The Later Years of Douglas Adams
filfre.net
filfre.net
I've been the same, ever since I learned to always keep a good towel around.
That’s a fantastic eulogy and something for us all to aim for. Thank you for expressing something I did not know had also happened to me
(And "bullied goo" what a great concept. Please, write a book!)
He seemed very unhappy. I'm weirdly glad that the end wasn't a death of despair, just a weird stupid awful freak accident. So I'll choose to believe what the article says.
But yeah I myself am having a lot of trouble balancing compassion with a deep anger that I can't help. The cynicism is my attempt to shield myself and it's not working so great either.
The brazenness - and visibility - of the hypocrisy and callousness of our leaders has eroded public trust. We no longer have any paragons, really. We just have people who we think aren't quite as bad as the alternative. To use the events of today as an example, everyone knows the people running CrowdStrike are going to continue being fabulously rich, and might not even lose their jobs. Even if, by some miracle, CrowdStrike gets sued out of existence, they'll walk away and still be multimillionaries.
And when this seems so universal, so inevitable, in the people running the world (whether that be in business, politics, or whatever else), you start to wonder if it's even possible to do otherwise.
One of the first things I wrote down when I founded my company was, quote, "do not spin, do not mischaracterize, do not omit, do not grey-pattern." I don't know what the chances that that doomed my company on day 1 were, but they certainly are not zero. I am genuinely not sure it's possible to succeed in the world as it is without being a lying, cheating bastard to some degree. And I'm not the only one.
Have you ever tried just going down a grocery-store aisle and counting every snake oil claim within your line of sight [1]? It's astounding. I looked on the coffee table my laptop is sitting on right now, and sure enough I've got a box of what are effectively Twizzlers claiming to be a health food because the sugar came from apple juice instead of being distilled first. Every room in my house is full of lies. It's desensitizing.
"Quiet quitting" provides a workplace example of what this does to a culture. In a sense, intentionally not doing the work you're being paid to do is a crappy, somewhat immoral thing to do. It's certainly not a sign of good character, at least in my book. But people do it because they perceive (correctly) that their employer would screw them given the slightest chance. The local incentives of each side to be adversarial have fallen into a defect-defect equilibrium (see [2]) that is detrimental to both parties. Both sides are so used to being exploited that they defensively and preemptively spend tons of energy defending themselves against it and failing to find common ground in the many areas that aren't zero-sum. Worse, they even feel bad about things that are positive-value to themselves but might be used against them! [3]
And once you're in that kind of a culture, it's so hard to argue for anything constructive. How can you believe in anything when the representatives, the would-be paragons, of every moral value you'd like to promote are flaunting ignoring them, when so many values are used as paper-thin excuses to hurt people day in and day out?
That's true almost whatever you believe! Are you big on the traditional family? You're probably voting for the cheated-on-his-wife-with-a-porn-star guy. Did you favor invasive pandemic measures in California? You're probably voting for the guy who had a party while you were staying home. Like organized labor? You're voting for the guy who shut down a strike on critical infrastructure. Like law and order? You're voting for a felon. Almost everyone knows this, and for some years now, we've gone "ugh, but have you seen the other guy?". (This isn't a criticism - I do this too.)
But the optimistic take, to quote MLK for a second, is that we might be climbing out of one local minimum into another:
> [Protest] seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored...there is a type of constructive nonviolent tension that is necessary for growth. Just as Socrates felt that it was necessary to create a tension in the mind so that individuals could rise from the bondage of myths and half-truths to the unfettered realm of creative analysis and objective appraisal...the purpose of direct action is to create a situation so crisis-packed that it will inevitably open the door to negotiation.
> ...How strange it would be to condemn a physician who, through persistent work and the ingenuity of his medical skills, discovered cancer in a patient. Would anyone be so ignorant as to say he caused the cancer?...We did not cause the cancer; we merely exposed it.
(MLK is, of course, talking about a different issue here. But the observation is valid to others.)
It's only in this moment where we're all so disgusted, where we're all in a world so "crisis-packed", that we act. For better or worse, the people of Earth are wildly destabilizing their societies, whether that's the right in the US or the left in Latin America or protestors in Shanghai. We're "mad as hell, and we're not gonna take it anymore," and while that's unpredictable, it does at least offer the opportunity for the establishment of new, more legitimate institutions built on the disgust of those who make them.
