One of the questions that came up was whether reporters should read the scientific papers related to the story that they are covering.

Is that even a question?

Perhaps it’s me being naive, but I honestly thought that every professional science journalist (that is, someone who is devoted to write about science, and not just some random journalist who happens to have to write about science) had to have a science degree (and possibly some research experience). I couldn’t think someone could enter this job without being able to follow, at least generally, a scientific paper.

I am honestly scared that a serious conference, and then a Nature blog, no less, both feel this is a genuine question to be asked.

It’s true that most scientists do not read beyond their own discipline, but that’s exactly what should separate a potential science journalist from a normal scientist. A science journalist should be someone who enjoys reading papers from a lot of disciplines -that’s what the job is all about!

At least, reading and learning about multiple disciplines was one of the factors that led me to think I was suited to be no more a scientist but a potential science writer (in Italian, in case you wonder about my shoddy English): I was spending more time reading papers about entirely other stuff than work-related ones.

Yes, jargon can be a barrier between different disciplines -and surely if you give me a particle physics paper, my molecular biologist self can be confused. Still, again, a science journalist should be someone who knows a bit of every field, and if they meet some concept they do not know, they should do their best to learn it, at least roughly, before going on writing. Science writers are there to let people understand science: how can they explain to others if they do not understand it themselves?

Then, here I’d like to report to my non-US readers what some excerpts from a Reddit thread on the work condition in USA. Read how real capitalism works, and weep.

In a recent post, a friend of mine poses a long-standing question I’m quite obsessed with. Who owns the fictional universes that an author creates?

The problem arises from a practical discussion. An author, Alan Moore, wrote a work of art, Watchmen. This work traces a parallel universe, a possible world, characters, a sequence of stories and psychologies. As it seems, the contract signed by Moore gives to a third party -DC Comics- the rights not only on the work Watchmen (interpreted strictly as the sequence of text and images it is made of) but also on the Watchmen universe. Therefore now DC is making a prequel of it, that is, a work that is not Watchmen but contains the same characters, builds upon the same universe and extends it.

Is it right or wrong? The mainstream opinion about comic book authors, with various tones, is that it is legal but morally wrong: DC can do it, but it shouldn’t, because the Watchmen author doesn’t want anything like that, and this is somehow immoral.

My friend, writer Susanna Raule, sums it up in a comment her point of view:

I believe that in giving away intellectual property one should behave just like for extreme sex: you can do anything, provided everybody is consenting.

Now, in the specific Alan Moore-Watchmen controversy, there are also a lot of other aspects: the greediness of DC and the asymmetry between giant publishing houses and authors in contractual power, the monopoly of DC etc. But let’s forget all of that, because these are somehow tangential questions (they will come back). Let’s put forward a basic question. If I invent a fictional universe, and someone else wants to use it, should I be asked?

I have been poisoned, in my early teens, by Borges’ Library of Babel and by the infinite monkey theorem, therefore I know authors are just, in the end, machines that output artworks. Authors shine in being, by and far, the most efficient artwork-producing machinery, but this proposition, true today, could be false tomorrow. Other systems are in fact conceivable: every young programmer worth its name has written at least a poetry automatic generator (with not necessarily awful results).

This truth could appear bizarrely degrading to authors, but it isn’t: being able of doing something as subtle and mindbogglingly complex like creating a work of art, and doing it better than anything else is worth of pride for the human brain (A merit is probably due to the fact that the enjoyers of works of art are, often, other human brains). But to know that -that is, to know that artworks are mere combination of bits- allows us to look with a different perspective the whole concept of authorship.

Often it is considered fact (and more often than not by the authors) that a work, once generated, remains in some philosophical sense a property of the author. This then crystallizes practically as the legal intellectual property system -but even in a world devoid of any intellectual property protection, we would feel almost instinctively that, if Susanna writes comics or books, characters of such books are somehow hers, that she is the only one entitled to pull strings to her puppets.

