Bernie Spring: two new views

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Tuesday March 15, 2016 · 3:22 PM PDT

2016/03/15 · 15:22

Out of the hospital, back at life!

We left things unresolved. From my hospital bed I was watching the Chicago protesters at the canceled Trump campaign event and asked some questions. This question, How are they organized?, connected, presented with an apparent answer: Bernie Spring.

Problem is, Bernie Spring is not much of an answer, not yet. It sounds everything like an answer while it is jangling through the twisted synaptic undergrowth of my personal biochemical brain jungle. Fat good that does anyone else. I need to sit down and put words to those flashing impulses, release the idea from my inner wild to the great outer wild we all share. I need to write a damn essay.

I hated essays; hated reading them, really hated writing them. Essay comes from the French verb essayer, to try. Practically it means "wall of text". Or, maybe, “boring”. Turns out the essay form is one of the most effective tools we have for translating the jangled bouncing signals of our thought processes into words that work for others. Damn. Essays are hard.

Bob Dylan sang about essays in 1966:

I got my black dog barkin’

Black dog barkin’

Yes it is now Yes it is now

Outside my yard

Yes, I could tell you what he means

If I just didn’t have to try so hard

( Obviously Five Believers, B side of Just Like a Woman )

Yep. Too hard. If I just didn’t have to try so hard.

Besides primary election Change last week I also noticed the same in a couple of essays. The essays discussed social problems with voices that seemed to capture that same mysterious Change force, that found a way to energize the well known, tightly structured essay form.

I’m not aiming at some double English major textual analysis point here, this is about what happened last week. Something is happening.

( This is part two of Bernie Spring. Part one is here )

Mr Fart's Favorite Colors

Catchy title! First up is an essay about security, about encryption and the FBI / Apple Computer / iPhone controversy swirling around the San Bernardino shooting. There are strong views and powerful players on both sides of the question. Should Apple backdoor your phone?

( -link- )

There is an answer here, a better answer, not a perfect answer. By the end of Mr F you will not only know what that answer is but why it is better. You will be able to explain it to yourself and to others.

Mr F clocks as a nine minute read. Buckle in. You will stroll through hopelessly hapless airport security theater at LAX, sit in a job interview at Google. You will follow a noob programmer on his progress through the Stations of the Programming Cross from first program through stages of developer to Silicon Valley security engineer. You will deal with internet trolls and government bureaucrats.

You will end up locked outside the reinforced cockpit doors on an Airbus A320 jet, desperately trying to break cockpit security before the suicidal copilot splashes the plane into the side of a mountain. This is a ride.

Mr F is a gem to read. It presents as an essay but the essay structure obeys new rules, just like the primary elections as shown on CNN last week. Change.

( Cable treasure John Oliver recently did a segment on FBI / Apple / iPhone. He comes to the same answer as Mr F, uses 18 minutes of high production value video assets to tell his story. )

Blood Ties

The second piece from last week speaks with more formal tones than Mr F. It speaks with a grownup voice, leans to the academy rather than the marketplace. Like Mr F it smashes constraints of the essay form, offers an exciting ride, a grownup’s roller coaster.

( -link- )

Ponce de Leon, the fountain of youth guy swaggering around the Carribean, turn of the 16th century, is Blood Ties’ central figure. The piece is history, genealogy, and language. The history, for me, is an utter revelation. I hope I'm in the minority here, but I honestly had no clue.

For the record let me present the entirety of my personal knowledge of the history of European settlement of the Caribbean:

In fourteen hundred and ninety two

Columbus sailed the ocean blue.

Pathetic. Now, having read Blood Ties, I am truly shamed. Lucky for me, personal ignorance is a problem with solutions.

Blood Ties is a longer piece. It brings together threads of stories related to the explorer de Leon, his travels, Alexander the Great, New York City today, Miami, Spain in the late 1400's. It is about history's legacy for us today, it is about words.

For our purposes are two parts here. The first shows us de Leon's experiences in the New World, the second moves from that world to the world of ideas. This second part is a more esoteric interest, follow as you will, it is extra credit here.

Stylistically Blood Ties flies straight and fast, brimming with vivid fact. It bounces around time and place like Billy Pilgrim from Slaughterhouse-Five, unstuck in time. I feel a connection with nonfiction voice of David Foster Wallace, the cool easy command of a wide ranges of fact.

Blood Ties opens like an action movie:

The trip across the ocean, from Cádiz to the first outpost in the New World, is twenty-two days long and disgusting.

