An elegy for sweet forgetfulness, soon to be lost forever

In my memory, I'm standing on the Île Saint-Louis, looking at a butcher shop.

But was I ever there? I've provably been in Paris. I've likely been on the Île Saint-Louis. After that I don't know. In my mind's eye I can picture it and picture myself there, but my mind's eye is a notoriously filthy liar. I can remember any number of events that never happened, and I have forgotten many important events that did.

If I was never there, where did this memory come from? It could have been Edmund White, whose evocative novels of his life in Paris have always brought the city to life for me. Reading Declare by Tim Powers brought these memories back, and added wartime paranoia and Nazi intrigue to the mix.

I'll never know for sure whether I've been there before. My previous visits to Paris were before the era of ubiquitous surveillance, GPS cellphone tracking, Google Latitude, Foursquare and ultrazillions of digital photos being taken of absolutely everything at every moment and being pasted online. So even once all of the artificial "privacy" barriers are dropped, once indexing and face recognition systems correlate every sparrow fart since the dawn of the digital age, once every credit-card purchase record is cracked open and something like Vernor Vinge's GreenInc provides a complete personal history of every human, nobody will be able to say with any degree of clarity whether that memory is true or false.

I weep for the children. Their digital trail will never allow them to erase their personal history and start over. No more retrospective virginity restorations. No more he-said, she-said he-did. No more bonfire of the diaries for personal reinvention. Everyone will become a politician denying their words of the day before, followed by an immediate multi-POV video playback with subtitles, location tags, and links to probable original sources shown in the goggles of everyone around them.

On the other hand, I weep with joy for the children. Memory prostheses will make arguments quite different: instead of arguing whose recollection is more accurate, people's agents will automatically debate the relative authoritativeness of the certificate chains and trust authorities of the different sources of evidence. When professionally photoshopped memories, reputation laundering, real-time distributed consensus auctions and whitelisted memory attestation services become common we just won't worry about it anymore. We won't argue about trivia.

Maybe I'll steer clear of the Île Saint-Louis on my next trip and leave the past alone, whether it's mine or borrowed from somebody else. I'll just preserve my own personal mythology a little bit longer.

Taste matters: why I should have known better than to use GoDaddy

Years ago I registered several domain names.  They were a lot cheaper then, and because I didn't want to think about which registrar to use, I went with the cheapest and most popular one: GoDaddy.

I did it despite their stupid, vaguely patriarchal name.  I did it even despite the blatantly sexist advertisements.  I told myself that they were just doing what they had to do to bring in customers, that it really didn't matter.  I silenced my doubts and gave them my money.

Since then, GoDaddy's behaviour has been increasingly tacky, insulting, and just plain bad for the Internet and its users.  I'm moving all of my domains onto another registrar, and although it is a pain in the neck, it's the right thing to do.  The lesson for me is that taste matters.  If a company seems distasteful to you initially, they're likely to offend you later — and they'll be doing it with your money.

Second, Third, and Fourth-Order Effects of Social Marketing and Mass Securitization

Several years ago, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg crowed that he was able to use the database to retroactively predict with 33% accuracy with whom people would hook up a week later. This was widely viewed as very creepy (and was not spoken about again until recently) but you can guess that this was a dog whistle meant for potential advertisers. The advertisers have listened, and now Google is scrambling to catch up with Facebook on social search (and then advertising).
It’s impossible to get clear numbers on how well this stuff works. Even Facebook and Google probably have no clear numbers, but they certainly have clear enough indications. Google obviously has a clear enough indication to reform their entire company around this. So we can assume it is real. It all seems plausible enough, right?


So we can easily assume that this trend will continue, and that Google and Facebook will correlate increasing amounts of data on us, our friends, our coworkers, and the people we encounter, and will sell this data to advertisers who will essentially be placing bets on our behaviour. If there is a 27% chance that a given couple will marry within the next nine months, then there is a 14% chance that each of their closest long-distance friends will want to buy a plane ticket to the ceremony. Therefore, as an advertiser, you buy a tranche of ads for people whose out-of-town friends are soon to marry. The MapReduce job is an exercise for Google’s new Malaysian coding shop, the tranche is sold to the highest bidder via AdWords. Bada-bing, ca-ching.


