Blog » I program computers and I also write. There is more than one way to program, but there are a few good practices in programming which have analogous good practices in writing. Here is how you write like a programmer.
The following is not necessarily advice.
First, write with purpose. Do not write just because. Don't write because you love writing, because you love reading your own writing, because you love other people reading your writing or because you love feedback. Instead, write because you have an objective. Your text is supposed to achieve something. Write because you want your writing to accomplish something, because you want your writing to have an effect on the reader.
In fact, flip those two things around in the phrase, in order to make the emphasis clearer: First, develop an objective. Discover that there is a story you want to tell, a particular piece of information you need to share, an emotional instant that you want others to experience, a particular reference wor...
There is a term among those who study journalism called Afghanistanism that means, roughly, the practice of concentrating on problems in distant parts of the world while ignoring controversial local issues. There also is a term among those who study news websites that focus on writing recency-rich made-for-Google headlines called, “What time is the Superbowl?”
“What Brexit means” and its variant, “What does Brexit mean?” is a mix of these two “news value” factors: Attempts to take something remote to most of the world (Brexit} and localize its impact in order to show up in a Google news search.
A small sampling of hundreds of articles appearing in news sources indexed during the past 32 hours by Google News
“The British vote feels momentous, but we will most likely look back at it as merely the first in a series of fights for the soul of Europe. The outpouring of anger and anti-establishment aggression in Europe has only begun.”
“Just as an obsession with ‘growth’ has left a moral vacuum at the heart of some modern nations, so the abstract, materialist quality of the idea of Europe is proving insufficient to legitimate its own institutions and retain popular confidence.”
It's hacks like this that make the world great. What we have here is basically a PHP script that read a Blackboard-produced common cartridge (the URL is hard-coded and inaccessible to me; you will need to substitute your own), creates an array of resources from the manifest, gets the resources as necessary, and then saves them as WordPress posts. There's no guarantee that this script would work on any cartridge other than the one which was tested. The point is, if you create resources using open standards, people will find a way to use them creatively. Even if they come from Blackboard. Related: Importing Moodle into WordPress.
Neil Irwin tries to zoom in on the central question no can answer yet about Brexit:
What will a post-E.U. Britain really look like?
The exact process by which the nation will remove itself from the union is murky; it will presumably invoke Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty, which is a mere 261 words. It isn’t exactly a detailed road map for extricating a country from a complex set of interconnections affecting every facet of economic life. It will take years of arduous negotiations.
One possibility — the benign option, if you want Britain to remain well integrated with Europe — is to model itself on Norway or perhaps Switzerland, two countries that are not part of the E.U. but maintain free trade within the bloc.
The only problem with that: The price of maintaining free access to the rest of the European marketplace for those countries is allowing free migration from E.U. member states and accepting E.U. regulations on businesses. To the degree that pro-Brexit sentiment was driven by British opposition to immigration and regulation, this solution wouldn’t really solve anything.
Britain will get through the immediate financial turbulence and a possible recession just fine. The question for its future is which of two options British leaders now choose. They can maintain the status quo and remain a major international business center (while ignoring the impulse that led voters to choose “leave” in the first place). Or they can become a smaller, more isolated island that is a less important cog in the global economy — but at least one that honors its voters’ wishes.
As Britain – and perhaps other countries – work to extricate themselves from the current form of the EU, there may be another option: A European common market in which all players can operate around the (almost) free movement of goods and services, but without the degree of economic, fiscal, and political integration of today’s EU.
Oh yeah. They did that back in 1957: France, West Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg formed the European Economic Community – also called the Common Market – which the UK joined in 1973 (France vetoed their entry twice before that), along with Ireland and Denmark. Others joined, but in 1993 they screwed up the Common Market with the Maastricht Treaty, establishing the European Union.
My hunch is that Brexit will be the first step in rolling back the EU – and the ‘free movement of people’ provision of the charter – and ultimately replacing it with the Common Market 2.0. There can be a common market without all the immigration fears.
Some imagine this as fate, believing our desires are pre-destined by some deity or other. Others believe in free will, countering that our decisions are our own to make.
Most of the time, what we choose to do impacts us, and perhaps our loved ones or co-workers. (A few others, but not THAT many.)
Then there are people like LeBron James.
LeBron, who reclaimed his mantle as the Best Basketball Player in the World last night, crushed the hopes of an entire region when he left the Cleveland Cavaliers in 2010. (I’m writing on Monday.) If you’re not up on sports, LeBron switched teams back then, joining the Miami Heat, in one of the more tone-deaf PR moves of the 21st Century.
“I’m taking my talents to South Beach,” he said, thereby dooming gloomy North East Ohio to more basketball misery. The city had not had a Championship in 52 years, until last night, and it’s hard for anyone outside of that area to understand how many hearts were broken when LeBron left town.
Shockingly, in 2014, LeBron chose to return to the Cleveland Cavaliers, claiming the pull of home was too great. (He was raised in nearby Akron.) It was unprecedented, both what he did and how he did it, this time engendering a PR coup by writing an open letter to the city of Cleveland, announcing his triumphant return.
It seemed like a somewhat insane move, as the Cavs were by then the worst team in basketball, and trading South Beach for Cleveland makes as much sense as Donald Trump’s campaign accounting.
The numbers people began spewing estimates of how much money would flow back into the Cleveland metropolitan area, and it was in the tens of millions. One man, who’d grown up under difficult circumstances, was hailed as a mini-stimulus-package, personally impacting the economy of an entire region.
He promised everyone a Championship, and last night he made good. It was a spectacular feat, from a sporting perspective, as the Cavs fought back and won a series, after being down 3 games to 1, a situation that had never been reversed in the HISTORY OF THE NBA.
Quite the magical ending.
There were videos showing downtown Cleveland as one massive party. People wept, including LeBron. (No team had won anything of note there since 1964.) It was revelatory, and came about, once again, because of the decision of one human being, and his concomitant devotion and belief.
LeBron James had a vision, and he made a seemingly odd choice, because the little voice in his head told him it was the right thing to do.
The same goes for a young woman named Lauren, who realized in her early 20’s that she had fallen in love with God.
Say what now?
Well, Lauren is the main subject, or perhaps we should say dramatic lead, in the beautiful “Radical Love,” a photo book by Toni Greaves, published recently by Chronicle Books in San Francisco.
“Radical Love” follows Lauren’s path as she eschews life in the outside world, and joins a cloistered convent of nuns in Summit, New Jersey. (The site of my own biggest sports fail, as I managed to just-miss scoring the game-winning goal, as the ball trickled across the goal line, in a huge playoff game back in high school.)
Lauren is attractive and photogenic, and, as Toni points out in the afterword, is living in a place and time in which she could follow so many paths. This is an unprecedented time to be a woman in the West, because despite the lingering stench of sexism, there are freedoms available that have never been available to women before.
Ever.
And yet Lauren, who apparently had a boyfriend at the time, felt that her future lay beyond closed doors, praying to that same God, on behalf of the rest of us. (The Nuns of this order live to pray for others.)
It’s obviously strange to see, as we’re accustomed to Nuns as asexual, older women, whose wrinkles keep them company in bed at night, rather than a man’s hairy arms. We imagine Nuns as dour; whacking palms with rulers, or wagging fingers at our filthy language and continued indiscretions.
But this book, which really functions as a long-form photographic narrative, dispels such cliché notions. These pictures depict happy people, engaged in a community that supports them, (and apparently us,) with love.
There are some remarkable pictures, in particular a recurring motif in which Lauren, and others, lie prostrate on the ground. One even captures Lauren making a snow angel, that most child-like of joyful activities.
Over the course of this 7 year project, we do get to see Lauren age and grow a bit; the ebullient sheen slowly wearing off of her skin as comfort and confidence replace the pallid flush of the new.
This is a lovely book, and it is clear that both its maker, and subjects, approach each day with positivity and grace. Those feelings emanate off the paper, an offering to anyone who picks the object up to take a peek.
As I sit here staring at the cover, I notice the barren black trees against deep navy. (And the implied crucifix as well.) It’s a heavy image, resonant of winter and death. It fits what I expected to find inside, but the innards were nothing like that at all. Instead, they shined like the freshly mopped floors of a convent kitchen.
Lemon-fresh scent included.
Bottom Line: Lovely, long-term project following a young woman as she devotes her life to God
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City Cyclist at it again: Bike lanes on Bloor and on-street parking
dandyhorse readers who want a little insight into how contributor City Cyclist does what he does will enjoy this review: he describes his his GoPro, and why he likes to ride around Toronto with it. This follows on the heels of our Lights, Camera, Action dandySWAG feature in our new issue.
Here's what the City Cyclist had to say about his GoPro:
City Cyclist with his Hero 3+ GoPro atop his helmet.
My name is City Cyclist and I'm a GoPro addict. I first heard of GoPro about two years ago. My friend was raving about them and I bought a Hero 3+. I got a helmet mount, attached the camera, and rode to work. I was amazed at how clear the pictures were! GoPro does a great job of putting viewers in the picture - for cycling, sports in general and even underwater! After my first test video on a snowy day in April, I started shooting clips of my pet peeve at the time: cars and trucks blocking the bike lane! Fortunately, this never happens anymore, but a couple of years ago it was commonplace. Cyclists were given the odd scrap of pavement here and there, lines were drawn, and bike lanes were created in Toronto. The trouble was this: bike lanes were so complicated (painted lines, bike symbols, bright green paint at intersections, white sticks to block off the lane and cyclists riding in them) that drivers didn't realize what their purpose was, and hence they blocked them all of the time. This issue led to my first GoPro video 'Bike Lanes by CityCyclist' . It seems the issue resonated and within a few days my video had flown around social media (thanks to dandyhorse!) and even made it to the CBC news.
