“Being a writer,” is a strange thing. I’ve written about this before, but there’s more here. I had a conversation with Caroline about what it means to be a writer and I thought some of the things we came up with were pretty good. I hope I’ve done a sufficient job of capturing what we talked about.

One of the things that we emphatically agreed upon was the fact that writing, despite being something that we’re all taught to do in school, as part of being “an educated person” is not something that everyone is particularly capable of.¹ Not that that’s a bad thing. Having said that, because everyone reads at least in some capacity, and most people know how to write, when you tell someone “I’m a writer,” or you say something like “I’ve been working on this novel for about 16 months,” you’ll get funny looks. Guaranteed.

There are, I think, a few major issues at play here:

1. Because reading is an automatic facility for most people, I’m convinced that laypeople are very prone to misunderstanding the amount of work that any given text represents.

I might even go so far as to say, writing is not something that people automatically think of as “work.” I’m going to sit down and spend some time talking to imaginary people in my head who live on a spaceship a thousand years hence, in an attempt and hope that I can productively explore the post-colonial condition in a new and different way, doesn’t sound like it should be hard. But it is, and I think much more difficult than the kind of writing that I do professionally.

2. Because most writing education focuses on grammar and extensive reading (which are great things,) the gulf between “people who write” and “people who don’t,” is often not about writing technically solid prose or not (despite the fact that in primary and secondary education, this is the major p).² Rather, the ability to understand something (a process, event, or story) in enough detail to describe with an awareness of an audience is the real challenge.

Indeed when successful, all of the “work” of writing is entirely opaque to the reader.

3. Writing a text (an article, essay, or story, as opposed to a memo or message,) is not something that an individual can--or should be expected--to accomplish independently. You can’t tell a writer “go write this story, and when you get back we’ll print it.” Editors, from the person who says “I need you to write this,” to the people who give you feedback as you progress on a project, to the people who prepare a text for publication. You can’t do it alone: there are too many conflicting interests at play in the writing of any text that make it challenging for a single person to write alone.

I don’t bring these up to complain. Nor do I think the solution to these problems is to “just give writers a bit more respect.” Knowing these things about writing, I think we could, quite productively, change the way we educate students to write. It might also, I think lead to some productive reorganizations of how writers and editors organize themselves to get “content” produced.

After a while of talking through these ideas, the conversation produced the following gem, which I simply must share with you:

caroline: you know how everyone has a memoir now?

tycho: yeah…

caroline: you know what I don’t care about?

caroline: most people’s memoirs

Onward and Upward!

I’ve been reading a lot about web development in the last few weeks. I’m not exactly sure why. There are some interesting things going on in terms of the technology. Frameworks that provide for some interesting possibilities abound, and while I don’t know if the web is the only future for programing, it’s certainly a big part of the future of the way we interact with computers.

So what are you working on developing tycho?

A whole lot of noting. I know how the technology works. I know--more or less--how to build things for the web, and yet I’ve not said “you know what I need to build? A web app that does [this awesome thing]”

Maybe it’s because I’m unimaginative in this regard, or that I tend to think of web applications being a nearly universally wrong solution to any given problem.

I think it’s quite possible that both of these things are true. It’s also likely that when approached with a problem with technology or with data, I don’t instinctively think about how to solve it pragmatically, much less with some sort of web-based system. As I think about it might be the fact that my mind is intensely qualitative. In my psych major days I always had problems coming up with ides for non-hokey quantitative studies (Insofar as such things exist.)

In a lot of ways the questions I ask of the technology aren’t (particularly) “how can I manage this data better,” but rather how can I interact with this technology more efficiently. While I don’t think data interaction is a solved problem, I feel like I’m pretty far ahead of the game, and that the things I do to improve how I work has more to do with tweaking my system to shape the content and way that I’m working. While there’s often some little bits of code involved, it’s not the kind of thing that’s generalizable in the way that an application or web site might be.

The Imperative Tense

Most of the time, you put me in a room with programmers and tell us to talk about our work, the conversation will be really lively. Aside from the fact that I use programmers tools to write, and use a very iterative approach

One thing I notice many of my coworkers doing is saying “I’m going to write a program that’s going to do these four things, and it’s going to be written in such a way as to make these other things possible,” (insert words of awesomeness in this sentence.) And I think “Cool! I can’t wait!”

For a long time this way of talking confused me and almost put me on edge. When I have an idea for a new project, I get these images, and an interesting concept to toy with and I have little conversations in my head with the characters, and I see their world from their eyes, and it’s sort of an absurd experience and I don’t tell people about this. I mean, I might say “I got an awesome idea for a new book,” but usually not more than that. And the truth is that I get ideas for stories all the time and I know that I’ll never really be able to write most of them.

