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How Systemic Racism is like the Hillsborough Disaster

CW: People crushed to death at Hillsborough Stadium.

The Hillsborough Stadium disaster has always struck me as a metaphor for systemic racism. The cries and pleas of the people being crushed and asphyxiated at the bottom of the crush of the crowd cannot be heard by the people at the top. So, the people at the top are oblivious to the danger that their pressure adds to the system.

The ones who are making decisions about the system also do not have a good view of what’s happening at all places. Thus, they make decisions that have life and death consequences to the people who had an unfortunate position in the system.

Even the authorities blame the very victims for what is clearly a failure of systems. People want someone to blame— the victims’ families blame the authorities and the authorities blame the crowds themselves.

The problem is the system and that the authorities made decisions without all of the information about the system in a timely manner. This is where lack of communication, lack of foresight, and lack of understanding of the system turns to be deadly. I fear that I’m seeing this same pattern play out in real-time with systemic racism and this administration’s response to it.

The people at the bottom are screaming, “I can’t breathe” but it’s still business at usual at the top, where people are unable to hear the screams of people at the bottom. The people at the top are still applying pressure, not knowing that they are each contributing to someone’s death far away from where they see that everything is fine and normal.

This is a metaphor for the mechanism of systemic racism that has cost George Floyd his life. Privilege, ignorance, obliviousness, the inevitable consequences of systems, the randomness of position in the crowd, consequences and the casting of blame from all points of view are all represented here as similar to the pressures of systemic racism.

But more importantly, the crush of systemic racism is still happening. The oppressive crush and pressure is still ongoing, with some people advocating for it, causing its pressure to build up. I hope people can see this because it’s not too late to recognize the crushing weight of the system and pull back from adding our own weight to the system onto the people below us.

It’s not too late for authorities to recognize the system and turn back and relieve pressure before a disaster worse than Hillsborough occurs.

I hope people can see this metaphor clearly and take action to help shout so that people at the top of the crush and people in a position of authority are able to hear the voices who are being crushed at the bottom.

Even the allies who were dismantling the fences and carrying the injured on advertising boards were chastised by authorities as hooligans. The other side saw the victims’ desperation as pitch invasion because they didn’t have a complete understanding of what was happening. These same misunderstandings are occurring in the struggle for the voices at the bottom to be heard that “I can’t breathe!” Let’s be allies and help everyone hear their voices! I hope that this metaphor can help people see the system that is culprit so that the right information can get to the right people an that more people will become allies to the cause against systemic racism.

Eu-Ming Lee
6/3/2020

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How I dropped Out of Society Into a Fourth Social Class

There are three social classes in America. I have chosen to be in none of them. This is not a choice normally available to people. Let me explain a little bit why I dropped out and how I’m basically classless now.

First, let me define the three classes.

There is a worker class who produces material goods. Then, secondly, there is a capitalist class who creates an organization to collect the surplus value of the workers after paying the workers. The market decides what the workers get paid. In America, we rely on the market to balance many things, and worker wages is one of these things. However, when only a single class (the capitalist class) competes in the market for workers, it is difficult for the workers to receive full value for the product of their work whose labor surplus is inevitably skimmed for profit by the capitalist class. What capitalists are competing for in “the market” is this labor surplus. However, competition for this surplus never causes the surplus to go to zero, otherwise, the capitalist has no incentive to start the company at all. Thus, by the very nature of the system of capitalism, it is guaranteed that the worker class can never receive the full total of their labors, for by nature, the capitalist must be incentivized by equity in order to risk his capital to receive the surplus.
The worker’s only choice is which capitalist they choose to skim their profits. Occasionally, workers may band together in a start-up company in hopes that their skills and labor allow them to become elevated to the capitalist class themselves. Ironically, such a gamble requires selling a significant share of their labor to the capitalist class in the form of equity to angel investors, venture capitalists, or Wall Street investors.

Aside from the worker class and the capitalist class, there is one other class that I am not a part of. That class is the incarcerated class. That is the class you fall into by design if you choose not to be a worker for the capitalist class. As a person who has chosen not to be in any of those three classes, I am constantly in danger of falling into the incarcerated class due the laws which rig it that way.

An example of a law which would put me into the incarcerated class is the law which bans sleeping in vehicles. Although you can eat in your vehicle or do just about anything else in your vehicle, many cities have outlawed sleeping in your vehicle because they don’t want homeless people living in their cars.

Our society purposely doesn’t want homeless people because they fall into a non-category of peoples who have rejected the rat-race of being a worker who has her surplus value skimmed by profiteering capitalists. Once you have decided you don’t need a home, then you certainly don’t need a job and thus you don’t need to enter the job market for various capitalists to choose how to exploit you. This is very bad for a society of capitalists. So, it is discouraged. And one way it is discouraged is to arrest you and fine you so that you remain trapped in a cycle of poverty and incarceration so that you will want to join the worker class to escape your spiraling predicament.

I have to be very careful while skirting the fringes of society not to accidentally fall into the incarcerated class. Once one tendril of poverty has grabbed you, it won’t let go until you are trapped in the incarcerated class. So far, I have managed to avoid it with previous wealth accumulated when I was a worker and by continually disguising myself as a “decent” worker class citizen.

Worker class people are afforded certain privileges in society that we take for granted, and I know how to act and present myself as a worker having been one myself for decades. Fortunately, many well-to-do technologists look poverty-stricken and disheveled; so a crazy homeless van dweller, a wealthy start-up app creator, and a math professor at Berkeley are indistinguishable to a police officer.
It is this guise of normalcy which affords my safety in society. It is not the laws which protect me. It is the disheveled appearance of my fellow Silicon Valley workers which affords me the most security.

