Archive for the ‘Soapbox’ Category
Hacks
My frustration with the hack culture here within the Oxford bubble has reached new heights in recent weeks. A hack is someone who gets involved in either student politics and student journalism with the primary aim of personal advancement; while they may have subsidiary interest in whatever it is the organisation they have joined does, they are generally willing to sacrifice effort they could put into the organisation if it serves their purposes. For example, they might join their JCR’s committee as a stepping-stone to greater power, neglecting the rest of their duties in that post just as soon as it has got them a ‘better’ job somewhere else. The greatest frustration is how to tell hacks from non-hacks when figuring out who to put effort into, who to rally behind and who to speak well of. It’s made harder by some hacks becoming alright when they get to the ‘pinnacle’ of their ‘career’ in Oxford; they might then start caring about things that matter once they’re comfortable. But figuring out when this has happened isn’t easy.
The thing that I’ve only really realised recently is just how much the main hack-infested organisations in Oxford link up with each other. Perhaps the biggest are the Oxford University Labour Club (OULC), the Oxford University Students Union (OUSU) and the Oxford Union (the Union), a debating society. My thought in the past was that they were fairly independent. There were the Labour hacks and the OUSU hacks and the Union hacks, with JCRs being trodden on by all three groups in their quests for advancement, but now I’ve realised that people tend to bounce back and forth between the three, sort of jumping up between three or four ladders. The only independents seem to be the journo-hacks who write the (abysmal) student press and don’t seem to get involved in the politics they write about directly, but this could be another illusion on my part. As I say, I’ve realised major links between the three lately. I always knew that OUSU has at least three sabs each year who got there because OULC masterminded their election campaign, but what I didn’t realise was that OUSU is basically under OULC’s control as it has many many elected positions, and the majority are filled with OULC folk. JCRs mean that we have a very weak students’ union in Oxford, with a very low election turnout, and this is capitalised on by the likes of OULC. Okay, I thought, so OUSU and OULC are tied up, but hopefully the rather less progressive Union is a separate entity; hopefully the OULC hacks have at least some standards and don’t throw their lot in over there. Some hope. At an OUSU campaign meeting this week where the best of OUSU’s campaigners met (and they really are quite good at fighting the university and its colleges), the chatter before the meeting began, from those there who I most respect, was concerned with whether or not each of them had voted in the Union elections happening that day.
This is not to say that there are not good people involved in these organisations too. My JCR job this year is to liaise with OUSU and form a link in the JCR-OUSU-NUS chain, and there are others like me who sit there getting frustrated and just try to improve things in our own little domains, with no thought of advancement. But we end up falling victim to hacks who try to muscle in on projects; we end up disenchanted with it all. At the start of this term I was very enthusiastic about OUSU and wanted to promote it within Balliol and work hard to counter its extremely low reputation there, but my impetus has all but disappeared as I’ve realised just how many of the people involved are there for the wrong reasons.
Time for two examples to attempt to illustrate my realisations. The first is a hack we’ll call X who I met at the meeting for JCR OUSU reps, so, all the people from across Oxford with my current job. He had a lot to say and a lot of it didn’t seem too relevant to me but there was nothing to complain about, even though my antihack-senses were tingling slightly. Then a few weeks later he stood for a minor position at OUSU that no-one had stood for in the real elections. Here come the divided loyalties which evidence his concern with personal advancement: I’m pretty sure that the position entitles him to a vote at OUSU Council, the place where JCR reps like me and the OUSU officers get together to make decisions. But you can’t have more than one vote. So his JCR’s vote (I have one of Balliol’s three votes) and his OUSU exec vote now clash and he can only use one, so he can’t do both jobs properly. A friend of mine in a similar situation resigned her JCR job as soon as she got elected to her OUSU one, in order that her college could continue to be represented properly. But, assuming I am right that the position X ran for does give him a vote, X clearly doesn’t care about either of the positions all that much and is keeping both to milk them for all they’re worth. The icing on the cake was when he came and sat down again after the hustings, and flipped open his laptop (obviously it was an Apple laptop; they often outnumber other makes in Oxford), and opened up the OULC website and looked at its committee page. There was his face smiling back, with a reasonably important-looking position. No wonder he won. The room was full of OULC people ready to vote him in.
