geniquity, n. the degree to which an individual's life prospects seem fated by their genetic material; genetic justice.
From the Latin genus meaning kind or rank, and aequus, meaning level or even.
The notion of geniquity appears to have arisen simultaneously in a number of heavily class-based societies throughout Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries. With the growing interest in science and the rise of evolutionary theory occurring at that time, a modern-minded, educated portion of the populace clamoured to apply these concepts within the world as they saw it.
Geniquity was one such application. The term was first recorded in written English in 1771 by Harold Batten-Batten, a wealthy estate owner, would-be intellectual and London dilettante. Batten-Batten proposed that the reason why he had enjoyed a charmed life while others suffered the apparent vaguaries of fate was geniquity.
"I was," he wrote in a paper explaining his theory, which was presented to the London Scientific Club in November of that year, "born to indulge, to enjoy, to succeed. My genetic material has pre-destined me to goodness."
Despite an outcry from the community's scientific quarter -- most of whose members scorned the London Scientific Club as a coterie of idle rich men who wished they'd achieved something with their lives -- the concept of geniquity took hold within the less intellectually rigorous upper eschelons of society.
It was called on as an explanation for all manner of injustices, many of them wholly malevolent, for the next hundred and fifty years. The concept finally lost support in the end days of the Second World War, and after a series of entirely fruitless experiments had been conducted across the European continent, starting in the 1850s and ending around 1893, in an effort to prove the concept.
Says the great Manfred Sayer, social historian, in his final opus In Our Nature: Europeans and the Dawn of Science (Faber, 1913):
"We must conclude that the popularity of the idea was due in large part to the guilt of an upper class whose then-living members had done little at all to achieve or maintain either their own prospects, or those of the society in which they lived.
"Geniquity made a convenient, if erroneous, explanation for the circumstances of an entire segment of society, and one that absolved its constituents of any personal responsibility to act or even think differently about the social order. It makes a fascinating study for those interested in what we call "class.""
Monday, February 28, 2011
Thursday, February 24, 2011
WordPress why-can't-Is
WordPress, why can't I:
- search for authors in the admin section
- search for keywords in post content in the admin section
- search for practically anything with any success in the admin section
- sort the post view by clicking on column headers
- go from the Edit Post page back to the Drafts list (or Published list, or whatever) in a single click
- have you remove empty tags autofreakingmatically (empty tags for the love of God!)
- unschedule a post and save it as a draft in the Quick Edit screen
- find commenters by searching for their names in the comment admin view?
Wednesday, February 23, 2011
The Friendly Web
We've had Web 2.0, the Social Web, and the cutesy/gag-worthy intertubes/interwebs for far too long now. What's next? I'd like to hypothesise. Or perhaps I'm just dreaming. But I propose that we, the people who make the Web as well as consuming it, should now set our sights on creating The Friendly Web.
What is The Friendly Web?
It's a place where things work. Where life is easy, even if you've forgotten one of those sixteen-characters-no-spaces-at-least-one-number-and-one-letter-no-caps-ah-crap-it's-considered-"weak"-anyway passwords you need to log into any of the zillion services and sites you use every day.
It's a place where marketinglingo and corporatespeak are never uttered. Where people are treated as they would like to be treated. Where sales pages aren't fifteen angry punches of the Page Down key long, with crucial sentences highlighted in flashing red text. Where sales pages, my friend, do not exist, because people know what they want when they want it, and don't need to have it "sold" to them.
The Friendly Web is an intuitive place where you can get what you want, when you want it, without hassle. It's a place where news services go further than Mashable and Twitter for article topics, and further than first-year university students for copy editors.
On The Friendly Web, no one tries to coerce you to do something you don't want to do. There are no embarrassing popup-lightbox-skip-ad faux pas. In fact, there are no embarrassing faux pas (generic 404 pages, stupid contextual ad targeting, clunky language, etc.) full stop. It's a place where eTax is available for Mac, syncing is seamless, and your username is your freaking name, for Christ's sakes.
Can we do it? Consider if you will the sequential waves of uprising now taking place in North Africa. Here are people who are tired of the tyranny, and want to be heard, to be free. If ordinary people, without rifles, budgets for mercenaries, bombs, or their own secret service can topple tyrannical dictator after tyrannical dictator, then web geeks can certainly push us from the Social Web to The Friendly Web.
Don't you think?
What is The Friendly Web?
It's a place where things work. Where life is easy, even if you've forgotten one of those sixteen-characters-no-spaces-at-least-one-number-and-one-letter-no-caps-ah-crap-it's-considered-"weak"-anyway passwords you need to log into any of the zillion services and sites you use every day.
It's a place where marketinglingo and corporatespeak are never uttered. Where people are treated as they would like to be treated. Where sales pages aren't fifteen angry punches of the Page Down key long, with crucial sentences highlighted in flashing red text. Where sales pages, my friend, do not exist, because people know what they want when they want it, and don't need to have it "sold" to them.
The Friendly Web is an intuitive place where you can get what you want, when you want it, without hassle. It's a place where news services go further than Mashable and Twitter for article topics, and further than first-year university students for copy editors.
On The Friendly Web, no one tries to coerce you to do something you don't want to do. There are no embarrassing popup-lightbox-skip-ad faux pas. In fact, there are no embarrassing faux pas (generic 404 pages, stupid contextual ad targeting, clunky language, etc.) full stop. It's a place where eTax is available for Mac, syncing is seamless, and your username is your freaking name, for Christ's sakes.
