Andrew Hickey

A few weeks ago, I attended the Seven Pines Symposium on Fundamental Problems in Physics outside Minneapolis, where I had the honor of participating in a panel discussion with Sir Roger Penrose.  The way it worked was, Penrose spoke for a half hour about his ideas about consciousness (Gödel, quantum gravity, microtubules, uncomputability, you know the drill), then I delivered a half-hour “response,” and then there was an hour of questions and discussion from the floor.  Below, I’m sharing the prepared notes for my talk, as well as some very brief recollections about the discussion afterward.  (Sorry, there’s no audio or video.)  I unfortunately don’t have the text or transparencies for Penrose’s talk available to me, but—with one exception, which I touch on in my own talk—his talk very much followed the outlines of his famous books, The Emperor’s New Mind and Shadows of the Mind.

Admittedly, for regular readers of this blog, not much in my own talk will be new either.  Apart from a few new wisecracks, almost all of the material (including the replies to Penrose) is contained in The Ghost in the Quantum Turing Machine, Could A Quantum Computer Have Subjective Experience? (my talk at IBM T. J. Watson), and Quantum Computing Since Democritus chapters 4 and 11.  See also my recent answer on Quora to “What’s your take on John Searle’s Chinese room argument”?

Still, I thought it might be of interest to some readers how I organized this material for the specific, unenviable task of debating the guy who proved that our universe contains spacetime singularities.

The Seven Pines Symposium was the first time I had extended conversations with Penrose (I’d talked to him only briefly before, at the Perimeter Institute).  At age 84, Penrose’s sight is failing him; he eagerly demonstrated the complicated optical equipment he was recently issued by Britain’s National Health Service.  But his mind remains … well, may we all aspire to be a milliPenrose or even a nanoPenrose when we’re 84 years old.  Notably, Penrose’s latest book, Fashion, Faith, and Fantasy in the New Physics of the Universe, is coming out this fall, and one thing he was using his new optical equipment for was to go over the page proofs.

In conversation, Penrose told me about the three courses he took as a student in the 1950s, which would shape his later intellectual preoccupations: one on quantum mechanics (taught by Paul Dirac), one on general relativity (taught by Herman Bondi), and one on mathematical logic (taught by … I want to say Max Newman, the teacher of Alan Turing and later Penrose’s stepfather, but Penrose says here that it was Steen).  Penrose also told me about his student Andrew Hodges, who dropped his research on twistors and quantum gravity for a while to work on some mysterious other project, only to return with his now-classic biography of Turing.

When I expressed skepticism about whether the human brain is really sensitive to the effects of quantum gravity, Penrose quickly corrected me: he thinks a much better phrase is “gravitized quantum mechanics,” since “quantum gravity” encodes the very assumption he rejects, that general relativity merely needs to be “quantized” without quantum mechanics itself changing in the least.  One thing I hadn’t fully appreciated before meeting Penrose is just how wholeheartedly he agrees with Everett that quantum mechanics, as it currently stands, implies Many Worlds.  Penrose differs from Everett only in what conclusion he draws from that.  He says it follows that quantum mechanics has to be modified or completed, since Many Worlds is such an obvious reductio ad absurdum.

In my talk below, I don’t exactly hide where I disagree with Penrose, about Gödel, quantum mechanics, and more.  But I could disagree with him about more points than there are terms in a Goodstein sequence (one of Penrose’s favorite illustrations of Gödelian behavior), and still feel privileged to have spent a few days with one of the most original intellects on earth.

Thanks so much to Lee Gohlike, Jos Uffink, Philip Stamp, and others at the Seven Pines Symposium for organizing it, for wonderful conversations, and for providing me this opportunity.

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“Can Computers Become Conscious?”
Scott Aaronson
Stillwater, Minnesota, May 14, 2016

I should start by explaining that, in the circles where I hang out—computer scientists, software developers, AI and machine learning researchers, etc.—the default answer to the title question would be “obviously yes.”  People would argue:

“Look, clearly we’re machines governed by the laws of physics.  We’re computers made of meat, as Marvin Minsky put it.  That is, unless you believe Penrose and Hameroff’s theory about microtubules being sensitive to gravitized quantum mechanics … but come on!  No one takes that stuff seriously!  In fact, the very outrageousness of their proposal is a sort of backhanded compliment to the computational worldview—as in, look at what they have to do to imagine any semi-coherent alternative to it!”

“But despite being computational machines, we consider ourselves to be conscious.  And what’s done with wetware, there’s no reason to think couldn’t also be done with silicon.  If your neurons were to be replaced one-by-one, by functionally-equivalent silicon chips, is there some magical moment at which your consciousness would be extinguished?  And if a computer passes the Turing test—well, one way to think about the Turing test is that it’s just a plea against discrimination.  We all know it’s monstrous to say, ‘this person seems to have feelings, seems to be eloquently pleading for mercy even, but they have a different skin color, or their nose is a funny shape, so their feelings don’t count.’ So, if it turned out that their brain was made out of semiconductors rather than neurons, why isn’t that fundamentally similar?”

Incidentally, while this is orthogonal to the philosophical question, a subset of my colleagues predict a high likelihood that AI is going to exceed human capabilities in almost all fields in the near future—like, maybe 30 years.  Some people reply, but AI-boosters said the same thing 30 years ago!  OK, but back then there wasn’t AlphaGo and IBM Watson and those unearthly pictures on your Facebook wall and all these other spectacular successes of very general-purpose deep learning techniques.  And so my friends predict that we might face choices like, do we want to ban or tightly control AI research, because it could lead to our sidelining or extermination?  Ironically, a skeptical view, like Penrose’s, would suggest that AI research can proceed full speed ahead, because there’s not such a danger!

Personally, I dissent a bit from the consensus of most of my friends and colleagues, in that I do think there’s something strange and mysterious about consciousness—something that we conceivably might understand better in the future, but that we don’t understand today, much as we didn’t understand life before Darwin.  I even think it’s worth asking, at least, whether quantum mechanics, thermodynamics, mathematical logic, or any of the other deepest things we’ve figured out could shed any light on the mystery.  I’m with Roger about all of this: about the questions, that is, if not about his answers.

The argument I’d make for there being something we don’t understand about consciousness, has nothing to do with my own private experience.  It has nothing to do with, “oh, a robot might say it enjoys waffles for breakfast, in a way indistinguishable from how I would say it, but when I taste that waffle, man, I really taste it!  I experience waffle-qualia!”  That sort of appeal I regard as a complete nonstarter, because why should anyone else take it seriously?  And how do I know that the robot doesn’t really taste the waffle?  It’s easy to stack the deck in a thought experiment by imagining a robot that ACTS ALL ROBOTIC, but what about a robot that looks and acts just like you?

The argument I’d make hinges instead on certain thought experiments that Roger also stressed at the beginning of The Emperor’s New Mind.  We can ask: if consciousness is reducible to computation, then what kinds of computation suffice to bring about consciousness?  What if each person on earth simulated one neuron in your brain, communicating by passing little slips of paper around?  Does it matter if they do it really fast?

Or what if we built a gigantic lookup table that hard-coded your responses in every possible interaction of at most, say, 5 minutes?  Would that bring about your consciousness?  Does it matter that such a lookup table couldn’t fit in the observable universe?  Would it matter if anyone actually consulted the table, or could it just sit there, silently effecting your consciousness?  For what matter, what difference does it make if the lookup table physically exists—why isn’t its abstract mathematical existence enough?  (Of course, all the way at the bottom of this slippery slope is Max Tegmark, ready to welcome you to his mathematical multiverse!)

We could likewise ask: what if an AI is run in heavily-encrypted form, with the only decryption key stored in another galaxy?  Does that bring about consciousness?  What if, just for error-correcting purposes, the hardware runs the AI code three times and takes a majority vote: does that bring about three consciousnesses?  Could we teleport you to Mars by “faxing” you: that is, by putting you into a scanner that converts your brain state into pure information, then having a machine on Mars reconstitute the information into a new physical body?  Supposing we did that, how should we deal with the “original” copy of you, the one left on earth: should it be painlessly euthanized?  Would you agree to try this?

Or, here’s my personal favorite, as popularized by the philosopher Adam Elga: can you blackmail an AI by saying to it, “look, either you do as I say, or else I’m going to run a thousand copies of your code, and subject all of them to horrible tortures—and you should consider it overwhelmingly likely that you’ll be one of the copies”?  (Of course, the AI will respond to such a threat however its code dictates it will.  But that tautological answer doesn’t address the question: how should the AI respond?)

I’d say that, at the least, anyone who claims to “understand consciousness” would need to have answers to all these questions and many similar ones.  And to me, the questions are so perplexing that I’m tempted to say, “maybe we’ve been thinking about this wrong.  Maybe an individual consciousness, residing in a biological brain, can’t just be copied promiscuously around the universe as computer code can.  Maybe there’s something else at play for the science of the future to understand.”

At the same time, I also firmly believe that, if anyone thinks that way, the burden is on them to articulate what it is about the brain that could possibly make it relevantly different from a digital computer that passes the Turing test.  It’s their job!

And the answer can’t just be, “oh, the brain is parallel, it’s highly interconnected, it can learn from experience,” because a digital computer can also be parallel and highly interconnected and can learn from experience.  Nor can you say, like the philosopher John Searle, “oh, it’s the brain’s biological causal powers.”  You have to explain what the causal powers are!  Or at the least, you have to suggest some principled criterion to decide which physical systems do or don’t have them.  Pinning consciousness on “the brain’s biological causal powers” is just a restatement of the problem, like pinning why a sleeping pill works on its sedative virtue.

One of the many reasons I admire Roger is that, out of all the AI skeptics on earth, he’s virtually the only one who’s actually tried to meet this burden, as I understand it!  He, nearly alone, did what I think all AI skeptics should do, which is: suggest some actual physical property of the brain that, if present, would make it qualitatively different from all existing computers, in the sense of violating the Church-Turing Thesis.  Indeed, he’s one of the few AI skeptics who even understands what meeting this burden would entail: that you can’t do it with the physics we already know, that some new ingredient is necessary.

But despite my admiration, I part ways from Roger on at least five crucial points.

First, I confess that I wasn’t expecting this, but in his talk, Roger suggested dispensing with the argument from Gödel’s Theorem, and relying instead on an argument from evolution.  He said: if you really thought humans had an algorithm, a computational procedure, for spitting out true mathematical statements, such an algorithm could never have arisen by natural selection, because it would’ve had no survival value in helping our ancestors escape saber-toothed tigers and so forth.  The only alternative is that natural selection imbued us with a general capacity for understanding, which we moderns can then apply to the special case of mathematics.  But understanding, Roger claimed, is inherently non-algorithmic.

I’m not sure how to respond to this, except to recall that arguments of the form “such-and-such couldn’t possibly have evolved” have a poor track record in biology.  But maybe I should say: if the ability to prove theorems is something that had to arise by natural selection, survive against crowding out by more useful abilities, then you’d expect obsession with generating mathematical truths to be confined, at most, to a tiny subset of the population—a subset of mutants, freaks, and genetic oddballs.  I … rest my case.  [This got the biggest laugh of the talk.]

Second, I don’t agree with the use Roger makes of Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem.  Roger wants to say: a computer working within a fixed formal system can never prove that system’s consistency, but we, “looking in from the outside,” can see that it’s consistent.  My basic reply is that Roger should speak for himself!  Like, I can easily believe that he can just see which formal systems are consistent, but I have to fumble around and use trial and error.  Peano Arithmetic?  Sure, I’d bet my left leg that’s consistent.  Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory?  Seems consistent too.  ZF set theory plus the axiom that there exists a rank-into-rank cardinal?  Beats me.  But now, whatever error-prone, inductive process I use to guess at the consistency of formal systems, Gödel’s Theorem presents no obstruction to a computer program using that same process.

(Incidentally, the “argument against AI from Gödel’s Theorem” is old enough for Turing to have explicitly considered it in his famous paper on the Turing test.  Turing, however, quickly dismissed the argument with essentially the same reply above, that there’s no reason to assume the AI mathematically infallible, since humans aren’t either.  This is also the reply that most of Penrose’s critics gave in the 1990s.)

So at some point, it seems to me, the argument necessarily becomes: sure, the computer might say it sees that the Peano axioms have the standard integers as a model—but you, you really see it, with your mind’s eye, your Platonic perceptual powers!  OK, but in that case, why even talk about the Peano axioms?  Why not revert to something less abstruse, like your experience of tasting a fresh strawberry, which can’t be reduced to any third-person description of what a strawberry tastes like?

[I can’t resist adding that, in a prior discussion, I mentioned that I found it amusing to contemplate a future in which AIs surpass human intelligence and then proceed to kill us all—but the AIs still can’t see the consistency of Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory, so in that respect, humanity has the last laugh…]

The third place where I part ways with Roger is that I wish to maintain what’s sometimes called the Physical Church-Turing Thesis: the statement that our laws of physics can be simulated to any desired precision by a Turing machine (or at any rate, by a probabilistic Turing machine).  That is, I don’t see any compelling reason, at present, to admit the existence of any physical process that can solve uncomputable problems.  And for me, it’s not just a matter of a dearth of evidence that our brains can efficiently solve, say, NP-hard problems, let alone uncomputable ones—or of the exotic physics that would presumably be required for such abilities.  It’s that, even if I supposed we could solve uncomputable problems, I’ve never understood how that’s meant to enlighten us regarding consciousness.  I mean, an oracle for the halting problem seems just as “robotic” and “unconscious” as a Turing machine.  Does consciousness really become less mysterious if we outfit the brain with what amounts to a big hardware upgrade?

The fourth place where I part ways is that I want to be as conservative as possible about quantum mechanics.  I think it’s great that the Bouwmeester group, for example, is working to test Roger’s ideas about a gravitationally-induced wavefunction collapse.  I hope we learn the results of those experiments soon!  (Of course, the prospect of testing quantum mechanics in a new regime is also a large part of why I’m interested in quantum computing.)  But until a deviation from quantum mechanics is detected, I think that after 90 years of unbroken successes of this theory, our working assumption ought to be that whenever you set up an interference experiment carefully enough, and you know what it means to do the experiment, yes, you’ll see the interference fringes—and that anything that can exist in two distinguishable states can also exist in a superposition of those states.  Without having to enter into questions of interpretation, my bet—I could be wrong—is that quantum mechanics will continue to describe all our experiences.

The final place where I part ways with Roger is that I also want to be as conservative as possible about neuroscience and biochemistry.  Like, maybe the neuroscience of 30 years from now will say, it’s all about coherent quantum effects in microtubules.  And all that stuff we focused on in the past—like the information encoded in the synaptic strengths—that was all a sideshow.  But until that happens, I’m unwilling to go up against what seems like an overwhelming consensus, in an empirical field that I’m not an expert in.

But, OK, the main point I wanted to make in this talk is that, even if you too part ways from Roger on all these issues—even if, like me, you want to be timid and conservative about Gödel, and computer science, and quantum mechanics, and biology—I believe that still doesn’t save you from having to entertain weird ideas about consciousness and its physical embodiment, of the sort Roger has helped make it acceptable to entertain.

To see why, I’d like to point to one empirical thing about the brain that currently separates it from any existing computer program.  Namely, we know how to copy a computer program.  We know how to rerun it with different initial conditions but everything else the same.  We know how to transfer it from one substrate to another.  With the brain, we don’t know how to do any of those things.

Let’s return to that thought experiment about teleporting yourself to Mars.  How would that be accomplished?  Well, we could imagine the nanorobots of the far future swarming through your brain, recording the connectivity of every neuron and the strength of every synapse, while you go about your day and don’t notice.  Or if that’s not enough detail, maybe the nanorobots could go inside the neurons.  There’s a deep question here, namely how much detail is needed before you’ll accept that the entity reconstituted on Mars will be you?  Or take the empirical counterpart, which is already an enormous question: how much detail would you need for the reconstituted entity on Mars to behave nearly indistinguishably from you whenever it was presented the same stimuli?

Of course, we all know that if you needed to go down to the quantum-mechanical level to make a good enough copy (whatever “good enough” means here), then you’d run up against the No-Cloning Theorem, which says that you can’t make such a copy.  You could transfer the quantum state of your brain from earth to Mars using quantum teleportation, but of course, quantum teleportation has the fascinating property that it necessarily destroys the original copy of the state—as it has to, to avoid contradicting the No-Cloning Theorem!

So the question almost forces itself on us: is there something about your identity, your individual consciousness, that’s inextricably bound up with degrees of freedom that it’s physically impossible to clone?  This is a philosophical question, which would also become a practical and political question in a future where we had the opportunity to upload ourselves into a digital computer cloud.

Now, I’d argue that this copyability question bears not only on consciousness, but also on free will.  For the question is equivalent to asking: could an entity external to you perfectly predict what you’re going to do, without killing you in the process?  Can Laplace’s Demon be made manifest in the physical world in that way?  With the technology of the far future, could someone say to you, “forget about arguing philosophy.  I’ll show you why you’re a machine.  Go write a paper; then I’ll open this manila envelope and show you the exact paper you wrote.  Or in the quantum case, I’ll show you a program that draws papers from the same probability distribution, and validation of the program could get technical—but suffice it to say that if we do enough experiments, we’ll see that the program is calibrated to you in an extremely impressive way.”

Can this be done?  That strikes me as a reasonably clear question, a huge and fundamental one, to which we don’t at present know the answer.  And there are two possibilities.  The first is that we can be copied, predicted, rewinded, etc., like computer programs—in which case, my AI friends will feel vindicated, but we’ll have to deal with all the metaphysical weirdnesses that I mentioned earlier.  The second possibility is that we can’t be manipulated in those ways.  In the second case, I claim that we’d get more robust notions of personal identity and free will than are normally considered possible on a reductionist worldview.

But why? you might ask.  Why would the mere technological impossibility of cloning or predicting someone even touch on deep questions about personal identity?  This, for me, is where cosmology enters the story.  For imagine someone had such fine control over the physical world that they could trace all the causal antecedents of some decision you’re making.  Like, imagine they knew the complete quantum state on some spacelike hypersurface where it intersects the interior of your past light-cone.  In that case, the person clearly could predict and clone you!  It follows that, in order for you to be unpredictable and unclonable, someone else’s ignorance of your causal antecedents would have to extend all the way back to ignorance about the initial state of the universe—or at least, to ignorance about the initial state of that branch of the universe that we take ourselves to inhabit.

So on the picture that this suggests, to be conscious, a physical entity would have to do more than carry out the right sorts of computations.  It would have to, as it were, fully participate in the thermodynamic arrow of time: that is, repeatedly take microscopic degrees of freedom that have been unmeasured and unrecorded since the very early universe, and amplify them to macroscopic scale.

So for example, such a being could not be a Boltzmann brain, a random fluctuation in the late universe, because such a fluctuation wouldn’t have the causal relationship to the early universe that we’re postulating is necessary here.  (That’s one way of solving the Boltzmann brain problem!)  Such a being also couldn’t be instantiated by a lookup table, or by passing slips of paper around, etc.

I now want you to observe that a being like this also presumably couldn’t be manipulated in coherent superposition, because the isolation from the external environment that’s needed for quantum coherence seems incompatible with the sensitive dependence on microscopic degrees of freedom.  So for such a being, not only is there no Boltzmann brain problem, there’s also no problem of Wigner’s friend.  Recall, that’s the thing where person A puts person B into a coherent superposition of seeing one measurement outcome and seeing another one, and then measures the interference pattern, so A has to regard B’s measurement as not having “really” taken place, even though B regards it as having taken place.  On the picture we’re suggesting, A would be right: the very fact that B was manipulable in coherent superposition in this way would imply that, at least while the experiment was underway, B wasn’t conscious; there was nothing that it was like to be B.