Let me make this clear. It is not the laws which make me safe from imprisonment and harassment from police. It is my old CodeWarrior and OpenGL t-shirts from 10 years ago that allow me a disguise to slip past laws intended for homeless people. These old clothes are mostly still stored in my storage area. Ten years ago, I could not have known that they would serve me as a uniform of the worker class that I dropped out of and be as valuable as a literal license to participate in society.

There have been many times I have been told to move or threatened with a ticket or various anti-homeless measures that I have been able to thwart by convincing the police that I was “programming” or “visiting someone” in my obviously expensive van and then hastily moving away. I have had the privilege of select enforcement of the law because of the privilege or illusion of wealth, I am not ashamed to admit. I am truly sorry for the treatment that less wealthy citizens would receive due to these laws, but that is not something I am prepared to go to jail for and fight a civil liberties battle over at this point. Such a move would certainly put me into the incarceration class for good. And these laws will remain precisely because no one who is ever put into that legal position could afford to fight those laws.

One of the “solutions” to the homeless problem is to put people to work. I see this as problematic for various reasons. For one, some people may have chosen to drop out of the rigged game of workers and capitalists. I know that we in the worker class believe in the stigma of being homeless as being mentally ill or having substance abuse problems. I don’t know enough about the topic to determine whether this stigma is one of causation or correlation or whether the stigma serves more as a warning to the worker class to not become homeless and to keep maintaining a steady pace on the treadmill for their capitalist of choice.

For me, I tried to get out of the worker class by starting my own company and joining many various start ups. I didn’t quite succeed. I’m not sure I have what it takes to be a capitalist anyway. So, now, I’m adrift neither here nor there.

What I want to do is just create stories and experiences for people to enjoy using the skills that I’ve learned over a couple of decades. I think I can do that without spiraling into the incarcerated class.
But I’ve also chosen to do that without attempting to join the capitalist class or to beg them for help. This is not really a rational thing to do because what I would like to do requires resources beyond what I can muster myself.

And so, things are going slow. That’s okay. I don’t care about deadlines, and I don’t care about milestones, and I don’t care about making money. I’ll let things sort out on its own. Maybe I’ll make money, but I’m certainly not counting on it. And if I don’t count on it, I think I can properly enjoy the process of creating. I think the journey of creation is what matters to me now. Once I strip away all of the stress of starting a company that has to balance income with expenses and has to hit a market window and has to choose the right people, choose the right platform, and choose the right moment, I can truly enjoy what I always wanted to do when I first played Space Invaders in 1977 as a 7 year-old kid— to make his own game.

I only need to get back a fraction of the value of work that I put into my own game to make it worth my while. After all, I’m only getting paid a fraction of my value by any capitalist that’s making a profit anyway. So, for now, I’m not going to worry about what that fraction is going to be. I must accept that that fraction is exactly zero and go on doing what I want to do anyway. It’s not worth worrying about at this point. I’m too far from completion on any of the projects to even think that far ahead anyway.

And so I’m hoping there is a fourth social class in America that joins me. Perhaps there will be enough wealth from an automated and nearly workerless society that a fourth social class can emerge and can simply create art, literature, and entertainment while sustaining themselves with occasional gifts or purchases from the worker and capitalist classes.

This class, like me, will leverage the skills gained from years in the worker class to create novel things that could never be commercially successful enough for the capitalist class to want to exploit.

There are many small things too specific and niche and weird to ever be mass market and thus never be commercially viable to a capitalist class. Such things can be created by a mature post-worker artisan class simply because artisans love to create things and such crafts were not allowed to even be attempted when under the yoke of a capitalist.

And so that’s what I’m going to be doing— sometimes. I hope I can succeed, not so much to make money, but as to serve as an example to others that it is possible to be done. If freedom affords you this luxury, I hope you can take it as I have. I don’t think you have to be brave or anything to do this.

You have to realize that being in the worker class is merely a more comfy kind of incarcerated class. I think Fight Club touched on this a little bit. But you don’t have to be violent or disruptive to break free of the seeming stranglehold of the worker class. The prison is an illusion.

You can live just fine and be happy with less. You can be happy with your relationships without your things. It’s a matter of elevating your most important values to the top of the priority list and then shedding the rest. Once you’re accustomed to not dealing with the rest anyway, it becomes easy to focus on only the necessities.

It’s simpler and less complicated and more fun to focus only on what matters to you, even if it’s trivial or not understood by others. In fact, not being understood by others is what makes it special and enjoyable to you and only you. People might ask, “won’t you get tired of it?” I don’t think you can ever get tired of being a kid every day. Besides, if you miss any aspects of worker society, you can always put on a uniform and blend in and experience a taste every now and again.

Now, granted, I have built myself a bit of a cushion in finances in order to do this, and not everyone will have the same flexibility. But I think the fundamental concept is sound. We are really much more wealthy and capable than we think we are. We’re under an illusion that running out of money will result in homelessness or mental illness or substance abuse as if all of the latter were one thing.

I’m amazed at people who grow up poor but wind up having a huge number of kids anyway. Well, if they can do , then anybody who works in tech in Silicon Valley can also. People working tech jobs in Silicon Valley have a tremendous amount of wealth compared to people in other parts of the United States and other parts of the world. Yet, they’re always comparing themselves with each other and their neighbors which makes them feel poor.

So rather than bemoaning that you can’t buy a house in Silicon Valley, be grateful that you can do things that many people in the world cannot even begin to comprehend, like spending $5 for a cup of coffee and then not even finishing it.

Because wealth is relative like this, I have chosen to focus on how wealthy I am compared to the rest of America even though I’m not working, and to change my perspective on life to appreciate the luxuries that that wealth affords me. And what it really affords me is time. I can have time to do the things that I want to do without worrying about spiraling down into the incarcerated class. I see the danger in that for those who are closer to poverty. Perhaps I am skirting a bit close to the edge of poverty, but I have chosen to not be afraid of it and to be confident in my ability to stay out of the trap of poverty.

