Author Archives: quinn

1000 Ledes n + 3: Six and Three Quarters Years Old

Sheila Uhulay is crying. She is screaming, sobs ripping out of her throat with a force that makes her little body look like it’s being pummeled by an invisible and cruel playmate. She stops occasionally, eyes too crowded and wet to see her mother’s hand, her face puffed, lips straining in the wide oval of children’s violent grief. Sometimes, as if she’s run out of spirit, the wail dies out, and her face is frozen in this too-big emotion. Then the cry returns, halting and stuttering, until the sound begins to really flow again.

A few minutes ago Sheila was carrying the commemorative green Duckworld Bouncy Playland cup with matching crazy straw. She was tired of carrying it. She has attempted to get her mom to carry it 15 times, but Mom had been adamant, she was carrying her cup herself. She had carried it through two train transfers in busy and hot tunnels where all the huge grownups crowded down on her and only her Mom’s hand had kept her going the right direction. After all of that they had emerged onto a sunny and clear street. Sheila had walked over to a tall trash can and circled it looking for the hole. Eventually her mother pointed to the top and she pitched the cup in.

She turned away, took three steps, and panicked. A few moments later her mother was trying to reach down into the trash to retrieve the cup as she pleaded for her mom to somehow make it reappear. Her mother, unable to reach the cup, eventually took her hand and lead her away.

Now she is walking down the street, the crying calmed to the point of speech being possible. “Why did I do that?” she begs the wall, the ground, her mom. She rounds on her mom. “Why didn’t you stop me?” “I didn’t know what you were doing,” her mom replies, shrugging the shoulder attached to the hand that is holding Sheila’s hand. Sheila says it over and over again: “Why did I do that?”

Sheila is six, and now knows that she can betray herself.

From my archive: Notes on LA, circa 1997

“Precious and few are the moments that you and your own worst enemy share.” -TMBG

I was born in a city made of alien’s dreams. LA is fabricated out of the wild ideas of her immigrants. The streets are littered with dream fragments, dream dust, hope detritus. When you spend your childhood sliding between the bitter remains of so many grownup’s visions you don’t learn to dream for yourself. Hope is a quality that one conceals. You have to go somewhere else to learn to dream. It is vital for the children of LA to leave, and they do in droves. But it is also important to take the essence of it in you, you will anyway, and fighting it just makes the exodus longer and lonelier.

I have lived in self-imposed exile from my hometown for a few years now. I miss my beaches. I miss the continual crush of life. I even miss the dead and dying dreams of the Midwest. It’s easy to avoid homesickness though, thinking of the reasons I left. The worst part of LA is easily enough. It’s the worst part of California in general, it’s the palm trees. Ratty little worthless things that don’t serve a purpose under heaven but to look bad and sway dangerously when the Santa Anas blow. They don’t even have the decency to cast shade anyone can use. They occupy space, they smell like nothing, they have no fruit or flowers and they are everywhere. I hate them, I hate the hours I have had to stare at them while stuck in traffic, which is the second worst thing about California in general and LA in specific. You haven’t done traffic until you’ve come across the mouth of the valley at 2:30 in the morning and been utterly and totally packed in like a parking lot for no reason anyone can divine. it would just appear that everyone as one decided to stop moving.

There’s more, you haven’t experienced terror until you’ve tried to merge into the other form of LA traffic jam: bumper to bumper going about 80-85. Speed limits in California are not only often optional, they are at times downright deadly. The most insane part is that people choose daily commutes to and from work that are simply nuts. they are on the road forever, and driving on the edge of death the entire time. The culture has completely evolved around it; the LA freeway systems now have designated accident spots. It is LA’s own unique way of dealing with surreality directly in the face. The West Coast’s version of “reasonable travel” proves that our perspective on distance is eminently scaleable. there’s this wonderful quote from Bill Bryson that says roughly if you say you are driving from Surrey to Cornwall “a distance that most Americans would happily go for a taco” the British will think now that’s a tall order. Even the rest of America looks to the west and thinks “you guys spend waaay too much time in your cars.” In the Bay Area, this is considered a reasonable step in career building.

