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Theory of Intrinsic Value
“Value is like that of energy. It cannot be created nor destroyed, but can change form.”
Individuals have arrived! We have evidence!
We’ve finally narrowed down humanity to a microscopic enough concept that we can actually consider our value as a truth and our individuality as unique pieces of a networked community. I said that during a speech at Lawrence Technological University in Michigan recently. The shadow of the crowd blurted back at me “What does that mean?”
In order for one to advocate for the value of a thing, one must understand what it means to be truly valuable… I actually mean to say truthfully valuable. During a Saturday lunch that I regularly host in Manhattan to pick the brains of knowledge’d people, a crowd of professional students at Einstein College of Medicine and Yale Divinity School told me that they’ve never considered a person’s value as fact. They further explained it as an abstraction in places of faith. Value is still abstract in regards to how learned people reference it; even economists and financial analysts at their core regard value as a trust of sorts. They are faithful that their collective thoughts about the ability of a thing to exist and or thrive are validation enough of its value. They are right. Still they do not think of their collective right as true.
Just like most uncharted conversations, I had to use some language that they were familiar with and describe something else in order to help them explore value. Personal data was the starting point. All of these people were new graduate students at a minimum and were relatively educated in the realm of information technology and have at least seen an article or two that talked about the bigness of data, or big data. For house keepings, and so that I wasn’t rambling on and on, I defined a few things for them.
Big Data = High Volumes Velocity and Variance of identifiable information
In technological timelines, the term (big) data is a relatively old one. Old being less than ten years. In a nutshell, few people have looked at the rabbit hole that I’m about to tumble down. There has been a clandestine industry built around the ideal that acquiring a critical mass of data can transform our ability to know things with near certainty. The language of the industry is summed up in two syllables: data [dey-tuh, dat-uh, dah-tuh]. No matter what our accents allow, the thing that we are trying to convey is succinct enough to be distinct. Big is just a suffix on the word that sums and measures evidence of our existence.
The personal kind of data is less well known than the big kind, but there is actually more of it, because it’s the building blocks of bigness. In 2016, only two organizations had formally published a definition of personal data. The Data Protection Commission of Ireland (DPCi) per their Data Protection Act of the Irish government and the Keith Institute via its Personal Data Project (PDP), an American research organization focused on inclusion. It has my surname. While writing this,the
Singapore government published a definition in their Personal Data Protection Regulation, but my objective is not to chronicle the history of sovereign definitions of your data, so I won’t acknowledge any more additions, as they’ll be similar to Irelands per the influence of the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation. The governmental and the not-for-profit sector almost naturally defined the micro kind of data slightly different.
DPCi
Personal Data = shall mean data relating to a living individual who is or can be identified either from the data or from the data in conjunction with other information that is in, or is likely to come into, the possession of the data controller.
PDP
Personal Data = is metadata that is contributed from living and non-living individuals. It can be identified and confirmed as transactional information with other individuals and institutions, regardless of the possession or primary control of the information.
As usual the business organization casts a wider net of a definitions than the government. The former is seeking to establish personal data as a basis for our personhood and the latter is seeking to establish material that can be protected. Neither of these is necessarily wrong or vague, as they have separate organizational mission statements. My objective is to establish the personhood that governments acknowledge as something of immense value.
The talk of today (2017) with regards to data is specific to fear, safety, and privacy. Before exploring any of those important concepts, it is necessary to establish what we should be fearful of, safe with, of private about. It is also necessary to state again that all big data is made up of personal data. Life is getting smaller, and even as it seems as though society is individualizing, what’s actually happening is that we are finally defining it: society. In one form or another, progressive thinkers from times that predate today have stated that our unique identities are what make us so similar. The 21st century will allow humanity the first opportunity to actually integrate those identities in the degrees-of-separation that we call our society. This opportunity is only available because we have spent the past century incrementally documenting every single thing that humans are. The emergence of information technology spawned the concept of data and it has change the potential of knowing.
Without dwelling too much on semantics, data is plural for the term datum, which is Latin for “something given”. Of course in English we understand the word as meaning “facts” or “pieces of information”. Per some linguists it can be confused with “dare” or “to give”. The point of briefly mentioning the history of this language thought to be stumbled upon in the 17th century is to establish that its origins have a transactional purpose. That is increasingly important when establishing the digital representation of humanity and individuals are not other than their physical selves, but tangible measurable representations ourselves. Further, all digital things are just technologies.
Technologies exist in three rigid forms, but should never be looked at as separate from humanity. They are simply spawns of humanity and are intrinsically tied to us. Data or digital notations of our existences are entanglements of the three types of technologies converging upon each other.
Technologies are absolutely and only:
Methodologies = processes that humans use to navigate life.
Hardware = things that humans can touch to enhance or degrade life’s obstacles.
Software = things that humans cannot touch to enhance or degrade life’s obstacles.
When considering the oldest types of technological representations, it is most common to think about language as the oldest and broadest methodology, hammers as the oldest hardware, and fire as the oldest software. In the past ~350,000 years we’ve built the foundations of civilization on these three types of technologies. Considering the tutelage of a master blacksmith in the creation of tools that were eventually converted into processes for mass production of goods and services that compelled the industrial age. Humanity is stepping out of that age and while language synonymous to “information age” have been used over the course of the past few decades, it not real. Information is still a derivative of the industrial ideal. It’s considered as copy, or copyright, or intellectual property. Our personal data is more granular than information itself. It’s the make-up of whatever information and information’s spawn might be. There is nothing intellectual or even big about our personal data, per se.
The bigness or personal pieces of our data are not as important as the root word. They are merely prefixes that have helped us travel to the beginning of this resurging human age. Documentation of the personalization of information that stems from our individual existence is what has allowed for a paradigm shift in how individuals and institutions (groups of individuals) are compelled to interact with each other.
All of the other ages that have been documented by archeologists and historians over the millennia have been specific to how human beings have endeavored to survive. That stated, it is important to note the context of that fact before exploring any other ideas-on or ideals-of our time. The poorly formed question of what is human nature must be answered in order to progress. It must be answered, if for no other reason, because it lingers. Human nature is a topic for multi volume books by people exploring the abstract concept of what is natural from a context of both design and mission. I won’t do that. I’m going to merely consider the empirical evidence that humanity has sought to survive its current state. We’ve done that throughout time. Our only mission has been to survive. Our only need for technologies of sorts has been to enhance the chances of our survival. At times our efforts to enhance our longevity and our tribe’s, has compelled us to politically degrade that of our competitors. The (s)heroes and villains of the past have all been the good guys looking to survive what they thought were situations of inevitable scarcity, uncertainty, and sure extinction. Further, all human endeavors are natural, as they all exist in a physical space. For that reason humans cannot have a nature other than the mission to continue to exist.
To be redundant: The effort to survive and to be better is something that is indicative of the living experience, if one respects and plans to continue the precious experience. Specific to humans the phenomenon is not synonymous with our nature, as nature suggests too rigidly a mission of nature’s entities. The human experience is in fact a system made up of individuals who derive their value from one another, and from non-human entities in physical space. While the dynamism of the living experience cannot be possessed by individual entities alone, it is physical and encompassing of the system of entities. The ideal of “nature” is an over simplification of the dynamic system of our collective existence.
In the human age, we’re finally able to show proof of the ripple effects of our individual influence over the system of individuals that we come into contact with. It’s the pervasiveness of nature, not the absence of it that validates us as humans. From a standpoint of language as a methodology, it is not necessary to acknowledge the nature of our existence in the case of our personhood and it’s value. Simply, we don’t need to, because we inherently acknowledge our existence by endeavoring to document and quantify it (IT, information technology, data…). The context of nature and it’s conversational meanings should not distract anyone from the earthy or universal basis that human
beings and our humanoid creations have an intrinsic type of value because they exist in our time and space and influence us, if for no other reason than to move around them as an obstacle. Still, it is difficult to consider value in a factual or even a physical sense because of its abstract origins. In the 13th century it was a derivative of valiant or a play on the potential of something or someone to be brave, strong, or useful with regular regards to labor. Value itself has always lingered in the realms of subjective determinations about what and how an entity can be deployed. It’s not a scientific term at all. By the 14th century it was being considered in economics (another non-science) terminology to elaborate on the worth of a thing. By the 15th century it was used as a verb that could demonstrate the thinking about a thing or even the estimation of a thing. It is important that note that modern banking and insurance sprawled in Europe during the three aforementioned centuries as a result of valuing things under possession of individual peoples. That time provided a resurgence of more ancient economics that fell apart after the political deconstruction of cultures in the horn of Africa and Mediterranean regions. I guess we could all thank nature for population density and war. It is what required multiple groups of individuals to create groups or institutions that eventually facilitated cooperation with regards to agreeing on the value of influence.
Value today as it was meant in previous days, is designed to communicate deserved importance. The word itself when coupled with prefixes like inherent or intrinsic straddles the fence of economics and ethics. It has a separate meaning for each context. The former refers to the fundamental value of a thing, for instance the worth of a corporation based on its revenues or profits. The latter refers to a more philosophic value that an object has within itself regardless of if it can be quantified in terms of capital or numerically. I don’t think that we are asking if people have intrinsic value anymore, because the pervasive nature that has established a system in which individuals prop each other up through social and technological integration has been facilitating the formerly abstract.
The on-slot of personal data has allowed us to quantify the valuable bits of ourselves regardless of, if we can tie a rigid monetary value to them and compel the question: how is my value intrinsic?
Imagine a moment in time where a full grown and experienced person can be transplanted into an empty white space. I use the term white space, because a black space in physical terms would be dense and destroy our necessary light. So back to the white space… A person is there alone and unable to interact with anyone. For an unknown and irrelevant reason that person’s life is sustained long enough to be aware in that space. They are aware of the nothingness and emptiness of the space and that is all.
