Ken’s Blog

Sadly, Gary Austin, the founder of the famed improv troupe The Groundlings, passed away this week. As a longtime admirer of his work, I read with great interest the thoughtful obituary in The New York Times.

There was one thing the obit quoted him as saying which really jumped out at me:

““My aim is to be totally present in the moment, and when I’m totally present in the moment I can do no wrong,” he said in 2015. “That’s a feeling I like to have, and I have it sometimes.”

That’s a very Buddhist way of looking at the world. Alas, I suspect it is very far from the way most people in “modern society” live their lives.

It strikes me now that every time you walk into a meeting with a SmartPhone in your pocket, and you keep your phone’s ringer or vibration mode switched on, you are doing the opposite of what he said. Some part of you is going to be absent from that meeting, even if your phone never rings.

I am an admirer of the related anthropological research of Applin and Fischer into PolySocial Reality. I wonder whether we should also be studying PolySocial Unreality.

I know for sure that I am living in a political bubble because every person I have any sort of political conversation with — and I do mean every person — thinks that the Trump administration is a scary combination of functionally insane, grossly incompetent and ethically corrupt.

This is particularly notable because a number of my friends and relatives tell me a different story. While they themselves share this view, they talk of conversations with friends or relatives of theirs, one step removed from me, who think that this administration is doing a fine job.

Politics aside, there is a part of my mind that is viewing this situation with a kind of astonished curiosity. My inner Mr. Spock wants to raise an eyebrow and say “Fascinating”.

How can grownups, who presumably are, for the most part, functionally sane, disagree so strongly with each other on something like this? Putting aside the particulars of the issue itself, isn’t it amazing that we are capable of such astonishingly extreme intellectual discord?

For many years I have loved the word “provenance”. The first time I ever heard it, its meaning was clear from context, and it has given me a reassuring feeling ever since.

The provenance of any historical object (whether a book, a painting, or a piece of furniture) is the verifiable history of the chain of custody of that object. But I’ve also seen it used in slightly more abstract ways.

For example, we can talk about the provenance of a famous quote. Are we talking about the original quote by its proper author, or was its text or attribution altered somewhere along the way when nobody was paying attention?

I also like the way “provenance” sounds like “providence”. So there is that subtle association with the idea of a divine being or beings in a well-ordered Universe looking out for us. Reassuring indeed.

So I was delighted this week to see the following headline in an article in The New York Times: “Are These Artifacts Plundered or Proven?”

Aha, I thought, it turns out that the verb corresponding to “provenance” is “to prove”. An historical artifact has been “proven” if you can reliably trace its historical chain of custody.

The word “proven” is not used anywhere else in the Times article, but that one use makes the point. I guess it makes sense. I had just never noticed it before.

You learn something new every day!

In a shocking reversal, Congress held a joint session today to move forward on removing Donald Trump from office. Representative Paul Ryan (R Wisconsin) and Chuck Schumer (D New York) issued a statement on behalf of the entire legislative branch, which in a rare show of solidarity voted unanimously to begin impeachment hearings.

“It’s not the influence peddling, the lying, the creepy Russian connection, the pussy grabbing, the Mexican wall nonsense, or even our President’s sheer inability to close a legislative deal,” explained Mr. Ryan at a hastily assembled press conference. “It’s the stupidity.”

In a moment that many found poignant and moving, Mr. Ryan admitted to having given in to a false sense of hope that the candidate who ran for election by posing as a narcissistic sociopath was not, in fact, a narcissistic sociopath.

“Alas, the time has come to reject ‘alternative facts’,” said Mr. Ryan sadly. “The man is simply out of his mind. We’re looking bad to our potential trade partners, China is about to corner the global clean energy market, and nobody knows what nutty thing the President is going to tweet next in his undies at five in the morning.”

Senator Schumer chimed in, “It is rare that our two parties can agree on anything these days. But we finally had to face the facts. This guy is a cuckoo bird.”

Both houses of congress will take a formal vote on the matter tomorrow. They would have voted today, but several legislators demurred, expressing a wish to respect the traditional moratorium on voting during April Fools Day.

Steve Bannon, who is widely respected in our nation’s capital for his ability to make Donald Trump walk and talk on command, was unavailable for comment.

This morning I gave a talk about the future. It was one of my sunny optimistic talks, focusing on the possibilities, the excitement, the wonder of what we might all be able to do as advancing technology permits. In fact, it was much like this talk that I gave a few months back.

But then during the Q&A somebody asked me about the larger implications for society. I said that until three days ago I had been very optimistic, but that my views had darkened considerably this past Tuesday.

As I indicated in yesterday’s post, two things happened on that day. One of them I wrote about the other day: The Republican majority in Congress passed a law that allows Telecoms to gather and sell your digital data. The rather odd argument used to justify this vote was that Google and Facebook already do this.

But of course that is a false parallel. You can live your digital life just fine without Google or Facebook, but in most parts of this country you must use a Telecom even to connect to the internet.