In California space is considered irrelevant and personal. As is the custom of so many city folk Californians measure distance in time, as in “oh, the restaurant is 15 minutes away.” The phenomena, however, goes beyond how I have seen it played out anywhere else. If you say but how far is it, a native will look at you as if you just asked “yes, but does the owner have a foot fetish?” it’s none of your business to know more than the freeway exit. The caveat: there are pretty much just two measures of time: 15 minutes, and 45 minutes. These two measurement however have no real relationship with how far it to somewhere or even how long it will take to get there. They pass to you one bit of information: whether you are going to spend most of the journey on the freeway or the surface streets. Anything on surface streets is 15 minutes away. It takes more than 15 minutes to park in most of southern California, actually. If you should be visiting, budget yourself an hour. As for a 45 minute trip, budget yourself 15 minutes. When you arrive is a completely arbitrary unit of time. La has one of the world’s finest freeway systems that may at any time be utterly impassable. The culture has again adapted wonderfully though; if you say “sorry I’m late – traffic” you can be instantly forgiven for missing anything up to the birth of your child. If you toss in “..and I couldn’t find parking.” you can miss everything on up to puberty.

I went back to visit recently. I learned there is a flip side to the idea that there is no such thing as a prophet in his hometown- a hometown makes a lousy Mecca. Nothing had changed. All the little strip mall corner shop I had know had gone out of business and been replaced by corner shops that would be out of business before I return. I sat in a room full of stand up comics on a Wednesday night, no smoke hanging thickly in the air. More than three hours of carefully timed bitterness turned the funnest thing in the world into ditch digging. People sat around like piles of cloth. Slack and lost of purposes- they seemed to have sacrificed all the wrong things. They came to Los Angeles with the idea that LA owed them something for the effort; they have replied its indifference with a persistent indifference of their own. What I hated most about the world of that room was all the erie places it connected to my inner world. They highlighted their pain, and sometimes they highlighted mine too. They served it cold and without love. They said “it’s funny cause it’s true” but the truer it got the less funny it was. Southern California lives totally in reference to itself- making a twisted yardstick to measure the world with, and my fellow comics had internalized this yardstick. Selling out was the topic of the hour, and how much you could get for doing it. I escaped into the night air and thought hard what I had learned since leaving; as long as you love your life and what you do you can’t sell out; when you don’t care anymore it’s time to stop, even if you haven’t made a cent. It’s cliche, but I escaped so it was good enough. Sitting beside and within my old paradigm, I saw the yardstick inside myself, and I saw the huge distance between me and brilliance. I could see where I became intolerant of my own learning process. Where I had no time for my own expression, where I would never approve. LA is sick of it. There is little room for creativity without filters, there is no tolerance for experimentation because experimentation spends so much time failing. Instead everything must sparkle and be clustered with jewels. It is a jaded where. It is a where in me that will never be pleased with all the time I spend between flashes of brilliance.

I was fairly proud to be from what seemed to be the world’s Most Hated Big City. It always gave me an underdog feel, so I loved Los Angeles and told everyone so. I tried to step back in and see it clearly, but still not for it’s own sake. I wanted something from it still; to give context to other things I have and plan to write, to define the “my city” that became the basic unit of my perceptions. Los Angeles is not a simple place to understand. I didn’t get it in these reflective meditations about it, but I also didn’t get it in the 16 years of growing up I did there. It got me without a doubt.