So, maybe for this part, you do have to be a little brave. If you or your family has fought hard to come out of poverty, I can see how this part would be scary. However, if you’ve made it into the worker class and saved up some money, have confidence in yourself that you can re-enter the worker class at some level if you so choose. It may be at a lower level than you were accustomed to, but just accept that that was part of the cost for chasing your dreams and experiencing real freedom in your life.

I understand. You don’t want to lose your place on the ladder. You’ve worked very hard to get to that rung and you don’t want to lose it, so you grip tightly. I get that. But don’t cling to the ladder just for the sake of the ladder’s position itself. Remember that you got to that rung for some reason. What was that reason? Do you still remember? You had something else you wanted to do and climbing that ladder was the way to achieve it. It’s not too late to try to achieve it. Even though you haven’t reached the top of the ladder, maybe you’ve reached a high enough rung that you can simply let go and try and achieve the original goal you had in mind. Climbing the ladder certainly wasn’t your only goal until you got onto the first rung, right? The ladder was meant to lead somewhere. Maybe you don’t need to climb the rest of the ladder to get there right now. That’s what is worth considering.

 

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All Your Files Are Right Where You Left Them

When Windows 10 update finishes, it says, your files are all there right where you left them. This is an ominous message to receive. After my stroke, I feel like my memories are all there, right where I left them. Yet, something is still different all the same. I am missing some sense of scale of time or when the memories happened. The memories are all there, true enough, but they are all smushed together, as if an elephant had stepped on a grilled cheese sandwich. My memory is that smashed sandwich. All the parts are there, but not quite in the same shape as I’d left them.

There are many strange aspects to having this new kind of memory that is different than before. I don’t know if I can do a good job describing it to you, but I’ll try. One of the weird things is that the feelings of a memory aren’t stored with that memory anymore. Maybe I lost that part in the stroke or maybe I never had any feeling about my memories in the first place. I tend to think it’s the latter since I was always pretty good at regulating my feelings. I probably did it all the time as a defensive measure. I doubt I relented for even a second. I think this is what people call “putting up walls.” My guess is that things happened that I remember  but, at the time, I had suppressed the feeling at the time. So while the memory got recorded, there was nothing to record when it came time to record the feeling. It’s not that my feelings got lost when my brain got scrambled, it’s that they never happened in the first place. I think that’s what’s happening here, but who can really know?

This is strange, because I find myself feeling a lot of things about these memories that still exist that I never felt before. Sometimes, they are welcome warm memories. Sometimes, they are a bit raw and sensitive. Maybe what I’m about to describe is how people normally feel about their memories and feelings and I was somewhat abnormal before the accident for having the ability to suppress that. Maybe the stroke “fixed” me in that way.

I find myself having some pleasant feelings and some unpleasant feelings of memories that have long ago been stored and processed. These are very old memories with no particular feelings attached to them, but now I’m receiving very much new emotions about these old memories that could easily have been forgotten.

One memory that got me to notice that all this was happening that was different than how my pre-stroke damaged brain had worked was of Beth’s feet. Beth was a girl I went to high school with. I think she was friends with my girlfriend in high school, but not really close friends or anything. More of an acquaintance, I guess. I don’t remember being friends with her, either. I don’t think we knew each other more than as classmates or acquaintances. Beth is my age now, around 46, probably. So, it’s strange that I have these feelings because of these memories of a high school girl from long ago as if it just happened recently.

What I remember strangely and inexplicably vividly are Beth’s feet. She went around high school barefoot most of the time. I think she owned shoes. She simply chose not to wear them most of the time. At the time, I recall, I thought that this was kind of dangerous and unsanitary. Imagine walking around your high school without shoes. Your feet would get dirty pretty fast with no way to wash them. Beth didn’t seem to care about that. She would prop her bare feet up on nearby chairs and things. It sounds way sexier than it was at the time which was rather mundane and somewhat unsanitary. Maybe there is something about writing that transforms the every day action into something more when that writing is complemented by an imagination. That is how my feeling about that memory has transformed. It’s as if it were stretched through the lens of writing.

Although Beth was a nice enough girl, I made no attempt to be her friend or to talk to her. Now, I have the feeling of regret that I didn’t do that. I don’t know anything about her at all, whether she was a nice person or whether she would like me. I just vividly remember the specific details of her feet and how she propped them up near where I sat in class. And in some sort of post-feminist way, now, I feel like it was a bit transgressive and bold of her to walk around with dirty bare feet like that as if it were no big deal at all. I now have the brand new feeling that I like that she didn’t care what people thought about it or even what I thought about it. She just did it and it was who Beth was. She was the one who walked around in bare feet, enjoyed the visceral feeling of it, and didn’t care what you thought. I find that really cool now in a way that I didn’t when I was in high school. And I feel some regret for not recognizing how awesome it was then and letting her know how I felt about it. Maybe that is not the kind of conversation you have in high school with a girl your age who is also your girlfriend’s acquaintance. It is kind of a weird conversation to have at any age, really. I don’t think I could have even had the same kind of feelings about post-feminist empowerment when I was a teenager. Such a person didn’t even exist yet. But now, here I am existing and responding to these memories as if they had just happened.

