My MacBook isn’t dead yet, but it’s on life support. Madame Psychosis, my long running, long suffering, White MacBook nothing will be put out to pasture this weekend. Its successor, an as yet unnamed June 2012 model Refurbished 15" MacBook Pro, gets picked up from the Apple Store in Grand Central on Friday. I’ll probably spend Saturday getting it fully set up to records its inaugural episode of Crush On Radio that Sunday. Meanwhile, this old thing will be shipped to Gazelle for whatever sinister purposes they have in mind. A computer that’s given me five and a half years of service has been sent up-river for the princely sum of $113.

That’ll cover a 16GB RAM upgrade.

This machine’s seen me through thick and thin. I got it when I graduated college. I’ve upgraded the RAM to 4GB, which seemed huge at the time. I covered the lid with band stickers—something I regret now. Every iOS device I’ve owned has connected with my MacBook. It sent out dozens résumés during my lost year. I’ve rebuilt, and re-rebuilt Sanspoint on it several times. Crush On Radio began on this thing, with 31 episodes recorded on it, most of which were edited on here as well.

In fact, starting Crush On Radio is when it began to show its age. Waiting an hour while Audacity munches and crunches on a ninety minute audio file to normalize, mix down, compress, and export as MP3 is proof. Plus, the backlight’s been going for some time now… I’ve had to make cutbacks to keep performance up: no running non-essential apps. Disable Dashboard. Disable Flash. Disable Java. [1] I’ve been using my iPad for anything that might be strenuous on my laptop, like streaming video. The time has come. This machine ha the weight of five and a half years of use and abuse, a small amount of road travel, and three major moves.

The new MacBook Pro will be a chance to start my computing environment over again, from scratch. I’m only going to install things when I need them, as I need them. I have 154 items in my Applications folder, many of which I’ve only ever used once or twice—if at all. This, of course, says nothing about the half a decade worth of apps I’ve installed, or the cruft that came over when I imported all the data off my iBook G4 and Mac mini back in the day. It’s taking up space. Even if my new MacBook Pro has a larger hard drive, and it does [2], if I can make it run lighter, all the better.

Still, it’s been a good run. I’ll be sad to see this old thing go. It’s for the best. Time marches on, and sometimes you finally have to make the upgrade. Good Night, Madame Psychosis, and flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.

Every so often, when I leave work, I stop by a chain pharmacy [1] on the way to the subway. There, I often purchase a beverage and, if I feel it, a starchy snack food. When I check out, the cashier hands me a comically large receipt, then asks me to take a customer service survey and give them a “nine.” Typically the receipt, and the information on how to take the survey never makes it past the trash can by the door. I’m certain I’m not the only one. The way the staff robotically repeats the exhortation to take the survey, circle the little spot on the receipt with the survey information, and insistence we give them a “nine” tells me that it’s a matter of job security. They used to promote the survey with the chance of a large cash prize, but that stopped, fast.

This seems self-defeating. The sort of person who is going to fill out a survey on customer service at a chain pharmacy is not the kind of person who is going to give a high rating by default. I view it in much the same way I viewed customer interactions when I was behind the counter: you remember the bad experiences more than the good ones—in other words, the negativity bias. I know I’ve had great customer service experiences, but I remember the bad ones more. [2] When we have a bad experience, we want people to know. When we have a really good experience, we want people to know, too. Where, then, does this leave the poor cashiers at the pharmacy?

When the bulk of the interaction is as workaday as buying a soda and a bag of pretzels, the “best” interaction I want is one that is as minimal as possible. Scan the items, tell me the price, take my money, return exact change, bag it, thank me, and let me go. Asking me to take a survey, even on my own time, is negatively influencing the transaction. This being a pharmacy, where people may have larger-scale interactions with a pharmacist, or need to find something they need for a medical problem, this would be more useful. However, the methodology is still flawed, in that you’re asking someone to take a survey and remember the experience they had, and the experiences that will stick with us are typically negative.

It’s the sort of thinking that is prevalent in large, bureaucratic organizations. [3] What’s the easiest way to get a tap into how things are going on a store-by-store level? Ask the customers! How do we ask the customers? Well, since stationing someone at the door to ask folks leaving if they want to take a survey is unlikely to work, so let’s just slap something on a receipt, and make our cashiers spew out a rehearsed line to customers. It’s cheap, it’s efficient, and means we don’t have to do any real work at the corporate office. Extra-long lunch breaks, all around.