Now consider that same person existing in the world that we all know. More specifically imagine that person sitting in front of you in any kind of situation. It could be as empty as the white space or as dense with stimuli as a Manhattan Starbucks.
The person in the empty or populated space will have to eventually engage the space or the people in it in order to survive. Beyond breathing, basic bodily functions come into play. No matter if the person is sane; questions about survival come into play. When placed in front of another being, in the empty or populated space the person might attempt to interpret the other’s existence and their state of awareness for assistance of sorts. It wouldn’t matter if the person was simply asking for direction to the bathroom, or if reality was in fact real, or even a deaf mute’s blinking gesture to see if the other could respond and confirm, again, if reality is in fact real.
Influence would be upon both of the subjects in space.
In this thought experiment, the person’s sanity or awareness about his/her potential to survive hinges on the influence of interactions with others. It is necessary to agree that all valuable
individuals derive their value from other individuals and/or groups of individuals (institutions), because influence itself is something that has to be distributed to be identified. While we should aim to reach a point as individuals where we can thoroughly define ourselves at any given point, it is necessary to understand that we are changed at every engagement point with other physical beings. Our value is transactional. Individuality is real but only as valuable as it can be when applied as an interpretation to an instance.
The notion that an abstract economic concept can be applied to the ethical implications of something having value for its own good or within itself, is still a lose one without some physical or physics analogy. All well designed arguments must have a physical analogy, and if they don’t, they’re not within human’s means to be communicated well. That’s what I think. But it’s also what’s true.
In this human era where data will serve as the magnifying glass for our physical space’s facts of life, the best way to think about value is in the context of energy. Unlike value, energy is a real thing, existing in physical space that can be measured based on friction of sorts, from the interactions of matter. I’m referring to actual matter not why we matter.
Matter = physical substance in general, as distinct from mind and spirit; (in physics) that which occupies space and possesses rest mass, especially distinct from energy.
In this human era, we are all default advocates for the notion that all things that can be measured can be improved upon. Matter in its transactions in nature by movement or change of any sort generates energy.
Energy = the property of matter and radiation that is manifest as a capacity to perform work. Engineers during the course of the discipline’s existence have expanded in multiple silos that examine a specific type of energy and its movement: mechanical, electrical, chemical, and even computer engineers are tasks with root cause analysis of how and where energy exists. In some instances the question is where it goes.
Consider the stick of dynamite. There is far more energy transpiring in its explosion than the bit that comes from a match or spark that starts the chain reaction of a wick. The most notable types of energy that is exchanged in blowing-up a stick of dynamite are the changes from chemical energy (or the potential of chemical substances) to kinetic energy (or the possession of motion). Still in a controlled environment the measure of energy transformation is far more detailed than that of chemical and kinetic energy alone. There are exchanges in thermal (or heat) energy and sound… as friction happens.
Humans have spent millennia aiming to measure and quantify matter that transpires through the transformation of energy. Our very human efforts are to turn all matter into a datum. We’ve relied on time and space, two relatively abstract concepts like value, to measure that of matter and energy two real things.
Time = the indefinite continued progress of existence.
Space = a continuous area or expansion that is measured by height, depth, and width within which all things exist and move.
Space, predating value, is just matter that human’s have chosen to measure in quantifiable and segmented situations. Time, and even more awesome concept that predates space and value exists to provide historical context is a haughtily debated subject of constraint among some physicists. None of those run on thoughts posed as sentences are necessary here; I just thought I’d mentioned them for context… like thinking out loud. Personal data is about measurement and as previously stated, I’m acknowledging that we exist, right here, right now.
Taking into consideration the use of abstractions (like time & space) to debate truths about real things (like matter & energy), I don’t think it to be a far stretch to argue that yet another abstraction should be added to the mix of measurement and confusion. That’s sarcasm. But in all seriousness, I mean to sum my theory of intrinsic value in an analogy.
Value is like that of energy. It cannot be created nor destroyed, but can change form.
If we are going to grow well in our ability to be productive during this human era, we have to use value as a unit of measurement based on the units of data that are changing form as they transact between individual and institution and individual alike.
That stated, I think it necessary to explore the political economic socio-cultural and technological impacts of the fact that:
Value is like that of energy, as datum is like that of matter.
Fifth Freedom
The Four Freedoms as per the 32nd President of The United States, Franklin Delano Roosevelt were noted as freedoms of speech worship want and fear during his 1941 State of the Union Address. Those same freedoms rang out prior to FDR’s birth with the founding writers of the American constitution and even some unknown queer men in Rome, Samaria, Egypt, and other places. The scalability of freedom in general has never sustained a millennium (1000 years). Still, it is resurgent. Dictatorships, slavery, genocide, and the degradation of individual value have always popped back up cyclically. It’s always difficult to remember to learn from our history when it is poorly documented for our cultures. That stated, we’ve yet to see if it is as difficult to remember to learn when everything is documented in as a granular fashion as it is today.
I’m optimistic in this century because of our ability to documents truths, even in the face of freedom hungry tyrants who fear decision from less formidable people and unfamiliar tribes. We still have much work to do in getting the people of the world on board, but that is mostly due to our lack of communication of the universal ideal that we all have value. Our values are a conversation, but in a consistently less tangible way than the litigation that influences our most local laws. From a legal standpoint freedom currently looks different in every sovereign silo of the world, but regardless of the foundation of our freedom’s domicile, humanity has to establish some that are universal.
FDR’s Four Freedoms were goals. They weren’t laws.
Freedom of Speech
Freedom of Worship
Freedom from Want
Freedom from Fear
A fifth freedom is also a goal, but it should be first.
Freedom in Personhood
The ideal that self sovereignty is something that needs legal or political backing is relatively new. The 21st century has yielded digital selves as a type of asset class without being first acknowledged as a relevant representation of one’s self. Wrongly, our digital representations are viewed as separate from ourselves and also separate from capital. While data scientists can detail how
individuals influence capital and how data is connected to ourselves, we have yet to ideologically connect our influence to any normative sense of capital that we use to value our own and each other’s lives.
Freedom in personhood is the notion that all individual persons have the right to be and own all representations of their tangible selves.
Reading the statement in 2017 is understandably ridiculous. I keep surveying it. Still it is necessary to state that we have a right to ourselves. As a result we should also have the right to ourselves as we, in a digital representation, are also identifiably nominal pieces of ourselves that travel and transact with other individuals and institutions. We are all data. We are all matter. We are all interconnected. We are all that matters. We should strive for agency and equity of ourselves, as we all benefit when individuals are incentivized to contribute as much of themselves to a community as possible.
Still real risks exist when individuals are all giving of themselves. For instance, in the case of microtargeting consumers of messages with falsehoods to incite fear and other extreme emotions is dangerous and immoral. Microtargeting falsehoods should be considered in the same fashion as yelling fire in an enclosed and otherwise peaceful place.
Microtargeting is typically defined as the use by campaigns of direct marketing data-mining techniques that involve predictive market segmentation. In the era of more personal data types being either publically available or for purchase, it should be assumed that the makeup of our personhood is being unreasonably searched.
The question should be asked: Does political microtargeting of America’s private citizens infringe on the Bill of Rights? It has been widely documented that the Trump campaign deployed the largest scale personal data campaign in US history. Using ~5000 separate data points on ~300 million Americans, they narrowly won the US presidential general election in key counties while losing the popular vote. I wrote multiple OpEd’s about his use of microtargeting in Wisconsin’s and Michigan’s largest newspaper, two states that he won in the final days of microtargeting lies. I also met with and interviewed the professionals at the technology company that developed his campaign for him, leading up to the Personal Data Week conference in New York. My efforts were to explore and understand if predictive analytics, a business that I’m in, played a role at all in the delivery of information that incites decisions by individuals. I also wanted to know if efforts of predictive analytics was stifling individual’s choice. Freedom in personhood is, at its core, about choice and autonomy of the individual, but give the predictability of some of their efforts, choice can be high jacked.
Predictive Analytics = the use of information, both historical and current, to derive relevant and likely outcomes of one’s likely actions.
It occurred to me that if an individual and their peers could know the most likely decisions that they’d make in a given scenario, they’d need to have some potential to decide to be contrarian, even if it’s just for the sake of being contrary to the norm. The ability to make a decision transforms the value of knowing about oneself. As data scientists engineer our objectives in measuring value via data, it should not be used to place a rigid price on everyone’s head. Markets, regulated for ethical and equitable regard, will do that. Our objective in establishing freedom should be to provide the real potential for agency over ones personhood so that a value is an option that they have if they so choose to. The newly available ability to scientifically witness everyone’s existence should be used to validate the notion that everyone has intrinsic value and protect their ability to contribute an unfettered version of themselves to a community. At no point am I suggesting that people do or should have the kind of unbothered freewill that ignores the
influence of others. That concept is ridiculous. Still, people have to have the ability to make choices to be more or less influential, and even more so, less predictable than their patterns.
Part of the choice to have some agency over oneself, whom can also be modeled digitally to make predictive decisions about, is the need to have agency over the entities that are able to make predictions about us. The United States’ 4th amendment reads:
“The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”
Is it possible that microtargeting violates the 4th amendment? While we are in a new era of agreeing upon how to classify the data that citizens naturally contribute to the pool of society, it is not a stated fact that our native data is under our private ownership. Still while the American Bill of Rights does not mention privacy explicitly, our personal property needs to be secured by us, just as our persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures.
Consider what we seek to secure by acknowledging our personally identifiable information (Pii) exists in the form of tangible manipulatable data-points. Specifically we are considering the security of our basic right to be informed and right to choose. Both of these inalienable Basic Rights that are theoretically enforced by the American constitution. They also rest chronologically between the right to safety and the right to be heard. For clarity, I’m referring to another set of theoretical, non-legal rights pushed forward by another American President, John F Kennedy. The United Nations also seeks to enforce these eight Consumer Bill of Rights which JFK expended on FDR’s four freedoms ~20 years after.