I’m okay with the way programmers plan projects, and I’m pretty happy with my own methodology. Having said that, I think the difference in the way that I think about and plan projects has a lot to do with the way I think about these things.

Onward and Upward!

I bought a Kindle. I am weak.

(Note: I drafted this post early last week, and it arrived last Wednesday, and I started using it in earnest over the weekend. Nevertheless, this post is written from the perspective of my past self.)

In any case, there are a number of questions that you may be asking yourself at this juncture.

ZOMG That’s a lot of DRM that you’ve signed up for. How does that make you feel?

I’m not wild about it. I mostly view the DRMed kindle stuff as: not as a collection, but rather as a convince for reading specific texts on demand and as needed. And on those terms, I can live with it. There’s all sorts of things wrong with what I’m about to say but: DRM is most onerous if you think that the files you download are “your possessions.” Because they aren’t. When it’s just a dinky file that you have the ability to read in a highly convenient way, that’s easier to swallow. Having said that, if you’re not buying something that you get to keep the books as they are now are too expensive.

I’m about 100 pages into the book I’m currently reading (it rocks, more on this later) and I picked it up the other day to discover that the cats had helpfully chewed the back corner. This isn’t the first time this has happened. While I don’t really care, I can still read it, part of reason I don’t seem to care is that the quality of books as objects these days doesn’t particularly impress me. So I don’t feel like I’m loosing anything. And if I want a real book-object, such a thing can be had.

I have a suspicion that you have more than a few paper books that you haven’t read. What are you going to do with them now?

Read them. I don’t think that I’ll stop reading paper books, though I think a great deal depends on context. I suspect that I might not take paper-books out of the house very much. I don’t have a lot of books, but I certainly have a few, and I know that I mostly have them with me for nostalgia, and not because I actually intend to read them any time soon.

Paper books, on my shelf, represent possibilities, in a way that the object of the Kindle is a possibility. I think even considering the limitations of the Kindle, these two truisms balance each-other out.

How do you think you’ll use the kindle?

I think once the initial buzz of the Kindle wears off, I’ll probably settle into a rhythm whereby I’ll read periodicals, fiction, and documents that I generate (along the lines of slush) on the Kindle along with anything I read out of the house, and then read reference material off of paper. I’m mostly worried about how the kindle might screw with my--often quite good--spatial memory for texts. We’ll have to see how this develops.

I’m strongly considering joining a gym in the next few weeks and I hope/expect to read whilst doing the aerobic thing. The kindle seems ideal for this.

I hear your a slow reader, is this really worthwhile?

Perhaps, and I think that my main issue is that I’m really bad at setting aside time to read when I’m awake enough to actually read. This is separate issue from the Kindle, and one I suspect I’ll address in future posts. Having said that, I’m attempting to carve out a bit more time for reading in my day--as reading more is a personal goal--so I’d say that yes: Despite my apparent slow pace, a Kindle is worthwhile.

Do you have any Kindle related questions for me?

Ok folks, here we go. I’ve put the word futurism is in the title of the blog and its near the end of the calendar year, so I think it’s fair that I do a little bit of wild prediction about the coming year (and some change.) Here goes:

Open technology will increasingly be embedded into “closed technology”

The astute among you will say, “but that is already the case:” The Motorola Razor cell phone that my grandmother has runs the Linux Kernel (I think.) And there’s the TiVo, lets not forget the TiVo. Or, for that matter the fact that Google has--for internal use, of course--a highly modified branch of the Linux Kernel that will never see the light of day.

That’s old news, and in a lot of ways reflects the some of the intended and unintended business models that naturally exist around Open Source.

I’m not so much, in this case talking about “openness” as a property of code, but rather openness as a property of technology, and referring to long running efforts like XMPP and OpenID. These technologies exist outside of the continuum of free and proprietary code but promote the cyborg functioning of networks in an transparent and networked way.

XMPP says if you want to do real time communication, here’s the infrastructure in which to do it, and we’ve worked through all the interactions so that if you want to interact with a loose federation (like a “web”) of other users and servers, here’s how.

OpenID solves the “single sign on” problem by creating an infrastructure for developers to be able to say “If you’re authenticated to a third party site, and you tell me that authenticating to that third party site is good enough to verify your identity, then it’s good enough for us.” Which makes it possible to preserve consistent identity between sites, it means you only have to pass credentials to one site, and I find the user experience to be better as well.

