Aneesh Sathe

Category: Blog Posts

  • What do platforms really do? 

    In 1986, David S. Landes wrote the essay, ‘What Do Bosses Really Do?’. He argues that the historical role of the ‘boss’ was an essential function for organizing production and connecting producers to markets. Digital platforms have become the new bosses. Platforms have the same functions of market creation, labor specialization, and management, but they have replaced the physical factory floor with algorithmic management. While their methods are novel, platforms are the direct descendants of the merchant-entrepreneurs and factory owners Landes described, solving the same historical problems of production in remarkably similar ways.

    Design for a Teacup (1880-1910) painting in high resolution by Noritake Factory. Original from The Smithsonian Institution. Digitally enhanced by rawpixel.

    So, why am I posting this on my own blog and not on a “platform”? I don’t view writing as a financial transaction. It is a hobby. By putting the financialization lens front and center, platforms are killing the mental space for hobbies. When you monetize tweets, you create incentive to craft tweets that create engagement in particular ways. Usually not healthy ways. 

    If we think of old media or traditional manufacturing, we can compare them to guilds. Guilds kept up prices and controlled production. With the simplification of tasks factories could hire workers who weren’t as highly skilled but didn’t need to be. Nowadays, why should any newspaper or TV channel’s output be limited by the amount of airtime or page space they have?

    Platforms take unskilled and train them. We are in the age of specialization of ideas.  Akin to the “the advantage of disaggregating a productive process”  Platforms leverage this by having many producers explore the same space through millions of different angles. This allows the platform to “purchase exactly that precise quantity of [skill] which is necessary for each process” —paying a viral star a lot and a niche creator a little, perfectly matching reward to market impact. Which is to say platforms make money through whatever sticks.  

    In Landes’s essay, Management became specialized, today management will become algorithmized. Platforms abstract away the issues that factory owners had such as embezzlement of resources, slacking off etc. Platforms don’t care how much or how little you produce, or even if you produce. If you do, the cash is yours (after a cut of course). 

    This may lead to a visceral reaction against platforms. This week when Substack raised a substantial amount they called the writers “the heroes of culture”. This should ring at least a tiny alarm in your head. The platform’s rhetoric of the creator-as-hero is a shrewd economic arrangement. In the putting-out system, the merchant-manufacturer “was able to shift capital expenditures (plant and equipment) to the worker”. Platforms do the same with creative risk. The writer, artist, or creator invests all the time and labor—the “capital” of creation—upfront. If they fail, they bear the entire loss. The platform, like the putter-outer, only participates in the upside, taking its cut from the successful ‘heroes’ while remaining insulated from the failures of the many.

    So what do platforms really do? They have resurrected the essential role of the boss for the digital age. They are the merchant-manufacturers who build the roads to market, and they are the factory owners who discipline production—not with overseers, but with incentive algorithms. By casting the creator as the hero, they obscure their own power and shift the immense risks of creative work onto the individual. While appearing to be mere background IT admins, they are, in fact, the central organizers of production, demonstrating that even in the 21st century, the fundamental challenges of coordinating labor and capital persist, and solving them remains, as it was in the 18th century, a very lucrative role.

    What Do Bosses Really Do?, David S. Landes, The Journal of Economic History, Vol. 46, No. 3 (Sep., 1986), pp. 585-623 (39 pages). https://www.jstor.org/stable/2121476

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  • Hack, Hacky, Hacker

    A few days ago I wrote about the beauty of great documentation; this is the evil twin post.

    The spectrum of meaning across the words hack, hacky, and hacker form a horseshoe when thinking about postures toward life. On either ends are the most difficult options. Being either a hack or a hacker requires dedication and both approaches narrow your world. Being hacky, taking imperfect shortcuts, in the world is immensely satisfying. It is play disguised as problem solving. 

    Fox by Arnold Peter Weisz Kubincan. Original public domain image from Web umenia

    A successful hack takes tremendous effort and dedication just to pretend to be great at something. Humans are great at spotting and discarding hacks. It takes a true master to fool a large enough population and build financial columns under the smoke. Being a hack is constant desperation, there is no play. It is no way to live. 

    On the other end of the same horseshoe as the hack, is hacking. Here, you are actually achieving something difficult enough to require mastery. “Playfully doing something difficult, whether useful or not, that is hacking.” says Richard Stallman. Now, I’m all for the playful, the difficult, and the useful, but not the “or not”. At minimum hacking should be in service of a prank. Doing things just because is like felling a tree in a forest when no one is around. At least a jump scare is a sine qua non (the dictionary is working :P). 

