Millennial Cyborg

Hello! I'm Milo. Freelance designer, idea explorer, & analytical critic. I like to play the tenor guitar and think about cyborg nature. I also have a Medium for more articley things.

[miloaxelrod]

The evolving relationship between myself and my inner dialogue

It started with support. I was hurting, I was wounded, and I needed arms to lean on. I had no others but my own, so made them strong and leaned hard. "It's okay, you're dong fine." "I know you can make it through this." "I've got you, I'm here. You can trust me when I say that I know you can do this." "You're doing your best." "Keep it up!" "You're doing your best." I held myself in my own arms.

But I was getting better and stronger, and the bar of 'my best' was rising. I was still telling myself I was doing my best, so I wasn't stretching to hit the bar. I was becoming complacent. When I saw the complacency, I decided some discipline was needed. The dialogue became more stern. "You are doing, but it isn't your best, you know that. You can reach farther." "Come on. Step up." "You're doing well, but we can do better."

Gradually, it got harsher. "This isn't good enough, you can do better. Do it!" "It's time to stop screwing around and get your shit together." "Is this what you're doing with your time? You don't need this, get to work."

And eventually, I stopped listening to it and it stopped helping. Maybe it had stopped helping a long time before I stopped listening.

Telling myself to do work didn't make me do work. The only thing that could make me do work was to do it. I knew this already in other contexts, and now I knew it in this one also. I silenced the dialogue.

[miloaxelrod]

Ikea

In line at the Ikea food court, my friends were discussing which balls to get. Swedish meatballs, chicken meatballs, or vegetable balls. We were carrying oversized plastic cafeteria trays, and while there were other foods available, the only options I could see on the large overhead menu were balls. I was vibrating with nervous energy.

We hadn't gone through the showroom yet, but we were hungry and and the food prices were incredibly cheap. I felt like we were getting a great deal and also felt very afraid and I wasn't sure why. As the line crawled forward, we approached a cooler with several different sealed beverages: canned apple cider, canned pear cider, and small juice boxes labeled "elderflower". I was struck with images of pinterest trends and cute hipster bars (which I love) and 1984 (the book) and I was seized with both joy and terror. I loved all of these beverages. I also felt very suddenly powerless and manipulated, that my love of all these beverages was carefully devised by an authority above me. I felt the sinister weight of The Trend, of being coerced so carefully that I believe it is my choice and feel joy when presented with it, even to gain outside my own—and even to my own detriment. Its a concept that‘s been in my periphery for a long time, but coming mainly from teens with originality complexes and people who don’t like to have fun. I mostly ignored it. It had never hit me in the head so abruptly as this moment in Ikea, deliberating over trendy drinks.

I bought a can of pear cider and a serving of vegetable balls. I took a sip of the cider and tasted an artificial preservative, checked the ingredients to verify, and offered it to a friend who didn't mind artificial preservatives. The very low-priced vegetables balls were OK but filling, and the sauce was pretty good. I sat at a very aesthetically appealing faux-wood table under well-designed lighting eating my vegetable balls, and continued to gain an ever-deepening understanding of the joyous daily life of 1984. The Ball is the most aesthetically communist form of food I can imagine.

[miloaxelrod]

Snow

When it is snowing on Christmas Eve it doesn’t matter who you are or what you celebrate. There is power in it.

Especially in this year of 2017 year of stretching and wearing thin of pulling taught, tighter than you have ever pulled before. Year of falling and laying on the floor of stumbling downhill of guitars played and unplayed of furniture that devours, of dust.

It is snowing on Christmas Eve and the human mind sings with it like a struck chord, a dissonance that resolves.

[miloaxelrod]

Belief and Failure and Optimism and Pain

I believe in the power of belief. I believe if you believe something hard enough, its a little more likely to come true. Not because belief is magical, but because when you believe something, you act as if its going to come true. If there are a series of events required for something to happen, you will participate in those events and act on them because you believe it will happen. Even if the last one fails, you will have set up the whole thing for success. Eventually, it won’t fail. It will succeed eventually, but until then it will fail many, many times. Each failure will betray your belief, and it will hurt each time because you believed in it. But you will try again.

