And does anybody bother to write it down?

A recent discussion at Crooked Timber about pop understanding of Communism and Steven Berlin Johnson’s excellent Where Good Ideas Come From focuses my gaze briefly on a strange confluence of attention I’m having. The connection is still vague and loose, but bear with me for a while.

Recently my attention’s been sortof equally spaced on:

…American Pragmatism, via James and Dewey and culminating in Richard Rorty’s latter works—which tend to be dismissed as illogical by folks I respect, who know a lot more about big-P philosophy than I do, but which somehow still resonate with me.

…Anarchism—not the anti-globalism spray-painting variety or the caricatured bomb-throwing terrorist variety, but the thoughtful sort spelled out by Michigander Voltairine de Cleyre a hundred years ago.

…Business and Work—not the power-grubbing flavor popular among the Chambers of Commerce and the Military-Entrepreneurship Machine, but the sort of self-adapting social dynamics focused on delivering collective, mutual value that Peter Drucker and the Agile Software movement call for.

…And of course the “new tech culture” stuff we all love so much. I imagine you’re soaking in it, because you’re here: Makers and innovators and networks and open source. Emergence and complexology and decentralization and OMG The Future!!eleven!

Four or more threads. This is the knot that’s caught my wordy attention today.

Pragmatism is a philosophical stance I might never have heard of—nor taken seriously if I had, given others’ prejudice against it—if not for a pleasant rambling conversation I had with Michael Cohen some years back.

It has fallen from our shared cultural platform, is not part of our canon.

Anarchism I would surely have never considered valid or worthy of attention, were it not that I digitize and republish old books (for fun), and I recently scanned my own copy of this work, which Google has already put online:

But who’s read this 100-year-old description of what’s happening now, besides me? Nobody I know.

The Agile Manifesto (and the other design patterns for what you might call Humane Making) would probably sound weird and useless to me—after all, I started out as a scientist and academic, and moved on to become the sort of cowboy know-it-all consultant Founder. If it weren’t for time spent with Ron and Chet, and seeing how they—and the countless other Agile Coaches they’ve trained and inspired—have come to make a real difference in the quality of people’s work.

And yet this movement starts even now to fall back into jargon and cant in the hands of corporatism.

And of course we’re all bathed constantly by the hoopla about social networks and complexity theory and emergence and bioengineering and autonomous systems and look this is the revolution this time—no really we swear. I’ve had the luck and pleasure to have actually been in the room when a lot of that was being born. Not just during my too-short time spent working with Chris and Stu and all the rest in Santa Fe, but also lurking at the edges of the pre-Web Reality Hacker/WELL culture, and actually using genetic programming as it buds and blooms into a New Kind of Engineering [FYSW].

And yet despite my own awe as a participant, I see the ridiculous Chaordic people and Management Consultants garner as much mindshare as the people who actually help explain the world and make things.

I’m lucky, I say again, on all these counts, but frustrated in each case.

Luckier than I can sum up. I’ve even started to forge some kind of “career”, and sometimes we can really help how people work with this strange mishmash of notions.

And more frustrated than I can sum up, too. Because I’m starting to realize how little we see of the things at the edges of history, away from the stars.

Is it just that History is a machine we cannot see from inside? Gerald Stanley Lee, as I find so often, said something lovely about the beauty of locomotives. But he was actually saying something deep about the beauty we should see in the “network of Man”:

Unless the word “beautiful” is big enough to make room for a glorious, imperious, world-possessing, world-commanding beauty like this, we are no longer its disciples. It is become a play word. It lags behind truth.

In the context of the joyous Voice of the Machines—which you should go now and read aloud to one another—Lee’s message isn’t about finding metal pretty, it’s about how we should value things in the world. The poetry he sees in locomotives and telegraphs doesn’t just rebel against the aesthetic canon that excludes the engineer’s work, it questions the validity of that canon itself. What inherent right does a Great Master have to our accolades, which we deny to a power grid’s architects?

I wish there were a thousand more like Gerald Stanley Lee, despite his mistakes. Because of his mistakes. His poetic vision revealed a community that was being fostered by mass media and technology a century ago… but he never realized that fascism and commercialism would feed on that same raw material.