Can we do it? Consider if you will the sequential waves of uprising now taking place in North Africa. Here are people who are tired of the tyranny, and want to be heard, to be free. If ordinary people, without rifles, budgets for mercenaries, bombs, or their own secret service can topple tyrannical dictator after tyrannical dictator, then web geeks can certainly push us from the Social Web to The Friendly Web.
Don't you think?
Monday, February 21, 2011
You're invited to my experiment
Hello [name].
I'm making an experiment. Since you're...
...I thought you might be interested in donning one of those white coats on the rack behind the door and joining me.
WTF?
My experiment is an interactive fiction story called Greener Grass.
The story is presented through Twitter.
To:
...you will need to follow these four Twitter accounts, which represent the story's key players:
This way, the story will appear naturally in your Twitter timeline. If you prefer to track the story separately, you can follow the Greener Grass Twitter list.
Wait. Is this like a novel?
No, not really. It's more like an interactive short story in 140-character installments.
How long's this thing gonna take, lady?
The story starts on Friday February 25 and runs for two weeks, finishing on Friday March 11.
Will it overload my Twitter timeline with crap?
That's not the plan.
But what about—
Answers to further questions can be solicited in the comments. I do hope you'll join me.
Alida
I'm making an experiment. Since you're...
- a big reader
- interested in social media
- one smart cookie
...I thought you might be interested in donning one of those white coats on the rack behind the door and joining me.
WTF?
My experiment is an interactive fiction story called Greener Grass.
The story is presented through Twitter.
To:
- watch from afar
- participate, engaging with characters and shaping narrative
- ensure you don't miss anything
...you will need to follow these four Twitter accounts, which represent the story's key players:
This way, the story will appear naturally in your Twitter timeline. If you prefer to track the story separately, you can follow the Greener Grass Twitter list.
Wait. Is this like a novel?
No, not really. It's more like an interactive short story in 140-character installments.
How long's this thing gonna take, lady?
The story starts on Friday February 25 and runs for two weeks, finishing on Friday March 11.
Will it overload my Twitter timeline with crap?
That's not the plan.
But what about—
Answers to further questions can be solicited in the comments. I do hope you'll join me.
Alida
Wednesday, February 16, 2011
To-do
Writing tasks for the February-March liaison...
I feel like Hercules. An excited Hercules with typey titanium fingertips. And startlingly little time.
- two ebooks
- a 10,000-word report
- copy for two serialised digital products
- copy for two websites
I feel like Hercules. An excited Hercules with typey titanium fingertips. And startlingly little time.
Incompatible
Did I mention that I love confusing Google?In all seriousness, though, I can't wait until they start programming real-world question stems into search engines, so that they know, for example, that "wtf is" is a request for a definition or explanation. All this "Define:" bullshit is just that: big and lumpy. The day Google can recognise and answer the question "wtf is", we'll know we've finally achieved the Friendly Web.*
*More on that later.
Saturday, February 12, 2011
Mind-blowing lines #23
Other Voices, Other Rooms, by Truman Capote* is one of those extremely elusive things: a beautiful book. You know I'd never throw around such florid praise without due justification. It's the kind of book that makes you think that if you could invite one person, living or dead, to dinner, it'd be Capote.
Briefly, it's about a boy of thirteen who's sent to live with the father who abandoned him, in the rural Louisiana of the 1940s. It's a story of loneliness and dissolution, and the search for happiness—the search for belonging.
I have two mind-blowing excerpts for you.
It was a terrible, strange-looking hotel. But Little Sunshine stayed on: it was his rightful home, he said, for if he went away, as he had once upon a time, other voices, other rooms, voices lost and clouded, strummed his dreams.
The whole novel seems to be written like this, but it's a delusion. There's a clean simplicity interwoven with this richness that catches readers off guard, plunging cool, hard knives into our hearts when we least expect it.
Overblown? Consider for yourself this example, presented as Joel steps outside on his first breathtakingly hot, deserted, abominably silent southern afternoon, having asked to see his father and received no response, and having seen no other living person in the dilapidated mansion for hours. He goes into the garden and finds himself immediately lathered in sweat. Says Capote:
It stood to reason such weather would have to break.
A curious line. Does it speak of the solace we take in logic? Or is it a plea for fairness in an unfair world—a gambler's prayer for clement odds regardless of the irrationality of nature, and of fate?
*Yes, mentioned before, and mind-blowing lines from his other books related earlier, and earlier still.
Briefly, it's about a boy of thirteen who's sent to live with the father who abandoned him, in the rural Louisiana of the 1940s. It's a story of loneliness and dissolution, and the search for happiness—the search for belonging.
I have two mind-blowing excerpts for you.
It was a terrible, strange-looking hotel. But Little Sunshine stayed on: it was his rightful home, he said, for if he went away, as he had once upon a time, other voices, other rooms, voices lost and clouded, strummed his dreams.
The whole novel seems to be written like this, but it's a delusion. There's a clean simplicity interwoven with this richness that catches readers off guard, plunging cool, hard knives into our hearts when we least expect it.
Overblown? Consider for yourself this example, presented as Joel steps outside on his first breathtakingly hot, deserted, abominably silent southern afternoon, having asked to see his father and received no response, and having seen no other living person in the dilapidated mansion for hours. He goes into the garden and finds himself immediately lathered in sweat. Says Capote:
It stood to reason such weather would have to break.
A curious line. Does it speak of the solace we take in logic? Or is it a plea for fairness in an unfair world—a gambler's prayer for clement odds regardless of the irrationality of nature, and of fate?
*Yes, mentioned before, and mind-blowing lines from his other books related earlier, and earlier still.
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