Reasonably Stupid

Something happened to me just now. An interaction between me and a couple of strangers, two young girls. It was the sort of shit that most people pay no mind to, in fact they most likely just get pissed off and then let it go. In short: it was something and nothing. Except that it typified a lot of the interactions I have, even with people I know. 

I was driving my car down a road narrowed by a line of parked cars on one side. The road had a gradual curve to it, meaning you couldn't see oncoming cars that far ahead. I'd stopped before the line of cars, to let a car I could see have priority. Before I could restart, I saw another approaching car and gave way to that car too. Then I set off only to see two oncoming cars, I was now level with the obstacle and it was difficult for cars to pass. The first of the two cars saw that I'd moved closer to one side and there was a gap to pass and passed. The second car didn't advance. The driver and her friend both gestured to suggest I needed to resolve the issue. So, I crept forward and put as much of my car as I could into a small gap between two of the parked cars. The girls drove their car at mine, to pull close along side so they could wind down their window to talk to me. Even though I knew they would just bark angry nonsense at me, I too wound down my window - as I didn't want to ignore their obvious overture. The driver using heavy sarcasm pointed out that she couldn't pass me where I was originally and that she felt she had the right of way, and didn't want to mount the pavement to travel past. 

I listened to all of that. Then I said: I understood what she was saying but...whereupon she drove off. 

I felt horrible. I wanted to point out that I couldn't have seen her car or stopped earlier and that I had twice, in the end, moved to make way for her and another car had managed to pass by. What did she expect I could have done better? And what point is made by belittling anyone when the situation has been easily remedied. 

Why did I care? Why couldn't I just ignore her or brush it off as a silliness or arrogant person who needs to correct everyone else's behaviour?

In the first instance it's an inbuilt thing in me: I feel I must allow all questioning, to not to do so would be an arrogant act saying: you can teach me nothing. Allied to this is the fact that I want to be reasonable and been seen to be reasonable. To do that I must listen, and respond only when I feel my motives had some virtue to them that in part or whole justified my action. Accept wrong when no reply can be offered, accept wrong when motive is fair but doesn't cover the resulting action or receive acceptance when the reply satisfies the original query or complaint. 

The trouble is this invariably leads me into encounters where I'm unreasonably attacked, I respond giving the attack legitimacy of sort, only to be ignored or accused of not being able to accept when I'm in the wrong. Accused of the opposite of what's allowed me to accept the discussion moving towards what many might consider ad hominem attack and not proper discussion and just angrily reject it. 

These girls felt they could tell me off. In the end I allowed them to do just that. And was left feeling wrong and wronged. Hurt and embarrassed. Feeling guilty because i couldn't see if my motives were good because those I'd offended, hadn't accepted them - leaving me to implicitly accept that I was wrong. 

Other peoples perception is always more important than mine. If I think I'm reasonable that is meaningless if others don't. If I can't appeal to reason and find out what if any case I need to answer, I'm left feeling unreasonable but unable to fix it. 

Social Media is it worth it

Recently, Twitter’s share price fell 23% following announcements that the take-up of new accounts had slowed down, and engagement with the social network had dropped. The social network makes huge losses year on year which investors happily overlook while more users are caught in the network’s dragnet. The hope is that they will find a way to monetise the service but if use of the service is in decline, and the trend suggests it is (ever so slightly) the investors run scared.

Given the prevailing wisdom that all software should be free, I wonder how Twitter can make more money for its investors – if they can't hope to get its users to pay for its services. Of course saying that social media is free is a delusion and one that all users subconsciously are happy to subscribe too. After all, we know that these services aren't really free; they let us natter over peer to peer networks, while they mine our personal information for advertising revenue.

While users consciously decry their information being sold-on without their explicit permission, they are also happy to implicitly give their permission for it to be used by logging on for free, knowing as they click-in that their information will be exploited by the service; exploited in ever expanding ways if these companies are ever to make up their losses and provide a real return on their investment.

So what value do we place on social media services, and what value do we place on our personal information?

It would appear that we place a low value on our personal information because, it would seem, we don't value the social media services enough to want to pay for them – so the hidden cost of selling our personal information must mean less to us than whatever annual fee we fear might be levied.

