Vertical by Rex Pickett

The obvious, enantiodromic sequel to Horizontal, I mean Sideways, this time, the tables have turned, and Jack is at rock bottom while Miles, mimicking the author’s real life, has just sold his novel which has become a famous movie, and now, he’s basking in the glow of wealth, fame, and wine glory as winemakers are loading him up on expensive complementary bottles in hopes getting into his next book, which I’m sure the author conceived as the sequel movie to Sideways, this time in Willamette which oddly enough, Miles had no idea existed before his fame. Miles resuscitates the diametrically opposed yet of the same coin, drunk super duo with Jack but brings along his stroke-victim mother in a wheelchair with an annoying dog and her caregiver, Joy, constantly referenced as the Asian or Filipina, like she comes from another planet.

 

Fiction is a funny thing, in that it both celebrates our pains as well as greatest desires and ambitions. The Big Bang Theory encapsulates this phenomenon by starting off with all four dorks being single, charming losers. Invariably, they live out every dork boy’s fantasy and all unbelievably get girlfriends, two well outside their league. It was this very bullshit fable of Hollywood that convinced me that I could date well outside my league in real life, wasting countless hours hitting on beautiful women. But as Vertical proves, a little fame and wealth can dramatically improve your chances with women, and if you think that’s shallow, imagine the women who have plastic surgery and come out looking substantially hotter than before and suddenly getting attention from guys, or a woman who dramatically loses weight. We’re all shallow, really, some of us just hide it better than others.

 

I disliked the Sideways Miles. He was way over-the-top Woody Allenesque, self-conscious, self-loathing, self-annihilating, and anti-social. He was even more annoying portrayed by Paul Giamatti. Self-loathing, existential narcissism can be entertaining if balanced with wit and a sense of irony, but Sideways Miles was just a total bore, a whiny, bitching, closed-minded, wuss of a human whose only saving grace besides a few eloquent overwrought verses and nerd vocabulary, was his ebullient, charismatic foil, Jack.

 

Funnily enough, She’s All That is playing on my TV which I keep on without watching. What would it be like to be a tall, good-looking dude? I sometimes wonder. You’d be a targeted breeder. Sure, you could sleep with a lot of women, but in reality, most of them would be expecting more than a meaningless shag, so you’d also be breaking a lot of hearts or at least disappointing and exploiting a lot of women. How would that make you feel? How would it make you feel, courting a woman, knowing full well that you had no intention whatsoever of making her a long-term girlfriend? You’d be a perpetual liar and exploiter. On the other side, you’d start out life with a lot of women trying to get pregnant with you. Perhaps you’d wind up getting a girl pregnant in high school, and if you were a jerk, you’d run away and not pay child support. If you were honest, you’d be stuck with child support or married. I think a lot of guys wish for this ideal that isn’t really ideal. In an ideal world, there would be gorgeous robots you could have sex with and just walk away, but in the real world, most women are looking for relationships not quickies. It’s often the women with low self-esteem who give away quickies, but now you’re spending most of your life with people with low self-esteem, and that can’t make you feel good about yourself.

 

On the other side, you wish for some gorgeous, tall woman, but in reality, imagine how all their lives, people tell them how pretty they are, and imagine how superficial it makes them, and how they surround themselves with other superficial, attractive people in this sort of shallow echo chamber of beauty. A person is their influences, so what kind of person is someone surrounded by shallow, attractive people all their lives? They’d certainly be nice trophies and perpetual eye candy until they age, but what kind of company would they be? God help you if they’re Instagram models and turn you into their photographer. “Hon, do I look good in this light? Hon, that’s a bad angle, can you try again? Hon, I’m almost at 100K followers, maybe you should take photography classes?”

 

Perhaps I’m just rationalizing sour grapes. My life has certainly not be encumbered by women trying to breed with me, which has provided me the liberty of countless nights of debauchery and the illusion of almost, perhaps, maybe hooking up with a cute woman I somehow convince to spend a few drinks with me. Certainly, it has freed up my time and money not raising a child, enough to enjoy traveling and reading. While the DNA programming inside me is robust enough to keep my mind open to breeding, philosophically speaking, is there any other reason to breed? And I’m not really defying my DNA, because in nature, countless animals are born and not suited to breed, and they nonetheless provide a valuable contribution to their family, social group, or species with any sort of productive work outside of breeding. In pursuit of naturalism, I always considered breeding important, and any lifestyle of society that discourages breeding is unnatural, i.e., Western Europe and Japan. However, there really is no such thing as unnatural. Some groups, animals, and societies simply become extinct, and that’s fine, and it doesn’t mean failure in the human sense of the word. Nature just goes on fine without them, but their time on Earth was not meaningless or a ‘failure’ but just a natural thing that happens to most species on this planet. Nature actually doesn’t even have a goal. We anthropomorphize nature and animals so much that we lose sight of what they really are. Nature does not strive to reward the fittest and most adaptable. If this is true, then most of nature is a failure, because most animals die prematurely, and most species to ever have existed are no longer here.

 

Sure, we are born with these powerful programming codes that convince us to breed, but there are many instances of animals being frustrated and not breeding, or their children dying and not passing on their DNA. It happens more than not. It doesn’t mean that their lives are meaningless and unnatural. We may desire to breed and have copious sex, and we may write novels about that, but there’s also much to be said about being losers and not having any sex. Sideways was popular to a lot of people, because they could identity with Miles and his frustration and suffering. There was release and eloquence in his drunkenness and pitiful ways. There was meaning in his meaningless life, value in his self-devaluation. We seemed to be overly concerned and caught up with our desires and fears so much that we think the fulfillment of our desires and complete triumph over all we fear is the only thing that counts when in fact, what counts more is the continued struggle with our desires and fears, the continued frustrations and laments, the questions and doubts.