A survey request on a receipt is the least effort you can put into getting feedback. Unless they’re spending the money on data analysis to smooth out the distribution of extremely negative answers, and the occasional extremely positive answers, what you will get is basically the fine beige mush of the few people who gave honest, middling answers, and where do you go from that? Nowhere, really. At least in fast food, you can focus on speed and quantify how long it takes for a customer to get food. Retail isn’t as easily simplified and quantified.

Generally, I have the same set of complaints about any retail establishment I go into.

1. I can’t find what I’m looking for easily.
2. I can’t check out fast enough.

The first is intentional on the part of every store. Stores, grocery stores especially, are designed to keep you moving through the store, and make a few impulse buys. The second part is the tricky one. It’s a combination of factors related to staffing, training, number of customers, number of items per customer, method of payment, how well the customer speaks the language, how well the cashier speaks the language… The easiest way to get around that is to throw people at the problem, but then you risk paying cashiers to stand around when the store isn’t busy. And please, don’t get me started on self-checkout machines. They don’t help at all. [4]

To reach the point that I’ve been laboriously trying to set up, retail surveys suck. Surveys that require the customer to put time and space between the transaction and the survey suck even more. They’re a waste of receipt paper, a waste of time at the cash register for the customer and the cashier, and don’t tell you anything you can’t already find out by walking into a store at a busy time of day and trying to buy a bottle of soda and a bag of pretzels.

Saturday night, I got the chance to see one of my favorite musicians try something new, in an intimate setting. Thomas Dolby, better known as that guy who did “She Blinded Me With Science,” debuted his work-in-progress documentary film The Invisible Lighthouse. The film is about the area where he grew up, on the coast of Suffolk in East Anglia, which is slowly sinking into the ocean. The titular lighthouse is the Orford Ness Lighthouse, which is being shut down, taking with it a bit of Dolby’s childhood memories.

Thomas describes it thusly:

There’s a mysterious island across the water..e. On the tip of the island is a beautiful lighthouse. Since I was a small child I have fallen asleep at night to the soothing periodic flash of the light on my bedroom wall. But now it’s about to be closed down. Like many lighthouses around the world, it’s becoming obsolete as ships adopt satellite navigation. With global warming and beach erosion threatening its very foundations, it’s soon going to be a pile of rubble left to fall into the North Sea.

I’ve been lucky enough to see Thomas Dolby perform four times, now. The first and second times were him performing solo, a boffin surrounded by synthesizers, MIDI equipment, and some shiny Apple hardware. The third time, touring for his first album in nearly twenty years, featured a full band. Saturday’s show was something else. Thomas performed a live narration and soundtrack to the work-in-progress film, combining pieces of music spanning his career with new music. The final product will feature a full band performing the soundtrack to the completed film, and after what I saw, I can’t wait.

Storytelling has long been part of Thomas’s shows, at least since his return to performing. Film is a natural extension of that medium. The Invisible Lighthouse, even in its unfinished state, is haunting, and informative—not just from a historical/geographic perspective of a part of the world I never knew, but also explains references in his music I never got. It felt as though a part of the curtain were being pulled back, and I got to see not how the machine of Dolby’s music works, but the machine of his mind that created it. It was one of the most intimate half-hours I’ve spent with a musician, even separated by three rows of dining tables at Joe’s Pub.

When Thomas comes back around with the final product, I’ll be there. If you’re not familiar with his work, start with The Golden Age of Wireless, which is his first album. There’s a lot to discover in his work—far more than I thought there was. That is what separates true art from anything else.

Children can be cruel.

I know this first hand. I still don’t fully grasp the reasoning behind what happened to me in my elementary school years, but I’ve overcome it as best as one can. I remember the way it started. It was in first grade, and it happened in the school yard at St. Timothy’s before admission. My homeroom was gathered together, waiting to be summoned into line. Thomas Spickett, I think his name was, was being chided by my classmates over his dirty pencil case. It was inferred that he had the “Thomas Disease” and the pencil case was the way it would be transmitted.

