I feel as though I shouldn’t post anything here until I’ve at least posted about The Academy, and maybe until I’ve done everything to follow up on the day, but the former is going to take a while and the latter is: impossible. Besides, my need to post this missive about Facebook somehow supersedes everything I do online, including the Academy post I haven’t yet typed up.

I’m spurning Facebook as much as I can now, and this post explains why, as well as how else I’ll share the information I so love, in case you’re interested in following that trail. If you’re chasing notes about The Academy, festival guest Sophie Langley has posted some here and here.

Privacy Paranoia Mixed with Boredom

Check out this freaky video, in which Facebook’s connections with the CIA and the innocuously named Information Awareness Office (IAO) are illustrated:
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*SPOILER ALERT* According to this clip:

The IAO stated its mission was to gather as much information as possible about everyone, in a centralised location, for easy perusal by the United States government.

So, according to this clip, Facebook are doing much more than selling our data to advertising firms, which is bad enough: they are making that data available to gummint authorities, presumably for the purpose of civil surveillance.

Now, I’ve written before about wanting to move away from Facebook and not stuck to my Steakzooka, but this time it’s different. Until I can confirm evidence that contradicts the conclusions in this clip, I’m too worried about my privacy, and the affect of its exploitation on my life and the lives of others, to abide remaining as heavily involved with Facebook as I have been in the past.

I’m concerned about Facebook’s advertising-based business model: we feed them data, they feed that to advertisers, then the advertisers feed it back to us, perfectly catered to manipulate our consumption choices, then we talk about those choices on Facebook, ad infinitum, ad nauseam, etc., etc. We get enough advertising drivel already, and it saps our will to differentiate between products, rendering us susceptible to the will of the few large companies who control most of our production.

Those are now the least of my concerns.

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Call me paranoid, but there are other ways to share information on the internet and, for now, I’d rather be the one in charge of who I share that information with.

Privacy concerns aside, I’m moving away from Facebook for a much simpler reason: boredom. Facebook homogenises the way we share information, and it’s just stopped being fun for me: post a link here to illustrate your political acuity, ‘like’ a post there to congratulate your friends for the ideology you share, tag yourself in a funny avatar because you’re, like, totally removed from how your face represents your identity. Whatever.

Alternatives: Introducing ‘SIB’s Miscellaneous Miscellany’

Until I can be sure that my information is safe with Facebook I’m going to take my online activity as far away from the site as I can manage without compromising my ability to communicate with as many people at the same time as possible.

The obvious alternative to Facebook is Diaspora, for which I grabbed a sneaky alpha invite recently from Rohan Harris. Diaspora aspires to be Facebook with two fundamental differences: you can store your data on your own server, so Diaspora will never own your data, much less extract it and sell it; within the network you can choose who you share your data with according to Aspects. (Actually I think you can do this with Facebook’s Groups or Lists, but I’ve never really used these or known them to be used. Anyway.)

Great, but the general sharing model is almost identical to Facebook’s and (as Adam Ford said in a Diaspora comment) it’s not clear why Diaspora is even good, let alone better than Facebook. Adam described it as a ‘big echoey room’, and that’s what it is right now: considerably minimal, lacking certain functionality we’ve come to expect from such a networking site (stupid games, somewhere to post your androgynous, Hipstamatic self portraits, and your network of 67–5000 disinterested acquaintances).

So, Diaspora is not going to fulfil my need to over-share with relative strangers.

The less obvious but more fun and creative alternative is to begin sharing my Facebook links and thoughts here, on SIB. I will call the post category ‘SIB’s Miscellaneous Miscellany‘.

I was going to say ‘fun, creative and original‘, but that would have been a lie. What I intend to do from now on is based on a rudimentary understanding of ‘link-blogging’, which used to be popular in the late 90s, before sites like Facebook and Twitter made it fundamentally easier to post annotated links to pages you find interesting on the internet.

My intention is the same: I will filter the content I wade through on the internet, produce a digest of links with annotations, and email a link to the post to the people I’d like to share it with. I might also start using and building up my mailing list for this purpose. If you’re reading this and would like to be on the SIB mailing list, shoot me an email.

This conveniently brings me to the first step I’ve taken to get away from Google because of similar privacy concerns: finding a reliable, halfway intuitive, independent webmail provider or a web-hosting company that’s not affiliated with Google. I think my web-host (JustHost) is affiliated with Google. I actually don’t know what I mean by that, except that I’m equally paranoid they’ll scan my email and sell the data to advertising firms or, ya know, the gummint.