 

Big business and the state beguile us with promises of solving all our personal and social problems in exchange for money and liberating us from our freedoms and responsibilities, but we fail to appreciate that we can deal with our personal and social problems without them, and in fact, they are the ones who are creating and amplifying most of our problems to sell us on their manufactured solutions. It’s like they want to make us believe that they can make us the most popular kid in high school, they can transform us and make everything perfect, when in fact, even the most popular kid in high school is not always happy and carefree, that there is also pressure and breeding traps they have to deal with. Having all eyes on you is not liberation but imprisonment as you try to live up to everyone’s expectations.

 

* * *

 

While Sideways Miles wore on me with his incessant shitty attitude, Vertical Miles wears on me with his continued narcissism but in an exploitative and more shallow way. I think a lot of people think that people with big vocabularies are deep and thoughtful, but all it takes is a good memory and an SAT prep book. And even if you have read a few classics, it doesn’t mean you can think for yourself or even at all, in fact, I think a lot of classically read people are nothing but pretentious, bigoted, classist pricks. At the same time, a lot of people who think sad, existential, nihilistic people are intense and deep, often, they are just shallow. The dwelling in the deep pit of self-pity is what gives people the impression that they are deep. Fundamentally, you can’t keep being depressed and nihilistic if you continue to open yourself up to people and social experiences. You get feedback. People don’t want to be around morose, boring people. In fact, Jack constantly reminds Miles to perk up and avoid going dark when they’re about to engage women. In high school, I was one of those dark, depressed, philosophical kids, but I wasn’t deep; I was in fact, amazingly shallow. You gain depth by exposure to a diversity of people with different backgrounds, perspectives, and lives. Only then can you understand the complexities and differences as well as commonalities in humans. People who close them off to people aren’t deep at all, they just pretend to be.

 

Fundamentally, however, Vertical Miles reveals the shallowness and simplicity of Sideways Miles. Just like every sequel from Rocky II to Hungover 2 destroys the original, Vertical absolutely demolishes Sideways. In Sideways, you wonder, if Miles had become a successful author, perhaps he would be generous and transform his life, not drink so much, and actually do something interesting, something that reflects his true potential. Nope. As you read Vertical, you realize that, as he admits at one point, he just wrote to get laid, and now that he’s famous, all he wants to do is get laid. It’s actually shocking his lack of charm and wit as he asks women if they have boyfriends or if they’re married. What are you going to do if they say, ‘yes?’ Now, you’ve put them on the spot and made them think you think less of them for cheating on someone. Later on, he tells a woman she smells of seafood. The only way this guy’s getting laid is by Jack telling everyone he’s the author of Sideways, or should I say, Shameless. You get the feeling that Miles is just putting on a show for everyone to get laid, the whole over-the-top vocabulary, drinking, and ultimately his retreats to write and hopefully become famous.

 

* * *

 

In one of the most perplexing parts of the book, and somewhat of a nod to all the drunk driving in Sideways, Miles is pulled over. What is perplexing is that Miles and Jack had both finished 3 bottles of wine between them that night, and Joy, his mother’s caregiver, only has a glass of wine. Why in hell didn’t they have Joy drive? And when the officer hides their keys, why in hell didn’t he just have Joy drive them? While the two books are filled with morally ambiguous tales, extramarital affairs, questionable nonconsensual blacked-out drunk sex, binging on alcohol without major repercussions, I have to hit pause on drunk driving. It reminds me of stupid movies where the characters drink several drinks and act completely sober with no red eyes, no lazy eyes, no slurred words, and completely focused looks. In fact, Paul Giamatti does a shitty job of acting drunk as do most actors. I swear, the one true litmus test of a great actor is to see if they can act like a drunk without actually being drunk. Anne Hathaway is a great actress, because she can actually pull off acting drunk if you watch her bit on Between Two Ferns. It makes young people think they can drink several or more drinks and be fine, when in fact, they turn into boorish, annoying, stupid, lame, slurring drunks and get miserable hangovers. In Hollywood, you go to Vegas and make thousands starting with a few hundred. In fiction land, you drive all over wine country drunk and never get a DUI. Give me a break! I was actually pulled over in Willamette when I drove around a car going 10 MPH under in the middle turning lane. Fortunately, the officer didn’t breathalyze me, because I had just come from a tasting room. I swear it was a setup, who drives 25 in a 35 and a cop just happened to be waiting down the block?

 

* * *

 

I enjoyed Vertical much more than Horizontal, and not because it celebrates Miles’ celebrity and sexual vigor, but rather that it continues to ensnarl Miles in hardship and hijinks with a half-demented, childlike mother creating the necessary conflict and difficulties that give the book the necessary acidity to avoid being just a crowd-pleasing flaccid juice bomb of sex romps and drunken revelry. I actually didn’t enjoy all the sex scenes, envious and a bit shocked at just how slutty women can get when they’re involved with a man who’s famous. I’m not slamming women, because men get that way too with attractive women, but men don’t go around acting all pure and pristine. Whereas men weaponize sexuality to spread their genetic material around, women also weaponize their sexuality to achieve greater social status, better genetic material, and financial security. It shouldn’t come as a surprise, but from the point of view of getting rejected routinely, it’s always rather upsetting to see how easily some men get it, the same way women must feel when attractive, younger women get all the attention, and they wind up with the balding, short dude with questionable social graces.

