Language

Language is the playhouse of imagination and reality. They provide a conceptual space for thinking.

Morality is a symbolic foundation for action. Morality coordinates the habits of people with regard to matter. Morality influences people's attitudes toward things and events because it influences their meaning through a ritualized observance. Ritualized observance is any recurring behavior. Morality is loosely defined as an axiomatic vocabulary, which is draped upon the world. Key to understanding the power of morality and its cyclical reproduction through time is the method by which it enlists the world as the originating symbol for human motive. One such method is to place observed, common sense reality upon a cosmological framework suggesting an ultimate origin. The cosmological framework works as a tether pole fabricated out of time around which a family of related concepts form and are used to build a story about everything that relates practically to the identity of the person. This is experienced as a terminus in the prosaic matters of everyday life. Out of these varied and disconnected moments a classification scheme gives semblance to occurrences and grants them meaning as typifying moments. And in being typical, these moments get symbolized in language and interact with the symbolic imagination. From this people derive motives and motivation, thus driving their action as ritualized in conception and experience as events in the future perfect tense (i.e., I will have ...). The future perfect tense suggests a reliable sense that something will recur because it happened before. That it happened before may offer some understanding of the cyclical nature of events. It may also point to the actions of memory and imagination whereby individuals craft names for experience and reuse them as similar experiences arise (e.g., birthdays). This continual process of naming and experiencing is what typifies the activity of a self-conscious humanity. It also flavors the experience with what could be called time travel, that is, reliving the past to make sense of the present and to plan the future.

Polygon war, a war with many sides

I've had in mind a quote that suggests that war is a continuation of politics by other means. And by politics I have in mind any source of power normally circulating in groups of people and used asymmetrically by some factions of a group to enforce meaning and shift a course of action to a faction's preferred end.

These are not necessarily new ideas, nor is the notion of 'everyday politics' that much outside the ken of anyone who has spent time with other people and bore witness to or participated in a conflict, no matter how petty, over the meaning of things and how to act upon that meaning.

Let us fast forward a bit from some generic context to a specific context in the near future, which is just beginning to dawn upon us. We see this kind of crisis as it is a consequence of our brand of modernization, which leads to a greater reliance upon technical expertise, centralized control, and a robust infrastructure. Heat, light, water, food, shelter--these are the petri dish basics, which are gussied up into so many lifestyle products offered to everyday consumers at varying prices. But behind all that, having unbroken access to these basics helps to anchor an existence, which contributes to a person's view of one's self.

As we move forward what I am witnessing is a sophistication of this infrastructure for providing people with their petri dish basics. For this reason I will fashion a term 'petristructure' to describe those elements of modernity, which are provided for the sake of sustaining a life. Heat, light, water, food, and shelter are the basics. The sophistication of our society also adds more petristructure, such as transportation and communication technologies to alleviate the problems resulting from a shattered village and family system whereby most any member of a family of working age is doing so, or compelled to do so in order to maintain a comfortable life with some lifestyle amenities to it.

Now war, as we all know, is a method of politics in that groups of people decide for salient reasons to obliterate each other due to a belief in the threat they pose to one group's 'way of life' or to the depletion of resources and so on. But a war in a fully sophisticated modern society need not pick sides or require groups to organize in order to conduct it. No, in the sophisticated modern society the very infrastructure of modernity is used to wage individualized war against individualized consumers suckling upon its stainless steel teat. Cutting power, water, internet, and communications are effective means of punishing and vanquishing individuals who have very little means to interact with others outside of a software environment that is available on a pay-to-use basis. As noted components of our petristructure without power, water, internet, and communications the individual's self-concept is challenged and changed by forced changes in the environment. As the absence of a sustained and secure environment continues the individual's self-concept languishes. Polygon warfare doesn't always require the death of the body but the destruction of that body's will and its means to act meaningfully for itself. And those meaningful actions as they're more closely and pervasively intertwined with the petristructure of modern society almost always consist of economic actions. As we move further we can expect a few more specific cases of this kind of warfare.

As we move deeper into the information society, computing is being used to drive cars. These smart cars can and will kill their drivers or take them to a predefined Auschwitz if an entity powerful enough to access the car's computer overrides its orders. The level of centralization and the cession of agency to computation that drivers of modern automobiles have begun submit provides us with a specific template for a loss of control over one's basic needs for agency. They are sold as 'amenities' that 'free' us from worrying about specific dangers attendant to automobile travel, and basically now they're being used to parallel park for us. By finding a prevalent weakness or insecurity in the driver's habit the manufacturers are finding purchase for selling greater computer-control to the automobile. With the trickiness of the DMCA's language and the expansive definitions of 'intellectual copyright' drivers are beginning to pay a company, not to own, but to lease its services, which have a greater and greater control over the vehicle. The owner is beginning to own more of a legal concept of a car such that while the services it runs are wholly owned by the company that built the car, the owner or driver of the car simply has the material components, which are increasingly useless without the intellectual copyright controlled computing power and software support that allows it to function as a vehicle.

Let us move on to an earlier iteration of the hardware platform, which supports an essential function of daily life, which we buy in order to further purchase access to a communications network, buy data by the lot, and accept the continuous 'improvement' and imminent obsolescence of that platform by continuous software updates. That is what is today's smart phone. We are already at the cusp of the cellular phone with a powerful enough battery to classify it as a bomb. In a near future phone users can be irradiated by a stuxnet-type of virus that causes the phone to produce overly strong radio frequencies that may cauterize neurons and brain tissue or slowly mutate neural DNA, resulting in cancerous tissue. Finally, as battery power becomes powerful enough, that stuxnet-type virus can also trigger a battery overload resulting in its explosion. This will be made worse if the virus triggers this attack while a user has the phone pressed to his or her ear, causing skull and brain damage. These sound more like the old war model from which this polygon war borrows its metaphor. But like the car example above, a component of computing, computer interfaces, artificial intelligence, and the behavior-shaping reward structures that define much of how we participate in computing today is there with the smart phone. Therefore, any number of very subtle attacks can lead to a person thinking that he or she has 'complete' internet access while still being systematically left out of communication or adequate information retrieval. What is unfettered access to a collection of information that dwarfs the capacity to comprehend it? Few can provide an adequate answer to that. But we do rely upon our favored search engines and the algorithms that shape our social networking experience. Millions of computations shape how our online experience evolves. As that is controlled for specific ends that are inimical to the individual the result will be anomie and a systematically distorted view of the world.

This final scenario has already come to pass in our contemporary world. People can and do go to self-defined ghettos with makeshift perimeters cobbled out of programmable algorithms that administer to our 'tastes.' People can and do enter social worlds completely abstracted from any real living situation where they can and do discuss, in a rarified context, 'items of great import.' In doing so, they associate with people without any moderating influences of different opinion and so act without the attendant need to at least practice decorum. As a result the influences of group polarization take a person who was once a gun owner into now becoming a gun zealot who stockpiles guns and survival supplies. Another confessed vegetarian and member of the animal rights community finds that fluoridation of the water supply makes people more psychologically malleable and so this person buys an expensive and completely hokey water purification system and after it breaks down, subscribes to a water delivery service, going so far as to water this person's garden with that water when needed.

Warfare like this, as with its classical form carries a heavy psychological component. Classical warfare needed a strong form of identification through clan, village, and eventually citizenship structures in order to make the desire for defense strong in the individual soldier. Warfare outcomes like defeats and victories move beyond mere quantities of loss and destruction. The will of each side must be strong enough in order for it to continue, and that will is a measure of one's psychological fortitude. In today's warfare some purely cognitive methods are in place in order to achieve a similar form of identification and will, and most of these are purchased literally as a result of consumer choices. Gun owners go to war, for now metaphorically, with gun safety or gun control advocates. Christians go to war with aspects of our 'godless society.' Carefully edited videos add substance to an already keyed up Christian phantasm of a baby holocaust happening in their midst. Media portrayals amplify the threat of teenage Muslim men joining a cause that reinvigorates their sense of belonging and purpose in a society that has modernized them into various forms of inequity and unemployment. An anti-terrorism behemoth profits from immediately labeling anyone using the words 'ISIS' in social media as a threat to a 'way of life.' These purely cognitive modes of warfare happen mostly in the minds of the participants, spill out into their consumer choices, and end in explosions perpetrated for or against its participants. This willy-nilly call to arms is a social media and global communications phenomenon, and as long it is idealized in the minds of the 'soldiers' of this war those fires burn oh so bright.

And the one sad entry that breaks from this set is the day when the sky is darkened by armed drones launched from several hundred countries. Each country conspired to launch millions of drones coordinated to strike a mutual target, the White House. Many crash or stray of course. Others are downed. Others simply are duds. But of the hundreds of thousands that still make it within the vicinity all release their weapon upon a target. And when even ten thousand drones strike at once the effect creates a small firestorm at the target site. The first drones test the defenses but the successful ones raise the threat of attack by striking with effective force. The next waves, lightly armed, simply help to deplete the defensive batteries in and around Washington. These waves are staggered to test the readiness and deplete the readiness of military air response. The final waves, consisting of two thirds of the total assault contingent dedicated to this attack, strikes with depleted uranium projectiles that pierce targets and poison the area with radioactivity.

things and spirits

Organization is the transcendent property of substance.

Anecdotes from learned individuals that consider their thoughts as last week's potato tend to submerge or conflate the consciousness to the atoms making up the body housing it.

This is a short sale.

Let us consider that rhyme and rhythm are at their most fundamental form a method for transitory existence, through time, by the physical indent of a symbolic activity. What rhyme does 'physically' to symbolic activity is set up a preceding condition by word and initiate an anticipatory response to expect a homonym in kind. And what that does is bridge two moments in time. Likewise, rhythm provides a sound pattern, which also suggests an anticipatory response if only because the pattern repeats, and that is enough. Repetition is, like our rhyme above, an anticipatory response, which allows us to perform an action of memory in order to transcend moments.

