Trust the Ferret, the Ferret is Wise

There is a line in one of the Mage books in the third edition before White Wolf blew up their world that I got reminded of today. It was about the Virtual Adepts, and it was about the change in attitude between the second and third editions. I couldn't find it leafing through the main book or the VA clanbook, but I remember the gist of it.

It was something like this. In the old version, the ethos was the hacker slogan "Information wants to be free!" so thematically, they grabbed whatever they could and threw it out there. But in the newer edition, the focus changed, because it wasn't working. Information might want to be free, but throwing everything out there was just dumping out a mess, with nothing to separate the important from the unimportant. Too much information doesn't mean more stuff happens, it slows stuff down since people have to go through all the information to find what they need.

And this seemed relevant today, since I was catching up on what had happened on the Internet since I hadn't been on much for a couple days, and because of the linkdump post I made with several things I had wanted to write more about but hadn't gotten to. A couple of them I still plan to write something about, really. But there were so many things I was finding that I wanted to say something about, I just kept finding new ones and throwing the old ones on a pile of bookmarks. It's the same kind of thing as the story bit above. And I'm hardly the first person to have that happen, there's plenty of wonks and self-help gurus who are trying to turn "information overload" into one of those breathless reports on the local evening news. "And coming up, after sports, ARE you stressed by TOO MUCH INFORMATION? Dick Steele has the surprising facts!"

This is where filters come in. That's part of what newspapers and TV news and stuff does in theory, they go through all the news and information and filter it to what's important. Of course, most of their job is supposed to be going out and finding that news, but in this day and age their real job is to make the advertisers happy, since the advertising is what pays their salary, so the advertisers are the real customers. The explosion of the 'net has made all sorts of information more available, and has made a lot of other filters available. From the obvious, like slashdot or Metafilter or Google News, to tiny little things like this right here. There's also automatic filters, like RSS feeds and automated news sites and so on. Though none of that is nearly as good yet as a good secretary or personal assistant, which is still the preferred choice of the rich.

The problem with any kind of filter like that though is it's somebody else's decisions about what's important, and they can always miss something YOU think is important. On the other hand, there's a lot of problems with people being easily able to ignore large chunks of news and information too. But I've drifted quite a bit from my original point. One last diversion, though. When you have a mass of unorganized information, the human brain is great at finding patterns. That's one of the main things it seems like our brains have evolved to do. We do it so well we can find patterns in the completely random. A bewildering array of patterns, depending on which bits we choose to pay attention and mark as important.

Back on to my original point. I need to learn to filter better, just so I spend less time reading over every bloody thing, and actually post about things and get things done and so on.

But there's another point here too. As a nerd and a sort-of writer, I probably worry too much about the importance of ideas in and of themselves. Alone, ideas don't really mean much. They're important in what they can get people to actually do. That was the last part of the little story about the Virtual Adepts, they had changed so instead of just tossing information out there, they tried to get specific information where it would matter. The ideas just there where nobody sees them or does anything because of them might as well not be there. Now it's true, using ideas to get people to do things is awfully close to the Dark Arts of Spin and Marketing, it's really exactly the same. But really, persuasion is like any other tool, it can be used for good or evil. And yes, even putting information out there specifically so people can use it to make up their own minds about something is trying to persuade them. You're trying to persuade them to think, and that's hard.

How much of the everyday bullshit and poor design of life do people go along with just because everybody else seems to be going along with it? Or because they're told to go along with it by people in suits who act like alphas? If the Alpha Suits stopped making excuses for the bullshit, would the bullshit stop?

Y'know, every time I read something about the Left Behind books, it makes me almost want to write something like that. Not the crappy fundie side, or even the "end of the world" side of things. But take the whole "A third of the world's population disappears, just like that!" thing, and then run with it.

Eventually, of course, I'd have to explain how it happened, although I guess there'd be points to leaving it a mystery too. Hmm.

It's really the wasted opportunities that get to me. Just like with the Star Wars prequels.