* * *

 

Two quick things. First, Miles is a Xanax junkie, and it’s no surprise that he is often visited by suicidal ideas. I took Xanax once, recreationally, and the next morning, I too was visited by rather bizarre suicidal ideas even though I had no reason to feel depressed about life. It makes you have to wonder whether certain drugs also give you homicidal thoughts, and whether many mass-shooting kids were on those drugs. Second, Miles’ mother, or perhaps the author’s too, is not one of those lovey-dovey types. I’ll never forget the time I saw my best friend hug and kiss his mother. I had no idea, people in the universe, did that sort of thing. I’ve read enough books to know that a cold, unloving mother creates sociopathic, cruel, mean men who have major intimacy issues with women and often objectify them and become misogynists, passive or overtly. They often bond strongly with men, because that is the only way they’ll ever get warmth in life, whereas their relationships with women are fleeting, sexual, and oscillating between emotional smothering and emotional detachment. Invariably, if they do hook up with women, they unconsciously seek out women similar to their mothers, openly fake and caring, and later mean, abusive, and emotionally detached. It’s like two fucked up dudes who invariably find each other in a bar to get into a fight; two fucked up people also invariably find each other in a bar for a one-night stand. If you want to know what a relationship will be like with a dude, just ask him about his mother and how his mother treated him. That’s exactly how he’ll wind up treating you.

 

The ending is somewhat of an interesting twist. [Spoiler alert]. The entire book, Miles comes across as an exploitative, miserable, shallow jerk, and driving his mother across country is not so much an act of charity as it is transferring the responsibility of taking care of his mother to his aunt and soothing his guilt over his mother’s misery at her nursing home. Because of this, I’m not entirely convinced of the innocence in the ending. Miles is a Xanax druggie with insomnia and under high stress and anxiety, it is quite possible, he misinterpreted his mother’s real wish in the end. At no point in time, does he ask his mother if she wants to die, it’s just implied. He is in no condition to make that decision with all the booze and drugs he’s on, and although he quits drinking for a bit in the end, he’s suffering withdrawal. It’s quite possible, in his drug-addled, stressed mind, he projects on to his mother who is now incapable of fully expressing herself verbally. At the same time, his mother is in no condition to make a decision either, having suffered a stroke and often being in a state of confusion. It is quite possible that what you witness in the ending is simple and clear homicide which would take a huge burden financially and emotionally off Miles. I enjoyed this book a lot more than Sideways, and the huge 400 pages went by pretty quickly, but this moral paradox at the end is like tasting something rotten and bitter in the aftertaste of a wine that makes you wonder if it went bad. There was a moment when his mother died, and Miles considered not calling 911 immediately, but he did, and they resuscitated her, and you can only wonder if they weighed on his mind as he watches his mother’s condition deteriorate. Despite how awful her condition deteriorated, the decision to end her life, which I fully believe we have a right to do, should have been clearly expressed by her in no uncertain terms. Someone with limited mental capacity crying, “I want to go home” may actually be thinking they want to go back to their childhood home and not to some heaven place where all their loved ones are.

 

* * *

 

The afterward by the publisher is annoying and unnecessary, but it does include a little insight into the third Sideways book which I looked up and refuse to read based on the negative reviews. Apparently, Miles gets a trip to Chile and reunites with Laura, the one-night-stand from Willamette. I don’t ever see Miles managing a mature relationship with another woman, ever. The reviews indicate that the book is pretty much a Sideways rehashing minus Jack creating balance, so it becomes even more self-indulgent Miles’ mental notes which are nothing but shallow and dark. What I do see Miles doing is squeezing every last drop out of his Sideways fame while unashamedly promoting wine labels for cash in all his future books. The fact that the author would continue to write sequels is indicative that the Sideways Miles was never a genuine, honest, good person trapped in a miserable, anxiety-prone life finding relief and respite in grapes, but rather just a whiny, shallow dude who couldn’t manage relationships with women and just turns into an exploiter of not just women but Sideways fans.  His book titles are really just the different ways he can screw you.

 

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B004H1TM2K/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1

 

 

 

Sideways by Rex Pickett

I watched the movie and wasn’t impressed, so I was very reluctant to read the book at the suggestion of a wine friend. I thought Paul Giamatti’s Miles was an incredibly annoying, whiny, unlikeable ass. They nailed Jack with Thomas Haden Church. In the book, Miles is not as annoying as Paul Giamatti’s version. The book makes Miles seem more attractive, as he gets the attention of women. I don’t see Giamatti getting any woman’s attention. The author actually looks more like a Miles, not exactly a stud, but someone who would be able to get the attention of a 30-something and a 20-something. There’s just no way I believe Giamatti doing that. The biggest thing I remember is that Giamatti’s character was unbearable, like there was nothing to like about him, not the slightest hint of charm or wit. Just this self-loathing, self-pitying, moody, immature foil to Jack who was light-hearted, macho, and manly. While the book is filled with rather poetic descriptions of scenery, it sometimes gets a bit cliched and that’s exactly how the whole book comes across with Jack and Miles the complete opposite and Jack being the personification of a Pinot. Miles must be the personification of a fat, buttery chard or a fat, juicy zin, something that pleases women without getting too deep or austere, a cheap, self-indulgent thrill on impulse that doesn’t age well.

 

The one thing that will shock you in these times is how much they drink and drive, at one point drinking while driving. Although, self-disclosure, I visited Napa with my best friend, and we drank and drove too, but nothing to the extent of these two dudes. You just can’t and shouldn’t do that if you really want to enjoy yourself and sample a lot of wines. I actually drove around the Bourbon Trail and went to three distilleries, but in Kentucky, you can, because they are only allowed to pour you like 1.5 ounces per visit, something ridiculous like that. Now, there’s Uber, there’s really no excuses not to get a ride, and what fun it is now that you can really get hammered.

