Rian van der Merwe

Recursion

Tue, 02 Jul 2019 21:43:00 -0700

I’ve been thinking about memories a lot. I just finished the book Recursion by Blake Crouch. He wrote the excellent Wayward Pines series (which was later turned into a really bad Fox show). He also wrote Dark Matter, which is not a prequel but kind of a precursor to Recursion.

Recursion is about how memory is everything. That without memories, we cease to exist. It’s a science fiction novel, yes. But it’s that particular brand of science fiction that is rooted in just enough Actual Science to mess with your head a little bit. Or, in my case, mess with my head a lot.

I’ve always had a weird relationship with my memories. I’ve moved around a lot, I’ve lived in too many places, and I’m naturally a nostalgic person. In a way I’ve always felt like I’m in a Fog of War video game that I’ve explored too quickly and now there’s no turning back. For that reason I’m prone to silly things like Sunday Night Blues and listening to Phil Collins’ “Take Me Home” over and over (and over) again while I remember the past. I don’t know, it makes me feel safe. As Counting Crows said:

If dreams are like movies then memories are films about ghosts.

So back to the book — I am intrigued by this idea that even the present moment is just a memory, and that reliving memories is a form of time travel. I’m not going to spoil the book, but I am going to say that it takes that idea too far (in the best possible way), and that it’s making me take a real hard look at my propensity to live too viscerally in my past experiences and regrets.

📖 Book review: Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport

Mon, 11 Feb 2019 16:00:00 -0800

I read Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World by Cal Newport over the weekend, and it exceeded my expectations. I was a little worried it would just be a re-hashing of his previous book Deep Work, through a slightly different lens, but it’s not that at all. Cal brings in lots of psychology, and provides practical (and pragmatic) recommendations for cultivating a better relationship with technology.

He also draws heavily from the experience of about 1,600 people who undertook a 30-day “technology declutter” during the research phase for the book. Cal uses their stories to share what worked for them, what didn’t work, and ways to address some of the most common pitfalls of trying to become a digital minimalist.

I won’t lie, this book is scary. It’s making me rethink every single online service I use, and I realize that I’m going to give up a lot of it. But I also somehow feel lighter and freer, having come to those conclusions.

Cal isn’t dogmatic in his approach in this book. He lays out the evidence for why the intermittent positive reinforcement and drive for social approval that are built into social media is detrimental to our mental health and relationships. He gives practical advice on how to choose and use the tools that will provide benefit to you. But then he also tells you to use the principles behind what he’s saying, but do what works for you. I really appreciate that.

Below are some of the quotes that I wanted to remember.

A better way to use social media: within it, but detached from events

Sun, 03 Feb 2019 07:37:00 -0800

The best way to use social media is to act like a 19th-century Parisian is an excellent essay, and it’s worth reading the entire thing. The setup:

If you’re not quite ready to quit Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter, a more measured approach is to treat virtual spaces more like a bustling street—a place where, like a flâneur, you can pick up a lot of information by observing the action, while being more reticent to offer opinions and circumspect about posting.

The 19th-century German philosopher Walter Benjamin likened the flâneur to an urban investigator, within the city but detached from events, the quintessential modern artist citizen.

I love that phrase “within the city but detached from events.” That would be my desire for my own experience with social media. It’s worth reading up on the concept of a flâneur — sometimes referred to as “a connoisseur of the street” — which is a very apt analogy:

While Baudelaire characterized the flâneur as a “gentleman stroller of city streets,” he saw the flâneur as having a key role in understanding, participating in, and portraying the city. A flâneur thus played a double role in city life and in theory, that is, while remaining a detached observer. This stance, simultaneously part of and apart from, combines sociological, anthropological, literary, and historical notions of the relationship between the individual and the greater populace.

And this is some solid advice right here from the original article:

But operating under the influence of the masses clearly has deleterious effects on our thinking and behavior. By simply refusing to provide the desired engagement, or at least slowing down the pace of our interactions and taking time to think, we can collectively, and very politely, undermine the expectations for empty affirmations and recognize the effects of groupthink. This could change the tenor of the cultural conversation and make actual engagement meaningful again.

