This street hums with the lives of others.
The chattering of fluorescent teeth reveal the black tracing lines.
A shape, a form, a life lived, a life to live.
Maybe a dog or a discarded pasta noodle there, obscene before propriety, sweating.
A silver shape, a silver man with silver scales.
He performs an autopsy on the body politic.
There, in the street, among the chattering of fluorescent teeth, the silvery augur reads for signs.
The body politic is a body without organs.
The body politic is a body of signs.
Friday, November 29, 2013
Monday, November 18, 2013
His teeth
His teeth were tombstones echoing the lament of ghosts.
These words are not your own.
They are human time's ghastly remains.
These words are not your own.
They are human time's ghastly remains.
Thursday, October 31, 2013
The anatomy of a troll
I receive few if any comments on my blog postings. Depending on the subject some posts get more views. And most are generated by a search, a search not for me or this blog but for something that I wrote about, which may have betrayed their search into uncovering.
So a lot end up reading about my MTurk piece perhaps for their own reasons or because they too have a beef with this Todd Dickerson fellow. And a lot end up looking for a passage from "With the Old Breed," which I quoted extensively and purposely to share the horror of war from the point of view of one sane man.
And then I get those rare posts that begin by contradicting me, and then conjure a piece of information out of their hazy awareness and pass it off as fact. I give you this:
Dave Hendrick was responding to a post I made about the Sifl and Olly show back when I was living in Muncie, Indiana, and still wrestling the academic ghosts that had possessed my body and mind. It was a lot of hogwash and dime story theorizing, but one thing I did get right was the dialogue that I included from a particular segment of that particular show.
In short, what Dave Hendrick stated was inaccurate. I checked and double checked the video of this segment and found that, indeed, Olly never says, "Well, you're a bock." See here:
Instead what Dave Hendrick does is invoke an alternate past, which allows him to assert his epistemic correctness about this past. In doing so, he then uses this assertion to insert a clever joke that did not exist in the original segment. It has several important organs: an assertion or dispute about a factual inaccuracy conjured by the poster, a follow-up word-related joke, and an assessment that reveals the underlying language structure that explains the joke's potency. In this case, the poster, Dave Hendrick uses his understanding of puns to reconstruct the Sifl and Olly segment to insert a joke about box being the plural of bock, which is never done but which could have been and which also could have been quite funny.
And that's the anatomy of a troll; it comes out of the randomness of word association and information management that punctuates online interaction. It stands upon a foundation understood and accurate--a theory about jokes--so that it only retains fidelity to its world, while it trespasses in yours.
The troll is an inescapable aspect of online interaction. Anytime someone becomes a blowhard someone will be quick to poach the perceived limelight and try to focus attention elsewhere. The easiest tack is to disagree with another and conjure up a convincingly accurate alternate version. Because owing to the information management and word association required to manage an online persona most are going to be won over by the logical argument and not seek out the information that is simply a search away. Information is performative.
So a lot end up reading about my MTurk piece perhaps for their own reasons or because they too have a beef with this Todd Dickerson fellow. And a lot end up looking for a passage from "With the Old Breed," which I quoted extensively and purposely to share the horror of war from the point of view of one sane man.
And then I get those rare posts that begin by contradicting me, and then conjure a piece of information out of their hazy awareness and pass it off as fact. I give you this:
Dave Hendrick was responding to a post I made about the Sifl and Olly show back when I was living in Muncie, Indiana, and still wrestling the academic ghosts that had possessed my body and mind. It was a lot of hogwash and dime story theorizing, but one thing I did get right was the dialogue that I included from a particular segment of that particular show.
In short, what Dave Hendrick stated was inaccurate. I checked and double checked the video of this segment and found that, indeed, Olly never says, "Well, you're a bock." See here:
Instead what Dave Hendrick does is invoke an alternate past, which allows him to assert his epistemic correctness about this past. In doing so, he then uses this assertion to insert a clever joke that did not exist in the original segment. It has several important organs: an assertion or dispute about a factual inaccuracy conjured by the poster, a follow-up word-related joke, and an assessment that reveals the underlying language structure that explains the joke's potency. In this case, the poster, Dave Hendrick uses his understanding of puns to reconstruct the Sifl and Olly segment to insert a joke about box being the plural of bock, which is never done but which could have been and which also could have been quite funny.
