On the Silk Road, Nick Bilton’s ‘American Kingpin,’ and the difference between being clever and being wise.

There are many forms of intelligence. A runner on our cross country team was a jittery kid with mediocre grades, but he was one of the most kinesthetically gifted people I’ve met. He was good at construction, auto repairs, skateboarding, climbing, running, jumping …

Our society holds these skills in low regard. We shower money and adulation onto klutzy math whizzes, whereas tactile learners are told they have “disabilities” like ADHD and are given potent psychoactive drugs to get them through each day at schools ill-designed for them.

I’m a klutzy math whiz, so maybe I shouldn’t complain. But, if this kid had been born fifteen- or twenty-thousand years earlier, he could have been a king. During most of human evolution, his talents would have been more valuable than my own.

I found myself thinking about the distinction between different types of intelligence while reading Nick Bilton’s American Kingpin. The protagonist – who went by Ross Ulbricht in real life and “the Dread Pirate Roberts” online – was clever but un-wise. And I don’t mean “un-wise” in the sense of antagonistically luring the wrath of government agents the world over – that’s ambitious, perhaps foolhardy, but it’s reasonable for an intelligent person to take risks while pushing back against oppression. Attacking the Death Star is never as easy as it looks in movies; it’s still worth doing.

Ross Ulbricht was un-wise in that he dogmatically clung to his philosophical stances without regard for new evidence. Ulbricht disliked the War on Drugs without considering that abetting the transfer of certain drugs could be as immoral as attempting to staunch their flow. Our world is incredibly complicated, full of moral quandaries and shades of gray. But Ulbricht treated real life like an undergraduate debate.

From Bilton’s American Kingpin:

[A man going by the username “Variety Jones”] was a loyal servant and companion. He had even talked about buying a helicopter company to break [Ulbricht] out of jail if he was ever caught. “Remember that one day when you’re in the exercise yard, I’ll be the dude in the helicopter coming in low and fast, I promise,” he had written. “With the amount of $ we’re generating, I could hire a small country to come get you.”

But even with that bond, fundamental disagreements over the direction of the site would crop up, and Variety Jones was trying desperately to steer [Ulbricht] in a new direction on a particular topic.

It wasn’t even up for debate in VJ’s mind that the Dread Pirate Roberts was as libertarian as they came and that he believed the Silk Road should be a place to buy and sell anything. There were no rules and no regulations, and as a result there was something illegal for sale on the site for literally every letter of the alphabet. Acid, benzos, coke, DMT, ecstasy, fizzies, GHB … but it was the letter H that had Variety Jones in a very difficult quandary. He was fine with everything before and after that letter, but heroin – he hated it.

“I don’t even have a problem with coke,” VJ wrote to DPR, but “H, man – in prison I’ve seen guys – I wish that shit would go away.”

Variety Jones was open about the time he had spent in jail. He told long and funny stories about people he had met behind bars and explained the ins and outs of getting around the system, including how cans of “mackerel” were the currency of choice in the British prison he had been confined to years earlier.

Instead of mackerel, many transactions in U.S. jails seem to be priced in terms of “Honey Buns,” shelf-stable sweet rolls often sold by commissaries for about a dollar each. In class one day my co-teacher J.M. mentioned that in Richmond, Virginia, two honey buns could buy you a roll of toilet paper or a blowjob.

The guys in our class were incredulous. “Two honeybuns for a blowjob? That’s extortion right there. Here it’s gonna run you one.”

“If that,” somebody added.

But they thought the price of toilet paper sounded fair. Apparently the guards are allowed to give out extra rolls, “but they’re not gonna give it to you unless you walk up to them with literally shit dripping down your arm.” J.M. and I once walked by a pregnant woman in the tank pleading with a male guard to bring her an extra roll.

And many of the men in jail in Bloomington – especially the ones whose actions would make you think they loved H – wish there was less heroin around. It seeps into every corner of their lives.

“My kid wanted some cereal, okay? A bowl of cereal for breakfast. So I got it for him, poured the cereal, poured the milk. I went to get him a spoon. First spoon I picked up, it had this big burn in the bottom. I threw it in the trash. And the next spoon too. I went through … every spoon I took out of that drawer was burned. I threw them all away. My kid ate his cereal with a fork.”

He was trying. But he slipped again and landed back in jail.

From American Kingpin:

Morally, though, Jones told Dread, “I don’t think I could make money off importing H. If you want to, I’ll offer all the help and advice you need, but I don’t want to profit off of it.”

. . .

Ross had never seen the effects of heroin in person … it still didn’t deter him from his belief system. “I’ve got this separation between personal and business morality,” DPR explained to VJ. “I would be there for a friend to help him break a drug dependency, and encourage him not to start, but I would never physically bar him from it if he didn’t ask me to.”

