How should the church respond to congregational decline, financial deficits, and vocational shrinkage? The answer is obvious: make ministerial selection more stringent, theological education more demanding, and spiritual formation more exacting. And burn anyone who proposes a managerial or entrepreneurial solution.
I used to find my sleeplessness – I usually fall off for a few hours, wake for maybe two, then sleep until morning – a cause of distress, and I have ground down more than a few teeth in gnashing protest. None of the manifold putative remedies – sheep, Bovril, breathing or visualisation exercises – have ever helped. I used to find this infuriating, and would stew in the dark next to my wife (who falls asleep in two minutes) exhorting myself: “Sleep! Sleep!”This injunction, of course, makes things worse. Eventually it works, mostly because it is exhausting to chant inwardly for hours on end, desperate to drop off. But what a telling mismetaphor that is! Drop off what? The edge of a cliff? It’s hardly a wonder one resists doing it, it’s dangerous.
Often I would get up and write, which is a near-perfect remedy for sleep. But I have recently come to accept what I thought of as a malady, and to embrace it as a boon. The reason for this is my Kindle. Until I had one, I would turn on the lamp by the side of my bed, which could awaken even the soundly sleeping Belinda, who would inquire how long I intended to keep it on, and her awake? But my Kindle has a cutesy little light that protrudes from the leather cover like some bit of a praying mantis, and which now allows me to read without causing distress to my loved one. And this, I find, is absolutely dandy. Looked at coolly, I have not only extended my day by a couple of hours, but created a time in which the only thing I can do is read.
Not being able to share photos seamlessly from one social network to another may be the epitome of a “first world problem;” getting lost in the Australian outback because your smartphone manufacturer replaced a bulletproof mapping app with its inferior homemade version is a bit more serious. But in either case, the essential value of these information technologies–their ability to seamlessly interface with each other as only bits, rather than atoms, can–is being purposely eroded. The vision is almost comically retrograde: Twitter, Google, Apple, and Facebook each seem to think that they can provide every conceivable digital functionality to the user all on their own at each other’s expense, much like GM’s “kitchen of tomorrow” at the 1964 World’s Fair promised to meet every need of a 20th-century housewife with one brand. Fifty years later, nobody has (or wants) a kitchen built solely out of General Motors products. So why do Twitter and Facebook act like there is a personal information-technology equivalent?
Another purported quality of Coursera is that it is “open”, as everything must now be. The cyber-credo of “open” sounds so liberal and friendly that it is easy to miss its remarkable hypocrisy. The big technology companies that are the cybertheorists’ beloved exemplars of the coming world order are anything but open. Google doesn’t publish its search algorithm; Apple is notoriously secretive about its product plans; Facebook routinely changes its users’ privacy options. Apple, Google and Amazon are all frantically building proprietary “walled-garden” content utopias for profit.“Open-source” software, on the model of the Linux operating system, used to be the cyber-theorists’ favourite example of why open would always beat closed. Yet, for all the admirable successes of open-source software (especially in industrial applications), closed commercial software and services still dominate. Even Google’s open-source Android smartphone operating system is, for the vast majority of customers, experienced as a customised and re-closed version on phones manufactured by Samsung, HTC and Sony.
“Owning pipelines, people, products or even intellectual property is no longer the key to success,” Jarvis wrote in 2009. “Openness is.” What is now the company with the highest market valuation on earth? Apple, which sells physical products, jealously guards its patent hoard and is about as “open” as Fort Knox. Only the most black-hearted of cynics could suppose that it is in a cybertheorist’s interest to lecture media companies that they must be “open” so that the technology companies for which he acts as a useful idiot can happily hoover up all their data for free and monetise it.
There was a time – long ago to most of you, though it seems recent to me – when Rosemary, our children, and I were living from paycheck to paycheck and barely getting by. I’d had three not-terribly-good stories published in a college magazine before I went into the Army, and I thought I might just possibly write on the side and make us a little extra money. I sold a few stories. Then it was time for school to start again, and Rosemary began badgering me for money for school clothes. I would gladly have given it to her if there had been any. Another story, “Car Sinister,” sold, and instead of depositing the check I got the manager of the hardware store to cash it for me. I took it to Rosemary: ‘Here’s every dime I got for that story. That’s how much you have for school clothes.’ A few days passed, and I was sitting on the kitchen floor trying to mend a chair. Rosemary came up behind me and said, ‘Shouldn’t you be writing?’“That’s when I knew I was a writer.
A lovely piece of ephemera: Charles Dickens Reading Ticket circa 1867.Source: Print Cave
According to one person there, the ground conditions at the actual Equator are not stable enough to hold a monument nor to welcome the huge crowds that regularly arrive to see it; according to someone else, however, the monument’s original builders “believed they were placing the monument in the correct spot, except that measuring techniques at the time were not as accurate as they are today, so they were off by a few hundred feet.”This is why a private counter-monument has been built, supposedly on the real Equator, in a place called Inti-ñan: “just a two-minute drive from the Middle of the World, at a small, privately owned site called Inti-ñan, there is a sign on a gate saying that its location is ‘calculated with GPS’ to be exactly at 0 latitude.” However, as we glimpsed with the help of Marguerite Holloway, commercially available GPS is not as precise as most people believe it to be, and it is subject to its own asynchronies and drifts.
As such, we read, even nominally accurate GPS readings at Inti-ñan actually “varied depending on how devices were calibrated. That, a local guide said, was why, on this occasion, a visitor’s GPS held over the line of bricks that Inti-ñan uses to mark its claim to equatorial exactitude showed that it was still several yards to the south of where it ought to be.”