The day will come when computer power surpasses that of brain power. Then we will shed our beastly costumes to become pure data.
In this ecstasy of data I will stick my one inside your zero and we will ejaculate our conjugated data.
More appropriate to this moment will be the preceding stages of development leading up to it. I suggest that your imagination conjure up a time when all basic tasks and responsibilities are in the hands (servo-motors) of robots. In such an instance who owns labor? The simple answer is the owners of the robots. In such a leap we've returned to the antebellum United States South.
What does such a return look like?
The social conditions necessitated by a plutocracy controlling a large population of laborers makes the relevance and presence of humans marginal to the needs of money. To decouple people's worth from their labor-value is to cast them into a sea of their own fate. Witness a referendum in Switzerland called the "Swiss Basic Income." The reasoning behind it is to secure a living income for the country's inhabitants in anticipation of a robotics revolution that will leave them, and the majority of the planet, unemployed.
More importantly, their politics will be muted.
Considering the major political uprisings of the twentieth century, we can easily see their erasure with the introduction of robots. Where people once were coerced to become the expression of labor, state power, and the military, robots will assume that role. I can only imagine that it will be an incomplete role taking. Robots lack the dynamics of balancing the needs of the personal and those of production. In its stead are limits on the robot's ability, be it physical/technological or a function of its maintenance cycle. That is a 'real' condition of the robot, something that did not exist almost in total when people did the job. Like robots people have physical limits and "maintenance cycles" as well. The diurnal rhythm of humanity and its caloric requirements in the face of arduous labor provide a template for limitation. As well, they provide the impetus for resistance, its moral contours, and the verve behind the message. The labor of individuals is markedly different from the labor of robots built in form of people but in the motives of an ideology. An entity which utilizes labor will first encounter this outcry of interpersonal resistance. That will not be the case with robotics.
The world will lose more than just one form of oppression. It will silence the poetry and politics of a once-oppressed people. Without being placed into a strenuous circumstance, people will, and should, change. As such we are defined by our immediate circumstances, to decouple us from one circumstance that framed our existence is to change our account of our existence. Much like the transformation of a nation's citizens from being champions of their vital needs to being servants to capital--which can purchase their vital needs--the decoupling of humanity from repetitive, physical labor will change the character of its people and by extension their relationship to the state, that is, their politics.
The technological singularity is a test-tube concept, an asocial theory that reasons inductively from the logic of machines. It allows the servomechanisms of our future to furnish the broad brush strokes of that history. It's a lazy way to think, from the effects in our immediate situation to their horizon. But the technological singularity is the orgasm of nerds in solitude with machines, and so our collective futures, via robotics, are caught up in this singular, solitary, selfish vision.
Saturday, December 14, 2013
this ruddy complexion
This ruddy complexion this embarrassing birthmark on our body. We do the biddings of men and of things. The two are mundane features of our social forms, which are essential to the constitution of ourselves. Hidden among the mundane is an outline, a shape, a form of oppression but also of function. This oppression is not unique; it is of the stuff of the universe, and it factors into our lived existence. The unique shape of its unfolding is in our performance of the actions constituting compliance; the performance itself is but an unfolding of interpretation, rote, and action that occurs under the actor's presumption of some schema that informs a sensible interpretation. That we do what we consider appropriate to our station and our situation is but a complex expression of the vast orchestration of order; it lasts but a moment in our minds then blurs into the sundry, everyday details of our lives.
In this unfolding constellation various subjectivities find purchase. And out of those that emerge an already-present antagonism exists. Most basically it exists as resource sharing, meaning that these subjectivities are in competition for anything they need, which is finite, often-managed, and shared among them. Deeper than their enmities exists are far more substantive bond; the conditions for the existence of each society requires this resource; they share this weakness. Our existence is tempered by our virtually universal need of money, which is then used to support a comfortable and preferably meaningful existence. As an exchange medium, money is a life-blood of positive reinforcement for compliance-driven activity and the method of substantiating wishes. Our society is tempered by a near-universal need for modern conveniences, which cannot feasibly exist without being connected to a vast technological gridwork. This gridwork provides warmth, water, light, and the vast, near magical applications of electricity. Electricity is power, potential, and the storage medium for applied power. The other is petroleum, which when refined has many applications, from moving people and things around the planet to clothing them. Petroleum is the building block of our material society. The things we touch during most of our days and throughout most of our lives are made from petroleum-based plastics.
Our plastic and material environments, our living spaces, our identities are products of modern technology. Modern technology shapes our existence so totally that we, as a people, are disconnected from the world as encountered, and are instead living upon a thin film of "functionality" within this technology based medium. Time, money, labor form a triad in this existence. Time is a coordination medium. Money is a good both as a reinforcement and as a commodity valued for its ability to transmute comfortable and meaningful existence for us. We use it to purchase living space, heat it, light it, and live out our days in it. This space is a mere enclosure that blocks us off from the lives of those who live out their days 20 to 30 feet from our body as it lives out its life in its home. We accomplish this sense of detachment from someone else 30 feet away through our consumptive habits, which in turn consume our attention.
Such a quaint existence in this box. We mistake it as such because we live out a quiet infinity of unmemorable time. It is unmemorable because we are reduced by the interfaces with which we interact to the actions allowed by them. The algorithms that make up the software that runs our quiet infinities of unmemorable time shape our interfacing with technology. At some point they are merely the vast architecture of electrons and silicon, which allow us to absorb complexity in calculation carried out at a vastly complex level. Here, perched atop these leviathans of calculation, we interact slyly and repetitively with a touch screen that fits into the palm of our hand ceremoniously realizing that the interface has fed us a little satisfying reaction to our action. These little loops of recurrence whereby we repeat actions for repeated satisfactions from them are both algorithmic as they are psycho-rhythmic. Our minds aren't much more than a collection of specialized motor neurons, operating in an organized manner. Like the motor neurons that they are, repetition is a key to our memory of something.
Owing to the complexity of our technologies and the organization of our society around monetary principles we face two magical horizons. Technology offers us a seemingly inexhaustible array of diversions and desires in the form of so much digital information accessible right at our fingertips. It has the power to supplant the imagination's need to dream of something unheard of or inaccessible. With technology some semblance of everything is accessible, enough to satisfy many and provide substance for their desires. Likewise, with money as the basis for all transactions in our society, it provides the possibility for wish fulfillment through its exchange for that which represents our wish, such as a home or a sense of safety. With these two magical horizons a society has found a meaningful way to yoke individuals to society through their labors for money.
The meaningless and repetitive time that we spend with our interactive technology absorbs a discreet activity with its attendant forms of attention. Consequently, and due to the rote nature of our interactions, we lose memory. This happens because we invest our time in a tacit-level interaction with a technological interface. Our actions and thinking are reduced to swipes and pinches, symbolic gestures programmed into the interface and which require the user's participation in using them. The interface is hungry for touching, and so we hardly if ever stop touching it because through that flat object a depth of experience passes, which structure an understanding of self, society, and others. We sacrifice the random encounter, serendipity, with a technological interface programmed to support our persistent needs and ephemeral desires. In affording us a platform for our expression of this behavior we cultivate it; and in so doing we program our lives around the interface programmed to accept your touch with a specific, often fulfilling response. Subsequently, we trade in a socially informed and dynamic self-orientation to one that is cognitive in nature, which operates mostly at the tacit level. A mind at rest is a mind that need not be vigilant and, in being so, fades into the substance of our daily existence. We live out time in a solitary relationship with a programmed response loop feeding and fed by the trained motor-response activity of routine usage. The nature of the experience that we have with technology is a fiction of our making because it is essentially solitary and repetitive in nature.
The solitary use of a media device to interact with others effectively mediates the interaction. In doing so, the device supplies some of the argot for the interaction, the currency of exchange so to speak. What shapes the currency, as intended by the reference, is the value that individuals and groups place on certain types of interactions. And these interactions are shaped by the technology used. What communication media provide, more than all, is the dream of scale. Scale is the dream of one-to-many communication and vice versa. In its train is its subversive foil, search. Search is a function afforded by technologies that define words as searchable objects tied to people and ideas. Having the native infrastructure of computer processing behind the applications used to interact invites cross-pollination among technologies and forms of interaction. Search also perforates organic discourse by the use of proprietary algorithms that understand without being. This is a paradox of substance in that algorithms only stand metaphorically. An algorithm's ground is the very stuff of its existence, a memory storage process and a set of mathematical operations, which represent numerical abstractions of categories.
A learned observer, a skeptic might recognize something amiss. We've always been technological. Speaking, itself, can be considered a technology. A thinker may find grammatical structure in our neurology. People have a lengthy relationship between the production of sound and the workings of their brains. Animals of all sorts already use such means to 'communicate' dangers or desires. The reflexive self-made monsters that we are live in the echo of this sound, speech through time. It is how we, as a people, live through time and it allows us to become meta-critics. All living things are critics in that they organize a world around their interests, which are normally shaped by the instinct of survival. Humans have added the adaptation of being able to organize organizing. This is demonstrated on the whole through language. This is at the heart of reflexivity, our ability to think about thinking and in so doing adjust our actions to adapt to new circumstances. With this adaptation comes a new concern spawned by the reliance upon acting in regard to thought. In essence, our actions may have more fidelity to a thought about the world than to the world as it could have been sensed otherwise.
Let me stop here to deal with reflexivity at another remove from the topic--me. I am doing the very thing that I see occurring, generally, in human society. It is based upon a symbol system that, at its rudiments, is composed of opposites. These opposites establish boundaries, which are evident in any thought exercise that would force us to describe, in words, the similarities and distinctions between a tomato and a cat. This may seem an arbitrary exercise on its face, but its the stuff of our judgment and action in the real-time world of a human caught in a stream of action-reaction in the world. I use the very same symbols and the same logic to interpret what I see society doing and place its origins in the same symbols and logic. My point is simply that we cannot lose sight of how they operate and subsequently have the influence to operate us. And this leads me to another important point.
As noted, our actions could have more fidelity to a world modeled in symbols, schema, thought than to a world seen afresh. This has potential for what I generically label "oppression." In the line of thinking that led me to discuss humanity as meta-critics we have stumbled upon the potential for both freedom and control. That we can think about thinking allows us to adapt and to act within our best, and changing, interests. Likewise, this same process can be co-opted by powerful groups and individuals to influence our thinking and action. Speaking to us and us speaking to our selves is structurally identical. Our conscious thinking is in words, and to that extent our consciousness is created out of that symbolic landscape. Who furnishes those words and under what motivations is important to how we form a consciousness. If the majority of our symbolic landscape leads us to believe in imminent risk, this will have a profound and lasting effect upon our thoughts and action. It's no wonder that great societal upheavals are expressed through the individual psychologies of its members. Societies suffering from prolonged strife are haunted by many ghosts. This, to me, is simply an revelation of the infrastructure of thinking. We are always haunted by ghosts as we live in a symbolic world that is populated by voices that we inherit, mime, live, and interact through. Any parent will recognize those points where his/her child begins to speak like somebody else, and it is, in a sense, a complete act. Gestures, paralanguage, and content all point to a 'script' and a character through which people not only act but think in real time as a mode of existing symbolically. This is a tricky topic. We can regard our symbolic worlds at a point and place removed from the action, but we're never quite disengaged from our symbolic worlds when we're acting under the implicit mandates of them. The 'stuff' of them is in our enacting them, in time, in a near totality of our social and symbolic existence to both others and to ourselves. Even right now I can stop and regard all of this as a simple exercise in thinking but it's no more removed from an interpretation of it into some category of philosophy, or politics, or some person who came before that may have influenced the categories I use to understand the exercise.
But before I lose myself in a morass of words and positions taken I'll simply reiterate that we are symbolic creatures, living through symbols, that are of our making, with tragedies built in to the kinds of fulfillment that they entail. So while we can use our symbolic sound production to live, transcendent, through time we are also trapped in its amber. That nature of that amber is the nature of our symbols. They have quiet teleologies that motivate us by an ancient instinct tethered to a fictional model of existence and of world. The fiction is both an expression of our freedom to make and to act and to think. It is also a warning to our habits of mind and action, which can be influenced from without as well as from within. And as we manage both thought and action in our usage of so many symbolic manipulating gadgets we have to question the purpose, use, and control of these gadgets.
In this unfolding constellation various subjectivities find purchase. And out of those that emerge an already-present antagonism exists. Most basically it exists as resource sharing, meaning that these subjectivities are in competition for anything they need, which is finite, often-managed, and shared among them. Deeper than their enmities exists are far more substantive bond; the conditions for the existence of each society requires this resource; they share this weakness. Our existence is tempered by our virtually universal need of money, which is then used to support a comfortable and preferably meaningful existence. As an exchange medium, money is a life-blood of positive reinforcement for compliance-driven activity and the method of substantiating wishes. Our society is tempered by a near-universal need for modern conveniences, which cannot feasibly exist without being connected to a vast technological gridwork. This gridwork provides warmth, water, light, and the vast, near magical applications of electricity. Electricity is power, potential, and the storage medium for applied power. The other is petroleum, which when refined has many applications, from moving people and things around the planet to clothing them. Petroleum is the building block of our material society. The things we touch during most of our days and throughout most of our lives are made from petroleum-based plastics.
Our plastic and material environments, our living spaces, our identities are products of modern technology. Modern technology shapes our existence so totally that we, as a people, are disconnected from the world as encountered, and are instead living upon a thin film of "functionality" within this technology based medium. Time, money, labor form a triad in this existence. Time is a coordination medium. Money is a good both as a reinforcement and as a commodity valued for its ability to transmute comfortable and meaningful existence for us. We use it to purchase living space, heat it, light it, and live out our days in it. This space is a mere enclosure that blocks us off from the lives of those who live out their days 20 to 30 feet from our body as it lives out its life in its home. We accomplish this sense of detachment from someone else 30 feet away through our consumptive habits, which in turn consume our attention.
Such a quaint existence in this box. We mistake it as such because we live out a quiet infinity of unmemorable time. It is unmemorable because we are reduced by the interfaces with which we interact to the actions allowed by them. The algorithms that make up the software that runs our quiet infinities of unmemorable time shape our interfacing with technology. At some point they are merely the vast architecture of electrons and silicon, which allow us to absorb complexity in calculation carried out at a vastly complex level. Here, perched atop these leviathans of calculation, we interact slyly and repetitively with a touch screen that fits into the palm of our hand ceremoniously realizing that the interface has fed us a little satisfying reaction to our action. These little loops of recurrence whereby we repeat actions for repeated satisfactions from them are both algorithmic as they are psycho-rhythmic. Our minds aren't much more than a collection of specialized motor neurons, operating in an organized manner. Like the motor neurons that they are, repetition is a key to our memory of something.
Owing to the complexity of our technologies and the organization of our society around monetary principles we face two magical horizons. Technology offers us a seemingly inexhaustible array of diversions and desires in the form of so much digital information accessible right at our fingertips. It has the power to supplant the imagination's need to dream of something unheard of or inaccessible. With technology some semblance of everything is accessible, enough to satisfy many and provide substance for their desires. Likewise, with money as the basis for all transactions in our society, it provides the possibility for wish fulfillment through its exchange for that which represents our wish, such as a home or a sense of safety. With these two magical horizons a society has found a meaningful way to yoke individuals to society through their labors for money.
The meaningless and repetitive time that we spend with our interactive technology absorbs a discreet activity with its attendant forms of attention. Consequently, and due to the rote nature of our interactions, we lose memory. This happens because we invest our time in a tacit-level interaction with a technological interface. Our actions and thinking are reduced to swipes and pinches, symbolic gestures programmed into the interface and which require the user's participation in using them. The interface is hungry for touching, and so we hardly if ever stop touching it because through that flat object a depth of experience passes, which structure an understanding of self, society, and others. We sacrifice the random encounter, serendipity, with a technological interface programmed to support our persistent needs and ephemeral desires. In affording us a platform for our expression of this behavior we cultivate it; and in so doing we program our lives around the interface programmed to accept your touch with a specific, often fulfilling response. Subsequently, we trade in a socially informed and dynamic self-orientation to one that is cognitive in nature, which operates mostly at the tacit level. A mind at rest is a mind that need not be vigilant and, in being so, fades into the substance of our daily existence. We live out time in a solitary relationship with a programmed response loop feeding and fed by the trained motor-response activity of routine usage. The nature of the experience that we have with technology is a fiction of our making because it is essentially solitary and repetitive in nature.
The solitary use of a media device to interact with others effectively mediates the interaction. In doing so, the device supplies some of the argot for the interaction, the currency of exchange so to speak. What shapes the currency, as intended by the reference, is the value that individuals and groups place on certain types of interactions. And these interactions are shaped by the technology used. What communication media provide, more than all, is the dream of scale. Scale is the dream of one-to-many communication and vice versa. In its train is its subversive foil, search. Search is a function afforded by technologies that define words as searchable objects tied to people and ideas. Having the native infrastructure of computer processing behind the applications used to interact invites cross-pollination among technologies and forms of interaction. Search also perforates organic discourse by the use of proprietary algorithms that understand without being. This is a paradox of substance in that algorithms only stand metaphorically. An algorithm's ground is the very stuff of its existence, a memory storage process and a set of mathematical operations, which represent numerical abstractions of categories.
