Short rounds! One short story by Cory Doctorow and three short stories by Andy Weir.
The first, Scroogled, is a very short story, just hitting 20 pages. Written in the mid-2000s, when Google was beginning its transformation from Mew to Mewtwo (or from cool website to frightening tech giant), it depicts the consequences of Google pursuing a contract from the state to handle first customs, and then internal security more broadly. The main character, a former employee of Google, opens the tale running afoul of the new Department of Homeland Security because the ads his Google profile is receiving are alarming to the g-men — involving shrooms and rocketry. This is the result of a recent agreement forged between Google and the state, that in exchange for not having to constantly answer requests for core user data, Google is offering metadata (ad information, in this case) to them to browse freely. Anyone who has ever participated in NaNoWriMo is going to be in serious trouble. (Just check the ‘weird things you’ve had to Google‘ thread there.) The main character has a friend at Google who has created a tool to clean up profiles, but things don’t go to plan. The book is technically dated at this point, but the main issue is still — even more so — salient. In 2005, Google had access to its users’ search history and email: shortly after this was published it acquired YouTube, and given how much time people spend on that platform, it’s no doubt developed a very good notion of who someone is.For laughs or terror, check out your Google ad center and see what kind of person Google thinks you are. They don’t show nearly the detail they used to, but there are some basic demographic profiles they guess at users being in, with varying success. (Google thinks I’m married, for instance.) The story is driven by its premise, not its characters.
Andy Weir’s James Moriarty, Consulting Criminal, on the other hand, puts its titular character front and center. You’re there for him, although a book about a Sherlock-type detective who assists criminals would be interesting in its own right. I listened to this on Audiobook, and the narrator Graeme Malcolm excels both in general narration and in voicing Moriarty. (Devout Sherlockians may dispute this based on other Moriartys they’ve seen, but I only have Star Trek TNG‘s to go by.) I enjoyed three stories well enough, but they’re almost all discussion oriented, and the most saliently enjoyable aspect was the narration. Moriarty isn’t developed much as a character.
American eccentrics are great. They’re more sincere, unabashed and convinced in their madness than any other eccentrics in the world. And they say hilarious things like, ‘Rule number one is don’t freak out.’
They have two cars, two teenage sons, designer stools by their breakfast bar, ‘girl scout cookies’ arranged neatly on a plate and between twenty and thirty bodies buried in their front garden, according to legal depositions from local farmers who once worked the land.
Will Storr vs the Supernatural
Today’s TTT is books with weather events in the title or cover. I thought I wouldn’t come up with anything for this, but wowzers are there a lot of books with “storm” in them.
Historical Fiction: Eagles in the Storm, Ben Kane. Second in his Roman series, following the aftermath of the Battle of the Teutoberg forest Warriors of the Storm, Bernard Cornwell. Anglo-Saxon merrie-making, by which I mean scheming and stabbin The Final Storm,Jeff Shaara. Disappointing Pacific War novel. The Four Winds, Kristin Hannah. A novel of the Dust Bowl.
Nick Haflinger is a man of many names and identities, on the run from what passes for the government these days. With so much of the population constantly on the move, existing more in the plugged-in virtual realm than in reality — and with reality itself so flexible, people abandoning jobs and spouses and children in the blink of an eye when the whim strikes them — it’s hard to maintain order. Even so, Haflinger, a rebel, will find ways to attract trouble to him. No matter how many times he transforms his identity, his prodigious gifts at manipulating networks draw attention. Shockwave Rider is an exceptionally interesting novel, notable chiefly for its imagination: how, in 1975, did someone realize how radically disruptive networked computers would be to society? How did Brunner think up computer viruses, even coining the word ‘worm’ to refer to one?