But in truth Susanna Raule, even if she generated the work, is not the work itself. Someone else, in fact, could have well written or conceived it (Borges remarked that, given an eternity of time, it is unavoidable to write the Odyssey, for example). It happens that she did that, but this wasn’t necessary, nor this necessarily means that she is the only one entitled to decide of her work.

To be honest, it is often permitted (both by laws on intellectual property and by authors’ good will) a right on satire or knowledgeable hommage, like the works of the so called fan fiction. This however doesn’t affect what said above: authors believe to be puppet masters that control their puppets, and even if they can sometimes borrow them for others to play, it’s still them that decide who, when and how.

Problem is, the puppets are considered hers only inasmuch she has generated them. But now, what do we mean with “hers”? Just that she generated them. Does this entitles her with other moral rights, automatically? Our human sons and daugthers may bear our surname or our eye’s colour or hair’s curl, but they are not really ours: they are indeed independent creatures that can do -and indeed do- what they like. Differently from offspring, creative works are somehow immediately autonomous: once they are published they go round the world practically independently from the authors’ will. They talk to people the authors would have never wanted to meet. They say things the author never thought to mean. They give rise to totally unexpected reactions. They are something else, independent from the author -authors happened to generate them, but that’s it. Indeed, the merit of the author is that to have unleashed this independent (from his will) interaction between the artwork and the public.

This is even more true for the concepts that underlie a fictional work: ideas, characters, the cosmos a fictional work implies and generates.

This point of view can look like an idiosyncracy of mine, but in fact I just described the most ancient of human creative activities: myth. Long before we invented copyright and intellectual property, humankind narrated itself through characters, stories, sceneries and universes that were shared by whole populations across the generations. Homer didn’t ask anything to sing the ire of Achylles, Virgil didn’t ask permission to Homer to write the Aeneid ; Marlowe, Goethe and Mann didn’t ask anything to the unknown author of Doctor Faust.

A mythology isn’t but a fictional universe shared by many -and between these many are the marvellous fiction machines (and therefore myth machines) that authors are. Every sharing of a myth, is an alteration of the myth: my Faust is not your Faust. A myth is therefore a malleable material, that authors can and do use as a building material: a familiar framework on top of which one can build an enhanced communication. Communication which is often (in this postmodern era) about the myth itself, and generates works whose beauty and interest and depth would be unconceivable without the ability to use shared myths (unless we resort to much less efficient libraries of Babel).

For these reasons -that is, the richness that myth conveys, its tradition and the skeptcism on a metaphysical  connection between authors and their works, I am against evey intellectual property restriction on fictional worlds. Every time we restrict the ability to use freely fictional universes and characters, we restrict in an unnecessary way the number and type of artworks we are going to enjoy. With such restrictions, we can’t see how other authors do see such worlds -worlds that we know as much as our real one, often. Let’s think about the simple myths of our era: let’s imagine indie filmmakers writing movies in the Star Wars universe; let’s imagine what if we had indie comics about The Godfather, let’s think about rewriting the Lord of the Rings from Mordor’s point of view (this already happened, but it is hard to find due exactly to intellectual property protection of authorship).

Or a world where authors revisit and renew, with exceptional talent, Superman, The Swamp Thing, Batman or even mix together dozens of literary universes together. Yep, because bitter irony wants that Alan Moore, now entrenched into refusal of seeing his own myths living against his will, built his career like nobody else by reusing imaginary worlds. The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen by Moore is exactly an exercise in conscious reelaboration and reuse of literary myth, where finally (and a bit oneirically) captain Nemo, doctor Moreau, Mr.Hyde and Martian tripods live together in a consistent story. Would we like a world where Wells or Verne could have stopped this from happening?

Someone will object that, all good intentions aside, authors still need to be paid for their work. But this isn’t going to change with freeing up fictional universes -it is quite independent from protection of works themselves. Only, if you want to live by doing Donald Duck, you have to prove yours are the best Donald Duck stories. There still would be competition, only now there would be more possibilities: one could compete by being the best at retelling and reinventing Star Wars or Neon Genesis Evangelion. After all, the world is also full of good ideas that have been met by mediocre realization -and the impossibility to reuse them is, truly, a crime.