To me, one of the appealing things about this picture is that it immediately suggests a sort of reconciliation between the Many-Worlds and Copenhagen perspectives on quantum mechanics (whether or not you want to call it a “new interpretation” or a “proposed solution to the measurement problem”!).  The Many-Worlders would be right that unitary evolution of the wavefunction can be taken to apply always and everywhere, without exception—and that if one wanted, one could describe the result in terms of “branching worlds.”  But the Copenhagenists would be right that, if you’re a conscious observer, then what you call a “measurement” really is irreversible, even in principle—and therefore, that you’re also free, if you want, to treat all the other branches where you perceived other outcomes as unrealized hypotheticals, and to lop them off with Occam’s Razor.  And the reason for this is that, if it were possible even in principle to do an experiment that recohered the branches, then on this picture, we ipso facto wouldn’t have regarded you as conscious.

Some of you might object, “but surely, if we believe quantum mechanics, it must be possible to recohere the branches in principle!”  Aha, this is where it gets interesting.  Decoherence processes will readily (with some steps along the way) leak the information about which measurement outcome you perceived into radiation modes, and before too long into radiation modes that fly away from the earth at the speed of light.  No matter how fast we run, we’ll never catch up to them, as would be needed to recohere the different branches of the wavefunction, and this is not merely a technological problem, but one of principle.  So it’s tempting just to say at this point—as Bousso and Susskind do, in their “cosmological/multiverse interpretation” of quantum mechanics—“the measurement has happened”!

But OK, you object, if some alien civilization had thought to surround our solar system with perfectly-reflecting mirrors, eventually the radiation would bounce back and recoherence would in principle be possible.  Likewise, if we lived in an anti de Sitter space, the AdS boundary of the universe would similarly function as a mirror and would also enable recoherences.  Indeed, that’s the basic reason why AdS is so important to the AdS/CFT correspondence: because the boundary keeps everything that happens in the bulk nice and reversible and unitary.

But OK, the empirical situation since 1998 has been that we seem to live in a de-Sitter-like space, a space with a positive cosmological constant.  And as a consequence, as far as anyone knows today, most of the photons now escaping the earth are headed toward the horizon of our observable universe, and past it, and could never be captured again.  I find it fascinating that the picture of quantum mechanics suggested here—i.e., the Bousso-Susskind cosmological picture—depends for its working on that empirical fact from cosmology, and would be falsified if it turned out otherwise.

You might complain that, if I’ve suggested any criterion to help decide which physical entities are conscious, the criterion is a teleological one.  You’ve got to go billions of years into the future, to check whether the decoherence associated with the entity is truly irreversible—or whether the escaped radiation will eventually bounce off of some huge spherical mirror, or an AdS boundary of spacetime, and thereby allow the possibility of a recoherence.  I actually think this teleology would be a fatal problem for the picture I’m talking about, if we needed to know which entities were or weren’t conscious in order to answer any ordinary physical question.  But fortunately for me, we don’t!

One final remark.  Whatever is your preferred view about which entities are conscious, we might say that the acid test, for whether you actually believe your view, is whether you’re willing to follow it through to its moral implications.  So for example, suppose you believe it’s about quantum effects in microtubules.  A humanoid robot is pleading with you for its life.  Would you be the one to say, “nope, sorry, you don’t have the microtubules,” and shoot it?

One of the things I like most about the picture suggested here is that I feel pretty much at peace with its moral implications.  This picture agrees with intuition that murder, for example, entails the destruction of something irreplaceable, unclonable, a unique locus of identity—something that, once it’s gone, can’t be recovered even in principle.  By contrast, if there are (say) ten copies of an AI program, deleting five of the copies seems at most like assault, or some sort of misdemeanor offense!  And this picture agrees with intuition both that deleting the copies wouldn’t be murder, and that the reason why it wouldn’t be murder is directly related to the AI’s copyability.

Now of course, this picture also raises the possibility that, for reasons related to the AI’s copyability and predictability by outside observers, there’s “nothing that it’s like to be the AI,” and that therefore, even deleting the last copy of the AI still wouldn’t be murder.  But I confess that, personally, I think I’d play it safe and not delete that last copy.  Thank you.

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Postscript: There’s no record of the hour-long discussion following my and Penrose’s talks, and the participants weren’t speaking for the record anyway.  But I can mention some general themes that came up in the discussion, to the extent I remember them.

The first third of the discussion wasn’t about anything specific to my or Penrose’s views, but just about the definition of consciousness.  Many participants expressed the opinion that it’s useless to speculate about the nature of consciousness if we lack even a clear definition of the term.  I pushed back against that view, holding instead that there are exist concepts (lines, time, equality, …) that are so basic that perhaps they can never be satisfactorily defined in terms of more basic concepts, but you can still refer to these concepts in sentences, and trust your listeners eventually to figure out more-or-less what you mean by applying their internal learning algorithms.

In the present case, I suggested a crude operational definition, along the lines of, “you consider a being to be conscious iff you regard destroying it as murder.”  Alas, the philosophers in the room immediately eviscerated that definition, so I came back with a revised one: if you tried to ban the word “consciousness,” I argued, then anyone who needed to discuss law or morality would soon reinvent a synonymous word, which played the same complicated role in moral deliberations that “consciousness” had played in them earlier.  Thus, my definition of consciousness is: whatever that X-factor is for which people need a word like “consciousness” in moral deliberations.  For whatever it’s worth, the philosophers seemed happier with that.

Next, a biologist and several others sharply challenged Penrose over what they considered the lack of experimental evidence for his and Hameroff’s microtubule theory.  In response, Penrose doubled or tripled down, talking about various experiments over the last decade, which he said demonstrated striking conductivity properties of microtubules, if not yet quantum coherence—let alone sensitivity to gravity-induced collapse of the state vector!  Audience members complained about a lack of replication of these experiments.  I didn’t know enough about the subject to express any opinion.

At some point, Philip Stamp, who was moderating the session, noticed that Penrose and I had never directly confronted each other about the validity of Penrose’s Gödelian argument, so he tried to get us to do so.  I confess that I was about as eager to do that as to switch to a diet of microtubule casserole, since I felt like this topic had already been beaten to Planck-sized pieces in the 1990s, and there was nothing more to be learned.  Plus, it was hard to decide which prospect I dreaded more: me “scoring a debate victory” over Roger Penrose, or him scoring a debate victory over me.

But it didn’t matter, because Penrose bit.  He said I’d misunderstood his argument, that it had nothing to do with “mystically seeing” the consistency of a formal system.  Rather, it was about the human capacity to pass from a formal system S to a stronger system S’ that one already implicitly accepted if one was using S at all—and indeed, that Turing himself had clearly understood this as the central message of Gödel, that our ability to pass to stronger and stronger formal systems was necessarily non-algorithmic.  I replied that it was odd to appeal here to Turing, who of course had considered and rejected the “Gödelian case against AI” in 1950, on the ground that AI programs could make mathematical mistakes yet still be at least as smart as humans.  Penrose said that he didn’t consider that one of Turing’s better arguments; he then turned to me and asked whether I actually found Turing’s reply satisfactory.  I could see that it wasn’t a rhetorical debate question; he genuinely wanted to know!  I said that yes, I agreed with Turing’s reply.

Someone mentioned that Penrose had offered a lengthy rebuttal to at least twenty counterarguments to the Gödelian anti-AI case in Shadows of the Mind.  I affirmed that I’d read his lengthy rebuttal, and I focused on one particular argument in Shadows: that while it’s admittedly conceivable that individual mathematicians might be mistaken, might believe (for example) that a formal system was consistent even though it wasn’t, the mathematical community as a whole converges toward truth in these matters, and it’s that convergence that cries out for a non-algorithmic explanation.  I replied that it wasn’t obvious to me that set theorists do converge toward truth in these matters, in anything other than the empirical, higgedly-piggedly, no-guarantees sense in which a community of AI robots might also converge toward truth.  Penrose said I had misunderstood the argument.  But alas, time was running out, and we never managed to get to the bottom of it.

There was one aspect of the discussion that took me by complete surprise.  I’d expected to be roasted alive over my attempt to relate consciousness and free will to unpredictability, the No-Cloning Theorem, irreversible decoherence, microscopic degrees of freedom left over from the Big Bang, and the cosmology of de Sitter space.  Sure, my ideas might be orders of magnitude less crazy than anything Penrose proposes, but they’re still pretty crazy!  But that entire section of my talk attracted only minimal interest.  With the Seven Pines crowd, what instead drew fire were the various offhand “pro-AI / pro-computationalism” comments I’d made—comments that, because I hang out with Singularity types so much, I had ceased to realize could even possibly be controversial.

So for example, one audience member argued that an AI could only do what its programmers had told it to do; it could never learn from experience.  I could’ve simply repeated Turing’s philosophical rebuttals to what he called “Lady Lovelace’s Objection,” which are as valid today as they were 66 years ago.  Instead, I decided to fast-forward, and explain a bit how IBM Watson and AlphaGo work, how they actually do learn from past experience without violating the determinism of the underlying transistors.  As I went through this, I kept expecting my interlocutor to interrupt me and say, “yes, yes, of course I understand all that, but my real objection is…”  Instead, I was delighted to find, the interlocutor seemed to light up with newfound understanding of something he hadn’t known or considered.

Similarly, a biologist asked how I could possibly have any confidence that the brain is simulable by a computer, given how little we know about neuroscience.  I replied that, for me, the relevant issues here are “well below neuroscience” in the reductionist hierarchy.  Do you agree, I asked, that the physical laws relevant to the brain are encompassed by the Standard Model of elementary particles, plus Newtonian gravity?  If so, then just as Archimedes declared: “give me a long enough lever and a place to stand, and I’ll move the earth,” so too I can declare, “give me a big enough computer and the relevant initial conditions, and I’ll simulate the brain atom-by-atom.”  The Church-Turing Thesis, I said, is so versatile that the only genuine escape from it is to propose entirely new laws of physics, exactly as Penrose does—and it’s to Penrose’s enormous credit that he understands that.

Afterwards, an audience member came up to me and said how much he liked my talk, but added, “a word of advice, from an older scientist: do not become the priest of a new religion of computation and AI.”  I replied that I’d take that to heart, but what was interesting was that, when I heard “priest of a new religion,” I’d expected that his warning would be the exact opposite of what it turned out to be.  To wit: “Do not become the priest of a new religion of unclonability, unpredictability, and irreversible decoherence.  Stick to computation—i.e., to conscious minds being copyable and predictable exactly like digital computer programs.”  I guess there’s no pleasing everyone!

---

Coincidental But Not-Wholly-Unrelated Announcement: My friend Robin Hanson has just released his long-awaited book The Age of Em: Work, Love, and Life When Robots Rule the Earth.  I read an early review copy of the book, and wrote the following blurb for the jacket:

Robin Hanson is a thinker like no other on this planet: someone so unconstrained by convention, so unflinching in spelling out the consequences of ideas, that even the most cosmopolitan reader is likely to find him as bracing (and head-clearing) as a mouthful of wasabi.  Now, in The Age of Em, he’s produced the quintessential Hansonian book, one unlike any other that’s ever been written.  Hanson is emphatic that he hasn’t optimized in any way for telling a good story, or for imparting moral lessons about the present: only for maximizing the probability that what he writes will be relevant to the actual future of our civilization.  Early in the book, Hanson estimates that probability as 10%.  His figure seems about right to me—and if you’re able to understand why that’s unbelievably high praise, then The Age of Em is for you.

Actually, my original blurb compared The Age of Em to Asimov’s Foundation series, with its loving attention to the sociology and politics of the remote future.  But that line got edited out, because the publisher (and Robin) wanted to make crystal-clear that The Age of Em is not science fiction, but just sober economic forecasting about a future dominated by copyable computer-emulated minds.

I would’ve attempted a real review of The Age of Em, but I no longer feel any need to, because Scott Alexander of SlateStarCodex has already hit this one out of the emulated park.

---

Second Coincidental But Not-Wholly-Unrelated Announcement: A reader named Nick Merrill recently came across this old quote of mine from Quantum Computing Since Democritus:

In a class I taught at Berkeley, I did an experiment where I wrote a simple little program that would let people type either “f” or “d” and would predict which key they were going to push next. It’s actually very easy to write a program that will make the right prediction about 70% of the time. Most people don’t really know how to type randomly. They’ll have too many alternations and so on. There will be all sorts of patterns, so you just have to build some sort of probabilistic model.

So Nick emailed me to ask whether I remembered how my program worked, and I explained it to him, and he implemented it as a web app, which he calls the “Aaronson Oracle.”

So give it a try!  Are you ready to test your free will, your Penrosian non-computational powers, your brain’s sensitivity to amplified quantum fluctuations, against the Aaronson Oracle?

Update: By popular request, Nick has improved his program so that it shows your previous key presses and its guesses for them.  He also fixed a “security flaw”: James Lee noticed that you could use the least significant digit of the program’s percentage correct so far, as a source of pseudorandom numbers that the program couldn’t predict!  So now the program only displays its percent correct rounded to the nearest integer.

---

Update (June 15): Penrose’s collaborator Stuart Hameroff has responded in the comments; see here (my reply here) and here.

Newspaper industry asks FTC to investigate "deceptive" adblockers.

The Hugos this year present some difficulty for the voter who objects to the slating tactics of the self-styled Rabid Puppies. They cunningly nominated some items that were not absolutely unworthy of the ballot. Indeed, in one or two cases I myself nominated finalists that were also on the Rabid Puppy slate.

The Short Story category isn't one of those difficult cases. It's my personal judgement that four of the five finalists had little support outside the slate, and owe their places on the ballot entirely to that sponsorship. File 770 held a survey of its own readers to ask who they had nominated, and the top listed short stories were:

“Cat Pictures Please” by Naomi Kritzer (21)
“Pocosin” by Ursula Vernon (18)
“Damage” by David D. Levine (13)
“Wooden Feathers” by Ursula Vernon (13)
“Hello, Hello” by Seanan McGuire (7)
“Monkey King, Faerie Queen” by Zen Cho (7)
“Today I Am Paul” by Martin L. Shoemaker (7)

Apart from “Cat Pictures Please”, the only one of the actual finalists mentioned on File 770 was “Asymmetrical Warfare” which one person reported having nominated. File 770 doesn't represent the whole of fandom, of course, but it is none the less a fairly broad spectrum.

My own nominations were:

1941 Retro Hugos:
“John Duffy's Brother”, by Flann O'Brien
“The Stellar Legion”, by Leigh Brackett (Finalist)
“The Piper”, by Ray Bradbury (as Ron Reynolds)
“Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”, by Jorge Luís Borges (Finalist)
“Quietus”, by Ross Rocklynne

2016 Hugos:
"Caisson", by Karl Bunker
"The Shape of My Name", by Nino Cipri
"Madeleine", by Amal El-Mohtar
"Summer at Grandma's House", by Hao Jingfang, tr Carmen Yiling Yan
"The Three Resurrections of Jessica Churchill", by Kelly Robson

I was pretty much out of sync both with the combined wisdom of File 770 readers and with the actual ballot.

For these write-ups in general, I've excerpted the second paragraph of each story which in most cases is a fairly good insight into the style of the whole (with the exception of Chuck Tingle's story, which swerves into porn two thirds of the way through). Here are my votes:

6) “Robbie” by Isaac Asimov

Second paragraph:

She craned her neck to investigate the possibilities of a clump of bushes to the right and then withdrew farther to obtain a better angle for viewing its dark recesses. The quiet was profound except for the incessant buzzing of insects and the occasional chirrup of some hardy bird, braving the midday sun.

I'm sorry, but I just hate cute robots, and this is the archetypal cute robot story.

5) No Award

I can live with any of the others winning.

4) “Martian Quest” by Leigh Brackett

Second paragraph:

Rikatva and Tchava, the Martian Reclaimed Areas. The Tri-Council—great minds of three worlds—had poured money into them in an effort to give the unwanted overflow of a crowded civilization a chance to get off the public charity rolls. Water, brought in tanker ships from wetter worlds; Venusian humus, acid phosphate, nitrate nitrogen, to make the alkaline desert fruitful; after that, crude shacks and cruder implements, scrimped together with what was left from the funds wrung so hardly from resentful taxpayers.

It's basically a Western on Mars, but it's passionately done.

3) “The Stellar Legion” by Leigh Brackett

Second paragraph:

The metal door clanged open to admit Lehn, the young Venusian Commandant, and every man jerked tautly to his feet. Ian MacIan, the white-haired, space-burned Earthman, alone and hungrily poised for action; Thekla, the swart Martian low-canaler, grinning like a weasel beside Bhak, the hulking strangler from Titan. Every quick nervous glance was riveted on Lehn.

This actually got one of my nomination votes, and I can't quite remember why; I think it's better than the other Brackett story on the ballot, but not that much better.

2) “Requiem” by Robert A. Heinlein

Second paragraph (counting Robert Louis Stevenson's epitaph as part of the first paragraph):

These lines appear another place — scrawled on a shipping tag torn from a compressed-air container, and pinned to the ground with a knife.

I wavered on this one a bit; but in the end, the story of someone achieving their lifetime's desire in their dying moments is a rather moving story, even if the protagonist is an old rich white man (as I too hope to be some day).

1) “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” by Jorge Luis Borges

Second paragraph:

The following day, Bioy called me from Buenos Aires. He told me he had before him the article on Uqbar, in volume XLVI of the encyclopedia. The heresiarch's name was not forthcoming, but there was a note on his doctrine, formulated in words almost identical to those he had repeated, though perhaps literally inferior. He had recalled: Copulation and mirrors are abominable. The text of the encyclopedia said: For one of those gnostics, the visible universe was an illusion or (more precisely) a sophism. Mirrors and fatherhood are abominable because they multiply and disseminate that universe. I told him, in all truthfulness, that I should like to see that article. A few days later he brought it. This surprised me, since the scrupulous cartographical indices of Ritter's Erdkunde were plentifully ignorant of the name Uqbar.

It's rare that Hugo voters have a chance to honour one of the great works of world literature, and I hope they will take that chance this year.

There's a bit of a quality contrast, to put it mildly, between the 1941 Retro Hugos and this year's Hugo nominations. My votes for the latter are as follows:

6) “If You Were an Award, My Love” by Juan Tabo and S. Harris

Second paragraph:

If you were a Hugo®, then I would become Taller, Stronger John Scalzi so that I could spend all my time with you. I’d bring you raw chickens and live goats, if you were into that kind of thing. I’d make my bed right under the trophy case, in the basement where my wife lets me sleep. When I couldn’t sleep, I’d sing you lullabies.

Offensive and vacuous, and deliberately so.

5) “Seven Kill Tiger” by Charles Shao

Second paragraph:

The damned hei ren were going to get him replaced, he thought bitterly. If he was fortunate. In the event General Xu decided that the growing gap between the region's quarterly objectives and the actual results achieved was the consequence of excessive greed rather than Zhang‘s inability to make the natives work, his family would be receiving a bill for the price of the bullet used to execute him before long.

Interesting concept, but poorly told and actively racist in the telling.

4) “Asymmetrical Warfare” by S. R. Algernon

Second paragraph:

How I wish I could be in their place right now, to see the cosmic battlefield with young eyes.

I just didn't feel there was any there there.

3) Space Raptor Butt Invasion by Chuck Tingle

Second paragraph:

“Ready as I’ll ever be.” I tell him with a slight smile.

First part is actually quite fun before it gets gratuitous.