Thanks to Esther Anatolitis for pointing me in the direction of Fastmail.fm, an Australian webmail service that appears to offer all that I was getting from Gmail, sans evil #robots. I’ll explain my fear of the #robots in a forthcoming Gmail post.

Questions

Am I just being dumb/silly/paranoid? Do you think it’s futile to try to escape these companies’ reach? Do you share my concern about the way these internet interfaces will influence the way we consume information and culture?
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A good book editor has to be capable of mentoring a person: after hacking at the fundamental structure of an author’s manuscript, an editor needs to be there to field questions, lend support and generally reassure the author their early work has not been one big, protracted period of self delusion and folly.

A good editor is often the only person who will ever consider the text as closely as the author, and therefore is in a good position to play the above mentor role, advising on intimate details of the manuscript’s development while the author rebuilds their manuscript around their shattered ego – this requires considerable, tact, diplomacy and compassion, and often it seems an author becomes willing to let their guard down with their editor more than anyone else, for the sake of their beloved manuscript.

This can be beautiful (though it is sometimes embarrasing and painful), and is the sort of relationship I constantly aspire to in my work. The operative word being ‘aspire’: it is not always possible, especially when an author’s insecurities manifest as petulance, arrogance and resistance.

I wouldn’t count myself as particularly anti-capitalist, or particularly political. But this article on Disney deciding to set up schools in China made me so angry I thought I was going to vomit. Then I read this other article on the same issue, realised it was worse than I originally thought. Like eating cereal for breakfast and then discovering the milk is off. And then upon further investigation, finding that the milk is in fact brake fluid. And the cereal is in fact dog shit. And the house is on fire.

Let’s take a look at why Disney might think they well equipped to handle formal education:

• pretty much every Disney story revolves around someone who is either fantastically rich, or becomes fantastically rich (with maybe the exception of Notre Dame)
• they usually feature tyrannical paternal figures to encourage the notion that responsibility to parents is more important than personal desires
• deformity and difference constitute comedy or evil
• blatantly chauvinistic
• they encourage the notion of a happy ending
• they reduce the world to the simplicity of black and white (quite literally, as everyone knows Disney protagonists are westernised. Can anyone spell ‘white supremacist’?)

I was going to put a picture of The Hulk here to represent my anger, but then I found out Marvel was bought by Disney in August, 2009 so this picture will have to do.

So, without having any previous ideological foothold to guide my negotiation of consumerism in this fast-paced and crazy capitalist world, and yet wanting to feel as though I am making a difference one purchase at a time, I decided to boycott Disney. Yes, that’s right. I am becoming a Disnedent.

This way of life applies ethical consumerism to Disney products. Which means basically I will not consume any more Disney culture. Most ideologies have weird grey areas. Like, is it right to eat meat if you find it on the ground? What if you kill the animal yourself? What if it’s free range? And can they even feel pain, properly, anyway? I can see no such grey area here. Disney’s idea of dabbling in education is for financial gain, a marketing plan that encourages ignorance and is beneficial only to Disney stockholders.

Consider this from the head of Disney Publishing Worldwide:

Disney estimates that it can earn over $100 million in the next five years from the education sector though it’s a challenging market because it’s a country where counterfeit Disney products, including DVDs and merchandise sell more than original ones. China, Hampton said, is a “promising market and as a company it has a high priority for us”.

These sucker companies join Disney in the boycott through affiliation:

• Buena Vista Records
• Holywood Records (sorry Queen, you’re blacklisted)
• Lyric Street Records
• Mammoth Records
• ESPN
• Marvel Entertainment
• Starwave
• Miramax Films
• Fox Family Worldwide
• Saban Entertainment
• The Muppets (not all Jim Henson, Labyrinth is safe)
• Pixar Animation
• New Horizon Entertainment

If you know of any companies that are affiliated with Disney that I should be including in the boycott, please let me know. Just like people sneak meat into shit (fish products in wine for example) it’s difficult to know whether a company is in cahoots with Disney just by looking at them.