What I mean is just to allow everyone to use what is, already, owned by everyone in their own imagination -and let everyone build upon everyone else in rebuilding and remixing fictional worlds. Let’s myths create themselves their own destiny, and let us authors not be afraid of letting their creative offspring free in the world. If you, who create a fictional universe, happen by chance to be also the best ones in narrating it, don’t be afraid to prove it.

The first world

Reddit cultivates its own sense of humour, and among humorous subforums there is, famous, /r/firstworldproblems. Here, “first world” is intended as meaning developed nations. The “first world problems” are “frustrations and complaints that are only experienced by privileged individuals in wealthy countries. It is typically used as a tongue-in-cheek comedic device to make light of trivial inconveniences.”

A typical First World problem

The Second, Third and Fourth World

Of course the original subdivision included the Second world, the (most famous of all) Third world and the Fourth world. All of them are represented on Reddit (click on image to reach the forum):

Threads in /r/secondworldproblems. The shiny daily life in socialist countries.

Typical /r/thirldworldproblems. I have no idea of where third world problems are discussed seriously on Reddit.

Usual /r/fourthworldproblems: the happy and simple life of tribes.

The Fifth World

Until so, nothing more than banter and satire on current world issues and division. But the Reddit hivemind soon asked itself: well, why should we limit to the classical four worlds? What is beyond that?

Enter now the Fifth World, which is a true through-the-looking-glass experience. You traveled the world from first to fourth: now you go forward and see what’s beyond.

/r/fifthworldproblems : everyday problems beyond your usual dimensions

The fifth world is all about the everyday inconveniences of transcendence. It’s peeling the veil of logic and rules and being puzzled by the surreality below. It’s opening your door and finding yourself in a painting of Magritte, or worse.

This is how an usual discussion on /r/fifthworld develops:

I wanted to make an apple pie from scratch, but the universe I created only spawns peaches

Although it’s likely that it ceased to exist once you left, perhaps you should try returning to the universe you existed within before creating this peach-only universe–bring a peach with you it may just become an apple

No, no, no. The only way an external object being brought through spacetime unto another plane could be physically changed is if another parallel universe is created from the peach universe. It’s as though you want him to suffer from inter-dimensional paradox fever.

Of course you’re right, but if you’d like to get off your high horse for a second: For many transcends, creating a universe is a one-time deal. I know the upper-echelon of Overlord Zangarth’s court may be able to create dimensions left and right, but think of those of us who can only catch a glimpse of the horrors in the multiscape once.

There are no common notions of space and time in the fifth world. It seems it is a general denomination that in truth encompasses several universes (that can be created and destroyed at will) and several dimensionalities, or none. Laws of physics or math seem to exist only to bother you at the very least convenient moment. Or, sometimes, more weird and less comprehensible stuff altogether happens, and it seems the forum has interesting members.

There is only a constant in the fifth world, apparently, and it’s that everybody is named Stephen (apparently due to this unfortunate time travel incident).

We don’t need to stretch our imagination to know how the Fifth World looks like, the Reddit community is nice enough to have provided a whole subforum dedicated to fifth world pics. Such images seem to confirm that the whole concepts of logic, dimensionality and spacetime are, somehow, different out there.

Fifth world inhabitant.

Other fifth world dwellers on a perfectly normal day

Commuting in the Fifth World during a winter day

The Sixth World

What could possibly be beyond the mind-bending vastities of the Fifth World? Nobody really knows, but it must be terrible, because all we have from the Sixth World are screams of various nature.

/r/sixthworldproblems. Whatever it is the Sixth World, it looks like pain

There is practically nothing intelligible about the sixth world. If the fifth was surreal and logic-twisting, but after all still describable in human words, this can’t be said for the sixth world. Only madness is there; only screaming can be had.

