Xark!

A new form of writing

We all learned to write in more or less the same way: Beginning, middle, end; Subject, predicate, object; Thesis, antithesis, synthesis. Beyond consisting of three items, each of these approaches shares another common theme: Inclusion. Everything necessary to understand the point is expressed explicitly on the page.

But when you write for the Web as you'd write for print, you write too long. You waste the reader's time explaining what she already knows.

When we write for the Web, we should use the Web's strengths to our advantage. This begins with thinking a little bit deeper about how information is constructed, because the Web can offer writers the benefit of  both clarity and brevity.

This post is an example: If you already recognized the concepts I used to build my argument, you're almost done reading. If you didn't, you can follow the links and read my explanations. And if you follow each back to its beginning, you'll find some definitive statements. Referencing one definitive statement for any concept or fact is an idea software engineers call "The DRY Principle," and I believe it's important to the future of both journalism and civilization.

Learning to write this way is a bit like playing three-dimensional chess, but it also reminds me of The Glass Bead Game. Sadly, writers today lack the technological tools and display conventions that would fully support and reward the required effort. But I suspect the ideas demonstrated here could lead us toward new ways of thinking and communicating that are far better adapted to the world we now inhabit.

Notes.

Image: This post as a rough semantic outline.Click to see full-size.

The flu will test who we are

"Flu is a highly political issue, to put it mildly," Terry Jones wrote this morning, and that's what I'm going to talk about -- not the science of it. Because science is only part of what we'll be facing in the coming days.

Whether or not history records April 2009 as the genesis of a global pandemic, there are some things we can expect with near certainty: Rumors, reports, controversy, credibility gaps and fear. So please bear these things in mind and, if you agree with these ideas, help spread them. Because fear is a deadly virus, too, and just as networked media can help spread it, network media can also serve as an immune system response to fear IF WE KEEP OUR HEADS AND WORK TOGETHER.

The exponential present

From Jefferson to America 4.0

I owe my patriotic sentimentality to my mother, a teacher from Iowa who encouraged me to read and spent the early 1970s prowling yard sales for age-appropriate books about American history, which I promptly consumed. It is because of her that I worshiped Thomas Jefferson above all the other founding fathers, carrying his ideal of intellectual egalitarianism well into my adult life.

Last week she sent me an email titled "Thomas Jefferson's sayings in light of today." My hackles rose before I even opened it, since poor red-haired TJ has become the Patron Saint of Liberty in modern America, cited by all sides as proof of their fundamental wisdom and Americanism. And Mom joined me in ambivalence: "Don't know how I feel about a lot of these ... but it is interesting!"

Interesting and deeply bothersome is how I'd put it.

"When we get piled upon one another in large cities, as in Europe, we shall become as corrupt as Europe."
 
"The democracy will cease to exist when you take away from those who are willing to work, and give to those who are not."
 
"It is incumbent on every generation to pay its own debts as it goes. A principle, which if acted on, would save one-half the wars of the world."
 
"I predict future happiness for Americans, if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them."

And so on. In short, the collection presents an American icon as Ron Paul with a pony tail, a Libertarian genius standing athwart history and shouting "Stop!" For every anxious American worried about the future of the country under Democratic leadership, this collection reads like Jefferson's j'accuse from beyond the grave.

Which brings me, this Presidents Day, to an uncomfortable duty. I come to argue not only with one of my greatest heroes, but in doing so, to argue for a new understanding of this particular moment in history. Because I believe we are in the midst of the fourth America revolution.

Unscientific thoughts on biology

From an e-mail exchange with Addison, who is taking biology this semester and apparently enjoying the hell out of it (don't get him started on Calculus, though, unless you already speak it. You've been warned).

The topic: Why is biology an a priori science? Why doesn't the math work like it does in physics? Could the math work like it does in physics?

It reminded me of an old line of thinking from a few years back: If matter and energy are information, can we think of life as the organizing counterbalance to entropy? And wouldn't that make the "how" of consciousness (in the matter-and-energy-organizing sense) one of the fundamental questions of biology? So here's my reply (lightly edited):

The (over-)Thinking Man's Guide to Dr. Horrible

I tried to watch Joss Whedon's buzz-generator Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog on its premiere day, but traffic was so heavy I  gave up. Here's the complete three-act musical (42 minutes, with some short commercial breaks), and it's worth a watch.

But how do I feel about it? Not so easily capsulized.

The most obvious observation is this: When you're a cult celebrity with a body of successful work (Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, Firefly, Serenity), a relatively small amount of money, plenty of talented friends and too much time on your hands (Dr. Horrible came out of the writer's strike), you can get plenty of publicity and great production values out of a low-rez media form like web video.

Another obvious observation: Neil Patrick Harris is an extremely funny guy.

Yet none of that particularly interests me. Yes, Dr. Horrible likely will be remembered as a historic milestone in the development of web video as an independent medium, but that was almost assured from the moment that news of the project started racing around the Twitterverse.

No, what I want to talk about requires spoilers. So don't read past the jump until after you've watched the final act.

An energy plan we can believe in

There are times in the history of our nation when our very way of life depends upon dispelling illusions and awakening to the challenge of a present danger. In such moments, we are called upon to move quickly and boldly to shake off complacency, throw aside old habits and rise, clear-eyed and alert, to the necessity of big changes. Those who, for whatever reason, refuse to do their part must either be persuaded to join the effort or asked to step aside. This is such a moment.

“Today I challenge our nation to commit to producing 100 percent of our electricity from renewable energy and truly clean carbon-free sources within 10 years. This goal is achievable, affordable and transformative. It represents a challenge to all Americans – in every walk of life: to our political leaders, entrepreneurs, innovators, engineers, and to every citizen.”

