That’s Certainly a Lot of Composing, Composing, 07/07/2017

I had to take yesterday off from the blog because I had to hit the emergency room Tuesday night to deal with an injury. It was nothing serious – I still have all my limbs, organs, and brain cells.

I’m missing some skin on my ankle, though. Thanks to the GF and my GP, that wound is now covered by a bandage that I actually know how to change myself. This is already more practical medical knowledge than I’ve ever had before.

Getting ready to close another era of Doctor Who with my first scheme
to make a little cash from it.

One good thing about having to sit in an emergency room for four hours is that I got a lot of reading done. So I have a bunch more blog entries to work through.

I also owe my Doctor Who analysis readers a rankings post. I’ll prepare that over the weekend, though I’m having trouble figuring out the best breakdown. I can rank them according to pure quality of story or their contribution to the ethical theme of the season, and I think both would be useful. But the lists would end up looking very different.

It’s also tough to figure out the best way to deal with the Monks Trilogy in the rankings. It’s a three episode story, but each episode is handled by a different writer and has such wildly varying quality that we’re best to treat it as three stories.

There are two ways I could go on both these issues, which make me think that this is the sort of thing to start talking about on Patreon over the weekend when I start promoting my Capaldi Era book. I choose one of each to put on the blog, and leave the alternative for the book.

As part of that work on Doctor Who, I’ve actually connected with some folks who are preparing a pretty substantial fanfic / media project. More news about this as the details firm up over the next year. But it’s going to be quite a lot of fun.

No, he's not that kind of founder.

I also published my first long-form blog post as part of my work with a young marketing firm. The Founder won’t mind that I linked it on my own blog in a Composing post because he specializes in SEO and this is how that whole process works.

I’ll be promoting these communications / marketing posts with a few key influencers I know. It’s a project that I think will let me contribute to the discussions of professional communications and marketing in a way I’m well-suited for – philosophical analysis of trends in online marketing, communications, and new media technology.

Long-term, I think my work with Rosaline Digital Marketing could give me the background to become a kind of in-house futurist. Yes, I know that sounds horrifyingly pretentious. I’m simply speaking here about branding, developing an approach to marketing and communications planning that sees the weaknesses of conventional wisdom by the time it becomes conventional.

All of this is very provisional planning, new writing ventures that have come up lately. It’s quite a few hats to wear, in addition to my work as a teacher, filmmaker, and political philosopher. But there are all enough common themes that, as all these ongoing projects come together, you can see the singular nature of all my work, its core unity.

Typical of most of my projects. I can’t tell you what it’s really about until it’s over.

Why Be So Ambitious About a Chatbot, Really? Research Time, 21/06/2016

You know, even though I spent yesterday’s post talking about the global mass fragmentation of online space, most of that actual post Brian Honigman published last week was about chatbots.

Now, chatbots are weirdly fascinating creatures. I mean this in a strictly intellectual sense. Because every time I encounter a chatbot in my actual life, they irritate the hell out of me. And this is a very important point for my argument that you should remember as I go through a more complex reaction to Brian’s ideas.

Hal, I asked you to open the pod bay doors. Why are you
asking me to do your survey about my satisfaction with
Discovery Space Systems before you'll let me back on
board the ship?

In a broad sense, artificial intelligence has a profound hold on the Western popular imagination. This is true for two worlds that I’ve worked in over the last decade – science fiction and philosophy.

Philosophically, I’ve studied cognitive science and the theory of mind in my younger days. Contemporary philosophy of mind developed from the community of scientists and thinkers that were part of the cybernetics community in the mid-20th century. 

This was the community whose ultimate goal was the creation of artificial intelligence. In its original sense, this was the replication of a human-style mind in a machine. Among the philosophical community (at least in academia), artificial intelligence is still largely focussed on this goal.

It’s the same goal and ideal that animates so much of science-fiction, from the first imaginings of mechanical men, through the creation of the term ‘robot,’ the innovations of Golden Age writers like Asimov, the more nuanced explorations of Star Trek: The Next Generation, Battlestar: Galactica, and so many other stories across so many other media.

It’s a focus of some of my own creative work, like the development of my Alice character for the film project Here Is a Man, and my plans for future short stories and novellas imagining the far future of humanity. 

Having survived multiple ecological crises and dystopias to live spread among stars hundreds of light years apart. A species of robotic sages who we created drift from world to world, the mirrors of our best natures, to whom we always fall short.