Maybe Disney aren’t the only corporation to exploit areas of life that they have no right to touch. But this demonstrates that Disney see no difference between human rights, like the right to an education, and capital gain. They obviously can’t distinguish between someone’s money and someone’s mind. So if you at all give a damn about stopping the rapid decline of intelligence in the world, I would encourage you to join me in this boycott. And even if it doesn’t make a shit of difference to anything, at least you can feel morally righteous in the knowledge that you’re not an accomplice.

]]> http://ryan-paine.com/2010/07/12/boycott-disney/feed/ 1 http://ryan-paine.com/2010/06/09/why-pulling-prizes-is-okay-sometimes/ http://ryan-paine.com/2010/06/09/why-pulling-prizes-is-okay-sometimes/#comments Tue, 08 Jun 2010 23:49:02 +0000 Ryan http://ryan-paine.com/?p=836

Over at Virugle there is a mostly-one-way discussion being had about how terrible Australian Book Review is for deciding not to award the inaugural Young Calibre Non-fiction Prize – an essay prize that matches their esteemed Calibre Prize, but for writers under 21. Unfortunately, apart from a questionable call for transparency, I don’t get a clear sense, from the comments on the Virgule post, exactly what the problem is.

I’ll get to why the call for transparency is questionable at the end, but first I’ll try to understand what some of the fuss is about, with qualifications that are worth considering before we go mouthing off about ABR’s commitment to youth literature.

One, it’s disappointing because it’s one less young writer published in an established journal. But this happens all the time and we don’t blog angrily about it. Perhaps that’s because, two, this collective rejection casts a shadow over the whole community of young writers. But the implication that zero out of 100 young writers are not good enough to be published in ABR is not so hard to swallow – that’s not a big slush pile, and I know a bunch of young writers, outside of that slush pile, who have written for ABR, myself included.

So, I dunno, it just seems like a lot of anti-ageism noise. Worse, ill-thought-out allegations that this decision means ABR don’t really support youth literature only shitcans their attempt to do so. Worst: Ben’s claims that ABR refused to award the prize because ‘its reputation or the respect of its readers might be damaged by the publication of a young person’s ideas’.

Phooey! Such a blatantly antagonistic, deliberate misinterpretation of their decision is simply uncool, and posting this as a comment on Virgule seems determined to pit the gilted applicants against ABR. Yep, that’s anti-ageist noise alright, especially when you consider the form letter doesn’t say this at all. It says:

In [discharging our right not to award a prize] we are mindful of our responsibilities to readers, to the magazine’s reputation for excellence, to our sponsor and – most importantly – to the entrants themselves.

Who’s to say the ABR editors aren’t on the phone/keyboard right now to the shortlist, commending them for their work and commissioning an In Brief, to get the shortlistees working on something more manageable than a full-length essay? So far we’ve only had a snapshot – from people who are upset they didn’t win, as much as they’re upset that no one won.

Even if the editors aren’t on the phone, it just doesn’t seem like something worth making a big deal about. Rejection slips are nothing new. Applicants are free to send their essays elsewhere. They’re running the prize again (another commendable initiative forgotten by most of the commenters), by which time the dedicated among the applicants might have developed enough to enter a winner.

Meanwhile, pulling the prize this year might actually be considered commendable: they are presumably (and understandably) worried about publishing poorly expressed ideas, which, let’s face it, are going to be among the majority in a slush pile of 100 from young writers – even at Voiceworks, where we would receive between 200 and 300 submissions per quarter, we were often scraping the barrel, because it’s true: young writers are usually not as accomplished as older, established writers – the ‘established’ is important: it’s not age that qualifies you as a good writer, but the amount of time, energy and dedication you’ve poured into developing your work, plus the extent of your natural affinity for ideas, and the ability to express them.

During Voiceworks Editorial Committee meetings we would often debate the merits of publishing a lesser-quality piece by a younger writer. There were usually two fronts: doing so might encourage the writer to continue developing their work – to keep writing at all, even – and we might get to publish their higher-quality work later; doing so might undermine the magazine’s reputation for exceptional quality, meaning that readers might not hang around until the time the younger writer had grown up.

Deciding to pull the prize this year does not, necessarily, undermine ABR’s commitment to youth literature. In fact, two alternatives to pulling the plug on the prize could be worse.

One, run something mediocre, which ABR’s older readership might read with disdain, which they then carry over to the broader community of young writers. And every applicant other than the winner remains equally gilted, as they read the winner that’s not as good as they think their essay is.

