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