To be sure, scattered attempts to construct real community in this complex technological society are always in the making. But we are bothered by what seems a far more pervasive tendency to simulate the completeness of proximate community through the ever expanding perfections of technology. In the relentless, full-color vibrations of the twenty-four-hour TV news, in the inevitable linking of homes and offices to the international superhighways of computerized information, and in the more specialized keyboard connections of like-minded e-mail network users, we seek the lost sacred links of community in cyberspace. But does not this frenzied search for constant connection through information also replicate Ahab's doomed quest for perfect knowledge of the whale as blank continent (only now the continent to be subdued is a simulation of the entire globe)? The skilled navigator of the computer "net" appears infected by the manic illusion that we can really "know" everything there is to learn "out there" if we can only keep up with the latest technological frontiers and tools for bringing them under control. Conquering the borders of cyberspace is, again, the frontier hunter writ large upon the electronic territory of the world.
The urge to build relationships is sacred, but our means are too often profane. The irony we confront when walking through the hallways of almost any office building, seeing each worker plugged into the net, frantically piercing the blank wall of unknowing while the hallways, coffee lounges, and committee rooms stand empty reminds us again of Marion Woodman's charge that we are "addicted to perfection." Like any "good" addiction, which Estes defines as "anything that depletes life while making it 'appear' better," being "wired" makes us believe we are in sync with others and with the world. But like other simulated perfections in the hunter myth, the connections of the hyperreal are an ultimately empty substitution of our ego extensions for a community of Selves. (pp. 212-213)
from "Projecting the Shadow: The Cyborg in American Film" by Janice Hocker Rushing and Thomas S. Frentz
Saturday, July 29, 2017
Friday, July 14, 2017
Direct interface
An incoming call, text, or other important update will directly trigger a nervous impulse to unequivocally inform the smart phone owner they're being contacted.
Saturday, July 8, 2017
Russian roulette
"Russian roulette reveals that the hidden 'logic' of technology is not control, but chaos, pure chance, something outside of the conscious command of the hunter/warrior. Michael's one-shot rule implies that weapons are the strategic means by which the hunter dominates his prey/enemy. But just as Victor Frankenstein loses control of his monster, the hunter loses control over his weapons. And just as the shark in Jaws attacks anyone who happens to be available, in Vietnam technology strikes everyone--hunter and enemy alike. Russian roulette mocks the one-shot code as it graphically illustrates the randomness that technology imposes upon us by making survival a condition of technical chance" (pp. 112-113)
from "Projecting the Shadow" by Janice Rushing and Thomas Frentz
from "Projecting the Shadow" by Janice Rushing and Thomas Frentz
Friday, June 16, 2017
Tuesday, May 30, 2017
Social Anxiety Disorder is ...
Tripping over your persona for the majority of an evening out with friends.
Sunday, May 28, 2017
Crafting a New Cosmology
This cosmology is situated in monism. Monism is a theological concept that all is one. Vagaries aside, my ode to monism in this theology is that there is only one Being, a being which exists in higher dimensional space. This being's presence in this world and perhaps all over the universe is premised around existence. In the case of our world, existence and being are inextricably linked to time or temporality in general. And life, as biologists define it, requires self-replication through time, which allows life to be time transcendent, and through that time accumulate changes, additions, subtractions, assortments, mutations--the full playset of randomness--as a consequence of passing a vessel through an environment to which it is also inextricably linked.
Humanity can be considered a special case of existence if only because humanity is the author of its own uniqueness. Its standpoint is a latent feature of its views on life and its meaning. Humanity has a neuroplasticity, which allows it to adapt uniquely to its place and adopt, prototypically, its culture. This led Alfred Korzybski to call humans time binders, that special case of life, which has, at its disposal, a symbolic inheritance through which the past is transmitted. A professor of mine would state that while animals have instinct, we humans have culture. Culture is our instinct. The upshot of this discussion is to solidify the status of time as the substance of existence.
Existence is time. Time is a dimension of our universe. And it is through time that Being finds an inflorescence, an outpost within the dimensional space of what human's take to be reality.
As we, as a race, pine to reach out to the stars and meet other sentient beings we are all--earthling and alien--simply vessels for a being occupying a higher dimensional space whose influence upon this universe is simply a bleed-through of consciousness through rivulets of time. The basic building block of conscious existence is the reflex network. To have a nervous response to stimulus regulated by an electrical impulse is to set into temporal flow a condition for conscious occupation. Within the space of reflex time consciousness builds out of behaviors that are organized to anticipate future events. Here, in the future-imperfect space carved out by complex reflex a stable flame of existence flickers to life. This becomes the vessel, the space ship for Being in this universe.
