Technology, even at its highest levels, is not always the answer. You know what would improve my lawnmowing? GPS! Technology, at any level, can be misapplied. You know what would increase the polish and rigor of my kazoo-playing? A metronome! Well, some technology at some level could be good. You know what could impose a useful limit on my kazoo-practicing? An egg timer.

I was going to say something about AI but we all know about AI: it's a chatty buggy search engine, and the alarming thing about it is not the bugs but the many people happily excusing these as hallucinations. An ordinary search engine, challenged to retrieve information about the Yugoslavian space program, would say there wasn't one. Teased or goaded further with the additional speculation or condition that Tito was black, it would deny that too. AI, on the other hand, would draw an utterly fake picture confirming the requester's idiocy in its entirety. And for this we build data centers that draw vast quantities of current, and in them programmers are anticipating every such idiotic request so as to reduce response time? Sure hope I got all that wrong! Anyway, now I'd like to talk about a somewhat related outlet for the tech impulse.

Here's an idea, or two, about search engine optimization (SEO). The first one is, I am pretty sure, not how SEO works: you're an author and you want people to read your books, so you pay a library to flip all the cards in the card catalogue except the ones for yours. The others are still there, but facing backwards; they can be viewed, but only if the library patron pulls the drawer almost all the way out and leans way over. 'Course if you pay even more, the library moves your cards to the front of the drawer and inserts chocks to ensure no one can pull it out any farther.

SEO or at least literature likely does not work this way because if it did, the richest author would by now have paid to have all cards other than his own removed. Or, there would be bidding wars among authors. Or, every library would have its own unique card catalogue. Or, most card catalogues would be regarded as useless, except in those few brave libraries that locked 'em up, but then you couldn't find a book unless you already knew its call number or you were really tight with the librarian. Since none of this seems to be the case, I assume SEO is honest most of the time, vain the rest of the time, and the best way to get your stuff seen is to produce the best stuff.

My second idea is quite whimsical, a harmless exercise of the imagination. Just fill in the blank in "What if the promoters of _____ had, or had had, recourse to search engine optimization?" This one is trickier than it looks, although my initial experimentation leads me to just two answers to that question. If it is completed with the Shah, Doonesbury, Peanuts, or (this may be just in Canada) Quebec, the obvious response is "I thought they always did." Many things have occupied more cultural space than they really deserved. They loomed nevertheless, and "Make Yourself Loom Nevertheless" is surely the slogan of every search engine optimizer, or in pre-Internet days every ad agency. The other possible answer I come up with, and it is not very different from the first one, is "It wouldn't make a difference." Not for the Sublime Porte, or for Jane Fonda: these had mostly theoretical volume, you might even call it Inertia For Their Time, and no one was sure why. Unlike with certain exotic political forces or comic strips, it was hard to remember when they were ever new or fresh or remarkable. Quite a few people who ever remembered when Saturday Night Live was at least one of those have died natural deaths. To make this more of a game, choices might be restricted to phenomena that never had developed much inertia but might really have taken off if they got the right electronic boost. Yet even Ross Perot, a computer tycoon, couldn't make this happen. Hmm.

(9/27/25)