And I want more Stu Kauffmans to point out the “adjacent possible” without knowing much about Pragmatism. More Steven Johnsons to point out this real revolution we’re in without always speaking correctly about the histories of others’ earlier revolutions. And more Richard Rortys to explain how to be civil and tolerant of one another’s differences, while dismissing the entire Enlightenment as a misleading sidebar.

We need these folks to make these mistakes more often, not less.

We need more people to draw our attention to useful things in the world, useful ways of living, without trying to be consistent and proper and right all the fucking time.

I think what’s bothering me is the Myth of Progress.

The mass media, our ubiquitous and consistent education, our canon of theory? They’re not tools by which “the Man” oppresses, and they’re not going to “set us free” by revealing the truth about the world; there is no “Man”, and the world doesn’t give a damn about what we say on NPR about it.

The risk these social forces pose is that the increased potential for general and popular success of smart people draws our local unsung luminaries up and away. So they can talk amongst themselves.

And not with us.

We should be linked to one another by conversations that look back and forward and down, and most of all sideways at one another. Not just “up” at our luminous colleagues, our canon, but across at the friend we never suspected knew so much about that thing we were working on together.

I’ve come to detest the consensus of shared culture and its keepers, and our canon, and the news we’re told. I’m trying to rely more on the people in my presence, and the people they know personally.

Not because I’m considering teapartyism, but because I pity the famous, the great thinkers I used to hang out with. All of them that I’m lucky enough to know personally? They were thoughtful and self-effacing enough to know that there’s more of value in a million roiling disparate details they’ve never heard of, than can be aphorized in their best-selling book.

We’re all of us always wrong. I pity the famous, the canon-makers, the revealers of truth, my professor friends because they’ve sacrificed their right to be wrong at the altar of Progress.

And as far as I can tell, that means they’re stuck; they’re not allowed to make mistakes in public.

Lee also said this, on the topic of my very own frustration:

So what shall we do on behalf of—and in spite of—these bright thinkers, owners of the canon we are taught as members of this crowd Lee talks about?

I’d like to free them, personally. Free them from the terrible price they pay when they sacrifice their participation.

If nothing else, we should at least try to build another one. Some other canon. Maybe a bunch.

Maybe one where we have no intention of trying to get our story straight, so that it gibes with our most recent global “objective reality” or the latest faceting of history. One where the notion of Progress—whether it’s progress towards unmasking Ultimate Reality, or achieving Perfect Health, or planning and executing (in either sense) The Most Appropriate Government, or even just making everybody happy—is dead. No more Progress; just progress.

How about we change gears? Maybe we can try making our neighbors’ lives better. “Neighbor” doesn’t have to be local, or even physical: it just needs to mean not everybody, and not all the same definition of “better”.

In other words, let’s just proceed as though that canon we’ve all been wearing out from overuse wasn’t the only one, and see what happens.

Who knows? Maybe we won’t wear out the “regular” one so quickly, if we don’t all use it all the time.

What will you do today instead of the thing everybody knows you should?

As it was our intention, when we commenced it, to give it, if possible, an enduring permanency, we have admitted, of course, no news or gossip of the day into its pages, possessing merely a temporary interest; and it will, therefore, constitute a miscellaneous volume of lasting value, suitable to be bound up and preserved in the library of the family, as interesting in one age as in another, and just as desirable to be perused, by those who have not read it, the second year of its existence, as the first.

Go ahead. Sing it.

“Place Your Dough Through Greene”

There is green upon the water;
There is green upon the land.
There’s a House of Greene in Boston
Built to lend a helping hand.
To the man with lazy dollars,
Who thinks it would be grand
To be an independent guy.

Chorus
Glory! Glory! To the Greene Plan,
To the preacher and baseball fan,
To the millionaire and ice man
Who place their dough through Greene.

There shines a light along the road
That means “full speed ahead!”
And those who grasp its meaning
Know the truth cannot be dead.
Their sympathy for all of those,
Who take Greene light for red,
They’ve got their signals mixed.

Chorus
Glory! Glory! To the Greene Plan,
To the preacher and baseball fan,
To the millionaire and ice man
Who place their dough through Greene.

etc etc

In particular, this strikes me as something that bears on many discussions I’ve had about machine learning and modern statistics. And it reminds me of a cultural problem I’ve been wrestling with among genetic programming researchers and operations research people for some time. And would be useful in explaining the pedagogy and practice of engineering “craftsmanship”, and more specifically that of software development.