In a more game-theoretic sense, my mental model is that the public and the elite are playing an iterated Ultimatum Game [4]. The elite holds the cards and makes the decisions, but the public can always flip the table over and screw everyone if they feel they're getting a short enough end of the stick. And it's at moments like this, when the public begins to pose a credible threat, that the elite begin to listen - or get replaced by a new elite that will, which is essentially my goal in life.
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[1] https://xkcd.com/641/ [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41011173 [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40346311 [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultimatum_game
> "do not spin, do not mischaracterize, do not omit, do not grey-pattern."
I try to effectively add something like: be honest, be open, be compassionate. It seems obvious. But apparently it isn’t, as we get to hear from those we work with, and their experience in other jobs.
worked out well for them
I'm sure I could argue that, say, failing to mention that one of our candidates did poorly on a coding problem could be characterized as "not evil". The company I'm talking to will probably over-weight that observation, they might think themselves out of an otherwise-desirable hire, and the candidate might lose an opportunity! Surely it's right to just tell this one little white lie...
The reason for the phrasing I used is to make it clear that no, we don't do that. And this comes up all the time. I find myself reminding myself of that principle almost daily when those little temptations to just skew things just a little bit pop up.
I think this is overly cynical. There are, I think still plenty of politicians who get into politics to make things better for people, I really do. But they are faced with complex, hard-to-fix issues where there is nuance and compromise needed, and people get really pissed off about the nuance and compromise
We can't vote out the people. The people are angry, at each other, in ways disproportionate to the nuance and compromise. It becomes self-reinforcing.
I'll be blunt that I think some people are more at fault than others. But I don't know how to stop that.
I wish it were just the politicians, or even just the media. Then there would be things that I could do. But when the people hate each other -- and I genuinely believe they do -- I can't think of any options.
Two individuals in a room are more likely to find common ground than hate until you bring up the right sport they happen to be on opposing teams for.
I don't care what they are like in person. I care what message they send to their elected officials, who have the power to harm me.
Most people aren't ogres in their own story, but that doesn't make them not hypocritical or callous. I've been a jerk many times to people I was in a position of power over in ways that felt justified and correct to me at the time but weren't either of those things in retrospect. The fact that people find justifications that let them sleep at night doesn't mean they're not screwing people over.
> and people get really pissed off about the nuance and compromise
I don't think it's quite so simple as "people don't accept nuance". That is true, especially in the era in which we live, but it isn't the whole story. Because that was true a generation or two ago, too - it might have even been more true then than it is now.
I, and as far as I can tell a large proportion of other people, don't have a problem with nuance and compromise in principle. We're just tired of seeing nuance and compromise used as an excuse exactly when they're convenient and only in ways that favor slowing down or preventing solutions (and not in ways that might ever limit the unlimited pursuit of power and wealth). Selective application of a principle is no principle at all.
As a concrete example, you've probably seen people do this with scientific studies. Study supports their view? Well, obviously it's true! Study supports the opposing point of view? Well, you have to remember it's just one study and bias is possible and there are numerous methodological issues so we shouldn't adjust to much from a small number of data points and hey there's this alternative explanation I just thought of it's probably that and...
Or look at your standard industrial or engineering postmortem. I'm sure whatever developer introduced that CrowdStrike bug is not going to have a job in a week, because pressure from your boss is no excuse to ship something broken, you have to stand up and do what's right! But is the same going to happen to the leadership? Is anyone going to say "being distant from the problem and operating in the fog of war that comes with leadership is no excuse to run a bad ship"? No, they aren't, and everyone knows it. The elite gets to profit off of their lack of concern for building something safe, and be insulated from the consequences when it fails.
That's not being nuanced, that's pretending (perhaps even to yourself) to be nuanced as a rhetorical tool. In isolation, there's no good way to distinguish the two, so once this tactic becomes sufficiently widespread, distrust for nuance is a reasonable response.
And the heros who rise and claim to fight all that? They are usually even worse, when you look closely.
And what's "best possible" supposed to mean? That we have reached the absolute highest form of social organisation? Even if we lived in something much closer to a utopia this would be hard to defend scientifically.
Well, I think this is the official version. Not what I think.