I find the camera very easy to use. I turn it on, leave it in video mode on standby, and simply push the button on top if I want to start recording, and again to stop it. There is a remote too, but I never use it. Some people record constantly as a safeguard in case something bad happens, but I just record short segments as I ride. The settings allow you to record videos or pictures in varying quality, up to 4k resolution. I usually shoot in 1080. I find deleting stuff a bit of a pain- for some reason the combination of which button in what order boggles my mind. It is easy to download footage onto my PC and then I use GoPro Studio (free) for editing. I'm sure you can use other editing software- I just use what GoPro had, got used to it and continue to use it. After you figure it out, it is easy to edit, add text to videos, and add audio.
I've put together videos now on various cycling issues: Winter Cycling, Cars Driving in Bike Lanes, Beautiful Toronto Biking, Bike Parking, City Cyclist Beats Toronto Traffic Jam (which exposes the absurdity of driving a car in city rush hour traffic as I fly by hundreds of stopped cars).
I never ride without my GoPro now. If I see something of interest, I start recording. I end up throwing most footage away, but still come away with some great stuff. GoPro records a wide angle view, so you if you are filming something small—like fish underwater—you need to be really close to the subject. Attachments are available at many stores, but tend to come in bulk, so to get the one mount you want, they sell you a bunch of other crap you don't really want. I've burned through several mounts- they are made of plastic, I remove them daily, so I understand the wear and tear. I've also purchased a floaty back door for water sports, a 'stick' mainly for underwater use, a better SD card and a few other minor things.
GoPro's aren't cheap, but they are versatile, easy to use and a great way to record sports action, including cycling!
Ride Safe!
City Cyclist
City Cyclist's Hero 3+ on his helmet.
Our new issue of dandyhorse has arrived! dandyhorse is available for FREE at Urbane Cyclist, Bikes on Wheels, Cycle Couture, Sweet Pete's, Hoopdriver, Batemans, Velofix, and Steamwhistle. Our new issue of dandyhorse includes cover art by Kent Monkman, interviews with Catherine McKenna and the women behind Toronto's first feminist bike zine, lots of news and views on Bloor, Under Gardiner and the West Toronto Railpath and much, much more! Get dandy at your door or at better bike and book shops in Toronto.
Pogue’s Basics: little tips to help you survive in a technological world. Nobody tells us these things when we first start using a new phone, tablet, gadget, email system, or social network. Or if they do, we forget. So here’s your refresher course.
In low light, you run the risk of taking blurry photos. That’s just the way it is.
It’s because a camera’s shutter has to stay open long enough to soak up enough light — and while it’s open, anything that moves becomes blurry. That goes for the camera, too: If it moves even slightly, the whole picture comes out blurry.
That’s what tripods fix. But when you’re at a school function, or just bopping through life in general, carrying around a tripod is silly.
You can use the environment to stabilize your camera: Find a big, stationary object that you can use to prop it (or your arms) against: a door frame, a tree, a wall, a car, a piece of furniture.
But there’s also a tripod in just about every room in every house in the world. The threads at the top of a typical lamp — where the lampshade screws on — precisely fit the tripod mount underneath your camera. Remove the lampshade, screw the camera on, and presto: You’ve got a rock-steady indoor tripod. Yours free!
(Note - for a good introduction to the history and current state of AI, see my colleague Frank Chen’s presentation here.)
In the last couple of years, magic started happening in AI. Techniques started working, or started working much better, and new techniques have appeared, especially around machine learning ('ML'), and when those were applied to some long-standing and important use cases we started getting dramatically better results. For example, the error rates for image recognition, speech recognition and natural language processing have collapsed to close to human rates, at least on some measurements.
So you can say to your phone: 'show me pictures of my dog at the beach' and a speech recognition system turns the audio into text, natural language processing takes the text, works out that this is a photo query and hands it off to your photo app, and your photo app, which has used ML systems to tag your photos with ‘dog’ and 'beach’, runs a database query and shows you the tagged images. Magic.
There are really two things going on here - you’re using voice to fill in a dialogue box for a query, and that dialogue box can run queries that might not have been possible before. Both of these are enabled by machine learning, but they’re built quite separately, and indeed the most interesting part is not the voice but the query. The important part of being able to ask for ‘Pictures with dogs at the beach’ is not that the computer can find it but that the computer has worked out, itself, how to find it. You give it a million pictures labelled ‘this has a dog in it’ and a million labelled ‘this doesn’t have a dog’ and it works out how to work out what a dog looks like. Now, try that with ‘customers in this data set who were about to churn’, or ‘this network had a security breach’, or ‘stories that people read and shared a lot’. Then try it without labels ('unsupervised' rather than 'supervised' learning).
Today you would spend hours or weeks in data analysis tools looking for the right criteria to find these, and you’d need people doing that work - sorting and resorting that Excel table and eyeballing for the weird result, metaphorically speaking, but with a million rows and a thousand columns. Machine learning offers the promise that a lot of very large and very boring analyses of data can be automated - not just running the search, but working out what the search should be to find the result you want.
That is, the eye-catching demos of speech interfaces or image recognition are just the most visible demos of the underlying techniques, but those have much broader applications - you can also apply them to a keyboard, a music recommendation system, a network security model or a self-driving car. Maybe.
This is clearly a fundamental change for Google. Narrowly, image and speech recognition mean that it will be able to understand questions better and index audio, images and video better. But more importantly, it will answer questions better, and answer questions that it could never really answer before at all. Hence, as we saw at Google IO, the company is being recentred on these techniques. And of course, all of these techniques will be used in different ways to varying degrees for different use cases, just as AlphaGo uses a range of different techniques. The thing that gets the attention is ‘Google Assistant - a front-end using voice and analysis of your behaviour to try both to capture questions better and address some questions before they’re asked. But that's just the tip of the spear - the real change is in the quality of understanding of the corpus of data that Google has gathered, and in the kind of queries that Google will be able to answer in all sorts of different products. That's really just at the very beginning right now.
The same applies in different ways to Microsoft, which (having missed mobile entirely) is creating cloud-based tools to allow developers to build their own applications on these techniques, and for Facebook (what is the newsfeed if not a machine learning application?), and indeed for IBM. Anyone who handles lots of data for money, or helps other people do it, will change, and there will be a whole bunch of new companies created around this.
On the other hand, while we have magic we do not have HAL 9000 - we do not have a system that is close to human intelligence (so-called 'general AI'). Nor really do we have a good theory as to what that would mean - whether human intelligence is the sum of techniques and ideas we already have, but more, or whether there is something else. Rather, we have a bunch of tools that need to be built and linked together. I can ask Google or Siri to show me pictures of my dog on a beach because Google and Apple have linked together tools to do that, but I can't ask it to book me a restaurant unless they've added an API integration with Opentable. This is the fundamental challenge for Siri, Google Assistant or any chat bot (as I discussed here) - what can you ask?
This takes us to a whole class of jokes often made about what does and does not count as AI in the first place:
"Is that AI or just a bunch of IF statements?"
"Every time we figure out a piece of it [AI], it stops being magical; we say, 'Oh, that's just a computation
"AI is whatever isn't been done yet"
These jokes reflect two issues. The first is that it's not totally apparent that human intelligence itself is actually more than 'a bunch of IF statements', of a few different kinds and at very large scale, at least at a conceptual level. But the second is that this movement from magic to banality is a feature of all technology and all computing, and doesn't mean that it's not working but that it is. That is, technology is in a sense anything that hasn't been working for very long. We don't call electricity technology, nor a washing machine a robot, and you could replace "is that AI or just computation?" with "is that technology or just engineering?"
I think a foundational point here is Eric Raymond's rule that a computer should 'never ask the user for any information that it can autodetect, copy, or deduce' - especially, here, deduce. One way to see the whole development of computing over the past 50 years is as removing questions that a computer needed to ask, and adding new questions that it could ask. Lots of those things didn't necessarily look like questions as they're presented to the user, but they were, and computers don't ask them anymore:
Where do you want to save this file?
Do you want to defragment your hard disk?
What interrupt should your sound card use?
Do you want to quit this application?
Which photos do you want to delete to save space?
Which of these 10 search criteria do you want to fill in to run a web search?
What's the PIN for your phone?
What kind of memory do you want to run this program in?
What's the right way to spell that word?
What number is this page?
Which of your friends' updates do you want to see?
It strikes me sometimes, as a reader of very old science fiction, that scifi did indeed mostly miss computing, but it talked a lot about 'automatic'. If you look at that list, none of the items really look like 'AI' (though some might well use it in future), but a lot of them are 'automatic'. And that's what any 'AI' short of HAL 9000 really is - the automatic pilot, the automatic spell checker, the automatic hardware configuration, the automatic image search or voice recogniser, the automatic restaurant-booker or cab-caller... They're all clerical work your computer doesn't make you do anymore, because it gained the intelligence, artificially, to do them for you.
This takes me to Apple.
Apple has been making computers that ask you fewer questions since 1984, and people have been complaining about that for just as long - one user's question is another user's free choice (something you can see clearly in the contrasts between iOS and Android today). Steve Jobs once said that the interface for iDVD should just have one button: ‘BURN’. It launched Data Detectors in 1997 - a framework that tried to look at text and extract structured data in a helpful way - appointments, phone numbers or addresses. Today you'd use AI techniques to get there, so was that AI? Or a 'bunch of IF statements'? Is there a canonical list of algorithms that count as AI? Does it matter? To a user who can tap on a number to dial instead of copy & pasting, is that a meaningful question?
This certainly seems to be one way that Apple is looking at AI on the device. In iOS 10, Apple is sprinkling AI through the interface. Sometimes this is an obviously new thing, such as image search, but more often it's an old feature that works better or a small new feature to an existing application. Apple really does seem to see 'AI' as 'just computation'.
