Genetic Engineering Is Bad For All The Wrong Reasons

Why do you think genetic engineering is a bad idea?  Is it because it's unnatural?  Don't be foolish, nothing could be more natural.  Or, perhaps nothing can be unnatural, unless it's supernatural.  Think of all the good it could do.  I'm talking about human engineering here.  You don't need me to tell you the benefits of genetically modified agriculture.  No, it's hitting up the lower 46 that is both scary and exciting in ways we can't imagine, and probably never will.  That is because the problem with human genetic engineering is that we lack imagination.

Engineering works great when you have a measurable goal in mind.  Engineered products have a function.  So far this has been true of genetically engineered plants and animals.  We've been doing it for millennia with selective breeding and now we're doing it with test tubes.  The objectives, however, are basically the same.  Increase yield, improve taste, and promote tolerance to pests.  I'm not really sure where advancements in nutrition fall in there.  Perhaps the agricultural industry puts more effort into nutritional content then I surmise, but my guess is that they don't.  They wouldn't, considering their customer base is so prone to ignorance.  Who cares about nutrition?  You and I do, but at the risk of sounding a little too self righteous, most people don't.  Even those who are trying to eat healthy don't.  Especially those who are trying to eat health don't.  If they did, they wouldn't be eating organic, free range corn from Portland.  Like the Food Babe tells them to, they make sure they can pronounce all of the ingredients before consuming it, because everyone knows ease of elocution is a reliable indicator of content.  You can keep your dihydrogen monoxide to yourself, Monsanto!  Knowing nothing about the basic facts of chemistry, biology or common sense, they settle for theater.  Or, maybe "settle" isn't the right word.  Theater is what they wanted all along.

This is a bit of an overstatement, but this is also the Internet and Google immediately deletes anything that isn't screaming biased generalizations at you.  Genetically modified foods are often more nutritious.  However, I guarantee you that, outside of animal feed, the bulk of the research in food production is not focused on nutrition.  Research costs money and the money comes from the people who vote with their feet.  Those people want bread and circuses, or just circuses really.  This is troubling because nutritional value is a quantifiable metric.  We can unambiguously measure how well we're doing, and yet we don't do it.  What happens when the standard for success is more subjective?

That is the frightening future of human genetic engineering.  I'm sure that we have some pretty laudable goals at the moment.  What if we could eliminate genetic influences on heart disease or cancer?  That sounds good.  Let's do that.  Some day, however, human GMO might become a commodity.  This could be a particular issue in the United States, which has a growing libertarian appetite for everything but abortion, gay marriage and flag burning.  Don't do those things please, but for everything else live free or die.  Preferably, live free or kill some else while standing your ground.  Once all the diseases have been cured, what's next on the shopping list?  Maybe your kids could be a little taller or better at sports.  That's important.  Some opponents of genetic engineering argue that it will ruin professional sports or the Olympics because it makes competition a moot point.  That's a stupid argument because competition is already a moot point and because sports are fun but also a distraction from the looming threat that's really going to east your lunch.

At least with sports, there is a definable goal.  Height, strength and aerobic capacity are all unambiguous, objective measures of "good" in that way the crop yields are.  Having conquered these things, we would naturally start asking if we could be prettier or smarter too.  That may seem like a long way off, but again the research money comes from those who vote with their feet.  How many of you would like to have this ability right now?  Put your hands down, you're making me nervous.  There is no objective definition of beauty.  It is fine for you as an individual to find something beautiful (not that you care about what I think is fine).  It's not superficial for me to stand in awe at the beauty of my children or the truly stunning woman that I love.

However, when scaled up to a social level it starts to become problematic.  It's bad enough that we have to measure ourselves against the model in the Victoria's Secret window, but what happens when some people have the money to actually force their children to look that way?  Do you know how certain baby names become so popular that you have a 50/50 chance of guessing the name of stranger's kid based on age and gender alone?  Now imagine a future where every preschooler at Bright Horizons actually looks like Giselle or her 2035 equivalent.  Don't be surprised by a future where celebrities sell their looks in tubes, like celebrity branded perfumes, and the bone structure of more popular VIPs sell for more.  I imagine this will also help them escape the paparazzi.  Now I know how old you are and how rich your parents are based on the celebrity you perfectly resemble.

Ah, you thought you were libertarian.  You thought you were taking matters into your own hands and taking charge,  but even if you wanted to you can't, because society's momentary ranking of beauty is a major determinant of success and you wouldn't want to sacrifice your progeny's chances at fortune on the pyre of individuality, would you?  Of course you wouldn't, because you're not a jerk and you'll join the rest of us inside the iron cage.  Technology doesn't always free us, even when it appears to do so.  Actually, you should be particularly suspicious when billions of dollars of research has been poured into a product that claims to give you more self determination.  We don't have a choice, even when the pills are handed to us, because our choices have been rigged.  Sometimes you only have two choices, the red pill or the blue pill, and neither is very appealing.  Other times you can have any color you want, so long as it is black.

