In college two paths are available. You can choose a degree that requires self-expression, or you can choose a degree that requires you to effectively solve many small problems.
Algorithms are a buzzword these days. Algorithms are rules for solving problems. And the more that we continue to use software to translate problems into computer-accessible code and to address them as outputs of computer programs the more and more lopsided our access to understanding of problems and solutions becomes.
A dumb but effective example would be solving the problem of 'finding a mate' by reducing desirable traits into categorical information that others seeking mates must feed into a computer to allow the computer to sort through the data that others submit in order to match people. This kind of dating has a 1 copulating with a 0.
Just think of this. Think long and hard about just how different it is to date those who are physically accessible to you, are part of a network of friends, and with whom you come into contact over the course of a week or month. Now compare that against a person who has been reduced to sets of relationship attributes scored and cross-referenced against yours in order to turn the 'dialectics of relating' into an algorithmic expression of a successful dating partner.
Now, dating and college aren't really analogues to one another, but the quest for knowledge requires a modicum of self-feedback, which is itself an outcome of some type of 'expression.' Granted, at some grainy level of human activity everything can be reduced to expression, be it the use of form or numeracy. The difference is that the self-expressive 'arts' that people can pursue in college have as only a sociopolitical analogue--genre--to compare to the resident knowledge of, say, engineering. The difference is that the knowledge of how to conduct engineering and how to compose a song follow different paths. One path is determined almost solely by the available formulas and 'algorithms' for solving problems. The other is run on self-defined heuristics for how to best pursue song composition. One is impersonal, the other is highly personal. One outcome is objectively defined as successful. The other is highly subjective, highly politicized, and fraught with interpersonal conflicts and idiosyncrasies. We can only imagine, which one offers a more ready access to self-understanding. I'd put that on song composition over doing engineering.
I have one more point to make. The differences I am claiming between the expressive arts and engineering are, at a certain level, meaningless. Yes, we can reduce all human behavior to a set of algorithms, which can be followed in order to compose a song or to design a better plane wing. And yes, the defining criterion for success behind a 'hit' song and a wing that 'flies' demonstrates just how different the two are. Algorithms can lead us to find some subjective success or they can lead us to find objective success. Now, which one is more probable, and controllable? The objective one, obviously. Now we begin to see why engineering knowledge is coveted. It is objective. It requires defined inputs and has discretely defined criteria for judging successful outputs. Art, well hell, art is just something that people do to which other people respond.
But in forcing analogues between art and this engineering science only opens up the ways in which the political is highly personal and very much human in the art world, whereas the inherent conflicts in engineering hierarchy are displaced into the abstract and uncontested vocabulary of mathematical formulas for conducting successful engineering calculations. Engineering is a solution looking for problems. Art is a problem or a solution finding expression. The contours of the work or the expression reflect the sociopolitical dynamics, the artists' personal limitations, the genre boundaries to which interpretation and artistic input conform, and the taste of the artist and the audience. The contours of a successful engineering solution may, perhaps reflect upon the sociopolitical climate surrounding the engineering firm where the solution is discovered. I could imagine that the engineering problems surrounding making a supersonic spy plane occurring at a skunk works in Nevada does speak to the larger context of superpowers trying to see what each other are doing without being shot out of the sky. That being said, this context supports some kinds of engineering solutions over other kinds. For example, developing fuel that can be fed into an engine capable of Mach-plus flight is more likely to be solved at this skunk works in Nevada than, say, designing solar panels capable of translating 50% of the sun's energy into a form readily available for consumption in some consumer or industrial power application.
I used to care about these distinctions: art and science. I am beginning to ramble on like a C.P. Snow at the moment. Nothing changes. People continue to find interesting intersections between art and science, art and computing, ad and nauseum. I got an early start only because I treated college as a smorgasbord from which I could and should sample. What it left me was a Renaissance man with no employable skill in a bee-hive world of job specialization requiring all potential candidates for those positions to use computer-searchable keywords in order to be known to exist to those firms seeking the few and amazingly clever and intelligent to fill those positions.
