Internet Miscellany

The Tech Plagues of Egypt
  1. Water into blood Soylent
  2. Frogs Engineer job hopping
  3. Lice Co-ops with bed bugs
  4. Wild beasts Black squirrels
  5. Deceased livestock Killing your own meat
  6. Boils
  7. Hailstorms Tweetstorms
  8. Swarms of locusts ride-share electric scooters
  9. Darkness Internet outages
  10. Death of the firstborn your first startup

Things I’ve Learned from Online Dating, Vol. 1

To cut the preamble: for about seven or eight months last year, I was active on OkCupid.  It’s a strange and brave new world, this internet thing, and after several abortive internet first dates over the last year, as well as one much more enjoyable and longer-lasting yet ultimately equally abortive traditional relationship (that I’m still making a distinction here may be telling, but so far my friends and alma mater have much better taste in women than any algorithm), I’m wrestling with whether it’s time to get back on that, uh, e-horse.

I started this list of learnings last year, before I met a pretty girl at a football-viewing party (like, a real party, with food and people and everything), and before she made me walk away from her in the middle of the night a couple of months ago.  But with every ending comes a new beginning, or however that not-really-consoling-at-all aphorism goes, and so in weighing the benefits of app-based dating — it’s mobile! social! local! 3D printed! — the list has surfaced from the mire of my many half-made blog drafts, to be presented here as evidence in the case of The People v. Winger.

Some lessons the proverbial fish in that deep blue online sea taught me:

  • You are not allowed to both describe yourself as “shy” and have a username with more than two consecutive x’s in it.
  • Don’t capitalize the G and S in “grad school” unless you go to a college named after William S. Grad.
  • I also think of my self [sic] as diligent, meticulous, and detail-oriented.
  • I will never remember what Meyers-Briggs type I am, or what your Meyers-Briggs type means.
  • Do not lead with “hey u want 2 cyber”.
  • What was your Meyers-Briggs type again?
  • HOW CAN EVERY. SINGLE. ONE OF YOU. BE THE MOST SARCASTIC OR MOST RANDOM PERSON I’VE EVER PSEUDO-MET OVER THE INTERNET.  (Unless this claim really is sarcasm, in which case: touché.)
  • “The basic currency of the Internet is human ignorance, and, frankly, [the OKC] database holds a strong cash position.”

But the most obvious thing I learned wasn’t about any of these girls.  Or women in general.  It was about me.  Chiefly:

  • I am an enormous, colossal, unforgivable asshole.

From ignoring people’s messages to criticizing their minor grammar mistakes to losing all interest because of a single unflattering photo, the sort-of anonymity of OkCupid (that’s-not-my-name, that-is-my-picture) both enabled me to embrace all sorts of misanthropic aspects of my personality and to feel terrible about it at the same time.  Would I really ignore a boring girl trying to talk to me at a cocktail party?  Would I really judge anyone for mixing up “less” and “fewer” when telling me a story?  Am I really so shallow that lighting determines how much I want to talk to you?

The answer to all of these questions, it would seem, is yes.  At least, yes when I know I’ll never see these people again (or in the first place).  Yes when there’s no social pressure to do the opposite.  Yes when I don’t have to hide behind cerebral concepts like “society” or “decency”.

It’s not how I like to see myself, to say the least.  But a general malaise of cynical misanthropy I can live with — I can at least assume that I’d feel the same way, that I’d be as judgmental about favorite television shows and Oxford comma use,  if I was trying to find male friends online.

But I wasn’t.  I was looking, at one level or another, for female companionship.  What got me to stop using OkCupid wasn’t a real-life girl with a smile like moonlight.  It was a night, a few weeks earlier, when I just kept scrolling.

OkCupid uses infinite scrolling instead of pagination (or at least did last year; I haven’t logged back on to check), presenting a never-ending parade of nubile would-be dates that waltzes up the screen as you scroll further and further down.  And so one night, as I was scrolling through potential matches, I didn’t stop.  Without realizing, I must have scanned a hundred — two hundred — profiles.  You don’t get much information to go on without actually clicking on a profile: a username, a thumbnail headshot, an age, a compatibility percentage.  And that was enough for me to categorically reject every single person that crossed my digital descent.