    Most systems, especially computers are designed by people for people like you and me who are neither very bright nor very invested in the thing. We want to not have the problem. You can always walk away but that is neither fun, nor useful, and certainly not hard. My favored way is to take the Nakatomi Tunnel through problems. Be hacky. Try enough approaches, push buttons that may do the thing you want until the alignment is just so and you slip through. Effectiveness here = solving many real-world problems quickly while preserving playful momentum.

    I want to draw a distinction here from the oversubscribed idea of jugaad. Jugaad was once framed as creative improvisation. It is not. I do not care for jugaad. To make something substandard and expect people to accept it is no way to be in the world. Build good stuff, be hacky route through the small issues.

    A hacky mindset is a foxy mindset and not just in the Hendrix way. The Hedgehog and the Fox is a great essay by Isaiah Berlin where he talks about the two kinds of people in the world. Hedgehogs, are great at one big thing. Foxes are mediocre at many things. Foxes thrive on lateral moves and opportunistic shortcuts, you know, hackiness. The hacky, foxy approach to life is more my style. 

    Breadth, speed, and joy beat fakery and fixation every time

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  • A Good Dictionary

    Yesterday I wrote about good documentation opening doors to options you didn’t realize you had. In the book On Writing Well Zinsser mentions how one of his key tools is the dictionary. That got me curious about the limitations about the dictionaries available to us. This is not just about the dictionary on the bookshelf but the ones that we have in-context access to. The ones on our computer and phones. 

    In my searches I came across this post by James Somers who references another great writer John McPhee and his article Draft No. 4. McPhee shows us how the dictionary is to be used. The crux is that modern dictionaries have taken all the fun out and left all the crud in. The old way is the proper way to play with words. 

    J.S ends with instructions on how to install the (apparently perfect) 1913 version of Webster’s dictionary. Unfortunately, his instructions are a little out of date. Which is to be accepted since he’s talking to people 10 years in his future. Luckily for us Corey Ward from speaking to use from just 5 years ago had updated instructions for MacOS that mostly still work.

    I’m updating Corey’s instructions below:

    1. Get the latest release for Webster’s 1913 from the Github Releases page for WebsterParser. Download the file: websters-1913.dictionary.zip and unzip it. You will see a folder like file with the extension .dictionary.
    2. Open the Dictionary app on your computer, and select File > Open Dictionaries Folder from the menu, or navigate manually to ~/Library/Dictionaries.
    3. Unzip the file, and move the resulting websters-1913.dictionary file into the dictionaries folder that you opened.
    4. Restart the Dictionary app if it is open (important), then open Dictionary>Settings (⌘,). At the bottom of the list of dictionaries you should see Webster's Unabridged Dictionary (1913) in the list. Check the box, and optionally drag it up in the list to the order you’d like.

    The dictionary is also available online if you don’t want to install.

    The best option is probably the OED . It’s expensive, but you may get access through your library. 

    Wordnik also cool. 

    Through J.S. I also discovered this interesting site: Language Log. They get really deep into language. I mean how much can you write about Spinach, apparently a lot. 

    I’d love to get back to a world where the internet was used in its raw form. If you are reading my posts, please do comment, share your site/blog and your posts. Social media is also good. More from Somers.

  • Divine Documentation

    Dad was about my age when he said that reading the manual was better than hypothesis driven button pressing. For teenage me, that took too long. Sure, I may have crashed a computer or two but following my gut got me there. Of course my gut isn’t that smart. In the decades preceding, devices had converged on a common pattern language of buttons. Once learned, the standard grammar of action would reliably deliver me to my destination. 

    Image of a nebula taken by the Hubble Telescope.

    In programming I was similarly aided by the shared patterns across MATLAB, Python, R, Java, Julia, and even HTML. In the end however, dad was right. Reading documentation is the way. Besides showing correct usage, manuals create a new understanding of my problems. I am able to play with tech thanks to the people that took the effort and the care to create good documentation. This is not limited to code and AI. During the startup years, great handbooks clarified accounting, fundraising, and regulations, areas foreign to me.

    I love good documentation and I write documentation. Writing good documentation is hard. It is an exercise in deep empathy with my user. Reaching into the future to give them all they need is part of creating good technology. Often the future user is me and I like it when past me is nice to now me. If an expert Socratic interlocutor is like weight training, documentation is a kindly spirit ancestor parting the mist. 