I digress into that seething pool of bloody hatred. I have a fat lip because I was pulling on some wire at work today and it snapped and the pliers flung back and hit me in the mouth. Yes, I'm an uncoordinated buffoon. Sure, I'm a Ferdinand, preferring to hang out alone, enjoying my five senses over interfacing as a tool user in the larger world-apparatus of participating in "scientific delta" for the sake of the "socioeconomic alpha." If I am going to worship a God. I'd rather that it be the universe creator than the job creator. If I am going to submit my knowledge to a hierarchy of meaning, interpretation, and self-interest I'd rather reproduce those sociopolitical contours in order that I don't go through my life blinded by power, muted by algorithms, obsolesced by automation, and approvingly selling that expressive part of my soul for a modicum of pecuniary worth.
Monday, June 8, 2015
Tuesday, June 2, 2015
Means Available
To paraphrase Aristotle, rhetoric is the art of finding the available means for persuasion.
First, it is an art, suggesting that the practice and preparation of rhetoric cannot be reduced to scientific calculation and reproducibility.
Second, rhetoric concerns itself with seeking out 'available means' for persuasion, suggesting that, akin to kairos, persuasion is contingent upon the speaker, the audience, and the context.
All of these are moving targets, and the one that challenges maintaining a tidy framework for 'occasioning' rhetorical acts would be context.
To shorten and simplify the discussion, our current technologically mediated context provides routes to attain the means available for persuasion. Putting it simply, we live in a smart phone connected society. People spend a lot of their time in this society swiping at screens, checking feeds, and killing all of their interstitial time by perusing a scrolling display. This setting provides opportunities for clever and quick presentations of information, much of which is reduced to an image and maybe a caption.
Entering this context we have the display of state power, via police, through the dissemination of mugshots that are deemed by police and others' tastes to be remarkable and quite often laughable.
I offer these two pieces of evidence :
Characterizations of these men aside, they got themselves in enough trouble to get arrested, booked, and have their likeness transformed into the legal evidence of a mugshot. Both men, to put it bluntly, have rather remarkable tattoos on their faces. Both men, without their consent, had their mugshots disseminated by online news agencies for entertainment purposes.
The purpose of this is twofold. First, it is entertaining. The more outrageous the person looks, the more interest and clicks it will generate. Second, as mugshots, the two men are representative of petty criminality. It is hard to take these two men seriously with their poorly chosen and executed tattoos. But also, and by comparison, having these men processed by the police offers up the cops as the adjudicators of judgment. In this case it is better judgment. It also offers a quiet and effective demonstration of police power. Policing is newsworthy; it always has been. This mundane procedural aspect of policing, the mugshot, provides an opportunity to publicly shame criminals and criminality. It creates an easy foil against which we can compare police conduct because what the police do is surely above the bar suggestively set by these two men and their facial tattoo decisions.
To conclude briefly, the ability of the police to disseminate mugshots for entertainment is made available by web technology and the native digital media production capabilities that most carry around at all times. As entertainment, these mugshots function as positive PR for the police. It also serves as a warning to us that we too can become the object of someone's entertainment while they're at lunch scrolling through headlines. In the world of smart phones it is all too easy to be snared by its media production apparatus to be offered up, in edited format, as objects of entertainment, curios of our modern world. And as long as the more remarkable mugshots get produced the dimmer view many of us will have of the people around us, and the stronger our allegiance with police power will be. Police power is offered as a ward against criminality, even the lighthearted variety such as this.
But just who are the police? They're mostly men, mostly white, and by and large, they represent majority interests. Perhaps, it is "majority" interest because we all know that the powerful are few, while the powerless are many. The powerless simply see the world as the few do because they have a privileged level of access to the means of reality production. If, for example, a few private banking interests at the Federal Reserve can print money and loan it to the United States at interest then we get a little sample of how our realities are administered through the decisions of a few powerful people.