And yet, as harmful as addiction is, you could argue that the War on Drugs is worse. After all, the War on Drugs pushes transactions underground; makes drug concentrations so variable that it’s hard not to overdose; makes harm reduction therapies borderline illegal.

If Ulbricht had been incarcerated simply for creating the Silk Road website, I’d have a lot of sympathy for him.

But, as a devout libertarian, Ulbricht thought it was okay to murder people. Eventually, the FBI caught a computer programmer who’d been helping with the website. During the bust, a rogue FBI agent used that programmer’s credentials to steal a bunch of money.

How could [Ulbricht] let someone steal [$350,000] from DPR and get away with a measly beating? The conundrum lay in the reality that violence was not something Ross was used to, though it was something he believed in when absolutely necessary.

…

Finally, Variety Jones rang the final death knell. “So, you’ve had your time to think,” he said. “You’re sitting in the big chair, and you need to make a decision.”

…

“I would have no problem wasting this guy,” DPR replied.

And so Ulbricht paid another rogue government agent to murder the innocent programmer. He’d go on to pay for the murders of several more people. And felt justified all the while – in his opinion, lethal violence was acceptable when used to protect his property rights.

By the same reasoning, anyone would be justified in murdering Ulbricht when his actions caused someone else’s property to lose value. Because his website increased the availability of guns and addictive drugs, he had crossed that line.

This is the problem with libertarianism and anarchy – without a coalition government to monopolize violence, individuals take violence into their own hands. Bad governments are terrifying, but unhinged individuals are pretty scary, too. Ulbricht paid for murder and felt righteous the whole time.

Despite the juvenile, unreflective protagonist, American Kingpin is a charming read. Ulbricht was clever. Singlehandedly, surreptitiously, he did the work of a billion-dollar start-up company.

But he was wrecked by his success. If he was intelligent enough to build the Silk Road, he thought, wasn’t he also qualified to decide who should live or die?

On Alvaro Enrigue’s ‘Sudden Death,’ translation, and the power of narrative control.

A friend of mine spent a summer teaching English to Roma children in Hungary. She was a college sophomore; most of the volunteer teachers were under twenty-one. As you might expect from a gaggle of underage students on break from their elite U.S. colleges, these volunteers took advantage of the lower drinking age in Hungary to get uproariously wasted.

One morning, my bleary-eyed friend watched as her even-more-hung-over co-teacher asked child after child to translate a Hungarian word for him, only to have each break into nervous titters. Apparently he, the co-teacher, had jotted down the words of a toast during the previous night’s drinking. Then, as expected, he forgot what the phrase meant.

The toast was, roughly, “When you tip back your drink, empty it, because a half-finished drink is no better re-drunk than a half-fucked woman re-fucked.” The word he was asking children to translate was “re-fucked.” Ah, Stanford. A college for our best and brightest!

In Alvaro Enrigue’s Sudden Death (translated into English by Natasha Wimmer), the granddaughter of conquistador Hernan Cortés escorts her visiting betrothed out of the house on the night before their wedding. The nervous, soon-to-be-married man had spent much of the afternoon talking to his future mother-in-law about Cortés, but it seems he only dimly understood their conversation He’d lived only in Spain, but the mother-in-law’s language was peppered with American slang, legacy of the bloody conquest.

As they were approaching the door where they would part for the last time before they were married, [he] asked with sincere and perhaps slightly alarmed curiosity: So what does it mean to xingar, would you say?

Of course, Enrigue has let his readers in on the joke. A few pages earlier he presented a scene from the future mother-in-law’s own childhood. Like all children who have lost a parent, she was curious about her origins:

And do you miss him, [she] asked [her mother] … Who? Father. He was old and rich by the time I had him, the poor thing; he imagined that he was a real nobleman and tried to behave like a gentleman. [Her mother] laughed again, a bit hysterically, and said: He was a wolf in a fine cap. But did you like him? The widow opened her eyes wide and dropped her embroidery on her lap to underscore the drama of her words: Who wouldn’t like him; he was Hernan Cortés, so los xingo a todos. Or, in Juana’s polite translation for the benefit of the ladies and maids who didn’t speak Mexican Spanish. He fucked everybody.

Alvaro Enrigue’s Sudden Death is a lovely novel in the tradition of Moby Dick. An off-kilter, obsessive narrator presents a series of essays that cumulatively build toward a new perspective on the world.

In Moby Dick, Ishmael’s obsession is monolithic. Whales! Whales, and their killing. Whereas the themes of Sudden Death seem manifold: tennis, Cortés, conquest, execution, painting, the upheaval of the Reformation. Yet the novel is beautifully esemplastic. By its end, all these concerns are interwoven. Perhaps this is what octopus literature would be like: everything needs to be understood at once to be understood at all, and so Enrigue lets the disparate ideas tumble forth chaotically, almost haphazardly. His goal seems to be to immerse his reader with these thoughts.

