The packing and unpacking game. Shakespeare, the Carolina Chocolate Drops and Communion.

I recently had to carry a few more things than I thought I could from one room to another. I stopped for a moment to think about it and devised a way to pack the items so as to be able to carry them all safely to the other side.

This packing and unpacking game is something that migrant cultures must get quite good at. I don’t mean literally – although remembering to “travel light” helps – but psychologically. The scattered nation, the nation in diaspora because of famine or social upheaval, has to be clever about how it stores or hides its meanings so as to be able to retrieve them again and again.

The trick about packing and unpacking memories is that the more you retrieve a memory, the more you damage it. Nostalgia kills the thing you want to love most. That’s a pretty striking evolutionary skill – or deficit. However you want to see it.

Reprisals and repetitions in which the variables change but the structures remain intact provide an alternative technique for preserving knowledge.

You retain the instructions but can leave behind the materials. You follow a recipe. An algorithm. Every time you relive it, you must relearn it. The process of re-learning ensures the necessary adaptations are made and the effective code, the replicating part, is launched successfully.

This kind of compression for ensuring your signal spreads faster and endures longer is certainly the way drama operates. In plays, all that remains of the first performance is the script. The actors, the costumes, the props all fade away. In religions, rituals serve the same function of allowing performers and audience alike to relive key events and phrases.

Like every performance of Shakespeare is a new interpretation, every rehearsal of the last supper is a new communion despite its lacking the actual bread and actual wine consumed on that first last supper.

Mutatis mutandis: only that which has to change is changed. All other things being equal. This phrase is a key instruction in our social code. It’s also a key instruction in our religious, musical and literary codes.

Adapt. Change. Evolve. If that’s not what has kept some cultures intact after so much packing and unpacking these last three thousand years, I really don’t know how they did it.

(Thank you, Victoria Zumba for your mention of the Carolina Chocolate Drops.)

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A nation of immigrants and also, perhaps, a nation of survivors.

Those who advocate for the human rights of migrants spend a great deal of time responding to mischaracterizations of migrants, to shallow depictions, to stereotypes. Migrants are millions of individuals and what they have in common may surprise us all.

Daniel Hernandez calls out this terrific quote from a recent Los Angeles Times story:

“This flag reminds you of what you left behind — your friends, your family and, above all else, your homeland,” Barranco said as a flag leaned next to him on the bench. “I came here to work, not for pleasure. If it was pleasure I was looking for, I would still be in Mexico.”

I don’t know – though perhaps my mom does – what percentage of immigrants suffer from depression but I’m going to guess it’s on par with the subset of the native-born population that has suffered a tremendous loss (e.g., being imprisoned, losing multiple family members overnight, living through an acrimonious divorce, being the victim of a violent crime, etc.)

And so, we have to ask: when informing or entertaining or advertising to immigrants, aren’t “sob stories” going to be more cathartic and thus more engaging?

Politically, there’s a benefit to describing immigrants as ambitious and optimistic. And that appears to be true, from an economic standpoint. But, psychologically, culturally, it might be that immigrants are also, often, quite sad.

The two feelings can coexist. God knows they have for centuries in the African American community.

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Our bodies, our selves. The time travel edition.

A fan of the possible, I sometimes overstate the unlikely. In recent years, I’ve toyed with the idea that the ancient past would “feel” different and might, in some ways, induce a state of shock on a time traveler from the present. (or vice versa.)

But then I read accounts such as this one about Pliny the Younger and I doubt the premise of my argument.

Perhaps, the lives of the rich today may not be that different from the lives of the rich two thousand years ago? Might the same be true for the poor?

Or, perhaps it’s far more elementary: the lives of writers haven’t changed much because language hasn’t changed much. What has changed greatly between then and now is how we move.

Many more of us now toil at work that is less physically demanding. We eat different diets. We play different sports. What would shock a time traveller would be the embodied meanings of our world.

To convey this to an audience you’d have to go beyond moving pictures and require actual movement: a video game that requires players to alter their movements and gestures in order to fit in and prolong the experience.

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Why so many lobbyists? Because the going is getting tougher.

Robert Reich on why corporations now spend so much money to lobby the government:

The real reason is the structural shift in the economy, beginning in the late 1970s, toward far more intense competition for consumers and investors. Globalization, deregulation, and technological advances — especially computers and the Internet — have been the driving forces. They have shifted almost all industries in almost all rich economies from being organized around stable oligopolies, in which competitive advantage derived mostly from economies of scale, toward far more intense competition in which competitive advantage comes from innovation — and from favorable treatment by government.

