Paul Ford is talking about editors and editing the web, and I think he’s getting at another twisty strand of this thing I’m thinking about as I keep coming back to the problem of how best for humans to make sense of data. There’s no way around it—computers are very good at finding patterns and humans are very good at finding meaning within those patterns. Computers are not so good at finding meaning in patterns. We keep trying to skip ahead, asking machines to find meaning for us, but the most momentous way to use the computation power available to us right now is to have human beings edit the patterns machines find in data, rather than to have human beings edit the data itself to make it more palatable to the machines in hopes that the machines will extract something important for us. Machines think humans always want single answers when really humans just as often want to be able to wonder about things, to ask half-baked questions on a hunch and select or reject patterns in the same way. We want to be able to guide the computations toward the meaning we’re looking for.

And to step sideways for a sec and come at the idea of meaning from a different direction; I have a fuzzy theory that the meaning we are looking for has a visceral component. We need to make a connection that maps the external world of patterns to our bodies somehow, and we have to do it for ourselves. Mitsu often talks with frustration about how even when we (both the big we of Society and the small we of me) have precisely the information we’re looking for, we are often unable to bring ourselves to use it, or maybe even to really and truly believe it. Financial information from a time before we were born is a fine example of this. No matter how relevant, we can’t quite trust it. For some reason, once things fall outside of a certain scale—too far before or after our lifetimes, too big or small in comparison to our bodies—we seem unable to internalize even information we rationally find sound.

Part of the reason I am so fascinated with genomic data and personal tracking data is that I see it as a link between the scale of our bodies and historical, geographic, and molecular events that we might not otherwise find meaningful. (Ferchrissake, I can’t seem to stop saying meaning.) But imagine (and this is a totally scifi example, but still), if I were able to relate a present physical sensation to a set of epigenomic markers which in turn were associated with an event that took place in a specific geographic location some forty years before I were born. That historical event, the descendants of the people involved, the location, everything surrounding that event and the cascade of consequences take on a new kind of urgency for me. They are literally part of me.

Humph. Another statistic proving that death is All Your Fault.⁰¹ Sure. Or maybe this fishy statistic reflects how demotivating it is to be constantly bombarded with information about what we ought to be doing to keep ourselves healthy. External rewards and punishments are known to kill intrinsic motivation (Hi Alfie!). How do we wake ourselves and others from the internal torpor induced by all this nagging and bribery? Maybe we should focus more on piquing our own curiosity than trying to boss or bribe one another into a semblance of self-respect. (California, you might want to stick your fingers in your ears for a sec.) I get frustrated with these claims because, barring the drunk driving example, from the point of view of the survival of our species; it seems unlikely that the occasional booze or cigarette binge or sabre tooth tiger burger should harm us so irrevocably. Perhaps if our bodies weren’t already so burdened by the onslaught of garbage we have no control over, they would be more resilient to some of the screw-ups we make as a result of the impulses for which we are adapted. But that’s hard to prove and we certainly couldn’t trust the filthy chusma not to shrug and hand their kids cigarettes and deep fried twinkies if it turned out to be true. We are frightened of questions that challenge the simplistic story we’ve agreed upon. So we prove what’s easy. You and only you are responsible for your cancer, obesity, high blood pressure, depression. And back we go to nagging, rewarding, and shaming people for the state of their health until all anyone can hear is a low buzz. It’s the hippie atheist version of sin and damnation. Every now and then we experience a burst of self hatred, but mostly we just don’t hear any of it any more.⁰²

Obviously our simplistic story isn’t working. We are all getting sicker and duller. What have we got to lose by telling complicated stories? Complexity is exciting, outrageous. Everyone has an opinion. A bunch of opinions means conversation, and you have to be conscious to converse. Once we are alive to the world around us, our personal choices have a context and become something more than a doped default.

My darling sister, who is an English professor and the head of the writing center at a fancy university here in NYC, proofread a small thing I was writing. It was a humbling experience, but not humbling like when you win the Nobel prize and claim to feel humbled. It was humbling in a more traditionally humiliating way. Compliment / complement! Who knew, who remembered? (Jane did, I did not.)

~

Plenty of people are still mistaking generosity for narcissism. If you think that the only reason people make things to give away free online is to gain something in return, I think you might be missing the point. But if I’m mistaken or you just can’t help it, than you’d likely better get to work catching up on what you owe the world. GalaxyZoo is a nice place to start.

And while we’re on narcissism, I just voluntarily put a photograph of my own mug on the internet for the first time ever. I find I need to be recognizable for work-related reasons at the moment. Aside from the evil real estate broker associations, I’m not sure why it feels like such a big deal; but it does. I could say that I got harassed a lot online in the nineties and that keeping a more gender neutral profile just feels more comfortable, and all that would be true; but it’s a little weirder than that. It simply feels more authentic somehow to disassociate my face from my online persona. I don’t entirely own my own image. Photos surprise me and reflections confound me. Do I really look that sulky and uncertain? I am neither. My mirror face, which is apparently unrelated to the face I walk around with, is cool and neutral; mostly poised for hair brushing or lipsticking. I am fond of it and wouldn’t trade if for a more beautiful face if I could. (There was a time when I would have traded my elbows though. When I was eleven I caught a glimpse of my straightened arms in the mirror and refused to unbend them again for a year or so. All that elbow skin!) The face of photos and chance reflections feels oddly fraudulent.

~

Must stop typing. I hear Aure piping to his babysitter about how he will be dead after a while and his body will grow into lettuces and worms. (We are still working on death.) In he comes! My little goth darling is wearing a neighbor child’s dress, the skirts of which he flaps like a butterfly as he bounds about searching for imaginary flowers to “devour.” His red ball cap reads Fierce Avenger. But quickly—more death. Prodromal Alzheimer’s, portraits taken before and after death, and E.M. Forster’s solemn and beautiful claim that “Death destroys a man, but the idea of death saves him.”