Spirit of the Escalator

A term coined in French, L’esprit de l’escalier, is afterwit, or the witty remarks thought of after having descended stairs. The Wikipedia article does a great job of detailing the origin of the story, including a reference to “the bottom of the stairs” which indicates a guest has fully left a gathering.

Witty or remarkable, our ability to reflect upon things allows us to speak greater on that topic. It is why skilled conversationalists carry conversations with their charisma, because conversations are rhythmic and the best don’t drop a beat.

Typically writers experience this phenomenon the most, as collecting and organizing thoughts can become an instrumental task to their expression. I’ve sometimes thought of this as introversion and the extraversion, but charisma comes to both spectrums. The life of the party may not be the speaker of the party and the person least engaged may have the most to say.

The term Spirit of the Escalator resonates with us because we have been in dialogues where we couldn’t properly reply and we thought of a reply afterwards. We appreciate its French origin because we like to think of ourselves as witty and cunning. The spirit captures but one element of conversational reflection, that element being comeback.

As our conversations take shorter and shorter forms, the desire for sharper and snappier comebacks increases. With more accessible conversations that have become narrower in digital spaces, from lack of intonation to lack of context, we have allowed conversation to boil down to bullet points and sound bites, thereby increasing the need for comebacks. Nuanced conversation, with give and take, becomes less attractive to traditional broadcasts day by day.

Now there is an equilibrium, where an opposite and equal reaction manifests at a critical point. When our distaste for short form content becomes too great, we gravitate towards long form content. Of course, these long form content creators will produce smaller pieces of their own content, indicating a self-awareness and sense of ownership towards sub-content. But the major draw of long form content is the ability to reintroduce long conversation, without the conversation turning into a martial art of offense and defense, of maneuvering around sound bites.

The term Spirit of the Escalator carries a modern invention’s name in it. Sure, I could be taking the translation too literally, with any set of stairs mechanical or not considered to be “l’escalier.” I wonder if the term’s genesis comes from a different age of conversation. When conversation was once communal, it now has became guarded in ivory towers with both speakers and audience on the defensive. It is remarkable the internet has recreated these ivory towers in some ways, in the form of closed communities and echo chambers, while the internet has also opened doors by removing gatekeeping and allowing different forms of conversation to be tested in the market.

It will be truly interesting to see what terms we’ll be using to describe texting or leaving a zoom call. Hell, we can’t even slam phones anymore. Our technology shapes our responses and sometimes the responses we’ve learned become phased out entirely. What will be our next Spirit of the Escalator?

The Digital Divide

I first heard the term phone world from a book called Modern Romance by Aziz Ansari. I’m fascinated by modern dating and would say I’ve spent more time than the average person thinking about and spending time on dating apps.

But this post isn’t about dating. Rather, it’s about how we’ve become farther from each other despite becoming more connected.

We’ve all been in the presence of a phone party. There’s multiple people standing around, sitting around, but there’s nothing happening. Everyone is plugged into their phone, engrossed in their phone world. This isn’t a new phenomenon, as we’ve seen commuters ignore each other since the dawn of commuting.

This isn’t the first time I’ve mentioned the term phone world. It’s one of the primary forces of loneliness in our Western world. Unlike distractions of the past, our phones persist with us throughout our lives, spanning several years of time now. Contacts, photos, and social media have created an inseparable bond between us and our phones, allowing us to always return to our comfortable world whenever we desire.

The ability to always return home is one of our first metaverse abilities. It is the ability to center or ground ourselves in digital space and reliably express ourselves. Unfortunately until our phone worlds connect, that is the end of our current state of the metaverse and it is why the best way to socially enjoy a phone party is to stand next to each and show each other what each individual phone is displaying.

Until we have the ability to enjoy an in-person live experience of our phones connecting, they will primarily be seen as a force of escape. Escape is necessary, but to have it be the only option seems disappointing. As technology develops, our connections with each other should slowly adopt a more in-person touch. We can see this from looking up directions on our PCs and printing out MapQuest, to using digital maps, to using live data, to soon asking AI.

Conceptually, it is easier to refine processes like looking up directions than it is to counter-disrupt what our phones have done to our social exchanges. Our phones and apps do try to talk to each other, and they’ll become better at it over time. The question is, do we try to talk to each other, and will we become better at it as our technology divides us?

The Waffle House Has Found Its New Host

Seeing this comment randomly spring up in my youtube shorts, I found it sometimes humorous, sometimes missing the mark. Seeing this comment a few times made me realize it wasn’t just a poor, unsuitable joke someone misused, but rather a developing meme in response to content. Typically the content contained some kind of “Don’t give a fuck attitude” that would do well in customer service, other times it was just a random reply.