Two (as suggested in the comments), edit the fuck out of the piece, which undermines the integrity of an award anyway – it’s not an award for an essay-with-great-potential – and establishes a misrepresentation among older readers, as well as a sense of false hope among the winner – few other outlets (Voiceworks aside, of course) will give the author the same extent of editorial attention in the future, when they start shooting equally mediocre essays from the hip at every major paper that still runs them.

In anticipation of the retort that who are Peter Rose and Mark Gomes to determine the nature of mediocrity, I come back to the questionable call for transparency.

Reading the article that Sam Cooney linked to from the comments at Virgule, I was reminded prizes are not much more than simple publishing decisions with a fancy label.

The decision might look different – it is preceded by a public call for submissions, presided over by a public (albeit usually secretive) panel of judges, and succeeded by publication with a gold sticker.

Compare this to other publishing decisions, which are preceded by a private solicitation of submissions, presided over by a private (albeit disparate, but no less inaccessible) panel of arbiters – agents, editors and (if you play with the big kids) marketing departments – and succeeded by publication without a gold sticker.

The only real difference is the sticker, which might momentarily and marginally influence sales, but does little to influence the aesthetic judgement of readers, which is what really drives sales, and therefore the extent of an author’s readership.

The decision to award a prize to a piece of literature is no less subjective than to publish one in the general sense, so ABR deciding not to award a prize merely means that nothing they received was worthy of a prize. It takes balls to do that – especially with so many egotistical writers (read: writers) running around – and at this stage I remain convinced that they not only have a right to do this, but a duty, to prevent mediocre literature being published as award-winning literature, an idea that is inherently contradictory.

ABR is a journal of particularly high … uh, calibre, so the upset over its rejection of these young writers’ advances is understandable, on a superficial level. But the panel was just a couple of editors looking for outstanding submissions from young writers. Attacking an establishment outlet for failing to award a youth-literature prize doesn’t help the very cause this outlet is trying to promote.

This is an important new prize run by an important journal with a long-running history of publishing high-quality ideas about literature. If we shitcan this prize it in its inaugural year, I bet the loud mouths won’t blame themselves for it folding – it’ll be the fault of yet another esteemed, establishment journal looking down on youth literature.

It’s not cool of the youth literati to go shooting their mouths off like this, so if you have a legitimate and informed criticism of the decision, I would love to hear it, and will happily respond in comments below, while eating the form letter. That means I will try to eat my twenty-inch iMac, so I’m pretty serious about this – please comment: tear me to shreds!

Sam Cooney republished an article he wrote for Bookseller+Publisher about, well, the relationship between booksellers and publishers – and how this relationship is changing as publishers embark on direct-sales ventures, which, I guess, have the potential to undermine the traditional business models of booksellers. On the surface it seems like a superfluous debate, when compared to whether eBookstores will overrun this model, but it remains relevant, and the article got me thinking, which I like, obviously.

I hadn’t quite got to wondering about how booksellers might feel threatened by publishers’ online sales, perhaps because I never really buy from physical bookstores, and because I currently work in production, which often leaves me feeling quite removed from the whole extra set of steps that are involved in getting books to readers.

I’m becoming increasingly interested in sales though, and Sam’s article tapped me on the noggin and said, ‘Dear naive and idealistic editor, booksellers are very important to you and your job, and your interest in disseminating ideas with literature.’ So I started riffing on how this shifting relationship might weather the rapid market changes that are being pushed along by this here internet thing.

Perhaps an organised partnership between booksellers and publishers could be established to develop a website that aggregates all of their separate marketing and direct-sales efforts. For these purposes (compared to blogging, say) one big website is surely better than many small ones. Australia Council should fund something like this – just as they’ve recently funded the establishment of Literary Magazines Australia.

Another idea that sprouted was whether booksellers could borrow from the idea of subscription publishing. McSweeney’s do this at their online store. You can sign up to their Book Release Club and receive every book they publish over a twelve month period. Maybe booksellers could offer something similar: I’d like to sign up for a package of ’seller picks’, a bunch of random books from various publishers, delivered to my letter box once a month.¹

The other thing that struck me in Sam’s article was the comment from Don Grover, CEO of Dymocks and aspiring booktrade despot slash self-described benevolent despot: suggesting that ‘a healthy industry occurs when everyone focuses on their own area, their niche in the market’ seems like a typically neo-con thing to say, but my understanding of economic ideology is pretty patchy. Am I right or wrong?

