Apocalypse vibes

The word apocalypse comes, via Latin, from the Greek word apokalyptein, "uncover, disclose, reveal," itself a compound word made up of apo-/,/ "off, away from," and kalyptein, "to cover, conceal."

This means a few things:

1. An apocalypse is an uncovering, a revelation. The original name of the last book of the Greek New Testament is Apocalypse. It doesn't introduce anything new into the world, but reveals what had always been true yet hidden.
2. Post-apocalyptic fiction — Mad Max, Apocalypse World, The Walking Dead, etc. — presents an uncovered version of the pre-apocalypse world. What is revealed is what had already been going on this whole time: the all-against-all fight for limited resources where humans prey on other humans. It's the veneer of so-called civilization that's stripped away, revealing the quick of humanity.
3. The process of apocalypse never ends: there is always more to uncover. Moreover, the uncovering doesn't arrive everywhere all at once. Consider Max Headroom. In the periphery, the conditions of bare survival already obtain: people huddle around fires in trash cans, scavenge for food and supplies, live in rubble and wastelands. Meanwhile, the center still retains its privileges: television networks, courts, offices, luxury apartments. The periphery is the repressed truth of the center: what's really going on is we're all scrambling to survive in a hostile world filled with hostile people, but sometimes we pretend that everything is fine. That doesn't mean that brutality can't occur before the uncovering; on the contrary, what the uncovering reveals is how much violence had been going on the whole time.
4. All learning is an uncovering, but it's also the end of not knowing. When the world ends, what ends is the world that existed before we learned what we know now. What ends is the people we were before we saw what had been concealed.

Stay safe out there, dear reader; I have no idea what conditions are like where you are, but I hope you've got shelter and supplies during the apocalypse.

Post from the grave

It's been quite a while since I've written a post here. I have been tinkering around with concepts for redoing the site, but for now I am mostly happy with the way this works. Of course the appearance isn't great, but that can be fixed with some CSS, once the underlying HTML is doing what I want it to do.

Since this is a log, I should be announcing what I've been up to. I've been considering how to add a mailing-list version of these posts, but that will take some time and study. My main project has been polishing my use of Emacs' bibtex options (for example, there's a utility to generate a bibtex entry from a DOI and download the associated PDF if it's available, which is quite useful). This has been in service of tightening up my research process, with an eye towards further graduate study. It would be nice to get everything under control, but it's a never-ending project.

I've been considering the Gallatin Master of Arts program at NYU, which is an interdisciplinary program that allows individualized study: you propose a course plan to your advisor and put together your own master's degree. It feels like a stumbling block to take another master's, but it would be nice to have practice with writing a thesis and to get more involved in the specific scene I'm looking to work in.

The digitial humanities have become mired in conceptual issues and haven't reached the promised land of objective literary studies, but I think we have also been overwhelmed by the possibilities and lost track of the true value of the thing: the computer's exhaustive examination of all extant evidence. The kind of minute counting work that occupied Strong for a long time could be done trivially by a computer in moments. This is the power of the thing, not the higher-level magic promised by tech magnates.

I'm just rambling, but I want to get some words in the file in the bloggist's voice — this isn't how I usually write, but it's nice to have the venue to be this person: the person who writes in this style, about these things, thinking in this way. I don't feel the need to promote myself, and I share my blog slowly, but that's okay. I'd rather have it and have people stumble across it when they find it, than promote it and have nothing to show. It's not as if I'm trying to gain anything by having people read this, and the people who do read it are enough for me.

Letter to my father and step-mother I will never send

Hello Papa and [step-mother],

I thought, since I have been exchanging messages with the girls via WhatsApp, that I would also send you an update on myself. I don't know if it's of any interest, but you might like to know.

This week is the end of my penultimate semester in a master's degree in computer science at the University of Illinois. I expect to complete the program by the end of this fall semester. This is a professional degree, without a thesis, a choice forced on me by the particulars of the bridge program I completed between my bachelor's and this program.

