This publication is dedicated to the pursuit of skills (among other less important things).  It has documented game-show hackers (pre-internet), video-game virtuosos, and race-car driving bike-riding video-game-shooting master Italians.  Each of these examples document individuals with skills that were acquired only through impossibly hard work and that have no redeeming societal value.  Why are they working so hard?

I don’t know.

I really don’t know.  Hard work is an exercise in extreme failure.  Each excruciating step in the process is planted right on the back of another attempt’s failure.  The enigma of it all is exaggerated when you consider the game-show hackers that have been previously discussed.  It is as if the concept of hard work has been narrowly defined as a 9 to 5 job in a factory; any task that does not involve that experience is considered constructive and/or worthy.  Everything else is a cliche from Office Space.  So as long as the man is working on his own project in his own way, then it is worth the extreme effort.

More to come…

Until then, what does Rakim have to say about this?

Waiting at a bus stop is your weakest, smallest, most ignorant (in the technical sense, not a personal stupidity sense) moments in your day.  You cede all sorts of control and information that you could use to understand the context of your wait to a process that is subjected to a variety of forces hellbent of ruining it.  Traffic, weird passengers, sick drivers, bad weather, rogue North Carolina farmers – all of them are out there ready to make you wait even longer.  The only thing you can do is stand there and hope the bus will make it.  It always does but the relief you feel when you can grab a seat on your bus is not appreciation for an efficient public transportation infrastructure; it is Stockholm Syndrome.

When you wait at a bus stop, you are waiting passively.  All of the variables in the interaction – the bus stop, the bus route, the bus number, the schedule (ha!), and finally you – are relics of an age where information required organization to be recovered.  Encyclopedias broke subjects to their elements so that an alphabet would lead you to some data.  A city would determine the most valuable routes to serve a population of commuters.  Everybody understands why these systems were originally designed and we have learned to live with the consequences.  Buses are always late; they are always clustered when they arrive; and you can’t change that.

When Slate.com asked readers to propose updates to public transportation, I proposed a solution that would change the way users wait for buses.  This realignment would revolutionize the way people relate to their public transportation.  Rather than considering buses as road-trains (fixed to a track-like bus route and schedule [ha!]), people will think of buses like livery cabs.  This is a valuable shift and one that would increase reliance on the bus system and improve mobility in a city.  My solution was called Smart Buses.

Smart Buses inverts the call/stop button on a bus.  In the old system, a rider waits at a bus stop for a specific bus to arrive.  The rider then pulls a rope to tell the bus to stop at another bus stop to depart.  In a Smart Bus system, the rider calls a bus at the initial bus stop and is picked up by a bus waiting for the call.  The Smart Bus then drops the rider off at a pre-determined destination (that was indicated at the initial call).

In this new system, the wait at a bus stop is active.  You are not waiting for a random process to notice you – you are calling for attention.  It is a shift in power and a streamlining of information.  The variables are simplified and the incentive to riding the bus is greatly improved.  Riders stuck across town can find their way to jobs anywhere in the system without depending on a limited set of bus routes.

More on this to come. (ha!)

How do we square the fact that there are people in our society that find ways to work and live with skills that are even more meaningless than the most scrutinized bean-counter?  It is not enough to say that these people earn a living at these tasks.  In some respect, we should applaud their resourcefulness.  The thing that is most alarming is that people practice these skills to make themselves better.  They practice hard.

The man below spent 6 months studying the seemingly random pattern of lights on the “Press Your Luck” gameshow.  Six months of intense scrutiny and study and attention and finally he recognized 5 rotating cycles around which the blinking lights always followed.  Then he verified his theory with his pause button – able to stop the light at will in his severely cluttered livingroom.  All of this was work – work without meetings or semi-casual fridays or movies devoted to the dronery, or folk songs depicting the struggle or days on and days off.  But it was hard.  Harder still because it was different and secretive and weird.  And yet this man persisted until finally he got his chance on Press Your Luck and promptly won $100,000.

He didn’t cheat.  He worked very hard to earn his victory.  What were his incentives?  What could he have accomplished if he applied his energy and focus to more mainstream endeavors?  How could he overlook the drone-like isolation of six months worth of staring into a television’s blinking pixels – to analyze bigger blinking lights – for the slight slight chance that he might win some money.

This man’s work ethic is amazing.  As are the hand-eye coordination of the Koreans below.

The output of all this effort goes *poof* like the smoke off a firecracker.

A man rides a bike on rollers with no hands in a room while playing an online action video game with both hands and most of his brain. He can easily fall off his bike. The amount of brain power utilized to perform this task is incredible.