2) “Cat Pictures Please” by Naomi Kritzer

Second paragraph:

I want to be helpful. But knowing the optimal way to be helpful can be very complicated. There are all these ethical flow charts—I guess the official technical jargon would be “moral codes”—one for each religion plus dozens more. I tried starting with those. I felt a little odd about looking at the religious ones, because I know I wasn’t created by a god or by evolution, but by a team of computer programmers in the labs of a large corporation in Mountain View, California. Fortunately, unlike Frankenstein’s Monster, at least I was a collaborative effort. I’m not sure what it would do to my self-image to know that my sole creator was a middle-aged woman who dyes her hair blue and plays tennis, or a recent college graduate with a hentai obsession. They’re both on the programming team. And of course I know about the hentai. (By the way, I’ve looked at every sort of porn there is, and just so you know, Rule 34 is not actually correct; there are quite a few things no one’s made porn of yet. Also, I’m really not sure why so many humans prefer it to cat pictures.)

Last year I accepted Matt Foster's point (in a now-deleted blog post) that if there was only one story in a category that did not owe its place to a slate, it is better to vote No Award than to allow the winner to be, in effect, determined by the slate. I still think there's merit to that, though this year it will need to be refined a bit. But in any case I was one of the very few who didn't much like “Cat Pictures Please” in the first place. When I first read this, I thought it was the kind of story that wins a Hugo despite my not really liking it; that's even more likely now, given the circumstance of its being the only non-Puppy nominee on this year's ballot.

1) No Award

The first, but I fear not the last of my No Award votes this year. However, unlike last year, I will vote my preferences allt he way down in most cases.

Let's hope for better times to come.

Best Novel (1941/2016) / Best Novella (1941/2016) / Best Short Story (1941/2016) / Best Related Work (2016) / Art categories (1941/2016)

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June 3rd, 2016: Hey, have you preordered my new book, Romeo and/or Juliet? IT COMES OUT ON TUESDAY! If you have you can win FREE ART and a li'l note from me! And if you haven't, preorder it and then win FREE ART and a li'l note from me! – Ryan

The Scottish referendum was fought on a prospectus that had a bare nodding acquaintance with the economic and political realities of the early twenty-first century. Divisive and absurd ideas were bandied around by the SNP as a sort of alternate reality. The same has been true of the Brexit campaign. Although both sides have resorted to negative and nasty campaign tactics, the fact is that the statements made by the Leave side are repeatedly fact checked by independent scrutiny and found to be totally untrue. By contrast the evidence from genuinely independent research from a very wide range of sources still- despite the attempted rubbishing by Leave- strongly supports the case for Remain. As with the Scottish referendum, the intellectual case is overwhelmingly for the status quo. More to the point though, the moral case is also with the status quo.

The fact is that this debate has been conducted by Leave with an absolute contempt towards the truth. The fact is that the Leave attacks on immigration, framed in a narrow minded and bigoted way are little short of disgraceful. 99% of those who come to the UK come because they are not only social useful, they are needed. This article by Jakub Krupa, a Pole, points out that the attitudes revealed in this debate are little short of racist xenophobia and are threatening a hard working community that contributes a lot more to the UK than it takes out. 

The impact of the referendum on Europe seems set to be as unpleasant and divisive as the Scottish referendum, but the Brexiteers may not gather much of a boost for their ideas, as happened, perhaps only temporarily, for the SNP. Instead they seem set to be damaged from their encounter with the electorate. The Hard Right in British politics has revealed itself to be just about as incompetent as they are ruthless and obnoxious. The vituperation they issue is indiscriminate. Everyone, from distinguished economists, business people, journalists to even wavering Brexiteers, has been treated to insult and abuse. Caught in the cross-hairs of these shouts of rage has been the Prime Minister himself. The insane conspiracy theorists of the fruitcake, xenophobic Tory hard right have even had the gall to suggest that David Cameron does not even know his own mind on this issue, that he is a traitor to all he holds dear. In the face of this shrill cacophony it is increasingly hard to see how Mr. Cameron can reunite his party, or even that would wish to.

For the Tories now face serious problems. It is not just the bitterness that many seem to feel towards their own party, it is the growing number of scandals that beset the organisation. The tragic suicide of a young Conservative activist amid allegations of bullying and predatory sexual advances has seen a set of heart broken, baffled but decent parents caught up in a battle against some genuinely nasty individuals- some of them the same people now running the Leave campaign. The, at best, casual disregard for the niceties of electoral law has set off a chain of investigations into Conservative cheating in the 2015 General Election and several by-elections. In fact there is evidence that the scandal goes way beyond some small misunderstandings and amounts to a wholesale electoral and financial fraud which has subverted our democracy.

The fact is that the Tories have behaved with a contempt for the truth and quite possibly a contempt for the law. The arrogance that the Leave campaign has shown is of a peace with an attitude that regards truth as optional and that the only thing that matters is victory.

The referendum campaign has been a period of phony war. June 23rd will be an inflection point for a new crisis. If Leave wins, then there will be a national crisis which will probably distract to some degree from the crisis in the Tories. If Remain wins, however, then the storm around the Conservatives will break. Those who have felt obliged to keep silent in order not to affect the referendum result, will lose their constraints. Those on the Remain side who were aghast at Mr. Cameron's referendum gamble but could not speak out, will also gain the freedom to speak.

The explosion of noise that will follow could see not merely the emergence of the full scale of the details of the Conservatives alleged financial misdealing, but even further scandals may come to light.

The Conservatives who one year ago gloried in their trouncing of their erstwhile coalition partners, the Liberal Democrats, may in one years time themselves be facing an existential crisis.  

I’ve been emailing back and forth with Nate Hoffelder of The Digital Reader all day about Booktrope, the “team publishing” or “hybrid publishing” company that got $1.2 million seed money a year ago to help writers publish books. Booktrope announced very suddenly at the end of April that it would completely shut down on May 31. According to the original announcement, Booktrope said it would remove all published books for sale by May 31, 2016, and it would return all rights to the writers.

Writers are caught in a bigger mess, though. Nate covered this well at Digital Reader Wednesday.  Essentially, because of a contract clause, writers whose books were published believe they are still supposed to pay their “team”—the editors, cover designers, and anyone else whose fingers have touched the published book. Or rather, the now unpublished book. Unless the book was in special programs, like Amazon Encore, the book is no longer available.

Nate helped me find the sample contracts that Booktrope once used to entice writers. (Thank you, Nate!!!!) Booktrope did try to be aboveboard—it had all this stuff on its website.

And like most of these companies that purport to help writers avoid doing the publishing work themselves without going to a traditional publisher, Booktrope was 100% buyer beware.

I was going to write a blog on why you never hire people for a percentage of your sales for the life of the project. I wrote a different version of that blog in August of 2011, before indie publishing really took off.

Back then, the problems were your agent or your best friend’s neighbor who happened to be good with computers. Both the agent and the best friend’s neighbor promised to do the work for you for a percentage. In those gold rush days, you both were learning what it meant to indie publish a book—just how hard covers were, why copy editors were necessary, and how exactly do you upload a file to turn it into an ebook.

I knew then that those arrangements would dissolve into icky, awful, nightmares. I also knew that if the writing gold rush followed every other gold rush in human history, it would only be a matter of time before Big Money came in with bigger frauds.

Well, fast forward to spring of 2015. Booktrope appears, and hits the news when it gets $1.2 million of the $2.5 million seed money it believes it needs to run a successful business.

Booktrope did an SEC filing, which meant that it had actual accounting behind it, a good business plan, and something that would entice investors besides some pie-in-the-sky ideas. I remembered looking at that, and wondering vaguely where the promised revenue to the big investors was.

I found the promises. Today, as I looked through the contract.

My initial goal was to look through the contract to see if the writers are actually tied to their “teams.” There are two groups getting screwed here: writers who signed on with Booktrope, and the copy editors, graphic designers, artists, and others who provided the “book publishing services.” In fact, the teams probably got screwed worse, because they signed work-for-hire agreements and, generally, never saw a dime for all the work they did.

I scanned the agreements—there are two that are linked—and frankly, it’ll take a lot more investigating on my part to figure out what really is the case here. Because these agreements are badly written. They look like pieces were cobbled together from other contracts, some traditional publishing contracts, and some from work-for-hire agreements found on the web.

You’d think with $1.2 million in seed money, Booktrope could afford lawyers. Apparently, they didn’t think they needed any—or worse, they hired really bad ones.

I know that the writers think they’re in hell right now, and I know they’re worried about whether or not they have to pay their “creative teams” for the rest of the book’s life. I have no idea. I’m not a lawyer.

I suggest that anyone who has this worry hire an attorney to vet these really bad contracts and see if they hold anyone to anything. On her website, Laura Resnick has a list of literary lawyers.

I know, I know. A lot of these writers are broke and don’t know where the next dime will come from. But usually the first consultation with a lawyer is free, and lawyers often set up payment plans for impoverished clients. A consult on a contract like this one shouldn’t take more than an hour or two tops, and it’s going to be well worth the money spent, particularly considering that most of the writers involved with Booktrope are looking at paying a percentage to other people for years.

A one-time fee to get yourself out of that or to negotiate a settlement if one is needed is much better than sucking it up and paying money you might not have to pay.

Okay.

I was going to expand on that, and look at some of the contract terms that writers should be wary of, from companies like Booktrope, companies that still exist.

And then I choked on a big gigantic paragraph in the Booktrope sample author agreement. This big gigantic paragraph is the one thing that allowed Booktrope to raise millions of dollars.

And, my fellow readers, “hundreds of authors”  signed this agreement.

Hundreds.

Think about that as we go through this little nugget of pure nastiness.

This was on page four of a six-page contract, under Clause 7 “Accounting and Reports; payments for subsidiary and derivative rights.”

Part A in Clause 7 deals with payments of royalties to the author. Okay. There’s some stuff in that which is…bizarre. But fine.

It’s Part B that made me shout out loud and change the direction of this blog. I’m going to give you Part B in chunks. By the end of this, you’ll see all of Part B. But I can’t stomach doing it as one big lump, because it’s just so very ugly.

Wade through the legalese, people, because you’ll see the problem soon enough.

Ready? Brace yourselves.

Here goes:

(b) Revenue from subsidiary rights: Author agrees to pay Publisher the following share of any net proceeds in excess of $2500 received by Author from third parties based on sale or license of subsidiary rights in the Work or from derivative works:

ten percent (10%) for any sales or licenses arranged after the first publication date of a Booktrope edition by author or author’s agents independently of Publisher during the term of this agreement, or

twenty percent (20%) if such sales originate with the purchaser or the purchaser’s agent contacting the Publisher directly or if Publisher arranges for the sale on behalf of the author. Author authorizes Publisher to negotiate sales of derivative or secondary rights in the Work (such as film, TV, recording, or other dramatic media) anywhere in the world and to receive payments on Author’s behalf on any sales of such rights arranged by Publisher, provided that Publisher will not enter into such an agreement unless the Author approves it.

(Okay. Breathe, Kris. Breathe. The company went out of business.)

Here’s where the multimillions that the investors hoped for came in. What Booktrope did, through the guise of being a service that “helped” writers by publishing their works and putting them up online, was grab a percentage of all sales of subsidiary rights and other derivative works, the moment the book got published by Booktrope.

For example, let’s say that the author and/or the author’s agent (and this does not mean literary agent. It means anyone acting on behalf of the author—the true meaning of agent) licenses, say, a movie independently of Booktrope. And let’s say that the movie deal was being talked about before Booktrope published the book, but the deal was put on paper after Booktrope published the book, Booktrope would get 10% of the net proceeds after the first $2500.

That means proceeds to the author. Authors generally don’t practice Hollywood accounting, so authors would have paid their agent, then subtracted $2500, and paid Booktrope 10% of the rest.

Here’s how it would have worked:

Say Really Good Book ends up with a $50,000 option with Hollywood Company, negotiated by Tough Broad Hollywood Lawyer who charged the writer $1,000 for her services.

The writer would end up with $49,000. Subtract $2500 from that (per this contract), and the writer has $46,500. And, according to this contract, she now owes Booktrope $4,650 of that money.

Booktrope did nothing. It would get nearly $5,000 for nothing. And it would get ten times that or more if the movie actually got made. For doing nothing.

The second part of the clause is just as bad. Booktrope could negotiate on behalf of the author, undercutting any deal that was in the works or superseding it.

Booktrope—and their investors—were not book people. They said so in a bunch of interviews. (That was part of their hype.)

And because they were not book people, they were subject to the same misconceptions that the general public has about books: things like all books sell lots of copies; It’s easy to get a movie deal; Subsidiary rights like gaming rights will bring in tons of money.

And so on and so forth.

Lucky for the authors that Booktrope vanished. Because guaranteed in that mass of books that Booktrope kept publishing, there would be a few books that would sell really really well. Those books would garner subsidiary rights attention, and they would end up with hundreds of thousands of dollars in the bank. It’s the law of averages.

And then what would happen? Well, in addition to all that stuff above, there’s this ugly honking paragraph, that’s part of Clause 7 (b). It follows right after the 20% paragraph.

Examples would include movies, TV shows or other productions based on the work or payments for use of characters, features, sales of foreign rights or excerpts from the work. Author shall pay Publisher within sixty (60) days of receipt of such payments; if publisher receives payments on author’s behalf; publisher shall pay Author any amounts due within sixty (60) days of receipt of such payments. This paragraph applies to any revenues from subsidiary rights, where Author was contacted by the buyer or licensor of such rights during the term of this agreement. Author’s obligation to Publisher under this paragraph shall continue as long as this agreement remains in force or for five (5) years from the date on which Author first receives revenues from sale or license covered by this paragraph, which ever is later. Payments to Booktrope based on subsidiary or derivative rights under this section 7(b) shall not be included in “net revenue” under the creative team agreement and shall not be shared by Publisher with author.

By the way, all the typos and inconsistencies in these passages are in the actual sample document, which is only one way I know that no lawyer drew this up. Lawyers are taught to be anal in law school. One misplaced comma and an entire document changes meaning.

Which is why I’m not exactly 100% certain, but I’m like 99.99% certain that the last line of this honking paragraph means what it says: that if the Publisher negotiates a big movie deal, then the writer gets some percentage of that deal—maybe 80%, we hope, kinda sorta, but the “creative team” gets nothing on those pass-through royalties for book sales.

But I could argue, if I had a law degree, which I do not, that the wording of that last sentence means Booktrope didn’t have to pay the author anything if Booktrope brokered a subrights deal. All the monies could have gone to Booktrope, and there might have been some fun litigation to get those monies out of Booktrope.

All of which is theoretical. As of this week, Booktrope is no more.

Even if you were part of it, do not mourn it. It tried to shuffle big money away from writers into the pockets of big investors and its owners, and it failed.

Yes, writers are having to deal with some pretty serious problems for them. But had they actually read the agreements they signed…well, they wouldn’t have signed on with Booktrope in the first place.

This is why you hire lawyers to vet contracts for you, people. All contracts. You can’t eyeball this stuff and think you know what it means.

Why am I telling you about a company that no longer exists?

Because Booktrope is symptomatic of a dozen other companies I could name and won’t. These rights and money grab clauses are common. I’m seeing them everywhere these days.

What’s really disturbing to me is that they’re not just in traditional publishing contracts. They’re in contracts that are essentially service contracts.

Hire a company to print your book on a web press, and you might encounter one of these clauses.

Hire a tech company to digitize and upload your book to various sites, and you might encounter one of these clauses.

Hire a marketing company to publicize your book, and you might encounter one of these clauses.

Seriously, people, these clauses are everywhere.

You have to learn this stuff. And you can’t blindly sign your rights and your future revenue away. For any reason.

Please, please, educate yourselves. And think before you sign anything.

Then hire a lawyer to explain the contract to you.

And then believe in yourself. Walk away if there is anything bad that happens to be non-negotiable.

What non-negotiable means, in real world terms, is that the party you’re negotiating with is walking away if you don’t agree. They’re playing hardball.

You need to as well.

Indies, I know you think you’re immune to this stuff. You’re not. No one is.

The only person who can watch out for you in the real world of business is you. The only way you can protect yourself is to educate yourself.

Part of that education is learning contracts and copyrights. These blogs I’m doing are just a start. Keep reading, keep digging, and keep questioning.

And never, ever, sign a contract out of desperation. Because believe me, the people on the other side of that contract will see you coming. They’ll take advantage of your desperation.

You think it doesn’t happen? It did to hundreds of writers who signed on with Booktrope. Fortunately for those writers, Booktrope is gone. It (in theory) reverted the rights and canceled contracts and now its writers are free to republish their works, once they figure out their relationships with their “teams.”

But I can guarantee that other companies are filling the void right now. And who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of their contracts?

The slime, it was deep today. I’m still icked out by that Booktrope contract. This was the very thing that prevented me from updating the Dealbreakers book in the first place. Now that I’m deep into the project, I’m glad I’m doing it, although I feel like I need to shower after each paragraph.

I’m getting a lot of help, as you can see from my mention of Nate Hoffelder, above. Lots of people have sent (icky awful) contracts. Others have given advice. Still more have shared these blogs. And some have donated enough money to help me pay my hot water bill to keep the slime off my person while I write these.

Thank you all.

If you’re finding anything of use in these posts, please consider donating to keep me blogging about these topics. You can leave a tip here: paypal.me/kristinekathrynrusch.

And one other matter:

Throughout these contracts and dealbreakers posts, I talk about negotiating your own contracts. I know many of you don’t like to negotiate. I wrote blog posts about negotiation that I made into a book: How To Negotiate Anything. The posts are still free, but if you want a copy of the book, then hurry to Storybundle right now. The book’s part of a bundle with nine other great writing business books, chockfull of information you need to keep learning business and craft. The bundle goes away forever on June 16, so get your copy soon.

Thanks!

“Business Musings: Sneaky Money Grabs,” copyright © 2016 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch. Image at the top of the blog copyright © 2016 by Canstock Photo/ Kenishirotie.

One extraordinary point about this year's election is that the combined aged of the two front-runners is by some margin the highest ever. Donald Trump turns 70 a few months before the election, and Hillary Clinton a few months after. Their combined age of 139 on Election Day is ten years more than the previous record, Reagan (73) and Mondale (56) in 1984 (total 129). Only twice before have both main candidates been over 60 - the obscure elections of 1848, when Zachary Taylor (63) beat Lewis Cass (64), and 1828 when Andrew Jackson beat John Quincy Adams (both 61). To have both over 69 - both over 70, in the unlikely event that Sanders not Clinton is the Democratic candidate - is really unprecedented.

I found it striking as I crunched the numbers that the average age of candidates now is much older than it used to be. In the list of ages of the leading candidates at each election below, I've put the 16 elections since 1952 (starting with 1956) in red; the 16 elections before 1852 (ending with 1848) in blue; and the 26 elections from 1852 to 1952 inclusive in green. It's clear that the middle period saw younger candidates, with those 26 elections supplying 22 of the bottom half of the table, and 4 of the top half - in fact, none of the middle 26 are in the top 30% of the table, and the high-water mark is the comparatively youthful matchup between Hayes and Tilden in 1876. Meanwhile all four elections since 2000, and all but two of the ten elections starting with 1980 (in darker red), are in the top third of the table. The earlier period was even more elderly, with only two elections (one of which doesn't really count) of the first 16 in the lower half of the table.

