A walk in the mountains

Yesterday I was climbing 5C comfortably and consistently for the first time. I often climb 5a, 5b and sometimes attempt 6a and 5c. Yesterday I skipped the easy grades and went straight for the 5C+. I expected it to be hard and I expected to struggle. I expect strength and fear of falling to be issues but they were not.

I believe that three factors contributed to this. The first of these is that last time I went climbing I was also bouldering. I believe that bouldering got me to work different muscle groups and that these muscle groups were primed for use when lead climbing.

The second factor that helped is that I noticed that the door frames in the building where I live have tiny ledges that I can grip and pull on laterally. By making this lateral effort I was strengthening my grip for tiny holds. I was using the strength I developed on holds that I would not otherwise have trusted. Amusingly it seems to have worked.

The third and most important factor is that I took a one week break from climbing. In this time my body had the time to recover and so did my mind. It had the opportunity to absorb what it had learned and desaturate from the previous climbs. In effect I arrived to the wall with a clean slate (no pun intended).

I love to go climbing because it is a wonderful form of escapism from all of the stress of adult life. It provides you with a workout and with an opportunity to clear your mind. Some would describe it as a form of meditation. As a former diver I would call it desaturation. You have the opportunity to live in and enjoy a moment with no past and no future. That’s why people love these sports. It can be summarised to one phrase. Well being. Yesterday’s successful climbs contributed to mine.

A popular refrain is that “the user is the product” when speaking of networks like Facebook and this refrain should not be valid. The user should be seen as the primary investor. We invest our time, we invest our social network and we invest our attention. We invest anything from minutes a day to hours a week and days per year. In such an environment the primary focus should be the value that Facebook provides to its users.

The Economist | Unmarked https://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21740401-both-facebook-boss-and-his-questioners-congress-fail-reassure-what-make-mark?frsc=dg%7Ce

As a follow up to Zuckerberg speaking to Congress “Over the course of his testimony, as the Facebook boss apologised for the leakage of data on 87m users to a political-campaign firm, his company’s shares rose by 5.7% and his own net worth by $3.2bn.” When normal companies have data breaches their value usually goes down and people walk away. In the case of Facebook, they are too endemic to contemporary culture to suffer much. We use Facebook for authentication, we use Facebook to stay connected with people who are not social media mobile.  If we want to preserve connections with friends spending less time on Facebook would result in knowing less about those we worked or went to uni with. It would also mean less sharing of images, videos and informal conversation. They have a monopoly which I hope will break. 

The “silo” that people have often complained about could become worse rather than better. “…the risk is that Facebook will throw up walls: its decision to kick third-party data-brokers off the platform has the convenient effect of both protecting users’ data and entrenching its power as a source of those data.” We are not a commodity. Facebook should not see its users as data but rather as communities. It should focus its efforts on encouraging community leaders, i.e sports organisers, event organisers and other people to interact with their users to create personal relationships that encourage people to spend time with each other offline.

In the early days of twitter, facebook and seesmic people spent so much time on networks that groups formed offline and then met in the physical world, in meat-space as it was called. Instead of looking at big data, at algorithms Facebook and twitter should focus on helping people find people with similar interests and passions. 

We should be in a reality where the more time you spend on a social network, the more personal connections you establish and as a result of this enrich your life.

Neither Facebook nor congress showed any interest in this. If we’re seen as users and data then what reason do we have to continue using Facebook? If we’re just entering data for marketers and shareholders to acquire wealth then we might as well blog, we might as well jump off of the platform.