And that's the anatomy of a troll; it comes out of the randomness of word association and information management that punctuates online interaction. It stands upon a foundation understood and accurate--a theory about jokes--so that it only retains fidelity to its world, while it trespasses in yours.
The troll is an inescapable aspect of online interaction. Anytime someone becomes a blowhard someone will be quick to poach the perceived limelight and try to focus attention elsewhere. The easiest tack is to disagree with another and conjure up a convincingly accurate alternate version. Because owing to the information management and word association required to manage an online persona most are going to be won over by the logical argument and not seek out the information that is simply a search away. Information is performative.
Saturday, August 3, 2013
What determines up?
What determines up?
In science, gravity offers one orientation. Up is the direction directly away from the terrestrial body. Science, as it is practiced by earthlings, determines up as away from the earth.
But once we leave earth things get tricky. A universe of countless heavenly bodies each determining their own up is what we're greeted with.
The way in which our solar system is presented to us visually gives the viewer some clues about how up works and of course how vision and representation collude in making knowledge. Firstly, the view of each planet and the sun grossly misrepresents both the sheer differences in scale of each planet and the sun but also their distances from each other and the sun. That aside, it's a handy representation of all that is of scientific relevance, astronomically speaking, for earthlings living in Sol, our solar system.
Let's look closer.
We see the solar system represented with the horizontal plane determined by the rotation of the planets around the sun. That makes sense from a number of perspectives, one of which is a criterion for internal validity. I agree with that as an explanation, and its tidy.
But there are two sides to this planar representation: up and down. Nothing in our representation determines what makes up up and down down. And here's where things get interesting.
Isaac Newton was spending time with a relative of the family as he looked out into the courtyard of the home where he was staying. He happened to see an apple drop from the tree onto the ground. And from that prosaic occurrence, one that perhaps he had witnessed countless other times, Newton began to think about gravity as a force that extended infinitely into space. Thus we are back to our version of up. It is in essence the direction away from the planet, or out. Up and out are interchangeable from a terrestrial standpoint, using gravity as a marker.
But we've added a wrinkle to up and much like Newton's gravity it extends out infinitely into the universe. The planar representation of our solar system sets the planets about an imaginary plane determined by their orbit around a central star, our sun. What determines up in this representation are the people creating the representation. This connects us to the work of metaphor in human understanding. As with many metaphors comparison is the function. Spatial orientations are no stranger to have added valences. Up and down are prime candidates. Which is better? In most cases, up is the preferred orientation. Who, after all, doesn't like to be on top? Sales are up! Participation is up! Up means more, means greater, means power, means wealth, means more, more, more. As for down? You get the impression.
The carbon dioxide graph that has become all but iconic of our belief or denial in the negative effects of fossil fuel usage could be one example where up and more aren't necessarily better. In this case up still is a means for conferring the salience of an issue. But I digress.
In determining where up is in this planar view of the solar system, science uses planetary north. And planetary north is a rule of thumb for up as if we were standing outside the earth and viewing it. In doing so, it requires that the rest of the universe carry on infinitely in every direction with our version of up extending out.
I'd hazard that, for the sake of internal validity, each solar system could be represented with an up counterposed with down along its orbit around a star. That doesn't necessarily destroy our view of our solar system and this imaginary up, which orders the universe around it. But, by way of metaphor and the vagaries of our subjectivity as thinkers and actors we have inherited a thought and an action, which orders the universe around a decision on what was 'up.'
At the very least having an up and a down are an indispensable means for understanding and representing some thing. Up and down as serve as a medium for exchanging ideas and coordinating meaning about the world we inhabit and that we story. Up and down fit into our visual understanding. And at its rather prosaic core, like the core of that prosaic apple is something much more human: pride, stubborn, arrogant pride.
Who, after all, doesn't like to be on top?
In science, gravity offers one orientation. Up is the direction directly away from the terrestrial body. Science, as it is practiced by earthlings, determines up as away from the earth.
But once we leave earth things get tricky. A universe of countless heavenly bodies each determining their own up is what we're greeted with.