A learned observer, a skeptic might recognize something amiss. We've always been technological. Speaking, itself, can be considered a technology. A thinker may find grammatical structure in our neurology. People have a lengthy relationship between the production of sound and the workings of their brains. Animals of all sorts already use such means to 'communicate' dangers or desires. The reflexive self-made monsters that we are live in the echo of this sound, speech through time. It is how we, as a people, live through time and it allows us to become meta-critics. All living things are critics in that they organize a world around their interests, which are normally shaped by the instinct of survival. Humans have added the adaptation of being able to organize organizing. This is demonstrated on the whole through language. This is at the heart of reflexivity, our ability to think about thinking and in so doing adjust our actions to adapt to new circumstances. With this adaptation comes a new concern spawned by the reliance upon acting in regard to thought. In essence, our actions may have more fidelity to a thought about the world than to the world as it could have been sensed otherwise.
Let me stop here to deal with reflexivity at another remove from the topic--me. I am doing the very thing that I see occurring, generally, in human society. It is based upon a symbol system that, at its rudiments, is composed of opposites. These opposites establish boundaries, which are evident in any thought exercise that would force us to describe, in words, the similarities and distinctions between a tomato and a cat. This may seem an arbitrary exercise on its face, but its the stuff of our judgment and action in the real-time world of a human caught in a stream of action-reaction in the world. I use the very same symbols and the same logic to interpret what I see society doing and place its origins in the same symbols and logic. My point is simply that we cannot lose sight of how they operate and subsequently have the influence to operate us. And this leads me to another important point.
As noted, our actions could have more fidelity to a world modeled in symbols, schema, thought than to a world seen afresh. This has potential for what I generically label "oppression." In the line of thinking that led me to discuss humanity as meta-critics we have stumbled upon the potential for both freedom and control. That we can think about thinking allows us to adapt and to act within our best, and changing, interests. Likewise, this same process can be co-opted by powerful groups and individuals to influence our thinking and action. Speaking to us and us speaking to our selves is structurally identical. Our conscious thinking is in words, and to that extent our consciousness is created out of that symbolic landscape. Who furnishes those words and under what motivations is important to how we form a consciousness. If the majority of our symbolic landscape leads us to believe in imminent risk, this will have a profound and lasting effect upon our thoughts and action. It's no wonder that great societal upheavals are expressed through the individual psychologies of its members. Societies suffering from prolonged strife are haunted by many ghosts. This, to me, is simply an revelation of the infrastructure of thinking. We are always haunted by ghosts as we live in a symbolic world that is populated by voices that we inherit, mime, live, and interact through. Any parent will recognize those points where his/her child begins to speak like somebody else, and it is, in a sense, a complete act. Gestures, paralanguage, and content all point to a 'script' and a character through which people not only act but think in real time as a mode of existing symbolically. This is a tricky topic. We can regard our symbolic worlds at a point and place removed from the action, but we're never quite disengaged from our symbolic worlds when we're acting under the implicit mandates of them. The 'stuff' of them is in our enacting them, in time, in a near totality of our social and symbolic existence to both others and to ourselves. Even right now I can stop and regard all of this as a simple exercise in thinking but it's no more removed from an interpretation of it into some category of philosophy, or politics, or some person who came before that may have influenced the categories I use to understand the exercise.
But before I lose myself in a morass of words and positions taken I'll simply reiterate that we are symbolic creatures, living through symbols, that are of our making, with tragedies built in to the kinds of fulfillment that they entail. So while we can use our symbolic sound production to live, transcendent, through time we are also trapped in its amber. That nature of that amber is the nature of our symbols. They have quiet teleologies that motivate us by an ancient instinct tethered to a fictional model of existence and of world. The fiction is both an expression of our freedom to make and to act and to think. It is also a warning to our habits of mind and action, which can be influenced from without as well as from within. And as we manage both thought and action in our usage of so many symbolic manipulating gadgets we have to question the purpose, use, and control of these gadgets.
Friday, December 13, 2013
being data
Being data.
The most relevant current application to this notion is found in Twitter, which marries a mark-up language to everyday talk. Twitter employs a simple mark up language to facilitate data sorting and searching while the very data are the twitter identities and topics: @ for identities and # for metacommunication, context, or topics.
The economics of being searchable are enabled through a data-sorting approach like Twitter’s. It makes the person do the work of being searchable by posting and properly tagging content. Twitter strikes a balance between content sharing/creation and content search. The potential for Twitter to scale interaction from one to many distorts content along the motivational vectors that define how we chase fame by remaining relevant to a right now. This can be done by providing relevant meaning to the unfolding events from which public opinion forms. That tweets are limited to 140 characters reveals the contours of an information management strategy that engenders platform neutrality. This facilitates the spread of tweets across media technology platforms and keeps them manageable within small mobile view screens. It also limits discourse to that which can be read and understood in mere seconds.
Considering how Twitter and other modes of online/mobile/media interaction operate as searchable persistent content, the limits of content, context, and relevance serve as a mode of oppression operating at the level of the interface’s functionality. In other words, these limits are the boundaries of algorithms that define and sort content. Their existence and function disavow the ambiguities that we find residing between the choice of one word over another. Our successful use of Twitter becomes the performance of the function of a software application by how our actions represent a concession in our creation of content to its operational requirements, its function. Furthermore, personal relevance and identity suffer from being in the penumbra of search. Therefore, oppression is also a function of not being found or found not relevant through others' search. The effect is subtle and pervasive. Discourse becomes heavy, tethered to search categories, which allow it to persist through time. Participation (i.e., content creation) concedes to the needs of a distracted and increasingly mobile and multitasking audience. Content is motivated by the unfolding of events that require meaning (i.e., helping to inform public opinion) and entertaining the ephemeral boredom of a swipe-happy mobile interface user. Oppression reveals itself in the manner that we form an identity to grab the attention of and entertain others. At the heart of much of this activity is human strategy. When we shift from searching content to content providing we swap roles from court royal to that of jester. The oppression at this level is more where content bleeds into search strategy, which has the effect upon how we imagine and appeal to an audience that exists merely as a coincidence of search and click.
In the context of an increasingly participatory media experience we become content providers for others and superficially perform the functions of providing news and entertainment. Others find our content by name, search relevance, and key words. These limit interactions to one front-loaded by topic relevance and the desires revealed by the search initiated. Search is participation in a media environment as well, and it generates data. It also serves as an editorial function, in that it can limit what one sees to that which is relevant to the search term. The information ghettos we create through our desires preceding search and the resulting matches of that search are an important aspect of an online identity. Search is the motivational context for accessing information, which in turn is how we ‘travel’ the web.
Every aspect of the web requires users' labor for meaning formation both in interpreting and in making content. Subsequently, the strategies employed in both activities lead to a practical set of self-imposed limitations upon choice. These limitations are a revelation of praxis, that is, the action and its motivation in context. It's a thin line to draw between meaningful action and brute action, but that's all that is needed to dam discourse in order for networks to turn our experiments in web-based altruism into a proprietary database of experience. Through the machinations of search algorithms, search strategies, and click those experiences become solutions. The query and the initiator of this query, the user, are in a weak position to the search engine's artificial intelligence. It is weak because a user requests knowledge from search, and is limited by an already limited understanding of the subject.
"The fog of search," like the fog of war, is an apt analogy for our interface with something much larger than our own thinking can allow. The world wide web is the amber of our contemporary culture, our history, and our daily dallying. Search is how we 'move' through it to find what we need. Search provides an acceptable and required limit to our pursuit of some media production. But it also paints the totality of our picture. Search is what is, in spite of all that is there. The fog of search is the fog of ware. Software, code, the material infrastructure that support a functional web and our interaction with it are reduced to a model of need expressed through a search query typed into a blank search field. A wise man once stated that rhetoric is what rhetoricians do. I'll adapt that to state, unwisely, that search is the web. Why else would the NSA be cataloging all human interaction passing through its infrastructure? We are at a weak position to the vast amount of information that exists. A search engine provides us with a placative means of interfacing with it. To have it all in your hands with a means of accessing it all in any number of ways can be both a liberating gesture to those whose activities are being held and consistently missed by the limitations of search and cataloging. It can also be a means of controlling that which has always been outside of our grasp physically but at least hazily understood mentally as 'it all.' The meaning of the web is like the meaning of existence. Its the focus of a 'religious' caste bent on providing meaning to those who live through it. The point being is that no conscious effort alone could give it sufficient meaning. Likewise, no manner of search could meaningfully find 'it all' in a manner that is useful to consciousness. The web, in its totality, like our existence in time, is but a vague horizon we use to provide a bearing upon our existence in it. And people will continue to derive power by dressing that horizon up in ways that motivate our sense of our self and our actions in it.
The most relevant current application to this notion is found in Twitter, which marries a mark-up language to everyday talk. Twitter employs a simple mark up language to facilitate data sorting and searching while the very data are the twitter identities and topics: @ for identities and # for metacommunication, context, or topics.
The economics of being searchable are enabled through a data-sorting approach like Twitter’s. It makes the person do the work of being searchable by posting and properly tagging content. Twitter strikes a balance between content sharing/creation and content search. The potential for Twitter to scale interaction from one to many distorts content along the motivational vectors that define how we chase fame by remaining relevant to a right now. This can be done by providing relevant meaning to the unfolding events from which public opinion forms. That tweets are limited to 140 characters reveals the contours of an information management strategy that engenders platform neutrality. This facilitates the spread of tweets across media technology platforms and keeps them manageable within small mobile view screens. It also limits discourse to that which can be read and understood in mere seconds.
Considering how Twitter and other modes of online/mobile/media interaction operate as searchable persistent content, the limits of content, context, and relevance serve as a mode of oppression operating at the level of the interface’s functionality. In other words, these limits are the boundaries of algorithms that define and sort content. Their existence and function disavow the ambiguities that we find residing between the choice of one word over another. Our successful use of Twitter becomes the performance of the function of a software application by how our actions represent a concession in our creation of content to its operational requirements, its function. Furthermore, personal relevance and identity suffer from being in the penumbra of search. Therefore, oppression is also a function of not being found or found not relevant through others' search. The effect is subtle and pervasive. Discourse becomes heavy, tethered to search categories, which allow it to persist through time. Participation (i.e., content creation) concedes to the needs of a distracted and increasingly mobile and multitasking audience. Content is motivated by the unfolding of events that require meaning (i.e., helping to inform public opinion) and entertaining the ephemeral boredom of a swipe-happy mobile interface user. Oppression reveals itself in the manner that we form an identity to grab the attention of and entertain others. At the heart of much of this activity is human strategy. When we shift from searching content to content providing we swap roles from court royal to that of jester. The oppression at this level is more where content bleeds into search strategy, which has the effect upon how we imagine and appeal to an audience that exists merely as a coincidence of search and click.
In the context of an increasingly participatory media experience we become content providers for others and superficially perform the functions of providing news and entertainment. Others find our content by name, search relevance, and key words. These limit interactions to one front-loaded by topic relevance and the desires revealed by the search initiated. Search is participation in a media environment as well, and it generates data. It also serves as an editorial function, in that it can limit what one sees to that which is relevant to the search term. The information ghettos we create through our desires preceding search and the resulting matches of that search are an important aspect of an online identity. Search is the motivational context for accessing information, which in turn is how we ‘travel’ the web.
Every aspect of the web requires users' labor for meaning formation both in interpreting and in making content. Subsequently, the strategies employed in both activities lead to a practical set of self-imposed limitations upon choice. These limitations are a revelation of praxis, that is, the action and its motivation in context. It's a thin line to draw between meaningful action and brute action, but that's all that is needed to dam discourse in order for networks to turn our experiments in web-based altruism into a proprietary database of experience. Through the machinations of search algorithms, search strategies, and click those experiences become solutions. The query and the initiator of this query, the user, are in a weak position to the search engine's artificial intelligence. It is weak because a user requests knowledge from search, and is limited by an already limited understanding of the subject.
"The fog of search," like the fog of war, is an apt analogy for our interface with something much larger than our own thinking can allow. The world wide web is the amber of our contemporary culture, our history, and our daily dallying. Search is how we 'move' through it to find what we need. Search provides an acceptable and required limit to our pursuit of some media production. But it also paints the totality of our picture. Search is what is, in spite of all that is there. The fog of search is the fog of ware. Software, code, the material infrastructure that support a functional web and our interaction with it are reduced to a model of need expressed through a search query typed into a blank search field. A wise man once stated that rhetoric is what rhetoricians do. I'll adapt that to state, unwisely, that search is the web. Why else would the NSA be cataloging all human interaction passing through its infrastructure? We are at a weak position to the vast amount of information that exists. A search engine provides us with a placative means of interfacing with it. To have it all in your hands with a means of accessing it all in any number of ways can be both a liberating gesture to those whose activities are being held and consistently missed by the limitations of search and cataloging. It can also be a means of controlling that which has always been outside of our grasp physically but at least hazily understood mentally as 'it all.' The meaning of the web is like the meaning of existence. Its the focus of a 'religious' caste bent on providing meaning to those who live through it. The point being is that no conscious effort alone could give it sufficient meaning. Likewise, no manner of search could meaningfully find 'it all' in a manner that is useful to consciousness. The web, in its totality, like our existence in time, is but a vague horizon we use to provide a bearing upon our existence in it. And people will continue to derive power by dressing that horizon up in ways that motivate our sense of our self and our actions in it.
metaphors and metaphysics
From the opening of chapter three in Lewis Mumford's "The Myth of the Machine: The Pentagon of Power."
That's such a subtle distinction to make. In observing the sun, we discover time, through this discovery we administer an increasingly sophisticated society whose very existence relies upon our knowledge of the sun. A sense of anxiety must have been evident to these people who cast their lot with a priesthood who purported a reality outside of their understanding that was conveyed in narrative as a more fateful and compelling feature to their lives. Lives would then have paths, all of which were fateful, and also, which this sun cult now controlled.
The cult of the Sun God gave the ultimate authority of cosmic fitness and rightness to every earthly manifestation of order, regularity, predictability, and--because of the sun's own position and influence--of centralized power.
Behind this cult lay an ancient perception whose truth farther scientific inquiry has demonstrated; that the phenomena of life are actually influenced by remote forces, many, like cosmic rays, long unperceived, some doubtless still to be identified, over which man himself can have little, if any, control. What was lacking in this original picture was the realization that man himself was also a cosmic event, indeed a culminating one, and possessed powers of mind derived not alone from the sun but from his own highly evolved nature. (p. 51)In this summary, Mumford recognizes a literal and figurative "central figure" to which humans living in societies invest their observation, science, and astronomy--the sun. The sun substantiates temporal realities into regularities stable enough for planning society. The relationship that learned observation of the sun has to the subsequent application of this knowledge is exemplified as it is performed by the Ancient Egyptian priest astronomers. It reveals a consolidation of understanding to a group of specialists who then convey this knowledge as power to a larger group of people. The sun, as an observable phenomenon, stands evident before all; the tracing of its circuit through the sky, over the seasons, for the duration of years is what reveals the deeper significance of the sun as a way to measure time. The observation and obedience to time is something that humans had done up to that point, but it was tethered to terrestrial changes salient to the observer that demanded action or planning. Tied to the sun, time now could reveal its more abstract features, namely the division of time into measurable units, which could be used to sunder people at once from the life cycles that punctuated their existence and toss them to the deeper well of historical time. The difference is one, also, of abstraction. Abstracting up creates the time of many generations, the collective memory of a family, its neighbors, a tribe. Through placement in historical time, persons became a people, their lives became connected to something larger and more abstract. Race, ethnicity, destiny would become the watchwords of a people whose very meaning was wrested from the details of their daily habits and written in the large, heroic outlines of history. Abstracting down creates the motion and time study, the rationalized unit of labor factored into the production of a good. Both are oppressive trajectories. The first places substantive grounding on a person's existence and does so by insinuating the individual by ancestry into an epic origin narrative with moral imperatives. The second places a rational gridwork over abject labor. Either trajectory persists through the use of numbered time whose dually ephemeral (something that passes) and concrete (something that had a duration and was counted) nature gives the observance of time a near mystical appraisal. Most importantly, counting time made it a fungible asset in the coordination of a society and in the exchange of its people's time for something of value.
That's such a subtle distinction to make. In observing the sun, we discover time, through this discovery we administer an increasingly sophisticated society whose very existence relies upon our knowledge of the sun. A sense of anxiety must have been evident to these people who cast their lot with a priesthood who purported a reality outside of their understanding that was conveyed in narrative as a more fateful and compelling feature to their lives. Lives would then have paths, all of which were fateful, and also, which this sun cult now controlled.
Monday, December 9, 2013
bodies, flies, death
A faint smell is all that remains, the smell of pain, a dull metallic sensation, and the flies. The flies cover us and fill the air so thick that breathing carries the prospect of feeding and choking on flies.
We eat them. They eat us. We eat ourselves.
The flies blanket every surface including our own. Slowly, they peck, they rub, the break down the skin they live upon. Flies cover our eyes, pass in and out of our mouth, course in and out of our nose, fill our ears. I am blind and deaf. I know I am not alone. I can feel others living around me, but I cannot see, hear, or smell them. The dulled sensation of body collisions, the vibration of walking, coughing, an ever present silence of voice. We were remnants, and quickly we were all dying. We were starving, sapped of strength, sickened by exposure, and worn down to a grim, unseen form by the countless flies.
Bodies were everywhere. Sometimes I stepped on one. Sometimes rotted bodies exploded hot gasses on us. This stirred the flies into a cyclonic frenzied mass, which we felt in our bodies as a tone, a hum, sonic vibration. The sound resonated off my chest. And I accompanied the flies to the feast.