Dream casting for Here Is a Man: June Diane Raphael as
Alice. She plays the same basic sarcasm and sense of
superiority she does so well on Grace and Frankie, but
where her character also has the genuine wisdom,
perceptiveness, and martial skill of the master sage
described in the Zhuangzi.

The human imagination has developed profound imaginaries of our most hopeful, optimistic alternative futures. And the most visible manifestation of artificial intelligence in our real lives are bloody chatbots.

That says a lot about human nature right there. 

Honigman discusses the potential of chatbots to improve consumer experiences, inquiries, and marketing techniques. Which is genuinely interesting territory – it’s fascinating and sometimes horrifying to develop algorithmic entities that can become creative and innovative thanks to continuing relationships with humans. Intelligence literally manifests through experience with an intelligence.

But our abilities at turning an algorithm heuristic* are still very limited. A chatbot can develop a very detailed and comprehensive power to respond to human needs and inquiries. But only within a very limited conceptual space.

* If I can borrow a phrase from Arthur C Clarke.

AI engineers can’t yet program a chatbot intelligence that can truly learn and adapt with the same flexibility that humans can with our uncommonly plastic, malleable brains. All the parameters of a chatbot’s interactions have to be pre-programmed into it. 

They can learn and improve within those parameters, so the best chatbots are the ones that perform very specific customer service functions. They're the front lines for a business to answer consumer questions in real time about specific product lines and company activities. 

With so much contemporary research showing how rooted
intelligence is in our embodiment and interactions with
our environment, building a truly human-like artificial
intelligence would mean literally building an artificial
human, down to our own neural plasticity and
developmental interaction with our environment.

The only AI we know how to build right now is one in which we can anticipate the boundaries of everything it will be asked to do. Life, taken on the whole, is too complex for anyone to anticipate. To imagine life in advance is beyond human intelligence.

So instead, we build computer programs to interact with people in messenger apps about consumer products. The first crack at help lines and customer complaint logs. A cheaper replacement for human operators.

With a little more flexibility, they can spam us with unsolicited and obviously fake conversations about a company’s products. In just the same way as I get generic emails to “try our progressive new product” from hotmail addresses that contain more numbers than anything like someone’s actual name, alias, or avatar. 

And I’ll pass over those open marketing messages in the same way I pass over those spam emails that slip through my filters and clutter my feed some mornings. Only I'll be more irritated, because I may not be able to get the chatbot to shut up.

Then I’ll go back to writing my story of the robotic sage who wants to save us from ourselves. Or watching an adventure with Geordi, Deanna, and Mr Data. Chatbots might be the future of a lot of marketing channels and consumer-company interaction, but I remain skeptical that they'll ever stop being annoying.

All the Fuckin’ Dope You Can Smoke! Greed’s Blindness, Sunnyvale, 14/05/2016

I said before that Julian isn’t meant to be an actual businessman. Last time, I was talking about what Sunnyvale as a creature* does to what we’d typically think of as a business like a bar. This week, Julian’s turned the entire trailer park into a business, and in the television episode “All the Fuckin’ Dope You Can Smoke!” we get to see what that does to Sunnyvale and to him.

* I guess I should say that I’m still not sure what Sunnyvale actually is. It’s a community, and it’s definitely a culture, and it’s obviously a trailer park. But it’s also a weird kind of entity in itself. Sunnyvale creates some weird space-that’s-not-a-space where the normal rules of how to run a business and how to run your life don’t really apply. Where trailers can fall on top of people and they can walk away and dust themselves off. Where the value and power of money itself just fucking breaks down. Sunnyvale isn’t a normal place. It’s more than a place. What it is, I guess we’ll find out through the next two years or so of writing about it. Maybe.

So what’s the situation? What are we actually dealing with here? Barb is coming after Sunnyvale. She’s out for revenge. She’s the spectre of death looming over the whole community. Well, she’s the spectre of mass eviction, which basically is death for a community. Death for Sunnyvale.

The last and only line of defence is Julian. Sunnyvale’s greatest schemer, planner, fixer, and con-man. He can hold off Barb’s attack with the help of his crooked lawyer Steinberg. By rezoning the park as private property for business, he’s built another legal barrier to Barb’s takeover. And if Sunnyvale is going to be a private business, he’s going to make sure it uses its full potential. A casino resort – for an entry fee, customers can gamble their money away and drink for free. Julian gets to make more money to keep Steinberg working to get Barb off his back, and Sunnyvale protects itself by doing what it does best – getting people drunk as fuck.