The way in which our solar system is presented to us visually gives the viewer some clues about how up works and of course how vision and representation collude in making knowledge. Firstly, the view of each planet and the sun grossly misrepresents both the sheer differences in scale of each planet and the sun but also their distances from each other and the sun. That aside, it's a handy representation of all that is of scientific relevance, astronomically speaking, for earthlings living in Sol, our solar system.
Let's look closer.
We see the solar system represented with the horizontal plane determined by the rotation of the planets around the sun. That makes sense from a number of perspectives, one of which is a criterion for internal validity. I agree with that as an explanation, and its tidy.
But there are two sides to this planar representation: up and down. Nothing in our representation determines what makes up up and down down. And here's where things get interesting.
Isaac Newton was spending time with a relative of the family as he looked out into the courtyard of the home where he was staying. He happened to see an apple drop from the tree onto the ground. And from that prosaic occurrence, one that perhaps he had witnessed countless other times, Newton began to think about gravity as a force that extended infinitely into space. Thus we are back to our version of up. It is in essence the direction away from the planet, or out. Up and out are interchangeable from a terrestrial standpoint, using gravity as a marker.
But we've added a wrinkle to up and much like Newton's gravity it extends out infinitely into the universe. The planar representation of our solar system sets the planets about an imaginary plane determined by their orbit around a central star, our sun. What determines up in this representation are the people creating the representation. This connects us to the work of metaphor in human understanding. As with many metaphors comparison is the function. Spatial orientations are no stranger to have added valences. Up and down are prime candidates. Which is better? In most cases, up is the preferred orientation. Who, after all, doesn't like to be on top? Sales are up! Participation is up! Up means more, means greater, means power, means wealth, means more, more, more. As for down? You get the impression.
The carbon dioxide graph that has become all but iconic of our belief or denial in the negative effects of fossil fuel usage could be one example where up and more aren't necessarily better. In this case up still is a means for conferring the salience of an issue. But I digress.
In determining where up is in this planar view of the solar system, science uses planetary north. And planetary north is a rule of thumb for up as if we were standing outside the earth and viewing it. In doing so, it requires that the rest of the universe carry on infinitely in every direction with our version of up extending out.
I'd hazard that, for the sake of internal validity, each solar system could be represented with an up counterposed with down along its orbit around a star. That doesn't necessarily destroy our view of our solar system and this imaginary up, which orders the universe around it. But, by way of metaphor and the vagaries of our subjectivity as thinkers and actors we have inherited a thought and an action, which orders the universe around a decision on what was 'up.'
At the very least having an up and a down are an indispensable means for understanding and representing some thing. Up and down as serve as a medium for exchanging ideas and coordinating meaning about the world we inhabit and that we story. Up and down fit into our visual understanding. And at its rather prosaic core, like the core of that prosaic apple is something much more human: pride, stubborn, arrogant pride.
Who, after all, doesn't like to be on top?
Wednesday, July 31, 2013
The city
The serpentine highways reach into the city like surgical tubes feeding the city's heart. A body under constant operation.
The highways are riddled with shredded scraps of tires from 18-wheelers. The truckers they are are molting this season.
The blood of the city pours out onto the city's freeways and thoroughfares: night-time revelers, the homeless and the beggars. Credit receipts and cash pass hands like a bad word: potent restriction. And the city's blood, its people, mill about who, when, where, and how.
The ebb and the flow of a city, its people, their actions, a life. The city, a metaphor for you and I, going about our business, in a world we didn't create, into a night that conceals us forever.
The highways are riddled with shredded scraps of tires from 18-wheelers. The truckers they are are molting this season.
The blood of the city pours out onto the city's freeways and thoroughfares: night-time revelers, the homeless and the beggars. Credit receipts and cash pass hands like a bad word: potent restriction. And the city's blood, its people, mill about who, when, where, and how.
The ebb and the flow of a city, its people, their actions, a life. The city, a metaphor for you and I, going about our business, in a world we didn't create, into a night that conceals us forever.
Defining the 'internet'
I read this in an article titled: "Web giants to deaf consumers: go away"
Tell that to all those men, women, and children in 1995 who still asked questions, who frowned at the prospect of the internet, who still knew how to put the damn thing down.
