Just a stray thought re Thursday night’s post on nostalgia that’s probably better kept to myself.

When you interview for a job, most people put their best foot forward, or try to anyway. When I interviewed for my current job in 2017, I know I did. But the one thing that continues to strike me is the volume of everything there is to do. How can you get to the projects/goals/ideas you’d mentioned on interview day when you’re using 40+hrs a week to keep things moving?

This is obviously (I hope) not meant as a criticism of my employer. I have a great boss/mentor and excellent coworkers. But I don’t know if there’s anything they could’ve said to prepare me for the past ~1.75 years.

The best thing you can do is keep moving forward: schau nach vorne.

As we enter the last week of the semester and let things wind down for a few weeks until the new year:

„Laßt uns gehen mit frischem Mute in das neue Jahr hinein! Alt soll unsere Lieb und Treue, neu soll unsere Hoffnung sein!“

The song doesn’t translate clearly but basically:

“Let’s enter the new year with fresh courage and pure hearts! Our love and loyalty should be old but refreshed with new hope!”

Every day this year yet to be, every day next year is a day full of the potential to make a meaningful difference.

If I’d said that in my interview, I don’t know what my search committee would’ve thought, but it’s maybe the truest thing I could’ve said.

Happy last week of the semester to one and all. auf gehts!

in which I attempt to thread some needles

I am by nature a very nostalgic person. I have vivid memories of things most people would—I hope—forget. To make matters worse, I’m the kind of person most people would describe as an “old soul,” I’m increasingly cautious of new technology, developments, flashy political candidates, untested policy, I could go on and on.

It’s maybe part of why I studied history and political science as an undergrad. And wrote a thesis that almost included an additional chapter on the strange beauty of the Austrian Empire and the potential it had to transform itself into a modern consolidated multinational state.¹ An act of counterfactual self-indulgence, but it was my thesis and my advisor was generous in humoring me on projects like that. It’s more due to running out of time than anything else that it’s not in there now.

If my previous post was about the fact that the internet/technology, etc., has changed in a profound and unfortunate way, this is just a note of further reflection. In a way, I feel a little like I imagine Janus must feel. Always looking simultaneously forward and backward. At least when you’re looking forward and backward, you can still close your eyes for a minute. I don’t have that choice when I think about where I was, where I am, and where I’m going.

während „Zeiten wie diese“

I’m writing very very late on 2019-12-12. Today is exactly two years since I flew to Dulles airport and was met by my now colleague and then search committee chair to interview for the job I am very fortunate to have now, but I never thought I’d end up here. The night before my interview, I went for a very long walk along the Potomac Tidal Basin to see the FDR memorial. I figured that I wasn’t going to get the job and so I wanted to see it. The weather was horrible with a cutting north wind. Despite my gloves, my hands were chapped and bleeding.

Last year on this date, I went on the same walk and, yes, my hands bled again. I had planned to do it again tonight.

For better or worse, I didn’t do it tonight because I was at an event. And then I ate dinner with friends. One might think “oh, it’s a sign that I feel like I belong here now!” But no, still haven’t found it.

I don’t know what it feels like to be comfortable somewhere, I don’t know what it feels like to belong somewhere. And I can’t quite shake the feeling that I might never feel that way, anywhere. I’ll keep looking backward and forward. Maybe I’ll find it on another Very Long Walk someday.

The most challenging thing you or I can do, ever more challenging in „Zeiten wie diese“ is to look forward, with hope to achieve our world and not the world we fear.² Let’s all do what we can. There’s not much else we can do.

the internet is a series of tubes

Between my 18th birthday in 2006 and my 20th in 2008:

• thefacebook became just Facebook
• Twitter was founded (and I’ll never forget thinking what a horrible idea it was hearing this on NPR).¹
• Youtube came into being and was bought by Google.²
• Amazon Web Services releases its first product, AWS S3.
• The iPhone was introduced (and to everyone’s shock and horror, didn’t support Macromedia Adobe Flash. It was a big deal, trust me.³
• The first public specification of HTML5 came out in early 2008. Google Chrome followed a few months later.⁴

I mention all this because it was 2006 when Ted Stevens, the late senior senator from Alaska declared the internet to be a “Series of Tubes.”⁵ Between that speech, the music video remixes, and Adam Sandberg+Chris Parnell’s Lazy Sunday, we were off to the races.⁶ And, oh yeah, Time Magazine made “You” the person of the year, complete with a shiny cover that was supposed to look like a mirror.⁷ AKA, the last time Time had much of any meaningful influence on the Zeitgeist.

It’s a strange thing, how much we (as a society) just kinda all jumped into this morass, myself (shamefully) included. I remember the September 2006 boycott across the US with college students upset about Facebook’s introduction of the newsfeed.⁸ And then, later that same month, when FB opened itself up to anyone.⁹ “MTV U,” which blared in the dining halls across Oklahoma State University, gave it all a fair bit of coverage. But both incidents were seemingly forgotten in a week.

So we started posting our photos and our whatever, loading it all into FB. And then Google Drive. And Instagram. You get the idea. Whereas in the second iteration of the net (roughly 1994?-2006?) folks would talk about how concerned they were about privacy, people started shoveling data into the social media machine. Time’s 2006 article naming “You” the person of the year framed it thus:

The answer is, you do. And for seizing the reins of the global media, for founding and framing the new digital democracy, for working for nothing and beating the pros at their own game, TIME’s Person of the Year for 2006 is you.

While also noting:

Sure, it’s a mistake to romanticize all this any more than is strictly necessary. Web 2.0 harnesses the stupidity of crowds as well as its wisdom. Some of the comments on YouTube make you weep for the future of humanity just for the spelling alone, never mind the obscenity and the naked hatred. But that’s what makes all this interesting. Web 2.0 is a massive social experiment, and like any experiment worth trying, it could fail. There’s no road map for how an organism that’s not a bacterium lives and works together on this planet in numbers in excess of 6 billion. But 2006 gave us some ideas. This is an opportunity to build a new kind of international understanding, not politician to politician, great man to great man, but citizen to citizen, person to person. It’s a chance for people to look at a computer screen and really, genuinely wonder who’s out there looking back at them. Go on. Tell us you’re not just a little bit curious.

Yeah. We sure did beat the pros at their own game. Uh huh. The final victory of democracy and privacy over unrestrained capitalism. How could anyone forget Mark Zuckerberg and Sergey Brin, et al. raising the white flag over Palo Alto?

Nope. Instead, in doing all of this, we abandoned a lot of what makes computers great and useful. We moved everything to platforms in the cloud, these great new “free” services.¹⁰ It didn’t occur to most folks, myself included, that customer “analytics,” basically, tracking how much time you spend on a given service (or worse, tracking cookies that tell Facebook/Google etc. which sites you’re visiting), is how they’re actually making their money. Why yes, I do feel like an idiot after writing that.

And so that’s where we are.

You’re probably saying, “well no shit, Sherlock. You just now figured it out? What took you so long?” which is a fair question.

If this blog is really anything, it’s just an attempt to piece together some thoughts I’ve had rolling around in my head for a while now. About privacy. About technology. Probably occasionally also about WMATA, aka Washington DC’s regional transit agency.

It’s about a world that is moving far far far too fast for the cognitive bandwidth of most engaged citizens.

At least it’s not Twitter, I guess.

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