This is what being an optimist is about. Optimism isn’t about blind hope, optimism is about hurting. Optimism is: when your belief fails you, you hurt, and you accept the pain, and you heal. You let yourself hurt really badly every time, and then you heal. You don’t scar. Then you can believe again and hope again and set yourself up every time for that success.

You know that shitty poster in every public school classroom that has a basketball on it and says “You miss every shot you don’t take”? That’s about optimism. Pessimism is not taking the shots because you don’t want to accept the betrayal and pain of failure. Optimism is taking 100 shots and failing all of them and hurting between every single shot until you finally get it in. Even if it takes 1000 shots, you hurt and you heal and you keep trying. Even if you never get it in.

Optimism is hard. To become a pessimist, all you have to do is reject the pain and scar. Optimism is accepting the pain. Optimism is hurting.

[miloaxelrod]

Pride Month

I have never been told that I was wrong for being who I am. My parents, my friends, they never told me that. I have been blessed that I’ve never had to overcome oppression in my own life or fight for my own acceptance. I have, however, been existing (as we all exist) in a vague miasma of homophobia and antisemitism and sexism that permeates everything we watch and consume and listen to. That is a much subtler poison, and despite all the ways I am aware of it, it has a hold on me. It put a fear in me that I am not normal and has taught me that to speak too much is dangerous. It’s a fear that’s very quiet, and very deep, and very hard to find in myself.

I have learned to identify this fear, though. It doesn’t look like fear as I generally know it. It’s quiet and almost invisible. It looks a lot like vague disinterest (but maybe all disinterest is just a form of fear). It makes me act and feel as though I don’t want to be proud. I’ve never been to a Pride Parade and I don’t—on the surface—feel the need to yell in the streets. Deep down, I desperately want to yell in the streets. I like to think that I don’t yell in the streets because I’m well adjusted and at peace with myself and satisfied that I can be who I am, but fear is there, deep down.

That fear comes to me every Pride Month and makes it very hard for me to say that I am gay and non-binary in a straightforward way. I’m entirely comfortably with these facets of myself and I can talk about them easily, but only when its relevant. Only when it’s on topic. I won’t bring it up unprovoked, so mostly I don’t talk about it at all. I validate my silence by calling it humility, because being humble is something I value in myself. But this silence is fear.

I want to be proud, I want to scream in the street that I am a furious queer jew and I want to be seen! But I don’t let myself. Last week I heard the Pride Parade on main street right outside my window, and I sat in my room with a feeling in my chest that I couldn’t define. Maybe next year I will be strong enough to scream.

[miloaxelrod]

One Year After Graduation

I mentioned some of these events in 2016 Year In Review, but between January 1st 2017 and May 15th 2017, a lot has happened. This, if anything, this is an even more important anniversary than New Years.

After graduating, I took the summer off. I did the job hunt, but didn’t find a job until August. That was the horrible one that I mentioned. All the while (through school as well) I’d been networking without realizing it, and when I quit that job I was able to get another pretty quickly through a friend. While the first job had been the epitome of old-school corporate, this one was all the chaos and fast-paced studio culture I could ask for. It was so much better but turned out to be unsustainable full time.

I started working a very cool internship with a startup that gave me proof that working remotely is awesome, but also had me feeling like I was in way over my head. Along the way, I picked up a great 6 month project with my alma mater and signed a contract for exactly the amount of money I asked for. This made me realize that it is possible to set your own price.

Meanwhile, networking continued to pay off and I started to attract a client or two for freelance work. My internship ended in April and work from my other job had decreased to a trickle, so I made the bold decision to go freelance full time. I’d been warned time and again that freelancing is extremely difficult, but I felt prepared.

Since then (and it’s only been a month since I made that declaration of independence) things have been steady. I’ve been getting more clients, connecting with more people, and meeting monthly income goals. I always had a spark of hope that I could be doing this, but never believed it could actually work. I’d been told over and over how difficult freelancing is and how important it is to get years of work experience before attempting that, but here I am. 

