The Age of Enlightenment in the 18th century weakened the grasp of the church over society, and tried to replace authorities like God, church and king with critical thought. Enlightenment led to the Age of Revolution, primarily the American and French. But the French revolution seemed to expose the failure of the Enlightenment's worldview, one that could cause both utopian liberation and tyrannous oppression. It felt like a new Fall of Man. The world lost its value; life lost its meaning; the individual no longer had grounds to reason about right and wrong. Those who articulated this dissatisfaction were the early Romantics, and they ushered in a new artistic, literary, and intellectual movement. In the process they created several iconic anti-roles that we still recognize in popular culture.

The Byronic hero

The Byronic hero appears as the wanderer, the outcast, the Wandering Jew, the mysterious criminal whose crime is never explained. The tremendous appeal of Byron's poems throughout Europe and America shows how widespread was the feeling of malaise.

The Visionary

Caspar Friedrich,
“Wanderer above the Sea of Fog”.

The Visionary was the first stage of recovery and the first positive Romantic anti-role. The word often used at the time was “mystic.” The Visionary tries to observe the world so intensely as to get to the essence outside of all mental categories. It was felt to be the special task and privilege of the artist and poet to communicate that experience.

The Bohemian

The Bohemian is perhaps the most modern of the anti-roles, characterized by a fascination with alcohol and drugs and sexual experimentation as ways to shift and change consciousness, put the mind through permutations of perceptions which are impossible for the square who is boxed in by his social role. Similar is the interest in non-bourgeouis modes of living, in indifference to middle-class standards of dress, furnishing, and cleanliness.

The Virtuoso

The Visionary avoided role-playing; the Bohemian defied it; the Virtuoso and Dandy transcended it, the one by fantastic mastery, the other by irony. Paganini was the first great Virtuoso and for decades the anti-role model and ideal. Other examples are Richard Burton the Virtuoso traveler and translator of the Arabian Nights, and the Virtuoso mountain climber who performs sublime feats of superhuman effort “because it was there.”

The Dandy

The Dandy transforms the role not by excess but by irony. The role of the highest status in European society is that of the aristocratic gentleman of leisure. By willfully playing this role better than those born and trained to it, the Dandy reveals the pointlessness of the socially adapted. The social type with the highest status spends his life in play and pettiness. The Dandy instead offers perfection and elegance without content, without social function. By stealing the clothes of society, he reveals its nakedness. He demands a greater exquisiteness and perfection than society can achieve. This explains the irritation of society with the Dandy, its efforts to deprive him of his ironic authority, the moral nastiness with which England relished the downfall of Oscar Wilde. Read more →

When I build services or write online I want to get feedback. Did anybody use them? Read my latest post? When my site has just a little traffic Google Reader summarizes too much. I want to be able to get my hands dirty with the data, to be able to drill down to individual user sessions to see how people interact with my site. How many real users did I have yesterday? Did somebody link to my latest blog post? How many people clicked on that link on Hacker News? Did any of them stick around and browse to other pages?

After several attempts at hard-coded scripts to answer such questions, I came up with a little collection of scripts that can be composed using pipes. Here's an example session on my commandline:

$ cat_logs access.log | dump_field IP | sort | uniq | wc -l

$ cat_logs access.log | skip_crawlers | dump_field IP | sort | uniq

$ cat_logs access.log | skip_crawlers | dump_field IP | sort | freq

$ cat_logs access.log | skip_crawlers | dump_field REFERER

$ cat_logs access.log | filter_field IP xxx.xx.xxx.xxx

You just built something and are trying to get the word out. What are the ethics of telling a bunch of strangers about it? Is all unsolicited communication spam? If I send a message to three people, is that bulk? What if I send a million mails, each email by itself? What if the wording of the messages is different? How different does it need to be?

Calling @addressed tweets and facebook events “spam” is increasingly meaningless; let's reserve the word for truly egregious messages. Instead, if you're considering telling acquaintances or strangers about something new, this formula may be useful: Read more →

Chuang-Tzu: Happiness is the absence of the striving for happiness.

Tim Ferriss: The opposite of happiness is boredom.

Eliezer Yudkowsky: When people complain about the empty meaningless void, it is because they have at least one problem that they aren't thinking about solving — perhaps because they never identified it.