Well. There's a simple, visionary plan from a guy whose life has earned him the credibility and stature to propose it: Reverse the trend in carbon emissions, end our dependency on foreign oil (thereby changing our relationship to the Middle East) and kick start our economy with new industries, new products, new services, new public works projects.

We rallied around Kennedy's call to put a man on the moon in 10 years and to do other grand things, "because they are hard." Well, we've got a better reason to do this: Because it's going to save our sorry asses.

Sure, we'll have the usual people telling us this is just more stupid libtard stuff. And to put it bluntly, screw 'em. They've had their time, and they blew it.

Anyway, I've just started a group at MyBarackObama.com to encourage the explicit adoption of this challenge. I'll post the URL as soon as it gets processed.

Info R/Evolution, Intertwingularity & Xarkism

I built this blog began in the summer of 2005 based on a couple of insistent thoughts:

1. The standard media/cultural categories for topics and discussions were entirely too sterile and limiting for the way I wanted to think and talk;
2. Based on my mode of working as a reporter (diving intensely into one topic after another) it was increasingly obvious to me that my learning in one area (quantum physics) influenced my thinking about another subject (microbiology), which provided insight into seemingly separate topics (mass media, sociology, politics, etc.).

Hence, Xark began with a foundational statement: Because there are no unrelated topics.

Our thought? Maybe by involving people from multiple backgrounds in multiple topics, we'd have more interesting and productive discussions and insights. I based this on the notion that communites that grow up around "themed" blogs tend to evolve into monocultures. Ecosystem biology teaches us that a monoculture (tree farm) simply isn't as sustainable, healthy or as valuable as a naturally diverse ecosystem (rainforest).

These days I'm happy to observe how well those concepts fit into our developing understanding of knowledge and human intelligence in the networked world. From Peter Morville and his book Ambient Findability to Dave Weinberger and his Everything is Miscellaneous, the leading edge of the culture is rapidly incorporating radical ideas about the semantic structure of information -- quite literally, how the Web works better when we pattern our information systems on human-ness. The Web has rather haphazardly grown into an extension of ourselves. The next step (generically, The Semantic Web) may be very deliberately built as an extension of human consciousness.

So Ted Nelson's notion of Intertwingularity (1974) re-emerges in a new contest and reflects its futuristic light on the notion of Xarking.

Intertwingularity is not generally acknowledged -- people keep pretending they can make things deeply hierarchaical, categorizable and sequential when then they can't. Everything is deeply intertwingled.

So Anthropology professor Michael Wesch begins to make sense instantly: Everything is connected. Nothing is separate.

I suspect it was always this way. Perhaps we saw it differently before because information and communication was so slow and precious and difficult before. It took improvements in maritime and navigational technology before we could "see" the Earth as round. Maybe it takes the explosion of networked media for us to "see" that everything is an expression of the one, that technology is evolution by non-biological means, that political, economic and social systems based on keeping us artificially separate and oppositional are wasteful relics.

The rest of the world doesn't think this way right now. We're still in the minority. But that could change.

Magic = Doing what you imagine

Twenty-six years ago I sold my clothes and books to buy groceries and Bugler tobacco to last me out the final two weeks of school and exams. Twenty-five years ago I had a script for a 10-minute film I could have shot with borrowed equipment if I'd had less than $200. Twenty-four years ago I could have quit my job cutting greens for $4 an hour and made double that if I could have come up with $500 to buy a used pickup truck and a push power mower.

Later that year (1984)  I thought it might be a good move to start a coffee shop in a vacant storefront on Howard Street in Boone, NC, just a few blocks from campus. Thought I could offer people a place to drink coffee and smoke cigarettes and talk talk talk.  I could have pulled it off for less than $1,000 in 1984, and I even had friends who wanted in on the idea. But they were broke too.

And so we didn't start a coffee house, and I joined the Army instead.

I like to remember this now, because it doesn't really seem that long ago that I lived in a world where I could imagine anything but I couldn't do very much about any of it. Not very many people could. The deck was stacked against people without money or access, and we shaped our dreams accordingly.

I've got a bad feeling about this...

I'm generally a pretty optimistic guy, and there's a general logic to that attitude:  Things have pretty much always looked bad to some degree, yet things have, generally,  gotten better over time.  So you shut your eyes and you keep on walking and you whistle past the graveyard and then, you know -- the sun comes out.

But now a-days you look around, you do the math, and you realize: Holy shit, dude -- are we fucked?

I get the sense that this is one of those moments when things are much worse than "they" are letting on. Which makes me think: We need an "F-Scale."  Like, if stuff is just sorta screwed up, but things generally work and you can pretty much expect that you're going to be able to keep your job and your house and suicide bombers aren't going to move in next door and really downgrade your property values, that would be F-1.

And then an F-10 would be economic depression, the destruction of the Bill of Rights, civil war and environmental collapse. And so on.

So where does that put us? Because when the Feds are bailing out the banks and the President is giving the economy a "You're doin' a heckuva job, Brownie" pep-talk, and currency converters in Amsterdam stop exchanging dollars because their value is dropping so fast, that's got to be like an F-7.

And when we're five years into a botched, brutal war and still hoping that the latest strategy is someday going to give the Iraqis a chance to build a society that's stable enough to do simple shit like, say, provide electrical power to most of the grid for most of the day, that's at LEAST an F-8.

And then we've got a political campaign where the entire focus of the past few days has been a concerted, deliberate attempt to destroy an inspiring presidential candidate by endlessly looping out-of-context statements by his preacher?  At essentially the same time that the President of the United States of America is openly advocating TORTURE? And the media doesn't even think the torture veto is really all that NEWSWORTHY?

Where's the F-scale on THAT?

Answers, please, on a post card...