Old Things

As if it isn't obvious by now, I am virtually unemployable. My schooling prepared me for no discernible activity in today's workplace. So many letters from potential employers and employment screening departments have indicated this much in writing. In a letter dated July 13, 2016, Bryan Boeckelmann, Manager of Recruiting and Examination for the City of Saint Louis writes: "I regret to inform you that your experience and training does not meet the Minimum Qualifications for this position." In a letter dated September 20, 2011 the Human Resources Division at Los Alamos National Laboratory "has determined that your experience and/or educational background are not the best match for this position."

I recall a brief moment after finishing the oral defense of my comprehensive examinations toward the fulfillment of my Doctorate of Philosophy in Communication at the University of Colorado, Boulder one of my advisors, Doctor Bryan Taylor, audibly shouted from inside the room that I had just exited, "What is he going to do?"

What am I going to do? Apply as I might, find brief moments of need from others as I do, I get by, just barely, but I get by. So Monday, August 29, 2016 I helped a childhood friend remove some wood lath and trim from a home built in Saint Louis in the late 1800s. In an upstairs closet where I had just removed some trim, two items shined like gems amid the rubble.

The green tinkertoy tab has been identified as coming from a Tinkertoy, Giant Engineer #155 set from Questor Education Products Co., which was produced in the 1950s. The picture, likely a yearbook photo or some other photographic memento, came from some time in the 20s through the 40s, judging by the sepia-toned patina of the photo. But if this is not natural yellowing of a photograph over time it could possibly be a much older photo. Sepia toning began in the 1880s, but the commercial availability of photographs on photographic paper for the context in which this photograph was produced was probably a 20th century advent. It would make little photographs like this the nigh-ubiquitous mementos of childhood, children, and other loved ones that would end up in so many small lockets and other collector's paraphernalia.

The image of this child came from a city home near the inner ring that defines the first stage of city development, i.e., out from the city center to the west terminating at Jefferson Avenue. Houses east of Jefferson are some of the oldest remaining structures in the city. Slowly, and piecemeal these homes are renovated, torn down, mysteriously burned and memories of what once was disappear. The photograph of this girl reflects a different demographic for the city's urban core at the time that it was taken. Most likely, her parents or grandparents were recent emigres from Germany. Her father likely worked at one of the many manufacturing businesses around the city. The Anheuser-Busch brewery is within walking distance of this home, so he may have worked there as well. Time, technology, and automation separates us from the world in which this girl lived or the world in which that Tinkertoy tab was played with. All we have now are conjecture about the fragments from the past that fall behind walls and become entombed in their own makeshift time capsules.

In essence, I just work for whatever I can get. Yesterday it was for a free lunch and the payment of a parking ticket. Finding things like this and leveraging what non-marketable skill I have for describing what I see is all I do now. Sad lot that I've become at times like this. As I've noted countless times before, I dug that hole. I dug that hole because conceiving of myself in a job depressed me like nothing else. It depressed me so much that a professor for a Business and Professional writing class I took during my undergraduate studies inserted a brochure for mental health counseling available on campus into my writing portfolio. I have no more to add to that discussion. I have to deal with a Social Security Administration that could not effectively stop payments to a dead person and is holding me accountable for their mistake 18 months later.

Attempting a Pre-Socratic fragment

"People are made from truth." 

 - attributed to Jason of Collinsville 2016 C.E.

The Booleans of Computer culture

Clicking an available button does not constitute a "dislike." The two opposing representations of taste available under a Youtube video are a programmer's attempt to map an expression of human interests onto the most basic of logic functions, i.e., an "on" or "off" state. So where we click within two available image maps routes information to one of two lists that is updated to reflect that click. Therein lies the rub. We never push through the machine's skin as we register our participation. Instead, the computer mimes an efficaciousness sufficient to satisfy a human interpretation of interaction by way of a cause-effect chain. 

a prison for one

These four walls.
They protect me from the world.
These four walls.
They protect the world from me.