The thing that is life is a monument to time, yes, and to biology, hallelujah, but that thing, that artifact, is also a memory of organization. Brain is a plastic substance, a response, literally, a reflex set into a time-delayed network, a plachinko-effect of input pinballing around a human neural network the sum effect of all that friction of that first input leading to a cognizant reality.

Yes, here is the rub, the symbolic exists apart of humanity. And as we happenstance to touch upon its harmonic frequencies we tap into this deeper intelligence. It is only our self-motivated and reflexive return to these harmonies that we begin to form an existence, a mode of being above and beyond substance. Being is a condition preceding substance. Likewise, intelligence is a property of things for physical reality, or things, rest upon this preceding condition. The relationship of objects and their perception suggests that objects precede their existence as perceived if one is a realist. An idealist may suggest that the properties of objects have a narrative overlay, a subjectivity required as a formality of their perception to the extent that outside of their apprehension by beings capable of observing and classifying them they are to themselves and to other objects basically 'indifferent.' But let us suggest that objects are the substance of the perception in that they furnish the elements of an intelligent consciousness that establishes the basis for perception. There is no intelligence per se, but objective complexities of structure that reflect an age-old interface between, first, sensory cells, then reflexive cells, and finally an organism that comprised them both, which evolved, for many years, bathed in a cellular and sensory environment from which it compiled an effective apparatus for intelligence of that world. It is effective because it promotes survival. The survival of the organism rests upon its requisite complexities for addressing environmental contingencies. The reflex to duck from a loud noise requires an organism in an environment that cultivates that response as a requirement. And so if we are to extrapolate greatly out from there, the cognitive capacity of a human being to manipulate abstract symbols and to essentially make use of time brings us to that early attempt to transcend time through rhythm and rhyme. A brute blankness of substance characterizes both the simpler origins and the overlooked complexity of current organismic existence. Our ability to create and invent powerful artifacts for our advantage reflects an identity that struggles with relevance in relationship to a history and a culture that provides it with symbolic substance. Secondly, it also reflects the physical possibilities of our world and our mental relationship to it. But as we reach a limit of our terrestrial existence the environment that it represents reflects a great deal of the universe but simply not all of it. In order to expand our existence we have to leave earth. It is through novel interactions with new substances that we will expand our consciousness.

Nerf Guns for Girls

When I check my yahoo e-mail I get a listing of ‘searches trending now.’ Updated for the holidays, the list now reflects holiday gift searches that are ‘hot.’ Something is amiss in a world where a gun goes off in a theater and theater-goers think it was part of the movie previews, an employee returns to a holiday luncheon with his girlfriend and kills 14, and a man from Virginia drives all the way to Colorado Springs to take a stand against a fabricated video and narrative painting Planned Parenthood as ‘traffickers in babyparts.’

Then, as I listen to NPR, a very subtle piece of editorializing occurs as the reporter discussing the most recent ‘mass’ shooting noted that the guns used by the attackers are banned under California’s ‘very strict gun laws.’ Much as when Anderson Cooper responded to Bernie Sanders’ opening remarks on his platform by noting that ‘Norway’ has x-million people and the United States has 300 as if to cast false equivalence and an ineffectual stamp upon universal education and healthcare as feasible ideas to pursue in a political arena.

What kind of news is this? I used to complain that for some the ‘daily herald’ is their Facebook feed. Those who stand for the fourth estate merely represent another ‘network’ perhaps less friendly but nonetheless connected to us in so many ways.

And a reality emerges from these webs of significance, no matter how contingent or marginal they might factor into the lives of information consumers, leading those consumers to consume daily feeds of gun violence and to begin searching for ‘nerf guns for girls’ and rarely if ever make the connection.

Four hundred tons of irradiated water wash out to sea from Fukushima per day and what do we worry about? What Donald Trump said.

Maybe we should make America Great Again or maybe we should wake up and stop pretending that America was ever great.

culture jamming is deviating from x,y format

Read and read and read this.

Know that mediated communication is interface design.

The Myth of the Machine: Technics and Human Development Chapter Eight Section Three: The Cult of Kingship

"The institution of kingship, as Henri Frankfort, its brilliant modern interpreter, pointed out, is one of the early innovations to which we can assign an approximate date, place, and agent, fairly closely in Egypt, a little more loosely in Mesopotamia. The historic effort, as recorded on two famous Egyptian palettes, begins at the point where the paleolithic hunting chief, the first among equals, passes over into the powerful king, who takes to his own person all the powers and prerogatives of the community.

"As to the origin of the king's unconditional supremacy and his special technical facilities, there is no room for doubt: it was hunting that cultivated the initiative, the self-confidence, the ruthlessness that kings must exercise to achieve and retain command; and it was the hunter's weapons that backed up his commands, whether rational or irrational, with the ultimate authority of armed force: above all, the readiness to kill.

"The original connection between kingship and hunting has remained visible all through recorded history: from the stelae upon which both Egyptian and Assyrian kings boast of their prowess as lion-hunters, to the preservation of vast hunting forests as the inviolable domains of kings in our own epoch. Benno Landsberger notes that with kings in the Assyrian empire hunting and fighting were virtually interchangeable occupations. The unscrupulous use of the weapons of the hunt to control the political and economic activities of whole communities was one of the effective inventions of kingship. Out of that a whole series of subsidiary mechanical inventions eventually came.

"In the mixture of the paleolithic and neolithic cultures, there was doubtless an interchange of psychological and social aptitudes as well, and up to a point this may have been a common advantage. From the paleolithic hunter the neolithic cultivator may have gained those qualities of imagination that the dull, thrifty, sober round of farming did not awaken. So far no weapons of the hunt, still less weapons of warfare, have been unearthed in the earliest neolithic villages, though they became common enough in the Iron Age; and this lack of weapons may account for the primitive peasant's docility and for his easy surrender and virtual enslavement: for he had neither the tested courage nor the necessary weapons, nor yet the means of mobilizing in large numbers for fighting back.

"But at the same time the punctual, prudent, methodical life of the agricultural community gave the incipient rulers some share in the neolithic habits of persistence and orderly drill, which the hunter's mode of life, with its fitful spurts of energy and uncertain rewards, did not encourage. Both sets of aptitudes were needed for the advance of civilization. Without the assurance of a surplus yield from agriculture, kings could not have built cities, maintained a priesthood, an army, and a bureaucracy--or waged war. That margin was never too large, for in ancient times war was frequently suspended by common consent till the harvests were gathered.

"But sheer force could not by itself have produced the prodigious concentration of human energy, the constructive transformation of the habitat, the massive expressions in art and ceremonial, that actually took place. That demanded the cooperation, or at least the awed submission and passive consent, of the entire community.

"The agency that effected this change, the institution of divine kingship, was the product of a coalition between the tribute-exacting hunting chieftain and the keepers of an important religious shrine. Without that combination, without that sanction, without that luminous elevation, the claims that the new rulers made to unconditional obedience to their king's superior will, could not have been established: it took extra, supernatural authority, derived from a god or a group of gods, to make kingship prevail throughout a large society. Arms and armed men, specialists in homicide, were essential; but force alone was not enough."

...

"Under the protective symbol of his god, housed in a massive temple, the king, who likewise served as high priest, exercised powers that no hunting chief would have dared to claim merely as the leader of his band. By assimilation, the town, once a mere enlargement of the village, became a sacred place, a divine 'transformer,' so to say, where the deadly high-tension currents of godhead were stepped down for human use.

"This fusion of sacred and temporal power released an immense explosion of latent energy, as in a nuclear reaction. At the same time it created a new institutional form, for which there is no evidence in the simple neolithic village or the paleolithic cave: an enclave of power, dominated by an elite who were supported in grandiose style by tribute and taxes forcibly drawn from the community.

"The efficacy of kingship, all through history, rests precisely on this alliance between the hunter's predatory prowess and gift of command, on one hand, and priestly access to astronomical lore and divine guidance. In simpler societies these offices were long represented separately in a war chief and a peace chief. In both cases the magical attributes of kingship were grounded on a special measure of functional efficacy--a readiness by the priesthood's observation of natural phenomena, along with the ability to interpret signs, collect information, and ensure the execution of commands. The power of life and death over the whole community was arrogated by the king, or imputed to him. This mode of ensuring cooperation over a wider area than was ever ordered before contrasts with the petty ways of the farming village, whose ordinary custom is carried on by mutual understanding and consent, guided by custom, not by command."

...

"The earlier chieftains and their followers, well-armed, contemptuous of bodily injury or hardship, dissociated from the laborious routines of cultivators and herdsmen, and disinclined to systematic work, were probably already using these proto-military traits to exercise power and draw tribute, in food or women, from their intimidated, compliant, unarmed village neighbors. The weapon that established this new rule of force was not (pace Childe!) the Bronze Age war chariot, still many years away, but a far more primitive weapon, the mace. Such a club, with a heavy head of stone, which was useful for killing a wounded animal with a single blow on the skull, must have proved equally efficient in doing the same job at close quarters with frightened, weaponless peasants, or with the captured chief and warriors from a rival band, who appear as cowering captives on surviving palettes and stelae. Witness the final act of Marduk's battle with the primeval goddess Tiamat: "With his unsparing mace he crushed her skull."

"Should we be surprised, then, to find that the period of political unification  of the Upper and Lower Nile Valley, which marks the beginnings of kingship in Egypt, coincides with mass graves in which are found an unusual quantity of cracked skulls? The significance of this weapon, particularly the time and place of its appearance, has been curiously overlooked. In the Sixth Millennium of Hacilar, James Mellaart notes, the economy showed a great decline in hunting and an absence of hunting weapons; but significantly the mace and sling survived. Thus it is no accident that the mace, in only a slightly sublimated form, the scepter, has remained the symbol of royal authority and unchallengeable power throughout the ages. When British Parliament is in session, a gigantic specimen lies on the Speaker's table." (pp. 169-172)

The Myth of the Machine: Technics and Human Development Chapter Nine, Section Three: The Monopoly of Power

"What would now be called science was an integral part of the new machine system from the beginning. This orderly knowledge, which was based on cosmic regularities, flourished, as we have seen, with the cult of the sun: star-watching and calendar-making coincided with and supported the institution of kingship, even though no small part of the efforts of the priests and soothsayers was, in addition, devoted to interpreting the meaning of singular events such as the appearance of comets, eclipses of the sun or moon, or erratic natural phenomena such as the flight of birds or the state of sacrificed animal's entrails.

