18396D 12H 12M 34S

I don’t know why I do this, but my diary entries are numbered in days as well as dates, starting with my first dated comment referring to an actual date when my mother suggested starting one, which was “17th July, 1975 ¶ I saw two spaceships docking”, referring to the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project. I choose to date it more precisely to the handshake between Thomas P. Stafford and Alexei Leonov at 2:17 pm, CDT. This was 8:17 pm BST, and I’ve rounded it off to the start of the minute. This numbering system is a little reminiscent of the Julian Date, which is the number of days elapsed since 1st January 4713 BCE, which was the last year the Indiction, Solar and Lunar years coincided. Two of those are self-evident but the first refers to a fifteen-year assessment for taxation in the Roman Empire, and I presume it’s in there because it used to be used as a proxy date. Obviously all three of these are proleptic, i.e. projected back before their real invention, because the year didn’t used to begin in January and the Roman Empire didn’t exist that far back. The point of the Julian Date is to provide a standard for the timing of astronomical events. It’s also used to calculate best before and sell by dates, batch tracking (for instance for product recalls), converting between calendars of different cultures and for dates in databases, since it’s less cumbersome than using the peculiar and fairly irregular numbers for the days of the month. However, in these situations it tends to be cut off and the date is recorded as the number of days since a more recent date, since otherwise the number would be needlessly large. The exact current Julian date is 2461006.828461, or actually it’s moved on since then. It actually begins at noon GMT, presumably because most astronomical events were recorded at night. It also, incidentally, provides decimal time, which makes things easier but is in the wrong base. My own dating system is based on days since a certain date, so in a way it is a real Julian Date. I have changed it several times. It used to be based on what was coincidentally my parents’ sixteenth wedding anniversary but I realised that prevented me from referring to dates before that, so I changed it to the first dated incident I wrote down. There is an earlier date in April 1975 but it just records the measurements of a staircase so it’s not about a temporal event and I ignore it. My sister once pointed out that I was recording historical events which were not appropriate for a personal diary, but in fact more than 99% of them are in fact personal.

It looks a bit odd to me that I’ve written out (18396) above, because I’ve almost always just used it in my diary and it feels like I’m revealing something intimate and personal by writing it out publicly. Another thing about it is that for me the day starts at 7:17 pm GMT, but I ignore that most of the time. If the Julian date had been used for computers there needn’t have been any Y2K problem. Incidentally, that wasn’t a panic about nothing, but I don’t want to get too distracted here. If it had been recorded as a 24-bit value, it wouldn’t have become an issue for tens of millennia. There are quite a few peculiar things about Y2K, not least the fact that software actually does use Julian Dates.

This has been on my mind recently for two reasons. One is that I’m writing an astronomical calendar for a client, so I should probably use Julian Dates for that for simplicity’s sake. That’s what they’re for of course. The other is that I couldn’t resist watching the current Vince Gilligan series ‘Pluribus’, which uses a similar day-based dating system for time before and since the Joining. I should point out that I have subscribed to Apple TV before, and no it isn’t ideal that I’ve had to do this again to watch it. I’m not going to try to defend that decision, but I will say that the quality of Vince Gilligan’s and his associated team’s work is so high that it’s hard to resist the temptation to do this. Just this moment, I’m wondering about whether I should introduce a spoiler warning, and I suppose I should but I’m not sure how important that is. At some point I will talk about the nature of spoilers and when they are and aren’t appropriate, but that’s for another monologue.

So here we go:

SPOILER WARNING

‘Pluribus’, styled as “PLUR1BUS”, has a title which can be analysed as “You Are 1: Be Us”, which makes me wonder if “PL” is also significant. It does constitute the first two letters of “please” I suppose. This sums up the premise of the series. The Very Large Array radio astronomy facility in New Mexico detects a signal repeating every seventy-eight seconds from the direction of the TRAPPIST-1 system around six hundred light years away, consisting of four different codes, and the scientists deduce that it’s an RNA sequence although I’m not sure why because DNA also has four bases. I should probably explain this although I think it may be common knowledge. DNA stores genetic code in most living things and RNA is the medium they use to transcribe that code into proteins. It does make sense that RNA would be used for this purpose, since it is actually being used to transmit information rather than store it. There are also some viruses which use RNA instead of DNA, and also some smaller things which I don’t fully understand which seem to be bare RNA molecules which behave like viruses which are candidates for the smallest life forms of all, assuming they are alive.

