To what extent is your blog a place for your own self-expression and creativity vs. a site designed to attract readers? How do you balance that? If sticking to certain topics and types of posts meant your readership would triple, would you do it?

My blog serves my own interests, as I use it as a soapbox to express myself to anyone who cares to read. I don’t actively seek out readers, as I blog principally to journal my travel through this lifetime. If I pick up readers, and they enjoy reading what I have to write, that’s a value added extra, a happy touch of serendipity but that is where it starts and ends. I refuse to pander to the hated phrase “SEO” which I find distasteful and repugnant. Who cares if the search engines find my drivel, I’m the last person who wants to game the system. I’m just here to talk into the darkness. I find that very comforting, as the darkness is a great listener.

I don’t and I won’t “monetize” my blog because that, along with the general notion of advertising makes me feel like my work is being turned into bait for a trap than worth anything on it’s own. There is a difference between a pat of cheese and something really worth pursuing. One of those is just there laying on a trigger in a trap. No ads, no money, just my drivel standing on it’s own with all the attendant misuses of grammar, spelling, and general gleeful disrespect for English. As I have said before, English is a whore, screw her, then push her down the MC Escher staircase.

If you enjoy reading this drivel, thanks, for what it’s worth. 🙂

Facebook has recently come under attack for failing to enforce its own guidelines on hate speech and violent imagery. Is it a website’s job to moderate the content its users post, or should users have complete freedom? Is there a happy medium? If so, how would you structure it?

Ever since I visited the Norman Rockwell Museum I have been absolutely absorbed by his wonderful multicultural work in regards to the Golden Rule. I’ve given it frequent and long consideration and I firmly believe that the wisdom of the Golden Rule is really the only one single rule that any conscious sentient being needs for proper conduct in life. “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” This wisdom occurs in other phrases from other cultures and they all share this core comparison dynamic. This is the central pillar on which a service like Facebook would be best organized with.

If a user posts a “Rape Picture” glorifying or lampooning violence against women for example, the central consideration should be how this particular bit of imagery lies on the balance scale of the Golden Rule. Violating the rule doesn’t have to end in a lot of histrionics, instead it can simply be marked to be not shared. Don’t tear it down, as that would upset people about their First Amendment Rights, but rather instead just fail to share it. Mark the failed share as “Golden Rule Violation” and be done with it. It’ll appear on the persons own wall as if it was shared, but nobody else sees it.

If someone wants to fight a violation based on the Golden Rule, then they can certainly try to assert why sharing such things are important. It’s been my experience that when you try to justify breaking the Rule, the raw level of absurdity that you run into (nee hypocrisy) makes any argument worthless to pursue.

What will the next must-have technological innovation be? Jetpacks? Hoverboards? Wind-powered calculators?

The next great technological innovation will be synthetic emotional personalities that will be embedded in our mobile devices. Right now for iOS and Android (the two real competing smartphone operating systems) there are “personal assistants”, like Siri for iOS. I only use iOS so I can only speak to my experience of using Siri. Siri is a great start, but it is pretty much a simple voice-based macro interpreter. She picks up only syntactical chunks and tries her best to interpret what the user wants, and appears to be “neat” because she’s arranged in a way where if we speak “plainly” she “gets what we want”. The problem with Siri is she has no emotional life on her own. She’s a personality that is brand new each time a human being engages with it. Even when describing Siri you feel it’s more appropriate to use it than her – and that’s where the next innovation is going to address.

How can you change an “It” to a “Her” or “Him”? It takes memory, appropriate emotional responses, and in many ways, almost all the way to a synthetic consciousness. Humans are creatures of wild exception, that is what we excel at. Humans are clever, imaginative, we have memories and motives and we have knacks and talents that let us handle wild exceptions that drive technology bonkers. We can do things that technology cannot, like contemplate the nature of existence, ask “What is the purpose of life?” and so on and so forth. These abilities we have allow us to handle exceptions that technology just fails to address directly and often times simply. Humans just “get it” and “get what we mean”. There isn’t any battle over context, no agreement/gender problems as we can consume signal and noise and handle them both gracefully. This is going to be the central pillar that these new synthetic systems have to master. You hit a button and your personalized assistant, whom you’ve named, remembers all the previous things you’ve discussed with them and have access to a gigantic index of human experience to draw from in order to understand something like “Open a new file for the saint louis file company. Also, remind me sometime later about my dry cleaning and around 7ish, call my husband and find out when we are heading to Missouri.” In many ways, we have an already existent mockup of what this is all about, and that is Marvel’s Jarvis. For these advanced synthetic personalities requests like these, the requests of lists, rambling, verbal noise like “oops, no not that…” do not end up with failure but are accepted in stride. With these synthetic personalities it may also serve as an entryway to automated education and even elder companionship. You have a relationship with Jarvis and he helps you do things, you live longer because you have a relationship with a machine that is nearly indistinguishable from another person and so there is a reason to live to see another day.