    Maybe it’s something about being this age but now I try to impart good documentation practices to my teams. I also do not discourage pressing buttons to see what happens. Inefficient, but discovery is a fun way to spike interest.

    Meanwhile, I’m reading a more basic kind of documentation. Writing English. Having resolved to write more, I’m discovering that words are buttons. Poking them gets me to where I want, but not always. Despite writerly ambitions, the basics are lacking. This became apparent recently when I picked up the book Artful Sentences by Virginia Tufte*. It’s two hundred and seventy pages of wonderful sentences dissected to show their mechanics. I was lost by page 5. The book is, temporarily, in my anti-library. 

    So, I’m going to the basics, Strunk and White, and William Zinsser. I’m hoping that Writing to Learn (finished) and On Writing Well (in progress) provide sufficient context about reasons to write to make the most of S&W, for the how, then somewhere down the road, savor Tufte. 

    * Those dastardly Tuftes are always making me learn some kind of grammar.

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  • The Plato Plateau

    This post started off as a joke. I was attempting to snow clone the Peter Principle for philosophy. It led to a longer thread of thoughts. But first, the snow clone: 

    The Plato Plateau: People philosophize to the level of their anxiety.

    Smoking farmer with branches by Kono Bairei (1844-1895). Digitally enhanced from our own original 1913 edition of Barei Gakan.
    1. Anxiety is the realization that you have absolute choice over life – Kierkegaard. Anxiety, in this context is not nervousness. It is a positive thing when harnesses. We harness it everyday.  
    2. Anxiety is a generative. Anxiety creates identity by locating stable places to launch exploration.
    3. Action, exploration, and anxiety are a motor. Anxiety → exploration → action → refreshed identity. Inaction leads to identity death
    4. Realizing you are radically free to choose can also lead to a forest of perceived signals. These can be an overwhelming inbox or simply overloaded ambition.
    5. When anxiety overwhelms it becomes difficult to tell signal from noise.
    6. Tools like GTD crash anxiety. When overwhelmed, GTD works well. When there is too little anxiety identity becomes ephemeral. 
    7. GTD isn’t a means to nirvana: GTD integrates 10k, 30k foot views to reintroduce future anxiety.
    8. When your identity is smeared across too many anxieties you declare anxiety bankruptcy and crash your identity in some safe spot. Journals, sabbaticals, quitting.
    9. Like the parable of the rock soup, vaporized anxiety needs a place to condense onto. Ideally something disposable but sufficient to let your identity create an “ordered world of meaning”
    10. Life examination occurs with identity crashes. Philosophy provides just enough of a toehold in the abstract to spur action in the actual. 
    11. Philosophy is a way to spur action absent anxiety/identity. We pick the philosophy depending on the degree of identity loss.
    12. Philosophy can be broadly sorted as:
      1. Survival – laws and tactics oriented
      2. Social Cohesion- harmony, virtue ethics, etiquette 
      3. Systems level order – algorithms and protocols oriented
      4. Self Knowledge and Meaning – reflecting on existing and consciousness 
      5. Meta-systems – theorizes about theories
    13. Most scientists and builders work best at level 3 systems level order. Going lower, i-ii, for environmental crises and higher, iv-v, for internal crises. 
    14. Complexity of selected philosophy is not superiority. A rung’s usefulness matches your identity state and environment, not some civilizational high score.
    15. Philosophy as Periodic Maintenance: Crashing and philosophy sampling are maintenance actions on the place called identity.
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  • Problems are Places, Questions are Spaces

    Last year, while regrouping myself and rebuilding my old curious ways, I had a thought. The common words “spaces” and “places” pass through our minds, fingers, and lips but they deserve a second thought. Unsurprisingly, I wasn’t the first one to consider this and the wealth of reading material helped me write We Need Homes in the Delta Quadrant. Spaces and places have been an enjoyable lens to look through.

    Recently, through Agnes Callard’s Open Socrates, I was introduced to the Socratic concepts of questions and problems. Initially I thought of it as a newish way to look at things, but I’m converging toward the idea that problems are places and questions are spaces. A quick exploration below as to why.

    Vintage pattern illustration. Digitally enhanced from our own 19th Century Grammar of Ornament book by Owen Jones.

    Problems impede your quest and solving them makes them disappear. There are established ways of solving problems—recipes, algorithms, or rituals that nudge the obstacle aside so the original activity may continue unabated. Essentially, problems are tractable.

