Trump has managed to do one thing for a lot of people: dispel the illusion that America is somehow special and immune to autocracy. Now we get a chance to get people to look clearly at American history and realize that…this is the way it has always been, except more subtle.
We have our own Nazi authoritarians now, so we don’t have to go to Europe to punch anyone and if we punched a Nazi we would probably end up in a concentration camp in Gitmo or El Salvador. We can’t make apple pies because no eggs to wash the pie crust.
So we have to now assess our country with clear eyes. Objectively. And welp, it isn’t exactly great. We have left too many people behind, we have not dealt with hatreds that have been born out of racism, evangelical cultism, regionalism, xenophobia or imaginary threats to someone’s piles of gold.
These things can be observed objectively. The only relative advantages we had over the world up to the last century was a vast supply of natural resources (that drove industrialization), an agricultural cornucopia (that drove industrial exploitation of agricultural goods) & a relatively open society with some marginal class mobility if you managed to pass for ruling class material.
That led to the industrial might that really won World War II, and if there hadn’t been a reactionary swerve away from the path being set post Great Depression through the war years, we might have had socialized medicine and other nice things everybody else has.
But we still had racism (born from colonialism), a legacy of rural poverty, unsolved issues from the abandonment of Reconstruction, and political structures designed for when we had an agrarian economy and were ruled by landed elites. And reactionaries. So we are where we are now—totally fucked.
At least most of the world is just as fucked in some ways as we are. Other places have nice things, but they are not necessarily responding to the challenges created by global migration due to displacement by economic and physical violence.
So maybe we should start thinking about MAGFA – Make America Great For All — instead of trying to go back to something that never really existed other than as some nostalgic vibe. </rant>
I recently acquired a “Smart Keyboard” at an apartment estate sale in New York. We were visiting a friend and she saw the sign in the doorway of a building near her co-op while we were walking to lunch, so we went in. And there was this bit of old tech sitting there, looking for a new home.
The AlphaSmart Pro as found.
So I grabbed it, along with its external power supplies—one for a cigarette lighter socket!—-and we paid $40 for it along with a few other small items, including what turned out to be a faux-leather jacket that fit my wife but then began to disintegrate as she wore it.
Fast forward to our return home a few days later. I plug the AlphaSmart in and discover there are still two text files on the thing. I have no idea how long they have been there…the AlphaSmart Pro was sold between 1995 and 1997, and I have no information on the previous owner other than what was in the files.
One file was clearly a sort of initial test. The other reveals the owner to be a struggling (perhaps self-published ) author, a writer who has published at least one book—which honestly could be half of the people who live in upper west side Manhattan. Other references (like “selfie”) place it at least after 2002.
Here is that file, with very minor edits.:
How did you do it all? How did you manage things?
All in good time, I know – there there – the last words of the day – I could write a lot more this evening.
The new protocol is no caffeine after 6 pm…. No e-mail or news – reading or television or writing – wind down smoothly, without the stress of the day filtering / bubbling up into the evening time.
One more thing – one little thing –
And some of the first – a screech fro the hallway – the little person is either really happy or really unhappy – you can’t really tell at this remove….
Was that a productive day? Maybe it was – maybe so…
And some of the first – you know all my usual feints and tricks and subterfuges – the old legerdemain that I have used too often, and for far too many shows – magic ceases to amaze after a few viewings, like jokes or old stories with a surprise twist at the end – once your seen or heard them more than one, twice, the effect is muted entirely…. It is erased – it doesn’t work – it was a good joke, a fine trick but now its cliché and much be discarded into the dump with all the other broken things that have been worn out by too much use…. There there there – one thing and another….
We’ll move in the usual directions now – we’ll get some real energy for the journey….
I need a few more dreams – I need some new obsession of things that I am interested in….
Be an American, someone devoted to the present and the future, not the past. The past has no place – it has to be denied – I think that’s a wondrous thing – increasingly though the young are mired in getting angry about the past – it’s an excuse for all sorts of shoddy beiahvior now – and to convinced oneself that there’s nothing left to do except to dwell on past wrongs and start thinking you are trapped b the system –a nd there’s no point in doing anything grand or even meaningful – that doom loop of the Past and all the obsessing about it.
For a long time, Americans were uniquely able to look forward, though – and to let bygones be bygones – without a long history like the Europeans, there was less raw material to forget – the Past wasn’t’ so nearly as important as the Present and the future of course….
There there – one thing more – a full word hoard – a full Hercule for the day…
That much was the easy part,all told.
Do what you can with every day….