Meanwhile (and this is what gets a lot of attention) Apple has been very vocal that companies should not collect and analyse user data, and has been explicit that it is not doing so to provide any of these services. Quite what that means varies a lot. Part of the point of neural networks is that training them is distinct from running them. You can train a neural network in the cloud with a vast image set at leisure, and then load the trained system onto a phone and run it on local data without anything leaving the device. This, for example, is how Google Translate works on mobile - the training is done in advance in the cloud but the analysis is local. Apple says it's doing the same for Apple Photos - 'it turns out we don't need your photos of mountains to train a system to recognize mountains. We can get our own pictures of mountains'. It also has APIs to allow developers to run pre-trained neutral networks locally with access to the GPU. For other services it's using 'differential privacy', which uses encryption to obfuscate the data such that though it's collected by Apple and analyses at scale, you can't (in theory) work out which users it relates to.
I understand Apple's point here, but it reminds me just a little of Nokia/RIM dismissal of smartphones pic.twitter.com/lIUdEjldFg
The sheer variety of places and ways that Apple is doing this, and the different techniques, makes it pretty hard to make categorical statements on the lines of 'Apple is missing this'. Apple has explicitly decided to do at least some of this with one hand tied behind its back, but it's not clear how many services that really affects, or how much. Maybe you don't need my photos of mountains, but how about training to recognize my son - is that being done on the device? Is the training data being updated? How much better is Google's training data? How much would it benefit from that?
Looking beyond just privacy, this field is moving so fast that it's not easy to say where the strongest leads necessarily are, nor to work out which things will be commodities and which will be strong points of difference. Though most of the primary computer science around these techniques is being published and open-sourced, the implementation is not trivial - these techniques are not necessarily commodities, yet. But there's definitely a contrast with Apple's approach to chip design. Since buying PA Semi in 2008 (if not earlier) Apple has approach the design of the SOCs in its devices as a fundamental core competence and competitive advantage, and it now designs chips for itself that are unquestionably market-leading (which, incidentally, will be a major advantage when it launches a VR product). It's not clear whether Apple looks at 'AI' in the same way.
(There's also, perhaps cynically, a 'power of defaults' issue here - if Google Photos is always 10-15% better than Apple Photos at object classification, will users notice beyond a certain level of shared accuracy? After all, Apple Maps has 3x more users than Google Maps on the iPhone and Google Maps is definitely better. And is any Google lead offset by, say, Apple's Photostream or other features layered on top? Again, little of this is clear yet.)
A common thread for both Apple and Google, and the apps on their platforms, is that eventually many 'AI' techniques will be APIs and development tools across everything, rather like, say, location. 15 years ago geolocating a mobile phone was witchcraft and mobile operators had revenue forecasts for 'location-based services'. GPS and wifi-lookup made LBS just another API call: 'where are you?' became another question that a computer never has to ask you. But though location became just an API - just a database lookup - just another IF statement - the services created with it sit on a spectrum. At one end are things like Foursquare - products that are only possible with real-time location and use it to do magic. Slightly behind are Uber or Lyft - it's useful for Lyft to know where you are when you call a car, but not essential (it is essential for the drivers' app, or course). But then there's something like Instagram, where location is a free nice-to-have - it's useful to be able to geotag a photo automatically, but not essential and you might not want to anyway. (Conversely, image recognition is going to transform Instagram, though they'll need a careful taxonomy of different types of coffee in the training data). And finally, there is, say, an airline app, that can ask you what city you're in when you do a flight search, but really needn't bother.
In the same way, there will be products that are only possible because of machine learning, whether applied to images or speech or something else entirely (no-one at all looked at location and thought 'this could change taxis"). There will be services that are enriched by it but could do without, and there will be things where it may not be that relevant at all (that anyone has realised yet). So, Apple offers photo recognition, but also a smarter keyboard and venue suggestions in the calendar app - it's sprinkled 'AI' all over the place, much like location. And, like any computer science tool, there will be techniques that are commodities and techniques that aren't, yet.
All of this, so far, presumes that the impact of AI forms a sort of T-shaped model: there will be a vertical, search, in which AI techniques are utterly transformative, and then a layer across everything where it changes things (much as location did). But there's another potential model in which AI becomes a new layer for the phone itself - that it changes the interaction model and relocates services from within app silos to a new runtime of some sort. Does it change the layer of aggregation on the phone - it makes apps better, but does it change what apps are? That's potentially much more destabilizing to the model that Apple invented.
Clearly in some cases the answer is 'yes'. At the very least, structural changes in what search means change the competitive landscape and destabilize the mix between Google's general purposes search and its vertical competitors: a Yelp search might become a Google question, or an answer offered before you've even asked. This is another case of removing a question - instead of Google offering you ten search results that it thinks might answer your question, it will try to give you the answer itself, and it will also try to give you that answer before you asked the question.
More interestingly, an Uber or Lyft request, or an Opentable booking, might also be re-aggregated from an app to a suggestion or answer within a voice UI or, say, Maps. An app with one button - that asks one simple question - could become a request pretty easily, whether in Google Assistant, Siri, Apple or Googles Maps or a messaging app. in fact, one way to look at Apple's opening of APIs into Maps, Siri, Messenger and so on is as a counter to Google. Where Google will find you a cinema, restaurant or hotel itself, Apple will lean on developers to solve the same use case. Google Allo suggests a restaurant where Apple's iMessage gives you an Opentable plugin.
How broad is this, though? Yes, you could tell Siri or Google Assistant to ‘show me all the new Instagram posts’, but why is putting that inside to a feed of responses to all your questions a better UI? Why is Google’s ML interface a better place to see this than chrome designed by Instagram? ML might (indeed, will) make the Facebook newsfeed better, but does it remove the difference between one-to-many and one-to-one communication channels? Why is the general-purpose rendering layer better than the special-purpose one? Does being subsumed into a general purpose ML layer change this?
One could propose a rebundling because it allows an easier interface - your home screen could show you documents, emails and meetings of the day instead of you having to go into each app to deal with them. Perhaps ‘which app do you want to open next?’ is a question that can be moved - the car is ordered, the meeting accepted, the expense report approved. This is already what Facebook does for a whole section of interaction, and before ML - what shared posts to see, who to talk to, what news to read. But it’s not the only thing on the phone. And, again, we don't have HAL 9000. We don't actually have a system that knows you, and everything you want, and everything inside all of your apps, and we're not anywhere close to that. So the idea that Google can subsume everything you do on your phone into a single unified AI-based layer that sits on top looks rather like what one might call a 'Dr Evil plan' - it's too clever by half and needs technology (the killer laser satellite!) that doesn't actually exist.
It seem to me that there are two things that make it hard to talk about the AI explosion. The first is that 'AI' is an impossibly broad term that implies we have a new magic hammer that turns every problem into a nail. We don't - we have a bunch of new tools that solve some, but not all, problems, and the promise of extracting new insight from all sorts of data pools will not always be met. It might be the wrong data, or the wrong insight. The second is that this field is growing and changing very fast, and things that weren't working now are, and new things are being discussed all the time. So we have excitement and bullshit, skepticism and vision, and a bunch of amazing companies being created. Some of this stuff will be in everything and you won't even notice it, and some of it will be the next Amazon.
Hauwei, the world’s third largest smartphone manufacturer by volume, is working on its own mobile operating system in case its relationship with Google goes awry, according to a new report from The Information.
In development in Scandinavia, Huawei reportedly has a number of former Nokia employees contributing to the effort, with the OS based off its EMUI skin.
This past October, Huawei hired Abigail Brody, a former Apple designer who was on the team that created the original version of iOS, to lead a revamp of the company’s software offerings. The outcome of Brody’s early efforts will reportedly shown off later this year when Huawei reveals a reworked version EMUI.
Huawei, according to The Information, sees better software as a way to realize its ambition to become a global electronics brand, not just one with cachet in its homeland.
Outside of the Nexus 6P, a device that most certainly does not ship with EMUI, very few Hauwei devices make their way to Canada, and indeed the rest of North America. There are exceptions, of course, but for most in the West, the company’s products lack the recognition of competing offerings from the likes of Samsung and Apple. Part of the issue, from Huawei point of view, says The Information, is its lackluster software, which is often accused of being to similar to iOS.
The company has also been frequently associated with the Chinese government and its efforts to spy on North American corporations. The Canadian government recently denied two Huawei former employees entry into Canada over espionage concerns.
That said, the news that Huawei is developing its own operating system in case its relationship sours with Google is interesting. It was just last year that The Information published a report stating the two were actively working on improving their relationship. Google tapped the company to build one of its Nexus devices, and helped it bring the Huawei Watch to North America. More recently, a Huawei executive told a South African publication the company was working on a follow-up to the Nexus 6P for Google.
On the other hand, Huawei is not the only major Android OEM exploring alternatives to what Google has on offer. A Samsung executive recently told Fast Company his company planned to drop Android Wear in favour of its own Tizen operating system for all of its future smartwatch products. The South Korean company later back-tracked on that statement, but it’s fair to say Huawei’s actions aren’t unusual given what other Android OEMs are currently doing.
Whether Huawei continues developing its own OS, it will be a while before we see it; according to The Information, Huawei’s new mobile OS “isn’t far along.”
Coursera is launching a new format today. You will recognize it as "what we had before MOOCs". Here it is: "we will begin piloting a few courses in which all content is available only to learners who have purchased the course, either directly or by applying for and receiving financial aid." It may be time to rededicate myself toward creating a genuinely open-only course framework, based to a large degree on the work I did with gRSShopper. Of course, that will require funding....
For years, encryption of data was ignored by the telecoms industry as a possible risk. Operators and vendors hyped the potential of DPI, "app-aware networks", the "optimisation" of video, insertion/blocking of adverts, and assorted other ways to monitor or change end-user data traffic.
Yet in the background, the use of both encrypted websites (with HTTPS), and "tunnelled" VPNs was becoming more widespread. Many apps' traffic is encrypted between smartphone and server. Such techniques stop or impede a large amount of in-network management taking place - whether one views such as actions as "value-added" or "non-consensual interference".
To some of us, it was a matter of when and how, not if, encryption became (near-) ubiquitous, driven by Moore's Law and more-powerful devices, fears about security and privacy, and perhaps push-back against unwanted intervention by ISPs and other intermediaries.