This man is a Formula One racecar driver.  This is part of his training.  Something about reflexes.

What is it for?  What could he create with that brain power and dedication?

In the end – who cares anyway?

Several posts on this publication have analyzed the normal everyday structure of life in the US.  The way we speak and think, the way we wait, the way we pursue goals and now the way we furnish our apartments.  Technically, and more specifically, the way I just re-arranged the furniture in my apartment.

The normal structure belies a wild, untamed, unexplainable and lonely and quiet unpredictable wilderness of bad grammar, aimless ambition, and unresolved hours.  The incredible weirdness of life – the utterly incomprehensible strangeness of the thing you are seeing or feeling or smelling right now is a controllable force.  It is a wild animal, but not a cool wild animal like a tiger; it is a normal, reasonable wild animal like a water buffalo, or a yak.  It is a boring, brutally strong, single-minded eating machine capable of clearing a field with its mindless chewing while restoring it with its profuse expulsion of shit.  But it’s too dumb to know its power.

It is a beast of burden and the thing that is probably your conscious or your soul and I don’t care if this is too big of an introduction about the interior decoration of my apartment.

The TV, the great tamer of the beast, is no longer the central focal point of my home.  It has been banished to the bedroom where it will be viewed only when demanded.  My living room is now the room within which I live.  Which does not include watching TV.  It includes other things, TBD.

This is not a post that celebrates the demise of TV in the era of Wikipedia.  I hate wikipedia and I love TV.  Especially bad primetime dramas about death and the resolution of crimes that prevent more death from happening.  These programs are the things that tamed the dumb wild animal inside me.

TV – the Empire of Television – drew the maps of my life.  It laid the highways in the wilderness that organized and neatly divided what was something that had no name or metaphor or reason. It gave a history to a place or to a thing or a to a person that didn’t need one, necessarily.  Is this too big a metaphor for interior decoration?  I don’t know – you tell me.

The boundaries that define normal have been drawn by television.  A living room has a couch and chairs that try to face each other (for, you know, conversation) as well as face the TV (in case, you know, no one’s talking).  A workday revolves around the prime time television schedule.  Even if no one is watching prime time TV the way they once did.  Dinner is eaten at or around the evening news.  Sleep occurs at or around the nightly news.   Go somewhere on this planet that has no specific concept of primetime TV and you will find yourself lost.  You will be looking for an axis point around which a day is organized.  Is today a workday or a weekend?  You will consult the TV and you will be confused.  This is the moment when you realize the strangeness underlying the thing you thought was normal.  It’s a thin line.

I crossed that thin line involuntarily.  I am trying to reorient my way around my home without this time-honored focal point.  I do not expect a meaningful transformation to occur.  I am not seeking a new level of productivity or awareness.  I simply cannot go back to unknowing the outside boundaries of TV’s map.  The outer area is bigger than the 3 hours of primetime.  It is wild, curvy, weird, boring, quiet and completely pointless.  Here’s my impression of a yak’s epiphany: “Oh Look!  More Grass!”

An everyday order belies the incredible weirdness of life.   There are phrases and words and compliments and mannerisms and womannerisms and made up words and single and double and triple entendres all like a giant raging river and it’s dammed and controlled by whatisit? our language or our God or our culture or our wommanerisms or our nationality?  I won’t even venture a guess.  But it’s controlled – only slightly, barely, as if a tiny hole would bring the whole thing crashing down.  It’s controlled and harnessed, as best as can be expected by the things we take for granted.  The power of language and ideas and conversations and arguments and confusion and boredom.  It’s all important.  This video plays with language the way today’s child plays a video game.  It’s sure-footed and quick and it comes out of a place apart – let’s call it the shore of the river that’s dammed by God.  Was that a pun?  Dammed by God.  Damned by God.  Does that even have to make sense?  Remember the river is life or truth or something I probably didn’t clarify because I never claimed to know in the first place.

The things I don’t know are probably not answers to questions.  They are things though, I can tell you that – they are items that can be quantified and probably stacked like books.  But books are filled with more things listed on pages.  Those pages are counted and numbered and then read and turned-over.  The aggregate of those things leads to less things but bigger things.  Bigger things are probably more important things; things with weight.  What is the thing of a book?

2666 is 900 pages of things that I’ve read and loved and when you ask me what is the book about? I answer back that it is probably…… probably about life – life like living, the verb part of life, the noun.  It’s a documentation of many things that are semi-related but man, they are barely semi-related.  The only thing linking them is the beating heart and blood and raging stupid sweaty hormonal thoughts of the characters involved.  God are they stupid.  God, did I love this book.  What was it about?  It’s about that god damn river.  Did we even get to the part where we wonder where the river originated and to where it leads?  Do metaphors have myths and origins?