My idea of a healthy industry is one that is not dominated by small groups of large, domineering companies controlling those niches, but one where individuals determine what is produced and how they get it. From this perspective, the suppliers are the ones who need to adapt, rather than trying to restrict trade to a traditional structure of publisher through bookseller to consumer. I guess that’s an irresolvable ideological difference, though.

Or not.

Because then Sam speculated that ‘the coin can also be flipped, the spotlight shifted. Will booksellers be forced to become publishers?’ This must be happening, somewhere.² Curiously (considering my aversion to Grover’s suggestion), this got my hackles up, with its suggestion that booksellers could just whip up the infrastructure required to produce quality books, as if it’s just a matter of pressing the go button on the the Espresso Book Machine.

Thinking about infrastructure, resources and expertise made me realise a more convincing reason publishers should be wary of ‘wading into booksellers’ waters’ (Don Grover’s defensive phrase), and it’s not because they’re not ‘customer-centric’ (also Don’s words). This suggestion denigrates the motives of publishers: does he think we make these books because they look pretty on our shelves? That’s only a secondary reason.

Okay, back to trying to be objective: I’d say a more convincing reason book publishers should be (and, sometimes, are) wary of prolapsing their resources on marketing and direct sales is that they operate in an ailing sector of the economy (especially small-press, literary publishers), within which they have barely enough resources to get their books to print, let alone invest in a serious marketing, sales and publicity strategy.

It’s also possibly true that such print aficionados feel drastically uncomfortable in the online world, and speaking into what seems like an echo chamber a lot of the time. If anything needs to change, I would suggest that booksellers, who will go down the eBookstore path or perish, are in a much better position to drive the development of a collaborative business model that focuses their own, and book publishers’ marketing, sales and publicity efforts. Booksellers and publishers need to share their resources, infrastructure and expertise, so that each is free to work on what they are proficient at, either bookmaking or bookselling.

It’s not as cut and dry as Dan Grover implies, but then, neither is parallel importation, and that didn’t stop him from pushing that wheelbarrow around in the dark.

The rest of the comments in Sam’s article, from all sorts of industry figures, are spectacularly reasonable, and well presented by Sam. A great spectrum of ideas, and all strung together with such clarity and concision. Check it out!

Meanwhile, do you know of examples of this type of bookseller/publisher collaboration? It would be great to keep this dialogue underway about how this changing relationship might morph into something weird, like an Imprints blimp parachuting books to customers in response to sign language made visible by wearing those massive foam-rubber hands.

1. NB: By googling ‘Book a Month Club’, which I thought was the name of McSweeney’s book-subscription service, I found this, The Book of the Month Club, and then I realised that this idea, which I thought was quite novel, is not novel at all, and then I remembered how much I used to bug Mum to join these, but she was savvy to their swindling ways, with which I now sympathise. And anyway, it’s still a better than Don Grover’s idea, which I’m getting to.
2. *googles ‘booksellers turn to publishing’, finds this, is not surprised*

Again with the Monty Python, but this clip illustrates the following post as well as it did the post about my flesh wound:

Brian Ward disappeared from Facebook the other day, while we were in the middle of a debate. I was surprised by this, because Brian runs a great-value blog, a lot of which is dedicated to holding other citizen journalists to account. I’m bothering to post about it because I feel like it’s necessary to return the service.

Brian posted a link to an article about the new batch of deadly drugs going around at the moment, accompanied by a comment that people deserved what they got if they took dubious drugs from a dubious dealer. I would post the exact link and comment, but of course I no longer have access to Brian’s Facebook wall.

I said the comment was inordinately harsh, that some people might not be in a position to make a better decision and should not be judged so fiercely for making a bad judgement call. Someone else got involved and the debate quickly swung away from the initial issue to focus on the morality of dealing, something I feel entirely differently about: dealing dubious drugs is morally reprehensible; consuming them is not – and is certainly not deserving of the scorn demonstrated in Brian’s dismissive comment.

It’s exactly this sort of narrow-mindedness that causes problems in drug culture: people who are ignorant of the complexities involved in the decisions surrounding drugs make generalisations that tar the whole community with the wrong brush. Drug users are not all reckless and irresponsible – many use them safely, and I consider it a shame that such users bear the brunt of the stigma that results from those who are irresponsible, and from those who shame them.