In any case, we’ve seen both of these technologies become swallowed up into closed technologies more and more. Google Wave and Google Talk use a lot of XMPP, and most people don’t know this unless their huge geeks (compared to the norm.) Similarly, even though it’s incredibly easy to run and delegate OpenIDs through third parties, the main way that people sign into OpenID sites is with their Flickr or Google accounts.

I’m not saying that either of these things are bad, but I think we’re going to see a whole lot more of this.

A major player on the content industry will release a digital subscription plan

I think, perhaps the most viable method for “big content” to survive in the next year or so, will be to make content accessible as part of a subscription model. Pay 10 to 20 dollars a month and have access to some set quantity of stuff. Turn it back in, and they give your more bits. Someone’s going to do this: Amazon, Apple, Comcast, etc.

It’s definitely a hold over from the paper days when content was more scarce. But it gets us away from this crazy idea that we own the stuff we downaload with DRM, it makes content accessible, and it probably allows the of devices to shoot down (to nominal amounts). While it probably isn’t perfect, its probably sustainable, and it is a step in the right direction.

Virtualization technology will filter down to the desktop.

We have seen tools like VirtualBox and various commercial products become increasingly prevalent in the past couple of years, to decrease the impact of operating system bound compatibility issues. This is a good thing, but I think that it’s going to go way further, and we’ll start to see this technology show up on desktops in really significant ways. I don’t think desktop computing is in need of the same kinds of massive parallelism that we need on servers, but I think we’ll see a couple of other tertiary applications of this technology.

First, I think hypervisors will abstract hardware interfaces away from operating systems. No matter what kind of hardware you have or what it’s native method of communication is, the operating system will be able to interact with it in a uniform manner.

Second, there are a number of running image manipulation functions that think operating system developers might be able to take advantage of: first the ability to pause, restart, and snapshot the execution stat of a running virtual machine has a lot of benefit. A rolling snapshot of execution state makes suspending laptops much easier, it makes consistent desktop power is less crucial. And so forth.

Finally, system maintenance is much easier. We loose installation processes: rather than getting an executable that explodes over our file system and installs an operating system, we just get a bootable image. We can more easily roll back to known good states.

Not to mention the fact that it creates a lot of economic benefits. You don’t need IT departments maintaining desktops, you just have a guy making desktop images and deploying them. Creating niche operating system images and builds is a valuable service. Hardware vendors and operating system vendors get more control over their services.

There are disadvantages: very slight performance hits, hyepervisor technology that isn’t quite there yet, increased disk requirements. But soon.

Soon indeed.

I’m not a web developer. I write the content for (a couple) of websites, and I’m a fairly competent systems administrator. Every once and a while someone will need a website, or I’ll need my site to do something new that I haven’t needed to do before and I’ll hack something together, but for the most part, I try and keep my head out of web development. Indeed, I often think that designing applications to run in the web browser is the wrong solution to most technological problems. Nevertheless, my work (and play) involves a lot of tinkering and work with web-applications, and I do begrudgingly concede the relevance of web applications.

In any case I’ve been reading through the following recently, and I (unsurprisingly have a few thoughts:)

• The Trouble with Frameworks
• The Web.py Tutiorial

The Trouble With Frameworks

I really enjoyed how this post located “web frameworks” in terms of the larger context: what they’re good for, what they’re not good for, and why they’re so popular. I often feel like I see a lot of writing about why FrameworkA is better or worse than FrameworkB, which doesn’t really answer a useful question. While I wouldn’t blame my gripe with web-based applications entirely on the shoulders of frameworks, it’s interesting to think of “the framework problem” as being a problem with the framework (and the limitations therein) rather than a problem with the web itself.

This isn’t to say that frameworks are inherently bad. Indeed, there is a great deal of work that websites require in-order to function: HTML is a pain to write “by hand,” consistent URLs are desirable, but it’s undesirable to have to mange that by hand. If you need content that’s dynamic, particularly content that is database-backed, there is all sorts of groundwork that needs to be done that’s basic and repetitive even for the most basic functionality. Eliminating this “grunt work” is the strength of the framework, and in this they provide a great utility.

However, from an operations (rather than development) perspective, frameworks suck. By producing tools that are broadly useful to a large audience, the frameworks are by nature not tuned for high performance operations, and they don’t always enforce the most efficient operations (with regards to the databases). Thankfully this is the kind of issue that can be safely delegated to future selves, as premature optimization remains a challenge.

Thoughts on Web.py

Though I’m not much of a Python person, I have a great deal of respect for Python tools. I swear if I were going to learn a language of this type it would almost certainly be Python. Having said that, the tool looks really interesting: it’s minimal and stays out of the way for the most part. It does the really “dumb” things that you don’t want to have to fuss with, but doesn’t do a lot of other stuff. And that’s a great thing.

