The Seventh Dispatch

First, I apologize. It gets worse from there.

Oct 14, 2022

I used to be interesting.

Not all the time, of course. But occasionally, I had thoughts that were provocative more than baiting, thoughtful more than ponderous.

A big part of the problem is that I have no background in my current occupation, so there’s a great deal of OJT, on top of which I still have to be productive enough to earn a living.

That seems to be getting better. September really kicked my butt—I worked every weekend and well after dinner most weekdays—but as a result, I’ve made enough to give Orine a much-belated honeymoon in January. (The strong dollar really helps.)

The rest is psychological. It’s as if a loved one died, and having closed the door to their room, I left it untouched as a shrine to loss. It’s simply too painful to open a writing project. The wound has yet to scar.

If anyone had any doubts as to whether I intend to keep writing, I’ll offer that wonderful line from the Marvel show WandaVision: “What is grief, if not love persevering?”

Of course I do. As if I could be anything other than what I am.

I can write this because I was never really a blogger. It was always a chore more than anything. But cracking open a novel—the feel of it, the cadence—is the happy melody of a lost lover’s favorite song. I’ve tried. I just can’t bear it.

So I apologize to all of you who’ve been so supportive over the years. It feels a bit stale to say it now, but I’m sorry.

I’m sorry I haven’t rewarded that support.

I’m sorry things haven’t turned out like we’d hoped.

I’m sorry for my weakness.

It’s not enough, but I’ll offer my hand at least so you know that I mean it.

Both in his essays and his fictions, C.S. Lewis repeatedly noted there is an undulation to life:

Humans are amphibians—half spirit and half animal. As spirits they belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time. This means that while their spirit can be directed to an eternal object, their bodies, passions, and imaginations are in continual change, for to be in time means to change. Their nearest approach to constancy, therefore, is undulation—the repeated return to a level from which they repeatedly fall back, a series of troughs and peaks. If you had watched your patient carefully you would have seen this undulation in every department of his life—his interest in his work, his affection for his friends, his physical appetites, all go up and down. As long as he lives on earth periods of emotional and bodily richness and liveliness will alternate with periods of numbness and poverty.
—The Screwtape Letters

What has withered will, with water and sunlight and the simple passing of time, return anew.

(This, of course, is where it gets worse.)

Although I have new chapter of ANACHRON to share, and several more besides, I have not written anything substantial in months. That is the truth of it. I’ve shared little to nothing on social media, where I am all but a ghost, and I don’t follow the news. Of whatever impending catastrophes preoccupy the collective mind—they never cease—I remain blissfully unaware.

Should one of them buck the trend, I can do little about it anyway.

In that way, I will be villain to many. The only thing the anxious hate worse than wrong opinions are no opinions at all. One must pick a side, where that is not the side of one’s family, community, or personal life because such things bear no relation to the busybody, and everything must in some way be about them and their struggles.

I have my own. I’ll let the rest of you be heroes.

Thanks to Glenn for making my month with the following, and to John Ward for bringing it to my attention. (As mentioned, I’m not much on social media anymore.)

If you haven’t already, you really should subscribe to John’s Substack, which has the most apropos title I’ve yet seen:

(I’ll have more recs in future posts. Just because I’ve been a bum lately doesn’t mean others have.)

There is, unfortunately, another entry in The Log of Strange Concordances, wherein I track those bits in THE ZERO SIGNAL that seem to be coming true.

Here is the entry:

The book supposes the existence of an automated data market where algorithms buy and sell enormous volumes of data, any bits of which are relatively harmless (and near-worthless) but which collectively determine much of what we can and can’t do in daily life, despite being largely opaque to us, to lawmakers, and even to the owners of such systems.

Specifically, the villain of the book brags that he made a name for himself as a young man by deanonymizing cell location data in exactly the manner described in this article from the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Inside Fog Data Science, the Secretive Company Selling Mass Surveillance to Local Police

Fog states that it does not collect personally identifying information (for example, names or email addresses). But Fog allows police to track the location of a device over long stretches of time — several months with a single query — and Fog touts the use of its service for “pattern of life” analyses that reveal where the device owner sleeps, works, studies, worships, and associates. This can tie an “anonymous” device to a specific, named individual.
Together, the “area search” and the “device search” functions allow surveillance that is both broad and specific. An area search can be used to gather device IDs for everyone in an area, and device searches can be used to learn where those people live and work. As a result, using Fog Reveal, police can execute searches that are functionally equivalent to the geofence warrants that are commonly served to Google.
This service could be used to determine who was near the scene of a violent crime around the time it was committed. It also could be used to search for visitors to a Planned Parenthood or an immigration law office on a specific day or everyone who attended a protest against police violence.

In fact, according to the EFF, the LAPD has already done that, and without having to worry about those pesky warrants.

More than one reader of THE ZERO SIGNAL has suggested to me that I overplayed the Big Data card in the book, that Big Data has nowhere near delivered on the promises of its proponents—or the fears of its detractors—to which my response has always been “That’s true. It hasn’t—yet.”

It seems to me the pace of data collection will not slow. It will continue accelerating, if only because the cost of collecting and storing that data will continue to drop. More and more devices will collect more and more data points because there will never be an incentive not to. The data could be useful to the collector, and since you can’t go back and get it later, and since it costs next to nothing to store, it will always seem better to grab it, or at least to grab a little more than last time, and so on.

Having grabbed all that data, now mostly sitting useless, its owners will eventually seek to monetize it, if only to make a few extra bucks and defray the cost of collection. In that way, data collection becomes a feed-forward mechanism that exists largely to sustain itself.

If true, then where we are today is nowhere near where we will be in 30 or 60 years. The argument is not that all that data will be collectively predictive, Hari Seldon-style. Most of it won’t be. That seems to be a law of information-dense systems. Most DNA, for example, is “junk.”

It’s not a question of volume. Excellence in complex systems is rare and tends to appear through stochastic interactions at the margins, the same way life appeared in tide pools or at the edge of thermal vents. It takes volume to get there.

When we do, I suspect we’ll eventually uncover some remarkable connections that will allow for hitherto unimaginable social interventions at scale, almost entirely in secret because those connections will not be visible or accessible to the democratic polis—at least not without major shifts in law, policy, oversight, and enforcement, and ordinary people don’t seem to have a stomach for any of the above, at least not at the expense of even the smallest of conveniences.

There are simple ways to start. Revive an interest in anti-trust. Split Google search from the rest of the increasingly dystopian Alphabet corporation. Give digital tenants on Amazon or YouTube the same rights as their physical counterparts. Pass a digital bill of rights, several versions of which have already been drafted. And so on.

As long as it remains more popular to use those platforms as levers to persecute political threats, none of that will happen. Humans—even the ones who claim to know better—are very bad at sacrificing today to save a hundred tomorrows. We live under the tyranny of the present, where nothing is ever as scary as what’s scary right now, and so every crisis that can be eventually will.

If you have any room left for kind thoughts, save a few for my wife, who was turned down for several jobs recently and who is feeling puny and unwanted in America as a result. Given I can theoretically do my job from anywhere, we may move back to Japan at some point. We’ll see.

Here’s this month’s picture of Henry, along with the newest addition to the family, my mother’s puppy Sadie, who I call Marshmallow because that’s what she looked like when we got her.