We've just learned from Jerry that the project has made it to the final round of reviews and needs your votes for the final twenty-four hours. I'm pasting below Jerry's personal request. Vote now. It only takes a minute.
People of the realm, I ask you once more to please lend an eyeball and a vote for Imagination Station's Knight Foundation grant application, and not just because it rhymes.
We made it through Round 1 as the top rated public application, which is amazing. This round is the final round, and a lil bit different. We just posted the application and have until midnight tonight to tweak things and get feedback.
The nutshell pitch is that LOVELAND has been killing it and just released an amazing new parcel-based social map of Detroit: http://livinginthemap.us . But a map is just whatever until people start using and shaping it. This grant is to fund a huge community engagement initiative to hit the streets and get Detroiters excited about putting their city online, starting with one neighborhood.
Many thanks for your time even if you have no time and can't do this. If you need me I'll be living in the map, currently stuffing my face with a burger at PJ's Lager House while I type this before running to a neighborhood meeting: http://livinginthemap.us/spaces/21025 .
Here's a great short interview at the World Economic Forum in Davos by Reuters finance blogger Felix Salmon with Chris Hayes, The Nation's Washington Editor. The interview covers, as Felix Salmon describes it, "fractal inequality and the prospects of a social safety net in China." But it also explores some interesting social dynamics of the microcosm of the economic community that attends this summit.
Senior Editor at The Atlantic Alexis Madrigal chose to post excerpts from the Egyptian protestors' plans in advance of tomorrow's protests. Despite the fact that the creator of the documents asked that they not be posted, Alexis argued that it's foolish to think cops don't already know about plans like "wear comfortable shoes." When Alexis's judgment was questioned by some on Twitter, he defended his position and his points in response were fair.
"People miss that this document is powerful," Alexis responded. "It shows how brave the people in the streets have to be and what the level of violence is."
The power of the document isn't in question, really, it's the spirit in which it was presented. Alexis's use of the adjective "fantastic" to describe the above graphic would never have been used if the image had been of real people, many of whom likely will be beaten tomorrow during the internet blackout and response to the protests. I realize that Alexis used the word to describe the actual graphic, but graphics, in this case, like avatars and data visualizations of human processes, are representations of real, actual people, not disconnected from the real world and physical bodies.
The Village Voice has uncovered a great story, the truth behind a popular Internet food meme right now. Yes, we mean none other than "Meat Water" the creation of the fabulously-name Till Krautkrämer. It's raises a very interesting issue in our digital era: When is art not art? Excerpt:
When asked if he would first clarify if his beverages as performance art or exclusively a comestible, Krautkrämer replied, "MeatWater is 'The King of Newtraceuticals.' It is the essence of nutrition, and the memory of dining without the hassle of eating. I see it as a comestible work of art, a ready made artificial beverage like no other before."
Genius! This is McLuhan at his best--it's the medium, people, not the message. MeatWater is brilliant because it makes consumers and the new-obsessed food media examine the kind of consumer culture they're creating--not because it has anything to do with wacky food flavorings. Indeed, Krautkrämer divulges why he created the product: "The impetus is consumerism and the concept of 'time saving.' Many new products make a selling point of how much time can be saved if only you buy some new thing. Cars, computers and other gadgets claim to free you from the drudgery of labor. But life is not about sitting back and pressing buttons, it's about getting involved."
If you have an hour or so to spare, I'd highly recommend you spend some of it watching this week's Personal Democracy Forum discussion on the significance of Wikileaks. It's an arresting discussing featuring thoughts and opinions from Constitutional Lawyer Floyd Abrams, Internet democracy philosopher Clay Shirky, digital anthropologist Biella Coleman and more. The comments by Abrams about the impact of Wikileaks on journalistic freedom are essential viewing.
Cory Doctorow has written one of the strongest and most thorough critiques of Evgeny Morozov's new book that I've read yet. (Rita J. King wrote a similarly important critique of Morozov in Policy Innovations Magazine last February called "The Evolution of Revolution," which we learned from Policy Innovations managing editor Evan O'Neil was the most well-read column published by Policy Innovations in 2010.)
Doctorow's essay reminds us that that there is a significant gap between what we perceive as the pitfalls of technology and the dominant media narrative against the dangers of technology. In an era in which the release of Wikileaks could possibly catalyze fresh infringements on freedom of speech and journalism (as was discussed soberingly in yesterday's Personal Democracy Forum by famed Constitutional Lawyer Floyd Abrams), Doctorow's review is even more important.
His criticism begins with the fact that he agrees with Morozov's general premise that technology isn't necessarily a panacea for freedom. It's Morozov's implementation that is lacking. An excerpt:
Though Morozov is correct in identifying inherent security risks in the use of the internet by dissidents, his technical analysis is badly flawed. In arguing, for example, that no technology is neutral, Morozov fails to identify one crucial characteristic of cryptographic systems: that it is vastly easier to scramble a message than it is to break the scrambling system and gain access to the message without the key.
