‘Rules are meant to be broken’ (said every dickhead you ever met)
Let me contemplate space… between my ears
Ray Bradbury famously quoted Jiménez: “If they give you lined paper, write the other way.”
Unintentionally the quote is a precursor to the current age of digital business. Write the other way is not much different from Think different / Disrupt old ways / Break things / Fail quickly / Get rich / Dodge tax / Spread disinformation / Fuck off with the investors’ cash / etc.
It’s a good quote but, as with all disruption, is misplaced. Ruled paper isn’t evil. It’s just paper with lines on it. You’re free to ignore the lines but doing so can be quite difficult and produces no obvious benefit.
What would the highly decorated authors of Platero y yo and The Illustrated Man do in France, where notebooks are pre-printed with horizontal and vertical lines, graph paper style? Write diagonally? It’s all fine for artistic smart arses with the wherewithal to risk exactly nothing from their faux-rebellious literary exuberance, but some of us have stuff to get on with.
I notice that neither author insisted that their works be printed sideways or upside-down or back-to-front or in invisible ink. Lining up text in neat visible rows makes it easier to read – and their books easier to sell.
Despite this, as a nipper I was quite taken by Bradbury’s quote when I discovered it at the beginning of Fahrenheit 451. I tried my hardest to “write the other way” for weeks. Far from releasing the muse and opening the mind, the exercise caused me to obsess about ensuring my writing was perfectly perpendicular to the ruled lines on the paper. What I learnt was that the pre-printed gnats-cock rules and baselines printed throughput my exercise books weren’t there to enslave the imagination but – guess what? – help me write quickly and legibly without effort.
These rules weren’t meant to be broken.
At around the same time, I found myself most impressed by the idiom “Read between the lines” and decided that I should stop writing sideways and start writing – literally – between the lines rather than on them. This meant I would have something interesting to read between the lines later.
To this day, the A5 notebooks I buy are always unruled blanks: every page is one big space to be written on in all directions without me having to deliberately break any rules. If I accidentally write in neatly stacked lines, I always make the effort to go back and write between them, just in case I fancy reading between them later on.
”Blimey,” you’re probably wondering, “Talk about contemplating your own navel.”
Almost right. Because writing between the lines trained me to concentrate on the spaces rather than the lines, a navel is too obvious. I am actually contemplating my own arse. It’s because I can’t quite see it and must therefore be somewhere else in space. Fellow arse-gazers everywhere, raise a beer!
Mme D has a similarly inverse way of viewing things. She carelessly picked up a business card from the counter at a high street baker’s and later on presented it to me, saying “Ha ha look at that!”
So what’s so odd about a handout card advertising a baker who specialises in a local variation of Proust’s famous memory cake? Surely there’s nothing to see here apart from some oddly oversized asterisks and a gestalt logo depicting the nearby landmark, a small mountain known as Pic St Loup?
Maybe that’s what you see. This is what we see:
If you still don’t see it, well, give it time. And living space. Bunker down and blitz through your memories of history lessons at school and maybe the ball will drop and you’ll get the solution, finally.
OK, let’s try another. Below is a photo I took the other day of a child’s play corner in a local pharmacist’s. The specially demarcated safe space enticed toddlers with a bucket of Lego animals, various boring ecologically themed toys made from wood, Kung Fu Panda playing on a video screen smeared with fingerprints and snot, and… what’s that on the wall?
What infant would not be delighted to indulge in educationally enhanced eco-play while the severed heads of three endangered species loom over them?
I’ve shown the photo to people and they just look at me blankly and say “What?” Clearly it’s just me that sees severed heads. Everybody else assumes the furry animals are still happily intact and that their enormous backsides are simply hanging out on the other side of the wall in the room behind.
I blame the hunting lobby which is hugely influential in France. Don’t legislate against hunting wildlife, they say, otherwise your living rooms will be overrun with antelope. What they really mean is that blasting the shit out of everything that moves in the countryside is fun. I totally get that. Waving guns around feels sexy, like being an outlaw in a Western or a muthafukken rapper in a muthafukken video. That’s it! Hunters are essentially rappers in wellies and tweed, albeit with pot bellies and smelling like wet dog.
Anyway, my point was that rules are not meant to be broken; it’s just that people feel obliged to break them because they are rules. And breaking rules has always been kinda cool, hasn’t it?
This is why IT billionaires try to portray themselves as ‘duckers’, ’divers’, ’innovators’, ‘rule-breakers’, ‘incorrigible freethinkers’ and all that. That sounds cool, right? At least it sounds cooler than ‘amoral fucking psychopaths’ which is what they really are.
The pose works right up to the point where their bluff is called. If you swagger around cosplaying a corporate outlaw, someone will eventually appoint a sheriff.
Craptocurrency hoodlums, for example, are finally being headed off at the pass and their only future could soon be Boot Hill. Regulators in the US are launching significant lawsuits against Finance and Coinbase. Even the UK prime minister, despite mumbling some utter bollocks about web3 and blockchain as if he was under the delusion that they were potential drivers of economic wealth rather than vampires that suck wealth out of the economy to offshore tax havens, hinted that fintech regulation was overdue.
The response from crapto jailbait has been the familiar refrain: “Regulation stifles innovation!” IT behemoths say this too, as does Big Pharma.
As does OceanGate, which for years insisted that its Titan submersible should not be required to meet tedious regulatory standards because doing so would stifle the company’s ability to innovate. You can’t argue with OceanGate’s dedication to its mission of innovation: it disrupted, broke things and failed quickly.
Fintech icebergs, here we come!
I’m looking at it the wrong way, of course, but as I explained earlier, I simply cannot see anything at face value. I can only read between the lines. Or indeed have a beer and contemplate my arse.
Actually no: I have decided to Think Different. I will innovate myself. I am going to… have a beer and contemplate someone else’s arse for a change.
Let’s contemplate together more in July, yeah?
Alistair Dabbs is a freelance technology tart, juggling IT journalism, editorial training and digital publishing. Earlier this month he read that Chat GPT failed a self-assessment test for urologists, achieving only a 30% rate of correct answers in an American Urological Association study programme. He was surprised at the AI’s poor performance in the test as he’d been told it was a piece of piss.
Juan Ramón Jimenéz actually wrote '"Si os dan papel pautado, escribid por el otro lado' which translated means 'If they give you lined paper, write on the other side'
This I take to mean, if someone/thing is trying to force you into their way, choose to go your own way.
Not a bad sentiment and a far cry from your interpretation of the Bradbury et al mis quotation
Mind you on being a disruptor I get accused of that at work, mainly because when I see something wrong I have an uncontrollable urge to fix it. The other day I found the firewall management console wasn’t collecting interface or cpu stats. So I asked the why not - the answer was it caused too many alarms so we turned it off!
Not good enough the company depends on these firewalls if they are generating alarms then it needs to be investigated not ignored. So I am turning the alarms back on in a week or so…