Are my eyes really blue?

I need some distraction from the troubles in my life at the moment, so I’m going to complain about where I live. Not just Northern California, which is a magical place, not just Silly Con Valley, which is not, but the specific belt of 101 between CA-84 and CA-85, which seems to be the particular Hellmouth from which all our troubles come.

At one end there’s Facebook. At the other end there’s Google. In between there’s Stanford. And clustering around the far side of Moffett Field, there’s Google AND Facebook AND Amazon. And every square inch in between is getting filled with Teslas, artisan bakeries, and apartment buildings that are turfing people out so they can try to sublet a 3BR for $10,000 a month on AirBnB. All in a nine mile stretch with an ostensible population of maybe 200,000.

See, that’s the problem. The finance industry was always a magnet for horrible assholes, certainly, but they were being pulled into New York City – a place with a huge population at high density and with the infrastructure and transit to support it. You drop ten thousand big swinging dicks into the isle of Manhattan, nobody will notice, because they’ll be overwhelmed by everybody else. Drop ten thousand big swinging dicks into Mountain View and you’ve grown the population by almost 15% in a place with no subways, no apartment buildings over 4 stories tall and an existing population that wasn’t prepared for housing costs to double inside of a decade when wage growth has been stagnant all century.

Because the idea that nerds would somehow make tech a better place than other industries was always aspirational rather than descriptive. The tech sector was created by human beings, and human beings are assholes. Anyone who could see the Apple vs Commodore flame wars on a BBS in Birmingham in 1986 could have told you that there is no particular moral virtue in being a nerd, and fifteen years in Santa Clara County has proven me correct in this assessment. All the people who thought Alex P Keaton was awesome and ran off to Wharton in 1986 had kids who all ran off to Stanford so they could drop out after a year and get on the VC sugar tit so they could be like Uber or Snapchat or WeWork or (fill in current trendy “unicorn” that bleeds money like a gutshot pig here).

And it’s making things worse. There are towns all along the Peninsula that will be screwed if the Big One hits us during other than business hours Monday through Friday, because most of their first responders live two counties away since a cop or a firefighter can’t afford to live in Los Altos or Cupertino. The people who make a city possible – the cashiers, the janitors, the taqueria operators and pharmacy technicians and bus drivers and bank tellers, you know, all the jobs that existed when we were in kindergarten – can’t afford to live in the city any more, and are progressively being othered out of the world of Silly Con Valley now that you can be anonymously serviced by Uber and Doordash and the likes of the gig economy. And people didn’t care as long as it was “unskilled labor,” but they also underestimate how many of them are nothing but bit-janitors in the end. The point being not that they deserve better, but that the janitors deserve better.

The good news is that with things like AB5, the state of California is punching back for the people against the nerds and the algorithms. The bad news is that it may already be too late for this place to be dragged out of the Hellmouth. Silly Con Valley is where your future comes from, and you may not be glad it does.

Well, you can’t buy last year’s high end phones anymore. That’s the quiet news out of Apple Park, as the iPhone 11 and 11 Pro and 11 Pro Max (sounds like a gas station male enhancement supplement) will be joined on the shelf by only the XR and the 8 going forward. This suggests to me…but I’m getting ahead of myself.

WHAT THE FALL APPLE EVENT MEANS TO ME, by Stagger Lee:

1) Apple Watch: always-on display but still has “all day 18 hour battery life.” That reminds me, I haven’t charged my Fitbit Charge 3 in a week, need to top it up. Not a word about sleep tracking either. Pass. I still think the Apple Watch with LTE could be a very interesting device – especially paired with the AirPods and able to be the shutdown-night phone – but I don’t need two things to charge every night. The always-on display is reminiscent of how Jony Ive always used advances in processing power and size to make the phone thinner instead of longer-lived. Of which more momentarily.

2) New cheap iPad, 10.2” for $329. Interesting. This is clearly the entry-level bulk-order hand-them-out-to-the-class device, but even so…when have you ever been able to buy an Apple laptop for $329? iPad OS and Swift mean you’re getting close to the last piece of the Dynabook puzzle, in which you don’t have a computer until you can program that computer and write software FOR the computer ON the computer. If I had to get serious about Swift in a big way, $329 wouldn’t be the worst entry-level option. And it’s always nice to see Joz again.

