?que haces? - What do you do?

When people ask me what I do for a living, I reply.

"I am a professional eraser."

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.

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.

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."

Jefferson School Production (1987)

Claims to dispute

• "Amazing Stories", audiovisual content administered by:
  

  NBC Universal

Reason 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.

Signature

Jason 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