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In 2020 what we need is utopia, but even Star Trek is jaded

I caught up on Star Trek: Picard. My main thought: What is the point of western civilization if even Star Trek can’t be hopeful?

Star Trek was, at some point, about a future where humanity had overcome its issues. There is no longer any war on earth. There’s no scarcity and money is a thing of the past. Humans are motivated primarily by curiosity and a desire for self improvement.

Star Trek was, in a word, utopian.

It feels like TV writers can’t imagine utopias anymore—or, at least, they assume no one wants to watch them. So we don’t get a utopian Federation in Star Trek: Picard. We get a Federation that is, at its core, corrupt. A Federation where an admiral tells Jean-Luc Picard to “respectfully, and at long last, shut the fuck up.” A Federation that long ago betrayed its values and can’t be trusted to do the right thing.

So what’s the solution? A plucky team of outsiders who can save the day! What was a show about people working inside an institution to expand humanity’s knowledge is now essentially a comic book movie, where individuals need to fix things that broken institutions cannot.

I am so tired of this kind of fiction. At some point these stories were corrective, expressing how disappointed we are with slow progress. But we’ve been telling this tale for decades. It feels like we’re stuck.

We face huge problems, including climate change, that no rag-tag group of heroes can solve. We need to work together. We need to build, and trust, systems that combine our efforts. That’s hard to imagine in 2020, which is the point. Fiction is supposed to help us imagine.

Right now all we’re imaging is how things could become even more broken. Kim Stanley Robinson, author of the Red Mars trilogy, put this well in a fantastic essay:

The situation is bad, yes, okay, enough of that; we know that already. Dystopia has done its job, it’s old news now, perhaps it’s self-indulgence to stay stuck in that place any more. Next thought: utopia. Realistic or not, and perhaps especially if not.

No one has ever accused Star Trek of being realistic when it comes to technology. I wish the current incarnation was wildly unrealistic when it comes to society, because we could all use a utopia right about now.

Facebook moderators miss key directives because the news feed is terrible

Many current social problems—not all, but many—can be traced back to our collective decision to prioritize #engagement in the systems we use to communicate with each other.

Facebook’s newsfeed is the most prominent example of this. Here you see not the most recent posts from your friends but the posts Facebook’s mysterious algorithm deems most important to you based on things like how many likes and comments it got. In theory this means you’ll always see the most important posts, but most of us know that in reality the most controversial stuff bubbles up and drowns out the more low-key posts that might prove more important.

It turns out Facebook, the company, also sees things slip through the cracks because of this system. Casey Newton, writing for the The Verge about Facebook’s US-based team of contracted moderators, pointed out that company leadership sends out directives using something similar to the News Feed. The results are, sadly, predictable:

While official policy changes typically arrive every other Wednesday, incremental guidance about developing issues is distributed on a near-daily basis. Often, this guidance is posted to Workplace, the enterprise version of Facebook that the company introduced in 2016. Like Facebook itself, Workplace has an algorithmic News Feed that displays posts based on engagement. During a breaking news event, such as a mass shooting, managers will often post conflicting information about how to moderate individual pieces of content, which then appear out of chronological order on Workplace. Six current and former employees told me that they had made moderation mistakes based on seeing an outdated post at the top of their feed. At times, it feels as if Facebook’s own product is working against them. The irony is not lost on the moderators.

The entire article is heartbreaking, and you should read it, but this entry sticks in my head. Who thought it was a good idea for company mandates to flow through an algorithm that prioritizes engagement? Why would such directives not simply be sent to the people who need to see them? I can’t imagine a less productive way to communicate during a crisis.

There are tiny hippos living in your house (and other thoughts)

All these years later I still think about house hippos once a month or so.

Confused? So was I, as a kid, seeing this PSA for the first time. The footage looked so…real. I couldn’t help but wonder, halfway through, whether there really were tiny hippos in my kitchen.