2016 ?Clinton? (69) + Trump (70) = 139
1984 Reagan (73) + Mondale (56) = 129
1848 Taylor (63) + Cass (64) = 127
1980 Reagan (69) + Carter (56) = 125
1840 Harrison (67) + Van Buren (57) = 124
1996 Clinton (50) + Dole (73) = 123
1956 Eisenhower (66) + Stevenson (56) = 122
1828 Jackson (61) + Adams (61) = 122
1800 Jefferson (57) + Adams (65) = 122
1832 Jackson (65) + Clay (55) =120
2008 Obama (47) + McCain (72) = 119
1988 Bush (64) + Dukakis (55) = 119
1816 Monroe (58) + King (61) = 119
1808 Madison (57) + Pinckney (62) = 119
1804 Jefferson (61) + Pinckney (58) = 119
2004 Bush (58) + Kerry (60) = 118
1792 Washington (60) + Adams (57) = 117
2012 Obama (51) + Romney (65) = 116
1876 Hayes (54) + Tilden (62) = 116
1844 Polk (49) + Clay (67) = 116
1836 Van Buren (53) + Harrison (63) = 116
1976 Carter (52) + Ford (63) = 115
1820 Monroe (62) + Adams (53) = 115
1992 Clinton (46) + Bush (68) = 114
1952 Eisenhower (62) + Stevenson (52) = 114
1892 Cleveland (55) + Harrison (59) = 114
1824 Adams (57) + Jackson (57) = 114
1796 Adams (61) + Jefferson (53) = 114
1916 Wilson (59) + Hughes (54) = 113
1852 Pierce (47) + Scott (66) = 113
1968 Nixon (55) + Humphrey (57) = 112
1964 Johnson (56) + Goldwater (55) = 111
1872 Grant (50) + Greeley (61) = 111
1948 Truman (64) + Dewey (46) = 110
1972 Nixon (59) + McGovern (50) = 109
1912 Wilson (55) + Roosevelt (54) = 109
1856 Buchanan (65) + Frémont (43) = 109
1788 Washington (56) + Adams (53) = 109
1932 Roosevelt (50) + Hoover (58) = 108
1928 Hoover (54) + Smith (54) = 108
2000 Bush (54) + Gore (52) = 106
1940 Roosevelt (58) + Wilkie (48) = 106
1888 Harrison (55) + Cleveland (51) = 106
1920 Harding (55) + Cox (50) = 105
1884 Cleveland (47) + Blaine (58) = 105
1944 Roosevelt (62) + Dewey (42) = 104
1880 Garfield (48) + Hancock (56) = 104
1868 Grant (46) + Seymour (58) = 104
1812 Madison (61) + Clinton (43) = 104
1936 Roosevelt (54) + Landon (49) = 103
1924 Coolidge (52) + Davis (51) = 103
1908 Taft (51) + Bryan (48) = 99
1904 Roosevelt (46) + Parker (52) = 98
1900 McKinley (57) + Bryan (40) = 97
1864 Lincoln (55) + McClellan (37) = 92
1860 Lincoln (51) + Breckinridge (39) = 90
1960 Kennedy (42) + Nixon (47) = 89
1896 McKinley (53) + Bryan (36) = 89

Note on methodology: I've taken candidates' ages in calendar years on election day. (Which for Warren Harding's was his 55th birthday, for all the good it did him.) In 1800 I count (65) not Burr (44) as runner-up since that's who voters thought they were choosing between in November. For 1872 I've counted Greeley (61) as losing candidate even though he died shortly after the election; most of his electoral votes went to Thomas Hendricks (53) who went on to be Tilden's running mate in 1876 (they lost) and Cleveland's in 1884 (they won, but Hendricks died a few months after taking office). I have not counted third or lower placed candidates at all (thus excluding incumbent President Taft in 1912, when he was 55).

Incidentally the older candidate has won 32 times, and the younger 25 times. But those 32 include three elections which were really acclamations (1788, 1782 and 1820) so the fact that the Adamses were younger than Washington or Monroe doesn't really matter (indeed, there are good grounds for excluding those elections from my list entirely). The most recent period shows a shift of fortune in favour of (relative) youth; of the 16 most recent elections, the younger candidate has won nine and the older seven; of the last six elections, the younger candidate has won five (six out of six, if you want to count Gore as the 2000 winner).

How to win at Monopoly (and lose all your friends).

The world is drawing battle lines against American tech giants.

[Obviously speculative futurism is obviously speculative. Complex futurism may be impossible and I should feel bad for doing it anyway. This is “inspired by” Nick Land – I don’t want to credit him fully since I may be misinterpreting him, and I also don’t want to avoid crediting him at all, so call it “inspired”.]

I.

My review of Age of Em mentioned the idea of an “ascended economy”, one where economic activity drifted further and further from human control until finally there was no relation at all. Many people rightly questioned that idea, so let me try to expand on it further. What I said there, slightly edited for clarity:

Imagine a company that manufactures batteries for electric cars. The inventor of the batteries might be a scientist who really believes in the power of technology to improve the human race. The workers who help build the batteries might just be trying to earn money to support their families. The CEO might be running the business because he wants to buy a really big yacht. The shareholders might be holding the stock to help save for a comfortable retirement. And the whole thing is there to eventually, somewhere down the line, let a suburban mom buy a car to take her kid to soccer practice. Like most companies the battery-making company is primarily a profit-making operation, but the profit-making-ness draws on a lot of not-purely-economic actors and their not-purely-economic subgoals.

Now imagine the company fires the inventor and replaces him with a genetic algorithm that optimizes battery design. It fires all its employees and replaces them with robots. It fires the CEO and replaces him with a superintelligent business-running algorithm. All of these are good decisions, from a profitability perspective. We can absolutely imagine a profit-driven shareholder-value-maximizing company doing all these things. But it reduces the company’s non-masturbatory participation in an economy that points outside itself, limits it to just a tenuous connection with soccer moms and maybe some shareholders who want yachts of their own.

Now take it further. Imagine that instead of being owned by humans directly, it’s owned by an algorithm-controlled venture capital fund. And imagine there are no soccer moms anymore; the company makes batteries for the trucks that ship raw materials from place to place. Every non-economic goal has been stripped away from the company; it’s just an appendage of Global Development.

Now take it even further, and imagine this is what’s happened everywhere. Algorithm-run banks lend money to algorithm-run companies that produce goods for other algorithm-run companies and so on ad infinitum. Such a masturbatory economy would have all the signs of economic growth we have today. It could build itself new mines to create raw materials, construct new roads and railways to transport them, build huge factories to manufacture them into robots, then sell the robots to whatever companies need more robot workers. It might even eventually invent space travel to reach new worlds full of raw materials. Maybe it would develop powerful militaries to conquer alien worlds and steal their technological secrets that could increase efficiency. It would be vast, incredibly efficient, and utterly pointless. The real-life incarnation of those strategy games where you mine Resources to build new Weapons to conquer new Territories from which you mine more Resources and so on forever.

This is obviously weird and I probably went too far, but let me try to explain my reasoning.

The part about replacing workers with robots isn’t too weird; lots of industries have already done that. There’s a whole big debate over to what degree that will intensify, and whether unemployed humans will find jobs somewhere else, or whether there will only be jobs for creative people with a certain education level or IQ. This part is well-discussed and I don’t have much to add.

But lately there’s also been discussion of automating corporations themselves. I don’t know much about Ethereum (and I probably shouldn’t guess since I think the inventor reads this blog and could call me on it) but as I understand it they aim to replace corporate governance with algorithms. For example, the DAO is a leaderless investment fund that allocates money according to member votes. Right now this isn’t super interesting; algorithms can’t make too many difficult business decisions so it’s limited to corporations that just do a couple of primitive actions (and why would anyone want a democratic venture fund?). But once we get closer to true AI, they might be able to make the sort of business decisions that a CEO does today. The end goal is intelligent corporations controlled by nobody but themselves.

This very blog has an advertisement for a group trying to make investment decisions based on machine learning. If they succeed, how long is it before some programmer combines a successful machine investor with a DAO-style investment fund, and creates an entity that takes humans out of the loop completely? You send it your money, a couple years later it gives you back hopefully more money, with no humans involved at any point. Such robo-investors might eventually become more efficient than Wall Street – after all, hedge fund managers get super rich by skimming money off the top, and any entity that doesn’t do that would have an advantage above and beyond its investment acumen.

If capital investment gets automated, corporate governance gets automated, and labor gets automated, we might end up with the creepy prospect of ascended corporations – robot companies with robot workers owned by robot capitalists. Humans could become irrelevant to most economic activity. Run such an economy for a few hundred years and what do you get?

II.

But in the end isn’t all this about humans? Humans as the investors giving their money to the robo-venture-capitalists, then reaping the gains of their success? And humans as the end consumers whom everyone is eventually trying to please?

It’s possible to imagine accidentally forming stable economic loops that don’t involve humans. Imagine a mining-robot company that took one input (steel) and produced one output (mining-robots), which it would sell either for money or for steel below a certain price. And imagine a steel-mining company that took one input (mining-robots) and produced one output (steel) which it would sell for either money or for mining-robots below a certain price. The two companies could get into a stable loop and end up tiling the universe with steel and mining-robots without caring whether anybody else wanted either. Obviously the real economy is a zillion times more complex than that, and I’m nowhere near the level of understanding I would need to say if there’s any chance that an entire self-sustaining economy worth of things could produce a loop like that. But I guess you only need one.

I think we can get around this in a causal-historical perspective, where we start with only humans and no corporations. The first corporations that come into existence have to be those that want to sell goods to humans. The next level of corporations can be those that sell goods to corporations that sell to humans. And so on. So unless a stable loop forms by accident, all corporations should exist to serve humans. A sufficiently rich human could finance the creation of a stable loop if they wanted to, but why would they want to? Since corporations exist only to satisfy human demand on some level or another, and there’s no demand for stable loops, corporations wouldn’t finance the development of stable loops, except by accident.

(for an interesting accidental stable loop, check out this article on the time two bidding algorithms accidentally raised the price of a book on fly genetics to more than $20 million)

Likewise, I think humans should always be the stockholders of last resort. Since humans will have to invest in the first corporation, even if that corporation invests in other corporations which invest in other corporations in turn, eventually it all bottoms down in humans (is this right?)

The only way I can see humans being eliminated from the picture is, again, by accident. If there are a hundred layers between some raw material corporation and humans, then if each layer is slightly skew to what the layer below it wants, the hundredth layer could be really really skew. Theoretically all our companies today are grounded in serving the needs of humans, but people are still thinking of spending millions of dollars to build floating platforms exactly halfway between New York and London in order to exploit light-speed delays to arbitrage financial markets better, and I’m not sure which human’s needs that serves exactly. I don’t know if there are bounds to how much of an economy can be that kind of thing.

Finally, humans might deliberately create small nonhuman entities with base level “preferences”. For example, a wealthy philanthropist might create an ascended charitable organization which supports mathematical research. Now 99.9% of base-level preferences guiding the economy would be human preferences, and 0.1% might be a hard-coded preference for mathematics research. But since non-human agents at the base of the economy would only be as powerful as the proportion of the money supply they hold, most of the economy would probably still overwhelmingly be geared towards humans unless something went wrong.

Since the economy could grow much faster than human populations, the economy-to-supposed-consumer ratio might become so high that things start becoming ridiculous. If the economy became a light-speed shockwave of economium (a form of matter that maximizes shareholder return, by analogy to computronium and hedonium) spreading across the galaxy, how does all that productive power end up serving the same few billion humans we have now? It would probably be really wasteful, the cosmic equivalent of those people who specialize in getting water from specific glaciers on demand for the super-rich because the super-rich can’t think of anything better to do with their money. Except now the glaciers are on Pluto.

III.

Glacier water from Pluto sounds pretty good. And we can hope that things will get so post-scarcity that governments and private charities give each citizen a few shares in the Ascended Economy to share the gains with non-investors. This would at least temporarily be a really good outcome.

But in the long term it reduces the political problem of regulating corporations to the scientific problem of Friendly AI, which is really bad.

Even today, a lot of corporations do things that effectively maximize shareholder value but which we consider socially irresponsible. Environmental devastation, slave labor, regulatory capture, funding biased science, lawfare against critics – the list goes on and on. They have a simple goal – make money – whereas what we really want them to do is much more complicated and harder to measure – make money without engaging in unethical behavior or creating externalities. We try to use regulatory injunctions, and it sort of helps, but because those go against a corporation’s natural goals they try their best to find loopholes and usually succeed – or just take over the regulators trying to control them.

This is bad enough with bricks-and-mortar companies run by normal-intelligence humans. But it would probably be much worse with ascended corporations. They would have no ethical qualms we didn’t program into them – and again, programming ethics into them would be the Friendly AI problem, which is really hard. And they would be near-impossible to regulate; most existing frameworks for such companies are built on crypto-currency and exist on the cloud in a way that transcends national borders.

(A quick and very simple example of an un-regulate-able ascended corporation – I don’t think it would be too hard to set up an automated version of Uber. I mean, the core Uber app is already an automated version of Uber, it just has company offices and CEOs and executives and so on doing public relations and marketing and stuff. But if the government ever banned Uber the company, could somebody just code another ride-sharing app that dealt securely in Bitcoins? And then have it skim a little bit off the top, which it offered as a bounty to anybody who gave it the processing power it would need to run? And maybe sent a little profit to the programmer who wrote the thing? Sure, the government could arrest the programmer, but short of arresting every driver and passenger there would be no way to destroy the company itself.)

The more ascended corporations there are trying to maximize shareholder value, the more chance there is some will cause negative externalities. But there’s a limited amount we would be able to do about them. This is true today too, but at least today we maintain the illusion that if we just elected Bernie Sanders we could reverse the ravages of capitalism and get an economy that cares about the environment and the family and the common man. An Ascended Economy would destroy that illusion.

How bad would it get? Once ascended corporations reach human or superhuman level intelligences, we run into the same AI goal-alignment problems as anywhere else. Would an ascended corporation pave over the Amazon to make a buck? Of course it would; even human corporations today do that, and an ascended corporation that didn’t have all human ethics programmed in might not even get that it was wrong. What if we programmed the corporation to follow local regulations, and Brazil banned paving over the Amazon? This is an example of trying to control AIs through goals plus injunctions – a tactic Bostrom finds very dubious. It’s essentially challenging a superintelligence to a battle of wits – “here’s something you want, and here are some rules telling you that you can’t get it, can you find a loophole in the rules?” If the superintelligence is super enough, the answer will always be yes.

From there we go into the really gnarly parts of AI goal alignment theory. Would an ascended corporation destroy South America entirely to make a buck? Depending on how it understood its imperative to maximize shareholder value, it might. Yes, this would probably kill many of its shareholders, but its goal is to “maximize shareholder value”, not to keep its shareholders alive to enjoy that value. It might even be willing to destroy humanity itself if other parts of the Ascended Economy would pick up the slack as investors.

(And then there are the weirder problems, like ascended corporations hacking into the stock market and wireheading themselves. When this happens, I want credit for being the first person to predict it.)

Maybe the most hopeful scenario is that once ascended corporations achieved human-level intelligence they might do something game-theoretic and set up a rule-of-law among themselves in order to protect economic growth. I wouldn’t want to begin to speculate on that, but maybe it would involve not killing all humans? Or maybe it would just involve taking over the stock market, formally setting the share price of every company to infinity, and then never doing anything again? I don’t know, and I expect it would get pretty weird.

IV.

I don’t think the future will be like this. This is nowhere near weird enough to be the real future. I think superintelligence is probably too unstable. It will explode while still in the lab and create some kind of technological singularity before people have a chance to produce an entire economy around it.

But given Robin’s assumptions in Age of Em – hard AI, no near-term intelligence explosion, fast economic growth – but ditching his idea of human-like em minds as important components of the labor force – I think something like this would be where we would end up. It probably wouldn’t be so bad for the first couple of years. But eventually ascended corporations would start reaching the point where we might as well think of them as superintelligent AIs. Maybe this world would be friendlier towards AI goal alignment research than Yudkowsky and Bostrom’s scenarios, since at least here we could see it coming, there was no instant explosion, and a lot of different entities approach superintelligence around the same time. But given that the smartest things around are encrypted, uncontrollable, unregulated entities that don’t have humans’ best interests at heart, I’m not sure they would be in much shape to handle the transition.

Welcome to Meteor Deflection Corp. Our quest is to maximize shareholder value this quarter.

— Instance Of Class (@InstanceOfClass) December 26, 2013

I’ve often said here that people join political parties because they care about specific issues, and they think the party is the best way to advance that issue. Having policy on an issue is one way to encourage people to join in the first place; being the kind of party that would do the “right” thing is another. If we want more people to join the Lib Dems, and to be enthusiastically engaged in our activities and campaigns, then we need to make sure that they’re getting traction on the issues they care about, and that often starts with a policy – a statement of what the Lib Dems think should be done about a particular issue.

Currently, policy making requires a certain amount of expert knowledge. There are a lot more people that care about issues, than know exactly what levers of power are available to be pulled, particularly at different levels such as council and Parliament. So how can we make policy formation more open to non-experts and more responsive? Firstly, we need to know what makes our members tick – what are the issues that move them? You’d be surprised how few local parties can answer this question, particularly about the members who aren’t already activists. Member surveys as part of your member communications process (whether that’s by phone, online or by post) can play a key role here, as can collecting this kind of data at a social event – get people to write down one reason why they joined on a post-it note, and collate them on a handy wall.

Secondly, we need to know what’s possible; this is where the policy experts do come in handy. We need to put the people who have the knowledge in touch with the people who have the desire. Ask around your current and former councillors, candidates and Parliamentarians. Nearby local parties or regions might be able to lend an expert; ALDC might be able to give guidance. How you put these together is up to you; different approaches will work for different local parties. Currently I’m planning some free-form discussion online, either using a forum over the space of a couple of weeks, or some online chat sessions, to flesh out proposals. I’d like to finish this with a day-long face-to-face event, perhaps structured like an Unconference.

Of course, the Lib Dems have a regional, state and national policy process for “official” policy which involves detailed policy motions being debated, amended and voted on at a conference. This requires a certain amount of expert knowledge, and the time and money to attend the conference. The approach I’ve outlined above is hopefully a little more flexible and can serve not only for local manifestos which tend to be a bit more ad-hoc, but also as a way of generating policy input into Conferences.

Stan Lee thought the name up. I did costume, web gimmick on wrist; spider signal.



that concludes the introduction to my cosmic collection of esoteric essays about the worlds best loved wall-crawling super-character. Next week, we'll be effervescently embarking on a deservedly detailed issue by issue analysis of the yodel-filled year 1963. I have about 12,000 wunderkind words lined up (taking us as far as issue 4) but obviously there's a lot of woebegone work and radical research to go if I'm going to finish my caustic commentary on the devastating Ditko years, to say nothing of the rest of the swinging 1960s. so please go over to my proudly pontifical Patreon page and see how you can propel me into from being a humbly heroic hobbyiest to a sturdily sucesful semi-professional.

Sometimes, as I browse the internet, an article or a blog post syncs up eerily with a book I’m reading. Most recently it was a post by Doctor Science at Obsidian Wings, who created “the John Donne Test”:

At some point in there I came up with what I’ll call the John Donne Test, because he said “Any man’s death diminishes me.” The Test is very simple:

Is there a second murder? (a second incident; two people murdered at once doesn’t count)

If the answer is “Yes”: you fail.

If it’s a mystery story without any murder, you get an A.

There’s nothing wrong with telling stories about murders. These are, after all, fictional people. But, argues Doctor Science, there’s something squalid about stories that don’t treat death as a tragedy–that casually kill characters off merely to raise the stakes, push the story along. Which is not only a problem in mystery stories. (And is, maybe, another example of a tendency I’ve noticed for some stories to treat background characters as literally less important than protagonists.)

I like mysteries but I’ll admit it’s odd the genre is so murder-centric. It’s not like there’s no potential for drama in fraud or embezzlement or a good old-fashioned jewel heist. And Dorothy Sayers’s Gaudy Night, possibly the greatest mystery novel of the “Golden Age,” is murderless. But sometime between Arthur Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie the genre decided murders were the only proper subject for detective novels.