That is a lot of feeling to process based on a small detail from a long time ago. Imagine if you remembered a girl flipping her hair or chewing on a long strand of hair in high school in great detail and a flood of new emotions came over you because of these meaningless, yet precise and vivid details. It’s a strange thing, but not altogether unpleasant because I get to visit a familiar place, and time travel into myself from an earlier time. I feel like I am still me, and not my teenage me, experiencing these old memories. It’s rather fun in a way to experience old memories in an unexpected new way. But there is a certain sadness, too, to this kind of time travel. This is the regret I was referring to. I can feel different things about a moment long ago passed. But I can’t express myself in that moment to the people who are in the past that is but my memory of them. Beth is probably around 46 with kids and a husband and maybe even kids who have kids. Who really knows, right? The Beth I know from 30 years ago doesn’t exist anymore except in my memories. The Beth at the time probably would not have reacted too kindly to my idea of her dirty feet as a kind of post-feminist transgressive action. Or maybe she would. The sadness is that I can never find out because Beth from 30 years ago is gone forever, but it seems like I can because it’s like it just happened and I can still respond to it. But I know it’s not true. But for some reason, I still feel that it’s true. And that feeling causes the feeling of regret. It’s a strange thing. There’s no word to describe a kind of regret that you have about not having done something that exists only as an illusionary feeling in your memories. What do you do with such a feeling? Certainly, it would be silly to act on such a regret. But also, doing nothing doesn’t seem quite right either. But doing nothing is exactly what my former self would have done, almost certainly. I’m not very accustomed to processing feelings. It’s something I’ve been able to avoid doing for a long time. Like a pile of unwashed dishes, it’s just been piling up and haunting me and waiting for me to take some sort of action. Yet, I don’t. So, although going back in time can be pleasant and fun, there are some strangely unpleasant side effects to it. I’m not sure what to make of it. I think it’s still worth it, despite the strange negative feelings surrounding it all.

A different, unpleasant feeling that I have sometimes is the feeling that I forgot to feed Gracie or that Gracie wants to eat, but I won’t let her. Gracie was notorious for waking us up far too early to get us to feed her. Now, she had totally trained Jennifer to feed her early by waking her up at inappropriate times, but I was determined to be the boss and try to teach her to only wake us up at the right time, that is, she should be taught proper doggie manners. Needless to say, it never worked. At the time, I felt like I had a purpose, like I was carefully training a dog to be a better dog.

Now, I feel differently about it. My friend is hungry and I’m being kind of a jerk about it. She can’t make her own food because she has no hands. But my friend can talk to me and tell me that she feels hungry now. I feel bad and my eyes are welling up a bit just thinking about it now. It’s not her fault she can’t make her own food. She would most certainly make us both food if she could, I’m pretty sure. She’s a good dog. She means well, but she’s just a dog and has her limitations. But all she can do is tell us it’s time to get up and get food. “It is a good time to wake up. Don’t waste the day! Today is going to be fun! Let’s eat and make it a good one!” she seems to be saying to me now. But that was not how I felt about it then. Back then, I was like, you crazy dog, it’s 4 am right now. Wait at least an hour. And if Jennifer isn’t here to get up for work, please wait longer, too.

 

I’m so sorry, Gracie. I saw you only as a dog, a thing to be trained, and not as a friend. I miss you, my friend.

Maybe this is what normal people feel, all the time. I’m sorry also, to all you normal people, with all your normal feelings, for acting however I did at the time. I know now that I must have seemed very alien to you at the time. Maybe this isn’t how normal people process their memories and emotions either. I can’t really know for sure, but this is what I have to deal with now, and it’s all kind of new to me. Not being sure if what I’m experiencing and how I’m experiencing life is the same as everyone else. But I suppose that’s true of everyone. Maybe it’s a little bit more true of me because of my smashed grilled cheese sandwich type of memory that maybe other people don’t have it like that.

Or maybe there’s a simpler reason to this. I’m reading Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore which has an eerie, disconnected metaphysical feel to it. Maybe I’m just overly influenced by this book while I’m recovering.

Or maybe, what I’m hoping, is that what I’m feeling is not caused by Murakami’s writing, but is a reflection of the truth of it. Maybe I am experiencing something real he tried to describe in his novel in figurative form. I feel like my experience is something new, but similar, because it is not exactly the same as what he described, but similar in feeling. It is not the same. it is not a copy. But it could be an influence. I really don’t know.

I am going to enjoy it while it lasts. I may go back to being my old self and back to building walls. I don’t think it can be helped. That’s just how I was built from the beginning. It will be a little bit sad to change in that way. You could say that this event changed me in some fundamental way. What’s strange is that by taking something away, another thing is added. Now that my walls are taken away, everything is different. Things are a little scarier because even small things can be tinged with regret or sadness that I didn’t realize could happen. I suppose, like everyone else, I’ll just have to learn to cope with it.

 

 

 

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No, Seriously, What Happened?

In a more serious tone, this is much closer to what really happened as explained by a Registered Nurse. My account is from my memory, which in light of what happened as described below, is understandably fractured.

From Jennifer:

