Elf Sternberg

Between winning a trip to Antarctica and actually being in Antarctica is the grueling story of flying to Ushuaia, Argentina, where the Pursuit was currently making port. Ushuaia, “the city at the bottom of the world, is 12,427 kilometers from my home city of Seattle. London is only 7,700 kilometers away. Tokyo is 7,600 kilometers away. Equivalent flights would be to places like Melbourne, Australia, or Johannesburg, South Africa. It’s literally on the other side of the planet.

Our flight began early Saturday morning boarding a plane to Mexico City. I was genuinely surprised at how lax customs has become. Oh, the TSA is still a pain in the arse with your belt buckle but overall the amount of security theater was much less than I’d experienced before COVID. The flight itself on an Aeromexico 787 was a little short of five hours, wasn’t too traumatic, and the food was tasty and hot in a way US flights almost never have anymore. I masked until plane was in the air, at which point it exceeds the 5CH changeover for fresh air and risks are considered minimal, especially since I had gotten my COVID booster just a month earlier.

The “Your flight safety presentation today was brought to you by Volvo” notice was a bit disconcerting.

My travel laptop is a Surface Pro 6. I had cleaned it out before leaving and hadn’t put any movies onto it, so I was down to a very short list of films that didn’t really interest me. I spent most of the trip reading, as I had my e-reader with me and about 400 books on it are still listed as “unread.” I made quite a dent in my tsundoku list.


From the air, Mexico City looks like any city embedded in an agricultural region: core, sprawl, and then lots of parceled and enclosed farmland spreading out for kilometers in every direction.

It’s been a long time since I had last flown international. Long enough that Mastercard now takes care of the exchange rate automatically and traveller’s checks are something only people my age remember. The exotic cuisine of Mexico on display at the airport consisted of a Carl’s Junior, a Krispy Kreme, a Starbucks and a 7-11. I mentioned this to someone who was also traveling on the flight and he said, “Yeah, it wasn’t like this before NAFTA. NAFTA really gave the ‘international franchises’” – his voice heavy with sarcasm – “free rein, and this is the result.”

I wouldn’t have thought it was NAFTA.

Our flight from Mexico City to Buenos Aires was much longer, almost ten hours, but it was overnight and we’d sprung for the seats that reclined fully into beds, so we slept most of that. Omaha’s CPAP worked even with the plane’s power outlets, which helped her sleep as well as one can under those circumstances. The food was, for flight food, spectacular, especially the morning omelet. Only the coffee was boring.

In Buenos Aires, the Seabourn people more or less took over our lives. It turned out that the contributor of the prize package had been the president of Seabourn itself and that he had made it very clear that Omaha and I were very VIP. While there was a knot of five Seabourn people there to take in all the arrivals, there were four specific names on a separate list that received special handling, and we were one of those names. “You’re special,” we were told. “The director said something about a charity.”

Which was good to know, because that’s when disaster struck. AeroMexico had lost Omaha’s luggage.

She had a single change of clothes in her carry-on, a few toiletries, and not enough medication to make it through the whole trip. The Seabourn people assured us that they would do everything they can to find that bag, and in the meantime they would also help us find alternatives.

I don’t do well under these circumstances. Things are out of my control and I have no idea what’s going to happen next, and that’s when I start to break down. I went with Omaha to the hotel Seabourn had booked for us, the Alvear Palace. There were a lot of other people going on the cruise, but I hadn’t yet figured out how to talk to them and, under the circumstances, didn’t really want to.


The Alvear Palace hotel is a stunning place of marble, sandstone, oak, and brass. The Seabourn people whisked Omaha away to discuss the luggage and medication issue, and afterward we were free to wander the city. We found a local pizza place named El Continental, walked around the Recoleta Cemetery where Eve Peron (among many others) is buried, and visited a pop-up artisan market in Carcono Park. Artisan markets are the exactly the same the world over, with tsotchkes and such for sale that wouldn’t have looked out of place in Pike Place Market or the Seattle University District Street Fair.

I didn’t sleep well that night. I’m not even sure I slept at all. Fitbit says I got maybe seven hours of sleep, I was so anxious about the luggage and the medication. Omaha took charge and, frankly, I felt a little bullied about being hauled along by her whirlwind as she demanded I get onto the bus to the airport and the plane down to Ushuaia.

The ride to the airport included a bit of travelogue about Buenos Aries, including a massive, beautiful but broken mobile of a robotic flower, and a statue of Christopher Columbus gazing eastward while his victims slump and writhe at the base of his plinth. I like to think he’s gazing eastward toward the source of his power and approval, the kings of Spain.