Make the most of every occasion – all the cliches are true you see – they’re cliches because they have been true for a very long time for many many people….
We get spoiled and think our wisdom has to be unique – just for us – concocted out of many original stories and set of knowledge assembled by us – unique to our sensibility.
But it’s actually a lot easier than that – you can learn a great deal fro the ordinary, from ordinary things and the wisdom of ordinary language – it’s not as quotable, but it’s still a form of wisdom in a way…
I take a good looking selfie right now – if I arrange my face in the frame in a certain way….
Well, I wrote and never heard back. So I just forgot about the situation. Was that careless? Maybe it was a little bit careless.
It’s still raining and will be for hours. The heavy stuff is coming this evening – that’s going to be something, indeed.
One thing after another – there there – we’ll all get along from here….
I think I have been a very kind and generous father – I have enjoyed every moment when I could. It has been a brilliant, unbelievable adventure and I wouldn’t trade that for anything in the world.
Oh look at me tearing up again – I promised I wouldn’t’ do that, but there I go again…
Well back to duty and love / love and duty – I have been lucky in many many ways – and I am truly thankful for it all.
Send a book to Brian M. Send a book to Robin S. Send a book to Uncle Dick and Sandra. Send a book to Edward M. Send a book to 3 old friends.
Send a book to that agent from the conference. Two agents, three. Keep going at all costs. There there.
There’s a momentum here, there’s a certain velocity to things…
Keep going, keep moving. Use your talents every day no matter what…. Keep going – keep going and you’ll see where this goes.
You’re not done yet. You’re just getting started as a writer with an audience, wit a voice, with a tiny reputation.
Write all evening like this and see what transpires – you’ll get along from here – there’s progress to be made – there’s the honest truth if you dare confront it…. And there you go…..
Wods for a new mood….
{Words After the Dark Night of the Soul}
He puts down his metaphorical pen – and rests a bit – catches his breath for what’s next.
That’s enough work for the afternoon….
Having released these words from the non-volatile memory of the keyboard, I now exorcise them and hope the soul of the author has found rest. I suspect my children will someday forensically find my digital detritus as well, so this serves as a reminder to me to delete my search history, shopping lists, and random musings from my devices early and often-so that the ephemera of my life does not outlive me and haunt them.
There are many times I wake up and feel like I’m living in a Samuel R. Delany novel. America sometimes seems to traverse history as a flat spiral, constantly re-encountering itself without recognizing itself as it passes.
I picked up Dhalgren in a remainders bookstore when I was 16, after moving at the end of my junior year of high school from Long Island to a small city upstate near the Quebec border, a town caught in its own desolate time loop with a SAC base and nightly scrambles of bombers and tankers.
The B-47 bomber outside what was once Plattsburgh Air Force Base.
The book was mind bending and the wildest thing I had read up to then, but Bellona felt like a town I knew somehow.
I was already living at something of a remove from the world around me, having moved 375 miles north of my whole life to that date because my father had taken a job as a high school principal. My mother was still going to be teaching on Long Island, commuting to our new home every other weekend-adding to the sense of unbelonging.
Margaret Street in PlattsburghPoint Au Roche trail
I sometimes feel like I’m walking past that kid with Cold War neuroses when I walk through my neighborhood in Baltimore, where I have family and friends but will never be a native. To always be from someplace else is a hell of a thing.
Wandering the old Jones Falls mills with my son Jonah, 2011. Mill #1 is now luxury apartments.
A lot of this came to mind last night as I sat in an auditorium listening to Jeff VanderMeer talk about Absolution , his new Southern Reach book, and the rest of the series. He talked about how his research assistant had to construct a map of all the layers of previous human inhabitance in Florida’s Forgotten Coast — black communities’ burial grounds, indigenous settlements, and failed plantations, etc. — because no one had ever bothered to centralize all that knowledge.
We keep recolonizing our past, not even recognizing it as our past. As we approach the first Tuesday of November, this is…very much apparent.
Maybe we’ll wake up at some point and look around and see ourselves walking the other way as we pass on that footbridge out of this place where we are all visitors.
2001 July 21, “Packet Rat” (pseudonym), “Judge Rat calls for a Microsoft defenestration“, on GCN: Government Computer News:◦ Enable one-click uninstalls of unwanted OS and application features with a Defenestrate icon.