That's pretty bad, but it ain't the worst.  Living in a world like that is scary enough, but don't forget that we want to be smarter too.  Genetically engineering intelligence will be like teaching to the test, only on a horrific scale.  You might argue that measures of smarts are more objective than measures of beauty.  Aptitudes tests are flawed, but at least they measure something.  At their best, however, these tests can only capture a fraction of human mental capability.  At their worst, no one cares.  Remember all those people who say they care about nutrition, but couldn't care less?  No one wants their kids to be smarter.  They want their kids to win awards and get into Ivy League schools and hedge GMO crop derivatives in corner window offices somewhere.

Intelligence, let alone creativity, can't be fully measured, but that's okay because all we wanted was a proxy for these things.  All we want is for society to agree that we are smart.  Society will respond no differently than it has before, by creating a standard that we can measure ourselves by.  Even if advances in psychology allow us to measure intelligence and creativity more objectively, it doesn't matter because we don't care.  We make it a point not to care.  Even if we start to care, it doesn't amount to much because so much is riding on the flimsy paste board standard we've created that everyone will do their best to prop it up and protect their position in the pecking order.  This is the world we live in right at this moment.  Human genetic engineering will only calcify it.  Technology has always been a way to exponentially extend power.  The steam engine allowed us to pull weights that no muscle could pull.  There's nothing wrong with that, so long as we're pulling something useful.  What I fear is that the power of genetic engineering will arrange stones into a bulwark around a certain standard of success, fortify the positions of those who sit within in it and halting our creative progress as a species.

The last straw will be when we face some threat that we cannot defeat because we have lost all flexibility and ingenuity.  When all the smartest people were engineered to get perfect scores on the SATs, what happens when they need to solve a problem that the SATs never predicted?

We've reached the time where I contradict myself.  I wouldn't want you to start trusting me, not that you ever did.  Let's keep it that way.  This isn't a post about genetic engineering.  I mean, the idea that celebrities could sell their faces is absurd, isn't it?  (Forget for a moment that sperm banks charge top dollar for material from good looking Harvard grads).  Maybe this future is not technologically feasible.  That is most unfortunate, because perhaps the feasibility of such horrors would expose the underlying pathology.  Genetic engineering would not create the world I have described, it would only make visible the world we have already created.

Your Personal Brand Is Killing You

I'm an inconsistent producer of content.  Since no one reads what I write, it hardly matters.  However, I think that when writing a blog you're supposed to spool out your thoughts little by little so people keep coming back.  Good thing that no one comes to visit me in the first place, because I write at my own pace.  Some days will see a few blog posts and some weeks will see none.  Rest assured that if my blog experiences a season of silence that I am okay.  I live in the real world, after all.  Well, it's realish.  

This is my second post of the day.  It's about personal branding and why it consumes personal and physical resources without producing value for anyone.  Keep in mind that this opinion is unfounded and that I am stupid.

There’s a lot of fuss among knowledge workers about personal branding.  Note that I called it fuss, not hype.  There’s no hype – personal branding is an essential tool in the white collar worker’s chest and it’s here to stay.  I’m of two minds about personal branding.  On the one hand, the tools available to us now are the most efficient means for professional development society has ever invented – assuming that you are a knowledge worker.  It helps us to solve the problem of increased specialization, where it is not as easy as describing your career as “20 years in carpet installation.”  Companies often want specific skills, and personal branding allows individuals to advertise those skills.  Another feature of knowledge workers is that we often move around among different jobs or different assignments within the same job.  A comprehensive personal brand allows us to synthesize these diverse experiences into a single identity that goes beyond the stock job descriptions previously available to us.

That’s too bad, because personal branding is bad for our health.  What’s more interesting is that it’s yet another sign of America’s economic self abuse.  As sure as the Internet distracts some while Rome burns, personal branding deludes the Internet’s savvier users into believing that they’re doing something about the fire.  All those empty buckets have got to be useful for something.

Do you know what I mean when I say “personal branding”?  It’s one of those things that’s been around forever but looks fresh with a new name.  For example, there’s probably someone in your family appointed (by himself or others) to give everyone advice on cars.  This guy is known as the “car guy”.  If he creates a Twitter feed on the subject of car buying and car repair, then he has created a personal brand.  This is typical for celebrities, such as The Car Guys themselves.  The Internet now offers all of us the chance to turn our expertise in personal brands.  It is more than a hobby, however.  Career advisers tell us that we better increase our competitive edge by starting blogs, writing tweets, participating in discussion boards, writing articles for webzines and paper-zines and doing whatever else we can to give hiring managers the impression that we are respected authorities in our fields.  Writing useless drivel (such as this blog) about your 5-point business strategies isn’t just for bored CEO’s anymore.  You want to go into that job interview with more than references, you need followers.

