jameswharris

Nick (1994-2013)

Today, September 3, 2013, I had to have Nick put to sleep. He was almost 19. His sister, Nora, died just two years ago, also in September. Nick was a survivor. When he was young Nick had cancer twice, having to have operations on his back both times. For each operation they had to shave his back and turned him into ugly cat for months. For years now Nick had mega-colon, an enlarge heart, a heart murmur, and arthritis in his hind legs. Today they told me he also had severe anemia and needed a blood transfusion, plus his heart had a new fast arrhythmia, and his kidney function was worse than it was just a few months ago.

Susan and I had a hard time letting him go, but we decided it was finally time.

I hate putting animals to sleep because they can’t make this decision for themselves. I’d like to think Nick would have thought it the right time too – for all I know, he might have been ready to go months ago, but felt obligated to stay around to be our cat because he thought it was best for Susan and I. The doctors and staff at the Greene Animal Hospital were wonderful as usual. Nick died very peacefully, and I only wish when my time comes I could go like that.

Nick was my all time favorite pet – although I loved all my dogs and cats. He will be my last pet. I couldn’t watch another grow old and die, and I’m not sure I could outlive another pet myself, and I wouldn’t want leave an animal that was attached to me that way. Back in 2002 I went to Seattle for six weeks and I felt really bad leaving Nick – he always favored me in picking laps. I worried about how he felt not finding me for so long. And when I returned I could never tell if he recognized me or just found another person to like.

We got Nick and Nora back in 1994. Yes, they were named after the famous movie detective and his wife, Nick and Nora Charles. Nick and Nora were our second set of cats, with Yin and Yang the first. Susan and I have been married long enough to outlive two generations of cats. Nick was so small when we first got him, I could hold him the palm of my hand. That was so long ago, and just yesterday.

When they were kittens, Nick and Nora loved each other, and like Yin and Yang, would play fetch with paper balls. Susan and I would sit in our chairs and the cats would get on our footstools and wait for us the throw paper balls over their heads. They’d leap high up into the air, snatch the balls in their paws, and sometimes even do flips before landing on their feet. Half the time they’d even bring the paper balls back for us to throw again. We’d always know when they wanted to play this game because you’d look on the floor beside your chair and find a pile of paper balls and a cat staring up at you. They’d also play soccer, batting the balls around while chasing after them, scattering them all over the house. But the cats would bring them to back us when they wanted to play fetch.

Sadly, both sets of cats got tired of these games as they got older. And it was also sad, as they got older they became less friendly with each other. For many years Nick would sit in my lap and Nora would sit in Susan’s. If there were only one of us in the den watching TV they’d both pile up in a single lap that we called a double-cat. If Nora got to a lap first she’d get pissy if Nick tried snuggle a space next to her. At one time Nick got up to 20 pounds and Nora peaked at 16, so we’d have 36 pounds of cat on our laps. However, as you can see, I’m no lightweight either.

Even though Nick and Nora stopped playing together, they stayed together most of the day. It was hard to tell them apart at times. After Nora died, Nick got the pick of our laps. He loved sleeping on us – until we bought him a heating pad for his old age. He loved that heating pad so much, but would always still spend a portion of the day sleeping on one of us.

Many of my friends have worried that I will be lonely without Nick. Since Susan works out of town, I’m by myself all week. Nick has kept me company for five years now, but I’m not sure if I will be lonely. Loving an animal seems much different from loving a person. Loneliness for me is not having someone to talk to, and I can call Susan on the phone. And even though I often talked to Nick, he never replied back or started a conversation. What I love about animals, and what I will miss, is their nonhuman qualities. We mainly communicate with animals by touch, sight, body language – and smells. I’m not going to miss the smells, but I will miss having a creature that chooses to curl up on me.

In his old age, Nick got very set in his ways. But then so am I. For the last two years we lived like old bachelors, following a clockwork routine. My life will take a new daily course without Nick. It will take me a while to get used to it. It took me a long time before I stopped seeing Nora after she died. Twice this evening already I’ve thought I saw Nick. It’s funny how we get used people and animals being in our lives, and how hard it is to not see them when they are gone.

But for now on, I will have to make furry friends with those creatures owned by my friends. I was very attached to Nick and Nora, and I just can’t go through that again. This might sound hard hearted, but from now on I only want to attach myself to beings that will die after me.

