Canned Dragons

When my oldest was younger, we used to read a Berenstain Bears book about prayer. While the books about these anthropomorphic bears are designed to be simple lessons for kids, the particular angles in this book struck me deeply. The take on prayer was nuanced and mature.

In the book The Berenstain Bears Say Their Prayers, Brother Bear is on the same baseball team with his devout cousin, Fred. When they face a particularly tough team with an intimidating player, Fred prays before he pitches to a hitter they refer to only as “The Beast.” To Brother’s astonishment, Fred strikes out The Beast. When brother inquires as to how he did it, Fred talks about his pre-pitch prayer. Brother tries to imitate Fred when he is up as hitter, and prays for a hit. Unfortunately for Brother, and as a blow to his faith, he strikes out. After the incident, he talks again with Fred about prayer. Fred asks what he prayed for, and Brother tells him his supplication was for a hit. When Brother asked Fred what he prayed for he reveals that he simply prayed not to be scared.

It’s hard to know what providence has in store and I suspect Cousin Fred is onto something. If we pray for something very specific, we are taking a chance in praying for something God doesn’t have planned for us. I believe in the power of prayer to move the heart of God. I also believe that God has a plan for our lives and that our prayers should be in alignment with His will for us. That can be hard to know, so sometimes prayers of supplication are just for strength to keep going in order to see what God has set in front of us next.

Fast forward a few years. My son is growing up, working diligently on school projects and just went to his first rock show at a club. He doesn’t read Berenstain Bears anymore. In point of fact, sadly, he doesn’t read any books. Perhaps more disappointing, he doesn’t seem to have internalized the lessons on prayer taught in Sunday school, confirmation class or by the anthropomorphic bears. It can be hard to get him to pray, even when he’s struggling. I wish that he could remember Cousin Fred and his example of prayer to know that it can be effective by putting us in touch with a loving God who wants us to live into the challenges set before us.

Over the years, Cory Doctorow has made himself an expert on digital privacy. This essay is mainly about surveillance capitalism and Doctorow uses Vizio as a negative example. When he takes on the now old adage, "if you're not paying for the product, you're the product," his insight really resonates.

In the simplistic account of what many call "surveillance capitalism," the original sin was swapping our attention for free content, summed up in the pithy phrase, "If you're not paying for the product, you're the product.

I used to subscribe to the idea behind this phrase and repeated it often. It was a go to critique for the Facebook model. Unfortunately, I was never fully taking into account income inequality.

"Paying for the product" isn't just hollow, it's actively harmful. Under conditions of gross inequality and high levels of debt, "paying for the product" excludes those who lack the means to pay from access to the digital world. If Facebook charged for access, people who couldn't afford it wouldn't dig a hole and pull the dirt in over themselves. They'd land on a billionaire-subsidized platform – a social media version of Prageru – where moderators would delete comments that criticized corporate power. This is even worse than widely recognized issues like, "The truth is paywalled and the lies are free.”

Two things really brought this issue front and center for me:

1. The rise in popularity of the subscription model. Apps, publications and services have gone all in on this model and for many of us, there’s only so much we can pay on a recurring basis.
2. Loss in income. When your take home goes down, you start to question all of your expenses, and value the items for which you’ve already fully paid and therefore own.

I’m now in agreement with Doctorow. The mentality of having to pay for every product to gain the entitlement not to be exploited as “the product” has to go.

Pluralistic: 14 Nov 2021 – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow No trackers, no ads. Black type, white background. Privacy policy: we don't collect or retain any data at all ever period.Cory Doctorow

Canned Dragons is a personal web log by a prolific notetaker named Robert. This blog pulls in thoughts from other independent blogs as well as social media accounts and major publishers. This project is an effort to celebrate the earlier days of blogging. The site focuses on faith, noise, technology and adjacent topics.

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B.D McClay points out how everything we do is being reframed as political.

Rest is a radical act. Cooking is a revolutionary act. Joy is an act of resistance. Savoring a pleasant moment is a radical act. Excellence is an act of resistance, but so is procrastination. Being thankful is — you guessed it — a radical act. Reading is a radical act. Ted Lasso is not, itself, a radical act, but it does provide “radical optimism,” which is almost as good. These are descriptions culled from a variety of sources, from Apartment Therapy to the New York Times. The verdict is in: the most radical thing you can do is probably the thing you were going to do already.