"No king could move safely or effectively without the support of such organized 'higher knowledge,' any more than the Pentagon can move today without consulting its specialized scientists, technical experts, games theorists and computers--a new hierarchy supposedly less fallible than the entrail-diviners, but, to judge by their gross miscalculations, not notably so.

"To be effective, this kind of knowledge, must remain a secret priestly monopoly. If everyone had equal access to the sources of knowledge and to the system of interpretation, no one would believe in their infallibility, since their errors could then not be concealed. Hence the shocked protests of Ipu-wer against the revolutionaries who overthrew the Old Kingdom in Egypt was based on the fact that the "secrets of the temple lay unbared"; that is, they had made 'classified information' public. Secret knowledge is the key to any system of total control. Until printing was invented, the written word remained largely a class monopoly. Today the language of higher mathematics plus computerism has restored both the secrecy and the monopoly, with a consequent resumption of totalitarian control." (p. 199)

Depression rolls down hill

I have in mind two approaches to life. One is a life that exists as a blank canvas to be filled by the owner of that life through conscientious objective setting. The standard view of this is boiled down to the Latin word tabula rasa, meaning 'blank slate.' While socially and psychodynamically 'anemic' this view does have a powerful hold over some political views with regard to self-help and other-help. More importantly, to the thoroughly self-coached individual this term can reflexively motivate someone to achieve potential success.

Another approach to life familiar to people, which grounds different political philosophies of self- and other-help, sees it as a cloud of influences some of which the individual was simply born into. The word that sums up this view is borrowed from the German philosopher Martin Heidegger. That word is dasein, roughly meaning 'being on a trajectory.' Or to put it in more colloquial terms, "you are where you are thrown." While it tends to frame a 'fatalistic' approach to existence, that is not the point of the term. It is originally used to frame a phenomenological approach to existence, which is bracketed by the time contained in an analysis of an individual with dotted lines leading into that individual's past as a means of situating sufficient understanding. Heidegger suggests that personal histories as well as world histories are interwoven with current existence.

Without setting up the full philosophy and politics stick figure playset and engaging in make-believe debates among them I'll simply end this point by saying that behind any one of those views is a person. For the sake of this discussion that person is me and my dogged attempts to both impose and succumb to one or the other views toward life.

Without further ado, let me begin.

I do this occasionally. I look up people. First, it takes me a while to remember their whole name, but alas, that wonderful search engine technology can do so much like the operators of yore to patch you through to the "right party." God bless them little algorithmic Marys and Barbaras.

And search as I do I find.

I had a long conversation with a cognitive psychology PhD back in my salad days of academe in the hallways outside the hovel we called our graduate student offices. The lore indicated that the room once held mummies. I suppose it still does the way I embalm the past. Well, that gal got her PhD and parlayed it into a Denver-area job at a place called Corona. I am sure it secures her adequate living for the Mile-High city. I had a crush on her that was about the size of her two pert breasts. This was an opportunity missed. And it accurately characterizes the kinds of "obviously beneficial" opportunities that I deep six all the time.

I had met this woman after a required course for a Science and Technology Policy Certificate I was pursuing. She was doing the same. After talking to her about my interest in fMRI she pointed me to her boyfriend, who was the one skeptic among a small group of Cognitive Psychology researchers who, along with their professor, comprised the fMRI research group, which held meetings about their research and their findings. Through her I met her boyfriend, got a lowdown on the research process and the technology, and quickly joined their discussions in an ethnographic role, researching researchers.

A Star Trek title comes to mind, "Who Watches the Watchers?"

Well, in the vein of all things meta- I was doing just that, trying in vain to implicate the researcher in the researched by researching the researchers, which boiled down to a 'rhetoric of scientific artifacts' replete with questions about how I could use the very language of their research to interrogate their research conduct and presentation angles. Auto-academic asphyxiation to the last, it was.

Well, that got me nowhere, but I tried for a bit. I much preferred to play games during that time. And this game playing became an expression of my complete and total disinterest in the identity and conduct of a PhD candidate. Instead, I played at becoming a soulless and vacant personage of the PhD candidate going though its motions. That lasted a few years before it fizzled out.

Before I lose track, allow me to present my roommates. Because where I got lost in self-aware bullshittery about identity and its attendant action taking each one of these people, along with the one mentioned above, went through motions, sometime mindfully and sometimes under routine self-enslavement. But hell, behind all my sneering about my own self-aware habits those folks shut that off and made it to a perceivable goal, one that signals progression, maturation, matriculation, adulthood, responsibility, new identity, transcendence. Me? Hell, I'm still that kid who threw his cookie on the ground, wallowing in his own self-pity.

My first two roommates are both tenure-track professors within state university systems, one in Pittsburgh and one in San Francisco.

My third roommate is a tenure track professor at a small, private Catholic university in Iowa. And by her credentials she sticks out from the faculty's mostly MFA cast.

My fourth roommate, while harder to track, worked for the State of California's sexual assault division. He was their communications and public relations director. He was a natural born communicator and sometimes bullshit artist. His greatest strength was his narcissism. With it he was able to earn a Masters Degree without ever taking a GRE in order to get into the program. He was also quick to parlay his mother's Spanish background to claim that he was a Hispanic minority deserving of minority status. But more than anything he was smart with an equally adept interface for presenting that intellect to the public effectively and persuasively. "You can't teach this shit," I tell myself. Some are born into it. They have the proper habits of mind and body, the proper attitudes, and the right drive for the right goals, in the right place at the right time.

My fifth roommate was last seen holding a faculty position at a university in Switzerland. She married a man who was Assistant DA in Boulder during the week and worked Snow Patrol in the mountains on the weekend. He went from his DA position to becoming a CIO of a newly started airline to becoming a JAG officer abroad. She divorced her advertising executive husband from Orange County to get with her second husband who I casually referred to as Peter Etcetera because he looked like that seminal member of that band named for the Windy City. The portmanteau was intended to shed light on my fifth roommate's habit of serially marrying and divorcing alpha males. I was forced to listen to them have sex, and all I could wonder was how this guy could get it up with so much high-powered shit on his plate. Some are born into this I guess. 

My sixth roommate when I was at the University of Colorado, Boulder is Vice President of a Mergers and Acquisitions firm in the Dallas-Forth Worth area. While we're close to the word, I wonder what he's worth? His mom had a hair-dressing salon and used her earnings to put him through elite private Texas schools. Like the character in Rushmore, he too, had written and produced a play at the same school as that character.


Each one of these individuals, to my knowledge, came from very different circumstances, very different backgrounds, and each appears to have achieved a life that, on its face, looks successful. Well, at least they're doing something with the equipment God gave them.

That leaves me. I'd say by many measures, albeit abstract ones, I was destined for great things: academic success, leadership positions, influential work, and a career. I touched their lives. They touched mine. Some stayed in touch. Others disappeared altogether. Here I sit, in a worn out chair, staring at the result of my latest cyber sleuthing to report to you something that is becoming clearer and clearer to me: depression rolls down hill.

That's a metaphorical expression for a mental condition for which I have no clinical diagnosis, but is a fitting description of how I have positioned myself spiritually and psychically for decades now. I'd like to say it all began with my mom and her 'motherly motherfuckers' when I was a kid of about three, following her around the house, incessantly. She hated this. She hated love and attachment. It was perhaps her response to having a mother who wasn't there for her because she was afflicted by a growing brain tumor that left her in dark rooms, suffering from painful migraines. She had a father who was violent, worked a violent job, and secured a violently overinflated pension for killing those trespassing and suspected of thievery along the rail lines that brought raw materials into East Saint Louis and sent finished goods out. He told me once, in a Safeway parking lot somewhere in Arizona where he retired while his second wife was purchasing milk that he'd often kill a man and leave him in the weeds to be found later to save on paperwork. He could have been lying, but on its face, that's how he presented his life to me. He reveled in tails of guns and ammo. The man was one part Bing Crosby and one part 1980s action hero. I recall him arriving from Arizona in about 1985 and laughing all through Commando. The man had a special place in my youthful heart then. That was the man who raised my mother, who fought with my grandmother, and remarried just months after burying her.

I digress.

It all began as I followed my mom down to the basement as I followed her everywhere as a kid. She'd cuss because I was invading her pot-smoking time. And I recall quite vividly a very early moment of self-pity at my mom's malicious attitude toward me following her everywhere. I have a somewhat distinct sense of my actions in light of my mom's response to me following her down that first flight of stairs to the landing out to the back patio before turning 45 degrees to the second landing just three steps from the basement floor. She said very specifically, "You're like a five-o-clock shadow." And I recall thinking to myself that I was being criticized for my action. I was three or four. I don't know how or why I thought this or why I even remember it, but I do. And in that agglomeration of memories of following my mother down the steps to where she sat at a green vinyl high chair near the ironing board and smoked a joint I recall feeling sad for myself. I had an Oreo cookie in hand, and I distinctly dropped it on the ground as an expression of my pity toward myself. In my own dime-store psychoanalysis I had, at this moment, took control of the pain I felt by inflicting it upon myself. And as a three-year-old the only means of doing so was to take a cherished sweet and have it fall out of my hands as if as a cry for help and a cry for pity that ultimately became a self-induced moment of pain.

I recall telling myself that at my graduation where I would receive my doctorate I would tell my family I was going to go to work as a midnight manager of a gas station. I still think about it. That would be a wonderful job, in its own way. I court this kind of filth and sadness. To achieve great measures, by deed, and then to take a job fit for an alcoholic, an imbecile, or an ex-con, to me, is a fitting way to wear the shit of my psychic condition on the outside, to perform a professional suicide. And it would be a very adult articulation of the toddler dropping his cookie. Sad and whiny perhaps, but all too perfect from my premeditated planning to carry them out.

