Dynamic Hypocrisy

I’m dumb with feelings. To set the bar low, I often miss or forget about basic urges. Like forgetting that I’m hungry or had to pee. (To be fair, it’s because I’ve gotten way too into whatever task or hobby at-hand, but it’s still ridiculous to say aloud.)

Anyways, it means I spend a lot of time thinking if what’s in my body is which feeling going on.

Whenever I watching TV with a friend or out about, I was always mystified by other friends who seemed to emote something much bigger than what seemed to be in my body.

“Harry Potter is the best!” versus “This is pleasant and amusing.”

And it put me into an interesting existential question: is this a regular case of “different things resonate differently among people” or are the sensors in my brain mis-reading the inputs?

Like are our musical instruments just tuned to different songs, or is my guitar not even tuned to the right scale?

Nuanced, it’s probably a combination of both. But it can be an anxious thought to think that you’re missing something.

I’m not sure where I fall on this tangent. But I find there’s a notion of line where discomfort begins. Presumably, it’s a boundary to keep you safe or within an average of normalcy. But to surpass that line can provide novel experiences that could turn into growth (or not, but that’s not the point at hand.)

What I wonder about is how often should this line be shifting.

Constant be wary experience, exhausting. And can mask a deeper discomfort and fear of stagnancy.

Never can hinder seeing your life through a different lens, and to miss opportunities.

The nihilist/stoic in me thinks the universe doesn’t really care either way, so that leaves personal perference and to make peace to whatever I decide. But in the meantime, it’s an interesting thought.

Credit reports were and is the business response to strangers. When cities scaled to the point where not everyone knew each other like back in the village, the concept of the stranger was formed.

Or rather, an individual of indeterminate trust. I know whether to loan money to my uncle or my friend’s cousin. But in a large city, it’s too hard to determine that effectively. Thus, the credit report that verifies whether I can do business with you as in renting you a room, or giving you a loan.

In this transitional era of relative anonymity of the internet, we only have the crudest of tools to determine trust. Many sites form their own currency with their markers of reputation. As in quality of posts within a forum or media site comment threads, or a place like StackOverflow.

China in its surveillance state is developing an all-encompassing credit report but for your life, and it already has ramifications on what train tickets or your relative agency within society.

Ideally there will be a freer interpretation of this symbolic calculation, but that remains to be implementated.

Technology advances unevenly, and the ramifications are hard to predict at any particular scale.

We’re at a juncture when the masses can swarm onto an individual via social media with vitriol and threats, but the individual has little recourse to respond effectively. A strong modern judicial system protected the individual from the mob, but we’re at an intersection where a modern equivalent for the internet doesn’t exist yet.

I draw parallels to a feudal system of lords with major platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Uber, Google, and the like. And currently, we’re reliant on benevolent kings and their mercy.

I don’t know the proper mechanisms for defense while balancing liberties and free-flow of invention. But there will be a need, or rather there has been.

I never really fully understood how computer memory chips worked. I know the words. That data exists within a location, and the computer keeps track of their addresses to access when needed. These things are called pointers.

So it’s like a neighborhood. Every bit and byte lives in their own house with a house number. And when the computer needs say that one family photo or that one song–it checks the address, goes to that house, and rings the doorbell.

It’s interesting to me because I always just assumed a computer had only data. Only the people who lived in houses.

But this concept told me that a computer is both the residents and a then a very fancy Yellow Pages directory book.

I think traditionally humans were like what I thought a computer. Full of facts and figures and memories like where the bison graze, and who was the tribe leader, and what the trees look like when the air gets cold.

But as we got books and journals and we crammed more things — we had to write all the extra stuff down in piles of paper. Which meant our brains had mostly residents, but now also some pointers to where we placed our books and journals.

As for me, I went too far. Between sketchbooks, books, laptops, and phones–my brain is almost no residents and all pointers. Only the Yellow Pages exist in my head. Which means if you ask me where that one restaurant that we ate at — I have to check my Instagram. If you ask me who was in that movie, I have to google it. If you ask me what my favorite music is, I have to open my music app. If you ask me what my dad’s birthday is, I have to check my calendar.