3) Apple Arcade: $5 a month is probably right for this kind of thing but I’d have to see the game options first. I have come to realize that after a childhood spent pumping tokens into every machine at Big Al’s or Silver Star, and a college life spent pumping quarters into Cyberball or 1st and 10 or NBA Jam, I am simply not a gamer (bar the likes of Kentucky Route Zero). Even casual gaming is not my thing; my idea of a time-filler is hitting refresh on Slack and Twitter, God help me. Pass.

4) Apple TV+: this is basically the equivalent of launching Netflix or HBO GO with only the prestige series, with no long-tail backlog of hundreds of older movies and shows. I don’t think they could have brought this in for more than $5 and had the kind of uptake they want, but a year free with every new Apple screen you buy may help hook people. I don’t know…maybe? The only show that looks compelling is For All Mankind, but if they want to take me up on my pitch for a Mad Men-style look at the dawn of Silicon Valley called “Wagon Wheel” after the legendary watering hole in Mountain View near Fairchild…

5) iPhone 11: This is plainly the new default iPhone, as was the XR before it. They are really trying to position it as such, too. There is a clear line of demarcation between the “everybody” phone (8, XR, 11) and the “special” phones (X, XS and now Pro). And the highest-end phones now only last a year. The X, XS and XS Max all got turfed out after twelve months, and you can’t buy the Plus sizes any longer (although 6.1” without a bezel seems to split the difference in most cases). Still too big for me. Pass.

6) iPhone 11 Pro: Hold. Up. The big news here is not three cameras, or the full plunge into computation photography to catch up with Google (and arguably surpass them if this is all done on the phone without needing cloud processing), or the increased focus on dropability – the battery life is four hours longer than the XS. It’s been a while since Apple gave out absolute battery times and not relative to older models, so I’m gonna need to algebra this up, but four hours made me sit bolt upright on the sofa. That’s not nothing. Especially if you’re not gaming or taking a ton of pictures, but just doing the kind of text downloading that takes best advantage of the throttled processing. I guess this is why they think the always-on watch is doable now: they’ve perfected a processor that has running-away-from-the-cops speed but, like Milton Berle, can also pull out just enough to win. 

Pass, for now, but it puts me in mind of two things: the notional 5.4” iPhone 12 Pro, so-called, would not have an appreciably shorter (and possibly longer) battery life compared to the iPhone X work has saddled me with. Indeed, the A13’s battery-sipping ways might make it possible to make a smaller device with a smaller battery without compromising mean time between charges. And that in turn makes me think of the “new SE”, so-called, which would have that A13 in the body of an iPhone 8 (with, presumably, no superannuated 3DTouch taking up thickness where a battery could fit). That device, with its 4.7″LCD display taking less power than a 6.1” Liquid Retina LCD or a big AMOLED and a bigger battery than the iPhone 8 being gently consumed by the A13, might just be my next phone, especially with TouchID instead of FaceID. I don’t need Animoji that badly, and lest we forget, the 8 had all the chipset features of the X including NFC reader mode, waterproofing, the better front camera…the New-SE could very well be my next phone.

Circumstances brought my wardrobe to my attention this week – a little bit of social media and enough overcast in the morning to make the flannel shirt viable – and I began thinking about the semiotics of my wardrobe over the last decade or so. I had a pretty distinct look in DC by the end of my time there: black shirt, black shirt, Hawaiian shirt, black Hawaiian shirt. Khakis in hot weather, jeans in cold, Docs all the time and the leather jacket from September to March inclusive. In California, I was dressed for dock-walloping at Apple half the time (even if I did try to look a little nicer on keynote and beer bash days) and once I landed where I am now, there really wasn’t anything distinctive – it was the same wardrobe as grad school, albeit with adult shoes instead of the Nikes.

