Today felt like I was on my way to Tipperary, that place about which I
know nothing and scarcely could identify as anything but a fanciful place
mentioned in cartoons and song. There was a long Peanuts strip in which
Snoopy is seen rambling over hill and dale, crossing rivers and traversing
mountains and byways, seemingly on his way somewhere but ultimately going
nowhere. In the last frame he is seen sitting down, tired, saying .They’re
right. It is a long way to Tipperary.. I felt exactly like Snoopy today,
on my way to Tipperary but with no idea where or what that place is or how
long it might take me to reach the destination. I traveled far and wide,
rambling the streets of Queens with the confidence of a conqueror, feeling
good about all this because I’ve had so much trouble of late simply
getting out of the house and walking a straight line from point A to point
B. It’s been a scary few months, I don’t know what to make of it all, but
today’s ramble felt like good policy for my body and for my mind. I have
plans for another epic stroll tomorrow, though I might save that one for
Monday, since it involves inter-existing with a bike lane, and I could do
this trip on Monday when the bicyclists are sitting at their desks.

I have ideas again, and thoughts, and motivations, even some ambitions. I
think I know what got me on this path again, but I’ll keep my secrets
safe. I’m tired of giving it all away, taking the imagined high road only
to find it a muddy alley. I’ve been changing my routines up, once and for
all, trying to get away from this assumption that computers own me and
that I work for them that I work for the software development industry as
a life-long beta user, a lifelong provider of feedback and helpfulness in
making sure those overpaid software kings get all the free advice they
need so they can keep selling me shit.

I’ve had some ethical dilemma conversations with myself of late. An e-mail
from a Romanian film-maker reminded me that I have not made peace with the
Sepulchral Portraits project, never quite deciding if it’s morally
acceptable to snap hundreds of photos of the faces of the dead and mass
them together with hundreds of strangers, chopping off their identities
and shuffling them into a moribund hive a humanity, an ocean of the dead.
But then I think about it a little more deeply and I find that the
presence of these portraits does not necessitate that their dignity be
memorialized to a higher degree than those whose tombstones have no
photos, or those who don’t even have tombstones. The portraits are an
expression of something but I don’t think it signals that the individuals
buried there be singled out for extended immortality. The decision to
place these pictures on the tombstones most likely had no input from the
deceased. Certainly this is true of the infants and children who couldn’t
possibly have had any say in what image of them appeared for all to see.
Most of the dead whose images appear on their markers would likely be
horrified at the choice of image, I think.

And then there is the ethics of commercial search engines, and those of
whose livelihood leeches off of them. Searchies go around the world,
gobbling up public content, indexing first and asking questions later,
ranking and relevating, determining who gets prizes and who gets left
behind, building its empire on the content of other people who may or may
not even be aware of the contribution they make to the empire. Is it
ethical for these companies to act like Grand Poobahs? Scooping up content
and manipulating it for its own reputation and for its own goals? As the
WWW goes more and more private the future of the searchies is imperiled,
and the advertising dollars are already reflecting the trends away from
the .WHATEVER THE FUCK. aesthetic of algorithmically determining merit and
value with no responsibility for the minds of the robots or for external
manipulations and the incessant game-playing of the leeching public. What
is the future of public information when the searchies can’t gobble up
your content and do with it as they please, slapping ads all around and
monetizing, monetizing, monetizing?

OK, I’m outta gas. Back en route to Tipperary.