“There are so many things that can be forbidden. The stranger thing is that we believe everything that isn’t forbidden is allowed.”

That’s true. Why? Is this lack of explicit rules part of why we see a generosity online that is almost unthinkable in the real world? I can’t unknow that if I offer to fix the bit of my neighbor’s roof that’s raining bricks into my back yard, she can sue me if anything goes wrong. I can’t unknow how many people of my acquaintance have actually sued or been sued. Sometimes behaving with innocence is demonstrably safer than arming ourselves against all possible attack, but that’s calculated. It’s a matter of knowing the lower accident statistics of the traffic circle and still feeling afraid and wanting the traffic circle instead of the stoplight. In real life, even if we behave with the best intentions toward one another, we weigh the possibilities for humiliation (or worse) and consider the risk “rent to the ideal.”

‘It’s better to be fooled than to be suspicious’—that the confidence trick is the work of man, but the want-of-confidence-trick is the work of the devil. (E. M. Forster again.)

Yet online the relationship between individuals is somehow still more innocent. Is it because the internet is still a frontier place? What will happen when there are suddenly sets of explicit rules for interacting with our peers? What will happen when the corporate drunk drivers take advantage of the generosity of individuals to swerve all over us? (Drugstore.com, give me one good reason why I should do unpaid work writing product reviews for you? I’ll do it if I damn well please. Stop harassing me.) Corporations are increasingly functioning in very personal spaces. No collective entity that exists to earn money, no matter how careful, can have the sensitivity of an individual to the nuances of these fluid, invisible agreements. Mostly they don’t even try, or worse– assume the rules simply don’t apply to them. Will we get burnt out and defensive? How long have we got? And what can we get done in the meantime?

A real human being is no longer an abstraction or an object. He is a person. In his position as child he owes me very little. He didn’t ask to be brought into existence. It’s my responsibility as a parent to establish the framework for the relationship that will define us as a family. Someday we will owe one another everything that people who have a long and loving relationship owe one another. (I guess that’s a reasonable definition of family in our culture.) But the idea that my child should be, by his existence, responsible for my happiness is just a new age-y iteration of the idea that he owes me respect or money or unquestioning obedience by virtue of the fact I spawned him.

Anyone who knows me and my particular sainted infant will understand that I do not speak from the sort of dumb luck that causes the parents of fat placid babies who slept through the night from two weeks on and grew up into coy obedient toddlers, to bridle in horror when other people’s kids shriek and writhe on the subway. (No one could describe my child as obedient, a thing I concede with some ambivalence. Also, sorry about the shrieking and writhing. Really. I spend a lot of time feeling truly awful about it.) I am often tired. I have not slept through the night since well before he was born. I get enraged with the tantrums that inevitably take place when I keep him safe and sometimes end up stomping and flailing a bit myself.

But considering all this in terms of happiness? Huh? I could lodge almost the same set of complaints about starting a business. (Though there the tantrums are mine alone and have mostly to do with printers and Adobe products.) Who are these magazine people whose choices in life are determined by what might or might not make them happy? What the hell does happy even mean? I am more likely to choose to undertake something because it promises to stimulate and challenge me, to change me. Having a child is one of those things. I had almost a year of enforced self-reflection, right smack in the middle of my thirties, when we’re all supposed to be too busy to think. I am more comfortable in a position of authority than ever before; more adept at achieving consensus and avoiding ultimatums. I am powerfully aware of the passage of time. In fact, I am changed.

Said Specific Human Child is playing Virgen de Guadalupe now (Soy la mama María!), pretending to breastfeed his exalted babydoll, whom he refers to as El Niño Oso, a mishearing of El Niño Dios, which I hesitate to correct.

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.