Five Capitals of Japan: II Kyoto

Building Nara worked: no local lord grew powerful enough to challenge the throne. But Nara also failed, because soon the temples started interfering. Emperor Kanmu came along and decided it was time to end this bullshit. He moved out of Nara, leaving it to become the smaller sleepy city of temples it is today. He picked a spot of land on what was then the ass end of nowhere, and snapped up control of it himself, attaching it to the throne directly, so lords and temples were frozen out. And there he built Heian-kyo [Peaceful Capital], again a harmonious grid like Chang’an. Kanmu’s reign was an all-time high point for Imperial prestige and direct power. His city, later called Kyoto [Capital City] would remain the capital of Japan for the next thousand years.

On paper.

The emperor was both a governing ruler and the focus of an intense cycle of ritual and obligations to maintain spiritual purity. The combination made for a heavy schedule. After a while, emperors started splitting the duties; they’d retire and shunt the ritual schedule off on one of their young princes, but keep running the government from ‘retirement.’ This precedent proved dangerous: if a retired emperor could call the shots, why not someone else altogether? Great lords and clan leaders didn’t have to risk divine wrath or popular rebellion by usurping thrones. Instead, just sideline the emperor, let burn incense and hit gongs, and exercise power “in his name.” Marry him to one of your own clan’s daughters, and make sure the grandsons depend on you, and repeat the cycle. This method let first the Soga clan, and then the Fujiwara, rule Japan for centuries. These Fujiwara were the builders of the Kasuga Grand Shrine.

Between Fujiwaras and nobles and shoguns, Kyoto most often played host to an emperor who did not rule. Sometimes the actual ruler lived there, but often they did not. So the city basically spent a thousand years trying desperately to keep up appearances, spending their years conducting ceremonies and handing out grand titles and honors to their court of nobles. Sometimes the real government paid them a stipend to support the show; in other eras, they had to trade in on snob appeal to survive. Court nobles would give lessons in poetry, ceremony and painting to uncouth samurai warriors looking to rent a little polish. In some desperate times, the emperors themselves sold calligraphy to pay the bills.

Today Kyoto retains that creative focus. It’s no longer the official capital, despite its name. It hosts a lot of Japan’s modern creative institutions, such as as the anime industry and Nintendo. There are some lovely districts with sprawling piles of classic old Japanese houses, complete with low wooden gates and secret gardens. The Fushimi Inari stands above the city, a huge sprawling complex of red torii gates that seem to stretch to infinity. You’ve definitely seen photos of it whether or not you recognize the name. At the other edge is the famous Arashiyama Bamboo Grove, a towering collection of green bamboo that you’ve also seen. In between is the city, with its own impressive collection of shrines and temples, some more known for their beauty, some more for their historic fame. There’s also, of course, a large rectangle containing the old Imperial Palace where those often-impoverished emperors performed.

But honestly I didn’t find Kyoto as resonant as I might have. You’ll find little peace at the bamboo forest, even as photos of it are a very symbol of tranquility, mostly because of the thousands of people avidly snapping those photos at all hours. The Fushimi Inari is one of the last places you’ll find religious reverence; but you’ll certainly find wannabe influencers using the rows of torii as backdrops for selfies. Some of the historic neighborhoods have signs with rules about noise and photos that everyone disobeys. Even the palace served an emperor without actual power, or money — so the gardens are perfunctory, and the plain buildings mostly closed to the public. As soon as the emperor regained a nominal spot at the center of government in the 1860s, he immediately decamped, and you can empathize with him. As centers of powers go, Kyoto’s history largely consists of faking it without quite making it.

That undercurrent of pretense without power made me less beguiled by Kyoto than I might be. But there are still moments to be found. The Fushimi Inari never closes, and neither does the remarkable train system, so I went there at 10 PM and saw it in the moonlight. There were a few influencers still there, setting up their phone on tripods and looking ridiculous posing “sexily” in front of the torii. But the complex is so vast you can just keep walking and avoid them, and see the stone foxes and red gates in the dim light. The bamboo forest is likewise open around the clock, though here you do want daylight, so make jetlag work for you and head there just before dawn. I confess I did not take my advice here; instead I plugged in headphones, leaned into my height, and just looked up.

In town, the little alleyway called Pantocho, a narrow strip of restaurants and shops that follows the shallow river, has definite tourist trap vibes, but it’s still a twisting warren of fascinating old buildings letting you forget what century it is. It’s a nice antidote to the aggressive openness of its modern equivalent, the strip mall. Pantocho is for walkers and humans, not cars and parking, and we have few enough of those left. And you can trip on history anywhere. My hotel was two blocks from the Honno-ji temple, where the great warlord Oda Nobunaga was betrayed and killed by one of his retainers in the 1500s, just short of ending a 160 year civil war. Americans know Oda now primarily through a line of video games, but here’s a good a place as any to read more about the real stories.

And you do find things there. I stumbled into a print shop, and found names of artists I’d never heard, whose prints now hang on my wall. I found pen and paper shops enough to gladden the heart of anyone who’s long ago abandoned the humble Bic. There was a random wine tasting of California wines, which I crashed. The labels were all top-shelf and famous; luxury good seekers here look for Names, and have little interest in ‘this cute find in Sonoma I’d argue is better than the top names.’ But I still snagged a free taste of Opus One.

And best of all, Kyoto is at the heart of the sprawling Kansai region, the older sibling to Tokyo’s Kanto plain; some huge chunk of Japan’s population lives in these two areas. Kansai has multiple centers where the Kanto is pretty much all-Tokyo, and here is where Japan itself began. The whole plain is nicely meshed with a complicated train network. But don’t fear the trains. Hit the ATM at the airport, and use the cash to buy an IC card from the machines by the train station. Don’t skip steps: when I was there, the phone app would not work for phones sold outside of Japan, you can’t use a Western credit card to load a card, and there was a chip shortage meaning you could only buy a physical IC card at the airport. But it’s worth it: the thing is magic. You load it up with money, and tap to pay for fares on virtually any transit service in the entire country. Imagine if your Boston Charlie Card could pay for a bus in San Diego. IC cards will also buy you a bottle of water out of most vending machines, or a onigiri at 7-11. Some trains have a system where you must buy a fare ticket separately from a seat reservation — but that’s because nobody buys a fare ticket. Tap the IC card and move on.