It started to change as I hit 40. I could sense it changing for sure, but where things really took a turn was when I went to Uniqlo in NYC (at a time when there were only three Uniqlo stores in the United States) and left with a couple of $30 cotton blazers, one off-white and one darkish-blue. They were transformative. I realized that the mere act of putting on the sport coat made me feel different, made me act different. The same holds up with the seersucker blazers (yes plural), or the new linen one I picked up this summer, or the Harris Tweed: as soon as it slides on I feel differently about myself and I project differently. I can’t explain exactly how or why, but I can be slouched in a black T-shirt and jeans and as soon as I put that linen blazer over it I’m ready for the first-class lounge at Heathrow.

Which I don’t name-check accidentally. I’ve never worn my Alden boots out of the country, but my wife’s dead-perfect birthday gift from over five years ago is the sort of thing that suggests things to me – that these same boots would be as well perched on a rock in the Scottish Highlands as on the rail of the bar in a pub in Galway or on the cobblestone streets of the West End theater district in London. These boots make me think I should be wearing them abroad, down European back alleys and alongside Japanese canals and propped on the footrest in international business class on a Dreamliner.

In the various notebooks (virtual and physical alike) I kept lists of things that were visions, inspirations, mood boards if you will, and looking back through them one of the common threads is wardrobe: most looking for workwear, things made in America, things of the sort I could wear and use for decades if I wanted to. In the last seven years, I’ve mostly accumulated them. Shirts from American Giant, especially the work shirt that I’ll wear every day from November to March if allowed. Jeans by LC King. The Filson x Levi’s trucker jacket, which I desperately need to re-wax. The peacoat. The Aldens. My Vanderbilt hat from Ebbets Field Flannels and the Kangol my dad used to wear. When I talk about having hit the finish line on stuff, I think that’s a huge part of it. I have the tools to be dressed the way I want to dress, and achieve the mood and feeling that comes from that. I can’t explain how different I feel in that work shirt (or now the flannel) – it just feels right.

The problem is, I rarely have more than four months to wear the things that just feel right. Even the summer blazers are a big ask when commuting in an area that gets hotter than it ever used to, more frequently and for longer. It’s entirely possible that the last piece of the puzzle is to lace up the boots and head for someplace gray, urban and below 60 degrees. Which is the trick. I can watch minor league baseball, I can watch MLS and the Premier League, I can drink 3.5% ABV pub bitter, I can walk through the Sunset and ride down the PCH at dusk, and I can do all of this in my most comfortable wardrobe – but it’s not going to be a substitute for Galway, or York, or Bath, or London. Not yet anyway.

Might be time to do something about that.

And so Parliament, by a majority of 27, takes the tiller from Boris Johnson with the intention of ruling out a no-deal Brexit. For perspective, the last PM to lost his very first vote was Pitt the Younger. Now all manner of chicanery is afoot. There’s talk of Boris refusing to seek royal assent for the bill. There’s talk of calling an election for October 14 and then pushing the date out once Parliament is dissolved to double down on the prorogue and ensure that Brexit happens on the 31st. And most of all, there’s a growing realization that unwritten rules aren’t worth the paper they’re written on.

At this point, the game is to secure the extension and push the date out long enough that an election can be held. From there, we functionally have our second referendum: yes or no on a no-deal Brexit. If yes, vote Tory or Brexit or UKIP; if no, vote for the Rebel Alliance, whether Labour or LibDem or SNP or what have you. The risk is that with the vote chopped so many ways, there’s no telling who might finish first past the post with a chance to form a government.

Theresa May’s problem was that she was committed to doing this within her government alone, and Jeremy Corbin was happy to let her. Now that the Tory party is withdrawing the whip from as many as 21 of its members, it remains to be seen where the non-Labour anti-no-deal forces will line up. LibDem? Possibly, although many of their rank and file are already grousing about uncritical acceptance of Tories whose other issue positions are anathema. An altogether new center-right party a la Change UK? Maybe. But would that party line up behind Corbin as PM? And if not, would Corbin line up behind some other MP for the sake of derailing no-deal?

One thing’s for sure: the people whose first field was Comparative are every bit as regretful as Americanists that they wasted years on a diploma at this point. What we have now is a six way cage match in an arena that’s burning down. British politics finally and firmly has no god but Loki.

My fiscal year always starts in September. Ever since 1976, when I first went off to playschool – arguably even before that, since my father was an educator. Even after washing out of grad school, I started every new full time job but one right around this time – and that one is the one I’m laid off from; the new job to which I was outsourced begins in two weeks.