As a second-order effect, this advertising activity begins to affect the behaviour of these out-of-town friends. A measurable jump in the number of people attending out-of-town weddings results, and the price on these ads consequently rises. Advertising grows markets all the time, so this is not surprising.


Now we emerge into science fiction-ville. An analyst-bot for a huge trading firm is trawling the AdWords marketplace, looking for interesting tranches for which the price has become overweight, and happens upon the out-of-town weddings advertising market, which is suddenly hugely oversubscribed. It pops up on the screen of a junior analyst (of the human variety) who clicks through to approve the creation of a out-of-town weddings futures market, which the trading firm then (automatically) proceeds to sell to its customers, and then (automatically) takes a short position.
An analyst-bot for one of the advertising agencies flags this new offering, and raises it to the desk of the (human) product manager for this market. She promptly buys into the futures market, betting that the market will rise. She talks to an executive VP and gets approval to buy a large product placement with a popular television show to feature a destination wedding as an upcoming plot. She does not get approval for a proposed contribution to a PAC formed by the National Organization for Marriage, as the VP is gay and cites the growing market for same-sex weddings.


Of course, this assumes that the securitization of everything will continue apace. Certainly there has been no progress in stemming the tide, and I don’t expect it to happen (barring a bloody worldwide insurrection against the dominant economic order).


What are some other examples of the weird things that could result from social marketing combined with this level of financial automation?

• A new global baby boom triggered by businesses embracing new market development, caused by an algorithmic storm of projected demand for diapers, crude oil, softwood lumber, and manual labour. [The whole thing is triggered by a rounding bug in an Excel spreadsheet.]

• Investment banks engage in wide-scale manipulation of tampon supply futures indexes by using sponsored advertisements to influence birth control method preferences so that women favour Depo-Provera over oral contraceptives.

• The Corrections Corporation of America gets into a bidding war with Indian defense contractors on a cheap-labour-supply futures index, which is based on the relative probability of incarceration due to attempted drug sales by American teens.  The Indian defense contractors are shorting this to offset their own risk (due to the effect of rural broadband penetration shortfalls on the gold mining talent pool), and the market becomes very volatile.  To ease this situation, the CCA makes a large automated contribution to a tough-on-crime SuperPAC.

• Asperger's patients become a new hot dating commodity, as their profiles are moved to the top of the activity ranking by social networks who wish to boost their visibility to advertisers who are bidding extremely highly for their ad dollars.  Social networks optimize their users lives to improve their value to advertisers.  This results in nerds getting laid a whole lot more, and lots more little Asperger's-prone nerdlings (who have truly wonderful advertising potential).

So just remember kids, just because you don't click on those ads in Facebook doesn't mean that those ads aren't clicking on you. And with Google+ and Facebook embedded in every single webpage, you can run, and you can hide, but you cannot avoid being aggregated, and those aggregations will be monetized until they control your every move. Resistance is futile.

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Re-reading this hours later I realized that what I'm describing here is a much less rosy portrait of the same technological trends outlined by Bruce Sterling in his seminal short story Maneki Neko back in 1998. Except of course his story has excellent characterization, plot, and narrative drive.

Thanks to everyone who worked to end DADT

I'd like to thank my friends and family for their efforts in ending the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" law. It means a lot for me, as I had honestly given up hope of it happening any time soon.

It's too easy to be cynical, but as I watched the past two years go by, and watched the hugest congressional majority in recent memory evaporate, I thought for sure there would be no progress on queer issues. And although I told myself I was content with Obama just naming Supreme Court justices, I was enraged by the contradiction of his "fierce advocate" image shown by his administration's aggressive defense of DOMA, his utter inaction on ENDA and DOMA, and the snail's pace of DADT repeal (coupled with continued vigorous legal defense of the law). I had come to the conclusion that the Democrats had decided that gay votes, gay money, and gay wedge issues were simply too valuable to them to give up, and that they would hold us hostage for another six years or until the courts finally grew a pair. I just couldn't take the disappointment anymore, so I really stopped investing any hope.

