The merc was more than a person: like a spaceship launch, her existence implied thousands of skilled people, generations of experts, wars, treaties, scholarship, and supply-chain management. Every one of them was all that.
She was in the zone, a human copressor for a complex system that used machines as a nervous system to wire together the intelligence of a global crowd of people she loved with all her heart.
This stuff only works in practice. In theory, it’s a mess.
Computers can control you or they can lighten your work – if you want to be in charge of your machines, you have to learn to write code.
The way out of a crisis was to deal with it as it was, not as you wished it were.
They say that it’s down to individual choice and responsibility, but reality is that you can’t personally shop your way out of climate change. If your town reuses glass bottles, that does one thing. If it recycles them, it does something else. If it landfills them, that’s something else, too. Nothing you do, personally, will affect that, unless it’s you, personally, getting together with a lot of other people and making a difference.
Impatience, not fear, is the mind-killer.
The great mystery of being a human being is trying to figure out WTF all those other human beings are doing.
But you technical people have a disease: it’s called ‘solutionism.’ You see every challenge as a problem and every problem as having a solution and every solution as being a piece of technology. You hare off after those solutions without ever stopping to see whether there’s another, worse problem that’ll burst into life the moment the current one is ’solved.
Technology won’t save their asses. We know that better than anyone. Technology is a tool that gives us the space to make political change. Politics are a tool we use to open the space for making better technology. It’s like parallel parking: you go as far as you can in one direction, then back up and go as far as you can in the other. Use tech to make political achievements, use politics to improve tech. Back and forth.
That would be like telling people not to send nudes. It doesn’t work.
The point is just that people usually only figure out that things are turning bad when they turn bad for them, and by then it’s too late. The time to act is when you still have privilege and power, not when you’ve had it stripped from you.
In the words of Ice-T, “Do I look like a motherfuckin’ role model?
It’s hard to pay your own way when you’re used to someone else picking up the tab.
Sometimes hard problems don’t have easy solutions.
One thing I learned in all my years as a tech person: tech is more about sales than it is about code.
Never underestimate the power of a kid who is time-rich and cash-poor, as a foolish boy once.
The time to act is when you still have privilege and power, not when you’ve had it stripped from you.
That’s because humans are imperfect, so they make errors, which is why every book you’ve ever read has typos in it.
Blowing them up or shooting them wasn’t right, but a world in which the wicked went about their days frightened of retribution was a more just one than a world where the wicked held their heads high.
I miss the days when forensic accountancy and security engineering were distinct fields.