The right to safety.
The right to be informed.
The right to choose.
The right to be heard.
The right to satisfaction of basic needs.
The right to redress.
The right to consumer education.
The right to a healthy environment.
In the 20th century all individuals were regarded as consumers unless they produced a good (process or product). In the 21st century those who are considered the consumer are acknowledged as the inputs to the goods. Their contribution is a portion of the make-up of the creation process that producers still differentiate from those that consume. The very language that America and the United Nations used breaks down when applying it to this human era of data. Regarding microtargeting, at no point in our democratic process should citizens have to repress the tangible pieces of their identities to avoid being targeted by truths or untruths in such a personally specific manner that the right to have free choice is compromised. For the right price microtargeting campaigns can collect social, financial, health, insurance, and location data on individuals while avoiding polling and focusing on circumstance of both habit and need to deploy messages. I think it necessary to state that personal data comes in 5 regulatory states:
Social
Health
Location
Starting at the beginning of the 2016 American Presidential campaign cycle, multiple professionals who ascribe the journalistic creed of acknowledging the public journal as a public trust documented facts of the Republican candidate as having told lies and untruths upwards of 70% of the time, a unprecedented amount. Using the method of seizing and searching individual’s personal data to create actions while discrediting the journalistic trust will have the most detrimental effects on our democracy and global discourse. The only way to secure and empower an individual’s right to choose, is to ensure that we the people acknowledge our constitutional rights to be secure in our persons, as the 4th Amendment explicitly states. Still there is a greater problem with the legal logic of the 4th Amendment protecting us. In a world where our physical identities can be summed in 0’s and 1’s our personal data is a tangible representation of our personhood but… The constitution and all of its amendments guide a federation of states and are susceptible to state action, which means that a state itself has to be the perpetrator of seizing and searching our personhood to be in the wrong. This leaves all people vulnerable to acts by private institutions or individuals that seize and search our personhoods without our pervasive consent or knowledge. Even while the Supreme Court has traditionally ruled in favor of our bodily integrity in the past, it has not had to consider digital representations of ourselves as our personhood. I think that a 28th amendment is the most reasonable ask in order to protect choice and freedom of our most basic property in the form of a fifth freedom that eliminates our need to have basic consumer rights and be fully acknowledged as contributors to the basic rights of all people we come in physical or digital contact with. An explicitly stated right to ourselves must be written or we will all fall to the differentiation of automation from the human experience. The advantage of an explicitly stated right is the ability of an individual to retaliate in a court of law.
Terms of Trust (not service)
Years ago a writer names Keith Wagastaff wrote for Time Magazine that it would take a person 76 work days to read all of the terms of services for the devices in their life that connect them to the internet of everything. The IoE is more of a term that succeeded his article and the ideal of the IoT (internet of things) which consists of devices that gather data on us to communicate it over the internet. It just so happens that the internet is accessed in increasing more things and will eventually, be everything, including all matter. That stated, the IoE is well aligned with the human ideal of becoming more interconnected. It’s in fact spiritual, even though spirituality is nothing like a fact. The internet is like the anti-spirituality. It’s quantifiable. It’s scientific. To that note, Keith’s article was based on salacious yet scientific information published by a couple of Carnegie Mellon University researchers who don’t need to be named to be credited with a contribution to critical human thought about technology. I’m in attendance at many conferences on security, data, and privacy. In that capacity, I’ve heard the 76 hour rant mentioned repeatedly at the top of keynotes, to scare the pants off of people who have taken pictures with their pants off on the internet of everything. There are at this moment, pants being sold that capture data about our existence, and artificial intelligence that make predictions on that data for retailers and every adjacent type of enterprise interested in what’s happening to our pants. The 76 arguments are great icebreakers, but they’re not a thing, whereas the internet is.
It doesn’t take 76 hours to read the terms of services in every device that we own, including out pants, because we, you, I, would never read those. It is true that if you read one terms of service agreement with a keen eye, you should be able to interpret every other similar contract. After all, the documents that capture terms are just contracts. Plenty of people are surprised to learn that lawyers who write terms of service contracts are frequently copying and pasting from other documents. Usually they result in many errors, but who cares, right? No one is reading the terms. Nor should they have to, in order to be protected from malicious or misleading distributions of their valuable contributions. Hashtag, rights over terms.
You should know what you’re looking for. Outside of identifying what information your contractual partner wants to access, you should understand the rights that your partner is reserving to interpret and exchange those information. The language may get wonky and confuses, every so often, but then again, I realize that I just wrote “those” before the word information in the previous sentence. Most lawyers and general counsels at product companies are too process
driven to create unique language for services, so they just copy and paste the best practices. It’s actually a good practice, because the precedence of those old language can be referenced as a norm. Lawyers are not employed to be wordsmiths, but to bearbiters of truth and forthrightness per their commitment to the state that grants them a license to merely ponder the problems that the rest of us have in transacting trust… Then they vet the terms of service at conferences on privacy, security, and data to understand which arguments might cost their trusting clients the most/least.
Regardless of someone’s or some firm’s effort to confuse a user who has enough time to read 76 hours worth of material that can’t enrich their lives, services should never be rendered at the expense of the user, but for the benefit of them. Terms of service could technically say whatever they want. Unless it is a contract in which both parties are knowledgeable about the affects of the terms, users will be at a disadvantage. That phenomenon of fundamentally putting users of products and services at a disadvantage is and will continue to be crippling to the economy, primarily because it stifles participation. And of course, I only mention it, because all empirical evidence shows that more participation drives economic growth. The objective of terms of service isn’t to ensure legal wit, but to insure economic transactions. A dollar for instance is just a contract with which we distribute trust. All capital is. They’re simply a representation of all three types of technologies: something we can and can’t touch and a method of trust for a noteworthy transaction of a good (product/service).
Users must have the right to retaliate at any point that they understand themselves as having been abused by the primary producers of products and services. A constitutional priority must be set for users of products and services, and those terms of service have yet to be considered as needing definition. American and other societies can’t continue to review the digital era as needing protection, before first identifying what we are protecting with audience with non-legal minds. It must be political. If we do, we’ll realize that we’re making trade-offs on the single most valuable medium: ourselves. Terms of service need to serve us. While most of the modern technological fear culture is one of hardware and software, two types of technologies, it is clear that our methodological technologies have run amuck much further. Corporate entities for instance, used to be solely established on a charter that served the public good, and were endorsed by a monarch of sorts who was, as always, endorsed by the God(s). The trade-off between the endorsed and the endorsers was a perceived better distribution of resources to people in need. Now entities incorporate simply by registering or identifying themselves as directors. Articles of Association are now, a literal stamp of approval, unlike the charters that the original corporations were required to possess. Endorsements or relevancy are only vetted after a need is brought to a judgment of some sort. I’m no opponent of the rapid propping up of new entities, but I am a proponent of ensuring that the trade-offs are endorsements of serving the better distribution of resources to that are valuable. Where God(s) were once the endorsement of a monarch who’d endorse incorporations of groups of individuals to distribute services, individuals are now endorsements of elected and appointed officials who endorse the incorporation of groups to distributed services. The trade of God(s) for people(s) has resulted in the distribution of more value. Recognizing of course, that we need to continually define value and that it has to be at the core of how we understand ourselves. Back to personal data; making trade-offs of privacy for the convenience of technology is nothing new. From the U.S. postal service mail in the 18th century to the 19th century’s use of switchboards as the telegraph turned into a telephone, we’ve been making trade-offs for centuries. In the 21st century, people are accustomed to trading rapidly increasing amounts of previously private data, even thoughts, for convenience. From a data science standpoint, user experience is driving the process of creation by uncovering more and more individualized data,
further blurring the line between producers and consumers of data and insights, and raising real questions about ownership of data.
The legal framework we choose profoundly shapes the terms of service under which people trade data for services. A world in which convincing copies of individual’s personality can be cloned electronically demands an equally revolutionary legal approach. Data sufficient to create a working copy of an individual’s personality — or even the much lesser amount of personal data sufficient to control an individual’s material decisions and turn them into a money-pump or vote-pump — can no longer be automatically treated as owned by default by the institutions. Instead, the default should be that data is owned by the individual in order to create more equitable terms of service that facilitate the protection individual autonomy: personhood.
When personal data reaches the point where it can precisely control or digitally copy the personality of that individual, it must be defined as part of personhood or else we will irrevocably compromise our ideal of individual autonomy, as other. Throughout history, we have actively redefined the line between what is considered property and what is considered personhood, so we are free to recognize personal data sufficient to control the identification of an individual as part of our inalienable personhood.
Our policies rely on privacy law to regulate personal data, which is the wrong tool for today’s hyper-individualized post-information (human) age, because it is inadequate to deal with the implications for individual autonomy. Data science has progressed to the point where companies have more information about individuals and how to shape their choices than those individuals have about themselves, Facebook knows more about your relationships than you do, and your insurance company knows more about your health than you.
The Internet of Things will mean that no one can opt out of this massive data harvesting, as all devices are growingly IoT. Current privacy laws were designed for a limited-information age that is now over. Data is now so individualized that I like to think of this human age as being synonymous with an identity-information age, or as having sufficient info about us identified and harvested. In a world where information equals identity, we must focus on protecting personhood and autonomy, not just privacy. Americans are now effectively making trade-offs for personhood, not privacy. In the land of the free, we have to ask the question, who owns us?
That question makes me think again on the tech used in the last Presidential race. The difference between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump’s 2016 campaigns came down to the data points, but not in the way that most people assume they did. Clinton relied on the classical 20th century big data of anonymous surveys, better known as polling. Trump relied on micro-targeting strategies by building databases of publically and privately available personal data to profile likely voting scenarios at the local level.
