NESTS DO NOT MAKE BIRDS

A group of techies

Not just on Medium.com but in a number of places there is an ideological struggle going on that most of us don’t even realize exists.  It is between the young mandarin techies of California (mostly) who have the idea that nests make birds (if you build it, they will come), and the aspiring entitled young writers whose acquaintance with wordsmithing is mostly gained through the lyrics of pop and punk songs DO come.  But no one cares.  Ev Williams is involved in some of this, since he links Twitter, Blogspot, and Medium.com.  Maybe the hopes for Medium were just too high.  But the hopes were secretly not about good writing at all -- they were about profit.  I use Blogspot, myself,  NOT for profit, but because it holds still so I don't have to figure out something new all the time -- NOT because I want to tinker with the html.

The American premise is that success is the product of “progress” in the sense of actively pushing numbers up and adding more gimmicks.  They are wrong.  Often success is the product of just sitting there, thinking.  Because the “nest” of thought and writing is in the brain, which is a lot of neurons, not a computer game.  The catch phrase is “generative plasticity” meaning that the brain physically re-shapes itself constantly to accommodate new experience and the thought it evokes.  I have read ever since the “eureka” moment about 1944 when I realized that the marks on the page were words and “Jack and Judy” plus their parrot (a primary school reader alternative to “Dick and Jane”) were in a virtual world I could visit at will.  This was the nest for writing.  It didn’t just grow, it transformed as it went to fit what rested there.

Song bird nest built by a BIRD.

One cannot attract condors by building robins' nests.  The real trouble with Medium is that the techies are conventional, the pride of their families, and utterly blank when it comes to breaking out of the crowd -- they didn’t want to do that anyway.  They just want to overachieve on some scale they learned in grade school -- stickers and A+ grades.  It doesn’t work like that.

What you think about, you become.  If you think about money, you become money.  If you think about technical coding, you become technical coding.  If you think about writing, the number of neurons in your brain about writing increase, complexify (there are over 200 KINDS of neurons that specialize in aspects of awareness), and swell into literature worth reading.  

Condor nest in the crevice of a cliff -- bird in center, I think.  

Remember how big a condor is.

What many readers are after is feeling.  Coding will not let you feel.  Feelings are the foundation of being human.  Trauma takes it away.  Coding takes it away.  Modern suburban successful swimming pool espresso sophistication takes it away.  It is a mistake to think that extreme sports/sex/
vehicles/stunts will make you feel.  Extreme things like fire-eating and wire-walking are not the point, though they will teach you to concentrate.  Well, at least it will eliminate all the people who can’t concentrate.  But coding is not a bad thing to do while you learn to feel.  Maybe relearn.  

I prefer reading print, even to film and other arts.  That’s partly about my age, but the point about being old is that I’ve had decades to expand my neuron plasticity.  And in my case, economic necessity forced me to take on environments and kinds of people I barely survived.  That’ll make your nest bigger in a hurry.  It might teach you to fly -- or eat worms.

In my case, teaching English taught me grammar.  English teachers don’t teach grammar anymore -- in fact, they don’t even know it themselves, nor do they know the reason for it, nor can they transform an appositive into a prepositional phrase.  They just pour out words on a wave of emotion that imitates every other wave of emotion.  I’m not saying you have to know grammar to write.  A lot of people know it intuitively, not from taking quizzes but from reading fine writing the way one intuitively learns how to ride a bicycle.  You want to do it, you want the momentum and the control, and you learn them by FEELING, not by logic or tech gimmicks.

Animal control taught me tolerance and to be alert.  Forget “beware the dog” signs -- watch for large-bore poop.  And never think you’ve seen everything now, because going through neighborhoods and knocking on doors soon reveals that some people are on the edge, some people are intensely driven to control their neighbors, and some people are dead and have been that way a while, but no one noticed.  I also benefited from sudden surges of adrenaline when under attack.  You remember that “black swan” guy?  Nassim Taleb -- not the ballerina.  Taleb says humans are MEANT to have sudden moments of danger, we're built for it, and I think he’s right.  But I cherished the moments when I was on a dog stake-out, just sitting and ruminating early in the morning while I watched for some uncatchable trespasser so I could see where he came from.

Writers will be constantly pressed to write what a monied investor or an internet audience wants to read, something spectacular that will make them pay.  Techies and investors don’t know how to do that kind of writing, and they don’t know it when they see it -- only when the stock market says so.  That’s their only yardstick and it doesn’t measure “real” writing.  In fact, whoring for the stock market will kill profit.  It’s a form of VD.  (A.B. Guthrie, Jr. always repeated “We kill what we love.”)

