The post political political simulator

I'm watching the debate (or the aftermath of the debate) between the two remaining candidates of the ever present runup to the American elections. As always, I'm watching through the glass of my Janetter window - what I see is not the debate itself, but the ever flooding flood of tweets gushing by whenever anything worth mentioning happens.

That debate is evidently high up on things worth mentioning.

The thing that strikes me is that the quality of information that can be gathered from these debates is questionable, to say the least. It would seem that neither of the candidates are given the chance to expound their views and opinions in any amount of detail, and that the "debate" part of the debate consists of the participants saying demeaning things at each other rather than giving the audience any useful insight into what their respective platform actually consists of. Which is all very well and good for those watching the proceedings for the entertainment value, but for those of a more analytical bent it leaves something to be desired.

I'm not saying that we should replace these happenings with something else - they are, after all, evidently worth mentioning. But I'm thinking that those who are of a thinking sort might benefit from a complementary form of presentation from the candidates, which would lend itself closer to the careful analysis by any and all interested voters with any amount of spare time on their hands.

I am, of course, thinking that the candidates should stage a game of Civilization 5 in such a way that their play style reflects the general outline of their political platforms. If they, for example, are of the militarily enthusiastic kind, this would be reflected in the building and maintaining of a strong army, and by the enactment of policies benefitting the military in various ways. And, conversely, a stronger focus on developing the domestic economic infrastructure would be clearly visible to all who would watch the gameplay of a candidate playing with such a focus.

There is to my mind a strong chance that such a demonstration of a candidates political views would convey just as much - or even more - information to the voters than the methods in use today. Rather than being limited to judging the actions undertaken by a single individual in a single social situation, the voters would have access to a wealth of information about how the candidate would manage war, peace, diplomacy, domestic spending, the advance of science and a host of other political issues.

A slight variation upon this theme would be to use the classic game Alpha Centauri in the same manner. This would have the benefit of adding the selection of an ideological faction as a factor to the analysis - those who beeline for the militaristic Spartans take a different approach to everything than those who play the Gaians. (I myself would, of course, play the Data Angels. For obvious reasons.)

As we move into a newer world, it becomes ever more important to consider alternative ways of presenting complex information to the public. The debate format might be the ol' reliable when it comes to candidates showing the world how they stand in relation to each other, but as my reading of my Twitter feed shows, it does not convey the amount of clear information needed for the public to make an informed choice about their candidates. It rather makes people tired of the whole process, and more than one person has expressed a sincere tiredness about the whole ordeal. Which, in truth, is the opposite of wanting to think longer and harder about the issues at hand.

There are other ways. We have the technology to make it better.

Let's remix politics, shall we?

Context is king

The essence of reading is not the words you are reading. It is the spending of time in the presence of the ideas that is presented in and through the words - the words give you a very valid excuse indeed to ponder things that might otherwise never be excusable.

This is brought home to me very clearly while reading Neal Stephenson's The Baroque Cycle, an epic tale of some three thousand pages about the economic, social and cultural shifts of the world at the turn of the seventeenth century. The point of it all is not that interesting things happen - more often than not, nothing in particular happens as the text goes on and on. The interesting part is not what's happening, but the context in which the things that do happen happen in.

Which means that there's a lot of idle chatter about nothings, while the wider context of the world is laid out at length and in detail. A simple stroll along a river bank turns into an umpteen pages long rumination about the state of the global system of commerce at the times. On the surface, it's just two persons walking along a river talking about this and that; in and with context, there's a lot going on for those who takes the time to notice.

Which, of course, gives us as readers ample time and opportunity to spend time with the ideas of the times, with the added bonus of having all of these ideas put into context for us. The content serves as an excuse for the content. And a good one, at that.

The one thing we readers might find in short supply is patience. But like all epic endeavors, the reward for persevering through page after page of nothing happening is an understanding of where the world of today came from. 

This spending of time with an idea is not only something exclusive to what a reader does. It's also very present in what a writer or a blogger does - gives the readers a chance to spend time with the ideas in mind, and to get a sneak peek into the context of these same ideas. Regardless of what we have to say is new or not - the content is not the point, as it were.

This goes for everything we write. There's no "just saying it straight and simple" - everything we do brings along context, and the fact that we are doing it is cluing our readers in to exactly what the context of our thoughts might be.

Which is why I always tell people to write about anything that comes to mind. It does not matter what - your readers are more likely to be more interested in how you view things than in the things themselves.

If you happen to be a blogger, this applies very much to you. You may think you write about your day at work, but you are in fact writing very much more than that. And I encourage you to keep at it.

