For a long time I had diagnosed my change in attitude this way: Harry Potter works from a model of the world where the hero doesn’t exist. What I wanted, on the other hand, was for Harry to become super bad-ass and lay waste to people at the end. If Harry Potter were a basketball story, I’d want to see him working on his game, then showing up in the climax having all these wicked moves and kicking ass on the player who’d humiliated him. That never happens. Harry manages to do what he does with luck, trinkets he’s given, and help from his friends. He is decidedly underwhelming as a Chosen One.

For years I thought this was the big failing in the books, and the reason I’d lost my taste for the movies. I’m all about the grand heroics, the levelling up, the showdown. I want magical Michael Jordan, or something of the kind. But in the last few days I’ve been re-evaluating the HP franchise, and I get now that Harry’s flavor of heroism isn’t a failing, but a particular design choice, a choice that is actually braver and more profound than the version that I would have liked better.

Harry is basically just a guy — an admirable guy, a guy who you wouldn’t mind if he were dating your sister — but pretty normal, really. Not a real standout at anything, kind of where he is by accident, a magical trust fund baby with a hard luck story, yeah, and sure, a pedigree, although really his parents being awesome is no accomplishment of his. But he lives up to it as best he can, in an uncertain world, with bad odds, with help from his friends. It’s very un-Beowulf or Achilles. It’s also a lot closer to the stories most of us know from real life, and closer to most of the situations in which we’ll find ourselves, one way or another: we’re born, we’ve had some good opportunities, we don’t live in Somalia or Palestine, we’ve got health care (or at least the possibility of health care) and a free education.

Few people have the tools necessary to be Michael Jordan, in basketball or in any aspect of life. Hard work made him, but that’ll only get you so far without superhuman ability. But greatness in the way Harry is great is something you could really aspire to, and the mythology of the HP franchise is one much more proximate to reality than most of the hero stories we’re told. Nevermind that there’s wizards and shit: do what you can; be worthy of friendship; keep your friends close; and hope for the best. That’s a way guttier answer than almost anything else fiction will serve you up, especially in this genre.

Hard to tease those apart.

I think that if someone thinks Garfield is hilarious they probably shouldn’t be allowed to have any sort of firearm.

Also, global warming? Total effing letdown. Americans are no longer believing in it. Do you know why? Not because the mountains of scientific proof aren’t there. Not because it’s not happening. But because it’s not yet happening to us like they said it would in the movies and those worst-case scenario books. Where are the zombies? The ice forests? Where’s the tidal wave crashing over the Himalayas? I want my goddamn apocalypse, and I want it now.

Here’s another:

My God, did you hear that pathetic State of the Union? That guy, that President Obama? Disappointing times a thousand, am I right? What the hell happened to him? Why is he so weak and ineffectual? Why the hell can’t he step up and fix the entire planet in under 400 days like he promised he would, in my dreams and fantasies and impossible liberal grass-fed organic tofu greengasms? Doesn’t he know I put a goddamn bumper sticker on my Subaru for him? I’ve never done that for anyone. Bastard.

He’s only accomplished what, about 100 of the things I expected him to accomplish by now? Big deal. I have, like, 5,000 more. Health care reform has failed. Guantanamo is still open. Wars are still warring. Jobs are still sucking. Gays are still unhappy because the entire human understanding of love and gender in this nation has not completely transformed within a year. Infuriating!

And finally, this one really captures the heart of it:

You have but to take a peek in the comments section below this column, any column, any article on this or any news site whatsoever, to see just how mean and nasty we have become. It does not matter what the piece might be about. Obama’s speech. High speed rail. Popular dog breeds. Your grandmother’s cookies. The anonymous comments section of any major media site or popular blog will be so crammed with bile and bickering, accusation and pule, hatred and sneer you can’t help but feel violently disappointed by the shocking lack of basic human kindness and respect, much less a sense of positivism or perspective.

I remember when we started Brain Harvest and at first we had open comments. Good sweet Jesus what a bunch of fucking tools came out of the woodwork, dissatisfied unto the core of their very beings with the stories they were getting for free, after they came to our site of their own volition, and which no one was forcing them to read. The most surprising thing about the whole affair was how much it _bothered_ me, how much I cared as wave after wave of vitriol and condemnation washed over us for incubating in our hearts the abominable notion of paying people money to write good short fiction.

Ugh. What a diagnosis.

From here via Kottke.

It’s less than twenty years since the living presence of networked information has become part of our thinking machinery. What it will mean to us that vastly more people have nearly instantaneous access to vastly greater quantities of information cannot be said with confidence. In principle, it means a democratization of innovation and of debate. In practice, it also means a world in which many have already proven that they can ignore what they do not wish to think about, select what they wish to quote, and produce a public discourse demonstrably poorer than what we might have known in the past.

This is an under-discussed aspect of modernity. If you asked me: “What’s going to be the biggest problem for human civilization in the next twenty years?” I would give an answer similar to the above-quoted text. Which might seem alarmist, but think about it: your average citizen now has the power to construct whatever reality he wants. It’s not that dumbasses are bigger dumbasses than they used to be, all else being equal. It’s just that all else is never equal. You can now spend 24 hours a day reading and watching stuff that confirms whatever it is that you happen to believe.

