The decline and fall of the internet
I recently read this article about the ways in which Chinese authors deal with censorship of their work. I liked this description of the early days of the Chinese internet, before the Great Firewall and the crackdowns of recent years:
This general openness coincided with the popularization of the internet, which was new enough that it largely eluded outmoded print-era censorship. For much of the first decade of the new millennium, the Great Firewall — the infrastructure that bans an ever-growing list of foreign websites — hadn’t yet been erected. Chinese citizens could access Facebook, Wikipedia and Google somewhat freely, and the state had yet to develop a robust mechanism to track sensitive words as a way to curb the spread of inconvenient information. By the end of the decade, scholars and writers debated public affairs on Weibo, a Twitter-like platform. Elsewhere, vibrant communities emerged around niche passions. The poet who writes under the name Xiaoyin remembers the new poetry websites of that era as chaotic and fun spaces. On sites like Poetry Life, his peers quarreled daily over matters like the possibilities of colloquial poetry writing. “Anyone could start their own bulletin boards,” he told me. “It was like bandits occupying hills and claiming to be kings.”
It makes me think of a few things. One: this book, which I received as a birthday gift and have yet to read. And two, the way that the internet is undergoing a similar shift in the United States.*
Obviously I don’t want to hold up the past (my half-remembered glimpses of The Internet That Was) as some kind of objective standard. I was just a kid when I first got online. For every person like me, there was a) somebody who had the technical wherewithal to make much greater use of it and b) someone who was not yet served by the internet or had no use for it and therefore no connection (literal or figurative). Maybe that’s what made my perspective of it so awe-inspired: I wasn’t jaded enough to see the whole enterprise as doomed to fail, nor did I completely miss the point of what made it interesting.
I just remember logging onto BBSes; then making a Geocities page; finding random websites that weren’t that interesting, but which somehow enthralled me; playing bizarre and offensive Flash games; knowing that, outside the internet in which I resided, there were even vaster happenings occurring, like whales dimly glimpsed in the distance; and connecting with people, actual people, whether on Quake or Unreal Tournament levels or on message boards–rarely having the temerity to post or comment, but still absorbing what they said.
* I have no deep knowledge of the other regional internets. Obviously everything is connected to some extent, but VKontakte, for example, is not something I can accurately assess. But I suspect that it’s no better than what we access here.
Now the good parts continue to disappear, and the bad parts multiply and scar the facade of what remained worthwhile. Apps and websites barter down what they give out for free in hopes of coercing readers into becoming subscribers. We seem to be returning to the bad old days of internet advertising, where fresh variants of pop-unders and other ad junk make websites unreadable in the hope of getting accidental clicks from naive readers. And the new trend, at least to me, is the mainstreaming of racist, eliminationist rhetoric, from the rafters of old-media publications on the web to the gutters of social media.
I’m reading Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, which is about video games, but the atmosphere of the novel really reminds me of how the internet used to be–and makes me hope for its return. Surely it’s hiding in there, somewhere?
Becoming more of an autodidact
After seeing Oppenheimer this past weekend, I’ve become more interested in physics. So I’ve begun the process of relearning, and hopefully moving beyond, the physics I learned in undergrad during my applied math degree. I’ve just started at the very basic stuff: vector operations (dot products, cross products) and I’m about to move into the opening phases of mechanics. Of course, this has necessitated a review of calculus, since it’s been ages since I’ve applied the chain rule or integrated by parts.
My ultimate goal is to go through much or all of this curriculum posted by Susan Rigetti. Just thinking about the various subfields of physics–E&M, cosmology, quantum mechanics, statistical mechanics–makes my heart kind of perk up, like I’d just seen a roller coaster that I can’t wait to ride.
It makes me wonder if I should have majored in physics in college instead of applied math. I got into applied math because I thought it would be full of math problems as opposed to proofs. DUMB.
Obviously I have to intermingle my physics studies with my ACTUAL studies. I’m in the middle of psychology and nutrition for pre-nursing right now. Good thing those classes aren’t too hard, or I’d have no time at all for anything. I may still need to take a pause in the fall when I’m taking microbio and physiology.
If only I had unlimited time, energy, and resources to just learn what I wanted, when I wanted. I don’t know if there’s anything that would make me happier.
What I’m worried about
Maybe it’s dawning awareness spurred by being a new parent, maybe it’s the type of content I’m consuming nowadays, but I feel a sort of overwhelming concern about the state of the world and the lives of its denizens–much more so than I did when I was younger.
- Global warming: On social media, you often see videos of climate protestors being attacked by random passersby for blocking roads or fouling old paintings. And the most common comment I see is–good. We are currently on a steady path toward societal destruction, something scientists have been warning about for decades, DECADES, and these fucking chumps have the gall to laugh at protestors getting signs ripped out of their hands and blame them for being arrested by police. In twenty years, some of those who laughed will be chastened–others will no doubt blame protestors for polarizing the issue of climate change while somehow avoiding laying any blame on themselves or the wealthy corporations and citizens who have led us inexorably off the precipice while ruling out any time of concerted action. I can’t wait until we’re all breathing sulfur that’s been pumped into the air to keep us at 2 degrees C.