The Seventh World

What is beyond madness? Peace, and a new state of mind. And here we enter the most bizarre and fascinating level of the Reddit cosmology, the Seventh World -the one that actually drove me to write this lengthy post.

The Seventh World is another world true. When we enter it, we first see the dominating image of a serene, sunlit tower, somehow metaphysical, De Chirico-esque.

The opening image of /r/seventhworldproblems

There is no documentation, no guide to the Seventh World: all we know, we know from the posts of its inhabitants (which tend to call it simply “Home”). Not even the tower picture seems a clear clue -there is basically no talk of a tower in all the forum. We know that Home has several inhabitants, and some of them feature a number, but nothing is known about what this could mean.

Threads on /r/seventhworldproblems. The terse or otherwise enigmatic titles are a clue of the general mood of the forum.

There doesn’t seem to be much interaction between them; they often interact however with a huge swarm of machines. Their purpose is unknown but from the posts they seem to be quietly pervasive. There are also disturbing clues of some form of mind control going on.

A thread of /r/seventhworldproblems discussing machines, and giving some mind control hint

It seems there are some kind of leader entities within Home, which are called the Colours -in particular two are known, who also interact (and moderate) in the forum, Blue and Green. What is the exact nature of the Colours, is unknown.

That is the beauty of the Seventh World: it is unknown. It is something that could only be reconstructed from the vague, contradictory and implicit claims of the forum posts. It’s like being an alien reading a single Internet forum of ours: they could reconstruct something but most posts would be too implicit, referring to things they can’t have knowledge of, or too alien, to make sense. /r/seventhworldproblems is not a world building exercise, it is an artefact that asks us to be interpreted as describing a world.

As such, /r/seventhworldproblems is a unique work of collective art. It is the Internet forum version of Arthur C. Clarke’s Rama from Rendezvous with Rama, or of Luigi Serafini’s Codex Seraphinianus: an interpretation device that yields no coherent interpretation. As Shelley Jackson remarked about the Codex, with words apt here as well:

it’s probably meant to hover on the verge of scrutability, to constantly hold forth the possibility of being read but stay resistant at the same time. It’s important that it bothers you with the feeling that there is some content that you ought to be able to extract from it in a normal discursive kind of way. It’s meant to appeal to the rational or exegetical urge. It wants to be interpreted but it won’t let you, and it’s very interesting the way it teasingly asks to be read and then refuses. You could see this as a really really elaborate inkblot. It’s never going to completely yield to you in the sense of giving you insight into the artist’s intentions, so it kind of reverts you back on yourself and makes you notice what you’re noticing and notice the associations that you make. It’s a kind of springboard for your own creative musings.

The difference is that here, instead of the asemic writing of the Codex, we have actual writing and concepts. It is possible that one day the Seventh World will collapse into a definite, meaningful narrative. It is also possible that it will dissolve and split, or that it will stay on the verge of vagueness forever, like the memory of a dream or the outlines of a hill from the mist. It’s an ongoing collective work of art -nobody knows what will happen out of that. The Reddit author who conceived /r/seventhworldproblems wrote to me in an email:

Hah no, the vagueness of it is the coolest thing. The latest interest in machines is great [...] and what ‘Blue’ has become since the beginning is totally amazing. Truthfully, I wish there were some way I could thank the active members of this community for being so cool, and creating such an interesting world.

And beyond?

Is there something beyond the Seventh World? There are a few, but none has really taken off. There is however /r/infiniteworldproblems, which is pure madness. You have to see it (and come back with retinas burned, most probably, if only from the stylesheet).

A sum up of the cosmology

There is a nice post that sums up the Reddit cosmology pretty well:

There’s method behind the madness.