JWH – 9/3/13

Retiring

Back in November of 1977, I took a job with Memphis State University, as The University of Memphis was then called, and have worked there ever since. If everything goes as planned, I shall retire next month, October of 2013. The long middle portion of my life, my work years, will be over, and I’ll start on what I call the final third of life. The first third is all about growing up and getting an education, the middle third about work, but I hope my retirement years will be more than just waiting to die. I have big plans. In fact, I’ve thought more about retirement than I ever did as a kid to pondering that childhood Koan, “What are you going to be when you grow up?” For ten years now, I’ve asked myself, “What are you going to be when you retire?”

I hope it will be more than taking naps with my cat.

Strangely, reaction among my friends have been mixed to what I consider great news. Many have pleaded I should keep working until age sixty-six.

Most of my work friends want me to stay. I will miss them too, and hope to keep in contact. I get the feeling they think once I’m gone, I’ll disappear. I hope that’s not true. A huge part of my social life has been work. Some of these people seem to suggest that retiring is stepping down from life. They are the ones that plan to work until their seventies or eighties. Many have exclaimed, “Won’t you be bored to death?”

People at work who depend on me for help ask, “Who’s going to program my reports now?” Luckily, I’m retiring just when IT decided to expand their sphere to all the computer related workers in the departments and colleges. They have already assigned a programmer to come work with me for the next several weeks.

My retired friends are the happiest to hear that I’m retiring. They’ve already started their new life and are very happy.

I have great ambitions for retirement, but even if I never achieve any of them, I’m quite sure I’ll be happy just having more time to read, watch movies, television shows and documentaries and listen to a lot of music. I read around fifty books a year, now, so I hope to expend it to 100. I have a lifetime of book collecting on my shelves that are mostly unread. I’ve collected enough unread volumes to last decades.

I subscribe to a music service with over 20 million songs, and plan to roam up and down the history of music, studying classical, jazz, folk, world, etc.

I have countless art books, art DVDs, video art history courses that I want to study.

Now with free online courses given around the world, I want to study everything I never had time for but dream about.

I’ve seen thousands of movies and documentaries, and I’ve still got thousand more I want to see.

Finally I have time – time, time, time!

I hope I don’t break my glasses like Henry Beamis.

However, I want my retirement years to be more than just pursuing passive entertainment. I’ve always wanted to write a novel, but whined I never had time. Now it’s time to put up or shut up. I have drafts of several novels I’ve written over the years that I’m anxious to finish. I don’t plan to sleep in after I retire. In fact, I plan to get up even earlier than I did for work, and devote my mornings to writing like it was a job. After lunch it will be hobby time.

Because I was a programmer all my life, I’ve always dreamed of writing fun programs. Apps for tablets and smartphones offers wonderful possibilities. My friend Mike, also a programmer that will retire soon, and I, plan to work on some projects together, or at least concurrently.

One of my major regrets of my first third years was not being disciplined enough to learn advanced mathematics. I’m going to test the assertion, “You can’t teach an old dog new tricks” by studying math. I plan to combine the desire to learn the Python programming language with study of math by programming all my homework problems into a graphical math system I develop myself. I’d love to buy a 4k monitor and program a coordinate system to display beautiful geometric designs. I’m currently reading Euclid’s Window, a book about the history of geometry and it’s impact on the sciences, and I’d like to understand this book at a deeper level than just racing over the narrative.

Scientific American used to run a column called “The Amateur Scientist” which described do-it-yourself experiments that could be done in a home workshop. A few years back I bought a CD of the complete series, thinking they might be a wonderful retirement hobby activity.

There’s a guitar sitting in my room, that I’ve been meaning to learn to play for years. I also wanted to learn to play chess and bridge. Man, I’ve forgotten more things I want to do than I’ve written about here.

How can anyone ask if I will be bored?

To be honest with myself, I’m racing to do these things while I can, because my brain is winding down, my heart is wimpy, and physical wellbeing is declining.

JWH – 9/2/13

Faith in Science Fiction

When we read science fiction do we only expect great stories, or do we read science fiction for great expectations?

For many, I think science fiction is just another genre to escape into, but for some, especially us older fans, science fiction inspired us about the future. Science fiction was a belief system, and science fiction sold us a philosophy about the future.

