Quinn Said

Most of the things I learned in the last ten years (like perl, what the hippocampus does, or how to build a ring flash) aren’t very useful to most people. But I learned many amazing, terrible, and funny lessons this last decade about the nature and doings of humans. Here are some, and may you come by this knowledge easier than I did.

• Busy is not the same thing as important, but it can sure seem that way
• If you want to see the future, don’t look at how people are using technology. Search out how they’re misusing it
• All people substitute belief for reality sometimes, and waste their time arguing with what is happening to them. Some people do this with business, some politics, some relationships, and some physics. This is how you get speculative bubbles, wars without end, horrendous breakups, and Darwin awards.
• The things you actively think will never happen to you are much more likely to happen to you than the things you just never considered at all.
• Just because everyone is doing it doesn’t mean the business world isn’t insane and stupid. It really is.
• Cultures can have nightmares. A Whole society can become sick, It can roil in somatic pain as its own subconscious tortures it. History records these times with confusion. They are disturbing and inexplicable moments that don’t seem to have a real cause. They’re no fun to live through, and living through them gives you no more insight than looking back on them. You just hope to get to the other side.
• Compassion, even for the very worst, costs nothing and opens up possibilities.
• It may be possible to forgive absolutely anything, and it may be necessary in order to survive. But to say you forgive someone before you can is a lie.
• Ten years ago I thought there was no such thing as a free lunch. But actually, they’re all free. “The sun pays all the bills.”
• I’ve been to Asia, Europe, North America, the Middle East, Africa, islands in the Caribbean, the Pacific, nations and states of wildly varying wealth and culture. Africa is different. Everywhere you go changes you, but Africa changes everything.
• Dreams can creep up on you and come true while you’re doing other things.
• Power and status are not as correlated with good decision making as I had hoped.
• You can’t love away illness.
• Some technologies will change your whole life for the better without you noticing, like text messaging, GPS, or spellcheck. Some will disrupt your life in ways you have no tools at all for dealing with, like the web vs newspapers or filesharing vs music labels, or when automatic spellcheck likes to correct your typos to say ‘incest’ when you meant to type ‘insect’.
• In the tech world you don’t have the luxury of believing your preferences. When you run up against a technology you don’t like, you have to figure out why you’re wrong. When you come up against one you love, you still have to figure out why you’re wrong.
• Storing a good collection of maxims, aphorisms, and proverbs in your head can actually get you through a lot.
• Most people explain their faults upfront, but it’s very hard to hear them while it will still make a difference.
• Ten years ago, I was in favor of Brinworld- radical transparency. Now my views are moderated, more complex. I thought it would usher in an age of tolerance, but I’ve learned that people can hold double standards in their heads I have no theory of mind for. But more importantly, I learned that privacy is vital for creativity. We need safe places to think strange thoughts. Sometimes they are what embarrass us, waste our time, or sink us to our lowest depths, but they are also the seeds of new worlds.
• People are about as smart as you tell them they are.
• You’re all geniuses.
• I never understood the capacity for addiction before I had my daughter. Now I’m pretty sure drugs and alcohol are just taking over the same circuits in addicts that would make me do anything for her.
• Humans have terrible memories. Most of the time, memories are just stories we make up about the past to explain how we see ourselves now. But memory is quite useful this way, and takes on an almost literary truth to make up for its factual error. However, it’s no way to measure or understand how we change over time, and it’s worthless for figuring out what happened.
• I have killed far too many ideas for being born infants instead of springing fully formed and battle ready from my forehead.
• There are people that just use a huge amount of toilet paper, and they seem to have nothing else in common, not bowel diseases or hygiene or so on. I have no idea what the hell they are doing with it. Perhaps that’s for the next 10 years.
• 30 is a great age, when you can start to relax and get some perspective.
• Graphic novels seem to make pretty good movies.
• Becoming an expert is the delightful process of learning enough to understand far less of your field of endeavor than you did when you started. These days it’s practically my main signal I am getting somewhere- a sense of my grain of knowledge in an ever widening sea of my ignorance.
• Whatever constraints, limits, or rules you come up with for humanity, there’s someone out there breaking them. And there’s a decent chance they’re blogging it.
• When humanity communicates instantaneously over vast distances and across all cultural and national boundaries, there’s almost nothing we can’t turn into porn. But it turns out porn isn’t the end of the world.
• Democracy doesn’t work very well anymore, if it ever did. The models I was given for how politics and policy work were completely false.
• The founding fathers were a bickering pack who largely hated each other. They spanned the political and cultural spectrum, and universally agreed on exactly nothing. They were rich, they were poor, they were monarchists, anarchists, aristocrats and demagogues. There were some saints and heros, but there were some downright evil people, and there were a few that were all of the above.
• This makes me wonder how the founders of the global network will be seen by history.
• Writing a first book is one of the hardest things a person can do.
• Minor tragedies always remain tragedies, but major ones can go either way.
• Most of the easy problems have been solved. The ones that look easy are hiding the most terrible complexities.
• Institutions are made entirely of humans, and all that implies.
• It is easy to forget that unsustainable things can’t go one forever, because you expect them to start failing as soon as you realize they are unsustainable. Instead I have found that stupid things can go on much longer than I thought they could.
• Unsustainable things are still unsustainable.
• Torturer, tortured, trainer, trainee, conqueror, conquered, these are all misleading distinctions. No one really comes back out of those rooms.
• You will likely reach a point when it seems life is not really your own, when it is filled with career, interests, family, obligations, and things. It will so architected, so set, you will believe you are trapped. You’re not. You can walk out anytime.

