lovehatethings

As I sit in a hotel room in my provincial capital after a few glasses of wine and few hours of socializing, I am readying myself for a night's sleep before getting up tomorrow to spend the day lobbying Members of Provincial Parliament about some of the shortfalls of public education. Now don't get me wrong, I've bemoaned professional lobbyists before as a cancer to our political system, not because of any perceived insincerity or wrongdoing, but more because of the financial influence they wield in the backrooms of parliamentary power brokers.

So, when I say I'm going to lobby, I am stopping short of calling myself a lobbyist. I prefer to think of it as an advocate, even though my anger rises when I have to think of myself as an advocate for public education because politicians are not picking up the slack. Although there is a position and a script that is expected to inform my conversations, I really hope to achieve one thing: motivation through sincerity. I hope, at least, that sincerity can win the day because I don't have any cash to spread around. And with sincerity as my only tool, and words as my only medium, I will try to move politicians to taking up a fight for something that probably rarely crosses their radar. Herein lies the problem. My message is clear, and the way I would like to express that message is without reservation, without filters, without worrying about playing a game that I do not want to even understand - the game of diplomacy.

Don't get me wrong, I'm a strong believer in tact and communicating a message with grace and persuasion, but considering a time span of 5, 10, or 15 minutes to engage someone in a dialectic about an issue they may not want to move on, may not want to believe in, or may not even want to hear, should demand an abandoning of the so-called rules of civilized discourse.

I want to sit down, look across a desk and say, "Surely you can see how f'ed up this process is... why won't you do anything to change it." When they respond with a shrug and an excuse I want to storm, "You idiot! Don't you get that this problem leads to that problem and the money you spend here will save you money over here!"

And when a final look of bewilderment crosses their faces with a tone of resignation that, in a perfect world, what I'm proposing might be a useful thing, but realistically it isn't going to happen. I can respond with, "Well of course it can't happen if you're not even willing to get up off you ass to try. You spazz! You stunner! You moron! How can you claim to represent the best interests of the people who voted for you, and even the people who didn't vote for you, if you're just going to sit around playing it safe, not ruffling any feathers? How can you advocate for your constituents if you're unwilling to take a stand? How can you tell me you agree with something, but in the end, give it up because your cohorts think it unpopular or radical or impolitic? How can you ignore the people you're supposed to represent?"

Of course I would like to say that, but in the end I will have to read the inside cover of the box and figure out the rules. I will collect $200 when I pass GO. I will climb up the ladders and slide down the snakes. I will only follow the colored directions in my very own Candyland. And I will shout "Yahtzee" and wave my hands frantically when rolling five of a kind.

While I believe that stark honesty can be brutal in some situations (especially between friends and loved ones), there is usually an opportunity to mitigate a message with time and gentle persuasion. Short timeframes demand short messages, and while I appreciate that some of the shortest are not appropriate for some company, they are often the most memorable. After all the catch phrase on the Diplomacy box reads: Why say in a finger gesture what you can say with years of arguments and the greasing of palms?

Now I know that with a lovehate topic like web advertising someone is going to expect paragraphs about pop-ups, but really, with the browser technology available today does every really need to see a pop up again? I don't remember the last time I saw a pop up for a poker site or porn but it wasn't too long ago that my desktop would be beseiged by them. I will say that almost as annoying as pop-up ads are the banner or sidebar ads that make noise. Try scrolling through the torrent compiler mininova.org with a smiley banner droning out a constant "Hello?" or a sidebar ad that crackles with a plasma energy burst that sounds like the electric pulses from the Commodore 64's Impossible Mission.

Now that Google is perfecting its "Blog Search" technology, the site can, on a week by week basis, navigate the meme streets and provide the Adsense matrix engine fodder to figure out which ads to show me and when, privacy advocates will start to squirm, and surfers will seek out proxy servers, and the truly paranoid will shut off every cookie and manually fill out form fields every visit back to a site. But what's the real problem here? I've consigned myself to the fact that I'm not going to be able to exist on the web without advertising of some sort. That said, 99% of ads have become wallpaper to me.

So I ask myself, do I really care that Google or any other company is compiling data about me to better target advertising to my browser? And the answer is yes, I do care, but not for the reasons you might think.

I care because I remember the layers of porn popups upon visiting warez sites and ads that were simply reaching for a clickthrough by sheer numbers. I care because I once had to sacrificially frag a Bonzi Buddy in effigy to keep myself sane. I care because I would rather see an unobtrusive column of a few links and text that maybe, once out ten thousand times, should I choose to click it, will actually be about something that I may have a fleeting interest in instead of some peripheral perception of static cunieform.

