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.
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