McClay goes on to point out that actions can have their own intrinsic rewards. You don't have to couch them in the language of revolution to enjoy them without guilt. The things that are typically the building blocks of our everyday lives are not, in essence, revolutionary.

Reading will not cause you to wind up in jail. There are still enough books being sold to assure us that reading is not a radical act and still being done by a decent percentage of the population. It may be countercultural to read instead of binging the latest Netflix series, but it's hardly radical.

The primary definition of radical from Merrium-Webster:

Counterculture

You are not going to become a revolutionary because you are thankful, or because you brush your teeth or savor a pleasant moment. However, in following some traditions, while they may not be radical, may be make you countercultural in contemporary Western society. In my bio, I mention "Christianity as counterculture." What I'm referring to are practices like observing the Sabbath (through rest and worship). I used to go to Trader Joe's on my way back from church on Sundays. A sizable number of people there were in workout gear. To say our physical health is more important to us than our spiritual health these days would be to state the obvious. Therefore, Sabbath observance, once upon a time effectively enforced by the laws of the land, is now countercultural. It's not radical, though. I think too many writers are missing the difference.

Calling Actions Radical Makes Them Sound More Noble

I recently came across a piece for the NYT titled Divorce Can Be An Act of Radical Self-Love. I'll set aside the many problems with the piece and focus on the title and premise. In many instances, divorce can be an act of self-love. You don't get to call something roughly half of the married population do "radical," though. It may make your self-serving actions sound better intentioned than they really are, but that's simply a semantic trick. Articles like these are diminishing the word certainly of its usefulness and probably of its very meaning. At least when "radical" was slang in the eighties, it meant something was extraordinarily cool. Even then, it wasn't so brutishly abused as it is now.

A few weeks ago, I blogged about Quebec artist MUNYA and her upcoming album, Voyage to Mars. MUNYA just released a new track off the album, the disco-inflected “Voyage” and filmed a video to go with it. In the video, lots of construction is going on, but the viewer is never really given a total picture of what is being built. It’s almost as if she’s creating something that can never be completed. The lyrics repeated over and over in the chorus may speak something to this.

All my life, all the dreams
I’ll never forget about you.

In the place of completion, there’s a sense of loss. Accompanying that sense of loss is the drive to move on. Perhaps a resignation over a relationship that’s never going to work out.

Voyage to Mars by MUNYA is out today, 11/12.

I realize that I posted a video from Colatura not long ago, but the second single off of their debut is as winsome as the first and it seemed like an opportunity wasted not to share it.

"Some days, crowded spaces feel lonely, some days they feel okay." It may not be the most profound lyric ever written, but it carries with it some truth that all of us have felt.

There has been a fair amount of debate recently about the utility of being able to “like” posts on social sites. Specifically, this has come up in the form of discussion around the photo sharing site, Glass, and their decision to eschew ways to “like” a post. Although likes are standard throughout social media sites, the idea to exclude them is not new. As I mentioned in this post, it’s one of the design principles that Glass follows that already existed on Micro.blog.

Low-cost approval

Some folks want an easy way of indicating enjoyment of a particular post.

Unpopular opinion in the micro.blog (and maybe the broader indieweb community), but I agree Glass, and other social systems, should have likes. They can be private, and they don’t have to feed an algorithm. But I would love a low friction indication of being seen and appreciated.

I have had the same thought as Becker. For example, if I post a collage on Instagram, and it gets 14 likes (some from friends and family and some from total strangers that dig collages), it feels more rewarding than when I post it on my blog and I get no responses.

However, are the likes from friends and family just obligatory and reflexive? It’s hard to be sure. The feedback isn’t three dimensional, it doesn’t have much weight and it’s low quality. There’s no indication of what the person likes. It takes approximately one second to hit that heart button, so if people can do it while flying through a timeline, it can be difficult to know if they really spent any time looking at the post.

The shame of no responses

There are negative sides to even positive reinforcement mechanisms. What if no one responds to the post? It has been widely reported that teenage girls will delete Instagram posts when they don’t get enough likes within a certain time period. The absence of feedback can become a void. A self-critical voice then fills the void.

Despite much being made of Instagram's negative effect on the mental health, we have to remember that much of the material from the studies that show this are based on subjective self-reporting.  Even subjective feelings of well-being represent valuable data, though. After all, we can’t usually objectively know how someone is feeling unless they tell us. We now have subjective pain ratings to render feelings as objectively as we can.

