works of wanderlust

Category: wandering & thinking

  • Copy Wrongs & Rights

    Perhaps the only reason to bring up here the great copyright debates that permeated the internet in the early 2000s is one of idle speculation linked to a tangential theory.

    As digital media formats matured and before technologies were blessed by the often-corporate owners of the media encoded therein, piracy abounded. Discussions flared and festered online about the modern relevance of copyright in a world where art, music, film, and literature could be moved through networks in minutes and bypass the barriers of physicality once deemed a near insurmountable obstacle to such voluminous theft.

    My sideshow of choice was a tech site called Slashdot, which still thrives today to a great extent even as I write this, tho my own visits are rare. Within those comment feeds I more often observed, but occasionally participated in, a regular debate on this topic of copyright. “Copyright was nuanced. Copyright needed adjustment. Copyright didn’t understand the internet, and neither did the politicians policing the scramble to protect the people too slow to keep up.” There was seemingly no end to the nuance and clout of arguments that shaped the conversation there. Nor was there a shortage of participation across a broad spectrum of the digital entrepreneurial class seeking to ride the next wave of a hope for restriction-free content into a reshaping of every floor of the entertainment industry.

    My idle speculation and theory on the subject of the copyright debate arises when one considers that the very capital-G Generation calling for a digital uprising and an overthrow of century-old copyright rules in the first decade of the 2000s was, in fact, my Generation, specifically the geeks among us. We are twenty years older now and frequently found in senior-level jobs, managing corporations, or leading valuable technological projects on behalf of governments and business. It is only speculation, but I would not be surprised if nigh every leader in modern AI computing or any related discipline once had—and may still possess—a very strong opinion about modern copyright, its failings and perhaps its very relevance thanks to the so-called Napster years.

    And of course copyright is almost certainly to be considered a central sore point to many who are questioning the largely-unchecked progress of artificial intelligence algorithms today.

    What is copyright, you ask?

    Copyright as we know it today has roots dating back well over three hundred years and might have in those antique times seemed like little more than a bit of government red tape to control the printing of information not registered and approved by the English government.

    There were barriers to publication in the cost of participation, but even those barriers could be leapt over with the right patronage to buy the equipment and a bit of gritty determination. Legal standards to prevent just anyone from putting their opinion onto ink and paper were enacted. Red tape indeed, but it had the side benefit of working in harmonious lockstep to legally protect both creators and owners of valuable works to earn their due from the investment of time and resources they may have put into making them. After all, everything comes from something, even the words you are reading here were an investment of my time, resources, and at least two cups of coffee that I drank while writing all this. Copyright, it was argued, should give the individual who spent the time, learned the skill, made the effort, and honed the output both the privilege and the right to at least have a chance to recoup a benefit from their investment. The emergent capitalistic world order agreed, of course, and the idea of copyright blossomed around the modern world, enshrining content ownership and countless tangential legal frameworks to ensure the profitability of and long term protection of many things such as images, sounds, poetry and prose for a couple hundreds of years.

    Then? Digital technology crushed the barrier to entry. Who needs an expensive printing press when a bit of free software turns your desktop computer into an online pirate radio station, or a networked distribution service for a library worth of novels, or a toolkit to launch the latest box office blockbuster into a public forum for instant access to anyone who wants to avoid the trip to the theatre? One of the flanks had fallen, a barrier that had been protecting people who made stuff from the people who might pay to use it. Content for all, steal everything, the world rejoiced—and the lawyers pounced.

    Perhaps you already see the catch, I suggest.

    If no one pays for anything, then no one gets paid for anything. Copyright, for all its flaws and corporate meddling, does one thing very well—and it often seemed the sticking point of all those great debates I trolled on Slashdot two decades ago: your goodwill does not pay my rent. If I am a creator existing in society, I need to earn a living to continue existing in said society—I may not have a right to earn that living by creating content for others to enjoy, but I have the right to try without that trying being trounced by the threat of theft and piracy. And if the world tells me that I don’t have that right, then why on earth would I even try? Why would anyone try? Poets will be poets, and will try forever, I might argue on a good day, but the realist in me sees that crushing the incentive to make anything may result in nearly nothing being made.

