The only photo worth sharing with strangers

Family photos are exercises in excess inward meditations upon everyday activities, objects, and familial others. Most are plain to understand and still hard to decipher completely. A melange of birthdays, graduations, holidays, and other ritualized special events are the normal foci as are kids. Yes, kids. Lots of kids get their picture taken, that is, until parents lose interest in memorializing every baby sputum, shit, piss, bath, step, word, nap, meal.

This picture stands out if only because it offers us a snapshot of a trailer park in Belleville, Illinois in October 1978. The trailer is that of Mildred Zimmerman. The car is hers as well, a powder blue Chevy Nova. My mother and her aunt would eventually take that car and this trailer away from her as dementia slowly took her away. I faintly remember riding around the house on a broomstick horse with my great-grandmother Zimmerman in the kitchen and Prince playing on MTV in the front room. This was some time around 1982. I was five. Back then photomats were near-ubiquitous, small drive-up locations in grocery store parking lots. We had one in the Supervalu parking lot at Saint Louis Road and Main Street in the adjacent town of Collinsville. It would close some time in 1987 because the millions of photos that I took while vacationing with my mother's grandparents in Arizona were never picked up after being dropped off. I hounded my mom about her not getting them, but this would be one of many themes in my somewhat unorthodox childhood relationship with her. What other mother would ask you to help reattach a pull string to a ceiling fan, hold your hips as you stood on the edge of the water bed, and perform a hasty reach around on your pubescent penis while your neighbor friend Joey stood witness in the doorway to the room? Not many moms would. Mine did. Rape? Nah. Molestation? Maybe. Let's focus on the photograph instead. I didn't need therapy. I needed a finish.   

Dark City

In the neo-noir film 'Dark City' we find our protagonist arising to awareness in what could be described as an episode of interoperative recall. Unlike every other member of his city, the protagonist, John Murdoch, begins to realize that he has lost memories just as he has lost places. Throughout the film, we see through his eyes as he discovers that the very people and places are changed daily, around midnight, and that the city itself is simply the face of a large spaceship piloted by alien controllers who derive some manner of occupational sustenance from maintaining this elaborate rat maze.

I am reminded of this film for one very simple reason. We spend time occupying pre-fabricated spaces whose architecture is a purely symbolic expression of underlying code. In fact, small and sometimes substantive changes occur behind the scenes, in the code, almost daily. When I return to a site and see the widgets changed or functionalities that were once separated now integrated I recall this film. While big unveilings of new sites can and do happen the little changes that accrue over time, as was recalled by the popular vlogger Pewdiepie, demonstrate that we are setting foot upon a fast-changing landscape. While functional buttons get moved and reskinned, and while some of these people are conscious of them is but a tip of a larger iceberg in a data-based landscape that is 'occupied' albeit as a type of fantasy chained narrative of 'online surfing.' And that fantasy, that modicum of normalcy, that foundation of certainty, is an expression of so many interests: the interests of coders, the interests of standards bodies, the interests of lawyers and of marketers, the interests of business, the interests of commodification and monetization, the interests of click, the interests of interface designers, and the interests of the vast majority of users and the kinds of ways that they interact with the data being displayed in the way that is being displayed. All this adds up to a world that, if it were real, would be an ominous sign, but since it is not, remains, at times, just below consciousness and gets registered as a few hiccups in the normal swipe and click routine of a barely conscious, strictly haptic aspect of the ritualized activity of 'online behavior.'

I go back to an early VR pioneer's work and his very iconographic dreadlocked appearance for inspiration and wisdom. Jaron Lanier's recommendation is to monetize data sharing in a way that makes ownership a baked-in feature of a web search and retrieval experience based in microtransactions that go from content creator to content consumer. He says that this will both motivate the creation of new culture and not simply incentivize the process of 'stealing' and remediating others' content.

That interlude is now over. Let us remind ourselves that the world we occupy is protean and surreal. The longer we tread down this path the more we could, and perhaps should, become preoccupied with counterfeit realities as Philip K. Dick described them. In his view, the Roman Empire had never ceased operating. And perhaps he has some truck with this notion of power and organization's historical continuity. This is our world. The glitzy, billion dollar ideas created, bought, and sold in the former orchard acreage that is now Silicon Valley should remind us that while we spend a lot of time meeting the hallucination of 'being online' halfway that there are very real and substantive effects of this whole operation. Money is funneled to the few. The fulcrums are increasingly consolidated into a few levers by which we gain access to a reality that is, by and large, digitally substantiated through so many different and routine mock fictions held together by perfectly separating friend from function in a way that incentivizes return activity.

In other words, to put this into Skinnerian language, our food lever substantiates more than simply organic sustenance but also neuronal sustenance. When we can swipe to order food, swipe to find our way somewhere, swipe to recall a family member or a loved one's number, swipe to 'be' with others, or simply swipe to pass the time we're already begun to flatten the world around us into that universal food lever. And as goes our environment, so goes our persistent behaviors, and then goes our identities, and finally our existence melds into some kind of interaction loop that is self-sustaining. In the end we becomes polyps upon the functional underside of a megatechnology.

