Criticism

That Business: A Changing World textbook has been a lot of fun. It is still a textbook—overly commercial (specially at the beginning), tiresome, and repetitive (a needless box here, a redundant summary there, summaries of redundant summaries)—but it is interesting nonetheless.

Near the beginning, economic systems are dealed in a few pages and there were two things I noticed. The first one was that ubiquitous communism catchphrase:

I thought it was about time Capitalism (here ’s a wonderful definition) got it’s own catch-phrase. Here’s my stab at it:

“What is honored in a country will be cultivated there,” is a quote frequently attributed to Plato, and I find it useful to compare both catch-phrases. It’s quite a dangerous thing to honor need in your country, to honor effort might sound as a step forward, but it’s still foolish—a farmer pulling the plough himself certainly puts more effort into his crop than a modern farmer with a tractor, is that to be rewarded? Rewarding talent may sound harsh or insensitive but it is the only truly humane thing to do.

The second thing is a simple question. For the life of me, I can’t understand the following sentence:

How do you define the standard of living of a nation and how can it be different from that of its citizens? Can someone help me give this a coherent meaning?

Es un deber basico de toda generacion introducir a la generacion siguiente a los logros mas destacados del pasado. Me molesto mucho pues que nadie—ni un primo, ni un tio—me haya dicho lo realmente genial que es Mecano. Habia oido, claro, clasicos que por alguna razon se cuelan en toda polvorienta coleccion de mp3s—Hijo de la Luna o Mujer contra Mujer, por ejemplo—y me gustaban pero hasta ahi. No me toco su periodo de fama y todo podria haber quedado en eso sino es que Martha me avisa un dia que tenia que escuchar la de Stereosexual. Me gusto muchisimo y, emocionado, baje toda su discografia. Que sorpresa oir canciones tan magnificas y originales como Cruz de Navajas, Aire o El Cine—entre lo mejor que he escuchado jamas. Tienen aparte muchisimas otras canciones destacables; bajenlas (su discografia de una vez), escuchenlas y lean sus letras—lo ameritan. Aqui va una muestra:

I’m fascinated and disgusted in equal measure with a recent Village Voice cover article: “Do you wanna kiss me?” (How New York’s women are wising up to The Game’s pickup tips). Fascinated because what it describes is such an interesting, natural, and inevitable step for men to take in relationships; disgusted because it seems to betray the all-important honesty upon which conversation relies. The rightly famous cluetrain manifesto is about the need for companies to speak with an honest, human voice; I guess we’ll soon need one for people too (but then again, what could be more positively human than artifice?). Magda, from William Gibson’s delightful Pattern Recognition, comes to mind:

And now, after reading the Voice article—let alone reading The Game, for whatever purpose—, how can you not act differently? How can you help from negging, from creating a yes-ladder or a false time constraint? (Or from recognizing them?) I now know that the style of conversation I’ve evolved over the years, mostly unconsciously, is quite neggish; doesn’t being aware of what one’s doing changes the very nature of the act? “Being natural is such a very difficult pose to keep up.”

Perhaps Dolly is right. These techniques may be nothing but conversation cosmethics (or rather, prosthetics) and I can surely appreciate their playful side, the way they’re “the grown-up version of hair-pulling on the playground.” But I’m still wary—it’s conversation we’re talking about here and there are few things I value more.

Oh, and I’m well aware that at least some parts of the article have been fabricated, as rumored first in Gawker, and then acknowledged by the Voice and the author himself. This is a shame (not least because of the wimpy apology by the author) but the article is still interesting and worth reading; that’s why I made a verbatim copy of it in my website.

Everything2 is a strange, addictive website that’s been around for almost 8 years now and still feels as disorientingly original as when I first found it. It describes itself as “an online community with a focus to write, publish and edit a quality database of information, insight and humor,” but I just chanced upon a better description: Everything2 is sort of a Wittypedia. No, really. You want something witty about Michael Spivak? About double penetration? About this quote, this poem, or this phrase? About lust? About Ghost in the Shell? About whores? About sex games? About beautiful, cry-worthy things? About language? About orgasms? About flaunting your sexuality? About menstruation? About growing old? You now know were to find it.

