I read through the logo guidelines on Twitter’s new birdie. You’re not allowed to modify it or give it a speech bubble, presumably so no one mixes up your crazy rantings with the official crazy rantings of Twitter.
Predictably, I couldn’t resist. I will admit, I’d be fascinated to meet the person that can’t tell this from Official Twitter Communication. And check for a pulse.
The problem with betrayal is that it takes a long time to recognize if you’re not the sort that does it. Even then, it’s impossible to to take it in all at once, like fitting a strangely shaped and inscrutable stone into a place a little too small for it.
As with so many things, those who spot betrayal at once tend to be practitioners.
Here’s what you should have done. You should have said, basically, “Oh, don’t worry, this is a just a motorcade coming through in a few minutes. Go on back to your car, and you’ll be out of here in a jiffy.” You could have even added “Hope you feel better soon!” if you wanted to be cordial. I kind of remember police officers doing that, when I was a kid.
When I left my daughter and walked across 3rd Street I clearly didn’t know what was happening or why the street was closed. I didn’t pull out and just drive away as a courtesy to you, by the way, a courtesy I won’t make the mistake of extending to you again. I came up and told you I had a medical condition and I was worried about getting to a doctor’s appointment. Instead of telling me it would only be a few minutes, or even why the street was closed, you grabbed my arm and tried to hold me down. My concern immediately went from making my appointment to my scared shitless 9 year old, watching me struggle with the police across 3 lanes of 3rd street.
I told you my daughter was across the street; you ignored me, and while you told me to stand still, you still didn’t bother to tell me why you were tightening your grip on my arm and yanking me away from my daughter. I admit that when I told you again that my daughter was across the street from me I was probably getting louder. I don’t like being forcibly separated from my daughter when I don’t know what’s going on, and neither does she. Eventually, as this was turning into a full blown physical altercation, and my daughter was panicking and trying to figure out whether to run to her mother, I was reduced to screaming that I had to get back to my daughter before whatever was about to happen on this street happened, which you still hadn’t revealed to me. You let go, pushed me, and told me to stay with my daughter. I did in fact run over to my daughter and stay there.
Once again, all you ever had to say was “Don’t worry, this is only going to take a couple of minutes.” You certainly never had any reason to lay hands on me at all, much less in response to a worried question.
Now my daughter is terrified of you. It’s frustrating to know that if she’s ever lost or in trouble, instead of going to the police, she’s probably going to run and scream if an officer approaches her to help. All because she’s watched the police start physically assaulting and screaming at her mother for asking a question. Not a crime, or a crime scene, or even a protest, just asking a question about getting to the doctor’s office.
This feels like it should be a parody piece, some extreme of what policing would be become if it were not merely out of control, but non-sensical and random. Instead, it’s just a record of Tuesday.
He is a man who earns a living by sending others to the scaffold. He is the official purveyor to every Place de Grève. Not only that, he is a gentlemen with pretensions to style and literature, a fine speaker, or thinks he is, who if needs be will trot out a line or two of Latin before deciding on death, who tries to create an impression, who is fascinating to his personal sense of self-esteem – O woe! – who, where other people’s lives are at stake, has his models, his appalling examples to live up to, his classics, his Bellart, his Marchangy, like one poet has Racine and another Boileau. During the proceedings he fights on the guillotine’s side; it is his role, his profession. His summing-up is his work of literature, he decks it with metaphors, perfumes it with quotations; it has to be good for the audience, it has to appeal to the ladies. He has his stock of commonplaces that are still brand new to provincials, his ornamental turns of phrase, his affectations, his writerly refinements. He hates the simple word almost as much as the tragic poets of the school of Delille. Have no fear he will call things by their proper name. Bah! For each idea which would disgust you in its naked form, he has disguises complete with epithets and adjectives. He makes Monsieur Sanson presentable. He veils the blade. He blurs the bascule. He wraps the red basket in circumlocutions. You don’t know where you are any more. Everything is rose-tinted and respectable. Can you picture him at night in his study, at leisure, doing his best to work up the harangue that in six weeks’ time will have a scaffold built? Do you see him sweating blood to make the defendant’s head fit into the deadliest article of the criminal code? Do you see him sawing through a poor wretch’s neck with a badly made law? Do you see how he injects two or three poisonous passages into a muddle of tropes and synecdoches so that, with much ado, he can squeeze out, extract the death of a man from it? Is it not true that under the desk as he writes he probably has the executioner crouching at his feet in the shadows, and that he puts down his pen now and then to say to him, like a master to his dog: “Hush! Quiet now! You’ll get your bone!”