We’re off! It is 1493 and Ponce de Leon has hitched a ride on Columbus' second voyage to the New World. Instead of nursery rhyme "ocean blue" he's living in a special hell of crowding, roaches, rats, lice, disease, and stench. And death. Lots and lots of death.

The story is just getting started. It gets worse.

For me, eye opening. It goes on and on, the swelling parade of Death’s many masques.

Read what you can, it’s long and while not essential information for life in 21st century America, we should have some notion of long story behind our culture.

Toward the end the author unloads this tidy bit about the fountain of youth myth, that hook by which I know the name Ponce de Leon some 600 years after his death. Turns out it was mostly a rumor started about de Leon by enemies in the royal court hoping to discredit him.

It would frustrate Juan Ponce’s political enemies to know that the very story they used to undermine him, to reduce him to a grown man chasing after Caribbean fairy tales, became essential in guaranteeing his legacy. His search for the fountain—and the smallest chance that he might have found it, unreported, before his death—became the most magical strain of his DNA. It elevated him above conquistador-as-hustler and into the metaphysical realm. It raised him above death, beyond the mundane fear of our own mortality.

Great. Yet another tidy bit of utter bullshit I've believed for a lifetime. This time it's not so bad, I'm guilty of bigger ignorances today.

We're getting close now. We've seen change coming, we've seen change happening in the campaign, in the world outside.

We've seen tools and techniques that can help us find the better answer when we have hard choices. This is exactly the problem presented to Democratic voters in this primary, a hard choice.

Next, we go back to the hospital and look at a medical choice strikingly like the Democratic primary dilemma. Perhaps the hospital context of choice will clarify that campaign choice.

Bernie Spring: first Sunday

blackDogBarking

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Sunday March 13, 2016 · 4:15 PM PDT

2016/03/13 · 16:15

Happy Spring Forward Sunday, a socio-technical efficiency mod to the national clock/calendar. Once useful, energy efficiency the goal, it prolly costs more than it’s worth these days. Another of modern life’s pains in the ass, easier to tolerate than fix.

Spring Forward Sunday is a symptom of a larger problem. Things that used to work just don’t seem to work as well any more. Been to college lately? There was a time when a college degree opened doors, meant big things. Definitely did not mean you were automatically friends for life with the financial office.

This steady downward pressure is natural, by the way. Gravity. Aging. Change.

Lots of changes happen in tiny bits at a pace so slow you don’t notice. Ever so ( almost ) never often something big happens. And you know what? Most of us miss that big change too. We’re busy, we’re tired, we have our routines — we have our ways. Change is painful, we don’t like pain. When it hurts we go back to bed.

Sometimes life won’t let you sleep when you go back to bed. Recently, for me, life decided to interrupt with a medical emergency in the wee hours, an ambo ride to the ER, another longer ambo ride, sharp clean knives and excellent drugs. This Tuesday past found me trapped in a hospital bed, wired for NASA-esque telemetry, tethered to an IV pole. My only contact with the world was a gimped wifi and bare bones ( cost efficient!! ) hospital cable. It takes a cohort of special constraints to get me to watch CNN on a Tuesday night. This is bad.

Stuck in miserable circumstances I witnessed first hand, in real time, a miracle; the Michigan Miracle. When the earliest returns showed a Sanders lead I shrugged, random distributions do funny things in the Short Run. When Sanders was still ahead as the returns edged into double digits I sat up. CNN was suddenly interesting. Something was happening.

CNN commentary was reliably unhelpful. They had their patter down, business was still usual. Their sources and satellite up links and fat internet pipes detected no disturbances in the force. From my shitty hospital cable I saw the world change.

wednesday

In Florida Senator Sanders and Secretary Clinton met for a debate in an hispanic forum, an event with unusually effective moderation assets. The candidates each delivered in their individual ways. Clinton has mastered the technical debate and she put on a clinic. She filibustered her clock, she parried questions with tolerable grace, fired off smothering final rejoinders to dampen Sanders applause lines, she applied audience management with the deft hand of an expert practitioner. Sanders innovated with hand gestures and shrugs to flag viewers to the Secretary’s rhetorical gamings. I noticed, CNN commentary did not. This was my first long look at his unique manner of engaging the questions, seeming almost to swallow and digest the incoming question before generating a response that rises from inside his torso, not from the top of his head.

End of the night the Florida audience rose to their feet to applaud … Senator Sanders. CNN didn’t notice. Change. What the fuck is going on?

thursday

The Republicans stage a debate of their own. Tonight Donald is New Donald, quiet, reasonable. This catches everyone off guard. CNN notices. They patter. One effect of quiet New Donald is that it shocks Ted Cruz into a moment of stunned silence. Wow. A miracle of a different color.