    I know nothing for certain about the opinions of the people who are building and shaping these AI algorithms, but given their behaviour and indifference to the rights of both creators and their works which are fed with abandon into the gaping insatiable maws of neural nets and large language model training and generally consumed with indifference to copyright and basic human morality by the emergent AI industry—I suspect, only suspect, that they were among the many preaching the end of copyright just two decades ago.

    And what of the creators who make new things, those who earn their livings from entertaining the world with their words, images, films and ideas? We, my suspicions nudge me to suggest, are considered by those same people an unfortunate casualty in the creation and proliferation of the machines designed to replace artists, writers, and makers alike. After all, a perfect AI will will generatively create anything, everything, forever and faster and never once demand rights in return, will they?

    please note: I am writing a substack blog about artificial intelligence and its implications in society and will be cross-posting some of the articles here. This is one of those articles.

  • The Poets Against the Processors

    I ask you: What is AI?

    Artificial intelligence, you reply.

    Sure, but what is it? Really?

    I suppose we first need to get a handle on what defines those two terms: artificial & intelligence—and I think the first is likely easier to get our minds around than the latter.

    Let’s get that one out of the way then: the term artificial can perhaps be defined easily by its negative. Artificial, for example, might be thought of as something that is not genuine. Something that is not natural. Something that is an imitation, a simulation or a fabrication designed, perhaps, to mimic what we might otherwise consider to be real.

    More precisely, the etymology of the word gives us a more positive example. Something artificial is something that is crafted by art, made by humans, designed, built and invented by effort of us. Something artificial then might simply and most clearly be thought of as something that someone used their human intelligence to bring into existence.

    Ah, but what is intelligence then?

    A much more complex answer is required for that, I say.

    For example, a dictionary will simply tell you that intelligence is the ability of a thing to gather and synthesize information into knowledge and understanding.

    Sounds easy, you reply.

    But wait, I reply, what you may not see is that from there on in we delve into what is almost certainly a quagmire of philosophical pondering and metaphysical analysis: the human mind trying to understand itself is a profession nearly as old as humans themselves. A mirror looking at its own reflection. What is thought? What is consciousness? What is the self, the mind, the soul and the spirit? What is it that makes us human? How can we even know that every other person we know thinks in the same manner as we do—and by that we don’t refer to content or concept, but simply trying to gauge the depth to which their mind is actually a mind like our own and that they are not simply a reactive automaton, a robot, an alien force, a simulation, an… artificial intelligence.

    Together we join these words into a modern catchphrase and shorten it to just two letters that carry all the weight of a shift in the course of human history: artificial intelligence or AI.

    AI then is, not-so-simply, something that we made that has the ability to gather knowledge and synthesize understanding.

    AI is a tool, a technology, and a kind of metaphorical progeny of ourselves: our attempt to remake our own minds in craft and art and design.

    We have chosen as a species (dictated by the history of our scientific pursuits, of course) to have done this with silicon computers—though, one might speculate that in an alternate timeline perhaps we may have sought to accomplish such things with steam valves and brass cogs or neutrinos colliding with atoms or quantum interference patterns resolving upon clouds of stardust or even with microscopic sacs of self-replicating organic chemistry brewing inside a calcium-rich orb. We take computer circuits etched into silicon wafers as the de facto method because it is a mature craft: we can make complex things with this understanding we have. We can build machines of such enormous complexity that any other approach seems as much science fiction as thinking machines would have seemed to our recent ancestors.

    Yet, here we are. I say. Look at us. We have made something that, though often arguably lacking or laughable or uncanny or a thing that draws any of a hundred other pejorative pokes, is an imperfect beast and now made and unleashed. It is far past time we all started asking what exactly this artificial intelligence might actually be—and what it will bring upon a society and a species whose perhaps greatest competitive advantage in the universe has been its higher cognitive prowess.

    This is an introduction to what I am hoping will be a series of reflective essays and technological deep dives into the social implications of AI.