The police are us or at least a subset. Most importantly, the self-selecting who become police have, among other things, a sense of justice and duty, and then some have an inflated sense of their power and responsibility. And somewhere between handing a man a gun and then giving him a badge of immunity we create organizational cultures like this:
According to the website that showed this picture, the man posing as 'game' that has been hunted is currently being detained at the jail. That he's black and the other men white demonstrates the uneven distribution of power. That he's playing along for the photo-op suggests that this black man has gotten accustomed to doing things like this, little acts of indignity for the entertainment of the powerful in order to get better treatment, hopefully.
Unlike the mugshots above, hunting photos like these are to be disseminated internally only. Shots like this harken back to the abuses at Abu Ghraib because shots like this are abuse. Mugshots are abuse. They force those of us who commit legal infractions to become incriminating public data. Mugshots erase the life of the person, and turn them into an artifact for the sake of the pose and the shot. Mugshots are data that the police hold to maintain a visual catalog of criminals, which can then be cross referenced with the memory of victims and witnesses for possible matches. The police know that criminals often repeat. When you're captured and processed by the police you begin to witness what lowly opinion they have of you. Do as they say, shut up, go here, hold this, sit here. You are a victim of their will because you have none. Our man posing as a deer, knows this better than me. Black men are 'practice dummies' for police procedures. The police learn how to stop, take down, cuff, and kill by practicing on black men. Where we draw the line between those who are deserving of police protocol and those who aren't happened well before a man has his likeness posted in an unfavorable way for the public or for other officers' entertainment. Dignity is so quickly crushed by the police. Citizenship is hemmed in by threats of violence and a semiotics of power administered upon the body and the mind through shaming, fear, and killing.
The means available for persuasion are many. In our time, in our place, the threat of shameful artifacts of one's self traveling around the web are but one. Enter the camera, the phone, the mobile web.
Welcome to the machine.
First, it is an art, suggesting that the practice and preparation of rhetoric cannot be reduced to scientific calculation and reproducibility.
Second, rhetoric concerns itself with seeking out 'available means' for persuasion, suggesting that, akin to kairos, persuasion is contingent upon the speaker, the audience, and the context.
All of these are moving targets, and the one that challenges maintaining a tidy framework for 'occasioning' rhetorical acts would be context.
To shorten and simplify the discussion, our current technologically mediated context provides routes to attain the means available for persuasion. Putting it simply, we live in a smart phone connected society. People spend a lot of their time in this society swiping at screens, checking feeds, and killing all of their interstitial time by perusing a scrolling display. This setting provides opportunities for clever and quick presentations of information, much of which is reduced to an image and maybe a caption.
Entering this context we have the display of state power, via police, through the dissemination of mugshots that are deemed by police and others' tastes to be remarkable and quite often laughable.
I offer these two pieces of evidence :
Characterizations of these men aside, they got themselves in enough trouble to get arrested, booked, and have their likeness transformed into the legal evidence of a mugshot. Both men, to put it bluntly, have rather remarkable tattoos on their faces. Both men, without their consent, had their mugshots disseminated by online news agencies for entertainment purposes.
The purpose of this is twofold. First, it is entertaining. The more outrageous the person looks, the more interest and clicks it will generate. Second, as mugshots, the two men are representative of petty criminality. It is hard to take these two men seriously with their poorly chosen and executed tattoos. But also, and by comparison, having these men processed by the police offers up the cops as the adjudicators of judgment. In this case it is better judgment. It also offers a quiet and effective demonstration of police power. Policing is newsworthy; it always has been. This mundane procedural aspect of policing, the mugshot, provides an opportunity to publicly shame criminals and criminality. It creates an easy foil against which we can compare police conduct because what the police do is surely above the bar suggestively set by these two men and their facial tattoo decisions.
To conclude briefly, the ability of the police to disseminate mugshots for entertainment is made available by web technology and the native digital media production capabilities that most carry around at all times. As entertainment, these mugshots function as positive PR for the police. It also serves as a warning to us that we too can become the object of someone's entertainment while they're at lunch scrolling through headlines. In the world of smart phones it is all too easy to be snared by its media production apparatus to be offered up, in edited format, as objects of entertainment, curios of our modern world. And as long as the more remarkable mugshots get produced the dimmer view many of us will have of the people around us, and the stronger our allegiance with police power will be. Police power is offered as a ward against criminality, even the lighthearted variety such as this.