I also had football. It was my favorite sport from the beginnings of my sports fandom until about four or five years ago, once it became obvious that Vanderbilt’s sudden burst of adequacy was a fluke. This is not a dig against Derek Mason, who has proven as viable a coach as was Gerry DiNardo or Bobby Johnson in his latter seasons – he seems to be a 5-win-plus coach, rather than a 2-win-plus coach like Watson Brown or Rod Dowhower. Rather, it’s part of the growing realization that it is not structurally possible for Vanderbilt football as currently constituted to ever be a reliably .500-plus team.

That’s a big part of why college football is out of the picture for me. It doesn’t spark joy. And the reason it doesn’t spark joy is because college football is the real world: then that has gets, them that hasn’t suffers, and the values people tell you to live by aren’t the ones practiced by them that keeps gettin’. By rights, I’m entitled to claim the Crimson Tide – I was a loyal fan through Ray Perkins and Bill Curry, through the first losing season in decades and dropping every Auburn game in high school and a miserable streak against Tennessee in the 90s and the Mike Shula era. But I have an SEC team from a school I attended, and for the last decade, supporting Alabama has been like rooting for the house, never mind the general character of Alabama fandom in the Saban era. No thank you.

The other problem is there’s no belonging associated with college football anymore. My ambivalence about the Dores notwithstanding, it’s not like I have any in-person interactions around football, because I’m a couple thousand miles away. I have Cal by marriage, but that doesn’t present an appreciably better caliber of ball these days – and points up the extent to which it’s so much easier to just turn on the TV than actually schlep up to a game when you’re not going with or meeting folks.

And really, what was the college thing for me but a problem of belonging? Undergrad never offered any way of belonging to the school at a whole – the fraternities and sororities were the organizing structure for everything else, and there was nothing, not even national championship caliber basketball, that compelled the students together. College football – which undergrad didn’t have at all – became an attempt at crafting a surrogate sense of belonging to remediate a hole in the past that I’d just as soon cover over and go around than try to fill in and repair any more.

Which actually goes for a lot of things. Of which more later. For now, I’m just trying to make the best of a new start – if not exactly a fresh one.

I’ve been keeping this blog for more than a quarter of my life. Which is a hell of a lot to think about. Sometime next year, I will have spent one-third of my life in California. Half a lifetime ago will be 1996 – after high school, after college. Already, I’ve blown off my 25th college reunion, because why would I stop trying to forget where I went to undergrad now? Next year will be thirty years since high school.

It’s a lot of time. And it’s a lot to wrap your head around. Looking back, though, this blog seems to have focused on the same damn things reliably:

* Cellphones should be omni-capable, yet fit in one hand

* The Confederacy won the 21st century and keeps winning

* I wish I lived somewhere with more fog and fewer techies

* The college thing in general – and Vanderbilt sports in particular – will always be a burden

And yet, I seem to be moving toward the ultimate goal. Football is a back-burner thing now; only the autumn ride-around keeps me engaged with the Skins (and with Sonny retired, this could well be the last go-round for that, who knows). When I left DC, my daily carry included a cell phone, a pager, an iPhone and sometimes a Blackberry or PDA along with a pipe, a tobacco pouch, a lighter and a Leatherman. Every bit of that has now been replaced with an iPhone and a bottle-opening screwdriver shard on my keyring.

And the wardrobe has evolved. There were horses for courses, naturally, and the resort shirts and khaki of DC summers have way to cargo shorts and steel toed boots in a secret Apple warehouse, and things have evolved over time. But now, in NorCal in the heat of the ever-longer climate change summers, I find that it’s gotten amazingly simple. Black T-shirt from American Giant. Jeans from LC King. As often as not, those damned black plastic Birkenstocks, of a brand and style that I would have sworn would never be in my wardrobe even five years ago. Basically, unless I have to take transit to work or have something special to go to, that’s the wardrobe every day from…March to October? And after that, the AG work shirt or flannel on top of the T-shirt, and the sandals for as long as I can get away with it. Nothing to lace, nothing to tie, no socks needed.

