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.

Cherry blossoms in amber

Charlie Stross' recent musings about his Japan trip, combined with Cory Doctorow's recent story featuring the Carousel of Progress, reminded me of an evening at the theatre.

In the Gion Corner theatre in Kyoto, Japanese Culture's Greatest Hits are performed assembly-line style twice each night. The facility has a well-worn burnish that somehow holds off shabbiness, but only just. The show is a veritable smörgåsbord with seven courses of traditional Japanese performance art; and like a smörgåsbord, it is all about the variety and quantity, not the quality of any given dish. The tea ceremony was performed with a curious mixture of precision, care, boredom and indifference, and an absolute absence of passion. The floral arrangement segment befuddled me: surely the product is what is appreciated, not the process? The thespians were variously talented and not, and the works presented in pre-digested, bite-sized chunks.

The tableau vivant rolled forward under the muted crackling of the soundtrack, the performances variously talented or not, but all held under the threat of preëmption by a fearsome narration with the comforting, terrifying verbal pacing of a postwar Westinghouse infomercial on nuclear power. The sound system had an oppressively vibrant analog complexity and gave the impression of ginormous drums of magtape rumbling inexorably in the basement.

The presentation was courteous and boring in the way of traditional tourist fare, yet it carried a dark undertone of sorrow, despair, hatred and reproach. The notes and movements seemed cast as pearls before contemptible, invading swine. I loved it.

A world unwelcome

Tom Ridge told the NY Times “The welcome mat has a little dust on it right now. We have to spruce it up a bit.”

Well, that's an understatement. People I meet go to great lengths to avoid traveling through what was once known as the Sweet Land of Liberty; it has now become a rogue state of the worst reputation. It seems like everybody has a story about being mistreated at the border or the visa office, and people will pay hundreds extra to avoid connecting flights there.

... and the chocolate ration has been increased
to four grams per month!

Aside from having flushed its hospitality industry, The US no longer attracts the brightest and best students and workers; they're now looking at Europe, Australia, Canada, Hong Kong, and Singapore. Heck, they're flocking to Dubai. You know you're in trouble when you can't compete for labour with a country whose working conditions have been described as "less than human". Richard Florida, who coined the term "creative class", documents this in The Flight of the Creative Class.

For a real-world example, direct your gaze to the building across the street from my office: Microsoft just opened a
global development facility in Richmond, BC. Three hours by car from their headquarters in Redmond, it is designed to allow Microsoft to recruit the best and brightest to work for them and live in an industrialized nation with a functioning civil society. They plan to employ 800 people there. Those would otherwise be jobs in Redmond if the US didn't have its priorities seriously out of order.

Back from S.Am

Rio de Janeiro was fabulous. They care about three things there: having great bodies, going to the beach, and getting ready for carnival. People there are beautiful, and they dress to show it. The samba parade was spectacular, truly something you have to see to believe.

The cruise was really, really nice. People tell us we're spoiled for life - the ship was small and had impeccable service and incredible food, and the ship was half-empty. We had a wonderful time.

Buenos Aires was pretty, and there was a lot of life, culture, and fashion there. It seemed like a nice place to live, though as a vacation destination was average. Worth seeing.

Montevideo and Punta del Este, Uruguay - forgettable, I guess since we didn't have any money laundering to do.

Florianopolis and Buzios were beautiful, with wonderful beaches. São Paolo is not a place you want to visit, unless you're going to visit friends -- there's nothing touristy to do, it's not pretty, except pretty dangerous.

So now I'm back at work and I feel like my soul has been vacuumed out of my ass. In comparison, it sucks to be here. The weather is nice, the sun has been shining at various times, notably when I get home from work, and Louie has been happy to go run and play in the park.

Bad service? Bad PR.

There's little doubt that the information age has changed how companies need to handle customers complaints to avoid bad public relations. This guy got mad at how United screwed his parents and made a blog. It got picked up by Consumerist, then Cory. And now United is getting email from a bunch of angry people. How embarrassed I am for modern business... these companies think they're still operating in the 1950s.

Linux unwelcome in hotels

In three different hotels I've had the same problem using my Ubuntu laptop with the free internet service. I run into an old "reply from unexpected source" error. This is a side effect of how hotels implement redirection to their terms-of-service warning page from any URL. Unfortunately, they're incompetent spoofers. The ISP providing support is GuestDirect, telephone number 1-866-221-6440, and they supply internet service to La Quinta Inns.