Ken’s Blog

A flight is always
A construction, a bridge to
Connect time and space.

Last weekend I went to my mom’s house for dinner. We knew we would see each other anyway for Thanksgiving in just another few days, but we also know that with the whole family there, Thanksgiving wouldn’t really be a good time to talk one on one.

We ended up having dinner at a cozy Italian restaurant in my mom’s neighborhood. As usual, our conversation roamed over many topics.

There was the obligatory post-election analysis. Fortunately for both of us, we are essentially in agreement on politics. If you manage to guess my political leanings from having read this blog (yes I know, it’s difficult), then you’ve got a good idea of my mom’s political preferences.

But mostly we discussed people we knew, family, relationships, all the really important stuff. My mom is incredibly insightful about these topics, and I find myself discussing things with her that I wouldn’t talk over with anybody else.

At last the check came. I took out my credit card and put it on the bill. My mom asked if she could split the cost of dinner with me.

That’s when I had one of those insights that one is privileged to get every once in a while. One of those moments of clarity when the clouds of the everyday part, and the light of the Universe manages to shine through.

“It’s ok,” I told her, “You gave me life.”

My mother, gracious as always, bowed to the unassailable logic of this argument. She agreed to let me pay for dinner.

I was having a conversation with a colleague this afternoon about the use of different media. We all know that there is a different feeling to a phone chat than there is to, say, face to face conversation. And both are very different from an exchange of letters.

Every medium brings with it certain affordances. I can spend all the time I want carefully composing an email response, a luxury that I do not have in face to face conversation. On the other hand, email does not let me use facial expression, body position, gesture or voice modulation to convey subtle shades of meaning.

At some point my colleague and I started talking about the phenomenon of having had a conversation, and then not being able to remember whether that conversation had been in person. Suppose, for the sake of argument, that we think of in person face to face discussion as a kind of gold standard. Then it is arguably a mark of success for any medium if that medium feels more like a conversation between two people who are physically face to face.

In particular, if you’ve had a conversation over, say, Skype, and you mistakenly remember it as an in-person discussion, that would mean that Skype is doing something really well. In practice, I think, this doesn’t happen very much. A face-to-face over Skype or Google Hangouts feels very different from the real thing — and that’s how we generally remember it.

But my colleague said that back when he and others were using Second Life, those who stayed in the experience for long periods of time — say, at least eight hours all together — sometimes started remembering their conversations in Second Life as having taken place in person.

I think this is a very important data point. It suggests that there is something in particular about the illusion of physical co-presence — as opposed to simply seeing a face on a screen — that can trick our memory into believing that we have been physically present somewhere.

We might therefore apply to conversation in any medium the “forgetting test”: After having had the conversation, how likely is it that you might mistakenly remember it as having been an actual face to face encounter?

It has not escaped our notice that this question immediately suggests a possible benefit of shared immersive virtual reality.

Allen Ginsburg used the phrase “First thought, best thought,” to describe the process of spontaneous and fearless writing. I find that I sometimes apply this in my own work in unexpected ways.

Creating something that ends up being new and interesting often starts by throwing myself a challenge, some added constraint to an otherwise predictable task. Intuitively you might think that the added constraint would make the task more difficult.

But it often turns out that adding another constraint serves as a catalyst, the grain of sand in the oyster that forces the pearl to form. Suddenly, when things are no longer rote and familiar, I need to think on my feet, to improvise, and now I am paying attention.

I think it’s really this part about paying attention, about staying awake and alert to whatever might happen next, which is the true catalyst. And anything that encourages that sort of out-of-the-box thinking is good.

This is not to say that coming up with some new direction is sufficient. For me at least, it is far from sufficient.

What really matters is what I do with that grain of sand in the oyster. A lot depends on the hard work of follow-through, of going from the odd inspiration to an eventual result that is well thought out, worked through, properly designed.

But heading off into some unexpected new direction, making sure I’m doing something I’ve never quite done before, helps make that process a lot more fun and interesting. It forces me to look at the design process with fresh eyes. And then the good stuff can happen.

Well, anyway, that’s my first thought. 🙂

Alexander Hamilton was a handsome fellow, as you can see from his picture on the U.S. ten dollar bill:

If you put two and a half million of those Hamiltons together, you get 25 million dollars. Which is how much our president-elect just paid out to settle his University fraud case.

But nobody is really talking about this embarrassing admission of dishonest dealing by the future leader of our country. Why? Because something far more newsworthy came up just in time.

It seems that our next Commander in Chief was deeply offended that people doing political theater were doing political theater. Enough so that he went on the attack with a Twitter storm. Before you knew it, everyone had forgotten all about the $25,000,000.

By the time anybody remembers to think about that again, it will be old news. We now know, all too well, that in this new information age old news is no news. And nobody knows this better than our president-elect.

Some people around here say Donald Trump is not very intelligent. But they are clearly wrong. After all, who else has the talent to put down one Hamilton in order to make 2,500,000 other Hamiltons disappear from sight?

For anyone whose love of the theater goes beyond Cats or The Lion King, the historical importance of theater in political discourse is a given. We look back to the voices of Brecht, of Shakespeare, of Aristophanes, and of Caryl Churchill and others in our own time, as a crucial part of the ongoing dialog that a society has with itself.

As I mentioned yesterday, the cast and creators of Hamilton spoke to Mike Pence from the stage after their performance this past Friday. When they respectfully alluded to the inflamatory statements his running mate had made during the campaign, Pence was right to listen and to respond with grace.