Reading Rich Horton’s introduction to his latest The Year’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2013 Edition led me to read Paul Kincaid’s review of last years best of the year anthologies in the Los Angeles Review of Books. Kincaid’s key paragraph:

The problem may be, I think, that science fiction has lost confidence in the future. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that it has lost confidence that the future can be comprehended. At its historical best, science fiction presented alien worlds and distant futures that, however weird they might seem, were always fundamentally understandable. The basic plot structure often involved the achievement of understanding. But somewhere amidst the ruins of cyberpunk in the 1980s, we began to feel that the present was changing too rapidly for us to keep up with. And if we didn’t understand the present, what hope did we have for the future? The accelerating rate of change has inevitably affected the futures that appear in our fictions. Things happen as if by magic (one thinks, for example, of Matter by Iain M. Banks, in which a character has casually assumed the appearance of a bush), or else things are so different that there is no connection with the experiences and perceptions of our present.

Kincaid says a number of things about the state of our genre by reviewing the three best of the year anthologies:

“…the genres of the fantastic themselves have reached a state of exhaustion”
“In the main, there is no sense that the writers have any real conviction about what they are doing. Rather, the genre has become a set of tropes to be repeated and repeated until all meaning has been drained from them.”
“but it is almost anti-SF in its affect: the future has run its course and come to an end; what was one of the most exciting aspirations of science fiction—the promise of life on another world—is here made available only to those looking backward to a former time. It is a story that makes manifest the exhaustion that is immanent throughout these three collections.”
“And yet the stories would all have a feel of the past about them, the sense of a genre treading water, picking up shiny relics from its own long history as though they were bright new ideas.”
“This one story illuminates the exhaustion that seems to have overtaken SF and fantasy, the sense that the future is something to be approached wearily because we have already imagined it and rubbed away anything that was bright and new. Judging by these three books, the genre is now afraid to engage with what once made it novel, instead turning back to what was there before. We might tinker with the details, but it seems that no-one has much interest in making it (a)new.”

I find Kincaid’s criticisms fascinating, and I often agree with him, but I’m not sure if it’s not just science fiction writers that are exhausted and have lost faith in the future. Readers too, don’t see the same future as they did in the 1950s and 1960s. Part of this is due to manned space flight going nowhere for forty years after such a promising start. We’re also getting older and realizing the futures we expected as teens won’t be coming true. And let’s face it, after reading science fiction for fifty years we’ve also wised up about its bullshit. Then there’s the problem of readers becoming jaded – the more stories you read, the more good ones you find, and the average becomes mediocre, and eventually even the exceptional becomes tarnished by reading real masterpieces of literature.

I’ve yet to become an atheist to my science fictional beliefs, but I have become more skeptical and agnostic.

But some of this criticism for science fiction story writing should really be applied to our personal beliefs in science fictional concepts. When we were young it was easy to be gosh-wowed into a sense of wonder. But if we look back on those concepts we loved back then, we might find our past futures weren’t all they were cracked up to be. Adolescent dreamtime isn’t very discerning.

Kincaid criticizes contemporary science fiction writers for not being as original as those writers back in the 1950s and 1960s because modern writers no longer seem to comprehend the future, but I think the shift in story construction is not because we can no long comprehend the future, but because we’re lost faith in futures we grew up hoping to find.

Strangely enough, I just read, “Close Encounters” by Andy Duncan in The Year’s Top Ten Tales of Science Fiction 5 edited by Allan Kaster that emotionally resonates with what I’m saying, and maybe with what Kincaid is saying too. Sorry, “Close Encounters” is not available online to link to, but if you click on “Click to LOOK INSIDE!” at the Amazon site I linked to above, you can read most of the story there. It’s very well written, with a wonderful voice, and yes, it looks backwards, nostalgic for the good ole days of science fiction.

The story is about a Mr. Buck Nelson, of Mountain View, Missouri, who in 1956 during the peak of the flying saucer craze had a close encounter with a visiting alien and his dog. The story takes place in the late 1970s, when a young lady reporter tracks down Mr. Nelson to follow up on all the close encounter folk from the 1950s. Andy Duncan gives us a sentimental account of science fictional faith struggling to survive with skeptical science. I loved this story even though I think flying saucer people are a bunch of nuts. Yet, as a kid back in the 1950s, I remember flying saucers being pretty damn far out. By the later 1960s and early 1970s we pretty much knew those close encounter people were crazy even though Steven Spielberg gave their kind new lease on life with his famous movie.

Paul Kincaid suggests that older science fiction was more creative because the writers back then believed in powerful shiny futures of hope. That newer writers often don’t see shiny futures and have retreated to past visions of the future to find their hope by writing retro-SF.