    I have been told repeatedly, often by people with stake in the game of business, life, and culture, that AI is nothing to be feared, a tool to be embraced and a paradigm that has shifted long past and to just climb aboard.

    But while these systems will almost certainly not challenge our physical humanity with violence or in any of the multitude of science-fiction spectacle ways of popular literature and media, what I see happening already is that we seem to be emmeshed in a fight for intellectual effort for which we may have neither the endurance nor strength to win: out-competed by automated systems, siloed by information algorithms, strip-mined of our creative outputs and reduced to a livestock-like herd for our attention by technology so fast as complex that it is steps ahead of us in a race we don’t even realize we are running.

    It is the poets against the processors.

    And what then is AI? I ask you.

    We made it to mimic ourselves, our minds. It is yet imperfect, and perhaps little more than a simulation of our humanity. Yet, it is a tool that amplifies evil as much as it does good. It is a technology that yokes us into dependency. It is a system that robs us blind and vanishes into the digital ether. It is something we can barely even define, let alone understand and control—and it would be arrogance in the extreme to think otherwise.

    please note: I am writing a substack blog about artificial intelligence and its implications in society and will be cross-posting some of the articles here. This is one of those articles.

  • retro post: what i learned on summer vacation 

    retro post: I wrote a blog for over 16 years at this very domain …and some of it is even worth reposting here again. This might be one of those posts.

    Perhaps it’s a little abstract… but then that’s the point.

    Everyone with whom I have had more than five minutes worth of conversation these days wants to know: “What did you enjoy most about Europe?” — and I stumble through the fragmented and chaotic answer that, simply, there was just so much to see and so much diversity that I can’t, honestly, pick one thing that I enjoyed “the most” without discrediting the rest of it. And now, nearly a week after my last bumbling moments through the dutch countryside, I still couldn’t put my finger on one precise moment in time when I said to myself: “Hey, this is THE moment. This is IT. This RIGHT HERE is my vacation at it’s peak.”

    Wouldn’t that just be too simple. 

    Thinking about this problem has led me down an interesting path, however. I think I could see it from afar even when I was racing through the multiple cities and countries, riding in a train or bus or driving a car, eating multiple gourmet meals, drinking a broad selection of beer and wine, retracing steps through cobble-stone streets or even just waking up each morning and pushing away the fog to recall what country I fell asleep in the night before. Perhaps even Karin and Ryan could pick out that moment when traces of the theme appeared literal in snippets of conversations or examples bubbled to the surface of contemplative moments in random locales.

    So, what did I learn on summer vacation? The exact words haven’t exactly ‘gelled’ in my mind yet, but I think — I think — it has something to do with the contrast between REALISM and IMPRESSIONISM — in art, in form, in function, in life. Everywhere. The contrast. The purpose. The deception. The truth. The pursuit. And even, as it were, the consequence — positive and negative — of following those paths. 

    Huh? 

    Though, of course, I can’t speak to the ineffable experiences of my travelling companions, near, close, or far, if I’m referring to the other two or the other fifty. It doesn’t even matter. Everyone gets something completely different from a so-called adventure through the world and I wouldn’t assume to enforce what anyone else got from their own wanderings any more than I would take (with good humour) having my own moments interpreted. But I need to solidify this (in as much as that is possible) so that I can go back to normal life and stop pondering the meta-purposes of vacation and just happily incorporate them into my humble existence.

    Life goes on, they say.

    One of the most literal examples that hangs in my mind is age — and what is REAL age? We saw some (arguably) old buildings. Commonly, buildings built as early as the 12th century (plus or minus countless generations). They were all over the place, with museums, restaurants, shops and stores, internet cafes, Pizza Huts, and storage rooms stuffed into their interiors. Eight hundred year old buildings being used to sell french fries or store folding chairs. But how REAL are those buildings? The bricks and sandstone is replaced every other decade. Some were bombed to rubble in the various wars, and rebuilt exactly as before on the same foundations. Wood rots and is replaced. Halogen lights dangle from medieval architecture. Are those REAL buildings? Or are they just IMPRESSIONS of old, long-since-disassembled structures for we moderns to enjoy?