The Shockwave Rider is a chaotic novel, frequently switching viewpoints and temporal frames even when its main character is not himself becoming different people. This is presumably deliberate, given that Brunner was writing inspired by the ideas of Future Shock and trying to convey a world even more in flux than our own: while we are on a runaway train called liquid modernity, the upset is worse in Brunner’s future dystopia, where a natural disaster has destroyed much of southern California, and entire populations are constantly on the move, chasing jobs or moving at whim. Society is severely unstable at every level: even families are not real units, since parents swap kids and spouses with as much thought as we do dishes at a restaurant — and readers are given the impression that most people deal with this through sedatives. The main character takes things even more seriously, frequently changing himself to escape the law or to gain access to networks that would otherwise be closed to him. Despite his technical talents, he encounters a young woman who sees through his psuedo-identities, into the man he really is. He’s disarmed by her, and their meeting will usher in a plot of tech-adventure and Nick’s finally taking a stand, instead of fleeing.
The Shockwave Rider is a difficult book to recommend — not because it’s bad, but because it’s somewhat esoteric. In its time, it was enormously far-seeing and experimental, and its artist’s vision makes it doubly interesting to those who take SF seriously, particularly the effects of the digital world on human civilization. Frankly. one reason I’m drawn to cyberpunk (and Shockwave Rider is the granddaddy of that genre) is because I believe whatever the perks, the disruptive energy of the digital revolution, coupled with human instincts that we have a marginal ability to control even under the best of circumstances, will ultimately lead us into nightmarish futures like that ofBrave New World‘s — and BNW is arguably on the better end of human futures, since at least there most people are content. They are content because they have been severed from all that makes living real and worthwhile, but they’re not acutely miserable like the people we see in Shockwave Rider. This is definitely an ideas kind of book, and if you think seriously about the world we are creating for ourselves, about the effect the digital has on the real, you will enjoy it. If you’re going into it purely for a plot, though, you may be disappointed. There’s a plot there, but the delivery is rather disorienting — and that’s done pointedly, I think.
Coming up: I’m working on The Chaos Machine, and will be beginning The Neuromancer. Also reading Will Storr vs the Supernatural: One Man’s Search for the Truth about Ghosts. Storr’s Adventures with the Enemies of Sciencewill be on my top ten list at the end of the year, I’m sure, and it’s an appropriate time of year to delve into a journalist’s hanging-around with ghost hunters.
Highlights: “There’s a lot of brave new misery in our brave new world.”
“Take no thought for the morrow; that’s your privilege. But don’t complain if when it gets here you’re off guard.”
“One might as well claim that the tide which rubs pebbles smooth on a beach is doing the pebbles a service because being round is prettier than being jagged. It’s of no concern to a pebble what shape it is. But it’s very important to a person. And every surge of your tide is reducing the variety of shapes a human being can adopt.”
“There was exactly one power base available to sustain the old style of government,” Nick grunted. “Organized crime.”
“Look at us,” my buddy chuckled. It was the halfway point of a 3-hour night class, and we’d been given a fifteen minute break to hydrate, caffeinate, and evacuate. Four people immediately flowed into the student common area and occupied the computers there, and all four of us were signing into facebook. It was 2007, and facebook was still in its innocent ascendancy, not yet a household world — but before long, I’d be installing browser extensions to cripple the website’s ability to track me online and regarding it as a necessary evil at best. Facebook’s growth from a Harvard-based social networking website into a global platform for consumerism, meme culture, political turmoil, shopping, etc is covered ably and soberly here by Steven Levy. Levy a veteran tech historian whose post at Wired gave him long exposure to both Mark Zuckerberg and his chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandburg, allowing him to ask questions of the Zuck that other reporters might have been shot down for. Here we witness an interesting project morph first into something with genuine commercial potential, and then into a global and pervasive digital power that is and continues to transform the world, offline and on, and Levy smartly weaves together technical, personal, business, and political threads for an altogether compelling and largely balanced story.
Despite its current importance, I can’t remember when I first heard of facebook: I know I couldn’t register for it, since my community college didn’t have student email back then, and potential users needed a .edu address. But who needed it? I had MySpace, with its blogs, customizable home pages, and ability to inflict music on anyone who visited your page. And yet a year and a half later, it wasn’t MySpace we college students were checking compulsively. Facebook was the latest creation of young Mark Zuckerberg, our contemporary, who grew up with a tech-friendly father and who was constantly creating software on his own time — including a program called Synapse, which used a person’s winamp playlists and playtime to guess what what songs a person wanted to listen to next. Another program allowed students to see which classes their friends were enrolled in, and gave Zuckerberg his first look into how hungry people were for information about their friends, leading him to another project that would become Facebook. The skewed version of events portrayed in The Social Network, based on the one-sided Accidental Billionaires, makes for a fun story, but is off the mark.