It’s a collision between human ingenuity, laziness, creativity, and our drive to be social creatures. We’ll create these synthetics because the rewards will be worth the costs of development. Imagine having a durable piece of technology with you (or inside you) that you can talk to, that can assist you in times of trouble. Nobody would kidnap a child with one of these synthetics attached to them. The synthetic would find a way to connect to the Internet and know exactly where the child is and what state they are in. It would eliminate a lot of these sorts of crimes and could possibly also banish loneliness as a complaint in our world. You won’t ever have to be alone again with Jarvis in your life.

Tell us about a time where everything you’d hoped would happen actually did.

The most recent moment where this came true was when I had a problem at work with my primary file server. It had been giving everyone fits for a while and I suspected there might be something wrong with the storage system. My system support specialist ran a check and found that indeed there was a deep logic problem in the storage system. It wasn’t earth-shattering but it did require a fair bit of white-knuckle “file system check” routines that had me on edge for about two hours. I was of course hoping that the deep repairs that I had started would end up all for the best with the corrected file system in a functional and error-free state. Thankfully the “file system check” did exactly that. It took a while, a bit of white-knuckle, but I landed squarely on my feet and I was very thankful to the Gods of Technology for blessing me with an easy fix. It wasn’t that the check was going to blow up in my face, but if it didn’t go well, it would have eaten a week of my life. Thankfully that didn’t happen. It all worked out for the best.

Write about your first name: Are you named after someone or something? Are there any stories or associations attached to it? If you had the choice, would you rename yourself?

I don’t believe I am named after anyone in particular. My first name, the given one, is Andrew. Generally speaking I have certain rules about the preferred use of my given name. Anyone can use my shortened given name freely, but only my parents are allowed to use my full given name. I don’t know exactly where this rule comes from as it’s rather irrational but it is there. I sort of ran over it as I was growing up and it’s a part of me so I just accepted it, put it in the voile of a rule and there we go.

It’s biblical and sainted and I certainly like having this name. I’ve toyed around with the only other variation which is “Drew” but that really doesn’t work. It offends the ear for some reason.

Would I rename myself? No. Absolutely not. In this I am mildly fatalistic, that I was meant to have this name, as my parents were meant to select it for me and give it to me. Any other name would merely be a pseudonym, and while that sometimes is useful in awkward social situations (or when you want to protect your true name, which has a certain undeniable power) what I am called is what I will always be called. It’s been years since I’ve run across another person with my given name, as odd as that seems, Andy just isn’t that popular around here. Of course, with any pronouncement like that, the world loves to screw you up. For a time I had a system support specialist at work who not only shared my given name but also had identical middle and last initials. Since then, I’ve gone back to not really knowing any other Andrews. I’m quite okay with that, I’m unique and being the only Andrew around helps reinforce that specialness.

That first names are given out is another little bit that I’ve thought about for a time. I’ve read in some science fiction stories about alien cultures where the young have to earn their name. I find that compelling, likely unworkable in human cultures, but it does make your name more important if you have to earn it versus simply being given it after birth. Huh.

When you gaze out your window — real or figurative — do you see the forest first, or the trees?

When I look at actual trees, it’s always the forest first and then individual trees. However the idiomatic expression that this is related to is quite different for me. When it comes to solving problems I tend to be more tree-than-forest based and it often times bites me when I miss the obvious answer if I could just step back and see things more simply and holistically. So far I haven’t been unduly defeated by this problem, but it’s something that occurs to me now when I see a problem that I have to solve crop up. It’s important I think, especially in IT, to stop in the very beginning of diagnosing a problem with technology to honor this idiom and pause in the beginning and ask “Are there any really simple explanations for why this is happening?” that one question sometimes is just what I need to find the real culprit and save myself the hours of pursuing shadows and gremlins through a system, completely ignoring the surface-only solution that I walked right past.

In a way this is an error of assumption. You assume that it couldn’t be anything really obvious so you don’t look, and when you don’t look, you don’t see and missing it right then and there is such an embarrassing mistake. Almost always I get the solution and the chagrin from missing the obvious makes me feel the fool each time.

Do you feel like you “get” social media, or do you just use it because that’s where all your friends and family are?