Planning it out is also worthless, unless it’s a Shinkansen covering a long distance. If you’re in Kyoto and you want to go to Nara, you don’t read six timetables in other alphabets and writing systems. You just punch in “Nara” in Google maps or something, and it will tell you what to do. “Walk three blocks east, go into this station, stand on platform 3, and board the 773 train at 11:14 am.” It will supply you with exact directions for transfers. And then an hour later you’re in Nara. Or Osaka. Or Kobe. Then use your IC card again to take the local train, if you want.

Five Capitals of Japan: Introduction & Nara

Introduction

I begin the travel log.  We’ll see how long it lasts.  I’m no influencer, though — you’re getting my internal reactions, and I’ll be light on recommendations.  Honestly, if you’re reading this site, you should have seen that coming.

I’m going to start with Japan.  I’ve always wanted to go there, partly from a fascination with the culture, and partly because, as you’ll find out, I’ve read a ton about their history as well.  I finally bit the bullet and planned out a trip where I got an excellent deal on airfare — for May of 2020.

Sadness.  But if Covid taught us everything, it’s that we should go now.  We can’t always rely on the world to stay open and reachable to us.  So the earliest time I could find to rebook it pragmatically, I did.  I ended up there over Thanksgiving and early December in 2023.  It turned out to be an excellent time to go to central Japan — it was neither cold nor warm, and saw clear skies and colorful trees.

I decided to do the trip in terms of a historical theme, that got stuck in my head as the five capitals.  Japan actually had innumerable capitals, many before Tokyo was even a village. They’re literally innumerable: we don’t truly know how many there have been. “Capital” was mostly defined as wherever the emperor of the day was living.

The Japanese imperial clan is as timeless and permanent a human institution as exists anywhere. Their line is unbroken for over a hundred generations, albeit with some twists and turns along the way. The dynasty even lacks a surname, since only the one family has held the title. There’s no need to distinguish Tudors from Windsors from Plantagenets — there’s only one line, and their only name is “emperor”.

Legend says the Imperial line sprang from the sun goddess, but the more skeptical historians think those early emperors were likely firsts among equals, warlords who’d won an extra war. The throne was not just about power, however; like most monarchies, it surrounded itself with rites and spiritualism, to strengthen its claimed divine heritage. The emperor became the agent to secure the favor of the gods for his subjects. His consequent need for purity was why the palace kept moving — an old emperor’s death polluted his home, so a new clean palace was made for his heir.

That limitation became politically handy. A capital city attracts power, and not all of it is held by the ruler himself. Local lords became more important, and influential. They marry into the imperial line, and make sure future heirs were their own relatives, and come to exert control over the court to the exclusion of the ruler. So new emperors who wanted independence would often build their new palace in a different town, someplace the local lords were more friendly to him.  Boom, new capital!  The court hopped around like that for nearly 300 years. We don’t know exactly how many towns, or years, or even emperors, because in our records of those days, the line between legends and reality is soft.

I Nara

By the seventh century, though, Tang Dynasty Chinese culture was all the rage. The Tang government was built along centralized, controlling lines, emanating from an enormous and decidedly permanent capital, named the Chang’an [which means Eternal Peace, which would prove a tragic misnomer] which was built in a precise grid pattern believed to be rational, harmonious and ritually pure. The Japanese court decided to follow the fashion — and the idea of building an entirely new city free altogether of established local lords and powers sounded handy, too.

And so they built Nara, in the southern Yamato plain, at the edge of the mountains. And to build a deeper moat against local noble interference, much of the land around Nara was instead given to temples and monasteries, for another new Chinese import: Buddhism. And so the Seven Great Temples were made. The temples remain today, vast sprawling complexes of bells, wooden arches and towards, nestled in the forests above the main city.

There’s two train companies that serve Nara, but you want the Kintetsu line; the station is much handier. March east immediately: there’s not much city between you and the temple lands. You’ll find yourself among a thick crowd if you do this at a sane hour; just let the tide guide you. A fair few of the crowd will peel off to take selfies with the deer that inhabit a large, flat park between the town and the temples. The deer are a symbol of the temples, because they are native to the area and the forests around it, and therefore protected as holy figures. The upshot is you can buy a few crackers and feed them. I skipped that part; I can’t help but think of deer as road hazards instead of sacred animals, no matter the local opinion otherwise. The deer seemed in good health, at least, though the grass in the park was rather thin and dusty thanks to their hooves, or the tourists’.

Keep going east, and start to climb uphill. Most of the crowd that stays with you now peels off see and selfie the Todaji Daibutsu, which is the largest statue in the word of the Vairocana Buddha. I can’t begin to decipher the many schools of Buddhism and their corresponding Buddhas and related figures. To my faithblind eyes, the Vairocana Buddha is recognizable as “the skinny one.” But the stone statue is as massive as the crowds going to see it. I took a look, but did not linger.

My real target was the Kasuga Grand Shrine, which isn’t Buddhist at all, but Shinto. In English, generally, “shrine” means Shinto buildings, while Buddhist ones are “temples”. In Japanese, you have Shinto jinja and Buddhist ji. But as religions go, they mostly play well with each other, and few would describe themselves as a “shinto follower” to the exclusion of Buddhism, or vice-versa. Buddhist temples usually have a little shrine to the local Shinto kami tucked away somewhere, often the cute little fox spirits of the god Inari. This shrine was built for the powerful Fujiwara family, and it features hundreds of bronze bells and torii gates in the forest hills.

The shrine itself is grand, and its botanical gardens as well, but for me the real appeal was to walk past it into the Kasugayama Primeval Forest, a preserve where logging has been banned since 841. Its ancient trees sneer at Yellowstone as nouveau riche. And after the crowds of selfie-hunters at the Daibutsu and the deer park, you find a silence more suited to temples here. The people you do see will tend to appreciate it too. You share a silent nod before parting around another bend. There were some places where you can poke through the canopy to a great view of the town behind you, too. If you take your walk to the far northeastern edge, there’s a nice little waterfall too, which can drown out all the ambient noise you could ask for.