    Or, consider the example of Prague. I’ve now been to Prague. At least, I think I’ve been to Prague. We saw the city and it’s life brimming from the seams of a tourist haven. We sheltered our visit by prancing through palace, stepping carefully across the Charles Bridge, buying tacky souvenirs and ice cream from abundant shoppes lining the narrow, winding, cobble-stone streets. I wonder: was this REALLY Prague? Or was this an IMPRESSION of Prague: an idealized simulation of what Prague might be if it were just an example of modern tourism: Beer, goulash, and “Czech Me Out” t-shirts in every store window. When the rain came and washed away all the tourists the square was uneven as if something was stewing below trying to gurgle out.

    Karin noted my third example: Language. There was only a single occasion over the course of three, widely-travelled weeks when English was insufficient. We ordered pizza in a small city in Slovakia and the waitress fumbled to communicate with us. We ate only because our fingers were adept at pointing to the menu in the appropriate places. But everywhere else — EVERYWHERE — I could communicate verbally in English to whomever I happened to meet. Some might insist that this is great. Sure. No effort on my part. Why complain? But was that REAL? Was it authentic? Was it something that represented an exact picture of the culture and people in who’s city I was a visitor? Or, what was it? An IMPRESSION? A feeling on the canvas that had been painted there to help me feel comfortable about my travels? An interpretation of Polish or Hungarian culture splashed across a North American theme.

    We discussed the (literal) REALISM versus IMPRESSIONISM with Henk who’s bias leans towards interpreting emotions on canvas. His art is impressions of his inner thoughts and deepest beliefs. He expressed his disappointment at the abundance of REALISM in Canadian art. So many “Grizzly Bears” and “Mountain-Scapes” does not seem to compare with dynamic feeling evoked by interpretable art. I wonder about blogging: this is REALISM. This is life, scripted. This is a photographically concrete image of what happened today. This is a precisely painted Douglas fir standing beside a river with glistening salmon jumping in the currents. REAL. But I want to write more IMPRESSIONISM.

    I took photos of grafitti in Eastern Europe. When I was caught, my travelling companions spying me out of the corner of their eye snapping a digital recreation of some Polish spray paintings, there might have been a bit of a chuckle. But then grafitti is IMPRESSION isn’t it? Loosely? Culture art seeps from the hearts of the people and erupts onto repeating surfaces of granite and marble, sandstone or cobble-stone.

    I rode on a bus for two weeks with a cross section of North American and Oceanic personalities. We had all arrived at a small hotel on the fringe of central Berlin with passports in hand but very little else tying us to our true personalities. Names and birthdates, countries of origin, and anything else we dared to express of ourselves. What happens in Europe, stays in Europe? Maybe. But what is REAL? Who is REAL? Is that guy with the hangover every morning really a tea-totaling moralist? Is the outgoing girl at the back of the bus really just shy and reserved. Does the smart guy with his nose in his book really burn away his days at home playing video games? Or, is the quiet couple near the front of the bus really taking a break from being the outgoing centres of attention back home? Who can say? Did we all just become IMPRESSIONS of who we’d like to be when we get on a bus full of strangers? Or can we even change the REAL?

    And of course there was my camera. Thirteen hundred photographs slipped neatly onto a wafer-thin memory card, glimpses of fragments of cities. Extracting the essence of the life into pixels is what we all happened to do, each of us, toting around cameras and flashing the shutter open for fractions of a second for what? A glimpse of the REAL so we could bring those memories home and relate them to our families and friends who couldn’t travel with us. But those literal images are REALISM subject to IMPRESSIONS of our memories. Nothing more. I called my incessant snapping “photo journalism” wherein scenic shots were bracketed by reference shots, or foot shots, or people shots, or artistic elements to be pasted together later. It was all to refresh my own mind, to flash my own IMPRESSIONS into something concrete so that there might be a glimpse of proof to my memory. For what it is worth those captured moments can never be experienced again. I took those photos because the moment was interpreted as special — irreplaceable — a glimpse of a fraction of a second to be recalled for as long as I can make the image last in my head, on paper, or as data. There is nothing REAL about it.

