One Score and Five

Today is September 11th, 2026... twenty-five years after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Unsurprisingly, it's been a day where the news media has been looking back at the events, and stories of people who were there, or otherwise affected by the event. There is, I think, something of a temptation to make that a very expansive set, but while it may be safe to say that the population of the United States as a whole saw some impacts from the al-Qaeda attacks, I don't think that it's accurate to say that each of us, as individuals, were affected.

Perhaps because I was sleep-deprived that morning, but still needed to drive to work, it wasn't something that I could pay very much attention to when I was first hearing about it. News reports were preliminary, and so while I made the drive from Seattle to the office, things would change, but I was busy navigating the expressway.

As the full picture started to become clear, terrorism took on a new urgency in the lives of a lot of people I knew (and very many more that I didn't know). For me, though, it was simply another thing to be added to the series of vague background threats that populated my life. I was still in my early thirties, and so, statistically speaking, gun violence was still far and away the most likely thing I would have had to worry about. And while any number of people advocated for moving (Islamic) terrorism into that top spot, I was never really moved by any of it. I think that's because the threat of terrorism made a lot of people feel unsafe in a way they hadn't before, that wasn't true for me; I was already aware that an unseen clock was ticking down somewhere; it perhaps ticking slightly faster than before wasn't a cause for alarm.

Now, it's true that the new airport security measures created changes for everyone who flew, and I did get on a plane from time to time (in fact, I went on a vacation in early 2002), but it didn't take much to realize that rather than solving the problem, it just shifted it. Coming back from London in 2004, Heathrow airport struck me as a dream target for a bomber; they wouldn't have needed to get a bomb onto a plane, there was a perfectly good mass of people in the run-up to the security checkpoints, similar to what I encountered at Chicago O'Hare in 2023. The infrastructure of flying was protected, but the actual fliers themselves were exposed until they reached that secure infrastructure.

While I can be something of a suspicious person, I never harbored enough of a mistrust of government to buy into the whole Trutherism movement that sprang up around the event, even if some of the literature was moderately entertaining. I might not have a high opinion of the Powers That Be, but I tend to consider them more ineffectual than malicious. And so that was another side effect of the attacks in which I found myself an observer, rather than a participant.

In the end, while I can remember what I was doing when I heard the news, that's mainly because it happened to coincide with a change in my daily routine prescribed by my doctor. Being on the other side of the continent from the attack places a lot of literal distance between me and the events. I do think that I have more interest in how people in other parts of the world see the United States. I recall spending a fair amount of time on red, double-decker, busses explaining how Americans tend to see the world. And while the initial idea for this weblog predates the attacks, it was having conversations that entailed me laying out aspects of the United States for people not native to it that finally convinced me to launch it.

I understand that I'm a different person now than I was then, but that's mostly because it was more than two decades ago, and very little of thirty-something me has survived the intervening years. And now I live in a world in which many of the people I interact with were too young for it to be significant in their lives; that honor belongs to the SARS-2-CoV pandemic. So it seems like a big splash in a fast-flowing river; an event when it happened, but with little in the way of visible ripples this far downstream.

Islands

LinkedIn differs slightly from other social media sites due to its general focus on networking (although one might say that nowadays, it's primarily about social selling and general self-promotion). A side effect of this is that people, at least those who aren't hoping to defraud someone, tend to use their real names.

This leads to an interesting facet of the site; when people complain about businesses, they tend not to name the business they're referring to. Since their comments can be attributed to them by potential employers who peruse their profiles, there is a particular style of "LinkedIn speak" that people tend to use. This is most visible when people are discussing their own layoffs, but it appears when other topics are talked about as well. When people address the topic directly, the rationale tends to be the same... they don't want to risk being thought of as a bad hire of one sort or another. And so they don't name names.

And this makes sense. What I'm not sure makes sense is the broader response to this from the overall LinkedIn community. Or, for that matter, the public at large.

People fear burning bridges with potential future employers. And this frees up businesses from having to fear burning bridges with prospective (and current) customers and employees. Given that businesses don't have to care what people think of them (because they won't be named) they can act as they choose. They can suddenly throw people out of their jobs, they can treat employment candidates poorly and they can even mistreat their customers. Because even if someone takes to LinkedIn to decry this behavior, the company won't be named.