Max Weber introduced the concept of “The Iron Cage”. Lest I seem too melodramatic, I see this as a frying pan and fire situation.  Pre-industrial life was far from idyllic.  After all, would you rather be a beaureucratic cog with leisure and a health plan or share cropper with hookworms?  To paraphrase Walter Kaufmann, one of the side effects of universal education is that it gives average people enough ambition to lament their uncreative lives, though surely those lives would’ve been even less creative in earlier eras.  It’s just that they would’ve lacked the awareness of something better back then.  Surely you’ve read Flowers for Algenon?  But shouldn’t technology give us more than it takes?  And what happens when the Iron Cage leads us down the path of ruin rather than prosperity? 

Fictional Engineering 2: Story Foundations and Sub-Stories

This is part 2 of my musings on story construction. You can see part one, if you are special and very, very, brave, here.

A Simple Story Foundation

One way to start a story is with three primary entities, called the triangle.  One familiar example is the love triangle, but the concept is broader than that.  And note that I said entities, not characters.  One or more of the three may be a situation.  The ideal is that the story starts with a potential conflict between two characters and a character and an entity.  If it is two characters, it is essential that they each have at least one internal conflict that is related to their external conflict.  Even better, their internal conflicts may be opposed in some way that neither understands.  For example, two characters may be lovers.  One has an inner conflict of suspicion - “maybe he’s after my money rather than my heart” - while the other has a conflict of self doubt - “maybe I’m not good enough for her”.  The external potential conflict is that their parents do not approve of the relationship.  This scenario may exist in a status quo for some time, until the introduction of third character, who throws a wrench into the works.  For example, the wealthy family hires a private eye to spy on their daughter’s lover without the their daughter’s knowledge.  He befriends the couple and then falls in love with the daughter.  Or the other way around.  In either case, the PI plays on the inner conflicts to bring the external conflict to a head.  Either tragedy of comedy may ensue, depending on the writer’s intent.

If this sounds vaguely like the plot of a Hollywood movie, that’s because it is like the plot of many movies.  It’s also a little like the plot of Othello (a little).  It’s reliable.  And though it’s formulaic, it’s versatile.

One thing I like about this example is that is demonstrates that conflict need not indicate aggression or opposition.  The two primary characters are actually in love.  But if there’s no conflict, there’s no story.  The story is not that they’re in love.  The story is that there are unresolved issues that will test that love.  The story begins with the cinder that lights that powder keg.  

So the triangle begins with two entities, a potential conflict and a potential resolution.  If any of the entities are characters, then they each have at least one inner conflict relating to their external potential conflict.  If the entities are in opposition, then we leave it this way.  If they are not in opposition, then we must add a unifier.  This is something that brings them together.   This is not the same as the potential resolution.  A resolution to a potential conflict is only strong enough to keep the conflict from boiling over, it is not strong enough to bring them together.  There must be something else that stands alone without other mitigating factors.

In my example, the unifier may at first seem obvious: they are in love.  But stating this is no better than stating the theme without involving the specific circumstances of specific characters.  Why are they in love?   There may be many reasons, but the story must story with at least one clear and powerful reason.  For example, they may have both been in imprisoned in a foreign country because they volunteered with a humanitarian mission opposed by the local government.  They helped each other escape.  Along the way, we may find other things they share in common, but this is a good start.  If we twist it further, we can make this unifier relate to the central conflicts: the woman’s family believes her humanitarian stint was just a phase and wants her to “grow up” and prepare to take over the family business.  The man wants is worried that his lover was never really committed to the cause anyway.  Throw in the third wheel and the story gets in motion.   

Scenes and Sub-Stories

Stories are not made of scenes.  Stories are made of sub-stories that may span several scenes and overlap.  A scene still has a structure, but that structure serves the advancement of the sub-stories.  Note that sub-stories are not necessarily sub-plots.  They may be, but not always.  A story is defined by the conflict stated in the premise and the ultimate resolution of that conflict.  A sub-story is about one or more of the character conflicts and their resolutions.  The difference between this and what most think of as a subplot is that a subplot is concerned with characters and events that are secondary to the core of the story, while substories are chunks of action that may make up a main plot or a subplot.

For example, suppose our lovers start out with potential conflict stated above, and the PI comes in and stirs the pot.  He successfully manipulates their inner doubts and suspicions and causes the lovers to split.  This is one sub-story.  It started with a potential conflict and it resulted in a kinetic resolution to that conflict.  But that is not the end of the story.  The audience knows that the split was based on misunderstanding and miscommunication, and they want that to be fixed.  The PI starts a relationship with the woman, but he is hiding the secret to why they are together now.  Meanwhile, the ex-lover decides to give up on love and returns to the country where he was imprisoned.  He has renewed his dedication to the cause, but his pain has also made him a little fatalistic.  