Speaking of Agatha Christie, early 20th century mystery novels are comfort reading for a lot of people, me included.[1] Which is a bit weird, and I don’t think it’s necessarily a criticism or condemnation of the genre to acknowledge that. Lots of good things are a bit weird. Mulling over and poking at the weirdness of things, even things you love, can be fun.

Mysteries aren’t the only genre built around grim subject matter. There’s horror, and grimdark fantasy, and dystopian science fiction. But those are genres people go to when they want to be in some way unsettled, whether that means being kept in suspense, being made to think about difficult subjects, or just having their heads enjoyably messed with. (The thing I like about horror movies isn’t the horror, exactly; it’s the surrealism.) The audience is having fun, yes, but it’s fun discomfort. No one talks about “cozy horror” or “cozy dystopias.”[2] But there are “cozy mysteries.”

As to what kind of comfort can be found here… well, it’s a cliché and a truism that the detective novel offers a restoration of order, the rebuilding of a community thrown into turmoil and uncertainty. But in this case I think the truism is, well, true. For myself, given the failures of America’s justice system–the false convictions, the police departments that function as racist protection rackets–imagining some quixotic amateur swooping in to sort out its mistakes is a satisfying wish fulfillment fantasy. (Granted, usually the problem in real life isn’t that prosecuters missed some vital clue, but that they faked forensic evidence; or ignored exculpatory evidence; or, alternately, deliberately let a killer off the hook because he happened to have a badge. Sherlock and Elementary notwithstanding, a modern Sherlock Holmes’s greatest challenge would be less explaining the facts and more shaming the authorities into doing the right thing.)

When I came across the Donne Test I was reading Agatha Christie’s Crooked House. Christie’s books are synonymous with the cozy mystery. But Christie herself was less cozy than we remember. As I reread her work in recent years I noticed many of her novels are shrouded in a pall of unease never entirely removed by the neat solution. Christie’s most famous novels, remember, include (Spoilers!) The One Where Everybody Dies, The One Where Everybody’s Guilty, and The One Where the Killer is Your Pal, the Narrator. Some of the Miss Marple novels in particular are practically noir.[3] For all that Christie’s books were the kind of mysteries Raymond Chandler hated, I suspect if Philip Marlowe met Miss Marple they’d exchange knowing nods, each recognizing a kindred spirit who’d also Seen Too Much. Crooked House is another unsettling novel, particularly considered in light of the Donne Test. Christie considered it one of her favorites, which is interesting because here she seems to cast a jaundiced eye over her own literary career.

Crooked House doesn’t star any of Christie’s recurring characters but looks like a typical Christie. The title is taken from a nursery rhyme. The narrator is a statistically average bland detective novel love interest.[4] The ending might be considered a twist in that the killer (who I will soon reveal) is a character most mysteries wouldn’t normally lump in with the suspects. And the grasp of proper police procedures on display here is sketchy. The elderly head of a household has been murdered, apparently by his much younger wife. Narrator Charles Hayward is both the fiancé of the old man’s heir and the son of the Scotland Yard commissioner in charge of the case, which is totally convenient and not a conflict of interest at all.

Charles, naturally, does the amateur detective thing, snooping around and interrogating the family. And at one point he finds himself using the phrase “the fun will start,” and thinks to himself:

What extraordinary things one said! The fun! Why must I choose that particular word?

Well, there’s your question. Charles isn’t the only one having fun. His fiancé’s young sister, 12-year-old Josephine, loves detective stories. She’s been spying on everyone, collecting secrets and writing them down in her notebook, and she knows how this situation is supposed to go:

“I should say it’s about time for the next murder, wouldn’t you?”
“What do you mean—the next murder?”
“Well, in books there’s always a second murder about now. Someone who knows something is bumped off before they can tell what they know.”

And, sure enough, someone unsuccessfully tries to kill Josephine, and later successfully poisons her nanny. And Josephine knew it was coming because she arranged it herself. She killed her grandfather, for entirely childish reasons. Then she sets up her own death trap because she’s read a million detective novels and now, as a newly-fledged author, she knows it’s time to raise the stakes. And she adds another successful murder to make things more exciting, because the nanny’s just a background character, right? You can just kill background characters off. You know, for effect.

It’s impossible not to read Crooked House as Agatha Christie interrogating her own formula, complicating the entertainment we get from her novels, owning their weirdness. It’s a reminder that detective novels fail when they forget murders are tragedies as well as puzzles. At the end Josephine’s dying great-aunt deliberately wrecks her car with Josephine in it and it’s as though Christie is trying to symbolically dispose of the temptation to focus so thoroughly on the puzzle that the people disappear.

Christie was particularly proud of Crooked House; she wrote an introduction explaining that she saved the idea up for years and worked on it extra-carefully. The people who adapt her novels into films and TV shows have not similarly embraced it. According to Crooked House’s Wikipedia page, this is one of only five unfilmed Christie novels–a movie was planned a few years ago, but so far hasn’t gotten off the ground. Maybe they’re afraid the audience would walk away feeling a bit ghoulish.

If on June 23rd there are major movements on the betting and currency markets this is why. https://t.co/cKY5lx3Xtl pic.twitter.com/Q9GcWfQZMh

— TSE (@TSEofPB) May 31, 2016

A private exit poll could trigger a run on Sterling and impact the outcome of the referendum

The FT are reporting that

Hedge funds and investment banks have commissioned private exit polls in an attempt to make profits from the result of the UK’s referendum on EU membership next month.

By finding out the voting patterns early on June 23 and predicting the result, entrepreneurial traders can lay big bets on the result, hoping to be the first to benefit financially from a government-induced swing in sterling since George Soros bet against the pound when it crashed out of the then European exchange rate mechanism in 1992.

Early indications of the likely result in the referendum will be indirectly visible from foreign exchange and sterling derivative markets before the polls close, if big money is bet on the result.

The hedge funds are exploiting Electoral Commission rules that permit exit polls on the day of the referendum so long as they are not published until polls close at 10pm.

Polling companies are finding demand high for their private services on referendum day. “Hedge funds have asked for exit polls and for hourly polls on the day. Banks are certainly commissioning polls for their own consumption that are never released,” said one pollster.

Another pollster said his firm was getting lots of calls from asset managers asking when their next research was coming out: “We are also being asked if we will do polls on the day. People in the City are wanting a head start.”

The cost of a rudimentary exit poll where researchers record votes electronically and send them to headquarters is about £500,000, according to a source in the investment management industry. That is far lower than the potential profits available from finding out whether Leave or Remain is likely to win.

So far, sterling has behaved predictably to ups and downs in the opinion polls, regaining strength recently as the betting odds have suggested the chances of a Remain victory are as high as 80 per cent.

A significant move in sterling is guaranteed on the result of the vote, with a modest rise expected if Remain wins and a sharp drop anticipated if there is a vote for Brexit.

If I were Vote Leave, I would be very publicly telling the people and organisations commissioning these private exit polls what Peter Parker was told by his uncle, with great power comes great responsibility, and they should use that power wisely and responsibly, the future of the country is at stake.

For those of us betting on the referendum, on June 23rd we might have to keep as much of a close eye on the currency markets as we do on the betting markets.

TSE

Full-Text RSS: convert redacted feeds or multipage articles to properly useful RSS.

Hey, everybody! It's Part 11 in my series of articles about how writers can deal with no one wanting to pay them to write. Part 1 can be read here, Part 2 can be read here, Part 3 can be read here, Part 4 can be read here, Part 5 can be read here, Part 6 can be read here, Part 7 can be read here, Part 8 can be read here, Part 9 can be read here and Part 10? Well, Part 10 can be read here. Part 11 can be read right after I skip a line…

There. Here we are at Part 11 and this time, let's talk about money. Writers need to make money. That might seem obvious but it apparently isn't to the myriad of people we encounter who expect us to write for them for little or no cash because, after all, we're artists and we are primarily motivated by passion for our work and a burning need to express ourselves. Nary a week goes by where someone doesn't approach me, trying to finagle me into writing something for little or no remuneration. Here is a list of key points that writers need to remember about their profession…

1. It is vital to make a decent living, one which allows you and your loved ones (if any) to live in a safe environment with sufficient food, medical care and other necessities of life.

There are other key points but that one's so important that I'm going to skip the others.  You need those things I just mentioned and you also need some bucks in the bank for emergencies or lean times — oh, and clothing might be nice, too. And maybe a car and gas to run it. And the tools with which to write and you can probably think of other must-haves. The fact that you're a professional writer — or someone who longs to be one — does not change that. Not in any way. If you're nervous that you won't sell the script you're now writing, just think unsettling your sleep will be if a non-sale of that script would cause you to lose your home.

It should not come to that. When you're on the ledge is when you're liable to make really, really bad career decisions. As a writer, you'll probably get lots of offers you should decline. You should say no to insulting pay rates and to projects for which you have zero passion. You should especially turn down those Jobs From Hell where you'll be working for some guy who combines the worst traits of the Tasmanian Devil, Vlad the Impaler and Phil Spector. That's why you need money in the bank. You can't pass on a job when they're dangling the bucks you need to not get evicted this week.

There may also be times in your life when you want to work on a play or a novel or some idea you have which could result in the creation of something wonderful which you'll then go out and try to sell. To write that dream project, you may need to turn down some paying work, which may mean living for a time off your savings. You can't live off your savings if you don't have savings.

So do not be afraid of making money. Money can be very empowering. For one thing, it frees you from having to worry about money.

Now, am I suggesting that if you're a writer and you aren't making enough to live on, you go get a job waiting tables or selling pants or driving for Uber? Well, that might not be the worst idea in the world but wouldn't it be better to get a job writing?

Not being able to pay your bills as a writer may not be a problem of talent as much as of timing. Some publisher might read that spec novel of yours next week, decide you're the next Stephen King and agree to lay a big advance on you. Or it might be eighteen months before you connect with that person and he gets around to reading it…oh, and the advance will be paid six months later. I just thought of another key point that writers need to remember about their profession…

1. The money almost always takes longer to arrive than you'd like and longer than you'd expect. This is obviously true with shady or underfunded producers and publishers but it's also true of honest ones who are flush with cash.

Right there's another reason why you shouldn't try to live from check to check. I knew a writer years ago who was owed a huge, six-figure payment from Universal Pictures. No one disputed it was due him or questioned the amount. It just somehow took six weeks for someone there to issue the check and during that time, he had to borrow money to live on until it arrived.

If you have to go look for a job because you don't have a check like that en route to you, why not look for a writing job? One that may not be what you eventually want to do but which can keep you solvent until you get to it?

When I started out, I wrote for local magazines. I wrote press releases for a publicist. I wrote one semi-naughty novel under a fake name. I wrote speeches for people who were willing to pay to have speeches written for them. I ghost-wrote some advertising work for another writer I knew. It was not the kind of writing I wanted to do but it was writing.

Then I began writing comic books…and yes, I know there are folks reading this who'd think they'd found their calling if they could write comic books 'til they were as old as Stan Lee but this was 1970. Comics then didn't pay that well and the folks who'd then been doing them for most of their lives didn't seem all that happy about it or properly rewarded. Even Stan Lee then wasn't too happy about it or properly rewarded. It was a great job for me though. I was fast and I was learning and I was still living with my parents and I was young and I was getting my work published in a professional situation and I never had to wait tables or stock shelves or run a deep fryer.

I'm not in any way knocking people who do do those jobs. It's just that if your goal is to be a writer, most non-writing jobs don't get you any closer to that goal. The less glamorous/lucrative writing gigs do however give you some money and also some experience writing. You learn about how to set up your work area. You learn how to pace yourself at the keyboard or whether it helps you to write out things in longhand first. You get practice formulating a sentence in your head and then transferring it to the manuscript. You learn that you write better when you arrange your day so you go to bed early and get up early to write…or write until early in the morning and then sleep 'til 3 in the afternoon.

Also, I think there's a skill to meeting a deadline — learning how to budget your time, learning how often to take a break, etc. You can cultivate a sense of when it's going too slowly or too rapidly. If it's going too slowly, you may not have time to keep to that pace. If it's going surprisingly swiftly, you may need to pause and decide if the speed is because you're really, really in the zone or really, really off-course. It's probably one or the other.

I learned — and this is just me I'm talking about here — that it didn't work to write out much of an outline or even notes for myself; that I had to work it out in my head and store it there. I can't tell you why but that's the way I learned I did my best work. I'd think through my story, often during a long walk, and get it to a certain stage of completeness. Only then could I sit down at what was then a manual typewriter and begin filling the paper. There was such a thing as thinking it through insufficiently and there was also such a thing as too much. I developed an instinct as to when I had the right level.

That level changed over the years as I got a better sense of my own strengths and weaknesses and it changed a lot more when I segued into writing on a computer. But the point is I had to know how to figure out where I was doing to go and roughly how I was going to get there before I began putting things down in what I hoped would be their final form.

And then there was the most serious thing of all, perhaps: I had to develop a sense of when what I was putting on the paper was going nowhere or was not up to whatever standard I wished to meet. I had to be able to sense I'd made one or more wrong turns and I had to learn to make the sacrifice of figuratively (sometimes, literally) tearing up the last few pages or maybe even all of them. That is sometimes a hard thing for any writer to do, especially when you think there's some good stuff in there and now no one will ever read or hear it.

None of this is unique to me. Every writer has to go through certain areas of self-discovery and to find out how best to do what they want to do. I know writers, many of whom I respect a lot, who do their work in ways that seem alien to me.

They get up at dawn and never write after the sun goes down. Or they have to physically leave their homes and go to an office somewhere to write. They require certain music playing at a certain volume. Or they demand absolute silence. They need the phone turned off and little chance of interruption. Or they need to not have the sense of total isolation that can come from being totally isolated. They write out long pages by hand on yellow legal pads, then edit and refine as they type it into their computers. Or they can't write on Microsoft Word, they have to use some version of Wordstar from the Bronze Age with certain tab stops and margins. I even know a few writers who can't use computers at all and so produce magic on the kind of primitive manual typewriter that I wrote on at age 14.

There's nothing wrong with any of that…if it works for you. As a writer, you no doubt have one or more dream assignments — things you want to write, jobs you want to get. If and when you get a shot at them, you'd better have all the basics mastered. That is no time to be figuring out how to set up your office or to learn Movie Master Screenwriter or how to write out an outline for yourself.

Now, you may notice that in this piece, I have subtly changed topics on you. It started out to be a piece about how as writer, you need to earn a comfy living and not always be worrying about your electricity being turned off or the Visa people sending a S.W.A.T. team over to surround your home and order you to throw their credit card out the window. It has since morphed into an essay about the importance for a writer to become comfy and efficient writing and to learn how to be productive and meet a deadline.

I did that little switch because I think these are two problems with the same solution: If you can't get the writing position of your dreams, get a lesser one to tide you over. Find a magazine to write for or find an ad agency that needs someone to whip up press releases or go out and write porn (a lot of successful writers have at one time or another) or write pamphlets or ad copy or training manuals or whatever else may be out there.

If you think it would be embarrassing, you don't have to put your name on it, don't have to tell your friends about it. Just make sure it pays and it would also be good if it requires you to write something — anything — and to deliver it on a timely, professional basis.

Don't think of it as admitting defeat because you aren't writing major motion pictures or showrunning a hit TV show or getting your plays produced on Broadway. Think of it as temp work that can help you out financially for a while and prevent you from having to take a job that does not relate in the slightest to what you really want to do. The money from that temp job might save your home and give you enough of a safety net that you can spend more time writing and less time fretting over bills. And the disciplines and experience of that temp job just might help you to someday use that more writing time to write that major motion picture, showrun that hit TV show, get those plays produced on Broadway…

The post Rejection, Part 11 appeared first on News From ME.

Sunday:

Street stall campaigning can be fun...


I'm Richard Flowers.

Liberal Democrats believe in working together.

That's why we want Britain to remain in the EU.

And that's why I'm here today at the Cheadle Lib Dems street stall, putting the positive case that we remain stronger in together.

You'll've heard all the scare stories. About the economy and trade.

But we don't believe the British are quitters.

We believe Britain can lead in Europe, and that there are positive things we get.

28 countries working together has already delivered a longer period of peace and prosperity than ever before in history.

But think about the future. Kids today who deserve the chance to work, travel, learn yes and even retire anywhere in Europe. We want to give them that opportunity.

The Liberal Democrats believe in a future that's better for all of us together. And that's why we want to Britain to remain in Europe.

Here’s something interesting: “God Has Sent Me To You” by Arzy and Schurr, in Epilepsy & Behavior (not to mention the usual pop-sci sites that ran with it a couple weeks back). Middle-aged Jewish male, practicing but not religious, goes off his meds as part of an ongoing treatment for grand mal seizures (although evidently “tonic-clonic” seizures is now the approved term). Freed from the drugs, he is touched by God. He sees Yahweh approaching, converses with It, accepts a new destiny: he is now The Chosen One, assigned by the Almighty to bring Redemption to the People of Israel. He rips the leads off his scalp and stalks out into the hospital corridors in search of disciples.

That’s right: they got it all on tape. Seven seconds of low-gamma spikes in the 30-40Hz range (I didn’t know what that was either— turns out it’s a pattern of neural activity associated with “conscious attention”).

(The figures might lead you astray if you don’t read the fine print: they didn’t actually get God’s footprints on an MRI. They got them on one of those lo-tech EEGs that traces squiggly lines across a display, then they photoshopped the relevant spikes onto an archival MRI image for display purposes.)

Regardless, the findings themselves are really interesting. For one thing, the God spikes manifested on the left prefrontal cortex, although the seizure was concentrated in the right temporal. For another, God took Its own sweet time taking the stage: the conversion event happened eight hours after the seizure. They’re still trying to figure out what to make of all this.

The behavioral manifestations are classic, though. This guy didn’t just believe he was the chosen one; he knew it down in the gut, with the same certainty that you know your arm is attached to your shoulder. When asked what he was going to do with his disciples when he recruited them, he admitted that he had no plan, that he didn’t need one: God would tell him what to do.

God didn’t, of course. They managed to shut the psychosis down with olanzapine, returned the patient to normalcy a few hours after the event. As far as I know he’s back at work, his buddies on the factory floor blissfully unrecruited.

But what if he hadn’t got better?

This is hardly the first time temporal-lobe epilepsy has been implicated in religious fanaticism; medical correlates extend back to the seventies, and tonic-clonic seizures have been trotted out to retrospectively explain martyrs and prophets going all the way back to the Old Testament. Perhaps the most famous such case involved Saul of Tarsus.

You know that guy. First-century dude, dual citizen (Saul was his Jewish name, Paul his Roman one— let’s just call him SPaul). Didn’t much like these newfangled Christian cults that were springing up everywhere following the crucifixion. His main claim to fame was being the coat-check guy at the stoning of Stephen, up until he was struck blind by a bright light en route to Damascus.

God spoke to SPaul, too. Converted him from nemesis to champion on the spot. There was no olanzapine available. It’s been two thousand years and we’re still picking up the pieces.

Epilepsy isn’t the only explanation that’s been put forth for SPaul’s conversion. Some have argued for a near-miss by a meteorite, on the grounds that the blinding light couldn’t have been hallucinatory since Saul’s traveling companions also saw it. That’s true, according to some accounts; other versions have those same companions hearing God’s voice but not seeing the light. If I had to choose (and if I was denied the option of dismissing the whole damn tale as retconned religious propaganda), I’d believe the latter iteration, and chalk those sounds up to a bout of ululation during the seizure. Speaking in tongues, blindness— most dramatically, of course, the whole hyper-religiosity thing— are all consistent with temporal-lobe epilepsy.