Oh, and complex systems research and emergence, too. That’s in there, somehow.

So you can see why I might think it’s important to understand.

I can’t quite put my finger on it, but something in here—perhaps obfuscated by what today we might perceive as a difficult style, but which is an attempt to convey very specific concepts in a way that tries to avoid misunderstanding—is vital to many threads in modern life. In particular, something deeply important happens down in the last paragraph, where I’ve highlighted it.

I would love to have a correspondent who could discuss this productively. Perhaps one might be found to read the original Dewey, or even the few surrounding pages extracted in McDermott’s summary, and tell me just what it is I’m responding to?

…Inquiry is the directed or controlled transformation of an indeterminate situation into a determinately unified one. The transition is achieved by means of operations of two kinds which are in functional correspondence with each other. One kind of operations deals with ideational or conceptual subject-matter. This subject-matter stands for possible ways and ends of resolution. It anticipates a solution, and is marked off from fancy because, or, in so far as, it becomes operative in instigation and direction of new observations yielding new factual material. The other kind of operations is made up of activities involving the techniques and organs of observation. Since these operations are existential they modify the prior existential situation, bring into high relief conditions previously obscure, and relegate to the background other aspects that were at the outset conspicuous. The ground and criterion of the execution of this work of emphasis, selection and arrangement is to delimit the problem in such a way that existential material may be provided with which to test the ideas that represent possible modes of solution. Symbols, defining terms and propositions, are necessarily required in order to retain and carry forward both ideational and existential subject-matters in order that they may serve their proper functions in the control of inquiry. Otherwise the problem is taken to be closed and inquiry ceases.

One fundamentally important phase of the transformation of the situation which constitutes inquiry is central in the treatment of judgement and its functions. The transformation is existential and hence temporal. The pre-cognitive unsettled situation can be settled only by modification of its constituents. Experimental operations change existing conditions. Reasoning, as such, can provide means for effecting the change of conditions but by itself cannot effect it. Only execution of existential operations directed by an idea in which ratiocination terminates can bring about the re-ordering of environing conditions required to produce a settled and unified situation. Since this principle also applies to the meanings that are elaborated in science, the experimental production and re-arrangement of physical conditions involved in natural science is further evidence of the unity of the pattern of inquiry. The temporal quality of inquiry means, then, something quite other than that the process of inquiry takes time. It means that the objective subject-matter of inquiry undergoes temporal modification.

Terminological. Were it not that knowledge is related to inquiry as a product to the operations by which it is produced, no distinctions requiring special differentiating designations would exist. Material would merely be a matter of knowledge or of ignorance and error; that would be all that could be said. The content of any given proposition would have the values “true” and “false” as final and exclusive attributes. But if knowledge is related to inquiry as its warrantably assertible product, and if inquiry is progressive and temporal, then the material inquired into reveals distinctive properties which need to be designated by distinctive names. As undergoing inquiry, the material has a different logical import from that which it has as the outcome of inquiry. In its first capacity and status, it will be called by the general name subject-matter. When it is necessary to refer to subject-matter in the context of either observation or ideation, the name content will be used, and, particularly on account of its representative character, content of propositions.

The name objects will be reserved for subject-matter so far as it has been produced and ordered in settled form by means of inquiry; proleptically, objects are the objectives of inquiry. The apparent ambiguity of using “objects” for this purpose (since the word is regularly applied to things that are observed or thought of) is only apparent. For things exist as objects for us only as they have been previously determined as outcomes of inquiries. When used in carrying on new inquiries in new problematic situations, they are known as objects in virtue of prior inquiries which warrant their assertibility. In the new situation, they are means of attaining knowledge of something else. In the strict sense, they are part of the contents of inquiry as the word content was defined above. But retrospectively (that is, as products of prior determination in inquiry) they are objects.

[Latter emphasis is mine.]

When reality is labeled unthinkable, it creates a kind of sickness in an industry. Leadership becomes faith-based, while employees who have the temerity to suggest that what seems to be happening is in fact happening are herded into Innovation Departments, where they can be ignored en masse. This shunting aside of the realists in favor of the fabulists has different effects on different industries at different times. One of the effects on the newspapers is that many of their most passionate defenders are unable, even now, to plan for a world in which the industry they knew is visibly going away.