This makes me ask: Was the science fiction back then really that great at understanding the future? Kincaid clarified himself by saying about modern science fiction, “… perhaps it would be more accurate to say that it has lost confidence that the future can be comprehended.”

Anyone who has read the books of Nassim Nicholas Taleb, especially the brilliant The Black Swan, knows the future can not be predicted. Nor would any sane science fiction writer claim they are predicting the future in their stories. Quite often science fiction writers present futures we want to avoid, but for the general run of science fiction fans, we like stories that we can vicariously imagine living in via exciting adventures. We don’t expect cushy, or even nice futures to inhabit, but we do prefer them thrilling. Few science fiction books then or now try to comprehend our actual future.

Although it is impossible to predict the future, that doesn’t mean science fiction writers don’t want to promote the future. Most of us want interplanetary and interstellar travel, and many of would like a future that includes intelligent robots, life extension, human clones and contact with aliens that hotrod around the galaxy.

Like me, I imagine many kindred spirits who want to write the next great American science fiction novel. What kind of future do you want to imagine? Are you going to play futurist, and extrapolate on current trends, or will you riff off from some classic science fictional future that already exists? Or can you imagine a wholly unreal future, like The Hunger Games or Ready Player One, and pile up that bestseller money in the bank.

I just read The Next 100 Years by George Friedman, and it makes me wonder about what the future means to science fiction writers. Friedman’s book came out in 2009, and it’s already suffering the fate of all predictors of the future – the future is everything we never imagined. Friedman expects more of the same based on the past, and it’s all rather boringly mundane. If you read Kincaid’s essay, and I recommend that you do, I think he’s suggesting that reality of the last several decades has confused current SF writers about the possibility of getting the futures we wanted. He suggests that science fiction has become recursive, with new stories being born out of past visions of the future, rather than being inspired by wholly new visions of the future.

Like I’ve said many times, only a nut would claim they can predict the future. But the meat and potato of science fiction writer is the future. I grew up in the 1960s with a serious science fiction habit that addicted me to the future, ones that have never come true. There are real futures, and then there are fictional futures, and they have seldom overlapped.

But what great past SF novels clarified any future? The Foundation Trilogy? Childhood’s End? Dune? More than Human? The only science fiction stories that I wanted to become my future were the Heinlein juveniles. But didn’t Heinlein give up on those futures with Strangers in a Strange Land, and all the other weird-ass books he wrote after that?

Kincaid claims we’ve given up on science fiction futures, and science fiction writers have turned to fantasy. I think this is well illustrated if you ask: when and where is The Game of Thrones set? Kincaid thinks that SF/F writers have given up on real futures, and gone for straight fantasy, or quasi-science fictional fantasies.

Robert A. Heinlein’s most famous novel, Stranger in a Strange Land is set in a future that’s already past, and one I don’t remember living through. Heinlein is also famous for writing his Future History series of stories, where he set many of his 1940s tales in a common imagined future that has already become our past. How did this old science fiction help us comprehend our futures? Did it ever mention anything you see on the Nightly News?

Because Heinlein was a major success as a science fiction writer, I don’t think writing failed extrapolations of near futures was a bad career move. However, George R. R. Martin’s success at creating a totally fantasy non-future suggests that it’s a much better career move. However, like Kincaid, I feel that giving up on science fiction for fantasy, or even writing science fictional fantasies is giving up on the future. Has our faith in the future died? Or has our faith in science fiction died?

Some SF books like The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi, are still diamond sharp visions an extrapolated futures. Few SF writers are ambitious enough to paint a detailed picture of a near future like Bacigalupi’s. The only comparison that comes to mind is 1968’s Stand on Zanzibar by John Brunner, about an imagined 2010, which I would propose as science fiction’s best novel of extrapolation. Brunner got most of his crystal balling wrong, but of all the science fiction novels I grew up reading in the 1960s, it’s the only one I felt like I lived through. The Windup Girl reminds me of the gritty post-colonial novels the British wrote in mid-20th century to understand their fading empire.

But that’s not what Kincaid was talking about when he claims we’re losing our faith in the future.

Some futures are more appealing to science fiction writers than others. Take Military SF. Most military SF stories are set in a future that reminds me of Heinlein’s Starship Troopers. This is actually a fantasy future, but it’s so real feeling that science fiction writers turn to it again and again. Some fans just can’t get enough grunts in space. Other fans can’t get enough post-human super-science space operas. Then there are legions of fans for romantic aristocracies set in galactic empires.