I was miserable on the flight, even if the airplane did have a cute fox on the tail. I almost didn’t get onto the plane, instead thinking hard that I could just head over to the International section and book a flight home. But I just couldn’t do that, and so I ended up in Ushuaia. It’s a nice, fairly large town that does exactly two things: be the hub for the Antarctic tourist business, and support the Argentine Navy’s southernmost base of operations.

The Seabourn people let us onto the Pursuit, and told us three things: they hadn’t found the bag, they were trying to find a supply of Omaha’s medication, there was a seamstress on board who could provide her with some clothes, and when this happens the ship provides overnight laundry service.

With barely an hour until the gangplank was pulled and we would have to abandon the trip entirely, someone found us and said, “We found your medication.” A pharmacy at the north end of city had it, and it would be on board before we pulled out.

I was still wrung out. I’d gotten less than nine hours of sleep in the past 60. I don’t remember what I had for dinner, or what else happened that day. I went to bed and passed out.

I’ve encountered two perfect examples of enshittification in the past 24 hours, both related to Google. And let’s just start off with this: Google has a monopoly on search. Sure, there are others, like Microsoft Bing or DuckDuckGo, but for all intents and purposes Google is everywhere: email, maps, search, translate, the list of features Google provides to you, and from which Google extracts information to sell to advertisers, creating for Google a loop so “virtuous” (in Capitalist-speak) that Google can now do whatever the hell it wants with search and there’s nothing you can do about it.

Professionally useless

I was writing documentation at work, and our current product is a browser-based single-page application. This means that when you navigate around the system, instead of going from page to page, just parts of the page change; it’s a subtle difference that means a lot to web developers and probably not much to everyone else. At my last job, we called the main part, the thing you care about, the “page” and the whole thing the “frame,” but that didn’t sit well with me. I wanted to know what terms designers used for those things.

I asked Google, and I asked Bing. “Glossary of Single Page Application terms,” “Term for the main part of a single page application,” “Glossary of web design terms.” I was getting desperate, because every single one of those queries gave me the exact same useless answers.

Google’s AI gave me the definition of a single page application.

The replies were equally worthless:

• (Wikipedia) Single Page Application


• What is a Single Page Application?


• Anatomy of Single Page Application


• What is a Single Page Application?


• Pros and Cons of a Single Page Application?


• Single Page Applications: What They Are And Why You Use Them

All of this beginner level dreck that’s only tangentially related to the question I asked, and despite that “anatomy” response, none of these actually answered any of my questions. And the Google page was so damned cluttered it bewildered the hell out of me.

Finally, after about half an hour of this, in desperation I went went to ChatGPT.

Me: In web design, a page contains a single, semantic unit of information. When someone clicks a link, that link takes them to a new page with a different semantic unit. In a Single Page Application, the “page” doesn’t change, only the important part, that semantic unit. Is there a common industry term for that semantic unit?

ChatGPT: Yes, in the context of Single Page Applications, the part of the web page that changes dynamically without requiring a full page reload is often referred to as the “view” or “viewport.”

Armed with this information, I was able to find not just other pages confirming this, but including whole glossaries of industry-standard terminology.

I shouldn’t have had to ask ChatGPT. Google says it knows enough about me to advertise to me effectively; if that’s so, it should also know that I’m not a friggin’ beginner when it comes to web development, or even SPA’s. So why hand me all the dreck?

Worse yet, that answer came from somewhere. Someone else wrote it, ChatGPT just barfed it up. I would like to know who they are, and what else they know, and give them the kudos they deserve. I’m not interested in reading ChatGPT and don’t want to read something no one bothered to write. By erasing the credit for creating this answer, ChatGPT decentivizes people from creating their own answers.

Personally useless

We just got back from a two-week vacation and there’s not a lot of food in the house, so this morning I decided I wanted Cream of Wheat. That’s an actual brand name; in fact, in the US it’s pretty much the only brand name known for the breakfast cereal known as [farina](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farina_(food). It’s a staple, and it’s estimated that as many as 1 million Americans eat it for breakfast at least once a week or so. There’s also a standard base recipe for the three main ingredients: milk, farina, and salt.

I couldn’t remember the amounts of each. So I searched: “Cream of Wheat Recipe.”

I got back a page full of recipies for “Things you can make with cream of wheat.” Pies. Cakes. Complex desserts using fruits and whipped cream. I tried “Cream of Wheat Base Recipe.” The brand page didn’t appear on the first page of Google, but it didn’t matter: Their recipe page doesn’t have the base recipe either!

Finally, I hit on the right term: “Cream of Wheat ratios.” That got me what I wanted, but then it lacked the recipe cook times! At least with a couple of those terms I was able to find that next.