As I’ve come to expect when reading Shirky: yes, that’s what I’ve been trying to tell people for years. [You know, if that Cassandra chick had been a smarter cookie, maybe set up with some agents or a PR firm or something, I bet she coulda made a fucking Fortuna. [Ba-dump-bump]]

As part of the “guerilla economic development” work I do at our company Vague Innovation, LLC, I spend a lot of time meeting with the nominal movers and shakers of the local business development community: folks from the Ann Arbor Chamber of Commerce, the Ann Arbor SPARK, marketers and Realtors and landlords and bankers and people who publish shiny color magazines have sunny offices in tall buildings.

I hate to stand alone against the stream of bigoted invective I hear from most of my New Economy peers, but people who wear suits and work in offices are good folks. They’re trying their best to help their town and region, their towns’ economies, to identify and shore up the entrepreneurs they recognize as the future of their local worlds.

They’re good people.

That said, a lot of my conversations revolve around the future of these nice folks’ careers. Like all of us, these are plain old human beings armed with the standard human cognitive heuristic toolkit. You know, the same one you have: some stupid mapping of your personal experience onto the whole world, the 5 ± 2 most memorable cultural norms they can bring to memory unconsciously, and the sense of massive importance of all that Received Wisdom they’ve been exposed to in their canalized plummet through life. Just like yours, you know?

As part of my work I keep a foot in both worlds (and a couple of others, too; you don’t want to know how that feels). And so:

• I mention seeing something in the Newspaper the other day, and an up-and-coming local banker doesn’t understand I mean the paper I read, the one that actually talks about local government and salient events, not the sports-filled fishwrap some dude in Grand Rapids deigns to publish. This leads to deep confusion; hijinks ensue and we both part shaking our heads in embarrassed but ominous disbelief.
• As part of a challenge exchange, both the CEO of the Chamber of Commerce and a dude for the local “tech development” firm promise to get their folks to edit the appropriate ArborWiki entries… and months later I hear that one of them has “hired a person to do that.”

I could go on. Hell, I did already. But I felt bad.

I deleted them all because they got more egregious and far more embarrassing for the “traditional business” folks as I totted them up. A list of searchable terms (and teachable moments) might do: “coworking”, “commercial insurance”, “business plan”, “admission price”, “intellectual property”, “next Google”, “corporate blog”, “personal brand”, “online marketing”, “open source”, “boot camp”.

Every one of those represents a little checkbox on the octagonal paper titled “Decommissioning Schedule of Battlestar BizDev.” A defaced gravestone in an overgrown family plot on a dirt road somewhere in ten years. A milestone on the road to obsolescence.

[And someday, when whatever is next comes along, the nanobio revolution or whatever, that will make people like you, you old fart, into stupid conservatives who still type into inorganic computers using some kind of "formal language". And you'll say you learned business sense the hard way on Facebook and with Google, and you'll say you've looked at the Senso but you can't figure out why people want to smell crap on other planets all day. And then you can look this blog post up "by Googling" on your stupid octagonal DVD of the "blogosphere" and be reminded: this has all happened before.]

These are good people. They try, really. But they’re crippled by insularity, by the people they hear and choose to listen to, by their distance from the Actual World. Hell, it’s a handful of them that even know the world exists as it does. No sense of the timescale “we” use, or of “our” means of action. A lot of these folks have heard about blogs and Facebook and Twitter now they’ve been in Forbes and NPR and stuff, but they don’t possess the cultural infrastructure with which they can parse what they’re seeing as relevant communication.

At least three people in very nice suits have made in my presence the joke about “Twitter is about what you ate for dinner” in the last month. So there you go. It’s no surprise that these people still aren’t welcome in the “tech community”. Which is sad.

And to be pragmatic about it all, and think about how cities and communities actually work in this capital-driven world we inhabit, kindof stupid: They have all the fucking money.

Ah, well. Cultural diversity gets short shrift these days. On both sides of that particular line: geeks and suits don’t get each other, though they often assume they do. [And Cf. "don't get me started on the other ones."]

Which, by a long and ranting road, brings us to our milestone parking spot for the day: Parking Data.

This won’t take nearly as long as the preamble.