We all need those excuses to think every once and a while, after all.

Tautologies as rhetorical devices

A tautology is a statement that states itself. For instance, that last statement is somewhat of a tautology, since a tautology is a tautology, ie a statement where one says that A is A.

For some reason, the one example everyone use to demonstrate what a tautology is, is that an unmarried man is a bachelor. One can clearly see that "an unmarried man" and "a bachelor" amounts to the same thing - A is A. Saying A twice does not amount to A being A twice as much as if it had only been said once - the relation between A and A remains identical, as it were.

Philosophers love these kinds of relations. They don't have to be proven empirically - they just follow from a proper understanding of definitions. It's neat, orderly and proper. One can depend on tautologies and the intricate relations of implicit definitions that follows from them.

Definitions are solid things. Once they are penned, they remain.

You know something that is not neat, orderly and proper? Rhetorical situations. They tend to be the opposite - messy, disorderly and improper. And, moreover, they tend to not give too much credence to what the implicit logic of grammar and language has to say behind the scenes - there's too much going on to really give the participants time to ponder exactly what makes "it" rain in the sentence "it is raining".

There is, in fact, enough going on in a single social moment to fill several descriptive pages of  descriptions. Just to mention a few factors going on: who's talking, to whom, about what, from what position, in what role, for what reason, with what credibility, with how much ethos, with - the list goes on for quite some time. And this is just for one singular moment - stretch it out in time, and it will become infinitely more messy and hard to relate.

This is important. This is the difference between philosophers and rhetoricians. The former act and perform in the eternalities of the good, true and beautiful. The latter act in the fleeting moment of the moment - and they act through speech acts.

Which brings us to tautologies. They don't add anything new semantically to the context - that bachelor is still unmarried, much to his chagrin. They do however add something social to the context - merely by the fact that the speaker speaks.

It does not matter what's being said. The fact that something is being said at all carries with it an enormous amount of implications - even if it's just stating the obvious.

It follows, then, that there is a wide array of uses for tautologies. An obvious one being that you mark yourself as a participant of the discussion - you are talking, and therefore take part of/in the interaction as a talker.

I'm not going to bore you with a list of specific situations. The point I'm trying to get across here is that there is a difference between what is semantic and what is social, and that the one sometimes has little or no bearing on the other. And that you will want to ponder this difference as you go about your daily life taking part of various social situations. Is it more important that you say the right specific thing, or that you're saying something in general in the right context?

A is A. And then it becomes an excuse to say something else.

I leave you to your own devices in determining what that 'something else' might be. -

Why I am annoyed with Anonymous

One would be charitable if one said that the relation between the Pirate movement and Anonymous is complicated. On the one hand, there is an unmistakably shared root - we could postpone the lengthy definition of this root by simply calling it "internet culture". On the other hand, there is a definite tendency on the part of the pirates to view Anon as that idiot relative who with random precision manages to do the most unexpected of stupid things at the worst possible moments.

Especially at those very moments.

Anons usually respond by saying that pirates are somewhat of a bore when these sentiments are aired. Which, in a sense, is true; planning and executing long term strategies for achieving realistic copyright and patent reform by feat of talking endlessly at the public opinion and with various interested parties - somehow includes less immediate gratification than doing random pointless overhyped DDoS attacks on arbitrarily chosen targets.

Somehow.

The reason I'm bringing this up right now is a piece of local developments. Rick wrote a summary of what happened, should you want the longer version; the long and the short of it is that a police raid took out a torrent site and generated a lot of political buzz of the good kind. The technical term for this is a "lucky break", and right about here Anonymous enters the picture.

You see, around the same time as this raid happened, some sort of unrelated technical jiffy over at the Pirate Bay took their site offline as well. Which was all manners of bad timing. Anonymous, not being the most patient and studious of non-organizations, immediately connected their paranoid dots and set out to revenge DDoS everything that moved.

I'm not sure what was accomplished by temporarily taking down the central bank of Sweden's website, but they nevertheless did it. And a couple of other seemingly random web sites that looked official, for good measure.

This in and of itself was no big deal. DDoS attacks happen to you just about every day once you reach a certain size or fame, and is to be expected by larger organizations. (Even the Pirate Party of Sweden has had its fair share of it at various times.) It happens, and then it doesn't happen anymore, and everything goes back to normal for everyone (except the computer security guys, who just might get those requests for bigger budgets approved a bit faster).

To give you a reference point: a DDoS attack is a computerized version of having a large number of people calling the same number over and over again until the phone system can't take the load any more. There's no real "hacking" involved in it, and the technical skill involved is akin to pressing the redial on a cell phone. No master hackery required.