 

One unfortunate thing about seeing the movie first is that you hear Paul Giamatti’s voice as Miles. I actually re-watched the movie, and there are a few interesting differences that must be noted. First of all, a lot of the movie was verbatim from the novel, but they completely removed the wild boar hunting chapter, gave Terra a daughter in the movie, and rather interestingly, [spoiler alert] did not mention that Jack had paid Maya $1000 to sleep with Miles. It really does completely change Maya. I mean seriously, who would take $1000 to sleep with a dude, even if you are interested in that dude? In the next novel, Vertical, early on, you learn that Terra supposedly moved to Reno to become a stripper. When I was in college, I took a writing class and was accused of not being charitable to my female characters, and I have to say, Pickett is rather hostile to his female characters.

 

I am reading Vertical, the Hollywoodesque sequel to Sideways right now, and it’s worth noting, because you won’t see Miles the same in Sideways after you see him in Vertical. You’ll have to read my next review on Vertical to understand why, but I’ll just give you a hint that Miles is much more successful in Vertical while Jack is much less successful, but amazingly, Miles is still just as annoying, but in a different kind of way, while Jack is just as charming, but in a different kind of way. In fact, it’s an important comparison. How does a shallow introvert handle failure and success, and how does a shallow extrovert handle success and failure. There are many similarities.

 

https://www.amazon.com/Sideways-Novel-Rex-Pickett-ebook/dp/B003J5UIM8/ref=sr_1_1?gclid=Cj0KCQiA2vjuBRCqARIsAJL5a-KPNct0DqUS1e-mirjl4i4tF9oJ2jp2igQHzm_9ngXBzRNy420ajbUaAhvoEALw_wcB&hvadid=326518535001&hvdev=c&hvlocphy=1022653&hvnetw=g&hvpos=1t1&hvqmt=b&hvrand=7680802585831261686&hvtargid=aud-836288731366%3Akwd-680907256&hydadcr=10020_9771273&keywords=rex+pickett+sideways&qid=1574843993&sr=8-1

 

Fun Thoughts That Make You Go Hmmm

Why We’re So Miserable

 

The Hidden Costs and Benefits of Being Human

 

One of the hidden costs of being human is that our DNA is specifically engineered to keep us striving for bigger and better. It is insatiable and only offers us brief moments of happiness or joy to keep us sufficiently motivated but brief enough to keep making us want more. In this sense, our DNA is our drug dealer, and we are addicted to dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin, endorphins, and endocannabinoids. In exchange for this mildly euphoric cocktail of drugs, we push ourselves to better protect ourselves, procreate, and acquire more resources for our children who themselves are manipulated and controlled by their DNA drug dealers. As much as we would like to think that we are our own masters, perhaps it is sad to say that our DNA are our masters and we are but subordinate indentured servants who are fed drugs to keep us perpetuating this guest cornucopia of genes that possesses every living thing on Earth and perhaps beyond.

 

One of the hidden benefits of being human is the incredible amount of investment our DNA has made in making us social beings. Of all the reasons our natural drugs are released, the biggest reason by far is social interaction, feelings of belonging, love, value, and adoration. Because of this, we do our best to please others and be nice and ethical beings. We almost always identify with and support people of good character.

 

One of the hidden costs of being drug addicts is that it is rather easy to switch preferences from our natural mildly euphoric drugs to more artificial highly euphoric drugs. The key to doing this is to cut off our ability to produce natural mildly euphoric drugs, and the best way to do this is to disrupt our social interaction, downplay it, and discount it. We are raised to believe that it is better to sacrifice for our future by leading a more solitary life studying hard and not playing with friends. While certainly, we should spend time sacrificing for the future, many people become obsessed with the solitary life of studying hard and then working hard. As a result, they don’t get as much of the natural, mildly euphoric drugs their body produces and must replace this with the more artificial ones, starting with caffeine and Ritalin and leading to addictions to junk food and artificial drugs both prescription and nonprescription. We are junkies one way or another, but the natural drugs make us more social whereas the artificial ones make us less social. The famous rat experiment where they seemed to prove that rats are easily addicted to drugs excluded one rather important variable. Some rats were put in a rather nice habitat filled with stimulating toys and other rats and then offered drugs. Those rats were much less likely to become addicted to the external drugs, instead choosing the internal drugs aroused by social stimulation and a stimulating physical environment.

 

One of the hidden costs of being human is that our social obsession can easily lead us astray. If someone takes over leadership of our social group, they can easily establish the wrong agenda and system to exploit everyone. Everyone is so obsessed with fitting in and pleasing one another, that they are reluctant to cause conflict and arouse discord by questioning leadership and existing cultural values, priorities, and direction. In other words, if the shady leader decides to create a culture and society that does nothing but serve a few people at the top, there will be very few people to question this while most people would be heavily invested in trying to make the fundamentally corrupt system work for them and their loved ones. Unfortunately, that is exactly what has happened to the human race, to America, and to every large group you join.

 

On top of this, we are simply not designed to handle groups larger than about 150 people. For hundreds of thousands of years, we never lived in groups larger than 150 people. In smaller groups, we face the people we impact. In larger groups, we rarely ever face the people we impact, so our choices and decisions never are checked. If we pass a law putting drug users in prison, we never see them suffer in prison. We never see the causes of their drug addiction. In smaller groups, we would know every single person we put in prison, and we would know their friends and family, so that when their friends and family complain about how badly they are treated, we hear about it. We would start to realize that maybe prison is not the best answer for them but rather rehabilitation and continued support and contact with their friends and family.

