Here it comes
Welcome back to The Jumpstack! It’s 2020, and we’re already had a few disasters and I’m off to a rocky start. Let’s jump in!
2020 has no chill
If you live in Ontario, the Sunday before last was an eventful one:
An emergency alert regarding an incident at the Pickering Nuclear Generating Station woke most of us up, with the vaguely sinister reassurance that we didn’t have to do anything but wait for further instructions. We did what was required: we all went online and made nuclear jokes until we got another emergency alert, this time to say that the first was sent in error.
So, this is timely:
No system is perfect, but it doesn’t help when the human ego is in direct competition. The best laid plans can be torn asunder with a “hold my beer” prerogative, as illustrated by the American Air Force:
Coded switches to prevent the unauthorized use of nuclear weapons were finally added to the control systems of American missiles and bombers in the early nineteen-seventies. The Air Force was not pleased, and considered the new security measures to be an insult, a lack of confidence in its personnel. Although the Air Force now denies this claim, according to more than one source I contacted, the code necessary to launch a missile was set to be the same at every Minuteman site: 00000000.
A week after the not-emergency emergency alert, we still have very little knowledge as to why it happened, or the results of the fall out. (Pardon the pun.) The information provided by the province is as scant as the original message.
I’m sure there’s nothing to worry about—or rather, in light of the above article, there’s not much good that worrying can do when the controls aren’t in your hands.
Back to the future proof
I have a confession: I’ve not read anything by William Gibson, although I know I should and it seems everyone around me has. This is not a slight against him or his work, but merely a recognition of my own failures.
A second confession: when William Gibson retweets me, I’m delighted, for he is held in great esteem by everyone around me—and he’s the clever, odd sort of man I get immense validation from. And each time it happens, I get a whole bunch of male sci-fi fans who message me to find out how exactly I got William Gibson to retweet me, and demand I show how big of a fan I am of him.
A third confession: Nothing delights me more than telling these guys, “I haven’t read any of his books and I guess he just thinks I’m funny, sometimes.”
I’m not completely sure, but given this fascinating interview with the man himself, I think Gibson would find that funny:
Gibson is not a prophet: the election of Donald Trump threw him for a loop as much as anyone else, and it resulted in major revision of his work in progress. Going over his life, influences, and successes, Gibson is thoughtful and honest describing how he writes, and how he responds to the future becoming the present and inevitably the past:
Does it matter to try to get it right, though? “Every fiction about the future is like an ice-cream cone,” he says, “melting as it moves into the future. It’s acquiring archaism by the second. And I’m sure that Neuromancer, for instance, will ultimately be read for what it tells the future about the past. That’s ultimately all we can get from old science fiction. That’s the fate of antique science fiction. All science fiction eventually becomes vintage – mine included. But I knew that. I knew that before I even started writing it. And I’ve always found it delightful. It’s a delightful thought, as I’m working, that one day this will all just be completely archaic and hokey. But it’s my job to make that take quite a while.
Right here, right now
Every August, professors moan and groan about how the generation gap widens between them and their freshmen students. Like parents, professors watch their pop culture references go from nascent, to nostalgia, to no one knows what you’re talking about.
This short article with excellent visuals by Tim Urban focuses exactly on such things in the year 2020, and how you’re even older than you realize:
If you were born in the 1980s like me, a kid today who’s the age you were in 1990 is a full 30-year generation younger than you. They’ll remember Obama’s presidency the way you remember Reagan’s. 9/11 to them is the moon landing for you. The 90s seem as ancient to them as the 60s seem to you. To you, the 70s are just a little before your time—that’s how they think of the 2000s. They see the 70s how you see the 40s. And the hippy 60s seems as old to them as the Great Depression seems to you.
Child’s play
Speaking of the 1960s, remember The Game of Life? Phil Edwards explains the genesis of this classic game in this short video, and how the version we know today is far different than originally intended:
The switch from moralistic instruction to unbridled consumerism is one hell of a twentieth century move, and I can’t help but wonder: as this new century continues on, how will The Game of Life reflect the values and mores of the 21st?
In the mean time
This is the first Jumpstack I’ve written alone. Let me explain.
I had a draft of this newsletter I just deleted: I had written it over a week ago, in the usual fashion, curled up on the loveseat with my cat Miles sleeping beside me. Although he made very strong arguments to sleep on my lap at all other times, he was always content to let me focus completely on my newsletter, as long as he could nap beside me, a paw against my leg. That was our plan last week. But life had other ideas.
My cat woke up ill and declined rapidly last Tuesday, dying shortly before my kid came home from school. It was as terrible as you can imagine. A week later, I am still adjusting to this very empty, very lonely house. I am still at the stage where I want my cat desperately, and resent the idea that one day I will bring another cat home and like it as much as I did this one.
I know this will pass: Miles was the kitten we brought home a couple of months after our first ginger tabby died of old age. That first night, he alternated between walking on my face and eating the lasagna we had forgotten about on the counter, and by next morning he had doubled in size. I worried back then that I had made a mistake in bringing him home: a decade later, I know otherwise.
But for now, I am in a lonely house, and I miss that paw against my leg.
And that’s The Jumpstack for this week! One of you has won a pair of slippers knitted by yours truly: I’ll send the email to the winner again, but if I don’t get a response by the weekend, I’ll pick another.
I’ve also let go of “a smoke break with the work wife” tagline: I quit smoking (yes, hasn’t this been a lovely year to do so, so far?) and I’m feeling a bit petulant.
When I worked in finance, I had a core group of friends who began a tradition called “threezees”: at 3 p.m. we’d all assemble for five minutes for food, fun, and discussions of inter-office fuckery. Three in the afternoon was the best time, because it was an instant recharge at the worst part of the day—two hours after lunch, and two hours before we could all go home.
So, as 2020 trudges forward, let me put my smoke break away and bring to the Jumpstack the spirit of the threezees: a well timed and good natured break to get you through the day.
See you next week.
— Jump