“The original bleed was worse than I had thought. Not because anyone told me it wasn’t bad, but no one said it was, and Ming’s neuro exam had been so stable.
The original bleed and subsequent swelling of the brain in response to the injury caused a pretty significant right to left midline shift. That is, a fairly good part of the right side of the brain was pushed over into the left side because there was no where else for it to go. This is a kind of herniation. Ming has had serial CT’s that have all been pretty stable. No new bleed and only mild increase in swelling but nothing surprising. It is difficult to see the clot as they are doing quick CTs without contrast and he said an MRI is best to evaluate the bleed. That said, they do not expect any of these things to change significantly (improvement wise) for quite sometime. It could take a month to see any improvement in the swelling on scan. But a worsening would be obvious, and goes without saying, bad.
Since admission:
they have been managing his blood pressure, oral or IV depending on the circumstance (as he has now been in and out of the ICU three times).
Managing the clot with anti coagulation therapy, first heparin drip and now lovenox injections (which neurosurgery said that now with therapeutic levels of lovenox there is no indication to switch him back to heparin)
Managing his pain as much as they can non narcotic but recently have had to resort to narcotics as the pain has worsened.
This brings us to the swelling and the event that happened yesterday evening. They have been using 3% sodium solution with a goal of pulling extra fluid from the brain tissue to help relieve the pressure that is causing the pain and deficits. The bleed and swelling are both contributors to this midline shift. Well, he can’t stay on this solution forever as it will affect his kidneys and it’s hard to keep all of his other electrolyte in balance with that much sodium. Because his neuro exams had been so stable (aside from the seizure activity) they decided to start weaning the sodium solution. Ming’s body decided it wasn’t ready. As the day went on he started having increased headaches and nausea/vomiting. Then he declined rapidly with a significant drop in heart rate and stopped breathing. They quickly intubated. Luckily the response team included the Neurosurg fellow. He said he literally watched Ming’s pupil blow in front of him. Not that this is good by any standard but the fact that they were all there meant quick response. They gave him a drug called mannitol, which does the same thing the Na does only super fast. With the lowered Na infusion throughout the day Ming’s brain started swelling again. Only this time instead of pushing right to left it pushed down. All of it is bad, but down is really bad because this puts pressure on the brain stem which controls your heart rate and breathing. The Mannitol acted quickly, Heart rate recovered and pupils returned to equal and reactive. They took him for another scan and it still showed no significant change.
They left him intubated and lightly sedated overnight. Another video EEG which they plan to keep him on through today. They woke him by stopping the sedation several times overnight and did neuro exams. Of course he tried to pull out the tube each time but they had his wrists restrained. Once calmed he would follow commands and then they would give more meds and let him go back to sleep. This morning they turned off the sedation and he woke up and they extubated him. He was doing ok, I happened to call 15min after extubation, sleeping but waking easily and following commands. She said he was not speaking clearly, just kind of mumbling. But that could be all the drugs.
She said the EEG overnight did not show any further seizure activity. They had started him on Keppra the first time around and have now added Dilantin. These can make you super sleepy especially since he got a loading dose last night.
I asked the neurosurgeon what he thought as far as long term prognosis and why they weren’t doing anything more to relieve the pressure. The surgical intervention has risks that far outweigh the benefit given his current condition. I can explain it to you guys if you want me to, but since right now it’s not an option, I’ll skip it. He felt this event tells them they have to go much slower in weaning him off the Na. All things considered he felt Ming could make a close to if not full recovery, but it wasn’t going to be quick or easy. He said he was looking at minimum of a year of rehab.
All of this to be figured out once he is out of the woods for everything else. “

Fox News Epiphany

Fox News Epiphany

I’ve come to an epiphany— The Fox News audience is a bonsai tree, and Fox News is this bonsai tree’s master.

Fox News tenderly cultivates and nourishes its own audience for its own pleasure and profit. Fox News carefully prunes the bonsai tree (i.e. its audience) in order to extract the advertising dollars that grow from the tree.

This tree must be forced to grow in a specific way that does not occur in nature because allowing it to grow free and unfettered would soon allow it to grow into a wilderness that Fox News would no longer be able to control. Should their audience grow into a wilderness, Fox News would not be able to package it into a palatable boxed product that they can sell to advertisers.

Commercial organizations other than Fox News, on the other hand, have to deal with this wilderness because they do not control their audience nor their market. Such is the devil in the free market— it is inherently free and unfettered!

It is for this reason (and not because of cancel culture) that many commercial organizations have decided to distance themselves from right-wing voter suppression policies— because their market demands it of them. Yet Fox News remains defiantly exempt from such market pressures.

Fox News is different from other commercial organizations, however, because they do not need to participate in the free market. Instead, they may cleverly choose to create their very own special market!

They can curate a special garden of their very own and grow just a single bonsai tree in the garden and tailor that tree for a particular garden that they wish to have. Thus, the tree and the garden and the master are one and the same.

For you see, the free market is wild and wooly and untamed. A lovely bonsai tree, instead, can be tamed by carefully pruning here and there and restricting its nutrients and the size of its roots. The reason Fox News is shallow is the very same reason the basin of the bonsai tree is shallow— to constrain the wild growth capacity of the tree itself. The entirety of the world that the bonsai tree knows or could ever know is strictly by the whim of the bonsai tree’s master. And so this is also true for the Fox News audience who is unwittingly fed an intellectual diet that intentionally stunts their growth in order for Fox News to package that viewer to a sponsor who pays Fox News for that finely curated audience of wealthy people.

Fox News and its audience and its sponsors are a closed ecosystem. Fox News has found a way to wrangle order out of the chaos of the free market by curating a bonsai tree garden.

I have no objection to this from a philosophical nor free market standpoint. They have found a perfectly valid exploit in human beings and have chosen to maximize profit from that exploit.

No. Rather, my objection is that Fox News is not satisfied with this small garden that they’ve tenderly raised. Their motivations are not for aesthetics as is the case for the bonsai gardener, but instead their motivation is (predictably) to maximize corporate profits. But their means of doing so is different than typical corporations who, in order to grow, must attract a more diverse clientele to its market because the market itself is diverse, and a narrow clientele such as the one that Fox News has cultivated, would necessarily narrow their potential market reach and thus limit their potential profits.

Because of this unique position in the market, Fox News is peculiar because they stand to benefit if the rest of the market and by consequence, the rest of the world, were less free and more similar to the curated garden of the bonsai tree. Rather than growing more diverse, Fox News stands to benefit financially if the entire world were less diverse and more similar to its curated garden. It is in Fox News’ interest to squash diversity and to prune wildness and to encourage an orderly and homogenous environment that is conducive to growing a specific kind of bonsai tree that continually bears the kind of fruit that has made Fox News so financially wealthy for all these decades.

And so in order to grow its market share while at the same time retain its present safe and successful business model, Fox News would prefer that our entire world to be most similar to the special ecosystem that it has fostered for its special bonsai tree.

And those preceding facts culminates in a special danger to our world. In a deadly cocktail, (1) the nature of human beings is that they are so easily influenced and (2) also that they are so easily and eagerly cultivated into pleasantly non-dissonant ecosystems that Fox News cultivates along with (3) the nature of Fox News as a widely broadcast information network, means that we are all in danger of being farmed by Fox News and placed into a tiny constricted basin for the rest of humanity’s existence.