 

In larger groups, we divide ourselves between me and them. We then treat the ‘them’ as scum and scoundrels who deserve their mistreatment. For example, few people truly care for the homeless and blame them for their condition. In small groups, there are no ‘them’ except any outsider. If someone you knew became homeless, you would either offer them a couch or try to help out in some way, because they are part of the ‘us.’ When you identify with someone as someone inside your group, you care a lot more about them than someone outside the group. In modern society, there is no us except a few close friends and family, and everyone else is a ‘them.’ As such, we are more than happy to pass laws and policies that are cruel and merciless to strangers, but we only worry when such laws and policies impact those who are close to us. Only then do we realize just how cruel and merciless those laws and policies are. I know someone who has become overwhelmed by medical bills for her son. It is now a lot more personal that I resent the healthcare cartel, price fixing and inflation, and corruption.

 

One of the hidden costs of our social obsession is that as much as we are motivated to please others and fit in, we are also obsessed with NOT being different, hurtful, and embarrassed. Our minds, therefore, constantly remind us of all our most embarrassing, shameful, or regretful moments. Peaceful moments to enjoy and appreciate our better moments and traits are crowded out by these constant reminders of our failures and shortcomings. While this makes us more vigilante about not being a jerk, unfortunately, in the long term, it can actually turn us into jerks. One way of turning off these constant reminders is to partake in intoxicating chemicals or activities that shut off our minds or prefrontal lobes at least. We can then enjoy living in the moment and not obsessing about the past or future. Unfortunately, when we start living in the moment, we also tend to discount the consequences of our actions and become more selfish. As a result of this, we wind up right back where we started, doing embarrassing or hurtful things that just give us more fuel for the constant reminders of our failures. In a vicious cycle, the more reminders we get, the more we try to escape them with intoxicants.

 

There is a theory that one way nature made us such incredibly social creatures is by suspending our maturity. When animals mature into adulthood, they are more reluctant to make new friends and social bonds and they are more suspicious and hostile toward the unfamiliar and foreign. By extending our period of youthfulness, we are more open to friendships throughout our lives and also learning new skills and tricks. Unfortunately, however, a hidden cost to this is our extended yearning for some adult supervisor or leader. A part of being young is depending heavily on a greater, smarter, wiser being. This is the root cause of much of humanity’s problems. That craving for a greater supervisor or parental figure has led us to become overly trusting and gullible of kings, religious leaders, deities, and today, the almighty and omnipresent government. The cost of being highly sociable and intelligent throughout most of our lives is also the misguided craving for someone to look over us, nurture us, protect us, and love us. And off we go, happily into the embrace of the worst demons of our worst nightmares, selfish, greedy, egotistical, power-mad assholes.

 

We also get confused by our desires and fears. We don’t realize that we crave things that are historically rare in our habitat and take for granted, often healthy things, that are historically common in our habitat. Take for instance carbs and fatty foods. We crave them, because historically, they have been very rare, yet they are filled with calories. Take for instance privacy. Living in small close groups, we hardly ever had a moment to ourselves, so we have an outsized craving for physical privacy, but what this does is make us desire living apart, separate, and away from others. We get exactly what we think we want, but we wind up so isolated and lonely, that we have to turn on the TV for background noise and spend all our time on social media for social stimulation. We also are not good at understanding abstract concepts versus physical objects. As much as we crave privacy, we don’t understand that someone spying on our social media and internet activities is a huge breach of our privacy. Just because we can’t see them, we don’t feel a breach of our privacy, but imagine if some dude were looking into your bedroom window writing down everything you did on social media and the Internet. Similarly, we don’t understand big numbers. A $100k credit card debt or a $22 trillion national debt mean nothing to us. This is why it’s so easy for us to get into credit card debt and support government spending. We don’t feel or sense the danger of the future where we end up paying huge interest on the debt individually and as a nation.

 

Perhaps at some point in the future, we will have one of two choices. We can manipulate ourselves so that we can achieve longer periods of happiness and gratitude for what we have. We can eat as much junk food without getting fat. We won’t have to work out, and nano-robots will stretch and build our muscles as we sleep. We will feel panic attacks when we accumulate credit card debt, and we’ll be able to sense the breach of privacy when something is monitoring our Internet activities. We would achieve this through manipulating our own DNA. But I just can’t get over the apprehension of the magic genie that always screws you over when you wish for something. The other path is keeping all our “faulty” DNA and simply changing our habitat to one that is more like the one we experienced for much of our evolution. I’m not talking about going back into the woods and wilderness but something that is more like that, living in groups of no more than 150 people, but with the accoutrements of some technology like video games, modern art, and modern music. I’m also fearful that perhaps we are living in the only moment in human history where we maximized technology while possessing our natural DNA, and the future is actually a bizarre and strange place where we are no longer technically humans, so in choosing to live our lives perpetually as humans, we choose to live in this age over and over and over again.

 

 

Permanent Record by Edward Snowden

If someone asked you to write your autobiography or a biography, what would you write about? A lot of great autobiographies are a series of witty, exciting anecdotes. “That one time when…” sort of thing, and you wind up guffawing or pleasantly amused. But it also has a lot to do with what made you famous. A biography about Roddy Piper is not going to be about what he enjoys eating or how he dresses, apart from his kilt. It’s going to be about wrestling and acting. I think biographers like to provide some reason for why a celebrity turned out the way they did. People want insights into motivation. A biography about a serial killer is going to focus on just how fucked up his childhood was. A biography about a hero is going to probably show some examples of early heroism. Wouldn’t it be funny though, if you read a biography of a serial killer that focused on his early heroism? Wouldn’t that be more tragic? Or a biography about a hero that starts off with stories of him beating up little girls and stealing their bags. When I think of writing my own biography, since I’m not famous for anything, what would I focus on? I think I’d focus on incidents of extreme craziness as well as extreme fun as well as some accounting for why I enjoy reading and writing so much.