Both campaigns bring to mind, 20th century ethnographer Margaret Mead, who would famously say, “what people say, what people do, and what people say they do are entirely different things.” It seems that the Trump and Clinton campaigns differentiated by evaluating what people do vs. what people say they do, respectively.
Validating the hunch that there was a silent majority, Trump’s team hired a British data analytics company to build psychological profiles on voters. The firm, Cambridge Analytica, is a technology consultancy that I’m familiar with from my time as a member of the United Kingdom’s Technology & Investment FinTech (financial technology) delegation. It trademarked Behavioral Microtargeting. By building a data warehouse for the Trump camp in Texas it fulfilled it mission to “connect with every member of your audience on an individual level in ways that engage, inform and drive them to action.”
CA executives, as previously mentioned, confirmed with me during our talks ~5,000 data points they hold on most of the voting public. Our personal data is very specific information about what makes us happy, scared, where we are, what we buy, how our health is, and what we actually say. When plotting personal data in a time-series algorithm to see trends in our history, algorithms can start to predict with some certainty, what people do, just like a trend line moving up an X,Y-axis. Further, when predictions are overlaid with probable voting scenarios, machines can predict with much more certainty, what people do.
Personal data is actually very small. Imagine every person as a database with only 5,000 data points on it. It’s smaller than a spreadsheet. It would barely consume a kilobyte of information for word processing. It’s important to note that this is different than what we’ve come to know as big data. Bigness is at the core of Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight or The New York Times’ Upshot model of aggregated polling data, for instance.
Having built and sold these types of big data and predictive software systems, I’m increasingly concerned about the ability to gain insights into the greatest fears of individuals as well as the greatest actions of communities. There are dozens of firms such as CA emerging as data proliferates. Naively, even I trusted the aggregate big data from polling that the news media and Clinton campaign used because I thought that it was the only information available to a campaign. After getting a trademark the phrase Apps for Insight with my predictive analytics firm nuOctave which was the foundation of our financial predictive analytics almanac at Accrue Inc., I was still too ignorant to see the potential of Trump’s firm superseding the terms of service of normal political action.
While working in a data science field, I rarely considered that the terms of service or lack there of would allow such large quantities of personal data to be collected on every individual for the purpose of yelling “she’s got a gun!” in a crowded space. I’m embarrassed to write my own naiveté, but it’s true. The core terms that we need to establish in the autonomous internet of everything will be a service of some sort, is the right to have agency over what, how, when, where, and with whom it is possible for others to know about us. Individuals must have agency over knowing, because microtargeting and similar strategies are aiming to transform how we know what we know.
Most recently, by July of 2017 the company that owns CA has taken new domicile in Arlington, Virginia which is the same neighborhood at The Pentagon. The newest board director is White House Chief Strategist, Steve Bannon. Coupe that with the, and oh by-the-way, the President’s administration aggressive want to evaluate voter fraud in each state, which compels it to ask the entire federation to turn over voter’s personal data. Often times data analysis is a result of triangulating records with new information. There is a thriving industry in AdTech (advertising technology) where companies sell the amending of data with more sources. For instance, if you have an email, I’ll sell you the services of trying to match it with a physical address and more… I’ll usually pay > $15 for a record from a platform or data collection company to then sell amendments-as-a-service to thousands of other interested companies for cents on the dollar.
When a political administration builds a database firm with the amendment capability that Trump has, it’s the equivalent of carpet bombing a small sovereign nation then walking in after it is defenseless and asking it to turn over all of its uranium so that a nuclear bomb can be build on their soil. The data that states have on voters is perfect for performing these triangulation tasks. The building of the Data Bomb isn’t actually the most frightening piece of Trump’s Manhattan Project, it’s the bucking of the normal staples of conservatism from within the political party that he ran. Conservatives normally campaign and advocate on behalf of less government oversight at
the federal level and more state sovereignty. They want their power locally, because they can control it better and have more individual agency. Although I’m not a conservative, I can admit that it’s not a bad argument. It’s a good argument that provides checks and balances on the management and distribution of resources that I would typically want to distributed to more people from a birds eye view, as a progressive. It’s a nuance that I think elected officials should be arguing and compromising on constantly. But…
By building a data engine in a private company that is controlled by a satellite team who has full access to the most powerful government on the planet, and insisting on all of the data from states, he is effectively trying to circumvent the validity of states and the information that they have on their digital citizen’s personhood, or the value that they hold as a result of housing people. If the President of a federation doesn’t need to interact with the federation to influence their citizen’s votes, democracy is finished. Hashtag, Death by Data. Still this would not be a technological death; it would be a policy death. Preventing the transaction of our truth is a matter of human rights not technological insights. In that regard I think it necessary to differentiate a tech or a tool from a right.
Internet Is A Human Right
In 2012, on the Opinion Pages of The New York Times, the renowned Vinton Cerf - computer scientist, “father of the Internet”, Turing Award winner, and Google’s Vice President and Chief Internet Evangelist - published an article titled Internet Access Is Not A Human Right. It could be argued that the key word here is “access”, but before I address access again, I should start with the definition of the internet.
I engaged in this debate at Michigan State University (MSU) in October of 2010 with the philosopher who literally wrote the book on Critical Theory of Technology, Andrew Feenberg, at a conference that he keynoted at the MSU workshop Commodification, Technology, and The Human. Feenberg, like every other man his age talked about the internet as a technology: methodology, hardware, or software. My argument from the audience that day made it into my first book also published in 2010 while I was on faculty at Michigan State, Integrationalism:
“Perhaps the internet requires much more definition, as the roots of the word can be confusing. Inter: situated within – Net: any network or reticulated system of filaments or the like. Its terminology is synonymous with the “web” or a web, which requires multiple linkages to points of initiation in order to exist well. If this is the internet that Feenberg is referring to then I’d think it accurate. However, the internet is not actually a web of ever connected points. Information destinations are not required.
The internet is analogous to space. Regardless of whether or not we access space, its potential exists – we can access or insert entities of sorts into the space regardless of, if another user were present to receive information of sorts from the distributed. Space is a dynamic system of expanding material potential as is the internet’s material potential. The potential of the internet expands as users (or rather, potential users) access to the internet expands– access could come in many forms including, user population(s) growth or by computing speed or by computing power… The internet, regardless of the constraints of the word, it cannot be identified as a specific technology.”
While visiting MSU, Feenberg uses a “ramp” as analogous with the internet, which was at the center of his mistake. I don’t mean to read redundantly gerontophobic, but based on the pervasive analysis that I’ve witnessed from Feenberg and Cerf’s generation; I’d have to accredit their perspective to the relatively similar changes in technology that they’ve seen during the 20th century. They were both born in 1943, nearly 40 years before me. The difference in composition
and utility of a technology (hardware, software, methodology) and that of the internet are synonymous with that of an air-craft and the expanding celestial matter beyond earth’s ionosphere(that’s a sufficient analogy).
Cerf wrote: “technology is an enabler of rights, not a right itself. There is a high bar for something to be considered a human right.”
He is correct! The problem exists when he identifies the internet as a technology, which it cannot be (to be redundant). This is in fact a human rights issue. It is perhaps the most significant human rights issue of our time, because of the internet role in providing the potential for transparencies in the public and private sectors. The deterministic nature of our technologies is bridging the cultural, political, legal, and economic GAPS of all our societies today, and if we as individuals allow a few mistaken “leaders” or the interests of institutions to control our ability to access a space, because of their resume, then we are all doomed. The implications of the masses adopting Cerf and Feenberg’s view on space are tremendous in building an ethically sound environment for human development.
Regarding Cerf’s word “access”, it may provide him an out from his varied rhetoric in the article. Near the end he transitions to civil rights where he writes “the responsibility of technology creators themselves to support human and civil rights” suggesting the internet hold egalitarian virtues. I’m no egalitarian, as it just doesn’t prove feasible in a world of, even, hyper-connected individuals.
While the ability to access an open space should not be prohibited, the technologies of certain kinds could be. Reference weapons of sorts. I’m no advocate for government supplying all of their citizens with camera phone (although it would be great idea for the individual and institution), but I am against governmental and other agents making efforts to restrict the individual’s ability to populate space with their entities aside from the technologies that one would hold on his/her person.
When the United Nations declared the Internet as a Human Right, they weren’t necessarily evaluating its full potential, but they were stressing that individuals should have the ability to be transparent and review information of all kinds as they so pleased, catering to the collective knowledge of the species and everything it supports. The problem with this article are the future implications of its rhetoric, even as he means well.
Tangent: Cerf having studied math, computer science, and IS for decades; knows as well as anyone that it is virtually (pun intended) impossible to prohibit internet expansion as small pockets of those educated in the knowledge community of development can find a way. Any computer (which would the blockage point) can be hacked its just a matter of time and will. I spent the last year consulting with Hewlett-Packard Global Info Security on multiple acquisitions of competitive companies and security tool providers, and as anyone in the IS/IT security industry can tell you, there are no solutions, only active management of incidents and problems. This is why methodologies are as (if not more) value than hard/software in modern business transactions. So then why wouldn’t Cerf think more thoroughly about this before publishing in the NY Times? Could it be because he has an equity stake (as an employee of multiple firms) in a less open space (internet). Speculation aside, I’m in the business services industry, I studied “control” specifically. Business is about control, which is the value proposition in establishing institutions virtues as separate from those of the individual. We can only forecast and manage risks well in areas that we can define and control. Business itself doesn’t require an suppressive type of control to make good calls on risks. A more transparent world could tell us all (individuals and institutions alike) more about the types of decisions that benefit the most in a society.
In the future let’s make a conscious effort to keep spaces open and hope that the benefits incentivize philanthropists, entrepreneurs, and governments to provide technology to the masses at a rate that enhances the human condition via more economic participation.