Let ads line me up in crosshairs. Show me something from a tech store or a blogging service or a social networking site instead of some banal cartoonish test of skill that I'm supposed to strive for in a sidebar. Show me something about Guinness or Jack Daniels instead of St. Pauli's and Bacardi. Pitch me an HDTV or a torrent app instead of an instant messenger add-on that will allow me to send sparkly smileys. Try to tempt me with a some consumer electronics or gadgets instead of mutual funds or insurance. I'd rather at least hold up the facade that at least somewhere in a server wearhouse The Gibson is parsing an algorithm to learn something about me instead of just sitting there cranking out spam into a billion killfiles.

Make no mistake, if I could choose between surfing the web with or without ads, I'd definitely forgo banners and pop-ups and sidebars - oh my! But if I have to live with web ads, I'll take the enemy I know over the enemy I don't.

In the past I have been anything but an apoligist for the tech world's advancements. I crave some of the visions of the future that I grew up with in sci-fi films and televisions. From a teleporter to a self-drive aircar. From a replicator or holodeck to an omnipresent mainframe that serves the needs of humanity... of course somehow these scenarios inevitably turn out bad.

The backbone for all such technology demands an immense mainframe that contains, if not the total, at least a large chunk of academic, social and personal information to dole out upon request. And while I know that, in most dystopian film plots, the archetypal consequence for individuals giving up their knowledge often ends badly, there is a lingering attraction to a tool that at command, whim and request can produce information and content that is uniquely customized to a user within a specific environment.

The first step to such a system has its nascent development in cloud computing, and while part of me is ready to release my kite into the cummulus, another part of me is remembering Twitter's Fail Whale and 404 errors of days gone by.

There is inherent risk that's greater than someone hacking Amazon to steal credit card information or a government website to lift social security numbers. Cloud computing demands that beyond the day to day information necessary to run our lives, we also commit our memory - i.e. writing, pictures, music and emails. And while many of us have copies of pictures in Flickr and stream music from last.fm, are we ready to commit the sole copies of such things to the cloud?

Being a victim of credit card fraud can range from annoying to devastating, but imagine a future where a system crash wipes out the only existing images of deceased loved ones or a child's first birthday. When do we reach that level of trust, not with certain things, but with EVERYTHING? For the skynet to work its magic, and be all it can be, it needs such information. Google, and other Web 2.0 in-browser software, would have us move all of our documents and spreadsheets into the cloud. Through blogs, many people have given up their creativity to the cloud... after all, how many of us keep backups of everything we post? Flickr has, what I'm sure, are the sole copies of at least some visual records of people and places and events. The news is moving from paper to html to rss to xml and soon hard copies will be a thing of the past.

Make no mistake. The sky is getting bigger. The clouds are growing in size and getting more numerous. The sun, however, is becoming infrequent and I can feel a storm coming on. I don't know when the first PCs and Macs will ship without hard drives, but I think we're within ten years. I don't know how soon after that a lightning strike will erase all visual records of someone's Uncle Owen or Aunt Beru, but I'm thinking we're within eleven years. I don't know when all high speed networking will be wireless and paid for through taxes, but I can see it through the rain.

I do know this. When I have to suffer a blackout, I feel, sadly, lost without a TV or my computer. My content has disappeared and now I have to spend time reading books, which, in a cloud world, will soon not exist off of my computer... well, at least I'll be okay until the batteries on my Kindle 2010 run out and my iPod nano version 10 (which has been broken to countersink into my forearm and run off of bio-electical energy) shorts out my nervous system. I suppose I can pick up a piece of charcoal from the barbeque and scratch some renderings of the circling wildlife that's coming back to claim a world where all knowledge has been shorted out by a failed surge protector.

While I love the concept of cloud computing, it's going to take a lot of convincing to get me to let go of the kite string that keeps my information grounded.

While most people in the US are wrapped up in election fever as November approaches, few below the 49th parallel even know that Canada is going to the polls in three weeks. And perhaps the differences between our political systems, while many, would provide some encouragement for me to at least like one electoral process over the other, I somehow manage to hate them both.

Both systems trumpet "democracy" and try to convince voters of an Ancient Greek manisfestation of "by the people, for the people." Both systems sell their processes on the idea that an election is the opportunity for the "little guy" (as spatially misogynist as that term is) to have the same say as anyone else.