I’m "barebacking".  No income from publishing.  I assume you will understand what I’m talking about, judging from what I read in pop markets, via the Internet.  (You cannot buy magazines in Valier.)  What I mean is that I’m not writing for sale -- I’m only after the un-mediated experience of writing, the addition of more neurons, the ones I can feel meshing in my head so that I wake in the night suddenly understanding something -- not in words, but in endorphins or something, in my gut.  If I can’t get to that point regularly, I get very very cranky.

Particularly aggravating are the few people who still press me to write something different from what I write.  Some have not realized that I write for a global audience -- this is not a local column in a regional paper -- or they have a favorite thread on the blog and want me to get rid of all the others.  They want the time-lines to include only their own families, history as endorsement.  But I’m after the meta-trends, mutation, evolution.  I love the anthropologies and analyses and quotes from grownup books written by seasoned observers.  I do not want to cheer up, settle down, or pull in my horns.

Academics have been suffocated by corporations or have fallen so in love with post-everything theory that they have abandoned reality because it has too few syllables.  Ministers have become therapists and fund-raisers.  "Smart" guys spend their days trying to invade other people’s lives -- someone is trying to hack this computer.  If I value something, I put it on the other computer that isn’t in contact with the world.  If I value it even more, I commit it to paper.

I’ve given up the idea of preserving things for the ages -- it’s just not possible in a world where ideologues blow up ancient statues in order to prove they’re better.  But I do save some things that look as though they might be useful in my lifetime.  I’m always surprised by what they turn out to be. 

Techies are mayflies, their work obsolete overnight.  But . . . so is a lot of writing.  In my experience there are too many high-school-level Friday essays stacking up that ought to be burned.  Grading tapioca is a fool’s task.  I once tried a Seventies sort of experiment:  I gave everyone in a class an A at the beginning of the quarter to see what would happen.  The kids formed the same curve as always.  And they worried more about how they were doing.

Sometimes I think that China had it right -- the students ought to go out and plant rice instead of sitting in a desk learning other people's big ideas.  But China is infamous for sacrificing its children.  We would be, too, if the truth were known.  All those mind-rotting Saturday morning cartoons have come home to roost in our computers where they leak out into kid brains.

A DO-IT-YOURSELF LIFE

The list below is by Nassim Taleb, the author of “The Black Swan.”  I appreciate it and find it effective.  “Antifragility” equates to survival.  Why would I spend time reading things I can’t put into practice?  Other things?  Well, for the fun of it, I suppose, and but some things are pathways rather than destinations, and this particular list is very useful.

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An antifragile way of life is all about finding a way to gain from the inevitable disorder of life. To not only bounce back when things don’t go as planned, but to get stronger, smarter, and better at continuing as a result of running into this disorder.

First, here are some principles that come from “Antifragile”:

1. Stick to simple rules
2. Build in redundancy and layers (no single point of failure)
3. Resist the urge to suppress randomness
4. Make sure that you have your soul in the game
5. Experiment and tinker — take lots of small risks
6. Avoid risks that, if lost, would wipe you out completely
7. Don’t get consumed by data
8. Keep your options open
9. Focus more on avoiding things that don’t work than trying to find out what does work
10. Respect the old — look for habits and rules that have been around for a long time

The general underlying principle here is to play the long game, keep your options open and avoid total failure while trying lots of different things and maintaining an open mind.

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My own simple rules are not likely to suit anyone else.  They are not based on convention.  Many women have a rule that they can’t go to bed without cleaning up the kitchen -- dishes washed, everything put away.  My practice, which is not a rule, is to let things soak overnight.  But my rule is to write a post for this blog every morning even if means there’s no time for housework.  My practice has been to post it just after midnight that same night so posts will indexed by date in a regular sequence.  

I’m thinking about changing this because now I have to stay up until midnight and I get too sleepy.  The “old” I must respect is me, though I resent getting older, weaker, more forgetful, and all that.  It’s not a tragedy -- just a nuisance.  But something I learned as a young person is very helpful -- I learned to do-without and to not want things that aren’t possible.  This was a product of a marriage where the uneven partnership (Bob much older and both of us devoted to his sculpture) meant that my reading, my time in general, and my taste in food and furnishings were simply impossible.  By the time I started an independent life again, I had absorbed much of his.  But not all.

Always I thought about what I needed to survive -- a table, a chair, a bed, bookshelves, a way to write.  Then the things that were luxuries:  books, cats, clothes I like, beautiful bedding, bowls and spoons, the pickiup, and a little shelf of odd things I’ll talk about another time.   The telephone is an ambivalent thing.  The television is not attached to broadcast or cable, just DVD’s.  Netflix is a wonderful luxury.  This computer is a GREAT enabler and luxury, but having to learn too much technology interferes with the writing.  I don’t have a cell phone, the same as I don’t have a radio in the pickiup.  I could do without television, telephone, even computer, if I had to.  So long as I had pencil and paper.  Even then, I could learn to memorize what I wrote like a person kept in the dark in solitary confinement.  