The Arbitrage of Unethical Hacking
When software became an on-demand offering, the software industry coined it, “as a service”. The average consumer is likely to just acknowledge that some types of software offerings are things that they can turn on and off. The can pay or cancel payment whenever they want, or in some predetermined interval. Software as a service in 2017 is distributing all types of related services as a result. I order my groceries on-demand for instance. More than the on-demand portion of software as a service, SaaS is an enterprise term that means that there is a certain amount of support for the service and the things that it delivers.
It should be understood that nearly everything is a SaaS in this day and age, like every mobile app for instance. The few offerings that are not, are nearly obsolete. When I write, everything, I mean everything. It’s how we are capturing 2.5 quintillion bytes of data per day in 2017. We’ve outpaced the past 100 years of data collection in the past 24 months, and we’ll beat that in the next 18 months, as more and more things become devicesthat capture information in some form or fashion, on-demand of course.
Even ransomeware is offered in an on-demand fashion, and in some cases, depending on who is offering it, with support. Yes, there is enterprise ransomeware as a service. Rasom(ware) is a type of software that has the function to target some form of computer system and stop it’s functionality until a criterion is met. That criterion is usually payment of some sort. It’s malicious in its intent to make operating a technological activity nearly impossible until it gets an update that the controller of the ransomware has actualized some form of extortion.
Security and investigative agencies like the Federal Bureau of Investigation are against paying ransoms in ransomware attacks, as there is no guarantee that the attacker will free victim’s information after payment, but decision makers still do. Hackers on the offensive and defensive are just a fact of life. They existed well before modern computers did, and even before old-timey computers like the people who were good at math at scientific corporations like NASA did. A hack is a noble term in some circles, because it just stands for a workaround.
Bullies and extortionists have existed since the beginning of our species. The news worthy realities of hacks and ransoms are colorful but only to shed some light on the varying value of information to people who are interested in owning or controlling it. Moreover, owning or controlling you.
This is a relevant economic conversation with regards to personal data, because of the fact that people still make the decision to pay ransoms. It transforms the old argument that data was a depreciating asset or that it had a static value. If we truly consider information as an asset class, which we must, we must acknowledge its market forces. Information has the price that it lists for, which is synonymous with the price that the contributor would hand it over to the controller for.
But it is also worth what the hacking arbitrageur thinks that they can get for it from the controller. That number is the increased or decreased value of the data controller’s perceived value of what they received from the data contributor. I’ll define these terms.
Contributor = entity (individual or institution) that disseminates information
Controller = entity (individual or institution) that collects and curates information
Arbitrageur = entity (individual or institution) that influences information without having direct contribution or control.
In the technological world, we can call those hackers of sorts, but in the financial markets, they are called arbs… short for arbitrage.
Arbitrage is the simultaneous buying and selling of securities, currency, or commodities in different markets or in derivative forms in order to take advantage of differing prices for the same asset.
Arbitrage is normally thought of as a financial term, but it’s so much more from a theoretical standpoint. It’s the guiding force of life. It’s evidence that humans can recognize opportunity costs in a closed system of transactions. Arbitrage happens anytime that a speculator tries to get the real value, per their perception, of a thing by trying to influence its value. It happens every time someone says “no you’re not” or “yes you are”. It’s validation or the lack thereof. It’s not about securities and currencies, but it is about the person whom executes the arbitrage to meet some objective of benefiting from the increased value of one thing and the diminished value of another. Arbitrage could be thought of as a representation of competition with a thing, but is more accurately elaborated on as a gauge of influence on the value of a thing.
The most regular example for arbitrage, is the evaluation of a single asset in two markets with different prices. An investor may think that the best price is somewhere in between the two listing of the underlined asset. As a result, an investor can bet against one price and for another price and make money on both ends as the prices comes together. In this case price is analogous to data and money is to value. The classic example of arbitrage when oil reigned supreme was the British and American listing of Shell Gas, and an investors keen ability to buy the price of one listing, say in America, while shorting the price of the other listing, to realize financial gains as one price rises and the other falls. Whether extortionists see themselves as arbitrageurs or not, they are affecting the listing of data and the overall price of it depending on the payment of ransoms. They are simply adding more variables to the market of consideration and could, as a result, influence the overall price of the asset. This is also representative in more personal terms. Consider every defamation of character case in modern case law that is tied to one’s personal fortune or ability as a professional. Consider the bias that comes long with sexism or racism or other sorts of xenophobic considerations that diminished or enhances subject’s valuation to a crowd of onlookers. Consider the individual that is degraded by their peers as a malicious act to ensure they’re inability to achieve some goal.
The executor of an arb only need to ask: is the opportunity cost such that I will have the possibility to gain? Moral and ethical codes aside, people assess the need to tarnish the reputations of other people every day. First they evaluate their own value(s), then the opportunity cost by evaluating
the other parties that they want to influence. We’re still transacting value though influence here, just like in the theory of intrinsic value.
As data becomes an entity that is more and more frequently arbitraged through documented influences of sorts, including ransomware attacks, the only way to retain a measure of truth about the real worth of the entity is to allow a regulated market to establish and aggregate value wit institutions that are arbiters of trust, like that of what used to be banks and insurance companies. In reference to the word “real” in the previous sentence, I mean specifically, the mutually agreed upon value by multiple parties. Realness is a collective phenomenon. God is real to some people, although none of them can constitute what he/she/it is, and the methodology of language or laws facilitate the community that renders it as real. Sometimes we call that culture. Regardless, an abstraction like culture can be pointed to in actions of realness based on a faith that participants have in said realness. I mean it is real, because we agree to say so.
In 2011, when I participated in a genome project where researchers gathered 100,000 people’s tissue (blood) samples to sequence their genomes, it was known that the researchers were going to try to derive solutions to problems that they saw our DNA being an input for. They were going to create value from the information that the 100,000 of us contributed. If they were hacked at a critical point in their research, and paid the ransom, my 100000th of a unit of value would be different than what it would be unfettered. Researchers like Dr George Church and Latanya Sweeney who work on separate initiatives are at Harvard using our data right now to derive solutions to problems with data science as medical doctors collaborate with the likes of Craig Venter’s Institute to further the research that establish the first humanoid animal cell, totally synthetic, manmade, just human.
We’ve had humanity created solely by humans since 2010.
At the beginning of the project that I participated, the website and email form managers of the project stated that my information would be anonymized. In Microsoft Word, that is not a word, whereas anonymous is, so I’m looking at a red line under the word that is not a reality thinking, “is that a thing?”… It is not a word, because it is not a physiological phenomenon. Unlike God, we have not agreed as a community that we can be made anonymous. When I was more naïve, I would have written that to be made anonymous is almost as ridiculous as the concept of something that is actually anonymous, being made real. But the great difference between the two is that millennia of story telling and deriving what a real thing like a God could be, has made it real. It is documented, it was written, and so it is as synthetically real as any other things brought to fruition with technology by humans. For instance, language as a technology is at the core of its existence.
To be made unreal is not something that ridding a database of our names and number can achieve. The sheer fact that we were acknowledged participants of a project makes us a known entity within its actions and results, even if diminished to its sole 100000th of a unit. In this case, because a contract of consent is necessary to process one’s personal data in a project like the Harvard Personal Genome Project, or any other project that collects our personal data in other forms, it is impossible to anonymize us. Our personhood was, and had to be, acknowledged in a seminal way. With regards to the digital existences of humankind, the most unethical thing that controllers of information could do, is deliberately fail to collect evidence of the existence. Harvard’s PGP compelled me to start Keith Institutes Personal Data Project (PDP), primarily because I was thinking of Henrietta Lacks’s HeLa cell line that her estate was robbed of. She was a Black woman who died from cervical cancer in 1951 at which point Dr. Otto Gey an unethical scientist the likes any of Hitler’s hinchmen industrialized her cancer cells to sell and send to multiple labs throughout the
world in for tests that eventually cured illnesses like Polio, and provided the seminal works for our eventual ability to conduct genome sequencing, and even the curbing of HIV/AIDS. Miss Lacks’ personal data was responsible for a trillion dollar industry boom across pharmaceuticals and adjacent industries, but her estate only has a plaque at Morehouse Medical College to show for it. They’re relatively poor. No one owned her 0’s & 1’s.
Our lives are technically comprised of 0’s and 1’s, which is at the base of the affiliate 1’s and 0’s that make up our livelihoods. Further the bottom line of the economy built upon the knowledge of the 0’s and 1’s that make up our personhood. This is not a riddle nor a belief, but a fact. One thing that is natural to human beings is measurement. The very method of measurement is what helps us survive past the experiences that consumed our previous day(s). Measuring the 1’s and 0’s that follow dollar (pound, yen, bitcoin) signs that which measure our ownership of capital is just one method in which we examine the makings up of our lives. Counting itself is a very technical effort. It requires a method to trace back to our beginnings, ensuring that it is more difficult to forget our past steps. There is little value in making the same mistakes over and over again if we are familiar with the consequences, and measurement thwarts the relative forgetfulness of our futures.
As we try and understand ourselves by understanding the functional narratives of our futures, we’re building operations that insist on us to document the actual trials and triumphs of our existence. It’s called data. A code on top of a code to eventually yield something that is readable. Every instance, every utter, every character, differentiated by a code and a time stamp and a place stamp to differentiate the seemingly “identical” things... the science of communication which has yielded computer science has reverse engineered being a human and everything that it means to interact with a human… from rocks to other human beings, we’ve even reverse engineered our ability to track the influence of the other thing’s in existence.