We now have a new sub-story.  It has two potential outer conflicts: (1) the new lovers have founded their relationship on a lie which we all know will come to light at some point and (2) the ex-lover is in a character vs situation conflict where is new work may hurt or kill him.  There are also lots of new inner conflicts: the woman is now even more suspicious, the PI starts feeling guilt over his actions, and the ex-lover wonders whether he’s really dedicated to the cause or has just developed a death wish.  Note that the situation is more dire than the potential conflict which began the story.  As a rule, the consequences of the potential conflicts which began the story have got to be much worse then they at first appeared.

The relationship between this and the previous sub-story is not the same as the relationship between a main and subplot.  These substories are sequential and advance the main plot.  A subplot occurs in parallel with the main plot and would involve something like the woman having to deal with her suspicions that her mother had something to do with her father’s early death.  A subplot starts out with no relationship to the main plot, although it usually has to be brought in at some point or why else is it there?  

There are some exceptions, such as small, quickly resolved subplots that help to illustrate character traits or subplots that help to balance the dramatic weight of the main plot.  A typical example of the latter is when you give minor characters a happy ending to balance the unhappy ending of the primary characters.  If you want to write a tragedy, then maybe the ex-lover dies in that dangerous country and the woman never finds love again.  However, you may want to balance this by letting the woman’s quirky sister find true love.  Or something equally cloying.  Television shows do this a lot to maintain sexual tension.  A classic TV plot is to create main characters that live in a perpetual “will they/won’t they” state (Booth and Bones).  Even if that tension ultimately finds resolution, it can wear on viewers after a few seasons.  Writers often through the audience a bone in the form of minor characters that do fall in love (Angie and Hodgins).  

Start writing a story by picking a substory.  It doesn’t have to be one implied by the premise or one of the primary character conflicts.  It’s even likely that it can’t be one of those, because their introduction probably depends on some other more minor substory.  So we start with one that has no dependencies.  We write that substory from front to back and then pick another, which may or may not be dependent on the first.  The rest follows by induction.  Entire novels can be written this way.  

The key to finishing an entire substory before continuing with another is that they are short.  Ideally, a story of any length is made up of substories of roughly uniform length.  If we have an idea for a substory that seems to long or complex to finish in one go, then it may be that we have concatenated several substories into one and we need to break it up.  The key to do that is to keep it concrete.  That is, try to stick as much as possible to describing conflicts, resolutions and unifiers in terms of physical actions that specific characters take.  The more we think in these terms, the easier it is to decompose bigger pieces into smaller chunks.

If we write in terms of sub-stories, then we always have something that resembles a complete and functional story.  Someone could always pick it up and read it and have some sense of where it is going.  This might be analogous to watching a few episodes of series with a story arch that spans a season.  They leave a sense that there is much more going on beyond those few episodes, but they also have a feeling of internal completeness.  There are unanswered questions, but there aren’t lots of hanging wires and dead drops where someone forgot to put the stairs.  A find that this helps with motivation and brainstorming, especially with a large story.  Substories help you to keep momentum and maintain orientation within the larger whole.  They also provide more agility if you decide to shift course midstream.

Substories are about implementation, not planning or design.  We tend to categorize authors as either discovery writers or outliners.  This intent behind this classification is meaningful, but it presents a false dichotomy.  Discovery writers are supposed to fly by the seat of their pants, jotting down scenes and seeing where their characters take them.  Outliners are suppose to plan everything from the top down so that by the time they start to write the actual scenes, they know exactly what’s going to happen in each.  However, every successful writer must employ both brainstorming and organization.  Without brainstorming, there is no creative spark.  Even so-called outliners must pass through a phase where they let their thoughts roam free.  And without organization, there is no sense.  Even so-called discovery writers must reach a time when they stick their hands in that pile of pages and start reordering and editing.  The difference between these two types of writers, and everyone in between, is which activity happens when in the process.  

I think that the substory approach is amenable to both ends of the spectrum.  One could outline in terms of substories.  Once the outline for each substory is complete, then the scene writing can take place.  On the other hand, one could just outline the characters and then start writing scenes, discovering new characters and conflicts along the way.  This latter type of person may benefit from the use of a backlog.  You may find in the course of writing a substory that we have ideas for new substories.  Following the ideal of finishing a substory before starting another, this author can add an outline of the new substory to a backlog.  The nice thing about a backlog is that if you grow it as you go along, you can always dip into it to find more work.  And you can beat the writing blue by dipping into it in any order.  Just pick another substory and go.

Keep in mind that through all of this scenes are just containers for substories.  They are not the structure for the story.  And a scene may contain several substories.

