“What I do and what I dream include thee,
As the wine must taste of its own grapes.” —Elizabeth Barrett Browning, via Tim O’Reilly
As the wine must taste of its own grapes.” —Elizabeth Barrett Browning, via Tim O’Reilly
July 2009
9 posts
June 2009
12 posts
“Gotama had listened to him quietly, motionless. And now the Perfect One spoke in his kind, polite and clear voice. “You have listened well to the teachings, O Brahmin’s son, and it is a credit to you that you have thought so deeply about them. You have found a flaw. Think well about it again. Let me warn you, you who are thirsty for knowledge, against the thicket of opinions and conflict of words. Opinions mean nothing; they may be beautiful or ugly, clever or foolish, anyone can embrace or reject them. The teaching which you have heard, however, is not my opinion, and its goal is not to explain the world to those who are thirsty for knowledge. Its goal is quite different; its goal is salvation from suffering. That is what the Gotama teaches, nothing else.”
—Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse
“And the air was full of Thoughts and Things to Say. But at times like these, only the Small Things are ever said. Big Things lurk unsaid inside.”
—Arundhati Roy (The God of Small Things)
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Where does it begin, this sense of being the Other? It can come early on, when you find yourself alone in your childhood bedroom, raising tropical fish, composing a poem, writing code, meeting friends mostly online, playing by yourself. Or in middle school, when the jocks turn on you and you pray you will get through gym class alive.
Or maybe it comes in high school, when you find yourself on the outside looking in, getting jostled in the halls, watching TV on weekends while everyone else goes to parties.
After some time, there’s an accumulation of slights, hurts, realizations: You don’t have a lot of friends; other kids avoid you; you’re not good at sports or interested in shopping; the teachers seem to like their other kids a lot more. There are few school activities you want to be part of, even if you could. The things you like aren’t the same things most other people like.
The alienation is sometimes mild, sometimes savage. Sometimes it lasts a few years, sometimes a lifetime. It depends on where you live, who your parents are, whether there’s a single teacher who appreciates you, whether you can cling to one or two friends, how well you can hide your brains.
Increasingly, your lifeline is technology. Computers and the amazing power they give you– to install a new operating system, to confide in like-minded allies three time zones away, to slay tormentors on the screen even if you can’t do much about the ones at school– are your passion. They give you skills and competence, or distraction and escape, or direction and stature, or all of the above.
Eventually, many of the people who call themselves geeks report a coming out, not unlike coming to terms with being gay or lesbian: a moment when you realize and acknowledge who you are and who you’re never going to be.
“One day in my sophomore year,” I emailed a good friend of mine, “I was sitting in the school cafeteria watching the kids at the other tables laugh and having a blast, plotting how I was going to get home early and start designing the next website design. And I suddenly got it. I was a geek. I was never going to be like them. They were never going to let me in. So I came out as a geek … I can’t say life has been a breeze, but after that, it was okay.”
Some say they get comfortable with themselves afterward, many never do. But however long it lasts, at some point, somewhere, you brush against this outsiderness– among geeks, it’s the one common rite of passage. A few carry the scars around with them for good. Sometimes they hurt themselves. Sometimes– rarely– they hurt other people. But if you’re lucky, you move past it, perhaps to a college where Others go. You find a community, a place where you’re welcome.
For the first time, you’re important, vital, on the inside; a citizen of an amazing new nation. You can instantly connect with the others like you. Being smart isn’t a liability; it’s usually the only thing that matters.
Whether you’re a programmer or Web designer or a developer, an artist, help-desk geek, or tech supporter, a filmmaker, or writer, you’re a part of the Geek Ascension. People need you. They hire you. They can’t afford to be contemptuous. Life isn’t a breeze, but it sure is different. You have an open invitation to what is, at the moment, the greatest party in the world: the Internet and the World Wide Web.
” —Jon Katz - Geeks: How Two Lost Boys Rode the Internet out of Idaho
“Schopenhauer, Kant, Nietzsche, naturally, I read all of those. I don’t respect them; I am just trying to remember some of those whose theories I soaked up in those years. These three, it’s said, laid the groundwork on which the Fascist and Nazi philosophy was built. I don’t respect them because it seems to me that most of their time was spent arguing about things that are not really important. They remind me of so many of the Negro “intellectuals,” so-called, with whom I have come in contact-they are always arguing about something useless.”