We have a bunch of parking structures here in Ann Arbor. The Downtown Development Authority contracts with a commercial firm called Republic Parking to manage them, and parking is a huge source of income. The DDA also gets taxes from new buildings, as I understand it, and manages liquor licenses and oversees new developments and stuff. There’s more involved: it’s complicated and political.

[As a symptom of my own increasing frustration with culture clash here: If you're a geek? And you self-identify as an Interwebz-using computery person? And you're thinking or saying that politics or business practice is "unnecessarily complicated" or "opaque" or "useless"? That sounds to me like you're one of those assholes who say they "don't get math" as an excuse for not paying attention to it. Business practice and the law and local government infrastructure are complicated because they deal with real-world public-good complexity, dumb-ass. I don't care if you run some kind of "alternative community" or you're Lord High King Open-source Maven or a Libertarian Fundamentalist or whatever: don't dismiss "politics" or marketing or these other people's culture as trivial just because you're not familiar with it. It really undermines the argument you're "smart" whenever you do that in public. And when you do it in "private", thinking somebody like me isn't there as well, it makes me treat you like the child you are.

Or, shorter: Don't diss "the Man", monkey-boy. We're all man.]

If you’re tired by now, here’s a timeline of what happened.

Some time back, the DDA started putting counters on the parking structures, and around that time they started publishing online feeds that updated as the numbers of cars parked in the structures changed.

This was cool and geeky. We want a cool and geeky town, and this was a good step. +2 points for transparency, and for actually experimenting.

Then some folks I know, including these guys and Ed Vielmetti, did what good modern Internet culture people do: they created a handy open source software package that took the public data and repurposed it into a free way to use your phone to call a number and find out how many spots are available.

This was cool and geeky. We want a cool and geeky town, and this was a good step. +5 points for mashups, repurposing public domain data, open source, and some others.

Then the geek points added up to the point that the Ann Arbor News wrote a cover story about the mashup.

This was cool and geeky. We want a cool and geeky town, and this was an unusual good step from a typically clueless newspaper (Cf. “fish-wrap”, above). +2 points for cultural crossover to the MSM, and promoting the local geek culture to a mainstream audience.

Cue fan. Cue shit.

Apparently this is where the DDA first heard of the cool, geeky thing that had happened as a consequence of their publication of the data. As far as I can tell, they reacted just like anybody in the 1970s would have done: they noticed belatedly that their cultural role as gatekeeper was being undermined, and so they shut down the phone service access to the numbers.

This was neither cool, nor geeky. Burn –10 points for reinforcing stereotypes on both sides of that goddamned line I mention above, and throw in an extra –10 points for the ongoing online shitstorm of bad publicity and even newspaper publicity this is building into.

And here we are, today.

We’ve got people who are core members of the geek community up in arms about it. Folks are stepping around the stupid and ineffectual blockade the DDA started off with. They’re writing open letters that smack of outright political threat. They’re bringing in the big guns from outside town. They’re submitting FOIA requests for the numbers.

It was a simple little thing. A triviality, really. Susan Pollay’s email clearly misses the fact that this was an experiment, the very sort of thing that the phrase economic development means today in this agalmic open-source world.

But it brings the two cultures together in what are probably the worst possible circumstances: The old-skool scarcity-driven infrastructure probably didn’t know these people even existed. Or if they did, they had wildly inappropriate expectations about demographics and values and potential impact on the status quo. And the scarcity-avoiding geek culture that didn’t until until now give a damn about what “suits” did is now suddenly swinging the full measure of its attention to bear on this affront, and they’re processing it on fucking Internet timescales, without old-skool handicaps like “business hours” or “weekends” or “face to face meetings”.

To any of us who are watching with one foot on either side of this line, this is quickly turning into what you might call “spectacle”. No joke: hairs standing up on my arms as this little fooferaw started to come into focus. This (to paraphrase what the cool kids say) is what we call the fire we brought you long ago.

I wrote an email to a colleague from the Chamber of Commerce Friday, as soon as this dynamic became obvious to me. A heads up, mainly, since he’s not directly involved.

For a few weeks now (non-Internet time, remember?) he and I have been talking about what the Chamber and the old-skool infrastructure might able to offer “the 1099 community” or the “independents” or the “Not An Employee crowd” in the coming months. Admittedly we’ve spent a vast proportion of our meetings trying to reconcile our dramatically different assumptions about work and community, and last week we were just getting to a place where we could say stuff that didn’t make the other one smirk or look confused.

