remote-control

On September 11, 2001 planes "kamikaze" attack buildings in the United States. The offical narrative frames this as terrorism and calls it an act of war.

The U.S. military and CIA reciprocate the gesture by waging war through the use of remote-controlled planes.

Ours is a world of remote control.

We wage a war on terror as a war on ideas. Terrorism simply needs to be a webpage or a speech by a radical cleric, which inspires someone to take the life of a non-believer. In this way, terrorism forces its views upon U.S. soil by influencing those who perpetrate terrorism, remotely.

Remote Control.

Likewise, terrorism grows out of a sense of Islamic identity, tribal identity, racial or ethnic identity, that is contradictory to that of the West. Fundamentalist Islam is a ward against Pepsi, Coke, and loose morals. All of this happens as Hollywood and Coke headquarters find new ways and new markets for their products, They dump these products onto a population in central Asia to influence their consumption without ever setting foot there.

Remote Control.

I am reminded of Arnold Toynbee's description of civilization as emanating from a center, populated by a creative few. Their creativity radiates out, gets adopted, and expands a civilization on the choices, identities, and commitment to enact it by the internal and external proletariat. When these groups no longer find legitimacy in the cultural accoutrements of this civilization it ceases to exist. Civilization's scope in space and in time is a measure of its influence and its control over its own dissemination. Civilization holds a high bar of influence, like that of the fundamental tool of humankind, language. And that high bar is the influence that persists both in space and in time after the speech has ended and its creator has died.

The idea lives on, remotely.

Remote.
Control.





Control.
Remote.








God Bless America

identity work

Everywhere I see identity work.

As I drive people slap bumper stickers on their cars, which proclaim what they are or what they love. Most of these loves are rather trite affectations such as "I love skiing" or "I love New York." And while I cannot deny that the person slapping this bumper sticker on his or her car actually feels this way I always must return to the big question.

"What is love?"

What is any emotional state for that matter? I have heard this elsewhere and I believe it myself. The majority of our childhood is spent being taught how to understand and act to specific stimuli. Central to this teaching is being furnished the words for what it is we are feeling. I cannot help but thinking that my nieces are learning how to be sad or depressed simply to feed a certain response mechanism set in place by their parents and grandparents. It's a very strange set of affairs that a somewhat pathological behavior would get molded into an acceptable condition such as being tired or feeling sick in order to give that pathological behavior a somewhat more acceptable window dressing.

These statements of one's feelings and their cliched plastering on car rear ends provides an effective introduction to the work we all do to connect with something other than us, be it a process, a group, a belief, or a companion human or otherwise.

For me love is a violent and sometimes possessive statement of affect. This is because love has become a sink for so many institutions that desire conditions for human bondage, and thus they tack phrases onto affirmations of love such as "in sickness and in health" and "til death do you part." These steep a romantic relationship into absolutist talk. And while the pictures are being processed and placed into a memorable portfolio other institutions are busy placing incentives upon the married couple to go into debt together because together they can get a better percentage than they otherwise could.

It sounds to me like companies are finding ways to insinuate themselves into loving relationships through financial transactions and contractual obligations. They do this knowing that they can position the responsibility to pay on time to make it equate the responsibility to one's spouse or lover.

Clever ruse.

Marriage is one of many relationships that are central to the identity work that most humans engage in and find rewarding. Identities are faces and feelings plastered onto any number of things. Identities are names, iconography, slogans, mission statements, invested with an emotional connection to bond individuals to larger entities. Identities are ready-made lifestyle choices replete with numerous consumer choices to accessorize and mobilize the lifestyle into representative activities. Buying cars, boats, bikes, sporting equipment, building muscles, tattooing skin are all identity choices. In modern societies they are a veritable connective tissue, the integument tethering people to objects, ideas, behaviors, and future-placed commitments. Identities are a form of control and manipulation because they are access points to the psyche and soul of each individual. Identities mediate experience of self, other, and world. In the pop neuroscience argot identities are a constellation of neural networks that are self-supportive and, importantly, are pleasure producing. We satisfy identity work through self-improvement via diet, exercise, surgery or some combination of these. Identity work is central to cosmetic neuropharmacology whereby 'patients' con their psychiatrists into prescribing them a performance enhancing brain drug.

Identities are the consumer gloss of citizenship. People pick pre-arranged political sides, passionately support abstract causes, and burp sound bytes that have long-lost any true personal meaning but instead short circuit any critical thinking about the issue they gloss. In some glassy building groups of experts in psychology, marketing, and human behavior use a powerful set of tools to generate new identities every day. These identities are the stuff of social control, feeding human behavior into a cycle of work all day, spend on 'free' time, stay up all night, and drug to maintain. Identity work is performed at its most ostentatious during leisure activity, but it's performed all of our lives.