A lot of the stuff I’ve accumulated in the last seven or eight years has a whiff of the cargo cult about it – that if I only prepare myself for a life walking the Cotswold Way, or cheering on the local GAA team, or watching the waves wash the pebbles on a Scottish coastline, then I’ll somehow be there doing it. Practically speaking, a 55+ trailer park on the coast near fog is a hell of a lot more likely, but hey – that same uniform with the work shirt would probably do for me for about eleven months a year (might need socks and boots in January).

It’s entirely possible that I’m on the upward swing out of the U-curve of depression that characterizes one’s 40s. I was hit hard by the encryption debacle when that happened in 2013, and work was a blight on my life until around 2016. Then politics took over as the thing that kept me from getting right, and I don’t doubt that the next fourteen months are going to be difficult to deal with, but maybe I have a slightly better toolkit than in years past. The things I want in life at this point are simple and quiet and in theory, easily obtainable – except for the ones that are wholly out of my power with no choices but how to cope.

Year 14 is begun. Onward.

So Boris the Muppet is going to prorogue Parliament ahead of a Queen’s Speech. This is normal. What is not normal is that the speech is planned for October 14, two weeks before the Brexit deadline, and the prorogue is five weeks long – when normally it’s seven days or so at most.

This is two things at once. One is an attempt to force a no-deal Brexit, which is now the only option palatable to the UKIP types that banged the drum for ages to bring this about. The majority of the public is opposed to no-deal, and it’s entirely possible that if the only options are no deal or no Brexit, a majority of the public (and of Parliament) could be easily found for “no Brexit.” But right now, the legally mandated result is a no-deal Brexit unless something happens to alter that, so all they have to do is prevent anything being done. Shutting off Parliament until two weeks before doomsday forces the issue.

Or it could lead to a general election, which is what Boris really wants – the opportunity to be validated as a fully elected PM rather than one thrust onto the scene by a handful of the electorate and the misbegotten Fixed Term Parliaments Act. And given that he currently commands a coalition majority of 1 in a house of 650, a general election is long since overdue. In every way that matters, a general election would be the much-debated second referendum – essentially a yes or no on a no-deal Brexit, because it’s readily apparent that a Tory government (aided and abetted by the yahoos of the Brexit Party, especially if their numbers are crucial to the coalition) is fixated on no-deal as the only true Brexit.

The truly ironic thing is that in their first post-Brexit-referendum election, the Tories got absolutely dishragged and had to cut a deal with the DUP just to stay in power. Yet a no-deal Brexit, which was not part of anyone’s campaign in 2016, is now apparently the only legitimate voice of the pubic – not the results in 2017, not the actions of the duly elected Parliament since then, and one presumes not the actions that Parliament might take in an attempt to stave off the economic and political crises that would arise from crashing out.

Basically, Boris is bent on destroying democracy in order to save it. One hopes the British public is brighter than to allow it. But on current form, I’m more convinced than ever that in my lifetime I’ll see Scotland independence and Ireland whole.

Wouldn’t that be something.

Yeah, I put in for the Apple Card. It arrived instantly, so to speak, but took a few more days to deliver a physical card. Which has come in for all manner of roasting online, because the white titanium coating apparently scratches or discolors on contact with leather. Or denim. Or other cards. Or air. Or who knows what. It’s Jony Ive at his most recto-cranially inverted. But when you think about it, the actual physical card is an afterthought. It’s meant to be. It makes me wonder why you needed a physical card at all; if you can have the “courage” to dispose of the headphone jack you can have the courage to make a credit card without the physical card. But I digress.

The card itself, naturally, has nothing on it but your name, an Apple logo, a MasterCard logo and a Goldman Sachs logo. And a chip and a stripe. No number. No place for signature. No anything. This is basically a dongle, for those parts of the world where the physical talisman is still required. The point of this card is that it is almost entirely meant to be virtual; you pay via ApplePay whether on your phone or on the Apple Watch or through the Safari browser. And those transactions have an individual number; there’s no credit card number to be lost or copied. If you actually need the number for other websites, you can look it up in the Wallet app or paste it through the browser.