Is it that far of a stretch to imagine that the weakness of most human minds is no match for the information/disinformation/misinformation behemoth of a network that Fox News is already/has already become? Now that I have clearly laid out the parts of the system and how they work, what alternatives would prevent Fox News from carrying out the above plan if they so chose? We have already seen the effectiveness of Fox News in cultivating human minds for profit and the myriad human minds who allow themselves to be molded and shaped in very much the same way as bonsai trees are shaped and molded according to their master’s wishes.

What will Fox News look like in 20 years? What will their audience look like? What will the world look like? Is the pattern I’ve outlined above a credible self-sustaining loop that Fox News may carry out for 20 years? Will other news organizations also adopt their own strategies for bonsai tree cultivation with the end result being that we are all separated by our own media ecosystems so that the big media corporations can each profit peaceably from the fruit from their little garden of stunted trees?

Story Engine first update 2021/04/21

I’ve been working on this Story Engine in stealth mode for several years now. As it turns out, it’s much harder than writing a 3D graphics engine. Basically, a graphics engine has a solid foundation of math and science that is stable for one to build structure on top of. Instead, a story engine has a spongy muddy foundation— because story and narrative content renders completely inside the player’s mind and not on the screen. Thus, you can’t easily capture it with science and math. Whereas you can compare CG rendering techniques to the actual real-life lighting and immediately identify the flaws to improve your rendering algorithms, there is no easy way to discover your flaws in a story engine in order to improve it.

This makes building an interactive narrative engine from scratch a very risky affair. You have to finish your whole game before you can see the flaws and mistakes, whereas in rendering algorithms you can look at particular rendering issues one at a time in isolation (for example, sub-surface scattering) and improve them independently and orthogonally of other rendering techniques. A narrative engine is judged as a whole by its finished content rather than the sum of its parts, so it’s difficult to build it piecemeal by perfecting independent chunks of it piece by piece. 3D render engines have strict separation of concerns throughout its entirety. A story engine is the opposite of that with everything dependent upon everything else by virtue of its very nature as a human artform. That makes it quite a challenge to build it coming from the experience I have had building 3D engines.

A graphics engine has pretty intuitive criteria for judging something to be “correct” or “incorrect” in terms of whether the code is working or not. You simply look at the thing on the screen and ask yourself if it basically does what you intend it to do. Sure, basic lighting techniques aren’t close to realistic lighting if you look with a trained eye. However, at a certain point, any rendering technique gets close enough and you’ll know fairly well that it will work for a large proportion of typical cases.

If it doesn’t look good enough, you can just keep going as you compare it to actual real lighting. You stop because you get diminishing returns for the amount of work required to improve how good it looks. And that will also be a function of what your competitors have put into the market and what the hardware is capable of. After a certain threshold in 3D rendering, most consumers will not notice the difference unless it’s rendering human characters too close to the edge of the uncanny valley. At that point you stop with realistic rendering styles and choose more abstract or cartoony styles and your art direction matters more than your render engine.

In the history of automobile manufacturing, this is akin to the point where top speed had become no longer the chief selling point of automobiles. Instead of top speed, the main selling points became such things as luxury and safety and aesthetics and other more “human” concerns. We are at this juncture in games, as well. However, AAA titles still must have outstanding rendering in the same way that for a while top speeds for automobiles were no longer a strong selling point, yet were still a prerequisite for selling cars for a long time even after driving 120 mph was not really something that anyone wanted to do or actually cared about to buy in a car.

Despite these challenges with writing the story engine, I believe that I have found some structural commonalities in interactive narrative design that can translate into a competitive edge over competitors’ offerings in the arena of interactive narrative design. I have, to the best of my ability, identified the areas in which my 3D graphics engine background allows me to recognize structure and patterns in narrative designs that can translate to a unique product that differentiates itself by virtue of the competitors not being able to politically nor financially afford the kind of random walk style of learn-as-you-go engine development that I can afford myself. This style of development for an engine is expensive and scheduleless that for a traditional studio is a nightmare to budget and staff. This is one small area where an indie one-person shop such as myself has a very minor advantage.

Because traditional studios can’t afford to wander and explore and to trust their people to come to some sort of profitable conclusion, what I am making will seem to come out of the nowhere from a nobody— namely me. However, what big commercial studios don’t understand is that I personally have always been overlooked by them throughout my career. Yet during all that time, I have been constantly honing and refining my skills as a game developer and programmer. So it is not entirely out of the blue, but has been a long time coming to fruition. I feel like I have reached a mastery of my craft and I am enjoying every day adding more capabilities to the story engine that still surprise and delight me.

Even so, I am still not ready to show anything. I keep getting closer and closer. But my instinct for what is a good cost-benefit slows me down because when I random walk into a feature that I think will save time or improve quality down the line, I work on it which halts my progress towards a showable demo. But it is progress in a different way. It’s very grindy, but I cannot ask (nor pay) anyone to do this grind for me. Only I know what the right balance of a good cost-benefit is to the features I’m adding. I have a pretty good vision and feel for the product now. At the beginning of this project, my scope was too wide and constantly expanding— because I am too curious about everything and all the possibilities are too intriguing to abandon for the sake of progress. I have a pretty good handle on the scope now, but alas I am still so easily distracted by cool features that I think will be useful later on down the line that it seems like I’m not moving forward.

As I do move forward, I must refactor and retrofit previous quick hacks to accommodate the more solid systems I put in. This seems like negative progress since the game content doesn’t make progress when I work on system features rather than adding content. But adding content on top of a shaky system just feels wrong, so when I come to a point where I find myself adding content on top of a system that could be improved, I can’t help but pause the adding of content to work on the system until it has a better chance of being production-ready.

