Stoic Observations

I learned computing and programming on products built by companies that no longer exist. My first was on a Nova which was a small computer built by Data General. My second was on an IMSAI 8080. My third and the one that taught me the most was a PDP 11/03. It was the leader in scientific computing manufactured by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC). DEC was the great rival of IBM and its users, like me were a rebellious sort.

“You can resolve to live your life with integrity. Let your credo be this. Let the lie come into the world, let it even triumph. But not through me. The simple step of a courageous individual is not to take part in the lie. One word of truth outweighs the world.” —Solzhenitsyn My Hobbesian Roots One of the reasons that I am patriotic is that I know that my father was a US Marine. I didn’t grow up afraid of him, but I knew that he and men like him were capable of great violence.

Over on X the other day, I saw something about a twerk-fest going on at the Caribbean Festival in one of the London neighborhoods. As a weird self-medicating cure for depression I have been watching a lot of violence. Some of it, as many people know had to do with the catastrophic avalanche and flood in Nepal. Some of it consisted of extended graphic videos of deadly animal fights, lions vs hyenas, etc. Some of the violence was MMA fighting compilations of knockouts and submissions.

The first thing you need to know is that I am personally weak and at a low point in my life. The dimensions are financial and mental health, with the latter being a trailing indicator of the first. It’s a tough thing to confess, especially when I’m not trying to make parallels between artistry and suffering. Time will tell. In the meantime I am handling myself with care and making credible efforts at managing my stress.

I was thinking about Jason Arday this morning, but last month I wasn’t thinking about Karmelo Anthony. These are two controversial negroes whose failures have been in the news, and since it’s American news it drags along racial implications. As usual, when I talk about race, I try to make it personal because it’s often difficult to convince Americans that what happens to one African American in one place has nothing to do with the rest of us. Except when pundits say it should. Thus I complain.

There was a period in my life when I swore I wanted to be a doctor or an attorney. It was because I was sick and tired of my industry, of ‘tech’. I hated the way that digital technology so easily served as the handmaiden of postmodern slop. Even when the internet was new, and then when n-tier architecture was new, and then when the cloud was new and now that social media has gone from new to tiresome there was always something missing. What was missing was the edification of the humanities.

I think we together are about to crack social media’s commercial focus on populism. I have just broken ground on a dream I have had for more than a decade. The book is called Anathem, the author is Neal Stephenson and the way I talk about it is he tells the story of a desolate future Earthlike planet which has literally descended into Idiocracy.

In the news, a Senator Lindsey Graham died. 71 is not that old, but 35 years in Congress is really not democratic. It turns out that he was one of the good guys on cursory looks. But South Carolina is what it is and it’s not in my responsibility to care. I wasn’t always absent from domestic politics, in fact some of you old hands may remember me as Cobb. In light of this guy and the fiasco of Graham Platner, instead of just shaking my head, I thought I’d offer up one of the last political benchmarks.

If you press me hard enough, my soft inner filling oozes out, like honey from a plastic bear. That’s a sentence it takes a human to interpret, but not really for long. The bots are coming and there is a tremendous amount of capital their implementors are going to have to recover, what with all of the new data centers and high priced Genius they’ll have to pay. In the meantime, there are interesting humans to meet. But are we really interesting, or do we live in ill-defined bubbles?

This is a return to form, and my old buddy Marc Danziger will probably be jealous. If you haven’t seen me have these kinds of conversations before, you can check out my American Wag YouTube playlist here. But if you hang around long enough I’ll end up bringing all of them here. A couple of notes. The dark poet I was thinking about is Paul Kingsnorth. My personality doesn’t allow me to be a doomsayer, not to say that he is, but I tend more to be a staunch defender and let the devil take the hindmost.