The interesting thing about biographies is how we are influenced so strongly by our past, and often times, I believe we are not even aware of it. Sometimes we are. In this case, Snowden mentions this computer game he used to play, “Loom was about a society of Weavers whose elders create a secret loom that controls the world, or, according to the script of the game, that weaves “subtle patterns of influence into the very fabric of reality.” When a young boy discovers the loom’s power, he’s forced into exile, and everything spirals into chaos until the world decides that a secret fate machine might not be such a great idea, after all.” It’s amazing how things get implanted unconsciously or subconsciously into our minds, and then as we find ourselves in a similar situation with an uncertain path, we may in fact be drawn to the path that is familiar to us, at least, a path we remember a character taking in a computer game or a movie. How else do we choose a path when there’s a fork in the road?

We really are much like computers, except we possess the illusion that we control our own programming. When we come upon a choice, what makes us pick one option over the other? A simple amalgam of previous programming is what, and by programming, I mean our exposure to what other people have done in similar situations. If someone cuts us off in traffic, we likely scream and curse, because we witnessed our parents doing the same. If we get into a fight with our boy or girlfriend, we likely scream and curse, because we watched too much Jerry Springer. We really have no idea just how much we are influenced by what we are exposed to. During lunch, I get to go home, and I have a choice of watching Dr Phil or The View, and I consciously don’t watch Dr Phil as enticing as it is, because I know it will fuck with my mind. You can’t keep watching fucked up people without having it unconsciously influence your own life or at least make you more doubtful of humanity which in turn makes you more impulsive and insensitive to others.

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One of my favorite parts of the book is when Snowden compares computer systems to the government as a system and how he started to notice that the government as a system, doesn’t operate like a computer system, and that it is effectively broken. First of all, what Snowden is noticing is the difference between a binary system that can only operate with clear, certain, and straightforward instructions providing predictable, certain, and binary outputs. When the output is not predictable, certain, and binary, this is called a bug, and it indicates some failure in the software, hardware, or network connections. The limitation of our current computers is exactly this. Our computers don’t operate like human brains. While human brains are limited in our processing power and memory, it excels at fuzzy logic, creativity, innovation, and relative independence. Our output is unpredictable, uncertain, and multi-dimensional. So a human network is innately different than a computer network, but what Snowden is pointing out is the inherent differences which to an IT guy may seem like a bug but in a more holistic picture, our human bugs are what makes us creative, flexible, error-prone, relatively independent, and dynamic versus computers.

With that said, what he is also noticing is that government is flawed in a different aspect than simply being a large human network. First of all, he mentions the old 150 rule, that you cannot manage more than 150 human acquaintances. We are simply not adapted to working with or leading over 150 people. It’s unnatural. We are inherently nepotistic. With a group of 150 people, while leaders are nepotistic and will favor their own friends and family, they can’t be overly nepotistic, because they get immediate feedback. “Hey, why is that contract only going to your family?” “Why did you make a rule and then create an exception for your friends?” Also, anything that undermines your non-friends and family, affects your friends and family. If you impoverish your non-friends and family, you likely impoverish the friends and family of your friends and family. Everyone knows each other, and everyone is immediately impacted by the actions of one another in a group of 150.

The problem with organizations larger than 150 and people ruling more than 150 people is that the nepotism is unchecked and often unquestioned. Also, when you impoverish or discriminate against a group of people, your friends and family are mostly unaffected, so you don’t sense the negative consequences or impacts. Nobody that matters complains to you. It’s easy to pass laws and policies that impoverish and discriminate against some group of people. In fact, it enhances your power, because people are so afraid of becoming that group or being treated like that group, that they’ll suck up to you more and support you more and curry your favor more. Often in early civilization, wars and sacrifices were used to consolidate power, because the fear in instilled caused people to support you more.

What Snowden has not yet captured is the rather simple fact that large bureaucracies become very much like organized crime organizations. Invariably, they create a pyramid hierarchy system where those at the top receive the greatest power and benefits while those at the bottom are abused and exploited. In government, they consider the public to be at the very bottom of the pyramid, and just above them are the frontline workers who must interact with the public. The highest level bureaucrats interact the least with the public. How strange is that? And Snowden doesn’t get the fact that the top level bureaucrats don’t serve elected officials, (which he derisively calls amateurs). Rather, if the head of the agency is appointed by the elected official, the top level executives will do their best to undermine and deceive them. They control the flow of information and the work that is done, so if they disagree with the politically-appointed director or elected official, they can work around it to protect their own agenda. Now, don’t be an amazingly dense idiot to think that the executives’ agenda correlates in any way, shape or form with the public interest. Far from it, the executives’ agenda is purely self-interest. Either A. they just want to keep their jobs and outsized salaries and benefits and enhance it by making their agency more important and relevant, and/or B. they want to do favors for contractors so that when they retire, the contractors will hire them as consultants and pay them millions of dollars.

Well, how do you make your agency more important and relevant? By fixing social problems? Your reward would be a smaller budget next year not a larger one. A bureaucracy becomes more important and relevant by NOT fixing problems and in fact by doing the exact opposite, and that is by creating more problems cloaked in more and more complexity and obfuscation. If they can convince everyone that the problems they are dealing with are so complex that they need an army of Ph.D.’s and experts to analyze them, ordinary citizens will be more than willing to give them more taxes and look the other way. Nobody wants to deal with problems that are so complex and confounding that it gives them headaches just to read about them.

Fact is, social problems are not that complex and confounding. Bureaucracies obfuscate almost exactly the same way that the early clerics, priests, and bishops had exclusive access to the Bible because there was no printing press and few people knew Latin. The Bible was so out of reach to the ordinary peasant, that they relied completely on intermediaries to understand the word of God, and this gave those intermediaries insane power. “Because God said so…” had no recourse. Today, it’s, “Because our government Ph.D.’s and analysts said so…” Much like the priests would claim that without knowing Latin and years of studying the Bible, you had no right to criticize them, so-called social “scientist” policy-makers claim that without a Ph.D. and years of studying social “science,” you have no right to criticize them.