    Places are tractable too as “an ordered worlds of meaning.” Place-making, like problem-solving, begins by drawing a boundary and then treating that encapsulation as a building black, whatever its inner workings. The moment you can stand somewhere and say “here” you have marked out a place; the moment you can name a difficulty and say “do this” you have packaged a problem.

    The Socratic question, by contrast, is a quest. It is a hunt whose solution is unknown. Questions do not disappear when solved, instead they are additive and leave you with something, i.e. the solution. A real question insists on orientation before action: you must find north in the wilderness before plotting any march. And yet, along the path to an answer, you inevitably solve problems. Those problems are the markers that help you orient and keep you moving. A previous “solution” to a question can be used as a new place to further explore and prod at the question. In that sense, a question is like the horizon you constantly seek.

    Spaces feel exactly like that horizon. Spaces are pure potential to be explored by the places that demarcate the space. Identity, orientation, and even memory of a space are created by and stored in the places that surround it. To explore a space you must create stable places around it

    While the new way of thinking about Questions and Problems is great, I still prefer the lens of Spaces and Places. Q&P seem too narrow a set of lenses limited to the human mind. S&P expand that stage and allow us to think of more in that context. What I like even more is that spaces can also be places assuming we allow a boundary to be drawn around the fuzzy nature of a space. As a scientist, this feels a bit more satisfying because it allows you to explore and experiment even when the knowledge isn’t properly tied down by facts. 

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  • The Best Game Ever Made

    What does audacity look like?

    I did not imagine the problems I was having was due to a lack of temples and worshipping the right gods. Being from India, this should have been obvious. I had figured out long ago that a steady supply of beer, dedication to craft, good means, and romance were the were critical to happiness. Spirituality had not been considered. Hewing a temple out of granite improved focus. 

    These days Dwarf Fortress gets lumped into the colony management category of games. It is a pioneer in the genre but it is also so much more. It is for good reason that it is one of the few games thought worthy of collecting by the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). Even there DF changed the way MoMA preserves art. DF one the most complex game ever created, starting from simple experiments, coded by a single person over 20 years, available for free, through all the normal human hardships. To play Dwarf Fortress is to experience audacity.

    DF is a complete simulation. From the growth rate of trees and grass, to simulating individual body parts of creature that allows cats to get drunk. The point of Dwarf Fortress is not to win. There is no way to win. As they say, losing is FUN! The gams starts normally enough. You set jobs for seven dwarfs to that helps them create a home in an unkind wilderness. Sometimes unexpected things happen like a giant farting bird attacks or the elves are cross with you because you used wood to make beds, which is fine in a new game. Eventually though something happens that tells you that there are more layers to this. Like my spirituality problems. 

    There is a lot of well known lore surrounding DF. From the famous story of Boatmurdered, Oilfurnace, Webcomics, to the drunk cats bug. DF in its small ways also reminds us of life’s important truths like, cats adopt the person not the other way around. 

    Tantrum spirals, goblin sieges, chairs of different qualities and the happiness they impart, dwarf fortress is deep. Like any effort by a single person, it started simple. Zach and Tarn Adams are brothers who created many many games as kids. DF was not even created for any kind of commercial aim. They simply wanted to simulate as many things as they could so that the game had the ability to tell great stories. Bit by bit, Tarn Adams coded DF without any external help, while finishing his PhD, and eventually getting enough in donations that he could dedicate his time to just building the game. 

    Recently the brothers worked with a publisher to bring their game to Steam. It made them “overnight” millionaires. That night was 20 years long. Along the way they build up a dedicated fan following, some contributed art, and music to the game, others hacked into the software to provide utilities to improve quality of life. Many of them are now part of the team working on DF full time. A few years ago Tarn estimated that the game was about 44% complete. I have a suspicion that the number hasn’t changed much because despite the regular updates, the brothers keep adding new ideas to build on. 

    You are unlikely to ever play Dwarf Fortress, but that doesn’t mean it’s not worth knowing about this bittersweet human story. No Clip has made a four part documentary, you should watch it.

    In a time when games were simple, computing power limited, with no funding, and life’s challenges, DF was created. To play Dwarf Fortress is to experience audacity.

  • Royalty, Administration, and Antimemetics

    I was all of 15 when defenestration was forever implanted in my mind. It means to throw someone out the window. It happened in Prague, 1618. Some important people were defenestrated, fell 70 feet, landed in dung. This led to the thirty years war and the coining of the word ‘defenestration’. Defenestrating happened to important, visible, people held responsible for mismanagement leading to widespread discontent. While the defenestrated may represent the idea, surely we can’t imagine that it was that specific person who was going around causing the suffering. No, they had minions. Here we explore a bit of their story. 