Firstworldproblems – the woes of the western entitled

Secondworldproblems – the woes of the eastern poor

Thirdworldproblems – the woes of the developing untouchables

Fourthworldproblems – the woes of the unrecognised and lost

Each ascending number abstracts the subject’s standing, and by four there’s nothing left materialistically. The only thing a fourthworlder has is their perception of reaity, which is subsequently abstracted in the fifth world. The sixth world abstracts the abstract, leaving you with nonsense, and the seventh world abstracts the abstraction of the abstract, bringing you to a bizzaro starting point.

The worlds of Reddit -and especially /r/seventhworldproblems – look like a simple and bewildering usage of the forum to create a collective work of art. A discussion venue which is not about something, but that is something, and alive and open. Take a look, and see if you can call it Home.

So, to restore a bit of karma, I just looked through this page and picked out a few October deaths we should have really mourned but I didn’t hear any word from anybody. Mind you, I myself didn’t know most of these people before looking for their deaths. That should tell you something about how sad are the priorities of the public. Yes, this also makes me look snobby -big deal.

Howard Wolpe (November 3, 1939 – October 25, 2011)

American politician. Howard Wolpe was an instrumental figure in the USA-Africa relationships, and apparently he did a few good things -surely stuff more useful to the world than whatever Steve Jobs, or the Guy-Who-Run-Fast-On-Two-Wheels did. Here are a few highlights from his Wikipedia bio:

he led the United States delegation to the Arusha and Lusaka peace talks, which aimed to end civil wars in Burundi and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Wolpe directed post-conflict leadership training programs in Burundi, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Liberia.

Wolpe authored and managed legislation imposing sanctions against South Africa, and over-riding President Ronald Reagan’s veto of the sanctions legislation

It’s all too obvious to notice that, since you are doing a truly good job at helping peace and sanctioning apartheid and in general shaping a good foreign USA policy, and especially you do that in regions of the world nobod.y gives a fuck about, then your political career doesn’t go to the top at all:

In 1992 redistricting made it unlikely that Wolpe would be re-elected and he retired from Congress.

Good job USA.

John McCarthy (September 4, 1927 – October 24, 2011)

After Dennis Ritchie -whom at least was somehow remembered here and there- another giant of computing dies. McCarthy in 1958 invented Lisp, which is an immensely influential programming language -and it is still used today, 53 years later. Lisp has been the main language used in the field of so-called artificial intelligence -a term that McCarthy invented himself in 1955.

Not only: you know all the buzz around “cloud computing”, distributed applications and similar stuff? Well, he thought about that first -in 1961-

In 1961, he was the first to publicly suggest (in a speech given to celebrate MIT’s centennial) that computer time-sharing technology might lead to a future in which computing power and even specific applications could be sold through the utility business model (like water or electricity). This idea of a computer or information utility was very popular in the late 1960s, but faded by the mid-1990s. However, since 2000, the idea has resurfaced in new forms (see application service provider, grid computing, and cloud computing.)

Yep. And they call Steve Jobs a “visionary genius” of computing.

Jerzy Bielecki (28 March 1921 – 20 October 2011)

Bielecki was in the first group of prisoners ever sent to Auschwitz: there, he managed to 1) Find a girlfriend, even if in theory men and women weren’t allowed to talk to each other 2) Escape from Auschwitz in one of the most brilliant ways possible:

on July 21, 1944, Bielecki appeared at the door of Cybulska’s barrack, dressed in an SS uniform he had pilfered from the German warehouse, barked out the number tattooed on his friend’s arm, and marched her out of the camp, as the SS were in the habit of doing, in an escape operation that was one of the most daring of its kind. The two continued eastward, walking, mostly by night, through fields and forests. Soon their food ran out, their clothes were soaked through, and Cybulska was exhausted. When she felt she could no longer continue, she begged Bielecki to leave her behind, but he refused and even carried her on his shoulders whenever he was able. Some ten days later, the two fugitives reached the village of Muniakowice, in the Kielce district, where a relative of Bielecki’s took them in. In time, Bielecki joined the partisans of the AK while Cybulska was taken to a neighboring village, where she was put up by the Czerniks, a peasant couple, who looked after her devotedly until the liberation.