Good Grief. I’m trying to imagine my mother, who’s in her mid-80s now, trying to navigate such a terrible, terrible experience just to make something really basic. Unlike the above problem, where I had an advanced question and Google gave me really basic answers, this was where I had a really basic problem and Google gave me advanced answers. Imagine anyone who’s not completely web-savvy trying to navigate this, and you’ll start to imagine the scale of the problem.

Professionally dispiriting

Google CEO Sundar Pichai recently said that Google is planning for “the post-search world.” Pichai believes that most search will be replaced by “summarization machines,” these AIs that suck in all the knowledge we’ve been putting on the Internet and summarize it into some kind of coherent explanation.

This makes me furious. Everything I’ve done over the past 30 years isn’t just free material from which Google can make a profit and leave me with nothing. A world like that gives me no reason to write anymore, if Google can take my reputation along with my knowledge.

“Pretend that I’m nine years old. In Ru Paul’s voice, explain to me how derivatives of regular expressions can be made to work in a language without a garbage collector.” Like, NO, Fuck You Google, that is my work and my discovery and you may not just steal it from me and treat it like it’s universal knowledge. Point people at me, let them learn from me, but don’t fucking pretend the discoverer doesn’t deserve to be recognized alongside the discovery.

Closing off the future

Cory Doctorow points out that platforms “enshittify” by going through three stages: First, they provide services to their users, connecting them to resources. Then, they slowly evolve systems to get more out of the users, making their lives worse as they deliver more and more to the resources, because it’s the resources that pay the bills. And finally, once they’ve sewn up enough users that the cost of switching to a different platform would be unimaginably painful, they start to abuse the resources.

Google’s vision is the final step: kill everything. Nobody will want to produce new intellectual content and put it on-line, because Google will just suck it up and make everything awkward, endearing, vituperative, argumentative, or entertaining about it just disappear. It’ll just be the facts. No new jokes, no new music, no new and interesting stories. Just machine-generate summaries of them, the humanity completely polished off, leaving a glittering machine world we don’t belong in.

Fanfic, even authorized fanfic, can be a risky venture. I've often made that point myself as a writer of fanfic, and as a reader. Making a fanfic video game out of a beloved work from a deeply respected genre master is especially treacherous. And yet, The Invincible somehow manages to both be completely faithful to Stanislaw Lem's original novel, The Invincible, yet extend it brilliantly.

I played the video game first, so let's start with this: I knew nothing about this particular book when I played the game. Like most SF readers, my encounter with Lem consisted of being forced to read Solaris in high school, which I found terribly dreary and uninformative. Lem's writing style is very much an older, more telling style, a narrative mostly of descriptions of people doing things; dialogue is reserved for brief color and long expositions. Not a style conducive to video gaming.

The Invincible: the video game

The game focuses on the character of Yasna, a member of a small exploratory vessel from "The Commonwealth," as she wakes up in the desert of Regis III, an unknown world of very dry atmosphere and a weak, cool sun. Her last memory is of her agreeing to stay on the ship with the ship's navigator (and its commander) while the other five people on the crew go down for a look, but she finds her backpack and her notes sticking out of a dune nearby. In her notes she finds that she had been walking for several hours and has a map back to the team's campsite.

She gets in touch with the navigator, finds two of her crew in a state of catatonia, and from there has to find her way back to the ship's one working lander.

The plot and story of this game are what make it worthwhile. There are very few places where you have to decide more than "go left or right," and like most such games the outcome of any such decision is foregone. This is mostly a tale being told in a slow, engaging way by a first-person game engine. The order in which you explore a new place, and whether or not to check out some side-stories, are pretty much the only fundamental decisions you'll make.

That said, it is an engaging bit of work. Yasna comes into conflict with a team from "The Alliance," who came in a starship named Condor. The game doesn't say so in so many words, but you get the sense that the Alliance is "western" in some sense, whereas the Commonwealth is more "soviet." Eventually, the real crisis of Regis III comes to a head and Yasna and members of the Alliance must work together to survive.

The game is gorgeous, the voice acting is excellent, and Yasna is good company with which to hang out.

The Invincible: the book

The 1964 novel has no "Alliance" or "Commonwealth." We're told only that The Invincible has been dispatched by "the authorities back home" to Regis III to find out why Condor, which had been scheduled to explore Regis III eight months earlier, had not returned.

The book focuses on the character of Rohan, the ship's senior exec and second in command, and the experiences he has on the surface of Regis III. The story follows Rohan around as various expeditionary teams are sent out to try to find Condor to discover what could possibly have happened to the ship and its crew. It's dry in that way that 1960s science fiction could be dry, especially when joined with Polish sensibilities of that time and the translator's efforts.

