Airs - Ian Lance Taylor

I just completed my eighth move in nine years, which is why the blog has been neglected. We still have lots of book boxes to unpack, so it may take me a few days to become dependable again.

When possible, I prefer to move much of the stuff myself, to have time to put things in the right place rather than have everything dumped by a moving company. Also, moving fragile items myself is a lot easier, as they don’t have to be packed nearly as securely when I’m the only one who will be carrying the boxes. I was able to do that for this move, as we were moving cross-town after completing a major renovation on our house.

For me this approach to moving, and the numbers of times I’ve done it, makes it an interesting personal case study in the aging process. I’m 44 now. My lifestyle is fairly sedentary, but I do bike to work and I do weights and cardio in the gym three times a week (in my twenties I scoffed at people who worked out in the gym, but that’s just what time does to you). I was in better general shape when I practiced Tae Kwon Do regularly, but I think I’m still as strong now as I ever was, in the sense of what I am able to lift and carry.

The change I really notice in myself is physical recovery time. When I was younger a day spent lifting and carrying meant some muscle soreness in the evening. The next couple of days I would notice it but it wouldn’t affect me. Now a day of moving leaves my whole body stiff, such that it takes a physical effort to stand up straight. This is a strange phenomenon that never happened when I was younger. The stiffness persists for days—I still feel it—quite apart from the soreness which is fairly similar to what I remember.

Injuries also take much longer to heal. Over three weeks ago I somehow strained a muscle in my left forearm, the one used to tighten the fist. This is still troubling me, and making it difficult to pick up heavy objects with my left hand–it’s painful to get a firm grip. I strained plenty of muscles in my youth, but recover never took more than a few days. Muscle pain lasting several weeks is a new experience for me.

We do not merely inhabit our bodies; despite the dichotomy of the language, we are our bodies, and our bodies are us. Aging is just evolution’s way of clearing the deck for the next generation, and animals that I’ve known seem to take it in stride. It’s only our human habits of foreknowledge and recollection that make it strange. And yet to be living it myself is, inevitably, strange.

In schoolbook accounts of the fall of Rome, one thing that was always mentioned was that the empire started hiring mercenaries to defend its borders, rather than the volunteer army. Those mercenaries were professional soldiers with no strong allegiance to the empire, and they often became a force in the struggles over who would be the next emperor.

The U.S. is now hiring large numbers of mercenaries in Iraq, although they are given the euphemistic name of military contractors. I’ve seem some statements that the U.S. has more contractors in Iraq than it does soldiers, although I believe that includes all contractors, not just mercenaries. Many of the mercenaries are in fact former members of the U.S. military, who change jobs in order to get the much higher pay available in the private sector.

This doesn’t have to be a problem. Mercenaries are still a fraction of the overall size of the U.S. military. The U.S. will leave Iraq, hopefully sooner rather than later, and demands for military manpower will drop significantly. In a few years it seems likely that the number of mercenaries will be much smaller.

Still, it’s a worrying trend. Regardless of your feelings about privatization, privatizing your military forces is an extremely bad idea. Ultimately the power of the state relies on its control of military force. Regular soldiers, especially volunteers as is true of the U.S. military services, support the state, and that inclination is strengthened by military training and indoctrination. Mercenaries are in it for the money, and it’s much easier to shift their allegiance. The more mercenaries the state hires, the closer it comes to losing its monopoly on military force. Fortunately, the U.S. isn’t close to that, and it still has plenty of time to pull back.

I grew up in Massachusetts, where the weather is unpredictable and changes regularly. I recall one March several years ago where one day I was walking around in shorts and two days later we had a huge snowfall. I’ve been conditioned to expect that sort of weather.

Now I live in California, where the weather is almost always the same from day to day. It does change across the seasons: it is somewhat rainy in the winter, and it never rains in the summer. But on average each day is just like the next one.

This puts me increasingly on edge all summer long. I keep subconsciously waiting for something to change. When nothing does, I feel like my brain is flattening out, like listening to muzak all the time.