A babe is born and is often assigned a color based upon its gender. This baby is given gender-specific toys and addressed, consciously or not, in sex-specific ways. All of these support the healthy and arbitrary development of the addressee, which takes up residence between the ears of the baby. And this addressee begins to adopt the language in media res as one that is already overwhelmingly invested with significance, history, and a sense of duty to it. So this adult-in-training goes about languaging into a world presupposed by languaging. "What and why" are often heard, and the issue settles into the child's adolescence by the circular argument's coda, "because." End of story.

This adult goes about its manufactured life, mistaking its manufactured identity for one that it made itself. Sooner or later, through designs built into the program of society, whether by accident or by fateful choice, lifestyle, or duty, the identity that was made over the course of its life dies. And then this life gets placed into a box, dressed in clothing acceptable to its audience, and is remembered one last time before it is interred into the soil. There the identity slowly degrades into the sundry elements that make up the bulk of our universe: hydrogen, nitrogen, carbon, and so on. And the little worms with no identity go about their "lumbrical" labor passing this once meaningful entity through their lengthy tube-like bodies.

And so in the end, identity work is an overcompensation for a more base understanding that all life--owing to the chances of evolution and the substrate of physical reality--is merely tubes. Except in our case our tube is bi-directional. Into it goes all the food and out of it come all the waste, but the one exception is that we also belch out the ideologies by which we live out our tube-lives without ever realizing it as such.

Identity work is such a chore, but its dark horizon is shaped by something the symbolism underlying identity work presupposes--the identity of no thing.

And we all 'wanna' be somebody.

the value of love (or friendship)

I have a practical measure for the value of love. It can apply to certain forms of friendship where friends can reliably serve one another in times of need, be it holding a piece of wood or holding a hand.

When you're depressed you don't bottom out.

That's it. My relationship showed me this today. I didn't need to call upon her but knew she was close by if I needed her. I was in a particular state of melancholy that proceeds a night of drinking and mild or implied debauchery. There I was, driving my car, depressively tracking under the speed limit on a busy road when I didn't bottom out. Now my sadness spiraled into a soft collection of ideas about this gal in my life.

I had a cushion.

I still did things that could constitute cheating. I gave this other girl a big hug, and followed that up with a text message today about said hug. She never replied, and it affected me not in the least.

I didn't bottom out.

A few weeks ago I parlayed a few leftover beers and my assistance with a third-floor renovation in my building into dinner, more drinks, and late night chatter with the gal next door. A few years ago, before Helen, I bottomed out in one of those very deep and dark spirals of redefining actions. I made a pass at this gal, and she shut me out of her life. Then I had the audacity to share my feelings about her with my good friend, who is now her husband. He shut me out of his life.

Then I bottomed out.

I tried hard to reclaim my self worth from them. Slowly, I pieced together my life and rebuilt a relationship with the two neighbors. But this was a true test of the values mentioned above and the relationships present and tested with my 'amorous overture.' Those amorous feelings came rushing back about two months ago. I finally parlayed them, as noted, into helping her. She was in a pair of elastic shorts, on her knees, scrubbing the old floor. I helped by vacuuming, removing items off the floor, and dumping out the vacuum. She had her back arched in a way that was quite flattering to her physique. I held my composure, offered her beer, and kept things genial. The work turned into dinner, which turned into more drinks, and more chatter. Soon we were alone on her front porch drinking a late-night round of beers, witnessing all kinds of strange behavior from the new neighbor next door. Somewhere out of the haze of those beers she told me those damn words, again. "I love you."

I was as high as a kite.

My recollection of the event is hazy, but I recall asking her what this meant in light of her marriage and her having said it before. She confirmed what I had wanted, and I shared with her my feelings. We aren't as close of friends after my first amorous overture. Some of this I chalk up to her own uneasiness with her feelings and with me. Through the haze of that evening and the help of some beers I remember being slumped over her legs, holding one, while she told me that she loved me, quite loudly, as she caressed my skull and pressed her head against it.

I was stiff with anticipation and worried about her volume. Nothing more came of it, and since then I've held my composure. She had a few drinks the night before her wedding reception and was in her element with her husband and his parents. There, she spoke, under the cloak of evening, and smiled beaming at me, directing her speech at me. She was at ease, and smiling at me profusely. She had done this before. Hell, she had even given my a very hungry stare one one drunken occasion. I cherish these moments. I cherish her. I have a girlfriend. She has a husband. Each of us has our cushion. And we have a very potent love for each other, one that must remain unrequited, stoked, deferred, building, exploding over some nights of drinking, and veiled under the pregnant stares each gives to the other when the beer isn't flowing and our apprehensions are in control. My sex life improved with the inclusion of her in my fantasies. By extension, my self-image has improved through my imagined intercourse with her.