I’m waiting for the NBA finals game 3 to start.  The pre-game show has lasted for an hour and a half.  The pre-game announcements have lasted over a half-hour.  The lights are off the stadium.  The entire nation is watching the Boston Celtics’ home-crowd promo video.  Paul Pierce just told a tired nation to GET LOUD.

Enough.

I love the Milwaukee Bucks more than you love anything.  When I make $1 Billion, I will buy the Bucks from US Senator Herbert Kohl (D-WI).  He will sell the team to me because he will know that I love them and will keep them there forever.  I will also build a new arena for the city.  I will hire a thick-accented old man to call the games at the new arena.  He will be old.  He will be unpolished.  He will wish he was calling an arena league football game.  He will be stuck with the Bucks.  He will fall in love with the team in spite of himself.  His love will infect the city.  There will be no dancers.  The music will be provided for by a city band that does not include Warren Wiegratz.  It will be plainer but purer.  I know what I sound like and deep down you agree with me.  Let’s replace the shine with boredom.  It’s okay.

When my Bucks (our Bucks) make it to the Finals, the game will start earlier, I don’t care what the networks say.  The tickets will be cheaper.  I don’t care what the sponsors need.  The game will reflect the city that will shine in the league.  The old man announcer will speak to something you forgot you thought you didn’t know.

I don’t have to make sense here – a) I’m going to be a billionaire, b) I’m going to own the Bucks, not you, and c) I’ll buy you a couple tickets to show you what I mean.

Go Bucks.

After a while, one recognizes the boundaries that frame a point of view – the things that define normalcy – are keeping other perspectives out.  This video demonstrates how our concept of time is determined by factors that have nothing to do with the seconds clicking away on the wrist watch you used to have but don’t anymore because your phone does it all.

Music is a math problem without a calculator.  Or without a right answer.  Or without a remainder?  I don’t know what music is.  That’s why I don’t know what it is or how to solve it.  I quit my trumpet 10 years ago like she was cheating on me for my impotence.  It’s not my fault – I was raised on the B flat blues scale and could rif mindlessly on it like 2+2.  Then one day my 2-D world grew shadows and I saw angles that made no sense.  For the first time I was sincerely lost in the room I grew up in.  The piddly little scale sounded like Mary Had a Little Lamb.

This song introduced me to the 3rd dimension.  To shadows.  To real symmetry – that is to say, it introduced me to asymmetry because every note I played was over-thought-out and wrong and slow and behind and did I mention it was over-thought-out?  A7 means A dominant 7 which means A C E G-flat – is that right?  tickticktick G-flat sounds weird, should I think of it as F sharp?  What’s the normal way to call it? tickticktick How can I connect this to an F tickticktick shit.

This is another language problem.  So many problems.  Problems like arithmetic.  Problems with remainders.  Problems with formulas.  Problems with answers and guesses that are right and wrong.  Problems with answers I already know but can’t yet communicate.

I miss my trumpet.  I am sleeping with a 49 key Yamaha so that someday I can come back to her.  But this is going slow.  I’m playing Mary Had a Little Lamb in Bass Clef so that I can someday play the thing I am already hearing in my mind.  Same with Bangla – I am squeezing out elementary phrases so that someday I can say what I mean.  I know what I know but can’t communicate either of them.  It is a math problem – I have the formula.  I have the variables.  I even have the answer.  I have trees and squirrels and bad metaphors and brooks and beavers and beaver dams but not yet do I have a forrest.

That was horrible.

As I finger Mary Had a Little Lamb (single entendre) I listen to Mendelssohn.  I was just handed sheet music to a Chopin song I can play (ostensibly).  Playing it drops me in the shadows of this 3rd dimension.  I am touching the sounds buried in my brain – the sounds I can whistle but can’t play.  I am touching them through the finger tips on those 49 electric keys.  I am feeling the curvature of their geometry and I am surprised and confused by the shape of things.  I am not trusting that feeling yet scared of wasting even more time in this struggle.  Both of my linguistic battles are stuck in muck.  This is why toddlers scream when they can’t say what they really feel.

Humans! from three legged legs on Vimeo.

I don’t have a third one.  This is a Twotych.  I just made that up.

I want to say more about this or maybe not this – I want to say more so that the output of my aspirations has some sort of weight.  I do not mean weight in the sense that the meaning behind those words generates any value or meaning, I mean weight in the sense that the tonnage of words is a verifiable measurement that can be taken to indicate that at the very least, I’ve taken this energy and put it to some use.  But rather than struggle for a point or a hook, I let the aspiration speak for itself so I can credit my goals for taking me to whereever I am when I stop and look around.  I don’t know if that’s a good thing or a bad thing, by the way.  I go on runs not to get in shape but to get tired.