In my opinion, he succeeds.

For the English publication of Sudden Death, Enrigue wrote new chapters about the vagaries of language (one includes the line “If you are reading this page, you are reading a translation”), which compliment a theme that I imagine was present in the original. Translators control our experience of stories; those who control stories, control the world. After murdering Walter Scott, a police officer composed an English-language story of the event. A translation. If a helpful citizen had not recorded video, the murderer’s translation would have shaped everyone’s perception.

Enrigue’s thoughts on translation are most clear in passages about Hernan Cortés, the man who destroyed an entire civilization.

Every second, 4.787 people are born in Mexico, and 1.639 die, which means that the population increases by an average rate of 3.148 Mexicans per second. A nightmare. Today there are more than 117 million Mexicans, and an unspecified number followed by six zeros in the United States. A rough calculation suggests that between 1821, the year the country gained its independence, and the second decade of the twenty-first century, 180 million Mexicans, more or less, have been born. Out of all of them, only Jose Vasconcelos considered Cortés to be a hero. His unpopularity is nearly universal.

Take, for example, an inexplicable organization called the Mexican National Front, consisting of thirty-two skinheads. The thirty-two morons who belong to the Front are admirers of Hitler – and even they explain on their website that Cortés was a bastard.

But Cortés couldn’t have done it alone. His inability to speak any of the local languages trapped him within a bubble of ignorance. He could function in the new world only with the help of pair of translators. Because no one spoke both Spanish and the language of the new world, every remark had to pass through a third language, Mayan.

One of Cortés’s translators was a Spanish priest named Geronimo de Aguilar – the priest had been part of a shipwrecked expedition, watched as his shipmates were sacrificed to the local gods, but made himself sufficiently useful that he was enslaved instead of killed, giving him time to learn Mayan. Then Cortés came and freed him.

The other translator was a native woman named Malinali Tenepatl – she had been born into royalty but was captured in a battle. The captors relegated her to the status of a sex slave, during which time she learned Mayan. Then Cortés came and … no, he did not free her. But life as the personal-use sex slave of an older conquistador was an upgrade over her prior circumstance, subject to general rapine.

Cortés was absolutely not ready for a diplomatic conversation that first morning in Mexico. They’ve brought gold, said the soldier, whose name was Alvaro de Campos; lots of gold. Then I’m coming, said Cortés; wake Aguilar. When the captain got out of bed, setting his feet on the cabin’s plank floor, there rose behind him – her hair in tangles and her skin a little bruised from the weight of his body – the face of the girl Malinalli Tenepatl, princess of Painala and courtesan of the cacique of Potonchan, skilled in arts no less valuable for being dirty. Time to use your tongue, Cortés ordered. She, whose polyglot brain was beginning to recognize simple orders in Spanish, asked in Chontal: On you or the gentleman? But seeing that Cortés was getting dressed and Alvaro de Campos wasn’t getting undressed, she understood that it was her services as a translator that were required.

During the invasion of Mexico, every message passed through three mouths. The conquistador had a relatively simple-minded goal – gold, and lots of it – as did the local rulers – peace – but the translators had their own agendas. With no one to contest their words, the translators could control the world.

This is what Moctezuma’s men delivered, no matter which chronicler is consulted:

A solid gold sun
A solid silver moon
More than one hundred gold and silver plates set with jade
Armbands, anklets, lip plugs
Miters and tiaras encrusted with blue gems like sapphires
All kinds of carved green stones
Harnesses, chain mail, doublets, shooting devices, shields
Plumes, fans, and capes made of featers
Strange woven garments and bed hangings

Cortés thanked them for the gifts and gave them:

The bracelet of glass beads

Since there was a notable imbalance between the two mounds of intercontinental memorabilia, he asked a soldier by the name of Bernardo Suarez to toss him his helmet:

A helmet

When the swap was over – the Mexica ambassadors exchanging slightly disconcerted looks before proceeding, either because Cortés’s gifts were rubbish or because they would have preferred a horse to sacrifice – Cortés made a small bow and turned his back on the imperial messengers. He was preparing to mount again when Aguilar informed him that the Aztecs had something else to add.

The main ambassador said [in Nahautl, the local language]: We bring you these valuable gifts so that you will give them to your emperor as a token of our friendship and respect; we hope that they please you and that you return to deliver them with all your men and all the terrible beasts you have brought with you; we hope that you never again set foot in our lands.