But there’s more. As I mentioned earlier, it’s been Union elections this week and mysteriously my copy of the manifestos which I got pidged, and my neighbour’s, appeared on our kitchen table with no intervention from either of us… very odd. Flipping it open, guess who’s face stared back, standing for the Union’s governing body? That’s right. Then yesterday I learnt from someone else that X is also standing for OULC’s top position, co-chair, for next term. He can’t possibly do all this stuff at once without doing some of the jobs rather poorly, and it’s very disappointing to see that attitude.
I have another example of a Balliol friend, Y, who I watched pace around the front quad from the library window for most of yesterday as I battled through a challenging article on the problem of induction. He sat on the bench and messed with his laptop, and occasionally he would spot people he knows as members of the Union to go and ‘hack’ them to vote for him in the elections. That’s basically what they come down to. How good you are at getting mass numbers of people to go and vote for you. Y attempted to hack me multiple times and while I like him, I decided to stick to my principle of never voting in elections that are such a farce, and when I’m only voting for the candidate who asked me because I happen to know them. It’s all so very pathetic and such a waste of people’s time.
So why do hacks hack? It’s definitely a pre-medidated thing because they seem to arrive at Oxford and get right to it. If I wanted a hack career I wouldn’t stand a chance, because I’ve been here for a year and a half already; you have to get going right from the word go. Some of them genuinely enjoy debasing themselves in this way; Y definitely does and tells me so. And perhaps some of them excuse their desire for power and prestige with the thought that they can achieve some positive change by getting these positions; as I say, some hacks cease to hack once they reach the top of whatever ladder they are building for themselves and start to do good stuff. But the main reason is probably that they want to be politicians and (in the case of journo-hacks) journalists, and since they’re in Oxford, that’s what’ll happen. The coalition cabinet has more ex-presidents of the Union than women; people I know involved in student journalism are going to walk out of their degrees straight into the offices of national newspapers, for which they already write for. Some of them are very competent and this is good. But when you look at the overall state of these student organisations and realise the extent to which they feed the ruling classes and the press of this country one worries very much for the future.
The reason it upsets me is that I have a positive view of student politics in general and what is can achieve. I pour myself into my JCR to help it achieve things, and I enjoy giving something back to my immediate community. I’ve written before about how valuable I think JCR-style organisation of people to do stuff can be. But anything above that level ends up dominated by people out for themselves and that leads to projects being short-term and under-achieving.
One final note about the Union in specificity. There is the hacking side but there is also the technical debating side, which is autonomous and meritocratic. I wish I’d realised that these things were seperate and got involved when I came to Oxford because I used to enjoy debating and I think it’s a good way of improving how you think. And as I say it’s separate from the front-of-house of the Union: in order to advance you have to win stuff, and that’s that. The rules are carefully set up for a meritocracy. But I wasn’t brave enough to fight through the hacks to reach this and I regret that.
140 characters isn’t really enough
When I first used Twitter, and when the main use of Twitter was the now-marginalised “keep up with what your friends are doing” rather than “just type whatever springs to mind” combined with “big up consumerism in a whole manner of ways not limited to communicating with your favourite celebrities in a banal and barely literate fashion”, I was a big supporter of the simplistic and limited functionality of Twitter, and I was a big fan of the 140 character limit to messages as something valuable for more than just its compatability with Twitter’s connection to SMS (something I was also a strong supporter of, despite owning an iPhone at the time). To avoid me using lots of past tense, let’s stick to the community of people I follow on Twitter, that is, people I know IRL who tweet about things they’re up to and thinking about; in this case, then, the 140 character limit forces you into a position where updating Twitter takes seconds, and reading it is also swift, so it can fit around those activities that you’re tweeting about rather than becoming an activity in itself which takes up time and thus becomes impractical to update with much frequency. 140 characters makes Twitter take up less time, so you use it all the time, and its function as a way of keeping up with activities and thoughts is best served.
At least, this is what I used to think, in one form or another. I’ve been thinking lately that the 140 character limit isn’t enough to be able to express interesting things, and expressing non-interesting things is just being unhelpful to your friends by using up their limited brainpower on things that aren’t, well, interesting, and I think that a good starting point for friendships, excluding times of emotional distress, might be to share interesting things rather than non-interesting things. But writing this is opening a questions about the words I’m using like bamboo shoots in my head and so I’m going to back away slowly from this particular point and leave it as assumed.