You Want Police Body Cameras And So Does The NSA

Last week brought us the indictment of six police officers for the death of Freddie Gray in Baltimore, a city in which I once lived.  The charges come after a series of mixed information from records and eyewitness accounts that have alternately supported and undermined the official story.  Though the trial will become the formal medium for the weight of evidence, it seems that we have another high profile case of police misconduct to judge in the court of public opinion.  Like some other incidents before it, the Freddie Gray case raises the question of whether surveillance may prevent some of the turmoil we've seen this month.  At first it seems like an obvious choice. However, technology serves those who control it.  The body cams and similar forms of monitoring are under the control of law enforcement and the citizenry.

Of course, there is no way it really could be under the control of anyone else.  The cameras not only record the actions of police, but those of the people they engage.  The privacy of the people involved needs to be protected.  You're not going to see all police activity posted on You Tube for all to view like an episode of Cops.  Fox gets release forms from the vast majority of the people it tapes and blurs out the people who didn't sign the paperwork.  This isn't going to be the standard operating procedure for police departments when it comes to their own body cams.  It's pretty sensible that most of the footage will not be released for public consumption.

Who will get to see it, then?  When there is evidence of misconduct, there would be some process for attorneys to access the relevant data.  This evidence has to be separate from the camera footage an sufficient to warrant requesting and obtaining this access.  The cameras would serve to support a case of misconduct, not detect it.  Then, once an attorney obtains the footage, one wonders what would govern how much they get.  It has to be enough to investigate the case, but not so much it provides them coverage of things they shouldn't be seeing.  How easy would it be to leave out those last few minutes that may change the context of the situation?  The only people who would know the total content of the records would be those who create and control that content.

Perhaps more concerning is the potential for public surveillance.  While the cameras watch the activity of the police, they are also watching the activity of every in proximity to the police.  The Snowden case demonstrated that intelligence agencies had created sophisticated programs to analyze the providers of various Internet services.  These agencies made the argument that because companies like Google were providing data to paying advertisers on individuals' web browsing habits, there was no reason the NSA couldn't join in too.  If they give it up in the name of commerce, should the interests of national security be any less entitled?  Police body cams may present a similar opportunity.  Now we're not even talking about data in the hands of private companies.  We're talking about data already on the servers of law enforcement.

Once we could argue that it's too much information to be useful in its aggregate form, but this is no longer the case.  Spy agencies honed their skills searching for terrorist activities in phone conversations and Internet activity.  The software and hardware necessary to search for incriminating evidence has vastly improved over the past decade.  Police cameras present a huge new frontier for looking into the lives of individuals.  We're not talking about public surveillance sources like the security cameras at shopping malls.  For example, every time and officer responds to a domestic dispute, the camera captures the interior of a private residence.  It sees what's on the walls, what books are on the shelves, what web page is up on the computer.  None of this is related to the original reason the police responded.  Indeed, the neighbors may have called the police because they mistook a movie you were watching for a violent argument.  There was no danger to anyone.  And yet , a snapshot of your private life is now stored somewhere.  Could it be construed to indicate motives that aren't there?

Fictional Engineering Part 1: Premise and Character

This is part one of a multi-part series I'm calling fictional engineering.  I'm an engineer by trade and a science fiction writer by delusion, so it made sense to me to characterize narrative composition as an engineering design process.  It isn't always that way, of course.  I tend to lose discipline with this technique a lot and that's okay.  However, I have found a few of these ideas helpful.  You'll probably find that they aren't exceptionally groundbreaking.  What I've done is synthesize some concepts I've encountered over the years from other writers.  In way it's a manifesto: out of all the ways I've seen fiction constructed, these are the ways that work for me.

Introduction

Every story is centered around conflict.  A single sentence summarizes the central conflict.  This sentence invokes at least one character and the situation the story puts them in.  Beyond that, every character, scene and theme can be defined in terms of conflict at some level.  Conflict is the energy that makes the story go.

Conflicts can come in three primary varieties: between a character and him/her/itself, between two characters and between a character and his/her/its situation.  These conflicts are analogous to the cliche (stated in masculine terms of course): man vs himself, man vs man and man vs the world.  

The “world” represents anything that is impersonal, be it an animal, a bureaucracy or a machine.  This is why I use the term “situation” instead, because the defining characteristic of this type of conflict is that one half of it is an object, not a subject, in the relationship.  A situation is anything that cannot reciprocate the character’s feelings of conflict.  If an animal, bureaucracy or machine obtains enough autonomy and personality in the story to reciprocate, then it becomes a character and should be classified in a character vs character conflict.  On the other hand, a person may be handled as a situation if he or she doesn’t have sufficient personality or autonomy to warrant full character status (e.g. the anonymous store clerk who is “just doing his job” and is more the face of a bureaucracy than a character with individual motivations).  Clearly real people can’t be categorized this way, but a story may have dozens of people like this.    

