I know it’s Christmas Eve but you’ll have to forgive me for going deep on the notion of science and moral responsibility.

The Biden administration has reversed a decades-old decision to revoke the security clearance of Robert Oppenheimer, the physicist called the father of the atomic bomb for his leading role in World War II’s Manhattan Project.

In stripping Oppenheimer of his clearance, the Atomic Energy Commission did not allege that he had revealed or mishandled classified information, nor was his loyalty to the country questioned, according to Granholm’s order. The commission, however, concluded there were “fundamental defects” in his character.

Oppenheimer wrongly stripped of security clearance, US says

In hindsight, it’s hard to divorce the revocation of Oppenheimer’s security clearance from his complicated views on his role as the “father of the atomic bomb.” Especially when you look at how that revocation has been used in the past: to punish those who spoke out against the use of the power of the state to bring violence.

It’s tempting to see the revocation of Oppenheimer’s clearance as punishment for speaking out, and the restoration as an endorsement of his views.

In this case, it’s too simple a formulation. Oppenheimer never apologized for his part in the creation of man’s most horrific weapon, nor did he regret its use in the war. He did, however, take responsibility for all it unleashed and the death it wrought. But he also saw scientific knowledge as an end worth pursuing, no matter the costs.

It’s a complicated legacy and worth revisiting.

Oppenheimer’s most famous quote comes from a 1965 documentary about the atomic bomb. In it, he intones a line from the Bhagavad Gita, a Hindu book: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”

This BBVA OpenMind piece delves into the quote’s original context within Gita and within Oppenheimer’s supposed pacifism:

Vishnu wants to convince Prince Arjuna that he must go to war, something that he refuses because it would involve killing his own relatives and friends. But Vishnu convinces him that he cannot shun that duty greater than he—it is his obligation, and it is not in his hand to choose. In the end, Arjuna goes to war.

Oppenheimer, Hijiya concluded, did not see himself as Vishnu. He did not arrogate the role of a god. He was Arjuna, the prince destined to fulfill that unavoidable duty, a terrible test for a pacifist who had always been one, both before and after the bomb.

Alex Wellerstein at the Nuclear Security Blog (linked in the article above) goes deeper on the context of Gita and speculates on Oppenheimer’s place in the atomic age:

Oppenheimer is not Krishna/Vishnu, not the terrible god, not the “destroyer of worlds” — he is Arjuna, the human prince! He is the one who didn’t really want to kill his brothers, his fellow people. But he has been enjoined to battle by something bigger than himself — physics, fission, the atomic bomb, World War II, what have you — and only at the moment when it truly reveals its nature, the Trinity test, does he fully see why he, a man who hates war, is compelled to battle. It is the bomb that is here for destruction. Oppenheimer is merely the man who is witnessing it. 

What I find strange and somewhat abhorrent in Oppenheimer is his laissez-faire point of view on what comes next. Personally, I’ve always been more of a Malcolmist in my views.

At the risk of seeming like I’m putting words in Oppenheimer’s mouth, here he is in his farewell speech to Los Alamos in 1945 – the year the bomb dropped:

If you are a scientist you cannot stop such a thing. If you are a scientist you believe that it is good to find out how the world works; that it is good to find out what the realities are; that it is good to turn over to mankind at large the greatest possible power to control the world and to deal with it according to its lights and its values.

Later in the speech, Oppenheimer addresses the common occurrence of technology’s creation moving faster than our ability to reckon with it:

There was a period immediately after the first use of the bomb when it seemed most natural that a clear statement of policy, and the initial steps of implementing it, should have been made; and it would be wrong for me not to admit that something may have been lost, and that there may be tragedy in that loss. But I think the plain fact is that in the actual world, and with the actual people in it, it has taken time, and it may take longer, to understand what this is all about.

We have not yet solved for our inability to reckon with the uses of new technology before its consequences are unleashed. This is true whether we are speaking of drugs, social media, or crypto. Some tools contain inherent harm, some are merely harmful when abused.