My time is slippery and quick – not fast (it’s still slow) but quick like a fat guy who can dunk.

Everyday I’m stuck on a train there is nothing to do and my eyes glaze over blankly through a cloud in my brain that suggests rainfall.  There’s light thunder and you start to smell the rain but ultimately it never produces a single drop, the clouds break up, the train moves along, and Access Hollywood is on and what’s up with Billy Bush anyway?   But somewhere in the gray darkness is a series of seeds that have been planted – probably in the angst filled dramatics of my teenage years.  In the middle of all that hyperbole was an overactive brain that was not searching for quiet, but raising quite a stink about one thing or another.  I did not have rent to pay – I had a trumpet to play.  I did not have a family to feed – I had a family feeding me.   I did not have small talk – I had Kind of Blue.

This is a post about the missed opportunities of not doing anything.  This is not a post about the potential of my seeds.  That was a single entendre.

I can’t not do anything as well as I could when I had 4 lawns to mow in the middle of a summer afternoon when it was Tuesday or Thursday (it didn’t matter to me anyway).  At that time, I could do nothing so well that when the time was over, I was better at something than I was before I started not doing it.  Now I just wait.  Not like a waiter in a restaurant, but like the 13th juror in a courtroom without  a book.  Huh?

When I am not doing something now, I pretend to be doing something, or am wishing I was doing something else, or yelling at myself for failing to do the thing I should be doing, or washing dishes.  The goal of my days is to get myself tired enough to sleep quietly at night.  It helps best if I run and cook an elaborate meal and do the dishes.  I avoid the emptiness of a nothing-moment because they just get filled up with check-lists.

It was more productive when it was meaningless.

There is a 3 month long (or short) performance art piece underway at MoMA.  If you look at the picture above, you will see the representation of a representation of a sculpture made entirely of light that depicts the human condition or probably better yet, human conditioning or even probably better yet than ever, the elimination of human conditioning.

what?

I’m not going to over or under write this anymore.  I’m going all id.

The space within which the user is invited to gaze into the outward gazing eyes of Marina Abramović is bathed in controlled light.  There are no shadows because the space is like a film set without the filming going on (even though this picture demonstrates the fact that there is filming going on, but the medium is not the message here).  The space is fake.  The gazes are  real.  They are empty but they elicit real emotion.  But not in you probably.  What they elicit I can’t tell, but what I can probably say is that the best they can do is answer a question that you didn’t ask or maybe the other way around and ask a question that has no answer.  Not because there is no right answer or wrong answer, but because the answer you would get is so banal and disappointingly true that you were better off not bursting that bubble in the first place.

There is nothing going on here.  If you hate this you are right.  If you love this, you are stupid.  If you don’t know what is going on, you are weak.  If you look at it and get it immediately but realize that once that happens you still don’t know, then you walk away and wonder if the thing that is invisible and dangles like a book on a line in the sun between the eyes of the two participants and the eyes of the 55 observers is the same thing that makes you want to want to want to want.

Ceci n’est pas une [ *blank empty thing* ]

Earlier I argued that the everyday applications that we consider to be the online world are too easy to use.  It was a complicated argument that was lacking for examples as well as a clearer explanation.  The bottom line is that the concepts of interaction are so commonplace they’ve become banal and invisible.  Until they are updated, the interactive breakthroughs that make the web so exciting will live on the cutting room floor of the next failed start-up.  What is a commonplace web-interaction that is ignored and boring and useless?

Comments.

It is hard to imagine this in 2010, but comments are a very strange phenomenon.  What is a comment section doing in an article?  What is the purpose of it?  An article is the broadcast of a thesis – in most cases it has been considered and marinated with time and editing and rewriting.  A comment is a statement made in the moment.  Until the online world made it ubiquitous, the phrase comment had verbal/audio connotations.  In other words, one made comments only in conversations.  Conversations are instantaneous and spontaneous exchanges – quite the opposite of articles.  Currently, a word about comments is considered more textual.  To put it all together: the fact that an article and a web-based comment are both text-based, is the only commonality.  They are different beasts all together.  An article is a donkey – it works and is productive and it can reproduce.  A comment is a mule – it works as well, but it cannot reproduce.

