Alan Jacobs

I want to write here about something I don’t understand.

My friend Robin Sloan alerted me to this post by a passionate advocate of crypto/blockchain’s power to … well, something awesome, I guess, though no matter how many times I read posts like this I can never tell exactly what is supposed to happen.

Now, that may be because writers like this fellow, Jacob, are writing for insiders – people who already know the details, who already have clear use cases in mind, who are already excited about the future of blockchain and crypto and web3. But when I ask knowledgable people about these matters, I always get pointed to posts just like this one, which are, you know, right there on the open web for all to see. So I think questions like the ones I am raising here are legitimate to raise.

So: Jacob is particularly excited about what he calls “hyperstructures”: “Crypto protocols that can run for free and forever, without maintenance, interruption or intermediaries.”

Wow, for free! But hang on a sec … Later, expanding on that definition, he says, “there is a 0% protocol wide fee and runs exactly at gas cost.” So when he says that hyperstructures can run for free, what he actually means is that no additional cost is imposed over and above the cost of making transactions, which is something that fluctuates, fairly dramatically, according to supply and demand.

But they run forever! Well … let’s look at the expanded definition of “forever”: “It runs for as long as the underlying blockchain exists.” Okay, so how long is that? “Hyperstructures … can continuously function without a maintainer or operator, and they can run for as long as the underlying blockchain is running — which can be at the very least a decade.”

So “forever” means “at least a decade” and “free” means “whatever the gas cost is when you make an exchange of any kind.”

See, this – along with the seemingly complete inability of anyone involved with this stuff to tell me one thing I could use it for – is what makes people call crypto a big con game. Maybe it isn’t! But I can’t find any of the advocates for it who can, or are willing, to explain why it’s not. 

Stefan Collini’s review of Claire Tomalin’s book on H. G. Wells is very strange indeed. For one thing, he only mentions the book under review in the final paragraph. But more odd still is the refrain with which he begins and ends the review: “It​ can be hard, from this distance, to see what all the fuss was about,” he says in the first sentence; and then he concludes, “Tomalin is a weighty advocate, and her admiration may help to spark a revival in Wells’s reputation, though perhaps even her noted empathy and artistry still cannot quite re-create for us, now, what all the fuss was about.” 

I can easily understand a reader today not thinking highly of Wells’s fiction. But if you can read The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds and Tono-Bungay and Ann Veronica and fail “to see what all the fuss was about,” I don’t know what to say to you. Wells’s fiction touches on most of the major themes and concerns of British culture in his lifetime, and a failure to grasp this is a failure of readerly and historical imagination. You don’t have to think him a great writer to see that he was a ceaselessly dynamic and provocative figure, even if his ever-more-pompous predictions, warnings, and commandments ended up making him look somewhat ludicrous (as in the caricature of him as Horace Jules in C. S. Lewis’s That Hideous Strength). 

I haven’t read Tomalin’s book — devoted just to the first half of Welles’s career — but I have read Adam Roberts’s “literary life” of Wells, which masterfully puts all of Wells’s voluminous writing into proper context. I’ll leave you with a passage from that book: 

As the world has grown bigger and more complex, as well as more complexly interconnected, a kind of socio-technological sublime increasingly threatens to overwhelm our individual subjectivities like Hokusai’s great wave. Steampunk is, inter alia, an attempt to dress technological advance in the habiliments of a more elegant and refined age, and Wells is one of the ways of focalising that. More, this cultural representation — the boyishly mobile and inventive Wells, the Wells of diverting scientific romances and sexual liberation — speaks, in part, to an ill-focused desire to assert ‘the little man’ (less so ‘the little woman’) in the teeth of this intimidating vastness. There is enough of Wells actual life-trajectory in this to give it bite: the physically small individual from small-scale roots who created himself as a world-class writer and thinker. He takes his place alongside other pervasive cultural myths of the small-man who effects great things in a baffling and alarming world — heroic hobbits, magical schoolboys: contemporary iterations of a fundamentally infantalising legendarium of underdoggishness. One need not deprecate these contemporary myths, any more than one need look down on Wells’s extraordinary achievements in the field of science fiction, to think this sells his larger achievement short. If there has been one through-line in the present work it has been that Wells was a literary artist of immense, underappreciated talent, a writer whose literary genius, whilst it must of course be central to a literary biography, deserves to be resurrected in a much broader cultural context too. 

I was a teenager working in a bookstore when this book, with this cover, came out. One day a lady came up to me and asked, “Do you have Billy Graham’s book Angels Angels Angels Angels Angels?”

Newsletter: Sir Shi and the Wanderer

Can’t stop, won’t stop.

This post on being defenseless has nagged at my mind, reminding me of something, and I finally made a couple of connections.

1. My brilliant friend Sara Hendren’s Substack newsletter is called “undefended / undefeated” – and that’s what it’s all about, isn’t it? Being undefended in this world, putting yourself at risk, but not being defeated by that risk. You can’t repair the world without exposing yourself to pushback, blowback, attack. But the world must be repaired.
2. Simon Tugwell, in his Ways of Imperfection: An Exploration of Christian Spirituality, says that Franciscan spirituality is “a way of radical unprotectedness.” What a phrase. What a terrifying and exciting ideal. 