The fallacy of such claims rests on one simple fact: both the US and Canada are effectively constitutional oligarchies. Oh sure, we get the end-user choice, but how many coffee filters, strainers and sifting devices did that choice have to get through? Because quite honestly, in Canada, I don't get any say in which person will be my Prime Minister. Our parliamentary party system allows for a small group of people to decide on who, within the party, runs for party leadership. A slightly larger group chooses which of these elite actually get the title, and then, we don't even vote directly for the person who's leading the country - we vote for their party affiliation.

The US is slightly more effective in giving its citizens direct input as to the country's figurehead, but such a race invariably results in a popularity contest that is not reliant on policy and promises or, even worse, hearkens back to party lines etched in stone and swathed in fields of red and blue. So yes, US citizens do vote directly for a president, but what say did they have in the choices?

On both sides of the border, since the 1960's anyway, "new" media has been the cause of great consternation for political parties and the electoral process. The "new" media of television reared it omnipresent head in the infamous Kennedy/Nixon debate of 1960. Since then broader and burgeoning aspects of television (with the current pervasive onslaught of punditry) has morphed into our concept of new media to include blogs, podcasts, youtube and twitter accounts. The clear appeal of a politician's ability to successfully utilize technology is often grasped most readily by younger populations who, thinking they see a like-minded individual, will fill out online petitions and become friends on Facebook. The online component of a campaign can often be very lopsided for one candidate over another and, while it may be a noticable piece, it is often a largely irrelevant one as the demographic that constitutes online supporters are the LAST people to get out to vote.

I get that an electoral system will never be perfect, but when leaders can claim mandates from less than half of the eligible voters participating in the process I start to lose faith. If a candidate "stumps" on anti-poverty, and the impoverished are the least likely to register to vote, where is the accountability? If a platform policy speaks of immigrant rights and improving the situations of newcomers to the country, how likely are they to register to vote, even if they are eligible at all?

And, with all this said, my vote is crucial. I still don't buy the myth that people who don't vote don't retain the right to complain - that's complete bullshit. If I'm paying taxes (for the many social programs that I am thankful for) I have made my investment into my community and my country.  I went through a common stretch of disillusion where voting was an afterthought for me and I was dismayed by the system enough to avoid even participating at the ballot. And while, I hate to adopt a cliche, one must pick their battles. I will never change the electoral system. The political will to do so has, quite simply, too many political angles for a sitting politician to tackle - after all, the old system has served most incumbents just fine thank you.

Instead, I participate though a vote and voice, and neither can be suppressed, and neither can be comprimised. If you've never found cause to drag your ass off your couch to get to a polling station and cast a ballot, I'm going to be the last one to criticize because I've been there and my couch has the indentation to prove it. My last word on the elections (in Canada and the US) is that I hate the electoral process, the political system, the lobbyists, pundits and backroom deals, but, when the writ is dropped, I will vote and vent and love and hate with the best of them.

After considering the affectation that I have for lists, I have tried to come to grips with why I absolutely abhor award shows. After all, aren't award shows simply groupings of lists that get refined to a final list of the night's winners?

I have, however, parsed down the key difference between liking lists and hating award shows: pomp.

If award shows could reduce down the core information (i.e. candidates and winners) to half an hour or less - I'd watch. Instead, the award show format of grandiose gala is perhaps the most BORING and taxing hours of television one can sit through. As much as I might like a host choice one year compared to the next, even a great host can not overcome the sheer banality of scripted humor and over-the-top musical numbers that should be consigned to the next High School Musical sequel.

I could care less about the red carpet and her red dress - who she's wearing, how much the necklace costs, how fabulous anyone looks or what's in the gift bags for the presenters.

I really don't need to see Hollywood starlets crammed into dresses with painted on smiles as their handlers tell them which direction to turn to when the cameras flash on them. I don't care to see unlikely pairings stumble over verbals fondlings of each other while trying to choke out unfunny dialogue before ripping open an envelope. I don't want to see a musical performance by an artist I don't like, and, even more, I don't want to see a watered-down uninspired performance by an artist I do like. And finally, I don't want to see acceptance speeches that contain people thanking those I don't know, don't want to know, and don't care about. I don't care that an actress wants to thank her mother or drama teacher, or a singer wants to thank his crew or god. I don't want to see people weeping or fist-pumping in joy.