—The Autobiography of Malcolm X
“In other words we’re talking about an underground, which did exist in a different way during the Dark Ages among the mystical orders of the Church. And the purpose of this underground is to find out how to preserve the light, life, the culture. How to keep things living. You see, I keep thinking that what we need is a new language, a language of the heart, languages in the Polish forest where language wasn’t needed. Some kind of language between people that is a new kind of poetry, that’s the poetry of the dancing bee that tells us where the honey is. And I think that in order to create that language, you’re going to have to learn how you can go through a looking glass into another kind of perception, where you have that sense of being united to all things. And suddenly, you understand everything.”
—Andre, My Dinner With Andre
Deprogramming, Pt. 2: Ideologies
I’ve been reading The Tyranny of Dead Ideas (as you can see from those quotes). The author, Matt Miller, attempts to debunk some harmful ideas that are dominating our political realm today, and replaces them with some more productive ones. He does this from a centrist position, avoiding ideologies to advocate for a productive form of policy. This is interesting to me, especially related to my last big post, Deprogramming. I’ve had a few ideologies take ahold of my brain at various points in my life, and I’m done with that. While I’m sure Miller doesn’t get it all right, it’s a productive discussion and I really enjoyed the book.
I’ll close this post with the “Dead Ideas”, ideas that he says are no longer correct and are harming our nation and economy, and the “Destined Ideas”, ideas that are not yet in hold but he hopes will be eventually.
Today’s Dead Ideas:
- The Kids Will Earn More Than We Do
- Free Trade Is “Good” (No Matter How Many People Get Hurt)
- Your Company Should Take Care of You
- Taxes Hurt the Economy (and They’re Always Too High)
- Schools Are A Local Matter
- Money Follows Merit
Tomorrow’s Destined Ideas:
- Only Government Can Save Business
- Only Business Can Save Liberalism
- Only Higher Taxes Can Save The Economy (and the Planet)
- Only the (Lower) Upper Class Can Save Us from Inequality
- Only Better Living Can Save Sagging Paychecks
- Only a Dose of “Nationalization” Can Save Local Schools
- Only Lessons from Abroad Can Save American Ideals
“Human well-being depends on much more than material things. The sad, lonely rich man is commonplace. Good health is the obvious first determinant of a positive outlook on life. Recent research also shows that the more full our lives are with intimate relationships and companionship, and with engaging leisure and spiritual activities (everything from fishing and listening to music to visiting friends and going to church), the happier we tend to be at any level of income.”
—The Tyranny of Dead Ideas
“It’s this sense of luck that inspired the famous thought experiment described in the philosopher John Rawls’s 1972 book A Theory of Justice. The way to create the rules for a just society, Rawls argued, is to first imagine everyone in an “original position” behind a prebirth “veil of ignorance,” where no one knows what their own traits will be– whether they will be rich or poor, beautiful or plain, smart or less so, talented or not, healthy or unwell. Then you’d see what kind of social order people would agree to in advance was fair if they couldn’t know what place they themselves were destined to occupy in it. From this vantage point, of course, qualities we often consider part of “merit” are really traceable to luck, since a person’s rains, and to some extent their character (at least when they’re young), are shaped by factors over which they have no influence.”
—The Tyranny of Dead Ideas
Play
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Forget sticks, and stick with carrots instead. So says Brent Schulkin, founder of a fledgling movement of activist consumers employing a kind of reverse boycott that he calls a Carrotmob. The concept is simple: instead of steering clear of environmentally backward stores, why not reward businesses with mass purchases if they promise to use some of the money to get greener?
“Traditional activism revolves around conflict,” says Schulkin, 28, a San Francisco–based activist turned entrepreneur. “Boycotting, protesting, lawsuits — it’s about going into attack mode,” says the former Googler and onetime game developer. “What’s unique about a Carrotmob is that there are no enemies.” The focus is on positive cooperation, using the power of the casual consumer to help save the planet.
” —Shoppers, Unite! Carrotmobs Are Cooler than Boycotts
“There’s a professor at Oxford University who makes a compelling argument that if humans survive long enough to create conscious computers, it’s likely that all of us, right now, are simply historical simulations the computers created for their amusement. After playing with The Sims 3 — the latest sequel in the mega-popular Sims franchise — I believe that prof. Ich bin ein Sim.”
—The Sims 3: Getting Real