There aren’t, of course. This was a lesson, designed to teach Canadian youth such as myself the value of thinking critically about media.

There’s something melancholy about watching this online, in 2018, alongside the conspiracy theory thumbnails YouTube’s algorithm sticks in the suggestion box. There’s just so much untruth in the world now, and most of it is a lot harder to debunk than the tiny hippos sleeping in my dryer lint.

I wish I could be so sincere the belief, presented above, that if we all think critically about what we’re watching we will spot the difference between what’s real and what’s false. That with a little critical thought we can come to some objective agreement on what truth is.

But we don’t want to know the truth: we want to be told we were right all along. The world’s smartest engineers are working on algorithms that spot this pattern and accelerate it—all in the name of Increasing Engagement.

And so we’re stuck, unable to find common ground, wondering why we’re so angry with each other. There’s probably some forum somewhere with people arguing, sincerely or otherwise, that house hippos are real. And another group, earnestly trying to argue with them, getting nowhere. That, seemingly, is just how the world is right now.

And that’s how the world will be, until we all want truth more than we want to be proven correct. Until we all want policies that work more than we want our side to win. Until we all find some way to live in the same reality again.

Does the decline of local journalism explain declining trust in government?

Calling the government useless only works if you take for granted all the many ways public employees make modern life possible. Officials doing their jobs are the reason we have fresh water and roads to drive on.

Debbie Chachra, writing for The Atlantic, pointed out this invisible work last week:

When I look at my phone to decide if I need an umbrella, the little blue dot that says where I am is thanks to the network of Global Positioning System satellites operated by the United States Air Force, and the weather is the result of a $5.1 billion federal investment in forecasting, for an estimated $31.5 billion dollars of benefit in saving lives, properties, and crops (and letting me know I should wear a raincoat).

She goes on to say that tech companies should do more to point this sort of thing out, a sentiment I agree with.

If I were to make a suggestion for how technology could be used to improve our democracy, I would want to make these systems more visible, understandable, and valued by the general public.

I’d like to add that journalists could also do more to point out this sort of work. Traditionally local journalism is more focused on infrastructure than national, and I’m wondering if this is part of why trust in government is so low right now.

Rants about national politics gets more clicks than articles outlining local infrastructure projects, so that’s all we see. Of course more people are unhappy about government: so far as they can tell nothing ever gets done. Even if, down the road, officials they’ve never heard of are working to make sure they have access to clean water.

Maybe giving those officials more attention will calm things down. But we’ve got to find a way to make that interesting, without resorting to anger.

Facebook throws pocket change at local news outlets, expects gratitude

Facebook killed local newspapers by sucking up all the revenue that used to pay for the person who’d sit in on council meetings and spell your nephews’ name incorrectly. Now they’re starting to feel bad about that, so they’re throwing a tiny percentage of their revenue toward appearing to do something about the problem. Mathew Ingram, writing for the Columbia Journalism Review:

In a blog post, Facebook’s Head of News Partnerships, Campbell Brown, calls the project “a $3 million, three-month pilot program to help metro newspapers take their digital subscription business to a new level.” Conspicuously absent, not surprisingly, was any mention of the main reason why newspapers and other media entities are being forced to rely on subscription revenue—namely, that Facebook and Google have vacuumed up the vast majority of digital advertising over the past few years, leaving much of the media industry with nothing but a giant, smoking crater where its ad revenue used to be.

If nothing else I’m glad Facebook at least sees value in appearing to value local journalism, but this is a drop in the bucket compared to the hole left by declining advertising revenue. Three million also, as Ingram points out, “amounts to 0.007 percent of Facebook’s 2017 revenues.”

This is a PR stunt, nothing more, and while it may help a couple of newspapers increase subscriber revenue it doesn’t begin to offset the challenges this ecosystem is facing. No realistic amount of subscription revenue is going to replace the ad money that’s never coming back.