Oppenheimer wrote this piece for The Atlantic in 1949, four years after he wrote the above, and five years before his security clearance was stripped. It’s a beautiful piece of philosophy and a meditation on the use of the unimaginable power of the state to create or destroy. In it, Oppenheimer somewhat fulfills his call for the consideration of this technology after the fact and begins to reckon with it:

In foreign affairs, we are not unfamiliar with either the use or the need of power. Yet we are stubbornly distrustful of it. We seem to know, and seem to come back again and again to this knowledge, that the purposes of this country in the field of foreign policy cannot in any real or enduring way be achieved by coercion.

[SNIP]

It is true that one may hear arguments that the mere existence of our power, quite apart from its exercise, may turn the world to the ways of openness and of peace. But we have today no clear, no formulated, no in some measure credible account of how this may come about. We have chosen to read, and perhaps we have correctly read, our past as a lesson that a policy of weakness has failed us. But we have not read the future as an intelligible lesson that a policy of strength can save us.

Back to 1965 and the Gita. In another clip, Oppenheimer suggests the hope that the mere existence of atomic bomb would mean it would not need to be used and would bring an end to the war.

Oppenheimer and the scientists he worked with may indeed be Arjuna. But in their conversation with Vishnu, with technology’s most terrible form come to life, how could they look upon it and not reckon more with its use before unleashing it on the world?

There are no simple answers here. But if science is separated from philosophy then we are at the mercy of its effects. That’s Oppenheimer’s legacy.

This is an updated version of something I wrote for this site’s Public Notebook last month. Since then, Dan Sinker wrote that he’s thinking similarly. And things have gotten worse on Twitter (W. Kamau Bell called it a “low-rent James Bond villain basement”) after Elmo started banning journalists for…talking about him? So I’m largely going read-only there for the foreseeable future.

I’ll use the Public Notebook embedded in this blog as a sort of link dump/thought starter/scratch pad. But “real” blog posts will go on the main page of this site. You can get them via email by subscribing here.

Recently, Andrew and I were taking part in that late 2022 discussion of “where are we going to go after Twitter dies/gets overrun by Nazis?” We briefly debated Mastodon vs. Hive vs. Post and eventually landed on Tumblr and/or Actual Blogging being the better options.

And then Whet said something similar in response to a tweet referencing a Substack post referencing a Scalzi blog post which started as a tweet and…I dunno: what if the Internet we wanted to go back to was with / inside us all along?

Everybody’s like “where should we go now that this place is closing?” like we’re at a 2am bar that has gone full shitshow and have once again forgotten our only options are places worse than this one.

Good luck at Mastodon, the Tai’s Til 4 of the Internet.*

I’m Tumblr-curious again. Visiting my dashboard now is a bit like going to a bar or club I used to frequent when the interior has changed and the menu is different, but it still sort of smells the same. To extend the metaphor, I haven’t ordered a drink yet but I’m looking over the menu. But it’s also really quiet there and I don’t think I’ll stay long.

(After I wrote the above, I realized I wrote a whole “Why I’m quitting Tumblr” thing which is just hilarious and quaint. Especially the update at the bottom.)

Last month, I started messing around with this site again, but purposely walled it off. These “public notebook” posts don’t show up on the main page and aren’t search engine-able. (But I think they show up in the RSS feed?) Not impossible to find, but not easy. Maybe I occasionally post a link back here via Twitter or Instagram something. It’s a pirate radio station from a long-dormant satellite that only people who are still occasionally checking the frequency can hear. It’s less important to me now that a lot of people see this and more important that it’s like that Joel Hogsdon quote about Mystery Science Theater 3000: “the right people will get it.”

It’s public, but it’s somewhat in shadow. A Dark Public space, maybe.

Some of this is particular to me, but I think it’s also reflective of what social media became.

Part of my desire for a Dark Public space is what happens when you exist online now.