I descended a different way aiming for the Naramachi district — the old merchant’s town with tiny streets packed with tiny old houses in a simulation of what a bygone era was like. The effect is ruined by the curiously unfinished feel of most Asian cities — instead of the bloodless Historical Preservation rules of an old town in Europe or America, here electric wires, air conditioning units and satellite dishes are as often slapped to the front of a building as tucked behind a screen or on the roof. You can’t forget what century it is here, except maybe at night when the HVAC units blend into the dark. But you can at least appreciate the patterns of the past hiding behind the needs of the present.

I had a delicious okonomiyaki for a late lunch at Omitsu. Okonomiyaki is a street food, closest in concept to a frittata, with tempura flakes, eggs, and various veggies slammed together into a patty with the meat if your choice and cooked on the griddle. Omitsu, like many Japanese eateries, is the size of a larger American closet, with a tiny menu. But all six choices are tempting, and you can only have one. The chef speaks some English, and makes up for any linguistic failings with his boundless friendliness. He seems to be thrilled he gets to serve you his food. I was thrilled in turn that I got to eat it.

Tabroom Blue™, or, The Death of the Text Blast

Elon Musk loves to inspire headlines. He’s also good at it, whch is nice because he doesn’t appear to be good at much else. Take, for instance, running a busness. It’s a skill you’d think a self styled god-tier entrepeneur might have. But just last year, Musk signed a $42 billion agreement to buy Twitter without apparently understanding it. Perhaps he didn’t even read it. But Twitter’s lawyers sure did, an when Musk got cold feet and tried to back out of overpaying for the company, they took him to court and lined up a sufficiently rapid beatdown that he surrendered and bought the company anyway. He then strolled into the company, spent barely a week in the office, and fired 3/4 of its workforce without bothering to understand what they do.

Next time you want to light $42 billion on fire, Elon, feel free to invest in speech & debate tabulation software instead.

That only started the headlines; they’ve been near nonstop since. Each article is a paragraph in a wider story. Musk’s original goal, the spark that spurred him to sign that awful contract in the first place, was to find an online home for unimpeded right-wing discourse. He found it unacceptable that Twitter and other social networks drew boundaries around Trump and his fiercest supporters. So Musk bought the place. Now the only people who get banned from Twitter are people who annoy him, people he deems too ‘woke,’ or sometimes folks who point out facts about his decisions.

But that policy shift created some serious problems for Twitter. The forces pushing to remove far right discourse from social media wasn’t a diabolical progressive conspiracy in Twitter’s management, funded by George Soros and connected to the Clintons somehow. Musk’s real problem is that as long as social media is paid for by advertisers, alt right speech cannot be welcome.

The dirty secret of the rightmost wing of the Republican party is that they’re a very small part of the overall population. They exploit loopholes and broken rules in the constitution to produce an oversize political impact in the US. Their demographics are skewed older and whiter, and such people turn out to vote in large numbers; they’re more rural than urban, and rural areas are over-represented in Congress and the electoral college. The GOP has spent a few decades cheerfully narrowing voting rights protections so as to produce election wins from an ever smaller base of support. But, that base is small, and when it comes to business, you can’t built much of a market on just that small faction, unless you’re running a scam.

Businesses need to reach a large mainstream audience. And modern far right rhetoric is polarizing: its few fans want to hear nothing but, but everyone else is allergic to it. So engagement and audience sizes on Twitter have been dropping off ever since Musk designated it as a safe haven for his brand of free speech.

Apropos to nothing, you can now find me on Mastodon at https://tech.lgbt/@mildconcern.

Naturally, as customers leave a platform, so too do advertisers. They always chase the largest audience. But it’s not just a matter of how many ads get seen, but what type of ads they are. Before Musk, Twitter’s revenue was about 90% brand ads. Brand ads are not designed to generate clicks and direct sales, the way most ads on Amazon work. Brand ads intend to create positive associations, so you remember the company the next time you need to buy whatever it is they sell. A car maker is a classic brand advertiser. The chances someone clicks an Instagram post and puts a Camry in their cart are very low. But if readers associate Toyota with “reliable” and “comfortable” and “safe” over time, through repeated exposure to brand ads, they are more likely to buy a Camry a year from now when their old car dies and is too expensive to fix.

If you’re running brand ads, you take care that the only associations you build are positive ones. Twitter is a news platform, and when the news ran bad, brands would pause their ads. Nobody wanted their ads to be associated with wars, earthquakes, or mass shootings. As discussion of the weekly tragedy would dampen out, brand ads would come back.

Now, enter Elon. Racism, sexism, or anti-LGBTQ rhetoric once got you banned; now it gets you retweeted by the company’s owner. Almost immediately, that rhetoric was everywhere. Advertisers reacted. Various estimates say Twitter’s brand ad revenue has dropped anywhere from thirty to seventy-five percent. That free speech sure has cost Musk a lot. Note that this process does not require advertisers themselves to personally object to the speech in question. They only care that most customers hate it. The companies and their management could be wildly racist, sexist and homophobic, but if they answer to investors, they’re still going to yank those ads. The bottom line is their only true morality.

So, a conundrum for Musk. Almost all of Twitter’s revenue was brand ads, and brand ads cannot coexist with the type of speech he spent $42 billion to liberate. Perhaps the genius Elon was supposed to be could untie this knot, but our real world Musk has no answer. His main attempt is Twitter Blue: selling blue checkmarks for eight bucks a month. It’s brought in nothing comparable to the revenues he’s lost. And Twitter has almost nothing else it can offer to a paying customer.

So Musk is now lashing out: he’s threatened his advertisers, but then gave ads away — and neither brought them back. His company is drunkenly lurching towards bankruptcy, perhaps as early as this summer. Musk, without any real idea of how to fix it, has crawled into the last refuge of the rich guy: cheaping out on everything.

He’s cut most of the staff, and cut perks, space and benefits for those who’ve stayed on. He stopped paying rent on his offices. Twitter keeps having technical failures because he shuts off servers at random to prove they’re not needed. Hundreds of vendors have overdue invoices sitting on his desk. He’s cutting pennies because he can’t find dollars. It won’t save Twitter, but it’s all he has left.