At this point it’s worth saying that conceptually the series is worth dividing into the setting and therefore science fictional stuff and the more conventional aspect of the story, which I will get to. Back to the science side then.

There are a number of whiteboards shown throughout the series so far. The first has equations on it referring to signal processing, the second is a plan for creating the virus and the third and fourth, unless I’ve missed some, are Carol’s whiteboards, one for planning her next mass-market romantic fantasy novel and the other detailing of what she’s determined about the Joined in an attempt to repeat them. I have no idea if this is significant or whether it’s just a good way to convey exposition and maybe conceal Easter Eggs. Possibly significant, I don’t know

A defence organisation in Annapolis, MD put together the genome and test it on rats. Unsurprisingly, it’s clear to neither the scientists nor the viewers at this point exactly what the RNA code does, but one interesting detail is that there is a gene in it which encodes for a receptor which responds to the scent of Convallaria majalis or lily of the valley and is also found in sperm cells and attracts them. This is possibly nothing, but it may be a reference to the lily of the valley storyline in ‘Breaking Bad’. It’s probably too obscure to be more than a passing reference. The astronomers also speculate that the dish or other antenna used to send the message must have been the size of Afrika.

One of the rats appears to have died and a scientist, suitably protected, picks them up and tries to feel for a pulse, but since she’s wearing gloves she can’t do so, takes one off and gives the rat cardiac massage, and they then wake up and bite her. Although she tries to wash it out and follow the emergency protocol, it doesn’t work and she’s infected. She then infects everyone else in the facility by kissing them, licking doughnuts on reception and pretty soon there are planes dropping the virus from the sky and infecting every human in the world. The result is that almost the whole human world becomes a single hive mind with the exception of thirteen people, including one in Paraguay who was undiscovered and appears to have avoided being infected. The other twelve are immune. Five of them speak English as a second language and one, Carol, is the focus of the series. She lives in New Mexico and her partner was killed by falling backwards when she, like almost everyone else, has a seizure on being infected.

Now there’s the larger, as it were Galactic, picture in the story and the smaller global one. The former is of course open to interpretation and on a galactic scale six hundred light years is practically next door. A fairly simple explanation for the developing scenario is that the Galaxy has a plague or a process which eliminates threats, like how the immune system eliminates cancer. At some point, civilisation becomes able to carry out genetic modification and decode messages from other star systems. When this happens, it detects a message, interprets it and out of curiosity turns it into a virus, which it is then infected by. This causes it to form a hive mind, build an enormous transmitter and send the genome signal to other star systems, and the cycle repeats. This could be a few things. It could simply be the next stage in the evolution of intelligence, a plague which is spreading through the Galaxy or a galactic defence system that renders potentially harmful species innocuous. Or, it could be pre-emptive action by another civilisation attempting to neutralise humanity, deliberately targetted at us. Scientifically, this makes more sense because the codes involved are RNA bases, suggesting that it’s designed for functioning among life on this planet unless RNA and DNA are the only basis for life.

To nitpick, it isn’t clear why adenine, uracil, cytosine and guanine were chosen for which of the four bases. There are presumably four types of signal and it does make sense that humans would interpret these as bases, but how do they know which is which and why did they see one as uracil rather than thymine? There are also other bases, such as flurouracil, used in cancer chemotherapy, and the synthetic pair known as P, Z, S and B, and some viruses use unusual bases to protect themselves from host defences.

All this, though, is about the science and very probably the point of the series is not connected to the wider Universe as such. Many fans of ‘The Walking Dead’ zombie series got very focussed on the idea of a cure or an explanation for the cause when in fact the point of the show was entirely unconnected to that, so far as I know – (<=en-dash – I am a real human) — I stopped watching it after I think the fourth series. It might not matter how it happened.