Alex Krupp: Given perfect freedom people have a tendency to do just enough to make themselves minimally happy, even if greater happiness is ultimately attainable.

me: There is no 'minimally happy'. Different things either make you happy or they don't. However, happiness from a source can last a long or short duration, ebb faster or slower.

Paul Graham: Unproductive pleasures pall eventually. Read more →

Mike Speiser: Most of today’s massive consumer web properties experienced exponential growth fairly shortly after launch. A few thousand users over a few months is probably sufficient to find out it you have hit a nerve.

Stephen O'Grady: Whatever the reasoning, more and more developers, projects and firms were transitioning away from centralized to decentralized. And happier for it. The trendline was clear, which is why we weren’t exactly going out on a limb predicting the ascension of Git, Mercurial and their brethren.

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Technology can compromise resolve. East Germans who watched West German television were paradoxically more satisfied with life in their country. The fact that Dresden—where the 1989 protests started—lies too far and too low to have received Western broadcasts may partly explain the rebellious spirit of the city's inhabitants. While we fret about the Internet's contribution to degrading the civic engagement of American kids, all teenagers in China or Iran are presumed to be committed citizens who use the Web to acquaint themselves with human rights violations committed by their governments. For the vast majority of Internet users, increased access to information is not always liberating. With their endless supply of entertainment, Twitter and Facebook might make political mobilization harder, not easier.

Technology empowers all sides equally. We cling to the view that all non-state power in authoritarian countries is good, while state power is evil and always leads to suppression. Not all opponents of the Russian or Chinese or even Egyptian state fit the neoliberal pattern. Nationalism, extremism and religious fanaticism abound. Facebook and Twitter empower all groups—not just the pro-Western groups that we like.

Technology drives decentralization; demonstration requires centralization. Thanks to the decentralization afforded by the Internet, Iran's Green Movement couldn't collect itself on the eve of the 31st anniversary of the Islamic revolution. It simply drowned in its own tweets.

Technology increases noise and misinformation. We assume the Internet makes it easy for citizens to see who else is opposing a regime and then act collectively based on that shared knowledge. In the age of the Spinternet, cheap online propaganda can easily be bought with the help of pro-government bloggers. Add to that the growing surveillance capacity of modern authoritarian states—greatly boosted by information collected through social media.

Technology shines a harsh light. Diplomacy is, perhaps, one element of the U.S. government that should not be subject to the demands of "open government"; whenever it works, it is usually because it is done behind closed doors.

—Paraphrasing Evgeny Morozov

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Plato, de Tocqueville, et al.: In a democracy, the greatest concern is that the majority will tyrannize and exploit diverse smaller interests.

Mancur Olson: Narrow and well-organized minorities are more likely to assert their interests over those of the majority.

Neil Freeman: Just redistrict the states after each census.[1]

me: Can this idea be generalized? Minorities can be oppressed or powerful; strive to so intertwine motivations that minorities are eliminated. Track minority power and standard deviation of group size as a quality metric for democracy.

But maintain diversity. And don't allow collusion to foster bubbles. Read more →

“People apparently only read mystery stories of any length. With mysteries, the longer the better and people will read any damn thing. But the indulgent, 800-page books like The Brothers Karamazov or Moby-Dick of a hundred years ago are just not going to be read anymore.”

— Cormac McCarthy. Contrast Jeff Bezos.

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“Frank Curiel Field in Curaçao looks like every small-town baseball field you've ever seen. But it's filled with primal cues, a window through which kids can see the ascending realms of heaven stacked above them in neat levels. First comes making the league all-star team (one of those guys). Then playing for Williamsport (those guys). Then just above that is getting signed by a scout, playing in the major leagues (being one of those guys). For a six-year old at this field, these aren't gauzy dreams; they are tangible steps on a primal ladder of selection reflected in the crackle of the radio, the clutter of the trophies, the glint of the scout's sunglasses. It is sort of like standing in the Sistine Chapel. The proof of paradise is right here: all you have to do is open your eyes.”

—Daniel Coyle. Curaçao has been to six of the last eight semifinals at the Little League World Series.

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“Search is broken like browsers were broken in 2002.”

— Asa Dotzler of Firefox doesn't like Google Read more →