Malinalli, [who spoke Nahautl and Chontal], who by now had her own agenda and preferred to be the wife of an absentminded old man [Cortés] than to go back to being the sex slave of a cacique and all his friends, translated this as: We bring you these very valuable gifts but in truth they are as nothing compared with what lies ahead; we hope you like them; we give them to you so that you won’t even think about advancing farther with your terrible beasts because we know that the people are so unhappy with the emperor that they would surely join your cause and not ours.

Aguilar, [a priest who spoke Chontal and Spanish], seeing the young warriors and their clubs bristling with knives, said: They give you a warm welcome; they say that they bring you these gifts from the emperor of this land, who is troubled because his people are unhappy; they say that it’s best if you don’t help him, that in order to get anywhere you’d have to beat all the boys over there, and they are terrible.

Cortés said [in Spanish] that he’d think about it, and everyone seemed satisfied with his response.

The conversation between the Aztecs and Spaniards continued in more or less the same vein throughout the first stage of the conquest of Mexico, which ended with the previously described stay of Cortés and his men in Tenochtitlan. There are few better illustrations of how a whole host of people can manage to understand absolutely nothing, act in an impulsive and idiotic way, and still drastically change the course of history.

This last line hits especially hard for a U.S. reader during the chaotic reign of the 45^th. Those who control the narrative still control the world. Although many citizens in the U.S. speak English, Fox News and Facebook can trap people in perceptual bubbles just as effectively as language barriers.

Enrigue furthers his message with some intentional mistranslations of his own. He includes quotations from historical documents about the origin of tennis, but these are often manipulated to fit his story; the novel is rife with falsified detail. One chapter of Sudden Death reads, in its entirety:

On the Causes of Poverty Under the Reign of Henry VIII

And what say you of the shameless luxury all about this abject poverty? Serving-folk, craftsmen, and even farmers themselves show excessive vanity in diet and in apparel. What say you of the brothels, the infamous houses, and those other dens of vice, the taverns and alehouses? And what of all the nefarious games in which money runs fast away, condemning initiates to poverty or highway robbery? Cards, dice, foot-ball, quoits. And worst of all: tennis. Banish from the land these noxious plagues.

Thomas More, Utopia, 1516

My own Latin is very poor, but this passage of Thomas More’s Utopia seems instead to say, “games played on a table, games played with paper, games with a ball, a sphere, a disc; and when the money is gone, won’t their players become brigands?”

Or there’s the early (1556) English translation from Ralph Robinson:

Nowe bawdes, queines, whoores, harlottes, flrumpettes, brothelhoufes, flewes, and yet an other flewes wynetauernes, ale houfes, and tiplinge houfes, with fo manye naughtie, lewde, and vnlawfull games, as dyce, cardes, tables, tennis, boules, coytes, do not all thefe fende the haunters of them flreyghte a ftealynge when theyr money is gone?

Obviously Robinson manipulated the original text to further an agenda of his own, listing illicit sexuality as a deadly vice six separate times. But he does not consider the haunters of tennis to be notably worse than those who gamble on other games. Nor do modern translators (e.g. Robert Adams: “Look at all the crooked games of chance like dice, cards, backgammon, tennis, bowling and quoits, in which money slips away so fast. Don’t all these pastimes lead their devotees straight to robbery?”).

It’s not enough to say that control over a narrative brings power, or even to show it. Enrigue makes his point far more effectively; he uses this power.

I highly recommend that you read Sudden Death. Enrigue’s writing is erudite, comical, and cutting; Wimmer’s rendering is lovely. And the book was written for all the right reasons. From an authorial interlude near its end:

[This] isn’t a book about Caravaggio or Quevedo, though Caravaggio and Quevedo are in the book, as are Cortés and Cuauhtemoc, and Galileo and Pius IV. Gigantic individuals facing off. All fucking, getting drunk, gambling in the void.

…

I don’t know what this book is about. I know that as I wrote it I was angry because the bad guys always win. Maybe all books are written simply because in every game the bad guys have the advantage and that is too much to bear.

On theft and bullying.

We aren’t born equal.

We never have been, not humans or any other animals. Among species that birth in litters, the baby that leaves the womb largest has a lifelong advantage. In the modern world, where a baby happens to be born dictates its future prospects to a huge degree. Maybe it’ll be born in the United States, instantly reaping the benefits of citizenship. Or maybe it’ll be born into a war-torn nation, amidst strife caused by climate change… which was itself caused by the creation of wealth and prosperity for all those U.S. babies.

And we use our initial advantages to further tilt the scales. The largest mammal in a litter pushes the others aside and takes the most milk. The rich get richer.

The same principal holds true in astrophysics. The more dense a black hole, the better it will be at grabbing additional matter. Densely-arrayed galaxies will keep their neighbors longest: because empty space expands, the rate at which stars drift away from each other depends upon their initial separation. The farther away you are, the faster you will recede. The lonely become lonelier.

