Superheros
June 2022
Superheroes have never ceased to be fascinating to me since young. I have pictures of younger myself wearing a superman outfit, the mask of Batman, and playing with action figures. I did not know precisely why I was drawn to them, but boy, was I in love with them; I played with robots until the 4th grade years too late compared to my peers. Throughout my teenage years and college, superhero movies were my favorite genre of all. I almost watched all Spiderman movies on the day or a day after the release dates.
Maybe it was their unique powers that attracted me. Perhaps it was how they carry out their quests--with courage, integrity, and responsibility. Maybe, it was the victorious moments that ensues at the end with elegance and grace. I can articulate my fascination more precisely now: superheroes use their extraordinary skills to solve meaningful problems despite their limitations, each victory improving the world bit by bit. These four components--skills, problems, limitations, and accomplishments --are the four critical components of my superhero fascination.
In heroic stories, the protagonists--initially unremarkable--are challenged with impending doom, which usually manifests in the form of the emergence of villains. Despite her physical, mental, and circumstantial psychological limitations, she must overcome them lest the world be destroyed. She is given special abilities to tackle these challenges. When she tries hard enough, she will rise to the challenges achieving victorious moments, saving the day. For example, the ordinary collage student named Peter Parker is bitten by a radioactive spider and is given a super power. He uses his web swinging skills to freely navigate New York City to attend to any area should problems arise. Similarly, Neo can control pretty much everything inside the Matrix. Before he took the red pill--which would wake him up from the false reality--he was a corporate engineer in the morning and a lonely hacker at night. After taking on the messianic title of the One, Neo helps bring the unawakened to the "real" world and ultimately sacrifices himself to bring peace between machine and humanity. Batman only performs his heroic acts in the dark at night, practicing what Matthew 6:3 preaches, "Do not let your left hand know what right hand is doing." He attempts to do this without fatally harming anyone. While still human, he overcomes his human limitations with his gadgets. Each hero faces a set of challenges with increasing difficulty over the course of time, and he must utilize his tools to tackle them.
Deep down in my heart, my childhood dream remains unchanged. I still want to be a superhero, putting things back in the right order and establishing justice. Although the physics of the natural world and the biology of my aging body makes it difficult, at least in digital world I have made tangible progress.
I face many types of villains everyday ranging from petty annoyance that can be automated out of existence to complex scientific problems that require data and infrastructure to support them. To combat these monsters effectively, I have gained many skills over the years. In my terminal, I can teleport, jump, and do telekinesis on objects that I see on the screen with a fewer keystrokes than typically necessary. I can morph anything as I see fit, doing alchemy using the plain text as my raw materials. In this world, I can time-travel and review the deeds of my past self and correct if necessary. Just like Iron Man, I can also create multiple robotic clones of myself, carrying out tedious tasks day and night tirelessly at a scheduled time. I can also predict the future with reasonable accuracy with a little bit of modeling and visualization. The best part is that my skills are constantly evolving, and they are organized neatly for quicker query and recall in my digital, external second brain. To laymen, the stuff I can do on Terminal are indistinguishable from magic.
All these knowledge and know hows can be viewed as mere "hacks" and "time-saver." When you can manipulate objects at the speed of thought, however, it fundamentally changes the way you see things in the problem space. It's akin to the having transportation infrastructure: you can go to more places and get more stuff, effectively and efficiently.
On the surface, I am no different than Joe typing things away behind the screen. With more experience comes a pursuit of elegance. With the help of my toolchain, I devise ways to do more things with less. When complexity has been abstracted away, fingers can synchronize with a train of thought. I become just like Neo jumping across multiple windows, shredding texts at the speed of thought, defying the law of gravity.