A few weeks ago, the tech press was baffled when Twitter announced that 2-factor authentication via text message will only be available to those checkmark buyers. Two-factor authentication, or 2FA, means you need more than a password to get access to an account. In its simplest form, a random code is emailed or texted to a user, and then asked as a confirmation of your identity. That should prove you have the phone listed in the account, which gives the site further proof that you’re you. Musk now said text messages only were for paying customers.

The more complicated method, 2FA by means of an authenticator app, was still free. Such apps work by taking a sequence of random numbers, called a shared secret. The site generates the secret, and you copy it into the app on your phone, usually by means of a QR code. After that, it’s never sent over the internet again. Instead, the app combines it with the current date & time, and runs that in turn through some math that produces a six-digit code. The site you’re logging into runs the same math on the shared secret stored in your account. If its result matches the six-digit code you typed in, you’re allowed to login.

Because they rely on timestamps, the correct code changes every minute, making them hard to snoop usefully — by the time you’ve cracked one, it’s changed. And, for Math Reasons, you cannot easily guess the original shared secret from the codes it outputs. The math works only forward, not backward. One-direction codes like that are called hashes, and among other things, it’s how your Tabroom password is stored in our database. When you log in, we can’t tell what your original password is, but we can tell that you typed it in correctly, or else the hashes would not match.

Shared-secret apps are a much more secure method of 2FA than using text messages. Texts aren’t sent encrypted, and it’s proven relatively simple to hijack cell phone numbers, especially if you’re targeting someone in particular. Phone company customer service reps are relatively easy to fool, and have often give account and phone access to hackers. With apps, the shared-secret is never sent to a phone company; it’s never trusted to anyone at all besides you and the service you’re logging into.

That’s why the tech press was confused. Paying customers are being given exclusive access to a less secure system. Most outlets assumed Elon was just being arbitrary and bizarre. Again. Given how much of the last year Musk has spent playing the role of “clueless clown on fire,” they can be forgiven for falling back on that explanation. But I knew right away what it’s all about, because it’s related to a slow crisis that Tabroom has been facing for most of the last year.

You probably think sending a text message is free. They have been free for people with most US phone plans for at least a decade. As soon as smart phones became the norm, and data became the bulk of cell traffic, phone plans stopped charging for talk minutes and texts. Data was where the money was. Who even talks on their phone anymore, anyway? My own ringer has been on silent for about four years, now.

So texts between phones are free now. But sending a text from a non-phone, such as a web system that manages speech & debate tournaments, to pull a random example out of nowhere, it’s more complicated. For Tabroom, I have two basic choices. I could use an SMS/MMS gateway service, which talks directly to the cell providers and sends messages. Or, I can use email. An email sent to 5555551234@messaging.att.net will deliver as a text, as long as that line is on AT&T.

So why not use a gateway? They charge a small amount per text you send. But if you’re Twitter, those charges can add up. Rumors say that Twitter spent $60 million or so per year on these texts, which seems staggering but not when you weigh it against a company that once had $5.4 billion in annual review. That is, until a business leader with no idea how to save his sinking ship takes over and starts attacking every little expense he can find. So, I figured he saw that bill and decided to cut it.

I hope this revelation doesn’t shock you, but Tabroom has never had $5.4 billion in annual revenue. So, we use the free method. But much as Musk’s free speech had costs, so too does free text messaging. Email to text gateways are much less reliable. Messages get tagged as spam, or sometimes just don’t deliver, all the time. I also have to keep track of your cell provider, because each one has a different email address I have to send messages to. When Tabroom users switch carriers their text blasts stop working until they update their account. And of course, when folks who judge tournaments do switch carriers, their Tabroom blasts aren’t usually their first concern, or their tenth. Few judges are constantly yearning to be harassed into hitting their start round button.

Those downsides are all annoyances. However, now Tabroom also faces a legitimate danger: those email gateways are not really intended for bulk messaging. And, spammers sometimes use them to bother phone customers. So the carriers are growing more restrictive. AT&T drops any message with a web address in it. That’s why Tabroom doesn’t send map URLs anymore. And then in late 2022, T-Mobile began capping how many messages per hour a single sender can send them. Which means, if you haven’t noticed, that T-Mobile users don’t get text blasts during the middle of the day most Saturdays; we hit that cap all the time when Tabroom is busy.

I can’t complain to T-Mobile, because T-Mobile’s answer will be “you should be paying to use the SMS gateway.” So, Tabroom hosted 192 tournaments this weekend, with 2356 schools, 21,312 entries and 6,133 judges. Over the course of this Saturday, those 27,445 folks were sent 144,350 text blasts. At that rate, we’d run up a $75,000 annual bill. That’s a lot of money for the right to yell at debaters to be on time.

Is it worth it to increase Tabroom fees a substantial amount for that? Should we try to track who texts a lot and bill them extra — but therefore increase our own overhead tracking every time Menick harasses that judge who never hits start? What happens if Verizon or AT&T follow suit and start limiting us, too? AT&T is already quick to delay deliveries sometimes too, when it decides we’re sending spam. Do we rely on emails and forget texts, when most people don’t get audio notifications of new email anymore? Do I have to write an app for Tabroom just so people get notifications through it — and then pray new judges install it basically so they can be bothered?

I don’t know the answer. But I hope it doesn’t become a crisis. We’ve come to rely on the text message as a prime form of communication, especially during the pandemic and online debates. We need to rethink that a lot in the coming months or years. It’s already tumbling around my brain, for what it’s worth. I’m trying to make sure Tabroom survives longer than Twitter will, at least.

The way Musk is going, that shouldn’t be too difficult.

the loneliest moment

A paradox of debate is that an activity where thousands of people argue with each other at once can still leave us lonely.

I don’t buy into personality type tests, but I am certainly an introvert. Constant exposure to people wipes me out, but when I go to tournaments, my place is usually at the center of the storm. That costs energy. So, after all is done and I fly or drive home, I’m ready for a break from all you screaming performers.

But I live alone. Before this year, I’d return home to an empty and cold house and it would be too quiet, too fast. The stampede of debaters and judges who all rely on me for assignments and results were gone, and I’m just left with an echo. It’s strange to be lonely at the same moments you most want to be alone, but on those Tuesdays Afterwards? I was.