The implications of the fact that all known existence is a culmination of 0’s and 1’s are relatively extraordinary considering the times that have proceeded our modern era. It means that everything can be measured as dynamically as the capital markets. For instance, considering the biased twodimensional (2-D) thought around cardinal and ordinal utility, it would take the influence of a third (3-D) party to establish a value of the datamade up by our 0’s and 1’s. First allow me to define terms:
Another random document with no related content on Scribd:
Ultima Thule; or a Summer in Iceland (London and Edinburgh, 1875).
FOOTNOTES:
[5] Heklu-fjall derives from Hekla (akin to Hökull, a priest’s cope), meaning a cowled or hooded frock, knitted of various colours, and applied to the “Vesuvius of the North” from its cap and body vest of snow. Icelanders usually translate it a chasuble, because its rounded black shoulders bear stripes of white, supposed to resemble the cross carried to Calvary.
[6] Rángá (“wrong,” or crooked stream) is a name that frequently occurs, and generally denotes either that the trend is opposed to the general water-shed, or that an angle has been formed in the bed by earthquakes or eruptions
VICTORIA FALLS
(AFRICA)
DAVID LIVINGSTONE
We proceeded next morning, 9th August, 1860, to see the Victoria Falls. Mosi-oa-tunya is the Makololo name, and means smoke sounding; Seongo or Chongwé, meaning the Rainbow, or the place of the Rainbow, was the more ancient term they bore. We embarked in canoes, belonging to Tuba Mokoro, “smasher of canoes,” an ominous name; but he alone, it seems, knew the medicine which insures one against shipwreck in the rapids above the Falls. For some miles the river was smooth and tranquil, and we glided pleasantly over water clear as crystal, and past lovely islands densely covered with a tropical vegetation. Noticeable among the many trees were the lofty Hyphæne and Borassus palms; the graceful wild date-palm, with its fruit in golden clusters, and the umbrageous mokononga, of cypress form, with its dark-green leaves and scarlet fruit. Many flowers peeped out near the water’s edge, some entirely new to us, and others, as the convolvulus, old acquaintances.
But our attention was quickly called from the charming islands to the dangerous rapids, down which Tuba might unintentionally shoot us. To confess the truth, the very ugly aspect of these roaring rapids could scarcely fail to cause some uneasiness in the minds of newcomers. It is only when the river is very low, as it was now, that any one durst venture to the island to which we were bound. If one went during the period of flood, and fortunately hit the island, he would be obliged to remain there till the water subsided again, if he lived so long. Both hippopotamus and elephants have been known to be swept over the Falls, and of course smashed to pulp. Before entering the race of waters, we were requested not to speak, as our talking might diminish the virtue of the medicine; and no one
with such boiling, eddying rapids before his eyes, would think of disobeying the orders of a “canoe-smasher.” It soon became evident that there was sound sense in this request of Tuba’s, although the reason assigned was not unlike that of the canoe-man from Sesheke, who begged one of our party not to whistle because whistling made the wind come. It was the duty of the man at the bow to look out ahead for the proper course, and when he saw a rock or snag to call out to the steersman. Tuba doubtless thought that talking on board might divert the attention of his steersman, at a time when the neglect of an order, or a slight mistake, would be sure to spill us all into the chafing river. There were places where the utmost exertions of both men had to be put forth in order to force the canoe to the only safe part of the rapid, and to prevent it from sweeping down broadside on, where in a twinkling we should have found ourselves floundering among the plotuses and cormorants, which were engaged in diving for their breakfast of small fish. At times it seemed as if nothing could save us from dashing in our headlong race against the rocks which, now that the river was low, jutted out of the water; but just at the very nick of time, Tuba passed the word to the steersman, and then with ready pole turned the canoe a little aside and we glided swiftly past the threatened danger. Never was canoe more admirably managed: once only did the medicine seem to have lost something of its efficacy. We were driving swiftly down, a black rock, over which the white foam flew, lay directly in our path, the pole was planted against it as readily as ever, but it slipped just as Tuba put forth his strength to turn the bow off. We struck hard, and were half-full of water in a moment; Tuba recovered himself as speedily, shoved off the bow, and shot the canoe into a still shallow place, to bale out the water. Here we were given to understand that it was not the medicine which was at fault; that had lost none of its virtue; the accident was owing entirely to Tuba having started without his breakfast. Need it be said we never left Tuba go without that meal again?
We landed at the head of Garden Island, which is situated near the middle of the river and on the lip of the Falls. On reaching that lip, and peering over the giddy height, the wondrous and unique character of the magnificent cascade at once burst upon us.
It is a rather hopeless task to endeavour to convey an idea of it in words, since, as was remarked on the spot, an accomplished painter, even by a number of views, could but impart a faint impression of the glorious scene. The probable mode of its formation may perhaps help to the conception of its peculiar shape. Niagara has been formed by a wearing back of the rock over which the river falls; but during the long course of ages, it has gradually receded, and left a broad, deep, and pretty straight trough in front. It goes on wearing back daily, and may yet discharge the lakes from which its river—the St. Lawrence—flows. But the Victoria Falls have been formed by a crack right across the river, in the hard, black, basaltic rock which there formed the bed of the Zambesi. The lips of the crack are still quite sharp, save about three feet of the edge over which the river rolls. The walls go sheer down from the lips without any projecting crag, or symptoms of stratification or dislocation. When the mighty rift occurred, no change of level took place in the two parts of the bed of the river thus rent asunder, consequently, in coming down the river to Garden Island, the water suddenly disappears, and we see the opposite side of the cleft, with grass and trees growing where once the river ran, on the same level as that part of its bed on which we sail. The first crack, is, in length, a few yards more than the breadth of the Zambesi, which by measurement we found to be a little over 1,860 yards, but this number we resolved to retain as indicating the year in which the Fall was for the first time carefully examined. The main stream here runs nearly north and south, and the cleft across it is nearly east and west. The depth of the rift was measured by lowering a line, to the end of which a few bullets and a foot of white cotton cloth were tied. One of us lay with his head over a projecting crag, and watched the descending calico, till, after his companions had paid out 310 feet, the weight rested on a sloping projection, probably fifty feet from the water below, the actual bottom being still further down. The white cloth now appeared the size of a crown-piece. On measuring the width of this deep cleft by sextant, it was found at Garden Island, its narrowest part, to be eighty yards, and at its broadest somewhat more. Into this chasm, of twice the depth of Niagara-fall, the river, a full mile wide, rolls with a deafening roar; and this is Mosi-oa-tunya, or the Victoria Falls.
FALLS OF THE ZAMBESI.
Looking from Garden Island, down to the bottom of the abyss, nearly half a mile of water, which has fallen over that portion of the Falls to our right, or west of our point of view, is seen collected in a narrow channel twenty or thirty yards wide, and flowing at exactly right angles to its previous course, to our left; while the other half, or that which fell over the eastern portion of the Falls, is seen in the left of the narrow channel below, coming towards our right. Both waters unite midway, in a fearful boiling waterfall, and find an outlet by a crack situated at right angles to the fissure of the Falls. This outlet is about 1,170 yards from the western end of the chasm, and some 600 from its eastern end; the whirlpool is at its commencement. The Zambesi, now apparently not more than twenty or thirty yards wide, rushes and surges south, through the narrow escape-channel for 130 yards; then enters a second chasm somewhat deeper, and nearly parallel with the first. Abandoning the bottom of the eastern half of this second chasm to the growth of large trees, it turns sharply off to the west, and forms a promontory, with the escape-channel at its point, of 1,170 yards long, and 416 yards broad at the base. After
reaching this base, the river runs abruptly round the head of another promontory, and flows away to the east, in a third chasm; then glides round a third promontory, much narrower than the rest, and away back to the west, in a fourth chasm; and we could see in the distance that it appeared to round still another promontory, and bend once more in another chasm toward the east. In this gigantic, zigzag, yet narrow trough, the rocks are all so sharply cut and angular, that the idea at once arises that the hard basaltic trap must have been riven into its present shape by a force acting from beneath, and that this probably took place when the ancient inland seas were cut off by similar fissures nearer the ocean.
The land beyond, or on the south of the Falls, retains, as already remarked, the same level as before the rent was made. It is as if the trough below Niagara were bent right and left, several times before it reached the railway bridge. The land in the supposed bends being of the same height as that above the Fall, would give standing-places, or points of view, of the same nature as that from the railway bridge, but the nearest would be only eighty yards, instead of two miles (the distance to the bridge) from the face of the cascade. The tops of the promontories are in general flat, smooth, and studded with trees. The first, with its base on the east, is at one place so narrow, that it would be dangerous to walk to its extremity. On the second, however, we found a broad rhinoceros path and a hut; but, unless the builder were a hermit, with a pet rhinoceros, we cannot conceive what beast or man ever went there for. On reaching the apex of this second eastern promontory we saw the great river, of a deep seagreen colour, now sorely compressed, gliding away, at least 400 feet below us.
Garden Island, when the river is low, commands the best view of the Great Fall chasm, as also of the promontory opposite, with its grove of large evergreen trees, and brilliant rainbows of three-quarters of a circle, two, three, and sometimes even four in number, resting on the face of the vast perpendicular rock, down which tiny streams are always running to be swept again back by the upward rushing vapour. But as, at Niagara, one has to go over to the Canadian shore to see the chief wonder—the Great Horseshoe Fall—so here we
have to cross over to Moselekatsé’s side to the promontory of evergreens, for the best view of the principal Falls of Mosi-oa-tunya. Beginning, therefore, at the base of this promontory, and facing the Cataract, at the west end of the chasm, there is, first, a fall of thirtysix yards in breadth, and of course, as they all are, upwards of 310 feet in depth. Then Boaruka, a small island, intervenes, and next comes a great fall, with a breadth of 573 yards; a projecting rock separates this from a second grand fall of 325 yards broad; in all, upwards of 900 yards of perennial Falls. Further east stands Garden Island; then, as the river was at its lowest, came a good deal of the bare rock of its bed, with a score of narrow falls, which, at the time of flood, constitute one enormous cascade of nearly another half-mile. Near the east end of the chasm are two larger falls, but they are nothing at low water compared to those between the islands.