But just who are the police? They're mostly men, mostly white, and by and large, they represent majority interests. Perhaps, it is "majority" interest because we all know that the powerful are few, while the powerless are many. The powerless simply see the world as the few do because they have a privileged level of access to the means of reality production. If, for example, a few private banking interests at the Federal Reserve can print money and loan it to the United States at interest then we get a little sample of how our realities are administered through the decisions of a few powerful people.
The police are us or at least a subset. Most importantly, the self-selecting who become police have, among other things, a sense of justice and duty, and then some have an inflated sense of their power and responsibility. And somewhere between handing a man a gun and then giving him a badge of immunity we create organizational cultures like this:
Unlike the mugshots above, hunting photos like these are to be disseminated internally only. Shots like this harken back to the abuses at Abu Ghraib because shots like this are abuse. Mugshots are abuse. They force those of us who commit legal infractions to become incriminating public data. Mugshots erase the life of the person, and turn them into an artifact for the sake of the pose and the shot. Mugshots are data that the police hold to maintain a visual catalog of criminals, which can then be cross referenced with the memory of victims and witnesses for possible matches. The police know that criminals often repeat. When you're captured and processed by the police you begin to witness what lowly opinion they have of you. Do as they say, shut up, go here, hold this, sit here. You are a victim of their will because you have none. Our man posing as a deer, knows this better than me. Black men are 'practice dummies' for police procedures. The police learn how to stop, take down, cuff, and kill by practicing on black men. Where we draw the line between those who are deserving of police protocol and those who aren't happened well before a man has his likeness posted in an unfavorable way for the public or for other officers' entertainment. Dignity is so quickly crushed by the police. Citizenship is hemmed in by threats of violence and a semiotics of power administered upon the body and the mind through shaming, fear, and killing.
The means available for persuasion are many. In our time, in our place, the threat of shameful artifacts of one's self traveling around the web are but one. Enter the camera, the phone, the mobile web.
Welcome to the machine.
Wednesday, May 20, 2015
The walking wounded
We had become the walking wounded, oozing the pus of technology. Lost were our connections to the world. In their stead hung a gaudy bouquet of wires, tiny screens, and touch-sensitive armatures. We were lost, in a sea asunder, no roots, no bounds, no bodies, selfish and pure. All data. Noise gone. Everything and anything was a meaningful input, nothing extraneous filtered through our senses. Godless, childless, and inhuman to the last. We were a self-made phoenix of our own cultural apocalypse lost in a fog of ware. No rituals remained outside of routines initiated by machines. And for that reason we had been circumscribed to the last by functionality. Nothing remained of us that wasn't rationalized into the activity of a buzzing set of micro- and macro-machinery in which we clothed ourselves and pierced our exteriors. This was hardly a new realization because we saw it coming, and helped it along every single step until it bled us of anything resembling volition or desire. We had become simply another routine perfectly factored into a larger program. Our actions were initiated and ended by a vast machinery to which we were connected sometimes literally and at other times metaphorically. But to the world of symbols we had grafted this one last ontological certainty, our functional machines, and from that we derived our last vestige of wisdom, one not lost to the ages of memory but to the after burn of a mere few microseconds when the nerve rebounded from its last stimulus. Our past was an immediate echo. Our culture was a continuously running program. Our life was set to the cycles of circuitry. Diurnal rhythm and recurring seasons could go to hell, and they did, along with much of our connections to a planet to which our existence we still relied upon but to our current realities it had no meaning.
Monday, May 4, 2015
Friday, April 10, 2015
Wire(d) mommy, or Algorithms of Authority
Decisions are laundered in environments engineered to offer up available choices.
Children in strollers holding iPhones correctly and interfacing intelligently with kid-oriented imagery and animation.