I don’t know why more people don’t mention this as a drawback of California.

Tibet has been in the news recently, as people are using the fact that the Olympics are taking place in China to protest against Chinese control. I’ve never been to Tibet, and I don’t know very much about it. Tibetans are an ethnic group, they have a long history, they have their own religion, they speak their own language. From my Western perspective, it seems natural that they should have some ability to determine their own fate. Right now they don’t seem to have that. That’s too bad. It’s also not that different from a lot of other ethnic groups around the world–the Kurds come to mind.

Why does Tibet have such strong support in the west? Why do we see so many bumper stickers saying “Free Tibet” and so few saying “Free East Turkistan?” My wholly superficial knowledge suggests that the two causes are very similar: ethnic groups which want more freedom from the central Chinese government. I see two distinct features of Tibet that make it more popular in the West: Tibetans have a charismatic leader, the Dalai Lama, and Tibetans aren’t Muslims. There is no denying that a charismatic leader is very important for these sorts of struggles. Unfortunately it seems that such people are born, not made. Tibet was very fortunate in the man who became the Dalai Lama.

The Chinese government naturally resists any arguments in favor of Tibetan independence. From a Western perspective they do so in a very ham-handed way: restricting journalists, making statements that seem obviously false, accusing the Dalai Lama of being a terrorist. More interesting is that most Chinese people outside of Tibet appear to support the government. It’s hard to imagine that Chinese people trust their government. But it seems that at least on the subject of Tibet, they do. Is Chinese propaganda more successful within China than it is outside of China? Is there a peculiar Chinese perspective that makes them see the Tibetan issue differently from most people in the West? Is it simply that China’s strict control over information prevents people from seeing an opposing point of view?

From a geopolitical perspective, Tibet is unimportant. I hope that Tibetan people get more freedom and the right to elect their own government. For that matter, I hope that everybody in China gets that right. But the brutal truth is that is that the Tibetans are one abused ethnic group among many, and there are several who have it a lot worse.

I find the apparent success of Chinese propaganda within China to be much more troubling. The increased economic freedom in China was expected to bring increased political freedom. I see no signs of that. China is going to increasingly dominate the world economy–or Chinese society is going to fall apart, one or the other. If China doesn’t fall apart, and if Chinese propaganda continues to be as successful as it has been so far, our ideals of free speech and free elections will matter less and less. This is very speculative, and not at all a doomsday scenario. But I think that if we want to retain what we believe to be the strengths of our society, we need a better understanding of how China is keeping itself immune to them–something the Soviet Union was increasingly unable to do.

Control over copying of analog data is, in practice, made possible by cost: it’s a pain to transcribe a book, it’s hard to make a perfect copy of a record. The cost of copying digital data, however, is near zero. This means that control over copying of digital data is, in practice, impossible.

It’s not hard to control whether anybody can make money using digital data. If somebody is making money, customers are finding them, and that means that you can find them too. If they are making money, you can sue them in court and take away that money. However, there is no practical way to prevent somebody from making a copy without making any money.

There are many industries which exist on the basis of charging per copy–most obviously, the industries which sells CDs, DVDs, and books. When a digital copy is just as good as any other, those industries are dead. They will take a while to die, but they will still die in the reasonably near future.

Historically speaking, none of these industries are very old. So the fact that they are going to die need not be a major problem for most people. I’ve seen occasional arguments that it’s important to find a way to compensate people who create data, as otherwise they won’t do it. That is nonsense. People create things all the time. Art existed long before copyright was invented. The people who will be hurt are the pop stars and the pop star wannabees. It will no longer be possible to make a large fortune in the data creation business.

Interestingly, it will still be possible to make a large fortune in some closely allied business, such as brand creation or jingle writing or video advertising. These are the areas where art finds a direct commercial application. Digital or digitizable art which is sold for its own sake is going to become the province of patronage, performance, and personal creation. There will still be stars, but they won’t be created by a studio system, and they won’t necessarily be rich.

None of this need be bad. But it does mean that our cultural landscape will be quite different from what we are used to.