When I realized how long I had just spent browsing, how many people I had reduced to nothing more than a 100 pixel wide picture and a fake name, I was disgusted.  It’s not that I had expected to find true love in the pool of a couple hundred random people on the internet that night, but rather that I took these girls and ignored them, cast them aside, based on a photo.  A photo!  That’s the textbook definition of objectification, and I — me — I had done this.  Not some frat star I went to high school with, not some red state politician, not some third world country’s dictator, but me.  I disregarded more girls than I could count because of how they looked, without even registering that I was doing it.

I am not here to argue that online dating is bad, in any sense of the word.  (I’m not sure which statistic to believe, but somewhere between 20 and 35% of marriages now start online — which, regardless of the exact number in that range, is staggering and beautiful in equal measures.)  But the ease of access to the most superficial parts of a person, to pictures and percentages and profile names instead of smile lines and nervous tics and laughter, to headshots instead of a head’s thoughts, eventually brought out something in me that I hated.  It was, no doubt, amplified by parts of my personality — I can be meticulous, addictive, obsessive — and so maybe the biggest thing I learned from data dating was that I need to be careful about high volume online romance.  Or high volume online anything, really, if the hours I’ve logged in Diablo say something about the rest of my personality.

And I realize that the same exact thing was happening to my own profile in the hands of who-knows-how-many girls on the other side of my monitor.  I do not pretend that my charms are universally irresistible.  To untold droves (droves!) of women, I will forever be “that dude with the vampire teeth and the goofy hair and the username that sounded like it could be a critically acclaimed children’s board game”.  I’m sure I was thoroughly uninteresting to the majority of people OkCupid pleadingly shoved my profile towards — take him! take him! please! have pity! — in the same way I was thoroughly uninterested in the majority of people presented to me.

But that doesn’t change how I felt about being so disinterested, how I felt about not caring to get to know anyone whose picture couldn’t land them a modeling contract.  With no information beyond a brief blurb about “what you’re doing with your life” and “six things you can’t live without”, looks won out.  They always did.  Which left me wondering if that’s what I actually cared about, if this yen I claim to have for a sense of humor or a deep intellectual conversation or a mastery of English grammar is really just monkey-brain nonsense trying to beat my brainstem into submission.

I know this is a trying time to fire off half-formed thoughts on sexism in a blog post that had its genesis as a rant about internet grammar.  My thoughts are with Isla Vista.  But I suppose that this is the time, more than any other time, to confront what lurks within me: that brainstem can be a sexist pig.  Which means I can be a sexist pig.  Not all the time, granted.  Not even anywhere close to some of the time.  But enough of the time.  Too much of the time.

I fall into so many traps guys my age are prone to — and not just the Tinderized romance of reducing girls on the internet to the sum of their headshots.  I’ll laugh at misogynistic jokes.  I’ll toss around words like “pussy” and “slut” without a second thought to the loaded gender bias behind them.  And, maybe most damning of all, I’ll be quick to agree that my ex-girlfriends are all “crazy”.

These are all huge topics, each worthy of a much larger discussion.  Where is the line between comedy and controversy?  Should we categorically declare certain words taboo?  How do people project their insecurities onto others?  I don’t know any of the answers, obviously.  All I can say is consider this post an admission of guilt, and a pledge to do better.  Because #YesAllWomen deserve better.  From me.  From us.  From everyone.

Terminal Eternal

I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work… I want to achieve it through not dying.

– Woody Allen

I am going to live forever.

I am also, of course, kidding.  (OR AM I?)  But some part of me is, undoubtedly, going to live forever.  The only hiccup with this is that I’ll be in no way associated with it.

There are two intertwining threads that lead to my inevitable immortality: 1) the amount of information and personality I’ve poured into the cloud via this blog, Facebook, Twitter, etc., etc., etc., and 2) rapidly accelerating progress in language processing and artificial intelligence.  Even just a simple Markov text generator (thanks, CS106B!) can generate passable, if not convincing, text in the voice of a sample author.  Now, extrapolate this is two dimensions: I’ll only continue to add information about myself in the form of writing to the web, and programmers—and thus algorithms—will only continue to be better and better than my simple class project.

The result?  Predicted in William Gibson’s Neuromancer: by the time I’ve died, I’ll have essentially uploaded myself to the cloud.  Insert your heaven metaphors here.

And not just me—anyone born in the last half century who has a non-negligible presence on the internet could be resurrected.  The only St. Peter and the Pearly Gates of this afterlife (there, a metaphor) are a friend, relative, or private investigator who feels like having a bit of a posthumous chat with the ghost you left in the machine.