We were remnants; this was the end. For months we languished on this rock in the middle of a sea that was now teeming with an older remnant of our world. It had destroyed our world in a quick invasion that could have been centuries in the unfolding. Maybe it simply occurred over the course of the few days it took from first spotting them to being here on this rock amid a flooded earth. These mollusks, descendants of the octopi that still lived in our oceans, returned to their ancestral home--the old, deep oceans--to reclaim their spawning ground . They were preparing our world to be theirs. Before, we were survivors on a desolate rock in the middle of the ocean, under the blazing sun, using our clothing to protect the carpet of still-extant mountain lichens upon which we fed.
Then, we suffered. Now, we barely remain, here on this mountain top that now meets the crashing sea of a flooded world.
I pay a dear price for survival. We began eating our remains. The bodies of the dead. We ate them where they laid without any ritual formalities. Weeks of hunger and exposure had reduced my body to a cage of determined existence hidden under a blanket of flies and pain. In hunger I ate all of my words and my ability to speak them. I don't know my name. The body next to me once had a name that I knew. It still shifts about next to me, disrupting the shattered pile of bones. Neither of us utters a noise. It would not be heard over the rhythmic drone of fly wings. Hunger had long since forced us to conserve our energy. Our minds were sacrificed to the needs of nutrition. The dead brought sustenance to us all. Then the flies began to compete for our existence. As they multiplied so did our suffering.
We eat them. They eat us. We eat ourselves.
The flies blanket every surface including our own. Slowly, they peck, they rub, the break down the skin they live upon. Flies cover our eyes, pass in and out of our mouth, course in and out of our nose, fill our ears. I am blind and deaf. I know I am not alone. I can feel others living around me, but I cannot see, hear, or smell them. The dulled sensation of body collisions, the vibration of walking, coughing, an ever present silence of voice. We were remnants, and quickly we were all dying. We were starving, sapped of strength, sickened by exposure, and worn down to a grim, unseen form by the countless flies.
Bodies were everywhere. Sometimes I stepped on one. Sometimes rotted bodies exploded hot gasses on us. This stirred the flies into a cyclonic frenzied mass, which we felt in our bodies as a tone, a hum, sonic vibration. The sound resonated off my chest. And I accompanied the flies to the feast.
We were remnants; this was the end. For months we languished on this rock in the middle of a sea that was now teeming with an older remnant of our world. It had destroyed our world in a quick invasion that could have been centuries in the unfolding. Maybe it simply occurred over the course of the few days it took from first spotting them to being here on this rock amid a flooded earth. These mollusks, descendants of the octopi that still lived in our oceans, returned to their ancestral home--the old, deep oceans--to reclaim their spawning ground . They were preparing our world to be theirs. Before, we were survivors on a desolate rock in the middle of the ocean, under the blazing sun, using our clothing to protect the carpet of still-extant mountain lichens upon which we fed.
Then, we suffered. Now, we barely remain, here on this mountain top that now meets the crashing sea of a flooded world.
I pay a dear price for survival. We began eating our remains. The bodies of the dead. We ate them where they laid without any ritual formalities. Weeks of hunger and exposure had reduced my body to a cage of determined existence hidden under a blanket of flies and pain. In hunger I ate all of my words and my ability to speak them. I don't know my name. The body next to me once had a name that I knew. It still shifts about next to me, disrupting the shattered pile of bones. Neither of us utters a noise. It would not be heard over the rhythmic drone of fly wings. Hunger had long since forced us to conserve our energy. Our minds were sacrificed to the needs of nutrition. The dead brought sustenance to us all. Then the flies began to compete for our existence. As they multiplied so did our suffering.
Saturday, December 7, 2013
1984 Presidential Election
I have a memory of the night before the American president was elected in 1984. Amid all the flash and bang of election-night hustle I asked my mother what was at stake.
I was 7 years old, so I didn't actually ask her what was at stake. But I did get her to reveal her emotional investments behind the political process on display. The beauty of a moment like this and how an American democracy work is that the motivations behind the electorate are close to child-like simplicity and base emotional yearnings.
As was the case on this night in 1984.
I asked in my own 7-year-old way who she voted for and why, and she replied that she chose Walter Mondale. Why? Because he was for the abolition of nuclear weapons; Reagan was not. Shortly thereafter I was sent to my bed. That night, as was customary when I was distressed, I prayed to God. I prayed to God for Walter Mondale to be elected.
God's mystery "works" in many ways, and he pads this impotence against the God-chosen American electorate by couching it as such. Needless to say, my prayer went unanswered.
Then in the Spring of 1988 I was at recess at Jefferson elementary when a fellow student approached me with jubilant news: Reagan had met with Gorbachev and they decided to reduce their nuclear stockpile. I was happy to hear this as was he, this vector of world political news.
The forks in our personal decision trees pivot upon worldviews so simple in their comprehensibility that a 7-year-old can understand them. And we may go about our lives living like a child, manipulated in our beliefs and actions like a child, praying, crying, and rejoicing like a child.
I was 7 years old, so I didn't actually ask her what was at stake. But I did get her to reveal her emotional investments behind the political process on display. The beauty of a moment like this and how an American democracy work is that the motivations behind the electorate are close to child-like simplicity and base emotional yearnings.
As was the case on this night in 1984.
I asked in my own 7-year-old way who she voted for and why, and she replied that she chose Walter Mondale. Why? Because he was for the abolition of nuclear weapons; Reagan was not. Shortly thereafter I was sent to my bed. That night, as was customary when I was distressed, I prayed to God. I prayed to God for Walter Mondale to be elected.
God's mystery "works" in many ways, and he pads this impotence against the God-chosen American electorate by couching it as such. Needless to say, my prayer went unanswered.
Then in the Spring of 1988 I was at recess at Jefferson elementary when a fellow student approached me with jubilant news: Reagan had met with Gorbachev and they decided to reduce their nuclear stockpile. I was happy to hear this as was he, this vector of world political news.
The forks in our personal decision trees pivot upon worldviews so simple in their comprehensibility that a 7-year-old can understand them. And we may go about our lives living like a child, manipulated in our beliefs and actions like a child, praying, crying, and rejoicing like a child.
Sunday, December 1, 2013
to speak
Speaking removes us from the protection of silence.
Clothed in only our motives, we stand naked before others.
Clothed in only our motives, we stand naked before others.
rape!
Rape, rape, rape, is what I do.
Because:
Foreplay is stressful.
Mechanical relations are much easier process than real feeling.
A monologue of force is easier than a dialogue of understanding.
Empathy is for gays.
Caring is for post-menopausal mothers.
Touching requires sensitivity, punching requires muscles.
Muffled screams or traumatized silence are "in" right now.
Raping means never having to say you're sorry.
I live in the great recession; courtship takes time and money.
It's not rape to me, and since we don't have a consensual understanding of what just occurred, then it didn't happen the way you said that it happened. And the way that you were dressed...
Because:
Foreplay is stressful.
Mechanical relations are much easier process than real feeling.
A monologue of force is easier than a dialogue of understanding.
Empathy is for gays.
Caring is for post-menopausal mothers.
Touching requires sensitivity, punching requires muscles.
Muffled screams or traumatized silence are "in" right now.
Raping means never having to say you're sorry.
I live in the great recession; courtship takes time and money.
It's not rape to me, and since we don't have a consensual understanding of what just occurred, then it didn't happen the way you said that it happened. And the way that you were dressed...
tick tick tock
Human thinking and human action is nervous activity. Among doing or shaping what is done, all action is performance. What is thought to inspire this performance or its reception is nervous activity. Performance is the phenomenal and hermeneutic sheen of action; it both exists and exists as such in our understanding of action and in our execution of it. Performance is a subset of action formed by our intentional understanding of certain types of action. Intentionality is itself at work here, as I write.
Action and thinking comprise a totality of human experience and our coming to awareness of it. The two form a distinct outline in our existence as a duality of being in the world and being in our heads, that is, as a product of nervous activity. This bifurcation corresponds to two points in place and time--the place of phenomena in relation to our understanding of them, coming into existence through nervous activity. Understanding lags behind an occurrence of phenomena; this suggests that, while essential to the meaning of the phenomena itself, thinking lags behind action as it comes into being. Thinking is in closer ambit to personally intended action, that action stemming from within the thinker's intention. This thinking also requires time to both initiate and complete its own action. Thinking is of the substance of the universe, categorically, but uniquely saddled across a temporal unfolding. Therefore, thinking as a phenomena itself exists in time but that its relevance to any specific instance of time only renders it as part of the stuff of the universe. The activity of thinking faces two logical planes, each of which contradict the other. The relationship that thinking has to the existing universe is indifferent to its phenomenal existence in the unfolding of time. Thinking becomes invisible to the material world as a phenomenon, thinking. Both thinking and the unfolding of a sequence of events that we may category as phenomena require time to unfold.
In this frozen moment as we regard the world and ourselves and we grant their aspects meaning those frozen bits of thinking digested into phenomena or facts are, themselves, historically emergent phenomena. The universe itself is supposedly the product of a primordial event that both unfolded time, matter, density, and the physical laws of the universe. While it signals a beginning, that beginning required time. And so we are now taking time to understand ourselves, our lives, the world around us. And you may be taking time to read this. But the things that we find meaningful take time both to understand and to occur because nothing simply existed forever. That unique seat goes to one entity who we call "God." God is prior to the reflex of neuron or the primordial mass that finally blew, creating the universe. God is also after everything has passed. But this God, especially as we commonly regard him through Christian theological teaching, has another specific purpose for our minds. God simply ends the question of why, not for everyone, but for many. And God need only serve that purpose for those that pursue answers out of an abject fear of nihilism. God also acts as a dam on our consciousness. At some point the powers of reason, of observation, of measurement, of calculation reach a barrier, a logical problem, a technical limit. God serves as a reminder at these junctures that nothing is essentially meaningless or ambiguous. It's all part of God's mystery.
Key word: mystery. Why? Because the insertion of God into a cosmology ends a mental exploration. God completes a method of inquiry by providing not only a noun but a whole grammar short-circuited around the significance of the term God itself. God is seen both in cause and effect. And God becomes a reflex word to stop thinking. God is the answer. For this reason God is used as a mental block. Instead of working past God as an answer, those who have procured great faith in this deity spend their time creating convoluted logical arcs to fit God into the pattern of life, society, and human behavior. God is the reason why some die and others kill.
Action and thinking comprise a totality of human experience and our coming to awareness of it. The two form a distinct outline in our existence as a duality of being in the world and being in our heads, that is, as a product of nervous activity. This bifurcation corresponds to two points in place and time--the place of phenomena in relation to our understanding of them, coming into existence through nervous activity. Understanding lags behind an occurrence of phenomena; this suggests that, while essential to the meaning of the phenomena itself, thinking lags behind action as it comes into being. Thinking is in closer ambit to personally intended action, that action stemming from within the thinker's intention. This thinking also requires time to both initiate and complete its own action. Thinking is of the substance of the universe, categorically, but uniquely saddled across a temporal unfolding. Therefore, thinking as a phenomena itself exists in time but that its relevance to any specific instance of time only renders it as part of the stuff of the universe. The activity of thinking faces two logical planes, each of which contradict the other. The relationship that thinking has to the existing universe is indifferent to its phenomenal existence in the unfolding of time. Thinking becomes invisible to the material world as a phenomenon, thinking. Both thinking and the unfolding of a sequence of events that we may category as phenomena require time to unfold.
In this frozen moment as we regard the world and ourselves and we grant their aspects meaning those frozen bits of thinking digested into phenomena or facts are, themselves, historically emergent phenomena. The universe itself is supposedly the product of a primordial event that both unfolded time, matter, density, and the physical laws of the universe. While it signals a beginning, that beginning required time. And so we are now taking time to understand ourselves, our lives, the world around us. And you may be taking time to read this. But the things that we find meaningful take time both to understand and to occur because nothing simply existed forever. That unique seat goes to one entity who we call "God." God is prior to the reflex of neuron or the primordial mass that finally blew, creating the universe. God is also after everything has passed. But this God, especially as we commonly regard him through Christian theological teaching, has another specific purpose for our minds. God simply ends the question of why, not for everyone, but for many. And God need only serve that purpose for those that pursue answers out of an abject fear of nihilism. God also acts as a dam on our consciousness. At some point the powers of reason, of observation, of measurement, of calculation reach a barrier, a logical problem, a technical limit. God serves as a reminder at these junctures that nothing is essentially meaningless or ambiguous. It's all part of God's mystery.
Key word: mystery. Why? Because the insertion of God into a cosmology ends a mental exploration. God completes a method of inquiry by providing not only a noun but a whole grammar short-circuited around the significance of the term God itself. God is seen both in cause and effect. And God becomes a reflex word to stop thinking. God is the answer. For this reason God is used as a mental block. Instead of working past God as an answer, those who have procured great faith in this deity spend their time creating convoluted logical arcs to fit God into the pattern of life, society, and human behavior. God is the reason why some die and others kill.
Friday, November 29, 2013
street
This street hums with the lives of others.
The chattering of fluorescent teeth reveal the black tracing lines.
A shape, a form, a life lived, a life to live.
Maybe a dog or a discarded pasta noodle there, obscene before propriety, sweating.
A silver shape, a silver man with silver scales.
He performs an autopsy on the body politic.
There, in the street, among the chattering of fluorescent teeth, the silvery augur reads for signs.
The body politic is a body without organs.
The body politic is a body of signs.
The chattering of fluorescent teeth reveal the black tracing lines.
A shape, a form, a life lived, a life to live.
Maybe a dog or a discarded pasta noodle there, obscene before propriety, sweating.
A silver shape, a silver man with silver scales.
He performs an autopsy on the body politic.
There, in the street, among the chattering of fluorescent teeth, the silvery augur reads for signs.
The body politic is a body without organs.
The body politic is a body of signs.
Monday, November 18, 2013
His teeth
His teeth were tombstones echoing the lament of ghosts.
These words are not your own.
They are human time's ghastly remains.
These words are not your own.
They are human time's ghastly remains.
Thursday, October 31, 2013
The anatomy of a troll
I receive few if any comments on my blog postings. Depending on the subject some posts get more views. And most are generated by a search, a search not for me or this blog but for something that I wrote about, which may have betrayed their search into uncovering.
So a lot end up reading about my MTurk piece perhaps for their own reasons or because they too have a beef with this Todd Dickerson fellow. And a lot end up looking for a passage from "With the Old Breed," which I quoted extensively and purposely to share the horror of war from the point of view of one sane man.
And then I get those rare posts that begin by contradicting me, and then conjure a piece of information out of their hazy awareness and pass it off as fact. I give you this:
Dave Hendrick was responding to a post I made about the Sifl and Olly show back when I was living in Muncie, Indiana, and still wrestling the academic ghosts that had possessed my body and mind. It was a lot of hogwash and dime story theorizing, but one thing I did get right was the dialogue that I included from a particular segment of that particular show.
In short, what Dave Hendrick stated was inaccurate. I checked and double checked the video of this segment and found that, indeed, Olly never says, "Well, you're a bock." See here:
Instead what Dave Hendrick does is invoke an alternate past, which allows him to assert his epistemic correctness about this past. In doing so, he then uses this assertion to insert a clever joke that did not exist in the original segment. It has several important organs: an assertion or dispute about a factual inaccuracy conjured by the poster, a follow-up word-related joke, and an assessment that reveals the underlying language structure that explains the joke's potency. In this case, the poster, Dave Hendrick uses his understanding of puns to reconstruct the Sifl and Olly segment to insert a joke about box being the plural of bock, which is never done but which could have been and which also could have been quite funny.
And that's the anatomy of a troll; it comes out of the randomness of word association and information management that punctuates online interaction. It stands upon a foundation understood and accurate--a theory about jokes--so that it only retains fidelity to its world, while it trespasses in yours.
The troll is an inescapable aspect of online interaction. Anytime someone becomes a blowhard someone will be quick to poach the perceived limelight and try to focus attention elsewhere. The easiest tack is to disagree with another and conjure up a convincingly accurate alternate version. Because owing to the information management and word association required to manage an online persona most are going to be won over by the logical argument and not seek out the information that is simply a search away. Information is performative.
So a lot end up reading about my MTurk piece perhaps for their own reasons or because they too have a beef with this Todd Dickerson fellow. And a lot end up looking for a passage from "With the Old Breed," which I quoted extensively and purposely to share the horror of war from the point of view of one sane man.
And then I get those rare posts that begin by contradicting me, and then conjure a piece of information out of their hazy awareness and pass it off as fact. I give you this:
Dave Hendrick was responding to a post I made about the Sifl and Olly show back when I was living in Muncie, Indiana, and still wrestling the academic ghosts that had possessed my body and mind. It was a lot of hogwash and dime story theorizing, but one thing I did get right was the dialogue that I included from a particular segment of that particular show.
In short, what Dave Hendrick stated was inaccurate. I checked and double checked the video of this segment and found that, indeed, Olly never says, "Well, you're a bock." See here:
Instead what Dave Hendrick does is invoke an alternate past, which allows him to assert his epistemic correctness about this past. In doing so, he then uses this assertion to insert a clever joke that did not exist in the original segment. It has several important organs: an assertion or dispute about a factual inaccuracy conjured by the poster, a follow-up word-related joke, and an assessment that reveals the underlying language structure that explains the joke's potency. In this case, the poster, Dave Hendrick uses his understanding of puns to reconstruct the Sifl and Olly segment to insert a joke about box being the plural of bock, which is never done but which could have been and which also could have been quite funny.
And that's the anatomy of a troll; it comes out of the randomness of word association and information management that punctuates online interaction. It stands upon a foundation understood and accurate--a theory about jokes--so that it only retains fidelity to its world, while it trespasses in yours.