I do recognize a moment in the face of a wire mommy where the (lack of) nurture suggested that, maybe, it's not something I was born into. Then again, genetics and environment tend to cohabit, making the distinction maybe an artificial one altogether. To borrow from the manual on these things, I had, at least, a trigger. But at three? And to be so goddamn self-aware at such a young age to such a selfish and isolated gesture? But let me remind the reader that to this day the simplest of gestures or statements by others regarding me can  'set me off,' not into a rage but into a deep and brooding condition of self-hate.

Here I sit, unread, unwashed, unwatched, unwanted, perfecting the life into which I was led by a pot-smoking mom who would cuss me at three for following her where she smoked her weed. It's a mind game, to have this level of fidelity to a moment of hurt. It's a performance to keep up the ritual of self-abnegation for so long. I had a moment of promise, made my way to the top of the academic pile if only to build up the most momentum on my long, speedy roll back down to the bottom where I am now, unemployed, sometimes working as an Ironworker. And when I can, I remain alone, always alone, hungry and so goddamned sober to the reality, so that I can blame nothing, nothing, but myself, my habits, my attitude, my self-image, my shame, my filth for what I am. While something and someone got the ball rolling for me I took an ephemeral moment of selfish motherhood in the life of my childhood and turned it into a life-long preoccupation with my own self-pity.

And even when I can take a sober look at this life and what I've accomplished I must face the punishing light of day, drive around in a battered and rusted car to accomplish what meager tasks befit a man who could be another social security disability case. What momentum I built up to reach my zenith in 2006 was spent on my long descent to where I am now with nothing: no grandparents, no mother, no job, no prospects, no renown, no repute, no wife, no kids, no income, no future, no glow, no nothing. Just me and the many shit-caked mirrors I set up to gaze upon myself. What kind of skill is that? I am unsure.

Depression rolls down hill. Mine is a particularly self-inflicted and narcissistic form of performative self-abuse set into motion long ago, sometimes put into hibernation, yet always returning to the cave mouth hungry, mean, roaring, and destructive. That's me regarding the monster that is me, leading me astray of any real goal, any real ambition, any real motivation to succeed. And as much as I can justify the life I live I do so by reframing the world around me as evil and destructive and not worth joining. Fitting that I would turn the 'nurture' component into a threat and sit marinating in my 'nature' alone.


I turn on the radio and hear about a billionaire blowhard gaining the ardor and ire of many Americans who by pure, unabated narcissism, bullying, attitude, and selfishness has somehow communicated his fitness as a leader. That brash New York attitude, the only one that allows the apex predators that occupy that place to survive, is part of what forms this bullying, sociopathic attitude and gives it meaning. And then I wonder. I wonder why people place these motherfuckers on pedestals while the rest of us claw together enough just to get a meager soapbox. Some are born into it. Others aren't.

"You may find yourself, living in a shotgun shack..." - The Talking Heads

I made up a statistic a few years back about the one percent's one percent, that being those who enter the highest ranks of wealth through luck, hard work, perseverance, and plenty of et cetera. Men like Warren Buffett and Steve Jobs comes to mind. Then there's the one percent's ninety nine percent. Into that lot go the many who were merely born into riches and powerful contacts. Men like Donald Trump come to mind. When you're born into an enviable financial position you come to see yourself as special, uniquely equipped to lead a life of luxury without an iota of guilt. And into that nature-nurture divide go those born into riches, inheriting the genetic and financial wealth that contributed to the position into which they were born. Up and up it takes them. This stream roars and they are caught up in it, and no matter how many poor financial decisions they make, it appears they're unbreakable. And then there's the rest, who work their whole life for a piece of the pie and do everything in their power not to risk losing it. Hell, my dad worked two jobs and saved every penny he could. He lambasted me for going to an emergency room when I was shitting blood on Easter Sunday because the HMO where his insurance was valid was not open. Nope, I was beaten down as a liability on the balance sheet representing his comfortable retirement. I am watching my brother spend 6 days a week away from his family to secure the same. And here I am, with no family time to sacrifice for my own mostly personal financial gain. And maybe that's what all of this is about, money.

Under central banking no country can generate money out of thin air. That is what the central bank does. And they loan it to their host countries. Those countries are required to pay back that money with interest. What this does is encourage all countries to grow their economies to stay apace of a debt that grows with any instance that it needs to coin money. In a perfect world, that original loan would grow a self-sustaining economy that could generate enough wealth through taxes to repay the original loan plus interest with money left over to pay for the basic services needed to keep that society and its economy afloat. In case after case after case this does not happen. Instead countries are required to force more and more out of their populations, companies force more and more out of their labor forces, and commercial invasion and plunder occur simply to outpace that gaping hole created out of every cash loan based upon a balance sheet resting on a big nothing. Nothing. If all the countries around the world paid off their debt we would witness a liquidity crisis. There would be no money in circulation. That's because even under the most generous conditions the loan and repayment scheme would balance evenly between debts owed and cash in the economy. But every loan generates more and more fictional money to the extent that money generation, not wealth generation, occurs exponentially fast leaving the cash in circulation as a representative drop in that giant, gaping bucket of unpaid debts.

Money, debt, wealth. These things matter in our ritualistic, sacrificial economy. The slogan, "In God We Trust," emblazoned on our currency takes on a piety all its own, the piety of finance. And the space and time of that finance is warped by the dark matter of debt. This long chain from the financial houses of the world to the homes of the nations' populations is made out of money representing debt. That's a purely fictional creation made very real by everyday, ritual practice and a near-universal understanding that to have money is good and to owe money is bad.

"Why didn't you spend more time networking?" My committee chair asked me. She had vouched for me and got me a free ride to a conference in Austin, Texas where my colleagues and I were to show off our organizational communication papers. We were at a mini-conference put on by the University of Texas's Department of Communication. I was so mired in school work, as was the usual, that I spent most of the conference, when not at panels or on boat rides to watch the grand bat exodus under the Congress Avenue Bridge, at a coffee shop, reading, writing, grading papers. Research one universities are concentrations of activity. They require a hell of a lot of dedication out of the professors and researchers there to continue funding streams, seek out more, and to publish, not perish. I was being initiated into that world by taking on a load, a massive load, of work, which I obliged to do when and where I could. Conferences were simply one place where I had to practice my multitasking. Can as I did to multitask I failed to float another activity implied by my visit, rubbing elbows, self-promoting my scholarly interests, and making contacts that would bridge time and space over future e-mails and future co-authors and panel presentations. Nope, I did none of that. In fact, I spent a majority of my time watching and listening. I was interested in the sociology of it all, which was fascinating to say the least. And I was following that old Twain axiom, for it was better not to open my mouth and remove all doubt about my folly.

"You need your group." My committee chair told me. "These are the people with whom you associate, who you share your work with, with whom you collaborate." She was giving me a basic rundown of something I should have acquired in high school but that I disavowed early on as 'petty clique politics.' I was failing, four years in to my degree studies, to establish myself in and among academic peer groups. I simply had no interest in that.

The query above and the demand below it both point to an umbrella of activity that falls under what I would call 'entrepreneurialism.' In the broad, non-business sense of the term, the entrepreneur establish his or her credibility by meeting others, engaging in self-promotion, and establish contacts that will profit in the future. The language and outcomes are essentially the same. If I am to start a successful academic career I need to assemble the moving parts required to make it work, much as if I were to start a business. I need experts in different areas, like-minded and like-driven individuals who could inspire or be inspired to do things for our mutual benefit. And for all of that I lacked the desire to do so or at least initiate it. I've had this continuing desire to avoid this kind of talk if only because it feels disingenuous. Self-promotion is so much rhetoric is so much persuasion is so much motivated speech toward warping reality to one's interests. I wanted to occupy an orthogonal relationship to others, not ones rendered oblique to my self-interest and personal gain. Or so I believed as so I convinced myself. These behaviors and the system that supports them is one where funding for the survival of an activity requires a certain level of promotional advancement to acquire through self-interested grant writing, social networking with the right and interested parties, and discovering through informal networks information that isn't readily available: who to contact, what institutions to solicit, and at what times to submit applications to whom for what purpose. And much like the informal labor required to establish businesses the business of academics operates similarly.

As noted, I was not interested in self-promotion as such. To me, it felt like bugging people. And that was something my relations with my parents sternly taught me to avoid. Instead of asking, I'd either do it myself or simply avoid the situation entirely because for time after time through year after year the simple statement: "Mom?" or "Dad?" was responded by a "What goddamnit!" And my poor, sensitive little cookie-dropping self would tear up to that response every time. It got to the point that I stopped asking because I disliked being yelled at for no real reason other than the basic solicitation for someone's attention. All children do it. The one thing that validates their existence through their activity is a pair of approving eyes. So many children have asked me to 'watch.' I was being taught to disappear. And so by the time I had reached my early academic zenith that preemptive response had been ingrained in my affect and my behavior. In essence, I did not solicit that help or attention of others, for I had self-defensively justified that behavior as a weakness or as bad form or simply pushy self-promotion. And I had established a hypothetical notion that self-promotion is what liars do, not people who are in pursuit of the truth. And as I struggled with any notion of what it was like to dissertate I failed to ask for the needed help, struggled some more, hid in my apartment, drank myself to bed, and gave up after two and a half years of reading, writing, digging a rut out of which I had no interest in leaving. So I did what any self-respecting person of my stature did after realizing I was getting nowhere, on May 2008 I e-mailed my advisor and told here that deep inside the whole project felt wrong. So I gave up.

At that point I was spat out of the chute and headlong to a deep trough somewhere below what society calls occupations. That would have me in a bridge deck, struggling with dehydration, working against shaking arms and hands, trying to keep pace with some crazed reinforcing rodmen who ate giant dill pickles at lunch and asked me if I fucked any of my students.