What I really want to talk about is whether or not Twitter is actually much good at expressing interesting things, and over the past few weeks I’ve been coming over to the opinion that it isn’t. I’ve got an example from this afternoon that got me writing this post. After five and a half hours of clearing my RSS reader’s backlog, and then transferring the feeds semi-manually (learning how to use Emacs regexps being the automation) into a new reader, I was headachey and feeling a bit burnt out so I went to my window and threw open both sides of it. My window here in Oxford is a small rectangular cushioned seat, set into the corner of the room, with three glass sides and one open to the room, and the two shorter sides (neither of which face the room – I’m hoping I’ve given sufficient information here to allow you to imagine the scene) can be opened. Breaking my usual habit of only opening the left window, as I say, I opened both and given the rain and wind this got everything blowing about and was a good way to refresh myself a little. But then I had this strange compulsion (reminds me, tangentially, of this) to go tweet about the fact that I felt really good to have the cool air wash over me after many hours of tedium and distress (because I was having to skip over lots of interesting-looking stuff). And then I thought, how can 140 possibly get that in? Someone reading that miles away as just another tweet in his or her stream is not going to get much of an idea of the scene, and unless it was a bit of an in-joke among my social circles that Sean likes to stand in the rain (and I’m pretty sure it’s not atm), it’s not really going to have any impact on them; there’s no way that I’m going to be able to transfer my experience to them via the 140 characters and thus I’m not only wasting my time by trying, but also I’m missing an opportunity to try to a better job of transferring that experience, if it’s worth transferring.
This last point is the key issue, because we all know that social networking is, so much of the time, all about time-wasting 
I don’t think that there was anything epiphanic about my experience at the window this afternoon, but suppose now that there was and I really did want to share it. By tweeting it, and not instead sitting down to write about it on something such as this blog or in a more limited form over on my tumblelog, I feel like I’m putting to bed any responsibility I might have had to myself or others to share it properly: Twitter is almost an excuse to be lazy about something that could actually be turned into a valuable expression of ourselves and our lives and the fact that we might want to share these with others in order to enrich our own lives and those of our friends. If we drop down to another level of cynicism and (anti)-buzzwords, it’s more consumerism, quick fixes and instant gratification that, ultimately, isn’t as good as doing things properly and taking our time.
In this post and in a recent one about my volte-face wrt the editor wars, I’m actually writing from a position of experience and knowledge. I’ve experienced the Vim way of doing things throughly and knew enough about Emacs to make an informed decision; in this case, I know enough about Twitter and about blogging to have come to the view that what I want to get out of being social on the Internet is better served by cutting most of the stuff from the former, pulling out the valuable and under-expressed things and then expanding them out into the latter. So I’m going to try to defeat the compulsion mentioned earlier to post things on Twitter in order to get them out of my head and use that as the way I stop worrying about them. If it’s interesting I’ll try to find the time to write about it, or if I haven’t got that time or inclination yet it really is something worth sharing, I’ll tumblelog it, and if not and yet I really want to type it out somewhere, I can always just slap it into my diary/journal, a huge text file which I add reams to each week. Because actually most things in my life are boring, and those things that aren’t boring are far more complicated than the English language will let me (attempt to) express in 140 characters.
Just a quick note about my Twitter account – I’m not going to get rid of it for two reasons. Firstly, purely as a protocol for chat it’s often very useful for certain individuals who don’t know how to use e-mail or instant messenging, so it’s useful to have around. Further, for a lot of friends, inter-personal communication has been replaced in this day and age by broadcasting snippets. They’re not going to write to me or ring me up or have a conversation over IRC or IM or something, so if I want to see the interesting stuff they’re doing I’m going to need Twitter to have some sort of glimpse. I really, really do not blame anyone for the Facebook broadcast culture being how they go about their social lives because it’s had me too at various points and of course there are arguments in its favour, and I’m not just going to isolate myself from people just because this is how they express themselves – but I’m trying to move away from it myself, to see what results.