For all that, it's a brilliant book. It was written 22 years before Drexler's Engines of Creation and yet every great idea in that book exists in The Invincible. How the dangers of Regis III emerged from naturalistic processes is so well-described it makes James P. Hogan's Code of the Lifemaker read like fanfic. Lem single-handledly envisioned nanotechnology, and how nanotechnology, automation, and the feedback mechanisms of natural selection could interact decades before those very terms came into existence.

Faith and Deviation

The game is astonishingly faithful to the book. Recall that I read the book after playing the game. In the game, the Alliance has caterpillar construction equipment digging massive boreholes, balloon-wheeled all-terrain jeeps, ground-effect transporters, ducted-turbine "flying saucers," multi-legged crawlers and a few force-field floating war machines. The mix of vehicles felt completely nonsensical... and every one of those is in the book. The "atompunk" feel of the equipment in the game is accurate to the book in every detail. So are the limitations of the space suits, the communications equipment, the surface-to-orbit landers, the sensory gear, and even Yasna's compass is a pretty good representation of the same one Rohan used (although Rohan could wear his on his wrist, and Yasna has to keep taking hers out of her pocket).

The game starts on Regis III three days before The Invincible is scheduled to arrive, which creates tension in that the Commonwealth people, who are just a little exploratory team of eight, know they need to do a quick survey and get the hell out of there before The Invincible arrives.

There are a few deviations from the book. In the book, the crew of The Invincible find Condor and it's dead crew... and one guy who might still be alive in one of Condor's cryochambers. (It's not a spoiler to say he's not alive and can't be recovered; it's just a moment Lem added for pathos.) For game reasons, those cryochambers are empty and still working when Yasna finds the Condor. The book says that Condor and The Invincible are the same class of ship and of the same size. The game says that the Invincible is "the biggest ship in the Alliance, and twice as large as anything else they have." Condor's team didn't have time to set up more than one drilling operation to explore the strange metallic ruins under the sand, but the game, to stretch out Act II a bit, has three different drilling sites for you to visit.

And ... and that's about it. That last one could even be just that the crew of The Invincible, wrapped up in its own concerns, didn't find all the explorations the crew of Condor conducted. Otherwise, the game is a wholly faithful and reasonable extrapolation of what happened in the book, and the cold war conflict of the Commonwealth and the Alliance are deftly added, sensitive to the conditions of the cold war as it was playing out in 1964, and believable. It's a visual novel, an entirely new story, the best kind of fanfiction, told in an interactive way that gives well-thought and well-designed visuals to one of Stanislaw Lem's great works.

Technology And Its Disconnect

You get less of a sense of it in the game because the first-person visual narrative forces you to be "in the moment" with Yasna, but both the book and the game really hammer home the weirdness of atompunk sensibility (and the game somehow manages to do this without being "ironic" about it!). Lem's future is "like five years from 1964, only with bigger engines." Lem didn't expect information processing to get much better; he has robots and, like lots of SF writers, over-estimated how easy speech recognition would be and under-estimated speech production.

In the book, The Invincible has both orbital and atmospheric drones, but their lifespans are short and their cameras are both analog and terrible. On two occasions in the game, Yasna gets to operate a "camera balloon" drone (something not in the book, but completely believable given the tech) and the cameras have the classic snow and terrible bandwidth of analog. The teams use Morse code when voice radio becomes unintelligible. Their orbit-to-surface telescopes have a resolution of "miles", whereas the Mars Orbital Surveyor has a resolution of 1.5 meters per pixel, and unlike the MOS, The Invincible has to de-orbit the satellite so its payload parachutes within about 40 miles of their landing site so someone can retrieve the film!

This is science fiction from the 1960s in all its glory: manly men doing manly things, with bigger engines and more powerful laser guns, but no one and nothing is going to challenge man's position as the most intelligent being. Need to map a planet? You'll need 200 men and four months to go through all the photographs.

Now that I think about it, the introduction of Yasna, a woman crewmember, into the game is actually one of the biggest anachronisms; there are zero women in Lem's book, the only mention of women at all is Rohan's observation that Captain Horpach never married. Or it could be completely in keeping with the games "cold war" sensibilities to introduce a woman on the Soviet Commonwealth's side, since one of Lenin's positions was that, unlike the West, the Soviet union didn't discard the intellectual firepower women could bring to scientific endeavors like space exploration.

