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survey me baby
Friday, June 1 2001
Tonight my housemate John revealed that he knows about this journal and has secretly known about it for about a month. The only thing that upsets him about it is the fact that I've concealed it from him and organized others in the deception. He feels like he comes off as some sort of chump. All of this came to a head in San Francisco, when he figured out that there was a conspiracy of silence around the whole issue and that I must have engineered it. This development is kind of weird and I'm upset by it, but it was bound to happen at some point anyway. I'm sort of glad this is finally over with. John isn't especially interested in being reader, so it seems Heisenberg-predicted observer/observed effects will be minimal, and that is, after all, the main reason I don't tell people that I'm doing this. An amusing meta-deception related to the core deception was the fact that for a time Gretchen knew John knew and I was the chump who wasn't in on their secret.
Arianna Huffington, why do I keep thinking about her? The woman has some good (or, should I say, common sense) ideas about issues such as drug policy. But much of what she stands for seems strangely anti-democratic. I remember seeing her speak a year ago at the Best of LA festival. At the time I was, well underwhelmed, to hear her suggest to her audience that they all vote for "none of the above" in the upcoming Presidential election. Now on her website I see she's teamed up with Harry Shearer in an opinion poll boycott. Here the idea makes a little more sense, but it's still anti-democratic. The populace is shallow and their wants are selfish, basic and often contradictory. And while not quizzing them about what they want may lead to greater depth in the policies made by our government, it's rather paternalistic. It could even be construed as a step towards authoritarianism.
Tonight a pollster chick called me on the phone and her voice sounded so appealing that I decided to stay on the line as she quizzed me about my views on prescription drug issues. Truth be known, I haven't really thought through my opinion on multi-national pharmaceutical corporations and had to rely on my more generic anti-corporate predilections to help me through the poll. Suffice it to say, I'm pretty much a socialist when it comes to the matter of drugs and medicines. The federal government should support universities doing drug research and should heavily regulate the entire process, including the pricing of medicines. There should be an emphasis on preventative medicine instead of on critical care, and on cheap and effective older medicines instead of the latest Windows XP version of RogaineTM. Prescriptions should be widely available to those who need them, and I'm very much against the idea of advertising them. I told the pollster that no one needs to advertise air, so why should there be ads for drugs?
The whole process of having my opinion extracted and filtered of all personal details and then thrown unweighted into a pile of data ran strongly counter to my theories of effective utopia instigation. Though I believe in democracy, I don't believe the voice of any one particular person makes any difference statistically. Evangelism and oratory, those are far more effective methods of achieving societal change than simply registering your opinion.
Later on I was talking to Gretchen on the phone and giving voice to a feeling I've been having of late about the state of my personality. I've decided that I've gradually allowed myself to become a mouse of a person, especially in my workplace. I'm so quiet and anonymous that people don't even wonder who I am or what I'm about. I'm a far cry from the flamboyant character I've been in other places such as Oberlin and Charlottesville. This is, I believe, entirely a consequence of this website. For me there's now an uncomfortable peace between the online world and the one made of earth, air, fire and water. I want to be something (I don't know quite what) on the internet, something that I once obviously aspired to be in the real world. But to achieve this, I feel like I must make a truce with the real world so that it can support my corporal needs but not distract me from my non-corporal mission. It's somewhat analogous to the Harpy Eagle who lives in a tree and gets along peacefully with the birds and monkeys living nearby while preying on their uncles and cousins living at another tree a mile away.
While in the bathtub this evening, I read an article in Feed about organizational paradigms based on time, not on space (as in a computer desktop). The gist of the article is that after a certain number of items, spatial organization systems start breaking down and a more useful paradigm is one of stacks of things organized according to when they were deposited. It turns out that the human brain is well-tuned to this sort of organization. "Where's that receipt? Probably about half way down in that stack of paper there." As I read the article I realized that I was unwittingly using a similar stack model to organize my life, and the core of the organization system is actually this journal. I don't know if people who read this site are fully aware of the structure of the archives, but in case you aren't, every month gets its own folder, and these folders are organized in turn in a root directory called "ran." Each month's folder on the web server has a corresponding folder on both my work computer and my home computer, and during that month, the folder has an alias on the desktop. The interesting thing about that folder is that it becomes the home for a lot more than just my journal entries and related graphics. All the work that I'm doing at that time (even some work-related work) takes place in that folder, and some of it also ends up on the web server. The folders: at work, at home, on the web server; they all contain the salient informational artifacts of my life at that time. And I know this. If I need to find something, I can usually remember about the time of year when I was working on it and I can go look in the appropriate folder.
Later on tonight I was talking with John about the Feed article and time-based informational architectures. I told him about the monthly folders on my desktop and how they organize most of the information in my life. Throughout this conversation, the recurring joke was that the discussion was actually a subtle ploy on my part to remind him that it was a new month and he owed me rent. Sometimes, you see, John lets a couple of days pass before cutting me that check.
I was reading an article about Microsoft's release of Office XP, and was freaked out and disturbed by all the anti-copying technology that's been built in. What's up with having to call Microsoft whenever you need to reinstall stuff? Will people really tolerate this hassle just to be able to save Microsoft Word files in a new proprietary format that friends with Word 2000 can't read? If Microsoft is so interested in the open standard of XML, why don't they make it the native format for Word documents instead of the many increasingly ponderous mutually-incompatible formats Word has used from the beginning? In the meantime, Arianna Huffington, we need to be boycotting Microsoft upgrades!
(At the insistence of my fiancée, the example of The New Yorker, and all those who hate The New York Times, I'm working on developing my serial comma. Please be patient.)
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?010601 feedback
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