But we are blessed. Through the vagaries of evolution, humans stumbled into complex language. We can sit and contemplate the world; we can consciously strive to be better than nature.

We can read Calvin and Hobbes and think, “Hey, that’s not fair!”

It is perfectly natural for Moe to get the truck. He is bigger, after all. He is stronger. In the world’s initial inequalities of distribution, physical prowess determined who would reap plenty and who would starve. After all, not all territories are equivalently bountiful for hunters or gatherers. Now we have sheets of paper that ostensibly carve up the world amongst us, but in past eras raw violence would’ve staked claims. Human mythology brims with accounts of battle to gain access to the best resources… and we humans still slaughter each other whenever insufficient strength seems to back the legitimacy of those papers.

When the threat of contract-enforcing state violence in Syria waned, local murder began. And we lack an international state threatening violence against individual nations – inspired partly by the desire for resources, George W. Bush initiated a campaign of murder against Iraq.

Except when we’ve banded together to suppress individual violence (the state as Voltron), the strong take from the weak.

At least we know it’s wrong.

We’ve allowed other forms of bullying and theft to slip by. After all, differing physical prowess is only one of the many ways in which we are born unequal. If it is wrong for the strongest individual to steal from others, is it also wrong for the most clever to do the same?

From Cathy O’Neil’s Weapons of Math Destruction:

But the real problem came from a nasty feeling I started to have in my stomach. I had grown accustomed to playing in these oceans of currency, bonds, and equities, the trillions of dollars flowing through international markets. But unlike the numbers in my academic models, the figures in my models at the hedge fund stood for something. They were people’s retirement funds and mortgages. In retrospect, this seems blindingly obvious. And of course, I knew it all along, but I hadn’t truly appreciated the nature of the nickels, dimes, and quarters that we pried loose with our mathematical tools. It wasn’t found money, like nuggets from a mine or coins from a sunken Spanish galleon. This wealth was coming out of people’s pockets. For hedge funds, the smuggest of the players on Wall Street, this was “dumb money.”

…

… the math was directed against the consumer as a smoke screen. Its purpose was only to optimize short-term profits for the sellers. And those sellers trusted that they’d manage to unload the securities before they exploded. Smart people would win. And dumber people, the providers of dumb money, would wind up holding billions (or trillions) of unpayable IOUs. … Very few people had the expertise and the information required to know what was actually going on statistically, and most of the people who did lacked the integrity to speak up.

O’Neil was right to feel queasy – after all, she had become Moe. All the high-frequency traders – who are lauded as brilliant despite often doing no more than intercepting others’ orders, buying desired products a millisecond before anyone else can, and re-selling them at a profit – are simply thieves. Sometimes they are stealing because they are more clever. Other times, they are stealing because their pre-existing wealth allows them to buy access to lower-latency computer servers than anyone else.

In any case, Calvin would disapprove.

Thankfully, O’Neil quit stealing (although she doesn’t mention returning her prior spoils). After all, that is part of our blessing – we cannot change the past, but…

… and here it’s worth mentioning that Ludwig Wittgenstein was clearly incorrect when he wrote that “One can mistrust one’s own senses, but not one’s own belief. If there were a verb meaning ‘to believe falsely’, it would not have any significant first person present indicative.” Most physicists believe in free will and the mutability of the future, despite also knowing that, according to the laws of physics, their beliefs should be false…

… we can always fix the future.

(As a special treat – here is one of the most beautiful comic strips about opening your eyes to change.)

On fear.

We recently visited my brother and our Auntie Ferret in Chicago. Traveling with two young kids was difficult, but not impossible. N held my hand while we strolled down the sidewalk and we did the five-hour drives to and from the city while she and her brother were sleeping in their car seats.

When we returned to Bloomington, I excitedly regaled staff at the YMCA “play and learn” childcare area with our adventures: we went to Restaurant Depot! A grocery store where you can buy a six-pound tub of chili garlic paste! It was magical!

One woman shuddered slightly: “Chicago? I’m afraid to go there.”

Based on that statement alone, I’d bet large sums of money that she voted for Donald Trump.

Which isn’t such a bad bet. He lost the popular vote, and Bloomington is a liberal isle in the midst of southern Indiana, but… this is southern Indiana, after all. Trump garnered a lot of votes here.

And he campaigned on fear.

It’s not the best emotion, fear. It’s no hope, for instance. I’d say fear is far worse than whatever emotion best characterizes the recent Clinton campaign, even though I’m not quite sure what that emotion is… scorn? Which isn’t good, but I’d swallow my pride and vote for smarmy self-satisfied scorn over fear any day (as in fact I did).