The advent of Snowden's revelations and the parallel Net Neutrality controversies helped catalyse today's predictable situation - a lot of traffic has "gone dark", much to the chagrin of the telecoms community.
My view is that this was not just predictable, but inevitable. And lo, it has come to pass.
The next inevitable risk for telcos: Multiple Network Connections & Arbitrage
We are now starting to see the signs of the next inevitability: arbitrage across multiple networks and connections - and more importantly, between multiple service providers. This is being aided by more/cheaper types of connection, ever-better software control of connectivity, and some creative hardware "hacks".
Some signs have been around for a while:
Least-cost routing by enterprises' telephony systems, especially to avoid international direct-dialling costs.
Multi-SIM mobile phones, to allow users to switch between networks and minimise prices
Rapid growth of (free) 3rd-party WiFi usage on smartphones, implicitly competing against cellular (paid) data services.
Redundant fibre connections into offices or data-centres, to add resiliency and reduce the risks of failure.
Cellular back-up for fixed connections of various types (eg branch-office routers)
Of course, service providers themselves do much the same - multiple transit providers for voice, multiple sub-oceanic connections, and so forth. In some cases it adds reliability, in some it helps arbitrage costs.
But it is end-user controlled, or OS/device-controlled multiple connections, or those provided as a 3rd-party overlay, which are now becoming more important. And the next generation of multi-access options are now emerging:
Enterprise SD-WAN, typically using multiple "vanilla" Internet connections as a cheaper option vs. MPLS WAN connections, providing a sort of quasi-QoS. I recently wrote a post on this (link) and also a full report as part of my work on STL Partners' Future of Networks research stream (link)
Multi-IMSI SIM cards, either for cheaper roaming (eg Truphone) or cross-network coverage (eg Google Fi)
eSIM / eUICC - which may allow end-users to switch between operators more quickly, although probably not in real-time. (Note: I am currently concluding detailed research on the potential of eSIMs - watch this space, or drop me a message)
Potential combinations of licensed & unlicenced connectivity in multi-standard LPWAN chips, perhaps via the ETSI/Weightless partnership (link)
Various device-to-device and mesh technologies, that can pool or share connectivity between multiple users within close proximity.
Multi-point cellular network technologies, especially with MIMO/beam-forming linking a device to multiple cell-sites simultaneously (from the same single-operator network, though)
One important thing to recognise is that the time for switching / control of the multi-network function varies significantly - it may be realtime, it may take seconds or minutes or even hours to complete. There are also differences in whether the main purpose is "bonding" to increase aggregate throughput, or for resiliency, least-cost routing or differential performance/security characteristics of various types. However, all are still specific examples of the same underlying trend and concept.
With the advent of 5G or later variants of 4G, we can also expect to see various home-broadband multi-access combinations linked with fibre or cable emerge. We may also see multi-radio cellular devices connecting to different MNOs' networks simultaneously, although that would have power-consumption implications (which might be OK for in-vehicle use, or public-safety workers' outfits with large batteries).
There are undoubtedly other forms of multi-connection system or business model that may evolve - and may also be accelerated by 5G standardisation, SDN, SDR, or other imminent changes.
Arbitrage Everywhere
But all of this is actually an example of a wider phenomenon - smarter software is creating the possibility of "arbitrage everywhere". From a telecom point of view this means that any device, any application, any location, any user has the ability to use cheaper/easier/alternative connectivity.
The criteria for selection, switching or bonding network access will proliferate and become more sophisticated over time. We may see differential routing based on application or traffic type, security optimisations, trade-offs of computing resource vs. battery power, desire for privacy, a function of cloud-service providers - there will be a widening variety of possibilities. Here, we will also see machine-learning and AI start to get involved as well - something I discussed in another recent post (link).
The other variable is the owner/controller of the "arbitrage layer". It will be a mix of direct user-control, OS-level automation and connection-management, telco-control, and others such as external SD-WAN and XaaS providers.
This will have a particular impact on telco providers wanting to offer their own network-integrated services. If they cannot be sure that a given user or device is always connected via their network, it is questionable how much value can be based on offering those functions only sometimes. This is particularly important when considering things like network QoS, or "telco cloud", or perhaps mobile-edge computing (MEC). Obviously many things (especially IoT things) will remain single-connection, or perhaps multi-connection from the same provider. But many others will move, inevitably, towards multiple connections, from multiple network providers. This trend is already seen in areas such as SD-WAN and WiFi/cellular use.
Network arbitrage and selection is itself only one aspect of broader trend. Software will generally get smarter, and allow us to source products or services from multiple providers. Price arbitrage is already common in some sectors (eg online flight booking, or comparison websites), but we should expect it to become a ubiquitous feature of our lives in many other regards.
When everything is virtualised, it becomes easier to choose between 2, 3, or N variants from different providers. We can use them simultaneously, or switch between them. Networks are just one domain to face this inevitability.
If this topic if of interest to you - or related areas around network evolution, 5G, SDN/NFV, and future strategic developments of service providers & related value chains, - then please get in touch via information AT disruptive-analysis DOT com to discuss opportunities for workshops, due-diligence projects or speaking engagements.
The last week was quite hectic for all of us in the Ethereum ecosystem. The DAO has shown us that it takes much more effort to write smart contracts than we originally anticipated; but also that it takes a surprising amount of debate to reach a consensus on issues of this scale.
Everybody in our community was very vocal and forthcoming about how the problem should be fixed in his/her opinion, or whether there’s even a problem to fix in the first place. While many have suggested an immediate hard-fork, the implications of such action are yet to be fully understood. An alternative suggestion was the creation of a soft-fork allowing miners to temporarily put certain transactions on hold, attempting to recover the funds without any invasive action on the Ethereum protocol itself.
As there is no clear, best course of action that will satisfy all community members equally, we’ve decided to give the power to the people running Ethereum to decide whether they support this decision or not.
To this end, we’ve released version 1.4.8 of Geth (codename “DAO Wars”) as a small patch release to give the community a voice to decide whether to temporarily freeze TheDAOs v1.0 from releasing funds or not. If the community decides to freeze the funds, only a few whitelisted accounts can retrieve the blocked funds and return them to previous owners. A similar mechanism is provided by version 1.2.0 of Parity too.
Note: If the soft-fork passes, it will block all DAOs from releasing funds, not just the ones the community considers attacked. This is understandably undesired for all legitimately split DAOs. As such – if the community votes to enact the soft-fork – we propose a follow up patch to the soft-fork that will whitelist all DAOs split according to the intent upheld by the enacted soft-fork.
How to use this release?
Miners supporting the DAO soft-fork can do so by starting Geth 1.4.8 with --dao-soft-fork. This will cause the block gas limits to be lowered towards Pi million until the deciding block 1800000 (approx. 6 days from now) is reached. If the gas limit of this block is below or equal 4M, the soft-fork goes into effect and (all updating) miners will start blocking DAO transactions that release funds.
Miners not supporting the DAO soft-fork can run Geth normally without any extra arguments needed. They will try to keep the block gas limits at the current 4.7 million. If the gas limit of the decisive block will be above 4M, the soft-fork is denied and (all updating) miners will accept DAO transactions that release funds.
Note: All updating clients will agree upon the outcome of the vote and will adhere to that decision. If the soft-fork vote passes, miners voting against it will start blocking transactions too; whereas if the soft-fork is denied, miners voting for it will also accept all transactions.
What if I don’t update?
Miners who do not update by definition vote against the soft-fork as they will continue the current logic of keeping the gas limit above the vote threshold. If the soft-fork is accepted by the majority, non-updating miners will still accept blocked transactions. In that case, non-updating miners will either fork off their own Ethereum network, diverging from the majority, or will forfeit any blocks they mined (since it’s not accepted by the majority, overruling the minority blocks).
Should non-miners (nodes, wallets, mist, etc) update?
From the perspective of non-miners, this update has little relevance. Either outcome of the vote is equally valid from a plain node’s perspective, so plain nodes will accept the heavier chain miners decide on without having to know anything about the soft-fork mechanism or results.
Epilogue
This release implements a soft-fork. A soft-fork is perfectly compatible with all protocol rules and requires only the consensus of the majority of miners to enact. It is temporary and can be removed/amended at any point in time upon miner consensus. It does not break protocol rules; it does not roll back any executed transactions/blocks; and it does change not any blockchain state outside of the original protocol capabilities.
Note: This release does not represent a consent to hard-fork the network. It is a means to give people more time to come up with the best solution.
I think you can view this article on LinkedIn without signing into LinkedIn - if not, please let me know. Kathryn Chang Barker writes, "LinkedIn can and should be in every secondary and university classroom in the world, but it needs to add one more tool – an ePortfolio." I have no doubts about the benefit of an ePortfolio - or, morewidely construed, a Personal Learning Record - but does it have to be on LinkedIn? That said, the appeal for Microsoft has to be undeniable. "Already Sony is working on an education and testing platform powered by blockchain. Already Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerburg have produced personalized learning systems with algorithms. Already machine learning is managing our curriculum and careers. This is a chance for LinkedIn and Microsoft to create an innovative space in the middle of these innovations."
Montreal-based AdGear, a digital advertising tech company, has been acquired by Samsung Electronics.
“AdGear will operate as an independent, wholly owned subsidiary of Samsung Electronics Canada Inc. This acquisition was spearheaded by the Samsung Global Innovation Center and will support the extension of Samsung’s Smart TV services,” Samsung said in a statement sent to AdExchanger.
AdGear also has an office in Toronto, and its platform offers advanced advertising analytics, attribution measurement, ad serving, real-time bidding, and exchange technology to its customers.
On its website, AdGear published a “heartfelt thanks” to its employees and clients. “Joining Samsung will allow us to leverage our platform to fuel further innovation in advertising. We are extremely excited about the future and the opportunities this partnership offers to our product and our team,” the company said.
According to a report from the Wall Street Journal, Samsung is pursuing advertising as a source of revenue as it struggles in the TV business.