My IndieWeb experience so far

Fri, 01 Feb 2019 11:11:00 -0800

My side project for the past month or so has been to try to extract myself from centralized networks by digging into the IndieWeb movement. I have a lot more to do and learn, but I’m at a point where I wanted to take a step back and reflect on the process a little bit.

First, I want to talk about my current setup. There are so many different ways to go and decisions to make that I find it helpful when others have shared the direction they’ve taken. So here’s how it currently works:

This is a static Jekyll site. It uses the Marfa theme, that I’ve adapted and changed in a few ways, and it’s hosted on GitHub Pages.
I added a Micropub endpoint to the site, so that I can use a variety of open source tools to post to the site from anywhere. My current favorite is Quill.
The content feeds into the Micro.blog community via a JSON RSS feed. From there, I can have conversations with others about my posts, as well as the content they post.
Micro.blog tweets my posts natively to a Twitter account. This is important, because it means that if the text is <280 characters, it posts the full text — no link back to the my own site. It only links back in certain circumstances. This is, incidentally, the only part of this whole setup that costs me anything ($2/month).
I made category pages on the site for my photo stream and music recommendations. I used a modified version of Ryan Palo’s Jekyll Tags, The Easy Way to get that working.
I mostly post using the excellent Atom text editor. It has native Github integration to push new posts live, and the Markdown Writer plugin makes it really easy and fast to add new posts.

I think it’s worth pointing out a fairly significant issue I came across with images. The Micropub endpoint I use doesn’t have support for the media endpoint yet. This is a bit of a pain because it means I can’t post photos through Quill or the Micro.blog iOS app by simply uploading the photo. Instead, I use a Siri shortcut on my phone to upload photos to my Amazon S3 bucket.

The shortcut does the following when I run it on a photo:

Resizes the image to 1200px wide.
Compresses the image using TinyPNG.
Asks me for a file name.
Opens Dropshare so I can upload the image to S3.
Opens Drafts where I paste the pre-formatted link and type a caption.
From there I copy the text and post it.

That is obviously, well, really inefficient. You can see a video of the whole process here (obviously the TinyPNG API is a little slow). So, yeah, support for the media endpoint would be amazing.

So with all that said, here are a couple of observations. As I mentioned on Twitter, the process humans have to go through to “own our content” is currently in the chasm, and I don’t think it will cross over into mass adoption until we make it way easier.

But that’s not a criticism. I had a lot of fun discovering how all of this works, and I like this setup a lot. I am grateful to the IndieWeb community, and encouraged that such a thing is even possible. I just want more people to see the value of “Publish on your Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere”, and yet I realize it’s still way out of reach to most people.

I, however, am sold. So if there’s anything I can do to help spread the word, I’d love to hear it.

Onward to the open web…

🎵 The self is a fragile construction of the mind

Tue, 15 Jan 2019 07:50:00 -0800

As a vinyl collector I read Why We Collect And What Your Collection Says About You with interest. This part jumped out at me:

Cultural historian, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi has also argued that we collect and hold onto things because they keep us grounded in the present and help us remember the past. Your collection and the items you curate could even go some way to informing your own sense of identity and how you see yourself. These items that he terms “continuity of self” help construct memory and personality. “Without external props, even our personal identity fades and goes out of focus. The self is a fragile construction of the mind”.

One of the interesting things my wife and I discovered over the years in our discussions about music, is that there is a fundamental difference in how we view the purpose of the music we listen to. I listen to music to reflect the mood I’m in. My wife listens to music based on the mood she wants to be in. There are exceptions, but that’s been our experience for the most part. So when I’m feeling down or overwhelmed, I turn on music that reflects that. For my wife, she would instead prefer to put on “happy music”.

I mention this because I think it’s another dimension to this need I feel for collecting vinyl. I see that shelf of vinyl as an anchor and a reflection of who I was and who I have become. It’s so much more than the music it contains. But at the same time I totally understand why some people think that collecting vinyl is a crazy thing to do. If you are not big on nostalgia — if, like my wife, you listen to music as a forward-looking activity, not a reflective activity — collecting things from your past would seem pretty silly.

But as they say, to each their own. I guess the only rule is this: use music in whatever way helps you. And don’t try to force other people to view it the same way.