Practically speaking, this means that poorly resourced individuals and groups with cheap, old computers are able to encipher their messages to an extent that they cannot be deciphered by all the secret police in the world, even if they employ every computer ever built in a gigantic, decades-long project to force the locks off the intercepted message. In this sense, at least, the technological deck is stacked in favour of dissidents – who have never before enjoyed the power to hide their communiques beyond the reach of secret police – over the state, who have always enjoyed the power to keep secrets from the people.
Morozov's treatment of security suffers from further flaws. It is a truism among cryptographers that anyone can design a system so secure that he himself can't think of a way of breaking it (this is sometimes called "Schneier's Law" after cryptographer Bruce Schneier). This is why serious information security always involves widespread publication and peer-review of security systems. This approach is widely accepted to be the best, most effective means of identifying and shoring up defects in security technology.
And yet, when Morozov recounts the tale of Haystack, a trendy, putatively secure communications tool backed by the US state department that was later found to be completely insecure, he accepts at face value the Haystack creator's statement that his tool was kept secret because he didn't want to let Iranian authorities reverse-engineer its workings (real security tools work even if they have been reverse-engineered).
Tim Radford, a former editor at the Guardian has re-released his list of 25 items of advice for science journalists. This list is excellent and could be advice for any writer or journalist. I've excerpted a few. But the entire list is well worth the read.
8. Life is complicated, but journalism cannot be complicated. It is precisely because issues – medicine, politics, accountancy, the rules of Mornington Crescent – are complicated that readers turn to the Guardian, or the BBC, or the Lancet, or my old papers Fish Selling and Self Service Times, expecting to have them made simple.
9. So if an issue is tangled like a plate of spaghetti, then regard your story as just one strand of spaghetti, carefully drawn from the whole. Ideally with the oil, garlic and tomato sauce adhering to it. The reader will be grateful for being given the simple part, not the complicated whole. That is because (a) the reader knows life is complicated, but is grateful to have at least one strand explained clearly, and (b) because nobody ever reads stories that say "What follows is inexplicably complicated ..."
10. So here is a rule. A story will only ever say one big thing. If (for example, and you are feeling very brave) you have to deal with four strands of a tale, make the intertwining of those four strands the one big thing you have to say. You may put twiddly bits into your story, but only if you can do so without departing from the one linear narrative you have chosen.
11. Here is an observation. Don't even start writing till you have decided what the one big thing is going to be, and then say it to yourself in just one sentence. Then ask yourself whether you could imagine your mother listening to this sentence for longer than a microsecond before she reaches for the ironing. Should you try to sell an editor an idea for an article, you will get about the same level of attention, so pay attention to this sentence. It is often – not always, but often – the first sentence of your article anyway.
12. There is always an ideal first sentence – an intro, a way in – for any article. It really helps to think of this one before you start writing, because you will discover that the subsequent sentences write themselves, very quickly. This is not evidence that you are glib, facile, shallow or slick. Or even gifted. It merely means you hit the right first sentence.
13. Words like shallow, facile, glib and slick are not insults to a journalist. The whole point of paying for a newspaper is that you want information that slides down easily and quickly, without footnotes, obscure references and footnotes to footnotes.
This CBC interview by George Stroumboulopoulous with performer MIA is worth watching for so many reasons. Most interesting to me were the delicate questions that the interviewer asks that illuminate the multi-faceted perspective Canada has of being a former British colony and member of the Commonwealth and next-door neighbor to the United States.
Game design students Moritz Freyer, Fabian Steiner, Florian Smolka and Lucas Reiner in Munich produced this thumb-driven, short history of video games beginning with a tennis game on an Oscilloscope to the Great Beyond.
Games featured include. Tennis for Two, Oscilloscope, 1958 Pacman, Arcade, 1980 Donkey Kong, NES, 1986 Sonic the Hedgehog, Sega Mega Drive/Genesis, 1991 Street Fighter II. SNES, 1991 Super Mario 64, Nintendo 64, 1996 Final Fantasy VII, Sony Playstation, 1997 Need for Speed: Hot Pursiut 2, Sony Playstation 2, 2002 Ecco the Dolphin, Sega Dreamcast, 2000 Super Smash Bros. Melee, Nintendo Game Cube, 2001 Wii Sports Golf, Nintendo Wii, 2006 God of War III, Sony Playstation 3, 2010 Rock Band, XBox 360, 2008 [History of Gaming]
Somewhere in her archives I've been told that Rita J. King has a personal letter from Madeleine L'Engle, which might make a good candidate for Letters of Note someday. Until then, you should drink in this 90-second snapshot of one of my favorite childhood classics.
In this BigThink video Malcolm Gladwell makes a few great points about artists needing to embrace chaos in order to fully engage in the creative process. He then gives an example of what he perceives to be the opposite kind of thinker, say, the manager of Ivory Soap whose job it is to sell soap. He can ill afford to let his imagination wander, lest he lose his sole focus on selling soap.