I would rather award shows became more debate-oriented. Let's have some well-informed people talking intelligently about who should win, and why for an hour before the winners are announced. Let's have an awards show that lasts an hour or less and gives me the information quickly, efficiently without any envelopes. Let's have after shows that contain the same (or different) panel of "experts" consider the decisions that were made and talk about the artistic merits of the winning choices.

Like watching any faux sport that has a basis in judging instead of hard numbers, award shows don't (and in fact can't) deal with any intrinsic data: it's all subjective. And I appreciate the filtering mechanism may be knowledgeable and that the process is engrained in history and tradition, but essentially for every 3-4 hour award show, I'm waiting for twenty names that could be read in less than two minutes. Watching sixty minutes of hockey or football during a three hour span is taxing enough at a 3:1 ratio. Award shows commonly have a 240:1 ratio of unwatchable crap compared to somewhat interesting information. And this assumes that I have any investment in the nominees to begin with.

I rather we simply pack all award shows in a giant envelope and ship them off to the Lost island where all of the nominees could, in Survivor-like fashion, eliminate each other one at a time until it turned into documentary about how nature had reclaimed its territory. If such events would happen I could happily announce that the ultimate winners would be the viewing public.

Far be it from me to take a cynical view on things (cue crickets and an Edna Krabappel laugh) but am I the only one who thinks that the release of this season's most eagerly anticipated video game experience is surreptitiously constraining its players under the guise of freedom and creativity?

Spore, for those who don't care for video games at all, is a Massively Multiplayer Online game that allows every player to be the god of their own world from the "pimp my bacterium" stage all the way up to their own private Death Star. It promises the freedom to create shared environments that go beyond anything before. It sells itself with the self-gratifying narrative hook: "What they never realized was that all along the way, from humble microbes to starship captains, someone had guided them at every turn... and that someone is you."

Now I suppose my following rationale will all come down to construct of reality that are probably far better left for a professor of metaphysics or Jeff Spicoli, but since neither of them are around, try this on for size. Spore is selling itself on three core ideas: 1) that you will have freedom to exercise your creativity, 2) that your ego will be so satisfied by the fact that you made a creature with a phallus sticking out of its chest, you will have no choice but to propogate your species, and 3) that the game itself holds more creative license over your time and energy than your actual life does.

Let's really take a critical look at a product that's supposed to "foster" creativity.

I realize that the creative process in most aspects of life is frought with parameters that we must learn to live with or submit to in frustration. While a piano player is limited by the instrument and the painter is limited by the canvas, we certainly applaud the pursuits of those artists and craftspeople who, within the boundaries of their fields, work creative achievement to levels we never thought possible. A game like Spore (and Civilization, the Sims and Sim City before it) may work as a noble attempt at entertainment (as subjective as the appreciation for various media is) but it is certainly a step down in basic creativity from even the act of picking up a crayon and coloring outside the lines.

I apologize in advance, but I'm gonna go all aesthetic here (and that doesn't mean I'm getting my eyebrows waxed). The artistic process must be unabridged, untethered, unfetterd and any other "un-" word you care to include. Spore, as any game, is like a giant jigsaw puzzle that needs to be assembled to complete the experience (and I'll admit, in Spore's case, the puzzle look wicked cool and contains millions of pieces). The only way to exercise individual creativity in assembling a puzzle is to screw it up to the point that the picture on the box becomes irrelevant.

One G4TV review of Spore includes: "Just as The Sims tapped into the human need to interact, Spore taps into a very deep and similar experience that few games dare to touch - to create and share." No matter how successful the marketing demographic is for this game, think of how restrictive the concepts of creation and sharing in the manner have become. Players are exercising  constrained "creating" and "sharing" with one type of person (other Spore players) in one type of environment (sitting in front of a monitor) with a mouse and a keyboard. While, to some, this might be entertainment - and party hard Spore-style with your mating dances if it is - the only artistry and creationism I see is on the part of the gamemaker. He has begun to create an unmatched  piece of concept art which includes screenshots of millions of people with glazed eyes and carpal tunnel syndrome playing virtual gods. Will Wright, I doff my cap to the master artist whose powers of manipulation may outstrip most world leaders. Other gamemakers may have more people staring at screens for entertainment value, but you've actually convinced many of your players that their doing something fruitful. You are indeed a master.