I care about my lady friend. She cares deeply about me. She also works with me. I have my space. My relationship with the neighbors has improved as I offer my help renovating the home or digging a hole. We each have a cushion to ease the fall, and we each have a rekindled passion that must be kept at bay. But I did lose a friendship that I had with her. She no longer knocks on my door randomly just to talk or share ideas. Neither does he, her husband. I've reciprocated the gesture, but on occasion we spend time together. And on those occasions I have one emotion in check simply because I have a love interest elsewhere and I know that I won't bottom out.

they came ... part 2

We survived, as I've noted, on the edges of this new-forming reality brought by the cephs--that's what we came to call them--this small band of humans clinging together like a ring of hope.

Hope was something that became strange, more like a religion, its wording and its contours cloaked in a cabalistic vocabulary of prohibitions. The word wasn't spoken like some shibboleth for our kind's creator. Hell, some even worshipped tattered remains of ceph technology. They'd form elaborate, for our lot, ritual masks, resembling the cephs, and do a light bobbing dance to mimic their synchronous movement in massive oceanic swarms.

Something strange about the cephs as we knew about our own versions of them here, before they came, is that the mind of a ceph is not centralized like our own. It's eight arms each has its own brain component. The only analogue to our own specialization would be the thumb, but a whole tentacled arm with its own mental investment contributed to the multilateral activity and thinking, so we thought, of the cephs. Our kind, on earth, before they came, could and would sense and taste and understand through the use of their arms. Yet they could stare at you with those eyes, those strange piercing, oddly human eyes, so round with their jagged pupils. Those eyes were an evolutionary extravagance, more adept at surveying their surroundings for the sake of making their protean pigmented canvas. So to the eight brains, as we came to believe, of the cephs they contributes various degrees of aptitude. And in their mass they each had one mind honed to the synchrony, and in that synchrony they controlled the oceanic currents and by extension the winds and finally the planet's rotation itself. Days extended for weeks and the remainders of humanity were thrown out of their circadian rhythm, committing to long stretches of activity and equally spasmodic and lengthy sleeps. It was our new normal.

To speak of a norm is misleading at this juncture. We weren't our earth's offspring. No, we were the rats of a new dawn, the creeping lowly beasts living among the shattered remains of a population cataclysm. In its shadowy nadir we crept, scraped, and grew a new identity than that of our forebears. We were not human in that sense; and it was a very real dawning of a new identity, one etched out of the hard contours of survival. We had lost most of the knowledge that we deemed to specialization. We lost most of the knowledge of its transmission and its indelible imprint on those things known as books. We had given them up not too long before the cephs came. And, like most of our culture at that time, it was loaded onto digital simulacra that we accessed through any number of powered devices. Now, with all power gone that once-ubiquitous access point to all of humanity's fitness of memory was gone, snuffed out in an instant. We could not have anticipated the delicate nature of culture because it was the stuff of our daily lives. Once we were untethered from the substrate of normal activity we cut it loose like so much dead weight pulling us into the briny murk of this new earth. Our settlement was on a broad but jagged remnant of a large mountain range. Here, we set about re-establishing a life, but not for long.

History, culture, and any stable definition of humanity were swept away in the first tidal rushes that came with the eruption of the cephs onto our planet. Our rituals were that of survival, and the sinews of our daily activities were taut and strained by each second of our hunger, our thirst, our loneliness, our abject existence. A beautiful thing about being reduced to a minimal population of 72 is that most of the disease that once flourished among a planet inhabited by trillions of humans was all-but-gone. With those bacteria and viruses, which pirated our cellular DNA we counted the ghosts of a vast heritage, a heritage of trillions, built of hundreds of thousands of years. All gone forever. Our language was denuded of plurals, pronounds, verbs. It was simply an undifferentiated soup of noises to which we claimed a fleeting significance. The ghosts, the many voices of the past were all gone. We lacked any understanding because we had no time to prepare. I cannot even tell you if I was born here or climbed to this vantage point to avoid the tidal rush. I had no yesterday. Those nearest me stared off into the vast wastes with the same forlorn and vacant expressions that I had. Our faces mirrored the great emptying of the inner life that once nourished us, that played a central role in shaping our experiences. Now, our visages were what we carried into the world behind which was a chasm of nothingness, the ocean itself. Our bodies were marionettes to an older puppeteer, and with the massive planetary changes our bodies followed suit. Atavistic appendages emerged, as the vibrating crystal that made up the planet's cool iron core was realigning the spin of our every atom. We were coming apart at a deathly slow pulse, and it registered on our bodies as these many and vast scars from which emerged the buds that would sprout something strange, scary, painful, old to the world but new to us.

they came in an overwhelming mass

Toward the end of the 21st century they came in an overwhelming mass, from nowhere. We couldn't see their ships, huge shell-like structures hovering in space and outside the visible spectrum. What we didn't know at the time was they were coming home.

