Welcome to Bill Quick: Swimming Downstream From the Culture Pool
When I embarked upon the process of familiarizing myself with the ins and outs of this new, (to me, at least) venue for writers called Substack, one of the first things I noticed was that the names of the individual Substacks tended toward either the vanilla and anodyne, (Glenn Reynolds, of Instapundit fame, calls his “Glenn’s Substack”) or the, (at first glance) quite esoteric: Alexander Macris, for instance, named his “Contemplations On the Tree of Woe.” Both, by the way, are well worth your time and money.
I like to think I’ve settled upon something in the middle. “Swimming Downstream in the Culture Pool, accompanied by a dire logo of the Titanic doing a deep header, would seem to be straightforward enough. But the tale of the Titanic turns out to be more complex than most people realize. It wasn’t just a matter of “Oops, where the hell did that big ice cube come from?” The real problem was that the builders and the operators of what was at the time the most advanced ocean liner in the world ignored just about every conceivable downside to their assumptions.
The first, and largest, assumption was that the ship was unsinkable. The downside to that assumption, which would turn out to be catastrophic, was in large part ignored. And there was more. To save money on rivets, (the Titanic contained about three million of them) a large number of cheaper iron rivets were used. The downside to iron rivets is they can become brittle when chilled, perhaps by cruising through icy arctic waters, and might crumble away when exposed to sudden pressures, such as those you might find when…colliding with an iceberg. This particular downside was left unconsidered as well.
The assumption of unsinkability also led to the truly perverse decision that a full complement of lifeboats was unnecessary, which resulted in a lifeboat capacity of 1100 on a ship loaded with 2400 souls, of whom only 700 survived. Nobody looked at the downside, and down they all went.
There were a great many more such upsides left unexamined for down-sidedness, and almost all of them contributed in some way to the most notorious shipwreck in history. Which leads me to my intentions here at Swimming Downstream. I am going to look at potential downsides to as many cheerful upside assumptions as catch my interest. Call me Cassandra. Call me a doomer. Call me Eeyore. But don’t call me late for dinner. What? You assume there will be dinner? Silly you. You probably haven’t even thought about the downside of that assumption, have you? (Insomnia, obesity, metabolic disorder, type 2 diabetes, tooth decay, farts…).
There will, of course, be essays not precisely on this particular point, but things will tend in that direction, so get into those non-existent lifeboats and fasten your missing seatbelts, because while we’re not going to the dark side, we are going to the downside at least as often as we visit happy-clappy land. Plan to embark on extended voyages at least once a week, but more often as inspiration warrants.
Bon voyage, and buckle up!
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