Local journalism needs a whole lot more than occasional tech industry charity if it’s going to sustain democracy. It needs an entirely new model, and subscriptions alone isn’t going to cut it.

Learn from this, Canada.

It’s an 82 kilometer drive from Peace River, Alberta to Fairview, and there’s not a whole lot to see along the way. Fewer than 10,000 people live in the two towns combined, but I still managed to get stuck in traffic driving from one to the other.

We sat there, my friends and I, waiting for the road to clear so we could get to a company Christmas party. We were listening to CBC Radio 1; Randy Bachman, of BTO fame, was outlining the history of reggae, playing songs that were perfectly juxtaposed with the snow-covered canola fields outside.

Eventually the cops motioned us forward, and we could see what the holdup was. The face of a Ford F350 was completely flattened, like an accordion. It hit a moose, apparently, though the moose itself was no where to be seen. The cops told us it walked away. Apparently that’s not uncommon.

This is the most Canadian story I could possibly tell, but that truck also nicely outlines my mental state the day after the election of Donald J. Trump. I was utterly flattened by something I really should have seen coming.

I didn’t sleep the night of the election. I wept multiple times on Wednesday. I spent the weekend on the coast with my wife, entirely offline, doing everything I could to avoid reading the news.

What I’m feeling, dear reader, is this: I want to love America, but I can’t. I just can’t.

I live outside Portland, Oregon, a city aflame with protests last week. When I go home to rural Ontario, people call me “the American.” I’ve lived stateside for over a decade. I own a house. And I’ve been known to spout dangerous foreign ideas, like “putting an NHL team in Hamilton isn’t a great idea.”

But I don’t consider myself American. I’m not an American citizen. Maybe someday, I’ve always told myself, but then something always happens. Sometimes a small thing, like the US facing Canada in Olympic hockey, makes me realize I’m completely incapable of self-identifying as American. And sometimes….well, sometimes it’s big things. Seeing Canada embrace Syrian refugees makes me feel deeply patriotic, and so does the way Canadian voters soundly rejected anti-Muslim rhetoric in the 2015 election.

Which brings me to the 2016 US election. I have never felt less American than now. This is not my native land, but I hesitate to even call it home. Don’t get me wrong: I’m very grateful to live here. I have many great friends here. I love these people. I love my wife.

But when I think of “America”, writ large, I now think of a country that elects a know-nothing demagogue spouting unambiguous racism and hatred. The thought of ever pledging allegiance to its flag makes me sick in my stomach.

I know this, on some level, is a defense mechanism. I’m a straight white Christian male, but playing the “Canada” card gets me off the hook for Trump entirely. Knowing the psychological reasons behind my sudden surge of Canadian nationalism doesn’t lessen its potency.

I’m going to feel like this for a while, and I’m going to be venting a lot. I’m hoping to put some of my energy toward making my local community a better place for the people Trump wants to hurt.

But in the meantime, I want to say something to my compatriots back home.

Canada: you’re the shining city on the hill now. America has lost faith with its own ideals, and Europe is descending into darkness. Canada is the only Western power that believes in multiculturalism, and the world needs Canada to live up to that belief.

So what I ask of you, fellow Canadians, is this: don’t fuck this up.

Last year the Conservative Party tried to play up anti-Muslim fear in an attempt to save its election hopes. The backlash was immediate, and Canada wound up electing Justin Trudeau’s Liberal Party in an unprecedented wave. The third-place party ended up with a majority government.

I know many of you don’t like Trudeau, or the Liberals, when it comes to policy. That’s fine. But please: no matter how you feel, do not let the hatred of minority groups drive the discussion. If politicians try to use suspicion of minority groups as a rallying cry, fight back, regardless of the partisan implications. Ethnic hatred unleashes forces that can’t be tamed, and will outlast any election victory. It’s not worth it.

The world is watching, Canada. Stand on guard.

Oh, and Trudeau: keep your damn voting reform promises.