While I’m here I should write about something else that’s been brewing for a little while. For most of my first year of university I was avoiding updating this blog about my first year/terms at university and so I ended up posting writings to my tumblelog instead. Ambiguity over the purpose of these two WordPress installations has been growing and I would like to make the distinction clearer. One should be able to decide what sort of Sean-stuff one wants and pick the appropriate blog, and finally in the past fortnight or so I’ve come to a conclusion on what I want each of them to be, supported and extended by the considerations advanced in this post. I’ve got a number of technical changes, which will involve moving some posts tumblelog -> blog, in the pipeline, but these will be time-consuming and they’re not happening any time soon. In the meantime, I want to establish as habits the following changes to where I put stuff, as these are more important than any restructuring and it would be nice to have things being used properly from day one when I eventually find the time to make those changes. An additional factor motivating all this is that del.icio.us is going, and I need a replacement (why did I trust my data to the cloud? why? grr).
The essential distinction between the two blogs can be described crudely as one of length, but I say that only because length is in the case of my writing a direct consequence of making a decision to meta-write, that is, to think about what I’m writing with the suggestion that it might be read, rather than just hammering keys. That doesn’t mean that this blog has to be perfect, but it is supposed to be my extended writing: selecting a title and then trying to lay out some thoughts and/or information in order to convey myself to someone else. But while posting on this blog will have a very narrow remit, I’ve got a lot of things that I want to put on my tumblelog. I’ve got the “expanded tweets” that I discussed above (This remind me of an issue that I haven’t looked at: the instantaneous nature of Twitter, and what value this might have, or otherwise – I’m not sure what I think on this atm so I’ll blog about it some other time.), and I’ve still got interesting little things found throughout the day – videos and pictures, and links of particular note that stand out from the usual stuff that I might slap into del.icio.us. Then I want to have two types of posts that group together links, in bullet-point form, that I’ve found interesting: one called something like “Today’s Bookmarks” which is things that I would otherwise post to del.icio.us, and another called “Today’s Articles” which is stuff that’s come to me through RSS that I found interesting. I dunno though; it might turn out to be better to combine these two into one daily set of links; I’ll think about this.
I’ll probably start this tomorrow, depending on how much time I get to read web stuff, for I have a busy day planned. In writing the latter half of this post I’m really seeing the value of my extensive notes on anything and everything that’s come to mind. I planned most of this on the 8th, and wrote a huge list of bullet points, and being able to dig it out to make sure I don’t miss stuff is useful because I was basically having the same thoughts as I had today without realising it, and it’s good to be more aware of how your thoughts flow.
Designed by Apple in California
The number has transferred, and the ordeal is over: I am finally free of my iPhone, which I have used for about twenty-three months, the last ten of which saw my frustration with the device grow and grow. I’m now ready to move on to my nice, simple, £22 Samsung GT-E2120, free of Apple’s twisted world of consumption for now. Monetarily, I haven’t done that badly out of it – I’ve had the phone for two years and, subtracting how much I am selling it on for and the value of the free data I got when I bought it, it cost me £130 for those two years. But why this volte-face? Why have I gone from someone who was willing to pay out such a high initial expenditure to get hold of the thing to someone who is now celebrating his freedom from it? This is worth exploring.
There are straight up, pragmatic reasons why the whole enterprise was frustrating. iTunes, the software one is forced to use, is really, really terrible: it is slow at the simplest of things, and my opinion is always soured by the fact that it has hosed my music library a couple of times when I hadn’t done anything out of the ordinary. iTunes is representative of the whole Apple enterprise: we want to design software – nay, electronic environments – for you to do a couple of tasks really well that we are happy for you to do, but we’ll make you do them all our way, with our ‘superior’ flavour dripping from everything. When you want to do something else, you’ll need to jump through some licensing hoops so that we can control you and make sure that the software you write is acceptable to us – a friend of mine has described to me the mind-boggling complexity of the process one must go through to develop for the iPhone and related devices. Then we’ll charge you way, way more than it’s worth for all of this because we put it in pretty boxes, and because we’ve made your friends go starry-eyed with admiration for those few features we wrote that they like, so they can help assimilate you into the collective.