What’s more, in his private life this public servant might be a decent man, a good father, a good son, a good husband, a good friend – like it says on all the headstones in Père-Lachaise. Let us hope the day is coming when the law will abolish these doleful duties. At some point the very air of our civilization must wear out the death penalty.
-Victor Hugo, Circa 1929 in France, Last Week in America.
I called United Airlines today and changed my flight to go to the Share Conference in Belgrade at the end of April. I was greeted with this:
Really? Thanks for letting me know, creepy automated call center message!
Please note that when society gets this bizarrely authoritarian, we may be required to upload crazy shit like this.
Today I feel old.
I am drinking pu-er and eating an old apple
alone at night
I am remembering bread and butter
across a melamine table in a messy kitchen
The pauses, breaths caught, trapped in the throat like little butterfies
washed down with red wine
I am remembering hot New York slices
and tepid coffee
gulped down to the rhythm of a New York sidewalk
defensive against the terrible night to come
I am remembering water with an alkaline tang
and little oat bars, sticky, crumbling
in my dusty, dry hands
eaten against the journey, against the sun’s wrath
I am remembering a black olive stuck on every finger
eaten with giggles and milk moustaches
kisses delivered as wards against growing up
I am remembering two coffees
two sets of gloves resting on a table
defying the last train of the night
to go home without us
I have eaten my apple to a jagged core
I have drunk all my tea
I am patient
for tomorrow
A few weeks of ago I found myself telling a teenager “You’re officially old now. That was quick.” after he’d tweeted “I don’t even understand the Internet anymore”, merely because our tweet conversation had been picked up and redistributed by @sodomy_bot.
Srly, in this way I am younger than my temporally challenged friend– I totally get the internet doing that. It loves a potty mouth, often algorithmically. It has loved my potty mouth for well-nigh 20 years. Despite my advanced age and the fact that I’m not a “digital native” I’ve often had an intuitive feel for the net. I get the inversion of privacy, I see institutions being disrupted, I’ve had a great track record in both predicting and participating in this whole rise of the internet thang. It has felt like something of a home for me for most of my adult life. In the 90s I taught a five week course that was a fire hose of protocols, clients, and social conventions called “The Internet From The Ground Up.” We started with what a packet switching network was and why it might help in the event of nuclear war, and got through why you should never type in all caps and what ttfn stood for, and eventually we all even made a website in class. My students, who were the staff and faculty of my college, often looked as if I had beaten them with a bat made of pure information. But I believed the more context you had, the more the next thing the net did would make sense to you.
I still believe in that approach, and I think that’s what mostly kept me young in internet terms. Once you understand that there’s an architectural politics baked into technology design, it’s easy to look at the protocols and interfaces and say: I can see what will happen to the people that use this, and therefore the world they inhabit. It takes only a little understanding of human nature, largely unchanged in its dealings with sodomy since it began, to understand why humans would write a sodomy bot.
So it’s with some pause that I too must admit sometimes I don’t geddit, and that this is where I am internet old. Back in the day of the paleonet, publications as I knew them had a distinct personality. They had a voice you could count on, a topic area you could model in your head, and a tendency to respond to the world in predictable ways. They were like people, and some were even like friends. Wrapped up in the designation of some corporate entity was something I could treat like a distant human, a penpal I would never meet. This quality was, of course, deliberate, and the result of a careful set of professional techniques. Editorial meetings, house style books, longtime guardians worked hard to create the gestaltic imaginary friends that lived under publishing brands.
You can blame the speed of the net, the disintermediation of gatekeepers, but I think it’s at least as much the loss of the artifact of print that decohered things under the urls that should have been, damn it, my friends and enemies online. This brings me to my moment: a moment lost in transcendental reading, lifted off the page and into the world the author envisioned. I love it when that happens. The article was a beautiful, to the point of lyrical, piece on James Dempsey’s discovery of a lost work of E.E. Cummings, one of my favorite poets. I read through the whole thing off a link on twitter before looking at the URL and realizing it was The God Damned Awl.