The fights that actually preoccupy Congress day by day, which consume weeks or months of congressional staffers’ time and which are often the most hotly contested by squadrons of Washington lobbyists and public-relations professionals, are typically contests between competing companies or competing sectors of an industry or, occasionally, competing industries. The result has been a clamor of business interests — a cacophony so loud as to almost drown out serious deliberation over the public good.

As I wrote last night, to play the game you need rules. Reich’s case is that the public are also in the game but are very bad at working the refs.

ideas/people

Best Michael Jackson reflection I’ve read.

Hilton Als:

Early on, he recognized the power mainstream stardom held—a chance to defend himself and his mother from the violent ministrations of his father, Joe Jackson (who famously has justified his tough parenting, his whippings, as a catalyst for his children’s success), and to wrest from the world what most performers seek: a nonfractured mirroring.

Psychologically astute and philosophically deep.

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Crashes are a form of feedback. But a really, really inefficient one.

Anatole Kaletsky writes:

Does this mean that financial cycles are pathological and immoral? The alternation of greed and fear certainly causes losses and economic disruptions in the short term, as well as suffering among innocent bystanders who have no involvement in finance, but in a longer historical perspective, financial cycles can be seen to play a crucial part in the evolution of the capitalist system.

Cycles are not pathological and immoral but the rules that inform cycles can be. The distinction is not semantics.

Cycles are produced by rule-bound societies. When governments allow markets to run their course, they are enacting a policy. When they regulate markets, they are enacting a policy. Either way, government is creating the conditions for a certain kind of market behavior.

But let’s take the author’s wording at face value and look at his conclusion: “financial cycles can be seen to play a crucial part in the evolution of the capitalist system.”

Insofar as declines are a form of feedback, then, yes, they are useful. But feedback need not come at such a high human cost as near market collapse.

Differences in states need not fluctuate to extremes for signals to be properly transmitted through a modern marketplace.

Most of the instruments in our everyday lives are finely tuned to avoid property loss or personal injury. For example, your car can accelerate to 40 mph without having to pass through 120 mph. It can also decelerate from 40ph to 30mph without first hitting 0. (Or another car.)

The application of information technologies to financial markets should benefit all stakeholders, direct and indirect, and not just those few with access to supercomputers.

Fortunately, supercomputers are no longer solely the domain of elite insiders. Google.com gives millions of people free time-shares to one of the the most luxurious and powerful “computers” on the planet.

A more transparent and inviting marketplace would allow feedback signals to travel more quickly and efficiently. If that requires a few to learn new ways to make money but saves the majority unsustainable cataclysms then, yeah, that’s the best value.

Those same few who will need to evolve have plenty of money in the bank. In a capitalist society, that’s a considerable head start.

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What every child wants.

Fun quote from an essay on CCTV surveillance and free will:

God is really no different than any other parent. All he wants is absolute, unquestioning obedience (which, by an amazing coincidence, also happens to be exactly what every child wants from their parents.)

The rest of the essay is as well written but flawed in its conceit. There are many reasons to ridicule the popularity of Michel Foucault’s arguments but his absence from an essay about surveillance is a weakness.

ideas/people

Companies adapting to, others defining the possible.

Rolling Stone failed to make its explosive article available online to consumers after making it available to other press outlets. I’m not sure how much money they may have lost but I’m pretty sure they lost money.

Google Voice is now available to all. I’ve started to use it and it’s both surprisingly good and exactly what you would expect from a telephone number in 2010. In other words, a virtual personal assistant. Ad-supported.

John Gruber speculates Apple will supplant telephone carriers: “FaceTime, I think, is a first step in the direction of a mobile ‘phone’ with no mobile carrier.”

All three items point to the quickening pace of change; trends years, if not decades in the making, can become apparent – real – overnight.

people/things

TV: Kill It, Cook It, Eat It from the BBC 3

Kill It, Cook It, Eat It is a very smart show from BBC 3. I’ve only watched the beef episode and it’s drawn out to fill an hour, but you can skip to the end of part three for the moment of truth, minus the smell and what must be a near tangible moment of empathy.

From that moment on it’s mostly a discussion of what makes grass-fed, sustainably produced meat delicious. Not necessary, not inevitable, not ordained; just delicious.