Naturally, I touched the case. I think I wanted to prove my classmates wrong. I ended up catching the Richard Disease. It was chronic, and there was no cure.

Thomas was forgotten. For the next five years, The Richard Disease followed me through my education. In the most formative years for developing social skills, children my age would not even stand next to me unless they had to. Any other time, they’d run away—often screaming. There was nothing I could do.

Looking back, with the awareness that comes from adulthood, the Richard Disease stigma was given to me around the time AIDS was gaining national attention. It’s presence in the zeitgeist likely did not escape first graders at a Catholic school, but nobody knew what it was. Even worse, was how it stuck. Day after day, semester upon semester, grade upon grade, I carried the stigma like the Cross that we looked upon every day. Sometimes, I would embrace it, deliberately charging at a group of girls to watch them run in fear. Usually, I just tried to disappear. In fourth grade, I spent outdoor recesses and lunch breaks standing in a corner of the back school yard, my back to my classmates, my face to the wall of the church.

I remember talking to a teacher who had her car parked by my corner one day. I remember explaining the situation. I remember tears.

I remember her saying it was my fault.

Summers were my respite, to a point. I spent them at a day camp, where the bullying changed from mental to physical. I was insulted, beat up, had balls thrown at me, and generally harassed, but there was human contact in the misery. In some ways, this was preferable, but only just. One summer, I spoke to the leader of my group about the bullying. He, too, said it was my fault.

Despite being a “gifted student,” I was also a terrible student. Teachers either loved me or hated me. At least one was offended that I was offered the gift of leaving school one day a week to spend my day with the Mentally Gifted program at another school. Despite this, I was terrible at schoolwork. I was a discipline problem, as well. Days when the bullying became too much to bear in my fourth and fifth grade years, I would get into fights. Naturally, I was the only one punished. One year, I earned an in-school suspension. Why? Because of the Richard Disease. Because socialization with me was either insults, fights, or running away.

I had one friend outside of school, Matt, who was blissfully ignorant of my disease. He went to the public school across the street. And you just don’t talk about stuff like that with your one real friend. When he moved away, I rarely left the house of my own accord. And, to be honest, come fifth grade, the cloud lifted somewhat, and I had friendly classmates. Thomas Bluett, and Chris Palko come to mind, but that was two out of a class of two-hundred. And, though my teachers were quick to blame me, there were a few sympathetic ears.

One of these was Sister Elizabeth, the principal of St. Timothy’s. With her help, I got to spend mornings helping in the library before classes instead of wait in the schoolyard. I spent lunch minding first graders, a task typically given to seventh and eighth graders, rather than spend it with my peers. The real escape, however, came when I left the school after fifth grade, for Masterman, Philadelphia’s magnet public school. There, I would have other problems, but no more bullying, no more Richard Disease.

I’m almost thirty, and I still remember the pain. It’s still fresh to me. I wonder of any of my old classmate remember. I know they remember me, at least. Years later, in high school, and in college, when I would walk around my old neighborhood in Northeast Philadelphia, I would be noticed by my former classmates. They would be friendly, and kind, and ask how I’d been. It took all the willpower I had not to shake them, and scream in their face about what they did to me, deliberately or otherwise. I wanted to tell them how they never would give me the time of day, or even stand near me. I wanted them to know my pain.

But I never did.

Even writing this feels like I’m picking at a scab that hasn’t fully healed. Still, it has to be done. I’ve approached this from so many angles. I tried to make a joke out of it, something about how first graders discovered a new disease hitherto unknown to modern medicine, and I was the carrier, and so forth. Better to just lay it on the line, instead. If I hadn’t gotten out when I did, I can’t imagine what would have happened. I could have been another teenage suicide, or worse, one of those kids with guns who shoot up their own school in a twisted revenge fantasy. The Columbine massacre happened while I was still in high school, and some people thought I would “pull a Columbine” as well. By then, I was going to do nothing of the sort. But I was free, then.

And I’m free now, as free as I ever will be. Perhaps I’m more free putting this out there. I’ve never kept this story a secret, but I’ve never made it public, either. Maybe doing so is as close to closure as I’ll get. It’s not exactly screaming it into the face of my now grown-up tormenters, but it is probably better for the both of us.