I’m not sure how accurate this is, but one of the things that initially intrigued me about web.py is that it sort of felt like it allows for a more “UNIX-y” approach to web applications. Most frameworks and systems for publishing content to the web work really well as long as you don’t try and use anything but the application or framework. Drupal, Wordpress, and Rails seem to work best this way. Web.py seems to mostly be a few hooks around common web-programing tasks for Python developers, so that they can build their apps in whatever way they need to. The the monolithic content management approach doesn’t feel very UNIXy by contrast. I think this is something that I need to explore in greater deal.

Having said that, I’m not terribly sure if there are problems that I see in the world that need to be addressed in this manner. So while I can sort of figure out how to make it work, I don’t find myself thinking “wow, the next time I want to do [this], I’ll definitely use web.py.”

But then I’m just a dude who writes stuff.

(ETA: On second thought, perhaps this essay should have been called “Materialism and the Utility of Deleuze,” but both work.)

Here’s the second part in my (re)contemplation of Deleuzian theory. Here’s part one.

Everything is a machine. Celestial machines, the stars or rainbows in the sky, alpine machines--all of them connected to those of [the] body. […] There is no such thing as either man or nature now, only a process that produces the one within the other and couples the machines together. Producing-machines, desiring-machines everywhere, schizophrenic machines, all species of life: the self and the non-self, outside and inside, no longer have any meaning whatsoever. (p. 2)

-- Giles Deleuze and Felix Guatteri Anti-Oedipus Originally published in 1972, English translation 1977. Translated by Helen R. Lane, Robert Hurley, and Mark Seem.

I think one of the key reasons that I keep returning to Anti-Oedipus is that it provides a way to be a fierce materialist while addressing the kinds of questions that idealists (i.e. psychoanalysts) raise. This in itself isn’t particularly unique (I suppose,) but I’m particularly taken with the way that they approach questions of subjectivity, identity, experience, and development without engaging or furthering the discourse of psychoanalytic thought.

Initially I think I was off put by all the psychoanalytic language in the text, and the way that they seem to argue incredibly fine points against Lacan and Freud. As I look at it more and more, I realize the point of Anti-Opedipus is to say “don’t think about these issues in Freudian terms, and with Freudian assumptions! Think about subjectivity and identity as phenomena with material foundations and mechanistic underpinnings!”

I, perhaps unlike the milieu that Deleuze and Guatteri were writing in, was never particularly enchanted by psychoanalysis, but I have been incredibly interested in the kinds of issues that analytic thought engages, and Anti-Oedipus provides a way to entertain those kinds of discussions without engaging in a troublesome intellectual lineage.

But to tie this post back to the last one, this approach to thinking about ourselves as subjects, to our creativity and desire, to the cultural implications of our identity, is not something that’s particularly useful addition to a theoretical framework. Right? I’ve not done a lot of this kind writing recently, but it strikes me that the call to be a materialist, and to think about the mechanics of social and personal phenomena is, as we say, “non-trivial.” Being Anti-Oedipal isn’t just something that you sprinkle here and there; it’s not a grand-theory-of-everything, but once it seeps in a bit, it makes it possible to think about the world and experiences in--what I’d call--a more productive way. Perhaps it’s true that Anti-Oedipus is a book of ethics after all.

I underlined the paragraph from the last post nearly four years ago. I think I’ve finally gotten it. I think, more than anything, that is a marker of my own development.

Onward and Upward!

I would say that Anti-Oedipus (may its authors forgive me) is a book of ethics, the first book of ethics to be written in France in quite a long time (perhaps that explains why its success was not limited to a particular “readership:” being anti-oedipal has become a life style, a way of thinking and living.) How does one keep from being fascist, even (especially) when one believes oneself to be a revolutionary militant? How do we rid our speech and our acts, our hearts and our pleasures, of fascism? How do we ferret out this fascism that is ingrained in our behavior? The Christan Moralists sought out the traces of the Flesh lodged deep within the soul. Deleuze and Guatteri, for their part, pursue the slightest traces of fascism in the body.

-- Michel Foucault, writing in the preface to Anti-Oedipus, by Giles Deleuze and Felix Guatteri.

I’ve spent a while away from Academia and geeky theoretical academic thoughts for a while. Then I discovered this twitter account and I got drawn back into it. I read the tweets and I thought, “you know,” these are hilarious on their own because they are so off the well, but I think I actually understand what’s going on. I’d have conversations with unsuspecting coworkers about little bits of Deleuzian theory. H.S. came for a visit and we had a rather long conversation about Deleuze and theory. I don’t know that “I’m back,” is exactly the right way to phrase this, but I definitely enjoy the added perspective that I’m able to bring to this stuff now.

