isomorphismes

notes-on-business-models:

Make sure you leap from Silicon Valley to David Cameron without batting an eye. Or explaining how Tim oreilly’s conferences have infected “language” and “thought”.

50% of his statements on software are bullshit. Same with he connections to Stallman and his retelling of Stallman-ESR-O'Reilly history. Not that you need to Be a Programmer but Morozov clearly didn’t do his research.

Also 80% of his critiques are just stating that someone / something is “Randian”, “right”, “corporate”, or “market”. You said it, Morozov: people don’t like complexity.

NOBM reviewing Evgeny Morozov in The Baffler — “Mouthbreathing Machiavellis dream of a silicon reich”

Over the past couple years I’ve written indexical wrap-ups of various posts to the isomorphismes blog. This year (since November 2015) I haven’t had internet at home, so I haven’t posted.

Also, in May 2015, I cut electricity to my house. (Called up the electric company—but if I did it again I might just switch off circuit breakers.) Although I like and crave attention online, spending all of my working time at a terminal and all of my non-working time reading through a list of 100,000 tabs about mathematics, financial markets, literature, and anthropology was exerting a cost on my attention and my will.

Distancing myself from internet and electricity helped me be more present in the physical world.

I still get internet and electricity at the office, so it’s not like I returned to pre-electrification life.

Some outcomes:

• slowly, slowly regaining my sense of choice over my life.
• spent more time cleaning my house
• spent more time exercising
• read more non-academic books
• wasted a bit of food because I couldn’t eat everything that had been in my refrigerator quickly enough
• swam, for 7 hours in a row, all the way across a lake (and lost at least half a kilo on that one day)
• learned to do a backflip
• picked up new hobbies, like couples dancing and acro-yoga
• spent more time outside
• went to bed early (9pm) and woke up early (4am) with no problem, when for years I’ve gone to bed past 4am
• went out less and drank less as a result
• started taking mid-morning naps so I get morning clarity twice per day
• got better at handstands
• received the best guitar lesson ever

There are still several things I am holding on to, or held back by—research, work, and reading under to-do, and relationships, memories, dinosaur-tracks of who I used to be under who-am-i.

My hippie-dippie physical therapist told me the other week that she thinks there are some pretty simple components to happiness:

1. sunshine & fresh air
2. good food
3. human touch
4. movement & feeling comfortable in your body
5. laughter
6. an organised space

If you are feeling malaise, look to these simple things first. For example, maybe you think if your job were more fulfilling (or better paying) you would be happy—but then you work out, tidy up your house, or go dancing, and feel happy. The answer was much simpler and your intellect pointed you in the wrong direction.

A (like me) hyper-privileged friend relayed the story of an old cook—an American Negro—who said to one of his younger colleagues:

Here’s how you don’t get depressed. Every day, make your bed. Then you won’t get depressed.

I bet he would have been happier if he got more respect, too. But people give—and withhold—respect for the wrong reasons all the time. You can’t necessarily influence that (unless you have a large readership or viewership, in which case, you can—and, please, do).

In an era of sad public news (but when hasn’t it been?), I still don’t believe in tuning out. But getting offline—hey, not even getting all the way offline—is not the same as tuning out. Every breath breathed in front of a computer, whether you’re arguing, laughing, or becoming informed, is still one of the breaths of your life. Diving into the mind—zoning out, reading, drawing, writing, running—is still part of life. Even if you don’t feel aware of your body, your body is powering the adventure.

For me getting offline was not about tuning out. It was about tuning in to the concrete world around me—at the expense of learning and writing.

Neither seeing only the world in my mind nor seeing only the physical world feels right to me.

Cutting internet at home has not solved my problems. I am not all the way in control. I am not all the way happy. Work still presents a lot of problems. Love is still the same roller-coaster it always is. I still let other people condemn or praise me by job title. I still spend time with people I only kind-of love. I still spend time with people who only kind-of love me. I still spend money on things I don’t need to. I still hold onto books I will never finish. I still own clothes I will never wear again.

But, I spent more of 2016 drawing and less of 2016 refreshing my inbox.