nerding out

So, in addition to tuning a few things up under the hood and getting my blog posts going back to ye olde Facebook, I decided to bust out some Variation on the Theme in light of the solstice.

I've been noodling on a real redesign with one of my mother's students for a while now, but it's not the sort of thing I've had a ton of time to invest serious energy into, and ergo things have kind of stalled.

But I want to write more, and have been sort of hating on my old rust-colored sexyface theme. Maybe this is part of what's blocking, I think, and I went ahead and cropped myself out a new photo, generated a little background to match, and set some new colors. New coat of paint on this lonely old town; inspiration, I'm ready for ya!

The bigger changes I want to make are about content organization and whatnot, but I think the sad fact is that until I start generating said content, energy invested in organization would be questionably allocated. There's always more time for fancy-pants layouts and whatnot. The more pressing question is what, pray tell, would fill the boxes, and how might it get written?

Scouring The Sources Of My Windless Sails

After yesterday's post, which looked at how my working life was sucking my will to live, I started thinking a bit bigger. Work is top of mind at the moment, so that's the first thing to come out, but getting that out of the way made room for deeper/better reflection.

The existential crisis is of course about more than just my jibity job; it's about who I am as a person, and the world around me.

One of the big things is I have this general feeling that time is running out!, that I've got to make something of myself now or never. However, casual examination reveals this is a falsehood. While I'm not a kid anymore, neither am I anywhere near the twilight of my human capacities. It's just the stress talking. This ticking-clock pressure can be handled, I think, with just a little more balance and deep breathing.

I'm also not really happy with myself in terms of my health. Since falling off my bike in May and going into a more sedintary cycle, I'm definitely feeling more giggly and slow. The answer here is pretty clear — start working out, duh, and maybe cut back the beer on weeknights — and it only takes a bit of willpower to implement. This is the sort of thing that's hard when you're all caught up in other things, but tends to melt away pretty easily if you focus on it for half a minute.

More troubling is the external world around me. I haven't blogged much about politics or current events lately, and mainly its because the whole thing is pretty monumentally depressing. I won't even begin to dig into the details here, but suffice to say that things are not going well with the world, and without any scapegoat in the form of a Bush Administration, it becomes harder and harder not to see all of this as a total systemic failure. There are plenty of low-level political fights worth having — and I do have hope that the Health Care Reform ball that's begun rolling will add up to something meaningful — but the general drift of events is still towards the precipice.

With the undercurrent of doom running strong, the obvious wrongness of the status quo — for instance, thigh lube — becomes a constant source of deflating disappointment. It's hard to see how our modern way of life survives this, and so one begins wondering who will make it and who won't, and why. I preach a dark future.

This one is hard. It's hard to get super-excited when you feel that even your best putative achievements amount to little more than yelling into the void. It's a cynical-depressive position, and not one I enjoy occupying, but until/unless I can unravel another transcendental win, feels like I'm stuck here.

So I do the little things. I fixed my bike. I did some decent stretching. I repaired the toilet. I spruced up the blog. I took a bit of pleasure in the World Cup. None of this changes the fact that I'm sort of burned/bummed out, but getting anywhere is really a matter of putting one foot in front of the other. The only way out is through.

Sold:

I’ll start playing with Chrome. After all, Tony made it (which he kept secret from us for like two years — well done there, Google NDA) and it really does appear to be the new hotness.

However, the coolness of this video also provides a little insight into Google’s strategy. They spent money on this, whereas Google Wave had a developer demo and some shitty screencast. That’s a datapoint.

I twittered about this, and posted a video in my last post, but I have to say I’m just blown away by the latest release from The Kleptones. These guys are the shit. They evolved from making ultra-clever — and still totally listenable — album-based mashups (Yoshimi Battles the Hip Hop Robots and A Night at the Hip-Hopera, which will make your head asplode with Queen+KRS) and have moved fully into the realm of Art.

I’ve listened to Uptime/Downtime several times though, and it takes the more free-form explorations of the 24-hours double-album to the next level. Plus they’re using the dirty beats now too. It’s just great to see post-postmodernism at work.

People of PDX and SF can unlock the magic LIVE this weekend…

Live fast, die old.

So I feel the need to expand on my previous posts expressing some pessimistic thoughts and doubts about humanity. I got some reactions from people, which means I touched a nerve, which is good, but I want to express an underlying opinion.