They were an ascendent branch of the mollusks that had developed intelligence, manipulated their environment, built a culture, and eventually left the planet as a consequence of an encroaching ice age that was destroying their kelp and shrimp gardens. This species of cephalopods, like the ones we knew, could master their environments by transforming to appear as a twig, a leaf, as part of the background, like nothing at all. This is how they came to us.

We didn't know that they had been among us at the time. They could blend in so well to their surroundings. Then, when their numbers were strong enough and well placed, they began to appear.

Our society fell virtually overnight.

Only pockets of us survive, mostly spread out in various hinterlands, surviving on the local land. We have to choose high ground because the ceph's terraforming operations are beginning to change the world that we once knew. They are flooding the planet by adding ice collected from outerspace. Now that electric light no longer whites out the night we can watch their operation in the glow of the night sky. A dimply glowing ball that appears in the sky at a size that dwarfs even the fullest and brightest moon. It is a very large craft that doubles as their aquatic biome. There, the ceph's spawn much as the ones we know do here on earth. And with that water they arrive in the billions. 

two tangents

I offer two tangents to illuminate two topics mentioned in the past, which is represented graphically by what is 'down below' or 'on the side' and then 'down below' on one of its links.

First, the notion that people are a virus was the subject of a terse, misanthropic observation made by Agent Smith to Neo in the 1999 film "The Matrix." His point is simply that we're not of this world because we find no harmony with it. Instead we continue to exploit the resources of an area until we leave it uninhabitable, both by us, and by much of the life that once lived there. We exhaust biomes, ecosystems, and the like by the means of our resource extraction.

Now, without getting into some pop-philosophy discussion allow me to say that Agent Smith makes an astute observation, regarding not only the ecological impact of humans but of their identity by analogy to their activities. They are like viruses because they exploit that which is available. People, per se, aren't the viruses. They are the marionettes of viral ideologies. As noted 'in the past' people are untethered from their day-to-day realities by overarching narratives that inform their identities and give their lives meaning. Meaning seems essential and especially so since most of us have identities as individuals. The two are co-dependent. One anecdote will suffice. During the early to mid 1990s the rainforests of Indonesia went up in smoke at an unprecedented rate. What led this were slash-and-burn farmers reclaiming whole swathes of forest for agricultural production. What motivated this was state policies that encouraged it. And the state was, of course, motivated by a need to expand its economy. Two observations about viral ideologies are that 'the state' is an abstraction. People with identities find theirs populated by a notion of citizenship to a state. They do its bidding as a consequence. Second, the economy is an abstraction. That people would find no value in life as such and instead see it as so much to exploit for the accumulation of capital is a second, viral notion. The world is one grand resource bin, and we take from it as long as there's something to gain. Granted, at the level of subsistence humans must take from their environments. But we have something new added to the design--money. Money can store energy, value, wealth almost indefinitely. And in the rush to get our hands on this stuff we tend to rob from the world at an alarming pace to become rich because those spoils rarely spoil. What comes of the food produced and the land that was slashed and burned is another story. It's a short-term gain strategy that leaves destruction in its wake.

Hence, people are like a virus.

Finally, I want to suggest an analogy between the rodent's incisors and the human brain. A rodent's incisors must be used in order to keep them ground down to a manageable length. Incisors grow continuously, and to not use them jeopardizes the life of the rodent. Having been the proud caretaker of a hamster I know just what this does to the rodent in captivity. Sure, my hamster lived in a see-through castle, but his life of luxury came at a simple but overwhelming price. My hamster had to maintain the length of its incisors. And so it did by gnawing on parts of its cage. The maintenance of its incisors became a defining nervous activity. Such can be said for the needs of the human brain. It, like the rodent's incisors, is both a liability and an asset. It is a powerful tool for abstract thinking, but it is also can seal our doom if it has very little to do. Much has been written about the delirium of solitary confinement. The mind literally begins to fall apart, and with it the person's sanity. Likewise, the non-confined human tends to keep its mind busy with any number of things because an existential abyss is always just a second and a step from our current position. So the business of keeping ourselves occupied becomes a defining nervous activity.