This is quite a lot of info for a first update on the story engine. However, it is long overdue. I am not even a free range programmer anymore. I am tied to a place that allows me to spend more quality programming time on this thing now.

But I don’t like to talk or write about things until it’s done. I’ve had a history of people not believing me. So showing a finished concrete thing that demonstrates exactly what’s in a very abstract form in my head is how I’ve been able to communicate my ideas to other people. I’ve done this several times with 3D render engines. I believe that this story engine is the same kind of thing. It’s not really enough to talk about it in the abstract. It has to exist and function and be capable of doing things that you don’t see in other interactive narrative systems to be worthwhile to talk about.

Also, my personal problem is that I have way too many ideas that it distracts me from execution. So, it’s quite common to hear some crazy ideas from me that I’ll never get around to completing. And I’m kind of terrible at completing things because in some ways my imagination is too good— such that it makes them so concrete and real to me, that I lose interest in finishing it and making it real for everyone else besides me.

I seem to feel that if I can imagine it, it’s good enough because it’s real to me. Well, part of the exciting thing for me now is that as it becomes more and more real, I begin to discover more and more capability and freedom of expression within the system that I could not envision until I got to the point after I made it exist. So once it becomes real, it actually engenders more ideas and more imagination and that’s what keeps me going. That’s a key dynamo to keep me self-motivated that I had forgotten had occurred in the late development stages of my 3D engines. And that’s why I make this update now rather than after I’ve finished the thing which was the original plan. I have more confidence that I’m not going to give this up as some fanciful fever dream as I have with so many other ideas that have wandered into my brain and trickled out to die somewhere. I never ever had confidence that I would finish anything. It’s kind of a wonder that I finished any of those aforementioned 3D engines now that I have had a long couple of years trying to find self-motivation. But now I have discovered the secret— that late in development, this threshold can be crossed where I reach the turbo or dynamo stage where there’s enough solidity to all of the previous work that you can stand on top of the edifice of it all and see much farther out into the landscape and be excited about all of that unexplored territory to conquer.

So, I’m just grinding away at it, making it more and more real. I have gotten close to reaching my secondary goal which is to make the story engine so pleasant to create content in that I’m mostly writing content (which I kind of loathe doing) rather than writing systems. I think once I reach that point, it becomes worthwhile to show off to actual content creators who do this sort of thing for a living and ask them what I could do to really impress them and make their content creation more enjoyable. But first, I have to get to the point where I am enjoying writing content myself. I think once I reach that critical threshold, then I can begin considering polishing it up for other people to lay their eyes on it.

And so ends update 1. I don’t think I’ll make many more updates— I have lots more grinding to do. This pretty much sums up where I’ve been the last couple of years. I’m still going kind of slow, but I’m still going and haven’t gotten bored which I think is pretty amazing given my easily distracted brain.

-Ming
April 21, 2021

Trumpism is a Zero-Sum Culture

A zero-sum culture believes that in order for it to win, some other culture or persons must lose. Its inherent view of the world is that of a strict binary of predator and prey. If you are not predator, then you must be prey. There is no middle-ground in this world-view. Thus, it is preferable to be predator at all times, lest you be mistaken for prey by another predator. This is the central idea behind Trumpism. Cobra-Kai! Never show any weakness! Sweep the leg!

We know this view to be wrong through the lessons of World War 1 and World War 2 combined. But certain cultures will never let go of this idea. Trumpism seems to have captured the hearts and minds of those cultures under its political umbrella.

The domino effect1 theory of the cold war was seduced by this zero-sum idea of the free world versus the communist world2. It was a failure as a guiding political theory. Its predictive nature was nil, and its damage to America was considerable.

The greatest historical lesson from both World War 2 and the Cold War is that a culture that believes in the zero-sum game is doomed to lose to the cultures that help each other as allies in a positive-sum game. The success of the positive-sum game cannot be more stark than the difference between post-WW1 Germany and post-WW2 Germany.

Post-WW1 Germany was a zero-sum culture. But 1930s Germans had every reason to see it this way since the Treaty of Versailles punished them by saddling Germany with the costs of WW1 which directly “stole” from Germany and enriched the Allies during the post-war economy.

And this alienation of Germany after WW1 of course led to the humiliated and economically isolated Germany that ultimately gave rise to Hitler and Naziism.

Contrast that with post-WW2 Germany which is an economically and politically thriving leader in European affairs with over a half-century of peace, growth, and prosperity. That’s because true economic prosperity is not a zero-sum game; it is a positive-sum game. And post-WW2 Pax Americana is a direct consequence of that positive-sum game. If we want to make America great again, all we have to do is to dive back into that positive-sum game and lead it again.

Even during WW2, the positive-sum game of allies working together was the winning strategy over the predatory strategies of fascism and nationalistic expansionism.

And post-WW2, the allies working freely together during the cold war out-competed the communist-bloc allies who were forged artificially as a defense unit, but not as true cooperative allies. In 1989, as soon as the USSR allowed the freedom of the communist bloc countries to leave the coalition, they did so quickly with little hesitation because the USSR was predatory in their relationship with them.

And since WW2, global economies have become even more integrated and more efficient. So if it was clear that the world had become a positive-sum game during and after WW2, then it should be exponentially clear by now, in 2020, that modern national strength derives from greater interconnectedness and not from isolationism and brutal winner-take-all competitiveness.

Yet, that archaic attitude of vicious competitiveness is at the heart of Trumpism, which in itself is a relic of an imperialistic nation prior to WW2.

Trumpism is that ancient virtue of selfishness at the expense of others. It is outdated and wrong. It is a loser ideology. Nazi Germany tried it, and failed. Soviet USSR tried it and failed. America tried it in Vietnam and Korea, and failed.