Everything should be running totally smoothly. And if you watch the episode, it looks as though Ricky is the one to fuck things up as usual. He improvises a line in the youtube ad Bubbles records for Sunnyvale Resorts about "All the Fucking Dope You Can Smoke!” And it gives the impression that free weed is part of the all-inclusive package, instead of the extra that it was in Julian’s original plan.

So Ricky and Julian get into a fight. Now, ordinarily, this isn’t really a big deal. We’ve seen Ricky and Julian get into fights. We see it all the time. One of the pleasures of watching Trailer Park Boys is in seeing Ricky and Julian get into ridiculous arguments over some fuckup and then watching them work it out. But this argument escalates absurdly fast. Within minutes, they’re pointing guns at each other. These two don’t lose their tempers this quickly. Even when they lose their tempers, they don’t point their guns at each other. 

Gun standoffs aren’t normal in Sunnyvale – they only happen when a situation gets so intense and dangerous that ordinary trailer park diplomacy collapses. And it’s usually an outsider to Sunnyvale who starts the gunfight. Like Leslie Dancer, Cyrus, or Sam Losco (before he decided to stop being an asshole). When a gunfight happens, one of the participants has to leave. Usually, it’s the one who started it. Sunnyvale is a place where people have guns, but gunfights and standoffs are normally pretty foreign. When guns come out, it’s not as a way to settle fights – it’s a sign that a fight’s gotten incurable. Ricky and Julian are best friends, and to see them point their guns at each other is incredibly messed up.

How did Julian get into this state? Look at how stressed he is all through this episode as he tries to keep Sunnyvale running smoothly as a resort. Julian’s getting petty, sharp, mean-spirited. He’s turning into the asshole that he normally hates to see in Sunnyvale ruining everyone’s good times and happiness. And he’s doing it in the name of making money. He even rebranded the place as Moneyvale, for fuck’s sake.

But Julian never originally rezoned Sunnyvale as a private property to make money with it – his Freedom 45 plan that he’d never have to hustle small-time jobs for a living again. The prospect of making money was a happy side-effect of his plan to save the residents of the park from Barb evicting them – his plan to save Sunnyvale. But to save Sunnyvale, he brought it into contact with the outside world – the normal human world that runs on money, prices, and profit. Having to enter commerce with that world started turning Julian into an asshole.

He’s even lost the sense of strategy, scheming, and planning that led him to think of rezoning as a defence against Barb’s attack. He turns a hippie away from Ricky's Drugs Store and Bubbles' pet-sitting business just because they didn't buy all-inclusive bracelets. He's become so focussed on his own narrow plan to make money that he even ignores all the ways that Sunnyvale can prosper just by encouraging people to join in the community – come get high while we watch your kitties for you! 

Just look at how he acts with Jim when he and Randy return to Sunnyvale. We’ve seen how Barb, Donna, and Candy are intimidating Jim into helping her take back Sunnyvale. And we’ve seen how Jim doesn’t want to have anything to do with anything in Sunnyvale anymore except Randy. But Barb won’t stop the violence, won’t stop using violence to keep Jim at her heel.

Because let’s be entirely honest about what Barb, Donna, and Candy do to Randy when they kidnap him and take him back to that camper. They are sexually assaulting him. It’s played for laughs,** but it’s clearly rape. Randy is distraught and traumatized afterward, and Jim drives him back to Sunnyvale, comforting him all the time. Jim is capable of incredible tenderness to Randy, and in those few minutes in that car, Jim does all he can to help Randy heal from a terrible act of sexual violence.

** Which is disturbing enough, and extremely unsettling to watch.

This moment should be the start of Jim’s victory over Barb. He returns to Sunnyvale, the community he’s denounced, because Barb’s violence toward Randy was too much for him to put up with. Jim can deal with being abused by Barb – he put up with being married to her for years anyway. But this kind of brutal violence done to Randy is too much. Jim is clearly, obviously desperate. He’s set on betraying Barb, no matter the cost to himself. He wants her defeated. He can’t let her win after she’s done this terrifying thing to his Randy. 

And Julian can’t see that. He yells at Randy for being away from his post, and doesn’t listen when Randy tries to explain that he was kidnapped and assaulted. Jim is presenting Julian with his best opportunity to stop Barb – a spy on the inside of her gang who’ll report on her plans. Randy’s been hurt so badly that Jim is offering to cooperate with Julian, a man he still regards with seething resentment over ejecting him from Sunnyvale. This could be the moment when the joy and love of natural Sunnyvale life wins its greatest victory – throwing together two mortal enemies as a team, in the name of Jim’s own desire to love and protect Randy.

