Secretly Ironic

Felix Salmon takes down Thomas Friedman and the entire edifice of high corporate profits and low wages.

A list of where the budget cuts are falling, where our great congress is cutting off everyone’s noses to spite each other’s faces.

Compare, contrast:
Blind Joe (Willie) Reynolds, “Outside Woman Blues”
Ida Cox, “Four Day Creep”
Cream, “Outside Woman Blues”
Davy Knowles, “Outside Woman Blues”
God, I love all versions of this song. Yes, it’s sexist. Still awesome.

I think that what I really object to is the way everyone always elides the intractable disconnect between credentialing and education. I don’t want to go to grad school just to check a box, and I have a hard time seeing any actual advantage to spending 3-4 years grinding through a series of online lectures about IT supply chain management, aside from that shiny piece of parchment.

I feel like one of those gold bugs who refuses to comprehend that money doesn’t have to actually be a physical object of permanent value, and instead dives into conspiracy theories about how fractional-reserve banking and the Fed are systematic theft machines. I refuse to accept that cultural capital is actually just whatever we say it is. I really want a degree to have a real and relevant value, and not just be a way to keep out the rabble and network Our Sort of People.

So, according to Wikipedia, a spime is an object that can be tracked through its entire life cycle, through space and time, hence the portmanteau.

But I’m looking for a somewhat different word. A physical object which is, in fact, only the representation of a digital object. Say, if I have a document on Google Docs or Sharepoint or my hard drive, and print it out. I might scribble all over that sheet of paper, but the original is the digital version. And the changes I make to the paper version only become real if I make them in the digital version. The physical printout of the object is disposable; the digital original is the (more) permanent one.

I might make a piece of music on my laptop and then print it as an LP and take it to a house party and put it on a turntable. The LP is an instance of the original object.

For a dissection of the confusion this creates in a world that also demands a hardcopy for authenticity and archiving, see

Stumbled across this fascinating piece on physibles and 3D printing via Quiet Babylon, which just may be my new favorite thing.

When I was a child I used to complain, the way kids do, that things that hadn’t gone my way were just not fair.” And my father, of course, would often respond that life’s not fair.

But once he said something else that has stuck with me. He said life’s not fair, and it’s usually unfair in your favor. That is, not just “stop whining” but “count your blessings and stop whining.”

My family has lost some deeply beloved members recently – a great-uncle and a great-aunt – and it seems terribly unfair that they were taken from us. And so I think back about what my father told me.

It’s unfair to lose someone so great, that you love so much. But it’s also unfair that other families don’t get to have relatives that great, and don’t get to know the relatives they do have for as long as we got to know ours. It’s unfair that other families can’t travel to a funeral to comfort each other in times of loss.

To lose someone you love is not just a reminder that life is capricious, but often that it has also given you far more than it has taken away.

We have lost people, and it hurts. But the inverse of that hurt is knowing how rich our lives have been for knowing them.