Sure, I went through the motions with emails to elected officials (pointless, since I vote in Georgia), but I really couldn't bring myself to care a great deal. I was resigned to it. But this is where my family and friends really stepped in and pushed this through. I'm very thankful and grateful for friends and family who care enough about me to take on issues that affect me - without my having to ask. It really means a lot.

It was a little over two years ago when a former friend's opposition to same-sex marriage made me snap and made me raise my expectations of what friends and family will do to help with the issues of queer people. I'm thrilled to say that not only did they take action, they did it without my asking.

Granted, these issues affect us all — when some of us aren't free, all of us aren't free — but when the folks on the comfortable side of the privilege line do more than I do on issues that affect me, it really is touching. Thank you.

Attention whores in the reputation economy

Yesterday on my way home I saw an ambulance driver texting as she drove. (At least she didn't have her siren and lights on.) But that wasn't the ironic part - no, that was the act of will that kept me from whipping out my phone and tweeting about it. Or better yet, whipping out my phone, taking a picture of her while I attempted to drive, and then tweeting the link. On the whole I'm glad I made it home alive.

The walk to the subway station this morning was surreal. It was snowing pink cherry blossoms which covered the streets and the grass, making me think of nuclear fallout and what a challenge it would be to clean that up if it wasn't just, you know, flower petals.

So then at the subway station there were new additions to the usual gauntlet of free newspaper pushers: a couple of well-scrubbed men pushing The Watchtower. So many voices clamoring to be heard.

The problem isn't an attention deficit, it's a surplus of bullshit. We create a cloud, a lake, an ocean, a galaxy of data, simultaneously afraid of where all this data is going and afraid that if we don't reveal more our voice won't be heard. We've reached the point of saturation with trivia and are waiting for the tool that will come along and stitch it together, but we're afraid of what that'll show. Mostly we're afraid that it'll expose our banality, our utter simplicity and lack of special worthiness of this embarrassment of riches that has been visited upon us.

I have the whole of human knowledge at my fingertips and I want to know more about the Octomom.

Spam now leverages social networks

I've been getting spam lately purporting to be from a former co-worker. Apparently they harvested her MSN Messenger list – it impersonates her hotmail account and sends to my work account.

This was probably due to a virus which hijacked MSN messenger, it's a notoriously problematic service: between the service outages, trojans and viruses, its usefulness is debatable. But even as Microsoft gets its security act together a decade too late, the attack is inevitably shifting someplace else.

With social networking sites asking for email passwords to "import connections", people respond quickly. After all, they say it's safe, and you can always change your password later (but you don't). As it has been pointed out, as an industry we've trained people to type passwords, and that's what they do – whether it's a good idea or not, and that's why phishing is so successful. But once they have your contact list they can keep that forever, and it's a wonderful tool for a spammer.

Facebook and Twitter are unlikely to misuse this data too egregiously, they are connected to real money and companies with reputations to protect. But Pownce, which is going out of business – what about their data? And tacky little utilities like Twitterank which spam your stream, you'd better believe they're warehousing your connections. And your private messages. And everything else. You can put these things together and draw meaningful conclusions about the people involved.

Science fiction has been talking about spambots impersonating your family and friends for years, but now it's happening for real, and expect to see a whole hell of a lot more of it. Expect to start seeing requests from friends and family, asking for money through new and unfamiliar websites (or even familiar websites that have been compromised). Expect increasingly strange and subtle requests: you may not even know what they're really trying to get you to do, or why. In short, this is going to get deeply weird, really fast.

Asking more from family and friends on queer rights

Following the election last Tuesday, I am very happy and hopeful about the future. Even though Proposition 8 passed in California, President Barack Obama will appoint liberal Supreme Court justices who will eventually give me full equality in the United States, maybe even in my lifetime. I have hope.