But that was the Before Times. The age of lockdowns has been unkind to us all. I’m a loner, sure, but also a nomad: I used to travel constantly, and even when I was home, I’d leave the house every day, if only to go work in a coffee shop or the library. The buzz of people around helps me focus, and the journey forms a boundary between work and not-work. In other words, I need people around that I can ignore. And it’s a rare introvert who can make do without human contact at all. I’ve found myself talking back to podcasts, or pacing around the living room for an hour at a time, or wasting gas just to change the scenery.

It feels like the worst year of our lives, even for those of us who’ve so far avoided direct harm from the greater wounds 2020 offers: the virus itself, the poverty it has sparked, the smoke and flames of an entire coast ablaze, or the constant reality that police can end black lives and stay free. Against that balance of misery, my own debts seem minor. But the lesson of a lonely time is that sometimes, no one is there to look out for you. Right now, no one can be, even if they wish to. You have to be careful of your own troubles, even if others have it worse. Being lonely and down might be the baseline right now, normal by majority vote. But it is no less healthy or easy to shoulder.

–

I bear the dubious honor of being Debate Famous. There are several ways to become Debate Famous – you can win a lot of tournaments, serve on a lot of tab staffs, national boards or committees, or just be obnoxious for long enough. Some manage all three! But I took perhaps the easiest route, and joined a tiny band with few entrance requirements and even fewer members. I am one of the Techies.

I cheat in calling us a band, for one of the defining features of a debate techie is that we all drift on separate islands. Each debate techie is tied to a Project. These projects are usually the residue of a hobby idea that got out of control. Tabroom is certainly that: it now runs 3,000ish tournaments a year and serves millions of hits per weekend. It’s a luxury beyond telling that the NSDA can make it my full time job and dedicate others to helping with the tsunami of emails that results from its popularity.

But at the end of the day, even with that support behind me, I’m still alone. Nobody understands Tabroom and its internal workings half so well as I do. If something major breaks, I can fix in minutes what might take anyone else several days. Speech & debate is never so lucrative that our scant resources can hire me a co-programmer; they’ve had to stretch to underpay me enough to do this full time. And that’s the root of my Debate Fame, because I am Tabroom, and it is me, as far as the debate world sees it. Every user of Tabroom therefore is one who relies on Palmer.

Such “fame” comes with a price, for technology is brittle. From time to time, some hidden capacity limit is reached, or a buried mistake in code I wrote six years ago decides TODAY IS THE DAY! My machines start to stagger, and disconnect, and lock up. My phone starts dancing with messages, half of which start “You probably already know about this, but… .” People have no choice, because only I can type the keys that get your tournament started again. Sometimes I fix it immediately, and people barely notice the trouble. Sometimes it takes me an hour, or two – or four – to find the illness and its cure. And those times are the loneliest moments I know.

If you were in a tab room with me, you’d just see me beating the crap out of my laptop keyboard. You’d hear me mutter incomprehensible nonsense to myself, as if I were chanting spells to appease furious eldritch demons of silicon and resin. I’d be zeroed in, focused on the screen, phone definitely muted. But I’m still utterly aware of you all. I can feel your eyes, the eyes of each and every one of the tens of thousands of you who rely on me to continue your tournament day. You might not know where I am, or even what I look like, but I can feel your eyes all the same, in the place where my neck meets my shoulders that tighten and coil with the strain of it. And I can’t step away, I can’t delay, because there’s no one to hand the problem to, and thousands are waiting.

It’s a pretty steep personal cost, this consequence of the realities of our activity, and the ever insufficient resources we have to stretch to meet our problems. Software is delicate, with so many layers and complexities that are impossible to fully predict or understand. Imagine an engineer designing a bridge: they carefully calculate known stress factors, material strengths, expected weights and the like to arrive at a construction whose weakest point is much stronger than the load it will bear. Now make the engineer do it without knowing what material half the bridge is made out of. Throw three hundred hollow rivets into their supply. Then build sixteen more bridges stacked atop the first one, all with unknown materials and different designers. Would you drive across those bridges? But that’s software development for you. Thankfully, unlike our hypothetical stack of bridges, nobody dies when speech & debate tech collapses, though you wouldn’t know it listening to people sometimes.

Because of this constant ticking disaster we call software, companies can spend billions on people like me. Vast teams of techies find and fix expensive problems, but those billions can only make outages happen less often, not never. Google had serious downtime just two days ago, and Tabroom’s entire annual budget is a rounding error in their departmental catering bill. But Google’s wizards are not underpaid, or alone. Their problems are greater in size, but not much different in kind.

When Debate Techies get together, that’s what we talk about, those lonely moments. You may imagine great rivalry between Speechwire and Tabroom and TRPC. There is none; I can think of no greater personal nightmare than Speechwire disappearing and having to fill even a portion of the gap it’d leave behind. But even if we did view each other as the Enemy, you would never see me laugh at Ben when Speechwire goes haywire, and he would never do the reverse. The price of admission to the little club of Debate Techies is understanding what that moment feels like. You cannot see another suffer it without sympathy and remembering your own terror.

–

The era of covid has affected debate like everything else. Online debate was always a side hobby project of a few visionaries, but never got much real traction – until suddenly in April it was everything. Every member of the little band of debate techies had to drop all plans and change our entire world overnight. 2020 Nationals was going to be the first all-online balloted Nationals anyway, but overnight that was no longer a Project but an Assumption. Priten suddenly joined our ranks with his terrific Classroom.cloud project, and therefore saved the TOC and Nationals both. He got his very own baptism, with a slowdown and lockup the first day of Nationals; I spent those moments in the Des Moines office preventing people from calling him. I know.

But Classrooms is based on Zoom and therefore can be pricey. Large expensive tournaments can swing it, but in the world as it existed in April, the type of small local tournaments I grew up in – the Massachusetts local that charges about seven bucks an entry – could not begin to afford it. Circuit kids may mock those types of tournaments, but speech & debate wouldn’t exist without them. And so, we set about trying to find a way to keep them alive, and the result is NSDA Campus. I’ve helped with Campus at the edges, but again all speech & debate tech must be lonely, and this burden belongs to Hardy.