The troll is an inescapable aspect of online interaction. Anytime someone becomes a blowhard someone will be quick to poach the perceived limelight and try to focus attention elsewhere. The easiest tack is to disagree with another and conjure up a convincingly accurate alternate version. Because owing to the information management and word association required to manage an online persona most are going to be won over by the logical argument and not seek out the information that is simply a search away. Information is performative.
Saturday, August 3, 2013
What determines up?
What determines up?
In science, gravity offers one orientation. Up is the direction directly away from the terrestrial body. Science, as it is practiced by earthlings, determines up as away from the earth.
But once we leave earth things get tricky. A universe of countless heavenly bodies each determining their own up is what we're greeted with.
The way in which our solar system is presented to us visually gives the viewer some clues about how up works and of course how vision and representation collude in making knowledge. Firstly, the view of each planet and the sun grossly misrepresents both the sheer differences in scale of each planet and the sun but also their distances from each other and the sun. That aside, it's a handy representation of all that is of scientific relevance, astronomically speaking, for earthlings living in Sol, our solar system.
Let's look closer.
We see the solar system represented with the horizontal plane determined by the rotation of the planets around the sun. That makes sense from a number of perspectives, one of which is a criterion for internal validity. I agree with that as an explanation, and its tidy.
But there are two sides to this planar representation: up and down. Nothing in our representation determines what makes up up and down down. And here's where things get interesting.
Isaac Newton was spending time with a relative of the family as he looked out into the courtyard of the home where he was staying. He happened to see an apple drop from the tree onto the ground. And from that prosaic occurrence, one that perhaps he had witnessed countless other times, Newton began to think about gravity as a force that extended infinitely into space. Thus we are back to our version of up. It is in essence the direction away from the planet, or out. Up and out are interchangeable from a terrestrial standpoint, using gravity as a marker.
But we've added a wrinkle to up and much like Newton's gravity it extends out infinitely into the universe. The planar representation of our solar system sets the planets about an imaginary plane determined by their orbit around a central star, our sun. What determines up in this representation are the people creating the representation. This connects us to the work of metaphor in human understanding. As with many metaphors comparison is the function. Spatial orientations are no stranger to have added valences. Up and down are prime candidates. Which is better? In most cases, up is the preferred orientation. Who, after all, doesn't like to be on top? Sales are up! Participation is up! Up means more, means greater, means power, means wealth, means more, more, more. As for down? You get the impression.
The carbon dioxide graph that has become all but iconic of our belief or denial in the negative effects of fossil fuel usage could be one example where up and more aren't necessarily better. In this case up still is a means for conferring the salience of an issue. But I digress.
In determining where up is in this planar view of the solar system, science uses planetary north. And planetary north is a rule of thumb for up as if we were standing outside the earth and viewing it. In doing so, it requires that the rest of the universe carry on infinitely in every direction with our version of up extending out.
I'd hazard that, for the sake of internal validity, each solar system could be represented with an up counterposed with down along its orbit around a star. That doesn't necessarily destroy our view of our solar system and this imaginary up, which orders the universe around it. But, by way of metaphor and the vagaries of our subjectivity as thinkers and actors we have inherited a thought and an action, which orders the universe around a decision on what was 'up.'
At the very least having an up and a down are an indispensable means for understanding and representing some thing. Up and down as serve as a medium for exchanging ideas and coordinating meaning about the world we inhabit and that we story. Up and down fit into our visual understanding. And at its rather prosaic core, like the core of that prosaic apple is something much more human: pride, stubborn, arrogant pride.
Who, after all, doesn't like to be on top?
In science, gravity offers one orientation. Up is the direction directly away from the terrestrial body. Science, as it is practiced by earthlings, determines up as away from the earth.
But once we leave earth things get tricky. A universe of countless heavenly bodies each determining their own up is what we're greeted with.
The way in which our solar system is presented to us visually gives the viewer some clues about how up works and of course how vision and representation collude in making knowledge. Firstly, the view of each planet and the sun grossly misrepresents both the sheer differences in scale of each planet and the sun but also their distances from each other and the sun. That aside, it's a handy representation of all that is of scientific relevance, astronomically speaking, for earthlings living in Sol, our solar system.
Let's look closer.
We see the solar system represented with the horizontal plane determined by the rotation of the planets around the sun. That makes sense from a number of perspectives, one of which is a criterion for internal validity. I agree with that as an explanation, and its tidy.
But there are two sides to this planar representation: up and down. Nothing in our representation determines what makes up up and down down. And here's where things get interesting.
Isaac Newton was spending time with a relative of the family as he looked out into the courtyard of the home where he was staying. He happened to see an apple drop from the tree onto the ground. And from that prosaic occurrence, one that perhaps he had witnessed countless other times, Newton began to think about gravity as a force that extended infinitely into space. Thus we are back to our version of up. It is in essence the direction away from the planet, or out. Up and out are interchangeable from a terrestrial standpoint, using gravity as a marker.
But we've added a wrinkle to up and much like Newton's gravity it extends out infinitely into the universe. The planar representation of our solar system sets the planets about an imaginary plane determined by their orbit around a central star, our sun. What determines up in this representation are the people creating the representation. This connects us to the work of metaphor in human understanding. As with many metaphors comparison is the function. Spatial orientations are no stranger to have added valences. Up and down are prime candidates. Which is better? In most cases, up is the preferred orientation. Who, after all, doesn't like to be on top? Sales are up! Participation is up! Up means more, means greater, means power, means wealth, means more, more, more. As for down? You get the impression.
The carbon dioxide graph that has become all but iconic of our belief or denial in the negative effects of fossil fuel usage could be one example where up and more aren't necessarily better. In this case up still is a means for conferring the salience of an issue. But I digress.
In determining where up is in this planar view of the solar system, science uses planetary north. And planetary north is a rule of thumb for up as if we were standing outside the earth and viewing it. In doing so, it requires that the rest of the universe carry on infinitely in every direction with our version of up extending out.
I'd hazard that, for the sake of internal validity, each solar system could be represented with an up counterposed with down along its orbit around a star. That doesn't necessarily destroy our view of our solar system and this imaginary up, which orders the universe around it. But, by way of metaphor and the vagaries of our subjectivity as thinkers and actors we have inherited a thought and an action, which orders the universe around a decision on what was 'up.'
At the very least having an up and a down are an indispensable means for understanding and representing some thing. Up and down as serve as a medium for exchanging ideas and coordinating meaning about the world we inhabit and that we story. Up and down fit into our visual understanding. And at its rather prosaic core, like the core of that prosaic apple is something much more human: pride, stubborn, arrogant pride.
Who, after all, doesn't like to be on top?
Wednesday, July 31, 2013
The city
The serpentine highways reach into the city like surgical tubes feeding the city's heart. A body under constant operation.
The highways are riddled with shredded scraps of tires from 18-wheelers. The truckers they are are molting this season.
The blood of the city pours out onto the city's freeways and thoroughfares: night-time revelers, the homeless and the beggars. Credit receipts and cash pass hands like a bad word: potent restriction. And the city's blood, its people, mill about who, when, where, and how.
The ebb and the flow of a city, its people, their actions, a life. The city, a metaphor for you and I, going about our business, in a world we didn't create, into a night that conceals us forever.
The highways are riddled with shredded scraps of tires from 18-wheelers. The truckers they are are molting this season.
The blood of the city pours out onto the city's freeways and thoroughfares: night-time revelers, the homeless and the beggars. Credit receipts and cash pass hands like a bad word: potent restriction. And the city's blood, its people, mill about who, when, where, and how.
The ebb and the flow of a city, its people, their actions, a life. The city, a metaphor for you and I, going about our business, in a world we didn't create, into a night that conceals us forever.
Defining the 'internet'
I read this in an article titled: "Web giants to deaf consumers: go away"
Tell that to all those men, women, and children in 1995 who still asked questions, who frowned at the prospect of the internet, who still knew how to put the damn thing down.
Like a dog, it keeps jumping up: into our laps, into our hands, onto our faces, into our minds.
What's next for this internet? That seems to be up to the technologists and the technology-savvy multi-stakeholder bodies.
A definition exists for this kind of power: technocracy. Simply put, expertise becomes the means for attaining power and influence in a technocratic society.
The internet was a clever end-game run around the normal channels of power, influence, and information sharing. Its impact should be clear. It killed jobs, consolidated professions, and blurred the distinction between media producer and audience. Now we watch child stars come apart in under 140 characters over the course of weeks. They stitch together a patchwork of web appliances and applications to document and broadcast their madness, their faltering grasp upon consensual reality.
And the web was supposed to bring us together? This much was clear from the start; its power lies in its ability to arrange data. In as much as we participate as data, data which is meaningful to us, we can arrange our lives in a way that gives us control over our web experience.
To make your web experience meaningful, to give it control you set up what is called a 'feed.'
Upon what do you feed? Experience? A sense of being there through a friend's update? A handle on your "diaried" life through multi-media self-presentations?
We've arrived at our knack, our technology. We've arranged our world in such a way that we don't have to experience it, as it is, without pretense, preparation, obsessive self-selection. No, we're experiencing a world managed by our choices, the choices we make about how we use our devices. We live in self-demarcated information ghettos.
That's fine; we live in ghettos of our decision making. We could conceive of our lives prior to the web as simply a web of activity that we engaged in on a relatively permanent basis. Structurally there is no difference because this is what we've always done. The only difference is that we've grafted this technology onto our lives, which shapes the patterns and the content of our activity. And because of it and its interface design we get stuck in these charmed loops of obsessive watching, checking and rechecking, waiting for a response, to so much graffiti, so much mail, so much video, so much music, so much information, so much interaction, so much.
It's obsessive. It's compulsive. It's what we get when we marry the technology that a technologist conceives with an application that makes the businessman happy. The data they want to collect we gladly generate through our choices, all of our choices, clicking about, swiping and swirling about, our interfaces, each generating some data point, assessing some worth, some value, some thing.
But we've since left the first decision behind, sometime between 1995 and 1999. Then we could have chosen, wholesale, whether or not we wanted to participate. So many have arranged their lives around this web of technology and inflated multi-format self-promotion that a sea change has already occurred. Now we simply make decisions premised upon the always-online reality that we accept. And we've so arranged our world that we don't see outside our creation. Our attention is permanently tethered to the gadgets we use and the habits they purposefully generate then support.
This is the world of the technologist, his lawyer, and their businessman friend. The musicians, the artists, the thinkers, the philosophers, become wrapped in the din, just more information. The technologist, his lawyer, and their businessman friend get to define the internet through legal briefings. And a Swiss playwright nailed it an internet century ago.
The Internet Association rushed to eBay's defense, filing a friend-of-the-court brief saying the web is far too complicated to accommodate disabled people.I spent many years reading definitions of the internet, of computers, of technology. In those years I ran across a few gems. One, by Swiss playwright Max Frisch, explained technology as:
“The Internet is complicated, and its technical inner workings are regulated not by any government, but by a combination of individual technologists and an interconnected web of technically savvy multi-stakeholder bodies that have overseen the Internet’s evolution from the beginning,” the group argues in its brief.
“the knack of so arranging the world that we don’t have to experience it.”I've read a great many things, mostly from the early days of the web, when then-surviving journalists in their then-surviving field spent time writing about and forecasting what the future with the web may hold. And after all that smoke cleared I recall, very vividly mind you, what one of my professors and mentors just audibly screamed from within the room where I had completed an oral defense.
"What is he going to do?"It's complicated. This much I know. I live in its shadow. And because I made an academic exercise, an academic pursuit out of understanding contemporary trends in technology I am in a sense rendered obsolete by my role. This internet does not confer degrees for your interpretation, your research. No, if you can successfully launch campaigns using its many software components then you earn yourself a place in society. But if you question it, if you try to define it then you're simply being reactionary.
Tell that to all those men, women, and children in 1995 who still asked questions, who frowned at the prospect of the internet, who still knew how to put the damn thing down.
Like a dog, it keeps jumping up: into our laps, into our hands, onto our faces, into our minds.
What's next for this internet? That seems to be up to the technologists and the technology-savvy multi-stakeholder bodies.
A definition exists for this kind of power: technocracy. Simply put, expertise becomes the means for attaining power and influence in a technocratic society.
The internet was a clever end-game run around the normal channels of power, influence, and information sharing. Its impact should be clear. It killed jobs, consolidated professions, and blurred the distinction between media producer and audience. Now we watch child stars come apart in under 140 characters over the course of weeks. They stitch together a patchwork of web appliances and applications to document and broadcast their madness, their faltering grasp upon consensual reality.
And the web was supposed to bring us together? This much was clear from the start; its power lies in its ability to arrange data. In as much as we participate as data, data which is meaningful to us, we can arrange our lives in a way that gives us control over our web experience.
To make your web experience meaningful, to give it control you set up what is called a 'feed.'
Upon what do you feed? Experience? A sense of being there through a friend's update? A handle on your "diaried" life through multi-media self-presentations?
We've arrived at our knack, our technology. We've arranged our world in such a way that we don't have to experience it, as it is, without pretense, preparation, obsessive self-selection. No, we're experiencing a world managed by our choices, the choices we make about how we use our devices. We live in self-demarcated information ghettos.
That's fine; we live in ghettos of our decision making. We could conceive of our lives prior to the web as simply a web of activity that we engaged in on a relatively permanent basis. Structurally there is no difference because this is what we've always done. The only difference is that we've grafted this technology onto our lives, which shapes the patterns and the content of our activity. And because of it and its interface design we get stuck in these charmed loops of obsessive watching, checking and rechecking, waiting for a response, to so much graffiti, so much mail, so much video, so much music, so much information, so much interaction, so much.
It's obsessive. It's compulsive. It's what we get when we marry the technology that a technologist conceives with an application that makes the businessman happy. The data they want to collect we gladly generate through our choices, all of our choices, clicking about, swiping and swirling about, our interfaces, each generating some data point, assessing some worth, some value, some thing.
But we've since left the first decision behind, sometime between 1995 and 1999. Then we could have chosen, wholesale, whether or not we wanted to participate. So many have arranged their lives around this web of technology and inflated multi-format self-promotion that a sea change has already occurred. Now we simply make decisions premised upon the always-online reality that we accept. And we've so arranged our world that we don't see outside our creation. Our attention is permanently tethered to the gadgets we use and the habits they purposefully generate then support.
This is the world of the technologist, his lawyer, and their businessman friend. The musicians, the artists, the thinkers, the philosophers, become wrapped in the din, just more information. The technologist, his lawyer, and their businessman friend get to define the internet through legal briefings. And a Swiss playwright nailed it an internet century ago.
Wednesday, July 17, 2013
Page views
Keywords, search terms, bot algorithms.
These have contributed in varying ways to my blog reaching almost 5,000 page views. Sadly, few human eyes see the pages. Few human minds comprehend the narrative journeys. It's just the OCD of a virtual computer spinning in some cloud somewhere on this planet.
As I reach 5,000 page views I need to remind myself that among those views only a few were achieved by people, looking for something on a topic that this blog addressed. Few visits were perpetrated by people willingly clicking on a search engine link to my page. I'd put those in the 250 page view range.
I'm a blogger for bots, an author for algorithms, a star for software, a host for hyperlinks. Foremost, I'm here, unemployed, staring at things I've done, wondering what they amount to, and the internet equivalent of cockroaches infest my work.
These have contributed in varying ways to my blog reaching almost 5,000 page views. Sadly, few human eyes see the pages. Few human minds comprehend the narrative journeys. It's just the OCD of a virtual computer spinning in some cloud somewhere on this planet.
As I reach 5,000 page views I need to remind myself that among those views only a few were achieved by people, looking for something on a topic that this blog addressed. Few visits were perpetrated by people willingly clicking on a search engine link to my page. I'd put those in the 250 page view range.
I'm a blogger for bots, an author for algorithms, a star for software, a host for hyperlinks. Foremost, I'm here, unemployed, staring at things I've done, wondering what they amount to, and the internet equivalent of cockroaches infest my work.
Tuesday, July 2, 2013
"it sends a message"
I read an influential book by an equally influential rhetorician named Barry Brummett. The book was titled, "Rhetorical Homologies." In his book, Brummett describes what rhetorical homologies are and how they shape our thinking, action, and understanding. One of the more engaging uses of his analysis is in exploring the ways that warfare and rhetoric were practiced through history to find the homologies that existed between them.
Firstly, a homology is akin to an analogy in suggesting that one experience or object is like another. The only additional requirement is something structural, such as a sequence of steps or the types of subjectivities furnished by an activity or relationship existing in both areas. These form the homology that exists between the two distinct entities or experiences. Brummett continues by explaining that homologies are a formal resemblance or "a pattern found to be ordering significant particulars of different and disparate experiences" (p. 2). These formal patterns shared among disparate experiences have a deep structure. That is, they are behind empirical (observable) reality. They derive their rhetorical power by offering or suggesting a course of action. In other words, if one were to experience a homologous relationship between two experiences the resolution to act chosen in the presence of one experience would resemble the action chosen in the presence of another.
By analyzing the structural similarities between warfare and rhetoric through history Brummett develops a blueprint for homology research. In this analysis he finds compelling connections between communication--message sender, message receiver, and the means of message conveyance--and warfare technology. Each broad era of rhetoric had an attendant theory of communication, which suggested how messages and meaning worked and the nature of the relationship between two interlocutors. As each model of communication or rhetoric changed so did the predominating means of warfare. One necessarily did not follow the other. Instead, rhetoric and warfare shared deep structural relations. Rhetorician Kenneth Burke elaborates upon these relations when he describes warfare as a "perversion of community" in that warfare and communication both require that its participants coordinate the meaning of each act. And so warfare, in its then-modern sense of nation-state versus nation-state, is premised upon a set of rules for knowing when and how to conduct war. These occur through formal declarations, which are a subset of the communication, broadly defined, which has modeled similarities with the methods of warfare.