But in the meantime, it's going to be rough. Each step forward will be met with stiff opposition. Queers have long been convenient targets for political hate campaigns. This will get worse before it gets better. It already is.

Recently I've discovered that several long-time friends don't agree I should have equal rights, including the right to be married. Some of them have participated in campaigns specifically intended to take away my civil rights. By definition, these people are not my friends, and I will no longer encourage such behaviour with my continued association. These people will no longer be able to truthfully say "I have gay friends, but..." – not if they're referring to me.

I am also raising my expectations of my friends and family. In the past I simply asked friends and family to accept me and not say bad things in my presence. I didn't feel I had the right to ask them to volunteer for a cause, contribute money, or vote a certain way. Although I knew in some cases that they were opposed to my rights, I ignored it. I had very low self-esteem, and I just felt happy that people actually liked me: Internalized homophobia is powerful and insidious. Those days are past.

Now I will call on my friends and family to help advance my civil rights whenever I see fit. Since my friends and family love me as I love them, I expect they will be willing to help me. If friends and family are engaged in or supporting organizations that hold anti-gay agendas, it is my expectation that they work to improve those organizations from within. To be clear, I'm not unreasonable: I don't actually expect my friends and family to live up to my every expectation any more than I live up to theirs.

Queer issues will never be as important to most of my friends and family as they are to me. But now I'm not going to hesitate to ask for help, and if that turns out to be a problem, it will be short-lived. It will be fantastic if they choose to help, and it will be okay if they don't, but no friend will be allowed to work against my civil rights and remain my friend. This is called self-respect, and it starts now.

Obama's election: hope for an exiled gay American

Living in Canada over the past four years it's been hard to admit I'm an American. Before the 2004 election people used to commiserate, saying "what a terrible government you Americans have to deal with." After 2004, the mood got ugly: we really did elect Bush that second time. The negative opinion of the US government was transferred onto its citizens. Since 2004 whenever I have admitted to being American I've watched welcoming smiles melt into frowns, and often had to listen to a tirade about Bush and the US government. I've had to agree with them, too.

After all, I had to leave the US in order to live with my husband, and you'd better believe I've resented it bitterly. With laws that treat me as something between an abomination and a criminal, a Supreme Court prepared to permanently relegate me to second-class citizenship, and a president that seemed intent on breaking every international law, violating every civil liberty and every standard of decent conduct, I could find little to defend about the US, and even less reason to want to.

I certainly hoped Obama would win. I contributed to his campaign, I made phone calls. But I never let myself really believe, because it would just hurt too much if he lost. The Supreme Court holds the key to deciding whether I'll be a second-class citizen in the US until the day I die, and if more Scalitos had been appointed it would have dashed my hopes for two generations. I held my breath.

Today Barack Obama pulled it off, and decisively, breaking the last barrier for African-Americans (which John McCain spoke of so eloquently and movingly in his concession speech). Obama even mentioned gay people as actual Americans in his acceptance speech. Today I have hope, and I can say I'm an American without embarrassment and without (excessive) anger and resentment. I see that the dream is alive in the United States, and I see reason to believe that one day I might be able to live there again, maybe even as an equal.

A lot more has to change for this to happen. Today, people in Arizona, California, and Florida voted to ban same-sex marriage; it passed in Arizona and Florida. The vote is very close in California, but one thing is certain: voters hold farm animals in higher esteem than their fellow citizens. We have a long way to go, but when I look at how far we've come in forty-five years, I have hope.

Congratulations to President-elect Barack Obama and to the people of the United States on turning this historic page. Congratulations to African-Americans who can say that they are now full participants in the society and democracy of the United States. Congratulations and thank you to everyone who worked, donated, and voted to make this happen. Someday it will make a difference for me, too.