[Though he made that confused face when I mentioned glibly the bit about tearing down the hideous mid-century bank building at the center of town and getting a Town Square back. I'll win that bet, too, by the way.]

He’s framing what he sees as the future role for the Chamber in the coming decades in terms like expansion and cultural adaptation so that it can cope with the different lifestyles “we” NAE folks represent. He’s trying to help, and to make what has traditionally been perceived as a useful and necessary business support infrastructure available to more people who need help. Maybe he doesn’t see 100% that they don’t need that help, but he’s trying. He wants to help out and reach over the line for the sake of the city, the region… and to some extent to drag his organization into the 20th century [sic].

In our conversations I find that I’m framing what I see as the future role of the Chamber using concepts I’ve mentioned here already: as a safe decommissioning, as an opportunity for outreach between cultures that are fundamentally irreconcilable, as a model of what to do and what not to do in a nonoverlapping organization… and frankly because I like people and also money, and there must be some way of ameliorating the damage this whole thing will cause in the next decade (Cf. bank tear-down).

But I look at that list of benefits, and I realize that neither I, nor any of the people I know, want any of those “benefits”. But just like my friend in the Chamber, I also want to help the city… so it doesn’t end up abandoned when us New Economy people just leave in disgust. And the region… because I want there to be trains and convention centers and some non-provincial buildings built, and fuck “human scale” I want to see the bleeding edge of posthuman scale. And to some extent to drag out the useful salvage from the wreck of his organization and set it up and dust it off and introduce it to the 21st century [sic].

And in that email I sent last week, in which I explained briefly what I’ve said here in this rambling blog post, I pointed out that this little parking fiasco has something to do with the balance he perceived between our different views of the local landscape.

I said to my friend two things, and I hope I’ve set this up so they might make sense when I repeat them here in public:

(1) That it will probably seem from “his side”, among the suits and hallways in which people come and go according to agenda and business hours and rely on telephone conversations, that nothing much has happened. Some extra phone calls to the DDA maybe, some annoyance felt as this pissant internet crowd throw their weight around and complain about something this trivial. That in the long term this tempest in a molehill will look like it blew over and disappeared, and then “his” folks can get back to business as usual. Or maybe that things will get smoothed over, and the data will be free and things will get all geeky and fun again and all the frowns will turn upside down.

…but also, independent of how it plays out on his side: (2) When we look back years later, this will be the week we say the ground shifted. Or if we don’t identify this exact “triviality” as the turning point, then it’ll be one of the seventeen cued up and waiting in the wings.

Last week it was a decent and smart thing, an appropriate use of his time, for my friend to be paying attention to his goal of “outreach to the independent tech community”. It was good that he was musing about how the two cultures might mutually adapt to fit together for one another’s benefit.

Today, though, a switch is thrown: it’s now possible—no, it’s now the most likely outcome—that folks from the Chamber of Commerce will be watching in a year, or two, or five as all the businesses rush to join something else. Some other organization, not the “answer” to them because it won’t be set up in response to the Chamber or the SPARK or the DDA. Something new that just doesn’t give a damn about any of that old junk, or even recognize its existence.

An orthogonal institution.

Because of this fiasco about the parking, or maybe because of any one of the seventeen other accidental clashes that could function just like this, whatever rises up will not look at all like a partnership founded on principles of outreach and mutual support.

It won’t be founded on anywhere near the kind of cooperation it might have been.

The New Thing is not fully formed yet. It shambles on towards its Bethlehem, independent of what’s happening under its feet. But its eyes are open briefly, and today it’s paying attention to the friendly, helpful people in the suits who only want to help. And I suspect what’s moving though its collective mind are appraisals, a kind of sizing up that should make the friendly business development old-skool institutions pause. A look that increasingly feels like a brief consideration for salvage, of food value. Not a spirit of friendly symbiosis, but a glance that takes in all the hinges, all the convenient places for a pry bar to lodge.

I suspect these things happen too fast to respond to, when you insist on keeping your eyes to the path you started on, when you listen to the cues you’ve learned long ago.

And to be frank, maybe that’s best for everybody.