Spielberg^{WP, IMDB}’s Munich^{AM, IMDB, WP} is a great film; there’s not a scene I would change in this 164-minute movie. On the other hand, the man’s starting to scare me, I mean, how can he be so talented? Every film of his I’ve seen is a masterpiece, to the point that it seems almost unfair that someone should hoard so much talent. He embodies that Gap Paul Graham talked about in much of Hackers and Painters:

More to the point, Eric Bana^{WP, IMDB} and Ayelet Zorer^IMDB (sometimes called Ayelet Zu’rer or Ayelet Zurer) were the two Munich actors that impressed me most, and my favorite scene from the movie was the sex scene between their characters, Avner and Daphna. It is remarkable both for the long-during, extreme closeup on  Daphna, and for the fact that she’s visibly pregnant all along. Closeups are one of the wonders of film, something unthinkable in theater, and this is one of the best ones I’ve seen: for over 30 seconds there’s only Daphna—beautiful and breathy and rhythmic and smelly and sweaty and lusty and doe-eyed and blushing and nubile. As for the visible pregnancy… well, I’m somewhat disturbed to find that very arousing, but I guess it’s all part of being a male homo sapiens at a reproductive age.

This is fantastic: a cool website that specializes in selling royalty-free stock photos, iStockPhoto, has created a new way to search through their whole catalog: by arrangement. They call it ColorSpace, and is wonderfully simple, yet powerful. It consists of a 3×3 grid of squares. You change the color of each square to indicate what you want in that area: green, if you want it clear; red, if you want it occupied; grey, if it’s the same to you.

It works. If, for instance, you search for “flower” with this colorspace, , you get:

Or if you search for “sky” with this colorspace, , you get:

The star here is not only the algorithm but the clever, information-design interface.

Overall, it’s a very impressive site, its web developers really do care about it, and that’s always refreshing. The weirdest thing is that they’ve convinced me that selling royalty-free stock photos on the web makes perfect sense…

I’m a fan of DHH (that’s David Heinemeier Hansson, but since no one, not me for sure, can type his name correctly, he’s usually called DHH). He is the creator of Ruby on Rails, a very smart programmer, and an even smarter manager. How can you not like someone with this in his about page?

Anyway, out of a childish infatuation with his persona I’ve taken upon myself to read his blog, Loud Thinking, back to front, all 4 years of it. I’ve just read the first 24 posts from July 2001, and it has been a lot of fun.

For one thing, I feel like a scholar, tracing all the antecedents that lead to someone’s achievements, savoring the obscure details, going straight to the source, nosing around on the archives. It’s fascinating to see his development.

It also feels like if I were talking to his ghost of days gone by. Blogs are truly a new state of being (see the next post for more of that techno-boosterism). What’s surprising is how similar that ghost is to myself. How he also struggled with procrastination, also likes the same music that I like, also learned VIM, also loves to argue, also fears growing old, also has sleep disorders, also likes to pontificate once in a while.

Of course, there are also lots of differences. But I knew that already. What is amazing is how much you can have in common with someone apparently so different. One of the first bloggers I read—back in the day when reading a blog was something weird and shameful (”You read people’s diaries? What for?”)—put e.e.cummings’ Anyone lived in a pretty how town in her about page, and interpreted it as a love story between “anyone” and “noone” (here’s an interpretation in that vein). What she found tragic was how oblivious the townsfolk were to their love and grief:

So what she treasured in blogs (this is all from memory, I’ve never been able to find her blog again) was their ability to let you see behind “anyone” and “noone”. They put you in contact with people you’d probably never even meet, let alone talk to, and show you that, in the end, they’re not so different from yourself—they also struggle, love, fear, and fail, just like you do.

My favorite from those 24 first posts? Refusing to let an identity mask run my life, hands down.

Last time a friend asked me what a blog was, I blabbered and gesticulated madly for a long while, only to cap it off, desperate, with the safe “they’re online diaries”. As it often happens, I ended up saying exactly the opposite of what I believe. I don’t think blogs are mere online diaries. Those are a sub-genre, to be sure, but blogs are much more, and it is misleading, stifling, and plain false, to have that as their only metaphor (isn’t it overstretching to call this very blog post you’re now reading a journal entry?).

So that no one finds himself forced to betray his better knowledge again, I’ve tried to find a metaphor that outcharms the prevailing one—one that’s true and yet as simple and catchy. I think I’ve found it: Blogs are open letters.

Blogs are open letters. Compilations of written communications addressed to whoever may want to read them¹. The title of a blog post, the letter, is in fact its address, crafted to route the epistle to its many recipients (though of course Google, the post master, uses far more clever ways to deliver it). A good dose of current happenings goes in these letters, of course, but there’s much, much else: recommendations, reviews, analysis, reflections, advice, criticism, self-promotion, narrative, essays, rants, howtos, explanations, interpretations, confessions, j’accuses, press releases, calumnies, lies, exaggerations, gossip, sobs—anything that would go on a letter.

So now you know. Blogs are open letters. Spread the word (or challenge it in the comments).

Google is life’s man.