Gary Saul Morson:

How did Dostoevsky anticipate what would happen? For one thing, he took the beliefs of intellectuals seriously. It is one thing to have ideas, it is quite another to define oneself and others by them (and that is what the Russian word intelligent — not exactly “intellectual” — suggests). Dostoevsky asked: what would people who defined themselves by ideology do if given the absolute power a revolution confers? Solzhenitsyn, who experienced the answer, asked a related question: why were previous evildoers, like those in Dickens and Shakespeare, content with a few murders whereas Bolsheviks executed millions? “The imagination and the spiritual strength of Shakespeare’s evildoers stopped short at a dozen corpses,” Solzhenitsyn explains, “because they had no ideology. Ideology — that is what … gives the evildoer the necessary steadfastness and determination.” The sort of ideology Dostoevsky and Solzhenitsyn had in mind displays two essential attributes: absolute (“scientific”) certainty and the division of people into purely good and purely evil. One does not break bread with someone from another political party. Once one thinks this way — as ever more people do — literally anything is possible to those commanding sufficient power.

I have many, many thoughts about Morgenbesser. I have often thought of writing little vignettes about him doing mundane things in New York City: “Morgenbesser Eats a Pastrami on Rye,” “Morgenbesser Takes In a Knicks Game,” “Morgenbesser Observes the World Trade Center.” Each vignette would be an opportunity for one of those absurd-but-maybe-also-profound Morgenbesserisms.

One of my favorites among the real ones: Someone told Morgenbesser that the most essential philosophical question is “Why is there something rather than nothing?” He replied, “So what if there was nothing? You’d still complain!”

Or is that a real one? You can’t tell, so many stories seem to attach to him. But it seems to me that his primary achievement in life was to perform Morgenbesser in such a way that he became a magnetic attractor of a certain kind of story. And in that sense, even the stories that aren’t true are true. They embody Morgenbesser whether they “actually” happened to him or not.

I keep thinking about this by Rivka Galchen in the LRB:

Berman is keen to dispel the notion that those who refuse vaccines suffer from an information deficit problem. Anti-vaxxers collect evidence in order to disrupt or conceal the truth, not to uncover it. For those who are sceptical of vaccination without necessarily being anti-vaxxers, the most effective public health strategy remains unclear. Berman argues that ‘reactive’ responses, such as mockery, are counterproductive. He cites a series of studies that demonstrate what we might feel instinctively: showing people information that contradicts their beliefs rarely makes them change their minds, and often hardens their convictions. Factsheets like those used by the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention tend not to work, both because they are less powerful than personal narratives and because the other side produces misleading literature in the same format. Online bots and trolls are a source of both pro and anti-vax messages, in more or less equal amounts: the amount of contradictory and unstable information is as much, if not more, of a problem as the information itself.

Maybe some problems can’t be solved. If every imaginable way to persuade people to change their views on a subject only serves to confirm them in those views … what then? My suggestions: 

• Don’t invest much hope in changing minds; 
• But don’t absolutely write anyone off; 
• Be patient and gentle; 
• Vary your methods and arguments; 
• And above all, focus 95% of your energy on younger generations — on people who haven’t yet screwed up their lives by being Extremely Online — in hopes of helping them to have better habits than their benighted elders. 

From Alan Lee’s illustrations for the Mabinogion 

John Ruskin, The North-West Angle of the Facade of St Mark’s, Venice

Guess I won’t be visiting the McDonald Observatory – one of my favorite places – today. (Even if it weren’t a 7-hour drive.)

Prep

Jamie Zawinski, formerly of Mozilla: “Anyone involved in cryptocurrencies in any way is either a grifter or a mark. It is 100% a con. There is no legitimacy.” Elsewhere he says: “Cryptocurrencies are not only an apocalyptic ecological disaster, and a greater-fool pyramid scheme, but are also incredibly toxic to the open web, another ideal that Mozilla used to support.” Admirable clarity from JWZ. 

Rob Sheffield:

I’ve always loved CDs, and I never junked my collection, even when the format fell off a cliff in the 2000s. I cherish all noise-making gear, from cassettes to vinyl to streams. But the CD has its unique charms, especially for longer, deeper listening. No format has ever been kinder to music that takes time. It was the CD that turned Pet Sounds and Another Green World and Heart of the Congos and Astral Weeks into widely beloved classics, as opposed to cult items; it was the format that finally made Lee “Scratch” Perry a mainstream hero. An already-famous LP like Kind of Blue became a whole new phenomenon on disc. The quintessential classics of the jewel-box era — D’Angelo’s Voodoo, Radiohead’s Kid A, Missy’s Supa Dupa Fly — would have flopped as streams. 

Could not possibly agree more enthusiastically. The last couple of years I have been adding to my CD and Blu-Ray collections, because I want to focus my attention on art that (a) I own and (b) I want to encounter over and over again. 

CDs aren’t as cool as vinyl — you miss out on the big beautiful artwork and liner notes, and the ritual of playing isn’t as much fun — but the musical experience, for my money, is significantly better.