Tyrants, when they assume power, instinctively move to silence inconvenient opinions from the stage. Fortunately, it seems that Mike Pence, much as I disagree with him on many issues, does not have the instincts of a tyrant.

Perhaps others in the contemporary theater — particularly theater that speaks to political issues, as Hamilton does — should continue this tradition. Maybe after every stage performance of a play on or off Broadway in which a public official or policy maker is in attendance, the creators of that play should speak to that attendee from the stage.

This could be in the form of praise, if the official in question is doing a great job, or in the form of constructive criticism, if there is a sense that policies are not serving the needs of all the people. Good politicians will come to see it as a badge of pride that they were singled out in this way.

This wouldn’t be quite a political stump speech, since the most important element would be the added dose of reality — a quality which is never far away in true theater. I propose a new term that inserts the “r” of reality into the idea of a “Stump” speech.

This proud new tradition, in which the cast members and creators of a play speak directly from the stage to a politician in the audience after a performance, could be called the “Strump speech”. Whenever those in the theater make such a speech, they will be affirming the first amendment rights which we all value so highly here in America, and they will be reminding us that we still live in a free society.

This week the cast of Hamilton realized that Michael Pence, the incoming VP, would be in the audience. They decided to reach out to him from the stage after the show.

Their message was pointed yet highly respectful: “We, sir — we — are the diverse America who are alarmed and anxious that your new administration will not protect us, our planet, our children, our parents, or defend us and uphold our inalienable rights,” he said. “We truly hope that this show has inspired you to uphold our American values and to work on behalf of all of us.”

The audience cheered and applauded wildly. After all, this was New York, and those words spoke quite directly to what Donald Trump had said on the campaign stump.

Pence responded with grace, taking the time to listen attentively to what the creators of Hamilton had to say before leaving the theater. He clearly understood that this difficult time of transition requires an ability to listen, to understand that power comes with certain obligations, including an ability to properly read an emotional moment and to respond appropriately.

It could have been a real moment of triumph for Pence. If it had ended there, it would have been an opportunity for him to show the populace that this incoming administrations takes seriously the need to listen to the concerns of American citizens, whatever side of the aisle they may be on.

Unfortunately for Pence, it seems his moment of would-be triumph was immediately dashed by tweets from an internet troll. Alas, I suspect there will be a lot more of that sort of thing in the days, weeks and months to come.

Kris Kobach, a member of Donald Trump’s transition team, had suggested that the new administration could reinstate a national registry for immigrants from “suspect” countries. So then yesterday, Carl Higbie, a prominant Trump supporter and fund-raiser, told Megyn Kelly on Fox News that he supported that idea.

“We’ve done it based on race, we’ve done it based on religion, we’ve done it based on region,” Mr. Higbie said. “We’ve done it with Iran back — back a while ago. We did it during World War II with Japanese.”

Ms. Kelly seemed taken aback. “You’re not proposing,” she said, “that we go back to the days of internment camps, I hope.”

Mr. Higbie said, in response, “We need to protect America first.”

My very first thought, when I heard that, was that if they start rounding up Muslim Americans, I will immediately go out and register as Muslim. This evening I was heartened to read in the NY Times that the chief executive of the Jewish Anti-Defamation League, Jonathan Greenblatt, had had exactly the same reaction. “If one day Muslims will be forced to register,” he said, “that is the day that this proud Jew will register as a Muslim.”

Reading all this, I am reminded of a quote from pastor Martin Niemöller of the German Protestant Church, as he looked back on the Nazi policy of rounding up successively larger groups of “undesirables”:

First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out —
Because I was not a Socialist.

Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out —
Because I was not a Trade Unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out —
Because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me — and there was no one left to speak for me.

Continuing from yesterday…

It seems to me that the one thing Americans can do well which people from other countries cannot do well is be Americans. Where, in the future information economy, would this matter?

Well, for one thing, suppose you walk into a virtual diner in a future shared VR world. Who is going to bring you to your table? Who will take your order?

If you are looking for an entertainment experience (why else would people pay such inflated prices for restaurant food), then you are going to want your experience to be authentic.

I am guessing that there is not a single person out there from Bangalore who can do a proper impression of a waitress in a roadside diner in Alabama. Not one.

So that was one example of knowledge work well suited to rural Americans that cannot, by its very nature, be outsourced to other countries. Can you think of others?

The information economy has been most successful in the more urban parts of our country. That’s where you find large population density, the opportunity to assemble teams with complementary expertise, and an ability to find the resources needed to pivot rapidly as markets evolve.

But what if we redefine knowledge work? Suppose there were a kind of economic value creation that functions particularly well in rural environments? After all, those are places where housing costs tend to be low, community cohesiveness is high, and where people who work at a profession tend to be in it for the long haul. These are very attractive qualities in a workforce.

There was a time when that wouldn’t have been practical, simply because of the cost of technology per worker. In places with low population density, it can be hard to amortize such costs through the use of centralized resources. But that time may be past.

Today you can buy a perfectly functional Android tablet for $50 in the U.S. With proper government incentives to promote rural economic growth, that cost could drop down to zero.

Note that I’m not talking here about a government hand-out. Rather, I’m talking about tax breaks for people who are earning a living. If that sort of deal is good enough for a certain president-elect, it’s good enough for other hard working Americans.

But for such an industry to be inherently stable, there would need to be a good reason why such knowledge work couldn’t just be out-sourced to India or China. I have some ideas about that.

More tomorrow.