Googling the phrase yields two important results. This article, written just three days ago, concludes that the phrase means nothing at all. This video on the other hand, stands to legitimize the phrase by creating a user-generated advertisement.

Has strong “Library Takeout” vibes

It’s nice to see two polar opposite reactions to internet nonsense. And that’s what this post is really about: invoking meaning from the meaningless. Or rather, contextualizing that which has no context.

I have been doing this type of exercise in all sorts of forms, from content that had much more concentrated meaning like books assigned to me for literature classes, to content made from internet celebrities that is low-brow and well accessible. It is in our nature to find patterns and to dissect them, finding meaning in things that may not have meaning.

Ideas live in generations, from its genesis to each retweet or repost, to how those ideas are consumed by the end user.

Meaning is not only defined by ourselves and by our culture, but also by generational digestion and regurgitation, meaning ideas can evolve over time, especially when ideas grow larger than the speaker and become entrenched with society before any firm ground has been laid on what has been said. This comes largely in the form of catchphrases, used to propagandize the public’s opinion on things, like “Black Lives Matter” or “Believe all Women” which started as humble phrases with good intention and ended up as weaponized rhetoric. This is not to say all catchphrases will fall to the dark side, with some phrases having harder to misinterpret messages, like “Stop Asian Hate.”

Without making this whole post about the power and use of propaganda, I’ll just say that the specifics around bite-sized sound clips has become a business, a science, and a force of politics. And while that is an extreme and harrowing view, this post also started as a dissection of memes spreading around, even without roots.

I’ll touch on the topic of meaning and phrases more in a future post. For now, I’d like to end on an actual Waffle House story, which is not all that related to semantics.

There were not many Waffle Houses in Illinois, where I spent most of my young adulthood. When I traveled for competitive gaming, I would stop by restaurants local to the area, and this area had a Waffle House. I had been told the food was legendary, the service not so much. I’m a fan of these types of places because I can handle being ignored, especially if the food is worth the social experience.

I enjoyed my meal alone before my tournament. As I was paying the tab, I looked over at a mother and her son finishing up their meal, They were asking for a to-go container. The servings were decently large and a to-go container’s nothing new for a big breakfast.

This was not their leftovers. This was a to-go order after their meal had finished. Okay. I’ve seen this before. Maybe someone at home is hungry or maybe they just love Waffle House and they wanted some more for later. What I saw disgusted me. After this mother and son had finished their meal, they had asked for two large waffles to take home. And when they received their Styrofoam package, the son revealed his waffles, took a syrup dispenser from the table, and unleashed an oil spill level of syrup onto his to-go waffles. His mother carefully supervised the whole encounter, only saying “good” when her son twirled the dispenser upright. He closed his food with delight and they hopped off to their car.

Believe me, there’s a lot of things I could comment on. But those waffles are going to be soggy as hell, bro. C’mon you can’t be doing this to yourself. Amongst the several other reasons.

Resource Attitude

Experiments with money are becoming more common with social media. I remember doing small experiments myself whenever I had some pocket money in college. It’s interesting to see people’s reactions to resources and their attitudes towards them. I once took a taxi and paid the driver at the end with a $20 bill. He asked how much change I’d like and I gave him a range. “Oh, I dunno. Four, five, six dollars?” They always gave me the least dollars back. But that’s to be expected from those who work hard and those who are loose with their money, is it not?

The short is well composed with the setup, the antithesis, and the thesis at the end.

The viewer expectation is for the money to go towards those who really need it. And this assumption isn’t a terrible one, as his sign does say “Take what you need.”

Unfortunately this man’s experiment is a great analogy to our world around us. Resources are not distributed based on need, but rather based on want. Wealthy individuals become wealthy by having a hunger for resources. Poor individuals, conversely, become poorer by having apathy towards resources.

Opportunities, business, resources, etc. all come to those who desire it first, ultimately being sold or distributed to those who need it later.

I didn’t intend this post to be an analogy for all opportunity and resources in life, but rather a reflection on attitudes on actions carried out by them. It may seem obvious, but the setup of the video is meant to tug on emotional strings and beckon the viewer to a more charitable and fair world, and that’s just not how the world works. The world works as the video portrays, with the setup inviting failure. Those who take advantage of resources remain wealthy. Those who do not remain poor.

It is a mistake to believe that all people share the same attitudes or viewpoints as others, especially ourselves. It’s also a mistake to believe that what is received in life is fair or needed, when really it is opportunistic and wanted.

