The Packbats' Weblog

So, we just watched an old TED talk - "The transformative power of classical music" by Benjamin Zander, you can look it up if you're bored - arguing that everyone likes classical music, and I feel like there's ... four assumptions? it made that we can't vibe with.

Like, the first assumption is that we need to be convinced that everyone likes classical music, but we'll get back to that.

The second assumption is that everyone always prefers a lively and excited performance to one that is more understated and subtle, which, whatever, I don't care - if one-buttock playing is just how Benjamin Zander plays, so be it.

The third assumption is that people who don't listen to classical music are sitting it out because they don't care about classical music. Like, y'all know how much of the world got fucked over by western European nations to make a tiny portion of folks from western Europe rich, right? Their culture can't escape being the culture of colonizers and oligarchs, so folks are gonna react to that.

The fourth assumption is that music in the western European classical tradition is somehow distinctive in this regard.

Like, okay, yes, Frédéric Chopin's Prelude No. 4 in E Minor is a lovely, heartbreaking piece of music. Tracy Chapman's "Fast Car" is a lovely, heartbreaking piece of music. Bea Miller's "feel something" is beautiful and desperate. MUNA's "Around U" is beautiful and lost. Andy G. Cohen's "Oxygen Mask" is overwhelming, powerful, perhaps despairing. Erik Satie's Gymnopédie No. 1 is agonizing, we actually have to turn it off because it hurts so much. We're talking about music here - if you're talking about music and people loving music, you can find music to love.

...because we're not even arguing with Benjamin Zander. We're arguing with the tradition that Benjamin Zander is participating in, of campaigning for classical music.

Like, does Zander know that classical music isn't music? He talks about a scourge of bland, technically accurate performances, then launches into playing a piece he loves with passion, intention, and understanding, and he thinks he's demonstrating that classical music is good. Music is good, my dude! People love the music you play because you're playing them music!

But classical music is a performance by the audience, of class. It is class-ical music. It's allowed to be boring garbage because, to paraphrase early (worse) xkcd, it's about getting some culture in you - and white culture is allowed to be terrible, to be bland and technically accurate, because white oligarchs can pay to have everyone taught that it's great anyway, that everyone should have it in them.

We found Zander's talk in the least charitable context possible. We found it via an Innuendo Studios video about "smart music" - about music you play to show that you have drunk deep the well of colonizer oligarch culture, and that therefore you are worth listening to. Because, in part thanks to Zander and Zander wanting people to love classical music, Chopin's Prelude No. 4 in E Minor makes the list.

I wish he'd been trying to teach people to love music instead. I really do. But the TED people wouldn't have paid him for that, because when the audience is paying six thousand dollars a year to be here, the speakers better be selling something exciting to rich people, and rich people don't want to be told that the problem with classical music is them.

A couple weeks ago, in a fit of frustration about not understanding object-oriented programming, we read several articles from the August 1981 issue of Byte Magazine explaining Smalltalk. One of those, "Is the Smalltalk-80 System for Children?" by Adele Goldberg and Joan Ross, contained this passage:

Contrary to the idea that a computer is exciting because the programmer can create something from seemingly nothing, our users were shown that a computer is exciting because it can be a vast storehouse of already existing ideas (models) that can be retrieved and modified for the user's personal needs. Programming could be viewed and enjoyed as an evolutionary rather than a revolutionary act. The frustration of long hours of writing linear streams of code and then hoping to see some aspect of that code execute was replaced by incremental development. Emphasis was placed on learning how to make effective use of existing system components (objects in the Smalltalk sense). Much of the teaching we did was to show users how to search for and read the descriptions of the many useful components we and others (and even new users) continued to add to the system.

Using resources within an already-powerful system is a highly effective and rewarding form of programming, and understanding that it is programming allows users to program more effectively within these systems.

We bring this up because, when you create a formatted document using a modern word processor, this is what you are doing: you are simultaneously creating data and creating instructions for how that data should be processed. (That's why it's called a word processor: it is doing work to convert the words into a format where they can be comfortably accessed.) When the Accessibility Awareness disabled.social account talks about using paragraph styles, it is because you, by using these library functions, allow other document interpreters – like screen readers and keyboard shortcut tools – to execute their own versions of these library functions and therefore process the data more usefully.

Obviously, word processing programming languages are special-purpose, like the bespoke forks of Lua implemented in fantasy consoles and game engines, or the Personal Home Page tool that some folks use for managing websites. It is a vast storehouse of already-existing components, designed to support its specific purpose.