It turns out spinning up a custom private video conferencing on-demand service given about 3 person-months of work and a shoestring budget isn’t simple. So we’ve had our problems. The first couple of weeks went fine, but then we hit a threshold of usage that triggered an odd undocumented condition in our proxy service — the traffic cop that keeps all the traffic for your particular PF round going to the same server so you can see your opponents and judge. The proxies went nuts and started sending people anywhere and nowhere. It was not because we didn’t have enough server capacity — we’re running our servers on Amazon’s cloud, which also hosts services you might have heard of, like “Netflix.” As I write this 128 machines are serving Campus rooms just fine. The flaw was a condition buried deep in someone else’s code that would only manifest when we had more than 400 rooms going at once. It’s fixed and behind us.

Today we hit another, tripped by a new threshold of 3,000 users. Hardy found these new issues, and fixed them too. Because that’s what we do in the little club of Debate Techies.

It’s hard to test these things. We don’t employ a couple thousand people who can be drafted to all join online rooms at once, just so we can see what breaks. There are ways to simulate that type of load in testing environments, but setting such things up is time consuming too, and each of us lonely techies has an enormous list of problems to deal with right now. It’s hard to find time for the future’s problems when when we have so many already on fire in the present. And of course, only one of us can solve most of them. Hardy is the person who understands my tech province best, and vice-versa – but if we traded to-do lists, our productivity would nearly vanish. The difference is like translating text into a language you’re fluent in, versus one where you have to look up every 5th word.

And so was Hardy was condemned to another pair of lonely moments for each of those bugs. He knew they’d come. We all do.

—

Because today the demons came for him and not me, I feel more free to speak, to point out the underlying realities of our activity, and to shed light on the effort we’re making to keep our speech & debate circus going despite a global pandemic. The type of tech required to do debate online is only barely ready for what we’re asking it to do. If covid-19 hit 10 or even 5 years ago, speech & debate would simply have shut down. As it is, we haven’t caught our breath. Everyone in the debate tech world has been running full tilt for months now, trying to get this all to work – and sometimes, we fail. We can promise you effort. We can never promise perfection. Neither can Google and its billions.

But perhaps, on behalf of the other members of my little tribe, I can ask for more clemency, at least in public. It is unkind at best to churn out memes about a service that someone just spent three days not sleeping to fix for you. It’s unwise to hit Facebook to air grievances or unfounded theories as to what the issues are. And most of all, it’s bad form to suggest we give up on the whole project, and give up affordable speech & debate tournaments with it, because of a few software kinks that made you wait around a couple hours – at home, no less – in the early days of an immensely complicated project that did not exist and was not planned for six months ago.

When you do so, you underestimate the realities and the economics that go into the projects that us lonely techies are keeping alive so that debaters can debate and speechies can speak. But more than anything, what you do most of all is take our loneliest moment, and make it lonelier. In the era of covid, when the gaps between us in real life are so huge and enforced by a deadly and invisible enemy, we should be careful before adding to another’s isolation.

And do remember, none of us in debate tech are in it for the fabulous wealth and prizes. We do this because we’re tied to the activity, and find it worthwhile to make your competition work better and faster in normal times – or to work at all, now in the age of pandemic. We do it because I too once paced in prep rooms before giving extemp speeches, while Priten and Hardy blitzed through policy debate rounds and Ben prepped his IEs.

Any of us could expand our wealth and free time by leaving speech & debate, and the lonely moments it causes us. We stay because of the satisfaction and our connection to this community. So consider please the living, breathing, lockdown-trapped & lonely person at the other end of that link before you decide to trample on us because the fragile tech we’re trying to build snapped today. Even if the meme is funny.

Solidarity

I was born into a city as it started to die.

That takes a long time, and it may still recover, but it by the late 70s, Fitchburg was fading in all the ways that more famous cities in the center of the country would. Fitchburg was a place that worked with its hands, turning out machine tools, paper, wood and the like. It was a busy booming city in the late 1800s. The city carved the Hoosac tunnel out of a western mountain to build a train to Albany and beyond. The New York Times was printed on its paper, along with others up and down the coast.

And like many other places that worked with their hands, a haze of decay began to set in during the 70s and 80s, as factories closed and were not replaced. Poverty is now around 20%. Grand old buildings sit quietly, unpeopled, crumbling for want of a few coats of paint. If either end of Main Street were blocked entirely, no traffic would pile up. It hasn’t been hard to park for decades. The population as a whole shrank by a tenth, which yet understates the change. Almost everyone I went to school with then would leave. About three to five generations of my ancestors in any direction were born there, but my classmates’ children were mostly not.

My age cohort was also one of the last where schools were mostly full of white kids. A large stock of empty cheap housing was a draw, even in a poor and wage-sparse area. As the white folks left for fancier places, we were gradually replaced by others. By the grace of a local quirk, most of these newcomers were not in fact immigrants. The vast majority were Latinx, and despite many coming from other places, they were broadly labeled for their majority: The Puerto Ricans.

My parents and their siblings didn’t go to school with any kids who spoke Spanish. I went to school with a few, though that was an era of separate bilingual education, so we didn’t know any of them. Those kids weren’t in our classes, and we were separated by language. And beyond that, I was in no way encouraged to get to know them. They didn’t have names, or individual identities to us, and the adults around us were careful to keep it that way.

These white adults were anxious for their jobs and their homes, and saw both declining at the same time as this new population moved in. So they associated the decline with the people. And the lessons passed down to us were as clear as they were horrible: these different strangers were Ruining. The. City. They weren’t even working; they were instead sitting around at home sponging off the system, absorbing welfare benefits that were put in place for Us, not for Them. They were dirty, immoral, incomprehensible thieves, and their very presence an affront to all that was good and just in the world.

And so, it was The Puerto Ricans that were used to teach me racism. This message was never laid out all at once, of course. It was collected in brief asides, comments that were clear only in context, snide remarks half concealed around the kids. But it was made clear to us all that the Puerto Ricans were the lowest of the Different. The Laotians and the Vietnamese were war refugees, and were here because they sided with America. We had more black kids around school than most New England towns, but that’s not saying much, and they weren’t visibly worse off than anyone else. I only later learned the hidden ways the world deals harshness to black kids. Overall, in Fitchburg in the 1980s, it was all about the Puerto Ricans, who ruined all they touched.