Success Isn't Always Pleasure, But In This Case

Fun is where you find it. The book isn't fun, and neither, really is the game. What they are is intriguing and, ultimately, satisfying. The game succeeds wildly in what it sets out to do: retell the story of what happened to the starship Condor on Regis III from a unique (for the book) and different point of view, provide a visual vocabulary for all the wonders Lem described, and make the point of the book and its conclusion just as hard. You learn something from the book and the game, and you learn different things. The book is short, less than 200 pages, and can be read in about four hours. The game is about twice that long.

Technical details

The Invincible ran "okay" on my computer. I run Ubuntu Linux and have a GeForce 2060 with 6GB of RAM, and the framerate was sometimes not all that fantastic (I discovered that disabling the "special effects" on the operating system's window manager made it run much better!), but it runs well on modern hardware and it's gorgeous all the same. Given the nature of the game, I didn't need perfect aim. Running it on Linux and Wine (Proton) was otherwise flawless.

How are queer theory and the green energy discourse similar?

One of the books I’m happy to own is the somewhat infamous Fear of a Queer Planet, published in 1991, right in the center of the AIDS crisis. FoaQP was a distilliation of decades of queer theory, about how being queer was always an inherently political act, a challenge to a status quo. It didn’t incorporate everything: the influence of Roughgarden, Jane Ward, and Denny Lowell aren’t here, nor are the critical insights Pat Califia brought through the 80s and 90s, but overall it’s a good intro.

One thing queer theory does is explode the myth of “men are reliable and stable, women are fickle and unpredictable.” Gay men’s relationships are infamously less stable than heterosexual couples, and the ancient joke about what a lesbian brings on her second date still has a ring of truth to it. (Answer: A U-Haul.) The last 30 years since the publication of FoaQP has shown both significant progress in addressing this duplicity between the myths straight men tell about themselves and the reality straight women face in dating men, and often violent pushback from straight men that such truths should not be spoken.

I bring this up because we’re seeing it play out again in very strange ways when it comes to “green energy.” I’ve now encountered several conversations where the accusation is that green energy is “feminine,” that is, unreliable, fickle, and likely to fail when critically needed. “The wind doesn’t always blow, and the sun doesn’t always shine,” goes the refrain from these manly men, “which is why the market is stupid to embrace these technologies.” (Nevermind that “those technologies” produce electricity at the lowest cost and highest environmental respect.) Both fossil-fuel boys and nuclear boys are enamored of their own tech: it works, they say, and it’s reliable. You can turn it on and off with a switch, unlike the sun or the wind, and that’s why they like it, and that’s why we should embrace it. And they’re independent: you don’t need a whole network to just drive your gasoline-powered car.

Except they’re not really reliable. Chernobyl and Three Mile Island proved that about nuclear energy, and fossil fuels have contaminated enough of our planet it’ll be centuries before the taint of their passing is removed from our air, water, and soil.

Commodity streams of oil and nuclear fuel depend upon “a whole network” to deliver commodity fuels to gas stations and nuclear power plants. The transport of nuclear fuel and nuclear waste are both security and health nightmares for the people tasked with moving them, as well as the communities through which they might move.

Pro-nuclear-power and pro-fossil-fuel people lie about green energy the way men lie about women: because they like what they have, they like the feeling of power it gives them, they like the howling explosions– inside a V8’s cylinders and within the atoms at the core of any reactor– and they like the idea that it takes a lot of high-performance engineering to keep either from blowing apart the engines they power. Solar is disappointing: it just sits there. The worst thing a wind turbine does is catch fire and fall over, and that’s no fun. The opportunities to be manly, to engage in rescue, are few and far between.

The pushback against green energy resembles the pushback against queer theory: it’s an upset of the status quo, and it takes pieces of the carefully crafted “masculine” identity and says, clearly: you men are either lying or being lied to, and the lies are in service to a destructive (and self-destructive) lifestyle.

For the past three months or so, I’ve been playing with Stable Diffusion on and off, experimenting with different settings and generally entertaining myself with silly things. At one point I tweeted out something about having a bad day and ending with, “Fuck it. Stable Diffusion, give me 100 images of Disney princesses masturbating by a beautiful summer lake.” And the thing is, Stable Diffusion can do that.

(No, I’m not going to share anything I generate; I know it’s crap, and I know the databases are probably stolen as much as everything on Tumblr not posted by the original artists was stolen, and people mourn the death of Tumblr much more than they will the unlikely end of Stable Diffusion.)

One of the things I’ve found, though, is that “real person” Stable Diffusion is really unsatisfying. Even when there’s a very good plug-in model of that person, using AI illustration to make more of what that person did doesn’t really have much of an impact.

I was in my 30s and 40s through the era when names like Chloe Vevrier, Renata Daninsky, Aria Giovanni, Erica Campbell, Veronika Zemanova were all over the adult corners of the internet, and there have since then been plenty of quite good plug-ins that will do a decent job of rendering these women in whatever phase of their careers that you like.