Of course, I never got as far as explaining this to Brian. When I came back to the debate and couldn’t access his page, I thought maybe an error had occurred. I added him again, but my advances were rejected. I tried again the next morning. Then and now, when I search for his name he no longer comes up in the results.

At first I thought Brian had a massive dummy spit because I didn’t agree with him¹, but as I’ve gone about drafting the post I’ve realised I should give him the benefit of the doubt, as his Facebook page appears to no longer exist. Maybe something really has gone wrong: I’ve emailed him to find out, but have not heard back.

Of course it’s entirely up to Brian whether he allows me to see his Facebook page, and the truth is that we’re not exactly ‘friends’ – we have met once, through a mutual friend. But I had assumed Brian was reading the Facebook definition of ‘friend’ rather loosely – he did, after all, either extend a friendship request to me, or accept one from me, I can’t remember which now.

Maybe I was wrong in assuming that Brian was using Facebook for reasons other than to keep in touch with friends – I have seen him chime in on debates elsewhere, so I thought it would have extended to Facebook. Plus, that he published such a provocative and opinion-laden link suggests that he uses Facebook for debate and information extending beyond his immediate friend circles.

Brian, if something really has gone wrong with Facebook and you’d like to rejoin the debate here, I would certainly welcome that.

1. from what I’ve read on his blog, he doesn’t take criticism well

I’m really glad to be working on a book that’s not government funded. A stack of money has been poured into this and we need to earn the money back to pay off the debt.

This just came to mind when I was talking to a guy who put out a bunch of comics with a group called Silent Army. He said they never had a real distribution model – they used half the grant to make an approximation of the funded book, then the rest to make the book that didn’t fit within the funder’s criteria.

Fine, but this guy was disappointed they could never really get the books out to a broader audience. Government funding has a tendency to hinder considerations of sustainable business models in the arts – especially with literature, which is so labour intensive, in a culture where production skills outweigh business acumen considerably.

Today we figured out we need to sell half our print run to break even, then we have the potential to make enough to for Breakdown to do another book.

This is the sort of thinking that I’m really happy to be a part of.

I have this thing – a kind of guiding principle – that I have come to call Three Degrees of Uncoordination. Calling it a principle is a bit of a stretch. It’s more like an explanation for my disorganised, frenetic, fumbling approach to life. For a long time, before I labelled my own methodology of life, I just read and wrote and observed the world, noticing things and ideas and wondering what on earth to do with them. And I talked a lot of shit.

Recently I began to get pretty tired of all the talking, and frustrated by the lack of doing. But I’m reluctant to act without conviction in my opinions, so I got kind of stuck: how could I act without conviction about my ideas, but how could I reach conviction without experiencing life (without acting)?

This was all happening at the end of my tenure as Voiceworks editor, where I had been reading a lot, talking a lot, editing a lot, crunching spreadsheets a lot, and not writing a lot. I was leaving my editorials to the last minute, but they came naturally when I finally got down to them.

This, I found, was because all of the reading and talking I was doing had a place to coalesce: as I drew from things that had happened in the three months since I last wrote an editorial, usually about three separate instances of something like intellectual coincidence would occur and I would have an idea – something to write about, some intention for the editorial.

Usually the process of writing the editorial had forced me to think about something in a way that I had not previously considered. I would express this, with the intention of encouraging readers to do the same.

Since then this ‘principle’ has developed naturally as a way of connecting ideas into some form of coherent thought, without which I get wickedly confused and forget my opinions all the time. I still chase ideas down rabbit holes until I find bits of grit, around which all those ideas coagulate.

I don’t have editorials to write anymore, but I have posts to write for this blog. The themes will develop sporadically, as I process ideas and output them here: kernels of principles I will then use to guide my way through life in an approximation of goodness and decency. Maybe, dear reader, you will too, as, here, in the category Three Degrees of Uncoordination, I will capture those kernels in the hope of disseminating something useful.

Indeed, they are opposites. According to Socrates’ oracle, the wisest of them all is the person are aware of their own ignorance. Such an awareness cultivates an ongoing, organic interest in gaining, challenging and validating your knowledge. Doing this, and then applying that knowledge to life is what I do, and the central theme of Socratic Ignorance is Bliss.