The other thing that happened this past Tuesday was that Elon Musk publicly announced Neurolink — a company which proposes to develop neural implants that will allow people to directly connect their brains to the world. The goal, as I understand it, is that everything which now requires you to perform a physical action, from shopping to hailing a cab to turning on lights and opening doors, will eventually be a mere thought away.

If you put these two events together, we are now on a direct path to an interesting world: The very thoughts you think will soon create a digital footprint, and will therefore become part of Telecom traffic.

So the Telecom which carries your thoughts — a Telecom that you are most likely stuck with — will be legally entitled to listen in on those thoughts, store them as its property, look for patterns in them, and sell them or otherwise exploit them for commercial gain.

Yes, I know what you’re thinking. Soon everybody will.

I have to say that I am overwhelmed by the confluence of two extremely important events that both happened the other day, on Tuesday March 28, 2017. Perhaps the synchronicity between them was mere coincidence. Perhaps not.

One of these events I wrote about in yesterday’s blog post. The other is something else entirely. But then again, perhaps not really.

I am going to need a day to process all of this. Taken together, it’s all quite overwhelming.

When Abraham Lincoln referred to “government of the people, by the people, for the people,” how many of those people was he talking about? Perhaps the top 1%?

By the ethical standards of today’s Congress, that would practically make our 16th President a Communist. After all, given our nation’s current population, the top 1% is an awful lot of people — about 3.26 million. Asking the government to care about such a huge number of the unwashed masses would be crazy. Although admittedly those 3.26 million one-percenters are slightly better washed than the other 99%.

So maybe Lincoln meant the top 1% of the top 1%. But that too seems wildly generous. We’re still talking about 32600 people. I mean, has anyone in Congress even met 32600 people?

If you’re going to talk about legislation that benefits a meaningful group of U.S. citizens, you need to tone it down. Our nation’s laws should benefit at most a few hundred people, right? After all, that’s a manageable number — roughly the number of individuals who own significantly large shares of stock in our nation’s Telecom companies.

Yesterday our Congress passed a bill to honor Lincoln’s famous statement, with suitable adjustments.

Until one day ago, you legally owned your personal digital data. As soon as our current president signs this bill (which he strongly supports), you won’t. Somebody else will.

What used to be the digital portion of your personal wealth — which can translate into potential earning power — will now pretty much be owned by just a few hundred people. In particular, your data will mainly be owned by the small group of individuals who have significantly large ownership shares in Telecom stock.

What about the other roughly 325,870,000 people who currently reside in these United States? I think the message from the Congressional majority was extremely clear on that point: We can all go fuck ourselves.

By the way, I am typing this in a Tor Browser, which I switched to this morning. It stops a Telecom provider from being able to collect and then sell all of my browsing data.

Tor is a free download which works on all computers, and I highly recommend it. Such privacy-protecting browsers are still legal, but who knows how long the Congressional majority (and their extremely wealthy and generous donors) will tolerate that?

I have been thinking about parallel universes. But not so much the arcane mathematical constructs of physicists. I mean the possibility of everyday parallel universes.

After we start wearing those cyberglasses or contact lens implants, the digital world and the physical world will fold together — even more so than they do now. The reality that we walk through with our physical bodies will be filled with bits, all stored in the Cloud and delivered to our eyes as needed.

Will this all converge to a single reality? For example, will we always go to a particular place to have a conversation about some agreed upon topic?

Or will all of these virtual universes become layered on on top another, imparting any physical place with a kind of multiplicity? If so, then you might walk into a particular room on Tuesdays to discuss some sports-related topic, whereas I might walk into the same room on Wednesdays to talk about the opera.

I suspect the latter to be the case. After all, we already do this sort of thing with the physical world around us.

When I teach my class at a certain time every week, the classroom becomes a microcosm of the world of our course topic, just for that hour. Two hours later, that same physical room might become a microcosm for discussion of some other topic entirely.

I suspect that this folding of multiple meanings into physical spaces will only grow more complex and multifaceted with time. Soon the world of our physical surroundings and the world of our digital realities will have become so thoroughly intertwined that people will find it hard to imagine that it was ever any other way.

How lovely to see
Donald and Hillary have
Something in common

As I was leaving a restaurant today, where I had just eaten a very nice lunch, I happened to glance in the mirror. Or at least I thought it was a mirror.

Turns out it was another section of the restaurand that just looked a lot like the one I was currently in. A perfectly understandable error.

Yet that brief moment of confusion, before the situation becams clear, was interesting. For in that moment all sorts of thoughts passed through my head.

My first thought was “Wow, I don’t have a reflection.”

My next thought after that was “Maybe I have somehow become a vampire.”

Then I tried to think back to the night before, for a memory of who might have bit me. After all, reason dictates that such a change would require at least a few hours to take effect.

Then I found myself feeling thankful that I was about to walk out into a cloudy, overcast day. Direct sunlight could be very problematic.

This all happened in about one second. In the next second, it finally dawned on me that I had been positing some very low probability events.

Which is when, tracing backward through my earlier logic, I concluded that the mirror couldn’t have been a mirror at all. And the realization finally hit me that I had been looking into another room.

As you might imagine, I was very relieved by this news.