Snowden implies that there is a way to fix the government just like one would naively debug a computer system. What he fails to appreciate is that you cannot fix a system that is inherently built to favor those in power and exploit the majority of people in a pyramid scheme. The only true way to fix the system is to make the system smaller, less intrusive, less powerful, and more manageable. We have been deceived into believing that we need a massive, intrusive, powerful, and unmanageable system of oversight and supervision in order to collaborate with one another in an orderly and collective manner. This is perhaps the biggest and most farcical lie in the universe.

Humans are the most social beings on this planet. Left to their own devices, they start organizing and creating spontaneous order and collective behavior. What happens when you throw a hundred strangers together? This happens all the time at cocktail parties, at festivals, at art shows, at parades, at conferences. Certainly, at some gatherings where alcohol is involved, you need security, but that security is rarely overbearing and intrusive. They stay in the background until a problem occurs. Most of the time, when you assemble 100 or more people, they do their best not to stand out. They do their best to be courteous and polite to everyone and not make a scene. They do their best to fit in. If suddenly someone falls and clutches their chest, everyone becomes fantastically compassionate and a few people jump in like heroes to help. We all feel great about helping out, and we all feel ashamed and embarrassed if we create a scene and cause conflict or hurt feelings. Government is this big, old scam that says, no, if you put 100 or more people in a room together, pretty soon, they’ll start eating one another. Therefore, you need to give a few people enormous power and money to control, supervise, and monitor everyone to make sure everyone behaves. It’s a joke.

And government will actually cause all the problems to make you believe this fairy tale. They’ll incarcerate nonviolent people with violent people, creating more violent people. They’ll invade foreign countries and kill countless innocent people, and their families will turn into terrorists or enemies. They’ll outlaw all sorts of things to make people into criminals and pay more and more fines. If they can convince you that there are more criminals, you’ll agree to also give them more taxes and power. The less you trust your fellow citizen, the more you’ll trust government to contain, control, monitor, and supervise them. Your absolutely convoluted, misguided, incorrect, scientifically false understanding of humans leads you to embrace a fundamentally corrupt system whose only motivation is to acquire more wealth and power by encouraging your ridiculous misapprehension of humans.

All large bureaucracies exist on a bed of lies, deceptions, scams, crimes, distortions, and obfuscation. If you’re confused, you can’t even begin to fix the problem. They’re cloaked in secrecy and unaccountability, because they need to deceive the enemy in order to defeat them, but what everyone fails to realize is that the number one enemy of government is not terrorists or foreign governments but rather their very own people! Should the people wise up to the scam, it would spell the end of big government. The greatest existential threat to government is not nuclear holocaust or some goat farmer living in a cave, the greatest existential threat to big government is an informed public that recognizes a scam when it sees one. The entire goal of public education is not preparing youth for the modern work environment, but confusing and filling their minds up with so much clutter and fear, instilling strict obedience and conformity, all to ensure that they never question authority, never question status quo, never rise up, never organize, never resist, never educate themselves, and likely never read another nonfiction book the rest of their lives because they have been trained to hate learning and reading. Think about it.

It’s almost embarrassing to say that Snowden is not some political ideologue who believes in freedom and liberty from a tyrannical, corrupt government that harms people, but rather Snowden is a nerd who sees a broken system and through his computer systems training was driven to try to fix this broken system by revealing bugs in the coding. He’s all like, “Dude, I just told you how to fix your government intelligence operating system, and instead of giving me a medal of honor, you try to imprison me! What the fuck, dude?” He’s oblivious to the fact that if you uncover a crime syndicate, they don’t want to fix a problem they created to keep them in power, rather, they want you dead and/or silenced.

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Snowden points out a new wrinkle in the government scam, what he calls Government 2.0 which is the contracting system. Right wingers may cheer that this means the private sector is more involved in government work, and private sector in seeking profits, is more efficient and cost-effective than the public sector. Right? Wrong. Contracting is not a free market phenomenon. Rather the opposite, it is a rigged market whereby contracts are given based on the limited input of a very small, unelected group of bureaucrats who all have a conflict of interest. If they select a particular contractor, they may one day be working for that contractor. Contractors also have this rather undemocratic strategy of contributing to political campaigns whereby the politician gets elected and returns the favor by increasing government spending on contracts.

In the case of defense, they would come up with some reason to increase defense funding. In the case of private prisons, they would come up with some reason to pass legislation that would make prison terms longer and crimes apply to more people. And far from being more cost effective, large corporations that get the largest contracts have every incentive to be LESS cost effective and do a bad job, so they require even larger contracts the next go around. And contracts do not necessarily go to the lowest bidder, and even if they did, government has no way of setting bids low enough to minimize profits.

The free market minimizes profits when new companies freely enter the arena offering slightly lower costs and slightly lower profits. When the profits get too low, companies simply leave that area to find new areas where profits are higher, so an equilibrium occurs. With bidding, entry barriers are high for smaller companies, and big profits are almost always guaranteed. Public-private sector colluding is exactly what America revolted against with England. England maintained collusive arrangements with monopolies they supported like the East India Company. It was these monopolies that excluded US competition that frustrated the colonists. Forget the history books that tell you it was about freedom and taxes. It was about the special arrangement of the British government and the monopolies they empowered. America did not so much get rid of this arrangement as it did eventually replacing it with oligopolies of the Industrial Age and now contracting in the Information Age.