I could not do without my mind.  That’s the cruelest diminishment of old age, that I can’t remember names or where I put things.  Some memories I can do without because if I can’t remember that I once could remember them, then they don’t matter much anyway.  Between photos and my own bulging files, I can recover most things.  But now I wish I’d bought a yearbook every year that I taught, that I had a photo directory of the whole Blackfeet tribe through the Sixties when I knew them.  Now they are the grandparents of the adults I talk to.  These present adults didn’t exist yet.

Secrecy and privacy are things I wanted to discard, but now I find it impossible.  Not because I have anything to hide but because other people need to be let alone.  I can’t praise them publicly though I passionately (not carnally) love them.

Security is one of the things I risk losing daily but not in the usual way.  I lose when the neighbors come over to chainsaw limbs off the tree that is such a joy, or when I turn on the computer (like this morning) and find another pay-wall.  iTunes wants a LOT of information and legal agreement to their terms or I won’t be allowed to proceed !!!   Whaaaaaat?  The only thing I use it for is to stream my NPR station because their land broadcast fails so much -- it’s tough to maintain translators and relays in this country.  Fine.  I’m already learning that silence in Valier is free.  (You have to pay for it in other places.)  But I have to buy drinking water.

The biggest threat to security is ironically the efforts of people to guarantee THEIR safety by constant vigilance and the imposition of rules that suit them.  They become more and more over-reactive, more inclined to regulate and impose fees, more suspicious of everything different, more inclined to carry firearms and drive faster in bigger vehicles.  They have never heard that story about how armor was not so much destroyed by the invention of firearms as it was by the nibbling of the leather hinges by mice.   They seem to think they can only get rich by executing some major coup or scheme, like striking oil, not through the simple diligence of showing up for work every day and getting things done.  Nevertheless, people here are kind and practical, more than some places.

I’ve kept a little woodstove in case both electricity and gas fail in winter.  I hoard branches.  So far the gas has never failed (though we’ve all grown suspicious of pipelines and there have been catastrophic explosions from leaks, like the one in Bozeman on the main street).  Just last week the electricity here was off for more than an hour at 4AM.  We never found out why.  My internet feed shuts down my keyboard whenever there is a lot of local web traffic, but no one seems able to fix it.  They’ve stopped even telling me they’re trying -- just deny that it has anything to do with them.

When I was in college as an undergrad (1957-1961) the world was hopeful in spite of catastrophic assassinations which someone evidently thought would make things go their way.  We see that happening again today, though mostly it’s our government doing the dramatic killing in other people’s countries, while merely killing our own citizens with non-funding.  Instead of killing Obama, they kill all he suggests.  By the time I left Browning (1973) the response to the deaths of JFK and MLK Jr. had boomeranged into a new vision of what life was about.  My soul was seized then and is still gripped by it.  In fact, because I have access to news and conversation among thinking people through the Internet (Edge.org and TED Talks and all the H-humanities listservs, plus a host of other online organizations) my hope is robust.  Antifragile.  I do not despair.

My practice is to shop for necessities once a month at a county seat, which makes me dependent on my little freezer.  My rule is to eat according to diabetes guidelines: no sugar, few carbs, high quality meat (no sausage), no sodas, lots of green stuff.  That means less dependence on meds and possibly eventual freedom from them.  Just now I’ve started a pot roast with no potatoes -- just carrots and onions.  It’s beginning to smell pretty good.  I enjoy the immense wealth of the senses.  It’s opera day, if iTunes will let me stream WFMT.  If not, I’ll sing to myself -- though it worries the cats.  NOT.

NASSIM TALEB & THE 3-COLUMN MORALITY

Since we have defined corporations as persons, though they have none of the characteristics of what makes people human and often make human beings into greedhead zombies (oops -- have I tipped my hand already?), we need a new matrix for morality. I say morality rather than ethics, because it is a matter of small daily acts more than grand theories.

Nassim Taleb to the rescue. He has used his time, money, and fame to investigate the roots of our Western culture, looking for keys. They turn out to be more simple and more obvious than one might have thought, knowing “Greek” was involved, which has been hard to understand even for the Greeks. But we all lose our way with money now and then. (Some are beginning to question the usefulness of “money” as a marker of wealth.)

Once on an enviro listserv I got into an argument with someone (probably a young white academic male) about whether corporations were hopelessly evil. My position at the time was that since they are “owned” by share-holders, reform would be simple: enlighten the shareholders and they would take their votes and proxies to the annual meeting to demand that the business wake up to human suffering and global warming. (It worked on MacDonalds.) The arguer couldn’t explain why that wouldn’t work (he was a Marxist and went by theory), but Nassim can by using his little charts and his invented characters with their well-defined points of view.