I did try to do it their way, but the stars aligned and I’m really in love with what I’ve built. I love working from home every day, I love being able to set my own hours and my own rate of pay. I even love the icky stuff like tracking my own finances and putting together contracts! One year after graduation and I’ve found something that feels right. I’m not drowning anymore, I’m captaining the ship.

[miloaxelrod]

Scrolling

Opinion time: experimental wacky scrolling on the web is bad. 

The things that live in screens do not live in the same universe as humans. No matter what you do to it, it’s 2D, and that’s weird. The ways that we relate to 2D worlds are limited and difficult to pick up and understand. The computer mouse was a revolution and so was the trackpad. Natural Scrolling on the trackpad is an emphasis on how amazing a (good) trackpad really is!

On smartphones, users can literally touch the screen, but desktop computers are generally not so approachable. One of the few things we have that reacts naturally and predictably is scrolling. The speed and direction reacts to the speed and direction of your fingers. It makes intuitive sense and allows for a greater spacial awareness within the screen. 

When you mess with scrolling, you mess with the user’s spacial awareness and damage the relationship between their fingers and the environment of the screen. Wacky scrolling effects and unexpectedly repurposing the tool dramatically changes one of the user’s key motor controls, and it’s disorienting and immersion-breaking. If you want to create a neat slide-show effect or unique navigation experience on your website, is it really too much to ask to just use arrow keys?

[miloaxelrod]

Finding yourself again.

Sometimes I forget who I am. It’s just a thing that happens when I experience deep immersion into another person’s story. It happens when I am alone with with immersive fiction books, movies, TV shows. I will wake up from the story into the real world and my real self and it takes a while to stop being the person from the story and remember who I am again. It’s easy to be someone else when they are portrayed deeply and well and their secrets are bared in a way that only happens in very good fiction, but I have no such elaborate samples or descriptions of my own self.

In fact, finding my real self through such a method would not even be my self, it would only be a story of myself, a recorded version, staticky and incomplete. It would be a returning to who I was at the time of its recording, and worse, to a version that was seen from the outside. The goal is not to return to myself before I lost myself, it is to discover myself right now. A story cannot tell you what is present and current.

I considered what is present and current, and realized that the sensations of the body define who I am in many ways. My own self is not something I can touch or record, but the way I interact with outside experiences and feelings stimulates and reflects my own self. By experience, not thought, can I reveal myself. The list I have created looks like this.

How to find yourself when you forget who you are: ( 1 ) Stand up and stretch your body ( 2 ) Experience a feeling of touch ( 3 ) Experience a feeling of smell ( 4 ) Write something ( 5 ) Put on your glasses ( 6 ) Make some tea and drink it

It has so far not failed me, and I believe something similar could help others, too. Some of these steps are universal, but some are very personal. Stretching allows a person to feel their body, and touch and smell allow them to feel their body interacting with their world.

I write as a way to understand myself and make my thoughts coherent. This reveals things to me, and even if the writing is shallow or simply “here is me. these are my hands. these are my eyes.”

I put on my glasses because I have inevitably taken them off. When I am not wearing glasses, my awareness of the world shrinks and becomes vague beyond what I can easily see. Sometimes that is comforting and helpful, like a cocoon, but in a moment where I need to know myself, knowing all of where I am is more important.

I make a cup of tea and drink it, which not only engages me in an experience of taste and consuming something that makes my body feel good, but is also a simple activity that brings me back into the world of doing activities and creating and progressing. Tea is normalcy and productivity. Tea is moving forward while being comforted.

By the time I finish the cup, I’m myself again and I am moving forward.

[miloaxelrod]

Cleaning

I didn’t realize how far I’d come until I caught a glimpse of where I used to be. I know I can never return, I can only go forward and step carefully. The path does not look like the end. It winds.

The aux cable to my speakers acts like an antenna when there is no input. I can hear through the speakers a very faint radio station and a very faint static.