This statement wrongly assumes that soap-selling is not itself a creative act. If you want people to buy the soap you're in charge of selling, it's a good idea to think of yourself as creative, to embrace the chaos that does not just belong to writers and artists.
Gladwell also gives an example of a surgeon at work. You wouldn't want his mind wandering while he's in the middle of it. I agree. But I wouldn't mind if, when he isn't actually yielding a scalpel, he does let his mind wander, just like an artist would, and maybe come up with a more elegant and painless solution to one of the most uncomfortable aspects of being human.
Artist Nathaniel Whitcomb of ThinkorSmile.com took a "pile of 40-year-old National Geographic Magazines" (some originals below) and assembled them into a "motion collage" music video for the forthcoming EP by Brooklyn musicians "Holy Spirits." Looks great. I love the monolith motif and the way the images turn from lush to desertification.
"Ten years from now I think we're really talking about having more of a user experience where you actually move through these things, versus something that's just projected to you," BBDO's Michael Smith says in the video that accompanies "HBO Voyeur." David Carter adds, "I don't think it's any longer a push industry. We're going to have to create things that people are going to want to pull towards them." For the ad business, those are the big challenges ahead: creating more messages and platforms that people will want to pull their way, and transforming those creations into story worlds they'll then be able to inhabit. Other than that, it's all easy.
Shortly before his death, Mac asked to see part of my novel. I braced myself for the fact that the excessive planning might have changed my prose and that Mac would no doubt point this out. Instead, he told me he loved it and that I should get serious about finishing it.
"I don't have time," I said.
"Find the time," he replied.
National Novel Writing Month started a couple of weeks after Mac's death. Writing 50,000 words in 30 days is a mammoth task. I turned my grief into a novel, pulling all-nighters as if cramming for final exams while still working with clients. Even after I caught someone breaking into my house and spent a traumatized week dealing with bars, cameras, sensors, and an alarm being installed, I kept my word count up. Even after my father called to tell me my grandmother had passed away, adding another body to the death count, I kept on writing.
By day 24, I crumpled in a heap at the keyboard as my count went over the 50,000 word mark. Since then I've added another 30,000. A year later, however, I'm coming to terms with the fact that it's time to get serious about another draft.
Another one of my favorite writers has written a treatise about this year's (2011) Computer Electronics Show (CES). The erudite and hilarious Helen Walters who worked for years as business design editor at Business Week and now is working in the design industry herself, has written a cringe-worthy take on the opulence of CES. You should all read it. Here's an excerpt:
I honestly don’t want to knock the hard work of executives who are struggling to survive in a terrible economy. But really. 20,000 products? Each one the result of hours, days, weeks, months of meetings and discussions and agonized decision making. Each one apparently accompanied by a breathless press release describing how it represents genuine innovation, not to mention fabulous design. And yes, some of the products will probably even be a welcome addition to our gadget-laden homes. But this as the face of modern day innovation? Oy.
Most of the stories you read (or choose not to read) about CES, the Computer Electronics Show currently going on in Las Vegas, will be about the new gadgets soon to be released on the market.
Amid all stories about what new tablet competitor to the iPad we have to watch out for, you should read this article by Alexis Madrigal. Maybe you'll glance at the pictures of the new tablets, but after that you should take a few minutes to read this article.
It reads like a Raymond Chandler novel. Maybe we should call it Noir Journalism. Just take a look at this exerpt and then read on ...
LAS VEGAS -- Two retired cops, one from New York, the other from Dallas, were sitting on a black faux-leather couch off a hallway of Central Hall. Both are men of a certain age. Bruce Powell, the Texan, has a glorious belly and moves like an old athlete, creaky but graceful. He calls the New Yorker, Artie Mahor, his partner. Artie, dapper in a surprising pink shirt, is the suspicious type, and he's not too sure he wants a reporter sniffing around the CES security apparatus. He would be the bad cop, at least from my perspective. In fact, he'll later tell me that he thinks "the press is a greater threat to the security of the United States than Osama bin Laden."
People should take inspiration from this video that, at a minimum, living an authentic, creative life and expressing it using freely-available publishing tools, has value. Note that The Sartorialist uses a, simple, free Blogger blog.
Though Twitter has become pervasive to the point that millions of people have Twitter accounts, I still find myself in conversations where people perceive the value of Twitter as being more ephemeral rather than substantive. To those in the ephemera camp, I submit the above screenshot and below link, thanks to Kevin Marks.
Last night five thoughtful Twitterers, Rita J. King (@ritajking), Alex Howard (@digiphile), Kevin Marks (@kevinmarks), Andrew Hazlett (@AndrewHazlett) and Andrew Rasiej (@rasiej) engaged in a provocative and thoughtful discussion in Twitter about Systemic Change. For those following, the night before Rita J. King had been talking about this with Helen Walters (@HelenWalters), Saul Kaplan (@skap5) and Lina Srivastava (@lksriv), also worth following. A link to last night's exchange follows.