Technology changes our battlefield relationships, specific to how we wage it. Simply, the means through which we attack and kill our enemy are mediated by a technology, be it through the dispatch of an enemy at close range, using a stiletto or lobbing lead slugs at an opponent at gunpoint. Similarly, prevailing technologies and philosophies inform how we view persuasion and how we practice it. During the Renaissance era, rhetoric was part of a classical education whereby one learned the aesthetic conditions for persuasion and used these in much less public spheres to influence others. Likewise, warfare in the Renaissance era was a personal affair. Prior to the pitched battles of a later era, politicians and their operatives dispatched their political foes by knife at very close range.
By the time we reach the modern era, warfare is organized around the musket and the rules of probability. The prevailing form that this warfare takes is of two opposing forces marching in formation to maximize deployment efficiency and spread as each army launches salvo after salvo of bullets at each other Likewise, at this time rhetoric--communication theory--saw each of us as individual minds to be influenced through the telepresent actions of a communicator, forming the right message to reach its target. Like the muskets on the battle field, the messages in this sphere had to be aimed and strike their target in order to persuade.
And so we reach the abrupt end of our journey only to see this relationship between the gun and persuasion still practiced. When people adamantly proclaim that killing sends a message they are invoking several rhetorics all of which coalesce around a subjectivity furnished by the wielding of a gun. First, a dead body is undeniably real and consequential to most of us. Using a dead body as a way to convey the consequences of one's actions hammers that point home as forcibly as can be done. That is, if one were to set the individual and his/her body as the standard target for persuasion, putting that target on the ground in a pool of its blood is an ultimate 'no.' Invoking that dead body as a meaningful and unambiguous message is a rhetoric of reality. It also performs for the gun wielder a subjectivity couched in a philosophical and legal view of the indivisible subject, its inviolable rights to liberty, and the attendant freedom to protect this liberty and this subjects property through any means, including the gun. The second rhetoric relies upon that homology defined above. Except now it has reached its logical and final conclusion. When the bullet finds its body is when the message has been sent effectively.
Now, I only brought this up because so many invoke the need to 'send a clear message' to whomever it is: the enemy nation, terrorists, criminals, and so on. And so many see the gun and the dead body as a means to 'send' this 'clear message.' This was applied to a hostage situation where a deranged man held a child at knife point only to be shot point-blank in the head by a police officer. My question became, "how do we send a 'clear message' to the deranged, to those who do not always have a grasp on the reality that you and I share?" The chilling answer suggests a very strong bias toward the gun wielder to subject an interlocutor to his meaning. This logic of the 'clear message' isn't being sent if most of us resort to the ultimate act of violence under great psychological stress. Much like the insane person, those of use under duress or under the influence or both are not thinking about the consequences so much as we are absorbed in the moment when the conclusion to send a 'clear message' comes to us.
So what?
We live in an era of 'message sending.' Most of it is impersonal. Does our penchant for sending 'random texts' or flaming anonymously offers us a suggestive new horizon for the gun? Maybe ours is an era of remote violence, where the gun shot is not heard by the person pulling the trigger. People have bullied people online to suicide. The United States has used drone aircraft to target and kill enemies. Sometimes, people with guns shoot randomly at strangers. This sort of homology falls apart as a clear message. Errors creep into the system. The heat signature of bodies in the drone's sensor array may be misidentified. Maybe the person being targeted for random violence is saved by a ricochet only to have that bullet strike another? There is no clear message just more error, more randomness. Chaos enters this universe of sending clear messages. Now, we want to deputize ourselves through conceal and carry legislation so that we can send one clear message to any perceived foes. Gun in one hand and cellular in the other; we've reached the tail end of our homology.
Firstly, a homology is akin to an analogy in suggesting that one experience or object is like another. The only additional requirement is something structural, such as a sequence of steps or the types of subjectivities furnished by an activity or relationship existing in both areas. These form the homology that exists between the two distinct entities or experiences. Brummett continues by explaining that homologies are a formal resemblance or "a pattern found to be ordering significant particulars of different and disparate experiences" (p. 2). These formal patterns shared among disparate experiences have a deep structure. That is, they are behind empirical (observable) reality. They derive their rhetorical power by offering or suggesting a course of action. In other words, if one were to experience a homologous relationship between two experiences the resolution to act chosen in the presence of one experience would resemble the action chosen in the presence of another.
By analyzing the structural similarities between warfare and rhetoric through history Brummett develops a blueprint for homology research. In this analysis he finds compelling connections between communication--message sender, message receiver, and the means of message conveyance--and warfare technology. Each broad era of rhetoric had an attendant theory of communication, which suggested how messages and meaning worked and the nature of the relationship between two interlocutors. As each model of communication or rhetoric changed so did the predominating means of warfare. One necessarily did not follow the other. Instead, rhetoric and warfare shared deep structural relations. Rhetorician Kenneth Burke elaborates upon these relations when he describes warfare as a "perversion of community" in that warfare and communication both require that its participants coordinate the meaning of each act. And so warfare, in its then-modern sense of nation-state versus nation-state, is premised upon a set of rules for knowing when and how to conduct war. These occur through formal declarations, which are a subset of the communication, broadly defined, which has modeled similarities with the methods of warfare.
Technology changes our battlefield relationships, specific to how we wage it. Simply, the means through which we attack and kill our enemy are mediated by a technology, be it through the dispatch of an enemy at close range, using a stiletto or lobbing lead slugs at an opponent at gunpoint. Similarly, prevailing technologies and philosophies inform how we view persuasion and how we practice it. During the Renaissance era, rhetoric was part of a classical education whereby one learned the aesthetic conditions for persuasion and used these in much less public spheres to influence others. Likewise, warfare in the Renaissance era was a personal affair. Prior to the pitched battles of a later era, politicians and their operatives dispatched their political foes by knife at very close range.
By the time we reach the modern era, warfare is organized around the musket and the rules of probability. The prevailing form that this warfare takes is of two opposing forces marching in formation to maximize deployment efficiency and spread as each army launches salvo after salvo of bullets at each other Likewise, at this time rhetoric--communication theory--saw each of us as individual minds to be influenced through the telepresent actions of a communicator, forming the right message to reach its target. Like the muskets on the battle field, the messages in this sphere had to be aimed and strike their target in order to persuade.
And so we reach the abrupt end of our journey only to see this relationship between the gun and persuasion still practiced. When people adamantly proclaim that killing sends a message they are invoking several rhetorics all of which coalesce around a subjectivity furnished by the wielding of a gun. First, a dead body is undeniably real and consequential to most of us. Using a dead body as a way to convey the consequences of one's actions hammers that point home as forcibly as can be done. That is, if one were to set the individual and his/her body as the standard target for persuasion, putting that target on the ground in a pool of its blood is an ultimate 'no.' Invoking that dead body as a meaningful and unambiguous message is a rhetoric of reality. It also performs for the gun wielder a subjectivity couched in a philosophical and legal view of the indivisible subject, its inviolable rights to liberty, and the attendant freedom to protect this liberty and this subjects property through any means, including the gun. The second rhetoric relies upon that homology defined above. Except now it has reached its logical and final conclusion. When the bullet finds its body is when the message has been sent effectively.
Now, I only brought this up because so many invoke the need to 'send a clear message' to whomever it is: the enemy nation, terrorists, criminals, and so on. And so many see the gun and the dead body as a means to 'send' this 'clear message.' This was applied to a hostage situation where a deranged man held a child at knife point only to be shot point-blank in the head by a police officer. My question became, "how do we send a 'clear message' to the deranged, to those who do not always have a grasp on the reality that you and I share?" The chilling answer suggests a very strong bias toward the gun wielder to subject an interlocutor to his meaning. This logic of the 'clear message' isn't being sent if most of us resort to the ultimate act of violence under great psychological stress. Much like the insane person, those of use under duress or under the influence or both are not thinking about the consequences so much as we are absorbed in the moment when the conclusion to send a 'clear message' comes to us.
So what?
We live in an era of 'message sending.' Most of it is impersonal. Does our penchant for sending 'random texts' or flaming anonymously offers us a suggestive new horizon for the gun? Maybe ours is an era of remote violence, where the gun shot is not heard by the person pulling the trigger. People have bullied people online to suicide. The United States has used drone aircraft to target and kill enemies. Sometimes, people with guns shoot randomly at strangers. This sort of homology falls apart as a clear message. Errors creep into the system. The heat signature of bodies in the drone's sensor array may be misidentified. Maybe the person being targeted for random violence is saved by a ricochet only to have that bullet strike another? There is no clear message just more error, more randomness. Chaos enters this universe of sending clear messages. Now, we want to deputize ourselves through conceal and carry legislation so that we can send one clear message to any perceived foes. Gun in one hand and cellular in the other; we've reached the tail end of our homology.
Friday, June 28, 2013
?que haces? - What do you do?
When people ask me what I do for a living, I reply.
"I am a professional eraser."
Monday, June 17, 2013
run, run
I wish I had gotten that job, the one in Kalamazoo. It all comes rushing back. I knew then what I know now, how important it is to run, to hide, to get away, to start over, to redefine.
It all comes rushing back in. I cannot escape a feeling, a definition, a form, an outline, of a life that I've created out of the habits of mind and the habits of body. I stalk, I listen, I live by the footsteps overhead.
I tried so hard before to shake it and working day in, day out, spending the weekends with a perfect diversion helped. But it's back. I lost that job, and my diversion had lost its luster slowly but certainly as a feeling more powerful came rushing back in.
Lust.
I cannot think of a better word. There's no logic behind it, other than that which I put towards my stalking, my spying, my watching, my listening, my planning, my life lived around the patterns of another life, hers.
Stop it. Fill a life with diversion, activities, projects, anything to keep me busy. This feeling is unfair to me. It's overwhelming me. I wanted that job. I gave it a good effort. And I lost it to a PhD from the Ohio State.
Pitiful. Shameful. I opened up that folder, entitled "dissertation" and peeked inside. So much that I didn't look at, so much that I didn't write, so little of my effort expended on the right thing, and too much of it spent licking the wounds that I inflicted upon myself. I took a job. I hated that job. I ignored my work. I ignored my life. I slid into a routine of disavowal. I couldn't have done any good at the Kalamazoo job anyway. I would have been in a sea of guilt, self-doubt, self-pity, loneliness. I couldn't have replaced Helen. She wouldn't have allowed me to leave. When I told her about that job, she clung to me like a sad, sad little girl. She cried. I felt nothing, but the air of freedom and the vague expanse of a future that was completely new, new routine, new people, new environs, new municipal water, new state tax structure, and a new damn job. A job that, at the very least, didn't insult my education, but would certainly insult my ego. Why? Because I would dig my own hole. Teaching jobs are isometric exercises. The harder you push the harder you invoke one of Newton's laws. It exerts an equal force back on you. The harder you try, the more work you do, the less you are rewarded monetarily, and its educational value is utterly uncertain. Hard work doesn't come through that often. Helen sucked my dick that night, and I came in her mouth. She swallowed, and I learned that she enjoyed that little job, that job that she does, the one that pleases her man, the one that she will not let go. "We're on the same page" she said in so many ways. We danced one night to her records in an early 'date night' in her basement apartment bedroom. She pushed me on the bed, and I played the passive one. "You get me." She said. I can fool anyone.
Even myself.
There is no future. I just thought that an academic job at Kalamazoo would save me from this blue collar relic, this job fitting for a murderer, a criminal, an addict, an unprincipled and uneducated buffoon. And I'm stealing that guy's job. John Scoville told me as much. When he was laid off, he cussed and stormed out. He didn't say goodbye to me. He saw me as someone standing between him and a job. What a fool I am. I am too damn poetic, too damn ivory towered, and mostly too damn Ferdinand Bullheaded to pick a career, any career, and stick to it for a time fitting for a line on my resume. But who needs resumes anymore. Computers do searches using the logic of algorithms. I need keywords not experience.
Here I am, sitting at a coffee shop, feeling sorry for myself. Blacking out hours of my day because it's one that is done in secret. The rest of my day I prey upon visions of the object of my desire, snapping its picture, putting it on my computer, and jerking off violently to it, zoomed in, transfixed on the dissected object, which was once part of another person. Completely objectifying are my advances. I was told this, and it wasn't what I had wanted to do. She's a tough one to understand. She will tell me that she loves me, but she will build a life around the principle of ignoring me. Ignoring me to death.
I need to get out. I needed that job. I need a job. Mine has dried up. I had a good job. It was dirty, but I worked around the best, at a pace that wasn't too terrible. The best job I had was fabricating, handrail around a tar decanter. Man, I felt like I had some control, some authority. I simply was allowed to do all the heavy lifting and made sure that my two co-workers didn't have to work that hard. It was warm up there. It was cold outside. This was a perfect job. We had to wear respirators the whole time, and I loved that job. Looking like a bunch of MIG fighter pilots, we walked upon the tarred lunar surface of that tar decanter. And suddenly we were laid off. Then we were laid off again, and again, and again. And finally, after we picked up our tools, and cleaned up our half-finished projects, the mill shuttered our operation--a decision made a thousand miles away and it killed our job. I missed the great monetary gain and mental diversion that the job offered me. Now I go back down to the hall and put my name on the list. To find a job, to fill in for the job that I had, that I was willing to drop for a job in Kalamazoo, that I would have hated by now, but that still haunts me like a bad night, one that cannot be forgotten because it got my name in the papers and put another in the obituary. I didn't kill anyone in a drunken driving accident, but something about my life is an orchestrated tragedy. I would have engineered it as one, but I lack that degree. You don't need a degree to orchestrate. So many damn barriers to entry. So many damn degrees that I don't have. This writing may prove that I exist. It may prove that I can and do write. It may even provide a measure to my ability to construct compelling sentences. But it ultimately damns me because it's personal, it's taboo, it's too fucking self absorbed, and it's going to get me in trouble. I am writing a diary of my inner states on a publicly accessible web page. This is an allegory for our publicly viewed privacy, our socially networked, fame-measured existence before others. The technology mediates us in a way that adds some very consequential contours to our interactions--they can be searched, they can be found, they won't be forgotten.
Perhaps this Blog sealed my doom at that Kalamazoo job. My cynicism, my pain, my inner turmoil, my self-pity and self-doubt: these aren't good for a job interview. Jobs are public. The spaces one occupies at work are formal, deliberately restrictive, emotionally oppressive, and utterly central to making a meaningful existence, a life lived out of the purely fungible dollar that we earn, sometimes by the hour, sometimes by the job, sometimes by contract.
The dollar. It's something that I seek to have at a constant rate in my life. But what I seek more than the money is that which must be done in order to obtain it--work. Work offers me one thing that I need right now--a diversion, time spent away from underneath the clop, clop of feet, my sulking behind the blinds, my paparazzi tactics, my sickening and sick desires, unrequited love, twisting into objectify, violent lust.
This world; it's a collection of base desires, selfish motives, and stitched together, barely, just barely, by boogeymen, ideologies, laws, and the one consequence that motivates most--fear of losing control over one's body through incarceration or death. It's a fitting allegory for our inner lives, ones that we try to shape and control by replicating the very institutions that shape the way our bodies move, how our eyes see, what our tongues taste, and what our ears hear. We're in it, but we're so far from it. The mind is trapped. Our senses mock it. Our institutions give it the long-throw reflex of extant culture. But the reflexes, the nerves, the motor neurons, the associational network of synapses, are all so coextensive to the reality that makes us perceive any reality, and yet they could have any content, any whatsoever, and look similar.
I needed that job damn it. I wanted a new start. I have to run. I cannot outpace the demonic habits, the objectifying and violent possessiveness of my desires. And here I am, in the midst of it, hungry, hated, empty. Back on the list to find another job, something to keep me from remembering what I am running from. The continuous demoralization of clumsy work, getting my ass kicked by a knot, a bar, a weld, a bolt, a tool. I guess it beats getting your ass kicked by a not, a not thing, the positive object of negation, the category and essent preceding non-existence. Another set of clumsy words, another stab at existentialism for which I have yet to earn any chops, another bot-crawled screed about my sad existence, a sadness conjured by myself, a continuous and painful editorial board, damning me to exist in a prison of doubt, self-hate, and articulate awareness of my pain.
This, this labor, this painful trudging through self-doubt, it is my job. It pays nothing. It produces words like this. It births opportunities to think, to practice, to preach, to poetry. It pays nothing. It does something. It pays nothing. My stomach burns from hunger. The screen displays what my checking account holds; it dwindles. My confidence dwindles. My life; it's a job. My job is my life. My pay is my sadness. The work I do the poetry of contours, the contours of my mental states, my confessions piss out, my words never stop, my sadness continues day in, day out. I will not sleep well tonight. I will not sleep. I must get up early to get my name on the list. I need a diversion. I need to put my mouth on something. I need to quiet the voice of my pain, my doubt, my shame. I need to hold something, a tool, anything, to keep me from trying to hold her too close, once again, scaring her away.
I hate my job. I hate being me. I hate. I am hate. Run. Run until you collapse, and hope you run far from the thing that defines your existence.
It all comes rushing back in. I cannot escape a feeling, a definition, a form, an outline, of a life that I've created out of the habits of mind and the habits of body. I stalk, I listen, I live by the footsteps overhead.