We’re already seeing the awful consequences of fear: an executive order barring immigrants and refugees from a few (poor, Trump-property-less) countries that people here fear. Yes, it looks like children are drowning as families flee the civil war (sparked by climate change from our pollution). But what if those deaths are all part of an evil ploy by ISIS (not Daesh, not ISIL) operatives to infiltrate the United States?

The ban is misguided and heartless, obviously. But it’s hardly the worst that fear can do. Because fear inspires attack.

Which is a fascinating research finding. Terrifying, yes, given our current political situation. But still fascinating. You get it all here: mind control… senseless violence… and… killer mice?

Back in 2005, Comoli et al. found that hunting seemed to activate a pattern of neurons in the amygdala, the brain region responsible for fear in a wide variety of mammals, including humans.

So… what would happen if you suddenly activated those neurons?

Usually, neurons are activated only when we think. Our thoughts are patterns of neuron activations, and they cause further activations, which means we get to keep thinking, on and on as we learn and grow… until we die. Then the activations stop.

Each of these “activations” is a flow of electricity from one of the cell to the other. Neurons are lined by “voltage-gated ion channels,” and these let signals flow. Ions entering through one gate cause nearby gates to open. After a gate opens, though, it takes a while to recharge, which causes the current flow in a single direction.

And that’s how you can create a Manchurian candidate. Instead of hypnosis – conditioning Sinatra to flip when he spots a playing card – you infect neurons with new ion channels that open when you shine laser light on them. Make a recombinant virus, load it into a syringe, and plunge that needle into the brain!

The laser causes your new ion channels to open, and then, once they do, all the others respond, creating a flow of current. The signal becomes indistinguishable from any other thought. Except that whoever holds the laser is in control.

Wenfei Han et al., for the study “Integrated Control of Predatory Hunting by the Central Nucleus of the Amygdala,” took some mice and infected their amygdalas with these light-activated channels… and found that they’d created killing machines. In their words:

When a non-edible item was placed in the cage, laser activation caused the otherwise indifferent mice to immediately assume a ‘capture-like’ body posture and seize the object, which was then held with the forepaws and bitten. Behavior was interrupted immediately upon laser deactivation.

Light on… attack! Light off… whoa, what was I doing?

From Han et al.:

Generally, upon laser activation, mice readily seize, bite, and often ingest, non-edible objects, an effect that was modulated by internal state. Laser activation also abolished natural preferences for edible over non-edible items.

When left to their own devices, mice will hunt crickets (although it’s worth noting that “Consistently, by employing the cricket-hunting paradigm, [laser activation] shortened the time needed for mice to capture and subdue their prey. Captured crickets were immediately eaten.”), but the mind-control lasers cause them to hunt anything.

Well, almost anything.

Activation did not induce attacks on “conspecifics,” that is, their fellow mice. But human psychology seems to allow great flexibility in distinguishing between our own kind and others. When a mouse sees a mouse, it’ll know it’s a mouse. But we are so tribal that when one Homo sapiens sees another, the knowledge of shared humanity is often clouded over. Instead of recognizing a human, we might see a Syrian, or a Muslim, or an “illegal,” or a Republican, or a criminal.

A mouse won’t hunt another mouse, but we humans are great at attacking our own.

Of course, we don’t know for certain that humans would attack so single-mindedly if we activated neurons in the amygdala. We conduct only voluntary research on humans, and it seems unlikely that many people would sign up for an experiment involving the injection of viruses into the brain (which causes the infected neurons to become light-activated), intentional lesions between various brain regions (to isolate activities like hunting and eating – a quick slice lets researchers permanently uncouple those thought patterns), and euthanasia (to dissect the brain at the experiment’s end).

The mice used in these studies – or any other research studies, since mice aren’t even considered “animals” for the purposes of the Laboratory Animal Welfare Act – did not fare particularly well. Far worse than the impoverished or imprisoned Homo sapiens whose “voluntary” research participation is induced by the offer of a piddling amount of cash or less mistreatment inside.

But now we know. Inspire sufficient fear, trigger attack. We’ll find an other – edible or not, deserving or not – and try to kill it.

People who felt afraid voted for Trump… and he has been using his social media megaphone to inflame their fears further ever since… and if we don’t calm those fears, war is coming.

Terrorism is scary. But can we get a little more “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself” around here?

On Marlon James’s “A Brief History of Seven Killings.”

Bob Marley had such towering celebrity that, even today, he hoovers up attention & can make the world around him appear flat and undifferentiated. When many Americans think of Jamaica, they think of Marley and little else. When many Americans see somebody with dreadlocks, they think of Marley and little else (I’ve had countless Marley lyrics shouted at me while running, even though our similarities end at dreadlocks & a little beard). When many Americans talk about reggae, they often mean Bob Marley’s music, not the entire musical tradition.