I’d like to say this post wasn’t inspired by Facebook’s recent Timeline update, but—alas—something about seeing my entire digital history vivisected and displayed got me thinking about what it might look like in ten, twenty, thirty years.  (And if I’d ever be able to run for public office, but frankly in thirty years I don’t think I want to vote for anyone who doesn’t have some digital dirt on them.)  There’s a record of my soul, if you want to call it that, online—the places I go, people I talk to, things I say.  My wit, my inanity, my charm, my tiredness, my good side, my bad side are all there.  In fifty years, it’ll just take a little clever stringing together of those lumps of clay to make a convincing Seth-golem, something that talks like me, something that acts like me, something that is deterministically programmed to emulate the free will and spontaneity of me.

Someone told me once that his idea of the afterlife—heaven, hell, or purgatory, depending—was to put everyone you’ve ever met into a theater and show the movie of your life, in real time, from birth to final breath.  I propose a new afterlife, and with it a new metric for a life well lived:

When your avatar is raised by some computer necromancer in a séance of modem noises and flickering blue screens, what would it say?

#ugres_rcfs

[Cross-blogged on Leland Quarterly‘s new website.]

At 5:20pm on Sunday, April the tenth, two-thousand and eleven years after a nice Jewish boy was nailed to a cross for telling us we should all just get along, my phone buzzed.  Twice.  A small envelope notification flashed in the upper left corner.  And then all hell broke loose.

It was what I’ll call—and what I hope the history books will refer to as—Listomania.  Acute readers may realize this is a reference to the general hysteria induced by Franz Liszt’s piano performances in the mid-1800s, and not a mediocre Phoenix song—though, to be honest, both have probably accounted for roughly the same number of women’s undergarments being thrown on stage.  Anyway, as a historical aside, Lisztomania was probably generated by the sheer virtuosity of Liszt’s performances, his steely eyes, and his fantastic haircut (something like James Polk meets a Hungarian Keith Urban).  It also probably did not last into old age (sorry, Liszty, some people age like Clooney, some age like wine, and some age like Clooney dunked in wine—somewhat fruity, mostly drunk and pruney).

Young Liszt, lookin' dapper if bookish.

Old Liszt, who—JESUS HOOBASTANK CHRIST WHAT HAPPENED

Polk, winner of presidential medal of mullet.

Urban, professional pretty person and occasional guitarist.

Our Listomania was the result of, well, probably an errant checkbox which allowed everyone subscribed to some mysterious mailing list (previously used for room condition forms and now repurposed to inform people—a third, or possibly fourth, time—of an unresolved sexual assault case) to post to said list.  So okay, fine.  Noble goal, if I hadn’t heard about it three different ways beforehand.  And obviously terribly executed, in a ham-handed fashion that even this woman who has hams for hands could have avoided.

Frankly, I’m surprised a Google image search for “ham handed” only had one of these results.

But that’s not what this post is about.  This is a post about the collective consciousness that emerged from the two hundred messages that crammed themselves into every Stanford undergraduate’s inbox in the span of just over an hour.  Suddenly, 6,000 people were given the chance to say something—anything—to an audience of 6,000, and they rose to the challenge.

Generally, the pattern followed the five stages of grief.  I’m no psych major, but this says something meaningful about the human condition, right?

  1. Denial. No one could possibly have put every single undergraduate on one enormous mailing list!  That’d be absurd.
  2. Anger. Holy shitballs they did put every single undergraduate on one enormous mailing list.  Stop sending me goddamn emails you assholes.
  3. Bargaining. PLEASE FOR THE LOVE OF GOD STOP SENDING ME EMAIL I CAN’T TAKE IT ANY MORE I ONLY HAVE SO MUCH GMAIL STORAGE AND SO LITTLE SANITY
  4. Depression. “unsubscribe-list-this” doesn’t work? NOOOOOOO
  5. YouTube. Or acceptance, whatever.

But beyond that, it seemed that this 6,000-person strong list was Stanford in microcosm.  People used it for shout outs (though conspicuously without the oh-so-Stanford “I SEE YOU” preamble), people used it to plug events, plug personal projects, and people used it, of course, to humiliate their friends—which, in the long run, is the goal of any form of mass communication among college students that doesn’t devolve rapidly into inside jokes.