Levy covers facebook’s rapid expansion in the era of “move fast and break things”, as it was driven largely by engineering and the desire for growth, and dominated by a group of socially awkward young men captivated by what their new software toy could do and what it might become. Astonishingly, new hires were expected to commit code changes within their first few days at the website, a way of promoting new ideas. (One wonders how many newbie code changes were simply repairs to problems created by previous newbie code changes!) Fortunately for them and their bank accounts, as the company grew it brought in people with actual business experience — chiefly, Sheryl Sandberg, who became The Adult in the Room and gave facebook a less chaotic organizational atmosphere. The history of these years is something of a walk down memory lane for me, making me remember how the site used to be: I can remember the absolute contempt we had for the Newsfeed when it dropped, and the weird years when it seemed like facebook was trying to incorporate messy customization aspects of MySpace. Facebook’s approach was “Do this and see how it lands — if there’s an issue, we’ll remove it, maybe apologize, and throw something else out there”. A big example of this was Beacon, which allowed facebook to plant its flag all over the internet and made it possible for users to share their web activity with their friends — sometimes without meaning to, as when one man’s surprise engagement was ruined when his facebook profile announced that he’d just purchased a ring. His intended was dismayed that he’d bought it on sale. What is love if not going stupidly into debt for shiny rocks?
Facebook got better and better at optimizing the website to attract people’s eyes to it and keep them there, which was good for its ad-oriented business, but also worked towards its mission of ‘bringing people together’. As the 2010s passed middle age, though, the platform that was so great for selling things and bringing people together proved that it was also a great machine for selling….well, everything else, including politics and disinformation. Zuckerberg and co also realized that “bringing people together” can look like a mob burning things down or a conspiracy-theory echo chamber just as easily as it can be a kumbaya circle. In terms of content moderation, it often found itself in the same pickle as YouTube: there were so many people creating so much content at once that responding to everything was impossible, Europe’s demands that it remove offensive posts within 24 hours notwithstanding. There were the same gray areas: is quoting a celebrity saying something vile as bad as saying something vile? Does the historic significance of a nude child running away a burning village scrub away the fact that it’s a photo of a child? Facebook’s obsession with bringing everyone together meant the darker parts of internet culture, like the shock-trolls of 4chan and the like, were suddenly exposed to the innocent and unsavvy, leading to perfectly innocuous soccer moms falling for Qanon theories. Even as it tries to impose order despite its preference for free speech, facebook catches fire from both sides — from one, if it doesn’t do anything, and from another it’s viewed as impartial. It definitely grew more partisan during the coronamania period, but that’s not covered here.
Facebook: the Inside Story is a solid history of a significant period of the digital world’s life, one that doesn’t shy away from facebook’s mistakes and vulnerabilities but which acknowledges that the company is trying to rein in the Gollum of its own creation. A few more books in this vein are coming — The People vs Tech, The Chaos Machine, and antisocial media among `em.
Related: If you don’t like facebook building an ad profile about you based on your web traffic, consider using the Facebook container extension for Mozilla Firefox, and the Disconnect extension for any browser.
[Grandpa]’d say, “You weren’t born, to just pay bills and die” You weren’t born to just pay bills and die Alls you need is a dog, a shack, a crick in the back And a good woman, oh Lord You don’t need that rich man’s gold
Today’s blogging prompt was ‘most creative costume I’ve worn’, which…erm, should be easy. I’ve only ever gone to two Halloween parties. In one (2019) I dressed as Walter from The Big Lebowski. Tres interesting, since I had an excuse to quote The Big Lebowski all night. (“You want a toe? There are ways, man, you don’t even want to know. Believe me. I can get you a toe by three o’clock, with nail polish.”) Last year, I dressed as a monk. The Walter costume was both less ornate but more involved in creating: I had to get a bandanna, the shades, and a vest. (Oddly enough, I already had dog-tags: when visiting the USS Kidd one of the souveniers was customized tags.) My godsister who throws Halloween parties has moved to another city, though, so I don’t think I’ll be going to one this year. If I am, I’ll put one of my Bass Pro caps and a longneck (ice cold) beer and announce that I’m Luke Combs. (Or, reprise the monk but drop the cross and pretend I’m a Sith lord.)