Humanity can be considered a special case of existence if only because humanity is the author of its own uniqueness. Its standpoint is a latent feature of its views on life and its meaning. Humanity has a neuroplasticity, which allows it to adapt uniquely to its place and adopt, prototypically, its culture. This led Alfred Korzybski to call humans time binders, that special case of life, which has, at its disposal, a symbolic inheritance through which the past is transmitted. A professor of mine would state that while animals have instinct, we humans have culture. Culture is our instinct. The upshot of this discussion is to solidify the status of time as the substance of existence.
Existence is time. Time is a dimension of our universe. And it is through time that Being finds an inflorescence, an outpost within the dimensional space of what human's take to be reality.
As we, as a race, pine to reach out to the stars and meet other sentient beings we are all--earthling and alien--simply vessels for a being occupying a higher dimensional space whose influence upon this universe is simply a bleed-through of consciousness through rivulets of time. The basic building block of conscious existence is the reflex network. To have a nervous response to stimulus regulated by an electrical impulse is to set into temporal flow a condition for conscious occupation. Within the space of reflex time consciousness builds out of behaviors that are organized to anticipate future events. Here, in the future-imperfect space carved out by complex reflex a stable flame of existence flickers to life. This becomes the vessel, the space ship for Being in this universe.
Thursday, March 23, 2017
This slavery, it has roots
Current discussions speak of a solar economy and a solar revolution while emphasizing its novelty in our coal- and oil-powered world. Contrary, civilization is by virtue a solar powered phenomenon. What makes a civilization? Complex social organization. What makes complex social organization possible? A large population that can be subdivided into specialized occupations. What makes this large population? Food. How is this food acquired? The hugest contributor to population explosions and the attendant societies organized around food production, the veneration of this production into a mythological construct maintained by a priest class, and ascendance of god kings who control the conditions of plant growth is the grain, nurtured by the sun, the soil, the water, and human toil. Corn in the Americas, wheat in the Middle East and Europe, rice in Asia--each growth of a civilization was powered by the same energy source surplus food production, which was, in turn, powered by the sun. Civilization has and always will be solar powered so long as members of a civilization need to eat. And a religion will venerate the arrangement of people and institutions around what the sun can produce to both sate the risk associated with basing the existence of an artificially maintained population center around food production and to justify the organization of such a society. More importantly, religion conducts a shell game with the causality between sun, plant, food, satiety, and food safety.
Ecology tells us that the sun is a wasted resource. Even by the grossest calculations among scientists, of the sun's total energy that reaches the earth, one tenth, one exponent, one power is lost between what photons blanket the earth and those that ricochet off of chloroplasts inside the cells of photosynthetic life on earth. And for each ensuing step the same loss occurs, which is what gives a food chain such a wide base and not much hierarchy. By dint of that reality humanity has learned that food production around a good source of weather and water affords almost a limitless opportunity to produce its staple foods. And because the sun is a wasted resource the opportunity to maximize production exists such that enterprising farmers who clear a plot of land can expand production to a hypothetical point of excess. And thus in an economy based in real worth, the possibility to produce great food riches exists. Here we have the basis for a relationship between people, the land, and the sun, which produces wealth, power, and population. And it is in that retreating hypothetical point of excess where land use achieves excess food production, a precariously grown population, and a power structure that administers it where we find the roots of slavery.
In essence, it is the excessive production possibilities along with now-established excess population that sets the stage for a gross abuse of power in the establishment of slaves. Between the sun, the plants, and the people a line of ascension is drawn through symbolism. From this symbolism a very real condition of existence, food, anchors a new identity in power relations between the coordination of land use and the coordination of labor to take advantage of that hypothetical excess production of food. These are the conditions for the emergence of slavery. Technologies of food production don't end at the plow or the irrigation ditch. They extend into the social organization of a class of toilers and the ideological systems that convince them to work the fields, justify the coercive content of labor, and smuggle into the fruit of labor, i.e., civilization, the connection to the sun, the land, and plants. And so out of this arrangement we find the development of property, both land and produce, and finally chattel, that is, people held for labor.
Agriculture is many thousands of years old. People have learned to domesticate and breed plants and animals to establish a productive relationship to set parcels of land. The peculiarities of this system, like human reproduction itself, is that it is set in that atavistic mold and rarely finds different expression outside of those real conditions of labor or the real consequences of not doing the labor. Food production requires a certain amount of labor input to prepare the land, plant the seeds, nurture the growing food crops, harvest them, and process them into the foodstuffs that form the foundation of a culture. Even after landing on the moon and sending rovers to mars we find people enslaved or close to slavery conditions working the land for land owners under some coercion be it the whip, the threat of death, or the reinforcement of money.
The line from sun to food production plays out in time. That is, agriculture, takes time. The culture of food production, the veneration of productivity gods, the arrangement of sacrifices to appease those gods, the quasi-religious ceremonies around planting and harvest, those are human culture. Human culture is time. More importantly so, it is time shifted, that is, time with an express outcome ordering how its sequences flow. From this we have the coordination of the basic conditions of toil required for survival being used to consequentially order how that toil will occur and to what extent it will be maintained. Even after landing on the moon and sending rovers to mars we find that labor and its value is something that can be infinitely exploited for the gain of a few under the quasi-religious organization of labor into a system of production that sustains itself. This is the basis for that shell game, that essential ambiguity, that is handled through myth and ritual.