Science Fiction novelist Rudy Rucker has a new post up on h+ magazine considering the technical logistics and implications of making a copy of one's self in a computer. With all these posts about preserving one's cyberlife after death, it seems uniquely timely.
In practice, copying a brain would be very hard, for the brain isn’t in digital form. The brain’s information is stored in the geometry of its axons, dendrites and synapses, in the ongoing biochemical balances of its chemicals, and in the fleeting flow of its electrical currents. In my early cyberpunk novel Software, I wrote about some robots who specialized in extracting people’s personality software ⎯ by eating their brains. When one of my characters hears about the repellent process, “[His] tongue twitched, trying to flick away the imagined taste of the brain tissue, tingly with firing neurons, tart with transmitter chemicals.”
In this article, I’m going to talk about a much weaker form of copying a personality. Rather than trying to exactly replicate a brain’s architecture, it might be interesting enough to simply copy all of a person’s memories, preserving the interconnections among them.
I blogged earlier about the poignant story in The New York Times Magazine called Cyberspace When You're Dead. On a day when the tragedy of death and the difficulty of dealing with the cyber remains of someone is being discussed in The New York Times, comes news this evening from Metafilter that one of its community members and Princeton University computer science PhD Bill Zeller had hung himself. I first read about it on a tweet by Andy Baio, (aka Wax Pancake), a blogger I've been following for what seems like the past decade.
As I clicked his link over to the post on Metafilter and then to the suicide note and began to read, I found myself instantly engrossed. The tragedy of this letter is not just the fact that a human being was in a pain so great that he felt compelled to kill himself, but that a human being with a unique capacity for expressing himself would feel so trapped inside his tragic past.
Normally, I wouldn't post something like this in its entirely, but Bill Zeller's note ends with a request that anyone who reads it do so. And, so, here it is, in its entirety at the request ofBill Zeller (See end of letter):
I have the urge to declare my sanity and justify my actions, but I assume I'll never be able to convince anyone that this was the right decision. Maybe it's true that anyone who does this is insane by definition, but I can at least explain my reasoning. I considered not writing any of this because of how personal it is, but I like tying up loose ends and don't want people to wonder why I did this. Since I've never spoken to anyone about what happened to me, people would likely draw the wrong conclusions.
My first memories as a child are of being raped, repeatedly. This has affected every aspect of my life. This darkness, which is the only way I can describe it, has followed me like a fog, but at times intensified and overwhelmed me, usually triggered by a distinct situation. In kindergarten I couldn't use the bathroom and would stand petrified whenever I needed to, which started a trend of awkward and unexplained social behavior. The damage that was done to my body still prevents me from using the bathroom normally, but now it's less of a physical impediment than a daily reminder of what was done to me.
This darkness followed me as I grew up. I remember spending hours playing with legos, having my world consist of me and a box of cold, plastic blocks. Just waiting for everything to end. It's the same thing I do now, but instead of legos it's surfing the web or reading or listening to a baseball game. Most of my life has been spent feeling dead inside, waiting for my body to catch up.
At times growing up I would feel inconsolable rage, but I never connected this to what happened until puberty. I was able to keep the darkness at bay for a few hours at a time by doing things that required intense concentration, but it would always come back. Programming appealed to me for this reason. I was never particularly fond of computers or mathematically inclined, but the temporary peace it would provide was like a drug. But the darkness always returned and built up something like a tolerance, because programming has become less and less of a refuge.
The darkness is with me nearly every time I wake up. I feel like a grime is covering me. I feel like I'm trapped in a contimated body that no amount of washing will clean. Whenever I think about what happened I feel manic and itchy and can't concentrate on anything else. It manifests itself in hours of eating or staying up for days at a time or sleeping for sixteen hours straight or week long programming binges or constantly going to the gym. I'm exhausted from feeling like this every hour of every day.
Three to four nights a week I have nightmares about what happened. It makes me avoid sleep and constantly tired, because sleeping with what feels like hours of nightmares is not restful. I wake up sweaty and furious. I'm reminded every morning of what was done to me and the control it has over my life.
I've never been able to stop thinking about what happened to me and this hampered my social interactions. I would be angry and lost in thought and then be interrupted by someone saying "Hi" or making small talk, unable to understand why I seemed cold and distant. I walked around, viewing the outside world from a distant portal behind my eyes, unable to perform normal human niceties. I wondered what it would be like to take to other people without what happened constantly on my mind, and I wondered if other people had similar experiences that they were better able to mask.
Alcohol was also something that let me escape the darkness. It would always find me later, though, and it was always angry that I managed to escape and it made me pay. Many of the irresponsible things I did were the result of the darkness. Obviously I'm responsible for every decision and action, including this one, but there are reasons why things happen the way they do.