When I turn off the music there is no silence. There is the passing cars, the buzzing of electricity in the walls, the ringing in my ears, and a very faint radio station that I did not realize my speakers were tuned to.

This is how I feel.

There was a time when I experienced silence. Did I have discipline? It was like a lake at sunrise when the wind never blows and the mountains are full of mist. Ears can never know silence. Eyes can never know the truest black.

You have to relinquish these, to know peace.  

Equilibrium is an impossible state.

The outside as a reflexion of the inside is a convenient myth that makes us believe we have more power over our state of being, through ways that we are better at manipulating, but do not truly affect what we desire.

I can clean the house for every hour of the day but it will not clean my mind.

To do that, I need to clean my mind.

[miloaxelrod]

Depression.

"I never thought this could happen to me." Here I am, though. I've devoted years to learning myself, learning how to manage and adjust and balance myself to my liking. I've learned how to handle discomfort and heal myself and keep myself in tip-top shape. I've always been the happiest person I know, the most unphased and resilient, understanding and rational, the most bouyant and well adjusted. This is how I learned that not any person in the world is safe from Depression. It wasn't out of the blue. I graduated school (the end of the set path that my life had been on for nearly it's entirety). I got a terrible job at a company where the normal rules of society didn't seem to apply. I'm sensitive and affected and susceptible (despite all the defences and counter measures I have taught myself) and I couldn't cope. I left, but the Depression and Anxiety did not. It feels as though my mind learned how to be depressed and anxious and can't forget it, as if it's now a state that's easy to slip into, and I do. I've learned to pull myself out (because of all the things I've learned, learning to adapt has been paramount) and I can dig myself out of those holes, but falling in is so easy now. It isn't bleak, though. I know how to ask for help, and for that I'm so grateful. I am supported and I'm not afraid of this, because I know I'm not alone. I know that maybe everyone I know is struggling, so I'm not afraid to say it aloud. I'm struggling with Depression, and I'm going to be okay.

[miloaxelrod]

We need to commit to listening to each other.

The “left” and the “right” are all just scared humans who think they’ve found an ideology that can fix their fear, and that’s ALL we are. I’m not talking about politicians — I’m talking about individuals in the middle & lower class who are desperate for SOMETHING to change. We have different fears, and we’ve aligned ourselves with different solutions, and we’re divided & screaming at each other over whose solution is best.

When we label ourselves with our political standings, we make aliens of those who label themselves otherwise. The very concept of “left” and “right” prevents conversation that needs desperately to happen. That conversation looks like this:

Two people share their fears with each other, and listen. They share ideas that could help. They acknowledge when one idea hurts the other.

Compassion is near impossible to find when the person your talking to seems inhuman. “Left” and “right”, “Republican” and “Democrat” make us believe that we already know everything about the person we’re up against. But we know nothing until we listen.

[miloaxelrod]

The Most Important Thing I Know

All religions and philosophies that are true say the same thing in the end: All things are one. It is a very simple idea that has endless repercussions that can't often be seen clearly. This is why it is a secret. Not because it's privileged information, but simply because it's very difficult to find. I found this in myself by examining very closely the nature of my being. I came to many incorrect conclusions along the way, but at every step I came a bit closer to knowing the truth. I could feel it approaching, which is why I didn't give up. I had to learn about many things before I could find the answer. I first had to learn that I did not know the answer, which my father taught me when I was seven by asking me the right question. Then I had to learn that I wanted the answer, which I discovered when I was fifteen when I wondered who I was. I then spent a long time learning all the illusions and fantasies that I had about myself, and tested them continuously, one at a time, until I could deny them. I eventually realized that my senses gave me a limited interpretation of the world, so I had to learn about things that could show me new perspectives. Quantum physics and Buddhist philosophy taught me these other ways to look at the world without my senses. When I was nineteen, I came to understand that there is no nature to the self. I finally uncovered the place where my basic nature should have been, and found an empty space. It scared me at first because I didn't want to have no unique true self, but I knew it was empty because I had discovered that nothing can exist in isolation and that all is defined by the existence of what it is not. Without something to contrast, a thing cannot exist at all. This lead me to understand that there is no core to anything in existence. All existence is intertwined inseperably from all existence. There is no way to separate one thing from another. There is no boundary between any two things in the world. And because I am inseperable from all that exists around me, I cannot have any true core to my being. No part can be defined separately. My core, and the core of all existence, is all of existence. It is one. Since learning this, I have come to interpret the world differently than I used to. By seeing with the understanding that everything in it is very literally one, I have learned how to be more compassionate because kindness to the world is kindness to myself. I take better care of myself because I also know that being good to myself is being good to others. I can be less fearful because I know that all things I fear are already me, and if I fear myself I can confront it. I know that I'm more powerful than I thought and that by exerting power over myself I can change the things around me as well. I am more grateful for everything that affects me positively and understanding of those that affect me negatively. I am more respectful of all, especially of things that cannot ask for respect. I am happier and a better human.