Possibly, heteronormativity prevented me from realising that Helen and Carol were a romantic item all the way through the first episode. However, I tend to do that with heterosexual couples too, so maybe not, but I don’t think it was very clear. I thought Helen was Carol’s agent who had become a friend. One important aspect of Carol being queer is that she’s estranged from her parents due to them sending her to conversion torture and has no children, which is not inevitable of course but probably is more likely. This puts her in a different position with regard to intimate relationships, particularly because Helen dies in the pilot. However, she becomes one of the joint in the final moments of her life and the hive mind therefore has access to all her experience, memories and personality, to a greater extent in fact than Carol ever had. She feels violated by this and she orders them to close Helen’s memories off and never to refer to them again, though on one occasion so far she’s caved into temptation when she wanted to know what Helen thought of her writing.

More than eight hundred million people died when the Joining took place. I presume this is due to things like people operating heavy machinery, driving passenger vehicles, crossing roads, being in the middle of surgery and so on when the virus hit, but some viewers have suggested that they deliberately killed some of those infected. I don’t think this is what’s happening though. It also emerges that if Helen expresses strong negative emotions towards them, they have seizures and on the one occasion when she did this so far, eleven million people were killed, meaning that she has to tread very carefully.

The hive mind is working towards assimilating all the people who have not been so far and they don’t know how long it’ll take. Most of the other people who are immune are entirely happy with the situation and at least one of the children wants to become part of the hive mind. Some of the others, notably an Indian woman called Laxmi, haven’t accepted that people close to them have had their identities dissolved into the collective. Carol has the Joined arrange a meeting of all the willing English speakers and they travel to Bilbao where she meets with them in Airforce One, which has been commandeered by a Mauritanian immune person called Koumba Diabaté, to whom I shall return. In this meeting, she comes across as a typically American White saviour and also to some extent a Karen, and in fact she has strong Karen energy throughout. She’s the only White person there and everyone else’s English is a second language, but she has insisted on English speakers rather than allowing interpreters. It’s understandable that she might not trust them, but – okay look, this is getting too involved. Right now I have a huge blizzard of thoughts about the show and I’m just going to jot down a few points.