Alcohol and other drugs provided a way to ignore the realities of my situation. It was easy to spend the night drinking and forget that I had no future to look forward to. I never liked what alcohol did to me, but it was better than facing my existence honestly. I haven't touched alcohol or any other drug in over seven months (and no drugs or alcohol will be involved when I do this) and this has forced me to evaluate my life in an honest and clear way. There's no future here. The darkness will always be with me.
I used to think if I solved some problem or achieved some goal, maybe he would leave. It was comforting to identify tangible issues as the source of my problems instead of something that I'll never be able to change. I thought that if I got into to a good college, or a good grad school, or lost weight, or went to the gym nearly every day for a year, or created programs that millions of people used, or spent a summer or California or New York or published papers that I was proud of, then maybe I would feel some peace and not be constantly haunted and unhappy. But nothing I did made a dent in how depressed I was on a daily basis and nothing was in any way fulfilling. I'm not sure why I ever thought that would change anything.
I didn't realize how deep a hold he had on me and my life until my first relationship. I stupidly assumed that no matter how the darkness affected me personally, my romantic relationships would somehow be separated and protected. Growing up I viewed my future relationships as a possible escape from this thing that haunts me every day, but I began to realize how entangled it was with every aspect of my life and how it is never going to release me. Instead of being an escape, relationships and romantic contact with other people only intensified everything about him that I couldn't stand. I will never be able to have a relationship in which he is not the focus, affecting every aspect of my romantic interactions.
Relationships always started out fine and I'd be able to ignore him for a few weeks. But as we got closer emotionally the darkness would return and every night it'd be me, her and the darkness in a black and gruesome threesome. He would surround me and penetrate me and the more we did the more intense it became. It made me hate being touched, because as long as we were separated I could view her like an outsider viewing something good and kind and untainted. Once we touched, the darkness would envelope her too and take her over and the evil inside me would surround her. I always felt like I was infecting anyone I was with.
Relationships didn't work. No one I dated was the right match, and I thought that maybe if I found the right person it would overwhelm him. Part of me knew that finding the right person wouldn't help, so I became interested in girls who obviously had no interest in me. For a while I thought I was gay. I convinced myself that it wasn't the darkness at all, but rather my orientation, because this would give me control over why things didn't feel "right". The fact that the darkness affected sexual matters most intensely made this idea make some sense and I convinced myself of this for a number of years, starting in college after my first relationship ended. I told people I was gay (at Trinity, not at Princeton), even though I wasn't attracted to men and kept finding myself interested in girls. Because if being gay wasn't the answer, then what was? People thought I was avoiding my orientation, but I was actually avoiding the truth, which is that while I'm straight, I will never be content with anyone. I know now that the darkness will never leave.
Last spring I met someone who was unlike anyone else I'd ever met. Someone who showed me just how well two people could get along and how much I could care about another human being. Someone I know I could be with and love for the rest of my life, if I weren't so fucked up.
Amazingly, she liked me. She liked the shell of the man the darkness had left behind. But it didn't matter because I couldn't be alone with her. It was never just the two of us, it was always the three of us: her, me and the darkness. The closer we got, the more intensely I'd feel the darkness, like some evil mirror of my emotions. All the closeness we had and I loved was complemented by agony that I couldn't stand, from him. I realized that I would never be able to give her, or anyone, all of me or only me. She could never have me without the darkness and evil inside me. I could never have just her, without the darkness being a part of all of our interactions. I will never be able to be at peace or content or in a healthy relationship. I realized the futility of the romantic part of my life. If I had never met her, I would have realized this as soon as I met someone else who I meshed similarly well with. It's likely that things wouldn't have worked out with her and we would have broken up (with our relationship ending, like the majority of relationships do) even if I didn't have this problem, since we only dated for a short time. But I will face exactly the same problems with the darkness with anyone else. Despite my hopes, love and compatability is not enough.
Nothing is enough. There's no way I can fix this or even push the darkness down far enough to make a relationship or any type of intimacy feasible.
So I watched as things fell apart between us. I had put an explicit time limit on our relationship, since I knew it couldn't last because of the darkness and didn't want to hold her back, and this caused a variety of problems. She was put in an unnatural situation that she never should have been a part of. It must have been very hard for her, not knowing what was actually going on with me, but this is not something I've ever been able to talk about with anyone. Losing her was very hard for me as well. Not because of her (I got over our relationship relatively quickly), but because of the realization that I would never have another relationship and because it signified the last true, exclusive personal connection I could ever have. This wasn't apparent to other people, because I could never talk about the real reasons for my sadness. I was very sad in the summer and fall, but it was not because of her, it was because I will never escape the darkness with anyone. She was so loving and kind to me and gave me everything I could have asked for under the circumstances. I'll never forget how much happiness she brought me in those briefs moments when I could ignore the darkness. I had originally planned to kill myself last winter but never got around to it. (Parts of this letter were written over a year ago, other parts days before doing this.) It was wrong of me to involve myself in her life if this were a possibility and I should have just left her alone, even though we only dated for a few months and things ended a long time ago. She's just one more person in a long list of people I've hurt.