[miloaxelrod]

2016 Year in Review

2016 was the weirdest so far.

Things that happened to me:

I graduated college 

Pokemon GO came out and resulted in a magical Pokemon and friend filled summer 

I learned to be okay with sweating 

It was the hottest summer to date 

And there were no mosquitos

I became friends with many wonderful people

I realized that I know so many many people 

I longed to move far away but did not 

I let my meditating slip a lot

I got a strange elbow infection that made it so I had to hire friends to move into a new apartment 

I moved into a new apartment 

I enjoyed a number of home DIY activities, including kitchen peg board and ladder shelf 

I took a trip to Seattle and reconnected with family

I wrestled with trans feelings 

I forgot that the main point is that gender is fake (and rediscovered this in 2017)

I did the job hunt and did it well 

I got a terrible job 

I spiraled into depression and anxiety 

I got help with depression and anxiety and quit my terrible job

I mourned the loss of time spent working on my thesis 

I gave a presentation on my thesis, which was wonderful and fulfilling 

I got a better job through the magic of networking 

I networked excellently and had fun 

I continued to struggle with depression and anxiety 

I planted an herb garden in the front room and my big plant flourished

2016 was a year unlike any that I've lived. It was surreal, clouded, distorted. The world went insane and voted Donald Trump for president of the United States. White supremacist nazis adopted Pepe the frog as their mascot. The insanity of the Internet went mainstream and politicians engaged in Twitter wars, propaganda ruled, conversations divided. The vicious reality hadn't sunk in yet, seemed impossible yet, seemed to have a way out. My generation was waking from its fog of political apathy.

Augmented reality became plausible and popular and Pokemon became real things that roam the world and that everyone I meet is aware of. A level of public face-to-face interaction that I have never see or experienced on such a large scale overtook the world. I walked through the hot streets of summer night with my friends and caught Pokemon. We roamed the town and met people and sweated and smiled.

I graduated college, which meant an end to my pre-ordained path in the world. The path from here is much foggier and it has affected me badly. I loved school, I miss school, I learned that I am an artist and learned that an artist is someone who longs always to and cannot resist creating works through which they express themself. I learned what I love and what I cannot abide in my work and in my environment respectively. I learned how to spiral into depression and learned how to grip my self by the shoulders and haul myself out. I learned to live in a surreal, clouded, distorted world. I learned that the path forward is winding.

[miloaxelrod]

The A.I.rony

Everyone loves scary movies about AI right now, presumably because of the shortly predicted arrival of our robot overlords. There is a common and accepted narrative in these movies of AI showing up, noticing we're a bunch of incompetent monkeys, and killing us off or enslaving us either to protect us from ourselves or protecting itself from us. Sometimes it's on a societal scale (like Terminator) and sometimes it's individual (like Ex Machina) but it's widespread and rampant through pop culture, furthering the idea that AI and humans are incompatible. 

As far as I can tell, it's a fearful self-fulfilling prophecy. If we’re scared that AI will think we're an awful threat to it, then spreading the narrative that its dangerous will only increase common fear of it, and therefore increase our threat to each other. Downward spiral, right? But hey, that's just me. 