I tried so hard before to shake it and working day in, day out, spending the weekends with a perfect diversion helped. But it's back. I lost that job, and my diversion had lost its luster slowly but certainly as a feeling more powerful came rushing back in.
Lust.
I cannot think of a better word. There's no logic behind it, other than that which I put towards my stalking, my spying, my watching, my listening, my planning, my life lived around the patterns of another life, hers.
Stop it. Fill a life with diversion, activities, projects, anything to keep me busy. This feeling is unfair to me. It's overwhelming me. I wanted that job. I gave it a good effort. And I lost it to a PhD from the Ohio State.
Pitiful. Shameful. I opened up that folder, entitled "dissertation" and peeked inside. So much that I didn't look at, so much that I didn't write, so little of my effort expended on the right thing, and too much of it spent licking the wounds that I inflicted upon myself. I took a job. I hated that job. I ignored my work. I ignored my life. I slid into a routine of disavowal. I couldn't have done any good at the Kalamazoo job anyway. I would have been in a sea of guilt, self-doubt, self-pity, loneliness. I couldn't have replaced Helen. She wouldn't have allowed me to leave. When I told her about that job, she clung to me like a sad, sad little girl. She cried. I felt nothing, but the air of freedom and the vague expanse of a future that was completely new, new routine, new people, new environs, new municipal water, new state tax structure, and a new damn job. A job that, at the very least, didn't insult my education, but would certainly insult my ego. Why? Because I would dig my own hole. Teaching jobs are isometric exercises. The harder you push the harder you invoke one of Newton's laws. It exerts an equal force back on you. The harder you try, the more work you do, the less you are rewarded monetarily, and its educational value is utterly uncertain. Hard work doesn't come through that often. Helen sucked my dick that night, and I came in her mouth. She swallowed, and I learned that she enjoyed that little job, that job that she does, the one that pleases her man, the one that she will not let go. "We're on the same page" she said in so many ways. We danced one night to her records in an early 'date night' in her basement apartment bedroom. She pushed me on the bed, and I played the passive one. "You get me." She said. I can fool anyone.
Even myself.
There is no future. I just thought that an academic job at Kalamazoo would save me from this blue collar relic, this job fitting for a murderer, a criminal, an addict, an unprincipled and uneducated buffoon. And I'm stealing that guy's job. John Scoville told me as much. When he was laid off, he cussed and stormed out. He didn't say goodbye to me. He saw me as someone standing between him and a job. What a fool I am. I am too damn poetic, too damn ivory towered, and mostly too damn Ferdinand Bullheaded to pick a career, any career, and stick to it for a time fitting for a line on my resume. But who needs resumes anymore. Computers do searches using the logic of algorithms. I need keywords not experience.
Here I am, sitting at a coffee shop, feeling sorry for myself. Blacking out hours of my day because it's one that is done in secret. The rest of my day I prey upon visions of the object of my desire, snapping its picture, putting it on my computer, and jerking off violently to it, zoomed in, transfixed on the dissected object, which was once part of another person. Completely objectifying are my advances. I was told this, and it wasn't what I had wanted to do. She's a tough one to understand. She will tell me that she loves me, but she will build a life around the principle of ignoring me. Ignoring me to death.
I need to get out. I needed that job. I need a job. Mine has dried up. I had a good job. It was dirty, but I worked around the best, at a pace that wasn't too terrible. The best job I had was fabricating, handrail around a tar decanter. Man, I felt like I had some control, some authority. I simply was allowed to do all the heavy lifting and made sure that my two co-workers didn't have to work that hard. It was warm up there. It was cold outside. This was a perfect job. We had to wear respirators the whole time, and I loved that job. Looking like a bunch of MIG fighter pilots, we walked upon the tarred lunar surface of that tar decanter. And suddenly we were laid off. Then we were laid off again, and again, and again. And finally, after we picked up our tools, and cleaned up our half-finished projects, the mill shuttered our operation--a decision made a thousand miles away and it killed our job. I missed the great monetary gain and mental diversion that the job offered me. Now I go back down to the hall and put my name on the list. To find a job, to fill in for the job that I had, that I was willing to drop for a job in Kalamazoo, that I would have hated by now, but that still haunts me like a bad night, one that cannot be forgotten because it got my name in the papers and put another in the obituary. I didn't kill anyone in a drunken driving accident, but something about my life is an orchestrated tragedy. I would have engineered it as one, but I lack that degree. You don't need a degree to orchestrate. So many damn barriers to entry. So many damn degrees that I don't have. This writing may prove that I exist. It may prove that I can and do write. It may even provide a measure to my ability to construct compelling sentences. But it ultimately damns me because it's personal, it's taboo, it's too fucking self absorbed, and it's going to get me in trouble. I am writing a diary of my inner states on a publicly accessible web page. This is an allegory for our publicly viewed privacy, our socially networked, fame-measured existence before others. The technology mediates us in a way that adds some very consequential contours to our interactions--they can be searched, they can be found, they won't be forgotten.
Perhaps this Blog sealed my doom at that Kalamazoo job. My cynicism, my pain, my inner turmoil, my self-pity and self-doubt: these aren't good for a job interview. Jobs are public. The spaces one occupies at work are formal, deliberately restrictive, emotionally oppressive, and utterly central to making a meaningful existence, a life lived out of the purely fungible dollar that we earn, sometimes by the hour, sometimes by the job, sometimes by contract.
The dollar. It's something that I seek to have at a constant rate in my life. But what I seek more than the money is that which must be done in order to obtain it--work. Work offers me one thing that I need right now--a diversion, time spent away from underneath the clop, clop of feet, my sulking behind the blinds, my paparazzi tactics, my sickening and sick desires, unrequited love, twisting into objectify, violent lust.
This world; it's a collection of base desires, selfish motives, and stitched together, barely, just barely, by boogeymen, ideologies, laws, and the one consequence that motivates most--fear of losing control over one's body through incarceration or death. It's a fitting allegory for our inner lives, ones that we try to shape and control by replicating the very institutions that shape the way our bodies move, how our eyes see, what our tongues taste, and what our ears hear. We're in it, but we're so far from it. The mind is trapped. Our senses mock it. Our institutions give it the long-throw reflex of extant culture. But the reflexes, the nerves, the motor neurons, the associational network of synapses, are all so coextensive to the reality that makes us perceive any reality, and yet they could have any content, any whatsoever, and look similar.
I needed that job damn it. I wanted a new start. I have to run. I cannot outpace the demonic habits, the objectifying and violent possessiveness of my desires. And here I am, in the midst of it, hungry, hated, empty. Back on the list to find another job, something to keep me from remembering what I am running from. The continuous demoralization of clumsy work, getting my ass kicked by a knot, a bar, a weld, a bolt, a tool. I guess it beats getting your ass kicked by a not, a not thing, the positive object of negation, the category and essent preceding non-existence. Another set of clumsy words, another stab at existentialism for which I have yet to earn any chops, another bot-crawled screed about my sad existence, a sadness conjured by myself, a continuous and painful editorial board, damning me to exist in a prison of doubt, self-hate, and articulate awareness of my pain.
This, this labor, this painful trudging through self-doubt, it is my job. It pays nothing. It produces words like this. It births opportunities to think, to practice, to preach, to poetry. It pays nothing. It does something. It pays nothing. My stomach burns from hunger. The screen displays what my checking account holds; it dwindles. My confidence dwindles. My life; it's a job. My job is my life. My pay is my sadness. The work I do the poetry of contours, the contours of my mental states, my confessions piss out, my words never stop, my sadness continues day in, day out. I will not sleep well tonight. I will not sleep. I must get up early to get my name on the list. I need a diversion. I need to put my mouth on something. I need to quiet the voice of my pain, my doubt, my shame. I need to hold something, a tool, anything, to keep me from trying to hold her too close, once again, scaring her away.
I hate my job. I hate being me. I hate. I am hate. Run. Run until you collapse, and hope you run far from the thing that defines your existence.
Tuesday, June 11, 2013
Helping grandpa clean out the garage
Grandfathers are notorious for amassing the detritus of their past and carefully curating it in dens, basements, storage sheds, and garages. My grandfather dabbled in many of these categories, but his garage was his own to use and to fill with things he thought would be useful someday or were meaningful to him now.
In about 1993 I helped my grandfather arrange his tools and clean out his garage. There, I found many things that no longer existed in the 1990s. I spotted a cardboard tube with DDT powder for one's roses. I came across a crank-operated drill press that preceded its electric powered counterpart. My grandfather had painted in black in haste to protect it from the elements. In the rafters were seemingly endless stacks of "Popular Mechanics," mouse eaten, water damaged, and moldy. An old fishing pole and tackle box hung above a peg board containing various screw drivers, hand planes, and other common tools.
A motif to my grandfather's collection was collecting itself. I spotted countless Pringles cans carefully arranged on their sides above me. He kept these for storage. The same goes for all the Old Milwaukee steel cans. Each had its top removed to facilitate its use in holding wood stain and other such liquids that my grandfather used on a regular basis. In addition, he had numerous King Edward cigar boxes, each stacked neatly on a shelf with a label indicating what lay inside. He was a prolific cigar smoker and cigar chewer well into the 1990s when he abruptly quit after his doctor gave him a grave prediction if he kept smoking. He collected many tools, lots of half-finished projects, and scraps of choice wood. Each had a story that he was quick to share with me.
He once was the proprietor of a store; the building still stands across the street from his house. When he closed shop in the 1970s a lot of the left over merchandise ended up in the garage. In one drawer he saved a U.S. history pamphlet that a popular brand used as a seasonal promotion of its bread buns. Another drawer contained a slide rule, which he handed me to use, as if he considered me some kind of math wizard. Like others, he held a common misconception of intelligence as being automatically good at math. Fat chance. Or shall I say obtuse?
Like me, and like many of us, my grandfather attached many memories to the items that filled his garage. And it became a burden to curate all these memory objects, so he paid for my help in arranging things. In the process he shared many memories in story form as if each thing in that garage, no matter how dusty and forgotten still had significance. As tools many had lost their usefulness through the ravages of time and neglect. Projects like this were always fun to me. We shared a similar interest in moments from our past. We managed an array of objects that offered us access to that past. When he enlisted me to help clean out the garage, he invited me on an odyssey of recollection through objects in disarray. The story telling that followed each discovery was a way to put order to this material universe in the garage and to dust off the narrative universe that belched out in sometimes slurred words from beneath my grandfather's well-kept mustache.
Our first task was to dig through the unlabeled cigar boxes to find what lay inside. In one cigar box he had his picture ID from the 1970s. He looked much younger than he did that day. He had his tell-tale mustache, bibs, striped shirt, and a dark blue hat. Also inside I found a stack of small cards, political advertisements my grandfather had printed to support his run for ward alderman. At this time, Collinsville had an aldermanic system. My grandfather was the most famous man in Morris Heights, a small neighborhood perched on the bluff, overlooking the flood plain to the Mississippi. At the end of his street the neighbors could take in the Saint Louis skyline and watch the July 4 fireworks display.
As we dug through toward the back end of the garage I spotted a lot of large items. One item in particular was a very old jukebox. Next to it were various wooden projects, which turned out to be seasonal items, Christmas decorations. Among these was a piece of wood upon which were some large colored bulbs arranged in the iconic Star of David pattern. He told me that he wanted to put a star on the house one Christmas, and that this star was the easiest for him to design.
And that's the story I believe. He was a first generation American. He was a practical handyman. This decoration was probably from the late 1940s to mid-1950s when one thinks that people were less sensitive to the minute details of one's Christmas decorations. In this era and in this small town everything was DIY. Any string of colored lights would do, even if the leg of the cross was a bit shorter than its head. And afterall, my grandfather donated his money and his labor to create the Saint Stephen's Catholic Parish on a parcel of farm land in the town down the road. The priests were no strangers to coming over for drinks, handmade pizza, and poker after Mass at my grandparents' house. They were quite active in the Catholic Church until the end of their lives. My grandfather married into a large and materially successful Italian family. Anyone with a modicum of DIY and business sense could get ahead back then, and my grandmother and her sisters were riding a wave of largesse that their father's business sense afforded for them back in Abingdon, Illinois.
My grandfather did convert to Catholicism. His grandfather was a follower of the Orthodox Church who upon immigrating to a small mining town in northern Illinois remained stubborn in his ways when he found no congregation nor church where he could practice his faith. For my grandfather Catholicism was the 'next best option.' He married an Italian-American woman, and so his religious affiliation only grew with her and her sisters, their husbands, their kids, their jobs, their fish fries, the beer, and all of their collective culinary acumen.
One evening after cutting the grass my grandfather decided to chat with me about the family name. There, over a fish plate and some flavored drink, he told me that several generations back his ancestors had to change their name. According to the story he told, the village had 'too many Yasheko's.' And so his ancestors changed their name to 'Lesko.'
At the time I accepted this story at face value. Watching an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation I learned that Worf's adopted parents were Slovak like my grandfather's biological ones. The writers and producers of this show used their understanding of Slovak culture to portray that the Klingon heritage of Worf and his Slovak parents were amenable. The original series modeled the Klingons after Cold War Soviet culture. To place Worf in an adoptive home of Slovaks appeared sensible to the writers and producers. The germ of an idea grew that perhaps my grandfather's story reflected the stubborn, pride-filled constitution that remained part of his family. Then I decided that the name was probably made up, perhaps on Ellis Island when my great-grandfather entered the United States. I ran with that one on a hunch, and a rather pedestrian observation of Slovak culture acquired through Star Trek's depiction of Worf's adoptive parents. I was young then.
Many years later I quit my job. This was a few years back. Shortly thereafter, the economy quit me. My future took on something rather bleak, and I took to sipping beers and reading web pages. In the absence of my elder family, Google became a way to imagine a past through search. It was my adventuring companion. Through it, I could find answers and flesh out a story about a past I never knew nor ever really mattered. When you grow up within three miles of a highway on-ramp you find yourself bled of any cultural heritage as you absorb brand standardization and efficiency dining. That variation on the melting pot reduced the zealous pride of culture to a menu item or brand loyalty. In spite of all this commercialization and its effect on consciousness and identity I still had questions.
A name sticks with you for life. Its sounds are familiar; they call upon you in a crowded room. You learn each word first intimately, then you reproduce them mechanically for life. But a name can be alienating when you see it listed among a bunch of strangers who share the same as yours. When you do search for your name you mistake finding it for finding, perhaps, a long-lost doubloon. When I plugged my name into search, a world of meaning came rushing in. Maybe it was the beer or the suggestiveness of a hangover.
I learned that "Lesko" is the name of a town in Poland, which is highlighted on Jewish heritage tours for its centuries-old synagogue. I also discovered this pop singer from Romania, who shares my last name but none of my obscurity. I learned about a tribe of 'Leskos' that aligned themselves with Russia at some point in that region's premodern history. I spotted a Youtube video under my name, where a group of what look to be Eastern European soccer hooligans are yukking up and singing some boast replete with taking sides and ramming your body into the other side. The last one held open for me perhaps one morsel of understanding. My name had to do with place, perhaps.
What is in a name? I began to consider that perhaps this name meant very little here, among the experimental soybeans and TV-tray sitcoms. And elsewhere it could be simply a very basic unit of Slavic nomenclature. The suffix '-esko' is one of the more common naming conventions in that part of the world. But what of this other word, "Yashesko?"
That word took me one specific place: the Romanian Wikipedia page for a city East of the Carpathians, called Yash. Perhaps, '-esko' was a way in the past to assign people last names that tied them to a place. Could my ancestors be from Yash? What of Lesko then? Maybe this is the name reserved for those who have no place? But a town in Poland has that very name. "Yashesko pogromo" were the words I spotted on the Romanian Wikipedia page. Pogroms are visited upon outsider groups, ethnicities not native or alien to a community with an already self-described insider group. Pogroms often befall two groups in Europe: the Jews and the Gypsies or Roma.
Then I remembered something from my Aunt's own exploration of her heritage. She took a Bible that was the property of her grandmother, my Grandfather's mother, to a Slavic studies and languages expert. Upon a cursory glance he determined that the Bible was one common among the Gypsies of Slavic lands. This was my best and only lead in a long-odyssey to understand something about my heritage through a family name.
These kinds of journeys tend to be wild goose chases. Names change, and inheritance is a jagged form of self-affiliation. Armed with my information age tools I think I have found something unique to my own experience. I did none of the genealogical work, nor did I pay to gain access to its tools--a database of records. Instead, I let my imagination roam with a narrative stitched loosely across scattered details about a past that I never knew. And it could be best that I don't know my past. Those with a past that outshines their present find themselves taken up by the ghost of an ideology. They are set into a centuries old knee-jerk hatred of another ethnicity and engage in the symbolic guerilla warfare to become ontically prior to all other ethnicities. This is a leveling up game done at the nation-state level to have one's identity co-extensive with that of the nation's. It's a rather violent way in which one's ethnic worldview, as piecemeal and arbitrary as it may seem, becomes the one adopted by the coming generations of a nation.
Does a history need to be preserved if it requires this much violence to sustain?
In the game of chutes and ladders, names are chutes that send you back to the barren, theoretical landscape of ursprung identity. I was pleased to find a rather ambiguous past from which sprung one of many possible paths. I could choose to wander any one of them back.
No particular past beyond that garage offers me much purchase. My present is a vague collection of carried out plans and ritual self abuses. My future is a motley constellation of grandiose visions of self-worth and equally depraved avenues of ruin. And when I want to feel free to start over I can wander again, like the Gypsy that I am.
