2 posts from September 2007

I'm thinking about registering with Megan's Law, just to keep kids out of our yard.

Given I'm not doing anything else with this address in cyberspace, I figured I'd use it as a way to guilt myself into writing about what I am recently obsessed with: information. It started with an issue of Warren Ellis' Planetary that broached the idea beneath the atoms and quarks was information, the actual building block of everything.

Then I moved from being a developer to being a developer and a team leader; this meant a portion of my time went from doing what I considered "work" to shifting information from one party to another, typically a project manager to a developer. It felt as though I'd become an old-school telephone operator, patching Klondike-5342 into the proper line. My initial reaction was revulsion because I had seen a number of other people using a similar process to hide from doing actual work.

Six months later, I couldn't tell you the difference between passing relevant information onto parties that need it and "work". We need packet sniffers watching the routing of information between people, intelligent agents (whether human or machine-based) that can watch the overwhelming streams of data we now generate and pick out the single notes that matter.

An aside: in the interests of simplicity, I am going to avoid questions of privacy and civil liberties as much as possible. I am a fierce believer in both, but I think the questions muddy the water. Furthermore, this kind of information sniffing is already going and will continue to evolve regardless of this discussion; better to get to the answers and then propose solutions.

I think information may be underneath everything. Even if it's not, this feels like a useful framework to investigate the world with. I've lost interest in video games in the past year as I started to see them as work. It's become hard to think about sitting down and executing a repetitive task as a vehicle for fun. I don't think this means video games are over or that I will never enjoy a game again, but it's changed how I look for games and I'm stuck to tell you what criteria I should use. The only game I've loved recently has been Wario Ware, and the whole concept of that is short, repetitive tasks. But there's no point to the tasks, and I think that's the difference.

The Information drives a lot of what we do. We live in a world that is a random system (if not random, the system and its various subsystems consist of enough inputs to make the system effectively random) and yet we are wired to try to impose order on the system. To try to see patterns, to try to fence things into grids (property maps, long/lats, GPS) in a system inherently opposed to this. I think much of the things we find entertaining are artificially ordered. Most works of fiction are satisfying in their sensibility: the protagonist has a problem with a clear cause, they take an approach to the problem and solve it or fail in an understandable way. Along the way (at least with a 3rd-person omniscient narrator), we assume we know everything that's happened to the protagonist even though few works of fiction are in real-time.

Put more succinctly: why the hell do I do the NYT crossword puzzle a couple of times a week? Ostensibly it sharpens my mental faculties, but I can't say that would keep me showing up for the kind of abuse Will Shortz provides.

There might have been a point to this post at one point, but I clearly lost it. The meta-point survived though, as I just need to get started. Hopefully with practice will come organization, thesis and, however unlikely, insight. I am not, fictional reader, here for you, I'm here for the Furies buzzing in my head.