I jest, to an extent, and it must also be noted that only some of these remarks apply to the iPhone; I do not know much about development for Mac OS X. But there is something very, very sinister about the whole affair. Companies exist to eek money out of the population, as many have heard me rage before, but in general technology companies tend to do this in one of two ways: they produce really decent products for those in the know – people who know what technology is worth or who, such as me, know people who can advise them about hardware – or they produce really rubbish products that they foist on the ignorant masses who just buy buy buy because they, blamelessly, have no idea what a gigahertz is, and wonder if it’s the rating on a lightbulb or something. This is the fault of our terrible information technology teaching in schools which leaves everyone just ready to open their wallets, and people suffer. But with Apple it’s something much worse: both groups fall to the seduction. The geeks tell themselves that the software makes it worth it, while they are drawn merely by the appearances – both the physical beauty and the good show put on by those few features that work really well.
Just look at me if you want a prime example. I bought an Apple laptop, telling myself it was okay because I was going to put GNU/Linux on it. I didn’t know as much at the time about these things as I do now, and I failed, though this may have been due to the specific model I had not being very well supported. Then the horror of what I fallen into crashed in on me; I am feeling slightly nauseus thinking about it now. I was able to send the laptop back, but at that point I wasn’t sure I was going to be able to. My stomach somersaulted as I imagined being forced to spend my university years with Mac OS X. I was shaking and very close to tears at my stupidity. I did manage to send it back in the end, very fortunately, and now I have a lean, mean GNU/Linux laptop configured for freedom, control, power and elegance – but it could have been disaster. And then of course there’s the fact that I bought an iPhone and had that for two years, seduced once more by the same old tricks. I’m considering buying a replacement keyboard from Apple at the moment for various reasons, but I would like to venture that that’s not quite the same thing. A keyboard isn’t an opportunity for Apple to worm its way into your life, and in my view a classic Model M beats it in any beauty contest.
I should be more careful when dishing out criticism on this topic: in reality, Apple is no different from all the rest of the corporations. As Stallman has said, the Free Software movement isn’t competing with other companies because it’s offering something completely different that none of them can really claim to be able to offer, which could be said to carry the implication that they’re all as bad as each other – and I think that would be correct. There are other, far more positive reasons why I have decided to downgrade my mobile phone so much, why I no longer have a smartphone at all, nevermind the fact that I moved away from a particular model. My new phone is technically capable of e-mail and web browsing, but one would be a fool to really try and use it for that. It’s a 2G device that is great at making phone calls, texting (my iPhone SMS database contains 7812 texts – I didn’t think I sent that many, though I guess compared to most people nowadays that’s tiny for two years), playing MP3s and tuning in to FM radio; I wanted something with the latter two features as these are parts of the iPhone I get genuine use out of. But why did I feel the need to downgrade? I could have switched to an alternative smartphone platform, with a less restrictive development ethos, and continued on much as before but without the drawbacks just described.
The answer is that I realised just how little I was getting out of owning a smartphone, and just how much, in a sense, it was taking from me. There are many occasions in modern life when someone pulls out a smartphone and solves an otherwise annoying and time-consuming problem with it: they might find some directions, send a picture to someone else who can then provide information, look something up that sorts out an argument. These are useful moments, but they are accompanied by so many wasted ones. Many a time has my sister looked at me in frustration as three-fifths of her immediate family pull out smartphones and stop talking to each other in a coffee shop or something. Many a time have I checked the latest tweets from people I don’t really care about, as an easy way out of trying a bit harder to maintain my concentration in a lecture. Then there are the organisational features. Someone in Oxford once remarked about how I was entirely dependent on the device to organise my day. I want to run things myself, to get better at keeping track of my time myself; I want to check my e-mails periodically, not with a frequency that almost has me waiting to be told what to do by an incoming message.
I am very happy to be moving on from two years with the iPhone, and am proud of having the courage to turn away from smartphones altogether. They have many useful features, but most of the time they instead suck time and focus out of my life. They’re a gadget, a luxury, and they represent a major affront to freedom: we use them as computers yet have so little control over their internals. I will learn from my dual experiences of falling for the temptation of Apple’s hardware as so many have done before me. I hope that by explaining my story here I have, at the very least, strengthed the resolve of those who stand with me.
Thinking the Unthinkable, part 2: examination as the good
This post is part of a series, meant to be read from the beginning. Go to the first post.