For all the hosannas Gawker received when it folded, few of us reckoned with how it was a stake through the heart of Being Weird Online. Their approach meant everyone with any kind of public self was fair game for attack. The “Gawker Stalker” approach made quick leaps from Lindsay Lohan to Julia Allison to random people on the street. One tweet suffering from context collapse gets signal boosted onto a Gawker offshoot and you lose your livelihood, your life, and your name becomes a shockwave of think pieces and cautionary tales.

Like Ronson, I was once a believer in the idea that the field of battle was waged in an online marketplace of ideas. But at some point we have to reckon with the fact that Twitter is maybe 10 percent of real life. If you want to fix shit, you have to go offline and wrestle with the very complicated notion that ideas are nice, but unless you can reckon with the world as it is you’ll never make them a reality. 

L’affaire de Justine is perhaps a too-fraught example. But that’s the gist. I know I’m not the only one of my Web 2.0 era who longs for … a quieter web? But also the one that was supposed to be about nuance, complexity, and the voices that often were drowned out by power.

I remain very much Team Consequences for Your Actions, but not Team Horrific Consequences if Your Actions Affected No One. Or Team Matching Consquences To Actions. We haven’t figured that out yet. Especially when the alleged harm is claimed by those who haven’t experienced it. Or how bad-faith actors leverage the incentives of social discourse to obscure and eradicate the real harm.

Back in 2008, I remember thinking an internet that was fueled by primary sources who could speak directly to the audience was Going To Be Good. At the time, gatekeepers were watering down the message, allowing power structures to dictate the discourse, and keeping minority opinions, voices, and people at the back. In its best form, the idea was to stand for a broader coalition that could become the best of our ideals. It was a very Gen X mindset if we consider Gen X as the weird geeks and dweebs in the class and not the sportos and dickheads we were sitting next to.

That all worked out terribly because now we have Nazis again. And anti-vaxxers. We forgot the very American way the pendulum swings back against any progress. Start with Reconstruction, make a quick stop at the rise of American fascism in the 1940s as a response to FDR, and watch history rhyme rather than repeat. (Thankfully, Gen Z is building on what the geeks and dweebs started.)

Anyway, that all happened.

I spent a good portion of 2004-2014 writing online with a lot of anxiety but not a lot of fear. Some of it evolved into occasional live storytelling, offline organizing, and even a professional gig that felt like the perfect combination of writing and action, for a time.

Much of it was aimed at improving civic life (or aspired to be). And then I got a gig that was all about that. Though I haven’t completely left behind the persona of someone who weaves together Chicago, humor, and social critique, it still looks different these days.

All the incentives for leaving a digital trail seemed bad. I started deleting tweets in 2018. I took a year off of Twitter in 2019 (remind me to tell you that story sometime) and this site has (like the platforms of many of my Web 2.0 cohorts) become a bit of an abandoned mining town.

I’d stake out some territory through the occasional essay, but mostly I’ve spent the last decade or so trying to figure out my “why” of writing online. And the what. For obvious reasons, Chicago civic life is not a thing I can easily opine on when I’m in the middle of it. I’ve chosen a life aimed at the inside game, rather than an outside one. No regrets about that, but I miss writing with impact.

(Also there’s parenting. And partnering.)

A couple years ago a bunch of us thought newsletters were going to be the answer to getting back to a Dark Public web. And then wouldn’t ya know, the Substack guys turned out to be sportos and dickheads, too.

But I tried it in 2020. Notes From Your Dad was an experiment, for me, in a different type of writing and I found it just wasn’t my thing. Substack throwing money at certain types of folks and pretending that didn’t make them publishers? It was a factor too. I stopped posting in October 2020 and despite a couple promises of starting it again, I’m ready to walk away from it. Someone called it “your pandemic sourdough starter” and I think that’s right.

That’s a lot about me, but based on conversations I’ve been having with others lately, I think we all have a version of this.

