I've commented before on what another wise diarist refers to as "these orange padded walls" and the need for us to get clear of them, at least some of the time, if we're to expand the Progressive franchise.
Bear with me if this is a little dense and hard to understand; I manage to pass among you by a little careful semantic proofing of diaries here and a whole lot of not saying too much in person, but I am an autistic adult in a neurotypical world.
So, these things being said, I'm going to discard much of my usual editing here, and be my dense, cryptic, elliptcal autistic hacker self.
Human communications are an intently studied process from the level of one on one conversation to national strategic political communications. Autistic adults typically develop circumscribed interests - narrow, deep studies in certain areas, and we tear ourselves away only with difficulty. Some years I enhanced my ability to pass among the neurotypical by digesting the works of hypnotist Richard Bandler and his associates, a roughly year long 'deep dive' into perhaps 2,000 pages of written work, much watching of video tapes of seminars, and some direct personal time with a trained person who endeavored to pass these skills along to me.
One of autism's defining characteristics is a deficit in mirror neurons. These are a common structure for all primates and they're involved in our ability to mimic or interpret the physical motion of others as well as the ability to read faces. This is believed to be an evolutionary 'rapid reaction' facility; reading the mood of a friend or potential foe and determining if someone was waving a greeting ... or throwing a rock at us ... are things one should do without thinking.
I spent much of the first six months of my life in a half body cast being treated for hip dysplasia. Reading between the lines it is apparent that my birth mother had a heroin problem and I was a fussy baby in a busy state orphanage in the late 1960s. Fussiness was a diagnosis, phenobarbitol was the treatment, and there is no mystery as to how I failed to develop the ability to read human faces - I was not held nearly so much as the typical infant and when I was I was sedated. There's a genetic component as well - my teenage son has a small fraction of the difficulties I experienced and they characterize him as having sensory integration disorder. So I'm an odd duck in the neurotypical world and I'm not entirely a fit among my autistic bretheren.
I saw The Messenger with Milla Jovovich in the theater and this stirred an interest in history in me. I surfaced again two years later, having more or less completed a history degree with a focus on western civilization. This left me fed up with monotheism and had long been interested in all things eastern. My conversion to Buddhism was natural, simple, and I didn't realize until after the fact that I'd picked the same spiritual teacher as Allen Ginsberg. Illness struck in 2007, I returned home to live with my mother at first, then later I went out on the road. I only worked a little while convalescing and I distracted myself by becoming the only researcher publishing on the topic of renewable ammonia, a fact I find quite curious given that this is the source of 2% of all human greenhouse gas emissions.
These were hobbies during the last decade. Professionally I busied myself as a transport engineer for an international voice carrier, I designed and built point to point and multipoint microwave data systems, I worked for a while as one of three voice switching core designers for North America's largest softswitch vendor, and I was a trainer at a well recognized 'academy' that teaches internetworking using the Cisco product line. Cisco Systems equipment at their zenith was something like 75% of all the routing and switching equipment that runs our global internet. Their dominance comes due to Cisco Press, which produces a prodigious torrent of text books, reference guides, and collections of studies on the design, deployment, and operation of complex networks.
If you had the requisite set of compulsions I could teach you to be a really good Internet Multimedia Subsystem engineer. I've long since let go of being a protocol droid myself, but for tending to the few network operators who feed me while I meddle in federal Senate elections and plot the public relations campaign for a strategic reconstruction of our national transportation system.
And these three, this IMS engineering, influencing of public opinion, and the movement of goods and services are all the same thing to my mind.
A data network has producers and consumers, mail servers and video sources and softswitches, all producing things for those at home. A transportation network has producers and consumers, factories and warehouses and shippers, all producing things for those at home. The blogosphere? It's just a slice of social media and not able to stand on its own, but an integrated approach to visualizing and using the channels available make this space no different than any other distributed network.
I have long been a node in this structure, consuming quite a bit of content from others and producing a good bit of my own. After wallowing in a cross section of the various systems for the last year or so I find that I'm ready to manage projects in the area.
When you have thousands of nodes using a network bearing bursty data, isosynchronous voice, and high volume one to many multicast video there are a set of rituals one must adhere to in order to avoid the wrath of the masses. The same concepts are in evidence in the social media space. Media acccess? Collision detection, collision avoidance, and token based access are in evidence. Input queues are always jammed; tail drop, random early detection, and priotitization schemes are discernible. The grief of synchronization seen in saturated links not employing congestion avoidance is always present and the larger global ringing of the news cycle is very reminiscent of the protocol timer based antics formerly seen in our global internet's core.
We've crossed a line right there; the network engineers are nodding and smiling, while the faces of the message crafters would likely reveal some anxiety to those capable of reading such signs. I'm making this as simple and as straightforward as I can given the concepts I have to cram into this limited, linear format. We'll be speaking hacker from here on out.
It's going to happen. You can't stop it. It's so deep in our economy now that any interdiction will eat away at sales and property tax revenues; a feedback loop that'll limit any long term government response. Automata don't really seem to stand a chance, either; slight perspective changes always reveal them. Ways to look rapidly eclipse places to hide.
I don't know who's right. Certainly Sterling in Distraction, but I see merit in Gibson's Spook Country. Always Vinge and the concept of singularity lurks, but that's the principle of the matter, not a build sheet like these others. Pattern Recognition simmered for a long time, but it took The Speed Of Dark to make it clear. It's amazingly efficient, self organizing, self healing. There's more than I can modulate; another congestion problem. The protocol seems closed, unless you've got the appropriate mirror neuron deficit.
Others are close, so close to it, but they have fatal flaws. Bought and sold? Or lacking a clear road map? Or they lack the self awareness needed to see. That lack of awareness is everywhere; I run out of fingers counting the ones who can almost follow the path I've cut. I've tried now, three different times, with the three who seem as if they might duplicate my methods. No go. There will, of course, be a slower, broader, collective move. More and more we have to use neurological rather than computational terms to describe it.
I sat for a long time after writing that. As I said above, it doesn't fit into a linear stream. Or it does, but I don't have the time to dispatch it all the way I handled my travels in 2008. It's a rapidly evolving situation.
An aside: SAM-e. DHEA. 5-HTP. Melatonin. Withanolides. Kavalactones. Sumatripan, Florinef, and Tramadol as needed. All with a healthy dose of Vipassana.
I wasn't aware when I started this but it is grim, the level of ownership. Renunciation is the only real answer; I don't even do backups any more – if it's truly important the intert00bz will remember it for me. That's not a form of attention conservation for everyone, mind you, but it's served me well for a couple of years now.
I trust at this point it's clear that you can't put me in a room full of linear people wanting linear solutions to problems growing at a geometric rate and expect any sort of positive result.