They don’t make people like this anymore.

Herbert A. Hauptman (February 14, 1917 – October 23, 2011)

Poor Hauptman -a mathematician who applied himself to chemistry- won a Nobel prize, but for something quite obscure (even among scientists), and therefore nobody remembers him. He basically devised a method which is a Graal for structural chemists: a direct solution to the phase problem.

To explain in full what the phase problem is would be long and quite beyond the point of this post, but let’s try a very crude description. When chemists want to know the structure of a molecule, one of the most used methods is to make a crystal of the molecule (often no easy task itself) and then fire up a beam of X-rays at the crystal. The X-rays have a wavelength comparable to that of atoms, and therefore they are affected by the geometry of atoms inside the crystal – they are diffracted. You then look at the pattern the X-rays do when they come out of the crystal, and from this pattern you can reconstruct the 3D structure of the molecule which composes it. It’s a bit like a very complicated version of reconstructing a 3D object shape by looking at its shadow from several angles.

Alas, the X-ray pattern contains all the information necessary to rebuild the 3D structure minus one part: phase. To understand what is meant by phase in this context we should talk about Fourier transforms, but let’s say that it’s like reconstructing a melody knowing the tempo, the notes and the times of the notes, but not their exact order. No phase, no structure.

The phase problem is a hard one, and its solutions yielded at least two noble prizes. One is John Kendrew, who invented an indirect method to solve the phase problem: you make two crystals, one where the molecule of interest is bound to a heavy atom, and one where it is not. This way he solved the structure of myoglobin, the first protein structure ever known by man, an achievement second only to the DNA structure one of Watson and Crick (who didn’t solve the phase problem and had therefore to rely on chemical and structural intuition to get the correct model).

The second is our professor Hauptman, who instead invented a probabilistic direct method, where you just do one crystal and then apply a truckload of math (and reasonable assumptions about the atom shapes, for example) to obtain the structure. Which is cool, because it can be automated and you need half the experiments.

Pietro “Pete” Rugolo (December 25, 1915 – October 16, 2011)

The art of jazzy TV and film themes: that’s what Rugolo, a Sicilian-born musician who lived in California, mastered. The New York Times took the decency of running an obituary which sums up a staggering and yet quite obscure career:

In three days of sessions, he helped produce a dozen 78s by the group that introduced a cooled-down interpretation of bebop. The records sold poorly at the time, but Mr. Rugolo lobbied Capitol to release nearly all of them in 1957 on a 12-inch LP, “Birth of the Cool,” one of the landmark albums in jazz.

Mr. Rugolo also recorded dozens of his own albums and wrote arrangements for a long list of singers that included Nat King Cole, June Christy, Dinah Washington and Mel Tormé. He later became a highly sought-after composer and arranger for television and film.

And indeed he seems to have composed a lot of scores and early TV series themes:

He made his mark in television at a time when noirish urban detective series and Henry Mancini’s groundbreaking music for “Peter Gunn” opened the way for jazzy big-band scores. He wrote the theme music for “The Thin Man,” “Richard Diamond, Private Detective,” “The Fugitive” and “Run for Your Life,” and the scores for many episodes of shows as varied as “Leave It to Beaver,” “The Bold Ones: The Lawyers,” “Alias Smith and Jones” and “M*A*S*H.”

Rugolo is an example of a sad phenomenon that always intrigued and bothered me. People who created TV scores, especially in the past, often create melodies that everyone remembers forever (everybody in the UK can whistle the Doctor Who theme) and such musics often display unusual musical quirkiness and imagination combined with irresistibly catchy tunes (again, think of Doctor Who). Yet nobody remembers them, and their names are seldomly known to the public. Which is a total shame. Their music may not change the world, may be superficial, yet they were not either one-trick radio tunes; they were conceived to became a trigger in our brain, a part of our everyday’s sound background, audio landmarks of familiarity. An unique art it is, and one that perhaps would deserve more study and respect.