Despondent, angry, confused and tired I responded in traditional American manner; I went midnight shopping at the local supermarket. I went and shared my space with other silent consumers, and stopped a while to eat my own paradoxes. What I hate most about LA is that even my picture is still not true. In the time between the lines that is a 1:30am run to Ralph’s you come face to face with people in a way with no social consequences. We became our shadows; we became real. We met each other in the eye, thanked each other for the help, they offered me a cut in line because I had only two items. Suddenly the tired bustle of the city opens and shows a tolerance that lives between the lines. There is, against all odds and because humans cannot ever be all one thing, a quiet and hopeful celebration of life we pretend not to see in each other in the light of the over exposing sun. LA is a city dying to be gentle. The people are sensitive but lost in the hype, even when they are creating it. Malice in LA is often the malice of a young child; unfocused and unhappy and slips all over and fades away and is forgotten. It is hard to sit quietly and think, aw- I am describing myself. I went to the beach I grew up on. It’s still big, but getting smaller. Time curves different as I get closer as well, some street I drove on no more than a month ago, the next turn I may have to retrieve from a distant past just to pick my way there. And when I said hello to my ocean I was sure that it had been no more than a week since I had last. It was night, this was gang territory, I was afraid the car would get fucked with, I was afraid of everything. But I had something to prove- that this stretch of beach was still mine, that I was still its. I walked getting sand in my shoes beside the sewer overflow we called the creek when I was growing up. Intellectually I know how bad that is, but I still go to taste that water. This bit of Pacific is my holy Ganges. It still washes me and its taste is imprinted in me somewhere below reason. I traced my way back to the under highway tunnel that led off the beach. I could feel the dried salt sticking to my face where I had washed it and sticking to my hands. I didn’t feel cathartic or even satisfied, but I can still feel that stickiness now. I carry it with me. I won’t be back for a long time.

This is my struggle with LA- that I can’t hate it, that I really can’t love it, that I have to stay away because I can’t handle it, not because it can’t handle me. But maybe it can’t handle me anyway. It isn’t a place to dream after all, it is a place to bring dreams to, and I’m not finished. The psyche it created in me is one of coping, and too often with vicious disappointments. To learn to dream, I suspect it’s better to go somewhere with a real public transportation system.

1,000 Ledes n + 1: Hetchman Noe Forgets

Hetchman Noe is writing a real actual paper letter. He is telling the object of the letter that he has recently moved to Portland, OR and since he

Since looks wrong. Sinse? sincse? cinse? Definitely not cinse. He stares at the letters he’s written. s i n c e. A cognitive paralysis begins to move down and throughout his body, beginning at his tight cheeks and pinched brow and continuing until his hand aches from an over-tight and immobile grip on his pen.

He knows how to spell this word, so this is ridiculous. Was it right he first time? Since, is it since? This is a first grade word. He stares at it, all the words around it melting away into the gibberish of inattention. It still looks wrong. Cince. That looks possible, but somehow unlikely. Hetchman closes his eyes. He looks for it on the page of a memory. He has the page up, he can see a jumble of other words, and where it belongs, there a five letter blank spot. It’s not there. Somehow it’s escaped the page, fled his memory. At least now he knows it’s five letters. He grits his teeth. “I have known this word since first grade,” He says quietly, never opening his teeth, “I know how to spell since.”

He stares at the words he’s written. He picks up his phone, flips to the editor and punches in his first spelling. S I N C E. He spellchecks. Since is the correct spelling. Even his dumb phone knows that. He turns back to his letter. Since still looks wrong. It looks so wrong, as if those letters cannot possibly add up to a word in English, not any word, much less since. He’s beginning to panic a little, he’s telling himself this is stupid, of course that’s how since is spelled. But inside him is a feeling, a feeling of wrongness that can’t speak, but if it could it would be yelling “Fuck the dictionary, that is not how you spell that word. It’s not!” He’s upset, enough that he can feel it in his throat, a large knot tying inside his neck, his own muscles choking him. Why the hell, he starts to wonder, do you have muscles in your neck that can choke yourself? He puts the letter down and takes a break. He will come back to it when he knows again how to spell since.