In about 1993 I helped my grandfather arrange his tools and clean out his garage. There, I found many things that no longer existed in the 1990s. I spotted a cardboard tube with DDT powder for one's roses. I came across a crank-operated drill press that preceded its electric powered counterpart. My grandfather had painted in black in haste to protect it from the elements. In the rafters were seemingly endless stacks of "Popular Mechanics," mouse eaten, water damaged, and moldy. An old fishing pole and tackle box hung above a peg board containing various screw drivers, hand planes, and other common tools.
A motif to my grandfather's collection was collecting itself. I spotted countless Pringles cans carefully arranged on their sides above me. He kept these for storage. The same goes for all the Old Milwaukee steel cans. Each had its top removed to facilitate its use in holding wood stain and other such liquids that my grandfather used on a regular basis. In addition, he had numerous King Edward cigar boxes, each stacked neatly on a shelf with a label indicating what lay inside. He was a prolific cigar smoker and cigar chewer well into the 1990s when he abruptly quit after his doctor gave him a grave prediction if he kept smoking. He collected many tools, lots of half-finished projects, and scraps of choice wood. Each had a story that he was quick to share with me.
He once was the proprietor of a store; the building still stands across the street from his house. When he closed shop in the 1970s a lot of the left over merchandise ended up in the garage. In one drawer he saved a U.S. history pamphlet that a popular brand used as a seasonal promotion of its bread buns. Another drawer contained a slide rule, which he handed me to use, as if he considered me some kind of math wizard. Like others, he held a common misconception of intelligence as being automatically good at math. Fat chance. Or shall I say obtuse?
Like me, and like many of us, my grandfather attached many memories to the items that filled his garage. And it became a burden to curate all these memory objects, so he paid for my help in arranging things. In the process he shared many memories in story form as if each thing in that garage, no matter how dusty and forgotten still had significance. As tools many had lost their usefulness through the ravages of time and neglect. Projects like this were always fun to me. We shared a similar interest in moments from our past. We managed an array of objects that offered us access to that past. When he enlisted me to help clean out the garage, he invited me on an odyssey of recollection through objects in disarray. The story telling that followed each discovery was a way to put order to this material universe in the garage and to dust off the narrative universe that belched out in sometimes slurred words from beneath my grandfather's well-kept mustache.
Our first task was to dig through the unlabeled cigar boxes to find what lay inside. In one cigar box he had his picture ID from the 1970s. He looked much younger than he did that day. He had his tell-tale mustache, bibs, striped shirt, and a dark blue hat. Also inside I found a stack of small cards, political advertisements my grandfather had printed to support his run for ward alderman. At this time, Collinsville had an aldermanic system. My grandfather was the most famous man in Morris Heights, a small neighborhood perched on the bluff, overlooking the flood plain to the Mississippi. At the end of his street the neighbors could take in the Saint Louis skyline and watch the July 4 fireworks display.
As we dug through toward the back end of the garage I spotted a lot of large items. One item in particular was a very old jukebox. Next to it were various wooden projects, which turned out to be seasonal items, Christmas decorations. Among these was a piece of wood upon which were some large colored bulbs arranged in the iconic Star of David pattern. He told me that he wanted to put a star on the house one Christmas, and that this star was the easiest for him to design.
And that's the story I believe. He was a first generation American. He was a practical handyman. This decoration was probably from the late 1940s to mid-1950s when one thinks that people were less sensitive to the minute details of one's Christmas decorations. In this era and in this small town everything was DIY. Any string of colored lights would do, even if the leg of the cross was a bit shorter than its head. And afterall, my grandfather donated his money and his labor to create the Saint Stephen's Catholic Parish on a parcel of farm land in the town down the road. The priests were no strangers to coming over for drinks, handmade pizza, and poker after Mass at my grandparents' house. They were quite active in the Catholic Church until the end of their lives. My grandfather married into a large and materially successful Italian family. Anyone with a modicum of DIY and business sense could get ahead back then, and my grandmother and her sisters were riding a wave of largesse that their father's business sense afforded for them back in Abingdon, Illinois.
My grandfather did convert to Catholicism. His grandfather was a follower of the Orthodox Church who upon immigrating to a small mining town in northern Illinois remained stubborn in his ways when he found no congregation nor church where he could practice his faith. For my grandfather Catholicism was the 'next best option.' He married an Italian-American woman, and so his religious affiliation only grew with her and her sisters, their husbands, their kids, their jobs, their fish fries, the beer, and all of their collective culinary acumen.
One evening after cutting the grass my grandfather decided to chat with me about the family name. There, over a fish plate and some flavored drink, he told me that several generations back his ancestors had to change their name. According to the story he told, the village had 'too many Yasheko's.' And so his ancestors changed their name to 'Lesko.'
At the time I accepted this story at face value. Watching an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation I learned that Worf's adopted parents were Slovak like my grandfather's biological ones. The writers and producers of this show used their understanding of Slovak culture to portray that the Klingon heritage of Worf and his Slovak parents were amenable. The original series modeled the Klingons after Cold War Soviet culture. To place Worf in an adoptive home of Slovaks appeared sensible to the writers and producers. The germ of an idea grew that perhaps my grandfather's story reflected the stubborn, pride-filled constitution that remained part of his family. Then I decided that the name was probably made up, perhaps on Ellis Island when my great-grandfather entered the United States. I ran with that one on a hunch, and a rather pedestrian observation of Slovak culture acquired through Star Trek's depiction of Worf's adoptive parents. I was young then.
Many years later I quit my job. This was a few years back. Shortly thereafter, the economy quit me. My future took on something rather bleak, and I took to sipping beers and reading web pages. In the absence of my elder family, Google became a way to imagine a past through search. It was my adventuring companion. Through it, I could find answers and flesh out a story about a past I never knew nor ever really mattered. When you grow up within three miles of a highway on-ramp you find yourself bled of any cultural heritage as you absorb brand standardization and efficiency dining. That variation on the melting pot reduced the zealous pride of culture to a menu item or brand loyalty. In spite of all this commercialization and its effect on consciousness and identity I still had questions.
A name sticks with you for life. Its sounds are familiar; they call upon you in a crowded room. You learn each word first intimately, then you reproduce them mechanically for life. But a name can be alienating when you see it listed among a bunch of strangers who share the same as yours. When you do search for your name you mistake finding it for finding, perhaps, a long-lost doubloon. When I plugged my name into search, a world of meaning came rushing in. Maybe it was the beer or the suggestiveness of a hangover.
I learned that "Lesko" is the name of a town in Poland, which is highlighted on Jewish heritage tours for its centuries-old synagogue. I also discovered this pop singer from Romania, who shares my last name but none of my obscurity. I learned about a tribe of 'Leskos' that aligned themselves with Russia at some point in that region's premodern history. I spotted a Youtube video under my name, where a group of what look to be Eastern European soccer hooligans are yukking up and singing some boast replete with taking sides and ramming your body into the other side. The last one held open for me perhaps one morsel of understanding. My name had to do with place, perhaps.
What is in a name? I began to consider that perhaps this name meant very little here, among the experimental soybeans and TV-tray sitcoms. And elsewhere it could be simply a very basic unit of Slavic nomenclature. The suffix '-esko' is one of the more common naming conventions in that part of the world. But what of this other word, "Yashesko?"
That word took me one specific place: the Romanian Wikipedia page for a city East of the Carpathians, called Yash. Perhaps, '-esko' was a way in the past to assign people last names that tied them to a place. Could my ancestors be from Yash? What of Lesko then? Maybe this is the name reserved for those who have no place? But a town in Poland has that very name. "Yashesko pogromo" were the words I spotted on the Romanian Wikipedia page. Pogroms are visited upon outsider groups, ethnicities not native or alien to a community with an already self-described insider group. Pogroms often befall two groups in Europe: the Jews and the Gypsies or Roma.
Then I remembered something from my Aunt's own exploration of her heritage. She took a Bible that was the property of her grandmother, my Grandfather's mother, to a Slavic studies and languages expert. Upon a cursory glance he determined that the Bible was one common among the Gypsies of Slavic lands. This was my best and only lead in a long-odyssey to understand something about my heritage through a family name.
These kinds of journeys tend to be wild goose chases. Names change, and inheritance is a jagged form of self-affiliation. Armed with my information age tools I think I have found something unique to my own experience. I did none of the genealogical work, nor did I pay to gain access to its tools--a database of records. Instead, I let my imagination roam with a narrative stitched loosely across scattered details about a past that I never knew. And it could be best that I don't know my past. Those with a past that outshines their present find themselves taken up by the ghost of an ideology. They are set into a centuries old knee-jerk hatred of another ethnicity and engage in the symbolic guerilla warfare to become ontically prior to all other ethnicities. This is a leveling up game done at the nation-state level to have one's identity co-extensive with that of the nation's. It's a rather violent way in which one's ethnic worldview, as piecemeal and arbitrary as it may seem, becomes the one adopted by the coming generations of a nation.
Does a history need to be preserved if it requires this much violence to sustain?
In the game of chutes and ladders, names are chutes that send you back to the barren, theoretical landscape of ursprung identity. I was pleased to find a rather ambiguous past from which sprung one of many possible paths. I could choose to wander any one of them back.
No particular past beyond that garage offers me much purchase. My present is a vague collection of carried out plans and ritual self abuses. My future is a motley constellation of grandiose visions of self-worth and equally depraved avenues of ruin. And when I want to feel free to start over I can wander again, like the Gypsy that I am.
appealing copyright claims to the robo-lawyer
In a filing that could only go under "things that Lawrence Lessig wrote about 12 years ago" I'm caught in a legal battle over the copyright claims to media content that I posted, inadvertently to a Youtube page that I try to curate.
Twenty-six years ago I was in the fourth grade. My fourth grade teacher at that time decided that, as a class, we would produce a video that mimicked a channel. We came up with original commercials, produced a music video, and read the news as if our audience were our school community. To give the channel some verity, my fourth grade teacher decided to take currently existing commercials and commercial content and edited our video so that this material and ours was interspersed throughout the program. The final product was a contemporaneous media production that held together well as a channel because it had all the trappings of one.
The 30-minute production translated into a video file that clocked in at just under a gigabyte to be posted to my Youtube channel. This was a time consuming process not only to upload but for Youtube to scan, meticulously, for copyright violations. This took hours to complete and I was greeting with a list of 'potential copyright violations.'
Our mediated lives are crawled over by so many bots that represent so many intents all of which find parity under 'data collecting activities.' Perhaps my legalese is too weighed down by the jargon of the critical-cultural athlete that I once thought I was. Perhaps this bot will simply parse my appeal for the proper keywords in the proper order to satisfy the judgment algorithm. If anyone reads it I want it to be those bots that come here, parsing my words into "targets for search."
Twenty-six years ago I was in the fourth grade. My fourth grade teacher at that time decided that, as a class, we would produce a video that mimicked a channel. We came up with original commercials, produced a music video, and read the news as if our audience were our school community. To give the channel some verity, my fourth grade teacher decided to take currently existing commercials and commercial content and edited our video so that this material and ours was interspersed throughout the program. The final product was a contemporaneous media production that held together well as a channel because it had all the trappings of one.
The 30-minute production translated into a video file that clocked in at just under a gigabyte to be posted to my Youtube channel. This was a time consuming process not only to upload but for Youtube to scan, meticulously, for copyright violations. This took hours to complete and I was greeting with a list of 'potential copyright violations.'
Our mediated lives are crawled over by so many bots that represent so many intents all of which find parity under 'data collecting activities.' Perhaps my legalese is too weighed down by the jargon of the critical-cultural athlete that I once thought I was. Perhaps this bot will simply parse my appeal for the proper keywords in the proper order to satisfy the judgment algorithm. If anyone reads it I want it to be those bots that come here, parsing my words into "targets for search."
Jefferson School Production (1987)
Claims to dispute
NBC UniversalReason for dispute
This video uses copyrighted material in a manner that does not require approval of the copyright holder. It is a fair use under copyright law.
Explanation:These segments were put by my fourth grade teacher into the video to add contemporary flavor to the production. As a class, we decided upon the music video by way of a vote, and produced a music video to the original song. Music videos were in vogue during the 1980s, and we were participating, culturally and creatively, with the times. Likewise, the commercial content included within this production serves to 'bookend' the parts that we produced and to give the whole production a contemporary 'place' within the 1987 media landscape. Our video production was meant to be situated on a channel available on a contemporary television set. Mr. J. was quite masterful in producing the proper mise en scene for our rather simple but fun televisual creations. Both music videos, the Bangles, and Spielberg's Amazing Stories were popular at this time. Likewise, the local commercials that were sprinkled throughout this production and the ones that we made reflected those available at the time. In fact, our imaginations directly represented what media were available. Our intent was to engage in classroom creativity, engagement with video production, and education. In this manner, our applications of this copyrighted material falls within the realm of fair use. It was produced 26 years ago and distributed to a limited audience for the sake of giving each of us a share of authorship and participation in a media production rare for its time and our location in the country. I share it now as a means of preservation and for others to view.
I have a good faith belief that the claim(s) described above have been made in error, and that I have the right(s) necessary to use the contents of my video for the reasons I have stated. I have not knowingly made any false statements, nor am I intentionally abusing this dispute process in order to interfere with the rights of others. I understand that filing fraudulent disputes may result in termination of my YouTube account.SignatureJason Lesko
treating opinion as fact
A recent poll reveals that a simple majority of Americans (polled) approve of the wiretapping and other such NSA snoop operations occurring sub rosa throughout the nation's communications infrastructure.
A simple majority do not mind that their lives are compiled as so much data to be sliced, stacked, profiled, meta-analyzed, context situated in a network of contacts, activities, and topics, and saved long after you've forgotten the why behind your words and the whom to which you addressed them.
Polls such as this fall prey to a phenomenon perhaps more common in our i-stuff society--reflexivity. Being this connected, this present, this now, this active in our data collection, transmission, and remediation activities we are a creature of the media's now, that is, to an extent. And to the extent that we go about our lives hearing that one mantra echo through the sundry media we consume--"you're safer now"--then we will accept it.
But this kind of reflexivity, the kind, which feeds back a product--in this case, an idea, which was put into circulation by well-placed individuals is the stuff that memes are made of--"I'm just sayin'."
I know, "TMI." And "nice story bro."
That product, the well circulated bit coin, the meme, the indivisible unit of meaning that make up our loose constellation of media consumption activities that passes as a life lived these days is one that, itself, reflects the motif of reflexivity. Yes, we can judge its effectiveness as a mode of influence by witnessing it being used, to varying effect, as a method of raising an eyebrow, framing a discussion, digesting an artifact, adding meaning to a veritable shotgun spray of virtual and ambiguous digital stimuli.
Yes, in an economy of the sign whose veritable currency is reflexivity, both the motive behind the thing and the thing itself become indivisible. Thus, the state of a person's awareness at the time that a poll is taken becomes indivisible from the machinations behind the circulating information that influenced it. No, opinion is simply a transient condition of our information-aware, networked existence. We're simply the wetware on the end of a vast network of information distribution. Our opinion is simply the nodule, the outgrowth of a symbolic seed planted somewhere along this network, that accumulated in the wetware of enough individuals networked in such a way as to make an idea cohere, last longer than the Internet instant, and become solid enough to be passed off by the those constantly distracted in an i-shuffle as common sense.
As I've noted elsewhere, when one develops the tools for analyzing behavior by framing all cognition as the choices made in a card game, then uses those tools to answer broader questions about human behavior, and then gets picked by a betting agency to win the Nobel Prize we've jumped the shark in our current charmed loop with the technology, where the stuff we feed in becomes indistinguishable from the stuff we get back. Prediction is the orchestration of a prediction market whereby cost-benefit choices--gambling--bear out the best possible future event. In other words, putting enough money awareness on an issue, in effect, conjures the issue with the most money riding on it into existence. The extent that the money riding on this issue conjures it is where I find reflexivity operating.
In that prediction market, and in our post modern cultural pastiche of i-participation in culture-as-data management we find a flavor of reflexivity existing. At best it reduces us to gaming logic, the outcome of numerous individual cost-benefit analyses bearing out in the mass effect of a market trend. At worst it makes us an invention of our very inventions, a response coordinating the virtual machine of information-consumption choices, finger taps, and coordinated finger swipes and swirls that makes up our information-awareness environment. Confronted by a carefully arranged wall of decisions and primed by an interfaced design to satisfy a performative criterion for transmuting symbol into action our moves are the coordinated outcome of well-managed meaning.
Like many other phenomena we see. As long as the majority of us continue to act as if nothing is amiss. As long as we tell ourselves and are told that nothing is amiss. We will continue to, in spite of whatever historical or cultural heritage might tell us to the contrary, see nothing amiss. And few of us are moved by this vast machinery because few of us are on the upstream end of anything. The vast majority save their upstream effort for 'lol' and some variation upon 'I disagree.' Instead we react to the bombardment of stimuli ranging from angry birds to be launched, user-submitted nudes to ogle, gold to collect, and time to kill.
As long as we continue to keep our ears plugged with our favorite song, our eyes covered by the distracted gaze into our i-screens, and trade our mouths in for that ballet of finger swirl and finger tap on our i-thing we will continue to hear, see, and speak no evil let alone become aware of what is happening. In this world of reflexivity, we will instead feed back into interface, registered as so many electronic pulses, back into that meticulously managed data-management experience that poaches more of our awareness and our bodily posturing. In this reflexive world, we've long since conceded that our data-management techniques, like those of the telephone switchboard operator a few generations prior, reflect our self-aware decision making. Seen from within its own horizons the operator does live up to its namesake. What better judge of one's ability than to react fast and effectively to a thousand buzzing bells and routing the plugs in all the correct holes at an efficient clip? The outsider notices that all operation made by the operator were, in fact, motivated by the calls coming in, and so this operator, like the i-operator, is merely engaged in an activity set into motion by the thing itself.