I understand the feelings of the people who voted in favour of the Brexit. They are Europe's Americans. The situation of the UK and Europe is in many ways the inverse of Canada and the U.S. And I would not vote 'yes' to a union of Canada and the U.S.
This is one of the better lines I've read today (applies equally to the internet and to Brexit): "What those of us unversed in Marxist theory at the time didn’ t realize was if you get rid of government you create a very fertile soil for the unbridled growth of corporations." Rushkoff, of course, is talking about what happened to the world of the internet he talked about in Cyberia. "Cyberia lay the philosophical foundation for the internet as an opportunity for a new kind of liberation. Rushkoff argued that the web could generate a new renaissance by birthing a technological civilization grounded in ancient spiritual truths. But a different story emerged."
If your value to an organization depends on the quality and insight of your thinking, Cal Newport’s latest book, Deep Work, offers important insights about how to think about your thinking. The forces at work in our environment and in our organizations favor quick, shallow, and social over other forms of thought. That is generally adequate for much of the activity that fills our days.
Exceptional value, however, finds its roots in sustained, focused, individual thinking and reflection. Deep Work builds the case for this mode of thinking and offers paths to carve out the necessary time and develop the necessary mental muscles to engage in deep work more intentionally and predictably.
Newport defines deep work as
Professional activities performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that push your cognitive capabilities to their limit. These efforts create new value, improve your skill, and are hard to replicate.
The ability to think deeply is a skill, so it can be developed. Much of the book offers counsel on techniques and practices that can help you develop your skills at deep work.
Newport is an academic computer scientist. In his world the contrasts between deep and shallow work can be stark. His binary distinction doesn’t transfer neatly to organizational settings where it is more useful to think in terms of a spectrum of work with shallow and deep anchoring the extremes. With the pressure toward superficial and shallow, there is great opportunity for individual knowledge workers to become more proficient at going deep.
Newport does offer practical advice for how to make deep thinking more possible. That advice needs tuning and refinement to work well in most complex organizations. Newport sums up why that effort matters thusly;
A commitment to deep work is not a moral stance and it’s not a philosophical statement—it is instead a pragmatic recognition that the ability to concentrate is a skill that gets valuable things done. Deep work is important, in other words, not because distraction is evil, but because it enabled Bill Gates to start a billion-dollar industry in less than a semester.
In the beginning, people were mostly unhappy, but not too unhappy about being unhappy. They hunted, they gathered, and when unpleasant things (such as having a leg bitten off by a lion) happened, they shrugged their shoulders and said, “what are you gonna to do, huh?” And they spent as much time as they could being idle, because that seemed to help them not be unhappy for a while. This worked particularly well when there were temporarily no lions around trying to eat them.
Then history began to happen.
The people who first noticed there was history going on — they were called poets — also discovered that it ruined idleness for them (this effect would later be named “the frame problem”). This made them very angry, so they decided to tell everybody about history. If they couldn’t have any fun, why should anybody else? They also decided to write some of it down, just in case their children, and their children’s children, tried to forget the discovery. Future generations, they figured, had a right to remain innocent of unnecessary and burdensome knowledge of events past. Perhaps some pleasure could be found in denying them this right.
There was nothing much they could do about the fact that their ancestors in their graves, unlike their descendants, were beyond the reach of their words. But in a stroke of genius, they realized they could make their descendants more miserable by pretending that their pre-historic ancestors had actually been continuously happy, instead of just free of unhappiness about unhappiness.
That made it look like it was all going downhill, which made the poets happy about being unhappy about being unhappy. Because at least those who came after would feel like they were even worse off.
The writing down of history turned out to be a self-perpetuating activity. Anytime kids asked questions, adults would yell, “READ THE FUCKING MANUAL!” (later shortened to “BECAUSE I SAID SO”). These kids, when they grew up, tended to reproduce this behavior. This was called culture.
Since idle play had now been effectively ruined for everybody, the discovery of history was widely regarded as a very serious development. Some perceptive people tried to point out that this was backwards, and that the discovery of history in fact marked the development of seriousness. But they were told to stop making idle observations and start pretending to be serious and grown-up like everybody else.
The important thing about this development was that writing history down accidentally created the future, and with it, anxiety. This mix of impotent anger about the past and fruitless anxiety about the future — today we call it a ‘sense of history’ — allowed people to be reliably, continuously, unhappy about being unhappy.
***
Another unintended consequence of the discovery of history was the invention of intentions, which, as both the history of the future and the future of history would prove, was a terrible thing.
An intention, as physicists now know, is a device powered by unhappiness about unhappiness that allows you to:
Fail to see some shit
Itch to do some other shit
Deny responsibility for all other shit
Intentions are now the most widely used technology for creating unintended consequences, having disrupted older technologies like madness and stupidity. The intention industry now accounts for about 78% of world GDP by some estimates.
Some imaginative philosophers have speculated that intentions can also be used to cause intended consequences other than death and unhappiness, though they were never designed for the purpose. But this possibility has not yet been properly verified experimentally beyond an anecdotal level. These philosophers are optimistic that once the existence of the Higgs Boson is confirmed and the equations governing dark matter and dark energy are worked out, this possibility will become a reliable reality.
The invention of intentions did not immediately cause much trouble.
For a long time, the only use people could figure out for intentions was to declare, whenever somebody pissed them off, that they would murder that sonofabitch like the dog he was. Then they would use that intention to not see the many good reasons why they should not murder that somebody, and use the itch to maintain a sustained effort until that somebody was dead. The murderers came to be known as “good people,” and the murderees came to be known as “bad people.” Back then, these terms did not have the pejorative connotations they do today. They were just names, like “George” or “Trayvon.”
So for a while, a lot of murder went on, and people continued to get madder and madder about history (which had been accumulating all this time; it was the global warming of its time) and more and more anxious about the future. It become clear that merely writing down history to load-balance unhappiness about unhappiness in space and time was not a scalable solution.
Then a few people figured out that if, instead of calling it all “murder,” you called some of it “honorable acts,” and if you carefully forgot some bits of history, made some stuff up to fill the holes, and called it “legends,” something very interesting happened. Assuming you did this delicate surgery correctly, the future would sometimes turn into something that caused pleasant anticipation instead of anxiety.
If you figured out, in addition, the right set of people to do honorable acts to — simply for visibly existing outside your legends this time, not for pissing you off — not only could you make the future something to look forward to, you could make the present look like it was actually going there.
If you squinted a bit.
This meant you could intend to go there. And intending to go there could actually, for the first time in the history of history, temporarily make you happy, rather than angry and anxious, about the existence of the past and the future. The key trick was to die before the promised future failed to materialize. Poets of the future could then safely retcon whatever actually happened to make it look like they were where they intended to be all along. This was called “planning” and created some merge conflicts, but using a technique called incoherent interpolated rationalization, they managed to make the retcons work.
The people who did these honorable acts better than others were called “heroes.” They were rewarded for their prowess by being given something called “glory.” Which had to be invented about that time. Mo’ history, mo’ problems.
The poets of the early days graduated from simply recording history to make future generations miserable, to performing the delicate tactical forgetting surgeries that created legends, honorable acts, and heroes. These were the first true historians. Poets who had forgotten the original mission of spreading unhappiness about unhappiness, and had taken to phoning it in by merely recording genealogies in rhyme, generally failed to pivot to new careers as historians. They were marginalized, and have since gone on to become acutely sensitive observers of reality whom nobody listens to (a fact they find bittersweet and write poignant poems about these days).
Unfortunately, the people who figured out this cunning use of intentions to manufacture happiness — as best as we can estimate there were about a dozen who figured it out at around the same time — lived in widely separated parts of the world. And since, at the time, they did not have Reddit to debate which bits of history to forget and which kinds of killing to call “honorable acts,” they ended up with highly incompatible happiness-manufacturing legends. Though debating on Reddit would likely not have produced a consensus, arguably, things wouldn’t have gotten as out of hand as they did.
So the result was that as they fruitlessly multiplied and spread across the earth, led by their heroes, the peoples of the world increasingly began running into each other. And they learned that others had a tendency to talk about non-interoperable legends that really kinda ruined their legends and killed their happiness buzz.
Back to square one.
The only solution was to start doing lots more honorable acts efficiently, at scale. This was the invention of war.
***
The invention of war had yet another unfortunate consequence: the discovery of peace. Peace was what happened when two warring sides happened to stop between bouts of honorable acts for a breather, snacks, and wine.
Everybody kinda disliked peace, because while it prevailed, people could not forget the unfinished backlog of honorable acts. They could not enjoy their legends, or dream about their futures, while the Others still lived, believing in their incompatible legends. But most of the time, if it was a pleasant sunny day, and the snacks were good, most could temporarily get past their dislike and learn to tolerate the peace.
Except for some people who didn’t just kinda dislike peace, but absolutely hated it. These particularly honorable people, who were selfless enough to let fellow believers in their legends do most of the honorable acts, were called “leaders.” It was around this time that the terms “good people” and “bad people” acquired their modern connotations. The people who believed in the right legends were called “good people” and the people who believed in the incompatible legends were called “bad people.” Since everybody thought they believed in the right legends, this had potential for confusion, but fortunately, war (technically known as goodspace collisions) tended to sort out these ambiguities reasonably well for practical purposes.
We do not know much about these early leaders and the good people who followed them, but we do have some anecdata. For instance, we know that one particularly selfless leader named Cato was so unhappy with peace that wherever he went, and no matter what he was talking about, he would throw in the phrase, Delenda est Carthago! Which roughly translates to Let’s Do Honorable Acts to Bad People!
So for a while, things got a little confusing around Cato.
Guy on Street: Hey Cato, what day is it?
Cato: Tuesday. Delenda est Carthago!
Guy on Street: Huh?
Cato: How much for this used iPhone?
Used phone seller: 12 sestertii
Cato: I’ll take it. Delenda est Carthago!
Cato’s Neighbor, Ducato: Hey Cato, wanna come over for some snacks and wine?