I was never a very good theorist or philosopher, though I enjoy watching from a far, I tend want answers to different kinds of questions. I’m not, nor have I ever been “a scholar” of the “Capitalism and Schizophrenia” diptych--I haven’t even read it in its entirety--but it’s been a great influence me. Of the things that I read and interacted with in college, I’d have to say that Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus are the texts that I return to with the greatest frequency. And I never even took a class that assigned D&G!

I’ve read a fair number of papers and other pieces that have attempted to use Deleuze’s work as theoretical framework or some such, and I’ve always been disappointed by what happens as a result. For starters, the chance of Deleuze citations being: of the Rhizomatics essay at the beginning of “A Thousand Plateaus,” or from his collections of film criticism are overwhelming. This is unsurprising as this probably represents the most accessible of portions of Deleuze’s work. Also unsurprising is my sense that no matter what the paper is about, the Deleuzian theory overpowers whatever the author is trying to say. Deleuze’s thought is pretty darn heavy, and there’s no way around it.

And from some perspectives this is actually pretty funny: when you read Anti-Oedipus it’s not “fluffy,” but it’s pretty playful. There are lots of metaphors and images that draw out the logic and the point. There’s a lot going on, but it’s not dense (certainly not in the way that Derrida is dense.) This has lead me to ask a two important questions:

• If the writing is not very difficult or opaque, why do (Americans) who attempt to use the work fail to capture the playfulness, and seem too fall flat?
• Why am I (and clearly others as well) so intrigued by this work, and why do I (we?) keep returning to this text? Particularly since it’s so difficult to use in support of other arguments.

The answers, I think bring us back to Foucault’s assertion in the preface, that Anti-Oedipus is (counter to first impressions) a book of ethics rather than a book of cultural and social theory or even a commentary on Marxist and Freudian theory. When reading the texts, Anti-Oedipus (and A Thousand Plateaus) don’t feel like ethical manifestos, but I think that this explains why it’s so difficult to use and remains so intriguing.

That’s enough for now, but I hope you’ll pardon my impulse to blog about Deleuze for a little longer, as I think there’s another post or two here.

I know I just wrote a long piece about Arch Linux and for most things I’ve pretty much switched to Arch Linux as my primary, day to day, distribution. In fact, when an Arch Linux issue comes up at work my coworkers call me first. And I suppose it’s well earned. But if you were to ask me what my favorite Linux distribution project was, I’d probably say Debian as often as not.

I run a lot of Debian, straight up, unmolested (mostly) Debian Stable. There are a lot of practical reasons for this: it’s stable, I have faith that it’s going to work and do what I need it to. Aside from keeping on top of normal security issues, the system is stable and doesn’t require attention to keep up to date. And, in nearly every case the package manager can be trusted to do the right thing. There are also a ton of little niceties in the distribution: debconf, the management tools for Apache, and the shear diversity of the packages. It all adds up.

I mean, I have gripes with some things that Debian does, but they’re always little. I find myself asking “Why didn’t you enable mod_rewrite by default? Really?” or “Would it have killed you to include software that was less than 3 years old in this release?” But never “Why is this broken by default?”

With projects like Ubuntu getting press, attention, and energy (and money!) I can’t help but think that the outsider might think of Debian as being a bit… put upon? Or not good enough in it’s pure form? The Ubuntu folks are pretty good about talking about their Debian roots, and it’s totally clear to anyone who really takes a good look at Ubuntu that most of its awesomeness is due to being Debian-derived. Even if that isn’t terribly clear from the outside.

I also really enjoy the ways in which Debian has managed to grow and sustain itself, and create something that is so magnificent in scope. The Linux Kernel project is huge, the desktop projects are massive in terms of what they carry under their umbrellas. Distribution projects that start from nothing and control and build the entire stack are, I think, particularly intense because of the shear size of the project.

This of course holds true for all distribution projects, and doesn’t make Debian particularly special, I suppose. The thing is that Debian’s coverage is massive compared to other tools. Arch provides a great framework for an operating system, and makes it really easy to do a number of things, but there are nowhere near as many packages nor as many contributors. Ubuntu is, by contrast a great project but is mostly a process of “tuning” Debian into a system that’s more targeted for specific applications. Again these aren’t criticisms, but it does make Debian more of an impressive proposition.

And I guess, because of this, even though most of the time when I interact with a Linux system it isn’t actually Debian, I almost automatically categorize myself as a “Debian person.”

Shrug.