Especially ironic in this sense are the posts that purport to be warnings to businesses of the potential reputational damage of bad behavior when they detail the behavior, but don't name the business that perpetrated it. After all, how can a businesses reputation be damaged when no-one is willing to say that they did it?

The perception of powerlessness begets powerlessness. People feel that businesses can punish them with impunity, and this prompts them to keep their heads down, and not do anything that might draw negative attention to themselves; even when they believe that a business has behaved badly. This allows businesses to retaliate with impunity, because even if people were inclined to hold them accountable, they often don't know who the bad actor is. People see the overall lack of consequences, and the cycle continues.

One of the things that I tend to harp on is the idea that the United States is not a unified polity. Big picture, it's made up of a number of different ethnic and racial groups, most of whom feel that they have their own interests that are independent of (if not at odds with) those of the society at large. Drilling down, the overall individualism of American society creates circumstances where people look out for themselves first (even at the expense of others) because they are convinced that everyone else will do the same. And so it takes some pretty remarkable events to inspire people to collective action, and even that unity tends to be tenuous and short-lived. This prompts a feeling of isolation and powerlessness, which can often become a reality of isolation and powerlessness. 

Silence

I tend to post pictures to the blog here fairly often. I pretty much always carry a camera with me, and so I usually have a photograph to post, either by itself, or to illustrate a post.

But today, for some reason, Blogger is not allowing me to upload from my computer. These things happen, so it wouldn't be a big deal, except for one problem: there's no error message. The picture simply isn't displayed. This sort of occurrence, "failing silently," makes things difficult for users because it's hard to troubleshoot. After all, there's no information about what may have gone wrong that can be searched on the Internet or noted in a support ticket.

And I've noticed similar problems in Android; sometimes, an application simply fails to launch, and no explanation is given for why. I'm given to understand that this is poor programming practice, and so I wonder a bit why Google, of all companies, isn't better about it. After all, being unable to complete a task and having no idea why makes for a very poor customer experience.

Of course, the problem may not be on Google's end, which complicates matters. Perhaps an update to a browser extension, or some other software, is causing the problem, and there's no error message because Google isn't even aware that there's been a failure on Blogger's part.

This is the thing about modern computing... there are so many parts, and so many vendors, that the number of possible causes is astronomical. And that's not something that's going to change anytime soon. 

Out and About

In a corner of the Expo hall at PAX West, sandwiched between a local vendor that sells video games and anime merchandise and another vendor selling customizable lightsabers, the Washington Secretary of State's office set up a booth.

Secretary Hobbs himself as there yesterday. There's also a cardboard cutout of him, that, to be honest, shows him appearing somewhat stiff and uncomfortable, with a Captain America shield and Thor's hammer.

Curious, I asked the employees staffing the booth what had prompted them to put in an appearance at a video gaming convention. "This is where the people are," was the answer. It also seems that Secretary Hobbs is something of a geek himself. He certainly seemed to be in his element when I saw him.

The booth had a prize wheel that people could spin to win one of several small prizes that were on the table, like a candy bar, or a cloisonné pin of the department's mascot, Mark the Ballot. (Not the worst pun I've ever heard, but it's in contention...) When I swung by today, I asked if the booth was managing good engagement, and they said that they were. Which is good. While I understand that politicians aren't the most popular people on the face of the Earth, I do appreciate it, and applaud them, for getting out and being seen. I couldn't have told you who the current Secretary of State was, before this weekend. So I'm glad that I came across him.

And if it gets more young people out to vote, they should chalk up a win for that, too.
 

Newsbait

Out of six headlines, four are clearly clickbait, and one is a press release. No wonder the media isn't doing well. News, information about the world, is a poor fit for the attention rat race. And with all of the competition out there from social media sites and other internet-based sources of information, the investments needed to do the job well have poor returns. Subscription models are fine, but that raises the question of returns for the subscribers, especially in situations where one is simply paying for temporary access to the information.

My personal theory is that much of the news is entertaining, rather than informative. Sure, one can learn something from it, but the jury deliberations in the Lindsay Clancy case aren't big news because people can use that information to better their material circumstances. The story has a soap-opera quality about it that can make it an entertaining diversion from other things going on in the world. But so do a lot of other stories. And if they don't, creative, catchy headlines can make them seem as though they do.

And when the main vehicle that pays for news coverage is the advertising that plays alongside, around and sometimes over it, creative and catchy headlines for otherwise banal stories become a matter of survival. And so that's what tends to proliferate.