But there is something still ingrained in our hunter-warrior cultures that exalts the zero-sum conqueror as a glorious hero. Winning in sports and war has only one winner and one loser, by the rules of the game. That’s why Trump’s favorite insult is “loser” because in his binary world, if the other is the loser, then he alone remains the winner by default. Winning and conquering is glory, and America is addicted to that feeling both in its sports and its war.

America is a fiercely competitive culture— in its love of sports and war. When you see the world only through the lens of winning and losing, then any third alternative such as “cooperation”, by virtue of it not being “winning”, is interpreted automatically as “losing” to you.

This is how to view the world through Trumpism. Everything is simplified down to the point-mass diagram of winning or losing on a single dimension. Anything and everything that is too complicated can be reduced to this single line and placed on the “losing” side of the ledger. There is nothing in the world that cannot be simplified to this single-dimensional explanation.

Trump, and by extension his supporters, cannot grasp the concept of a positive-sum world in which everyone can be winners. Such a multi-axis world is too confusing, so they simplify it down to the single axis of winning-losing.

This is why universal health care or climate change accords are so strange of a concept to them. Their thinking is that if they accede to any demands, then they are losing ground to someone, and thus are losing the war on their one-dimensional axis.

There is no way to explain the multi-dimensional aspects of complex topics to them that clarify how everyone can win in a net-positive-sum game. They will tend to reduce your argument down to the single dimensional axis of winner-loser because that’s what they’re comfortable with in their worldview.

In such a zero-sum worldview, they cannot comprehend the simple facts of a net-positive-sum economy such as that winning against a pandemic as a team not only saves lives but also will improve the economy faster.

The same concept is true of global climate change. We all win as a team if we maintain the environmental conditions that are best suitable for human industry and agriculture as we currently understand it. To do otherwise is simply making everything more difficult and more costly for every person as a whole.

When we’re all on the same team, we all win together. There isn’t even an enemy, except for ourselves and our inability to work together as a team. The zero-sum mentality prevents this crucial understanding about how the modern economy works. This mentality is what thwarts the pandemic response and will thwart the upcoming climate crisis response.

Rejecting immigration is also a foolish artifact of zero-sum culture. It is only looking at one side of the ledger to see what someone takes away from you. But it’s not looking at the full ledger of what immigrants contribute to America as a whole.

Considering that America has always been founded on the strength of its generous immigration, it’s naive and foolish to reject the tremendous boon that immigration offers to America. It should be obvious and clear by many objective measures that immigrants by far add a net positive contribution to America in many ways, both historically and currently.

However, to the zero-sum cultures under Trumpism, this everybody is a winner concept is alien and unnerving and unconvincing because they cannot tangibly feel it in their every day lives. And that’s because America is so viciously predatory in its capitalism that it’s impossible to feel anything other than paranoia that predators are out to get you.

In that environment, indeed, you would prefer to be the predator rather than the prey. And this is the feeling of strength that Trumpism affords these people, even if it’s an illusionary strength. It’s an illusion they can comprehend and tangibly and viscerally feel in their day-to-day economic interactions with American capitalism.

They are not wrong. American capitalism does indeed prey upon them. And it is precisely this feeling which makes them believe whole-heartedly in the zero-sum game of predator and prey. Viewed in that vein, can you really blame them?

Fundamentally, at the higher level view, the modern interconnected world is a net-positive-sum game. But on a smaller, individual level, American capitalism is predatory to such a point that it feels like a zero-sum game to individuals. Although some small amount of socialism could be the antidote to predatory capitalism, the populace have been made so paranoid of socialism that it regards it as yet another predator hungering for their paycheck.

It’s going to be very difficult to convince zero-sum mentality people that they’re not being preyed upon. Their unease about pandemic response, climate change response, and healthcare reform are all attributable to their rightful paranoia of being preyed upon by American capitalist interests in their current lives.

Ironically, they voted for a man who blatantly and openly preys upon them in Trump himself who is literally funneling their campaign contributions into his own interests!

That they should fall for such a blatant charlatan and con-artist is an indication of how deeply wounded these people are by predatory capitalism in America.

So how do we lift these people out of these grievous injuries to their psyche? For post-WW1 Germany, they turned to fascism to assuage their wounded psyches. We must not let that happen here.

Traditionally, government has been the foil to curb the excesses of capitalism. But corporate interests and government have been in alliance against the people for too long that the people can trust neither government nor corporations. The liberal Left is deeply suspicious of corporations and the conservative Right is deeply suspicious of government. Both have well-founded reasons to be suspicious!

The government needs to make a bold statement against the corporate control over American government in order to win back the people’s trust in the government. I don’t know if that’s even possible. But that’s the route away from fascism, difficult as it may be.

Corporatism is too strong of a force to be countered organically by the people. Only a government that is dedicated to curbing its excesses stands a chance of providing shelter for the people against predatory capitalism.

If people are hell-bent on framing the world as a simple zero-sum dichotomy, then I’ll present this one— either strengthen the government to curb predatory capitalism or else suffer the consequences of an angry fascist mob!

It’s important to understand how American culture is accustomed to view conflict in terms of a villain and a hero. Right now, we need to portray the government as the hero against predatory capitalism. What Trumpism has done is to portray a zero-sum world with fascist white supremacy as the hero and the net-positive-sum game of cooperation as the villain. We cannot allow this incorrect view to stand unchallenged.

Footnotes:

  1. The entire cold war hallucination of the domino effect is a zero-sum culture belief— If a country could only be either capitalist or communist, then a communist country would infect its neighbors, and capitalist countries would have one fewer ally in the world.
  2. This world view is terribly naive in so many ways. Capitalist and freedom are not automatically synonymous, as we can plainly see in modern China. Furthermore, there is the false dichotomy of either capitalism xor communism without regard to any third option— decolonization of countries that wanted freedom from British, French, or other European imperialism. This was the true reason for the spread of communism— it was the automatic choice if you wanted an anti-imperialist ideology that automatically came with other anti-imperialist allies.