In a short aside within Lewis Mumford's writing he witnessed a quiet, little death in having city children, with no access to the country or wilderness, playing amid trees whose selection, nurturing, placement, and maintenance were the result of city park administration decision making. To him, that kind of encounter is much like the one footnoted by Stanley Deetz in bemoaning (coyly) the fact that his son encounters strategies to avoid lawsuits in the design artifacts of the playground where he plays. A blogger asides that nomadic humans were probably smarter than modern humans given the lack of structure to their daily lives and the constant requirement to invent, improvise, and survive under harsher environmental conditions amidst deadly animals.
Where are we now?
Sadly, large swathes of our society wait in line, over night sometimes, to spend perhaps a month or better's wages on their own personal Skinner Box, the new i-(me, mine) phone. This device becomes their constant interactive companion and, resonant with our above-mentioned blogger, divests them of any need for memory or imagination. No, that phone, that portable information and communication device offers both for them. When a phone owns your memory it owns your behavior as well. Yes, it allows them to interact with people, but no, it disallows a kind of unfettered or unstructured play between people in the face-to-face on the grass sense of the term. Instead, it offers up structured interaction with benefits. The 'game' of communication or simply of interaction within these structured communication formats have participants participating for looks, thumbs up, likes, and other micro-rewards. The popular user-generated website Reddit provides one such example of a now-recurring motif within computer mediated communities: a popularity economy. In Reddits, posters and viewers get to vote up or down posts by other users. Likewise, 'Redditors' carry a rank called karma, which reflects the 'quality' of their contribution to the Reddit community, which is a reflection of their posts' ranking.
What is behind all of this? A combination of user activity and algorithms. But where does one end and the other begin? Do the algorithms aid users in finding useful information? Yes. Do the algorithms enhance user experience? Yes. Does Redditor karma influence Redditor participation? I don't know, but they do post a searchable leaderboard.
Remember those standalone arcade games that would preview game play then flash the title screen and finally the top three or ten player scores? The "King of Kong" offers a fitting portrait of just how motivated some can be to play to the highest score. Game environments such as the one offered by the 'Donkey Kong' circuitry are the playground of OCDs. Sports in general and baseball in particular has spun off its own math and statistics devotees. Whole departments of organizations participate in fantasy sports pools where they select a team of players and advance their team based upon the abstracted play statistics of those players. Tabletop gaming runs on random number generation, which substantiates both luck and chance in the dramatic decision to roll the dice and offers a transparent view into game mechanics, which dramatizes fairness. After all, when the player decides to roll and the subsequent numbers that fall facing up determine the outcome of a gameplay decision they issued from that players decision to roll and that player's hand.
Math is fair, oh so fair. Infinity runs in both directions, and it scales infinitely between the discrete numbers around which we organize activity. Bell curves reflect 'actual' populations. Traffic light cameras employ simple algorithms to substantiate traffic offenses in the pictures of it taking place, which are mailed to the offender with a return envelope with instructions on how to pay the fine issued. Algorithms determine what, how, and where to plant crops. Computers monitor houses, mimic activity, and lock doors remotely.
Once these machines and their mathematical language could reliably use and solve problems with the mathematical language they were given we at least had machines for running decision algorithms. The computers, these mules, could perhaps alleviate humanity of some of the monotony of tasks. But we do have to ask why we built an environment for use on the basis of filtering out negative conditions, which must be done in a systematic, patterned, monotonously reconstructed and maintained way.
Do we have to weave baskets into perfect mathematical expressions of length, distance, tightness? Why must we submit a person to a lifetime of weaving a 'Persian' rug that is so dense, so 'information rich' simply to produce a very remarkable and striking pattern in a functional floor covering? Why, when we have so many technical feats under our belts, do we continue to enslave great numbers of society to debt-penury and force them to work it off over time? Haiti, if our history provides us with an explanation, declared itself the first free country founded by slaves. Their first order of business was to pay back the debt that they represented as property to the French crown. Africans were born free, captured into slavery, and sold abroad while their captors were goaded into this process by an addictive substance known as tobacco to which they had become so enamored. Slave ships would bring them their tobacco in exchange for bound bodies.
Children in strollers holding iPhones correctly and interfacing intelligently with kid-oriented imagery and animation.