The Reasonable Middle

From a clip I can no longer find, Joe Rogan talks about our political divide and how extremists from both sides of the aisle have forsaken a large majority of the population, the reasonable middle, in favor of activating the far-wing agendas.

This happens for several reasons.

The squeaky wheel gets the oil. Or the vocal minority is louder than the silent majority. And reporting bias as well, those who wish to speak up tend to have something to say. We see this in Yelp reviews and product reviews. Are polarizing reviews and beliefs the best way to incite change?

Unfortunately, yes. Political extremism is a great negotiating tactic in which a partisan issue is brought up as strongly and as extremely as possible, all the while being ready to settle with a much lower bargain. Much like starting with an absurdly high dollar amount to leverage the highest barter, political issues too can be gassed up in the hopes that any gain is made.

Reasonable, grounded conversation is sensibly had in the first couple dialogues exchanged. With complex issues, time, innovation, or procedure usually dictate the natural pacing. But with unreasonable, ungrounded conversation, dialogue can go on indefinitely, with very little regard to innovation or procedure. Unreasonable conversations and bad actors can engage far longer than what is socially acceptable on controversial topics.

Without watching the context of this image, we can identify a familiar composition on news television. Grabbing the opinion of several pundits, the network frames varied exchanges and dialogues that range from one side of the aisle to the other. It doesn’t matter what the headline or topic could be, this format works with any regard as long as the network is able to find a contrarian to any viewpoint.

The reason this format is popular is because it spans a lot of time, which daytime television is in abundance of. The format caters to everyone’s opinion regardless of the validity or extremism of it. And as for the reasonable middle population which holds little opinion on the topic, they are not so concerned with the issue to begin with that they would naturally spend lengthy amounts of time watching the topic on the news in the first place. This is why the news is becoming both more polarizing and more willing to engage with controversial topics. It caters to the most passionate, the ones who would spend the most time watching and engaging with the content. This in turn damages the experience for the reasonable middle, the silent majority.

In my personal life, I find it a strength of mine to be able to extend an intellectual hand to the other side of a conversation and to be able to understand their point and reflect on which parts resonated and which parts don’t. As the scale of the conversation grows larger and the viewpoints become more extreme, it seems that the ability to hold genuine dialogue fails as the media, the consumers, and the investors all battle for a part in a nonsensical exchange.

We see this happening with social media, with split-offs from our larger traditional platforms of Twitter and YouTube to smaller, less restrictive, platforms like TRUTH Social or Rumble.

This is partly due to a mass communication and the ability for a completely random person to post their opinion online and for that opinion to carry some, more, or any weight compared to other opinions, when previously this was nearly impossible. Just one generation ago, the likelihood that anyone could write a movie review or share a political view and for that piece of writing to get even 100 people to read it was astronomically smaller than what it is today. Going back further, it is even more dramatic. Because people know they can be heard, they also believe they should be heard. Which, to be honest, not everyone’s opinion should be heard.

While there is a lot more to discuss about the reasonable middle and the extreme ends, I’ve also touched on the topic of gatekeeping and how the internet has allowed everyone universal access to services ranging from sharing opinions to selling products. In future writing, I’ll expand more on both topics.

Proximity and Relations

After the height of the pandemic, I was in need of a part time job so I went out around my town and looked for one. I applied to a few places but the place that accepted me immediately was Jimmy Johns, a sandwich franchise I had once worked for in college.

As usual with minimum wage jobs, there were a handful of teenage coworkers. Teenagers have changed slowly over time, revealing how old I really am. While some things changed and others hadn’t, I would gather little nuggets of information from my coworkers, learning more of the status of the high school, its local community, and what the students were like.

From stories of kids vaping in school, to having sex on campus, social media and flagrant attitudes have embolden students to take their teenage life into their own hands, rather than be subjects of high school. When once high school was an academic time-out to let hormone imbalances naturally settle, it has now become a playpen of agency for high schoolers to compliment and criticize their peers online.

While the topic of social media both dividing us and connecting us with more opportunities is a nuanced and complex topic, the topic of today’s post is actually about the absence of proximity during the pandemic and how it affected high schoolers.

Despite it being early for academic backed papers to come out and address how the pandemic has affected education on an academic level, kids are already describing how the pandemic has affected education on a social level.

The most succinct explanation I got was “they just don’t know how to talk” or “they haven’t really matured” when asking about freshmen and sophomores. The high schoolers explanation was that usually middle school students have a coming of age or maturation in their first two years of high school, developing social skills and and understanding their social environment. That went out the window the two years students were learning from home, in isolation, away from their peers.

I could argue that with or without the pandemic, our younger generation has become more in tune with their phone world than with our shared world, which has several implications on its own, including the inability to communicate with generations that lacked this technology. My previous post, Digital Integration and the Chinese Room, covers how technology and social media have changed our communication.

