De-skill and replace, forever

At the lowest levels in the bureaucratic hierarchy ("blue-collar work"), scientific management clearly strove to limit or replace human technologies. For instance, the "one best way" required workers to follow a series of predefined steps in a mindless fashion. More generally, Fredrick Taylor believed that the most important part of the work world was not the employees but, rather, the organization that would plan, oversee, and control their work.

Although Taylor wanted all employees to be controlled by the organization, he accorded managers much more leeway than manual workers. It was the task of management to study the knowledge and skills of workers and to record and tabulate them and ultimately to reduce them to laws, rules, and even mathematical formulas. In other words, managers were to take a body of human skills, abilities, and knowledge and transform them into a set of nonhuman rules, regulations and formulas. Once human skills were codified, the organization no longer needed skilled workers. Management would hire, train, and employ unskilled workers in accord with a set of strict guidelines.

In effect, then, Taylor separated "head" work from the "hand" work. Prior to Taylor's day, the skilled worker had performed both. Taylor and his followers studied what was in the heads of those skilled workers, then translated that knowledge into simple, mindless routines that virtually anyone could learn and follow. Workers were thus left with little more than repetitive "hand" work. The principle remains the same at the base of the movement throughout our McDonaldizing society to replace human with nonhuman technology.

Behind Taylor's scientific management, and all other efforts at replacing human with nonhuman technology, lies the goal of being able to employ human beings with minimal intelligence and ability. In fact, Taylor sought to hire people who resembled animals:

Now one of the very first requirements for a man who is fit to handle pig iron as a regular occupation is that he shall be so stupid and so phlegmatic that he more nearly resembles in his mental make-up the ox than any other type. The man who is mentally alert and intelligent is for this very reason entirely unsuited to what would, for him, be the grinding monotony of work of this character. Therefore the workman who is best suited to handling pig iron is unable to understand the real science of doing this class of work. He is so stupid that the word "percentage" has no meaning to him, and he must consequently be trained by a man more intelligent than himself into the habit of working in accordance with the laws of this science before he can be successful.

Not coincidentally, Henry Ford had a similar view of the kinds of people who were to work on his assembly lines:

Repetitive labour--the doing of one thing over and over again and always in the same way--is a terrifying prospect to a certain kind of mind. It is terrifying to me. I could not possibly do the same thing day in and day out, but to other minds, perhaps I might say to the majority of minds, repetitive operations hold no terrors. In fact, to some types of mind thought is absolutely appalling. To them the ideal job is one where creative instinct need not be expressed. The jobs where it is necessary to put in mind as well as muscle have very few takers--we always need men who like a job because it is difficult. The average worker, I am sorry to say, wants a job in which he does not have to think. Those who have what might be called the creative type of mind and who thoroughly abhor monotony are apt to imagine that all other minds are similarly restless and therefore to extend quite unwanted sympathy to the labouring man who day in and day out performs almost exactly the same operation.

The kind of person sought out by Taylor was the same kind of person Ford thought would work well on the assembly line. In their view, such people would more likely submit to external technological control over their work and perhaps even crave such control.

From George Ritzer's The McDonalidization of Society: New Century Edition, pp. 116-117

What if we're trapped here?

What if we're trapped here on earth?

What if our materials and propulsion technology can neither protect us from harmful deep space radiation, nor propel us to the distant planets outside of our solar system?

What if this is the general case across the universe?

Then no sentient life would be able to visit another sentient life outside of it's native solar system.

All we have are each other, and perhaps that's for a reason.

If the universe were a simulation--the new vogue topic--then perhaps a component of this simulation is to not introduce other forms of sentience as that may, one, be too complicated for the system simulating our universe, and two, may interrupt the pattern of the universe as it requires our thinking it.

And that's more pop-philosophy bullshit for the reader. 

Pink Floyd Lyrics

"Hello (echoes). Is there anybody out there?"

I come to wonder who finds this place via search. I have summed it up in the past as simply a redirect scheme, a bot crawling through, and a last minute quote search for a paper about the Pacific Theater in WWII. Some of that has subsided, and I still wonder. It has been a while since I've received an 'attaboy' from a stranger, and it is not as if I want them but I do not mind recognition in the slightest.

So, if you are out there reading this consciously, click an available button to register my request to witness your volition. That is all.

Thank you berry much.

The Obsessive Self-Audit

I have a distinct memory of me, at three, standing in a doorway at my grandparent's house using the door strike to triangulate my height and telling myself in a rather gruff tone: "I am three." At this point in my existence I was concerned with my height. This point demarcates that place and that tendency, in me, to assume the role of the overseer and to administer myself through it. The very process of oversight became my consciousness. And through this process of oversight I became an obsessive over dates, numbers, landmarks in time denoting places in my lifetime used as reference.

Now, I am about to say something very controversial, but I do recall being ferried through the lobby and into the theater of a cinema in my hometown, Petite 4. There, I had a distinct memory of the marquee reading 'Superman,' which came out in theaters in 1978. The release month coincides with the December holiday season. That would have put me at about 19 months old. How I recall reading those words and that memory is a baffling thing to me because any more that memory has become a memory of it.