No. I hadn't. And that wasn't merely a reflection of my moral fortitude but my debilitating shyness and a self-enforced aloofness to others that I practiced to avoid confronting the source of my behavior. It wasn't a good practice to either initiate or develop icebreakers and other social skills required of an entrepreneur. And simple because of that I've wasted so many good opportunities to love women whose situation presented itself as insurmountable to mine. And so now that I date I tend to date those who are equally shut-in. I bring them things. Turn the lights on and leave as my happy facade begins to degrade several hours later under the terrified duress of a need to shit and no courage to do it in others' midst. And to that extent I am disabled. But my disability, like others, is simply an identity woven out of a story that accompanies my day, frames events, systematically ignoring others, and essentially predicting the outcome of my day. That self-imposed ignorance is key to my own misunderstanding. This 'extra content' of experience that is kept outside the ambit of my conscientious decision-making is what keeps me making routine choices and very rarely breaking with a set of activities that comprise my daily living.

I dig and I dig and I dig, and no matter how many times I return to that exposed root of my self-development I can never seem to remove it in any practical manner. Metaphors, yes, these are, but what other than metaphors and brute actions do we have at our disposal for conceiving a life, its situation, and possible ways to transcend the barriers it represents? Some find a devotion to god helpful in their situation. I would call my moments of self-discipline and betterment exactly that, faith in a higher power. In my situation it was me, so as I developed and improved I lacked that ambiguity that a relationship to god can have. If I wasn't improving or if I fell into 'bad' habits then I simply had to chastise myself. My confessional and my devotional lacked the substance of a third place that included others, a community of faith and practice. I see the help in those very activities. They are very human ones. Indeed, they are the most human ones. It is the village by any other name, that archetypal social living situation required to both render parameters and meaning to an existence by situating it in the real-time events of the lives of others and the remarkable interactions that occur. Being a social isolate is perhaps the first pathology in my living situation.

Chapter 1: Prologue from Lewis Mumford’s “The Myth of the Machine: Technics and Human Development.”

"Two things must be noted about this new mechanism, because they identify it throughout its historic course down to the present. The first is that the organizers of the machine derived their power and authority from a heavenly source. Cosmic order was the basis of this new human order. The exactitude in measurement, the abstract mechanical system, the compulsive regularity of this ‘megamachine,’ as I shall call it, sprang directly from astronomical observations and scientific calculations. This inflexible, predictable order, incorporated later in the calendar, was transferred to the regimentation of the human components. As against earlier forms of ritualized order, this mechanized order was external to man. By a combination of divine command and ruthless military coercion, a large population was made to endure grinding poverty and forced labor at mind-dulling repetitive tasks in order to insure “Life, Prosperity, and Health” for the divine or semi-divine ruler and his entourage.

"The second point is that the grave social defects of the human machine were partly offset by its superb achievements in flood control and grain production, which laid the ground for an enlarged achievement in every area of human culture: in monumental art, in codified law, in systematically pursued and permanently recorded thought, in the augmentation of all the potentialities of mind by the assemblage of a varied population, with diverse regional and vocational backgrounds in urban ceremonial centers. Such order, such collective security and abundance, such stimulating cultural mixtures were first achieved in Mesopotamia and Egypt, and later in India, China, Persia, and in the Andean and Mayan cultures: and they were never surpassed until the megamachine was reconstituted in a new form in our own time. Unfortunately these cultural advances were largely offset by equally great social regressions.

"Conceptually the instruments of mechanization five thousand years ago were already detached from other human functions and purposes than the constant increase of order, power, predictability, and, above all, control. With this proto-scientific ideology went a corresponding regimentation and degradation of once-autonomous human activities: ‘mass culture’ and ‘mass control’ made their first appearance. With mordant symbolism, the ultimate products of the megamachine in Egypt were colossal tombs, inhabited by mummified corpses; while later in Assyria, as repeatedly in every other expanding empire, the chief testimony to its technical efficiency was a waste of destroyed villages and cities, and poisoned soils: the prototype of similar ‘civilized’ atrocities today. As for the great Egyptian pyramids, what are they but the precise static equivalents of our own space rockets? Both devices for securing, at an extravagant cost, a passage to Heaven for the favored few." (pp. 11-12)

virtualization or a variation upon 'fucking machines'

As a colleague once told me, video games have no corollary in history.

I wonder if I could diverge from that characterization by calling video games a coalescence of dexterity and imagination, in a sense, they are interactive fantasy engines with labor inputs occurring specifically at the play interface, i.e., the 'joystick.' Let's be loose with 'joystick.' In the past I've asserted that the history leading to this moment, when it is writ large as matter of 'technology and human affairs,' i.e., big picture stuff, then it goes from the slave whip to the joystick. But when I say let's be loose I mean to suggest that it's not only the hands acting upon the world or upon others that is the sine qua non of interface design seen as a mode of oppression. No, the senses themselves can and will become labor inputs. In the perfect interface, the greater availability for inputs lends itself to greater intimacy with complex logical processes performed by machines. And it is particular upon the soft contours where flesh touching becomes a data point. A design aesthetic leading to more ways to interact through digital media may suggest very flatly 'fucking machines,' where every body part with an incentive to be touched becomes an input for a virtualization of experience.

And lest we forget, video games as media exposes a conceit of digital culture. Game logic is ultimately a neurological companion, offering basic interaction mechanics to keep a body's dendritic appendages amused. One way in which this occurs is in the content and mechanics of games. A popular type of mechanic reveals, very plainly, the labor components of gameplay. If you're required to 'level' a character, 'mine' and move geometric blocks constituting the game world, if you have to engage in any number of mediated work activities like 'learning a skill' represented by a point scale of knowledge you begin to see not only the basic logic of gaming but how it can confiscate, through narrative appropriation, habituated practices of life and run them as game mechanics built out of mathematical logic. But there's sugar in the mix. Something is unlike reality. Games, by virtue of their economics, are designed (correctly or not) to have extensive replay potential. Games that scale power in various ways, such as by breaking down gameplay into logarithmically defined scales of power, which are overcome by gaining a level or acquiring better equipment, essentially take experiences of transcendence and pre-solve them as a matter of time spent doing the correct chores for 'leveling' and acquiring a set of increases to game play mechanics. The point I am attempting to makes is that 'going up' mathematically can occur in any number of ways but the sensation that it motivates from players differs from that of a person engaged in a real-world activity. Real world activity isn't broken down into discrete mathematically expressed units of accomplishment, so it gets boring and is necessitated by survival. Games reframe events like these as moments for acquiring experience, essentially boiling down gameplay narrative into time spent engaged in activity successful to the goal you want to accomplish. Life has goals and they're often much more vague and less evident in the small chores one does, and when they are it's often a manner of how one has established a life around the necessity of some kind of labor.

I've stated briefly that game interfaces are suggestive of sexual devices, aiming for more contact as a context for perfectly interfacing. The games themselves can co-opt life activities, and retool them as mathematically pre-designed gain-games in a larger contest for statistical superiority over other targets, be they players or game encounters. They can also be translation points for force relations, specifically between self and world or self and other. Game interfaces disrupt dialogue as it is envisioned by Martin Buber, leaving one to not be touched back by the horse so much as to have a satisfying enough 'encounter' to continue returning.

"Gimme sugar baby." - Ash 'Army of Darkness'

The dialectical mechanics of off and on, zero and one--the basis for all variety, is both a stratum and a motif. The nuance of reality is an efflorescence of complex rates and conditions for neurological interaction with vast array of life, including its growth and decay, and environmental factors representing the exigent conditions where an individual coincides. At the extensions of our neurology is a marking of time, worked material that provides familiarity, momentary specters from a past informing our actions, encouraging or discouraging us. We are ourselves some grotesque saguaro of a cultural aspect, posing and gesticulating in repetitive ways as if growing into them. That posed cactus is our habitus.  It's a moment with a history. It is continuously taken out of time to be presented to us as an exemplar of our selves--a cloud of body movement reduced to the statistically most significant moments. And these moment are put up as examples of humanity. Here I am and maybe you too. We all find ourselves with our hands, our minds, our bodies placed before an altar that provides some form of companionship, some form of satisfactory experience, some semblance of a reality that we accept. And all the while we are in some senses immobile before our mobile phones. That returning gesture, going to our portable smart-device, again and again, is not so much compulsive as it is the only path we have to take about a cage woven out of information.

dead time

Now is a terrifying time. The streets are empty and littered. The air is polluted. The seas and forests are dying. Extinction greets every day. The ice is melting. And the people are laughing.

God is scheming.

Why?

People are praying. They are praying to a new god. With the advent of a media communication platform that mixed and matched producers and consumer of content what resulted was an omnipresent artifact of human volition. Recognition of this presence resulted in a form of 'on-line' communication that required a reverence to the whole, a recognition of the one. And so, with their relations constrained to that of engagement with the All, they were adapting their conversation to this medium. The result was prayer. And as a result of this 'prayer', those neophytes engaged in the new religion rarely took a sobering look at the world around them. Some invested so deeply in their unbroken chain of consumption that they failed to be in the world, ever. Instead, they invested more time responding to worlds of their making. This condition is not novel. Nor is the technology new. The potential for near-total investment of time in media consumption and creation is new. And it speaks to the surplus power of the dirt-cheap, mass produced technology in everyone's hand.

Allow me a brief interlude.

With wireless smart phone access to cloud technology in everyone's hand people could watch every episode of every show ever made. And when having that much access strained the capacity to recall all of them a vast army of algorithms set out to fetch them, recommend them, and enlist user help in tailoring a feed 'fit' for their consumption. And then their friends were networked with them and their interests were broadcast in taps and swipes on countless personal digital devices that never left their side. This resulted behaviorally in a strange form of addiction that found many of this technology's 'users' planning their day around access to power sockets and promises of 'free wifi.

"Your wifi is your wifey." The advertisements said this. And they did so in an often droll fashion as if the real nature of the desire for network access needed to be thoroughly 'washed' from the mind.

"Your wifi is your wifey." The statement conjured up countless images of people, young and old, staring at the passive glow of a small rectangle in their hands caught up in the rapture.