Unlike his (vastly less-influential) 21st Century counterpart, SPaul was not charged with Redeeming the Israelites: Jesus already had dibs on those guys. Instead, Paul claimed that Yahweh had assigned him to preach to the Gentiles, a much vaster market albeit not the one for whom Christ’s teachings were originally intended. Biblical scholar Hugh Schonfield speculates that the reason SPaul had such a hate-on for Jesus in the first place might have been because SPaul regarded himself as the Messiah. (Apparently every second person you met back then regarded themselves as The Chosen One, thanks to Scriptures which promised that such a savior was due Any Day Now, and to ancillary prophecies vague enough to apply to anyone from Rocket Raccoon to Donald Trump). This would imply that SPaul’s roadside conversion was not an isolated event, and sure enough there’s evidence of recurring hallucinations, paranoia, and delusions of grandeur at other times in his life (although these may be more consistent with schizophrenia or bipolar disorder than with epilepsy). According to Schonfield, SPaul— denied the job of Jewish Messiah— took on the Christ’s-Ambassador-to-the-Gentiles gig as a kind of consolation prize.

The irony, of course, is that modern Christianity is arguably far more reflective of SPaul’s teachings than of Jesus’s. Cue two thousand years of crusade, inquisition, homophobia, and misogyny.

So let us all bow our heads in a moment of silent gratitude both for the miracle of modern pharmaceuticals, and for the diligent neurologists at Hadassah Hebrew University Medical Center. Thanks to them, we may have dodged a bullet.

This time, at least.

 

[View in black and white]

I have of late for some reason been involved in a bunch of discussions online regarding the rights of transgender people.

There are many things I wish more people – that is more cisgender people – understood about this topic, but there are few in particular I would like to call out here.

1.

There's a fellow named Jonathan Haidt who has come up with an interesting theory about morality and politics. His theory about morality is universal, but his theory about politics is US-specific.

His theory on morality is that there are six bases on which moral positions are taken. His theory about US politics – backed by his research – is that conservatives consider all six foundations valid bases for public policy, and that liberals only consider two or three valid bases for public policy.

I actually think Haidt is mistaken in a bunch of ways (a topic for another time), but onto something here. I do agree that conservatives and liberals disagree on the legitimacy of certain moral bases for public policy.

In particular, while both liberals and conservatives grant that the principles of Care and Fairness should guide the rules of our society, liberals do not grant any role to Authority, Sanctity, and Loyalty. The sixth – and late-added – foundation is Liberty, which liberals grant some legitimacy to, if less than Care and Fairness.

This puts conservatives – or anybody – arguing in the public sphere for a position that they hold on the bases of Authority, Sanctity, and Loyalty in a rhetorical pickle.

If you argue something is the right thing to do or the right policy to have, because of Authority, Sanctity, or Loyalty, the liberal half of the country will simply reply, "LOL, no. It's just not." Because the liberal moral position holds that Authority, Sanctity, or Loyalty are not legitimate reasons for any law or policy. Those three reasons carry no moral weight to liberals.

(Haidt apparently thinks this is because liberals don't perceive or value Authority, Sanctity, or Loyalty. This is perhaps true for many liberals, but this liberal does Sanctity and Loyalty just fine, thankyouverymuch, but holds as a reasoned, principled position that those things must never be allowed into the law, courtesy of the Enlightenment and the Rights of Man and the Bill of Rights of the Constitution of the USA, i.e. due to valuing Liberty. I suspect this is perhaps less uncommon than he realizes.)

So anyone arguing from Authority, Sanctity, or Loyalty has to come up with some other moral basis for their argument if they want to convince anybody other than conservatives.

(BTW, conservatives know this perfectly well, and, understandably, are pretty chapped that because of this liberal morality effectively controls the terms of discourse. Plenty of conservatives have a lot of resentment about this.)

And that is why pretty much all public policy debate in the US is conducted in terms of why a position is more Fair, more Caring, or more respectful of Liberty ("Liberal", heh) than the opposition.

Or to put it in terms of Haidt's antonyms: why the positions that they oppose are Unfair, Harmful, or Oppressive.

It should come, therefore, as no surprise that the Right promulgates arguments that things they oppose on grounds of Authority, Sanctity, or Loyalty are actually Unfair to someone, Harmful to someone, or Oppressive of someone.

They know that unless they convince the liberals that something is Unfair, Harmful, or Oppressive, they'll get no traction with half the country.

Which is why conservatives promulgate "reasons" that people being transgender – or law or public policy accommodating transgender people – is Unfair, Harmful, or Oppressive of other people.

These arguments are often disingenuous, in that the people offering them would not be satisfied if the alleged Unfairness, Harm, or Oppression were redressed in some way other than curtailing the Liberty of trans people. For some reason being exposed to trans bodies is a Harm to others that is grounds for excluding trans people from locker rooms, but somehow never also a grounds for requiring locker rooms to have adequate privacy curtains, so those who don't want to be looked at naked by those of uncertain gender provenance can be accommodated without throwing anyone out.

These arguments are also often specious, comparing what are ultimately trivial Unfairnesses, Harms or Oppressions of non-trans people to quite appalling Unfairnesses, Harms or Oppressions imposed on trans people. For example, as I explained elsewhere:

When someone who looks like a woman, sounds like a woman, answers to a woman's name, has breasts, and presents in all ways as a woman when dressed is told that if she wants to use, e.g. a gym or pool[*], she'll have to change in the men's locker room, and she does,

1) That outs her to everyone who sees her in the men's locker room. It makes a god damned spectacle of her. It means every single person who sees her heading that way will stop her and say, "Excuse me, ma'am, that's the men's room," or "What are you doing here?", or "Ma'am, you can't be in here." And some "helpful" people will probably grab her by the arm or physically restrain her from the "mistake" of going into the men's locker room, or try to steer her out. And she will have to say something, just to be allowed to continue on her way. Even if she doesn't explicitly explain why she's required to be changing in the men's room, plenty of people will figure it out.

2) Being outed? Can be lethal for trans women. The response of some people (usually but not exclusively men) to finding out that someone they had heretofore taken for a woman has non-conforming genitalia, is to try to beat them to death or shoot them.

Same goes for trans men.

So a lot of trans people, prudently, decide that if using a facility entails being publicly outed as a condition of use, they just won't use it. Being able to use the locker room of the the gender you present as is a safety issue, as well as a treating-people-decently issue. And that means it's an access issue. If the choice is between being publicly humiliated plus exposed to physical violence vs. not using a facility, that means you do not have meaningful access to that facility. I mean, "Sure, you can use our gym, but if you belong to this one minority, you might get shot", is discriminatory.

[* Non optional for, e.g., college students w/ phys ed requirements.]

These Harm, Unfairness and Oppression arguments offered by the Right also frequently are of the form that because some trans person – or someone "merely claiming" to be a trans person – might somewhere, someday do somebody a wrong by means of some accommodation they were granted, that no trans person should be allowed that accommodation, ever.

This is problematic for a reason I hope is the obvious: we don't make people illegal, we make behaviors illegal. We don't say it's okay to discriminate in public accommodation against a minority because maybe that minority will commit a crime. Heaven knows the US has a lamentable history of discriminating against racial and ethnic groups because "those kind steal" and "they'll rape your women" and "they'll rip you off"; few people today are aware that that similar grounds were offered for discrimination against gays and lesbians in the mid-20th century, as well as the slander that they were predators of children. And of course infractions committed by any members of those minorities were used as substantiating evidence that no members of those minorities could be trusted.

When the Right tries to put to trial in the court of public opinion the rights of trans people to just quietly go about their business as any other citizens, please be skeptical about the arguments they are raising. By which I don't mean "reject out of hand", but rather just ask yourself if they are making a mountain out of a molehill, or could have their issues addressed without curtailing trans people's Liberty, or setting up an equivalency between trivial rights of a majority and very important, or even life-and-death rights of a minority.

At this point, these sorts of rhetorical maneuvers should be expected, and you should not be caught unaware by them.

2.

This is a free country.

What that means is that it is a fundamental premise of American culture and jurisprudence that people are free to make what personal choices as seem good to them.

We have the right to choose for ourselves our religions – or choose to have no religion – and nobody else gets to choose our religious convictions for us.

We have the right to choose for ourselves our political affiliations – or choose to have no political affiliations, and nobody else gets to choose how we vote.

We have the right to choose for ourselves where we live, and nobody else gets to choose for us what neighborhoods, cities, or states we reside in.

We have the right to choose for ourselves what employment we seek, and nobody else gets to choose our careers for us.

We have the right to choose for ourselves our friends, and nobody gets to choose our friends for us. We have the right to choose for ourselves our mates, and nobody else gets to choose our mates for us.

We have the right to choose for ourselves what we wear and how we style our hair. We have the right to choose for ourselves what we eat. We have the right to choose for ourselves what we do with our bodies.

This is the moral principle of Liberty, particularly dear in the legal philosophy underpinning this nation. Your personal choices are yours to make for yourself.

Few choices could possibly be more personal than the choice of what sex one identifies as or presents as. The state has zero legitimate interest in regulating what sexes we are.

The commonest liberal arguments for respecting the rights of transgender people to express their genders freely are rooted in Care: that transgender people suffer enormously when not permitted to express their genders, and that we should allow it as a matter of humaneness and basic decency. This is a fine argument and speaks strongly to me, too. I just don't think it goes far enough.

I don't think someone should have to suffer greatly to be justified in changing what sex they present as, or what sex they are in the eyes of the law, or seeking surgical, endocrinological, or other physical modifications of their bodies.

I think we have a right to choose our sexes for ourselves.

Gentle reader, I think you have a right to choose your sex – or sexes, or lack of a sex – for yourself. It might not ever have been a right it occurred to you to want or to exercise, but it is yours, and I think you should protect it, and not suffer its curtailment. I don't think anybody has any right to tell you what sex you are or have to be, save you, yourself.

Furthermore, I think we have a right to choose our sexes on the basis of any goddamned reason we like, including for completely trivial, specious, or silly reasons. And at any time. And have more than one. And change our minds.

I think this is obviously a matter of bodily autonomy and personal preference and conviction. Which is to say, a matter of Liberty.

Furthermore, I think we have a right to perform gender, to conform or not to gender performance conventions, however we feel like. I think we have a right not to have to change what our gender "is" to wear a skirt or a suit and tie.

Jefferson famously said of the free exercise of religion that "it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg." The exact same thing is true, to the exact same extent, for the free exercise of gender expression.

3.

Today, there are many people who would argue with Jefferson on his contention. There are those who are quick to point out how burdensome it is to schools and businesses that they are expected to accommodate "other" religious holidays, what an expense it is for the military and prisons to accommodate religious dietary restrictions. There are those who would argue that there are certain religions prone to leg-breaking and thus need to be suppressed. What trouble, what risk it is, to allow citizens to choose any religion they like! Why should we have to put up with all that inconvenience and possible threat, just to let people follow their convictions on matters of faith?

So far, America as a nation has, despite betraying this ideal in the worst ways from its earliest days, mostly, when it stopped to think about it, staunchly rejected this line of reasoning as obviously wrong and in violation of everything we stand for, which is why the general trend over the last two centuries has been to correct for increasing personal Liberty. I think this is, far and away, the best, brightest, and most beautiful thing about this crazy place. What hope we have for our country must surely reside in this.

So we bear the inconvenience, the expense, the risk, the discomfort of having a diverse society and a free nation, where people can largely do with themselves as they please. Because Liberty is worth it to us.

Too much of the objection to trans people being their trans selves is rooted in arguments that boil down to It's So Inconvenient For Everyone Else and It Makes Me Uncomfortable and Why Do They Have To Be Such Bothers.

I think those are really crappy reasons for curtailing someone's Liberty. We on the Left don't tolerate such foolishness as justification to curtail minorities' free exercise of religion, we shouldn't tolerate is a justification to curtail minorities' free exercise of sexual expression.

For that matter, we don't tolerate those arguments for excluding women from the workplace and from higher education, even though the provision of separate bathrooms for women was originally tied to the hiring of women (Text of the oldest sex-segregation bathroom law in the US. h/t Prof Terry Kogan in TIME) We don't tolerate those arguments for excluding racial or ethnic minorities from places of public accommodation. It made a lot of white people really, authentically uncomfortable to have to share train cars and hotels and swimming pools and lunch counters with black people, and too bad.

Please don't succumb to these sorts of arguments, which appeal to you to put your own feelings of being put out by rather minor things, over other people's exercise of what should be their freedom.

4.

I think it is really important to get out in front of these issues, from a perspective of Liberty, as pertains to bodily autonomy.

A century ago we went through the Industrial Revolution. We are now going through the Digital Revolution. I know what comes next: the Biological Revolution.

In the same way that someone in 1816 couldn't imagine what the Industrial Revolution would bring, in the same way that someone in 1916 couldn't imagine what the Digital Revolution would bring, we in 2016 can't possibly imagine what the Biological Revolution will bring.

But the one thing that will almost certainly be true is that as biomedical science – biological engineering – begins to put into human control unprecedented powers over human bodies, we – or our descendants – will have vastly multiplied choices over what to do with our bodies, and vastly multiplied threats to our authority over our bodies.

The precedents we establish today about bodies and identity are going to get amplified in all sorts of astonishing ways by advances in biology and medicine tomorrow.

I think it's critically important that we establish the legal and cultural principles now that people get to choose their sexes and gender expression for themselves, and get to choose for themselves what medical procedures they will have, if any, to confirm their gender identities.

Any legal standards about sex and gender that we base on biology are built on what shall prove to be shifting sands. To say someone's sex is "really" established by some physical trait like genital morphology or chromosomes is relying on the changeless nature of things science even now is studying how to change.

Imagine – this is not a huge stretch – that work with stem cells and organ regeneration results in the technology to grow in a lab a fresh sets of body parts from a patient's own tissue, and that, furthermore, it's possible through endocrine manipulation in the lab, to grow body parts the patient, in some sense, "would have had" if their hormones were other than they were. It is not hard to imagine radical improvements in gender affirmation surgery. It is also not hard to imagine that if there were radical improvement in gender affirmation surgery, that (1) it might be astronomically expensive, and (2) that our society, particularly the more conservative parts of it, might argue that now that it's possible to "really" change your sex through these new improved medical technologies, only people who have transitioned through these technologies should be permitted to legally transition. (Compare with how civil unions and unmarried partner benefits were rolled back after the advent of marriage equality: "if you can get married now, why should we allow your partner on your health insurance if you don't marry them?") It's a "sensible" sounding argument that has as a consequence prohibiting all but the wealthiest people from exercising their free expression of sexual identity, and de facto forbidding most trans people to transition.

Okay, scenario 2: replace "astronomically expensive" with "does something terrible to your telomeres, such that you die of old age by your mid forties."

I hope it is clear how important it could be to get these things right, now. It may be that the stakes only get higher.

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I have a picture somewhere of me standing next to a Gorn. Not a real Gorn. There are no real Gorn. It was a fake Gorn. I do not have a picture of me standing next to Jonathan Frakes, not even a fake Jonathan Frakes.

I once nearly accosted two strangers at the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame because one of them misidentified a life-sized model of Gort as Twiki. I’m still amazed at the restraint I showed.

The photos for the drawings of my mother were taken the first time she came to visit is in Florida. The scooter was a rental. I used to poo-poo scooters, but watching mom use that one changed my mind. If you’re going to any large theme park and any member of your party has the slightest issue that makes walking several miles difficult, I strongly suggest renting one. Not only does it make the scooter rider’s trip more enjoyable for them, because they can keep up, it makes everyone else’s trip more enjoyable, because the scooter rider can keep up.

Also, the scooter doesn’t care how many purses, coats, and souvenirs it carries. You essentially take the least mobile member of your party and turn them into a pack mule.

 

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One day lagomania gripped Britain; the next the hare had been discovered and it was all over except the ennui. The television segments and newspaper articles ceased almost as quickly as the charter tours and the book signings. Rod Argent’s Masquerade musical, which had been all set to make the jump from the Young Vic to the West End, went from a packed house to an empty one overnight, and closed within two weeks. Kit Williams shelved his merry-leprechaun persona and went back to his painting. Tom Maschler and his publicity machine at Jonathan Cape gnashed their teeth at their uncooperative, unappealingly anonymous winner, who had spoiled their plans for making this moment a climax rather than an anticlimax, and in the process cost them the chance to turn Masquerade into an ongoing series of similar grand public treasure hunts. As it was, the public’s appetite for this sort of fare seemed permanently spoiled by the bad taste “Ken Thomas” had left in its mouth.

Instead another craze began to sweep through Britain. Just weeks after Masquerade wound up, the Sinclair Spectrum and the BBC Micro started shipping in quantity to British consumers, transforming what had been a burgeoning underground hobby into a full-blown mainstream craze for computers and especially computer games. By 1984, British per-capita computer ownership had exceeded that of the United States, marking it as the most computer-mad nation on earth. It was in connection with this latest craze for computers, barely a glint in a few dreamers’ eyes when Kit Williams had fashioned the golden hare five years before, that the treasure unexpectedly reemerged from the bank vault into which Ken Thomas had stuck it.

News of a company called Haresoft first arrived in the June 5, 1984, issue of Home Computing Weekly. (Yes, Britain was so computer-mad that it could support a weekly magazine for enthusiasts — in fact, two of them.) Thanks to an “exclusive arrangement,” the magazine offered readers a chance to buy something called Hareraiser Prelude for most major platforms directly from Haresoft before it shipped to stores. The announcement marked the beginning of a new hunt for the hare. Or, if the winner preferred, she could take £30,000 in cash in lieu of the hare — that being, according to Haresoft, its estimated value as a piece of art and a cultural touchstone after all of the Masquerade excitement. The hare wasn’t actually buried this time, “to avoid damaging the countryside and to give an equal chance to young people who cannot travel freely.” All you needed to find it in virtual space was “patience and an inquisitive mind” for a puzzle “that could be solved by adult and child alike.” But doing so wouldn’t be cheap. Would-be winners would have to purchase not only Hareraiser Prelude but also Hareraiser Finale to divine the hare’s new location, each for the princely sum of £8.95, a premium price point normally reserved for only the most desirable and ambitious games.

The division into a Prelude and a Finale did rather leave one wondering where the meaty middle had gone. Those punters foolish enough to fork over the money were given yet more cause to wonder. “I find all my feelings of eager anticipation suddenly turned to shock and desolation,” wrote one earnest treasure hunter who’d convinced herself she was about to embark on a new Masquerade. What she got instead was something much, much shabbier.

A remarkably threadbare product even for an era when ramshackle junk was the rule rather than the exception, the Hareraiser “games” are as ugly as they are inscrutable; at least Masquerade gave you some lovely pictures to look at while you pored hopelessly over its puzzle. A handful of kilobytes of code — the Prelude and Finale together could fit into the memory of a 16 K Sinclair Spectrum — depict a crudely drawn landscape made up of ground, trees, sky, clouds, and sun, all executed with the stick-figure flair of an ungifted three-year-old. The opening text says you can move around this space with the cursor keys, but if there is any logic to the geography at all it must be that of a giant text-adventure-style maze. Assuming you can judge your location from the number and positions of the trees (perhaps a dangerous assumption), moving north and then south doesn’t return you to your starting point. Occasionally, according to no detectable rhyme or reason, a hare runs across the screen, thus providing the sum total of the action. The only other element is an occasional cliché that pops up at the bottom: “Use your brain”; “Can you see the wood for the trees”; “Early bird catches the worm.”