Modernity and the condition of being marooned

The condition of being marooned was perhaps most salient to early sailors who could find their ship dashed upon a rocky shore or sunk in an ocean. There, resorting to floating upon the flotsam of their vessel, the sailor probably succumbed to the danger of exposure, predation, and remaining in saline water for days.

This condition of being marooned is still with us only in different forms. The conscious apprehension of the world around each of us frames a condition of novelty and complete ambiguity with regard to the meaning of things. Behaviorally humans have few innate responses. Instead, humanity learns through parental guidance, group affiliation, and cultural membership to inhabit a world of symbols that overlays the physical world in ways that give it cosmological significance, a need for ritual, sacrifices, reverence, avoidance, love, distrust--the full human playset of emotional commitments.

Modern worlds, such as the consumer capitalist utopia of the United Sates present us with new and novel forms of being marooned. As consumers get individuated through consumer practices and institutionalization through schooling and workplace fealty these individuals gradually lose their bonds to family, friends, and culture. I should say that they can. Mormon and Amish communities represent two communities of faith and practice that have been able to mitigate the effects of consumer individuation. Others exist and so do many individuals who have chosen to avoid the trap of self-centered consumption.

In addition to being cut off progressively from family and friends through work, school, and other professional obligations--let alone media consumption and slavish devotion to leisure--in modern societies people are cut off from the earth. The first stage of this occurs historically through the mass urbanization of society, the lure of factory work, and easy access to travel. Let us be honest. Farm work is less desirable and less compensatory than working in a garment factory in South East Asia to rural South East Asians. The same can be said for rural Chinese who have flooded Chinese cities to assemble today's electronics. Those people are afforded some basic financial footing, have established lives away from home, and use earned money to plan for a better future. Farming, hunting, fishing, gathering--these are some basic ways that people have worked in their surroundings to establish a living, found sustenance, and learned about the world around them. These very basic activities have occupied humanity for ages.

Today's world has machines doing the bulk of heavy work. Computers do the repetitive logic tasks. People are left to find occupations so that they may live meaningful lives of consumption, so that they may occupy socioeconomic niches, and advertise their fitness as mates through dress, body maintenance, or conspicuous consumer purchases. And this is where my story of being marooned begins.

This condition of being marooned may not always surface consciously, but there it is. In the event of a major flood, fire, earthquake, or war the basic amenities of modernity break down. Sewer, clean water, electricity, gas, food transportation--all this halts or becomes problematic to rely upon. In the past I've called these the petristructure, that is, the very medium through which a life is lived. People are born into and grow up inside these prefabricated environments that they come to rely upon for daily meaning and basic needs. The post-traditional facade work of high-technology environments containing privately held structures and metered access to any number of needs require that a person have money in order to sustain meaningful connection to it. And this unfettered access, when the money allows, structures the one consequential moral in a modern world--without money you may die. At the very least, without money you live a degraded and undignified existence sometimes in group homes or on the streets, under bridges, in tent camps, or in abandoned buildings. That thin and often invisible line separating a have from a have not could be as simple as a power outage whereby one loses ATM access. Or worse, what if one loses his or her smartphone containing all the information one needs to live by for accessing others and calling banks or credit card companies? Or simply, what if there were no power? That phone becomes a rather blank slate-colored object of little use.

Does any one of us live in fear of losing access to all of this? Sometimes I welcome it as if fat people need to be weeded out or as if people with absolutely no ability to help themselves should go about begging like the indigent they always were. That lead me to think that modernity is simply a standardized dress code, a patina of functionality, the working ideology of a society that has essentially deprived the great many of us from any real existence outside of the stainless steel teats from which each of us, as a Romulus or Remus, suckle like the feral children we are underneath our designer clothing and knowledge of local sports teams. So this marooning is a very real condition of our artificiality and our contingency in a prefabricated and purely functional world that is one loose wire away from being lost.

