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"Primordial Ethics": Music to my eyes
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Let me tell you about Mickey. Mickey is a rock star, by which I mean not that overused expression for a high performer, but literally so, as I define it: Mickey is a portal into the world for thrilling music that will otherwise never be heard. He doesn't constrain himself to the stave (see image, above), may not even know that Every Good Boy Deserves Fruit, but then again, a lot of rock stars don't. He's an insatiable consumer of the work of others and a master synthesist, yet his output is utterly original. And, not least, he's incredibly fun to watch. Rock. Star.
I encountered Mickey's work before I met the man himself. It was the summer of '15, and I was doing my summer reading. I was on the hunt for something that would help me understand the Internet of Things, and after wading through a bunch of crap I discovered Trillions. To this day, it's the only book on the topic that expresses the scale of the IoT without being hand-wavy: "computing as an ecology" means something, and Mickey and his co-authors convinced me that the IoT portends a paradigm shift in your and my favorite technology and everything attached to it. Trillions is nothing if not big.
So imagine my delight upon discovering that Mickey had joined Autodesk as a Research Fellow. He, knowing no better, accepted my immediate request for a meeting, and I, determined to impress him in that meeting, brought with me some of the "elephant diagrams" I used to understand the company....
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Mickey was, if not impressed, at least amused, and a bit later invited me to join Project Primordial, his effort to help Autodesk think about generative design at scale. Join a cutting edge IoT project with my favorite IoT thinker? Yes, please.
Primordial (which later became and still is Hack Rod) was an education in lots of ways, but most especially a master class in unbounded thinking. I am a repressed person generally, and while that's probably for the best in most respects, it translates into a certain lack of audacity in my intellectual scope (if you're surprised to read that then you haven't met Mickey). And it was with those lessons in mind that I later catalyzed the MX3D Smart Bridge project, about which I've spoken before. What I haven't acknowledged previously was that Mickey was one of the first people I asked to help figure out how to make a bridge smart, and his ideas and especially his questions on that topic have been an inspiration more or less continuously over the (gulp) half decade we've been trying to do so.
So that's Mickey, or at least my Mickey. Now comes a request, from his partner (an extraordinary person in her own right): Mickey, it seems, is going to be bed-ridden for a time, a depressing and boring prospect. She asks for a story "about the goodness that Mickey has brought into your life," and that's what this is, if only a partial account. It was a pleasure to write it, but in addition she asks for reading suggestions for Mickey, which is the exact equivalent of trying to figure out what to get the man who has everything. Indeed, when I want to build a reading list, Mickey himself is my first stop: he's long since left Autodesk, but we are still collaborating, and I've actually just got off a Zoom call with him in which he first recommended The Nature of Technology and then proceeded to chat me (while operating what appeared to be a very up to date if fussy Jacquard loom) enough additional material to keep me busy the entire time he's recovering:
But I have a niche experience that will help here. I've been sick before, and in desperate need of bookish distraction. I read fast, too, so what I really want isn't a book, it's a series, and long enough that I won't be worried about it running out. It also has to be well written, entertaining, and not so tightly plotted that close attention is required. There are some obvious ones--Pratchett's Discworld series and Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey-Maturin stories come to mind--but I'm sure Mickey's already been there. Here are a few that got me through tough times, and which he might have overlooked:
Get well soon.