Put another way: many people say they would stop using Facebook or Twitter if they required an upfront fee. So, they’re not worth actual money – so our personal information must mean less to us than money because we will tacitly exchange that for the service.

I suspect that a fee would turn off users less than it would the vendors, as a fee would probably generate less revenue than advertising solicits. Yet, it would be a more honest transaction – pay for the software that enables the services, as that’s the real commodity these companies offer you. It’s a different proposition viewed from the providers’ side, where the users are their commodity and corporations are their real customers.

If social media giants got paid only to provide users with peer-to-peer gossip sharing software they'd not be super-rich. They'd maybe have fewer users too, as a few would keep to their threat and cease to logon. I wouldn't overstate the user drop-off, though, as it’s like a crack addiction, I doubt the buzz wears off after the free sample runs out.

Would it not be better to pay for the service and keep your personal information private, doing away with the pretence that you were ever getting something for nothing?

Slipping Away

I hold views that nobody else shares. It does make me question them. Be arrogant not too. Trouble is some of them are central to who I am. Core beliefs, if you will. So, if you doubt your core beliefs then you doubt yourself. 

Most of what I feel about my past, myself in total, is only my perspective. That counts for nothing in the face of other peoples perspectives. Particularly of those closest to you. Further self doubt. 

The Queen: 60 Years on the Job

Years ago, when TV started to regularly feature debates on the subject, it seemed we might outgrow the need for our constitutional monarchy. Sadly, they seem more a fixture of our way of life than ever.

The Queen has been celebrating 60 years of uninterrupted employment. She's done well, hasn't she? Apparently, so well that she is loved and admired the world over. Mostly for her staying power, or what commentators are calling continuity. Just to think she could have packed it in, or maybe been replaced for under performing. Except, she can't be. It's pretty much her gig until she croaks it.

Why do we fawn over the “achievements” of royalty?

Is it that we truly believe being incumbent in a job, where the only qualification was your birth right, that requires little to no actual work, where your personal life is one spent in opulent and private luxury, really represents a magnificent and selfless achievement?

Oh, but they can’t have a normal life. You enjoy your normal life to the extent that you look up to them in awe, and count them unlucky to be so venerated? What is this normal life and what are they missing out on? Shopping with members of the public?

Ah, they can’t marry who they like. Yes they can, and we love it when they do, the romance of it all. In fact, we offer the same vacant eyed adulation to the newly grafted on members of this special club. The blue blood required to make you special, divine even, and link you to tradition and history, in the ways we’ve been told justify the monarchy, seems unnecessary, as it’s all the more exciting when the “ordinary” are married in, and instantly become super human as a result.

Ah, but they can’t get divorced. Yes they can and they can remarry and carry on.

They live in a goldfish bowl, really? I thought they lived in several huge palaces, which they own and yet are maintained by taxes. As for it being transparent, so that we can watch them swimming inside, I haven’t myself been able to witness any private royal moments. What you do see is all public engagements, and by and large the press are very deferential to the royals.

60 years of selfless dedication to a life of service. That's what they're saying. Selflessly, carrying on serving as queen. I hope that when a doctor, or nurse or fireman retires, we have a huge public outpouring of sympathy and celebration for their life of selfless dedication to service. Otherwise, it seems we really put much too higher price on waving from the back of a carriage.

Breaking Bad's Black Heart

There is a black heart at the core of Breaking Bad. Not because it deals with the ugly side of life. Not because its protagonist is shown to be deeply flawed, eventually bordering on evil (if such a term is ever relevant). No, it deals excellently with darkness and the forgotten choices of the desperate and the weak, and those who prey upon them, while they slip through the cracks. Ideas and actions can be evil, even if it's overly simplistic to tar people with that label. Evil things do happen in Breaking Bad. That's not the issue, for me. It's just that the writers clearly believe something that I personally don't. In fact they believe something that I believe to be evil. They believe in damnation, and they do not believe, it seems, in redemption.