The rapture is like encephalopathy

Erasure is the word I used to describe a rapture event triggered by mobile computing culture. Specifically, consumer electronics that utilize computer power and function as constant indispensable companions conspire through their available functionality to preclude any involved use of memory or participation in a recalcitrant reality that wasn't summoned by search queries. Furthermore, as this constant computer companion demands more and more time in the day from the user, the user's relationship to computer functionality frames the experience of life. This exemplar of computer power and its interface, as a virtue of being a consumer product developed within a market-oriented capitalist framework, adopts the one product per consumer model. Contexts for usage become solitary activities and specifically can morph into self-imposed solitude even in the midst of people. This activity displaces the user into mediated relationships with other users. Consequently, consumer electronics compete for the attention and time of a user in real time. Functioning as an intermediary, consumer products utilizing computer power conspire to frame reality, manage it, and ultimately create it by learning to please the user as a function of its marketed appeal and consumer development as a day-long and life-long companion that satisfies many of the requests that once others fulfilled as an expression of friendship or of filial traditions. Such an undoing doesn't happen immediately, nor does it follow a trajectory specific to how I characterized it. Simply put, I present a worst case scenario to be avoided if it can. For me, that worst case is the loss of one's cultural humanity through constant mediation at the expense of social affiliation with others.

Computing power, as it grows, makes it easier to deconstruct specific functional human behavior, allowing for more intuitive and natural interfaces. Speech recognition, three-dimensional manipulation of objects in virtual reality, typing, mouse, all speak to the modalities for interfacing with computer power. And a consumer computer industry has emerged around proprietary expressions of these modalities. More importantly, with the insinuation of computing power into society and human organization the smart phone has become a proxy for the desire to have at the ready a universal interface with both information, people, and power in a society that relies increasingly on the blending of programmed human administrative algorithms with an increasingly centralized and more powerful cadre of people self-appointed through their accumulation of money and power to maintain a very high level of control. Similarly, people are induced in so many trivial ways to sustain a hypothetical condition of constant contact through their pocket interfaces to a great storehouse of information effectively walled off by the limits of their own current concerns. The computer feeds desire through the function of search. Search marries data entry, data retrieval, and a learning algorithm that suggests alternative searches based upon a spell checking algorithm and a database of similar searches performed by others entering the same or class-similar search terms. Through search and its baked-in design philosophies a social order of homogeneity is recreated through use that increasingly mires a person in behavior consistent to the ways a computer self-programs around a user history to feed the user more of the same. And down and down into an increasingly smaller spiral of decisions the user's world becomes a tailored product of computer power in the employ of human design interface concerns for sustaining pleasant and 'transparent' interaction with information and programs designed to encourage a face to face, natural language mode of interaction. Computers represent the latent desire to create models of humanity, and so the desire to improve them is to utilize more computer power to simulate 'better' interaction with computer power through more intuitive interface design. Better, in this case, represents an investment of over 99% of all new computing power to create that interface. What started out as an arcane interface dialogue, via a keyboard, with sometimes no video terminal at all, in a climate-controlled basement that never saw sunlight, soon enough became a visual and gestural metaphor of human interaction by, say, 2006. What that 99% in all new computing power enhancements resulted in is a greater and more sophisticated interaction paradigm focused on better sensory inputs, e.g., flawless sensory interaction using existing visual and auditory media. Does better interaction with computers enable better communication with others? That's a case-by-case study of just how people use computers, and no singular event substantiates the process of erasure nor of personal enhancement perfectly. The point to end on here hangs on the consumer model for computer access that encourages one computer per person and increasingly substantiates what an operant conditioning researcher would describe as a 'food lever.' In other words, that extra power is not simply a tool for access to information and people or to self-improvement per se but as an end in itself that sustains human interest and increasingly directs more time and human behavior toward interaction with their consumer device for its own sake. More importantly, people trade others for their devices because those devices have been developed to learn to serve each consumer to their specific interests. The reward structures of  both interfacing and the numerical measures of fame in social networking provide powerful incentives to get involved and to remain engaged.