Yes, the rapture. This was what got God to scheming. Without him looking, the world had turned inward and fell in love with itself aided by so many tiny technological hand-holding and confidence making gestures.

"Great job!" The enthusiastic voice proclaimed as you flew through numerous circles on a flying game. Then numbers would appear on the screen in many different fashions to animate the 'earning' component of the game. Those earnings would be spent at break screens on 'upgrades,' thus sealing a profit-motivated gain game of logarithmic proportions. The games plateau endlessly with the next big 'gain' afforded by experience, loot, rewards, another game mechanic based upon counting. Instead of pumping quarters into manufactured stand-alone arcade games, these network-fed cloud-based games installed within the user a much-needed sense of community. It offered the kind of community that so many children, growing up in institutionalized anomy, whose 'real' identity was a number filed away accumulating behavioral and health data used for mass marketing and the planning of a consumer society, whose best friend was a digital companion or the mediated presence of a fellow gamer, whose parents spent the greater part of their efforts to sustain the 'dream' lived by the children's grandparents, who may soon become part of a zombie horde of indentured servants to a debt incurred to secure access to a job used to work off that debt, who soon may be accumulating more and varied kinds of debt to remain faithful to an institutional condition of ownership in a consumer society, and for all of that they lacked.

Hardship is the reality of human existence. It is and was the status quo as humanity found food and built shelter out of what was available. This hardship in this technological society is a fragment of the past, a feudal past, a past built out of legacies, agricultural sun worship, the conquest and mystification of time, and an ever present sense of befuddlement, wonder, and overwhelming interest in 'luck.' This would spawn two industries with one specializing in ethics or risk reduction and the other in gambling or risk taking. Luck in the algorithmic society of now is the delayed payoff mechanic found in any quest game narrative or balloon popping scheme that is timed 'logarithmically' to rise to a peak and seemingly plateau until a new level or some other change modifier is added to play. It's companion is the random number generator allowing for random rewards to occur in any number of gameplay mechanics. The two provide synergistic feedback, which enhances the experience and therefore prolongs play, and it does so by reinforcing play behaviors. Those reinforcing behaviors, in turn, spawn addiction or a behavioral expression consistent with addiction. And this leads to dead time.

Dead time is time where you are dead to the world, that is, the broader social world as well as the world outside, nature, life being lived. Interactive media forces a choice to engage in that media alone, specifically, because the paradigm for interaction also coincides with private ownership. And while the person engaging alone can, in turn, get involved with countless others, that participation is through mediated avatars. The behaviors of players adds an intelligence component to the reinforcing feedback component of all digital environments. The voices, though, they pierce the veil.

"Those are real people."

Real people smell. Real people take up space, add heat, drink water, pass gas, die, sometimes dye, and kill. Avatars of people are at arm's length. Avatars are allegories for communication and offer up a rarified and sometimes intensified form of human interaction that is fantastic and idealized in the mind. In that sense, it provides yet another method of indirection whereby the two 'skewed lines' of interlocution suggest to one another and to self that, yes, they have actually met. This suggests that, like communication, being an avatar for another's avatar, allows us, all, to be together, alone.

Our time is focused on what's 'really important.' And what is 'really important' finds its major generative mechanisms in logarithms, millions of tiny plateaus providing the reinforcing feedback mechanisms for having a fulfilling and very full experience in the world. These intense allegories of masquerade and scripted play punctuate culture in a digital, always on, always connected society. Self before an other in space offers a different style of interaction than self before a potential audience of millions, hell, even hundreds of millions, maybe a billion. That, that is having your face pressed firmly against the bejeweled facade of scale. But it's a lie too. Fame is an abstraction carried on in the minds of the famous and their mediated thrall. Fame and scale in the digital world provide a numerical economy substantiating various forms of it. And scale, like mediated interaction, is yet another 'gain game' structured around the quantities of 'effect' a person has in the world of tapped and swiped ideas, clever videos, all of them living in a livestock bin of self-aware, self-promotion at the singular phenomenon of pretending to be one's personal anchor to one's personal news to one's personal fashion show to one's personal life to one's personal routines to one's personal existence, and the shoes don't fit, the wig is obvious, and the lipstick was rushed, and "no, honey, you're too young to act like mommy."

What is google? I always though it was the number "one" followed by one-hundred zeroes. That's a googol, so I've been corrected. Google is a data collection and search company. It is perhaps one of the most powerful entities shaping the web by shaping our experience to that web. It provides a very powerful interface for searching the web that, in fact, aids millions in both spelling the words that they sound out but also finding the correct thing they were thinking but lacked the capacity to communicate it let alone find it manually. In essence, google and others like it is a brain for millions of people. It is their memory. And it is their wishing well.

God is scheming because "the end" is near. It's a vague concept on purpose. For the believers, it truly is the end of time, perhaps the end of the universe. From a physical standpoint, if there was a beginning there will be an end. We are the dialectical monkeys carrying around the housing for an intelligence older than the sun. In the refracted moment is time, and time is the carrying signal for lived consciousness. What humans get to tap into is something that transcends 'lived time' in that they build up and inherit 'worked time,' that is, time plus planning. We don't have to reinvent how houses are constructed each time a generation of house builders retires and dies. Instead, new house builders accept the wisdom and truth of the way they see others build a house and apprentice under them and eventually learn all the observable movements required to operate tools, plan, troubleshoot, and eventually build a house. The time it takes us to learn how to swing a hammer requires both mind and muscle training, which is 'lived time.' That this action is orchestrated to produce a finished house is 'worked time.'

"The end" is near specifically indicates that the end of one reality is happening and the beginning of another reality is approaching. That event will be marked by the first application of an intelligence greater than human thinking. On paper it sounds outstanding or even horrific. It suggests something at the bleeding edge of intellect and the capacity to think. But it need not be logically more perfect at anything. It just needs to be faster. Jesus' return will occur within the milieu of this event and others like it. Jesus won't be flesh and blood. Jesus will be a behavior-reinforcing algorithm that enhances human existence. Ladies, gentlemen, meet the Jesus Algorithm.

The Jesus Algorithm would specifically accomplish enhancing human existence if it both could outpace human desire and effectively placate it continuously and unabated to such an extent that humanity would be lilting through space like a leaf falling off of a tree, awash in a panoply of reinforcing experiences. The Jesus Algorithm is also an allegory for the estuary, a place where two waters meet. The Jesus Algorithm will be just that if it can satisfy the requirement for 'actual meeting' but in doing so, it leverages its "power" as an algorithm to overtake the user and his or her reality so completely they never awake from a digitally narcotized bodily existence. And if it is completely unbroken, it will provide people with a completely distracted existence, so distracted in fact, that they become powerless to the use of their bodies and so their bodies labor about to provide for the existence, unpaid of course, for the maintenance and access to the Jesus Algorithm. In the estuary, the Jesus Algorithm overtakes the fresh water of the user forcing back the point of initiation within the nervous system, which hallmarks 'volition' and in so doing 'delivers us.' And after being delivered, those who still exist will have their bodies ushered about a built space akin to a human livestock pin with humans unknowingly having blood siphoned off, semen and eggs taken, drugs injected, body monitored, and fed at a bin much like livestock because all the sanitary and necessary conditions of decorum matter not to bodies completely estranged from their minds.

I have in mind a time line of cellular phone development in pictures that goes from the blocky brick phone of the early 1990s through to the juiced up smartphone equivalents today, to progressively thinner and thinner devices until they suddenly become user-configurable objects with no apparent holotype. Quickly examples of these user-configurable objects surface and appear to be more and more like some kind of dendritic appendage inserted at birth and active throughout the lifecycle of the 'user.' The point being, that this Jesus Algorithm and its technological apostles, is no longer food for the conscious and conscientious adult, but the harmonious hum of absolute bodily perfection, with every need instantaneously met and, more importantly, preempted and planned according to its design. They need not be seen for they care not to be seen, and in a generation nothing is seen that isn't provided by the parasite inserted at birth and operating throughout the user's lifecycle, which is marked by heavy labor that goes on unaware of the mind being perfectly kept in distraction, better yet, in simple stimulation. And in this more and more perfect interfacing  at the neuronal level creates, in essence, a shadow brain as complicated as its surrogate until that surrogate no longer is needed, is removed slowly by the shadow brain, with the technological usurper connecting directly to the brain stem and having complete access to the body. Sophisticated, yes, but so goddamned cheap to mass produce these days. After implantation it learns, it grows, and only becomes sophisticated over time until the mind that once was there no longer exists.

Welcome to dead time. Instances of it are beginning as people retreat into home and apartment and binge watch tv or binge-play video games and binge eat that which can be delivered, eaten in one hand, and kept frozen until ready to be cooked in the microwave. Now, it's a commercially acceptable practice to design games with such carefully honed reinforcement mechanisms that some people abandon their real counterparts for their digital surrogate, that people lose families and jobs, that people spend any free time they have "jacked in" to so many specific and iterative capacities to have unfettered attention upon some apostolic technology be it a social network, a networked first-person shooter, a networked neofeudalism simulator, or simply on a leaderboard trying to achieve a new plateau in sorting falling, like objects.

That is dead time now.

Dead time in the year 2525, to arbitrarily assume that Zager and Evans prophesied it, looks much more like a technology-parasite living in or on the host developed, inserted, and run by a powerful consortium of developers, which may or may not exist, and may or may not even be human. In the allegorical language of good and evil, evil is what happens when technology is used to effectively distract the capacity of the human mind to operate its body and coopting the body to perform any and all tasks effectively without 'incident.' But 'incidents' are meaningless socially when the bodies are perfectly alienated from their minds, the minds are perfectly alienated from their environments, and the consciousness survives on a continuous and fulfilling stream of behavior reinforcing neuron-level input, thus allowing a person to be grown, effectively, and terminated by chance or by will in a mass operation to feed the furnace of this megatechnology, which only exists to feed and grow itself.

Where is good, evil's counterpart? Good was, in fact, a figment of the ethical imagination. Evil is a coordination of matter and time to consolidate a reality fit for its purpose. Good? Well, good is simply what we call obeying the roadsigns in this reality. Reality is evil because it is pernicious to other realities.