Cato: Sure, I’ll be right over. Delenda est Carthago!
Ducato: Uh, on second thoughts, raincheck. I just remembered, I am out of wine and snacks.
Cato was not an exception. Others went on to do far more than merely insert non sequiturs into peaceful everyday conversations. Some hired the more enterprising among the historians to manufacture compelling justifications for the necessity of ceaselessly doing honorable acts to bad people, hoping to do away with peace altogether.
This was no easy task. Falsifiable elements in the old histories had to be carefully excised. Heroes had to be hardened for enterprise use into demigods. Entirely new characters, with no distinguishing features, and unencumbered by over-defined personalities and inconvenient backstories (and therefore able to play unanticipated roles in the future), had to be written in. This kind of character, called ‘God’, represented the invention of narrative surge capacity, capable of handling any kind of existential interrogative load, as in:
Person A: What the hell…?!
Person B: God knows!
The specialized backend historians who got skilled at deploying these new narrative technologies became known as priests.
***
The weaponized, enterprise-grade history created by these priests, which was called religion, differed from the poetry and history of olden times in one critical way. Instead of one flavor, it came in two flavors: defensive and offensive. The process of creating defensive enterprise-grade history was called sacralization. The process of creating offensive enterprise-grade history was called desecration (though sometimes it was called “justice”).
Sacralization was straightforward. It was the process of hardening old legends for enterprise use. Besides upgrading heroes to demigods and gods to God, sacralization involved adding single-sign on capability, 256-bit encryption, IE6 support, and so on. In other words, your basic scaling challenge after achieving legendary product-market fit.
The new bit was desecration. This was the art of systematically weakening the legends of bad people (i.e. the ones who needed honorable acts done to them for believing in the wrong legends), so that they would either fail to harden into religion, or harden into weaker religion.
The need to create history in two flavors posed a genuine challenge. As early priests discovered, rigorous use of abstractions like “God” and “good” tended to lead to unhelpful conclusions like “everybody is good” or “nobody is good.” It proved harder than expected to engineer the intended conclusion, “we are the chosen people.”
Even if you managed to engineer things very carefully, using technologies like MapReduce (the term was originally used to describe the process of carving up embarrassingly parallel social geographies into zones of “good people” and “bad people”), it was very difficult to make sure that the people who believed in the right legends were consistently labeled “good” and the ones who believed in the wrong legends were consistently labeled “bad.”
After some thought, the priests and leaders came up with a very cunning solution: the priests would decide what it meant to be good, and the leaders would decide who counted as people. This marked the separation of religion and state, and the invention of politics, proper. Now people could have honorable acts done to them for either not being good, or not counting as people, or frequently, both. This allowed well-formed phrases that followed certain rules, like “we the people,” to work only for good people. It was the first use of the design principle of separation of presentation and content. This also marked the invention of crippleware.
Armed with priestly justifications, and supported by good people, political leaders could finally begin going beyond mere intentions and retcons and actually begin inventing history. They were no longer limited to merely encountering it in the form of unpleasant surprises, and reacting to it on an improvised case-by-case basis. The ability to separately define “good” and “people” allowed history writing to become truly predictable, proactive, scalable and deployable to large populations. Sometimes history could even be written before it happened.
Not surprisingly, with the invention of history invention, the rate of creation of history sharply accelerated, and along with it, the rate of future creation. So much history was created, it resulted in a glut of histories and futures.
Around the world, for centuries, more histories and futures piled up, in the form of a global tapestry of glorious wars and miserable peaces. Over mountains and across oceans, armed with varied glorious religions, the good people of the world spread, led by their leaders, doing unspeakably honorable acts to each other.
In the process they acquired vast amounts of historical baggage, and mortgaged away increasing quantities of their descendants’ time to an impossible number of futures. Everybody knew things were getting unsustainable.
Something had to give.
***
Here we must pause to note a small but crucial detail.
An unintended consequence of the invention of politics divided the world into two broad kinds of good people in the world. There were those whose legends required them to develop farms, hoard grain, and build cities to live in that were densely packed, disease-ridden, and dramatically unequal. And then there were those whose legends required them to range thinly over vast territories, riding horses, herding meat, and living healthy, egalitarian lives in tents and sharing equally in honorable acts.
The first kind of good people were called settlers. The second kind of good people were called nomads. Both were proud peoples, with long histories of honorable acts.
The nomads though, were just a little bit better at honorable acts than the settlers.
Which is why all the poets, historians, and priests on both sides were unpleasantly surprised to discover that in general, the settlers tended to prevail over the nomads.
Though this was overall rather nice for the settler crowd, it was unexpected. And since the invention of history and the future, all good people around the world had shared at least one preference across their varied, and otherwise wildly conflicting legends and religions: they did not like surprises.
And this was definitely a surprise. Clearly, the leaders and priests concluded, there was more history going on than they knew about. Narrative dark matter that was not represented in their legends.
Leaders and priests around the world secretly sent spies to learn about enemy legends and religions, and learned that none could explain the narrative dark matter.
It was clear that there was a hidden, dark enemy around, absent from the legends, yet subtly shaping history and the outcomes of honorable acts.
As word spread among the good people of the existence of this dark matter, some, more courageous than others, and more willing to do honorable acts to unknown, invisible enemies, stepped up and declared themselves protectors of all that was good.
They began a ceaseless vigil against this new, unknown enemy, detectable only through unexpected turns in history. This had the effect of infecting even peacetime with the anxieties and threats of honorable acts associated with wartime. It was called the dawn of civilization.
Due to an unfortunate transcription error in an early version of the history of these protectors, they came to be known as the guardians of peace. This has created a great deal of confusion, but it doesn’t matter now that they were in fact the guardians of war.
The guardians did not have to wait very long, because the invisible dark matter of history began to take on a visible form.
***
To understand what happened, we have to switch from what we in the entertainment business call the A-plot, the story of the good people, to what we call the B-plot, which in this case is the story of the kinda-okay-I-guess people.
The kinda-okay-I-guess people were those who were not entirely unhappy with the invention of peace. They had existed all along, around the world, alongside heroes, leaders, poets, historians, and priests. They tended to be pleasant and plump people, like Cato’s neighbor Ducato, who like many kinda-okay-I-guess people, had grown rather fond of good snacks and wine.
What’s more, while they vigorously shouted “Yeah! Woohoo!” when their poets recounted their legends, they couldn’t help but notice that the bad people (who of course deserved to have honorable acts done to them, no question, delenda est carthago baby), had some rather good snacks and wine of their own.
So in periods of peace, they sneakily began swapping wine and snacks with the bad people who seemed to be okay-I-guess.
These were the first traders, and though they did not know bother to give a name to what they were doing — they tended to avoid words and let their very reasonable prices do the talking, which was one reason their story had remained dark matter — they had just invented trade.
Traders generally had no cunning plans besides buying low and selling high. They had a healthy indifference to history, but they did have the good sense not to talk too much about the history-agnostic things they were doing. Instead, they went about quietly introducing the good people, including the heroes, the leaders, the poets, the historians, and the priests, to the pleasures of foreign wines and snacks. This was a tricky business. The guardians were always on hair-trigger alert, ready to go do honorable acts at a moment’s notice. Conversations often went like this:
Trader: Here, try some of this new wine, and you’ll love these new snacks.
Guardian: Whoa, this is some good stuff. Where did you get it?
Trader: Oh, I can’t recall. I think it fell off the back of a truck somewhere.
Guardian: Hmm. That seems suspiciously…
Trader: Have you tried this drink? It’s called tea.
This went on for a while. Sometimes the guardians would figure out what was going on, declare the foreign wine and snacks profane, go delenda est carthago-ing, and steal a whole bunch of it. Then they would declare it sacred loot by virtue of having been won through honorable acts, and declare that it was now honorable to drink or eat it, even though it was the exact same thing they had declared profane a week ago.
This sort of honorable behavior of course set trade relationships back by decades each time it happened, but nevertheless, the traders persevered patiently. And gradually the peaces grew longer, and the wars shorter. Eventually, some of the traders gained enough confidence in their abilities to hire some of the poets and historians away from the heroes and leaders, and even some of the priests. Not many listened, but a few, who had gotten rather sick of honorable acts, did.
With the help of the new recruits, the traders slowly began to suggest, first via whispered rumors, then in increasingly aggressive ways, that perhaps there were no good or bad people. Perhaps everyone was merely kinda okay-I-guess. Perhaps if they traded enough wine and snacks among themselves, it would be worth everybody’s while to put up with everybody else without the need for honorable acts. Perhaps if everybody stopped trying to be so good all the time, and remained content at “slightly evil,” there would be fewer wars.
But this marketing campaign was just extra insurance. Mostly, they hoped low prices would do the trick.
It was a tough sell. Not many liked snacks and wine enough to allow themselves to be demoted from good person to kinda-okay-I-guess person.
But by 1800, a great realization began to dawn on guardians around the world: the reason settlers had gradually overwhelmed nomads everywhere, even though nomads were slightly better at honorable acts, was simple: settler traders were slightly better than nomad traders.
You’d think the two slight advantages would cancel out, but as everybody realized around that time, they do not. Because trader advantages, unlike guardian advantages, tend to compound over time. A small initial edge in trading had a tendency to quickly turn into an absolutely crushing, overwhelming advantage.
As the last of the nomads were rudely shoveled into reservations and other unpleasant places, guardians around the world came to a horrifying conclusion.
The epic struggles between good and evil had ended.
The epic struggle between good and neutral was just beginning.
People began to realize this around 1800. One good person, the well-known guardian priest Hegel, even picked a specific date and identified the nature of the event.
The date was October 14, 1806, when two groups of particularly good people, highly skilled at honorable acts, fought the Battle of Jena-Auerstedt.
The event that happened that day, argued Hegel, was nothing less than the the End of History.
***
As it turned out, history did not actually end on October 14, 1806. Hegel’s was an understandable mistake caused by the sort of sampling error that would get you fired from a survey research job. What actually happened on that date was that history ended for a specific group: white males.