Even so, I discovered that while I’m still highly entertained with the idea of “render Rapunzel as an Aztec warrior,” I quickly lost interest in renderings of real people, even real porn stars, in the same way.

I think the reason is simply that we develop a parasocial understanding of real people, being really photographed, in a way that doesn’t carry over. For all that it’s fantasty, Zemanova really did hold a shotgut and really did fire it and really was filmed by a high-speed camera that captured every delightful movement of her prodigious bosom. Monroe Rhys and Katya Clover really did masturbate (or at least seem to) for the camera while wearing Apple watches that depicted the rise and fall of their heartbeats.

But no matter how “realistic” Stable Diffusion can make an image, those images it produces did not happen. We couldn’t have been there, we could never have actually seen those events happen in real time and in real life. I could wish that Monroe Rhys made more than three films, and I could wish Aria Giovanni and London Andrews never got any older, but they’re human beings and they get tired of the job or they just get older and more tired in general and… that’s what being human is about.

Real Person Fan Fiction (RPFF) is a sub-category on the fanfiction site Archive of Our Own. RPFF puts words into the mouths of real people, often silly or horny or just revealing of what the writer wishes or believes the person being depicted should or would say. The writer is putting a lot of mental energy into maintaining and depicting the parasocial relationship they and their readers have with that person, and the strength of any given story comes from the resonance that writer can elicit from it.

Real Person Stable Diffusion, at least in the still image category, doesn’t have the same energy. Stable Diffusion is rummaging through a bag of eight billion tiny image shards and word relationships with those shards and assembling a collection of kaliedescopic images that, through the magic of alegebra and pareidolia, we hope looks like the prompt thet user typed in. It lacks even the illusion of verisimilitude: it doesn’t pretend to be true or possible or evidentiary or interesting. It’s just… pretty.

Pretty can sustain interest for awhile, but it’s not the basis for any kind of long-term relationship. Even animated films have the attention and interest of the artists behind them. CGI-heavy Marvel films work when we care about the characters, not the roller coaster ride of visual CGI. We want a story written by people, about people, for people. Real Person Stable Diffusion, no matter how “realistic” it can approach as a photographic simulation, sits deep in the uncanny valley where we know we are being fooled by a photograph of something that never happened.

I made the mistake (it’s always a mistake) of responding to someone on Nextdoor who complained that “… all the businesses downtown are boarded up. It’s really sad.” Given that it’s Nextdoor, the usual suspects chimed in with “It was the lockdowns!” and “We need more police!” But I stand by my response:

Well, let me ask y’all a question: how many packages from Amazon arrived at your doorstep today? Every single one of those packages, multiplied across every single person in that neighborhood, is a dollar you didn’t spend downtown. Every single trip downtown negated by your not needing to go anywhere to have your desires fulfilled is one less opportunity those businesses had to capture your interest.

You can blame politicians or COVID or whatever, but the simple fact is that, economically, we decided our convenience was more important than our town centers. We do our bulk shopping at Wal-Mart or Costco or Target, we get our food delivered by DoorDash, and we get the rest of our lives supplied by Amazon. Collectively, we are responsible for the death of downtowns by the thousand little cuts of “a dollar saved here, an hour of driving saved there.”

And I don’t know Kent Station shopping center very well, but Renton Landing shopping center is unbelievably hostile to “loitering.” When I was a kid, you could spend all day at the mall with just a few bucks for lunch at the food court and quarters at the arcade. But there are no more arcades, and the cops hassle kids if they’re being kids, and there’s no place to sit that isn’t a bar or restaurant. It’s optimized to sell you stuff and then encourages you to get the hell out of there. Which, I suppose, is another one of those end results of a culture that values “save a dollar here, save an hour there” over, you know, actually having a community.

Sometimes I don't trust my extended ADHD diagnosis. I suspect my doc took a look at my intake essays and descriptions, saw the sex, the religious questioning, and all the writing, and said, "That's not ASD, that's Interictal Syndrome!"

The description of Interictal Syndrom is so vague as to be useless:

A distinct syndrome of interictal behavior changes occurs in many patients with temporal lobe epilepsy. These changes include alterations in sexual behavior, religiosity, and a tendency toward extensive, and in some cases compulsive, writing and drawing.

Some interictal patients don't even have seizures... they just have a constant, ongoing storm in a temporal lobe that causes those "symptoms." Despite their low resolution, PET scans clearly show such a storm in my left temporal lobe (the "ADHD" one) instead of the right (the "sex and whatever" one).