🎵 Rediscovering the joy of the album

Tue, 28 Aug 2018 10:09:32 -0700

I get nostalgic about weird things for long periods of time for no apparent reason. This week I’ve been obsessed with Alanis Morissette’s early work, as well as her later live shows on YouTube.

But let me digress for a bit.

Do you remember CD shopping? You know, that thing where you went to your local store once a week to see if there was anything new… Do you remember how muscle memory took over the minute you stepped into the store, as you deftly flicked CDs with one hand, caught them with the other? Do you remember the sound the CD cases made as they slapped against each other? How your eyes got really good at evaluating covers in a split second based on the important information — do I know this cover? If not, do I know this band? If I do, is this a new album?

I will never forget the sights and sounds and smells of CD shopping. There’s something else worth reflecting on, though: the finality of buying a CD with your hard-earned money. There is only that CD, and those songs, and nothing more. To use a parenting phrase, “you get what you get and you don’t throw a fit.” If you don’t like a song, tough luck. You’d better listen to it over and over until you like it, otherwise you’ve wasted your money, and that’s no good.

Today things are a little different, of course. We don’t suffer songs we don’t immediately like. If you have access to every song in the world, ever, the thing you can’t afford isn’t being stuck with the wrong album. The thing you can’t afford is listening to a song for more than 30 seconds if you don’t like it. There is too much else out there. Must explore! Must discover!

Which brings me back to Alanis Morissette. I kind of lost track of her work after Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie. It’s not that I stopped liking her music, I just kind of moved on. I didn’t even know that she made an album in 2008 called Flavors of Entanglement. I’ve been listening to that album all week, pretending like it’s a CD I just bought. It’s good album. Good, not great.

At least, that’s what I thought at first. But in listening to it front to back several times, and not giving myself the option to skip whenever I got a little bored, I discovered depth and meaning in the songs I didn’t feel when I first listened to it. You see, songs take time. They take time to write, they take time to arrange, they take time to produce and record and mix and master. And when we treat those songs with the respect they deserve, something weird happens. We start to understand them. And like them. And make them part of us.

I knew this, deep down, because that’s what it was like when I bought CDs. But somewhere along the line I forgot what it feels like to really live with an album for weeks on end. Doing this with Flavors of Entanglement enriched my life, and it made me rethink my extreme reliance on playlists.

Maybe this is something you can try too. Instead of your usual playlist, pick an album today. One album. Put it on repeat. Read up on it on Wikipedia. Don’t skip the “bad” songs. Maybe the finality of that — the edges — will do the same for you as it did for me: make my day just a little more calm and controlled.

Oh, one last thing about Alanis. “You Learn” is a great song and this live version of it makes me happy.

The year that wouldn’t end (or, a sort-of eulogy to Dad)

Mon, 26 Dec 2016 13:33:30 -0800

The dumpster fire has become this year’s meme du jour, and for good reason. It’s been, to put it mildly, a really crappy year. In addition to all the global reasons for this relentlessly depressing crapshoot of a year, I have my own reasons for needing 2016 to just be over already. On November 5, while I was on a plane to my home town in South Africa, my dad passed away after a 20-year battle with cancer.

I’m going to back up a little.

Going home

I traveled to South Africa three times this year. After a decades-long remission, my dad’s prostate cancer came back with a vengeance towards the end of 2015. At that point I don’t think any of us thought that he would actually not be alive at Christmas 2016. But still, I went back in January to spend time with him while he was still mostly feeling ok.

I went back again in July. Things started progressing (regressing?) much faster than we expected, and the reality started to set in. For the first time, we realized that it’s time to face facts: our ever-present rock and safe haven is starting to lose his battle. So I spent almost 3 weeks there. Dad was mostly in bed, but we did manage to take him out a few times. It was good. We decided, very rationally, that I wouldn’t come back for the funeral. That funerals are for other people, and this visit was for Dad. So we’ll be ok.

Oh, how silly of us to think that.

Moment of change

By the middle of October it became clear that Dad only had a few weeks left to live. As Mike Tyson once said, “Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.” The news was a giant punch in the mouth and I realized our previous plan was stupid. I had to go. I had to be there. I booked a ticket.