The difference between a character vs character and character vs himself type of conflict is less straightforward.  Can’t the latter be reduced to a special case of the former, in which both ends of the conflict are the same person?  In many cases this may be true, providing us with two simple types of conflict: character vs personal entity and character vs impersonal entity.  However, there is often at least one important difference.  A character cannot typically change his orientation to himself over the course of a story.  Conflict may bring characters together or split them apart, but a person must always live with himself.  This changes the way conflicts may be resolved, or not.  People usually find a resolution to their conflicts with other people, whether it is coming to a common understanding, finding an outlet that is external to the relationship, or ending the relationship.  The last option is a last resort.  If nothing else, one can resolve tension by severing the rope all together.  Outside of suicide, this option is closed to inner conflict.  That crucial difference (and there may be others) can be put to good use.  More on this later.

Premise

As stated above, a story starts with a premise.  This is a single sentence stating the central conflict.  The premise may be thematic or non-thematic.  A non-thematic premise has no “point”.  This is the sort of thing we might associate with escapist entertainment.  For example, “James Bond must stop a terrorist attack”.  A thematic premise states a conflict which is indicative of one or more abstract themes.  For example, “Hamlet plots to kill his uncle, whom he suspects of murdering his father to seize the throne.”  This premise is central to the story’s themes of revenge, treachery and corruption.  Clearly, the theme is not always obvious from the premise.  Indeed, it may be possible to swap my categorization of these two premises.  We may find that James Bond (however unlikely) has conflicted feelings about his job and starts to wonder what separates him from a terrorist, making the premise indicative of themes on just versus unjust causes.  On the other hand, maybe we could write Hamlet as an Elizabethan version of “Kill Bill”, in which Hamlet spends all of his time knocking off all of Claudius’ associates before slaying the man himself and riding off into the sunset.  We get a lot of blood and action scenes, much like the original Hamlet, but without the introspective monologues.

So what’s the difference?  This difference is in your mind.  You obviously know whether you want your story to be about some philosophical theme or not.  You don’t need to spell this out to yourself.  However, when we go that route we can find ourselves struggling to make the theme concrete.  A theme may be stated as a conflict: “is it nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune or to take up arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing end them?” Stating the theme in terms of conflict is a good start, but it doesn’t make a premise.  A story has characters, and as the impetus for story, so should the premise.  Thinking in these terms forces a writer to restate the theme in terms of a specific personal story that illustrates that theme.  This is probably obvious, but it is important throughout the writing process to always be looking for the concrete.  If an abstract theme cannot play a role in a character’s concrete problems and pursuits, then why is it worth writing about?  Writing the thematic premise is the first step to bridging the gap between thought and reality.

Character

Every major character must have at least one internal and one external conflict.  There are exceptions, such as James Bond, who is usually portrayed as a sort of stone faced superhero with no history and no inner life, but even the most escapist stories typically have characters with internal conflicts.  And these conflicts need not be deep.  One of the easiest ways to make a character sympathetic is to create a space for contradiction.  For example, what if the Queen of England happened to be an excellent poker player?  What if this reserved grandmother sometimes took on a secret identity so that she could collect from hardened cockney gamblers?  Such a character is instantly likable and that humorous affability is based on inner conflict.  It’s not of the soul searching Hamlet kind, but it is conflict nonetheless and may result in both comedy and suspense.

Whether they be light or heavy, conflicts may be categorized as potential and kinetic.  A potential conflict is what we start a scene with and a kinetic conflict is the action that plays out the consequence of that potential during the course of the scene.  For example, two characters may start a scene with a personal history, such as divorce.  The potential conflict is that character A does not trust character B to avoid interfering with A’s relationship with their child.  That is a character vs character potential conflict.  On B’s side, the potential conflict is a desire to win A’s trust along with a desire for personal advancement.  That is an internal potential conflict.  The kinetic conflict occurs during the action of the scene, which in this case is a fight during which A says something that convinces B that preserving trust is less important than advancing career.  So B takes a job offer in another city and takes the child along - thus realizing A’s fears.

Every conflict has a resolution.  This is true even of potential conflicts.   Something has prevented a potential conflict from becoming kinetic up until the scene where the tension breaks.  In the above example, perhaps B has slowly been taking steps to earn A’s trust.  A is still suspicious, but is willing to be patient.  The kinetic conflict must overwhelm the potential resolution and result in a kinetic resolution.  The difference between a potential and kinetic resolution is that the potential resolution is a counter force against tension that maintains the status quo, while a kinetic resolution changes the game.  The potential conflict no longer exists once this resolution has come to a fore.  Sometimes, it ends there, because that is what the whole story was about.  Sometimes, it spawns new internal and external potential conflicts in its wake.