But Julian just throws him out. He can’t see Jim’s desperation. The stress of running a real business has made him blind. It’s wrecked his own ability to scheme. It’s ruined his ability to think. All Julian can do is yell and scream at his problems, flail around like an animal. 

Jim will only get more desperate after this. He has nowhere left to go for help. This could have been the team-up that changes everything, that finally brings complete happiness to Sunnyvale. But Julian’s been too blinded to see it. The moment is gone. And it can never come back.

So we have a chance for a redemptive friendship, the fundamental conflict of the entire last 15 years of Trailer Park Boys healing in the name of solidarity against violence and cruelty. And Julian blew it. There will never be that kind of opportunity again. And the friendship that defined the bonds of brotherly love and solidarity at the heart of the show is crumbling. Julian’s blown that too. It seems in these few moments that nothing can save Sunnyvale.

Then Jimmy Kimmel shows up and his audience laughs so hard at Ricky, Julian, and Bubbles’ zany antics that everything is fine. What the fuck?

• • •

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Truth Is the Egg that Splats on Your Face, Jamming, 24/07/2015

I was always planning to write about something in the news for Friday. After a few more philosophical and historical posts about my research, I thought I was due. But one of my Twitter friends linked an article this week that made me want to explore a problem in public relations.

Yes, it was about Ashley Madison.*

* Probably better than my original idea, a rant about the Iran deal and the exhaustion of global American power.

And yes, the popular reception of the Ashley Madison hack was immensely hypocritical coming in the same week as Gawker's outing of a high-ranking Condé Nast editor who no one is now naming out of contrition.** Dan Savage said it well enough that I can simply link to it. Shaming one rich person for an affair is terrible, but humiliating and compromising 37 million regular people is fine.

** This even though we all know who it is from having read the original Gawker story. I can say it because, not only do we know who it is, I’m one guy with kind of an anti-authoritarian streak. It’s David Geithner. Tim Geithner’s brother. Who is married to a woman and has sex with men. Soap opera country.

So incredibly cheesy.

That’s a moment of popular hypocrisy that I can acknowledge and move on. Because I’m most interested in exploring an analysis at PR News about how Ashley Madison’s public relations department was caught flat-footed by the hack. Well, as anyone would be with such a catastrophic compromise in your company’s confidential data.

The brief set of solutions that the article’s author, Matthew Schwartz, recommended have to do with maintaining a solid relationship between the PR and IT department. Ashley Madison’s major PR messages were that their information was absolutely secure from any hack, attack, or thievery. They promoted themselves as “the last truly secure space on the internet.”

If the PR folks had interacted with the IT department, they would have known that there is no truly absolute security on the internet. Every security system has its vulnerabilities, simply because of the complexity of software architecture, and the rigid nature of the logic of computer programs.

A company’s level of internet security is only as strong as its attackers are weak. If your data is secure, it’s only because no one has thought of how they can steal it – yet. 

Always, there is yet.

This is true. It’s a basic truth of internet security that you can glean from an afternoon chatting with your company’s IT folks over coffee, or reading Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon. I don’t think the problem was that Ashley Madison PR was somehow not knowledgeable about how internet security works.

The problem was that the priority of Ashley Madison’s PR department was not set to respect the company’s duty to be honest with their clients about the limits of internet security. Their priority was to disseminate messages that would encourage people to gravitate to Ashley Madison when they wanted adulterous services.

That’s a marketing priority. And it’s very easy for marketing priorities to leave out information that complicates how someone understands a company’s business, if that information would make them skeptical. 

“Ashley Madison is perfectly secure” is a simple message that encourages people to use the website for their secret sex transactions. “Ashley Madison does a generally very good job with security and we hire the best people, but at a particular level, we’re still constantly playing catch-up to the innovations of cyber-criminals and web malignants, just like every other business and government on Earth,” not so much.

The troubling part about PR is that it can be in the department’s best interests to obscure information that would make people think twice about becoming customers or clients. It’s the company’s best interests too, at least in the immediate frame of reference. 

Ultimately, PR is caught between the need to draw people to their business and the need to be open and honest with the people who’ve trusted their business. 

It isn’t a lie to omit a truth, but trust requires openness.