The only real element of the philosophical system I aim to set out that was present in my last post was the claim that the timeless edict
The unexamined life is not worth living.
—Socrates in Plato’s Apology
forms the axiomatic basis of my system of ethics. In this post, I hope to say what I really mean by this loose claim, and also give a little argumentation for it; why I am led to choose it above other similar starting points.
On its own, the sentence isn’t very helpful. What is the unexamined life; where on the scale between the extremes of a fifty year orgy and a fifty year meditation or degree course does it lie? By what standard, necessarily (we might think) external to life are we to judge whether or not something is worth living? The statement is informal and to worry about this misses the point. What I really mean is that my starting point is the belief that a careful, rigorous consideration of everything that we come across in our mind and outside it (if such a place exists; it is irrelevant for we certainly have a mental model of it) is worthwhile. I assume for now that it is the only thing that is truly worthwhile, to avoid adding axioms to my system, but as I go on it will surely be questionable whether I really have avoided drawing on anything else.
But my language remains loose as to the nature of this examination, the word I will use to refer to this assumed good. I am stuck, as we all are, in the context of the society I live in, and what it sees as thoughtful examination. For purposes that will become clear in the political parts of this series, I shall attempt to give a minimalist account of examination, and what I mean by it. The full view of what it is will likely emerge as we go further. Examination, then, is for me very philosophical in nature, taking that term in the informal sense that may be used with derision against philosophers in the modern world: it’s about questions and an understanding of those questions, not about asking questions and then seeking out answers to them. In my next post I will talk about the scepticism which leads me to this statement, but for now just consider the two things, side by side: a deep understanding of a question and how it relates to other questions and everything else that we come across, and an answer, which I take to be a statement that removes the uncertainty of a question and fills the gap that it leaves.
It is obvious that the latter is almost entirely useless without the former. An answer will not be accepted by anyone in a thoughtful state of mind until they have at least a rudimentary understanding of the question that led to it. So we are certainly to have the former if we are to have either. But as I will argue in my next piece, when one has a decent level of understanding of the significance, ramifications and nature of a question one will quickly realise that any answer that might be a genuine addition to the thoughts one already has is entirely out of reach.
In setting this out I have used the word “axiom” without any definition, and it has been clear that the definition used in mathematical and philosophical logic isn’t what I intend. A better way of describing my intent might be to say that I am treating this belief that I have tried to expound as self-evident, that I am treating it as if it contains everything it needs to justify itself within itself, in the same way that we see the phrase “a bachelor is an unmarried man” as being true.
I will close by attempting to describe the reasons which lead me to this axiom rather than others, to set this project in its context. On the assumption that working from single starting points makes sense, there are many I could have chosen: religious, utilitarian and scientific (where science is taken to mean the optimistic view held widely today that it can discover the nature of the universe, rather than what it might sensibly be taken to mean) spring to mind. I am biased, no doubt, by my good experiences of studying Philosophy and thus my axiom might be summarised as “Philosophy is good”, but in doing so we would strip away subtleties that I would rather keep around.
I do have, though, one reason that I will boldly claim as being a strong one: the advantage of examination is that it is capable of self-replacement. If it turns out that we are able to find that we should base our lives on something else, and in some way not known to me we are able to secure certainty and infallibility for ourselves on this point, then we will have found it through examination and examination will yield to it: we will have examined our lives and come to a different conclusion because our scepticism and thirst to examine will have driven us to pursue all possibilities. Examination is capable of being an axiom yet not being absolute. This lies in stark contrast to many other starting points; I will not be to crude as to exhibit “examination is bad” but instead briefly, and bravely, knowing my readership’s knowledge of my views, consider “seek happiness”. In following this, we will only perform examination as a means to an end, and chances are in gaining happiness for ourselves (or our society, depending on the formulation), and if another axiom is in fact that right one, our chances of finding it are either reduced or entirely destroyed.
I take the rigorous, “philosophical” examination of everything that we come across to be the basic good that we should pursue. The reason that leads my mind to this starting point rather than any other is the way in which examination is capable of finding out other starting points that may be improvements on this one if they do exist, and of yielding to them. But this is just my attempt to describe why my mind has got where it is. The important thing to take away from this post is that I am treating examination, as elucidated here, as self-evident, and I am basing the rest of this project upon it.