Social media and our digital evolution is only a part of the equation in why the teenage social atmosphere is the way it is. The other half will be largely influenced by an absence of proximity, caused by large issues like the pandemic ranging to small issues like service on demand.

I’d like to touch on the topic of dating in the digital age as well as further touch on the topic of disconnected communities, within education and other sectors. For now, I’d like to leave off with a question. Technology has created new avenues for old needs, allowing us to do age-old activities in new ways. What are some ways technology could help us do new activities, in age-old ways?

Sidewalk Symmetry

In a recent post, Scarred Discrimination, I touched on the topic of prejudice and difference. Prejudice and difference have appeared in my life in all sorts of forms, from living in low income neighborhoods and personally seeing distrust from race to race, to living in high income neighborhoods and seeing the dynamic between the have and have-nots.

Personally, in my eyes, my own greatest prejudice was imperfection.

In high school, I had a book assigned to me called The House on Mango Street. It’s written in the perspective of a young girl, who writes diary-like entries painting a picture of her life. Reflecting back on the themes of this book, it’s apparent why it resonated with me so much, as my parents were first generation immigrants from China and the book covers the life of immigrants.

I had an assignment to write in the style of the book. I wish I could find the essay I wrote, as even today I feel proud of what I wrote. The book captured a very whimsical, child-like wonder while being very observational, as any immigrant child would be. It’s easy to spot the differences when everyone claims to be normal and you are the one claimed to be different.

With a mix of prose and poetry, I wrote about grass in the sidewalks. When I was younger, I lived in a poor neighborhood with some unkempt yards, some poor sidewalks. I remember being so fond of lines and shapes as a kid, and I would always avoid cracks in the sidewalks. Before I even heard the child’s tale of cracking our mother’s back, I was skipping around sidewalks fast and slow and I always noticed the spaces between each block.

And that is how I always noticed grass in the sidewalks. I noticed cracks, breaks, spaces, and all the imperfections. I remember seeing adults weed whacking, mowing, and even hand removing undesirable landscaping. Wouldn’t it be in everyone’s interest if I helped remove all the grass in the sidewalks?

STOMP. STOMP. STOMP. I wrote. I remember even as a teenager I really tried capturing the author’s voice and her child-like perspective.

Surely just one child passionately stomping around sidewalks could not accomplish much in the name of decimation. Yet that was a true story. I would skip all spaces and cracks, but I would always walk on any vegetation growing out of the pavement. I had been taught by my parents and by my environment, that perfection and imperfection were blatant and obvious to all.

Now, were other kids obsessively destroying things that didn’t match up? No. Were my Asian parents particularly obsessed with perfectionism and othering? Yeah, kind of. This theme of perfection and othering would appear throughout my life, starting with my childhood all the way through my adulthood.

In a previous post, I covered the process and reasoning of subduing culture to assimilate. Is that not similar to stomping out grass to embrace conformity? The ability to blend in is an act of perfection.

There are a lot more themes I’ll cover in the future, such as prejudice towards ourselves and indifference to difference. And the actual, real topic of sidewalks and their design.

Liberal Vindication

I title this post Liberal Vindication but it could be titled with any political party or form of tribalism. Lately, I find the liberal party to be the most self-righteous. Everyone should have conviction in their beliefs. It crosses the line when one’s own beliefs are subjected to others, obligating others to live by their beliefs instead of allowing them to live within their own. This post can get controversial quite quickly, so I’d like to preface by saying there’s always exceptions and nuance to situations and that speaking in broad generalities allows us to see the big picture.

It is not exclusive of the liberal party to push a personal agenda onto public opinion, as that is the nature of voting and lobbying. For many reasons, obvious or subtle, conservative parties may be viewed as the unapologetic party while liberal parties may be seen as a voice for the unheard. Whether this is totally true or not, suppose that one party is seeking justice from another party. Wouldn’t it be natural for the party seeking justice to act as the righteous, to act as the protagonist of the story?

This is where I believe the commonalities of any parties with conviction and the liberal parties end. From my personal experience, from seeing myself and from seeing public figures online, disagreeing with an opposing viewpoint is only the beginning of a twisted relationship. When there once was civil discourse and the freedom to have opposing viewpoints, there is now immediate vitriol as one side stands chest-high, lording over any opponents.

The self-righteous attitude is perfectly acceptable within one’s own personal and private life. But when did it become acceptable to attack others for their viewpoint, to the point that conversation breaks down? Having disagreements is as old as time. Our reactions, our responses, and our navigation of it have changed.