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One of the most telling things Snowden covers is how the CIA is becoming less staffed by privileged preppies and more staffed by nerds. This is very telling, because the privilege preppies, while they may not be the sharpest tools in the toolbox have one gift that keeps a criminal organization running well. They have social savvy, or what others might call political savvy. They know when to keep their mouths shut, how not to embarrass their superiors, how to tow the company line, how to be a complete spineless sycophant, how to obey and conform to whatever dominant culture exists, how to fit in, etc. Corrupt and criminal organizations thrive because of people like them.

Tech nerds are the complete opposite. They are socially inept and challenged. They can’t even read a face and determine if someone is angry, sad, elated, or confused. They don’t see the different, subtle shades of emotion, context, subtext, the bigger picture, hierarchical structures, etc. When they see something that is broken or wrong, they say something, they do something. A socially savvy person would keep their mouth shut or use it as leverage in their favor. They’re not in the business of fixing things. They’re in the business of self-preservation and climbing social status. A tech nerd is in the business of fixing things, of searching for broken things, in making everyone aware of something that is broken, of being the hero by making the system work more smoothly and efficiently. It is the complete antithesis of what a criminal organization needs, because obviously, a criminal organization would operate more smoothly and efficiently, if it were obeying the law. Instead, it purposefully operates ineptly and inefficiently so as to confuse everyone and keep them from knowing the truth of what the organization really does, who does it, and how they do it. Criminals keep secrets for a very good reason. Hiring tech nerds to run a government intelligence agency that is in the business of committing crimes, undermining politicians, abusing the public, and inciting more chaos and conflict to justify their existence and expand their influence and power, is just as bad as hiring a bunch of journalists to run the organization, another group of socially inept truth seekers.

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Snowden did something in training at the CIA that should have flagged him as a nonconformist, disobedient trouble-maker, something I would never have done in my career. At the urgings of his fellow students, he complained about the working conditions, withheld benefits, and labor law infractions like not getting paid overtime pay. When the head of the school told him there was nothing he could do, he went over his head and sent an email to his boss and that guy’s boss. While conditions were improved, he was reprimanded for not following the chain of command. In perhaps one of the funniest moment in the book, he had volunteered to work in combat areas, something nobody else wanted as a field assignment, and as punishment, they sent him to Geneva, perhaps one of the most cushiest, nicest field assignments in the CIA. This is how fucking petty, stupid, and inept bureaucrats are. It also informed Snowden that the chain of command doesn’t work, because when your boss refuses to do something, the message is that it ends there, you don’t go up the chain of command until someone does something. You learn to shut your fucking mouth and deal with it. I’m not entirely sure a lot of tech nerds understand that. They’re fix-it people. They’re problem-solvers. They’re debuggers. They see a problem, they live for the resolution not the socially savvy solution of allowing the problem to fester and linger and covering your ass so that when the problem does explode in everyone’s faces, you can safely extricate yourself from fault as the higher ups look for scapegoats to distract attention from their own culpability, because they believe in the chain of command bullshit which suppresses information flow upstream.

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One often used rationalization people use against privacy is why should anyone care what the government finds out about you if you have nothing to hide? First of all, our privacy is a right, a right that allows us the freedom to think and act as we please without fear of someone monitoring what we are thinking or doing and sharing that with anyone. Some people argue, well, you would only find embarrassing things about me and nothing illegal, so I don’t really care. But would you honestly like people you know to watch a video of you masturbating or a report of your STD, or your health report to go to your health provider so they can charge you more? Would you like a log of your driving to go to your auto insurance company so they can charge you more? Would you like a log of your drinking to go to a prospective employer? There are many ways your private information can hurt you. In fact, when you were a kid and shared a secret with someone you thought was a friend, doesn’t it hurt when they use that secret against you? Do you really want a world where there are no secrets, no privacy?

Second, you make the horrible assumption that the government is god, a well-meaning, loving, benevolent, all-good being that has your long-term interests in mind and wants you to succeed and be happy. Where the hell does that come from? The government only cares about the government, and if you are a threat to them, they will use any means necessary to tarnish your reputation, incriminate you, incarcerate you, or just have you killed. The government is a criminal organization; I’m not sure if you haven’t noticed how many times our government has broken international law killing and torturing innocent people who have never been proven guilty in any court of law. Has anyone gone to prison or been held responsible for purposefully infected poor black people with syphilis? Has anyone gone to prison or been held responsible for dropping bombs on civilians? Has anyone gone to prison or been held responsible for breaking our own treaties with Native Americans and banishing them from their land and killing them along the way?

How else would you describe an organization that is responsible for the greatest atrocities in American history? I would call it a criminal organization plain and simple. Privacy is one of the most powerful weapons people have at their disposal to organize and resist government abuse of power and criminal behavior. Imagine if the government had access to every journalist’s computer and could undermine journalists who are critical of government or could incriminate the government? What if they have access to every lawyer’s computer who is working on cases against the government? Well, they already do. You don’t just sit there and allow one of the largest and most powerful crime syndicates to trample over your right to privacy, to free speech, to assembly, and to be free from warrantless searches and seizures.

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Perhaps the funniest part of an otherwise sad and suspenseful book was part of Snowden’s girlfriend’s diary excerpts. Apparently, after Snowden came out, the FBI followed his girlfriend 24/7, even walking around a Macy’s store with her. “Made it to the studio and couldn’t find street parking, but my tail did. He had to leave his spot when I drove out of range, so I doubled back and stole his spot.”

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Don’t get me wrong, I’m not portraying Snowden as just some clueless nerd who tried to fix a system bug. He knew very well that he was going to destroy his life for sake of improving his country. He is a greater person and hero than I’ll ever be in life or most people on this planet. What he did was historic, and hundreds of years from now, if he is portrayed as a villain, we are fucked as a species. If he is portrayed as a hero, there is some hope for us.