Category Archives: writing

1000 ledes n + 21: Nothing New Under the Sun

The present is always providing a stream of historical metaphors for the future. For instance, in the Exxon controlled algae fuel future, government heavies break down the doors of poor people at the company’s behest. People that can’t license Exxon’s patented algae, but provide their neighbors and villages with illicit energy, run the risk of violent arrest, property destruction, and having everything they own covered in bleach in the course of IP enforcement.

1000 Ledes n + 19: Compassion for the Unimaginable

Suicide is perhaps best understood as a particular kind of accident. It’s the confluence of a state of mind, circumstance and equipment. In a way, it’s no different than falling asleep behind the wheel. A life may end there, but it didn’t lead there. It could have been completely different if someone had chanced to walk in at the right moment. How could something that arbitrary define a whole human life?

New Years Day: Things I have learned in the last ten years

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 be so architected, so set, you will believe you are trapped. You’re not. You can walk out anytime.

How to Open a Vein redux (text as written)

(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.

1000 Ledes n + 7: Constraints/Consumption

Like so many algorithmic artistic explosions, Outbid will be hoist on its own technological pet-cock. Already the noun consumption is perverted by the digital diffidence- we no longer look thistles up in rubbishes.

Outbid is scriptable, therefore possibly obsolete, and not alone that way. My 1992 inutility to Utensil demonstrated that Daily too seemed to be consumed in the larger that possible noise genitor we came to know as the intersect.

1000 Ledes n + 15: The Writer’s Fallacy

Perhaps someday I can write something so perfect, so beautiful, something full of ideas so important, that you can’t help coming back to me and loving me forever.

Variations include the general artistic fallacy, and the performer’s fallacy. Some employ the absence of a mother’s love in place of a partner.