This caused a good deal of confusion for a while. As is now known, one of the effects of history ending is that you die. Or more precisely, you die as a good person and are resurrected, a nanosecond later, as a slightly evil kinda-okay-I-guess person. If you aren’t paying attention, there is a very good chance you won’t even notice it.
Most white males in fact, did not notice that history had ended for them on October 14, 1806. They continued about their business, doing honorable acts, leading, writing poetry and history, and making religion, for quite a while after. The last few still haven’t figured it out.
Not that the non-white-male types were any more perceptive. It took them a good century and a half to notice that white males seemed to be acting dead, like zombie versions of the good people their ancestors before 1806 used to be. So they called them Dead White Males, and for a while, alternated between making really funny jokes about them, and being really angry about them.
These people were called Social Justice Warriors, and history ended for them too around 1980 (they are now known as Dead Social Justice Warriors). That’s a zombie-versus-zombie story for another time.
Then there was a period of confusion after that where nobody knew precisely what was going on, and a lot of people were frantically urging everybody else to keep calm and carry on like nothing was happening. It was called “the eighties.”
Then history actually ended for everybody, with unceremonious, unseemly quickness. This happened in 1993, when the neutral finally prevailed over the good by gently persuading most guardians to go play video games instead of committing honorable acts, largely leaving the running of the world to traders. The transition is not yet complete, but it is mostly a done deal.
Not everybody has caught on, and history still appears to be going on in many parts of the world, but trader philosophers — there are no trader historians — assure us that this is a mix of several factors: delays in deploying the end of history, some people acting dead, other people larping continuations of history on the Internet, and something like a widespread, collective, phantom-limb effect. It’s all noise and fury signifying nothing.
There is a review scheduled for 2050 to monitor the ending of history (it’s going to take a few decades to bring this thing to a dead stop; it has a lot of inertia). Though interesting, surprising, and unexpected things will no doubt continue to happen, no new history or future is expected to happen between then and now. The forecast is for partly cloudy atemporality, with scattered showers of future nausea.
Though they make no promises and definitely harbor no intentions regarding the matter, many traders suspect that we can soon stop being unhappy about being unhappy, and go back to being mostly just unhappy, with breaks for idleness.
This time though, without the lions. So that’s some progress at least.
In a logical response to some issues with the recent installation of fare gates, Translink is installing special gates for disabled riders who can’t tap in/out of the system. It’s a sensible move, given publicized issues with the current system.
A rendering of the new gates – Vancouver Sun
As a recent PT post demonstrates, the current system is not without its detractors and supporters – and people who think the whole idea of fare gates was another provincial sop to the moral panic of ‘fare dodging’ by those who rarely even take transit.
There’s some truth to that. An estimated $7M a year lost to fare dodging under the old honour system vs. $250M+ for the installation of the existing and new gates. This does not include on-call maintenance costs in perpetuity.
The existing gates
The gates for disabled riders will have a more powerful sensor to read a rider’s Compass Card. This won’t stop some ne’er-do-well deadbeats from hanging around the new gates waiting to slip in behind someone who’s legitimately activated them, as prompted the post linked above.
But to paraphrase one Vancouver Sun commenter, ‘why not just install these more powerful sensors at every gate so that tapping in/out is not necessary?’ It’s only money.
If you’re not feeling brave, there are some relatively simple things you can check here.
1) The concept. Is it about the brand or based clearly round a problem people know they have, an opportunity they believe exists, or a passion they want to learn more about? Is there any evidence that this is a strong common interest? Are lots of people talking about it elsewhere?
2) The user experience.Is the user experience positive? Is content easy to read? Does it contrast well with the background? Are there long, block, paragraphs? Can the copy easily be scanned? What is the font / font size? Do the CTAs stand out? What is the line length?
3) The CTA. Is there a clear call to action for new visitors and/or existing members? Is this based around solving a problem, seizing an opportunity, learning something interesting, social inclusion (exclusivity)?
4) SEO. What are the title tags/meta description? Is the title tag optimised for what the audience might search for (and less than 60 characters)? Is the meta-description likely to be clicked?
5) Registration form. Does this only ask for the email address, username, and password? Is there any unnecessary copy that could be removed? Is social sign on well implemented? Is the design clear and present? Are there any unnecessary clicks required here?
6) Post-registration page. Are you immediately taken to a page that is likely to drive you to make an immediate post? Do you receive a notification or a special message tailored solely to someone who has just joined? Is it clear what the next immediate action is?
7) Welcome/confirmation message. Does this give you a consistent message to take the next action? Is it clear here what the next step is? What do you want people to do right now? Are there multiple CTAs inserted here?
8) Removing unnecessary/unpopular pages. Are there pages that are rarely visited or have limited content? Can we remove them and condense activity a little further?
9) Topic categories. Are these based around problems that people want to solve, unique passions, or opportunities that people want to seize? Can we combine/merge any of these?
10) Landing page / homepage. Can you easily see what’s new, what’s popular or who’s new and who’s popular? Is there a good menu of discussions to appeal to a broad type of member each time they visit? Is it easy to see the most popular discussions of all time?
11) Priming. Is there any negative or unintentional priming here in choice of words, images or anything else we might want to tweak?
12) Tone of discussions. Is the tone of discussions reflective of the type of community you’re trying to create? Is it fun and sarcastic? Positive and constructive? Serious and substantive? Do most posts and responses reflect that tone of discussions? Are all discussions receiving a good, quick, response?
13) Messages from community manager / Automation messages. Do messages from the community manager feel personalised and unique to me? Are they designed to either build a relationship or get me to take an immediate action? Do they avoid any cliches ‘thank you for joining….’ Does the automated email journal apply a motivational principle to encourage participation? Does it indoctrinate me better into the culture of the community?
14) Newsletter. Is this automated or cultivated? Does it only contain value or does it simply fill spaces regardless of quality? Does the newsletter remind people about the community or increase the perceived value of the community?
15) Social status. Is there a clear sense of community? Do people seem familiar with each other? Do they reference the history of the group? Do they seem emotionally on the same page? Do they have influence over what happens within the group?
16) Brand interaction. Does the brand participate well? Do they respond to discussions about themselves personally and with genuine care? Do they act like real people? Do they solicit opinions? Do they give exclusive information / previews to members first?
17) Integration. Is the community well integrated with the rest of the company? Are discussions clearly linked from various areas of the content. Is the community highly visible?
This isn’t an exhaustive list, but hopefully it’s a few simple things to consider if you review your own community.
Just a few days ago, Microsoft released a clever video claiming that its new Edge browser is the top web surfing platform around when it comes to optimizing laptop battery life, surpassing the likes of Opera and Chrome.
Well, it looks like Opera has something to say about that. According to the company, Opera’s new battery saving feature, which it launched last month, results in battery life being extended by a considerable amount when compared competing browsers. The company posted a blog post entitled “over the edge” that features a sassy Willy Wonka meme.
“Like most other engineering teams, we love it when someone picks a fight,” said Błażej Kaźmierczak, director of software development at Opera, in a recent post on the company’s official blog. “If we get beaten in a test like this, we consider it a bug.”
A Microsoft Edge programmer has Tweeted a response to Opera’s claims, stating that the test actually turns on an ad blocker that’s typically off by default. On the Microsoft side of things, Edge’s inability to take advantage of plugins like Firefox, Chrome and almost every browser on the market, is likely one of the main factors why Edge works well with battery life.
This test turned on an ad blocker, which is off by default. Not loading+rendering the same content in all browsers. https://t.co/fKTWxqkUuq
President Obama and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg have already read the book, but they will have to wait until next year to catch the motion picture adaptation of The Three Body Problem (三体), one of China’s most hotly anticipated films.
As a book, the sci-fi story took China by storm with its depiction of a surreal virtual reality world mixed in with the brutalities of the Cultural Revolution. The highly original story even saw Liu Cixin become the first Asian author to win the Hugo Award.
The success of the story soon prompted Liu to adapt it into not just a film, but also a video game, with Liu becoming both “Art Director of the movie and Cloud Architect of the game,” according to a press release in December.
That same announcement said the film would be released in July 2016. But with only a couple of weeks to go, there has yet to be a trailer or any other sign the film will make a deadline that many local sci-fi fans and industry insiders doubted it ever would.
Since shooting wrapped up in August 2015, the film’s post-production process has been less than smooth, with high-level personnel changes and a wholesale replacement of the CGI team, according to several local media reports and social media updates from key players.
While the details are still murky, and contradictory behind-the-scenes accounts play out in the media, there have been enough problems to prompt author Liu Cixin to tell local media the film’s release has beenpostponed till 2017.
After initial local trade press reports of the resignation of Kong Ergou, CEO of Yoozoo Pictures and executive producer on the film, the executive took to social media to deny the charge and clear up the reasons for the delay.
Kong confirmed the delay, but said it was because the post-production budget had increased and they had higher standards for the CGI.
“As the first sci-fi in China, we want to do our best to achieve the best possible visual effects,” he wrote.
Sci-fi, though increasingly popular in China, is seen only in films, television and Internet entertainment imported from overseas. China’s strict censorship of homegrown content leaves little room for plot points not grounded in fact.
Kong said that he had switched from CEO to executive director a year earlier but he also took the opportunity to promote a new company he had created called “Rexue Yoozoo” (热血游族). It’s unclear whether the new company is related to Yoozoo Pictures.
China Film Insider repeatedly contacted Yoozoo Pictures to confirm Kong’s version of events, but the company’s representatives did not reply.
An employee at one of the visual effects companies connected to the film told China Film Insider that the delay in the film’s release was due to a disagreement over funds between director Zhang Fanfan and his producers.
Given the global success of the book, hopes are high that the sci-fi story will become a rare thing in the Chinese film industry—a breakout movie with worldwide appeal.
But such a result is unlikely for a Chinese sci-fi film if the special effects aren’t up to a global standard.