A Simple Story Foundation

In my next post, I'll put these things in motion and discuss story foundations.

The Robots Will Kill Us All, But Only If They Obey Us

They say no one makes anything in America anymore and this has been the case for a generation or two. While most people recognize that as an exaggeration, it is hard not to look at the decline of former industrial powerhouses like Detroit and Baltimore and not feel as though manufacturing has fled the country. It doesn't help that governors crow over the opening of factories employing a few hundred workers and promote these developments as great successes in their plan to bring "good middle class factory jobs back to American soil." The truth is more complex. It always is. Moreover, since my thoughts wander toward the future of our society, I speculate that the truth hints at what may be by turns dismal, Utopian and ultimately catastrophic. I should have something to say for myself, and I do.

Common knowledge tells us that developing nations have weakened US industrial might by employing cheap labor. American factories paying American wages and benefits cannot compete with the labor of the millions who earn cents on the hour and receive few if any benefits. This assessment is largely accurate, but it describes an unstable dynamic. Labor costs in the West are so high because we are a victim of our own success. Well I suppose victim isn't the right word here. With rising economic development comes a better standard of living. Of course, great inequality remains, especially in the US, but it is hard to argue that human development isn't higher here than it is in much of the developing world. That world, however, will get its chance. As the economic prospects of poorer nations improve, their labor costs will likewise increase. Perhaps there's nothing wrong with this. Everyone gets a little richer, the labor cost differential among nations decreases, and competition derives solely from innovation. There you go. You've reached the first Utopian plateau.

Developed nations, however, are not willing to sit back for the next century and hope that this scenario unfolds. They are fighting back with their own reductions in labor cost. Though China passed the US in total industrial output in 2010, the US still maintains a significant lead in per-capita productivity (though it is second to Japan in this regard). While the US is paying its factory workers more, it is also getting more product from fewer people. Are Americans working harder? No, you know what I'm talking about. It's not the people that are working harder, it's the machines. Automation is a great strategy. You as a nation have a choice. You can compete with cheap labor, which if you're successful will only result in that labor becoming more expensive. Or you can compete with ever more sophisticated machines, which will only get less expensive. The guy with the first plan doesn't really stand a chance against the gut with the second one. If developed nations, and the US in particular, capitalize on their lead in automated production and distribution, it could put them back at the head of the pack.

That seems great, except for all the people in the unemployment lines. Who really wins in this scenario? In the short term, it's the people who own a stake in manufacturing profits more than it is everyday citizens. Those folks are off in search of jobs at Bertucci's. For example, consider this story (anecdotal though it is):

Louisville factory: 100 printers, 3 employees

Or this one:

Robots Threaten These 8 Jobs

 Now wait a minute. What year is this? 1930? Am I sounding like one of those doomsayers who predicted the fall of civilization when industrialization hit the heartland, replacing all those farmhands with the giant bug-like tractors from the Grapes of Wrath? One might argue, this is just another stage in economic progress. Most of the US population worked on farms in 1900. Only a few percent do now. We were fine because we created new industries. Namely, we created the new industries that are following the path of farming in the twentieth century and firing all of their workers. What's the next stage? They say it's the knowledge economy. There is, however, a significant difference between the knowledge economy that is replacing the industrial one and the industrial economy that replaced the agricultural one. Most people who participated in the farming economy could also participate in the industrial one. That was true in the US a century ago and it is true in China now, where millions have migrated from the farmlands looking for work in the country's manufacturing centers. Not everyone can participate in the knowledge economy, however. The problem is only exacerbated by the lack of political will to develop the human resources we already have.

Is the solution to go Amish and decide that we should halt automation at a certain point? Perhaps if the major industrial powers would just get together and agree on a technological target that allows full employment? Ah, global socialism... However, there is this other problem with development. It usually leads to lower birthrates and longer lifespans. Even if it were possible for everyone to agree on a way of keeping the world employed at a certain level, it's natural to assume that a part of the deal would be similar standards of living across that economic bloc. Many developed countries are struggling with stagnant or declining populations, along with aging demographics. Even in the US, which has a higher birthrate than many of its Western piers, population growth is really driven by immigration. That trend is especially pronounced at the younger end of the population. This would imply that perhaps automation is a good thing in the long run. Machines can replace the young workers we aren't making anymore and reduce living costs for older people who can't work as hard as they used to. Maybe machines can even take care of us in our golden years. Maybe, just maybe, we can drive production costs down to zero. In that scenario, where every lick of farmed or manufactured product comes from the hands of our robot friends, we don't have to worry about jobs. Everything costs nothing. Wouldn't that be great?