With Venture Capital Lyle Lanley buying Twitter, it seems like the last place to still experiment online is disappearing, but it’s not. Like the Web 1.0, when you encounter an error you route around it. Tumblr still exists. Blogs still exist. RSS is still there.

All the bad incentives are still out there but we can route around it. It starts with getting away from something “doing numbers.” Scale is for suckers. Quality of audience beats quantity every time. Twitter was the best when it was you and 50 people you “knew.”

Go back into the warehouse where you’ve kept the old machine under a tarp and start it up again.

Just don’t tell anybody about it.

Or just tell the right people.

* Yes, this is me re-using a tweet but honestly this just confirms the above thesis. Both in terms of blogging again but also returning to 2008-era-mindsets.

I have various projects under various rooves. One of these days, I’ll create a better way to bring them all under one.

In the meantime, I wrote this thing on Medium about where we are at the end of the 2nd year of a pandemic. It has some advice and clears the deck for what I hope is a better year ahead.

A few excerpts:

Since we have self-driving cars, robot vacuums, video calls, and holograms, it has occurred to me that we are in a post-apocalyptic science fiction novel. Or, at the very least, a shitty version of The Jetsons.

COVID-19 was the fertilizer that spread inequities throughout our societal garden. Instead of flowers, we got weeds. The old weeds multiplied while new ones pushed up through the dirt.

What an era we are living in! An era of boiling, impotent rage from within the unending doom of the world’s worst group project.

Some of the folks we elected to fix all this are still working from an old playbook. The playbook got us here. The playbook is bad.

Why are we prioritizing the needs of people who don’t believe in community over those who truly want to be a part of it?

We have to continue to want things to be better and take steps to make it so. Hope begets justice only when fed by wisdom and resolve.

Go read the rest and I’ll see you in 2022.

The other day I realized I’d written a grand total of three posts here this year and two of them had to do with death. This realization came after reading a friend’s status update lamenting a case of writer’s block. I’m not sure if I’m blocked per se, but the motivation to write here has been missing. Or at least not what it was. So I’ve been trying to figure out why.

I’ve rarely been prolific here, especially in the last couple years. I’ve mostly written when there’s something longform I need to get off my chest. Other than that, this space has mostly been a repository of live readings, announcements and a few bits of ephemera.

This never particularly bothered me before. I enjoyed the notion that I only wrote here when I really felt I had something to say. (I have a couple of drafts started in background but never finished them to my liking.) Twitter was the steam valve for everything else. But lately it’s been mostly jokes and work links from me there.

I’ve wondered if this particular dry spell could be attributable to work. The creative itch, the ability to tackle larger issues…much of that gets taken care of on a daily basis there; it really is great to be participating in a newsroom again. But as much as I’m helping guide that process, the real writing is handled by others.

And yes, I’ve been busy. The first event in the reading series I’m producing – it’s called The Frunchroom, you should come! – is this week. It’s one of the big to-dos on my #40in15 list. Then there was the parade and everything else. But everybody’s busy.

So I’m back to where I started.

I’m not entirely sure how much my friend Mark’s recent death is tied into all this. But quite a bit, I’d wager. The raw emotion of the experience is certainly why I didn’t have it in me to write my annual post about Abigail and I sharing a birthday week (he passed away in between our birthdays). And he was one of my favorite writers, particularly in the past year as he tackled some of the headier issues in Chicago politics. My better moments of intelligence came from discussions with him. I miss all that.

I’ve wondered what my first post back from that will be. And it’s probably kept me from writing – the need for it to be just right. But it won’t be so…

I’ve hesitated to discuss this in this space. It’s personal and I don’t tend to write like that here or do these kind of deck-clearing, head-clearing posts either. But at some point I realized until you do that, the fear is going to get the better of you. And you’re never going to get back to why you did it in the first place. And by you, I mean me.

So the above is a bit of a mess. That’s fine. It’s enough that it’s here at all. The publish button as an act of defiance.