(Numbered by the minute. Tip for other Ignite speakers: I used text to speech to time the talk, which worked pretty well.)

0. Hi my name is Quinn, I write for a living. Some days I write more than others. I am not going to tell you how to be a good writer. There’s a lot of people much better at teaching that than I am, and it can’t be done in 5 minutes. There’s one thing they say can’t be taught even if you take years, and that’s how to open a vein. I figured years might be the wrong approach, and I’d see if I could do that in five minutes. First off- done right, writing is a risky business. When I say I’m a writer I mean I’m a thrill seeker in emotional hellholes. I’m like Steve Irwin but for the inner demons of humanity instead of crocodiles. There’s a reasons so many of us drink ourselves to death and eat gun barrels. But let’s say you still want to write. What does it mean to open a vein? Imagine for a moment a man with a gun to the head of your mother, and he’s going to shoot her if you don’t tell him exactly how your mom makes you feel,

1. really, all of it, the ambivalence and the irrational adoration and how that irrational adoration sometimes pisses you off. And he can tell, and you know he can. And your mom’s right there. That’s a little like the vulnerability of writing from the heart.
It is not just telling a factual truth, but your very own truth. I write because I like to tell the truth. It makes me more sure of my own existence. When I find something strange in the world, something you may fear or hate or just not know about, and I make you understand it, you are closer to me. Sometimes you can borrow passion on a subject from a person, but only if you care about the person. You never escape empathy, either you have to have it for yourself or for them. You never get away from confessing that you care, which means confessing not only that you can be hurt, but exactly how to hurt you.

2. The first barrier to good writing comes from the schoolyard, the first time a bully finds out something tender and teases you, and you learn you can be shamed by your peers, you learn to live in their heads to keep yourself safe, not your own. And you cannot write from anyone else’s head. When I don’t put my heart in my writing, I’m being insecure, and I’m talking down to you because I don’t trust you. Specifically, it’s the self protective arrogance of still not wanting to let the teasing sting, not wanting to take this risk that when I get off this stage tonight someone is going to say “That was inappropriate”, or “You’re just wrong.” or “We just don’t like that sort of thing here in New York, could you cease to exist now?” But none of that is as important as telling you how to get your meaning from your heart and your brain out your fingertips.

3. Start tonight, by blurting the truth to someone, pick a truth, and blurt it, come what may. and when you’ve walked off that cliff, you can rephrase it, to make damn sure they understand what you’re trying to tell them. Not to make it better, but to make damn sure they understand what you mean. A couple warnings: 1) When you are doing it right, it will never be good enough. There’s not a point where it’s finished, there’s a point where you can’t go on. 2) For many people, you can write about it or you can talk it out- talking out your feelings and verbally telling your stories is great for productive group therapy, not so good for writing. You can talk away your thunder. It’s cathartic and fun but it’s not writing. If you think all of this doesn’t apply to your python documentation, you may be right. But it applies as soon as you’re explaining. We think tech or science writing has no blood in it, but when it’s good it does. It’s there whenever you care more than you fear.

4. So if you want to write, if you want to really write, ask yourself, “Why do I care?” Why is this important enough to risk humiliation, ridicule, a broken heart, and madness? And when you answer that, you will know how to make us care. Words are barriers and conduits. Horribly and wonderfully, they are for the most part, throughout our lives, throughout history, all we really ever have of each other. They are the semi-permeable membranes of our minds, through which we touch and shape and do violence and love one another. Make them count. Write the truth. Thank you.