I suspect the extended diagnosis is a failure. He was an older man and burdened with prejudices. He's retired now. I don't know if I want a re-diagnosis; I get to have something in common with my wife (We're both epileptics now? Cool!) and there's something ticklishly delightful about having an "obscure" diagnosis, especially one with the promise of so much havoc behind it.

Then I remember that TempleOS's Terry Davis was THE poster boy for Interictal syndrome, and maybe I rethink that. Terry was a sad victim of his syndrome. He was a brilliant programmer who wrote an interesting DOS-shell, then claimed it had been dictated by God, was viciously racist and sexist and hated sex itself in all its forms, and harassed anyone who told him TempleOS wasn't that great.

But I'm clearly NOT Terry Davis, and the general diagnosis is good enough to give me access to a psychiatric neurologist and the medications I need to keep a job I actually like and that actually pays well, and doesn't (quite so often) drive my wife crazy.

The other day, as I was heading home from an event downtown, three adorable women, college-age, walked onto the train and started making their way up the aisle. I was in one of the seats that faces toward the back of the train, so eventually they passed me and out of sight.

Across from me, facing the other way, was a man who had to be about ten years older than I am. After the girls had passed it was comically obvious that his eyes were locked to their asses for what even I thought was an unseemly amount of time.

I realized then that I had become old, because, dammit, I used to check out cute womens’ asses all the time. I’m a firm believer that being aesthetically pleasing in public, especially if you’ve put effort into being aesthetically pleasing in public, is a fine thing, and that others should be able to appreciate it.

But dammit, I miss the vitality, the drive, that went with my aesthetic appreciation. Getting old kinda sucks.

Ebay vs Newmark

A relatively obscure court case, Ebay vs Newmark (Newmark here is Craig Newmark, the founder of craigslist), found that yes, a corporation’s first duty is to maximize shareholder value (Yale Law Review. Note: PDF).

That case hinges on some fairly technical issues, but here’s the gist of it: Ebay bought a 28% share of craigslist, and the board at craigslist voted to restructure the corporate governance into a poison pill; Ebay buying just one more share would trigger a whole cascade of penalties that made buying that share much more expensive and troublesome than it was worth.

Ebay sued, saying that the restructuring was done not for the benefit of craigslists’ shareholders (including itself), but for reasons unrelated to shareholder value. Newmark testified that this was, in fact, the case; he rejected the idea of “maximizing shareholder value” and instead desired to steer craigslist in a way that maintained its value to the communities it served.

The Law Review article starts by asking if corporations exist for specific reasons:

What is the purpose of the corporation? Who cares? If the New York Times is formed to publish a newspaper first and make a profit second, no one should be allowed to object. Those who came in at the beginning consented, and those who came later bought stock the price of which reflected the corporation’s tempered commitment to a profit objective.

It describes this as “concurrent with contract law, and a person’s rights to enter into a consensual contract.” But in Newmark, the court ruled that you cannot enter into such a contract with a corporation that explicitly declared itself “for-profit:”

Having chosen a for-profit corporate form, the craigslist directors are bound by the fiduciary duties and standards that accompany that form. Those standards include acting to promote the value of the corporation for the benefit of its stockholders. The “Inc.” after the company name has to mean at least that. Thus, this court cannot accept as valid for the purposes of implementing the poison pill Rights Plan a corporate policy that specifically, clearly, and admittedly seeks not to maximize the economic value of a for-profit Delaware corporation for the benefit of its stockholders.

This language is so strong that the court is saying the poison-pill restructing after the fact doesn’t matter. Craig Newmark had no right to create a business and incorporate as a corporation if he didn’t intend to maximize profits for shareholders. As Max Kennerly puts it, corporations “can engage in modest philanthropic efforts, but if they put their money where their mouth is, they’ll get Newmark’d.”

Corporations are Sociopathic Thinking Machines

Corporations are effectively large, slow thinking machines. They’re information-processing organizations that take in data and react to it with real-world affect. Their collective effort does not necessarily reflect the moral ideals of the people who make up the majority of its workforce. They have a consciousness of sorts, that taking in information and reflecting it back upon the world, but very few corporations have a conscience, a recursive, reflexive, inward-looking process that asks if it is doing the right thing, if it is acting well toward its neighbor.

The Newmark case shows that having a conscience is simply not legal for a for-profit corporation; that taken as a whole a corporations actions must be seen to maximize profits and any philanthropic activities must be seen in that light as a form of “reputation management” and nothing else.