“We hope the movie will trigger a huge transformation in the whole Chinese movie market,” Lin QI, CEO of Yoozoo Pictures, said in November. “The entire movie is expected to contain more than 1,700 special effect shots.”
On June 17, Yoozoo Pictures released a statement via the official The Three Body Problem Weibo account which said the new CGI team was made up of top American, Korean, German, and Chinese teams working in tandem, including the high-profile visual effect company Pixomondo.
Some reports claim the film’s marketing department has been slashed as a result of the delay. While the film scrambles to get its visual effects right, gripes from anonymous insiders continue to leak out into the press.
“We originally planned to jointly market The Three Body Problem with 20th Century Fox’s Independence Day: Resurgence,” one insider said in a social media post that later was deleted. “The film will hit the screen for sure, but now we just don’t know when exactly.”
About the Author: Fergus Ryan is a reporter at China Film Insider and previously worked as a journalist for the News Corp. publications China Spectator and The Australian
“I’ve found a bone…but what is it?” Fourteen-year-old bone collector, naturalist, blogger, and author Jake McGowan-Lowe points out common identifying traits of animal remains you might find while hiking (or in my case, while gardening in the backyard). Photo: Gregory Han
Inner Vision is a weekly digest connecting the dots between great everyday objects and the cultures and techniques behind living well with them. Here, we move beyond recommendations and ratings, because just as important as knowing what to buy is knowing what’s possible using the products you’ve purchased.
The Kama Sutra of Audio: I’ve been experimenting with positions lately. On the floor, on the shelf, on stands, on a pile of books—moving a pair of audio speakers everywhere in an attempt to find the sweet spot where imaging becomes apparent, but the speakers aren’t floating in the middle of the room. I’ve been using this tip as offered by audio guru Jason Kennedy of The Vinyl Factory: “To find a balance that suits your room and your music, try moving them 10cm at a time away from the wall and stop when the bass loses power, then maybe move them back a bit to find an optimal balance.”
A Resistance to Change: Everyone knows what it’s like to start a new habit with all the best intentions, only to slide back into old practices as initial enthusiasm wanes. That’s homeostasis in action, the physiological propensity for inertia. Simply put, your body is like a picky 3-year-old and food: It likes what it already knows. So how do you maintain any momentum of change? In the same way a distance runner improves speed and distance without injury: by turning up, not tuning out, awareness.
Winner, Winner, Chicken Dinner: Lemon juice and malt vinegar—in combination these two ingredients give this 18th century British fried chicken recipe from Nathan Bailey’s cookbook, Dictionarium Domesticum, a distinct tartness revealed with every crispy bite. Wearing a tricornered hat while deep frying is an optional affectation.
Living Spare and Bare: In no way am I implying we all should live in such sparsely furnished homes as these committed minimalists (ミニマリスト or “minimarisuto” in Japan). An extreme absence of things can be as stifling as a hoarder’s den. The real takeaway here is becoming more thoughtful about and conscious of what we bring into our lives and how, awakening to the premise of quality besting quantity.
The Security-Deposit Checklist: One of the benefits of adopting the tenets of minimalism noted above is it surely makes moving a lot simpler. For the rest of us, the ordeal is best done with a plan of action, especially if you’re a renter hoping to receive the full amount of a security deposit back upon vacating. The Manly Housekeeper’s cleaning tips for moving out are also applicable for any time when you really want to get your place tip-top before inviting guests over.
Get a Hobby, Get a Life: “Our hobbies should be a form of dissent, a radical expression of our individuality, a celebration of doing things that we’re not obliged to do.” Novelist and journalist Alex Preston argues hobbies are neither inconsequential or trivial—they’re an opportunity for us to shed the pretense of what we do for what we really are.
The Dakota Fire Hole: I’d imagine evasive Jason Bourne would know how to make a Dakota fire hole, a survivalist’s technique resulting in a long-lasting, hot-burning, and smoke-free fire cloaked from sight. Comprised of two interconnected holes in the ground—one larger than the other—the simple design feeds a flame with oxygen and requires a minimal amount of wood fuel.
A Vow of Silence: For those occasionally overwhelmed and overstimulated by the soundscape of the modern world, this newly announced meditative documentary may offer solace in its celebration of the ineffable pleasures of silence.
Photo: Sarah Han
No-Churn Matcha Ice Cream: If it was possible to eat ice cream in place of two square meals every day without immediate weight gain (and lactose-related repercussions), I think I could happily partake in such a meal-replacement program. I’m still on the fence about which machine to invest in, but in the meantime, my sister offered this 3-ingredient recipe that doesn’t require anything but a whisk and the strong forearms of a determined ice cream lover.
Weakly World News: Speaking of strength, studies at the Winston-Salem State University in North Carolina found men and women under the age of 30 are exhibiting weaker grip strength than their generational predecessors. Unsurprisingly, all that mousing, texting, and Snapchatting is resulting in weak-sauce handshakes (see solution here).
Got an interesting story, link, resource, or how-to you think we should check out for consideration for our next issue of Inner Vision? Drop us a line with the subject “Inner Vision,” and we’ll take a look!
The younger generation are quite rightfully pissed at their elders (who voted mostly Leave) and the Scots were a bastion of sanity, so there will be a variety of schisms to work through. And that’s off the mainland alone – all the nutcases in the EU are going to have a field day with this.
(I’m also a little annoyed that the pound dropped to 0.8 EUR today after I ordered a bunch of gear from Amazon UK last weekend, but that’s nothing compared to the prospect of the entire EU going down the drain due to a handful of bigots…)
But hey, at least Lisbon is going to be a lot more appealing for startups now.
One day a new political party will form in Canada - let's call it the Union party - pledging to put the country to a referendum on whether to join the United States.
It's something we've been pulled toward for years, with the free trade agreement, NAFTA, harmonized border security, and more. The corporate sector has been slowly pushing us toward this. The vote is inevitable.
If I am still around, I would vote against such an integration. From my perspective, the United States has to change a lot in order to be worth joining. Among other things:
- The U.S. is very pro-private-enterprise, to the point where basic services are subject to the whims of the marketplace. I would not dream of joining a country without universal single payer health care. I would not want other major parts of our infrastructure to be run by private corporations.
- The U.S. has a history of militarism and imperialism. This stance would have to change. The country would have to have a very different stance on guns and other weapons.
- The U.S. is an unequal society. It has problems with racism and xenophobia. It has one of the widest income divides in the world. It is a land of elites and masses.
- The political structure is not reliable. Lobbyists hold far too much sway. The media is in the hands of people who prey on hate and fear for personal profit, publishing without shame falsehoods and innuendo.
I know many Americans, and individually, I love them all. They can be dear friends, loyal to a fault, resourceful and helpful. I just don't want to be part of their society. I think differently, and I live differently.
There are costs, personal costs, that I bear as a result of this. For example, even with NAFTA - the North American Free Trade Agreement - there are hard limits on what goods and services I could offer in the U.S. which put me at a competitive disadvantage. I don't qualify for U.S. federal contracts. major funding agencies, such as the Gates Foundation, will not fund non-Americans.
My currency typically trades lower, meaning that imports cost me more. So I pay a premium on electronics and other gear. High tech employment in Canada is limited, as companies prefer the synergy and access-to-market that places like Boston and Silicon Valley provide.
But I bear these costs, willingly, because I view my own country as far more free and open. When I return home I feel like I'm breathing fresh air again - figuratively and literally. I could be Muslim if I wanted, gay if I swung that way, a pot smoking (well, next year at least) long-haired socialist, and still get a government job.
So I understand the feelings of the people who voted in favour off the Brexit.
They are Europe's Americans. The situation of the UK and Europe is in many ways the inverse of Canada and the U.S. - it is the UK that is pro-private-enterprise, the UK that colonized the world and still gets into wars, the UK that the UK that has the unequal society, the UK with the at-risk political structure.
Of course the British don't see themselves that way, which is fair enough. But they see Europe very differently than I do, or indeed many of their compatriots. The things that (I think) Europeans really value - public good, peace and order, fairness and equity, civil society - are not seen in the same light by Britons (or, at least, a majority of them).
But their vote to leave iss in this light completely understandable. Just as Americans would very much resist becoming like Canada - especially today's modern multicultural Canada - so also the British resist becoming like Europe.
I, personally, feel this was the wrong move for the UK. I think that the sway of the EU over time would have let to a better and fairer society. I think that they now face an uncertain future, one where they will probably seek to throw in their lot with the United States, becoming in essence part of a north Atlantic (mostly) English trading bloc.
I think they will also seek to reassert their leadership over the Commonwealth, but may be disappointed to find that the Commonwealth has moved on. In many ways, the Commonwealth is another Europe. Certainly there are lessons learned here about the British tolerance for people from other places.
I think that England alone will be poorer (I expect a Scottish referendum and independence now). It will never again lead a global empire, never again enjoy a privileged position in trade, never again have access to cheap and abundant resources. England will be forced to seek solace in trade - a nation of shopkeepers! - and will see itself in competition with Switzerland. But in reality, it will be western Europe's Belarus.
As for Europe, there is no turning back. Without the British distraction there will be greater opportunity - and greater imperative - for greater integration. Some badly needed reforms - such as economic equalization - can now be put into place. Turkish membership becomes a much more attractive prospect, if the Turkish government can reform.
The risk, though, is that there is a chain reaction. Support for the EU is especially low in places like Greece and even France. A referendum would be a risky proposition in any number of countries. A collapse of the European Union would create a lot of risk and uncertainty, instability in many member countries, and a real need for another framework that enables the countries of Europe to live together without fighting each other.
My heart goes out to the people of the UK in the wake of the Brexit vote. They face the uncertain task of navigating a post-European future with, very soon, a new prime minister to succeed David Cameron. Turmoil and suffering are inevitable. But of course, here in America, we think only of ourselves (America … Continue reading Today, statements from US and European leaders on Brexit →
City Cyclist with his Hero 3+ GoPro atop his helmet. 
This article originally appeared on China Film Insider