The review of Spore in PC Gamer UK reads much more interestingly, "Spore's triumph is painfully ironic. By setting out to instill a sense of wonderment at creation and the majesty of the universe, it's shown us that it's actually a lot more interesting to sit here at our computers and explore the contents of each other's brains." In one sense, I completely agree; it is a lot more interesting to explore the contents of each other's brains... although I would rather say minds so as not to sound zombie-like. It's just a shame that where the platform of interaction used to be face to face, the new exploration consists of keystokes and double clicks.

I've really got nothing against Spore. I do, however, hate the fact that someone, somewhere is going to beatify the game as manna from the heavens when it's hardly that different from the days I used to jack up the taxes in Sim City by one percent so I could build a football stadium... what an artist I was back then!

T.S. Eliot promoted the idea of the literary canon. The concept that there were works that should be read by an educated individual to create a standard template, and in order to claim the rank of "educated". Some of the more esoteric aspects of the canon theory implied the idea that works (in true Elaine Benis assurance) were either "canon-worthy" or not, even as they were being written. While I never believed that canon theory needed to be extended to ridiculous levels. There still seems to be a certain belief that literature contains a bunch of "must-reads", just as film contains its "must-sees" and music contains its "must-hears". And while I suppose the canon can be applied to just about subject where so-called expertise can be expressed, I'm starting to wonder if the concept (as it pertains to the leviathan-like stature of the worldwide web) should be cannonballed out of existence.

Is there a canon of websites? Places that anyone who considers themself a web afficionado must visit on a regular basis to be considered "webjucated"? Must my web travelling habits include occasional visits to The Onion, Rotten Tomatoes, You Tube, Wikipedia? Do I lose any web geek cred without regular trips to io9, Ars Technica, Cnet, Engadget, Lifehacker, 1up, Slashdot, Sourceforge, TechCrunch or Digg?

Is there any piece of the web that has outlasted the transitory nature of the medium? Novels, short stories and poetry and rather constant. I haven't yet seen a story on Digg concerning a press release for Finnegan's Wake 2.0 or rumors that Prufrock is finally coming out of beta. Is there a website that contains content that is always enjoyable to go back to and remains unchanged? Many people have the ability to devote hours, days and weeks to re-reading novels on repeated occasions and enjoy them in unique ways each time. Does a website contain this same quality? I'll admit, that even years later, I can return to some of the early homestarrunner and Strongbad shorts and laugh as much as ever at Fluffy Puff Marshmallows and Trogdor the Burninator, but, other than content created as sheer entertainment, it's hard for me to think of an non-updated site that I will go back to over and over. And even with this, I would argue we are increasingly engrossed in the web than any single novel in spite of its transitory and unfinished quality.

While I would not say that, with regards to the web, the dissolution of the canon concept is tragic, there is an aspect to a wide-ranging common experience that I see becoming lost. The blog has made it easy for anyone to publish. I wish I could say "even though most shouldn't", yet that wouldn't only be antithetical to my populist belief in the medium, but the nature of the medium itself. Where Eliot's canon came from a few hundred years of white male Euro-centric writers, the demographics of web creators have blown that parameter wide open. And with this acknowledgement I pose two questions: will we ever have another William Shakespeare? Does anyone care?

If Bill was competing with hundreds of millions of playwrights instead of a relative handful, would his work have shone through the rest or would it have drown in a sea of obscurity? Does the web, as a medium, have the ability to create a wordsmith superstar or a "canon-worthy" podcaster? While I love the web's diversity, I am often frustrated by it's magnitude. While I clamour for the fresh and new, I still find myself with an inexhaustible list of bookmarks.

It seems the "suggestion" phenomenon is the latest attempt at a solution to navigate through the ocean. By data and trend and mathematic formula StumbleUpon wants to suggest what sites I might like, Digg wants to tell me what everyone else thinks is cool, the Internet Movie Database wants to aggregate films by previous users preferences and Apple's Genuis wants to emulate Pandora's ability to recommend not only what music I may like, but how my existing music should be organized. While the power of suggestion can be a great tool in sifting the through the dreck, it does have an insidious limitation: how is one supposed to be shocked anymore? Can I find a song that blows my mind through suggestions of music I'm already used to? Will I pick up a film that offends my senses but makes me see the world in a new way if the suggestions come from what I'm already comfortable with? And how does one find the truly inventive on the web when the recommendations come from a social demographic that, while admittedly more diverse than Eliot's "educated" society, has become relatively narrow in its own focus. Bloggers of a feather flock together. I love that we are canon-free but mourn the loss of greatness found.