This is sociopathy. Corporations, like sociopaths, have selfish extrinic goals. Neither cares about the rights or well-being of people who are not them, and the court has ruled that corporations are not permitted to have such cares. Large corporations will employ child labor if that’s what it takes to drive profits. Large corporations will argue that if their product killed you quickly, your family has no right to sue on behalf of your pain and suffering because it was over before you could complain.

There are two kinds of people in the world: those who behave well toward their neighbors and their community because it’s the right thing to do and all the evidence points to mutual benefit from acting well, and those who behave tolerably– at least not criminally– toward their neighbor because a powerful external authority would punish them if they did not.

Both sociopaths and corporations view the world through a lens of risk vs reward, and the feelings of others don’t factor into that view at all. They are only and ever the second type; only the threat of painful sanction keeps them from heinous behavior.

Un(Just) Workplaces

So it was with a strong sense of familiarity that I read Tim Burke’s Institutionality Is The Thief of Joy. Burke’s case is a simple one: capitalists sell you constantly on the idea that work, and only work, is the source of all self-worth. “The dignity of work” is the idea that they prattle on endlessly, but that idea sucks all the life and self-worth out of people who are not sociopaths.

The notion that hospitals and schools are only workplaces, that they are for-profit enterprises and that notions such as “healing the sick,” “safeguarding the well-being of people,” and “inspiring minds and soul,” are sentimental twaddle; your duty is to maximize profits and those notions and actions inspired by them are merely the mechanisms by which you do so.

Burke says he’s “unwilling to accept a life sentence without parole in the worst timeline,” but he’s also unwilling to accept the idea that we live in a kyriarchy, in which there are so many forms of oppression that resisting any one of them results in the others inflicting so much pain the resistance is forced back, so he’s unwilling to “burn it all down.”

It’s not just that, as I once heard a street preacher say, “The world we need will not be built by men loyal to the world we have.”¹ It that the institutions loyal to the world we have don’t care about the men in it.

Now how do we do better?

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¹(I was later disappointed to learn that he cribbed it from Game of Thrones.)

I recently received one of those “The US Office of Management and Budget requires that we survey you about the quality of your stay while at our hospital. Please fill out the survey and return it to us. There is a space at the end where you can describe any concerns or praise you wish to deliver.”

Here’s what I wrote:

I was hospitalized for 23 days while at Valley, and in that time there were a number of occasions where I felt the strain that is slowly degrading our healthcare system.

My injury was mechanical; I had a hematoma blocking my duodenum and was unable to digest food. I was given an NG tube to remove the bile and stomach acid, and an NJ tube to provide food and water. Aside from that, I was in excellent physical health and am modestly athletic; I ride a bicycle regularly and have a workout routine.

The hydration I was given was “typical for that of a 56 year old man,” but it turns out that the typical 56 year old man is not in excellent physical health and does not work out regularly. My condition was not accurately explained to the nutritionist. As a result, after five days I was severely dehydrated and begged for more water. After a test revealed that I was in hypovolemia, this was resolved, but the miscommunication and neglect of patient’s own wisdom about his body was appalling.

At one point while I was there, the hospital pharmacy ran out of the liquid suspension ibuprofen necessary to manage the pain of having two nasal tubes passing down my throat.

I had a narrow NJ tube that required minimal but constant maintenance in order to continue to function properly. Twice while I was there that tube became blocked because a nurse either did not understand how the tube functioned or was too busy to take care of the tube properly. Because of the lack of liquid suspension ibuprofen, one nurse attempted to crush tablet ibuprofen and put it down the tube, blocking it. In another, the alarm indicating that the food being pushed through the tube, a product named Pivot, had run out. Pivot hardens when not in motion and completely blocked the tube.

On both of these incidents, I had to be sent down to Interventional Radiology and subjected to unnecessary X-rays to have the tube replaced.

Despite these incidents, I managed to maintain a daily routine of being unhooked from the NG tube for an hour or so every day in order to do a minimal set of exercises– a quarter-mile walk, a few push-ups, a few squats, that sort of thing. The equipment being used to manage the NG tube was unfamiliar to some of the nurses, and I was the one who had to show and instruct them on how to unhook it.

All of the nurses I spoke to said they were understaffed; where one was optimally assigned to four patients, each was now overseeing six patients. I am not naming any names in the above incidents because I don’t believe that the nurse was at fault; instead, the overwhelmed and undersupplied system failed to teach, monitor, and advise them, and failed to provide them with the proper support.

I am well-educated and insatiably curious. I was able to manage much of my own healthcare, and got along well with all of my nurses and doctors, and so I survived these incidents without any consequence worse than a significant uptick in pain while I waited for resolution. My concern is for the other patients who do not or cannot understand their predicament and manage their own healthcare.

Hire more nurses, and train them better.