    Horned owl (Hoornuil) (1915) print in high resolution by Samuel Jessurun de Mesquita. Original from The Rijksmuseum. Digitally enhanced by rawpixel.

    Royalty is meant to be seen. They were either chosen by or were the local gods to lead the people. They were the head of everything and if something were to go wrong it was their responsibility. Royalty also means creating good memes. Whether the Alhambra, Taj Mahal, or Beijing projecting power through architectural memes was the standard.

    Administration and bureaucratic structures is the silent clockwork that powers the projection. These guys, are antimemetic. The antimeme is a recent invention and denotes ideas that have high impact but are hard to spread. This is important because when the tax burden gets too high you want the peasants to go for the king not the local tax collector. 

    The Mughal emperors were the head of the administrative machinery with final say over all important matters. The administration itself was antimemetic in nature. The provincial officials such as the bakhshi, sadr as-sudr, and finance minister reported directly to the central government rather than the subahdar (provincial governor). Matrix organization, I hear you thinking. This complex, multi-layered reporting structure, while designed for central control, also diffused responsibility and made the precise locus of decision-making less transparent to external observers and even to other officials.

    In the Ming dynasty, the Hongwu Emperor abolished the Central Secretariat to assume personal control. However, the volume of letters got so high that he soon appointed a few grand secretaries. They never held a high rank and always merely “recorded imperial decisions”. If merely were a boxer he would be a heavyweight. Can’t blame that guy with the pen if he’s just doing what the king asks him to.

    From the al-Andalus through the Ottomans, Safavids, and Mughals the the ulama shaped legal systems and molded public morality. Of course the monarchs decrees but the ulama interpreted them and applied them as law into daily life. This interpretive authority, operating subtly within the legal and religious bureaucracy, allowed for continuous adaptation and influence without the visible, attributable acts of formal legislation, making it profoundly antimemetic. 

    Let me end with the quote from the wonderful, and joyfully mimetic, Yes, Minister:

    “Hacker: Humphrey, did you know that 20% of all honours go to civil servants?

    Sir Humphrey: A fitting tribute to their devotion to duty, Minister.

    Hacker: No, their duty is what they get paid for. The rest of the population has to do something extra to get an honour. Something special. They work for 27 years with mentally handicapped children six nights a week to get an MBE. Your knighthoods simply come up with the rations.

    Sir Humphrey: Minister, her Majesty’s civil servants spend their lives working for a modest wage and at the end, they retire into obscurity. Honours are a small reward for a lifetime of loyal, self-effacing discretion and devoted service to Her Majesty, and to the nation.

    Hacker: “A modest wage”, did you say?

    Sir Humphrey: Alas, yes.

    Hacker: Humphrey, you get over £30,000 a year! That’s £7,000 more than I get.

    Sir Humphrey: Yes, but still relatively the modest wage.

    Hacker: Relative to whom?

    Sir Humphrey: Well, Elizabeth Taylor, for example.

    Hacker: Humphrey, you are not relative to Elizabeth Taylor. There are important differences.

    Sir Humphrey: Indeed, yes. She didn’t get a first at Oxford.

    Hacker: And you do not retire into obscurity?! You take a massive index-linked pension and go off to become directors of oil companies and banks.

    Sir Humphrey: Oh, yes, but very obscure directors, Minister.

    Hacker: You’re in no danger of the sack. In industry if you screw things up, you get the boot. In the civil service, if you screw things up, I get the boot.

    Sir Humphrey: Very droll, Minister, now if you’ve approved the list…”

    [Series Two (1981) Episode Two: Doing the Honours]

    Sources

    Much of the reading and sourcing of material for this was done across books from the Contraptions Book Club and some deep research help.

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  • Beyond the Dataset

    On the recent season of the show Clarkson’s farm, J.C. goes through great lengths to buy the right pub. As with any sensible buyer, the team does a thorough tear down followed by a big build up before the place is open for business. They survey how the place is built, located, and accessed. In their refresh they ensure that each part of the pub is built with purpose. Even the tractor on the ceiling. The art is  in answering the question: How was this place put together? 

    A data-scientist should be equally fussy. Until we trace how every number was collected, corrected and cleaned, —who measured it, what tool warped it, what assumptions skewed it—we can’t trust the next step in our business to flourish.

    Old sound (1925) painting in high resolution by Paul Klee. Original from the Kunstmuseum Basel Museum. Digitally enhanced by rawpixel.