So, we're viral rodents. In that we reveal our progenitors: life as such. Nothing symbolizes the oddity of the life process like an RNA plasmid in a protein shell bent upon pirating the replication apparatus of cellular DNA. That is the life of a virus. A virus is a solitary thing, which desires nothing more than to replicate itself. It reveals a rather abject definition of both existence and of life itself. Life requires violence done to others. Life requires the blurring of this and that, in and out. And life is simply the continuance of itself through time. These are the basest meanings behind all life--protein warfare over time. Rodents are simply one of the more resilient progenitors of the mammalian line, the ones that climbed over so many skeletal remains of the past.

I've said this somewhere 'in the past' as well. Consciousness is simply the coincidence of matter over time. Or to put it into a language that is more recognizable to the reader: we are all possessed by the ghosts of time. Time is what we are. We are temporal creatures.

A future without work

Meet Baxter.

Baxter is a friendly little robot. Baxter can learn how to do any number of menial tasks, which are now performed by low-paid, low-skilled workers. He's so easy to program that all you have to do is grab him by his arm and direct him through the task once. If you are a good enough teacher then Baxter will simply do the job that the low-skilled, low-paid worker once did. Heck, the low-paid, low-skilled worker just became a robot programmer.

But that was a one-time stint as a robot programmer, and now the low-paid, low-skilled worker now must find a new job, hopefully not through a temp agency, anything but a temp agency.

Baxter represents one small but important step in the evolution of work. Now, employees are charged with training their human replacements. Soon, employees will be charged with training their robotic replacements. A workforce of robots begs the question of the role of humans in a society that requires humans both to work as a contribution of the society and to collect compensation for that work to enjoy this society's basic needs and its amenities. Perhaps this is the Communist utopia where technology replaces the drudgery of work such that humans can be free to explore their own self-development. That's a scary thought because I sense that the majority of us, if freed of the responsibilities to remain sober and capable of taking orders, will face an existential abyss. For many, a life without work is a life without meaning. We often find ourselves needing a struggle to both give our lives meaning and to preoccupy our minds. A robot will not replace all people and all work; it simply replaces some work and some types of occupations.

Perhaps I am too beholden to the identity work of work. A time existed when whole masses of people organized into workers unions and workers congresses of this or that sort. Through these means many people were able to fight against the capricious hand of capital and its handlers to take what some union members call a 'fair shake.' To see the actions of a union and its sometimes atavistic language one gets at an awareness about power and reality. If you put enough people together you can create a world of your own that persists through time. Labor unions have and continue to be eroded and destroyed by corporate interests, private money interests, and the politicians that represent and speak for them. Robots are one of many assaults upon work as a relationship between knowledge of a craft and the market needs for its products. This robot now only has the opportunity to take away low-skilled, low-pay jobs. It is a matter of time before the development of a more sophisticated robot for more sophisticated tasks.

I am hazy on the details, but I could conceive that the conditions under which manufacturing work was done in Communism's political and philosophical heyday was physically demanding and mentally jejune. To free people of this work would be liberation. But what of craftwork? Perhaps this robot will never be enlisted for such professions. But what of those of us who aren't in a craft or who simply can never find meaningful or financially supportive work may be left in the shadow of these robots.

I see a long-term progression to a time where people will be needed less and less living in a society that they rely upon more and more. Not long ago, perhaps 120 years ago, most people subsisted on their own skills in growing, collecting, and hunting food while they traded what they created, grown, or collected in surplus for what they couldn't create, grow, or collect. That society begat us, who rely upon water, electrical, and gas utilities. We need a car or fare to travel any where. We can't even deliver our own offspring with any success. We've been successively bled of the knowledge of our own survival and that of our species. We are all babes in a modern world, completely powerless. Without the knowledge to survive on our own outside the modern sociotechnical system we are pressed into its service in some fashion. We need a job or we simply need to acquire money to survive. Money can be traded for what keeps us alive. Outside of that system we would have to create a new system based upon our own abilities and our free association with others with whom we deal for personal gain. It's not an impossibility for all, but for many it would lead to one of many outcomes. Becoming an outlaw or becoming a corpse suggest some of the brutish and shorter ones. To avoid these outcomes many of us are loathe to support the system for the sake not only of its survival but ours as well.

Do robots signal a return to two societies: one lived within the confines of the modern sociotechnical apparatus and one lived like Little House on the Prairie? Do robots signal a population decline because people aren't needed nor can be supported to live within the current system? I can only speculate. And I will continue to do so.