On the shutdown: call out bullshit, then question your own.

As you know by now the US government’s been held hostage by right-wing extremists. These people thought Romney was going to win in a landslide, so reality isn’t their forte. We should absolutely call them out on their bullshit, especially when the result of it is a government shutdown that’s going to cost the American people billions of dollars.

But while you do that, question what bullshit you might hold dear. Because there is some. All of our brains want, more than anything, to be told that we’re right. To be told that our ideas are legitimate, and that anyone who disagrees is immoral, misinformed or somehow inferior to our superior selves.

And we’ve all got personal internet bubbles set up. Facebook filters out people we don’t interact with, you only follow people you like on Twitter and even your Google searches are determined by what Google thinks you like. Our stupid brains love this, but reality becomes increasingly subjective as our filters grow to service them.

Again: only one party decided to use a basic government protocol to hold hostage a law passed years ago by a democratically elected congress and supported by a recently re-elected president. They absolutely deserve the blame here.

But the deeper problem is a cultural inability to agree on what is and isn’t true. This nonsense is only a symptom – albeit a batshit crazy one.

Who Are You? Thoughts On Identity

Identity is a complex thing. People who know me know I’m from Canada, despite living in the USA now. People here, in Boulder, know me as the Canadian if they can’t remember my name.

When I go home, however, people call me the American. Live in any country other than your own long enough and this will happen to you – it’s basically inevitable. My identity – like yours – can’t be boiled down to a nation, a religion, a TV show or anything else.

diever

My Oma’s childhood home in Diever, Drenthe, The Netherlands

Last week I, and my family, visited the Netherlands. As I said: identity is complex, and that was true even before I moved to the USA. All my life my grandparents have spoken of The Netherlands as the proverbial Old Country. I grew up calling them Oma and Opa, and Dutch baked goods were always plentiful. The church we attended was full of other immigrant families much like ours, and as a kid it just all just seemed normal. At one point I actually thought all old people had a Dutch accent, because just about every old person I knew did.

I’m Canadian. I’m also, at this point, kind of American (though not if you check my passport). And while visiting The Netherlands, I also felt strangely at home.

Don’t get me wrong – there were ways in which it was foriegn. The language isn’t one I speak – beyond what three months of Rosetta Stone can do, anyway – and almost all the traffic signs I saw meant nothing to me. We didn’t know what a red X through a blue circle meant until checking Wikipedia at home (it means no stopping).

diever-horses

But in other ways, however, I felt right at home. We visited my grandparent’s home town (Diever, in Drenthe) and almost all the last names we saw there were shared with people from home – an effect, I was told, of immigrants tending to cluster with people from their home towns. The baked goods, of course, were familiar – albeit much less stale than we were used to (seriously, Stroopwaffles are so much better than I thought as a kid…and I freaking loved them). And the general atmosphere was simply comfortable.

Identity is complex. I’m Canadian, I’m American, but my ancestry is entirely Dutch. I’m glad I took this trip, because now I know just a little more about what that means – and find myself wanting to know more.

Mom and Dad: thanks for flying us all out there. It was one of the best weeks Kathy and I have ever had, and I’m sure my siblings feel the same. I’ll do all I can to get more video out there in the weeks to come – I’ve got a lot of footage to sort through now.

Everyone else, I’m wondering: do you know where your family comes from? What does that mean to you? Comments, below: you know what to do.

Keep Your Stick On The Ice: 4 Hockey Idioms And What They Mean

Sports metaphors are all over the English language, especially in North America. Here in the USA, most everyone knows what means to strike out, for example, or to score a touchdown – and people use those phrases regardless of whether they actually enjoy the sport they’re from.

Being obsessed with hockey I make a mental note every time I hear an idiom from that sport. Like most sports idioms they’ve taken on a meaning of their own, often disconnected from the game that created them in the first place. With that in mind, here are those idioms in context – both in their sport and life in general.