    Two load-bearing pillars

    While there are many flavors of data science I’m concerned about the analysis that is done in scientific spheres and startups. In this world, the structure held up by two pillars:

    1. How we measure — the trip from reality to raw numbers. Feature extraction.
    2. How we compare — the rules that let those numbers answer a question. Statistics and causality.

    Both of these related to having a deep understanding of the data generation process. Each from a different angle. A crack in either pillar and whatever sits on top crumbles. Plots, significance, AI predictions, mean nothing.

    How we measure

    A misaligned microscope is the digital equivalent of crooked lumber. No amount of massage can birth a photon that never hit the sensor. In fluorescence imaging, the point-spread function tells you how a pin-point of light smears across neighboring pixels; noise reminds you that light itself arrives from and is recorded by at least some randomness. Misjudge either and the cell you call “twice as bright” may be a mirage.

    In this data generation process the instrument nuances control what you see. Understanding this enables us to make judgements about what kind of post processing is right and which one may destroy or invent data. For simpler analysis the post processing can stop at cleaner raw data. For developing AI models, this process extends to labeling and analyzing data distributions. Andrew Ng’s approach, in data-centric AI, insists that tightening labels, fixing sensor drift, and writing clear provenance notes often beat fancier models.

    How we compare

    Now suppose Clarkson were to test a new fertilizer, fresh goat pellets, only on sunny plots. Any bumper harvest that follows says more about sunshine than about the pellets. Sound comparisons begin long before data arrive. A deep understanding of the science behind the experiment is critical before conducting any statistics. The wrong randomization, controls, and lurking confounder eat away at the foundation of statistics.

    This information is not in the data. Only understanding how the experiment was designed and which events preclude others enable us to build a model of the world of the experiment. Taking this lightly has large risks for startups with limited budgets and smaller experiments. A false positive result leads to wasted resources while a false negative presents opportunity costs.   

    The stakes climb quickly. Early in the COVID-19 pandemic, some regions bragged of lower death rates. Age, testing access, and hospital load varied wildly, yet headlines crowned local policies as miracle cures. When later studies re-leveled the footing, the miracles vanished. 

    Why the pillars get skipped

    Speed, habit, and misplaced trust. Leo Breiman warned in 2001 that many analysts chase algorithmic accuracy and skip the question of how the data were generated. What he called the “two cultures.” Today’s tooling tempts us even more: auto-charts, one-click models, pretrained everything. They save time—until they cost us the answer.

    The other issue is lack of a culture that communicates and shares a common language. Only in academic training is it possible to train a single person to understand the science, the instrumentation, and the statistics sufficiently that their research may be taken seriously. Even then we prefer peer review. There is no such scope in startups. Tasks and expertise must be split. It falls to the data scientist to ensure clarity and collecting information horizontally. It is the job of the leadership to enable this or accept dumb risks.

    Opening day

    Clarkson’s pub opening was a monumental task with a thousand details tracked and tackled by an army of experts. Follow the journey from phenomenon to file, guard the twin pillars of measure and compare, and reinforce them up with careful curation and open culture. Do that, and your analysis leaves room for the most important thing: inquiry.

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  • Nothing Ventured

    The wave towered over me. Then the sound filled my ears. Not the calm breath of the waves;  but it was surf music. I was maybe 3. Song names and artist names were beyond me. There was only the blue-green wave and the twang of the guitar. 

    The Very Best of the Ventures Album

    I have chased music all my life. Just had to figure out the tools. The record player and the giant speakers taught my first lesson: pressing buttons was joy.  In my pursuit I learned in about records, tapes, CDs, mp3, flac, streaming, Napster, torrents, Winamp, VLC, blanks, CD-R/RWs, compression, bit rates, conversion, transfer, backups, VPN, networking, impedance matching, DACs, amplifiers, calibration, ARC, fibre, buying, licensing, and streaming in approximate order. 

    I discovered that they were called The Ventures by accident. Late in the college years I watched Pulp Fiction and wanted all the music. This one wasn’t quite home but it was the right street. It was surf music.

    The hunt was on. Only a notion of the song and the confidence that I would know it when I heard it. I didn’t know the name of the album only that it had a big wave on the cover. It took me the better part of 6 months, on slow DSL, trawling all the sources I knew. Listening for that drum fade-in. Then one day I found it. 

    It’s been decades since the record player stopped spinning. I’ve moved a dozen times, the records were lost. I am the default A/V guy and love the role. Now I live in one of the surfiest places on the planet, the current still pulls but I walk, don’t run.