We live in a contracting world, with diminishing options to travel far from your home and meet people of unfamiliar backgrounds- if you’re a child.

With increasingly regimented time, homework starting in Kindergarten and ever-constricting public space children are sent a message the world is too full of dangers for them, that the world is not for them. In short, They are told their lives are too precious to be lived. If they aren’t, it seems to be they are told they aren’t precious, and being allowed into the world devalues them.

The irony is that it’s far less dangerous than it was when I was a child. I regularly rode my bike far and wide, explored up the local creek for hours with and without friends. I explored the city I lived in, which was not only Los Angeles, but LA in the 80s. I learned to steer clear of scary people. I learned how to navigate the roads, and how to talk to people. As a teenager I hung around the mall and snuck around the beach at night. I ran around Westwood, lost my wallet a few times and had to avoid the occasional civil unrest. I saw strange things my mother never did, and sometimes I even told her about them. I nearly got locked in a mausoleum one night. I used to bring my mother a flower from nearly every trip when I was very young. In fact, I would stress out about leaving the house without at least a dollar- the price of a carnation. I got into some trouble and had to call her a few times. She came and got me, and chewed me out, but I was out there again next week, still tromping out the steps of my childhood in all the wonderful and strange environs for LA- even hours spent swimming hard in the Pacific.

My six year old daughter is the most precious and wonderful thing in the world, but she is not a Ming vase. She’s entitled to the choice and freedom I have, even if she chooses a riskier life than I have, or a less risky one. She’s entitled to make informed choices about the level of risk she assumes, armed with an understanding of how to cope with situations as they arise, and how to analyze both the world around her and her level of comfort with it. We do our child a great disservice when we protect them from all risk and harm, as great as letting them go into the world unable to read. These experiences are the things that lead to the social skills and confidence that let them find their place in the world as adults. To prevent them from talking to strangers or explore strange places is as disabling as protecting them from reading books because they might get ideas from them.

Horribly, my social group is creating a construct whereby I can’t easily give my daughter her freedom without sending her the message that I don’t care about her. This is a first attempt to strike out against that. When enough parents are saying they restrict their children’s freedom out of love and responsibility, I have to defend my desire to let my kid experience new things- it’s not indifference and negligence. It’s being the kind of parent I would want to have, and putting her as a person above my own desire for comfort.

I won’t ever teach my daughter to not talk to strangers. I will teach her that context matters, and we will work together to learn how and when it is safe, and perhaps even safer than not. I won’t be teaching her to automatically trust anyone in a uniform. I’ll be teaching her that situations where a number of strangers are gathered together make even bad actors behave, when they know they’re being watched. I will not teach her to run to abstract authority figures when she’s in trouble, I will teach her to build up goodwill and social connections in her community, and to have a number of people always in the back of her mind she knows she can turn to.

I won’t be telling her there are bad people out there- I will tell her even good people can get sick from things like drugs, depression, or anger, and do bad things. I will give her the skills I can, and teach her above all to know herself and trust what she knows, and to seek help without shame where she needs it. I will talk to her about the consequences of her choices. I will hope that a few painful turns early on will inoculate her from big unconsidered choices as a teen or adult. I will be trustworthy for her, and I will show her trust.

At the end of all this I will- yes, possibly nauseous with fear- let her go. As far as possible and reasonable I will always be a resource for her, but I accept that role will diminish with time, that it’s even far diminished now from what it once was. I will always express my interest in her life, but her life truly belongs to her, just as much at 6 as 36. For now I am the steward of abilities and knowledge she doesn’t yet have, and where I make choices for her and limit her it should always be guided by giving her the benefit of my life experience as she makes the choices she can for herself. It’s not mine to choose what she wants and is good for her, but to help her keep safe from immediate, non-theoretical dangers and to give her tools to keep safe in as wide a set of circumstances as possible.

There are no guarantees. I can’t keep her completely safe, ensure she’s happy and that nothing bad happens to her. I know her heart will be broken, and that she will face loss and death in the fulness of time. I know she’ll get hurt in all sorts of ways. I know there is always a chance I could lose the most wonderful thing in my life, and I know that she could lose me. None of this is a reason to cower in our houses. That bit of safety isn’t worth trading the adventures of the world that filled my childhood, and I hope will fill hers.

I made the second call, just like I’d made the first.
“I miss you. I think I’ve made a mistake.”
He’s quiet. Finally, “I had to work very hard to get used to the idea of being without you.”
“And?”
“I got used to it.”