In a short aside within Lewis Mumford's writing he witnessed a quiet, little death in having city children, with no access to the country or wilderness, playing amid trees whose selection, nurturing, placement, and maintenance were the result of city park administration decision making. To him, that kind of encounter is much like the one footnoted by Stanley Deetz in bemoaning (coyly) the fact that his son encounters strategies to avoid lawsuits in the design artifacts of the playground where he plays. A blogger asides that nomadic humans were probably smarter than modern humans given the lack of structure to their daily lives and the constant requirement to invent, improvise, and survive under harsher environmental conditions amidst deadly animals.
Where are we now?
Sadly, large swathes of our society wait in line, over night sometimes, to spend perhaps a month or better's wages on their own personal Skinner Box, the new i-(me, mine) phone. This device becomes their constant interactive companion and, resonant with our above-mentioned blogger, divests them of any need for memory or imagination. No, that phone, that portable information and communication device offers both for them. When a phone owns your memory it owns your behavior as well. Yes, it allows them to interact with people, but no, it disallows a kind of unfettered or unstructured play between people in the face-to-face on the grass sense of the term. Instead, it offers up structured interaction with benefits. The 'game' of communication or simply of interaction within these structured communication formats have participants participating for looks, thumbs up, likes, and other micro-rewards. The popular user-generated website Reddit provides one such example of a now-recurring motif within computer mediated communities: a popularity economy. In Reddits, posters and viewers get to vote up or down posts by other users. Likewise, 'Redditors' carry a rank called karma, which reflects the 'quality' of their contribution to the Reddit community, which is a reflection of their posts' ranking.
What is behind all of this? A combination of user activity and algorithms. But where does one end and the other begin? Do the algorithms aid users in finding useful information? Yes. Do the algorithms enhance user experience? Yes. Does Redditor karma influence Redditor participation? I don't know, but they do post a searchable leaderboard.
Remember those standalone arcade games that would preview game play then flash the title screen and finally the top three or ten player scores? The "King of Kong" offers a fitting portrait of just how motivated some can be to play to the highest score. Game environments such as the one offered by the 'Donkey Kong' circuitry are the playground of OCDs. Sports in general and baseball in particular has spun off its own math and statistics devotees. Whole departments of organizations participate in fantasy sports pools where they select a team of players and advance their team based upon the abstracted play statistics of those players. Tabletop gaming runs on random number generation, which substantiates both luck and chance in the dramatic decision to roll the dice and offers a transparent view into game mechanics, which dramatizes fairness. After all, when the player decides to roll and the subsequent numbers that fall facing up determine the outcome of a gameplay decision they issued from that players decision to roll and that player's hand.
Math is fair, oh so fair. Infinity runs in both directions, and it scales infinitely between the discrete numbers around which we organize activity. Bell curves reflect 'actual' populations. Traffic light cameras employ simple algorithms to substantiate traffic offenses in the pictures of it taking place, which are mailed to the offender with a return envelope with instructions on how to pay the fine issued. Algorithms determine what, how, and where to plant crops. Computers monitor houses, mimic activity, and lock doors remotely.
Once these machines and their mathematical language could reliably use and solve problems with the mathematical language they were given we at least had machines for running decision algorithms. The computers, these mules, could perhaps alleviate humanity of some of the monotony of tasks. But we do have to ask why we built an environment for use on the basis of filtering out negative conditions, which must be done in a systematic, patterned, monotonously reconstructed and maintained way.
Do we have to weave baskets into perfect mathematical expressions of length, distance, tightness? Why must we submit a person to a lifetime of weaving a 'Persian' rug that is so dense, so 'information rich' simply to produce a very remarkable and striking pattern in a functional floor covering? Why, when we have so many technical feats under our belts, do we continue to enslave great numbers of society to debt-penury and force them to work it off over time? Haiti, if our history provides us with an explanation, declared itself the first free country founded by slaves. Their first order of business was to pay back the debt that they represented as property to the French crown. Africans were born free, captured into slavery, and sold abroad while their captors were goaded into this process by an addictive substance known as tobacco to which they had become so enamored. Slave ships would bring them their tobacco in exchange for bound bodies.
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