…and we are dwelling on this thought today because we know many users of word-processing tools who do not avail themselves of these existing functions. And because we think this is, in part, because using these functions comfortably requires a degree of philosophical understanding of computers – an ability to learn a computer's language and translate your intentions into it.

As sighted writers, we are well familiar with the idea of marking off sections by having some big text at the top … but the idea that you can directly communicate, below the level of visibility, that a specific block of text is a section heading? And that the bigness of the text should happen not because you chose it, but because you chose to invisibly designate a line of text as heading?

That's a programming mindset.

And you have to learn that.

(original thread.)

Okay, you might or might not know the constructed language Toki Pona, but we're certainly still learning, so I think we can construct a good metaphor.

There's a "no more turing tests" tag now.

This might be kinda obvious but we'll just stick it here anyway. Also, shoutout to acorn_squash, who made a perceptive comment about disability and neurodivergence in the last post.

the question "is this human" has expired - it has become a torment of con artists and cash grabbers

the one, perpetually remaking their machines to deceive us

the other, perpetually demanding that we become harder to fake so they can keep selling us to advertisers

the doppelgangers yell, "I am human!"
the marketers yell, "Prove you are human!"
we all tuck ourselves into corners trying to find respite from the noise

why? why are we being yelled at? why for humanity are we being yelled at?

Alan Turing started with "can machines think?" and went from there to "can machines make humans think they are humans?" but listen to his imaginary machines

his machines talk about poetry, arithmetic, chess, Mr. Pickwick and winter's days

his machines speak honestly to their interrogators, try to understand, try to help

our phone makes a noise after half an hour, because we asked it to in a way it understood

our friends speak honestly, because they want to us to know that they miss clubbing, they like umbreon, they think of a sunrise as a sun, rising

why should we put the people who traumatized us in the category with the friends who help us survive? why should we put the machines that exploit us in the category with the machines that help us survive? why is this the split we are asked to make?

why "are you human" instead of "are you good"?

why not "are you good"?

can you tell if something is good to you over a teletype connection? are you good to it?

(edit: followup)

been frustrated a lot lately

but also have been trying to try more, lately

to take chances on folks we don't know and folks we do, speak up even when we're not guaranteed to feel heard

to do new things that are hard and not just give up

so yeah

been frustrated more lately

okay, but for real now

depending on genre, fantastical elements are approached in different ways

in much of the ~speculative fiction~ umbrella - sci fi, fantasy, superhero stories, blah blah blah - there's prolly an answer to how it works, and knowing the answer can help people deal with the challenges they face

for example, one of the characters in the 1999 Mystery Men movie, Invisible Boy, can make himself invisible when no-one (including him) is looking at him

like, obviously, that's funny - like, how do you even know

but also that's the rules, that's how it works, and that's how he saves the day later in the movie

in that story, knowing how things work is how you win

...but in other genres - something something magical realism? - how it works is simply not considered interesting

if Hobbes is a person, a walking tiger who can demolish Calvin at snowball fights, you can make humor and story out of it

if Hobbes is a toy, a plush animal that Calvin plays with, you can make humor and story out of it

if none of Calvin's magical nonsense is real, then he's a kid, using his imagination to create stories that feel real

but also for a lot of kids, especially neurodivergent kids, toys are a kid of real which matters

but also Calvin isn't real, none of this is real

Hobbes makes sense to us, reading a newspaper comic, because a kid and his tiger friend makes sense, and a kid and his tiger plushie makes sense, and living in a different world than the people around you makes sense

and if you want to tell a story with that? choose which one you want to tell

There's an interesting arc you can have with studying Toki Pona.

At first, you're learning words and phrases. That "toki" can mean "speech", "communication", "stories", and suchlike. That "pona" can mean "good", "acceptable", "approved of", and similar. That "jan" can mean "people", "characters", "humans", that kind of thing. That "jan pona" can mean "friend" - a person or people you approve of, that you like and endorse. That "insa" can mean "inside", "center", "stomach", and so forth. That "toki insa" can mean "inner monologue" or "thoughts". And learning all these things helps you understand what people are talking about.

And then you start unlearning them. Sort of.

Like, the thing about toki pona is that a lot of its strength is being not specific, is being contextual, is being personal. And you can translate the English word "think" with the toki pona phrase "toki insa", but there's a lot of things that a communication can be within - a house, a community, a back room, standard usage ... a lot of things. And "think" does a lot of work - I think that origami is delightful, but when I say that, I am saying that to me origami is delightful: musi pi lipu sitelen li pona tawa mi.