When even positive feedback is unwanted

In 2018, David Heinemeier Hanson, from Basecamp, wrote about how even good feedback can be problematic.

It’s the long-term exposure that does the harm. It’s the building of a tolerance. The cultivation of vanity. It’s not the first hit, but the forty-fifth.

It was a week’s worth of abstinence from Twitter and Instagram that brought about this reflection. It felt liberating. Liberating not to play to a crowd with the power to instantly judge the performance. Liberating to be free from the likes, the hearts, and those flattering comments.

He discusses the cycle of getting habituated to likes and then craving them and constantly checking for signs of approval. Eventually, the impetus to write is to get positive reinforcement. It doesn’t have to be the case that authentic writing suffers for this, but most of the time, that would be the end result of reorienting your goals purely to satisfy your audience.

One idea that buttresses David’s post is that Basecamp’s blogging solution, Hey World, doesn’t have these problems. The only way to comment on a post is to email the author. Nothing is public, so the performative aspect of commenting is absent.

I will note that not all of us have the problem David has where we get too much good feedback and have to run and take shelter, lest it swell out heads. While his choice to forego praise seems sensible enough for him, and perhaps helps him stay focused, I’m not sure it’s right for the rest of us. Occasionally, it's nice to know that someone is reading what we write.

My wife and I started watching the new Apple TV+ sci-fi series Foundation last weekend. The trailer for the show promised exciting visuals and an intriguing plot. The review from the site Common Sense Media was mostly very positive. The write-up on the show focused quite a bit on the show's diverse cast and little on the violence. The quick summary on the site encapsulates their review well:

"Cerebral sci-fi drama has diversity, some violence." Representation is important, but I'm ashamed that we've become so saturated in violence that we consider the level this show contains barely worth mentioning.

Fictional violence

In the universe of Foundation, a powerful empire rules over many planets. In a scene from episode two, we are shown how the empire responds to acts of terrorism. They find scapegoats for the act and target vengeance upon token individuals from the scapegoated populations in a town square setting. The indviduals are masked and made to stand on the edge of a building rooftop with a neuse tied around their necks. Each faceless character was kicked off of a roof to hang by their surely broken necks. The show wasn't shy about stretching this out, showing each individual being kicked off one a time and their dead body twisting in the wind. It was reminiscent of what Saddam Hussein used to do with people that he wanted to eliminate. While this was happening, weapons of mass destruction were being deployed on the entire populace of two planets, while their ambassadors wailed and screamed at the fate of their fellow citizens back home. During the incredibly visceral ordeal, crowds, shown on the balconies of their spartan apartments, cheered in triumph. What made the scene even worse for the viewer was knowing that the people being punished were not guilty of any wrongdoing, but were simply the targets in an exercise of force. They were victims of an act of genocide for show. When the show was over, a traumatized boy is brought over to the hanging dead bodies. He asks if they ever handle these situations differently and is told no.

Violence in television and movies has become so mainstream that even sites specifically created to surface it aren't up to the job.

In the same episode, we see one of the protagonists brutally stabbed to death by his protege, his life blood oozing across the floor. The murder is done with no context, and is shocking. The frantic scene that follows gives no more information on why the murder happened. The viewer is left, potentially emotionally damaged, all in the service of trying to squeeze a cliffhanger in to draw people into the next episode. It's crass and manipulative.

Real-life violence

When I was in the eleventh grade, I lived in Albuquerque, NM, which was, at the time, second in the nation in gang activity. It could be a rough place and in high school, you learned to keep your head low (literally, lest someone you looked in the eyes think you were mad dogging them). The high school I went to was the same high school that Neil Patrick Harris attended, though he was two years ahead of me and graduated the year before I was there. That same year, a boy from the school was killed in the parking lot because he had allegedly said something bad about his murderer. I only heard stories, but I'm sure Harris remembers the incident, which would have happened when he was a senior. The part that disturbed me most about the stories that I heard was that a crowd had gathered around the conflict and were chanting, "kill him." I can never get that out of my mind. The bloodlust of the crowd depicted in Foundation brought back for me the ugly reality of human nature.

When sense is no longer common

This show and its evaluation on the Common Sense Media site shows that I can no longer rely on that site for giving reliable information with which to judge whether a show is too violent (for me, or my kids). Violence in television and movies has become so mainstream that even sites specifically created to surface it aren't up to the job. It's frightening what that says about us.