I’ve often hit on the twitter-thought above from dustincurrie. Life is fundamentally an anti-entropic force. At the universe-level, thermodynamics still wins (we think), but at any other scale, any scale that actually matters to us, what makes Life Life (and in some ways People People) is that we build things. We assemble, compile, amalgamate, reconfigure. We create complexity from the soup, whether it’s protoplasmic algae pulling carbon out of the air and combining it with solar radiation to create hydrocarbons or the global human-hive that’s currently doing an unplanned terraforming exercise on the whole planet. We’re unique like that, and this is pretty special.

Life is Holy and Every Moment Precious.

This isn’t a scientific or rational belief. It’s fundamentally a romantic one, but I also think it’s pragmatic. I believe that our lived experience comes from a combination of fantasies and reality, neither of which we can really address directly or independently. However, we can sometimes choose (or at least slowly steer) our fantasy, which adjusts the possible and helps us have a different experience, which ultimately leads to different outcomes, which impacts reality. Lather, rinse, recurse, and you have my basic theory of social change through culture.

Yes, our current all-channels communication explosion may practically amount to networking while Rome burns. However, if we want an alternative to violently addressing the problems through infrastructure sabotage (specifically long-haul coal transport via rail), which I think we do, I think our new networked reality is the best basic chance we have to Get it Together and also to Deal With The Shit that’s already in the pipeline.

People may be disappointing creatures, but we’re all we’ve got, and all we’ve got is right now. Might as well try to make it work.

The real problem is that I don’t get along with a lot of tech people. It reminds me of how when I was in acting school I found I didn’t like many actors. Here I am in a space, a culture, a zone where I seem to be getting some traction, and I’m increasingly frustrated with my nominal peers.

In particular I find the crossover between geeks, hipsters and entrepreneurs — a flavor that runs strong in SF — to be especially nettlesome. There’s a kind of passive-aggressive form of snobbish competition which emerges around these kinds of people, a sort of nerd machismo. I don’t really have time in my life to contend with machismo, and the un-manly brand is just annoying.

Cue the record-scratch sound effect. There’s an undeniably enormous element of “I am the things I hate about other people” at work here. I’m a geek, entrepreneur, hipsterish in style, and possessed of my own stinky brand of macho bullshit. The opinion-piece colliery to thinly-veiled autobiographical content is perhaps thinly-veiled self-loathing?

Maybe, but there’s also something particular to my structural-hole-bridging personality that I think prevents me from really clicking into a truly deep groove with any given set of people. My persona is playing twister with the universe, and I’ve always got a food or a hand on some other dot. Never all at home.

It’s an old gripe. There’s not much I can do about this but live through it, to keep transcending whatever games I can. Noticing things one hates about oneself in others is a growing moment once you realize that’s what’s going on, and opportunities are created every time I can see my way past one of these things, to a higher purpose or more integrated whole. This is where you level up as a person, I think.

I am my own man, which is a vastly privileged thing to be. I have, as they say, First World Problems. And although I know I am not like other people in my circumstances, and probably not in my composition, I believe at a core level that I could be anyone, and everyone could be me. Not literally, but situationally. I think we can all be “our own people”, and the world would keep on churning, maybe quite a bit for the better, if we were.

Which makes it particularly jarring when I’m forced to the realization that all this internet goodness isn’t changing human nature, or at least if it is, it is evolving us more even slowly than a W3C spec (cue rimshot). People are still largely the same: shallow, scared, narrowly self-interested: very much not their own people. We may be moving gradually towards a brighter future, but in the mean-time I’m confronting the very things I hope to change manifesting themselves in the very space that I thought would be home base for said changing. That’s a mouthful, but hopefully you catch my drift. It’s a bummer, man.

I don’t subscribe to the notion that people are inherently anything more complex that social pattern recognizers who like to be well fed, safe, sexually satisfied, and part of a community. Beyond that — and even sometimes in the face of that — we are what we believe, what we learn from observation and emulation, what we come to know in the spaces between us and others.