Well, in the short term it would be a painful transition for many generations. In the long term it would probably destroy us all. Assuming such a thing were even possible, the transition to a zero cost, fully automated economy would take longer and produce far more upheaval than the more incremental transitions we've seen so far. Social unrest would be inevitable, putting the whole experiment in jeopardy. But suppose that we survived this stage, as we probably would? Is there a light at the end of the tunnel? For a little while, perhaps. We would be sitting pretty until we reaped the consequences of everything costing nothing. For when everything costs nothing, what would stop us from having everything? That is the moral of this rather long winded story. Even now, where production costs are far from zero, the decrease in costs has lead to a natural increase in demand. If this trend should continue, it may well lead to environmental ruin before we ever get to the time when everything is free. Hiding behind the story of competing economies and hand wringing over employment figures is the story of consumption. To me, that's a pretty scary story. It would be easy to say that we should consume less. Honestly, we probably should. I tend to believe that once they've achieved a certain level of comfort, most people would be happier without the burden of more stuff. Apologies for the blanket generalization, but deal with it because chances are I'm right on this one. However, it is hard to separate that "certain level of comfort" from the overall economy. Good food, good healthcare and good schools exist in the same world as high end phones and luxury cars. It may not be possible to have one without the other. Consumption seems to be the only model we have to support any kind of standard of living above that afforded by subsistence farming or hunter gathering. I'm not advocating a return to that way of life by any means.

That is where this ends, with no solution. I leave that as an exercise for the reader.

Raising The Minimum Wage Won't Cause Inflation, But You Don't Know That Because This Sentence Is Already Too Long For You To Handle

Lately there has been discussion about raising the national minumum wage in the US.  One of the more common arguments against it is that this will cause inflation and leave us back at square one.  That is, everyone will get more money and prices will go up.  On the surface this makes a little bit of sense.  Maybe.  However, logic doesn't really favor this conclusion.

Inflation is a complex phenomenon affected by many factors, including wage increases.  Say everyone got a 10% raise, whether by government mandate or printing money or some other cause.  In this case, it is reasonable to assume that currency value when measured as purchasing power would re-normalize to neutralize the wage increase.  That is, everything now costs 10% more so no one wins.  However, we're not talking about giving everyone a raise, we're talking about giving the segment of the population at the lowest income bracket a raise.  This accounts for less than 5% of the US population.

While it is true that the raise would have cascading effects beyond the lowest earners, those effects would be muted.  What I mean is that if an employer raises the wages of its lowest earning employees, it would probably also raise the wages of those in brackets just above those employees.  However, the impact of this effect would dissipate as you get further up the income chain and probably wouldn't be a linear curve (if for example you were to plot percent wage increase against original wage.  Maybe it would be logarithmic?  I don't know, I'm just guessing).  My point is that a 10% wage increase to the shelf stocker earning $7.25 / hr wouldn't cause a 10% wage increase to the accountant earning $30 / hr or the CEO earning a billion dollars an hour or whatever.

I think this at least partially addresses the other end of the argument, which is that in addition to increasing wages, we'd be increasing costs.  That is, wouldn't the cost of a hamburger go up 10% if everyone at the McDonald's now earns 10% more?  Wouldn't the company pass along the increased labor costs to its employees?  Maybe, but maybe not and even if they did it wouldn't be anywhere near 10%.  There are a couple of reasons why.  The first is that, as mentioned before, the increase in minimum wage to the lowest earning 5% of the population would not boost the wages of the remaining 95%, meaning that it is not as though everyone else has more money with which to purchase these more expensive products.

Producers would be warry of passing along all of their increased labor costs to consumers.  Another, perhaps more important, fact is that labor is only one part of a company's costs.  There is not a direct, 1-1 relationship between the labor cost of people earning minimum wage and the cost of the products they produce.  Various material and overhead costs (not to mention the wages of people earning above the minimum wage) tend to dwarf the costs of these workers.  The statistics bear this out.  Historically, increases in minimum wage have been linked to far smaller increases in the costs of goods.  Some increase does inevitably happen, but the ratio when compared to the percentage increase in minimum wage is more like 10-1 or higher. (Or 1-10; I forget which thing I'm putting in the denominator here).

I think the final, and perhaps most damning issue with the linkage between minimum wage and inflation is that the minimum wage actually lags inflation.  Because federal and state minimum wages can only be increased by legislative action, such increases tend to lag actual inflation by many years.  Unfortunately, increasing the minimum wage doesn't actually do much to improve the situation of the poorest class of people, it only keeps them from falling further behind then they already have.  Each year that inflation marches on (due to the many other factors besides minimum wage that cause it), people at the lowest income bracket get a salary cut.  If the world is racing on, you fall behind just by standing still.  Thus increasing their wages is more analagous to releasing back pay than it is to an actual rate hike.  Generally, the rest of the population has been seeing their salaries increase at a faster rate (which may not be very fast at all, but still faster than those at the bottom) and bringing the poorest 5% up to par won't hurt the rest of us.