This probably sounds kinda stupid. But we've been doing wave experiments in physics, and doing physics homework, and there's something about doing the math and then having the experiment work out exactly right that strikes me as absurdly unlikely. It's probably silly to ask why math works to represent the universe so well, since math was a system developed to help describe the universe. And all of our modern technology depends on maths far weirder than waves in a string. But it still just somehow feels strange and wonderful to see something go from abstract equations to an actual embodiment in the universe. But there it is. And one of our greatest achievements of modern technology and user interfaces and stuff has been to make all that invisible, and make things Just Work. Though I suppose that has the downside of science being less glamorous than it was in earlier days, and the invisibilty letting people use things without understanding how it works and figuring science is like magic or "just like religion" because they don't understand it and don't think they have to.

I don't think most of the rest of my class quite sees the absurd brilliance of the fact we can go from these equations to something that actually describes the world pretty accurately. It's sure reminding me why I'm a geek for science, though. Maybe I'm easily amused.

In general, I try not to swear that often. It's not out of a sense that they're "bad" words, or anything like that. I've gotten looser about that as I've gotten older, and it depends who I'm around. When I'm around people who swear more often, I do too, for example. But the reason I try not to swear is because they're powerful words. Not in and of themselves, they're just sounds. But the reactions they can get from other people, and the emphasis they place on things. It's a lot more meaningful when somebody who rarely swears refers to somebody as a "fucking asshole" than when it's done by somebody who says fuck every third word. That's why stuff like "fuck the police" was a lot more revolutionary in the wake of the Leave It to Beaver 50s than now. But when you overuse a word that used to have power because of shock value, or because of its meaning, or whatever, it gets watered down. Eventually to the point of being almost meaningless. Just look at politics or marketing, and how many words both of those have pretty much destroyed.

I'm slow to make friends. This might just be because of being an introvert, or a poorly socialized nerd, all the regular reasons of people on the Internet. Sometimes it feels like whatever part of peoples' brains let them make connections to others easily is just broken or atrophied for me. But at least part of it is because to me, "Friend" is a pretty big word. Not like in those after school specials where the plucky heroes would tell the henchman "You're our friend! Yeah!" and he'd go, "Really?" and then let them out and betray the villain. But, a friend is more than just somebody you hang around with sometimes, or work with. At least for somebody worth calling a friend, I'd figure. So maybe it's not so much that I'm slow to make friends, but that I'm slow to call them actual friend. So my circle of friend friends is fairly limited. Some people I've known and gamed with for years, and they're still basically just gaming buddies, not friends, if that makes any sense. It takes time to get to know somebody and decide to trust them and all that sort of thing. The stuff it takes to make somebody a friend.

Most of the time, that goes double for relationships. There's only one time I can think of when I started totally just crushing on somebody from how they looked. That never managed to go anywhere, either, unfortunately. But most of the time, before I can figure out if I'm interested in somebody, I have to get to know them. Which takes time. Of course, by the time I feel like I know somebody well enough to be interested in them, that whole "friend zone" has kicked in, and the lady isn't interested, or has decided I'm obviously not interested. So that doesn't work out well either.

Maybe I'm putting too much weight onto words that are, really, just words. Because I'm a nerd, or because I spend a lot of time on the Internet, which is made up of words, porn, and pictures of cats. Or maybe because I fancy myself to be a writer, so I put too much emphasis on using words right, or just think they're more important than they are. But if words didn't have power, then why would I bother wanting to be a writer? And if they have power, well with power comes responsibility. Right, true believers?

There's a problem with working at a bookstore. It means, every so often, you have to sell somebody something that you know is bad, lame, and utterly irredeemable. Sometimes I can tell people this, other times, I can't really because I know they won't care. So I sell them their horrible book of lies and poor writing, and feel a dirty because I helped support people churning out more of this trash.

The case in point, this time, was Left Behind, the horribly written series of books and movies that are basically the apocalyptic fringes of the Religious Right gloating over how everybody's going to die in the end of the world except them. Thew books are based around their weirdly "literal" interpretation of Revelations, which involves a lot of reading into things that aren't literally never mentioned in the entire Bible, the whole "Rapture" idea first among them. If you want more explanation of the problems with these books, clink the link above, which leads to Slacktivist's page by page dissection of the first book. But the ultimate scary thing about these books? They're written by and for people who think the end of the world will be a good thing, and look forward to it, and try and hurry that day through politics and begging their idea of God. That's the kind of things the bad guys in D&D or Buffy or something do.