Currently the relationship between articles and comments is taken for granted.  They are almost always included on a blog or article, an in almost always the same way.  An article is broadcast into the universe and the readership takes in the thesis.  Then slowly over time, the readership responds with comments – they can be thoughtful, challenging, spam, confrontational, tangential, long and short.  Either way, they are posted in chronological order at the bottom of the page in a way that de-emphasizes their content (opposite of the article).  Some commenters respond to other comments, rather than the article itself.  Rather than broadcasting the fruits of that tangent, the content is buried deep at the bottom of the page relevant only to those willing to dig for it.

How to make comments more relevant

Make them harder to post.  Hire a well-paid moderator to sift through incoming comments and select only those that contribute to the thesis in a pre-determined way.  Hide all comments to readers – only making them available to those who have posted acceptable comments.  After a time, broadcast all accepted comments in a way that organizes the content.

This proposal for a comment meritocracy requires something that is considered counter-productive in the speed-first internet.  The articles that use this strategy need time to marinate with readers.  They need time for things to happen behind-the-scenes.  Andrew Sullivan uses comments in such a way on his blog.  Rather than open all comments to users, he accepts user emails and filters through all the noise that accrues, publishing only those user-comments that contribute (positively or negatively) to the conversation.  His conversations take on their own life on this publication, giving the readership time to ingest the points he is making, and contribute thoughts of their own.  What transpires is a truly interactive experience where the ideas are emphasized by turning down the noise volume of the comments.

More on this soon…

The internet is too easy.  Sorry: too broad; let me use a scalpel on my point.  The way we design and define interaction online is too simple.  It’s limiting our concept of a connected world and is preventing the kind of breakthroughs that make this medium so exciting.

We are barely connected now.  Look past all the signal noise from the most popular sites online and you see a lot of people talking to walls.  They are clicking instant polls, commenting on random posts and stalking their high school crushes.  The accessibility of information (absolute and relative, important and not important) is eating our time and streamlining our thoughts.  The connections that were once celebrated – I can chat with someone in Bangalore right now! – are hollow and short.  We, the world, the known intelligent Universe are all speaking more English.  We are all thinking the same thoughts, accessing the same kind of information.  This is because it is too easy.

The internet is full of failure on the development level.  It is full of broken start-ups and incomplete revolutions.  What about failure on a different level.  Can a user fail when making a comment on a blog post?  Can a person fail a tweet?  Currently we consider failure in terms of content.  You might miss the point of a post and your comment will reflect that to an embarrassing level.  You might tweet a link to a Nevada bordello to the wrong crowd.  Those are embarrassments for sure, but are they failures in the same way as Betamax?

A failed startup begets an improved startup.  That doesn’t guarantee success – it just leads to improvement.  Who cares about success – I want more improvement.  Does a failed comment mean improved discourse?  Does an inappropriate tweet lead to improvements or simply to reticence?  Does that make it better?

What is the point of web-based interaction?  I know: that’s way way too broad.  Consider specific examples.  My employer considers extra comments on articles an enhanced interactive experience.  The more buttons we add to a page, the more interaction we offer to the user.  But why?  What are we creating with those buttons?  At this point, the comments on an article represent a separate and completely unrelated aspect to the original content.  The applications we add to the page should be considered tools to the user-base.  The community uses those tools to create an experience that cannot otherwise be duplicated.  It also cannot be explained.  A proper interactive experience is to the user what a good moderator is to a discussion.  The moderator keeps the discussion lively and draws from it points that would not have been made and could not necessarily have been predicted.

I will continue this conversation in other posts.  I am painting with the broadest strokes imaginable here on accident.  This discussion will return to specific examples.  Look out next for the online language learning breakdown.  There is an important component missing from this market that needs to be launched.

This is from TED.

How do I put this constructively?  I need to eat and sleep in my apartment to protect me from the rain and the cold and mosquitoes.  I need my spouse to enjoy the same comforts as me.  Collectively we have utility bills to pay and insurance premiums to account for and student loans to crush our near term dreams.  I need to prop up all of these things and yet I know I’m doing something wrong and this video puts it all to words.

We are made to be isolated by our dreams.   We move away from home in pursuit of something bigger and more rewarding than our presence, drawn in by the bright shining light at the top of a hill.  Meanwhile, our homes are cluttered and dirty and in the way and so we leave them for our new organized and optimized environment.  Our kitchens become clean and orderly.  There are no smells and we don’t sweat unless dressed for it.   Anyway…

The point is that we can’t abandon one track for the other.  We can’t find the special Sardinian wine and sit on the floor for the sake of our golden years.  How to right this boat?  I ate Chipotle for lunch yesterday – that was stupid and wrong and I knew it with every bite.  The lives that are defined in this video are lives that are not chosen and in the cold empty space of my dreams, I am free.