for electing the prime minister. First they should put the candidates naked on a stage and measure their penises. Then they should have them mount some women and see how many each can manage. Finally they should measure the volume of the sperm that they produce. This method will be more amusing to watch and I think a better barometer of the popular will.
* * *
I hate coming back to this second-rate target of repugnance. Airports the world over have erected barriers around the US and UK making it clear that you're travelling to the places that people detest. If you go there, they fence you off and double check that you're not some agent of hate because, well, they expect them. At least the US work on their enemies: They bomb them and invade them and support brutal regimes. The British are just running after the emperor's chariot crying, "Us too, us too, we support the Romans, we demand that you hate us as well".
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As I watch the impending elections here as a sort of outsider with a good grasp of the language, it strikes me that the offering to the voters is organised in a very stupid way.
Greece is a bipolar system with fringe parties. The two parties that alternate in government behave like service providers. You put them in office, and buy state services from them. They behave entirely like integrated service providers might do: Each of them wants to sell to the entire addressable market, their package is as lousy as it can get without losing customers to the other, and each tries to have some small USP. They have PR sense too. The ruling party reacted to the country being ravaged by forest fires, and to criticism about its weakening of legal protection of the wilderness, by removing the flaming torch from its traditional logo.
I wonder if politics could be improved by electing smaller branches of government independently, in the sense that you might get better service by shopping for services individually than by buying a "for dummies" bundle. But I'm told that I'm out of touch with reality concerning people's "intelligent buying" habits.
Meanwhile on the fringe, the fascist candidate is putting on a well presented show for his following. The Left, as usual, are not. There's the boring communists with their back-to-basics slogans, the supposedly modern communists with yet another random name and logo, and the Angry Left #1, #2, and #3. There's possibly more Angry Lefts, I've only noticed these three. The Angry Left posters are, frankly, childish. I'm going to vote for the supposedly modern communists, but I despair. I'm not sure what the point of concept parties is in an election of service providers, but I wish the Left valued credibility even slightly.
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There's an old joke comment attributed to Bill Gates that goes: "If General Motors had kept up with technology like the computer industry has, we would all be driving $25 cars that got 1,000 miles to the gallon."
Well, they have. Cars are enormously better than they were twenty years ago. The controls are far more usable and standardised. The engine delivers power more smoothly over a broader range of speeds, while emitting less pollution and making less noise. Accidents are less likely due to better handling and performance, and when they happen they're much less hazardous to the occupants and even to pedestrians. Cars have sensible user interfaces for opening doors and turning the lights off. You can buy cars for carrying a passing fling or an extended family, and you can buy them as cheap accessories or as durables.
If the computer industry had evolved computers in the way it thinks the car industry evolves cars, we would all be using home computers that could only add numbers between 0 and 255, but could do so on four concurrent streams at a rate of two billion numbers a second each. They'd display fabulously crisp images on your HDTV using 8, or maybe 16 colors chosen to include cyan and magenta. The computers would forget everything between each use, including you, and you'd have to type epic BASIC programs or insert several USB sticks in the correct order to tell them what to do. Computers would differ by having rigid keys or rubber keys, but they'd all run for 1000 minutes on four AA alkaline batteries and nobody would pay more than $25 for them.
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Greece is mostly on fire. This happens most summers and is usually merely "a shame", but this time round over fifty people got burned alive in their cars or houses. Common knowledge is that forest fires in Greece are set on purpose, to get rid of forests and thus develop properties that are covered by the forest. This is, of course illegal, but one can be caught for cutting the forest, while there is no official geographical record of where the forest ought to be. So once it is burnt, the owner of the land can say "what forest" and develop. So over fifty people dies because of greed and (tacitly accepted) technical incompetence by the state. Several attempts to establish such a geographical system met with resistance or non-cooperation and failed.
It could be worse, of course. In places such as Nigeria or Pakistan you occasionally hear that a fuel truck crashed, people turned up to scoop the petrol off the road with metal canisters and they all burned alive in the inevitable explosion. So in terms of civil stupidity Greece rates slightly higher than some of the world's worst countries, but not by much.
I'm in Edinburgh and it's the last few days of the various festivals. Normally the festivals are a good thing, but I'm kind of overcome by dross. The great majority of the Fringe is, of course, dross. This in itself would be OK if it merely meant empty seats at bad shows, but we don't get such efficient market discipline. We get to see the ugly side of the market, more often than not. People crowd the High Street and try to grab the attention of punters with the cheapest possible tricks: A man wearing a kilt, Jokes about inflatable girlfriends, another man who is dressed as a slice of toast. They give you flyers for equally stupid and ultimately unsatisfying productions. After a while you feel harangued by this constant stream of people wanting to take your money in exchange for some valueless hastily thrown-together entertainment non-product. It's hard to resist insulting them before they do it to you.