Star Wars reminds me of Asimov’s galactic empire, as do the stories of Lois McMaster Bujold, but were any of them about realistically possible futures?

Dystopian futures are quite popular for young adult science fiction novels right now, but what if you wanted a different kind of future for the setting of your novel? Although I do think the word dystopian is overused, and maybe even misused. Common definitions for dystopia included “An imaginary place or state in which the condition of life is extremely bad, as from deprivation, oppression, or terror” – American Heritage, and “an imaginary place where everything is as bad as it can be” – Collins, to “an imaginary place where people lead dehumanized and often fearful lives” – Merriam-Webster. Wouldn’t those definitions describe Westeros, the world of A Song of Ice and Fire? Or most horror novels, and probably war novels, as well as Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and most Shakespearean tragedies?

Then we have PKDickian futures. PKD often imagined the little man trapped in an insane world. Jack Bohlen, the repairman in The Martian Time-Slip is not your typical action hero. How many SF readers expect to read about unions on Mars? And Rick Deckard is not the Harrison Ford in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, the book Blade Runner is based on. I think Dick imagined a fucked-up 1959 future where animals were gone and we had robots that could pass for humans and animals. Other than that his future seemed a lot like 1959, as did most of Dick’s 1960s novels. It was the movie makers that colored Dick’s future so fantastically that I believe many readers now use those visuals to color in his novels.

But how do you see the future? When you write your science fiction novel, will it be inspired by the real life world you live in, or from a favorite fiction world you read about, or one you loved in the movies? I think late 1950s Marin County California inspired many of the fictional worlds that Philip K. Dick created. I think 1920s and 1930s America shaped Heinlein’s sense of the future. Like it’s commonly expressed, science fiction is often about the present. But more than that, it’s about the person who writes it. My view of a lunar colony will be shaped by my personality and life, and will be different from Heinlein’s. And even if I try to extrapolate hard science like crazy, will anything I write really help readers comprehend their future? I don’t think so.

Probably living on Earth with our big screen TVs, computers and smartphones is more exciting than the reality of living on Mars. But where does this leave science fiction? Is turning to fantasy stories the right path after all? What we all have is a fiction habit. Science fiction used to be the fictional drug of choice, but it doesn’t give us the high we used to get. Watching Breaking Bad, blows away every science fiction novel I ever read. The reason why George R. R. Martin has legions of fans is because storytelling itself has gotten better. It’s not comprehending the future that will rekindle excitement in science fiction, but convincing writers with storytelling abilities like J. K. Rowling and George R. R. Martin to write science fiction.

When Kincaid criticizes the SF/F best of anthologies it shouldn’t be because of the state of the genre or the writers’ ability to comprehend the future, but just lack of story telling skills. When I gorge myself on short stories from the best of anthologies, I’m always exhausted by long info dumps, techno babble yakking, and characters that feel like they are puppets on a string trying to mime out some ridiculous idea the author has. Too many SF stories try much too hard to rationalize razzle-dazzling concepts, and don’t spend enough time on standard storytelling techniques or realistic emotional character building.

That’s why I loved “Close Encounters” by Andy Duncan so much. It was just a well told story. It has real emotions. But is that what we really want, nice nostalgia about our old dreams? But then science has taught us that old science fiction only offered us Santa Claus futures. I think Kincaid was onto something, but I haven’t worked out the exact nature of the problem. I had faith in science fiction back when, and I have nostalgia for those memories now, but I’m not sure what science fiction should become next.

JWH – 8/22/13

The Unwinding by George Packer

George Packer has written a book about America coming unwound. He theorizes that America has come undone many times before, and we rewind ourselves in cycles over our long history. I’m not sure if America isn’t always unwinding and rewinding at the same time – like the famous yin-yang symbol. That if you’re young, the chaos that is America becomes new possibilities bursting forth, while if you’re old, the same chaos becomes cherished traditions breaking apart.

Packer tells his story not by philosophizing or political rhetoric, but by reporting on the lives of a diverse group of people surviving The Great Recession. This has far greater emotional impact than abstract commentary on demographics. We see Youngstown, Ohio through the eyes of Tammy Thomas, and Tampa, Florida through a family of four who becomes homeless. We see Washington politics through Jeff Connaughton, as he spends decades campaigning for Joe Biden. We see Silicon Valley via billionaire Peter Thiel, and North Carolina through Dean Price, and up and down businessman. Packer also profiles some famous people too, like Oprah Winfrey, Colin Powell, Robert Rubin, Jay-Z, Newt Gingrich, Sam Walton, Raymond Carver, Elizabeth Warren and Alice Waters.