Years ago, I had a bad experience post-surgery when my wisdom teeth taken out. A couple of days after the procedure, I ruptured a blood vessel in my gum. I spent all night spitting out blood into a bucket. I stuffed tea bags into my mouth, hoping the tannin would stop the bleeding. It didn't.

As soon as the morning came, I phoned my oral surgeon and told him in some graphic detail of my plight. He seemed annoyed at my sense of urgency, but agreed to meet me as soon as his office opened for the day. When I got to the office, the doctor seemed surprised. "You really are bleeding!" I reminded him that I had mentioned that on the phone. "Yeah, but everybody says that," he told me. He stitched me up and left me to ride out the next several days feeling like someone was trying to rip the jaw off of my face.

The experience left me wondering how people who are honest are impacted by the dishonesty of others. The surgeon had openly admitted to taking my claim less seriously because his experience had taught him that people often exaggerate the state of post-surgery complications. I was able to get the care I needed, but are there situations where appropriate medical care is not received, because the care provider doesn't understand the severity of the case at hand. I imagine this could come into play in an emergency care environment where triage is being done. In such an environment, the order in which people get care is critical. What if someone is not believed, and they don't get the care they need in time to prevent further escalation of a health issue? Or worse, what if there are additional complications because the patient did not get attention quickly enough?

There are times when this dynamic comes into play and we don't even realize it. We can't always know when people are being dismissive, and, even if it's obvious, we don't always know why. An obvious case came up again recently in my life, though. I was trying to sell a pinball machine. The guy who was attempting to line up a buyer was helping me price the sale, sight unseen. He tried to talk me down from my original price, even though I told him the machine was in good condition and completely in working order. The attempt to talk me down wasn't coming from self-interest, because he wasn't going to be buying the machine. He was just trying to help me come to a reasonable price at which the machine would sell fairly quickly.

When the individual who was helping me by acting as the middleman came to assess the machine, he expressed surprise that it was in such good condition. I mentioned that I had told him it was in good shape and he responded that everyone says that. It struck me as another situation where those of us trying to be honest are saddled with expectations that other people who are less scrupulous have set.

In discussing this with someone else, I was reminded that, in these instances, people may not necessarily be dishonest, but may simply not have the knowledge to best described their experiences. That seems right for some people, and probably not for others. I'm really concerned with the others, where I think distrust becomes transitive and affects the people who don't do anything to court it.

The radio started when I turned on the ignition. NPR had been playing from when my wife drove the car before me. A guy was shrilly complaining about filling out paperwork for getting a vasectomy and being told that his wife also had to sign. He was livid and kept yelling, “this is my fertility!” The interviewer was gamely playing along, perhaps even as convinced as vasectomy man that his autonomy had indeed been violated. The man being interviewed went on to state that he had an epiphany come from this experience. “This is what women have to go through every day!” he forcefully exclaimed to the interviewer, as if a bolt of lightning had struck him from out of the blue.

The man on NPR was seemingly oblivious to the nature of marriage as a social contract between two individuals. It’s not a stretch to say that choices of reproduction are some of the most central decisions within this contract. To enter into a covenant relationship, in which two people very often decide to have children, and to exclude your spouse from that decision without their knowledge is a breach of that covenant. The man was perfectly comfortable being dishonest with his spouse (and seemingly, the interviewer was sympathetic to this stance), as long as everything was within his control. He didn’t understand that the partnership of marriage means ceding some control to the relationship, through communication and mutual agreement.

In Alan Noble's new book, You Are Not Your Own, he takes on the problems caused by worshipping autonomy.

From this inauspicious start until today, “humanity’s fundamental rebellion against God has been a rebellion of autonomy,” writes Alan Noble in his latest book, You Are Not Your Own: Belonging to God in an Inhuman World. As the subtitle suggests, Noble’s premise is that modern society is fundamentally inhuman and that this inhumanity stems from the lie that we belong to ourselves. Like Adam and Eve, we believe that accepting our creaturely limits will likewise limit our happiness, so we reject God’s authority and end up experiencing what they did: distance from God, each other, and even ourselves.

→ The Inhuman Consequences of Satan’s Oldest Lie

I'm eager to dive into Noble's book, as I firmly believe the desire for autonomy that conquers natural law and community is a destructive force in contemporary society. When we speculate about the reasons for worsening divisions between people and mental health problems reaching a new high, we have cause to look at trying to decouple ourselves from anything that might anchor us. We can't pull up our own roots because we feel like they are tethering us to the ground and expect to thrive.