When they set about making a new radio series after his death, they used his narration of Agrajag as the voice of the character. It was spooky and beautiful hearing him participate in his radio play after his death.
Check out the Tyrant Philosophers by Adrian Tchaikovsky - a brilliant absurdist fantasy series (2/3 published so far).
First one is tough going for a while, then quite fun. Second one is brilliant in my opinion!
I am truly not mad at either of those guys. At the end of the day they gotta live their lives the way they see fit. But it is a real bummer that we are unlikely to see the end of either series. And unfortunately for up-and-coming authors, it makes me very leery of picking up any unfinished series again.
They looked at me oddly and went. Then an hour later over lunch I found out who the keynote speaker had been: it wasn't in the working meeting invitation I had...
Adams died the next year. I hope he got to use the honorarium to fund something in conservation, I'm told it was massive.
Although I don’t find it as hard as Douglas did with his writing, but then that level isn’t needed for most software projects.
I was about to say that software, unlike creative writing, can be changed after publishing. But Douglas did that for Hitch Hikers - the radio script, books, and TV show are fairly different stories!
Given that every story about the man emphasizes how hard it was to get any writing out of him, this is a universe that could probably only exist as a side-effect of an Infinite Improbability Drive, but it's still fun to imagine. And to wonder if it would have started getting weirdly poignant and serious under the silly surface the way Discworld did about a dozen books after Terry Pratchett gave up trying to find reasons for Rincewind to ever leave his room again.
Second, he did branch out and wrote the Dirk Gently books and his travelogue about seeing endangered species. He didn't seem to have much more fun writing those, and they were not as commercially successful, by far.
But I will note that the idea of an SF/F author having a world to which they return again and again, with a mix of recurring characters and new ones, is pretty common. Asimov had the Foundation and the Robots books, and eventually tied them together. Heinlein had his Future History. Alan Dean Foster's Humanx Commonwealth absorbed a lot of my pocket money in the eighties. So did Larry Niven's Known Space. Tolkien's Middle-Earth. A new book by a beloved author in another corner of the same setting that their big success came from is an easier sell to that "subset of fans who are interested in what Arthur Dent is doing" than a totally different book by the same author.
Was also interested to hear one of the background clips mentioning how the greenhouse effect was 'really starting to bite', and this was in 1990.
I bought the book with pocket money in '79 when it came out - I remember the kind of oilslick-pattern cover, and being secretly pleased that no-one I knew had heard of it. I read it until it fell apart. His proof of the non-existence of god was probably my first Mobius loop, at least until I discovered Hofstadter in the library.
Teenage me was unexpectedly charmed by So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish and was perhaps a little hopeful of meeting someone like Fenchurch one day.
So, a part of my nerd hustory I guess - albeit not something I've thought about for a while. Thank you Mr Adams.
I wonder if ppl who are upvoting this submission actually read the whole, verbose piece before upvoting or whether they're just upvoting on seeing Douglas' name in the submission title ?
And I disagree about the badly written bit, that seems a little much.
We're more than 20 years past Douglas' untimely death. People writing new pieces on him now need to be writing much more appealingly or, if they're only going to deliver information without any flair, boil it down to just that, the newer or lesser known information they are presenting without all the detail that most even moderate fans of Adams are already familiar with.
In Hamlet, Polonious declaims that :
“Since brevity is the soul of wit / And tediousness the limbs and outward flourishes, I will be brief…”
and then goes on and on at pompous length. Adams truly understood that brevity was the soul of wit and showed it in his writing. The author of this blog piece doesn't.
Hadn't really twigged that aspect but I think you're correct.
So he combined deep ideas with humour and brevity. He also had to carry his torch post-Hitchhikers, a show which had had creative input from other talented people in addition to his own.
Small wonder he found writing hard. It must have been really really hard.
After a while I stopped reading, it was very wordy, and it felt like they were trying too hard. Long form is fine if you have good reason. I didn't think this was it.
This piece about Adams is part of that timeline. Over the past 13 years he’s covered 1971 to 1998:
https://www.filfre.net/sitemap/
It’s not unfair to say that his pieces could use some editing. But he writes them every week, like clockwork, for decades now. As a long-time reader, I find the Digital Antiquarian’s long-winded digressions to be cozy and essential to why I keep coming back. It’s a bit like sitting down with a friend regularly.