Help stop constitutionalized bigotry in California

California's Proposition 8 is intended to end same-sex marriage in California, which the California Supreme Court ruled constitutional in June. The California Assembly had previously passed a law to allow same-sex marriage, but Governor Schwarzenegger (it hurts to type that) vetoed it, saying that it was up to the supreme court to decide. Well, they did, and although Arnie said he'd campaign against Prop 8, he's done dick-all about it. I guess he's too busy to call a press conference.

Anyhow, the Mormons are pouring enormous sums of cash into the campaign for Prop 8, and although many high-profile celebs are donating to the fight to stop it, it isn't enough. I've given, and I'd like to ask you to give as well. Everybody deserves the right to marry the person they love, and shouldn't have to emigrate to do so, as I did. Equality can be maintained, but only at a cost. Please give now.

Enjoli, for the woman that does it all

Back in the heady days of the late 1970s, feminism morphed from a fringe movement to a popular crusade. Helen Reddy sang I Am Woman and women sang along. Support for the Equal Rights Amendment reached its high water mark, and Gloria Steinem was a rock star. Women were earning $.69 for each dollar earned by their male counterparts, and were demanding compensation for household work.

In that heady climate of 1978, marketers decided to tap into the image of the all-capable woman:

♪ I can put the wash on the line, feed the kids, get dressed, pass out the kisses and get to work by five to nine, 'cuz I'm a woman – Enjoli ♫

Charles of the Ritz creates Enjoli, the new 8-hour perfume for the 24 hour woman.

♪ I can bring home the bacon, fry it up in a pan, and never never never let you forget you're a man. 'cuz I'm a woman. Enjoli! ♫

The feminist revolution was repackaged as slavery: women are strong, subservient, hard-working sex kittens that smell great – for eight hours! Long-lasting perfume really is such an important issue: women work 20% more than men, and if they want to hold on to a man so they can raise the children, make the money, and serve him sexually, they have to smell the part: 24 hours a day.

Vancouver PD vs NYPD for Critical Mass: protection vs assault

Critical Mass in Vancouver is a very mellow affair. Although there are sometimes incidents, it is predominantly peaceful and generally treated with equanimity. Not so in New York City, where a police officer assaulted a cyclist on Friday:

via Dynamic Critical Mass Vancouver

Contrast this with Vancouver, where Critical Mass is escorted by two police motorcycles who pace the rear of the pack, keeping cars from crowding the cyclists. The police even block traffic to allow the riders to congregate briefly on the bridges:

Obviously a single officer does not represent the entire NYPD, nor indeed his region or country, but the contrast is as striking as the assault. These attitudes and actions do not exist in a vacuum: they reflect the direction and values of the leadership and the society at large. The relationship between Critical Mass and the police is fairly representative of impressionistic differences between the East and West coasts of North America, and of the North and South divide between Canada and the US: senseless repression and harassment vs tolerance. I consider myself rather fortunate at times to live in the North and the West.

Sous le Grand Chapiteau

We went to see Cirque du Soleil's Corteo this afternoon. It was a very good show, of course: they do beautiful work.

The last time I saw Cirque du Soleil was in 1991: Nouvelle Expérience in Atlanta, to which my mother invited me. That show was a revelation to me. It was also a very different time for that organization: just a small circus company, not the "entertainment empire" as it is described today. Then, it was just one touring show; now it has fourteen touring companies and six resident shows.

It was also distinctly non-English then, with very few words spoken at all, and the French nature of the show very distinct. Today they sing and mumble in a eurotrash polyglot (which probably reflects the many nationalities involved) and speak in English. It somehow now feels safe where the show used to feel somewhat subversive: two nearly naked men doing a hand-to-hand show was practically a felony in Georgia, and although speaking French hadn't yet reached the depths of infamy it later did, it was certainly different for that place and time.

Inevitably, that which is good and cutting edge eventually becomes mainstream. Even when the quality remains the same (or gets better, to be perfectly honest), it often doesn't feel that way. After all, middle age is when nostalgia blossoms. But age has some consolations: at least I no longer affect a little black fez with gold embroidery (some photos will never be scanned).