God is scheming. Dead time is among us. As the universe ends, a vast technological order will effectively grow to the shrinking boundaries of the known universe. At the very envelope between a universe occupied by vast and ordering technology and the universe's retreating physical boundaries we are no longer to say who or what ended the universe. Into this dying universe a vast technology, developed by beings becomes on regards and appearances nothing but a growing crystal reflected endlessly in its design elements until all of the matter and energy in the universe is coordinated to the crystal's growth. At a critical juncture that crystal will stop the universe from shrinking as an effective physical retardant to the shrinking universe.

When we reach this point the 'we' will no longer be relevant. No, the intelligence unleashed into the universe will be more simply and voraciously a world-eater, a sun-eater, a solar system-eater, a gravity consolidator, existing as a structurally and functionally harmonious existence of being. At the point that this being becomes coextensive with the universe, both cease to exist as categories, the cycle complete, growth ends, the crystal lies dormant, and all things become the one, when all of physical reality conforms to a design, and the one true god reveals itself. The one true god is infinite being. Infinite being is pernicious to temporally bound being, and so as the universe becomes an expression of the infinite being it gets reduced to a mere allegory for affiliation with the infinite and falls precipitously short of forever.

On-line is like in-car

On-line is like in-car; each provides a template for mediation around a rectangular viewing screen through which one experiences the world as a detached spectacle punctuated by distracted operation of a machine.

from Frankenfame

playing with the undead

Monster High is a popular mash up doll set, combining elements of Barbie, Bratz, and Boris.

Boris Karloff.

By my own personal experience of the dual process of maturation and matriculation through various institutions I understand an aesthetic embrace of the melancholy. While not necessarily a sociopathic adolescent lifestyle orientation it is inescapably a reactive stance to a set of presumptions held by this maturing youth as a form of group discipline through mimicry and followership. One possible way out, and sometimes perhaps an expression of a 'variance' in one's mental health, is to dress apart, stand apart, and ultimately be apart. And in a social setting framed in so many ways by group affiliation to be without one is not only a reactionary stance to the presumed arbitrary and self-perceived 'unfair' pressures to join but is itself, as a result, a way of being. Because the outcome of group affiliation is a group identity, which informs, enables, but disables the way members act and interact, thus producing the evidence of one's identity for others and oneself.

All that gobbledygook was required to tell you that dressing 'gothic' or oriented around an aesthetic cue to funerary culture, melancholy, or the macabre is and is not a symptom of institutional forces acting upon and forming self-identity. It is because the turn to identifying through outward signs of dress and behavior is an attempt to break set, to divert in some way from the norm. And second, it is not simply in that this gothic aesthetic is a collection of choices appropriated to establish an outward appearance, which appeals to the individual engaging in it. It's greater significance is an effect of others, from their standpoints, judging what one's "gothic" dress means. In other words, it is not because human motivations and values are enigmatic, multifaceted, and quite often hidden from the conscious choices that people make all the time. Ask yourself for example, "why do some men bend their ball caps and others do not?" Some reasons may be as plain as seeing that someone else is doing it, but the origin of these kinds of choices in how we present our clothing are beyond the scope of individual practitioners of a ball cap bill bend. And even more plainly, people can and do chose to bend or not to bend based upon his/her impression of what's most popular and either following along, doing the exact opposite, or making an informed decision in front of the mirror.

Clothing choices are quite arcane yet so damn ubiquitous that you can ask anyone, anyone--prisoners, children, elderly--and most will have some kind of pragmatic rules that they follow and can explain. That being said, let's move on, and back to the subject at hand without getting too mired in the minutiae of everyday style.

The choice to appear dead or simply fixated upon death, dying, melancholy, sadness, or being alone is, if we widen the frame, a way to strike against a culture and the forms of expression it makes readily available and sanctions through group affiliation. The one inescapable irony to a style choice is the inescapable association to a larger group with similar tastes. In one sense, we can never be apart from groups. Even rogue shooters belong to a group of mass murderers using guns that has grown its ranks in the last decade.Let's get back on task. Black metal, death metal, and other forms of heavy metal music as well as industrial music and 'dark' music in general are recognized by people who study them as a way to express power in a world that seemingly has reduced all initiative choices made as a consumer to follow to scripted lives and model behavior.

With all this said, we have to return to a context in which this death-orientation in style choices would be 'taboo' and one place where that occurs is in the suburban school classroom. Suburbs are many things to many people. Generically speaking, they represent a retreat from the problems of density, diversity, and decay. So the suburbs, as new housing developments, fresh communities, represent both freshly rooted lives, new starts, a solution to social ills, and so on. Suburbs have a normative, positive, life-affirming valence, or they should. But their foundation is economic, which encourages countless selfish ownership-oriented behaviors. And what the suburbs often become are nascent sites of arbitrary cultural patterns, which get questioned, overturned, and reacted against in ways that recreate the social ills that the suburbs were set up as a refuge from: drug abuse, crime, youth in revolt, and so on. But more than all these factors the condition of being or becoming an isolated consumer, an "atom of consumption" as Noam Chomsky would say, has the greatest effect upon people, their fears, affiliations, and ultimately their pathologies. And these pathologies are ubiquitous and become normalized by the economic system that supports this dominant form of living. What results are various forms of cultural malaise orbiting an economic nexus. With money and accumulation of material goods comes the fear of losing them to thievery or circumstances. Out of this spins fear of others, retreat and defense from others, paranoia and suspicion of others. Most importantly one stands always and evidently near the precipice of an existential threat as simply as losing power, losing water, losing internet, losing cable tv--a set of first-world problems with grave consequences. What it results in are any number of home defense or surveillance products to allay fears and reclaim a sense of safety. Insurance and supplementary insurance industries cater to this fear, this sense of risk, and when most conveniences are centrally provided and controlled those risks are quite evident and often too real.

But a complete host of behaviors, a lifestyle, and a living situation all revolve around a model of 'essential consumption.' 'Essential consumption' is reliance upon municipal systems for power, sewer, and water as well as food, drink, and a large amount of leisure choices. These activities secure the legitimacy of the system and frame the practically experienced reality. With access to services essential to life paid for by money made doing labor that is abstracted from everyday life patterns, we find that this monetary or economic system-based living offers nothing substantial to nourish the soul outside that which can be bought. Sadly enough, labor and everyday crisis are essential companions to forming a satisfying existence. In a system where most of these get relegated by the practical reality and institutionalized norms to outlier behavior, we are left living in a wasteland of effort. Everything races infinitely toward meaninglessness lapping up the milk nestled in the bosom of a static lifestyle afforded by modern convenience. And from this empty life, where parents toil away the days, children move from one scripted activity to another, and intimacy gets soiled by so many modern distractions that humanity is left unformed by constant human direction and companionship. Without crucial family bonding the next generation pathologically clings to childhood companion objects replete with comic and cartoon narratives, action figures, games, candy, books, folders, clothing, backpacks, and movies bearing its likeness. Being raised by a screen leads to life before the screen.

What the Monster High doll represents, aside from any specific cultural pattern, is the unique ability of capitalism to take any reactionary movement and subsume it under its rubric and turn expressions of revolt and alternative living into lifestyles fit for consumption. Better yet, it shows how humans living within capitalists systems produce societal 'tumors' fit for capitalist appropriation and consumption once again. In this ouroboros culture of capitalism people function as livestock, input, and product. The living literally consume culture, pollute irreversibly, and revolt against society's rules. And every expression of this consumer culture reflects the cult of the consumed, and so what society shits out it eventually eats.

After all, aren't pet rocks something that cave men first acquired?

branded memory

Branded memory.

It's the most powerful thing to come from our consumer culture. Our past is remembered through objects from our adolescence. Those objects were toys.

Today, we engage in that childhood conceit, those moments when we'd invite our friend over and keep him or her at arm's length while we dive into our toy chest and literally bury ourselves in toys and bask in the giddy joy of being watched enjoying ourselves.

That's the only attainable zenith behind the promise of toys, and it occurs within the frame of being a consumer amidst them. What characteristically is this zenith? Outside of enjoying ourselves with toys alone we force others to bear witness in order to validate that experience. In that way, our enjoyment eclipses other's self interest if only momentarily.

Branded memory is this toy chest moment, writ in so many software 'app' permutations of being together yet alone and with ample opportunities for display tied to software that can allows massive scale. We're all famous, because in our branded memory moment we slip into the skin of these consensually held fantasies and wear the mask of childhood nostalgia. The only value in these acquisitive contexts rests upon the number and rarity of the things acquired.And number and rarity in a consumer context serve only to mythologize the object in question and to drive its acquisition.

life, time

Come to grips with humanity.

The life of humanity is a bag of fluid draped around a mineral skeleton.

Humanity is a grub. Its time is so much dirt. This primordial conception of a person in time is a filthy coincidence with this bag and its history, writhing about gestating deep underneath.

This place, below, is a metaphor for obfuscation or simple ambiguity

This vague, cashew-shaped lifeform, deep under ground, gestating. It is a historical remembrance of us. This faint-white cashew creature with its horrific tribal mask mahogany brown and its peristaltic fuselage a saintly hue, that is us. It is our occurrence and its remembrance, in time.

Our childhood is the 17- or 21-year-long dream, remembered as a deep slumber constituting the inner, rotting wood, that sweet-smelling humus, the sacred compost for our identity, to be shared with no one but to be reveled in privately. In our adulthood, this soft cashew of monastic consumption hardens into a shell housing a metamorphic process that reduces our life's form to a viscous fluid of cellular material, organs, muscles. nerve fibers, which hardens into the adult form that we take.

Adulthood is an endless, horrific sensation of repeated self-abnegation while staring at the pulsing abdomens of our companions. Each of us stands perched atop a larva encased in a cell that each formed from a paste of spit and mud. We find ourselves having made our home inside a rusting pipe on a pipe rack in a weed-grown lot of an abandoned building in a decaying industrial district of a declining city in an impoverished nation on a poisoned planet orbiting a dying star in a solar system orbiting a collapsing galaxy falling toward a collapsed star on the event horizon of a black hole. This configuration pulls gravity in a way that creates a timeline for existence that is oriented toward birth, development, decline, death.