When every citizen sucked from the same three televised teats our mental faculties might have been grossly under-utilized, and our pictures of the world stupendously myopic, but at least our opinions were grounded in a common subset of information. All of us regularly brushed up against opinions we didn’t share, analysis we disagreed with. Not so any longer, and the effects are as corrosive as anything I can reasonably imagine.

Remember that crazy-ass poll of self-identified Republicans? You wonder how half of them could possibly think that the question of whether the President is a terrorist was seriously up for debate? Well, it’s not so hard to understand if you imagine that 100% of their media consumption is exactly this type of lunatic whispering, like having Grima Wormtongue on call every waking moment. And it’s not like only Republicans who are sick with this scurvy, although they probably have it worse than most because the machinery pumping it out is so much more developed. Thanks Rush; Glenn; Ann; Bill.

Seriously, I can’t tell you how much this brightened my day. It’s weird, awesome (in the literal sense) and sad, all at once, to think about the power you have to make somebody feel great, by doing very very little. And how often you choose to not exercise this power.

But then, how easy it would be to change that. (Let’s end on an optimistic note.)

It’s tempting to imagine that women could be forceful and self-confident without being arrogant or jerky, but that’s a false hope, because it’s other people who get to decide when they think you’re a jerk, and trying to stay under that threshold means giving those people veto power over your actions. To put yourself forward as someone good enough to do interesting things is, by definition, to expose yourself to all kinds of negative judgments, and as far as I can tell, the fact that other people get to decide what they think of your behavior leaves only two strategies for not suffering from those judgments: not doing anything, or not caring about the reaction.

This reminds me of something Peaches said once. We were talking about writing and arrogance, and he said: “Anyone who thinks they have something so important to say that it has to be written down is at least a little bit arrogant.”

I’ve thought about that quote a lot over the years; I can’t remember if I agreed or not at the time, but I agree now, so much so that I’m on board with Shirkey — sometimes it’s important to be a jerk, to think you’re better than other people, to think that you Kick Ass. It’s important because thinking those things will help you keep going when self-doubters would quit; and it’s important because a lot of times in life people will take their cues from you. If you say you are awesome, then who am I to disagree?

(Of course, my personal reaction when I run into these people is to think they’re annoying jackasses, so whatever positive effect might be achieved is more than balanced out. But I don’t think I’m representative.)

The other issue, of course, is whether the advantages of jerkiness will continue to be true. If jerks have all the power then maybe doing whatever will advance your cause with jerks is the optimal strategy; but times are a-changing, and women and non-jerks are rich and powerful, too, though not in as great of numbers. You could do an interesting model of this as a differential equation, and I’m confident under certain parameters having low-jerkiness would be better. The only question is whether those parameters are realistic.

Anyone, the article’s worth a read if you have a minute.

In human development, primatology, and artificial intelligence, the notion of contingency matters way more than you’d imagine. Contingency, in a phrase: I do something and it causes you to do something. Contingency matters in human development because infants react contingently to certain stimuli, which allows developmental psychologists to intuit various things about their cognitive abilities; and because, like with Arthur, the infant’s contingent reaction to its mother is an important part of the bonding experience. Later it will matter in a host of shared-attention features necessary for language use; these kind of contingent reactions is the most important thing that separates humans from non-human primates (cognitively speaking; other differences matter more when it comes to dating, for example.) Contingency’s role in AI is discernable from those already mentioned: devices that react to you seem intelligent — you call, the robot comes running. The effect works like magic.

What I find remarkable is how powerful this simple idea is, even in day to day life. I like the waitress who says something in response to the stupid joke that I said to her, something that indicates that she has actually heard the joke. I do not like the snotty lesbians at The Spy House because nothing I could do would seem to alter their condescending attitudes. Come in with my pants around my ankles? Yawn. Come in with Arthur in a backpack, wearing a little Vikings helmet? Just more tiresome visual stimuli their retinas are forced to transduce. You’d think they’d grown up in that bar from Star Wars where Han Solo shoots Greedo.

Anyway. Here’s a tip, for free: to be twice as charming as you already are, behave contingently. Listen to what people say to you, and then say something back to them that contains the seed of what they’ve said. There’s interesting work to be done here. You can get a long way in life without mastering much more than this one skill.

But now I wonder if it’s a skill that can be mastered, if you’re not predisposed to master it. If chimps can’t learn to do declarative pointing, can people learn to listen, to _really_ listen? Hmm.

If you were online in 1996, you remember some of the anything-is-possible topsy-turvy feelings. But more important, I think, is the history of thought that accompanies any potent tech advance; where zealous practitioners say: this changes everything. Like this, at the dawn of radio:

Ditto, concurred a colleague: “Let a legislator now commit himself to some policy that is obviously senseless, and the editorial writers must first proclaim his imbecility to the community. But let the radiophone in the legislative halls of the future flash his absurdities into space and the whole state hears them at once.”

Obviously it didn’t work out that way; and it would be easy to get cynical, and say that nothing is ever any different, which is the same kind of stupid dichotomous thinking that causes a lot of the problems that surround us every day. A rule of thumb is that no technology is likely to change the essence of human nature; but human nature can be, and is, tweaked all the time. So it’s interesting to see how many times these utopian prognostications have been made, and what they’ve been made about. And what has really been changed, and what hasn’t.