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Either way: is such communication strategy an instinctive or a learned behaviour? It seems likely that at least part of birdsong communication is gained after hatching because birds from noisy cities are louder than their country cousins (although you wouldn’t know it, to listen out of the bedroom window of my rural home, this morning!).

Just a moment’s curiosity for the morning.

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Web isn't just a brand, it's also a noun and a verb. "I web you." #

Tech and democracy#

• I found the TechDirt piece by Mike Masnick about being a democracy blog disturbing because imho it should have been about democracy at least since 2017, when it was clear that Twitter had just elected a president of the United States. That was a clear strong signal that tech and democracy were tightly connected. #
• At the time I tried to raise the alarm, in tech and in finance, that a Republican could buy Twitter for $12B, and that was a cheap price considering the value of the presidency in a tech entrepreneur's hands.#
• My experience in Silicon Valley goes back to the late 70s, so I have a pretty good understanding of the personality of tech entrepreneurs.#
• My blog, Scripting News, has been about democracy since inception, in 1994, though it has primarily been about technology. I got the same complaints that I should stick to tech, but I didn't see a line of separation. The stakes were large then, but now they're much larger and as Masnick notes, impossible to ignore. #
• In the mid-90s there was not much of a debate whether the First Amendment applied to the web, the consensus was that it did not! The NYT didn't defend the 1st A on the web, and Congress passed a law saying the 1st A didn't apply and a Democratic president, Clinton, signed the law. That was a pretty clear signal. (We were saved by a Federal appeals court, otherwise who knows what we'd be doing now.)#
• In tech, every generation thinks they're seeing a problem for the first time. This is almost never true. It's like anything else, we're iterative, going over the same issues again and again, and we have a chance to wake up at any point and learn from our mistakes and not repeat the previous cycle, but it seems we never do.#
• Most important is that we work together and share what we learned. But first you have to be aware that there is history. You know the famous line about people who "cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."#
• We have great historians working here, and TechDirt is more famous than Scripting News is now. It would be a shame if the historians overlooked the historic connection between tech and democracy because they weren't aware it was documented much earlier than 2025. And btw -- don't miss that Google et al would like to deprecate the archive of the early web. No one is paying attention to that problem, and it's another way history is lost. The wisdom of the Google people forcing this on the rest of us is very much like the DOGE bros in DC today. #

The cage was L-shaped, and I was lying on the long side. At the other end, a brown mouse was digging through the chips. I understood that the other me believed this mouse was his mother. Near where my other me was shuffling wooden chips, I saw a mummified brown mouse and thought that perhaps that had been the real mother, but insane me just hadn't noticed it.

As I began to exit the cage, I discovered that the living mouse had built a nest on the other side which, on closer inspection, revealed to contained many mummified baby mice. I was certain the brown mouse was also insane, somehow having forgotten about its offspring. I never felt fear, but I did feel dirty in some way and wanted to get out of there as soon as possible. I pitied them both.

The cage was open. It had a large, adult-sized frame with an entire wall made of chicken wire mesh that opened to the outside, so the cage was luminous and didn't really feel oppressive. Upon exiting, I saw many other similar but smaller cages. Some lemurs caught my eye as they were standing on spiderwebs and looked really gracious. All the animals placidly looked at me as I passed, interested but not at all disturbed. I think they were all, in some way or another, insane like my hosts from the previous night.

I left what turned out to be an alley and walked right, discovering that the animal cages were actually behind a fancy café. For some reason, I made a quick pencil sketch of the cafe entrance and sent a picture of it to my coworkers. One of them replied with a link to the place, saying it was called something like Café du Monde and was in Brazil. I found this strange since I had no memory of traveling to Brazil, but I didn't give it much thought.

As I headed toward my parked car nearby, I met a friend who warned me to be careful because everyone on the street was behaving crazily. He showed me a video on his phone—people were driving recklessly, ignoring road rules, many of them extremely angry. The video showed a driver crashing into another car while attempting a left turn on a straight road without signaling or checking for oncoming traffic. The man became furious and began to convulse, his spasms so violent that they threw his body from one side of the car to the other. I thanked my friend and continued to my car, not particularly worried about his warning but resolved to take extra care nonetheless.

The first thing that I thought on writing this down was that the first part of the dream stands for the rise out of animal consciousness into the human psyche, but with the interesting twist that the high and mighty humans are just as insane, if not more so.

Though I don't feel that's it, or at least not all of it. The fact that insane me was in the cage, and stayed there when I left (despite there being no door) is deeply symbolic I think. Like a cage that is open, but still confines its occupant through other means than by force. This also, obviously, points to the idea of the divided self, specifically my shadow self being disowned in some way, the cage representing a containment (forced or otherwise) of primitive or unconscious energies. The fact that this other me doesn't exit the cage perhaps points to a divide between what I associate as the conscious me and the actual contents of my unconscious. I also think a crucial aspect here is the feeling of pity I had towards myself, as that seems to suggest there's some sort of work going on to integrate these shadow elements.

The insane mother rat, that let its other babies die, also has a strong emotional connotation. I can't pinpoint exactly what it is, pity, sadness, a tiny bit of fear, disgust... Neither of the two really ever gave much thought to the other, though I think they drew comfort from the from their respective presence. Here of course, we have a plain mother symbol, and the dichotomy of a mother that's alive and one that's dead. Also the dead baby mice seem relevant, but I don't know what to make of it.

The convulsing human is also important I feel. Maybe something to do with us building all these fancy things (cars; technology) but in reality they're ill-fitted to our nature. This image is also clearly representative of loss of control theme, especially through inflation of the ego (anger), and the danger this poses to me and others. Ego inflation brings one back to a primitive, chaotic, state maybe?

Also, why do a sketch of the cafe entrance and then take a picture of it rather than just take a picture of the entrance? The weirdness of this action points to it not being accidental. My first thought here is that a drawing is a representation of something, it's created by filtering an external experience through a subconscious interpretation, and is entirety subjective. The fact that I share it with my coworkers, and then have one of them validate it I think directly points to the fact I'm looking for external validation of my subjective interpretations of reality. Sounds about right.

Oh that makes me think of another association. The fancy cafe is juxtaposed with animal cages in the back alley! And that clearly ties in with the driver image as well. "A civilized exterior often conceals more primitive aspects of ourselves that we would sometimes prefer to keep hidden (in the back alley) of our minds".