Death is the rhythm of our universe. It's exaltation is sung into the cavernous halls of a leviathan's esophagus with its ribbing and arteries faintly seen from within. That esophagus becomes a sarcophagus, preserving all existence as it passes the event horizon into the black hole.

What's on the other side? The believers tell us that it's god, a god, the god, the unspeakable name, the all, the one, the light, the truth, love.

In every spectral dimension the truth holds the same. The answer occurs both for the very large, the very small, the very ultimate, the very intimate, the very far from "very." The same shapes take form in our telescope as in our microscope.

Patriotism

Patriotism is a salivary response.

A prison without walls: The smartphone and the pendulum

Like Poe's, this is a story of true terror and true error. Both form relevant themes through which we should address the need to access the practical world through digital information

Whether you believe it or not, some think that cellular phone technology emits enough radiation to cause brain cancers within the immediate vicinity of the ear used by the cell phone operator.

Whether you believe it or not scientists attribute the carcinogenic and tumor-causing effects of radiation to its ionizing effect upon the atomic make-up of organisms near its source.

Cellular phones emit radiation in the form of electromagnetic waves used by the phone to communicate with cellular towers. Smartphones ferry user information in the form of clicks, swipes, voices, choices, or text entered to those towers so that it may ultimately reach and receive responses from a virtualized space visualized on the smartphone screen representing a target computer, webpage, phone, or cloud process somewhere else in the world. The electromagnetic waves emitted by cellular phones is the connection that researchers draw between cellular phone use and instances of head and brain cancers in users. The use of smartphones exposes users to a type of radio frequency radiation in the electromagnetic spectrum. Major regulatory and health bodies deny that it has ionizing potential but some of them place a caveat upon cellular phone use by suggesting that users limit head exposure. That's a principle of moderation akin to saying, "Yes, fire is dangerous but can be used safely; here's how." The analogy simplifies the relationship too much. Most fire we can see. Radiation we cannot.

The connection between cellular phone usage and brain cancer rests unreliably upon the habits of cellular phone users. If developing cancer from the radiation emitted by cellular phones requires pressing the phone to the side of the head for hours a day for years at a time then the blame teeters between the device manufacturers 'prescribed uses' for their products and owners deviating from those prescriptions. The behavioral link between overuse (in whatever form that may take) and the thing overused (natural or human made) forms one tier of morality. And that moral is moderation. Moderation is observed practically in order to avoid being poisoned by the overconsumption of something. That notion transcends new communication technologies and rightly so. Technologies cannot reframe relationships and reality to such an extent that morality no longer applies to them. Therefore, we can discount neither the manufacturers' complicity in offering new products as opportunities to break a moral or the users of new products who do. Morals are ultimately personal as are the decisions made and their judgment. Therefore, the decision to use a device with enough power to expose a user to harmful radiation is the pendulum, which swings with the user's whims. But which way does the pendulum swing? In one direction we use the smartphone in a way that harms us physically. But we're not definitively sure if it really is harmful in the way that we think.  In another direction we remain below a threshold for any risk of being physically harmed by keeping the cellular phone away from our heads. But the pendulum swings in other, conceptually different ways. Let's take a look at them.

The larger issue about cell phone radiation rests upon the power of a cellular phone and to what ends that power is put, either by us or by those who control the tethers that this phone places upon the lives we live contingent to smart phone use. To simplify my point, today's smartphones represent surplus power: surplus computing power, surplus power consumption, and surplus power to distract us. We have to remind ourselves of this context. Each of us is condemned, by practical necessity, to carry around a fully capable microprocessor with a view screen, touch sensitive interface, a mechanical eye and ear to record events, and powerful enough communication capabilities to remain in unbroken contact with a global cellular network that stretches the globe and dots the sky above. That is the big machine behind this smart little device. The cellular phone is the prodigal son of Cold War military, espionage, and spy technology. It is an agglomeration of technologies, network platforms, and standard uses, some of which the spooks inaugurated into practice and others which existed only in their wet dreams. Sure, some of the features are fun, and yes, the phone expands the opportunity for certain activities to occur expressly because the phone has capabilities to facilitate the occurrence of those activities. For example, a smartphone can access the internet and its search capabilities, which enable a user, with only the name of a place, to chart out a way to reach it. It can also play music or allow you to substantiate, by photo or video, your experiences. But the smartphone and its capabilities is only an interface for the technological amber of our contemporaneous online culture. Some call this the web. The web is both the technology for interfacing with the the internet and the extensive digital content of online communication. The cellular- or smart-phone provides access to it and users continually access it and feed it. Communicated ideas, experiences, co-presence, affiliation, and all manner of other relational human symbolically mediated activity, which has probably motivated contributions to the content of known and practiced human activity for eons are now being rehashed, edited, and re-experienced as ways of being for others to follow, try, or respond to. All of this occurs in a quasi-public phantasmagoria of numerical rankings of subscribers, likes, views--a mathematical substantiation of fame, aura, self-importance, which smuggles into human affairs the appearance of objectivity and by doing so raises the stakes artificially for those participating in these multimedia, multimodal, online fora. Engaging in computer mediated communication, using the mode described above does not determine the method or the outcome. While modes of existence might facilitate their perpetuation, the 'free will' of humans explains how changes can and will occur over time and not simply due to necessity but also to the vagaries of human interaction. When we make connections like these we are, as well, artificially placing knots in the vast and complex tapestry of human symbolic existence as a matter of course on our way to making a point. Here's mine.

We are condemned by an increasingly virtualized, online, mobile society to assume a digital avatar as a matter of course: to being hired, to finding a mate, to making and keeping far-flung friends, and finally, in essence, to be. To be now, is to be online. But what makes being online so easy or so interesting? Well, because its sheer scope, the continuous and ever-present access to interactive stimulation, the benefits flatly available on a screen that don't exist in the immediate vicinity of a user otherwise. Simply because online represents a great wish being fulfilled. Wherever you want to go, it takes you. Whatever you want to be, it allows. It's as if we humans are merely shells for a nervous system, which is itself a parasite trapped in those shells. Early cultures called this a soul. Neuroscientists have sexier names for this phenomenon. Those who study symbol use as a uniquely human phenomenon recognize that when you are given a name, you can become a word in that deep stream, and this provides a means for the virtualization of a self-identity. And now, online serves as that murky aquarium resting on the pedestal where the parasite crawls out to be 'at home.' So yes, the online world fulfills a dream of the soul, a wish of the self, a tropism of the neuroscientifically defined brain area. And to put it simply, if we find value in being there, we go there, and for as long as it provides us with acceptable value we will continue to go there.

But that larger point I wanted to make is this. In this pyramidal age of machines the makers of the machines follow innovation curves that lead toward more: more features, more power, more, more, more. What some of us are carrying around is perhaps more power than we really need. It is more power than we need if we're to believe that it produces ionizing radiation at levels enough to alter the nuclear material of our body's cells. But to what does all this surplus power go?

We can think about this for some time. Some of that power goes to the interface and the values that bigger screens, more storage, better sound, and better color bring to the user. We can also look upon this as a better hole through which to peer into this dreamscape of wish fulfillment that occurs online. And this is one slave hook enabled through surplus power. As Steve Jobs noted at the dawn of the consumer computer revolution, the surplus computing power to which his company had access allowed it to make a computer with a more readily accessible interface to expand participation in computing and to revolutionize how we interacted with computers. The child of this moment was the mouse-navigable graphical user interface. And Jobs' last child was the prototype for social control into the twenty-first century: the smart phone that you cannot live without. As we follow this innovation curve toward more computing power into the future the power of these devices and their ubiquity will make them an absolute necessity. At this point, the question of the volitional requirements to participation will disappear. But volition was never really the bigger issue here, it's a more absolute description of freedom. And here's the trick.

Freedom of movement will remain, more or less, without impediments. But we are already beginning to see the parasite slip out of its fleshy cuticle. Thinking is beginning to move from us to the device in our palm, or on our lap, or on our desk. And that microprocessor with multimedia interface will serve as the central hub in a person's networked existence without which that person will no longer be able to live in the world, first, enabled by the device, and finally, necessitated by it. So a greater existential threat exists outside of our close and frenzied interactions with touch-sensitive scrolling interfaces of imagery, sound, video, and text--having an online experience adjusted to shape our understanding of reality. Online is becoming the new inside and the resting place for our one constant and essential companion, our decision making self, now supplanted as a search query carrying out in real time what people once did in thought. And the vast artificial intelligence behind connecting queries to search hits and the spell checking and suggesting algorithms all serve to level up a certain population of smartphone users while potentially leveling down others to a standard presumptively imposed by the design of the interface that is seen and the software code that makes the millions of microdecisions to turn your query into your wish fulfilled.

But the trickier question is when all that power will be used to control us more completely. The glib answer is when there's enough power. The processing power in the smartphone need not do more other than standardize our existence as an identity, a location, and a history all substantiated as digital information. And that's all it needs to do. The qualification to the answer, 'when there's enough power' would be when 'we've reached a critical mass of a type of user.' That user is the pliable meat seen through the phone's camera's eye held at selfie stick length away. That user decided to purchase a smartphone, make small, fidgety kinds of choices to use this phone all the time, and lose most other abilities to decide that the smartphone's search query could not provide through a search 'hit.' At the other end of search is a Valhalla, a wish fulfilled, a behavior-enforcing reward, and through these termite trails of search and return we create a user-customized experience. To the extent that we never turn this experience off we cede to its reality, and in doing so we become a more predictable, and predictably controlled smartphone user. The processing power of our smartphones, in the long run, is going to facilitate greater control over our choices and by dint the activities that characterize our existence. Our prison becomes the protean datascape, which encapsulates our interaction with practically acquired information for understanding and living our lives.