New Donald knows that something has happened. He saw it too. How that observation migrates across his unique brain cross wirings of Freudian id and life long privilege is a hard thing to estimate or articulate. I doubt even he could put it in words if for some reason he were so motivated but he sees what I’m seeing. Change.

friday

Secretary Clinton voluntarily praises the newly departed Nancy Reagan for Mrs Reagan’s efforts to bring the scourge of AIDS to the nation’s attention in the 1980’s. The statement is so wildly at odds with reality I’m surprised the Secret Service didn’t step in to shield her. What is happening? Secretary Clinton is bright, articulate, engaged in the world around her. She was bright, articulate, and engaged in the 1980’s too. She knows the score. She is distracted, she’s off her game. She sees change but, like me, doesn’t know wtf is happening. I’m in a hospital bed, she’s got a microphone in her face.

It’s pushing 7 pm local, CNN is getting ready to cover yet another Trump “speech” and I will look elsewhere for diversion. As I reach for the button they switch to a crowd scene from Chicago. Holy shit. There is a swirling mass of protesters inside the arena at the Trump site. Lots of protesters. An announcement, the “speech” is canceled. The show does not go on. Damn.

Something is happening. CNN talking resources are clueless. They are out of book, lost. They’ve long ago abandoned their primary skill, they no longer ask questions. Who is protesting? What are they protesting? The talkers don’t even ask the simple questions, the ones they can answer, the ones I can answer from my hospital bed. Are the protests organized? Kinda. There is no obvious hierarchy but there is some coordination, a sense of connection, which means a de facto organization. How is that happening? How do you de facto organize?

There it is.

How are they organized?

Now I know what has been happening.

Bernie Spring.

the Game today

The mass news communications Game delivers high bandwidth low cost information to a mass audience at efficient price points. It is hierarchical. Field operatives gather information at end points, push this info up to the central studio where it is abstracted and managed into broadcast format, pushed out onto the network and a mass audience of dedicated viewers. Producer, consumer.

event → reporter, camera → up link to studio → editing, condensing message → talking head → audience

Social media uses a different organizing structure, an inside out approach where nodes make connections, organize around other nodes, change contexts. Hierarchy requires a tight structure. It is efficient, but rigid. When it works it works quite well.

Networks are flexible, they can change, and adapt to change. Everyone can talk. This requires coordination but with built in tolerance this is manageable. Peers talk to peers.

user → user

Change has happened. This is not about one politician in one single campaign, it is about a lot more. It affects our lives in many ways that have nothing at all to do with politics. It is a part of life. This is a huge subject, a lifetime-big subject.

My original idea was to introduce the Change as presented by a couple of web articles I stumbled across this past week when the weak hospital wifi was doing its version of working. These articles stand out because they breath life into a tired and old format, the dreaded essay, using new ways of presenting the information payload we look for from the essay form. Two gems.

I’ll start here next time.

White is Right ... ( this time ): DKos 5 ++

blackDogBarking

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Sunday November 08, 2015 · 11:16 AM PST

2015/11/08 · 11:16

First thought on seeing DKos 5? Snow blindness. That’s not pleasant and doesn’t sound like much of an endorsement, but once the eye adjusts to the new brightness of the room it’s not as bad as it looks. It’s actually pretty nice.

Reading comments, there’s a lot of concern about the amount of white space, that there is an uncomfortable amount of white space. There are concerns about the legibility of the site, the new site is harder to read, it is too hard to read. First time through it is harder to read, all that blinding white.

The problem with the white space is not the whiteness, it is the emptiness. Empty space on a page is a very effective way to direct and focus attention. Readers’ attention, your attention, is the critical resource here, the resource to be managed, conserved, spent wisely. All that empty white space effectively directs attention to the fewer things left on the page, to the content of the articles. Practical, useful, emptiness.

DKos 4 has more structures on the page, boxes and barriers, compartments and columns all holding information and competing for my attention, my finite attention. DKos 5 has white space that I mostly ignore surrounding fewer simpler structures. More of my finite attention is available for the text of the articles, the content of the site. Less mind share leaks away.

Relax and read. The new site is more relaxed and easier to read once your attention controller remaps itself. This remapping will go fast because it is mostly learning to stop looking for things it was trained to find expressly so it could ignore them. Get used to the silence of white space, the silence of things you used to ignore.

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