The trend in response to this is what in general business is knows as channel consolidation: The people who control the channel of bringing the goods to the market, which in this case are the venue brands, consolidate. Five large distributors, Assembly, Pleasance, Underbelly, C, Sweet, and the ultra-lowbrow Meadows Big Top monopolise the venue real-estate and essentially turn the Fringe into a corporatised supermarket experience. This seems to go down well with the crowds of stupid people from London, who apparently are here to drink beer and be generically entertained, or possibly distracted from the banality of their beer-drinking but scores of derivative comedians.
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The other night I dreamt that I was watching an exceptionally clever piece of theatre, whose single scene consisted of a political debate by the leaders of a country about a matter of utmost importance. Although no introduction was given and the play started abruptly from a dark stage mid-debate, the matter clearly involved the timeless question of gong to war. The politicians, who were some kind of parliament, were standing crowded in a long, twisting, featureless corridor-like dark room, and they wore mostly black. A bright spotlight illuminated this or that portion of the room in dusty, sweaty film-noire style, and those who were under the spotlight would speak their stance as forcefully as possible. The light would then move to the next speaker. The audience was seated only in the circle seats, and so could see at any time the lit portion of the corridor-parliament over its walls. The rest of the stage was dark. The debate lasted a while and covered the whole spectrum of views, from the most reactionary to the most progressive. The politicians were arranged that way along the length of their corridor-parliament, and this was made apparent early on in the play by some well-placed exchanges between Left and Right speakers, with corresponding light movements. The text consisted of classic, relatively shallow rhetoric about the ethical and occasionally practical questions of war. So, throughout the play, the audience was conditioned to follow the light and predict quite accurately the position that would be argued. ( Until... )
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Our moral instinct, the urge that we feel to do things a certain ethical way or the indignation that we feel when unethical things happen, is a feeling. It's a phenomenon of the mind, like smell or attraction. It's not some thing that exists outside of our minds, and so an abstract axiomatic discussion of morality, such as Plato might have offered, is an expression of morality rather than any useful analysis of the phenomenon.
The object of the moral feeling, in other words the thing that we feel some moral obligation towards, is a mixture of two factors. One factor is empathy, and it yields a moral obligation to whatever has the capacity to suffer. This certainly includes conscious people, and we may allow it include other creatures. The other factor is reciprocity, and it yields a moral obligation to whatever we think harbours a similar moral instinct. We may extend this to more or fewer people, and possibly to other anthropomorphic entities such as organisations.
Many moral problems arise from differences over what is a valid object of empathy. For example some believe that mammals suffer in a similar way to us and thus cruelty to mammals is morally wrong. If you are planning a controversial action, like a war, you are going to harm some people presumably to aid some other people. Which people have the strongest claim to empathy? The more numerous? Those who are more acutely harmed? Those with whom you are emotionally closer (an obviously immoral but common stance)? The same person might change minds radically over time. For example someone may want to "give up" now, committing suicide, falling into addiction, or whatever. The same person may wish to live an active and integrated life in the future. Is the present or the future mind the better object of empathy?
More commonly, moral problems arise from differences in our assessment of what moral feelings are present in other minds. We justify killing enemies in a conflict by claiming that they are similarly void of moral responsibility towards us. When arguing how to punish criminals, we're tempted to ask for a stronger punishment if we feel they have no moral boundaries. If we are racist, we assume that people of other cultures don't apply high moral standards in their interaction with us, and we set out treating them "the same" way. It is very self-serving, seductive, and open to manipulation to believe that another person's morality has broken down.
Still other problems arise from the balance between empathy and reciprocity as moral drives. If we love someone, but they have done something wrong and the state, acting fairly, wants to punish them, what is the right thing to do? If someone has killed others with no apparent remorse, but they are still human and probably in need of compassion, which motive should have greater weight in how we deal with the case? Suppose that two factions who despise each other have fought over some territory for decades, resulting in terrible bloodshed on both sides. As third parties, should we take a dim view of their respective morals, or extend compassion to both of them?
Curiously, the subject of morality, the mind that is expected to do the judging, is not our own self, nor is it the other to whom we extend moral feelings and actions. It is a third party. We act morally to be positively judged by some from of peer group or authority structure in which we feel we belong. One can imagine that our morality evolved this way because it provides a stable mechanism for altruism, whereas a morality rooted purely within the self would easily degenerate into sadism. Unfortunately, there seems to be no evolutionary trait to maximise this group.
We differ materially in moral behaviour by how broadly we choose to define our approval group. Relatively few people seek approval from the entire body of humanity, and we think of this as an unrealistic or admirable stance. More commonly, we seek approval from our own state or culture, and once we get it we can go to war with other states or cultures. Some people get their approval from smaller groupings such as sects or political alignments, which gives rise to hostility or fighting. Gangsters, terrorists, Nazis, and CEOs all get their moral approval from extremely narrow groups, perpetuating great harm on the majority. Families are an appalling source of approval unchecked by moral obligation to the world outside.
As well as choosing the scope of our moral peer group, we can also choose the weight that we give to its messages compared to messages that might reach us from outside with a different moral teaching. For example if we are strongly religious, we're likely to hear only what our church says, ignoring criticism or argument from the outside. We can choose to take in the moral messages of our national media only, or we can pay attention to what people in other places, perhaps where we fight wars, are saying about us. If we are in a highly disciplined organisation such as a corporation or an army, we're more likely to limit ourselves to a narrow moral code than if we're an unaffiliated member of the public.