The whole body of water rolls clear over, quite unbroken; but, after a descent of ten or more feet, the entire mass suddenly becomes a huge sheet of driven snow. Pieces of water leap off it in the form of comets with tails streaming behind, till the whole snowy sheet becomes myriads of rushing, leaping, aqueous comets. This peculiarity was not observed by Charles Livingstone at Niagara, and here it happens, possibly from the dryness of the atmosphere, or whatever the cause may be which makes every drop of Zambesi water appear to possess a sort of individuality. It runs off the ends of the paddles, and glides in beads along the smooth surface, like drops of quicksilver on a table. Here we see them in a conglomeration, each with a train of pure white vapour, racing down till lost in clouds of spray. A stone dropped in became less and less to the eye, and at last disappeared in the dense mist below.
Charles Livingstone had seen Niagara, and gave Mosi-oa-tunya the palm, though now at the end of a drought, and the river at its very lowest. Many feel a disappointment on first seeing the great American Falls, but Mosi-oa-tunya is so strange, it must ever cause wonder. In the amount of water, Niagara probably excels, though not during the months when the Zambesi is in flood. The vast body of water, separating in the comet-like forms described, necessarily encloses in its descent a large volume of air, which, forced into the
cleft, to an unknown depth, rebounds, and rushes up loaded with vapour to form the three or even six columns, as if of steam, visible at the Batoka village Moachemba, twenty-one miles distant. On attaining a height of 200, or at most 300 feet from the level of the river above the cascade, this vapour becomes condensed into a perpetual shower of fine rain. Much of the spray, rising to the west of Garden Island, falls on the grove of evergreen trees opposite; and from their leaves, heavy drops are for ever falling, to form sundry little rills, which, in running down the steep face of rock, are blown off and turned back, or licked off their perpendicular bed, up into the column from which they have just descended.
The morning sun gilds these columns of watery smoke with all the glowing colours of double or treble rainbows. The evening sun, from a hot yellow sky imparts a sulphureous hue, and gives one the impression that the yawning gulf might resemble the mouth of the bottomless pit. No bird sings and sings on the branches of the grove of perpetual showers, or ever builds his nest there. We saw hornbills and flocks of little black weavers flying across from the mainland to the islands, and from the islands to the points of the promontories and back again, but they uniformly shunned the region of perpetual rain, occupied by the evergreen grove. The sunshine, elsewhere in this land so overpowering, never penetrates the deep gloom of that shade. In the presence of the strange Mosi-oa-tunya, we can sympathize with those who, when the world was young, peopled earth, air, and river, with beings not of mortal form. Sacred to what deity would be this awful chasm and that dark grove, over which hovers an ever-abiding “pillar of cloud”?
The ancient Batoka chieftains used Kazeruka, now Garden Island, and Boaruka, the island further west, also on the lip of the Falls, as sacred spots for worshipping the Deity. It is no wonder that under the cloudy columns, and near the brilliant rainbows, with the ceaseless roar of the cataract, with the perpetual flow, as if pouring forth from the hand of the Almighty, their souls should be filled with reverential awe.
The Zambesi and its Tributaries 1858-1864 (London, 1865).
THE DRAGON-TREE OF OROTAVA[7]
(CANARY ISLANDS)
ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT
Orotava, the ancient Taoro of the Guanches, is situated on a very steep declivity. The streets seem deserted; the houses are solidly built, and of gloomy appearance. We passed along a lofty aqueduct, lined with a great number of fine ferns; and visited several gardens, in which the fruit trees of the north of Europe are mingled with orange trees, pomegranates, and date trees. We were assured, that these last were as little productive here as on the coast of Cumana. Although we had been made acquainted, from the narratives of many travellers, with the dragon-tree in M. Franqui’s garden, we were not the less struck with its enormous size. We were told, that the trunk of this tree, which is mentioned in several very ancient documents as marking the boundaries of a field, was as gigantic in the Fifteenth Century as it is in the present time. Its height appeared to us to be about fifty or sixty feet; its circumference near the roots is forty-five feet. We could not measure higher, but Sir George Staunton found that, ten feet from the ground, the diameter of the trunk is still twelve English feet; which corresponds perfectly with the statement of Borda, who found its mean circumference thirty-three feet, eight inches, French measure. The trunk is divided into a great number of branches, which rise in the form of a candelabrum, and are terminated by tufts of leaves, like the yucca which adorns the valley of Mexico. This division gives it a very different appearance from that of the palm-tree.
Among organic creations, this tree is undoubtedly, together with the Adansonia or baobab of Senegal, one of the oldest inhabitants of our globe. The baobabs are of still greater dimensions than the dragontree of Orotava. There are some which near the root measure thirtyfour feet in diameter, though their total height is only from fifty to sixty
feet. But we should observe, that the Adansonia, like the ochroma, and all the plants of the family of bombax, grow much more rapidly than the dracæna, the vegetation of which is very slow. That in M. Franqui’s garden still bears every year both flowers and fruit. Its aspect forcibly exemplifies “that eternal youth of nature,” which is an inexhaustible source of motion and of life.
The dracæna, which is seen only in cultivated spots in the Canary Islands, at Madeira, and Porto Santo, presents a curious phenomenon with respect to the emigration of plants. It has never been found in a wild state on the continent of Africa. The East Indies is its real country. How has this tree been transplanted to Teneriffe, where it is by no means common? Does its existence prove, that, at some very distant period, the Guanches had connexions with other nations originally from Asia?[8]
THE DRAGON TREE.
The age of trees is marked by their size, and the union of age with the manifestation of constantly renewed vigour is a charm peculiar to the vegetable kingdom. The gigantic Dragon-tree of Orotava (as sacred in the eyes of the inhabitants of the Canaries as the olive-tree in the Citadel of Athens, or the Elm of Ephesus), the diameter of which I found, when I visited those islands, to be more than sixteen feet, had the same colossal size when the French adventurers, the Béthencourts, conquered these gardens of the Hesperides in the beginning of the Fifteenth Century; yet it still flourishes, as if in perpetual youth, bearing flowers and fruit. A tropical forest of Hymenæas and Cæsalpinieæ may perhaps present to us a monument of more than a thousand years’ standing.
This colossal dragon-tree, Dracæna draco, stands in one of the most delightful spots in the world. In June, 1799, when we ascended the Peak of Teneriffe, we measured the circumference of the tree and found it nearly forty-eight English feet. Our measurement was taken several feet above the root. Lower down, and nearer to the ground, Le Dru made it nearly seventy-nine English feet. The height of the tree is not much above sixty-nine English feet. According to tradition, this tree was venerated by the Guanches (as was the ash-tree of Ephesus by the Greeks, or as the Lydian plane-tree which Xerxes decked with ornaments, and the sacred Banyan-tree of Ceylon), and at the time of the first expedition of the Béthencourts in 1402, it was already as thick and as hollow as it now is. Remembering that the Dracæna grows extremely slowly, we are led to infer the high antiquity of the tree of Orotava. Bertholet in his description of Teneriffe, says: “En comparant les jeunes Dragonniers, voisins de l’arbre gigantesque, les calcus qu’on fait sur l’ âge de ce dernier effraient l’imagination.” (Nova Acta Acad. Leop. Carol. Naturæ Curiosorum 1827, vol. xiii., p. 781.) The dragon-tree has been cultivated in the Canaries, and in Madeira and Porto Santo, from the earliest times; and an accurate observer, Leopold von Buch, has even found it wild in Teneriffe, near Igueste....
The measurement of the dragon-tree of the Villa Franqui was made on Borda’s first voyage with Pingré, in 1771; not in his second
voyage, in 1776, with Varela. It is affirmed that in the earlier times of the Norman and Spanish conquests, in the Fifteenth Century, Mass was said at a small altar erected in the hollow trunk of the tree. Unfortunately, the dragon-tree of Orotava lost one side of its top in the storm of the 21st of July, 1819.
Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions of America during the years 1799-1804 (London, 1825); and Aspects of Nature (Philadelphia, 1849).
FOOTNOTES:
[7] This famous tree was blown down by a storm in 1868 Its age was estimated from five to six thousand years E S
[8] The form of the dragon-tree is exhibited in several species of the genus Dracæna, at the Cape of Good Hope, in China, and in New Zealand. But in New Zealand it is superseded by the form of the yucca; for the Dracæna borealis of Aiton is a Convallaria, of which it has all the appearance. The astringent juice, known in commerce by the name of dragon’s blood, is, according to the inquiries we made on the spot, the produce of several American plants At Laguna, toothpicks steeped in the juice of the dragontree are made in the nunneries, and are much extolled as highly useful for keeping the gums in a healthy state
MOUNT SHASTA
(UNITED STATES)
J. W. BODDAM-WHETHAM
Mount Shasta is the most striking feature of Northern California. Its height is about 14,500 feet above the sea—very nearly the height of Mount Blanc. Mount Blanc is broken into a succession of peaks, but Shasta is one stupendous peak, set upon a broad base that sweeps out far and wide. From the base the volcanic cone rises up in one vast stretch of snow and lava. It is very precipitous to the north and south, but east and west there are two slopes right up to the crater. It is a matter of doubt whether Shasta is dead or only sleeping. Vesuvius slept calmly for centuries, and then spread death and desolation for miles around. The base of the mountain is magnificently watered and wooded, and forms a splendid huntingground. The woods are full of deer and bears; and now and then a mountain-goat, an animal very like the chamois of the Alps, is seen in the higher part of the mountains.