I could spend pages talking about the other relationships I've had that were ruined because of my problems and my confusion related to the darkness. I've hurt so many great people because of who I am and my inability to experience what needs to be experienced. All I can say is that I tried to be honest with people about what I thought was true.
I've spent my life hurting people. Today will be the last time.
I've told different people a lot of things, but I've never told anyone about what happened to me, ever, for obvious reasons. It took me a while to realize that no matter how close you are to someone or how much they claim to love you, people simply cannot keep secrets. I learned this a few years ago when I thought I was gay and told people. The more harmful the secret, the juicier the gossip and the more likely you are to be betrayed. People don't care about their word or what they've promised, they just do whatever the fuck they want and justify it later. It feels incredibly lonely to realize you can never share something with someone and have it be between just the two of you. I don't blame anyone in particular, I guess it's just how people are. Even if I felt like this is something I could have shared, I have no interest in being part of a friendship or relationship where the other person views me as the damaged and contaminated person that I am. So even if I were able to trust someone, I probably would not have told them about what happened to me. At this point I simply don't care who knows.
I feel an evil inside me. An evil that makes me want to end life. I need to stop this. I need to make sure I don't kill someone, which is not something that can be easily undone. I don't know if this is related to what happened to me or something different. I recognize the irony of killing myself to prevent myself from killing someone else, but this decision should indicate what I'm capable of.
So I've realized I will never escape the darkness or misery associated with it and I have a responsibility to stop myself from physically harming others.
I'm just a broken, miserable shell of a human being. Being molested has defined me as a person and shaped me as a human being and it has made me the monster I am and there's nothing I can do to escape it. I don't know any other existence. I don't know what life feels like where I'm apart from any of this. I actively despise the person I am. I just feel fundamentally broken, almost non-human. I feel like an animal that woke up one day in a human body, trying to make sense of a foreign world, living among creatures it doesn't understand and can't connect with.
I have accepted that the darkness will never allow me to be in a relationship. I will never go to sleep with someone in my arms, feeling the comfort of their hands around me. I will never know what uncontimated intimacy is like. I will never have an exclusive bond with someone, someone who can be the recipient of all the love I have to give. I will never have children, and I wanted to be a father so badly. I think I would have made a good dad. And even if I had fought through the darkness and married and had children all while being unable to feel intimacy, I could have never done that if suicide were a possibility. I did try to minimize pain, although I know that this decision will hurt many of you. If this hurts you, I hope that you can at least forget about me quickly.
There's no point in identifying who molested me, so I'm just going to leave it at that. I doubt the word of a dead guy with no evidence about something that happened over twenty years ago would have much sway.
You may wonder why I didn't just talk to a professional about this. I've seen a number of doctors since I was a teenager to talk about other issues and I'm positive that another doctor would not have helped. I was never given one piece of actionable advice, ever. More than a few spent a large part of the session reading their notes to remember who I was. And I have no interest in talking about being raped as a child, both because I know it wouldn't help and because I have no confidence it would remain secret. I know the legal and practical limits of doctor/patient confidentiality, growing up in a house where we'd hear stories about the various mental illnesses of famous people, stories that were passed down through generations. All it takes is one doctor who thinks my story is interesting enough to share or a doctor who thinks it's her right or responsibility to contact the authorities and have me identify the molestor (justifying her decision by telling herself that someone else might be in danger). All it takes is a single doctor who violates my trust, just like the "friends" who I told I was gay did, and everything would be made public and I'd be forced to live in a world where people would know how fucked up I am. And yes, I realize this indicates that I have severe trust issues, but they're based on a large number of experiences with people who have shown a profound disrepect for their word and the privacy of others.
People say suicide is selfish. I think it's selfish to ask people to continue living painful and miserable lives, just so you possibly won't feel sad for a week or two. Suicide may be a permanent solution to a temporary problem, but it's also a permanent solution to a ~23 year-old problem that grows more intense and overwhelming every day.
Some people are just dealt bad hands in this life. I know many people have it worse than I do, and maybe I'm just not a strong person, but I really did try to deal with this. I've tried to deal with this every day for the last 23 years and I just can't fucking take it anymore.
I often wonder what life must be like for other people. People who can feel the love from others and give it back unadulterated, people who can experience sex as an intimate and joyous experience, people who can experience the colors and happenings of this world without constant misery. I wonder who I'd be if things had been different or if I were a stronger person. It sounds pretty great.
I'm prepared for death. I'm prepared for the pain and I am ready to no longer exist. Thanks to the strictness of New Jersey gun laws this will probably be much more painful than it needs to be, but what can you do. My only fear at this point is messing something up and surviving.
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I'd also like to address my family, if you can call them that. I despise everything they stand for and I truly hate them, in a non-emotional, dispassionate and what I believe is a healthy way. The world will be a better place when they're dead--one with less hatred and intolerance.