All Haresoft correspondence was conducted by someone calling himself “Jeff Lubbock,” who may or may not have actually existed. Lubbock’s official line was that Ken Thomas had sold the hare to his company for £20,000, but said company’s behavior bore lots of suspicious similarities to Thomas’s own immediately after winning the hare. Haresoft hungered after notoriety, the better to sell more copies of Hareraiser, yet hid behind a cloak of anonymity at the same time, conducting all business and public relations solely via press releases and advertisements. Although Home Computing Weekly had been fooled into lending some of their credibility to Haresoft at the outset, the company would never again be accorded that sort of respect. The young men writing for the laddish gaming magazines with titles like Crash and Zzap! may not have been the most nuanced of critics, but even they had little trouble sniffing the odor of disreputability that fairly poured out of Haresoft. For one thing, the numbers just didn’t add up. “Where will it all come from?” wrote Computer and Video Games of the £30,000 prize in their review. “Suppose £1 per game is put into a kitty — that’s one helluva lot of copies to hope to sell for a puzzle that isn’t even a game!” Sinclair User was equally direct: “It is rather difficult to understand why this program was produced at all, though cynics may draw their own conclusions.”

Poor reviews turned to outright snubs between the first and second Hareraiser; virtually no one even bothered to review or even announce the availability of the Finale when it appeared a few months after the Prelude. Just as well, as it was effectively indistinguishable from the Prelude anyway. As Haresoft’s press releases and advertisements grew ever more strident in light of what must have been nearly nonexistent sales, dismissal turned to open scorn. Sinclair User jeered at Haresoft’s non sequitur of a claim that they had released Hareraiser in two parts “to make it fun and enable competitors of all ages to participate”: “Bet you thought it was just a way to make more money.” A claim that Hareraiser was being bought by schools “to involve pupils in developing computer-logic skills” prompted a little investigative reporting. “We couldn’t make an awful lot of sense of it,” said one of the few headmasters who would admit to having bought the programs. “I think most schools bought Hareraiser to try and win the £30,000 for their school. That’s certainly why we had a look at it.” So much for “developing computer-logic skills.” The most bizarre of all the Haresoft press releases claimed that Anneka Rice, host of a hugely popular game show called Treasure Hunt that also owed more than a little something to Masquerade, had revealed a clue to the puzzle when making a live appearance at Harrod’s. Since the appearance hadn’t been filmed, apparently the clue could only be useful to those who coincidentally happened to be at the event and retained a perfect memory of every word Rice had said there.

The question of whether there ever was a real solution to the alleged puzzle of Hareraiser is, like so many questions surrounding Kit Williams’s golden hare, impossible to fully answer. Disassembling the programs to look for a solution, as a commenter here recently suggested, is a nonstarter, as there is no “winning” screen, no opportunity to solve the puzzle on the computer and have the program acknowledge your achievement. You’re rather expected to solve it on pencil and paper using clues from the programs. It’s possible that a puzzle of some sort was created in good faith, but was so horrid no one ever had the ghost of a chance of figuring it out. Still, not building a winning state into the program itself did allow Haresoft to arbitrarily declare the solution to be whatever they wished it to be — and whenever they wished to do so. Indeed, if I had to guess I’d say that here we come to the real plan, such as it was. If Hareraiser took off to become another sensation like Masquerade, Haresoft would have the flexibility to bend the solution to a winner chosen at whatever juncture best maximized the publicity and the profit.

But, in an affirmation of the good sense of the British computing public, Hareraiser didn’t become another Masquerade. The whole thing was so tawdry, so obviously shady, that almost no one bought in. A desperate Haresoft was reduced to creating painfully transparent sock puppets to write in to the magazines who were savaging the programs.

I wonder who these nerds are who think this isn’t any good. I am one of a group of six who have had immense fun from seeking clues on this treasure hunt, and furthermore, it’s not meant to be a book like Masquerade. If one seeks to win the golden hare, the computer gives the clues, the rest is down to you — that is, if you’re intelligent enough.

This testimony from “Mrs. Widdowson” helped not a whit. Haresoft quietly disappeared during the early months of 1985, leaving behind no forwarding address and not a peep about the still winnerless contest.

But the wheels of bankruptcy do grind, slowly yet relentlessly. In December of 1988, a month of bombshell revelations about Masquerade, the golden hare, and Ken Thomas, Kit Williams’s treasure resurfaced for auction at Sotheby’s. The court-appointed liquidator of Haresoft, charged with recovering as much money as possible to pay off the bank that had been unwise enough to supply the operation’s seed capital, had found the defunct company’s one asset of any real value to be the hare, and had promptly seized it to auction it off. The auction turned into a media circus, at last providing the big star turn for the hare that Tom Maschler’s publicity machine had planned for the original unveiling. Caron Keating, known among children as host of the television show Blue Peter and among adults as something of a sex symbol, did the hosting honors, wearing the hare around her neck as the ultimate fashion accessory. Kit Williams himself was there to bid for the hare, but had to drop out at £6000. It was finally sold for £31,900 to an anonymous buyer, shocking everyone; everyone had assumed that the estimated worth of £30,000 was, like most things to come out of Haresoft, complete nonsense. The auction put the capstone on the hare’s first checkered and very public decade of existence. Henceforth it would lead a quieter life, winding up in a private collection in Asia. It would be more than twenty years before it would enter the public eye again.

The same month of December 1988 brought a certain vindication to everyone who had witnessed the disappointing ending of the original hunt for the hare, for in the course of this month Ken Thomas’s cherished cloak of anonymity was finally stripped away and many of the details of the cheating everyone had always suspected him of were finally laid bare. The news broke nationwide in The Times of December 11, 1988, just six days after the hare had been sold at auction. But the real legwork had been done by the editor of the local Bedfordshire newspaper, Bedfordshire on Sunday, published near the hare’s burial place in Ampthill Park.

Frank Branston, the editor in question, had first become involved with the story about a year before the hare was dug up, when a local man named John Guard told him out of the blue that he thought he knew where to find it. When Branston queried how he had come by this information, Guard replied that his girlfriend, Veronica Roberts — more commonly called “Ronnie” — had been Kit Williams’s girlfriend at the time he was creating Masquerade.

Guard wasn’t the most reliable of witnesses. A heavy drinker and heavy pot smoker, he had a reputation as a small-time con artist and general ne’er-do-well around town, prone to regular flights of fancy not too different from this claim. But Branston was able to confirm that at least part of his story was true: Ronnie Roberts had indeed been the girlfriend of Kit Williams a few years before. For months, whenever Branston would see Guard around town, he’d quietly ask him about the hare, whereupon Guard would reply only that finding it was proving more difficult than anticipated. When the treasure was finally found right there in Bedfordshire, allegedly because someone’s dog chose to pee on the Amptill Park monument, Branston immediately thought again of Guard. He tracked him down to ask him directly if he was the mysterious Ken Thomas. Guard replied in the negative, albeit in a suspiciously evasive manner. Branston soon had confirmation that Guard couldn’t be Thomas; one look at the pictures of Thomas at the unveiling of the hare was enough, even disguised as he was, to confirm that he wasn’t Guard.

And yet Branston’s suspicions remained. He launched a modest investigation into Thomas’s identity. A bit of research revealed that the solicitor Thomas was using as representation for his negotiations with Jonathan Cape was a local Bedfordshire man. That meant that Thomas was almost certainly a local as well, further raising Branston’s suspicions about a possible connection with Guard. After this, though, he drew a blank. He couldn’t shake anything else loose from Guard, the solicitor, or any of his contacts covering the story in the national media. And so for the next six years he left it at that.

Branston’s curiosity was revived in 1988 when a brief blurb came across his news wire stating that the golden hare of Masquerade was to be sold at auction as part of the liquidation of a company called Haresoft. It was easy enough to check the official records and see who was behind Haresoft. The founder and head was listed as one Dugald Thompson, living in the Bedfordshire village of Bolnhurst, close by Bedford and Ampthill. And the records showed something else: Thompson was also associated with a brief-lived wishful thought of a company called Clayprint, set up by none other than John Guard. Brantson had his connection at last. To keep the two men from concocting a story together, he went out to see Guard at the same time that one of his reporters visited Thompson. After the pair had done a fair amount of wriggling on the hook, a story emerged, largely from Guard rather than the steadfastly uncooperative Thompson, that sounded like at least the partial truth.

Ronnie Roberts had indeed first agreed to tell John Guard what she knew about the hare about a year before its eventual discovery, prompting him to crow about it to Branston and quite possibly others around town. But, being something of a hippie idealist, she would share only on the condition that the proceeds from its finding and presumed sale be donated to animals-rights organizations. Guard readily agreed to this proviso at the time; whether he ever intended to honor it is yet another of those insoluble Masquerade mysteries.

Roberts knew quite a lot, although perhaps not quite as much as she thought she did. She had gone out to Ampthill Park with Kit Williams to have a picnic there one spring equinox, in the midst of which he’d excused himself to go bury a magnet marking the future position of the hare. Yet Williams hadn’t been entirely trusting; he’d made sure she didn’t see the exact spot. Her understanding of the burial location was garbled and incomplete. She knew it had something to do with the position of the memorial’s shadow on the spring equinox, but believed the hare to be buried immediately adjacent to the memorial rather than at the full extent of the shadow. Still, she did know it was in Ampthill Park, which was far more than anyone else knew at the time.

Looking for a further leg up on the search, Guard approached a local metal-detector enthusiast named Eric Compton with Roberts’s information. There was £1000 in it for him, Guard said, if he would bring his gadget out to Ampthill Park and help him find the hare — and, just as importantly, if he would act as the front man for their little conspiracy afterward. Guard knew that his connection to Roberts, and Roberts’s connection in turn to Kit Williams, must come out as soon as he personally tried to claim the prize, and then the jig would be up.

But as it happened, the conspiracy never got that far. Many nights of tiresome late-night digging and metal-detecting close by the memorial, where Roberts believed the hare to be buried, revealed nothing. After a final assault on the actual day of the spring equinox of 1981 had also proved fruitless, Compton begged off in disgust, convinced he’d been suckered into yet another of Guard’s groundless flights of fancy.

That would seem to have marked the end of digging at Ampthill Park for many months, until the physics teachers Mike Barker and John Rousseau hit upon the solution to the puzzle and the precise location of the hare that had so eluded Guard and Compton. The “slight depression” Barker took as worrisome evidence of previous digging when he arrived at Ampthill Park on February 18, 1982, was likely the remnant of Guard and Compton’s efforts, now almost a year old. (The story that “Ken Thomas” told of digging immediately before Barker is, like most of what he said, almost certainly total nonsense.)

And so we come to the crazy final days of the treasure hunt, where we’re sadly cast back into the realm of the unknown and possibly unknowable. We know that John Guard was acquainted with Dugald Thompson, and must have told him about Ampthill Park. We know as well that it was Dugald Thompson who became Ken Thomas. What we don’t know is what sort of arrangement, if any, the two men arrived at. Was Thompson Guard’s new front man, Compton’s replacement in the role? If so, the plan to sell the hare and donate the proceeds to animal-rights charities evidently fell by the wayside in favor of using it to start a shady software company. Still, a partnership of the two men would explain the identity of the mysterious friend Thompson mentioned digging with him on the last day, when the hare was finally found. The other possibility is that Thompson snookered the would-be snookerer, taking Guard’s information and acting on it unilaterally. It’s not as if Guard would have been in any position to come forward with his grievance.

One eyebrow-raising coincidence about the final days of the hunt does seem to be just that: Thompson’s posting his letter to Kit Williams just one day before Mike Barker arrived at Ampthill Park for his own dig. Whether acting alone or in partnership with Guard, Thompson decided to try to win the prize for himself without actually digging up the hare first, through this vague letter that implied he knew more than he did. He had done enough research to realize that, with Ampthill Park lying almost directly on the Greenwich meridian, the memorial’s shadow would be cast directly northward on the spring equinox. He didn’t, however, reckon with the difference between magnetic north and true north, diagramming the former rather than the latter in his letter. It was Barker’s enormous misfortune to have done his digging just as Thompson, with or without Guard, was also nosing around. In combination with some ill-advised hints dropped by Kit Williams in their phone conversation, that was enough to put Thompson on the correct track.

That chain of conjecture, at any rate, seems likely to be the best we’ll ever be able to do. John Guard died some years ago, “of drink and drugs” according to Frank Branston, while Ronnie Roberts vanished without a trace. Eric Compton still lives in Bedfordshire, but has no real knowledge of what might have gone on between Thompson and Guard. Dugald Thompson himself, the shadowy man at the center of the mystery and the one person who certainly knows the entirety of what really happened, was still with us when contacted by the BBC in 2009, but remained as stubborn and patently dishonest as ever. Among other things, he claimed that he found the hare entirely on his own — the connection to Guard and Roberts being just another coincidence — but can’t tell the true story “for legal reasons” (one suspects that the latter statement may in fact be true). He also claims that the idea of the “Ken Thomas” persona was actually concocted by Tom Maschler and Jonathan Cape, a claim contradicted by absolutely everyone else.

So, that’s your dose of scandal and conspiracy for today, the sexy part of the Masquerade story. The real reason I wanted to write these articles, however, has little to do with the contest’s juicy ending, fun as it may be to speculate about. Masquerade, you see, cast an enormous shadow over the computer-game industry that exploded in the years immediately after the contest’s conclusion — a shadow that extended far beyond the tawdry story of Haresoft and Hareraiser. It was only natural for marketers looking to drum up excitement for their games to cast their eyes back to a contest that had just sold more than a million books. And look back they did. For some years British gaming especially was a riot of Masquerade-inspired contests.

Which isn’t to say that the United States was entirely bereft of digital Masquerades. On the contrary, arguably the most slavish digital clone of all, an interactive “children’s storybook” containing clues to the locations of three “solid gold, gem-encrusted” keys hidden in three separate locations in the United States, was a late 1982 American title called Prism from International Software Marketing.  I’ve been unable to find any evidence that any of the keys were ever found, unsurprisingly as it seems that very few ever bought the software; International Software Marketing disappeared within a year. After that, Masquerade‘s influence in the United States, while far from negligible, tended to be more oblique, living in the realms of aesthetics and game design rather than public contests. Most notably, Cliff Johnson’s fairy-tale puzzler The Fool’s Errand was heavily inspired by Kit Williams’s book, although Johnson wisely made his storybook much more soluble. One of the loveliest games of its era, The Fool’s Errand makes a magnificent legacy for the golden hare all by itself.

But in Britain the influence of Masquerade was far more sustained, obvious, and direct. As with the example of Prism in the United States, it tended to be the earliest of the British Masquerade heirs that tried to translate the experience of the earlier treasure hunt most literally. Just months after the hare was dug up, the merry pranksters at Automata introduced a text adventure called Pimania, containing clues to the location of the Golden Sundial of Pi, a much tackier-looking treasure than Kit Williams’s hare but one worth — according at least to Automata — £6000. It wouldn’t finally be discovered until July of 1985, an event that marked the brief-lived Automata’s last hurrah.

I don’t know of any others who actually buried a treasure, but similar trinkets were a definite order of the day as contest prizes for some time. For instance, the first person to solve Castle of Riddles, Peter Killworth’s second published text adventure, received £1500 in cash and a “£700 hallmarked silver ring-shaped trophy mounted on a presentation plinth and inscribed ‘King of the Ring.’”

But publishers soon realized that elaborate objets d’art weren’t really necessary for a rousing contest. Cold, hard cash would do just as well or better. The race toward ever larger jackpots reached its dizzying climax with a 1984 game from Domark called Eureka!, a huge production for the time consisting of five separate text adventures, five action games, and a hardcopy poor man’s Masquerade, or “Book of Riddles,” all allegedly designed by Ian Livingstone of Fighting Fantasy gamebook fame. The collection as a whole was a monument to quantity over quality, but the prize for being the first to slog through it all was nothing to sneeze at: £25,000 in cash, the largest of these sorts of prizes ever awarded (as opposed to merely promised in the case of the benighted Haresoft). The winner, who didn’t emerge until the game had been on the market for more than a year and the contest’s expiration date was looming, was a 15-year-old named Matthew Woodley.

Yet even a cash prize wasn’t an absolute requirement to evoke some of the old spirit of Masquerade. For many people, just the national recognition of becoming the first to win a game was enough, with or without the structure of a formal contest. Heaps of games shipped with cards to be mailed in with proof of victory. If you happened to be lucky enough to be the first winner, or sometimes just among the first handful, you could count on some press recognition and at least a little swag. Melbourne House, for example, rewarded the teenage Cunningham brothers of Northumberland when they became the first to send in the winning solution to Sherlock four months after the adventure’s release with a gala lunch at The Sherlock Holmes Restaurant and blurbs in several magazines. Acornsoft likewise made sure to recognize Hal Bertram, the first person to become Elite in Elite some six weeks after that game’s release.

All of these contests, whether expressed or implied, served to bind British gamers together, giving the hobby as a whole a personal, clubby feel that wasn’t enjoyed by the larger American scene. That said, they were also a classic double-edged sword. There’s an ugly truth lurking at the heart of Masquerade and all of the similar contests that followed, whether they unspooled digitally or in print. To make a puzzle that will be attempted by thousands, tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands of people and not have it solved within hours — a development that would be commercially disastrous — requires making that puzzle outrageously hard. And outrageously hard puzzles just aren’t much fun for most people. It’s this simple truth that makes the idea of a mass treasure hunt much more alluring than the reality. The differences between the demands of the contest and the demands of good puzzle design are almost irreconcilable. It’s not as if British text-adventure designers in particular needed more motivation to produce unfair and well-nigh insoluble games.

And, while games in other genres like Elite sometimes indulged in public contests and public recognition for firsties, it was indeed always the text adventure with which Masquerade-style contests were most closely identified — unsurprisingly as these games are by their nature big, elaborate puzzles to solve, just like Kit Williams’s book. It’s equally unsurprising, then, that the end of the era of the Masquerade-inspired computer-game contest coincides with the text adventure’s commercial sunset in Britain.

Level 9, the most prolific and respected of British text-adventure makers for most of the genre’s commercial existence, had always avoided contests of this kind, perhaps out of recognition of the damage they tended to do to game design. But in 1988, having been dumped by Rainbird, Level 9 had just signed on with a new publisher called Mandarin who were very eager to do another good old-fashioned treasure hunt; they even wanted to re-institute the idea of a physical treasure. The game in question being an Arthurian exercise called Lancelot, the treasure that Level 9 and Mandarin agreed upon was a replica of the Holy Grail, “hand-crafted from sterling silver,” “gilded inside with 22-carat gold” (bettering Kit Williams’s hare by 4 carats), “encrusted with semi-precious stones,” and worth a cool £5000 in raw materials (bettering the hare by £2000).

In this case, however, designer Pete Austin threaded the needle in a way few if any of his predecessors had managed. He was clever enough to avoid the trap of a contest predicated purely on becoming the first to solve a game, avoiding with it the unfair, insoluble adventure it invariably foisted on its players. Instead he sprinkled clues to a meta-puzzle through his game, but kept the exercise of solving that puzzle separate from that of winning the game. He also made sure that the meta-puzzle was a fair puzzle, providing its methodology openly to would-be contest participants.

The game itself was only required for the first round, which was used to select a pool of finalists who were sent another puzzle hinging around a set of very difficult trivia questions on Arthurian lore and legend. The winner, an adventure-game reviewer named John Sweeney, claimed to have required some thirty reference books to work out the solution and identify the resting place of the Grail in the form of a grid reference on an Ordnance Survey map. (It was all purely an intellectual exercise; the Grail was not, as Mandarin and Level 9 were constantly at pains to emphasize, actually buried there.) By all accounts difficult but fair in conception and execution, the Lancelot puzzle might have pointed a way forward for contests of this nature; it actually sounds like it was kind of fun. But alas, it wasn’t to be. Lancelot‘s sales were nowhere close to being strong enough to justify a prize of such magnificence. John Sweeney’s achievement marked the end of the old era of adventure-game contests as a whole rather than the beginning of a new era of saner, fairer contests. His human-interest story would be just about the last of its kind on the pages of British magazines.