In this one moment

pg 859: ‘At St. Collie only the Crocodiles’d heard of him. My own Daddy’d followed him, cut out pictures, as a boy.’ Gately can tell she’s smiling under there. ‘But what I used to do, I’d throw away the pipe and shake my fist at the sky and say As God is my fucking witness NEVER AGAIN, as of this minute right here I QUIT FOR ALL TIME.‘ She also has this habit of absently patting the top of her head when she talks, where little barrettes and spongy clamps hold the veil in place. ‘And I’d bunker up all white-knuckled and stay straight. And count the days. I was proud of each day I stayed off. Each day seemed evidence of something, and I counted them. I’d add them up. Line them up end to end. You know?’ Gately knows very well but doesn’t nod, lets her do this on just her own steam. She says ‘And soon it would get… improbable. As if each day was a car Knievel had to clear. One car, two cars. By the time I’d get up to say like maybe about 14 cars, it would begin to seem like this staggering number. Jumping over 14 cars. And the rest of the year, looking ahead, hundreds and hundreds of cars, me in the air trying to clear them.’ She left her head alone and cocked it. ‘Who could do it? How did I ever think anyone could do it that way?’

Gately remembered some evil fucking personal detoxes. Broke in Maiden. Bent with pleurisy in Salem. MCI/Billerica during a four-day lockdown that caught him short. He remembered Kicking the Bird for weeks on the floor of a Revere Holding cell, courtesy of the good old Revere A.D.A. Locked down tight, a bucket for a toilet, the Holding cell hot but a terrible icy draft down near the floor. Cold Turkey. Abrupt Withdrawal. The Bird. Being incapable of doing it and yet having to do it, locked in. A Revere Holding cage for 92 days. Feeling the edge of every second that went by. Taking it a second at a time. Drawing the time in around him real tight. Withdrawing. Any one second: he remembered: the thought of feeling like he’d be feeling this second for 60 more of these seconds — he couldn’t deal. He could not fucking deal. He had to build a wall around each second just to take it. The whole first two weeks of it are telescoped in his memory down into like one second — less: the space between two heartbeats. A breath and a second, the pause and gather between each cramp. An endless Now stretching its gull-wings out on either side of his heartbeat. And he’d never before or since felt so excruciatingly alive. Living in the Present between pulses. What the White Flaggers talk about: living completely In The Moment. A whole day at a crack seemed like tit, when he Came In. For he had Abided With The Bird.

But this inter-beat Present, this sense of endless Now — it had vanished in Revere Holding along with the heaves and chills. He’d returned to himself, moved to sit on the bunk’s edge, and ceased to Abide because he no longer had to.

His right side is past standing, but the hurt is nothing like the Bird’s hurt was. He wonders, sometimes, if that’s what Ferocious Francis and the rest want him to walk toward: Abiding again between heartbeats; tries to imagine what kind of impossible leap it would take to live that way all the time, by choice, straight: in the second, the Now, walled and contained between slow heartbeats. Ferocious Francis’s own sponsor, the nearly dead guy they wheel to White Flag and call Sarge, says it all the time: It’s a gift, the Now: it’s AA’s real gift: it’s no accident they call it The Present.

‘And yet it wasn’t til that poor new pipe-fellow from home pointed at me and hauled me up there and I said it that I realized,’ Joelle said. ‘I don’t have to do it that way. I get to choose how to do it, and they’ll help me stick to the choice. I don’t think I’d realized before that I could — I can really do this. I can do this for one endless day. I can. Don.’

