Deonte Osayande - “Silhouette”
"You bring up old music, like we ain’t made shit since Motown left."
Performing for Button Poetry at the Soap Boxing Poetry Slam in Saint Paul, MN. Subscribe to Button on YouTube!
"Loving someone means inventing your own language."
Performing during the Button Showcase at the 2014 National Poetry Slam. Subscribe to Button on YouTube!
So check this out. I was thinking about education. Yes that old smelly stuffy institution where everyone wears ties and talks in monotone at a room of uncaring faces.. NOO! - actual education. The kind where you sit down and learn something because it's the thing you actually want to do goddamn't.
Anyways, this class I'm taking, while I'm somewhat interested in it - otherwise why would I be taking it right - it's far away from anything that I would use, or want to use in my life. And as a result it hasn't really "hooked me".
Oh sure, it's giving me "hands-on" activities, but these are all contrived academic experiences, maybe stuff loosely useful for some kind of hellish work experience, but nothing that I would do, you know, for fun.
"Well of course not!" You say, "you're taking some obscure techy class and you expect to have fun? You r stupid."
"Ah ha!" I retort. But I have already stumbled on something I can mess around with that's fun and interesting and still has to do with the technically obscure mess that is ones and zeros! It's called glitch art, and it looks like this:
I did this today. It's a picture of the sky manipulated by messing around with the photo data. I did it for my own amusement. Thank you.
Now I GET them: these ones and zeros. What they're about. What happens when you mess with them. What happens when they're not there. It's not abstract and academic and theoretical. It's the sky exploding right there in front of you.
I really feel like this applies to more than just this. It's what I've felt about the education system my whole life. You've got to be able to mess around to really learn something.. because that's the point where it becomes relevant.
Show people something fun. Let them see the holes in their knowledge and how that connects to something they can touch and get dirty in. Let them seek out education. And once their knowledge overflows and the messing around ceases to be fun, they'll be hungry for the next thing. This goes on until they achieve mastery in a skill set or move on to something more interesting.
And it all started with messing around. We need more of that.
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Want to learn how to make glitch art? Me too. This video was pretty great:
A Penny For Your Thoughts - The Mechanical Turk Experiment
How much value is there in a penny? These days not much, but for 5 of them you can draw the attention of a huge pool of workers from around the globe - at least for a few seconds.
I'm talking about Amazon's Mechanical Turk, which is one product where the product matches the mystique of its name. The Mechanical Turk is a global resource of people, ready and willing to take on small tasks for as little as a penny. Which means that you can hire a worker with just the change that's in your pocket right now.
Late one night I decided to take it for a test run, both as a worker and as a "Requester" (A name perhaps strategically chosen as a euphemistic alternative to "Exploiter")
The tasks range from the mundane (move this data from one column to many) to the academic (what experience do you have with retirement homes?) to the creepy (look at all these photos and near the obscene ones, check a box). In just a short while, I received $2.50 from a quick sociological study, and 1 penny for sifting through images of people making bad life decisions.
Most of the tasks were quick and painless, but decisively boring. The more exciting part of the experiment came when I realized I could switch to the other side of the table and take this tremendous power into my own hands.
I opted to go with a simple question and answer format. The question: "What brings meaning to your life?" for which I requested 10 responses at 5 cents a pop. With a 5 cent fee from Amazon the grand total came to $0.55.
I pressed submit, and figured I would go to bed and view my results in the morning. Not so - Within a few minutes I had received my first two responses:
"Spending time with friends."
"My studies and my family...They helped me a lot and if they are not then I am zero..."
There was something surprisingly intense about this experience. It reminded me of the early joy of the internet, posting for the first time on a forum or IRC chat, and getting back a response.
Maybe in being able to set the topic of discussion on an otherwise chaotic internet there is a fresh novelty which hearkened back to my internet adolescence. Whatever it was, I felt a deep and unexplainable emotional connection with these people anonymously opening up themselves to me for 5 cents at this late hour.
Some spoke of God, or love, or family, or obsessed over money. Some clearly did not try very hard (As was the case for the person who took 15 seconds to write the word "Happy"). But a few seemed to put genuine thought into it.
This person spent 263 seconds sharing this with me:
"My life will be meaningful by living for my daughter Srikutty, because i lost my wife last year. Now am planning lot of things for my daughter
1)giving good education
2)good entertainment
3)satisfy her needs
it is very difficult to replace my wife.But i put best efforts to minimize the gap and live for my daughter."
Another spent 99 seconds:
"love makes my life beautiful.It gaves meaning to my life.I love Arun Pinto.After he comes in my life,My life became Bright and colourful…."
Watching these responses come back in realtime, I could sense each of these strangers, sitting at their computer, taking the time to reflect on their life, and maybe - for a few moments - their purpose in life became a little bit more clear and, somehow, I felt like I had just played some part in their lives... Which is admittedly is an odd thing to think about those you only know by their randomly generated 13 character user id.
The potential of the Mechanical Turk is inherently intriguing, and the possibilities endless, although for now it is certainly bent towards the exploitative and the spammy. And I can't speak for its viability for accomplishing tasks in business or science. But for the existential task, it's the best 55 cents I've ever spent.
What Harry Potter can teach us about the tech bubble
I've never been into fantasy writing - I thought it was too far removed from my reality - but I've come to see that for the purpose of escaping the idling busses and hammering jackhammers of Center City Philadelphia, you can do much worse than cracking a kindle and stepping into a fantasy world. So why not? I picked up the Harry Potter series and away I went.
I wasn't expecting to discover anything too revealing about the nature of our world, but I was surprised when I came across a passage that ignited that familiar sensation of truth: "Never trust anything that can think for itself if you can't see where it keeps it's brain."
In the early 2000's when investing in Mortgage Backed Securities became hip, the understanding was that housing prices would always go up, defaults always resulted in profit, and high risk investments could be bundled together to create low risk opportunities. It was a system that worked (like magic even) and - for many - that was enough.
But that's the same way every scam works. "It's okay that you don't understand was is going on beneath the surface, just look at the results! Just look at the historical data! This works." The thing thinks for itself.
I see the current tech bubble in a similar light. We're seeing buyouts for the sake of acquiring talent, rather than aquiring a business. Valuations of startups that extend far beyond their actual worth. Huge companies grabbing up small ventures, "saving" them from dealing with the difficult problem of monetization and self-reliance.
So far, the system is working for everyone. But where's it keep its brain?
Now, this only represents my current understanding of the situation, which is bound to change over time, and if you got any suggested reading on your side, feel free to send it over. But I do believe that some things that are true in a fantasy world, can be true in ours too.
If something is working for your benefit, do not assume it will work that way forever; especially if you can't see the systems at play beneath the surface.
Or to put it another way, if you can't see where a thing keeps its brain, it's not to be trusted.
Have you ever experienced a faux-human interaction? I have.
I just finished an audio book from audible, and at the end of the recording, was this message:
"Audible hopes you enjoyed this reading."
Great, but I have just one question... Who the fuck is Audible?
If a human being, like the CEO or the author, took the time to record her voice and give me a message, that might mean something... but did they really think that the disembodied voice of a legal entity was going to make me feel anything?
It is easy to hide behind a corporate identity, but if you want to establish a relationship that goes deeper than customer and seller, you've got to go the next step:
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