Communication with others follows many scripts, and many of those scripts can be accurately and effectively reproduced by software algorithms to simulate and mass produce: business and legal arrangements, the singles matching that friends do, the recommendations once provided by a geographically originated cohort of like-minded familiars, in order to cut labor costs. In the ashes of industries and their employees who once performed these jobs we have a denatured familiar in the software programs, running on 'learning' algorithms, reproducing the "effects" of 'service' once performed by economic actors in a labor economy running on promises, affect, and affluence. Those illusions are gone. We are left with three service relationships with others, be they human or algorithm; they are: the servant, the executive assistant, or the secretary. Allow me to explain.

Three models of humanity are represented in computer power interfaces: the servant, executive assistant, or secretary. As each of us participate in these functions by using most any contemporary smartphone, tablet, computer, game system, or unforeseen object, what we do is allow those programs to provide service roles that it derives from the above models of humanity. In the process they extract information about our habits that they compile into an interaction profile that is used to enhance a program's chance to 'satisfy' a user.

The service that computer power provides is collecting and storing any number programmed into it, allowing strings of these numbers to represent any number of representational artifacts. The richness and complexity of a computer's ability to collect, compile, sort, and analyze any one of these artifacts illustrates how computer power, as a very simple tool kit, has become the project through which talented and savvy individuals realize their dreams of human interaction, human influence, human communication. This model is akin to Arnold Toynbee's own structural-realist form of culture as a radiation of influence from a creative minority to a mimetic majority, which creates a culture that decays as the mimes stop reproducing it. This makes it, one, performative; it is a sequence of actions, over time that substantiate any notion of a head and tail to some phenomenal aspect of culture. What computer power does as it mediates human cultural exchange, human labor, human decision-making is perpetuate its existence. It does this by conserving the power and common sense reality of its place in a society that becomes increasingly reliant upon it. Computer power's potential lies in its scope as a dream narrative for infinite development to greater and greater levels of complexity and power. Therefore, it is a technology that also allows something important, it catalyzes human thinking and cultural production to levels neither foreseen nor feasible. Computer power suddenly makes a kid's bedroom and what that kid does in that bedroom something potentially special to millions of others. Computer power helps to overcome the anomie caused by consumer individuation and estrangement in developed capitalists societies that have all but supplanted much of what would be considered the tethers of folk culture to which people had remained. Transportation and novel living arrangements separate people from each other and reconnect them through functional narratives that incentivize particular modes of relating that tend to rest upon calculations of fame and desires to attain it. Strange yes, but media are strange, ethereal, godly, and still so prosaic.

Herein lies the rub. The science that props up a society and a civilization comes from a world of examples inherent in the pattern of how life has found ways of occupying niches in a vast and complex energy exchange system that scientists call the food web. From sun, heat, and chemicals molecules have found means of coordinating their coincident development with them, using them to catalyze chemical reactions that expand possibilities for molecular diversity and survival. Over time, a long, long time, this pattern toward greater and greater complexity through the active recruitment of more and more energy for the molecular processes behind cell function, life, and death has resulted, in a life form, humanity, that manipulates electrical impulses propagated along specialized cell bodies to keep a vast fabric of networked nervous interaction that substantiates a lived event as a memory that serves as a building block in the metatemporal self that propagates, like nervous impulses, out of years of nervous interaction with a human-built environment. As we take bricks out of the long-history of our reproductive culture by adopting computer power surrogates to them we take bricks out of our humanity and replace them with co-dependency upon a computer metaphor for the type of service one once received from a fellow person. The effectiveness and the very functional consistency of computer interfaces makes them fitting minions for the power elite who employ them, be they banks, trading houses, or simply people using self-selected search queries to find bike routes, better restaurants, or a good barber. With this kind of computer power who needs friends? A great many don't or simply adopt online friendships as a proxy for co-present interaction with fellow human beings. Surely computer power bears the brunt of a great many of inane questions normally asked by individuals to family or friends. But the requirement to turn to another person establishes a need for others that is essential to a societal fabric. Power to the people is a sufficient condition of the largesse that has been heaped upon people through the excess computer power at the ready for programmers to funnel toward better ways of living through computing. That largesse is born out in the mobile high-definition display showcasing the gestural world of a bleeding-edge consumer smart phone with enough computer power to run a small country quite easily. These have become status symbols because they are so essential to living apart and with a computer surrogate hand-holding a great many through the most mundane of experiences. Does a smart phone per person strategy democratize computer power in any way? No. The presence of tap water in U.S. homes speaks to its essential role in the life functions of humans. The smart phone is attempting to be its own exemplar of a utility that will one day become a basic human right. And at that point will we hold these truths to be self-evident that all should have chip-based smart phone progeny implanted at human birth as a matter of hygiene and public safety.