“A great quote from Slashdot: “From the fall of AOL to the rise of iComputing, we had a 12 year golden age where walled gardens were derided, people owned their own devices, and the landscape of the internet formed more or less naturally.”

RIP, Steve, but as much of a visionary as you were, I hope that your passing away will contribute to giving us back the openness in computing, that same openness that you did so much to destroy.”

Steve Jobs was a dangerous man. He did more than anyone else to destroy the concept of open platform, and in general to jeopardize the consumers’ right when dealing with computing.

Apple under Jobs has embraced an approach which can be summed up as: remove choice. According to Apple, the end user must be given practically no voice on how they should use their devices. Apple knows better. Apple will decide for you. When Apple says Think different it really means “Let us think for you”.

This can be just a very clever marketing approach if it’s about operating system interface customization, or limited number of models available. But it becomes a real nightmare with the app store model, which Jobs popularized.

App stores like the ones for iPhone and iPad mark the shift from a world where:

- there are *platforms* like computers which have a known interface, on top of which everybody can write software and distribute it

- there is an Internet which is accessed by open, public protocols

to a world where:

- the platform is closed and apps have to be explicitly approved by the platform manufacturer (and they can be censored/retired at any moment, at the manufacturer’s whim)

- Internet services are accessed by close, independent apps

Mind you, this is not theory or catastrophic thinking. This is the reality that every iPhone user keeps in their pocket. Censorship of apps and content the Apple app store is an even too infamous fact: just for the record, read this for a quick recap of what is the issue about (even very mildly) sexual content, or this in China (where Apple chooses not to think so different from the government), or how it attempted to censor satire.

Now, one could think that it’s just my problem: if I don’t want that, I don’t buy Apple, and fine. This is true, but it is only part of the problem. The real issue is that Steve Jobs made this kind of approach viable and respectable. He not only made a model which takes away freedom from the user acceptable: he even made it enthusiastically embraced. Jobs really was a marketing genius: he twisted reality, in his customers’ minds, up to making them believe that he was giving them freedom, when he was only giving them expensive, shiny tools that took away their freedom -even worse, that removed their need for freedom. Love of the Big Brother has never been as real as in Apple fans. And if Apple has been successful this way, why shouldn’t its competitors follow it? That’s the danger.

One could object: well, it’s just phones. But what will happen if and when such an approach extends from iPhones to desktops and laptops? This is not at all far fetched: the iPad is the natural step towards that. Do we want a computer where Microsoft, or Apple, or Google will control what applications will run and which won’t? What content we can access or not? What we can read, see or even talk about? This is not crazy talk. iPhones and iPads already behave like that.

Steve Jobs was a genius, true: a genius of deceipt and marketing, capable of misleading otherwise brilliant creatives and learned professionals, guiding them into the cult of “Think different” -by stopping thinking and following Jobs vision. Humans are all too prone to do all the same thing by making them believe they are unique: Jobs understood that and exploited that to the end. This made Jobs incredibly dangerous, because he was mind-bogglingly capable of selling his snake oil under the sexy, glamour gadgets he sold.

“Stay hungry. Stay foolish”, he said, and his fans now repeat as a mantra. Yes. He wanted everybody to be foolish enough to buy his swindle, to be hungry enough to want his gadgets.

That’s why the death of Jobs is a relief. He hypnotized everyone for far too much. After him, we can try to hope that the future of computing will be again in the hands of the users.

I am addicted to habit: when I leave habit, I feel exhilarated and refreshed; when I reflect on my habit, I feel prisoner and desperate. Yet I can’t let habit go: it forms on me, it grows on me like the woolly fungi that grow on insects and induce torpor, becoming death.

I am thirty, and I still don’t know how to live.

If you’re not Italian, I leave you with a bit of comic relief : a wonderful linguistic sketch by Fry and Laurie, just to link things with the previous post about Tlingit ; and an old but eternal masterpiece of animation.