• Event TV used to be something which united people in a particular country and in a sense, very occasionally, globally, as with the lunar landing with Apollo II, and maybe to a very limited extent the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project on (1), but with the advance of the internet and the advent of access to non-live video, among other things, there has been fragmentation. ‘Pluribus’ is in a sense a unifying factor although it isn’t easily accessible or on the main streaming services, which is a shame because it would be appropriate if it were.
• There’s a purple and green thing going on, which is interesting because those are the two main colours of aurora. I’m not sure what they mean, but there’s a pattern, as there was in ‘Breaking Bad’, of colour-coding. Purple was associated with Marie, whose clothing stays purple until almost the end of the series, green with Walter White more than anyone else and associated with money, greed and jealousy. Purple is the colour of the emperor, so it may be that purple in this signals those who rule, i.e. the Joined or the virus, which starts off in a purple solution. Green also symbolises growth and change. I don’t know what to do with this. Yellow also seems significant – Carol wears a yellow jacket at the start of the season.
• “Soylent Green Is People”. Right now, and this is why I’m rushing this out on (18402) because the next episode, ‘HDP’, is out on (18404) (again, this feels weird), Carol has found that the Joined are constantly drinking “milk”, which is however a plasma- or serum-like yellow fluid which we are at least led to believe from the final scene is partly made from something shocking, presumably human corpses. The issue, though, is that it probably either isn’t that simple or is misleading. Maybe the yellowness is also significant, I don’t know. My current presumption is that the 800 million deaths led to a surplus of corpses which are rendered down into nutrients or possibly some kind of culture medium for the virus or source of antibodies against a simple and relatively harmless pathogen which would enable them to become individual again.
• Things like serial numbers, licence plates and other sequences of characters may be significant. In ‘Breaking Bad’, these referred to colours as hex triplets. But there’s more going on than colour in this.
• There’s a suggestion that Carol’s unpublished novel ‘Bitter Chrysalis’ is connected to the outcome of the series in some way, for instance that its plot prefigures the arc of the show. There was a large butterfly on the wall of the ice hotel in Norway. It could simply be that Carol has to become the butterfly through the bitterness of her experience.
• Even if the viewers’ sympathy is meant to be with Carol as the product of capitalism against the Joined as communism, and of course my sympathy would be the opposite, it’s still interesting as a study of the American Way. Gilligan is in any event a genius at making us root for the bad guy.
• Speaking of which, maybe this is a mirror image of ‘Breaking Bad’, which is “Mr Chips becomes Scarface”. This is an unsympathetic character whom circumstances force to be a messiah.
• Speaking of which, obviously he gets us onto Team Carol, but actually there’s not a lot wrong with her. It’s more that women are rarely permitted to behave like that in popular culture. In real life it’s not quite so bad. She’s the opposite of a Manic Pixie Dream Girl.
• Connections have been suggested with a ‘Twilight Zone’ episode. I personally perceive connections with David Brin’s ‘The Giving Plague‘ and possibly even Andy Weir’s ‘Project Hail Mary’ in the sense of an interstellar plague, which links to Olaf Stapledon too. There’s an episode of ‘The Twilight Zone’ called ‘Third From The Sun’ with a character in it called Will Sturka, based on a 1950 Richard Matheson story. It doesn’t seem to be otherwise connected. In ‘The Giving Plague’ a sociopathic scientist has to deal with a blood-borne virus which causes people to become more altruistic and therefore more likely to give blood, and ends up faking altruism out of necessity. ‘Project Hail Mary’ has an algal plague spreading between yellow dwarf star systems which dims their suns, which is more loosely connected, and Olaf Stapledon has two instances of interstellar plagues, one of which, the “Mad Star”, infects stars and ends up seeming to wipe out the human species in the distant future, and the other of which is spread by apparently very sane, virtuous and balanced civilisations on various planets which gradually, through interaction with beings in other star systems, would conclude that it would be in the other civilisation’s interest to have its culture destroyed or even the species exterminated.

So there’s plenty more, and I realise this has broken down into disorder but I want to get this out now to beat the deadline of ‘HDP’ being released, which incidentally seems to stand for “Human Derived Protein”.

That’s it for now.

11A0 – 11B0

One of the drawbacks of the Unicode system is that it lacks proper duodecimal symbols. Hence rather than using unambiguous dozenal symbols, of which there are various forms, none of which I can type here, I’ve resorted to using A and B to represent ten and eleven. When I first thought about writing this post, it was going to be about the 1990s CE, but since I am fairly committed to duodecimal it’s instead about the years 1992 to 2004. At the start of this cycle (which is what I call the analogue to decades in duodecimal, after “A Cycle Of Cathay”), I was two dozen and obviously at the end I was three dozen, so it covers what might be regarded as the first cycle of my adult life. Almost equivalent to a Jovian year in fact. The brain is said to stop growing at the age of two dozen, so that could be said to mark the beginning of adulthood. It’s sometimes informative to shake up the way we measure space and time to see if it brings any new insights.

One insight this brings is the tendency for most of the world to think in terms of decades, centuries and millennia, because those bits of rhetoric and marketing, for example, and the psychological divisions created by nice, neat round numbers in our lives and history, will tend to be at odds with this method of reckoning ages and dates. There will appear to be a sudden flurry of activity around 11A8 which represents Y2K and the turn of the Millennium which looks quite distinct and perhaps a bit odd from a duodecimal perspective. Had we been working to a different base, and let’s face it it probably would’ve been octal or hexadecimal rather than duodecimal because of how digital computers represent integers, the year 2000 would’ve been 3720 or 7C0, both round numbers to be sure but not epoch-making ones.