Keep Your Stick On The Ice

Many people don’t even realize this is a hockey phrase – they know it only as Red Green’s life-affirming sign off. But anyone who’s ever played hockey has heard this a lot: it’s a favorite of coaches, dads and even teammates. Visit any rink, in any small town, and you’ll hear it multiple times: “Keep your stick on the ice!”

The idea here is simple: when playing hockey you never know when the puck might come your way, so you should be ready for it at all times. Keeping your stick on the ice means you can shoot at a moments notice, important when you’re on the receiving end of a lucky bounce or a great pass.

stick_on_the_ice

Hockey’s a fast game, so it’s important to always be ready – where your stick is when the puck comes could easily be the difference between a win and a loss. So “keep your stick on the ice” is advice every young hockey player needs to hear.

But there’s a reason Green ends his show with this phrase, even though he rarely mentions hockey itself. You never know when an opportunity is going to come up, so you might as well be ready all the time just in case.

Keep Your Head Up

It’s easy – in hockey as well as life – to only focus on one thing. In hockey this means looking down at the puck while you skate, and doing has disastrous consequences.

keep_your_head_up

“Keep your head up” is another common phrase in small-town rinks, and for good reason: if you’re looking down at the puck, instead of up at the play, you’re going to get blindsided eventually. You’ll probably even get hurt. There’s a lot going on at once on the ice, so it’s important to learn to handle the puck by feel so you can use your eyes to keep track of the other players on the ice – fail to do that and you’ll end up on your ass.

Tunnel vision is dangerous in any context: if you’re only paying attention to one thing you can bet some other thing is going to eventually sneak up on you. Keep your head up.

Skate To Where The Puck Is Going To Be

This one’s just basic physics: both you and the puck are quickly moving around on the ice, so if you constantly skate toward where the puck is right now you’ll probably never be near it. Don’t skate to where the puck is: skate to where the puck is going to be.

goingtobe

Of course, this isn’t unique to hockey: anyone who’s played the classic arcade game Space Invaders can understand the meaning easily. In that game the aliens move quickly, so you need to aim not at where they are but where they will be by the time your bullet gets there.

Whatever the context, this phrase is a good reminder that the world changes. If you’re always chasing, and never anticipating, you’ll find it hard to achieve much of anything.

Drop The Gloves

Everyone’s heard this one, even if they’ve never watched hockey in their life: drop the gloves. When hockey players are about to fight they first drop their gloves. It’s a declaration of intent, a signal that you want to fight.

gloves-drop-o

There’s nothing too deep here: it’s just people hitting the crap out of each other to make a point, commonly to inspire their team. Sometimes, in order to rally people, you need to do something that has absolutely nothing to do with the goal at hand. To win a moral victory. It’s silly, but it works.

What Did I Miss?

This list isn’t suppose to be complete, so let me know what other common hockey idioms are out there in the broader culture, and what they mean to you. I’m looking forward to hearing from you.

I’m So Angry At The NHL That I’ll Watch Every Freaking Game

Hockey’s back! To most of you this sentence means nothing, but for this Canadian living in Colorado it means life is more worth living than it was two weeks ago.

I shouldn’t watch. The season was delayed – and an outdoor game between my two favorite teams cancelled – because millionaires and billionaires couldn’t decide how to properly distribute my money. The last thing I should do after such an inexcusable event is watch NHL hockey, because it tells the owners and players I’ll keep watching no matter what stupid crap they do.

But….but….

I will keep watching hockey no matter what stupid crap they do. I’m stuck in an abusive relationship, but at least I admit it. That’s something, right?

Anyway…hockey’s back! So excited. I gave the league 50 of my dollars so I can watch every game. Tip: use the XBMC Gamecenter plugin and you can bypass every blackout, and get a better interface for watching to boot. HD picture, occasional buffering, no cable required.

Anyway, I hate myself for supporting the league. And am so happy the game is back. And angry. And happy.

Whatever.