He’s talking about the same sort of thing I talked about when I was discussing Native American artifacts: the gradient of value. (You can get rich if you find something that is of low value one place and high value the other place, and then carry it across to sell.) But this is in terms of money. Long ago, someone explained that lawyers get rich because they are the ones who pass the cookies. That is, when someone wants a cookie, they ask a lawyer, who passes them the plate and takes a cookie for his trouble. Then he returns the plate to the cookie maker, again taking a cookie. Every time the plate moves, the lawyer gets a cookie because he controls the plate.

It is not the “owners” of corporations who get rich, it is the CEO’s, the managers. They are passing the plate between owners and investors. And they carry it between rooms, never revealing to one group what the other group knows. They themselves are the only ones who really know what is going on and, Oz-like, they control that knowledge partly by pretending that it is beyond the understanding of mere mortals, quant-magic that only they can provide. No one else could pass cookies like they can, though they can’t bake and always hoard. In fact, they begin to pass bits of paper that say “cookie” instead of the food itself. No one knows where the cookies go or even whether they ever existed at all.

Nassim writes “in plain sight” online with readers giving him feedback and asking him questions while he develops the chapter. When he begins on one of his ideas, it’s a great big tangle with his typos and second-language locutions getting in the way. He doesn’t like dumbheads and tells them so. But then he finds a guiding phrase and it all comes into focus.

This time the phrase is “skin in the game.” The investors and the owners have skin in the game. The CEO does not. He’s a manager on salary which he manages to shove up high (ahem) and bolster with bonuses whether the company is doing well or not. He has NO skin in the game. In ancient times a bridge builder and his family were required to go live under the bridge for a time until it was evident that the bridge was solid. When there was a war, even so recently as Napoleon and George Washington, the leaders of the war were in the field on horseback, unarmored, risking their hides, not sitting at a polished table somewhere, glancing at their watch to make sure they aren’t late for cocktails. (cock-tails). Even society at large has “skin in the game,” so that tax-revenue bailouts are mandated, at immense cost to citizens.

If the CEO is fortunate in the circumstances of the corporation (which he may not control as much as timing and politics do), the money rolls in and no one questions strategy. If things go sour, the owners (whether shareholders or family founders) take the loss or society pays cents on the dollar. The CEO keeps the plate. Managers of mutual funds are also working on salary and not at risk if things go wrong. They do not lose their pensions and life savings.

So Nassim’s chart has three columns: one for those who have NO skin in the game, one for those who DO have skin in the game, and a surprise category: those who have SOUL in the game. That is, people who are willing to take a loss for the sake of others. (He’s been hanging around with idealists like Ralph Nader.)

By occupations, the first column (no skin in the game) includes bureaucrats, consultants, corporate executives (“with suit”), theoreticians, data miners, observational studies, centralized government, editors, journalists, politicians, bankers.

The second column (skin in the game) includes citizens, merchants, businessmen, artisans, entrepreneurs, lab and field experimenters, city-state government, writers, speculators, crusading journalists, activists, traders and his character “Fat Tony” who is always practical. He says, “Do not fly in a plane without the pilot aboard.” (Predator drones risk no lives -- just a lot of taxpayer money. Aside from the targets, of course.)

The third column (soul in the game) includes saints, knights, warriors, soldiers, prophets, artists, innovators, mavericks, municipal government (I’d argue.), great writers, rebels, dissidents, revolutionaries, taxpayers (involuntarily -- whether providing safety nets or needing them). This is where he assigns his character “Nero Tulip.” (Himself)

The next step is linking the fragility theory from the Black Swan idea. The more distance and lack of understanding between columns one and three, the more fragile the system is, the more unexpected the disaster because the farther from reality. The corollary is that modernity (technology, globalization) increases the difference between columns one and three, because it is education and wealth that takes people’s skins out of the game. (Until now, when education of the academic kind has proven much less effective. Wealth ALWAYS works.)

The middle class is in the middle column. The much discussed distance between the rich and the poor corresponds to columns one and three. Talk (Fat Tony says “tawk”) lives in column one, but direct experience is heaped up in columns two and three. The trouble is that column two can be persuaded by clever talk and they are over-impressed by the wealth and status of column one. They tend to be wary of column three.

The discussion goes on to name names. It will be in the next book but by then the lawyers will have things to say about it. It’s more fun now. And I think he’s right. Even helpful.

I must add to this post a grateful hat tip to Dave Lull, who keeps me in this particular Nassim Taleb loop.