While I’m on the subject of Y2K, this was one significant concern during the 11A0s. However, in some ways it was also a decidedly odd one. Whereas it made sense that various mainframes would be grinding through two-digit representations of the year in that way, programmers of yore having opted to save storage space back in the 1170s and 1180s because they expected the year 11A8 to be the realm of science fiction, hover cars and holidays on Cynthia, Microsoft didn’t have the same excuse because DOS had stored the year as a value starting from 4th January 1980₁₀ which would not have gone round the clock on 1st January 11A8 at all, and for some reason it was a problem they had actually introduced with Windows when it became an operating system rather than a front end quite a bit closer to the crucial date. I have no idea why they did this but it seems irrational.

There is an æsthetic based on this period, or the latter half of it at least, characterised by futurism, optimism and shiny, liquid and spherical 3-D CGI. It was the cycle the internet went mainstream, and up until 9/11 there seemed to be a distinct atmosphere of optimism about the future. It may have been ephemeral and vapid, but it was there. And this is where I have some sympathy, though not agreement, with the conspiracy theories built up around the Twin Towers. I can’t remember the minutiæ of their content and it may have been rather dissimilar to my view, but the parsimonious, Ockham’s Razor-style approach to be taken to this is to assert that building up the War On Terror around the incident made it very convenient for the military-industrial complex. It would be going too far to assert anything else, or to insert “suspiciously” into that, and in fact to do so would distract from the situation we need to confront: that it led to the situation where the idea of making life better for people was discarded for a fatuous agenda of protecting the public from violence committed by non-state actors, without regard for the cause of these acts or how to prevent them by changing social conditions, or comparing the number of people killed with the number killed in the countries concerned by the NATO powers. Subjectively, it was like they just couldn’t let us be hopeful or look forward to a better future. Oh no. They had to crap on our dreams instead.

But the dreams were in any case nebulous. In this country they were, for me, associated with the fairly mournful and small expectation that New Labour had been lying about being right wing extremists. That government also entered into an illegal war on the back of 9/11. Even so, on the day after the election in May 11A5 people were smiling at each other in the street because we thought the dozen and a half year long nightmare was finally over. For me, much of the time was very positive, because in that period we got married and had our two children, but this isn’t meant to be personal. In contradiction to that, it was also when I got heavily involved in home ed, trained, qualified and started to practice as a herbalist.

This was also the cycle when the internet became the Web. This actually started with the World Wide Web browser in 119A, Tim Berners-Lee’s invention of course, but even when I started using it at home in 11A7 there was still quite a presence in the form of the likes of Usenet, FTP sites and so on. At the time, this seemed like an entirely positive resource although I had reservations about inequality of access in the global South which led me to doubt the wisdom of allowing myself the privilege. It was also very expensive in terms of bytes per pound compared to today. What was definitely absent at the time was the strong influence of social media. There’s a sense in which social media have existed since the 1170s in the form of PLATO at the University of Illinois, and behaviour on bulletin boards was quite like that, but the scale on which it happened was very small compared to the world’s population. Classmates is a possible instance of the earliest social media website although there are various contenders: this one dates from 11A3. In another area of IT telecommunications, mobile ‘phones started to take off and as an afterthought, texting was included. This became very significant during the 11A0s and mobiles moved from being yuppie devices to must-haves. I actually still haven’t adjusted to this, to the annoyance of my immediate family, so in a sense to me the revolution afforded by mobile devices hasn’t happened in the same way. On the whole, I don’t think this is a bad thing.

Things were a lot more analogue back then. Video cassettes and laser discs, the latter very obscure to most people, were the only way to watch things on TV other than actual live-broadcast television itself. However, digital optical discs had existed since before the beginning of the cycle. This is a pattern, not particularly distinctive of the ‘A0s, that the technologies which were later to transform society already existed but had not been widely adopted. However, I don’t want this to turn into a mere consumerist survey of high-tech products, so I’ll go all the way back to the “End Of History”.