So, while the dual motives of empathy and reciprocity give rise to some interesting, slightly theoretical moral problems, the burning moral issues that we have to deal with arise from the peer groups that people use as suppliers of moral approval. To make the world a better place, we must broaden these groups and make their walls more permeable. We must therefore engage rather than antagonise those whose morals we seek to change, we must try to demolish or break holes in approval groups such as countries or families, and if we find ourselves inside the group of someone who does wrong we must use the opportunity to pass a moral message.
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We are all embodied and conscious, and for this we have joys and needs. We are also inter-dependent, partly because our individual capacity to deal with the world is minimal, partly because the world is limited and thus contested, and primarily because our evolution compels us and fulfils us in the interaction with others through the social and physical concept of sex.
The greater part of the good that we constantly create through our interactions is unavoidably externalised. We create objects, environments, ideas, sensations, discoveries, relationships, commitments, and reassurances. These do not rest in our individual bodies, nor are they necessarily distributed equitably or freely. Their destiny, after externalisation, is emergent and open to contest.
The cognitive and practical activity of politics is the contest over this externalised product of human life in pursuit of desire, which includes sex but also self interest and morality. The measure of politics is credibility, in other words we invest our life's product in the political system that most credibly allows us to fulfil our desire, and credibility includes coercion. The system with the most credibility gets invested with most of the human product, and wins.
Capitalism recognises and celebrates the externalisation of life's product, and in this respect is most realistic. Capitalists compete to control a maximal amount of life's product, not to use it but to compel those with less to interact with them positively. Thus they seek power, a degenerate form of the sex instinct that gives refuge from the fear of sidelining, at least for men. Capitalism has high credibility because it delivers this refuge to all but the poor, and because it uses violence to ensure a supply of compliant poor. Capitalism is well served by a single hierarchy, and therefore seeks globalisation.
Socialism acknowledges the externalisation of life's product but seeks to regulate it equitably. It succeeds, but fails to provide a compelling answer to desire. The best that Socialism does is to provide security through collective norms and assets, turning a social group into a haven in which desire could flourish. The credibility of Socialism is high in small groups, but falls as the group enlarges because empathy is replaced by conservatism or opaque power as a cohesive force. Socialism has not yet managed to deploy a global model with credibility comparable to Capitalism.
Anarchism denies the externalisation of life's product, or harbours the mystical belief that no particular attention needs to be paid to its distribution. Instead, it celebrates the fulfilment of human desire in a true way, and not in the surrogate way of Capitalism or the tentative way of Socialism. It is thus the most compelling but also the least credible of the three systems, because it offers no analogue to the robust experiences of power or regulation that the other two systems put forward as refuge from individual frailty.
So Capitalism wins. In order to improve matters the Left has to articulate some plan that is at once as celebratory of desire as Anarchism and as credible as Capitalism. So far the Left has only come up with the compromise of Socialism, but there is hope. Technology changes the emergent patterns of externalisation of good, and Feminism moves the subject of desire away from patriarchal men. Perhaps these factors will shift the balance of credibility towards a system where desire can be fulfilled.
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I'm in San Francisco again, so I went to the Apple store to look at an iPhone, as one does here this weekend.
Good Points
- It's physically the right size, dimensions, curvature at the corners, and weight.
- The screen is high-resolution, bright, uniform, and with good contrast and colours.
- The user interface is pretty and well designed, and the keyboard sort of works.
- It has a real web browser that renders pages full-res, and IMAP email.
- It works very nicely for browsing and reading things over WiFi.
Bad Points
- It is locked to AT&T, and will be locked to some other provider in Europe.
- It doesn't have iChat or Skype, so you are forced to use the phone.
- It's not a first-class computer. No real writing tool, no filesystem, clumsy input.
- There's no password manager or real cryptographic security as far as I could see.
- It has a bulky cradle, needs it to sync, and needs an adapter to plug in standard headphones.
So, basically, it's a great technical achievement but it's screwed as a product. It's screwed because it's a phone, and therefore beholden to the wishes of phone carriers. It's also screwed because it's an iPod, and therefore designed for passive browsing and consumption of content.
It ought to be an ultra-portable Mac with an optional built-in 3G phone. I'd be happy to buy it without the built-in phone, and use bluetooth dialling instead. It does have WiFi and Bluetooth, but you can't use any VoIP application over WiFi or dial numbers on other phones via Bluetooth. In fact it doesn't work at all, even as an organiser, until you sign up to the AT&T phone service.
More importantly, there's no good way to create things on it - you can write emails or notes but it's inconvenient and the keyboard doesn't switch to landscape mode in these applications. There's no voice recorder, no outliner/to-do/list-making tool, and no drawing tool. Since there's no filesystem, there's no easy way to move a document between your Mac and the iPhone. It has no password manager, so unless you are weird and remember your passwords you won't be able to access much online. In all it fails miserably to be a thing that you can buy and carry around instead of your Mac.
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