Go join Distributed Proofreaders if you want to see more of this sort of thing whenever you want.

All that to say: the book scanning has slowed don in the last few months. This should improve soon.

Better, we’re re-exploring the Distributed Proofreaders workflow and community, and bringing an experienced and critical eye to improving or replacing it entirely. So a number of experiments are underway around here, trying to find our own appropriate use cases for scanned and transcribed works, not Project Gutenberg’s hopelessly outdated and crufty junk.

So here’s a test from last night: an issue of Willis’s Current Notes from May, 1852. The PDF is once again just pure PDF/A pooped out by ABBYY FineReader, without any proofreading or attempt to improve the text layer. But the images are somewhat improved from the originals, and I kind of like finding a way to OCR Hebrew, Latin, Greek and English all at once.

It may be of some interest to readers with esoteric tastes, so it’s presented as an acknowledged draft; the slightly complicated document structure will be a nice test fixture for the software we’re considering.

Enjoy it. Let me know what you think.

Uncorrected OCR; we’ll post a more authoritative version someday when I’m not just putting the software through its paces.

ELECTRICITY seems destined to be the motor power for street cars. In Montgomery, Alabama, the mule has already been superseded, and there are fifteen miles of street railways operated by the electric motor. Some satisfactory experiments have been made on the Cambridge Street railway. Edison’s latest discoveries in the conversion of heat into electricity are expected to produce important results, dispensing with the intermediate use of steam, and ultimately getting the power from the sun’s rays.

The air is certainly yet to be navigated when a sufficient amount of power can be concentrated in the machine, but at present we can do little more than float with the wind. It is probable that an engine sufficiently strong, built of the best steel, and propelled by the explosive power of gun cotton, or some similar explosive, would overcome the difficulty. If I were to construct such an engine I would substitute for the lifting power of a balloon that of a sail acting as a kite.

In 1783-1787, that is. And look what that got us: a brand new government, run according to completely new rules. Because of course up until that point the United States was “run” by the Articles of Confederation.

A fascinating book in its own right, it starts off with a bang by dismissing all the mythology surrounding the Founding Fathers, the “rights of man” and all that diverse crap that Republicans, Democrats and Libertarians have conflated with the document at hand. It was about economics; about lending, credit, landlords and tenants. About banking, about law enforcement, and about (in some real sense) balance.

But in light of this weekend’s foreboding sense of doom, an interesting analogy might be drawn. I’m going to spend a few hours finishing it, and see what kind of perspective might arrive.

Too often history goes unnoticed when current events overshadow people’s memories.

And it’s in the public domain, since it was published in the US before 1923. So whatever you want, that’s what it is.

As with all Gerald Stanley Lee’s writings, modern readers should say it aloud, with the innumerable commas enforced breaths. The poetry of the drawl, the long list of phrases, makes the modern limited mind lose the thread and start casting abut for imaginary sentences that don’t exist.

Read aloud. Preach it. Then go read the rest of his work.

Symbolic Facts

If the meeting is to accomplish anything before it adjourns sine die, everything depends upon the gavel in it, upon there being some power in it that makes some facts sit down and others stand up, but which sees that all facts are represented.

In general, the more facts a particular fact can be said to be a delegate for, the more a particular fact can be said to represent other facts, the more of the floor it should have. The power of reading for facts depends upon a man’s power to recognise symbolic or sum-total or senatorial facts and keep all other facts, the general mob or common run of facts, from interrupting. The amount of knowledge a man is going to be able to master in the world depends upon the number of facts he knows how to avoid.

This is where our common scientific training–the manufacturing of small scientists in the bulk–breaks down. The first thing that is done with a young man nowadays, if he is to be made into a scientist, is to take away any last vestige of power his mind may have of avoiding facts. Everyone has seen it, and yet we know perfectly well when we stop to think about it that when in the course of his being educated a man’s ability to avoid facts is taken away from him, it soon ceases to make very much difference whether he is educated or not. He becomes a mere memory let loose in the universe–goes about remembering everything, hit or miss. I never see one of these memory-machines going about mowing things down remembering them, but that it gives me a kind of sad, sudden feeling of being intelligent. I cannot quite describe the feeling. I am part sorry and part glad and part ashamed of being glad. It depends upon what one thinks of, one’s own narrow escape, or the other man, or the way of the world. All one can do is to thank God, silently, in some safe place in one’s thoughts, that after all there is a great deal of the human race–always is–in every generation who by mere circumstance cannot be educated–bowled over by their memories. Even at the worst only a few hundred persons can be made over into reductio-ad-absurdum Stanley Halls (that is, study science under pupils of the pupils of Stanley Hall) and the chances are even now, as bad as things are and are getting to be, that for several hundred years yet, Man, the Big Brother of creation, will insist on preserving his special distinction in it, the thing that has lifted him above the other animals–his inimitable faculty for forgetting things.