In 11A0, Francis Fukuyama claimed in his book of the same name that history had ended. What he meant by this was not that events would cease to occur but that liberal democracy had proved itself to be the best form of government and that it would in the long term become increasingly prevalent. This is an overwhelmingly depressing and perhaps smug position, and in fact I don’t think it even makes sense. The problem with the idea that liberal democracy will triumph is that the parties involved in such governments would ideally aim for something other than liberal democracy, such as fascism or socialism or something less extreme, and proper politics without those aims is impossible. Fukuyama’s view of “democracy” would be anything but, because it would involve bland, practically identical political parties which did nothing to change the status quo, and that isn’t democracy, whether you’re right wing, left wing or something else. It’s also proved not to be so since in any case, since nationalism, conservative religion and various forms of authoritarianism have become more influential since then. Now I have to admit that I haven’t read his book, but the ideas are around in public discourse. This is related to the blandification of the Labour Party during this period. People didn’t seem to want to vote for something which was actually good.

One of the most shocking things for British progressives over this period was the Conservative victory in 11A0. It was widely believed that Labour would win the election that year, and even exit polls strongly suggested a Labour majority. Instead, the Tories received a record-breaking number of votes. Following on my experience in the previous year where I became utterly disgusted with popular support for the first Gulf War, I just got really angry with English people in general at their dishonesty and cowardice. They hadn’t admitted that they were voting for the “nasty party” because they were ashamed, so on some level they either recognised it was wrong or that they wouldn’t be able to convince people that it was the right thing to do. This was probably the first time I experienced the peculiar nightmarish quality of a traumatically negative electoral or referendum result coming in on the radio overnight, which was to be repeated several times until the Trump and Brexit results. It also made the relatively progressive years between 1161 and 118B look like a blip in history when things were getting better for the common people, but the idea of doing that was now consigned to history.

All of that sounds quite depressing. However, it isn’t the whole story. The beginning of the cycle had been a time of awakening consciousness for many people, with Acid House and Ecstasy becoming important. I didn’t partake myself although the end of the previous cycle had involved a lot of dancing and clubbing. It felt like there was going to be some kind of conceptual breakthrough, although it had also been observed that the use of psychedelic drugs like LSD at that time was more like wanting a picture show than a fundamental shift in consciousness. I can’t comment from an informed position on that, but it seems to me that they have such a profound influence on the mind that even if people went into it with that in mind, they would still come out profoundly changed. Of course, the government either didn’t like this or decided to capitalise on some mythical “Middle England” by introducing the Criminal Justice Bill with its notorious “succession of repetitive beats” clause, and a number of other measures such as the end to the right to silence. This was in 11A2. It also clamped down on squatters, hunt sabbers and anti-roads protests. Another quote from the government at about this time was something like “we don’t want to go down in history as the government which allowed any kind of alternative society to survive”, which had a flavour of genocide about it. Also, in order for that to work, society as it was would need to have some kind of appeal to it and not be bent on the destruction of the planet.

In many ways, then, this period was one of contradictions. The establishment was heavily asserting itself in academia, which made me wonder about complacency in that area. This was just after I’d dropped out of an academic career in disgust at Nick Land’s and other people’s response to neoliberalism as almost something to be enjoyed, and feminist hostility to animal liberation. It occurs to me now that I might have stayed to defend progressive opinion and movements, and after that disillusionment I became rather aimless and cynical. But on the other hand, it was also a cycle of hope and optimism, with the expectation that progress could be made in other ways. And it wasn’t all negative. Nelson Mandela became president of South Africa, Germany reunified (this is a mixed bag of course but it meant the reunification of communities too), there was the Good Friday Agreement (again a mix because it seemed to mean giving up hope of a reunified Ireland), the re-establishment of the Scottish Parliament and the establishment of the Welsh Assembly, and on reflection the real flavour of that period was a strange mix of hope and despair. Hope seemed to be sustained through lack of political analysis and despair emerged on close examination of events, but that doesn’t invalidate the more positive side. I suppose the real question is, how can we extend the principle of hope, as Ernst Bloch put it, from this superficial shiny façade into something more profound which transmutes political action into something valuable?