If you're unfamiliar with the situation, my parents are fundamentalist Christians who kicked me out of their house and cut me off financially when I was 19 because I refused to attend seven hours of church a week.
They live in a black and white reality they've constructed for themselves. They partition the world into good and evil and survive by hating everything they fear or misunderstand and calling it love.
They don't understand that good and decent people exist all around us, "saved" or not, and that evil and cruel people occupy a large percentage of their church. They take advantage of people looking for hope by teaching them to practice the same hatred they practice.
A random example:
"I am personally convinced that if a Muslim truly believes and obeys the Koran, he will be a terrorist." - George Zeller, August 24, 2010.
If you choose to follow a religion where, for example, devout Catholics who are trying to be good people are all going to Hell but child molestors go to Heaven (as long as they were "saved" at some point), that's your choice, but it's fucked up. Maybe a God who operates by those rules does exist. If so, fuck Him.
Their church was always more important than the members of their family and they happily sacrificed whatever necessary in order to satisfy their contrived beliefs about who they should be.
I grew up in a house where love was proxied through a God I could never believe in. A house where the love of music with any sort of a beat was literally beaten out of me. A house full of hatred and intolerance, run by two people who were experts at appearing kind and warm when others were around. Parents who tell an eight year old that his grandmother is going to Hell because she's Catholic. Parents who claim not to be racist but then talk about the horrors of miscegenation. I could list hundreds of other examples, but it's tiring.
Since being kicked out, I've interacted with them in relatively normal ways. I talk to them on the phone like nothing happened. I'm not sure why. Maybe because I like pretending I have a family. Maybe I like having people I can talk to about what's been going on in my life. Whatever the reason, it's not real and it feels like a sham. I should have never allowed this reconnection to happen.
I wrote the above a while ago, and I do feel like that much of the time. At other times, though, I feel less hateful. I know my parents honestly believe the crap they believe in. I know that my mom, at least, loved me very much and tried her best. One reason I put this off for so long is because I know how much pain it will cause her. She has been sad since she found out I wasn't "saved", since she believes I'm going to Hell, which is not a sadness for which I am responsible. That was never going to change, and presumably she believes the state of my physical body is much less important than the state of my soul. Still, I cannot intellectually justify this decision, knowing how much it will hurt her. Maybe my ability to take my own life, knowing how much pain it will cause, shows that I am a monster who doesn't deserve to live. All I know is that I can't deal with this pain any longer and I'm am truly sorry I couldn't wait until my family and everyone I knew died so this could be done without hurting anyone. For years I've wished that I'd be hit by a bus or die while saving a baby from drowning so my death might be more acceptable, but I was never so lucky.
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To those of you who have shown me love, thank you for putting up with all my shittiness and moodiness and arbitrariness. I was never the person I wanted to be. Maybe without the darkness I would have been a better person, maybe not. I did try to be a good person, but I realize I never got very far.
I'm sorry for the pain this causes. I really do wish I had another option. I hope this letter explains why I needed to do this. If you can't understand this decision, I hope you can at least forgive me.
Bill Zeller
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Please save this letter and repost it if gets deleted. I don't want people to wonder why I did this. I disseminated it more widely than I might have otherwise because I'm worried that my family might try to restrict access to it. I don't mind if this letter is made public. In fact, I'd prefer it be made public to people being unable to read it and drawing their own conclusions.
Feel free to republish this letter, but only if it is reproduced in its entirety.
Author and Interplanetary Man of Mystery Mac Tonnies who died in October 2009.
The New York Times Magazine writer Rob Walker has an expansive, poignant and touching article about what happens in cyberspace when you die. It describes Mac Tonnies, who died last October at age 34 and includes extensive interviews with Rita J. King about her thoughts on death and digital culture. It also includes quotes from Mac friends Mark Plattner (aka @CapnMarrrrk), Sarah Cashmore (aka @BlazingBetta), and Dia Sobin.
Rita J. King, an expert on online identity and persona who is an “innovator in residence” for I.B.M., was introduced to Tonnies via e-mail in 2004, and they kept in frequent touch. “He is the one I had all my conversations with, early on, about technology and consciousness,” she says. Possibly a typical venti latte buyer in Kansas City would have found that puzzling and dismissed some of Tonnies’s other interests (U.F.O.’s, life on Mars, the paranormal) as flat-out weird. But online, he wasn’t some guy with a lot of strange ideas. He was himself. And he attracted an eclectic group of similarly minded friends.
The last entry on Posthuman Blues was titled “Tritptych #15,” a set of three images with no text. The first comment to this post came from an anonymous reader, wondering why Tonnies had not updated the blog or tweeted for two days. Some similar comments followed, and then this: “Mac Tonnies passed away earlier in the week. Our condolences are with his family and friends in this time of grief.” The author of that comment was also anonymous. After a rapid back-and-forth about whether this startling news was true and some details of the circumstances, that post’s comment section transformed into a remarkable mix of tributes, grieving and commiseration. You can still read all this today, in a thread that runs to more than 250 comments.