Even in Jamaica, Bob Marley seems to command an outsize percentage of everybody’s brainspace. In Alan Greenberg’s vibrant documentary Land of Look Behind, many of the interviewees speak voluminously about Marley, about being like Marley, about the country needing a new Marley, at the cost of expressing their own personalities (although, two caveats here: I have no idea what Greenberg’s aims were when he was cutting his film, so maybe his interviewees would’ve come across as more unique individuals if he hadn’t selected only their thoughts about Marley, and the film was made shortly after Marley’s funeral, which might’ve put the dude in the forefront of people’s minds).

In A Brief History of Seven Killings, Marlon James brings into crisp focus the Jamaican populace that many people overlook because they’re so busy ogling Marley. Yes, Marley is there, and most of the action in the book is still pulled toward “the Singer” as though by a massive gravitational field, but James explores the lives, loves & losses of numerous (extremely numerous) others nearby. Addled cokeheads whose thoughts pulse in stream of consciousness with choppy linebreak layout like it was poetry. Ghosts who ooze through their killers’ homes hoping but failing to affect the world they’re cursed to observe. Poor kids speaking & thinking in slang, hoping for little more than a bit of safety, maybe a place to shower indoors so cops won’t roll up and toss ’em naked into a lineup in the middle of the street, forced to hump the road till their genitals are raw. And many arrogant white men from the United States, sure they’re the country’s saviors.

James wants his readers to hear more Jamaican voices, to know about the bustling world so often papered over by cartoon imagery of Bob Marley’s face and marijuana plants and lion-emblazoned flags. You get a sense of that from his interviews after winning the Man Booker prize:

“There’s this whole universe of really spunky creativity that’s happening. I hope [the prize] brings more attention to what’s coming out of Jamaica and the Caribbean.”

… and from ironic passages in his book, especially when there are CIA agents thinking things like

You have to get to the point where you know how the country works better than the people who live here. Then you leave. The Company suggested I read a book from V. S. Naipaul before coming here, The Middle Passage. It amazed me how he could land in some country, be there for mere days and nail exactly what was wrong with it.

James wants for readers to experience a more genuine version of his country. He doesn’t want for the only literature that people read about the place to be stuff written by outsiders who spent mere days there.

But, if you’re going to read it, I should warn you. The language is very gruff. Much of the book is written in stream of consciousness, and his characters think awful stuff about women, and even more viciously awful stuff about homosexuals. Homosexuality, the chance that others are engaging in it, the risk of other men (or dogs, or Satan) sodomizing males as punishment, seems always to be on the characters’ minds.

Which is, as far as I know, an accurate representation of Jamaican culture. Homosexuals are subject to horrific violence and persecution in Jamaica, much of it aided and abetted by the police. In the Human Rights Watch article “Jamaica: Unchecked Homophobic Violence,” you can read about several such incidents, including one in which a victim was unable to sign a subsequent police report because the officers told him, “You are a battyman. We don’t want battyman to use our pen.”

And the awful stuff about women in A Brief History of Seven Killings also seems highly representative of the real Jamaica. Modern music especially is rife with misogynistic lyrics. Young girls are targeted for sexual violence in huge numbers. So, yes, it’s good that James draws attention to this, that he delves into the thoughts of a woman being driven to the middle of nowhere by the police, sure she’s going to be assaulted & abandoned somewhere far from home… but it makes the book hard to read, so I thought I should warn you. And, to me, even grim passages from the victims go down far easier than stream-of-conscious writing from the perspective of the assailants. It can be very unpleasant to inhabit their minds, even for just a short chapter at a time.

So I’d like to end this post by recommending a piece of music: Spice, “Like a Man.” Feminist dancehall reggae? That seems like a good follow-up to some of the more vicious passages in James’s book. Her song is great, even though I wish she lived in a world where she hadn’t felt compelled to write it.

On child pornography & an odd coincidence in timing.

Reading about the prosecution of a well-known fast food spokesperson has felt unnerving to me. In part because it’s always sad to hear about the type of activity he was convicted of. And in part because that particular well-known fast food spokesperson is featured in my (unpublished) book & is described in dialogue as being in possession of “this, like, absolutely monstrous pornography collection.”

Which seems like it would’ve been a totally reasonable detail to include if the book had been published earlier, but I’m worried that it’ll be distracting now. Even though it’s now more verifiably accurate.

I’d vacillated on using his real name — in one draft from 2013 those passages instead discuss a spokesperson named Garret who works for a fictional chain called Treats — but later that same year decided the connection to the real world was sufficiently important, and my information sufficiently accurate, that I should include the public figure. Especially because publicity itself was a minor theme of those passages. Myths come from somewhere, after all, and publicity is the first step toward myth-making. It’s interesting to look at the sort of actions that lead to publicity in the modern world versus the long-departed eras traditionally featured in epics. It seems unlikely that Homer would’ve versified over a man who had lost a lot of weight by eating food prepared by the same cook for every meal.