“Puerto Rican” is not a pejorative term. It simply denotes someone from Puerto Rico, after all. It’s the actual name, of the actual island. But I cringe to write it and automatically search for an alternative phrase, because as I grew up, it was voiced as a slur. It was spoken in that tone, with that heat, and with that intent. It was sometimes used as insult. I could almost wish the adults around me had used actual slurs instead, so the real term wouldn’t carry this fearful weight for me.

Of course, this picture of a people left out an awful lot. I didn’t know they were US citizens by birthright until we hit the Spanish American War in 8th grade history. The history of the US’s treatment of Puerto Rico also undermines any view that they weren’t owed the benefits of American citizenship. Hurricane Maria and its aftermath are only the latest testimony. Also, welfare benefits were never generous enough to provide that lavish lifestyle — after all, if welfare was so good, why didn’t we sign up? A good lifestyle on welfare was only possible if you cheated the system a bit, which we knew because white people in the family had done so before. But somehow, this sin was far worse when done in Spanish.

The Puerto Ricans tended to live in the worst housing on any street, with a few too many people per apartment — not a sign of excess wealth. The jobless rate among them was higher than white people, but not so high that the claim “none of them ever work” could be defended. As actual knowledge replaced the lazy folk wisdom, the collective sins of the Puerto Ricans of Fitchburg were reduced to “their music was loud sometimes.” But then, so was ours. And man, can they throw a killer barbecue.

I tried to say as much, and got nowhere. My family has not known Puerto Ricans personally, except a few people they worked with who were clearly The Good Ones, evidenced by their having a job. But “seeing people lying around all the time” was good enough evidence to support the narrative. Those people were moochers and thieves, and that was that. After all, if you want to believe something, any proof will do. And if the Puerto Ricans weren’t to blame, that would present some uncomfortable questions. So, anytime we’d pass some Puerto Rican people out on the porch or something, the line was “Look at them, just sitting there without a care in the world, while we work to support them.” I’d hear that often enough. On Sundays.

But as humans grow up, we don’t just understand things in isolation. Part of growing up is putting the things you learn into a broader context. The mind relies on categories, grouping things together to understand them more quickly. That’s part of why racism is so lazy and yet so hard to overcome. But these judgments go beyond race: the picture being painted with snide remarks and half-concealed hatreds was a clear to any 10 year old. It was a lesson being taught to tens of millions of other kids in the 1980s by parents fearing the change falling upon them: to be different is to be less. A generic white person is the pinnacle. Everything else is a faded and flawed copy. The more flaws among your neighbors, the worse off you’d be. It was a lesson I held onto for far too long.

I adopted my mother’s newfound judgmental strand of Christianity, and the conservative politics that resulted from it. By then, I’d gotten scholarships, and headed off to increasingly prestigious private schools. The academics were great, but I didn’t fit in well. I remember individuals would often be kind and open to me, but groups usually were not. And I was set apart politically as well as socially. Mom’s flirtation with evangelism didn’t go very far, but the politics were more stable. And I loved to be contrary, seeing absolutes and truths everywhere in the rigid way of the intelligent teenager. The timid liberalism of those private schools, with its placid faith in the system to do right, had no answers for me. Private school kids, and most of the teachers, didn’t understand places like Cleghorn or the Patch, and so they couldn’t address the real source of my fears and prejudices. Their talk of race and economic relations was rooted in the black/white divide of Boston and most of the rest of the country, and that seemed bizarre and irrelevant to what I believed. I knew something of their world, but they knew nothing of mine, and so they were unable to move me.

But then, I would end up moving myself.

There was a hairdresser named Keith who rented an apartment from my grandmother and came over a couple times to give us all haircuts. My uncle would mention his name and AIDS an awful lot. I didn’t know much about AIDS then, other than it was deadly, and had something to do with gay people. So, I was afraid of Keith. I didn’t know much about gay people either, beyond the bare facts of who they “liked”, but I definitely knew Keith was Different. Maybe different like the Puerto Ricans were different. Bad different. And a very few years after Keith moved on from my grandmother’s building, I came to know that I was Different too.

What followed was a story too typical of my generation, of sleepless nights learning to fear to love anyone, of trying to explain it away in a million ways, of stealing glances when I thought nobody was looking while everyone else got to leer openly. Of pretend conversations about pretend girls with pretend boobs. Of remembering my young childhood insistence that girls were icky and I’d never marry one with a twist of irony. Of seeing relationships and love as for other people, not for me, as the hand of the God would definitely punish me in some awful way, probably involving hairdressers with AIDS. If I ever gave into it. Which I tried very hard not to do.

And of knowing, most of all, that now I was Different.

And the adults around me, they hated Different. They were unfair to it, harsh to it — mocked it, avoided it, and penalized it. I was already different in enough smaller ways to understand that. I caught enough grief for reading books a lot, and being awkward physically, and having ideas nobody else around had, even though they also acknowledged these qualities were likely to help me out in life. They knew these were signs of a smart kid who might go places, but wouldn’t engage with them. I’d get blanket expressions of approval for Being Smart, but these were belied by criticism and poking at the particulars. So, I learned to keep these differences to myself, since I’d at best only be laughed at for expressing them. And if I could be mocked for small differences, what would a huge difference do to me, if it came out? “Reading too often” had nothing on being gay.

I did the only thing I could think of. I boxed it all in. I learned to keep the greater part of what I was going through from them, and everyone else. And even from myself. It pulled us apart, of course. One of the first lies a gay kid tells himself is that being gay doesn’t affect your personality, it’s just who you like for sex. But of course, that’s only possible to believe if you’re a teenager who has no personal idea what love is yet. Love goes far deeper and affects far more than just sex. So as I hid the parts of myself related to being gay, I hid the parts related to love. And therefore came to hide nearly all of what I truly am.