Enough with the speculative banter. Encephalopathy is a brain disease caused by the death of brain cells, resulting in the eventual existential death of the individual. As we engage in less contact and even less thought, memory, or brain power through the use of computer surrogates in order to meet needs that we once received from people we become less and less human. It's a long-term, inconsistent development of human co-dependence upon computing. The long-term will reveal how a temporal condition of conscious existence, which rests upon a longer-term structure--culture--can mutate into a very different culture and consciousness. As the panoply of computing power interfaces grows, diversifies, and embeds itself as a part of normal everyday life so too will our time be spent with those interfaces. And that time, that dead time, will constitute the first stirrings of the death of the human culture as we know it. In its stead we may find a a cybernetic pidgin of exchange becoming the basis for the culture. Time spent with computers can also be time not spent with others. The consumer model of computing thrives on gifted programmers exploring novel software solutions to life's many problems. And this consumer market, like many others, exploits a resource human time. Like all activities, computing must be fit into a daily routine. The question becomes what from a person's day must be sacrificed by virtue of the time sequestered for computer use. The commercial model of computing almost guarantees that developers will offer many more incentives to use computers than to preserve the life you had before computers. Between early adopters and purists we find a range of computer users. Individuals are all over self-consciously rejecting the binge/addiction model of computer usage. Yet it exists. And programmers and marketers have mindfully tapped into these behavioral loops and encouraged consumer loyalty through addiction or some self-identified reliance upon mobile computing access points. That this model exists speaks to how programmers have built environments running on very powerful incentive structures. And that very structure is used to corral people into increasingly demanding, yet satisfying arenas of pure fantasy. But the computer power interface also offers pure utility and subsequently pure necessity. To characterize this development toward greater reliance, in our development model we have a device that devours our time throughout our life being promoted by a capitalist model of consumer electronic sales that encourages greater use, which in turn sequesters time away from others. Corralling people away from others and toward consistent and controlled environments has been a hallmark of civilization for centuries. It's also an effective means of panoptic control. Computing power only catalyzes the process in novel and yet also predictable ways. The sum effect of these isolated interaction patterns with a greater reality of information for creative and satisfying consumption is to alienate the person both from self and from others and to enforce a temporal condition that favors reacting to a now of unfettered desire at knowing, seeing, hearing, or experiencing something on the Web. That level of time management between a desire being thought and that desire taking shape into a search query ensures that thinking is reliant upon a computer-framed activity. These are the kinds of bricks that are being removed from humanity.

The Christian apocalyptic notion of the rapture is when God returns to earth to take his select believers. Narratively, people disappear from earth as they enter the everlasting embrace of pure light and love of the one true god of Jesus Christ. Unlike this rapture, the high-technology rapture finds people disappearing behind doors and interacting behind screens for greater parts of their life. The final piece, the one reminiscent of brain cell death is the undoing of humanity by individuating people into digital information consumers remaining at their personal food lever for the duration of their life. Swiping to know, swiping to remember, swiping to order food and clothes, swiping to pass the time--these all speak to that universal food lever that perhaps we've seen white rats in lab settings being incentivized to activate over and over. We are building that condition now out of digital metaphors. And to the extent that we become perfectly alienated from each other by virtue of preferring or even being forced to accept mediated relations the death of culture and of the humanity we know begins.