And if it gets compromised? Well, there’s no number on the card. If your number gets pinched somehow, you go to the Wallet app on the phone, select the Apple Card, select settings, and request a new number. Boom, it’s done. If you lose the physical card, it’s one touch to lock it out and another touch to order a replacement. Boom, it’s done. And the phone never stops working while you wait for the physical card. One of the biggest annoyances of credit card ownership is when the pizza place or the shaky online vendor or the multinational corporation gets your digits compromised through their inferior security practice and it takes a week or more to rotate the card out and replace it. Now, that’s virtually nonexistent.

The card itself is pretty good. I don’t mind saying that my credit score is better than my SAT subject results, so I have a pretty good APR (which I will never use) and a pretty good credit limit (which I would have misused to excess in college). In the Wallet app itself, the card’s spending is broken out by category so you can see exactly where your money is going, and the “bill” in the app is in the form of an Apple Watch exercise ring of a thing that you can swipe around to pick minimum payments or category payments or “pay off a third of it to make a dent” or just pay off the whole thing. And there’s a button to pay now, without waiting for the due date, which also surfaces on the app.

And the benefits, such as they are, are straightforward and simple. There are no fees. No annual fee, no late fee, no international transaction fee (I specifically asked, via iMessage, and was assured there is no fee for international transactions AND you can take it abroad without calling to clear first). No fees at all. If you pay it off every month, this card is gratis. It also has a basic cash back program: 2% on all transactions with ApplePay, 3% on all transactions with Apple or chosen promotional vendors (Uber, at present), 1% cash back on anything paid through the card – and the cash is deposited into your Apple Cash on the phone, daily. Not spectacular, but not awful, especially if (as has been rumored) Apple is pushing Goldman Sachs to be aggressive with approvals. Word on the street is that if you apply for the card, you’ll get it – maybe not with the most competitive interest rate or credit limit, but barring catastrophic credit you won’t be denied outright.

Add all this up – along with the fact that activating the physical card isn’t a phone call, isn’t a web lookup, it’s an NFC touch to the packaging – and it’s hard not to think that this is what all credit cards will act like in five years. This is a step toward more secure transactions, towards reduced fraud, toward ease of use with your smartphone. People dismissed the iMac as trendy colors, the iPod as trendy white headphones, the iPhone as an overpriced vanity device – but eventually they prove to be pathfinders for the industry. It’s entirely possible Apple has skated toward where the puck ought to be, even if it’s not necessarily where the puck is going to be. And for me – whose primary card is an American Express on which everything gets charged – having a MasterCard universal backup, free of charge, is more than enough incentive to see this experiment through.

I used to have Bag Glee, every bit as much as Phone Glee or Car Glee or Shoe Glee. I don’t know when exactly it began – probably when I got my first laptop in 1999, if I had to guess – but for years I was constantly trying to find the perfect bag for everything, whether backpack or Kensington Saddlebag or some weird hip-slung thing or whatever Timbuk2 had come out with. My very first post on this very blog – almost thirteen years ago – mentioned my chagrin at their discontinuing the Ace pack. And once I got into a mode of carrying one laptop back and forth every day – which was the case for seven or eight years – I was constantly fixated on what would best handle my loadout, and what that loadout would consist of.

As it happens, about five years ago I settled on a very minimal Timbuk2 black backpack, enough to hold the computer and not much else. Because I genuinely can’t remember the last time I traveled with a laptop other than for work. Maybe 2010, during the netbook experiment – but even once I had an iPad, it rarely left the house. Not that we did all that much traveling in the first few years of my iPad experience, but even then, my goal was to get to the iPad mini and fit it in a coat rather than a bag.

Because really, in the smartphone age, the goal is to have a phone do everything. Worst case scenario, you add a Kindle for reading and a battery pack to recharge everything and fit it all in the right jacket, which can be most anything these days. The iPhone X has meant that I don’t even bother with the Kindle, and so anything will work: linen blazer, Uniqlo blouson, Harris Tweed, Filson trucker jacket, Rickson bomber, pea coat, rain shell, zippered sweatshirt.

I still have my Rickshaw messenger, and my slightly larger custom Timbuk2 messenger, and they generally do for a carry-on (the Timbuk2 will even do for a weekend getaway bag, especially if no flights are involved) but I haven’t gone looking for new bags in a long time. The closest thing I’ve been tempted by at this point is a duffel bag, something to substitute for a suitcase going abroad at an age when I don’t have to schlep my life around on my back like an impoverished student on a EurRail pass.