The look he was giving her was meant to like validate her breakthrough and say yes yes she could, she could as long as she continued to choose to. She was looking right at him, Gately could tell. But he’d also gotten a personal prickly chill all over from his own thinking. He could do the dextral pain the same way: Abiding. No one single instant of it was unendurable. Here was a second right here: he endured it. What was undealable-with was the thought of all the instants all lined up and stretching ahead, glittering. And the projected future fear of the A.D.A., whoever was out there in a hat eating Third World fast food; the fear of getting convicted of Nuckslaugh-ter, of V.I.P.-suffocation; of a lifetime on the edge of his bunk in M.C.I. Walpole, remembering. It’s too much to think about. To Abide there. But none of it’s as of now real. What’s real is the tube and Noxzema and pain. And this could be done just like the Old Cold Bird. He could just hunker down in the space between each heartbeat and make each heartbeat a wall and live in there. Not let his head look over. What’s unendurable is what his own head could make of it all. What his head could report to him, looking over and ahead and reporting. But he could choose not to listen; he could treat his head like G. Day or R. Lenz: clueless noise. He hadn’t quite gotten this before now, how it wasn’t just the matter of riding out the cravings for a Substance: everything unendurable was in the head, was the head not Abiding in the Present but hopping the wall and doing a recon and then returning with unendurable news you then somehow believed.

1,000 ledes #n: Ananda Panek

Ananda Panek doesn’t like peanut butter, but likes Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups for the particular end note of salt they give the chocolate. Also, they don’t really taste of peanut butter. She doesn’t like them enough to sneak her roommate’s whole precious supply at 2am, while unable to sleep. She is often unable to sleep. She takes one out of an actual desire for the pleasure of eating it- and her roommate wouldn’t mind that, either. As the taste goes a bit stale in her mouth and she looks at them, she knows there isn’t much pleasure in eating the rest. When she does eat them, it is out of compulsion. The experience isn’t devoid of pleasure, but neither is it really worth much.

After disposing of the wrappers and promising – promising she will replace them tomorrow morning, perhaps even before her roommate discovers they are gone, she lays down on her bed, feeling guilty and weak and not at all good in her stomach. She holds the pillow a little too tightly to be likely to go to sleep. She switches out the last light. A few moments later something flashes in the dark room. She sits up, and it happens again. The room seems to brighten in a grey, fuzzy way, but she can’t see anything much more distinctly than before. She feels warmer. More flashes. This time, she recognizes them.

“No no no no no please no,” she whispers quietly, throat tight, tears welling up. “Oh god,” she says, “The chocolate. Oh no, why did I do that?” She gets back up and without turning on the light and walks quietly to the kitchen, Trying not to pay attention to the continuing flashes. She returns with a bowl and puts it beside her bed. She lays down again, reaches out to touch the rim of the bowl, and confident that she can reach it without trouble, closes her eyes and waits for the pain that will slowly sever her head from her body. It begins from the left.

Publishers perishing

It’s arcane. It’s hidebound. It’s niche, intentionally obfuscated, and elitist. It’s written almost entirely in -cue retching noises- passive voice. That’s right, it’s the world of academic publishing, boys and girls! A world not only irrelevant to most people’s lives, but anti-relavant, deriving its sense of status from exactly how far up its own ass it can crawl. (Ok, that’s a bit harsh. But… you know who you are.)

For reasons that run in the same direction as but aren’t exactly like my copyright interests I am fascinated with methods of publishing in the world of academic journals. By methods of publishing I mean Open Access and alternative models to traditional peer review. Since a 2006 article for Seed which I over researched in my unfortunate way (‘here’s 4000 words of your 1300 word article… pick the ones you like’) I have known more than is useful about the changes in both, and their complete irrelevance to one another. Well, nearly complete. OA journals can be peer reviewed in any ol’ way, even the ol’ way, but toying with peer review models doesn’t really work with the old print system, so it helps to have some OA platform to play on. But let’s ignore changes in peer review. Assume all journals use the same system of rigor, and that it produces the same result. (Ahem.)