Musician Amanda Palmer recently posted a very intense missive to her blog about online bullying. [1]

I did something, and I don’t know exactly what possessed me to do it, but I did it. I typed “hate a…” into Google. I was going to type “hate amanda palmer” into the rest of the field to see what came up, but Google auto-filled for me. It auto-filled “Amanda Todd”.

“Who is Amanda Todd?” I thought.

Probably an actress. Or a teen celebrity girlfriend of Justin Bieber.

These are the types people who people typically like hating.

I Googled her name to find out what kind of celebrity she was.

She’s not a celebrity. Well. She is now.

She’s an ex–15-year-old girl who became specifically famous for leaving a sad, desperate YouTube clip behind before hanging herself a few months ago.

Reading this made me thing about something I’d read elsewhere, on ex-Futurist Jaron Lanier, and his reversal on the Internet.

As far back as the turn of the century, he singled out one standout aspect of the new web culture—the acceptance, the welcoming of anonymous commenters on websites—as a danger to political discourse and the polity itself. At the time, this objection seemed a bit extreme. But he saw anonymity as a poison seed. The way it didn’t hide, but, in fact, brandished the ugliness of human nature beneath the anonymous screen-name masks. An enabling and foreshadowing of mob rule, not a growth of democracy, but an accretion of tribalism.

It’s taken a while for this prophecy to come true, a while for this mode of communication to replace and degrade political conversation, to drive out any ambiguity. Or departure from the binary. But it slowly is turning us into a nation of hate-filled trolls.

Surprisingly, Lanier tells me it first came to him when he recognized his own inner troll—for instance, when he’d find himself shamefully taking pleasure when someone he knew got attacked online.

While some might brush off Palmer’s discovery as simply the cruelty of children, this sort of thing is not exclusive to children. Or the Internet. [2] This is a fundamental problem of human nature technology exacerbates, not a problem endemic to technology. What makes Internet bullying more insidious is that you often can’t put a name and face on your attackers. Even on Facebook, it’s easy to become someone else, and without seeing someone face-to-face, it’s equally easy to become a jerk. [3] Still, I can’t stress this enough, people have been jerks since time immemorial. Blaming the Internet for the problem is like blaming buffet restaurants for obesity. It’s not helping, but it’s far from the underlying symptom.

Rather than condemn, we should ask what can be done? Then again, is there something that can be done? I don’t want to take a defeatist attitude, but I’m not sure anything can be done to stop people from deliberately hurting others, online or in person. Solving fundamental problems of human nature are beyond me—one guy, a blog with a limited audience, and some experience in being bullied is unlikely to change the world. However, I would like to propose two things that can help mitigate the impact of the inevitable.

1. Don’t Feed the Trolls

“Don’t Feed the Trolls” is a piece of advice as old as the Internet, if not older. Sadly, it’s often very hard to do. People, especially children, never know what is going to incite someone to attack you. Expressing even the smallest opinion leaves you open to attack. When the wolves start sharpening their fangs, that’s you’re cue to disengage. Run the other way, and don’t say anything. At least online. The sort of people who attack you online have a short attention span. If you can get away early, and stay away, they’ll move on to an easier target.

2. Be Pre-emptively Private

Anonymity is a double-edged sword. If they don’t know who you are, that limits what they can do to you. Don’t put anything out there that you do not want associated with your name. It’s simple, basic Internet security practice, but if you didn’t grow up with this stuff like I did, you don’t think of it. In fact, I learned some of this the hard way, as a teenager—and as an adult—but that’s a story for another time. Our lives on the Internet are lived in public now, quite the difference from how it was when I first got online. However, Facebook and Tumblr can’t read your mind. People only see what you post, and we need to learn to post with discretion in mind first.

I’d also like to suggest something to parents on the Internet: be aware of what your child is up to. Look over their shoulder. Be aware of what can happen, step in before things get too deep, and do what you can to minimize damage before it happens. Kids will do stupid things, make fools of themselves, and be attacked. Only now can it happen on a global stage. Your job is to pay attention, and not let it get to that point. Surviving adolescence is hard, but it’s not as hard when you provide a support system, and that goes for things online and off.

This feels slightly defeatist, but I see little in the way of options at the moment. I’d like to have a discussion about this with anyone with experience in these matters, whether academic or otherwise. Please use the contact form to reach out and say your piece.