[Both emphases mine.]

More in a bit. Slow going, because the book is rather fragile (still in the publisher’s wraps, not bound.

How should I actually present the book online?

And can anybody read the handwriting? Here’s a bigger version.

Tonight, while thinking diligently about how best to share these all in a new format, scanned this old tome:

Seems pretty dry, eh? History ≣ dry.

Why is this of any interest at all? Because people like Thomas S. Grimké were in attendance, and they thought some weird things that are still holding sway over American education to this day. Here’s Grimké’s preface to his address:

[Not long after, they allowed how it must make a very good computer science or math degree or something, because they couldn't follow it at all. So the next time I visited SFI, it was as an Entrepreneur; that was more comfortable, to be honest. In a way. My advisor started a company about then doing what... well, things similar to what I was also doing, we'll say.]

But those were nice days. Nice place, SFI. We all miss it — it’s different now, I hear.

Aside from the multiobjective stuff, and the origin of life sims, and the grammar-based chemistry stuff, and the Tierra fork Simon Fraser wrote, and this and that neat research, I made wind chimes out of hard drive disks, and helped set up Ian Malcolm’s SFI web page (he was faculty at SFI, according to Michael Crichton) … and one day in October I tried to morph all the people in the building into a single image.

That one never got very far. The software for the Mac was crap back then: all PICT based and kludgy and full of System 7 (!) goodness. I think I was working on a Quadra 900 at the time; shared the desk with Ken Arrow.

But now, ten years along, I’ve lost the names of some of the people whose portraits I took. Should teach me for not taking good notes, when I know I rarely finish anything within a decade.

Well, anyway. These aren’t single people:

And I don’t know who some of these component (actual) people are at all. Some I do, of course: Stu Kauffman (who was my advisor), Cynthia Breazeal (who was using Post-Its for Kismet’s ears back then), some of the staff. But some of my best friends on staff and people with whom I had long late-night conversations about philosophy and science and the world as it should be? Nada.

So memory, she does me no good.

Maybe that’s what social networks are for. Distributed storage and processing.

The people of these highly civilized countries, while in profound peace, were taxing themselves to death, in order that the survivors might kill each other according to the most modern methods of modern warfare with the most modern weapons of human destruction.

from Memoirs to Illustrate the History of my Time by François Guizot, 1858.

Freethinkers, and I use that name as a title of honour for all who, like Mill, claim for every individual the fullest freedom in thought, word, or deed, compatible with the freedom of others, are apt to make one mistake. Conscious of their own honest intentions, they cannot bear to be mistrusted or slighted. They expect society to submit to their often very painful operations as a patient submits to the knife of the surgeon. That is not in human nature. The enemy of abuses is always abused by his enemies. Society will never yield one inch without resistance, and few reformers live long enough to receive the thanks of those whom they have reformed.

WESTON THE PEDESTRIAN.— Edward Payson Weston¹, the pedestrian, who created somewhat of a sensation in 1861 by walking from Boston to Washington against time, averaging fifty-one miles for the ten consecutive days, has been pitted against his old antagonist, to walk from Portland, Me., to Chicago, Ill., a distance of one thousand two hundred miles, in twenty-six walking days, for the sum of ten thousand dollars a side. The articles of agreement provide that Weston is to perform his arduous labor in thirty days, without walking between midnight on Saturday and midnight on Sunday; and is to walk one hundred consecutive miles inside of twenty-four consecutive hours as a part of the feat. The start from Portland will be made between the 1st and 15th of October. On this trip Weston will pass through parts of ten different States, and more than three hundred cities and towns.

¹A number of other pieces on Weston are in the stack waiting to be transcribed; he was apparently quite the celebrity of his day.