- The refugee crisis: This has been on my mind for years, and the recent sinking of the Adriana off the coast of Greece has forcibly created more mental space for this topic. The refugee crisis, among others, puts the lie to the idea that we are all one human family. We–meaning the relatively well-to-do of Earth–have been presented with an ongoing human tragedy that reveals itself every day across the globe, that of economic displacement and subjugation which results in the immiseration of hundreds of millions, many of whom try to make it to our lands so that they can build a living off of the most miserable wage labor, the scraps of our society. They and their families are preyed upon, and they suffer injury, illness, infection, miscarriage, and death in pursuit of any kind of economic sustenance. And we ignore it. Because… well, because we can. Because nothing forces us to deal with these people in a fair, humane way. Because there are those of us for whom some kind of support would cost barely anything, and there are those of us who would have to do with much less if we pursued some kind of humane policy, and the latter use their greater means to influence the former.
- Every death a tragedy: I just read about the death of Kevin Mitnick in the NYT. After living a life filled with escapades and adventure (even allowing for the boredom that spending time in prison must have been), this larger-than-life figure dies of pancreatic cancer at 59. Mitnick’s wife is pregnant with their first kid. I won’t pretend that Mitnick was a hero of mine or anything; I knew who he was and once I saw Hackers: Takedown which according to Hacker News is laden with falsehoods, and that’s the extent of my participation in his fandom. But man, as I get older it just affects me more and more, how anyone can be struck down by what are ultimately quotidian fates. How does a guy like Kevin Mitnick get cancer? How does a guy like Kevin Mitnick become another 59-year-old? Same way as everybody else, I guess.
So that’s two “fixable” problems, and one that currently is not. I think global warming and refugees are part of why I’m aiming to become a nurse. Being a health professional seems like a more helpful type of labor to pursue than plugging away at computers or arguing with lawyers about things. Other possible careers: refugee rescue boat crew member, or less remuneratively, “guy who glues himself to things to protest CO2.”
Bike goals, in no particular order
- Go on more rides–even if they’re just for an hour or so.
- But also, do a century ride. Maybe in the fall when it’s chillier.
- Go on a group ride. I feel like I really need to get my fitness up. I was looking at my old Strava routes and it looks like I can average maybe 13 mph. Apparently some of these group rides get up to 20+?! I would definitely get dropped.
- Do some actual gravel rides. Once I get my cyclocross bike back, I’m gonna have to look for some routes. It seems like there might be better gravel terrain in OC too, so when we move to Long Beach I should have some better luck finding good routes.
- Do an official randonneur race. Riding around, collecting checkpoints: sounds like a dream.
70-80 years is not long enough for a human life
There’s just so much to be done. To be read, and listened to, and consumed, and learned. It’s so constricting to have to choose between the available options. Which authors do I read? What food do I make today? Do I exercise, or watch an old French movie, or practice an instrument, or take a walk, or something else? How do I know if I’m making the right choice? What even defines the “right choice”?
Spirit stuff
Is there a way to be “spiritual” without getting ripped off? I see two dominant ways by which one can become spiritual:
Join some kind of organized religion. The issue here is that (for me, at least) there is always going to be some kind of precept which both a) I disagree with and b) is critical to the foundation and practice of said religion. And if you’re going to pick and choose what you believe in, then what’s the point of professing adherence in the first place? Judaism seemed really interesting to me for a while, until I realized that I would never be able to promise to raise my kid in the faith, let alone get him circumcised. Baháʼí seem pretty anti-LGBT, as do the various strains of Christianity. I guess there’s the argument of becoming a cultural [whatever], who just does the rituals and hangs out but doesn’t buy into the more strident aspects, but then if you’re trying to find some sort of authentic spiritual vision, that approach seems antithetical to actually getting any results.
Do a more self-guided approach where you’re figuring out what spirituality actually means to you. There are two main problems here. First, there are countless charlatans in this space. I find it impossible to trust anyone who’s making money off of selling their spiritual vision to others. Second, seeking spirituality in this way seems rather lonely. If the point of spirituality is, I think, to find a connection with something bigger than yourself–be that the world or the after-life or the weltgeist–then to attempt to find your own idiosyncratic connection with The Bigger Thing must necessarily wall you off from those who come at the search from a different angle, or who have different results. Unless you come down on “Any spirituality essentially works, and nothing in particular is more correct than anything else.” Which seems like a cop-out, a way of rendering the personal search for spirituality essentially meaningless, and also inherently contradictory–how can all these religions be correct if more than one of them are concluding that some or all of their fellow religions are wrong? And if we’re picking and choosing which parts of these religions are correct in an attempt to satisfy the “all religions are correct” premise… at that point, things are starting to get pretty wishy-washy.
So I dunno. Are both of these paths non-viable? Obviously there’s no proving any of this, so do you need to be an atheist in order to be consistent? (Although atheism seems almost too certain of its conclusion. And agnosticism seems… kind of tepid.)
Maybe it’s the masculinity of modern religion that throws me. You’re always hearing about a God who is the Father and He does stuff and you better not piss Him off or defy His will.
I feel very restless about this, and I’m not sure how to address it. There are no quick fixes, I suppose.