In short, it was beautiful—somewhere between Liszt-piano-sonata-beautiful and biking-through-White-Plaza-on-Activity-Fair-day beautiful.  A complete and utter disaster that showcased Stanford’s humor, the displayed the breadth of student involvement, and proved beyond a reasonable doubt that being brilliant does not translate directly to being tech savvy—and that’s okay.  We’re all imperfect.  (Just especially the ugres_rcfs moderator.)

Anyway, without further ado, some of the superlatives from Listomania 2011:

First. The first video to go out on the list, while more kind-hearted Stanfordites were still trying to explain this mysterious inbox apparition.

First to market. Battle of the Bands plug, 5:42pm—the first cynical realization of the massive exploitation potential of ugres_rcfs.

Best. Rick Rolling of the entire Stanford undergraduate population.

Worst. Smanging of the entire Stanford undergraduate population.

Most questionable taste. I’ma let this one speak for itself.

Quote: It's pretty tight.

Darkest horse candidate. Senator “Palatine” made an appearance (waaaay more underground than Palpatine).

Most. I count three separate “Friday” links, plus one more Ark Music Factory video, which really makes it just four instances of “Friday.”

Truest. “This is like the Diaspora, but for all of F-n campus!”

Most “Step Up 2: The Streets”-esque. Mirrielees teaches all of Stanford how to dougie.

Most innocent. 5:26pm: “what is this list?”  And lo, the floodgates were opened.

Most helpful thing to send to a list of 6,000 Stanford students. “woof woof.”

Most silent. Housing, naturally.

Last. 6:20pm: “unsubscribe-list-this.”  It had to be, right?

 

The Public Eye

Funny that Facebook status traffic about the Nobel peace prize is down so much among my friends this year as compared to last year.  Non-controversial or non-conspicuous choice by the Norwegians?  I think the former is fortunately true and the latter unfortunately so.

Aloneliness

The strangest thing about having very limited access to the internet for the last week and a half is the sense of isolation that comes with it.  I’m sure it has something to do, too, with living basically alone in a foreign city for the same amount of time, but the lack of internet really compounds it.

For instance, I’d normally be writing this post in the WordPress editor, with Gmail and Facebook open.  People can find me, contact me, and I can contact them.  But now I’m typing this out in a .txt document that I’ll then copy-paste to WordPress as soon as I can connect to the internet with my laptop again.

I’m not sure how people survived without the constant connection of my generation.  The first day I was here I had to internet and no cell phone, and I just felt utterly alone — no way to contact the outside world.  I now have mein Handy, and I guess to say I feel isolated is pretty trite, but what I’m trying to express is that I don’t just feel isolated from people.  I’m anything but homesick — Berlin is amazing — and though I do miss all my friends in the U.S., miss being able to chat online while writing these blogs, miss being able to yell down the hall and either have someone answer me or tell me to shut up Seth why are you screamblogging at three in the morning, miss all the familiar faces and all that, what I really miss is knowing what the hell is going on in the world.  Seriously, I have yet to see a newspaper in English and no internet means I’m not getting any news that way, either.  Basically all I know about world events in the last nine or ten days is that Ricky Martin came out as gay, and that’s because the entertainment news briefs that flash on the U-Bahn told me (that and the fact that “homosexual” is a cognate in English and German).

So in summary, I hope you’re all doing great, I apologize for being involuntarily out-of-touch, and please, someone spend the dollar or two to call me if the world is ending or something.

WEIRDEST AIM CONVERSATION EVER

SMOLDERINGSALMON: John McCain is aware of the Internet!
SWINGETH: say what?
SMOLDERINGSALMON: So I know you or something?
SWINGETH: i dunno
SWINGETH: do i know you?
SMOLDERINGSALMON: No
SWINGETH: ah.
SMOLDERINGSALMON: : Then why are you IMing me?
SWINGETH: you
SWINGETH: imed me.
SMOLDERINGSALMON: I did no such thing
SWINGETH: mmmm
SMOLDERINGSALMON:

TalkativeSalmon:John McCain is aware of the Internet!
darkshadowed0: …Who are you?
TalkativeSalmon: say what?

SWINGETH: wait
SWINGETH: who the hell is talkative salmon or darkshadowed0
SWINGETH: i am neither of those people
SWINGETH: and it says your SN is smolderingsalmon
SMOLDERINGSALMON: You are Talkative Salmon
SWINGETH: mmm
SWINGETH: no im not
SWINGETH: well
SMOLDERINGSALMON: Whatever

smolderingsalmon has gone offline.