But more and more aging backpacks and laptop sleeves and the like are finding their way from the garage or the closet to Goodwill these days. Which is just as well. There are things that are surplus to requirement with no sentimental value or prospect of future utility, and those are the things to get off your hands as quickly as circumstances allow.

You can’t trust anybody anymore. A blithe enough cliche, but then, cliches don’t get to be cliches because they’re wrong. In a purely professional sense, this crops up in the concept of “zero trust” – the idea that in computing, you never trust and always verify. Credentials at every step, least required privilege, and the use of certificates to automate the authentication process so that you can be forced to prove who you are literally every step of the way. It doesn’t matter if you’re inside the company network: you still have to authenticate to a VPN to access internal resources, and must log into those resources individually, and and and. The key thing being identity access management – the ability to prove who you are and thus move along.

Which made me think about what a zero trust society looks like.

The story of the 21st century is the tale of how the Internet, filter bubbles, social media and a firm belief that you’re entitled not only to your own opinion but your own facts created a post-truth universe. Ultimately, there are people with whom you can no longer communicate because the ground rules for what constitutes reality no longer obtain. You have no recourse to authority, because there is no authority. Ironically, all those postmodern academics that were the bete noire of conservatives during my college years are now underpinning the entire project of the right. There is no meaning beyond whatever narrative you can enforce, and if people don’t believe that narrative, there are no grounds on which to correct them or even come to some sort of understanding. We already have the very notion of science being kicked to the curb, while Fogust in NorCal is suddenly hotter than a two dollar pistol at an Alabama flea market.

Part of it, I think, is because of the old line about not being able to get a man to believe something if his salary depends on not believing it. Only inverse. Fox News makes its money because people believe conspiracy theories are real. WeWork and Uber and AirBnB make money because investors believe they are tech companies and not real estate, taxi or hotel companies. Scientology makes its money because…who knows. But as long as you can sell people something they want to believe in, they’ll pony up the cash. Maybe talk show hosts and tech startups are what replaced televangelists. Trade your cash for salvation.

And I think part of it is because people want to believe a simple story, no matter how absurd it is. Ross Perot, all those years ago, had a simple story, and got 19% of the electorate to buy it, which should have been a fucking siren red alert to everybody: if one-fifth of the electorate can be convinced that platitudes and internally inconsistent bullshit will make the Presidency an entry-level political job, it’s no great leap to expand that to one-half over the course of twenty-five years, or close enough to make a disaster possible. People want to believe that you can magically get a cab from your phone without needing cash, or to tip, or to do anything at all, and that this money-losing service will somehow be sustainable and that the company behind it will be worth more than General Motors because [FILE NOT FOUND] – because, presumably, if you get in at the right time you can achieve jackpot wealth when it goes public. And we’re starting to see how well some of these companies survive first contact with a public market. It’s not pretty.

It annoys the shit out of me to have grown up in a world where imagination was suspect and only the hardest of reality was permissible six days a week (notwithstanding the premillenial dispensationalism fanfic of Sunday mornings in the 1980s Baptist church), only to find myself approaching age 50 in a world where it’s okay to believe whatever you like because there’s always someone on the internet or cable TV to validate it. Because…what do you do? You can’t shut down all the websites. You can’t shut down Twitter and Facebook, as much of a blessing as that would be on the world at large. You can lead that horse’s ass to water, but you can’t make him think.

Maybe that’s a big part of what makes me think about retirement away from Silly Con Valley. If you don’t much like or trust people these days, it doesn’t make the sense to plant yourself in the middle of three and a half million of them. My retirement dreams these days tend more toward Galway or Half Moon Bay or some even smaller possibly fictional seaside village on some Celtic coastline that won’t tumble into the sea before I turn 99. But then, I grew up in a town of three thousand, and below a certain threshold of population, it’s easy as pie for literally everyone to be in your business. Paradoxically you might have to move someplace with a million people to get some privacy, because there will inevitably be a social decision that you have to leave people alone in order to get on with your life. Which in a way, I suppose, is its own form of defense in depth.