Known on the Web as Wretchard the Cat, Richard is a Sydney software developer. He has been named Australian Editor for Pajamas Media and is on the Editorial Board. Richard holds a degree in applied mathematics from Case Western Reserve University and a Master’s Degree in Public Policy from the Kennedy School at Harvard.

Richard Fernandez – He finds a different life in Australia

I grew up in the Philippines and was educated in U.S. graduate schools. My last job in the Philippines was in forestry inspection, a process that includes the people in the forest. I was hired on because I’d had experience providing assistance to tribal communities to get them title to their ancestral lands. In the Philippines, land with a slope of greater than a certain percentage automatically belongs to the government. This gives government enormous power over individuals, a fact actually regarded in many Third World countries as conducive to development.

I decided to emigrate to Australia in 1997. I had to retool as a software developer and eventually built a considerable number of utility applications for fairly well-known companies in Australia.

On his blog – Using known paradigms to understand the world

The Belmont Club really began Sept. 11. My wife woke me with news that two wide-bodied jets had brought the twin towers down. I got up in a daze asking ‘What am I going to do?’ Most people intuitively felt the world changed on that day. But for some, and I know it was true in my case, it also changed the past. For most, America is a dream. But for those who never expect to return to it again it is the memory of youth — something you expect to stay safe forever and not lie in broken pieces in lower Manhattan. I didn’t take the train into the city that morning and for a long time afterward, but walked, imagining I was making things harder for an enemy I wanted to get back at somehow.

I found Blogger in the months after the invasion of Iraq and started posting whatever came to mind. I had about ten hits a day until Steven Den Beste noticed and sent traffic my way. Things took off from there. In about 12 months I had logged between 5 and 6 million hits.

What’s the Belmont Club about? Nothing in particular. Sometimes I’ll write about human networks — how big can a group get before it needs to be controlled in a bureaucratic way, which turns out to be a limiting factor in the size of terrorist networks. Sometimes I’ll write about memory-less behavior, which came to mind after reading about events in the Superdome following Katrina. I look at current events through the prism of concepts from my workaday life. The surprising thing is that readers often feel that process brings a fresh perspective on the news.

On our direction

The consequences of increasing connectivity haven’t really hit people yet. We may soon be able to gather information at levels closer to the primary source than ever before. Before the Internet the public relied on mainstream media to tell it what happened. But with increasing connectivity people are now able, in a still limited but growing way, via telephony and satellites and whatever, to cross-check the facts for themselves and decide whether an event actually happened as described.

Some people have been passing fiction off as reality for a very long time. And I knew something about fiction masquerading as truth. In my past job we’d get forestry projects based on maps where no aerial photographs were available for cross-checking. Back then it was illegal to commission aerial imagery without a ton of clearances from the Philippine military. And so the maps were mostly hooey because you couldn’t independently verify what they said unless you could walk the ground to sample the truth of it. They substituted official fantasy in its place, and that was how things were cooked up.

In the past you couldn’t cross-check the news but now you can. It will be increasingly possible to discover, aggregate and distribute stuff using software. Some people haven’t realized yet there are real penalties for lying. But they will! With Pajamas, you might say, ‘How can all these strangers reliably interact? Isn’t this dangerous?’ It is dangerous. If you go and write a bunch of hooey, people are going to notice.