Winds of (spare) Change

Friday May 22, 2020

It was windy this evening as my wife and I took our customary walk through the fields that lie to the south of our house. It’s a known fact that walking through green plants lowers your blood pressure, which I find is a necessary antidote to consuming the daily news ‘in these dark times’ as we like to say to each other. The day had been sunny and mild, but now overcast and blustery, with an indefinable smell of imminent rain on the air.

A small child stopped us on the path and pointed out the undulating grass on the opposite slope of the valley. ‘You can see the wind — it looks like waves’.

Thousands or perhaps millions blades of grass. Seen up close, it would be apparent how each individual blade bows to the pressure, and springs back again according to its own particular resistance and resilience.

And yet, at this distance, a rippling pattern emerges in spite of the gustiness of the wind. As we walked on, I pondered — are we actually seeing the wind, or are we seeing something intrinsic to the nature of the grass? Springiness maybe? The grass is real, does the wind actually exist or is it just a convenient way of simplifying our observations.

Come to think of it, is it the wind moving the grass, or the grass creating the wind by moving in concert?

If you were an individual blade of grass would you even be in a position to observe wind as a concept? What is the lived experience of grass? Is it like being blindsided and buffeted by an invisible and unpredictable force bent on bringing you to your knees, or is it like rowing ‘all together boys, we can do this thing!’.

Most days, I spend more time than I’d like to admit flicking through the headlines on my pixel phone. Being a Google product, it’s actually less of a phone than it is a node in a vast array of sensors that has been lowered into the sea of humanity to measure temperature, currents, salinity and so forth.

Every flick and click is recorded, aggregated, disaggregated, trended, tabulated, and fed into the maw of a vast machine learning neural network which hovers like a massive flickering galaxy of electrons trapped on the silicon surface of bazillions of computer chips. Watchful algorithms and eager eyes are trained to detect the ripples of activity and opinion that presage the winds of change.

But if the machine is learning, who is teaching?

I saw a picture once of a man walking down the middle of a boulevard in Berlin. The street is completely empty, the shadows on the marble facades of the buildings indicate that it is near noon on a sunny day. The man is towing a child’s coaster wagon behind him.

Apparently he had purchased 200 cheap Android phones, and entered the same destination into the Google Maps navigation feature of each phone. As he walked slowly down the street, a virtual traffic jam developed in cyberspace, and real drivers were diverted to side streets presumably creating actual and virtual traffic jams of their own.

So being a person who does not actually wear a tinfoil hat, but can relate, I have to admit that I often pause before I flick or click to ponder: what will this action teach the machine which so faithfully tries to learn about me?

Scrolling through a mix of covid-related headlines and economic punditry with the occasional Bruce Springsteen puff piece gives me the same sense of satisfaction that others derive from intoning ‘sit’ and ‘stay’.

To be fair, since my wife and I share devices, the feed contains a healthy smattering of crochet patterns as well as updates on the doings of Meghan Markle. But then again, some wives feed the dog at the table, so I suppose I should not complain.

So imagine my surprise the other day to be confronted with the following headline:

NASA uncovers evidence of bizarre parallel universe where physics, time, operate in reverse.

You’ve got to be kidding me. Is this clickbait or what? Check the URL… a Boston paper. Not one I’m familiar with. Hmmm. Tell you what, maybe it will be good blog fodder.

So I skim the article. Antarctica. Scientific team. Balloon release. Stratosphere. Encounters strange ‘wind’ of particles moving away from earth… alternate universe…created same time as the Big Bang…time is going backward…

This is going to take some time to absorb. I clip the link and email it to myself. Sigh. OK google, ding me for a flat-earther. There’s going to be heck to pay in Trump ads for this. Still, gotta be willing to suffer for the sake of art. Blogging is no joke.

And now it’s Friday. Wind. Grass. Empiricism. Evidence based hypotheses.

It could fit.

I dig up the email and click the link. Page not found! You can’t make this up!

Hold on, hold on, hold on. Before you go off half-cocked and start inventing conspiracy theories about the deep state in concert with the leftist elite and the liberal media suppressing the truth listen to me this actually makes sense.

See if time is running backward in that alternate universe, it’s now earlier over there because it’s later over here. So the Antarctic balloon hasn’t intercepted the particulate wind yet in that other universe. There can’t be an article now about something that hasn’t happened yet. So the fact that the page is not found is actually evidence that it’s true.

So all this time, there’s been this other universe where time runs backward and particles are repulsed by gravity.

I wonder what all other things happen over there? Do the politicians tell the truth? What about money? Do the rich give to the poor or what? Or do they just come together and share all things in common and the money is kind of repulsed. Dollar bills carried upward on an invisible wind, spiraling into outer space, coins turning end-over-end, flashing in the sun.

This week I heard about the publication of a $40 book with the title ‘Another Life is Possible’. Also I heard about some families and singles who were planning to move into a large house in the city and share all their possessions. I wonder what Google makes of all this….