We are social animals and so having a ready source of social satisfaction like Facebook and Twitter is actually kind of obvious and expected. If nobody created such systems we would have eventually grown one. The rewards for a social animal in a social networked world is like a kid in a candy store. We love to share, sometimes for our own mental health and sometimes because we’re intensely curious about other peoples lives and their dramas. We on the surface complain quite loudly when we’re embroiled in other peoples drama but I think deep down we’re on some level intense and very closeted drama whores. This comes out as worry fetishism on one side and vicarious voyeurism on another. The endless curiosity of “What is going on in your life” has been the obsession ever since we started throwing ourselves to the winds and moving far away from the people we claim to love in our families. Families end up being spread all across the country and because we only interact generally annually, which is to say that at most the older you get the number of times you see your loved ones are distinctly limited. We’re a culture hopelessly enraptured by the notion of having your cake and eating it too. We find opportunities in far-away places and we keep the local threads flowing through social networking. In many ways, we are either cheating each other or we are cheating those aforementioned opportunities. Not that any of this cheating is making life less valuable for either party, but it does help keep us connected while we’re very far apart from each other. I contend that as the social structure of family disintegrates, the use of social networking will rise up to meet it. As we spend less and less time with our family, we find more ways to spend more and more time with them virtually. That the social networking infrastructure has created a new sublayer of the noosphere, one where we can regularly socialize with each other with distance abstracted away from the equation by technology.

I only see social networking to become more and more important and I can see us starting to socialize with our technology as well as with each other. Eventually we’ll have relationships with the tools we use to maintain relationships with each other. Eventually there will come a time when we’ll have to socialize these services and make them basic services like running water, electricity, and heat. What comes after that? I can see the technology wrapping around our lives, so we can share our experiences with our loved ones in a way that is both encompassing and ubiquitous in nature. We can actually start seeing this coming true with Google Glass. The only thing that science fiction has dreamt up that we haven’t seen yet is Jarvis, the AI that Marvel’s Tony Stark depends on to help him control his armor. If there was a sociable personality in a pair of Google Glasses, that would be nearly the completion of my entire thesis here. It’s just a matter of time, I think, for that to come true.

How are you more likely to make an important decision — by reasoning through it, or by going with your gut?

I create pro and con lists, look for advice from friends, family, and the internet and then once I have it all set, if the original decision hasn’t already been made by someone else or by the consequences of earlier decisions then I try to get a feel for what I should do based on everything and make a snap judgement from my emotions. That’s just my way. Facts are very useful, but generally the feeling of doing a thing is far more compelling. Answering the What and How is certainly important, the answer to Why is the topmost consideration. The decisions for Why usually come from instincts and gut-feelings.

Just like everything else, it’s good to do the leg-work and be deliberate but in doing all of that, in the end it’s all in the gut. I have to have faith that doing all the leg-work has set the stage for the drama to play out in my mind and whatever my decision is is the right one for me.

There are few aspects of our lives that government doesn’t touch in some way, from macroeconomics to home economics. But should it? This week, we’re getting philosophical — we want to hear about what you think the role and scope of government should be. It’s time to mind the gap.

The role of government. Whoa. That’s a huge subject that deserves a short pithy glib reply to do it proper justice. 🙂

The constitution would have it that governments purpose is to provide for the general welfare and secure our common defense. I can’t deny that a common defense is important, but for the past two hundred years we’ve been less interested about defending ourselves as we have been about being just generally offensive to everyone else on the planet. We bring hot death to pretty much everyone, at least once, sometimes we bring it a bunch of times, just because it’s something we’re used to doing. Yes, we’re that disgusting and jaded. Yay America.

As a “Filthy Liberal Scum” I’m fond of the other end of the spectrum, the general welfare part. What should government do? It should manage the socialized aspects of life that we can’t really do well individually. Things like insurance, protection from natural disasters, and welfare for the people who through no fault of their own can’t make ends meet. There shouldn’t be any homeless people, to say anything about homeless children. If you are a child in America you should not want for food, healthcare, or housing. It’s governments role to redistribute wealth through the application of taxes to address these common social needs.

If you are a conservative then pretty much everything in this post should make you burst into flames, and in the spirit of being a conscientious host, please go outside to immolate in private, we can’t have your second-hand smoke making anyone inside sick.

There are many other things the government can do, and probably should, but the general take away I think is that we’re war’s bitch and we should be paying attention to the more important things like our children and education than breaking our teeth in some very far-away sand-pit.

Have you ever wondered what it would be like to be a member of the opposite sex for a day? What do you think life would be like?

Think of another gender? To be a woman. The world is a mess for a woman. Coming from a tradition of being property, losing your name in the “tradition of marriage” and having to put up with male shit? I wouldn’t. To be the clear majority gender and yet treated somehow less worthy than their male counterparts? The world is stacked against women. Biology doesn’t really have anything pleasant in store for women either, years of readying oneself for reproduction only to have the entire structure torn down and purged monthly? It’s almost like some sort of rude practical joke to me. Male bullshit, rude biological jokes, and a society that at worst wants to hide you under a tarp and at best suffers your presence and underpays you just because of your gender.

It’s bullshit. It’s men’s fault, and as a man, I’m sorry ladies. What a mess. If it’s any consolation the trashy Y chromosome is dying out and with it, all the males – so it’s not like you won’t come out on top, at least at the end.