The highest camp of all

Even before the Internet we had annoying catchphrases injected into our daily conversation by advertisers. The Massengill douche commercials of the 1980s were masterworks of shameless campiness, at once implausible, ridiculous, and full of emotional weight. The "not-so-fresh" catchphrase caught on massively, with everyone discussing the commercial, and most importantly, repeating it. Again. And again.

The settings for these commercials are some waspy paradise like Montauk or Kennebunkport: one is invited to imagine a young Jacqueline Bouvier talking to her mother, receiving the feminine wisdom passed down, woman to woman, generation to generation. The sailboat, the American flag, the beach at sunset, comfy sweaters: the goal is visual distraction from the subject matter. An earlier commercial in the same vein doesn't have a catchphrase, but is altogether more heartwarming and cuddly.

Advertisers love to use the "introduction to the mysteries by the wise parent" trope: although (and perhaps because) it basically never happens. These are the types of conversations that parents never want to have (but guiltily feel they should) and children never want to have (but later feel they should have had); the male equivalent is the father-teaches-son-to-shave commercial. In reality, we all figure this stuff out alone (guided by television), so using a television commercial to pretend otherwise is fiendishly manipulative.

This last example predates the other two, with no focus on any "natural" qualities: instead it stresses "Effectal", a magical substance with close ideological (if not chemical) ties to Retsyn. This a more typical example of a Madison Avenue "two Cs in a K", with the actors mouthing the stilted advertising messages created by marketing interns. It shows none of the genius of the above commercials, but the stop-action daisy invasion is beautiful. My favourite detail is where they toast the efficacy of the product by almost touching the bottle to the box.

Undiplomatic behaviour

Gregory Levey, a columnist for Salon.com, spins a good yarn about his time working for the Israeli government as a speechwriter in his book "Shut Up, I'm Talking: And Other Diplomacy Lessons I Learned in the Israeli Government". He gives a great view of the other side of politics and diplomacy, and tells a couple of really funny stories. I was a bit jealous of his experiences, though not so much when he described daily life in Tel Aviv.

No intervention

Undeveloped land keeps becoming more and more scarce, and as the search for petroleum, hardwoods, and other raw materials continues, the very poorest people are the ones who suffer.

"Such a potent image leaves very little room for any doubt. In such circumstances do we need to know the details of the dispute to have any doubts that what we are witnessing is wrong?"David Vitters

Nobody does it better

When it comes to being a successful post-imperialist power, the United Kingdom is the out-and-out winner. Despite centuries of malfeasance, The United Kingdom has rebranded itself as a charming, cuddly nation of quaint historical quirkiness – bumbling bobbies and rambunctious royals, pushing prams and riding double-decker buses, carrying brollies and wearing funny hats, powered by tea and crumpets, bangers and mash, and the occasional haggis. James Bond has provided the most compelling model of masculinity for two generations. Brittania rules the cultural waves, providing an aspirational brand the likes of which the world's middle classes can't get enough.

The US ought to study these techniques. The days are quickly passing in which the US can exercise its droit de seigneur on the territories, people, and resources of the world and brush aside its ill will through well-placed slaps and tickles. The United States needs to learn to capitalize on the emotional weight of its chief cultural exports: the hamburger, the Internet, film, software and music, and car culture – and it must not allow anything to cheapen them.

It would be a good start to avoid spouting hypocritical insults at emerging superpowers, keep the welcome mat out, and make friends with the neighbours. Once it has stopped making enemies, the charm offensive can begin, and the US could one day attract the world's attention in a good way.

Halting State

I bitched all the way through the first half of Charlie Stross' Halting State about how bored I was, and how I really didn't get it. Although the setup was slow, once the men from ONCLE came in it took off and went someplace I really didn't expect.

I'm not much of a gamer, and there are few games I've gotten sucked into (Ultima XII and The Sims, that's about it), but the vision of a future with pervasive mobile gaming woven into real life rings very true, and sounds very compelling (I mean fun). Stross delivers with new ideas in a fun setting (Scotland after independence from the UK) with logical progressions of the current geopolitical environment. My only complaint is that his usual characters pop up with new skins and do their usual mating dance, but that's pretty minor and wouldn't catch your attention unless you'd recently read Singularity Sky. My final verdict is that I highly recommended this highly technical and groundbreaking book.