What is a big deal is how this overhyped prank got picked up by the national news media. If I were a kind person, I'd say they had a momentary lapse of journalistic sensibility and bought into the hype in a moment of publishing frenzy. If I were a more impartial observer, I'd say they carried on as usual, and thus once again used the kind of language once reserved for such occasions as the reemergence of a fully communist Soviet Union with an unmistakable interest in annexing nearby territories.

If you are the kind of reader who trusts your morning paper, you suddenly "know" that the country of Sweden is under a brutal siege by a mysterious international hacker group by the name of Anonymous.

Remember what I said before about strategic long term reform efforts? This is not conducive to such efforts.

In fact, having the general public up in arms about the Dangerous Hackers could easily be called something very close to the opposite of conducive to such efforts. Which means that we of the political bent have to go from good buzz mode to crisis management mode, which is very much the opposite of a good time.

If this had only happened this one time, I might have shrugged it off as a onetime thing. But it has happened before. It. Has. Happened. Before. And the general pattern of it is that I and my fellow pirates are starting to become very annoyed at these random acts of unstrategic counterproductivity.

The charitable way to summarize the Pirate movement's attitude towards Anonymous is to say that it's complicated. The more honest way is to say there's a wish that these kids go play somewhere where they'll not make too much of a mess of things.

Dear Anonymous: we're expecting you. You are mentioned in our crisis management folders, several unforgettable times. So you'll have to forgive me when I say that you might want to rethink your approach to how to make the world a better place.

You're not doing it right now. You're not even doing it right, whatever it is you're doing.

Holy reminders

Remember that fence I talked about a couple of weeks ago? The one which had had a hole in it since time immemorial, and then suddenly one day had a fixed hole in it?

Turns out that the fix didn't last that long. And the fence now sports a brand new shiny absence of fence in just about the same place as before.

No one is less surprised than I am. But it does serve as a reminder that there are some problems that really don't need to be fixed, and that there is a certain wisdom in knowing when to mend and when to make amends.

Sharing the fait accompli

I firmly believe that piracy will be a non-issue in about twenty years time. Not because of any massive political shifts, but because I and my fellow generational peers will be in our forties by then.

And, by feat of being somewhat contemporary, the internet.

I base this on the fact that piracy is a very hard issue to explain to kids who weren't around when the internet was a New and Strange thing. To those who were born only recently, it has always been there, just like electricity has always been there for us slightly older people. And just like there is an inbuilt absurdity to the claim that electricity is fatal to the candle industry, so the kids will view the claim that the internet is fatal to the culture industry.

To them, the internet is just a fact of nature. And the fact that just about any song or movie can be found, downloaded and shared on the internet comes as natural as the fact that birds migrate - one might marvel at the sight of it, but to question its political feasibility is a very odd thing to do.

And trying to stop it is an even stranger thing. Like trying to regulate the tides.

The very straightforward thing is that things can't be New and Strange forever. The internet might have been that ten years ago, but that was ten years ago. We now live ten years later, and have had ten years to incorporate it into our everyday lives. Which we have - irrevocably.

It's too late to say that the internet will change our lives. The bigger change at this point would be an attempt to remove the internet from the equation.

Candles did not disappear because of electricity, and culture will not disappear because of the internet. Why would it? There's more of it around than there has ever been! Available at our fingertips, just waiting for us to remember that we want to experience it again. And the only reason anyone calls it "piracy" is because that's what it was called when they were kids.

Today, this is called is to share things.

It would seem times are changing. Let's change with them, shall we?

Antispace, antitheory, antithesis

Consider the parking lot. Or parking space in general.

Parking space has two modes. Occupied or free. There is no middle ground - it's either in use or in potential use.

This is seen most clearly if and when the space is used for anything that is not the storage of cars. There is almost no need to explain this point - just imagine someone taking up space in a busy parking lot. If you are even a moderately invested car user, the anger you most likely feel at this stupid wastage is enough to make any theory somewhat overkill. And brutally irrelevant.

Wasting precious parking space is as close to a modern sin as one can get.

Yet unused parking space is just space. Antispace. The absence of everything else. The active non-usage of something that could potentially be anything.

It is possible to build a very intricate theoretical framework around the wasted space of the unused parking lot. It would probably be very interesting, too, were it not for that anger that any notion of there not being enough parking space instantly produces.

There is, after all, only theory and anti-theory. The middle ground seems to be as elusive as a somewhat occupied parking space. -