The majority of comments I have received on my stories include the terms “drugs” or “drug-fueled.”

I would like to propose alternative explanations, in descending order of anachronism:

10. Nearfield neural-frequency interference
9. Brain implants
8. Drugs
7. Satellites
6. Radio
5. Mesmerism
4. Telegraphy
3. Witchcraft
2. Possession
1. Imagination

_{Image CC-BY-SA by Kandinsky}

My mom (and, by extension, my brother and I) grew up in a subculture of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) that places strong emphasis on the Testimony of Simplicity.

I have always found that Testimony to be morally unassailable but spiritually flawed (in the sense that it lacks soul) because it devalues the pursuit of magnificence.

While pounding nails just now, I was listening to NPR on my crazy AM/FM/MP3 hearing-protector earmuffs, and I ran across a reference to magnificence as a cardinal virtue in Nicomachean Ethics. Huzzah! An ethical system I might want to fit into!

Fortunately, my neighbor on the other side of the fence is a scholar of Aristotle and Nicomachus. I will now bake him some cookies and run over there for a conversation.

_{Image CC-BY-NC-SA by Ibán}

But when I look at my gorilla-heavy resume, when I see all three of my kids laughing, when I think about how much less my life would have been if I’d settled for what I thought I’d wanted, I realize I don’t much care about the sensible things I once did. It’s the ridiculous I love.
—Claude Knobler on NPR

See, here’s the way I see it:
Thanks to the internet connecting all of the great social tribes together we’re re-entering a “storytelling age,” where authenticity, experience and the ability to communicate ideas in a compelling manner matter more than the authoritarian mono-culture sponsored by corporate America. Those of us who can adapt to this new world – the creatives, the visionaries, we who would have been Skalds, Bards and Troubadours a few centuries ago – will thrive, assuming our place by the fire and our rightful position of importance in the new global tribe.

Matt seems to be setting up three eras:
1. Pre-Mass (Including pictorial, oral, written transmission of stories, say 25000 BCE – 1800 CE.)
2. Mass (We could date this several different ways (Little Nell? Captain Midnight?) but let’s say 1800-2000.)
3. Post-Mass (2000-)

I want to point out a key difference between pre-mass and post-mass storytelling, based on the relative levels of coercion and choice (the seemingly-negative and seemingly-positive faces of a single phenemenon) in each era. Here’s a matrix:

In the pre-mass era, culture was heterogeneous but extremely coercive on individuals within a given tribe. You were born to virtually everything; you chose virtually nothing. Advertising was approximately moot. (Lots of interesting exceptions but the rule holds.) You did not choose your stories; you were born to them. A storyteller could tell a story and be close to dead certain that listeners would know the entire context for the story: Prosaic details would seem prosaic to everyone; exotic details would seem the correct degree of exotic; everyone would laugh in all the right places…

In the mass era, culture was closer to homogeneous (boo) less coercive (yay) but (for most people most of the time) the amount of apparent choice was low (booyay?). You could choose among a handful of major brands plus a house brand; you could choose among a handful of networks plus cable access… Advertising worked extremely well in this environment. It was easy to get people’s attention, and it was easy to get them to form brand loyalties. Similarly for stories: The sheer number of subcultures was fairly low; a storyteller could tell a story and stand a decent chance of finding an enthusiastic and comprehending reader; a listener could look for a story and stand a decent chance of finding a compelling and comprehensible storyteller.

In the post-mass era, culture is extremely heterogeneous (w00t) even less coercive (ditt00t) but there is such an explosion of choice that (in its limit state) it threatens to produce cultures-of-one, in which advertising is again moot (because of signal-to-noise and the Paradox of Choice described by Barry Schwartz). The consequence for storytelling in the post-mass era is also potentially dire: A storyteller stands some risk either of being a cultural island (or last living speaker) or of being buried in noise, and a listener stands some risk of tuning into sferics or the Tower of Babel.

The consequence of all this is that the entire project of storytelling (or, ironically, advertising) in the post-mass era depends absolutely upon the success of community-building. The new global storytelling depends upon new global tribes.

Volt:

1901

• Queen Victoria dies.
• First transatlantic radio communication.

1947

• Max Planck dies.
• Transistor is born.

Punk:

1. Do-it-Yourself
2. Be Anti-Authoritarian
3. Black Humor

-V. Vale

The distinction between hacking and non-hacking is the distinction between repurposing and purposing. In order to tell one from the other, you have to have a clear and complete understanding of intended use.

Take a claw hammer. Two ends, two intended uses: Bash nails, pull nails. Open a paint can with the claw: Hacking.

Now take a hunk of software. The only clear way to state an “intended use” is with a reproducible acceptance test. The only complete way to state “intended uses” is to assemble a suite of acceptance tests. If a test passes, that’s non-hacking. If a test fails, that’s a bug. Any use not covered byte-for-byte and click-for-click by an acceptance test is an unintended use: Hacking. Every user is a hacker.