What appealed to me at first about Breaking Bad, was that it seemed to be about how slim the line is between good and bad. That through circumstance, and increasingly poor decision making, anyone could fall from grace. It appeared to be a tragedy about a good man's fall. Placed in a world he didn't fully understand, Walter makes poor choices; at first to survive, and later to thrive, in that environment, having been almost complete taken over by his new life and surroundings. Fear and panic guide him, it seemed. Fear of losing everything he was trying to support, if the means by which he's trying support it are discovered. Panic in the moments when that fear seems to be realised. Could he turn around, or is the notion of his better self now only useful as a rationale for his increasingly evil actions?

What started out, for me, as a bold story of how good and evil are not useful terms because, given the wrong circumstances, anyone can flit between both. And, that understanding and empathy are always to be applied because nobody is evil and no one truly lost: context is everything. Has now shown itself to be about how people's true selves are not fully known, even unto themselves, until they are tested. That may be a simple truth: we don't know who we are without experience. Yet, here, it's used to explain why badness happens. In other words we are fated to be one thing and can expect no redemption. At first, Walter makes a seemingly naive choice to profit from a criminal undertaking, without fully grasping what he will lose in so doing. In later episodes, flash backs are increasingly used, to alter his motives and to reveal that: he was always this way, he always was arrogant and wanted to be a big shot. His apparent new self was, in fact, his true self.

This seems to have been the idea from the start. The creator of the show, Vince Gilligan, has this to say about what he wishes for people who do terrible things:

If religion is a reaction of man, and nothing more, it seems to me that it represents a human desire for wrongdoers to be punished. I hate the idea of Idi Amin living in Saudi Arabia for the last 25 years of his life. That galls me to no end. I feel some sort of need for Biblical atonement, or justice, or something. I like to believe there is some comeuppance, that karma kicks in at some point, even if it takes years or decades to happen. My girlfriend says this great thing that’s become my philosophy as well. 'I want to believe there's a heaven. But I can't not believe there's a hell.

Can't not believe there's a hell. Can't not believe in the most evil idea man has ever imagined. That in secret, and forever, some power that won't reveal itself until you've been judged, will punish you with endless torture.

This seems a popular notion and synchronises itself nicely with much of the shows audience. They have uniformly hated Walter and wait eagerly to see his eventual downfall and for biblical justice to be served. Definitive justice as a revenge or balance for all previous wrongdoing.

The appeal here seems to be in enjoying the horror at his actions and in believing that they represent a simple truth: there are bad people and they do bad things. Rather than feeling sadness at his downfall and believing the show operates on the complex truth: that bad things can happen to anyone and for no good reason but all of us deserve to be understood.

As I say, I've stopped believing that the show represents anything. I feel it has blackness at its core. It's pandering to the capital punishment crowd and offering them a gore story about how an evil man reveals himself. They could be anywhere you know and we won't be safe until we shoot them between the legs with huge volts of electricity, for they are a cancer and must be cut out. Well, I don't believe that and I'm not entertained by that notion. I can't just watch the story of a bad man doing bad things. There's just no point.

Anytime or Never

Who can I talk to about Breaking Bad?

It's arguably the best TV show ever, yet hardly anyone's watched it, or, more annoyingly, those who have are all at different points in the series, making it impossible to discuss without spoilers.

To me, this is just a fact of how entertainment is consumed in the age of multiple channels, on-demand access and Internet downloads. Seeing things at the same moment in time as friends, almost never happens. It's a pity as part of the fun of a series, beyond watching it, is experiencing it - anticipating it and taking time to discuss it with others, particularly for such a nuanced show as Breaking Bad.

Anyway, it has been suggested that this kind of dialogue over shows has not disappeared, it's just been relocated, moved from interpersonal space into cyberspace. Social interactions have evolved, removing the boundary of space and time, you can drop in and out whenever you want, contribute as much as like, from wherever you are - in much the same way as you can view shows, you can comment on them: on your own schedule. Failure to see this, it appears, is like old media's failure to coexist alongside new media.

Personally, I don't see it that way. Surely, just as time slipped viewings make the water-cooler debate awkward for fear of spoilers, so must open threads on the Internet make cyber discussion impossible without them, or even more limited, as at the time of writing you can't gauge how clued in your audience may be. Posting a comment with a plot point would reveal itself in everyone's timeline, whether they were ready to see that detail or not. It would be like somebody walking through the office freely shouting the endings to everyone's favourite shows.