At that point we had no expectation that I would make it in time. But as it came closer, and Dad hung on, I started to hope. When I went to the airport on November 3rd he was still hanging on, and we all started to think I might actually make it. But then there was a flight delay. And not just any delay. A delay that meant I had to go home and come back for the next day’s flight.

I was in the air, on my way to Amsterdam, when my brother’s message came through.

Dad passed away at 3:15am SAST.

I stared at it. I didn’t believe it. I couldn’t believe it. How could this be. I’m in an airplane. Dad is invincible. This isn’t right. This isn’t how it works.

The rest of the week… The only words I have to describe that week is that it felt surreal and banal. I spent my birthday at the funeral home, picking out a casket. We spent time in coffee shops organizing the obituary and planning food for the funeral.

What the hell?

The lesson

I did learn two very important things that week, though. The first is that the death of a parent is way more difficult than it might seem. I always thought that even though sad, the death of a parent wouldn’t be something that paralyzes me completely. It’s somewhat expected, and you have your own family to fall back on, right?

Well, both of those things are true. But it doesn’t matter. Losing my dad was devastating. Is devastating. I wrote this in my journal back in July, and it’s still the most accurate description I can come up with:

It feels like one of the invisible forces of nature that keeps the earth spinning around its axis is disintegrating. I feel dizzy all the time, off balance, as if I might fall over at any point. Kind of like how flocks of birds suddenly start flying into stuff in the beginning of that terrible movie where the earth’s core stops spinning. Dad is a force that I don’t see often, but who helps to keep everything in its rightful place, and I’m not sure how to survive without it.

So if something feels a little strange to you today — if you almost trip, or you feel a small shock when you touch something, or you can’t get comfortable as you try to go to sleep — I think I know why. You are experiencing a disturbance in the force as a great man’s hold on this world starts loosening.

Losing my dad affected me more than I ever thought possible. I withdrew into my close relationships with family and friends for most of the year. I stopped writing. I threw myself into work and family, and shut everything else out. I just couldn’t do it. The fog of war is defined as follows:

The fog of war (German: Nebel des Krieges) is the uncertainty in situational awareness experienced by participants in military operations. The term seeks to capture the uncertainty regarding one’s own capability, adversary capability, and adversary intent during an engagement, operation, or campaign.

That’s basically how I felt all year. Uncertain about my own capabilities, cancer’s evil capabilities, and the adversarial intent of so many people online. I just couldn’t do it. I still can’t. But I feel like I have to start trying. So writing this is a first step towards an attempt to break free from my own personal fog of war.

The second thing I learned is how important funerals are. My favorite word I learned this year is liminality:

In anthropology, liminality (from the Latin word līmen, meaning “a threshold”) is the quality of ambiguity or disorientation that occurs in the middle stage of rituals, when participants no longer hold their pre-ritual status but have not yet begun the transition to the status they will hold when the ritual is complete. During a ritual’s liminal stage, participants “stand at the threshold” between their previous way of structuring their identity, time, or community, and a new way, which the ritual establishes.

This is applicable in so many situations, but it becomes especially true of funerals. During that week after my dad died, we were in liminality. He wasn’t with us any more, but we also weren’t living without him yet. We couldn’t. It’s too much to get used to, so we just stood at the threshold for a while. The planning, and of course the funeral itself, was our moment of liminality. We needed that ritual. It wasn’t just a way to honor my dad — although it was that too, of course. Above all, it was a way to force ourselves to look up and forward again.

The finale

I remember getting up on the Saturday after the funeral, having coffee with my mom, and asking each other, “Now what!?” It was a sad, empty feeling. But it was also the first time we were even able to ask the “Now what?” question. For the first time, we could start wondering how we do life without Dad. We weren’t healed, we weren’t over it, and frankly, I don’t think we ever will be. But we could at least start talking to each other about what “new normal” might look like. All thanks to the funeral, and a renewed appreciation for the importance of ritual.

So this year was a mess. For most of us. I enter 2017 with zero expectations, but I also enter it as a changed person. I am now living a life where I’m determined to honor Dad’s amazing legacy by treating every single person on earth with respect, and by always putting my family first. I enter 2017 cautiously optimistic, albeit with a permanent vacuum in my life.

Thank you, Dad, for everything. I miss you.