“It was a very strange feeling,” Dana Tonnies, Mac’s mother, told me, describing how she and her husband became aware of the swirl of activity attaching to her son’s online self. “I had no control over what was being said about him, almost immediately.” Dana and Bob Tonnies were close to their only son — in fact they had coffee with him, in a regular Sunday ritual, the morning before he died — but they had little contact with his digital self. Sometimes he would show them his online writing, but he had to do so by literally putting his laptop in front of them. The Tonnies did not read blogs. In fact they did not own a computer.
Quora has the potential to raise the level of discourse and I'm glad it came along when it did. I love Twitter and there are many times when I'd like to have more of a conversation with the people in my stream.
But please, PUH-LEEEEEEEEEZE stop clogging the stream with so much zeal, if you know what I mean. Right now, much of Quora reads like an exercise in "Let me Google that for you."
Platforms are like planets with their climates, orbits and eventual ascension or demise. We've got this fun moment here with Quora--nothing wrong with taking a step back and letting things unfold before cluttering up the joint. There are already some real gems, including a question about whether Quora's UI was designed to be unintuitive, with smart answers from people like Jeremiah Owyang.
Oliver Uberti, who is a design editor at National Geographic Magazine gave an incredibly touching and inspiring presentation at TEDxNASA. His presentation ranged from describing how he tries to re-imagine traditional design expectations when looking at the design of the magazine, to describing the familial roots of his creative inspirations, to a truly cool inner-city project with author Dave Eggers.
Early in 2010, the Battery Dance Company, with a grant from the Robert Sterling Clark Foundation, commissioned Dancing Ink Productions to produce a public diplomacy toolkit to share tips the dance company has picked up from three decades of global work. We had first met BDC's artistic director Jonathan Hollander at an arts and cultural diplomacy summit at White Oak Plantation, where we also met Margaret Ayers, President and CEO of the Robert Sterling Clark Foundation.
Click here to see the map (Google Earth creates an entirely new dimension). The story is told on the left at each point along the way (with segments written by Jonathan Hollander), or you can click on the map to see a specific point with embedded mixed media, including videos (some of which were captured this summer by the marvelous documentarian André Blas who went to Germany with Battery Dance Company to document the journey). The map is still a work in progress, but since it has over 7,000 views we thought it was time to share it in its current incarnation.
As the creative director of the project, I was dazzled by the scope and beauty of the material gathered by Battery Dance Company in two decades of work across forty countries. I chose a Google map for the format of the toolkit. BDC has represented the U.S. overseas and has developed multi-layered and often bilateral international cultural engagement programs in the realm of dance and the performing arts, and a Google map is the best way to see the work they've done where they've done it.
One of the videos on the map. Click over to Nairobi, Kenya to check it out.
Credit for the work represented on this map belongs entirely to BDC's tireless, spectacularly talented artistic director, Jonathan Hollander, and the BDC dancers. Jonathan has led dancers around the world for years, constantly finding new ways to reach people and choreograph the often indecipherable and intangible emotions of what it means to be human in a world of boundaries, and his dancers, in the quest to uncover the tips shared here, have performed with superhuman ability despite jet lag and the inevitable snafus that arise from the fact that art has never been as well funded as war.
The territory covered, however, is not the map. The map would not be possible without DIP's executive producer Joshua Fouts, himself an intrepid world traveler and one of the world's most visionary thinkers on public diplomacy. He was the founding director of the USC Center on Public Diplomacy, with a unique focus on the digital culture which sparked a trend at other universities and, in some ways, an entire movement. A decade ago, he first started speaking publicly on the idea that the digital culture is changing the fabric of the physical world we share, which is a difficult idea for many people to process. Even the top experts in various sectors still refer to the internet as if it's separate and apart from the real people who use it, when in fact it is a luminous overlay that helps us visualize accomplishments and efforts in the physical world.
The story of Battery Dance Company is one of great intrinsic and extrinsic value. BDC has produced a spectacular array of beautiful dance that has truly connected people all around the world and allowed those of us who have experienced it to take a deeper look at the human condition. But the organization has also produced an extremely important body of knowledge about how artists, notoriously underfunded and too often relying on themselves, each other, their hosts and creativity, make the impossible happen. The direct relationships between individuals from different cultures, belief systems, socioeconomic or geopolitical backgrounds suspending preconceived ideas for a shimmering moment of deeper understanding is public diplomacy. Dance is the ultimate physical medium, and the ability to tell the story in a digital medium only underscores the power of that movement.
TED has recently uploaded some of the videos of the presentations given at the amazing TEDxNASA from this past fall. I'm going to post a few of them over the next few days. Here's Rita J. King speaking about "Creativity and Design of Identity and Community."