And this came up, because yesterday a lady came in, and bought all three of the Left Behind movies, plus most of the series. For her children. I'm sorry, kids. I'm really really sorry. Not just for the years of therapy they'll have to go through if they escape the millenialist cult, but also because they'll have to sit through the books. And the thing is, there's nothing I could have done. Refuse to sell them to her? They'd send another person to run the register. And if that failed, the lady'd just go over to Borders or the religious bookstore or somewhere else and still inflict them on the kids. I could have tried to convince her, but that was hardly the place, and I'm 95% sure nothing I would have said would have made a difference to her, anyway.

But I still feel dirty inside.

This post over at Unfogged I found interesting, since it's about the current rounds of stuff in the realm of political punditry where people who were for the war are still trying to explain why they still shouldn't have to listen to people who were against the war. Mostly pro-war liberals, because pro-war conservatives now, as before, don't give a shit. But the basic point is this, there's going to be people you think are silly on ANY side of any idea, so don't let your distaste for aesthetic silliness determine what you think. And that mostly, if you're on the same side as the people dressed as sea turtles, you're probably on the right side.

But the other thing that caught my mind was in the comments thread. One of the people suggested that part of why 60s style protests aren't as effective now is because culture's changed. Which it obviously has. Long hair, colorful clothes, etc, aren't any kind of threat any more. Black clothes and spikes aren't even any kind of threat. They're all stuff you can buy at the mall. If there's anywhere The Man is present, it's Corporate America. So funny clothes and long hair don't threaten anybody except the terminally reactionary, and you're never gonna win those guys over anyway. Individuality isn't a threat any more. It's a commodity.

Now, on the other hand, imagine this, my expansion on one of the commenter's suggestions. Imagine the streets full of protesters, all dressed alike. Not in uniforms, like the military or fascist boot camp, just dressed the same. Even if it's just a white button shirt and blue jeans. That means organization. It means coordination. It means cooperation. It means it'd be harder for floofy haired pundits to go "And here's some shots of the freaks out protesting!" on the evening news. I have nothing against puppets and tie dye. I'm fond of both. But for the purposes of scaring The Man, and presenting something the political establishment would have to take as a threat I think it might work better. The Bush Administration could ignore a hundred thousand people on the streets in suits as well as the people with puppets. (Hell, when I was at the pre-war protests, most of the people there were regular people. But the puppets and sea turtles make better photos, especially for the media outlets totally invested in the status quo.) But it might have more of an impact on the rest of the people. At least the ones outside the 20-30% that'd support Bush even if he ate a live puppy on national TV.

When a depressed person does something they enjoy to try and cheer themselves up while they're depressed, it's kinda like the babysitter giving a cookie to a kid to distract them right after they learn to say "fucK.' It sets up entirely the wrong kinds of associations, like "saying this word gets me a cookie!" Or "Being miserable means I get something that makes me happy." Which really just makes the whole thing worse, I suspect.

How much of what people do is to distract themselves from the fact they're not really doing what they want do be doing, do you think?

I'm sure most of you have seen this already, but I never let redundancy stop me. I love the Internet. A lot because it lets so many awesome things happen that wouldn't have happened before, and most of them done just by random folks.

Like these videos. There's a band, called Ok Go! They posted a pair of videos on YouTube, one for "A Million Ways", the other for "Here it Goes Again". The first video made the rounds a couple months back, the second's going around now. And they're both pretty awesome, even though it's just filming the four of them in the one guy's backyard, or the four of them in a coordinated dance on treadmills.Well, the coordination and choreography is pretty awesome. But y'know, the fact that it's just the four guys and the one guy's sister doing the choreography and filming them, literally, in their backyard or basement is part of the appeal. And the music's pretty good.

What makes it even more awesome though, is it worked. The one guy was interviewed on the Colbert Report, and they got a record deal in part (EDIT: Already had a record deal) because of the attention their videos got. That's pretty cool.

I wonder if they'll keep doing those kind of music videos. It's hard to keep low-budget cred when you have an actual budget to work with.