OA means simply this: you academic journal is published online, free and available to all comers. It sounds weirdly like The Pirate Bay, or Grokkster or something, but there’s a few important differences. The people that write in academic journals do it for impact, not money. Never money. “Publish or perish” is about status, not pay, and getting paid is a breach of ethics. You pay to get published, just like the person on the other end pays to read you in the old model. The people that peer review don’t pay money to do it, but they don’t get paid, so they do pay with time. The friggin’ editorial boards usually aren’t paid. It would be as if Lars Ulrich and his producers would never dream of taking money for their work, and only hoped that Elektra was hard at work doing whatever it could to get their tracks into the hands of true metal heads as fast and easily as possible. And that’s how all of this field has worked for hundreds of years before the wah wah was even invented.

If the creative and intellectual work of journals is unpaid, who the hell (you might reasonably ask) is collecting and pocketing all that money? Basically, the printers and manager/secretary types. Elsevier is the purest of middlemen- they not only don’t add intellectual value, it’s pretty much against the rules for them to do so.

If the past 17 years have shown anything, it’s that the net is hell on middlemen. It doesn’t take a genius to work out that with all the same academics offering to do all the same work for the same price (free or negative), charging on the other end for journal subscriptions is just a way for researchers to hide the material they are trying to promote and finally achieve a zen like balance of life long expert toil and total obscurity.

The world wide web was actually invented to do the thing that turned companies like Elsevier from vital parts of intellectual infrastructure into increasingly desperate parasitic lampreys attached to the body of human progress. Science has taught us that organisms displaced from their ecologies go crazy and fight like hell to survive. Nothing, with the possible exception of giant manatees, goes gently into that good night. Expect no different from the journal publishers who archive those ecology notes.

The writing is on the wall, yeah, but that still doesn’t explain why you should care, especially if you are here because you like my desserts or something. You should care because you want a jet car, a simple pill that cures cancer, perfect schools for your children, to live on the moon, the reversal of male pattern baldness, kumquats that never go bad, or perhaps even a planet your grandchildren can safely inhabit in 100 years. Science (and all academia really) seems like it’s about braniacs pelted with apples in patent offices or something, but it’s actually about tiny pieces of the puzzle of how things work being slowly assembled by more people in more directions. It’s an accelerating accretion of understanding and power over the world as it is. It’s exponential, metaphorically speaking, in how every piece of new knowledge opens up the door to n more pieces, etc. The fuel for this growth is eyeballs. (No, actually this time, really, not like the .com bubble.) OA is the rocket fuel approach. Let everyone see it the instant it happens, add small amounts of time, and viola, you get to live in the future.

One of the only solid downsides of OA is that the horrid scholar’s passive voice is now googlable, and not restricted to other academics who are presumably in on the joke. (“We noted across archives that vicious abuse of the English language had been seen.”) It’s the price you pay for progress.

The problems is publish or perish is about status as well as impact, so big name journals get to exist for a while longer largely holding up the progress they once solely enabled.

Which brings us to government action. Moves like the NIH requiring all research they fund to be OA within a year and FRPAA do a lot to get us closer to our jet cars and full heads of hair, even when those things aren’t directly being researched. Also, it takes a government to put an industry out of its misery when the time has come. But most governments are irresponsible twerps and ignore the painful screaming, letting the beasts suffer terribly before finally expiring on their own.

Peter Suber, a philosopher that accidently became the OA guy in the 90s, points to Ireland as a good example of what to do. They simultaneously launched OA archives at their universities while requiring funded research to end up in them. Coordination like this is a great idea, both in the potential mercy killing of Elsevier’s publishing model and in boosting both Irish and non-Irish research. (Is there an Irish word for Goyim or Gaijin? There should be.)

For 6 ramekins:

For Custard

* 2 cups whipping cream
* 1/2 cup sugar- turbinado, demerara, muscovado, whatever.
* 1 vanilla bean. Seriously, not extract, bean. Soft and squishy preferred.
* 5 large egg yolks

For Crème Brûlée

* white sugar

You’ll need:

* Cheesecloth
* Baking pan
* Aforementioned ramekins
* Propane torch

Quick instructions:

Put the whipping cream and sugar in a saucepan. Split the vanilla bean, spread it out and use a paring knife to scrape out the innards into the saucepan, then throw the rest in.