Agriculture is a mode of social control. And more basically survival is the existential condition upon which all thinking and any mode of sociality rest. Survival is the razor dividing is and is not. Agricultural practice, if one is born into it, is an ongoing struggle with the land to produce enough food for survival. It tethers people to a place, and it requires cooperation among families and communities. This condition of survival is the bedrock of community and the cultures that form within them. Without the immediate concerns for survival people lose that tether to the land, that tether to a place, and the ties among neighbors required to sustain a life and its meaning in practice.
Slavery or abject labor conditions is one efflorescence of a system based in power (that is food energy) production, which in turn is used, in its excess, to found an exchange economy, a diversified labor pool, and an artificially concentrated population. The other efflorescence is slavery by any other name--survival within an often precarious system of food production. Having landed on the moon and sent rovers to mars we are still bodies that need sustenance.
Ecology tells us that the sun is a wasted resource. Even by the grossest calculations among scientists, of the sun's total energy that reaches the earth, one tenth, one exponent, one power is lost between what photons blanket the earth and those that ricochet off of chloroplasts inside the cells of photosynthetic life on earth. And for each ensuing step the same loss occurs, which is what gives a food chain such a wide base and not much hierarchy. By dint of that reality humanity has learned that food production around a good source of weather and water affords almost a limitless opportunity to produce its staple foods. And because the sun is a wasted resource the opportunity to maximize production exists such that enterprising farmers who clear a plot of land can expand production to a hypothetical point of excess. And thus in an economy based in real worth, the possibility to produce great food riches exists. Here we have the basis for a relationship between people, the land, and the sun, which produces wealth, power, and population. And it is in that retreating hypothetical point of excess where land use achieves excess food production, a precariously grown population, and a power structure that administers it where we find the roots of slavery.
In essence, it is the excessive production possibilities along with now-established excess population that sets the stage for a gross abuse of power in the establishment of slaves. Between the sun, the plants, and the people a line of ascension is drawn through symbolism. From this symbolism a very real condition of existence, food, anchors a new identity in power relations between the coordination of land use and the coordination of labor to take advantage of that hypothetical excess production of food. These are the conditions for the emergence of slavery. Technologies of food production don't end at the plow or the irrigation ditch. They extend into the social organization of a class of toilers and the ideological systems that convince them to work the fields, justify the coercive content of labor, and smuggle into the fruit of labor, i.e., civilization, the connection to the sun, the land, and plants. And so out of this arrangement we find the development of property, both land and produce, and finally chattel, that is, people held for labor.
Agriculture is many thousands of years old. People have learned to domesticate and breed plants and animals to establish a productive relationship to set parcels of land. The peculiarities of this system, like human reproduction itself, is that it is set in that atavistic mold and rarely finds different expression outside of those real conditions of labor or the real consequences of not doing the labor. Food production requires a certain amount of labor input to prepare the land, plant the seeds, nurture the growing food crops, harvest them, and process them into the foodstuffs that form the foundation of a culture. Even after landing on the moon and sending rovers to mars we find people enslaved or close to slavery conditions working the land for land owners under some coercion be it the whip, the threat of death, or the reinforcement of money.
The line from sun to food production plays out in time. That is, agriculture, takes time. The culture of food production, the veneration of productivity gods, the arrangement of sacrifices to appease those gods, the quasi-religious ceremonies around planting and harvest, those are human culture. Human culture is time. More importantly so, it is time shifted, that is, time with an express outcome ordering how its sequences flow. From this we have the coordination of the basic conditions of toil required for survival being used to consequentially order how that toil will occur and to what extent it will be maintained. Even after landing on the moon and sending rovers to mars we find that labor and its value is something that can be infinitely exploited for the gain of a few under the quasi-religious organization of labor into a system of production that sustains itself. This is the basis for that shell game, that essential ambiguity, that is handled through myth and ritual.
Agriculture is a mode of social control. And more basically survival is the existential condition upon which all thinking and any mode of sociality rest. Survival is the razor dividing is and is not. Agricultural practice, if one is born into it, is an ongoing struggle with the land to produce enough food for survival. It tethers people to a place, and it requires cooperation among families and communities. This condition of survival is the bedrock of community and the cultures that form within them. Without the immediate concerns for survival people lose that tether to the land, that tether to a place, and the ties among neighbors required to sustain a life and its meaning in practice.
Slavery or abject labor conditions is one efflorescence of a system based in power (that is food energy) production, which in turn is used, in its excess, to found an exchange economy, a diversified labor pool, and an artificially concentrated population. The other efflorescence is slavery by any other name--survival within an often precarious system of food production. Having landed on the moon and sent rovers to mars we are still bodies that need sustenance.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)