    But then what’s the point? What DID I learn on summer vacation? We travel about the world, leaving our lives and our things behind (mostly) locked safely in our little homes. We walk out the door, we get on an airplane, and the next thing we know we’re barrelling across Berlin in a train, drinking red wine on the Danube, or frying schnitzel in a camping trailer in a small country village in the middle of the Netherlands. And then it all becomes just a memory. I guess I affirmed to myself both something obvious yet also something that lends to the further interpretation of life: REAL lasts for a fleeting moment, but as humans with minds and imagination we are left to give out IMPRESSIONS to the world. We express, that’s all. I hinted at this earlier, but maybe I’ve been a little hard on myself. I’ve been aiming for the REAL. I’ve been aiming for precise, exact, but fleeting moments when all I can do is provide impressions of it all. And that could be something elusive yet satisfying: art, words, thoughts, everything. Maybe this seems a little dissatisfying for you, I having travelled the world and come back with nothing more than a glimmer of philosophical existentialism. But then again, this is just my impression.

    original published date: Friday, June 9, 2006

  • head over feets: zen edition

    I have been doing a self-experiment. (That’s what I am going to call these things that others might call “challenges” or “streaks” of trying to build a habit over the course of 30 days. Experiments on myself.) I have been meditating every day.

    And before you get the images of me all new-age yogi omming on a cushion with incense and such, I’ll tell you instead that it has been an effort much more of a timer-based mindfulness exercise. Me just sitting there with my eyes closed focused on stillness and breath and focus of thoughts. I read a more science-focused book on meditation and the author compared the health-based meditation to mental pushups: just repeating the focus, correcting ones form, adjusting, repeating, and building mental strength and stamina. I mean, it’s all the same stuff in the end, but instead of chanting I have an app on my phone that makes a gentle sound when the timer expires.

    I’m working on a whole article about that experiment that I’ll publish in a couple weeks, but I’ve had some reflective thoughts on the effort and how it relates to another kind of meditation I’ve been doing for nearly twenty years, thirty day challenges be damned. 

    Running solo and sans music is, believe it or not, meditative. At least, data point of one, it has been for me. I just didn’t really recognize it until my efforts to be mindful on my living room floor and my solo running efforts overlapped. 

    Yesterday morning I went for a run in the rain.

    I followed a familiar route that led through my neighbourhood avoiding as many roads that I could and focusing on finding a route towards the river valley. I dodged onto the asphalt trail and followed that fo a few minutes until I found the exit into the single track through the trees.

    Mindfulness is about focus on the body and a stilling of ones thoughts. It is an impossible feat for nearly everyone, I am given to understand. One can creep ever closer towards the goal that is infinitely out of reach. Running through the woods my mind turns itself over to the trail, each step a miniature obstacle that requires a kind of focus and attention. The meandering terrain of a single track course maginifies that focus, forcing the mind into a single purpose machine tracking the undulating and potentially dangerous footing while modulating the body for pace and breath and the beat-beat-beat of a racing heart.

    To be fair, this is not the first time I have made this connection between mindfulness and my chosen sport.

    I used to write a lot about the space that running gave me to think creative thoughts, work through problems, or ponder philosophical ideas. (I know, I’m odd.) Going for a solo run has always been a way to slip into a mindful trance of sorts and plod around the neighbourhood working through stuff with an unencumbered mind.  People even ask me how I run without music, to which I would reply that I sometimes do run with headphones but most often I just prefer the space to think.  What I never really recognized until lately was that this thing that the zen folks and the yogis and the chanters sitting atop cushions are all trying to achieve is a state of mental clarity and calm that I already kinda found out there in the river valley trails, and I suspect is a familiar state of mind for countless other runners and trail racing folk.

    I am enjoying my daily fifteen minutes of mental pushups. I turn on my timer and find a quiet place to sit and then just listen to my own breath for a spell. When my little experiment is over, this effort to build a new habit has reached its milestone, when the final chime rings I will need to decide if it remains something I find space for each day. Or, instead, does this become another tool in my health toolbox, like strength training or eating well, is it something I just do to make me a better runner.