Preheat oven to 325.

Separate 5 eggs, keeping the yolk. Try to get rid of as much non-yolk as possible. Use a vigorous whisk get the yolks a bit fluffy.

Throw the cream on medium heat. Cook the cream, stirring nearly constantly for a minimum of 10 minutes. Let it scald at some point. When it’s cooked up, pour it through cheesecloth to filter, into something that pours well.

Boil some water. Arrange the ramekins in a baking pan.

Pour cream into the egg yolks in a very slow drizzle while continuing to whisk. After most of the cream is in you can pour slightly faster, but keep it blended and frothy.

Pour mixture into the ramekins, and fill the baking dish with the boiling water, taking care to not get any water in the ramekins. Put it in the oven, back 30-35 minutes until just the center of the custard shakes a little if you shake the dish.

Pull them out and cool them in the fridge for three hours – two days.

When they are firmed up and cool, put the ramekin on a plate to catch sugar and spoon an even coat over the top. Burn sugar to desired brown, put back in the fridge for 15 minutes at least, but not more than an hour. (It’s possible to firm up gone-soft sugar with more fire, but not recommended)

Eat.

What makes a high order primate click a submit button

TransparencyCorps, with which I am currently obsessed, isn’t interesting because it’s crowdsourcing. There’s been plenty of that, even from the Sunlight Foundation (Creators of TransparencyCorps.org). Among their past hits were Where are they now? which tracked the staffer/rep to lobbyist revolving door, and EarMarkWatch which employed Sunlight’s thousands of screaming fans to watch earmarks. TransparencyCorps is interesting because it’s about doing the task rather than the specific goal of the task. When you log in you are presented with various projects which you can apply your boundless, or at least NP friendly, intelligence to, that we might make a better government and better world.

Also they give you points, and if you have the most points you get listed on a leaderboard. This concept of the identity resting with being part of a community that does the action (in this case the Corps) rather than the goal of the action (Get those earmarks watched!) seems powerfully important to me. In the online world it has most in common with the stated inspiration for the Corps, Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. But psych studies would suggest an important difference: the turk is ruined by money. Social psychology studies have consistently shown that tasks people will enthusiastically do because they enjoy them lose their charm as soon as the people doing the tasks get paid for them. Being paid once can actually take away the pleasure forever.

What is this magic currency that is a disappearing polymorph in the presence of money? And why does TransparencyCorp have it in spades? Partly I think it’s the chance to beat the bastards in politics, to catch them at their game. Since their game is about corruption and money, it makes sense that introducing money dilutes the fierce sense of freedom that arises out of finding a web form that finally lets you stick it to The Man. In this case the disappearing polymorph is outrage.

But there’s more. When you hit done, another page comes up, subtly asking for another. Everything hints at stories. Who are these people? What are their lives like? In the case of earmarks, what do they want the money for, and how much is it? Given that there isn’t really a goal beyond ‘be part of the corps’ you’re free to wander mentally around what it all means. As Clay Johnson of Sunlight said, one of the reason people keep pressing the button is that “Everyone wants to be the person that finds the next bridge to nowhere.”

I predict stickiness, and a community that will grow up if Sunlight lets it, because there’s about four ways in which this set up is designed to make little primate brains go whir.

Tab Dump

  • From the wonderful and ever surprising Carl Malamud, audio of TS Elliot Himself reading the Wasteland. Other than all the talk about copyright, it’s something else to here it from the author. I felt like I could understand it in a new way.
  • Matt Taibbi, who is normally at his finest when Savaging Thomas Friedman, has found something even better to savage- Goldman Sachs. He continues with a piece about Goldman Sachs gaming the TARP. In my fantasy, Taibbi testifies a lot for a new version of the Pecora Commission.