So, in person or online, we are limited to oblique references, and vague statements of general encouragement to others, to: keep watching, it's very good. Or, am I wrong, is there some place we can get together and share our excitement or insights into our weekly viewings?

If you know let me know, I'm keen to get more out of my favourite shows by seeing in them, what everyone else has seen in them.

Flawed messengers reveal real hope

This Daisey story and KONY2012 make me sad. Sad because of the terrible issues they highlight, but also sad because, in contradiction to their intentions, they've given comfort to the neigh-sayers by being misguided/misleading.

We are often told (by cynical people) that we live in a cynical world, one where nobody could tear themselves away from their touch-screens long enough to care about anybody else - not even people they know, must less ones that they don't know. In fact, we're great at finding rationals to not care, to not help others: they brought it on themselves, I suspect the funds don't get fairly distributed, why help other nations out when we've got our own problems, why help our own people out they're just feckless.

Every once in a while, something comes into view, often via those same touch-screens we can't tear ourselves away from, that makes people aware of an issue. When this happens, it often disproves the cynical view, people respond openly with hope and a genuine desire to help: they do care. As with KONY2012, which went instantly viral and showed that thousands of people took it at face value, in an uncynical way, because when presented with a horrible situation, even one miles away and affecting people who practice a different culture, they cared. Maybe just enough to pass the word on, but they did.

The same was true of Mike Daisey. To Apple's legion of unquestioning fanboys, who see high-end electronics, beautifully made and marketed at the well-heeled, as virtuous, the company can do no wrong. Those of us who own their devices don't want to be made to feel bad about something that makes us feel ridiculously good. So, not much attention had been paid to the many, many news stories detailing the horrible conditions under which these shiny toys are made. Daisey's rhetorical one-man show caught the attention and contributed to a growing call for Apple to clean-up its act, so that it's as shiny as the buffed aluminium that makes their electronics so appealing.

Get the message out in an evocative way and people do respond, they do care. At the same moment the neigh-sayers, squirming awkwardly, look for reasons not to care. They pour scorn on the way the message was spread: over social media, or they question the credulity of the re-bloggers and re-tweeters. They may even sight a patronising cultural imperialism as a turn off. This all takes place before any real evidence appears to cause the original stories to be questioned.

Then the worst thing happens. The stories are shown to be questionable. The motives may still be real but the methods and practices are misguided at best, fraudulent at worst.

Daisey, it turns out, didn't visit as many places as he mentions in his entertaining rant, and, although nearly everything he mentions is real, he didn't witness much of it first hand and certainly not in the manner he describes. As for KONY2012, they're a real non-profit but they have a poor charitable rating (a mere 2 stars), owing to the fact that they keep closed accounts. Who knows for sure where all the money they receive goes, although it seems some of it ends up funding another ugandan rebel faction. One that it appears is as unsavoury as Kony's Lord's Resistance Army.

OK, this is all a salient reminder that we should be more informed before we take a stance. Some of the neigh-sayers were, in truth, only offering this caution. That in itself is no bad thing, a call to be properly informed. Yet sadly, the clay feet of the messengers has offered, for those who ridicule and rubbish every hopeful act, proof that they were right, that it's never worth caring: everything's a scam. Many who chose to care will feel duped, and foolish - the kind of foolish that the cynical seek to avoid at all costs. It may lead to some harding their attitudes in the future, for fear of being conned again. The whole thing ends up looking like it was fake, the stories and the caring; as the critics claim that its all just shallow click-revolution, and slacktivism.

It wasn't all fake. While the intentions of the authors may still be true, they may not be and, in any case, its hard to argue that now. But the intentions of those who were encouraged to hope and to care were real. The overwhelming evidence suggests that to be true. Given better information, via a less self-serving media, those people could make a real difference. I hope we don't lose sight of that and instead find that Invisible Children and Mike Daisey have just given us another couple of excuses not to care. We really don't need anymore of those.