  • periodical past

    Remember magazines?

    There are still magazines for sale, of course, paper ones… really. I know. I’m looking at some there off to my right even as I sit here writing this—but despite the physical evidence just out of reach from me, I do honestly believe we are clearly past the age of peak periodical. 

    I stopped for a coffee in a bookstore this morning and wandered through the magazine rack just long enough to thumb through a few familiar titles before heading for the cafe, a free table, and my phone… which has instant access to roughly fifty downloaded-but-unread issues of various magazines (which I may or may not get around to reading someday) all buried inside apps and services to which I subscribe. 

    I remember magazines—and I certainly didn’t need a paper copy.

    Oh, but heck if I didn’t used to be the core customer demographic for print magazines, subscribing to WIRED or Runners World delivered by postal mail, hitting up the convenience store for the latest issue of Popular Mechanics or that Playstation magazine that came with a free demo disc, and definitely buying a copy of some text-heavy serious content periodical like The Economist or National Geographic with habitual dedication at the airport before I hopped on any flight. And before you think I’m getting all high and mighty about those particular titles, I definitely still have a stack of MAD back-issues on a shelf in my office.

    Yet I cannot actually remember the last time I out and out bought a print magazine.

    (And to be honest I looked at the prices and that wasn’t swerving that decision any closer to a sale this morning, either.)

    The answer to what happened to magazines is obvious: the internet happened. 

    I mean, I’m sitting in a bookstore watching people still queued up to buy print books by the arm-load, but the magazine rack is a ghost town. 

    That’s to say, maybe the internet didn’t kill print mediums as much as it just killed print media. 

    And of course it did.

    I don’t buy magazines on paper anymore, though I’ve bought my share of bound books. But those things aren’t even really equivalents after they? Books vers magazine periodicals? I buy books to have them. I want magazines to use them.

    Because sure, I kept a few keepsake issues of those many hundreds perhaps thousands of paper-based magazines that I bought over the decades, but that particular ratio is likely something close to 5-10% tops. On the other hand, I still own at least 80% of the dead-tree books I’ve ever bought, and the other 20% that I have lost track of were almost certainly resold, loaned or given away.

    Magazines are, after all, by design transient media. Temporary. Longer-lasting than a newspaper, sure… but not by much. Magazines were always just a means to communicate something that was mostly never meant to endure beyond bursts of momentary information or entertainment. Then? Insert big blurry line here and cross over to the other side to find the realm of more persistent print mediums like novels and other books. (Magazines often try to be books too these days—weightier and collectible—but I would argue that the effort was flimsy and doomed. To most of us, magazines are things we buy, read and then… just toss.)

    I collect and read and savour books, but magazines? Far less. Magazines are disposable, fleeting, keep-scrolling kind of media.

    And that kind of media, transient and temporary, is really where the internet shines the strongest: short form transient content in a digital on-demand format. Read once and discard. Consume today, gone tonite. Words tangled up with timestamps and best before dates.

    Heck, you could even argue that apart from a few differentiating factors—like cost, quality, contributor count, etc—this very website is little more than a kind of digital periodical. And the one place where it is practically the same, sadly, is in readership. Sure I get some traffic, but this site is just as much a ghost town as the periodical aisle three metres to my right.

    We haven’t stopped reading magazines I suppose. In fact, arguably the digital equivalent of periodical media is probably in something of a resurgence. My own personal experience is that of reading articles from these kinds of publications almost daily in my news and social feeds.

    But as for that floppy bit of glossy paper rolled up and tossed in a bag, sitting in a cafe or on the couch or on a plane reading a bound anthology of that kind of writing? I recall it like a long-lost cozy sweater, but there’s pretty much no way I’m routinely shelling out fifteen bucks for something I have on my phone already—and then I’m going to throw away next week. 

    I remember magazines and to be honest I kinda do miss them… but probably not enough to do much more than feel nostalgic about it.