“DUDE, THE CHINAMAN IS NOT THE ISSUE HERE — OVER THE LINE!!!!! —- THE CHINAMAN IS NOT THE ISSUE HERE! I’m talking about DRAWING A LINE IN THE SAND, DUDE, ACROSS THIS LINE YOU DO NOT — also, Dude, Chinaman is not the preferred nomenclature. Asian-American, please.”
How would you imagine the Internet in 1981? “What a silly question”, say you, “The Internet didn’t exist in 1981! ” Despite this, several authors in the seventies and eighties nonetheless imagined ‘cyberspace’, or as it’s known here, ‘the Other Plane’. Vernor Vinge imagines that other plane as a fantasy realm, in which hackers are warlocks, databases appear as lakes and swamps (literal data lakes!), and security protocols appear as forest sprites. Very little of True Names occurs in ‘meatspace’ (as we called it in the ’90s), instead taking place in a digital realm of mountains, dark forests, and castles built upon clouds of code. When it begins, our main character Mr. Slippery (his rather pedestrian nom de guerre) is picked up by the police in the real world, and ordered on pain of his True Name being leaked — being doxxed, in other words – to spy on his coven, his tightknit community of hackers. There’s trouble brewing: some arch-hacker known as the Mailman is expanding his reach into more and more networks, and is rumored to be behind a recent coup in South America. Could it be possible that digital potentates now have the ability to exercise — and hold — power in the real world? Slips, as he’s known to his friends, shares his predicament with his online BFF Ethyrina, and together the two use an old ARPAnet connection to begin investigating more broadly, risking the wrath of both the Mailman and the feds. Exciting and imaginative, I find it baffling I’ve never heard of this title before.
Twenty years later, to celebrate its anniversary, “True Names” appeared as the center of anthology of works celebrating its vision and persistence relevance. The world wide web had begun fully flowering then, even altering the economy as a dot com bubble appeared and popped, and it was beginning to change from the province of tech geeks into the all-pervasive infrastructure it is today. Most of the essays focus on theme of cryptography: as one of the obsessive concerns of True Names were the warlocks concealing their identities (and the plot turned on their discovering the identity of the Mailman, which — well, no spoilers, but Vinge was pushing into territory we’re still exploring today), so the resonance is understandable. The essays have instant appeal for me given their psuedo-datedness (I love watching videos from the 1990s about the Information Superhighway), but they’re not actually that dated: when Tim May wrote about the need for technological means to conduct anonymous commerce, I could only think of bitcoin and the variety of escrow services used on the dark net. May and authors are empathetic that true privacy, true crypto-tools, must not have a back door accessible by the government — not just to protect individuals from a nosy and aggressive state, but to protect individuals from government incompetence. Carve a back door into the wall, and no matter how strong the door is, the integrity and strength of the wall themselves are diminished. One essay printed in the physical collection is deliberately withheld from the ebook version by request of the author, Richard Stallman — whose “Right to Read” commented on how governments and corporations could use hardware and software to track reading and frustrate readers’ abilities to share, on pain of imprisonment and hefty fines.
I will be reading more of Mr. Vinge! Next up is either Facebook: the Inside Story or The Shockwave Rider.
Turn and face the strange….. Today’s TTT is about bookish jobs.