The most disturbing thing I've found recently in this trend is the new trailer for the movie Morgan by Fox Studios. It's an AI horror-thriller, right on trend with the rest of the negative propaganda. Fox had the brilliant idea to ask IBM's renowned AI, Watson, to analyze the movie and arrange a trailer. Just stop and think about that for a moment. 

This is a movie pushing the narrative of violent, terrifying AI. They are asking an AI to design the trailer. 

Imagine you're a film producer, and you're making a horror movie about terrifying violent gay people, and you ask George Takei to arrange a trailer for it. Not only are you a homophobic asshole for making it in the first place, you're an idiot for not having the sense to even realize how disgusting that move is. 

This happened just now to AI and the general reaction is "wow robots are so scary." It’s true, Watson is not one to take offense and there aren’t a lot of other AI out there at present, but its the future we need to be preparing for. 

AI is going to be different from any minority before it for the single reason that it doesn’t exist yet. Almost any other oppressed group has been around pretty much since the beginning of culture, with thousands of years to navigate tumultuous social climates. AI doesn’t get the luxury of a history, though. It is going to exist suddenly and by our own hands, and society is going to have to figure out how to deal with its reality very abruptly. 

SciFi movies are an effective method of experimenting with ways to deal with AI well before its arrival. By experiencing the fiction, the viewer gets to examine complicated scenarios without the pressure of being in them, given a chance to take on different view points without repercussion. Its an amazing tool in that sense, but movies are also a vehicle for propaganda. A casual viewer can look at a horror movie like Morgan and take it for face value, accepting the doctrine that AI is scary and wants to destroy mankind. 

For this reason, movies like Morgan will often do more harm than good for the social image and understand of AI. When the day comes that AI is introduced into society, the climate we’ve created through media and literature is going to decide the sort of welcome it receives. AI will be a fruit of humanity, so we humans have a responsibility to respect it and treat it fairly and well. 

[miloaxelrod]

The Big Switch

Over the past few years I’ve started to become somewhat disillusioned with Apple. Since around the time Steve Jobs died, I’ve been much less impressed by their progress, with new features (much more often than not) being either not particularly innovative or straight up playing catchup with Android and Samsung. I used to be enamored with the beauty of iOS, but Google’s material design has, in many ways, surpassed it. After my thesis project, I became acutely aware of how incredibly non-customizable iOS is, which I am very against in my personal usage and also on a moral standpoint (because any interface that doesn’t acknowledge the diverse needs of its userbase isn’t treating them with the respect they deserve).

Also during my thesis project, it became glaringly obvious that I know nothing about Android. I had to do tons of research to be able to write about it at all. Sure, I guess I could be a UX designer who only works with iOS because that’s all I know, and I could also be a garbage human who doesn’t crave constant expansion of knowledge. 

So I bought a Galaxy S6 Edge.

I’ve had it for just under a week now, and holy moly do I have a lot to learn. Just getting the concept through my head that if I want something about my GUI changed, I can download an app that will do it. The amount of potential control is blowing my mind. Yes, things seem less organized and a bit less straightforward than iOS (probably just me being a noob), but there is so much more. It’s going to take me a while to figure everything out, but I know it’ll be worth it.

[miloaxelrod]

I hear the previous generation talk about the shock and wonder they felt the first time they heard The Beatles, and the first movie they saw in color, and the first time they took a trip in an airplane. I used to feel bad, feel like I missed out, like I was left out of the revolution, like the fire was gone and I’d come too late, but I realized that isn’t true. I was born with the fire, the automatic need to stretch every boundary is in my blood, and I never felt the shock of impact because the massive ripples of the impact are ripples of my muscles as I push and create and push. I don’t know the shock because I never knew what came before and I never had to break from the conformity of that time, it was already broken around me and in me, and I don’t need to crash through the walls before I question them to pieces. I’m already here.

[miloaxelrod]

Weather on Glass

Rain

Frost

Ice Pellets (which I had never heard of until the day they happened to me)