matthew flaming

In high school, William Gibson was among my favorite authors. So I suppose it’s not surprising that I’ve been fascinated, in a kind of deer-in-the-headlights-of-the-future way, by Stuxnet:

The Stuxnet worm is a “groundbreaking” piece of malware so devious in its use of unpatched vulnerabilities, so sophisticated in its multipronged approach, that the security researchers who tore it apart believe it may be the work of state-backed professionals. (CSM)

Although we’ve seen cyber-attacks designed to steal confidential information, or shut down computer services, this may be the first software weapon intended to sabotage a piece of physical manufacturing infrastructure.

The current smart money seems to be that the software was intended to target nuclear facilities inside Iran, and was developed by the United States, Israel, or the UK.

See more in:

• New York Times
• Computer world
• Christian Science Monitor
• CNET

This morning I watched a rather slick video from IDEO, a design consultancy, about the “future of the book” which illustrates beautifully the problem with (many) e-book technologies:

The Future of the Book. from IDEO on Vimeo.

My issue isn’t with e-books in general. The Kindle in its current incarnation, for example, is a fantastic device. Rather, what troubles me is when starry-eyed gadgeteers start adding bells and whistles to the reading experience which, in many cases, undermine our ability to connect with literature.

In the video above, we hear about “a reading experience that comprises multiple perspectives to let you see the bigger picture,” and enhancing books with “a series of informational layers that provide additional context to any material being read.” All of this sounds good in theory, and may be useful for certain types of research. But in many other cases, particularly that of reading fiction, this strikes me as both offensive and destructive.

When I read a novel, my engagement with the book is singular and immersive. Unlike the the internet, which is an encounter with an associative multiplicity of voices, books offer us the opportunity to connect profoundly with a particular voice: to spend a few hours inhabiting the thoughts and perspectives of another person. That encounter has a momentum and life of its own. Put down a book halfway-though and return to it weeks later, and the spell has been broken: it can only be recaptured with effort, if at all.

The software shown in this video seems like an attempt to make reading a book more like surfing the web. It allows the clamor of distraction to intrude on the connection between author and reader. Imagine reading, say, the Chronicles of Narnia with video footnotes and background digressions interspersed throughout the pages. Yes, the experience might be more informative but it would be far less magical or transporting. The idea that Moby Dick should be “jazzed up” by adding choose-your-own-adventure style hyperlinks is not just intellectually insulting: it feels like a fundamental misunderstanding of how and why books have value.

Today I snuck away from all the things I should have been doing to re-read one of David Antin’s essays on narrative. A great deal of the theoretical writing I’ve encountered about narrative seems to me either blindingly obvious or abstract to the point of uselessness. But Antin’s comments feel spot-on and incredibly insightful; reading them is the kind of ah-ha! moment that comes when someone manages to articulate clearly what we’ve intuited all along but never quite been able to grasp.

From his essay:

If a beggar wishes to become a king and there is a chance of his becoming one, there is also the possibility that the change will annihilate him….

Any transformation, no matter how promising, contains the threat of destroying its desiring subject in the magnitude of fulfillment. But what the beggar wants is to remain the beggar inside the life of the king, or to hold on to that subject position from which the life of a king would be a sufficient satisfaction to at least offset the gravest problems of statecraft, which the beggar has most likely never counted on. And it would be in the interest of the king, who is suffering from all the anxieties of kingship and in whose state of mind the beggar remains only in threads of nostalgia and anxiety, to build a bridge from his present life to his past. As it would be in the interest of the beggar to build a bridge from his present to his possible future, to imagine the speculative consequences of his transformation.

This bridge building across change is what I would suggest is the central human function of narrative.

(from Poems and Poetics)

Long ago, before this blog came into existence, I had another personal website.

In large part, that site owed its format to my contrarian nature. As a lifelong devotee of doing things the hard way, for reasons that I can no longer quite remember I decided to eschew the standard blogging frameworks in favor of a homebrew mess of Javascript, static HTML, and baling wire. The result was a halfway-decent site, that looked more appealing (to my eye) than generic template-based blogs like this one.

But the nature of the internet, it’s becoming increasingly apparent, is change. Slicker, more buzzword-compliant widgets replace old obsolete models, and whoever longs for permanence is barking up the wrong media format. Like the rest of the world then, I am opting for convenience. And yet, and yet… I am a sentimental creature. Rather than tossing all that old content out the window, I’ve kept it around in a semi-mothballed format.

For those who are curious, the predecessor to this blog can be found here.