Like a dog, it keeps jumping up: into our laps, into our hands, onto our faces, into our minds.
What's next for this internet? That seems to be up to the technologists and the technology-savvy multi-stakeholder bodies.
A definition exists for this kind of power: technocracy. Simply put, expertise becomes the means for attaining power and influence in a technocratic society.
The internet was a clever end-game run around the normal channels of power, influence, and information sharing. Its impact should be clear. It killed jobs, consolidated professions, and blurred the distinction between media producer and audience. Now we watch child stars come apart in under 140 characters over the course of weeks. They stitch together a patchwork of web appliances and applications to document and broadcast their madness, their faltering grasp upon consensual reality.
And the web was supposed to bring us together? This much was clear from the start; its power lies in its ability to arrange data. In as much as we participate as data, data which is meaningful to us, we can arrange our lives in a way that gives us control over our web experience.
To make your web experience meaningful, to give it control you set up what is called a 'feed.'
Upon what do you feed? Experience? A sense of being there through a friend's update? A handle on your "diaried" life through multi-media self-presentations?
We've arrived at our knack, our technology. We've arranged our world in such a way that we don't have to experience it, as it is, without pretense, preparation, obsessive self-selection. No, we're experiencing a world managed by our choices, the choices we make about how we use our devices. We live in self-demarcated information ghettos.
That's fine; we live in ghettos of our decision making. We could conceive of our lives prior to the web as simply a web of activity that we engaged in on a relatively permanent basis. Structurally there is no difference because this is what we've always done. The only difference is that we've grafted this technology onto our lives, which shapes the patterns and the content of our activity. And because of it and its interface design we get stuck in these charmed loops of obsessive watching, checking and rechecking, waiting for a response, to so much graffiti, so much mail, so much video, so much music, so much information, so much interaction, so much.
It's obsessive. It's compulsive. It's what we get when we marry the technology that a technologist conceives with an application that makes the businessman happy. The data they want to collect we gladly generate through our choices, all of our choices, clicking about, swiping and swirling about, our interfaces, each generating some data point, assessing some worth, some value, some thing.
But we've since left the first decision behind, sometime between 1995 and 1999. Then we could have chosen, wholesale, whether or not we wanted to participate. So many have arranged their lives around this web of technology and inflated multi-format self-promotion that a sea change has already occurred. Now we simply make decisions premised upon the always-online reality that we accept. And we've so arranged our world that we don't see outside our creation. Our attention is permanently tethered to the gadgets we use and the habits they purposefully generate then support.
This is the world of the technologist, his lawyer, and their businessman friend. The musicians, the artists, the thinkers, the philosophers, become wrapped in the din, just more information. The technologist, his lawyer, and their businessman friend get to define the internet through legal briefings. And a Swiss playwright nailed it an internet century ago.
The Internet Association rushed to eBay's defense, filing a friend-of-the-court brief saying the web is far too complicated to accommodate disabled people.I spent many years reading definitions of the internet, of computers, of technology. In those years I ran across a few gems. One, by Swiss playwright Max Frisch, explained technology as:
“The Internet is complicated, and its technical inner workings are regulated not by any government, but by a combination of individual technologists and an interconnected web of technically savvy multi-stakeholder bodies that have overseen the Internet’s evolution from the beginning,” the group argues in its brief.
“the knack of so arranging the world that we don’t have to experience it.”I've read a great many things, mostly from the early days of the web, when then-surviving journalists in their then-surviving field spent time writing about and forecasting what the future with the web may hold. And after all that smoke cleared I recall, very vividly mind you, what one of my professors and mentors just audibly screamed from within the room where I had completed an oral defense.
"What is he going to do?"It's complicated. This much I know. I live in its shadow. And because I made an academic exercise, an academic pursuit out of understanding contemporary trends in technology I am in a sense rendered obsolete by my role. This internet does not confer degrees for your interpretation, your research. No, if you can successfully launch campaigns using its many software components then you earn yourself a place in society. But if you question it, if you try to define it then you're simply being reactionary.
Tell that to all those men, women, and children in 1995 who still asked questions, who frowned at the prospect of the internet, who still knew how to put the damn thing down.