I got my start in tech as a Navy officer in November of 1988 when I was assigned the collateral duties of ADP Security Officer, Deputy Training Officer and Network Administrator at Special Boat Squadron 2 in Little Creek, Virginia. This was because I knew what a PC was, owned one, and had repaired and upgraded it myself. After the Navy, I spent a few years as a network wire puller, trainer, and occasional database administrator–mostly for government customers. Once, I even was forced to use WordPerfect 4.2 as a database by the NLRB, but that’s another story.
Then I went to work at Government Computer News. I was hired as a network administrator and occasional stringer–I had not been hired as a reporter straightaway because my previous editorial employer (a DC computer newspaper called Computer Digest, where I edited a certain SJVN occasionally) had refused to give me a good reference because I had the bad judgement of not regurgitating the press release but actually looking inside the case of computers I reviewed. After handling the conversion of GCN to a digital prepress, I was allowed to become a full time Labs editor. I even got a networking column.
In 1994, I was was offered a job at Information Week as a member of the labs team, working for IWL managing editor Julie Anderson. But my boss at GCN, Susan Menke, wanted to keep my column going in a different format. So she asked me to do a pseudonymous column in the style of the rumor sections that graced the big trade tabloids — eWeek (then PC Week) had Spencer Katt and InfoWorld had Cringely.
So I created The Packet Rat, with the fake byline R. Fink. The Packet Rat was an anthropomorphic rodent working as a senior IT professional at an unnamed government agency who somehow managed to get to all sorts of trade shows and burrow into tech companies’ inner sanctums for scoops. But what the column really became was an absurdist version of thinly-veiled autobiography of family and work life sprinkled with utter fantasy.
The Packet Rat became a mascot at GCN’s booth at federal tech trade shows, and the most read feature in the tabloid. “He” outlasted most of my old colleagues at GCN, running for 15 years. In the end the Rat was forced to retire by a redesign of the publication (and shrinking budgets); ironically, by that time I was back at the company that now owned GCN (1105 Media) as the editor of Defense Systems magazine, and had to do the last few columns before the sendoff for free.
Some of those columns still exist on Route 50, the site that consumed the remains of 1105’s content management system, but they’re so poorly formatted that they’re almost illegible.
I tried continuing the Rat as a blog for a while. I got laid off by 1105 during the financial crisis, and survived off freelance. I briefly took a job with Biznow running federal tech newsletters, but quit quickly when I realized I could do better if I stayed freelance (along with some technical writing and tech consulting gigs on the side). And then I got a call from Ars Technica.
All that time, thepacketrat has been my Twitter handle and username elsewhere. And it all began about 30 years ago today.
Back at the turn of the millenium, blogging was the way we shouted into the void. Democratized web publishing seemed radical. The act of editing in raw HTML and FTP’ing it up to some server, or running Radio Userland or some other bespoke script/code mashup to push unvarnished thought to a shared hosting account for all the world to see was a signal that you were part of the cyberspace revolution everybody promised in early Wired features. While it wasn’t the first “social media” — boards and chatrooms were — blogging was the beginning of something.
It has been 27 years since I first “blogged.” My first domain is long deceased, and much of the ephemera of my early blogs has been purged to /dev/null. Of course, the same is true of many of the publications that I worked for during that time and the things I wrote for them–good luck finding anything I wrote at Information Week, Government Computer News, Baseline Magazine, eWeek, TechTarget, Defense Systems, or anything before my first byline at Ars Technica. But blogging itself has blended into the rest of the online medium, and its early culture of “blog ring” intentional community has all but evaporated.
That’s partly because it was subsumed by mass social media and “microblogging”–Facebook and Twitter had a critical mass of people on them, and the conversation that had started in blog comment threads and loose federation moved into the for-profit platforms. Even your grandma was on Facebook. And all the Twitterati were posting what they had for lunch.
But while the dream of cyberspace was connecting with people globally and learning from each other, mass social media has become a toxic waste dump – full of disinformation, AI-generated attention grabbing and weaponized ignorance. Refugees from Elon’s X are looking to other platforms to regain some of the magic that Twitter appeared to have in the early days, but Mastodon is a fleet of volunteer pirate communities with a totally different vibe and BlueSky is still not at critical mass.
At least for now, mass social media seems to be dying – and in X’s case, it is dead to me.
So I’m doing what I’ve been thinking about doing since Elon carried the sink into Twitter – I’m taking back my platform. I have let this domain basically sit here for nearly 4 years, and have used it and other domains I’ve owned in the past to post long-format posts that I linked to from the other “social” platforms. Now, I’m going to use it as my primary posting place and self-syndicate it with links in an attempt to both keep control of my content and keep it out of the AI scraping hands of X and Meta.
The Packet Rat 