But my internal life changed. I gave my heart to someone. It was given back. He didn’t have a choice; my gaydar wasn’t so hot back then. So I was deprived of a villain in my first failed love story, and was never able to properly hate him as might have been better for me. Instead I spent an unreasonable amount of time being morose and weird about it. However, it made me realize how deep being gay ran. The bullshit line a conservative gay kid clings to is “I’m not a gay person, I’m a person who happens to be gay.” But it was clear to me now, love’s not that simple. I couldn’t pretend that to myself any longer, and giving that game up turned my world around.

I didn’t abandon my politics immediately, but they were much less central. My college friends would have been surprised by my high school polemics. I was reconsidering everything, starting with my heart, but eventually I worked outwards. I ended up in the wrong major as a result, but so it goes. There’s no good time to go through a huge, personality redefining crisis. I rejected the prejudices I’d been handed about being gay, came out in college, voted for Al Gore. And I started to question a lot of the other attitudes I grew up with. Now that I was okay with my Different, I started to reconsider the other Different people. I started to learn the lies behind the racism I was taught, and how similar they were to the lies I was taught about gay people. I can’t claim to be racism free — no white American does so without generous self-delusion. But, I’ve learned at least to recognize a lot of it and fight my impulses towards it.

But I still lead a dual life. I grew far more cosmopolitan, far more accepting, and far better able to embrace differences instead of rejecting them by reflex. But I never shared this outlook with the family whose prejudices I had to overcome to gain it. I tried a few times, halfheartedly, but settled into a truce where they didn’t get their ideas challenged, at the price of not knowing the vast parts of me that didn’t fit with those ideas. They know only a shell, not the full me.

The election of 2016 did not surprise me; I knew America was capable of it. Trump is what poor people think rich people are like, a self promoting liar and charlatan who proves every day he knows nothing and does not care, and his fans still love him for it. I knew this country was capable of deeming him the best of us and giving him power. So no, the election did not surprise me. But it did disappoint me. It scared me, and scares me still. We have a racist in power, who doesn’t even understand the law much less respect it, and who lets his aggressive hostility rule him. The same type of quick false judgment that made my family look down on people for not working on a Sunday is now setting White House policy. And, a good chunk of my own family had voted for him, both proudly and reluctantly, out of those same old impulses that scared me of AIDS and loud Spanish music and difference.

It was a step too far. I snapped. I haven’t spoken to most of them since.

Trump has been a remarkably hostile president to the LGBT. But he’s been so much more horrible to others within the LGBT community, and worse still to other groups of people, I almost don’t dare bring it up in reference to myself. I wish I could claim the worst of it, and spare those more vulnerable still. There are concentration camps full of children in this country. There are now laws in place saying others’ religion can be used to deny me just about anything. There’s a judge sitting on a stolen seat on the highest bench who’ll freely and gladly vote to downgrade my particular citizenship. We have a vice president who probably thinks in his deepest heart that I should be killed. And I still don’t have the worst of it.

The thing about building a big wall between yourself and other people is you don’t get too choose which side everyone is going to stand on. Where you place the wall doesn’t matter. Building the barrier is itself the sin. I’ve been outside enough walls to take no comfort from being inside theirs. The walls of the closet I was stuck in for too long, and the closet I walk mostly back into when I’m around them, are made of the same hatreds they taught me for Puerto Ricans.

The “freeloaders” and “welfare mamas” and various far ruder words they flung around built the walls of my closet, and fired the fears that kept me there far too long. So now, when you say those words and express those beliefs, you mean me. You can’t drop the n-bomb or the s-word or any other epithet without me automatically translating it to faggot. I can’t hear it otherwise. Nearly all gay people understand it so. Trump claimed strong LGBT support, but it was just another lie: McCain got 27% of the LGBT vote, Romney 22%, while Trump got 14%. He doesn’t attack the LGBT first, but most of us understand that when targets are being lined up we’ll make the list eventually. Any world made of walls is a threat to all of us, and we have to stick together in the face of opposition, of hatreds — and of family, be they ignorant, hostile, or both.

This message is partly an answer to an aunt who doesn’t understand boundaries — at all — and so has been drafting other family members as messengers to undermine my wish to have nothing to do with her. But that will fail. I no longer will crawl back into the box they created and continue to create — and vote for! Ignorance is no defense. It’s how we got here, after all. And I’ve tried to inform, and to teach. They can’t handle me outside of my box, and I won’t go back inside anymore. That would make of me “a person who happens to be gay.” Which is to say, a lie.

What’s more, I wouldn’t do it even without the personal angle. Trump’s language has an edge and venom unlike any Republican presidential nominee before him. I wouldn’t have liked President McCain or Romney, but I wouldn’t have been unable to accept them. But Trump is plainly different. And an election like this must have consequences for the winners. If you voted for an openly racist President, you can’t get pissed at me for treating you like the type of person who would vote for an openly racist President.

I can’t countenance that when there are children separated from their families no matter what their parents’ crimes were. I can’t be at peace with that when your hatchet man in chief destroys the last vestiges of welfare, health care for millions, social security, and more, while profiteering personally and inflaming racism. He calls people animals on a regular basis. He destroys relationships with our allies and embraces terrible dictators. His followers would make a dictator out of him. And you are marching along with those people, people waving the Confederate battle flag and even the swastika, people who’d have my friends deported, and many of whom would have me shot. Look at your fellow travelers, and wonder no longer why I won’t be there to quietly pass the turkey in November. To stand beside you is to stand beside them. I will not do it.

I had no choice over being different, and neither do the Black people in your state, or trans people in your bathroom, or Puerto Ricans down the street. The Trump faction label us together to blame us, to attack us, and in some cases to kill us. And in the face of that threat, solidarity matters. The only way the Different can last this thing through is if we don’t abandon each other. And in voting for Trump you helped build that wall you’ve been working on my entire life, the wall between the Different and you. Thanks to your wall, I can’t live on both sides at once. So, misguided Trumpist family, you’ve given me a choice. On one side of your wall are the people who share my burdens and struggles, the people who don’t dismiss facts with prejudice, who understand how privilege and power work, and who know what it feels like to be an outsider. On the other side sit you, the builders of that wall, the makers of the box I shoved myself into for decades too long.

The choice was not hard. And I do not regret it.