The career prospects are not good, and I have wasted the last two summers in educational opportunities (last summer I was an instructor at computer camp, an experience not unlike [half-sister]'s space camp from the sound of it, though surely less rigorous), and this summer I was a teaching assistant in an undergraduate course. Since I have not availed myself of the internship opportunities available to me, and made the idiotic decision to remain in Chicago since I believed that I would not be able to complete the program on my desired time line if I moved to the main campus in Urbana-Champaign (a lie told to me by the advising department) I have wasted the last three years with nothing to show for it but a master's degree, a 4.0 GPA, several teaching experiences, some new hobbies, and a deceased mother. I have also been sorely isolated from all of the friends and well-wishers I had encountered in Europe and have no particular social or interpersonal connections to the Chicago area. I moved here to be close to my mother in the early stages of her Alzheimer's disease, and she died less than a month after I moved back with her. Life is not fair, but I have been extraordinarily privileged and so have nothing to complain about.

I am presently preparing applications for doctoral programs in the intersection of English literature, philosophy, and cultural studies; I plan to study the reception of artificial intelligence in the light of horror fiction, focusing particularly on the work of HP Lovecraft and the use of his monsters as metaphors. I doubt that I will be funded, and I doubt that this will advance me in any clear direction. I am unemployable, with no real skills of any value acquired in the term of my program, and my exposure to the industry has convinced me that I have no interest in entering into the field as a programmer or software engineer. I would like to pursue higher research in computer science proper, but the particular program I made the error of subscribing to did not prepare me at all for that path.

I feel a distinct sense of failure and have become convinced that my entire life up to this moment has been a series of catastrophic errors for which I have nothing to show; besides applying to doctoral programs, my only plans for the future are suicide or idiotic wastes of my potential like traveling, training as a yoga teacher, cultivating my fiction, technical journalism, and remaining in contact with my dispersed friends and family.

I apologize for the length of this email and the infrequency with which we are in contact. It is obvious that you have no interest or availability to see me or incorporate me in your life, evidence for which I adduce from not having been informed of your presence on the North American continent, nor from any contact whatsoever in the intervening time. You did not even do me the honor of declining my invitation to my undergraduate graduation, a degree which I know you held in the highest contempt as a waste of time and resources.

I apologize for not being able to schedule a call with you, father, and for not living up to the expectations or standards you have set, [step-mother]. You both know to what I am referring, and I apologize to you both for the grievousness of my transgressions. I understand why you do not want me present in the lives of your children or families.

Love,

Preston

Addiction considered harmful?

So it's become clear that there exists a class of applications whose purpose is to be addictive. Their profit model is advertisements, and the number of advertisements the user sees is a function of how much the user uses the application. So perhaps "addiction" isn't really the best word: it implies to me that it is difficult to quit a substance, but not necessarily that the amount of time spent using the substance increases. I want to particularly focus on the goal of maximizing the time spent using, for which "addiction" is a good enough term.

I raised this in conversation the other day and compared it to cigarette companies' raising of the nicotine content of their products. This difference was pointed out to me: cigarettes cause lung cancer. The assumption here is that it isn't addictiveness per se that is the problem so much as the harm caused by the product. If cigarettes weren't addictive, it would still be wrong to encourage people to use them, because they are harmful to the health. That they are made more addictive is just a detail in the larger plot to get people to ingest toxins for profit.

What, then, is the harm caused by these addictive computer products? People have tried to get radicalization to stick, in the sense that the product proposes content to people that encourages violence or prejudice; people have tried to accuse them of encouraging suicide, self-harm, or depression; people have argued that using the computer more destroys traditional sociality ("smartphone zombiism"). None of these accusations have stuck, but they are plausible at first glance.

The response that these are not harms that everyone experience can be countered by pointing out that not everyone who smokes gets sick from it, either; yet we have no compunctions about discouraging smoking by propaganda and legislation.

Rejection is not expulsion.

Expulsion means being removed from a community. When the community expels you it sets itself as a unit against you, who are stuck apart from the remaining community and separated from as it if by a barrier.

Rejection is merely not being accepted. When you are rejected it need have no other consequences besides your not being accepted, but it can.

Expulsion is a painful and consequential form of rejection (though the experience of expulsion has properties other than those of rejection, to wit: loneliness, exile, survival, shame, guilt, culpability, accountability, solitude, self-destruction, seclusion, fear, uncertainty, doubt, and others), but not all rejection is expulsion: much of it bears few or no consequences.