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.