But it’s the less famous people that tell his story best, like the immigrant woman who owns a motel but hates to hire Americans because they are such poor workers. Packer talks about the fall of unions and good wages, and even how the mob held some towns together, because after they left all the towns had were street gangs fighting. Our lives depend on complex social and economic organizations, and when they unwind, it’s changes what we think of normal living, even if it’s corrupt to begin with.

Parker showing the rust belt neighborhoods eroding through Tammy Thomas lifetime is heart breaking. Ditto for the Hartzell family showing Tampa coming apart at the seams because of the housing crisis.

These stories are riveting. The sum of their impact is very emotional, and I’m afraid depressing. I read this book with my friend Linda, and we constantly emailed back and forth about how we felt The Unwinding made us yearn for solutions to start the rewinding of America. Through the biographical sketches Packer shows America breaking down in many key areas of life – work, democracy, health, food, energy, housing, schools, etc. – all the stuff you see on the news every night, but told through moving personal stories.

I have lived through the Great Recession without seeing all of this directly. My wife and I kept our jobs and house. Most people are like us. But for ten to twenty percent of the country, times were very bad. It’s like news reports of a tornado. Seen focused in on the damage, a whole city can appear destroyed, but if you back away some, you’ll see the devastation is limited. If your house is in the devastation your world is destroyed. If you live far enough away from where the twister hit, you might not even think anything is wrong. The Unwinding lets us experience a tiny bit of the misery of being at ground zero of The Great Recession.

The trouble is The Great Recession wasn’t an act of nature, but a man-made tragedy. And it didn’t have one cause but many. We all brought about the unwinding. Whether Packer’s book is an early report of the collapse of the American Empire, or just a narrative about catching an economic cold, is yet to be seen. I do believe things have permanently changed, a lot of things. The American middle class used to be the large bell in the bell curve of American economics. That bulk of that bell is collapsing. It’s not the 99% versus the 1%, but bulk of the bell has shifted backwards toward the lower class. Average incomes are declining. But then average wages around the world are rising. We’re all homogenizing around a much lower standard of living worldwide. This is just change, but does it have to be negative? Do we have to suffer man-made economic storms? Do we have to accept lower wages as everything becomes cheaper?

What’s unfair is a lot of people got very wealthy without creating very much, and in some cases by destroying a lot of what used to exist. That’s a very vague way of stating the problem. Read The Unwinding for a detailed view.

JWH – 8/13/13

Survival of the Fittest Evolution of Web Sites

How many millions of web sites are there on the Internet? How many do you visit regularly? How many websites do we need for each specific function?

When local newspapers were the only source of news they mattered a great deal to their communities. Television news and the Internet are competing them out of existence. But how many newspapers can survive in the world wide market of the web?

I love a mobile app called Zite. It’s like Pandora, but instead of rating music, it rates and shows me articles to read. Over time I’ve noticed that the number of different web sites it presents me is declining because I favor some sites over others. Even with seven billion viewers there should be a limit to the number of web sites that the Internet can support. Eventually we should see a shakeout.

Yesterday Jeff Bezos bought The Washington Post. I use to read The Washington Post online, but I seldom do anymore. I’d rather read The New York Times, The LA Times or The Guardian. Did Bezos buy a white elephant? I used to watch CNN, and after I gave up cable I read its website, but I don’t anymore.

If I could remember them, I could list dozens, if not hundreds of websites that I once loved, but I’ve stopped reading. The world only needs so many famous restaurants franchises before there is too much choice. Famous news sources should shake out too. Who wants to check any encyclopedia except Wikipedia now? Or shop for books other than at Amazon?

If Americans were allowed to buy cable TV channels a la cart, how many channels would survive? If every newspaper and magazine goes behind a paywall, how many will survive? Why doesn’t IMDB and Rotten Tomatoes merge and then buy Flixster? Look what Amazon did by buying Audible.com and ABEBooks? Isn’t it logical that they bought Goodreads?

If you think about websites like one cell organisms living in an organic soup, we should be seeing them combined with each other to form new multicellular organisms, and eventually evolve into some very complex animals.

Competition is good, but it tends to be violent and kill off the weak. I’m not sure if the Internet will always be a boom town.

JWH – 8/6/13