There’s no way they could run this on standard cable in the U.S. let alone broadcast. (Who would sponsor that hour? Carl’s Jr: you’re all talk and no action.)

And the whole experience on Kill It… is already far removed from factory farming. That’s a sight few want to see. Not even those who are paid to do so:

Today, roughly two-thirds of the workers at the beef plant in Greeley cannot speak English. Most of them are Mexican immigrants who live in places like the River Park Mobile Court, a collection of battered old trailers a quarter-mile down the road from the slaughterhouse…A spokesman for ConAgra recently acknowledged that the turnover rate at the Greeley slaughterhouse is about 80 percent a year. That figure actually represents a decline from the early 1990s.

people/things

Gourmet Magazine: now with easy to clean pages.

Gourmet magazine is back as an interactive iPad app.

Here’s what I wrote about the end of Gourmet Magazine back in October of 2009, four months before the iPad was announced:

We had a subscription to Gourmet. I was set to buy one as a gift to my parents. I’d recommended the magazine to friends. We will miss having copies to store alongside our cookbooks. But, one day, we’ll also have an easy to clean digital tablet in our kitchen. And, while it won’t be the same, it should serve its purpose well.

things/work

If it sounds complicated…

Aaron Swartz:

How do you tell if what someone is saying is smart? Most people’s first instinct is to think that things they can’t understand must be smart…

But…this method is exactly backwards. Smart people actually say things that are very simple and easy to understand. And the smarter they are, the more clear what they say is. It’s stupid people who say things that are hard to understand.

Part of this is because stupid people say things that aren’t true, things that aren’t true don’t make sense, and things that don’t make sense are hard to understand. But you can also look at it from the other end: if you genuinely understand something — really, truly understand it — then it doesn’t seem complicated and you can explain it rather simply.

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A leviathan for the modern man.

The most interesting adversary in a story is one to which the protagonist owes a debt. To whom or to what do we owe the greatest debt at this moment? To God or to Nature?

For some, there’s no distinction: God is nature and, therefore, the One that must be feared and revered is a natural god. Every life is sacred; those we know and understand and those we do not yet know and may never understand.

However, for others, there is a clear distinction between God and Nature. In many such orders, God is higher than man who is higher than animals. God is in the sky and nature is literally that which is below man: land. As land, nature can be bought and sold. Parcels, lots, rights.

If nature is a thing, a thing that can be privatized, it is a thing that can be destroyed, once and for all, if that is how the owner sees fit.

As a child I was very taken by the conceit of the cartoon The Transformers: “more than meets the eye.” They were everyday machines infused with a living spirit.

Everyday machines, especially large, powerful machines, infused with the spirit of nature, of a natural God, would be something to behold. A leviathan for the modern man.

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La familia y la política.

Las relaciones entre los seres humanos jamás son fáciles. Nacemos irresponsables y egoístas y poco a poco aprendemos como esforzarnos a ser humano, gracias a esos adultos que inician y sostienen el esfuerzo aún mas difícil de hacer de nosotros seres humanos.

Con ellos y gracias a ellos aprendemos los hábitos necesarios para manejar los miedos y los deseos, el como usar las palabras y las promesas, nos enseñan hasta incluso el uso de nuestros propios cuerpos.

En este sentido la familia “humaniza” el ser humano.

Claro, hay los que no quieren o no saben como relacionarse con sus parientes, ni con sus vecinos y aún menos con extranjeros. Muchos más han aprendido habitos que a penas funcionan entre las paredes de su ámbito familiar y que luego fracasan de manera catastrófica al nivel social o internacional.

Piensa en las guerras “civiles” (The American War of Independence, The American Civil War, las guerras de Cuba, las de Iraq, las dos coreas, Afganistán, etc). Son guerras entre parientes, entre amigos, entre vecinos.

Los problemas que originan con las relaciones humanas son problemas tan endémicos que se tardan muchos, pero muchos años para resolver. Las batallas para establecer los derechos de las mujeres, de los niños, de los creyentes, de los conquistados, de los enfermos, de los ancianos. Se tardan siglos. Milenio.

ideas/people

Neil Gaiman: information then, a desert; information now: a jungle.

Neil Gaiman

Information used to be gold: hard to find, expensive, the equivalent of going off into the desert and coming back with a perfect lump of gold. Now, it’s the equivalent of going off into the jungle, in which there is information everywhere and what you are trying to find is the piece that is useful, while ignoring the noise. I don’t know if this is good or bad: it just is.

via the browser

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