ps190419 Reading Paul Allen’s Memoir  

Art Student meets Zineography

Reading Paul Allen’s memoir, Idea Man, I found two comments toward the end of the book that struck a familiar note. One reminded me of Carl Chew’s concept of Art Student back in the 1980s, and the second one made me think of these ‘Zines.

P. 300: “Over the last decade [2000-2010] I began to think about a ‘Digital Aristotle,’ an easy-to-use, all-encompassing knowledge storehouse. … to help people do what they do best, those inspired leaps of intuition that fuel original ideas and breakthroughs.

“ … Running on a laptop or tablet, Halo book could serve as a research aide for working scientists or as a tutor for college and high school students, like a personal digital teaching assistant.

P. 301: “Ray Kurzweil foresees the imminent arrival of ‘strong AI,’ machines as smart as human beings, the first step in an accelerating progression of smarter and smarter machines – to the point that we’ll be able to download our personalities and self-awareness into computers and gain a sort of digital immortality.”

For about fifty years I have been writing little essays of 500-1000 words with no apparent intention of offering them for publication. I do it for writing practice. I do it to document my thoughts. I wrote over sixty volumes of journals, too. On scraps of throwaway paper and note cards, I’ve written millions or billions of words.

Why I do this is beyond me, but I have no regrets. Sometimes I review them, and in these moments, I think of being on a ship on the ocean and watching the wake of the ship streaming behind to the horizon as the ship moves toward some goal. Somewhere on the ship there is a chart room and a navigator whose job it is to make sure the ship and crew reach our destination safely before supplies run out.

The navigator is chiefly concerned about the future. As for the past, he or she calls for a reading of the ship’s speed and the log is thrown overboard and the knots counted off, and this gives the navigator an idea of nautical knots transited. From this and other data, the navigator can estimate the future for the time at hand.

When I read my notes – which is easy, thanks to computers – I can see what I was thinking as far back as the earliest entry. I have them all on several hard-disks. In a book I published in 2010 titled Ritchie Mined, I have listed abstracts of over three-thousand of these up to 2009.

Thanks to search algorithms, I can “ask” to see essays written in the past if I can specify the time I want to know. I usually pick the current date, such as April 19. My search will usually be written in a six or eight-digit, alphanumeric code with the last two digits of the year, the month and the day.

For example, on the computer I’m using to write this: 750919 – which yielded nothing. I entered new numbers for the year (the first two digits) until I hit pay dirt with 910419 – April 19, 1991. It is my notes from an MIT Forum meeting. Reviewing it I find familiar names – Tom Lopez and Peter Mollman. I met both, and they gave advice to me, directly and by example. The notes inform me as to what I was thinking when I was trying to make my way toward today. The article is titled Mammoth meets M.I.T.: Notes from a bystander.

How useful is this? Next week I meet a woman from Botswana, coming here to study business methods to apply to her cooperative farm network back home. I am interested in Africa from a comment in another book, The Retirement Myth by Craig Karpel. It was a comment about retirement funds and where to invest one’s portfolio. Africa was an example offered – but in a roundabout way. Investing in Africa is what I’m doing – in a roundabout way.

Referring back to Allen’s and Kurzweil’s ideas, I feel like I’m coming back to where I started and knowing the place better. My compulsion to write essays makes sense in Kurzweil’s notion of a personality or digital immortality.

That I would nest this data in a printing press makes sense – like a castaway who writes a note in a bottle – cast into the waters but without certainty anyone would ever find it, would read my data, and understand it.

The only valuable purpose would be, to quote Allen, “… to help people do what they do best, those inspired leaps of intuition that fuel original ideas and breakthroughs.”