After all, what is a choice but what is given. And ours is a world of carefully orchestrated affordances for action, which are programmed in to the i-things that we i-manage through our i-interfaces to create the i-stuff of our i-existence. Taken at face-value this is a reality even if it's a carefully managed network of decisions that serves to cage us.
#coolstorybro
A simple majority do not mind that their lives are compiled as so much data to be sliced, stacked, profiled, meta-analyzed, context situated in a network of contacts, activities, and topics, and saved long after you've forgotten the why behind your words and the whom to which you addressed them.
Polls such as this fall prey to a phenomenon perhaps more common in our i-stuff society--reflexivity. Being this connected, this present, this now, this active in our data collection, transmission, and remediation activities we are a creature of the media's now, that is, to an extent. And to the extent that we go about our lives hearing that one mantra echo through the sundry media we consume--"you're safer now"--then we will accept it.
But this kind of reflexivity, the kind, which feeds back a product--in this case, an idea, which was put into circulation by well-placed individuals is the stuff that memes are made of--"I'm just sayin'."
I know, "TMI." And "nice story bro."
That product, the well circulated bit coin, the meme, the indivisible unit of meaning that make up our loose constellation of media consumption activities that passes as a life lived these days is one that, itself, reflects the motif of reflexivity. Yes, we can judge its effectiveness as a mode of influence by witnessing it being used, to varying effect, as a method of raising an eyebrow, framing a discussion, digesting an artifact, adding meaning to a veritable shotgun spray of virtual and ambiguous digital stimuli.
Yes, in an economy of the sign whose veritable currency is reflexivity, both the motive behind the thing and the thing itself become indivisible. Thus, the state of a person's awareness at the time that a poll is taken becomes indivisible from the machinations behind the circulating information that influenced it. No, opinion is simply a transient condition of our information-aware, networked existence. We're simply the wetware on the end of a vast network of information distribution. Our opinion is simply the nodule, the outgrowth of a symbolic seed planted somewhere along this network, that accumulated in the wetware of enough individuals networked in such a way as to make an idea cohere, last longer than the Internet instant, and become solid enough to be passed off by the those constantly distracted in an i-shuffle as common sense.
As I've noted elsewhere, when one develops the tools for analyzing behavior by framing all cognition as the choices made in a card game, then uses those tools to answer broader questions about human behavior, and then gets picked by a betting agency to win the Nobel Prize we've jumped the shark in our current charmed loop with the technology, where the stuff we feed in becomes indistinguishable from the stuff we get back. Prediction is the orchestration of a prediction market whereby cost-benefit choices--gambling--bear out the best possible future event. In other words, putting enough money awareness on an issue, in effect, conjures the issue with the most money riding on it into existence. The extent that the money riding on this issue conjures it is where I find reflexivity operating.
In that prediction market, and in our post modern cultural pastiche of i-participation in culture-as-data management we find a flavor of reflexivity existing. At best it reduces us to gaming logic, the outcome of numerous individual cost-benefit analyses bearing out in the mass effect of a market trend. At worst it makes us an invention of our very inventions, a response coordinating the virtual machine of information-consumption choices, finger taps, and coordinated finger swipes and swirls that makes up our information-awareness environment. Confronted by a carefully arranged wall of decisions and primed by an interfaced design to satisfy a performative criterion for transmuting symbol into action our moves are the coordinated outcome of well-managed meaning.
Like many other phenomena we see. As long as the majority of us continue to act as if nothing is amiss. As long as we tell ourselves and are told that nothing is amiss. We will continue to, in spite of whatever historical or cultural heritage might tell us to the contrary, see nothing amiss. And few of us are moved by this vast machinery because few of us are on the upstream end of anything. The vast majority save their upstream effort for 'lol' and some variation upon 'I disagree.' Instead we react to the bombardment of stimuli ranging from angry birds to be launched, user-submitted nudes to ogle, gold to collect, and time to kill.
As long as we continue to keep our ears plugged with our favorite song, our eyes covered by the distracted gaze into our i-screens, and trade our mouths in for that ballet of finger swirl and finger tap on our i-thing we will continue to hear, see, and speak no evil let alone become aware of what is happening. In this world of reflexivity, we will instead feed back into interface, registered as so many electronic pulses, back into that meticulously managed data-management experience that poaches more of our awareness and our bodily posturing. In this reflexive world, we've long since conceded that our data-management techniques, like those of the telephone switchboard operator a few generations prior, reflect our self-aware decision making. Seen from within its own horizons the operator does live up to its namesake. What better judge of one's ability than to react fast and effectively to a thousand buzzing bells and routing the plugs in all the correct holes at an efficient clip? The outsider notices that all operation made by the operator were, in fact, motivated by the calls coming in, and so this operator, like the i-operator, is merely engaged in an activity set into motion by the thing itself.
After all, what is a choice but what is given. And ours is a world of carefully orchestrated affordances for action, which are programmed in to the i-things that we i-manage through our i-interfaces to create the i-stuff of our i-existence. Taken at face-value this is a reality even if it's a carefully managed network of decisions that serves to cage us.
#coolstorybro
Thursday, May 30, 2013
remote-control
On September 11, 2001 planes "kamikaze" attack buildings in the United States. The offical narrative frames this as terrorism and calls it an act of war.
The U.S. military and CIA reciprocate the gesture by waging war through the use of remote-controlled planes.
Ours is a world of remote control.
We wage a war on terror as a war on ideas. Terrorism simply needs to be a webpage or a speech by a radical cleric, which inspires someone to take the life of a non-believer. In this way, terrorism forces its views upon U.S. soil by influencing those who perpetrate terrorism, remotely.
Remote Control.
Likewise, terrorism grows out of a sense of Islamic identity, tribal identity, racial or ethnic identity, that is contradictory to that of the West. Fundamentalist Islam is a ward against Pepsi, Coke, and loose morals. All of this happens as Hollywood and Coke headquarters find new ways and new markets for their products, They dump these products onto a population in central Asia to influence their consumption without ever setting foot there.
Remote Control.
I am reminded of Arnold Toynbee's description of civilization as emanating from a center, populated by a creative few. Their creativity radiates out, gets adopted, and expands a civilization on the choices, identities, and commitment to enact it by the internal and external proletariat. When these groups no longer find legitimacy in the cultural accoutrements of this civilization it ceases to exist. Civilization's scope in space and in time is a measure of its influence and its control over its own dissemination. Civilization holds a high bar of influence, like that of the fundamental tool of humankind, language. And that high bar is the influence that persists both in space and in time after the speech has ended and its creator has died.
The idea lives on, remotely.
Remote.
Control.
Control.
Remote.
God Bless America
The U.S. military and CIA reciprocate the gesture by waging war through the use of remote-controlled planes.
Ours is a world of remote control.
We wage a war on terror as a war on ideas. Terrorism simply needs to be a webpage or a speech by a radical cleric, which inspires someone to take the life of a non-believer. In this way, terrorism forces its views upon U.S. soil by influencing those who perpetrate terrorism, remotely.
Remote Control.
Likewise, terrorism grows out of a sense of Islamic identity, tribal identity, racial or ethnic identity, that is contradictory to that of the West. Fundamentalist Islam is a ward against Pepsi, Coke, and loose morals. All of this happens as Hollywood and Coke headquarters find new ways and new markets for their products, They dump these products onto a population in central Asia to influence their consumption without ever setting foot there.
Remote Control.
I am reminded of Arnold Toynbee's description of civilization as emanating from a center, populated by a creative few. Their creativity radiates out, gets adopted, and expands a civilization on the choices, identities, and commitment to enact it by the internal and external proletariat. When these groups no longer find legitimacy in the cultural accoutrements of this civilization it ceases to exist. Civilization's scope in space and in time is a measure of its influence and its control over its own dissemination. Civilization holds a high bar of influence, like that of the fundamental tool of humankind, language. And that high bar is the influence that persists both in space and in time after the speech has ended and its creator has died.
The idea lives on, remotely.
Remote.
Control.
Control.
Remote.
God Bless America
Monday, May 27, 2013
identity work
Everywhere I see identity work.
As I drive people slap bumper stickers on their cars, which proclaim what they are or what they love. Most of these loves are rather trite affectations such as "I love skiing" or "I love New York." And while I cannot deny that the person slapping this bumper sticker on his or her car actually feels this way I always must return to the big question.
"What is love?"
What is any emotional state for that matter? I have heard this elsewhere and I believe it myself. The majority of our childhood is spent being taught how to understand and act to specific stimuli. Central to this teaching is being furnished the words for what it is we are feeling. I cannot help but thinking that my nieces are learning how to be sad or depressed simply to feed a certain response mechanism set in place by their parents and grandparents. It's a very strange set of affairs that a somewhat pathological behavior would get molded into an acceptable condition such as being tired or feeling sick in order to give that pathological behavior a somewhat more acceptable window dressing.
These statements of one's feelings and their cliched plastering on car rear ends provides an effective introduction to the work we all do to connect with something other than us, be it a process, a group, a belief, or a companion human or otherwise.
For me love is a violent and sometimes possessive statement of affect. This is because love has become a sink for so many institutions that desire conditions for human bondage, and thus they tack phrases onto affirmations of love such as "in sickness and in health" and "til death do you part." These steep a romantic relationship into absolutist talk. And while the pictures are being processed and placed into a memorable portfolio other institutions are busy placing incentives upon the married couple to go into debt together because together they can get a better percentage than they otherwise could.
It sounds to me like companies are finding ways to insinuate themselves into loving relationships through financial transactions and contractual obligations. They do this knowing that they can position the responsibility to pay on time to make it equate the responsibility to one's spouse or lover.
Clever ruse.
Marriage is one of many relationships that are central to the identity work that most humans engage in and find rewarding. Identities are faces and feelings plastered onto any number of things. Identities are names, iconography, slogans, mission statements, invested with an emotional connection to bond individuals to larger entities. Identities are ready-made lifestyle choices replete with numerous consumer choices to accessorize and mobilize the lifestyle into representative activities. Buying cars, boats, bikes, sporting equipment, building muscles, tattooing skin are all identity choices. In modern societies they are a veritable connective tissue, the integument tethering people to objects, ideas, behaviors, and future-placed commitments. Identities are a form of control and manipulation because they are access points to the psyche and soul of each individual. Identities mediate experience of self, other, and world. In the pop neuroscience argot identities are a constellation of neural networks that are self-supportive and, importantly, are pleasure producing. We satisfy identity work through self-improvement via diet, exercise, surgery or some combination of these. Identity work is central to cosmetic neuropharmacology whereby 'patients' con their psychiatrists into prescribing them a performance enhancing brain drug.
Identities are the consumer gloss of citizenship. People pick pre-arranged political sides, passionately support abstract causes, and burp sound bytes that have long-lost any true personal meaning but instead short circuit any critical thinking about the issue they gloss. In some glassy building groups of experts in psychology, marketing, and human behavior use a powerful set of tools to generate new identities every day. These identities are the stuff of social control, feeding human behavior into a cycle of work all day, spend on 'free' time, stay up all night, and drug to maintain. Identity work is performed at its most ostentatious during leisure activity, but it's performed all of our lives.
A babe is born and is often assigned a color based upon its gender. This baby is given gender-specific toys and addressed, consciously or not, in sex-specific ways. All of these support the healthy and arbitrary development of the addressee, which takes up residence between the ears of the baby. And this addressee begins to adopt the language in media res as one that is already overwhelmingly invested with significance, history, and a sense of duty to it. So this adult-in-training goes about languaging into a world presupposed by languaging. "What and why" are often heard, and the issue settles into the child's adolescence by the circular argument's coda, "because." End of story.
This adult goes about its manufactured life, mistaking its manufactured identity for one that it made itself. Sooner or later, through designs built into the program of society, whether by accident or by fateful choice, lifestyle, or duty, the identity that was made over the course of its life dies. And then this life gets placed into a box, dressed in clothing acceptable to its audience, and is remembered one last time before it is interred into the soil. There the identity slowly degrades into the sundry elements that make up the bulk of our universe: hydrogen, nitrogen, carbon, and so on. And the little worms with no identity go about their "lumbrical" labor passing this once meaningful entity through their lengthy tube-like bodies.
And so in the end, identity work is an overcompensation for a more base understanding that all life--owing to the chances of evolution and the substrate of physical reality--is merely tubes. Except in our case our tube is bi-directional. Into it goes all the food and out of it come all the waste, but the one exception is that we also belch out the ideologies by which we live out our tube-lives without ever realizing it as such.
Identity work is such a chore, but its dark horizon is shaped by something the symbolism underlying identity work presupposes--the identity of no thing.
And we all 'wanna' be somebody.
As I drive people slap bumper stickers on their cars, which proclaim what they are or what they love. Most of these loves are rather trite affectations such as "I love skiing" or "I love New York." And while I cannot deny that the person slapping this bumper sticker on his or her car actually feels this way I always must return to the big question.
"What is love?"
What is any emotional state for that matter? I have heard this elsewhere and I believe it myself. The majority of our childhood is spent being taught how to understand and act to specific stimuli. Central to this teaching is being furnished the words for what it is we are feeling. I cannot help but thinking that my nieces are learning how to be sad or depressed simply to feed a certain response mechanism set in place by their parents and grandparents. It's a very strange set of affairs that a somewhat pathological behavior would get molded into an acceptable condition such as being tired or feeling sick in order to give that pathological behavior a somewhat more acceptable window dressing.
These statements of one's feelings and their cliched plastering on car rear ends provides an effective introduction to the work we all do to connect with something other than us, be it a process, a group, a belief, or a companion human or otherwise.
For me love is a violent and sometimes possessive statement of affect. This is because love has become a sink for so many institutions that desire conditions for human bondage, and thus they tack phrases onto affirmations of love such as "in sickness and in health" and "til death do you part." These steep a romantic relationship into absolutist talk. And while the pictures are being processed and placed into a memorable portfolio other institutions are busy placing incentives upon the married couple to go into debt together because together they can get a better percentage than they otherwise could.
It sounds to me like companies are finding ways to insinuate themselves into loving relationships through financial transactions and contractual obligations. They do this knowing that they can position the responsibility to pay on time to make it equate the responsibility to one's spouse or lover.
Clever ruse.
Marriage is one of many relationships that are central to the identity work that most humans engage in and find rewarding. Identities are faces and feelings plastered onto any number of things. Identities are names, iconography, slogans, mission statements, invested with an emotional connection to bond individuals to larger entities. Identities are ready-made lifestyle choices replete with numerous consumer choices to accessorize and mobilize the lifestyle into representative activities. Buying cars, boats, bikes, sporting equipment, building muscles, tattooing skin are all identity choices. In modern societies they are a veritable connective tissue, the integument tethering people to objects, ideas, behaviors, and future-placed commitments. Identities are a form of control and manipulation because they are access points to the psyche and soul of each individual. Identities mediate experience of self, other, and world. In the pop neuroscience argot identities are a constellation of neural networks that are self-supportive and, importantly, are pleasure producing. We satisfy identity work through self-improvement via diet, exercise, surgery or some combination of these. Identity work is central to cosmetic neuropharmacology whereby 'patients' con their psychiatrists into prescribing them a performance enhancing brain drug.
Identities are the consumer gloss of citizenship. People pick pre-arranged political sides, passionately support abstract causes, and burp sound bytes that have long-lost any true personal meaning but instead short circuit any critical thinking about the issue they gloss. In some glassy building groups of experts in psychology, marketing, and human behavior use a powerful set of tools to generate new identities every day. These identities are the stuff of social control, feeding human behavior into a cycle of work all day, spend on 'free' time, stay up all night, and drug to maintain. Identity work is performed at its most ostentatious during leisure activity, but it's performed all of our lives.
A babe is born and is often assigned a color based upon its gender. This baby is given gender-specific toys and addressed, consciously or not, in sex-specific ways. All of these support the healthy and arbitrary development of the addressee, which takes up residence between the ears of the baby. And this addressee begins to adopt the language in media res as one that is already overwhelmingly invested with significance, history, and a sense of duty to it. So this adult-in-training goes about languaging into a world presupposed by languaging. "What and why" are often heard, and the issue settles into the child's adolescence by the circular argument's coda, "because." End of story.
This adult goes about its manufactured life, mistaking its manufactured identity for one that it made itself. Sooner or later, through designs built into the program of society, whether by accident or by fateful choice, lifestyle, or duty, the identity that was made over the course of its life dies. And then this life gets placed into a box, dressed in clothing acceptable to its audience, and is remembered one last time before it is interred into the soil. There the identity slowly degrades into the sundry elements that make up the bulk of our universe: hydrogen, nitrogen, carbon, and so on. And the little worms with no identity go about their "lumbrical" labor passing this once meaningful entity through their lengthy tube-like bodies.
And so in the end, identity work is an overcompensation for a more base understanding that all life--owing to the chances of evolution and the substrate of physical reality--is merely tubes. Except in our case our tube is bi-directional. Into it goes all the food and out of it come all the waste, but the one exception is that we also belch out the ideologies by which we live out our tube-lives without ever realizing it as such.
Identity work is such a chore, but its dark horizon is shaped by something the symbolism underlying identity work presupposes--the identity of no thing.
And we all 'wanna' be somebody.
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