This leads me to the trite and worn conclusion that we need to struggle more with a recalcitrant reality that requires us to cultivate, practice, and engage with our great mental inheritance. That we've been able to leave this earthly plain is a small leap from reflex to meta-reflex, time fixing, and cultural mediation in the future perfect mode. That is our great asset and our Achille's heel, imagination and sensation coalesce, which expose us to influence in the very process of creating models of reality. Why else do we worship purely fictional zeniths of social organization? Why else did we look to the stars to chart our paths, plan our crops, and honor the narrative deities that placed them there? Creatures of time we are. And at the very margins of that sensation of something not really present we mine time for significance, and pre-plan a social world by using revelations in time to manipulate a great mass of others through a narrative overlay of significance making upon time itself to furnish an attitude toward a fast-becoming reality.

A Craving for Tyrants

The story began when I rode along with a woman who was taking orders from a voice-prompted GPS navigation system adhered to her top dash. It told her how far she'd have to go after taking a right turn while she dutifully followed the path laid before her in an empty parking lot.

Two things are wrong here: one is computer related, and the other is a human condition. GPS technology like all technology is fundamentally unintelligent. The GPS navigation system gives directions whether the driver is on the highway or at the bottom of a lake. This lack of awareness demonstrates that it simply cannot contextualize outside of its interpretation of a geosynchronous satellite signal and the available information it has on the desired destination. And it shouldn't. This provides entry into the second issue, people's desire to follow orders dumbly. That is because some tasks are conjunctive tasks. Driving can be one. For some, piloting a vehicle and reading and interpreting directions are two distinct chores, requiring more than one person to coordinate the task of driving to a new destination correctly. In the defense of this habit it is a very effective means of accomplishing more than you normally could. In the interplay between participants some give orders some take and each assumes a distinct role with a set of tasks. It's magical. Words like transcendence and jamming come to mind as outcomes of group work and group play. But enough kindness has been given to the desire for group work to discuss something underlying group dynamics: power.

Power is a property of groups. As I define it, power and its sister, influence, operate within the contingencies of affiliation, support, and ultimately meaning that manifest in shifting loyalties, changing agendas, and the individuation of group members. At a further level of remove the ways that power and influence manifest themselves among people is through the coordinating medium of symbol use, most notably communication. Lewis Mumford's survey of human development that he carries out in 'The Myth of the Machine' demonstrates that the gift of command and coordination are essential traits of hunting party leaders. The better that a leader carries out the task of coordinating hunter's movement and attacks the more successful the hunting party is and the more successful their village will be. In this simple vignette power becomes an optic, a hole through which one may sometimes see all the way through the fabric of a given reality to an idealized future organized around this usage of power. In essence, power begets ideologies, which in turn beget persistent attitudes towards things, which in turn help to establish practical realities. Power and its effective utilization to increase energy, food, water, and resource collection gives power a second property: its mythologization as luck, destiny, caprice, or God's will.

Magical thinking begets magical practices. And so the leader of the hunt can become enshrined in religious practice such that this person occupies two simultaneous planes of existence one before us and the other divine. Leaders become the focus of worship as only to remember their divinity long after their deeds have been forgotten. Rituals bleed into memorials and the persistent feature of our existence is this preoccupation with leadership and order. Leadership and coordination brought us very far from a humble hunting and gathering existence. The society we keep together requires immense skill, a lot of energy, an increasing reliance upon expertise and specialization, and most of all a near identical veneration of the modes for keeping the whole thing working.

Our time and our society is modern. This is the little myth that we tell about ourselves. But we are the same people who hunted and gathered for hundreds of thousands of years. And so with our science comes the same mythic practices. One is simple enough to understand, the need for a desirable interface for participating in the creation of our society. In the past that was through group order. Today it is through a job and a career identity. Yet we still crave the presence of others, and our technologies offer up a saccharine version of humanity through connectivity and social media. Our petroleum-fueled consumer society has effectively erased many of the reasons for coordinated action. Modernity's true measure may come in its ability to allow a one-to-one relation between people and their feature-laden environment through the near total extinction of the everyday and mundane conjunctive task. In its stead is the isolated consumer living a nearly unbroken relationship with mediated others through a small gesture-based interface for communicating and information retrieval.

We aren't that far removed in evolution from our hunter gatherer forbears. In fact, we're almost identical. But our self-made environment has changed considerably. That hunting party leader, the living god, and the elaborate rituals that support them have been shattered into countless functional objects we utilize for navigating our environment and reproducing a meaningful existence through group affiliation. By virtue of the relationship established on the hunt we now take orders from computer algorithms and interfaces. The same order, the same task differentiation, but now the leader is simply a string of code for interpreting data and acting according to a program. Our tyrants are dumb. Their speech terse. Our technological tyrants are an evolving expressions of our desire to lead and, more importantly, to be led.

The myths and the rituals may change but one aspect of our lives remains, the desire to reduce uncertainty in practical affairs. Leadership--even in its denatured form as a commanding male British voice barking directions from a little black box on the dash--is one such means of reducing uncertainty.