All pointers to things outside my brain. Incredibly fragile configuration, but at the same time–my brain is completely geared for creation and generation of novel things. I design, I make art, I think and process ideas. All of those things depend on things known, but I don’t need those known things to be in my brain. I only need to know they exist, and I’ll look for them when I need them.

For better or for worse.

We always assume that if we ever meet aliens is when they come beaming down from spaceships.

But with the advent of gene editing gaining momentum. I wonder if that acceleration will reach a point where we’re able to turn our skin purple, or grow extra limbs, or grow horns for either functional or aesthetic reasons.

And if we do and we normalize it like we do with piercings or tattoos, that for a someone to time-travel forward to then — it would be indistinguishable from if aliens had landed and we co-lived.

That we accelerate our bodies to a point where we actively split off into separate species and genus to a point that we make ourselves the aliens.

I wonder about an aspect of discomfort that a traditionally hegemonic group feels when a society shifts away from them.

Namely, when the language shifts away from them, or a number of cultural objects that don’t resonate immediately with them.

I was listening to a friend’s roommate repeatedly go “Marie Kondo is about minimalism.” “Minimalism.” “Minimalism.” “Minimalism.”

And it was like, “What if that isn’t what she’s about?”

What if it’s a more subtle root in Shintoism, and the embodiment of spirit within each object, and to have a process of recognition of your relationship to the object?

As opposed to the implications of Western minimalism which is more a distillation of things within your life, and how the things you keep have a purpose to you.

It’s interesting to see the blinded-ness of encountering a cultural Object that doesn’t inherently echo your own thoughts. Or to not recognize the language it speaks.

Sometimes it’s straightforward as a Spanish song entering an English-speaking ranking charts. It’s overt in its foreignness.

And it can be disconcerting that this thing isn’t comprehendible, or more cynically — not making enough of an effort to be comprehendible. It seems rude that it isn’t.

But it’s also a reminder that the world is more vast, more plural.

As an inverse experience, growing up ethically Asian in America. Meant that inherently nothing was speaking to me. Country music wasn’t speaking to me about me and my concerns. It was speaking someone else about their shared concerns.

Which makes something like my relationship to hip-hop interesting. Most of isn’t speaking to me. Most of it is talking about things I don’t experience. And yet I enjoy it as a musical form, as a genre, as a construction of language, as an expression to be heard. But most of it isn’t speaking to me.

And I’m okay with that. I don’t take their symbols or concerns or words as my own, and I’m ultimately a voyeur. And that’s a discussion for another day.

But I wonder if this process is particularly painful for those who are being shifted from the majority to a minority. That it’s unfamiliar and untaught. I wonder.

I have no inkling of this. But every map where to disappear tonight:

How good would a new app be if it was purely constructed from publicly posted photographs on the internet?

Imagine every selfie in-front of a bakery, or landscape photo, or Eiffel Tower photo was scraped together, and had a computer stitch together all of them?

The ones that weren’t geocached would be less useful of course. But even so, my gut tells me it would be pretty decent.

Country-wide travel would be harsh. I don’t know of too many highway photos. But getting a diner or gas station might be useful.

I’m less concerned about the mapping part of the thought experiment. But more curious to feeling the weight of what we’re collectively collecting about our world. It’s a lot, but from a day-to-day perspective — it’s fairly ephemeral. And wonder if that disconnect is a missed opportunity. Of what, I dunno, but maybe.

I was listening to a podcast (as per usual.) It centered around networking and its pain points.

A solution I liked was the idea of Reciprocity Rings. Where a group of people collectively write and post their desires or goals. And the group then looks, and if they can help in some way — they offer to do so.

It alleviates the pressure of one-on-one, or hunting for the right person for help. Instead it’s almost closer to a party.

I was listening to a podcast interviewing a IT security specialist. And he brought up an interesting point that I had forgotten about. We’re in a phase where security breaches feel like a daily occurrence with companies. Seemingly always in the news.

But these higher number of incidences coincide with laws that force companies to disclose breaches.

The expert maintains that from the beginning breaches are commonplace, just nobody talked about it. But since reporting became mandatory, if normalized towards where its required–breaches have gone down relative to previous.

It reminds me of my home state, Minnesota, having higher incidences of children with autism. But at the same time, Minnesota has a higher relative level of medical and social services. So more resources are spent on detection than other states.

The absence of reporting doesn’t mean the absence of the phenomenon happening.