Like a dog, it keeps jumping up: into our laps, into our hands, onto our faces, into our minds.
What's next for this internet? That seems to be up to the technologists and the technology-savvy multi-stakeholder bodies.
A definition exists for this kind of power: technocracy. Simply put, expertise becomes the means for attaining power and influence in a technocratic society.
The internet was a clever end-game run around the normal channels of power, influence, and information sharing. Its impact should be clear. It killed jobs, consolidated professions, and blurred the distinction between media producer and audience. Now we watch child stars come apart in under 140 characters over the course of weeks. They stitch together a patchwork of web appliances and applications to document and broadcast their madness, their faltering grasp upon consensual reality.
And the web was supposed to bring us together? This much was clear from the start; its power lies in its ability to arrange data. In as much as we participate as data, data which is meaningful to us, we can arrange our lives in a way that gives us control over our web experience.
To make your web experience meaningful, to give it control you set up what is called a 'feed.'
Upon what do you feed? Experience? A sense of being there through a friend's update? A handle on your "diaried" life through multi-media self-presentations?
We've arrived at our knack, our technology. We've arranged our world in such a way that we don't have to experience it, as it is, without pretense, preparation, obsessive self-selection. No, we're experiencing a world managed by our choices, the choices we make about how we use our devices. We live in self-demarcated information ghettos.
That's fine; we live in ghettos of our decision making. We could conceive of our lives prior to the web as simply a web of activity that we engaged in on a relatively permanent basis. Structurally there is no difference because this is what we've always done. The only difference is that we've grafted this technology onto our lives, which shapes the patterns and the content of our activity. And because of it and its interface design we get stuck in these charmed loops of obsessive watching, checking and rechecking, waiting for a response, to so much graffiti, so much mail, so much video, so much music, so much information, so much interaction, so much.
It's obsessive. It's compulsive. It's what we get when we marry the technology that a technologist conceives with an application that makes the businessman happy. The data they want to collect we gladly generate through our choices, all of our choices, clicking about, swiping and swirling about, our interfaces, each generating some data point, assessing some worth, some value, some thing.
But we've since left the first decision behind, sometime between 1995 and 1999. Then we could have chosen, wholesale, whether or not we wanted to participate. So many have arranged their lives around this web of technology and inflated multi-format self-promotion that a sea change has already occurred. Now we simply make decisions premised upon the always-online reality that we accept. And we've so arranged our world that we don't see outside our creation. Our attention is permanently tethered to the gadgets we use and the habits they purposefully generate then support.
This is the world of the technologist, his lawyer, and their businessman friend. The musicians, the artists, the thinkers, the philosophers, become wrapped in the din, just more information. The technologist, his lawyer, and their businessman friend get to define the internet through legal briefings. And a Swiss playwright nailed it an internet century ago.
Wednesday, July 17, 2013
Page views
Keywords, search terms, bot algorithms.
These have contributed in varying ways to my blog reaching almost 5,000 page views. Sadly, few human eyes see the pages. Few human minds comprehend the narrative journeys. It's just the OCD of a virtual computer spinning in some cloud somewhere on this planet.
As I reach 5,000 page views I need to remind myself that among those views only a few were achieved by people, looking for something on a topic that this blog addressed. Few visits were perpetrated by people willingly clicking on a search engine link to my page. I'd put those in the 250 page view range.
I'm a blogger for bots, an author for algorithms, a star for software, a host for hyperlinks. Foremost, I'm here, unemployed, staring at things I've done, wondering what they amount to, and the internet equivalent of cockroaches infest my work.
These have contributed in varying ways to my blog reaching almost 5,000 page views. Sadly, few human eyes see the pages. Few human minds comprehend the narrative journeys. It's just the OCD of a virtual computer spinning in some cloud somewhere on this planet.
As I reach 5,000 page views I need to remind myself that among those views only a few were achieved by people, looking for something on a topic that this blog addressed. Few visits were perpetrated by people willingly clicking on a search engine link to my page. I'd put those in the 250 page view range.
I'm a blogger for bots, an author for algorithms, a star for software, a host for hyperlinks. Foremost, I'm here, unemployed, staring at things I've done, wondering what they amount to, and the internet equivalent of cockroaches infest my work.
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