I really don’t have a good impression of The Awl. I have read some truly turgid pieces of shit on its pages, and don’t get me started on Hairpin– Now Stupider for Girls! I even have good reasons, in my own mind, for not liking The Awl. It always felt like railing against the man when in this case the man had set up your trust fund. It was self indulgent, it was snarky for its own sake– and in a bad way. Every time I’d looked at it (which wasn’t often) or that one obnoxious friend had sent me a link to and Awl piece I’d been dissapointed. But here they had gone and betrayed me, by publishing one of the best articles I’ve read in ages. Did I have to love the Awl now? Did I have to visit it as a regular reader just to find out if they ever publish anything that wonderful again? I had no way of containing this new Awl in my head, or what I should do about it.
In the 90s I found myself explaining to companies that because of search engines there was no such thing as a reliable front door to their site, and that they would have to live with it. For them, everything was disjointed if they could not control the way their users would experience their site. Ad firms and old corporate entities balked at this lack of control. “Get used to it,” I told them, “this is the new world.” Well, to myself today I say, get used to it, Quinn, this is the new world. Publications are no longer gestalt monoliths. They’re messy, they are off message at the edges that butt up against search engines and timelines. They are more like poltergeists than old friends. Even in many cases, my old friends, moved online.
I read a wonderful debunking of Second Life by friend and sort-of occasional boss at ITP Clay Shirky years ago, and while I told him I loved the piece itself, I spent 90% of my time berating him for publishing it with Vallywag, at the time the most despised rumor rag in my little world of techies. Valleywag was truly awful, so why had Clay given it this legitimacy? Didn’t he understand that now everything else on the site looked more respectable? What The Awl made me realize that he hadn’t made Valleywag more respectable, and that my image of The Awl and Valleywag had never been real in the first place. Clay hadn’t made Valleywag any more believable because he wasn’t there when Valleywag was being stupid. It existed independent of any particular post, and yet because of that, not at all. Not the way magazines and newspapers had existed before, not with that singular voice, that one relatable attitude. There was nothing substantial for me to pass judgement on.
So The Awl can produce literary nonfiction art. My granny walker cognitive approach to this realization is what has made me, finally after kicking back hard for years, old. Getting to the party late. On the Internet important political movements come from /b/tards, E.E. Cummings comes from the Awl, and moral values are codified by lolcats, who in their own turn take their language from IRC script kiddies. At some point or another the Internet makes us all old.
While watching Twitter like a crack addicted monkey for new reviews of The Pale King I noticed an often retweeted aphorism:
Of course, pale doesn’t make any sense there, it’s a hale cobbler. “Pale cobbler” gets about 2,300 hits on Google, replace with hale, and you get three. On the other hand, the original quote is actually this:
Which gets you a healthy 11,220 hits on Google, and is attributed to 18th century Irish playwright Isaac Bickerstaffe. A further goog of Isaac Bickerstaff “pale cobbler” gets you only 173 people correctly attributing the incorrect quote.
The things I keep wondering about those first 2,000, and even more the 173 more learned attributers, is are they wondering what the heck the author meant by pale cobbler? And at what point on its putative growth curve will it pass the real quote, and become another “I could care less” aphoristic mind fuck?
This is the folk version of things like the medireview incident in the early 21st century, wherein a yahoo mail filter invented a new branch of historical academia that took a while to get caught and corrected. I suppose this has always happened, but in the age of the net it can happen and get corrected faster. I still wonder when enough of these, obviously enough laid along the paths of the net will get people to develop a healthy suspicion about the pale cobblers of the medireview when they come across them.
Thing-a-day 19: cable bag
Thing-a-day 20: Sleepy mint tea blend
Thing-a-day 21: Duct tape “cloth”
Thing-a-day 22: Thinking of Anonymous in Noisebridge graffiti
Thing-a-day 18: Bubble Bobble Skelly Monster. Ok. Done with perler beads now, I swear.