Well, I work as a reference librarian, so that’s a little on the nose. Of course, my job isn’t very bookish. My library is very social-services oriented, so I spend most of the day helping patrons with the computers, or faxing/scanning, that sort of thing. On Saturdays I hang out at a local downtown book store to get my fill of time with bookish people, and when I was a teenager I wanted to work at a bookstore. In retirement I could definitely see maintaining a cozy spot like Broad Street Books, using it less as a way of earning an income and more as a way to hang out with people, just as the founder and operator of BSB does now. I love thinking about and discussing the themes and ideas of books with people, and some of my favorite authors are in fact people who do just that — like Brad Birzer and Joseph Pearce, both in books and on podcasts. Finally, as with many people who read books, I harbor yearnings to write one myself — I think it’s telling that whenever I play myself in The Sims, he’s invariably a self-employed writer who lives in a little cabin and doesn’t work save for the books he publishes and the garden he tends…
And now, a Trio of Teases!
“You’re about to die. I really don’t think this is the time to be makin’ wisecracks.” “Personally can’t think of a better time to be makin’ wisecracks than when you’re about to die.”
Firefly: Life Signs, James Lovegrove
“Your past is far more intriguing than either your present or your future. Both of those are completely programmed.”
The Shockwave Rider, John Brunner
“I’m telling you, these platforms are not designed for thoughtful conversation,” Wu said. “Twitter, and Facebook, and social media platforms are designed for: ‘We’re right. They’re wrong. Let’s put this person down really fast and really hard.’ And it just amplifies every division we have.”
Tim Wu, as quoted in The Chaos Machine: How Social Media Rewired Our Brain
So there you are, dear reader, engrossed in an interesting story about two airplanes smashing into one another, and of a man named Bill Smith who’s trying to find why. And then, perhaps a half hour into your reading journey, you’re suddenly fifty thousand years into the future, and the actions of an airplane accident investigator are a matter of survival for the entire human race. Millenium is a story told in two parts: the first, taking place in the 1980s and following an increasingly confused airline accident investigator who keeps finding inexplicable details about an airline crash, and the second following a woman from a dying society who are attempting to save the human race from total extinction. The premise is fascinating and gloomy, but contains a warning worth heeding. For aviation-tech fans, it’s a fun period piece.
It is impossible for me to rate this book fairly, as I encountered its story first through the film adaptation of it, produced in 1989. I had no idea it was based on a novel until this past weekend, and immediately searched for it online. This is not the place to compare the two, but suffice it to say my enjoyment of the story in one medium was married to my enjoyment of it in the another — and the movie was one of the first SF titles I ever watched, and have returned to several times over the last 20+ years. As literature, its most compelling asset is its premise. Bill Smith keeps encountering a strange but beautiful woman who doesn’t seem to recognize him despite their having a torrid affair at one point in the story, and the frequency of her appearances increases as he finds strange things in the wreck he’s investigating. Why are the passengers’ watches running backwards? Why does the flight recorder have a pilot screaming like a horrified child because the passengers are dead and burned even though the jet was still in the air at that point? We start getting hints as to what’s happening by the every-other chapters, which follow the female agent Louise. She’s from the last remnant of humanity, in a future where our numbers have been destroyed by atomic wars, and our bodies ravaged by genetically-modified diseases that we cannot escape from: people are born compromised, and live only a couple of decades on average, and that only by steadily replacing their organs with synthetics or becoming organic parts of fixed machines. There are only a few hundred humans left, but they have the ability to transport back into time — which they use to abduct humans who are about to die (third-class passengers trapped on the Titanic, for instance), in the hopes of finding a place where humanity can be resettled.
As fascinating as the plot is, there’s a lot of strangeness to it ,especially the idea that Louise comes from fifty thousand years in the future. Varley doesn’t go into extensive worldbuilding beyond alluding to the wasteland 20th century humanity created through environmental degradation, atomic weapons, and then bioengineering attacks, but it’s improbable to me that the same species capable of genetic weapons couldn’t also be able to create genetic shields — and frankly, blaming a few decades’ worth of humans from fifty thousand years in the future is both sad and amusing. That’s a lot of time to curse the darkness instead of finding a way to create a light. It’s definitely an environmental-awareness kind of novel, but would have made more sense if it were set closer to home — say, the late 22nd or 23rd century. Still, the weird premise goes a long way to creating an interesting story, especially with the horrifying view of humanity in its last days — a bit of organic film atop a machine, a mere residue. It’s very chilling. I watched the film last night, so reads-to-reels to follow.
Reading Freely 