This isn't actually about Toki Pona - this is about Kyle Kallgren's analysis of the movie "Network", and the cover of "Land of Confusion" it ends with, and the idea of reading classic rock songs as saying something. Saying "things aren't okay, we're being lied to, and we need to stop the damage". Saying "justice for those American Indians who fight against poverty and police violence". Saying "the classist and racist status quo isn't actually a natural state, we can do something about it". Saying "The USA gave us a terrible life, sent us off to kill people who looked different than us, and left us with nothing when we got back, if we even made it back". All these words that got flattened into "angry" or "comforting" or "exciting" or whatever else, they were saying something.

People learn to ignore what a communication means.

Probably because if any of these people were allowed to be understood, we might not be okay with letting the rich get richer as everyone else kills each other.

Howard Beale was saying something. He was saying that you have to get mad because the other option is depression and not caring, and if we have any hope of not taking it any more, not letting all the evil be wrought upon us, we have to care.

And on a personal level, to paraphrase jan Sonja about Toki Pona: if a friend is a "jan pona", a good person? A bad friend is a contradiction in terms.

Words mean things. And caring about what words convey can mean caring about a lot else, too.

We're thinking about making a new personal website for ourselves, and thinking about the way we avoid buying physical things most of the time, and suddenly we remembered a concept that computer software developers talk about: tech debt.

Like, the thing is, if you write code, then now you have to maintain it. If something changes in the computers that use the code, the code can break and you have to deal with that. If something changes in the problems the code must address, then the code may no longer fit and you have to deal with that. Writing code is work, but now that it exists it continuously produces more work, and that work doesn't happen on a schedule of you just feeling like writing code one day - it happens whether you like it or not. The upkeep costs come due no matter what.

And we're thinking about making a new personal website, and what to put on it ... and it's the same problem. Unlike a blog (where posts happen and then settle into the archive) or a microblog (where posts happen and then get buried in the churn of the past), anything we put on a website we have to upkeep. What ingredients we use in a recipe changes. We write new PICO-8 chiptunes. A webcomic's site hosting dies. These are changes and, to us, if we make a website, it's supposed to be correct, not just a historical artifact.

So ... yeah. We're thinking about making a new personal website. But it probably won't have a lot on it.

(This began as this fedi thread.)

Bigotry is specifically the exercise of power within and by a system like kyriarchy to fuck over marginalized groups in favor of privileged groups. We're not professionals, but that's our best understanding of the definition.

That said, kyriarchy isn't self-consistent. Kyriarchy can contain hatred of men just fine - hating men is a lot less threatening to it than hating injustice, so threats to the system can be diverted to individuals within it...

...and especially diverted to marginalized individuals within it.

So, yeah, misandry is real. You can tell it's real because autistic people, black people, trans people, disabled people, PoC, children, migrants ... we all get attacked. People take a power structure, turn it into a description of a villain, and use it to attack the vulnerable. It's not hard - all it takes is attacking people you hate with things you're told are hateful traits, and never ever ever listening to them when they try to teach you to be better.

This is half a tangent, but we still like Jay Smooth's video "How To Tell Someone They Sound Racist" and its distinction between the "what they are" conversation and the "what they did" conversation. Pretty near every time we try to talk about something we have a problem with, we try to talk about actions we have a problem with - about what they did - and, when necessary, let people draw conclusions from what they did about what they might do next.

(By the way, Jay Smooth's followup TEDx talk, "How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Discussing Race", is terrific. It's worth watching both.)

I'm gonna be honest with y'all as people who've been around on the Internet for a hot minute: we've seen some bullshit. But I'm also gonna be honest with you as a disabled genderqueer transfem Black plural system: "what they are" got fuck-all to do with whether you got bigotry in you. You got bigotry in you. You got that for free.

So when we're talking about misconduct, we leave "what they are" out of it. We even avoid "reply guy" and "mansplaining" and other suchlike phrases. Are they doing harm?

Are they doing harm?

Like, seriously, is anyone being hurt here? Is this just weird and uncomfortable and makes you feel bad? Because it's okay to feel bad, feeling bad isn't a sin.

And if people are getting hurt, what kind of hurt is it, where did it start, and why? If one person weren't fighting, what would the other person be doing? (That last question is inspired by "Lady Eboshi is Wrong" from Innuendo Studios.) (Lady Eboshi transcript.)

It doesn't matter which people in the conversation are being called what kinds of oppressor. Calling your critics your oppressors is the easiest damn thing. And the kyriarchy doesn't care why you attack its favorite targets. It just wants those targets taken down.