There are huge overarching factors with globalism, the internet, urban sprawl, political divide, and more. Engaging and disengaging with preferred topics and circles has created echo chambers. Our strength and conditioning when encountering disagreements has become weaker and weaker.

The current state of weakness has manifested itself most fully when observing the liberal party’s confrontation of its opponents. In classical debate, when you have your opponent in your sights, you use clear arguments and reasonings to strengthen your position and to weaken theirs. Classical debate is not about the face of an argument and whether that face reacts in a specified manner or not. The end goal of classical debate is not to make the opponent cry, repent, or even change his mind. It is merely to present a strong enough case that your side is socially received as the winner.

Either from a breakdown due to the frustration of the liberal party dealing with conservatives maneuvering around the topic or law or from an unsatisfied result and divide when failing to address their own issues, persuasion and debate have moved from polite and civil discourse to thought policing and speech control.

This in lies the whole premise of our post today. Forced or coerced vindication, which I find to be no different from forced pleas or pleas made under duress, have become a staple tactic when dealing with liberal opposition.

Common tactics and phrases include:
“You should apologize.”
“You should take back what you said.”
“You should promise to never say that again.”
“You should make a claim for or against ___.”

Is this not how we talk to little children who lack judgment or experiences? Are we to talk to grown adults this way and expect their responses to be genuine? It’s one thing to say the above phrases aloud to comfort one’s self and to hear what they want to hear. It’s another thing to believe the phrases above could truly convey the gravity of a conversation and the ability to manifest a different attitude from someone else.

I say this knowing that these types of conversations and sentences are building blocks towards complex and difficult solutions. However, you and I should not be fooled into thinking that all causes are noble. I say this because it is incredibly easy to mix in these opinionated phrases with honest or well meaning ones. And that is where the self-righteous reside, on a thin line between what everyone can agree on and what everyone should agree on. Since when did anyone become in charge of what should be thought of?

This post will be followed up with future posts on topics of individualism vs. collectivism, reality vs. perception, desires and outcomes, and more themes.

Digital Integration and the Chinese Room

The Chinese Room is a famous thought experiment in which a slip of paper written in Chinese is handed to a mysterious machine or room. Within this room or machine, are systems which interpret the Chinese into English. With an English translation, it formulates a response. This response is applied through the same systems to translate the English into Chinese characters. At the end of it all, the machine or room spits out a new slip of paper responding in Chinese.

While this sounds like a complex Rube Goldberg contraption, it really is a simple interpretation of a translation machine, written out as a thought experiment before technology could allow for said translation.

The point of the thought experiment is to ask the reader: does the Chinese room understand Chinese? In the thought experiment, there is an infinite and always accurate amount of translations the Chinese room can handle. But because it has to go through an interpretative process and is unable to directly communicate in Chinese, the Chinese room fails to meet the criteria of truly understanding the language. It must consistently rely on tools to interact with the language.

How does the Chinese Room apply to ourselves and our world outside of the analogy of language? Do we operate by reading symbols and characters, filing and sorting interpretations, and respond with said initial symbols and characters? I’d largely say yes, especially as we spend more time in digital spaces with computers and smartphones. Interpretation of spaces and boundaries, expression with colloquialisms or memes, and societal expectations have shifted our language and the tools we use to express ourselves.

This is most easily observed with the pre-Internet generation interacting with the post-Internet generation. The ability to communicate on a meaningful level has changed, not because of the nature of English or whatever common language is shared. Rather our ability to navigate and interact with spaces has dramatically changed. From the globalization of our supermarkets to the globalization of social interaction, our expectations and habits have dramatically shifted and continue to rapidly evolve. The younger generation is quick to adapt and older generations or those who fail to adapt will have a harder time communicating with those who do.

In the Wikipedia article of the Chinese Room, the applied ethics section covers remote military operations and the morality of taking actions upon interpreted data.

The Chinese Room has an intense implication of the Turing Test and determining whether something is human. The question of authenticity or consciousness is a popular existential problem for artificial intelligence. However, the reflection or internal observation of the Chinese Room with ourselves helps us examine what we are becoming as we integrate with technology and how we respond socially to others as our world evolves. The question of does AI truly understand could be inversed to do humans truly live?

Calm is the Rock in Rain

Not every day is sunny
Know the rain will pass
Ease the mind and body
Not too slow or fast
Face the cold, dark winds
The storm breaks just ahead
To this point you followed
What’s left must be led

Roars of thunder clamor
Fear had made us hide
Clear streaks of lightning
Blinded by our pride
Under this rock we stand
Ready for what’s to find
Saying this to ourselves
It’s different this time