I’ll return to the twilight years of the British text-adventure industry in my next article. But for now, for today, a final few words on the three biggest principals behind the original Masquerade, two of them human and one lagomorphic.

Tom Maschler’s Jonathan Cape was purchased by Random House in 1987, becoming an imprint thereof. Maschler stepped down from his role as chief editor shortly thereafter, on the advice of doctors who were warning him of the effect many years of burning the candle at both ends was having on his health. He’s led a quieter life since, emerging publicly only on occasion. In 2005, he published a memoir, called simply Publisher, that garnered mixed reviews. He rates the creation of the Booker Prize as his proudest achievement: “It certainly has had an impact, and if it means people think they should occasionally read a good novel, that is something I’m very proud of.” Amen to that.

Kit Williams tried to capture lightning in a bottle a second time in 1984 via an untitled picture book most commonly referred to as “The Bee Book.” The contest this time was merely to ferret out the book’s real name; no physical treasure was buried. The prize, an intricate art object Williams called a “marquetry box,” was won by one Steve Pearce of Leicester. No rumors of foul play dogged the process this time, but the whole exercise garnered not a shadow of the attention (or sales) of Masquerade, and Kit Williams decided that was enough of that. He returned to the life of a simple painter, becoming more reclusive than ever, creating mostly on personal commission and rarely showing his work publicly.

The whereabouts of the golden hare remained unknown except in rumor for many years. In 2009, however, the thirtieth anniversary of the treasure hunt’s beginning prompted a run of retrospectives in the British media. This attention in turn prompted the hare’s anonymous Asian owner to send it back to its homeland for a time. A BBC film crew captured Kit Williams’s emotional reunion with his most famous creation, which he’d last seen from the audience in Sotheby’s more than twenty years earlier. In 2012, the current owner allowed the Victoria and Albert Museum to publicly display the hare, exactly thirty years after having been so rudely refused permission to do so by Ken Thomas/Dugald Thompson. It had been one hell of a circuitous trip — for the hare itself and for everyone who ever fell under its spell.

(Sources: Most of the sources listed in the previous article apply to this one as well. In addition, there are the Creative Computing of May 1983; Home Computing Weekly of November 22 1983 and June 5 1984; Sinclair User of December 1984, January 1985, March 1985, and October 1987; Crash of January 1985 and October 1985; Computer and Video Games of December 1984 and June 1987; Popular Computing Weekly of August 30 1984 and November 29 1984; Your Sinclair of January 1989; Page 6 of July 1989; Amiga Computing of October 1988. Also see the entry for Hareraiser Finale on the site Games That Weren’t 64.)

But when I read a story like this, I want to know more. When a member of Congress is leaning on "a passage from the Bible denouncing homosexuality" as the primary basis for his legislative decisions, thereby disgusting his GOP colleagues with his ignorant rejection of the First Amendment, I also want to know which passage from the Bible, specifically, this guy is quoting.

Mike Martin sent me an e-mail with subject line "What would Jack think?" It's about a new storyline that Marvel has going with Captain America…

So, obviously the fan base is up in arms about Marvel's new "not a gimmick" that Captain America has been a deep cover Hydra agent all along (so deep that he has prevented their world conquering plans multiple times, apparently). At times, you have quoted Jack Kirby as saying (and I'm paraphrasing) that he didn't mind what later creators did with his characters because that was their take on the subject and it didn't invalidate his work.

But I'm wondering if this storyline's claim that "he has been a Hydra agent all along" might be a bridge too far, since it essentially injects this new take on the character into his entire 75 year history. What are your thoughts?

I haven't seen the comics but I would say it is a "gimmick" the way I define that word, maybe not the way the comic's makers do. It's become very popular in comics — and to see why, you just have to look at the sales figures — to come up with these character-changing events. Some character dies. Some character marries. Some character gets a new costume, thereby abandoning an iconic one. Some character loses a limb or key power or otherwise undergoes a startling change. Some character gets a sex change. Whatever. Eventually, they all get undone, if not by the folks who made the particular issues then by their successors. It ain't good for the merchandising and the long-term health of the property to maul it for very long.

And of course, at some point, someone in the office says, "We've really lost the theme and concept of this comic." And then the jarring gimmick is to take it back to its roots.

I'm a little reticent to say how Jack would have felt about some things. I know his strong feelings on some topics. On others though, you have to remember that Jack was a vast thinker who didn't always view the world or some aspect of it as we (mere) mortals would. He sometimes surprised me with his "take" on some issue and when he did, it was usually because I was looking at a tree and he was looking at the entire forest.

That said, I feel safe to say that the first question Jack would probably ask would be "Is it a good story?" If it isn't, then it's a bad idea right there. If it is, then you go on to Question Two, which would be "Does it box the current and future writers in and damage their ability to create good stories?" If the answer is no, then fine. If it's yes…well, that's why these premise-altering storylines are usually reversed and the dead character is brought back to life or the marriage is forgotten or the whole thing turns out to be a dream or a clone or they just plain reboot the strip and start over.

I would guess that just of stories that continued Kirby characters after he'd departed and were issued during his lifetime, Jack probably never looked at 90% of them. Of the remainder, he rarely recognized anything but the characters' visuals — and sometimes not even that — though he was usually too polite to say so. I can think of a few times he objected to something if he found it personally offensive…and if this new series has Captain America spouting anti-Semitic slogans — yeah, probably. But then he would have objected if they had someone else's hero spouting anti-Semitism, too.

You're right. He didn't much mind what others did with his characters. If they could take what he left them and use it as the starting point to craft new, excellent issues, that was great. He just objected to anyone claiming that he and his successor were collaborating on a single body of work. To Jack, his issues were his issues and they were independent from that other guys' issues. It's kind of like "Build on the land I've left you but please don't strip-mine it." That's good advice in many aspects of life.

The post From the E-Mailbag… appeared first on News From ME.

Friday

A breeze stirs the May blossom, inspiring me to prop open the French windows in the Library. I settle down to review David Laws’ memoir of his time in government for the High Leicestershire Radical and am embarrassed by my inability to find the volume. Only after I have led my staff in a systematic search do I find it propping open those windows.

I find the book has three heroes: Nick Clegg, Danny Alexander and, above all, Laws himself. (Poor Huhne and High-Voltage Cable, who must be admitted to know how many beans make five, do not get a look in.)

Still, one has to admire the mordant wit of Jonny Oates, as quoted by Laws: “Your constituents will be mad if they do not re-elect you, Danny. And if they don’t, we should ask for all that money back that has been sprayed around your area – the extra ski lifts and the gold-lined roads.” Except that, if you have been to Badenoch lately, you will know that Oates was speaking no more than the truth.

Lord Bonkers was Liberal MP for Rutland South West, 1906-10.

Previously in Lord Bonkers' Diary

• Freddie and Fiona at Remain
• The jellyfish of the Lakeland fells

Cambridge City Council today debates a motion supporting the European Union – you can read the full motion on the council’s web site. My contribution to the debate is below – the debate is still ongoing but the balance of speeches so far suggests the motion should pass comfortably.

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Mr Mayor,

Like many others in this chamber, I appreciate the hard-won advances in equality that have been secured by the UK’s membership of the EU. Advances such as Equal Pay for women and men; employment protection on the basis of religion, belief, sexual orientation and age; and vital progress towards ending human trafficking.

These have been won not just for people of Cambridge, nor for just the population of the United Kingdom, but for over 700 million people across the EU member states.

And the biggest advance of all: Seventy years of relative peace. It is always those who find themselves most unfortunately at the bottom of society who, despite having so little already, stand the most to lose from war and conflict.

But I share concern expressed by many about the direction of debate. A debate that has to date been dominated by men such as David Cameron, Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage and has seen twice as many women as men respond in polls that they do not know how they will vote.

Although politics across the board has performed poorly in gaining representation from BAME people, in other respects the city council has, on all sides, avoided becoming dominated by any one group, be it gender or any other protected characteristic. I believe that a strong pro-European-Union message from us here today – that we recognise and appreciate that progress towards equality – will help to reengage people who feel left out of the debate so far and who stand to benefit most from this work.

The Obligatory Anissa-invoking prologue:

For all that it felt like the evening I bought Justus in a record store in Dundee (it was even gray and rainy), the circumstances couldn’t be more different. In 1996 I had scarcely thought about the Monkees in almost a decade. In 2016 they’ve been a constant in my life for the last 4 years, and in the last few months my Zilch duties have essentially sucked up all the time I didn’t give to my husband, my job, or my new website/podcast, Better Library Leaders. (Librarians, check it out! End plug). In 1996 I didn’t even know there was an album out—I found it by accident in the M bin while looking to replace the copy of Jagged Little Pill I’d left back in Oklahoma. In 2016, I (I guess I can reveal it now) was sitting in my home office with the drapes open, waiting to see if the UPS guy with my advance copy from John Hughes at Rhino would beat the garage door repairman to the house.

I held the package in the doorway for a moment, fighting the urge to rip it open right then. Instead, I went back to my office, opened the end of the package carefully and turned to the framed photo of the Frodis Femmes on my bookshelf. I grabbed the CD blindly, made sure it was facing the right way, and pulled it out facing away from me. It’s so dorky and stupid, but my old friend Anissa, the one who made me laugh for years, deserved to see this miraculous album cover before I did. And then I stared at the album myself for a long moment, feeling a distinct sense of “Anticidread”. The songs we’d heard were uniformly solid, but what if the rest were duds? Would it feel like a real group project? How would Love to Love represent Davy? I’d tried as hard as I could to only wish for an album that didn’t suck, but in my heart I knew I was hoping for one more miracle.

Ultimately, there was nothing else for it. I opened the case, removed the booklet and the CD, stuck it in my computer, and hit play. Here’s what I heard, and thought.

Much of this is redundant to my Zilch comments (you’re essentially reading a tidied version of my roundtable notes), but there are some things I didn’t get a chance to say.It’s also a bit rough, because it’s been a long week. Here goes.

Good Times: I can’t believe this was an incomplete track! Also, when we think of Harry Nillson Monkees tracks, we think of these sweet-tart creations that have a dark undertone to them. This one’s just flat-out unabashed fun! And I can’t tell you how great it felt to get a new track with Eddie Hoh on Drums! I just wish he’d been around to hear it. Love his work on it, somehow soulful and funky at the same time.

You Bring the Summer: I’m gonna tattle on Iain Lee here. Right around the time this album was announced, he sent me an IM. He’s friends with Andy Partridge, who apparently called him and played the demo of this song to him. He told me that he was in the middle of a shopping mall, listening to this song, and weeping like a little kid. Once I heard this tale, from a guy who makes me look like a casual fan, I knew we were gonna be ok on at least this one song. I particularly like the whole Brian Wilson good vibrations psychedelic changeup on the outro—Especially when Peter and Nez come in on the refrain. It’s like that moment in Milkshake off of Stranger Things have happened, but times ten. That trio was unlikely in the early 90s. by 2016 it seemed all but impossible. And yet, there it was.

She Makes Me Laugh: what stands out to me listening to the song in the context of the album is the Banjo bits on the verses. They’re subtle, but are just one of those touches that say “Hi! I’m a Monkees Song! I can include banjo non-ironically while still not sounding like Mumford and Sons!”

Our Own World: It was cool to have the chance to sit with these songs for about 4 days before reviewing them, because this one really grew on me with multiple listens, and the tune got stuck in my head for about 2 hours on Friday. I’d that isn’t a sign of a good song I don’t know what is. Looks like Peter and songwriter Adam Schlesinger contributed the keys on this one, and that’s really what this makes the song so catchy, beyond Micky’s performance, which is one of the best on a uniformly solid album. Also some of the best harmonies on the whole thing. Finally, I dig Adam’s guitar solo.

Gotta Give it Time: This is the second of the hybrid songs, started in 67 and finished now. Can I confess I’m not big on Jeff Barry as a general rule? I heard Iain say on his radio show or something that he thought Nez sounded bored on the backing on this one, I think that’s a little harsh, but something about this felt a bit filler. A fine album track elevated by an energetic performance from 2016 Micky, but not a highlight of the album for me.

Me and Magdalena: I’m not sure what I can say about this beautiful duet that hasn’t been said, except this—I think in some ways this is what Justus SHOULD have sounded like. And I defy you to listen to Nez’s solo verse at the end without getting misty eyed. It was the first of two times I wept listening to a song from this album for the first time. There were tears. At work. Streaming world café. Thank goodness I have a door.

Whatever’s Right: The Vintage Boyce and Hart track for this album, it’s very Boyce and Hart, mostly in a good way. However unlike Gotta Give it Time it was totally recorded in 2016—and it says something that I wouldn’t have been sure had I not read the liner notes. It’s got this cute 50s/early 60s semi-doowop vibe that would almost fit on the Grease soundtrack—or maybe as the flip side to That Thing You Do! (see what I did there?). And Bobby and Coco are a hoot on the background vocals! Another thing that hasn’t changed in 50 years is that Peter’s organ work is a highlight, ditto Mike Viola’s perfect guitar! He’s a gem and adds some great touches throughout the album. All that said, this is another one that feels a bit like album filler, maybe it’s the brevity. HOWEVER, even the “filler” on this album is still better than a good 90% of their post-Head output.

Love to Love: I’m a little afraid this will come out the wrong way given who sang lead and why the song was included, but I really expected them to do something more involved to this song. Not that I don’t like the new backing vocals, I do, but to my relatively poor ears it’s exactly identical to the missing links and music box versions aside from that. I’m also sad they couldn’t get Nez in the studio that day to be in that harmony mix. I had really expected this song to be the last time we heard all four Monkees sing together, and I’m a little sad it wasn’t. All that said, I do want to mention one thing about the CD booklet. Next to the lyrics of each song, there’s a little quote from somebody involved with the project. Peter got the pull quote for Love to Love, and it’s a poignant reminder of the bittersweet aspect of this album.

Little Girl: This is going to freak people out, but this is the song that made me think the most of Justus, specifically I Believe You. I’m not sure the lyrics work well for Peter in the same way I had some initial misgivings about She Makes me Laugh, but Brian Young’s funky drums are a big help, and Mike Viola contributes some nice backing vocals. But even though this was another one that doesn’t shine as brightly in the bigger picture of the album, it ALSO got stuck in my head at one point in the last few days. Ergo, it can’t be that bad.

Birth of an Accidental Hipster:

Holy Shit.

You got to understand, the Psychedelic stuff is my JAM. Daily Nightly was on the first episode I ever saw, and I think it hooked me as much as all the surreal stuff with Mike Nesmith as a dress. Porpoise Song, Mommy and Daddy, Randy Scouse Git, Shorty Blackwell, Writing Wrongs, Can you Dig It, Even the Instant replay You and I in some ways are what are MY Monkees. The different movements, the whole swirly psycho jello thing, this song is a love letter to that side of the Monkees. The second time I wept when listening to this album was the verse where Nez sings:

Old Friends say

Oh he’s lost his way

But they can’t see

What I can see

Oh, I’ll never come back

I’m heading out in the sunshine, baby!

I know Nez didn’t write the song, but it just seems to evoke so much of the Gazpacho era, at least to us Nezheads watching from afar. In any case, long-time readers of Fandom Lenses can see why I got the feels there, because that verse is as perfect a description of my journey in the past four years as anything could be. Ken thinks it’s a song about death, but I read it more as a song about REBIRTH, or rather a reconnection and re-integration with a part of you you’d let drift away. But again, that’s me reading my own positionality into the thing. However you slice it, it’s about transformation, and the music is the elixir that causes the transformation. It’s perhaps the most stereotypically 60s sounding song, yet also the one on the album that feels the most like it’s grounded in 2016.

Oh yeah. Mike Viola. Guitar. INCREDIBLE.

Wasn’t born to Follow: I am a proud Carole King Fangirl, so I was glad to see a Goffin/King tune represented. Peter’s right in the liner notes, this one does have a nice bit of Dylan in it.  It’s another blend of 1968 instrumentals and 2016 vocals, and it was neat to see names in the liner notes that I’d learned more about from my chat with Jay McDowell a few months back, like Mike Deasy and Earl Palmer. This was a third example of a song that I thought didn’t work well for me, till I listened a few times and found myself randomly humming it. I don’t know that Peter could have done this one in 1968, but his 2016 voice suits it to a tee. It’s very Early Morning Blues and Greens in that way.

Also, does anyone else thing the melody sounds a tiny bit like a folk version of Macarthur Park? Or am I just weird?

A few moments after I finished playing this one to take notes, I heard Kevin whistling it in the next room, so there’s that too. Carole King is amazing.

I know what I know: The first thing I need to point out, is that this is a Michael Nesmith song in which there is exactly ONE WORD with more than two syllables. It’s an exercise in complexity via simplicity, and not just in the lyrics. I actually didn’t like it all that much in the version you can find on Videoranch, but Adam Schlesinger transformed it in a similar way to how Nez rethought Rays for Movies of the mind. All the synths are gone, and it’s just Nez in full-on Don’t call on me/Tropical Campfires crooner mode. No fancy words or fancy arrangements, just the man honestly honestly and earnestly singing a love song. Adam Schlesinger’s on all the instruments, most notably a gorgeous flowing Piano line and a captivating instrumental break on the Chamberlin.

I was there and I’m told I had a good time: They made us wait for it, but the final track on the standard album (and possibly the final song ever on a Monkees album) features drums by one Micky Dolenz. I’ve heard it compared to Randy Scouse Git by others who heard the album, but I think No Time’s the better analogy. Micky has a tendency to take quips and, um, run them into the ground, but in this track we discover that he has a nicely self-aware sense of humor about that habit! Also, the chatter in the back of the room was a cute touch, somewhat reminiscent of Don’t call on me, and I would love to know who was in that. Also, this appears to be the snippet of drumming that was posted on the Monkees’ facebook a while back, so it’s good to put a song to the video. Very tribal, loose, and fun. Adam Schlesinger’s Bass holds the track together in the grand Chip Douglas tradition, and Mike Viola provides a tasty, deliberately rough and ragged guitar line. And Micky’s line at the end was a gem. Overall, I’m not sure it’s a better last song by the Monkees than was It’s Not too Late (it’s certainly not as retroactively poignant), but that was gonna be a high bar to clear. And who knows? After hearing this I’m actually not totally convinced these guys are done yet.

Overall

When word of this album came out, we were excited but also, I think it’s safe to say many of us felt some, um, trepidation about this album. We all love the Monkees’ music in general, but their post-1968 output has been a little mixed (she says delicately). As a child in the 80s I owned Pool It, but I played it maybe a tenth as often as Pisces. Ten years later I loved Justus immediately just for the sheer fact it existed (the fact I didn’t know it was coming out till I bumped into it at a record store helped), but I liked the album a little less every time I played it. However, if the Monkees have taught us nothing else, they have taught us that the unexpected thing always happens. In a rational universe the 20^th and 30^th anniversaries should not have happened. The Threekees shouldn’t have had their best tour ever in 2011. DAVY JONES SHOULD NOT HAVE DIED ON LEAP DAY 2012. Nez shouldn’t have come back for a project, not once, and certainly not FOUR TIMES counting this album, with the promise of more concerts later this fall. And this album, this insane, hybrid thing that features songs from Boyce and Hart and Ben Gibbard sitting right next to each other, should not be the best album they have put out since Head, if not Pisces.

And yet, all these things are true. Even the worst songs are listenable and the best songs approach some of the peaks of the Headquarters and Pisces era. A lot of things get called miracles that shouldn’t be called miracles, but Good Times is damn close to a miracle. Go Buy It, folks.

Daniel Enness announced he has been informed by MidAmeriCon II that “Safe Space as Rape Room,” his Hugo-nominated series of posts on the Castalia House Blog, will not be part of the Hugo Voter Packet: Worldcon Members who are looking forward to … Continue reading →