I have this distinct sensation of institutional memory, of passing through the long chute of education. At the point that I reached high school I had this very stark realization that I was 'growing up' and by the time those four years were up I was being pushed ever faster through another academic chute, college. In those years I spent evenings smoking weed, watching Star Trek, and staring at myself in the mirror witnessing the ageing process. I recall the peeling away of childhood as something resembling my father, nay my grandfather, emerging underneath. It is a strange metamorphosis to witness in the silent moments of a reflection but it did occur, and I documented it by sight as I did the Superman marquee and the height/age self-reflection by an obsessive self-audit.

I had come to a conclusion in my post graduate studies that rhyme, repetition, and memorials are the obsessive nee neurotic conditions of memory-as-existence. I still agree with this summation as I have lived it, experienced it, and see it still in action. To be in a process and to still be able to use that process to bracket out an existence in meta-process is something of a miracle yet it is simply a third-level reflex network sufficiently complex enough to articulate self-consciousness and still embed it within the process to see its horizons as miraculous.  According to Tor Norretranders, that's the 'User Illusion,' the stark fact that of the neuronal bandwidth occurring, conscious apprehension is but a sliver. Where do we go from there? That, as noted just above, is in the realm of outside of my fucking ken by a long shot, and to what we evolve mentally I can only imagine. It is the shuffling of time, the sorting and coordination of it, that constitute a consciousness that is perched so precariously upon a coral reef of genetic existence through time.

Let us reflect just briefly upon a metaphor that comes to mind, that of a bunching up of a rubber gasket stuck in a window frame. That little loop that occurs is something akin to self-consciousness. It's a homology to recursion. And that it occurred at all is a miracle happening within the material universe of possibilities. Material, energy, and persistence, through time, marshal the force of time to their vector. Time is something meta-matter, and yet it is so ever-present within all material. According to Einstein, time is on the material universe continuum, and so when we adjust the conditions of materiality we transform time as well. Clever man. He was one of many who had thought this during his time. And that's what makes it an important marker of our cultural existence, our cultural awareness as a society.

What comes next? My obsessive self audit had flung itself outward into the universe like the Milky Way of which I am a resident. This part-whole resemblance is something that does not escape me. Nor does the fact that much of what I am is much of what the unvierse is. It's as if we are the T-1000 from Terminator 2: Judgement Day, that is, something that was scattered that is now re-assmbling slowly into a conscious existence. And that's what leaves me with the universe-as-simulation scenario. Perhaps we are simply the will to self-knowledge of existence as such but an existence that is trapped within the universe and that uses the universe as its self-knowledge, which gets reflected into the peculiarities of matter's assembly thus making it a simulation of an active intellect.

Blah.

Blah.

Blah.

what telephone travel would be like

"This mouthpiece I'm talking into? Of the telephone?"
"Yes?"
"It's like a sieve. It's like those little filters you put over the bathtub drain. Sometimes I think with the telephone that if I concentrate enough I could pour myself into it and I'd be turned into a mist and I would rematerialize in the room of the person I'm talking to. Is that too odd for you?"
"No, I think that sometimes," he said.
"But the interesting part," she said, "is that the trip itself would take a while. I think a lot about what it would be like to be turned into some kind of conscious vapor. You know those trucks that come around on streets and grind up the brush on the curb? Those droning trucks? The guy throws a branch in, and it goes mmmmmn-yooonnnng-mmmmmm, and all these tiny chips fly out of a high pipe? I think of that, except of course it wouldn't be painful--I think of the part where I'm just this spume of wood chips and pieces of leaves. Or you know what else? You remember those birds that were getting sucked into the jet engines? Sometimes I lie in bed at three or four in the morning and I imagine myself flying miles above the earth, very cold, and one of those black secret spy planes is up there with the huge round engines with the spinning blades in it, the blades that look like the underside of mushrooms? The black plane's going very fast and I'm going very fast in the opposite direction and we intersect, and I fly right through one of those jet engines, and I exit as this long fog of blood. I'm miles long, and because it's so cold, I'm crystalline. Very long arms, you'll be pleased to hear. And then I recondense in bed, sshp, as my short warm self. It must have something to do with my estrogen level. But that's what telephone travel would be like out there, I think. What am I saying, that's what it is like." (pp. 95-96)

From "Vox" by Nicholson Baker

United States Presidents Acquire a Staff Infection

This is a pun. The staph indicated by "staff" is staphylococcus aureus, which is the cause of staph infection. A staff infection is when the people you concede to including on your cabinet as President of the United States for securing votes and campaign contributions represent entrenched special interests that have been occupying cabinets since cabinets have existed. And over time those cabinet positions have been verily guaranteed as a formality of being allowed to state one's desire to run publicly and most of all legitimately.

This is our time

The wounded skeletons are tapping at the glass. This is the soundtrack to our destruction. To imagine a landscape in ruins and to imagine a life are two disparate entities. "Remain calm and carry on" is an old adage told by a proud people to maintain their dignity through flagging moments of insecurity, destruction, war. What is it that we tell ourselves in this time? We have become complacent upon interactivity as a means of passing the dead time that now encompasses our life. We say nothing outside of the usual pathological flinging and screaming that defines a perfectly atomized hominid zoo animal separated from any meaningful context by a wall of alien onlookers.

"What are you?" he says.

"I am a casualty of consciousness." I reply.