Human nature, such as we reference it, can change. It can change in pretty big ways and with impressive relative speed compared to, say, geology or genetics. Specifically, as soon as we gain insight into ourselves, our selves themselves are changed; a sort of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty principle of the psyche. It’s one of the reasons I don’t find those “simulation theories“ very philosophically interesting. Epistemology often comes down to pretty basic decisions — what do you believe — and I fundamentally don’t subscribe to a mechanistic/deterministic model for humanity. We’re an organic, emergent phenomena, and thus a constantly moving target. We can’t simulate ourselves accurately because if we did we wouldn’t be us.

And so one can argue that the generation coming up and the generation that’s gotten on board with the internet thing have evolved in fundamental ways. Our assumptions about communication and geography are different, as are our understanding about how knowledge and truth are obtained. I think these shifts are more or less for the better, but in and of themselves they don’t seem to have led to very different behaviors other than the phenomena of internet usage in and of itself. We retain the same patterns of action otherwise; a politics dictated by an elite class of of insiders and talking heads, a social milieu defined by those who are in and those who are out, an economics that is on the way to creating a permanent generational underclass. All of these things should and could be changing, but they aren’t. At least not yet.

Under such circumstances, one can begin questioning the strength of one’s small-d democratic beliefs. I can idealize a world of egalitarian brotherhood and harmony among peoples, but what if peoples themselves aren’t so into it? What if they prefer starfucking, holy wars and reality television?

As an upper-middle-class college-educated straight white male, it’s hardly my place to judge anyone, but it would be really cool to see something unexpected in the next year or so. I’m always optimistic and constantly hopeful.

My first blush with the festival gave me The Fear. There’s a huge amount of visual noise. Brands, bands, posters, pasties, people in suits, people in costumes, people looking lost, desperate, hungry, hung-over. People in lines. People cutting lines. People talking about how it used to be.

It makes me question a lot of my basic assumptions about the Goodness of what I do for a living. The revolution hasn’t changed human nature, and it’s unpleasant to see how sheepie we beings can still be. As the man says, I am the things I hate about other people.

On the other hand, some dudes made a massive Tesla coil that can play music.

My talk was well received I think, and now I’m just wandering and soaking it up. There’s a lot of good stuff here, now that I’ve gotten over my initial culture shock. Austin is beautiful and warm, and there are lots and lots of happy smart brilliant buzzing people around. I’m going to enjoy my sunday.

Assuming the weather doesn’t totally screw me, I’m headed to Texas for SXSW interactive. You can check my song and dance on yr schedule. I’m gonna do 70 slides in about 35 minutes, so it should be good.

I expect I’ll get all caught up in the digital excitement, so probably plenty of twitters and the like.

And BBQ.

I’m in NYC, but thanks to a return to The Palace (from days of yore) I am moving slooooow. It was a good time though! Fab Dinner with Jeremy and Rachael (who have set a wedding date!) followed up by sister-dude, $8 pitchers of budweiser, Priest on the juke and me stepping up to some guy with my early-2000 street-cred. He was born in the neighborhood, so I ended up buying him a shot, but given that the place is overrun with kids these days I felt like I had to stand up.

Anyway, muddling through things, I goofed around with Pantheon a bit, and then google analytics data exporter, which I plan to start integrating for more accurate statistics of reads on my posts, etc. Fit of pride: 3,500 actual reads of this essay.

And now a txt from the momster. She’s arrived. Time to get up and go!

This is my “good” presentation. I’m looking a little haggard here — this is after two more days of being on a boat in Stockholm, and two more nights out with the king of Denmark, then flying back to spend Friday/Saturday nights in Austin, Texas — but this is the best Video I’ve got of my “inspired by Lessig” deal.

Someday I’m going to get my own projector, a foot-pedal clicker, and a few weeks of time, and make some king-hell presentation-art. Lots of potential.

One of the things I did while on my world-tour last fall was give a talk about Drupal and academia in the belly of a ship in Stockholm. And the cameras we’re rolling.

How Berkeley and Stanford University Use Drupal (Joshua Koenig) from NodeOne.se on Vimeo.

It’s not my best presentation due to jetlag/sickness and a funky mic (I also never really had my breath working right, a big no-no from Theater World), but I did a decent job of regulating my pace and I think it’s a more or less accurate talk.

Huge thanks to my hosts who cut together this video really well, and gave me some lovely liquor that I didn’t quite get to drink. Looking forward to showing them a really good time when they come out to San Francisco in April!