Ian M Rountree

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Glory and Other Single-Tense Words

January 10, 2010 by Ian 2 Comments

What do you hear, when you hear the word Glory? You probably hear Success jangling around under it. If someone up and says, Success!, what do you hear then?

I hear endings. I hear epilogue, being written after the fact, usually with a good dose of revisionist history.

You almost never hear someone call something glorious in the moment it’s happening. It’s also rare to hear a prediction of glory, because unless you’re doing something that involves a definite end – like being a last-holdout defender in a siege, or becoming a suicide bomber – there’s no sure way to see what, if any, final ramifications your actions are going to have. It’s tough to predict glory, but it’s really easy to claim it once the event has passed.

It’s the same with success, it’s a form of revisionist history. Some of the most powerful people I can think of never claim to be truly successful, because they know – like you know – that they’re not finished yet. Success is finishing a project. Success is designing your victory (another single-tense word) and acting as the hand that says “Here, this is done. It’s yours now.” Success exists only in the past. Just like glory, and victory, it has no place in your plans.

Another great example of past-tense-singularity is golden Age. I hate this phrase. It implies that all of the good about whatever it is you’re describing has gone, and what we’re left with is the remnants, the fruits of our success, and the mitigating treaties by which we measure our past victory. There is light at the end of the tunnel, though, because as soon as a golden age is declared, you know there’s a sure sign you’re going to have to look for something else to succeed at. You can change tracks, get on to being the one who will create the next golden age, and no one will be the wiser until you succeed spectacularly and leave everyone else in the dust.

Prophecy is like this too, except prophecy works in reverse. It’s revisionist future. Prediction of any kind is a wonderful business to be in, because if it fails you can always claim people didn’t do things your way; and if it succeeds, you ride that success right to the top. It’s like a wish-list, and if you get really good at it, it becomes a calling card that says either “I know what’s going on,” or “I know how to make enough people listen to me, that whatever I say, goes on anyway.”

People love to label things. It’s our nature; we like communicable ideas, and the best communicable ideas fit into nice, neat packages like success, glory, victory and prophecy. Part of your job – and mine – is to see past the packages and assess the real contents. And, if there’s value beyond the single-tense useless cage it’s been put in, to act on that value in a way that’s to your own highest good.

And you’ll succeed. I know you will. Just like I will. Because we both say so.

Photo by ms4jah.

Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: caution, glory, prophecy, revisionist history, single-tense, success, victory

Is This The End of Prophecy?

December 18, 2009 by Ian 10 Comments

photo by Temari 09
photo by Temari 09

Whether you’re a proponent of a real-time web or a near-real-time web, one thing is for certain: we’re facing communication as it’s never been predicted.

A few things brought this thought on. Earlier today, I was listening to CC Chapman‘s stream-of-consciousness podcast, Managing the Grey (specifically the episodes on Moments and Buckets – you’ll get it if you hear them) after having had a conversation with someone about the state of the internet ant communication. I’ve also spent the last week reading William Gibson’s Neuromancer, which I’ve never read before despite its general acceptance as a seminar cyberpunk book. It’s also been a big week on the net, with Google releasing so many new toys and making an apparent bid on Yelp.

So this evening I’ve been poring over my library of assorted science fiction and so on, and it seems like that’s it: The very concept of total democratization by way of technology is incredibly rare. I know, a lot of you are going to tell me it’s not (Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom is on my christmas list, now) but this is an important thing. A lot of advancement lately has come at the inspiration of science fiction, yet the idea of social media, the creation of the meritocratic celebrity, and even the modulation of how we basically receive information, seems like a huge oversight.

When I look at the effect the internet has had on our culture from the perspective of a fiction author, I see a lot of things. How jacked in we are, even when we’re not tethered. The shift toward a gestalt state where many minds are fuelled by a singular, bottomless well of information best available to those who know the currents in the well. The falling principle of enforceable influence such as mass media once controlled. All of these things, taken together with a growing acceptance of the cloud, makes for some really interesting change. Clay Shirky said something to the effect that things only get socially interesting once they’ve gotten technologically boring. Absolute truth.

Being at the end of prophecy is a troubling prospect. Mayan calendars end in three years. I’m sure Nostradamus is just about out of quips by now. Where do we go from here? Science fiction writers are still, naturally, dreaming up new things, but most of what I’m seeing lately is either nothing but new toys, which will be developed eventually, or new approaches to old problems using previously invented new toys. It’s hard to find good examples of purely tangential thought that can still be accurately represented in digestable sociological terms.

But maybe that’s where the falling down is going on. Try explaining the Twitter phenomenon to anyone ten years ago; we were all still getting over email back then, much less instant messaging. Try explaining Google to the people building the infrastructure the internet itself relies upon during the time it was being built. Would they have understood? Do we understand now?

Frank Herbert wrote in the Dune series about the end of prophecy, and summarily concluded the series still in the thick of dealing with the fallout of the event itself. “You cannot see past a decision you do not understand” the books said many times. Perhaps that’s the crossroads we’re at now, the intersecting of technology, humans being, and the slow but sure changing of trajectory beyond which we simply can’t see.

The worst part of all this? Quantum physics demands that observing the state of minutiae is, itself, interference in the process the minutiae has undertaken. So not only are we unable to see past the crossroads, all purported prophecy is futile because it comes through the filter of our past experiences.

Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: doctorow, doom and gloom, fiction, google, prophecy, quantum physics, scifi, sulphuric-acid-sponge-bath, the-web, yelp

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