The ever-growing list

I'm reading Stasiland, a book of stories about the East German intelligence apparatus that engaged 2% of the population to spy on itself. It's sad, engaging, and absurdly funny at turns.

If, by the mere fact of investigating someone you turn them into an Enemy of the State, you could potentially busy yourself with the entire population.

[The definition of "enemy" becomes] "Too wide," he continues, "to be properly carried out. Within available resources I mean."

Stasiland, pp 200

Which makes me think about various terror watchlists compiled in recent years, with no clear criteria for inclusion or exclusion, which grow longer and longer, and thus mean less and less. When you watch everyone, you watch no one: the Stasi compiled the most pervasive surveillance state so far, but even so they failed to predict its own fall.

So one would assume that list keepers have learned this lesson (let's give them the benefit of the doubt on their competence and intellectual capability). So if these lists are ineffective in detecting or preventing terrorism, then what exactly are they for?

---

Of course, one must also never underestimate the power of stupidity: always assume incompetence over conspiracy. It's hard to credit these clowns with carrying out anything successfully.

Overheard by the pool

This afternoon I got about twenty minutes in the sun down by our pool, which just opened for the season a week ago. Since I haven't really had much sun this year, I am blindingly fish-belly white, so a little bit of sun goes a long way – but even so I was sad when the clouds rolled in (it was a little too cool at ~22c to stay there without the sun).

I parked myself at the upper-right corner of the pool (it doesn't look quite that pristine anymore, three years later) near where the afternoon pool queens gather to dish. I had my iPod implanted and was gamely trying to complete Halting State. When the first song ended, I paused to eavesdrop on our neighbours' conversation.

"I got them in New York. I really liked them, but the only ones they had were scratched, so I ordered them and they said they'd deliver them in a couple of days. But do you know how long it took? It took seven weeks. [italics his] I was calling that woman every single day, eventually she stopped taking my calls."

So I turned my iPod back on and kept reading. The next song ended, so I paused again.

"Yes, they're Armani, but not the new ones. I don't like them very much."

I turned the music back on and stuck my nose back in my book.

A few minutes later I paused to turn over, and saw Adolfo arriving at the pool for his swim. I hit pause, and then gaggle next to me fell silent (yes, they were still talking about sunglasses) and watched as Adolfo took off his shirt and shorts and stepped into the pool. After he was underwater, they resumed.

"I loaned him my Pradas but then after he wore them I didn't like them anymore."

After that I left, so I can't attest that they continued to talk about sunglasses longer than the twenty minutes I was there.

Sustained futurism

(I know I keep going on about Mr. Gibson. Indulge me.)

William Gibson's fiction has aged better than most of its cyberpunk cohorts. Although Walter Jon Williams' Hardwired inhabits a similar milieu, and although it remains an enjoyable read, it hasn't aged as well. Gibson is a strong world builder who has succeeded in creating his own continüum, but more importantly his characters inhabit hard lives and have faint hope.

Marly stared at the perfect lips, simultaneously aware of the pain the words caused her and the sharp pleasure she was learning to take in disappointment.

Count Zero, Chapter 2, ¶ 20

The key to his success is that he focuses on the human elements, and keeps the technical elements as vague as possible, allowing the reader to focus on the human problems that remain embedded in the technological future, through the lens of our present. Gibson's fiction has been progressively moving from the far future into the near future (with a jog into an alternate past); he is most successful where he provides social commentary on real peoples' lives today: from the down-and-out to captains of industry.

And, for an instant, she stared directly into those soft blue eyes and knew, with an instinctive mammalian certainty, that the exceedingly rich were no longer even remotely human.

Count Zero, Chapter 2, ¶ 2^nd-to-last

If that's not a truism today, then I don't know what is.