And the discussion of pornography is important for my work — my original impetus for the project was as a framework to write about violence against women. Providing an alternate perspective from Bolano’s masterful 2666, for instance. And hoping that, by making the story more accessible than his was (the police blotter portion of his book is pretty hard to get through for a lot of people), I could expand the audience for those ideas.

I subscribe to the school of feminism that believes pornography itself, i.e. explicit depictions of human sexuality, is okay — but there is plenty of pornography that is not. The biggest issue is that pornography and sex do not seem to be substitute goods. You might think they would be, that either would result in satiation and so people would not seek both, but most research I’ve seen suggests that pornography increases people’s desire to experience the depicted acts. With smiling footage between consenting adults, that’s fine. It’d be nice if more pornography depicted conversation — I don’t know of any wherein the actors ask “What do you want to do next?” or “Is this okay?” or the like… instead the actors mostly groan or shout Saxon-derived language about what should go where and how — but, still, if the participants look happy and the depicted acts are gentle, I don’t think there’s a problem.

But despite being a gung-ho free speech liberal, I really dislike the existence of violent pornography… and child pornography even more so. Even if pornography is simply stylized to look childish but used all consenting of-age actors I think it’s inappropriate. Our world is already rife with abuse. Anything that might increase demand for that sort of activity seems pretty evil.

Which I tried to express in my book… but now I’m worried I’ll have to rework those passages.

On Charleston, the morning after.

tl;dr — This is horrible. To anyone who lost someone yesterday, & to anyone who finds the world a little more terrifying after seeing this in the news, you have my sincerest condolences, although I know they count for very little. I’m sorry.

************************

Given that I’ve written several posts about race & racial conflict in this country, K thought I should write something about the most recent tragedy in the news. But even though this particular hateful, deranged individual couched his hatred in racial terms, this, to me, is very different from the police-perpetrated murders that have been in the news recently.

Recent episodes involving the police reflect institutional biases — those stereotypes, and the ease with which juries, review boards, fellow officers et al. can be convinced that actions were justifiable reveals persistent unfairness in our country. Although “unfairness” is a rather bland word for inequities that put people’s lives & their loved ones’ lives at risk: I still think Charles Blow’s piece about his son is terrifying. And I think it’s terrifying while reading it from within the safety of my white skin, and with a daughter who is even paler than I am… blue eyes, even. Thinking about how it would feel for a black parent to read his article, or to watch any of these recent cases, or to follow the Trayvon Martin case, or to learn U.S. history, is gut wrenching. I am lucky that I don’t know how it feels, and instead know only that it must feel awful.

Despite the recent press about race in the U.S., there’s still a lot more that needs to be said, obviously. We’ve switched from barely talking about these issues to discussing them a little, but that doesn’t mean these injustices are being given the full weight they deserve — “better” is very different from “good.” Even with the little bit of press some of these issues have received, a lot of the underlying economic issues are still not being discussed. Wealth begets wealth, and the initial prosperity of this country came from sin. Everyone here who enjoys good fortune today benefits from & is thereby marked by an evil whose reverberations have not ended & will not end on their own.

Black students are still under served, still kicked out of schools for infractions that would incur lesser punishment if committed by their peers, and are saddled with the additional psychological burden of knowing they’ll be treated unfairly in this country, while in school, while applying for jobs, while trying to walk safely home.

That said, from the initial news reports I don’t think it’s helpful to lump this newest tragedy into the same category of horrors as all the police abuses — as was K’s initial reaction. Because no matter how far we come as a society, there will always be crazy people. Brains are fascinating, poorly understood organs, and there is a lot that can go wrong. A crazy person might latch on to any number of groups as being worthy of hatred: blacks, Muslims, women, Democrats — there have been shootings that reflect all of these recently, right? It’s perhaps easier for crazy people to latch onto groups for which membership is visibly recognizable as targets for hatred, but this case doesn’t seem fundamentally different from those who blame gays, or commies, or Jews, or… for a society’s ills.

I think the biggest issues here are, our country needs to do a better job addressing mental health, and we have to recognize that the scale of these tragedies is proportional to the type of weaponry we consider it to be a citizen’s God-given right to buy. We will perhaps never prevent every hateful person from attempting murder, but a hateful bigot with a knife can effect much less damage than a hateful bigot with a semiautomatic handgun. And, now that guns exist, we can never expunge them from our society, but we could make them harder to acquire & make the legal repercussions of ownership steeper.

Which won’t help anyone who lost their life or a loved one yesterday, or anyone who now feels a little more terror in their day to day life after seeing this happen. You have my sincerest condolences, although I know they count for very little.

Frank Brown Cloud

Justice through words.

Tag: violence