Well-provided with blankets and provisions, we started with a guide, and a man to look after the horses, at a very early hour, and rode through a beautiful forest of pines, silver firs, and cedars. Along the banks of the streams were aspens, willows, and the trees known by the name of the “Balm of Gilead,” whose vivid green leaves were already changing to a rich orange or an apple-red—forming a beautiful contrast of colours with the glazed green of the cedars and the green-tinted white of the silver firs.
After an easy ascent to a height of about 8,000 feet, we reached the limits of vegetation. Thence our upward path lay over snow, ice, and lava—lonely, isolated barrenness on every side, relieved only by an occasional solitary dwarf-pine, struggling to retain life amidst fierce storms and heavy-weighing snow. Many of them were quite dead, but embalmed by frost and snow in a never-decaying death.
With a few loads of this fuel we soon made a splendid fire, the warmth of which was most welcome in the cold rarefied atmosphere. Scarcely had we finished a capital supper ere night descended, and great clouds and fitful fogs began to drift past. These in their turn broke, and the moon threw a weird light over the forest below; whilst above rose piles upon piles of pinkish lava and snow-fields, reaching far up into the sky, whose magnificent blue grew more sparkling and clear every moment.
Wrapping ourselves in our bundles of blankets, we crept as close as possible to the huge fire, and before long my companions were fast asleep and snoring. I could not sleep a wink, and mentally registered a vow never again to camp out without a pillow. No one can tell till he has tried it, the difference there is between going to sleep with a pillow under the head and a stone or a pair of boots or saddle as its resting-place.
MOUNT
The deep silence, unbroken save by a most unromantic snore, was painfully oppressive, and I longed to hear even a growl from a bear or a deep whine from a California lion.[9] I listened intently, for it seemed as if the slightest sound, even a hundred miles away, ought to be heard, so still and frosty was the air.
But none fell on my ear, not even a murmur to soothe one to sleep, and I began to think bears and lions were snores and delusions, when, just as I was dozing off, I felt my arm violently pulled, and a voice called out that it was time for us to make a start. Hot coffee soon had a cheering effect, and long before daylight we left our warm camping-ground, and began the higher ascent on foot. Broken stone and slabs of lava afforded pretty good foothold, far preferable to the fields of frozen snow, which we carefully avoided. After a couple of hours’ hard walking we seemed to be just as far from the summit as when we started; but the views gradually became grander From a rocky promontory we looked back over a sea of glittering clouds, the only land visible being the peaks of the Coast range, near the Pacific; all else was cloud, to which the moonlight lent an almost dazzling whiteness:
“Far clouds of feathery gold, Shaded with deepest purple, gleam Like islands on a dark blue sea.”
When the sun rose and the mists cleared off, the scene was indescribably grand, and the gradual unfolding of the vast panorama unapproachable in its splendour.
After some hours of weary climbing over crumbling scoria and splintered rock, we reached the crater. In the ascent to the summit overlooking the crater, we had to cross an ice-field. It had that blue tinge found in the ice of which glaciers are composed, and its slipperiness made it almost impossible to walk over it, the ice lying often in ridges resembling the waves of the sea. The main crater covers several acres. It is hemmed in by rims of rock, and is filled with volcanic débris, covered with snow and ice.
Numbers of little boiling springs were bubbling up through the bed of sulphur, and were suggestive of the subterranean fires which once threw their molten lava over the surrounding country. The view from the summit was most extensive, and fortunately there was none of the usual smoke from the forest-fires, so prevalent in autumn in Northern California and Oregon, to impede the range of vision.
Looking northward, far over into Oregon, we could see her lakes, valleys, and mountains. Southward, we could trace the Sacramento and Pitt rivers. The great boundary-wall of the Sierra Nevada lay to the east, and farther onward, the deserts and sparkling lakes of Utah could be distinguished. To the west the sinuous outline of the Coast range was visible, and beyond, the broad Pacific shelved away to the horizon. Fertile valleys, rugged mountains, wood and water, all lent their aid to enhance the beauty of this unsurpassable scene.
The descent to our camping-ground was accomplished in a comparatively short time. On the way, we stopped to witness a most glorious sunset. Round the horizon ran a thin mist with a brilliant depth of colouring. To the east a blue gauze seemed to cover each valley as it sank into night, and the intervening ridges rose with increasing distinctness. The lower country was flooded with an exquisitely delicate light, and a few fleecy clouds tinted with gold, pale salmon, and sapphire, passed over the empurpled hills of the Coast range. The great shadow of Mount Shasta spread itself, conelike, across the valley; the blue mists were quenched; the distant mountains glowed like fairy hills for a few moments; and the sun, poising itself like a great globe of fire in the darkening heavens, descended slowly below the golden ridge to illumine another hemisphere.
During our descent we passed through some patches of red snow, which leaves a crimson track behind those who cross over it. This curious phenomenon is always avoided by the Shasta Indians, when acting as guides or porters, as they say it brings death if you tread on it willingly and after due warning. We found a warm fire to welcome us on our arrival at the camp, and the exertions of the day made us very willing to turn in among the blankets where we slept soundly till long after daybreak. The following day, when we arrived
at our original starting-point, my companions resumed their journey to San Francisco, and I went on to Sissons, a station on the stageroad, whence I was to start on a shooting expedition amongst the Castle Rocks.
Sissons, so-called after the name of the proprietor, is a very delightful place to spend a few days at. The view of Mount Shasta, which is directly opposite the house, is magnificent; and Sisson himself is a capital sportsman guide, and succeeds in making his guests very comfortable. Looking at Mount Shasta is occupation enough for some time. The play of colour on the mountain is extraordinary. The lava, which is of a rosy hue, often penetrates through the snow, and when the sun shines upon it the effect is most beautiful. The pure white fields of snow are diversified by great blue glaciers, and when the sunbeams fall with refracted glory on the veins of ice they exhibit wonderful tints of opal, green, and pink. The effects produced by the mingling colours of lava, snow, and ice, and the contrasting shadows of a deep violet hue are so varied, and the radiation of colour at sunrise and sunset so vivid, that it is difficult to keep the eyes turned from the mountain—for nothing seems worthy of consideration in comparison with Shasta.
Western Wanderings: a Record of Travel in the Evening Land (London, 1874).
FOOTNOTE:
[9] These so-called lions are a sort of panther, and abound in most parts of California and Oregon. They are very cowardly, and seldom attack a man, unless they can spring on him from a tree, and not often then.
THE LAGOONS OF VENICE
(ITALY)
JOHN RUSKIN
In the olden days of travelling, now to return no more, in which distance could not be vanquished without toil, but in which that toil was rewarded, partly by the power of deliberate survey of the countries through which the journey lay, and partly by the happiness of the evening hours, when from the top of the last hill he had surmounted, the traveller beheld the quiet village where he was to rest, scattered among the meadows beside its valley stream; or, from the long hoped for turn in the dusty perspective of the causeway, saw, for the first time, the towers of some famed city, faint in the rays of sunset—hours of peaceful and thoughtful pleasure, for which the rush of the arrival in the railway station is perhaps not always, or to all men, an equivalent,—in those days, I say, when there was something more to be anticipated and remembered in the first aspect of each successive halting-place, than a new arrangement of glass roofing and iron girder, there were few moments of which the recollection was more fondly cherished by the travelled, than that which, as I endeavoured to describe in the close of the last chapter, brought him within sight of Venice as his gondola shot into the open lagoon from the canal of Mestre. Not but that the aspect of the city itself was generally the source of some slight disappointment, for seen in this direction, its buildings are far less characteristic than those of other great towns of Italy; but this inferiority was partly disguised by distance, and more than atoned for by the strange rising of its walls and towers out of the midst, as it seemed, of the deep sea, for it was impossible that the mind or the eye could at once comprehend the shallowness of the vast sheet of water which stretched away in leagues of rippling lustre to the north and south, or trace the narrow line of islets bounding it to the east. The salt breeze, the moaning sea-birds, the masses of black weed separating
and disappearing gradually, in knots of heaving shoal, under the advance of the steady tide, all proclaimed it to be indeed the ocean on whose bosom the great city rested so calmly; not such blue, soft, lake-like ocean as bathes the Neapolitan promontories, or sleeps beneath the marble rocks of Genoa, but a sea with the bleak power of our own northern waves, yet subdued into a strange spacious rest, and changed from its angry pallor into a field of burnished gold, as the sun declined behind the belfry tower of the lonely island church, fitly named “St. George of the Seaweed.” As the boat drew nearer to the city, the coast which the traveller had just left sank behind him into one long, low, sad-coloured line, tufted irregularly with brushwood and willows; but, at what seemed its northern extremity, the hills of Arqua rose in a dark cluster of purple pyramids, balanced on the bright mirage of the lagoon; two or three smooth surges of inferior hill extended themselves about their roots, and beyond these, beginning with the craggy peaks above Vicenza, the chain of the Alps girded the whole horizon to the north—a wall of jagged blue, here and there showing through its clefts a wilderness of misty precipices, fading far back into the recesses of Cadore, and itself rising and breaking away eastward, where the sun struck opposite upon its snow, into mighty fragments of peaked light, standing up behind the barred clouds of evening, one after another, countless, the crown of the Adrian Sea, until the eye turned back from pursuing them, to rest upon the nearer burning of the campaniles of Murano, and on the great city, where it magnified itself along the waves, as the quick, silent pacing of the gondola drew nearer and nearer. And at last, when its walls were reached, and the outmost of its untrodden streets was entered, not through towered gate or guarded rampart, but as a deep inlet between two rocks of coral in the Indian sea; when first upon the traveller’s sight opened the long ranges of columned palaces,—each with its black boat moored at the portal,—each with its image cast down, beneath its feet, upon that green pavement which every breeze broke into new fantasies of rich tessellation; when first, at the extremity of the bright vista, the shadowy Rialto threw its colossal curve slowly forth from behind the palace of the Camerlenghi; that strange curve, so delicate, so adamantine, strong as a mountain cavern, graceful as a
