I’ve been re-adjusting my life to unplugging from the network. This is not one of those techno-isolation trips, done in some latter-day Christian mystic Transcendentalist notion of re-establishing balance to one’s informational life by means of putting one’s devices in a plastic bag for a week and walking in the park. This is, instead, an unwanted divorce from the network for economic reasons. Having an iPhone has become too expensive for me, and so I have downgraded to a pay-per-month regular cell phone (it’s a RAZR, which is amusing for its last-generation cutting edgeness). With no internet at home (thanks, Century Link for having an unacceptable service level causing me to embargo your requests to pay the double-charged bill you will not adjust correctly), and temporarily being forestalled from getting a planned mobile broadband hotspot by T-Mobile’s insipid economic red-lining (i.e. a $400 deposit due to my credit), this means I only have a few hours a day online, when I’m at the coffee shop or other work space.
Which is a harsh adjustment, for a person who has already migrated to the cloud, and quite liked it. I’ve been using an iPhone for the past three and a half years. I use a Chromebook. The cloud made me portable, light-weight, and completely flexible. I was online near-constantly, writing, reporting, and managing various other Occupy Portland tasks, communicating with friends and colleagues all across the world in many time zones. This is the extent of the plug that has been pulled.
But I’m finding ways of adjusting. One does adapt to economic straits. The interesting thing is that it is doable. There are ways. Here’s how I’ve been doing it so far.
Apps that sync is the key. After ignoring ScratchPad, a little Chrome OS app that came with my ChromeBook, I’ve discovered that it now allows you to write a Google Doc fully offline, including a certain amount of formatting, and then sync this Doc when your computer re-connects to the internet.
Instapaper is, as always, truly one of the best iOS apps around. (I still have the iPhone, but no SIM card, so it is basically a fat iPod Touch.) When I am near a Wifi zone, I open up the app to let it sync its read/unread tallies and download fresh articles. Off network, it functions as normal.
Net News Wire does the same thing for my Google Reader feed. The trouble is being able to share articles back and forth between my RSS feed and Instapaper, and then from either of these to Twitter, all of which requires a live network connection. For these tasks, email is the key. Email–that most defunct of network activities! Emailing a link to my private Instapaper email address will sync that article as soon as I re-connect to the network, and my email Outbox sends all those messages that were composed while offline. I haven’t found a way to send an email that converts into a Tweet yet.
As far as email goes, handling it once a day is something that many efficiency tips recommend, and so far it is working for me. Email Time is the first 30 minutes after I re-connect with the network. Frankly, I’m kind of surprised I ever gave it much more time than that.
I do miss being able to be on Twitter at odd times of the night, when sitting at home with nothing to do. However, I’ve enabled the ability to send a message to Twitter via SMS, and so now I tweet blindly into the night, carefully tapping out 140 character messages on my RAZR. I don’t receive any tweets that way, as that would be disastrous for my SMS plan. It’s kind of fun this way, more like graffiti. I leave messages, and don’t get feedback until I re-connect to the network, sometimes twenty-four hours later. And if you want to talk about “Old Twitter”, well, this is how the service was originally designed to be used.
I’ve also hooked up Google Voice, though I’m not sure exactly how that benefits me off-network. There isn’t any way to receive chats or emails via SMS or phone yet. However, from a schematic point of view, it does serve to remind me that my regular old cell phone is a tiny funnel for communication when I am offline. When I’m back on the network, suddenly my phone becomes superfluous, as the computer is my phone; I call and text straight from the browser. The phone is merely a handset, and the network is the main channel of communication. I don’t know if, like the email efficiencies I’m forced to apply, this will end up being a benefit or not. But, at least it seems to be all part of the process, which I’m forced to accept whether I like it or not.
All of this seems to break down the networked communication I’ve come to expect into its basic components. I’ve been so used to App-For-That thinking, and user-friendly API integration, that I forgot what the basic components of networked communication is all about. It’s about the information: either short bits of communicative text, or a link that will take you to more information later. Emails and hyperlinks. I’m restoring the mental schematic of packets to my networked communication. Each email, link, and SMS is a packet. If I can work out how to make sure the packets arrive where they are supposed to, even if it is delayed, then the network continues to flow.
The antimedial arsenal proves unlimited: short-circuiting telephone exchanges, bringing satellites off course, burning down cable boxes, sawing down electric pylons, not paying television and radio fees, sending out fake press releases, getting cameras to show up for nothing, pouring cement into dish antennas, cutting assorted cables, cleaving TV screens in two, painting over security cameras, altering data, installing magnetic fields, implanting and spreading viruses and worms – communicating with the hammer: »Talking back to the media.«
The quote comes from a book about the Netherlands squatters’ movement. This anti-media attitude was a pretty standard view for radical politics, up through the anti-globalization protests, and through writings like The Coming Insurrection. If you’ve been there, you’ve seen it before. The hassling of camerapersons, especially those who attempt to photograph people’s faces. Stickers, and vasoline stuck to lenses. And worse.
But this concept of anti-media doesn’t carry on through the Occupy protests. Sure, there are individuals who don’t like the constant camera presence. But in general, media coverage is viewed as a good thing, and not just for publicity purposes. Media is an all-seeing eye, and the panopticon is on our side. Each occupation with a significant amount of action has its own Livestream–a 24 hour news camera, embedded at eye-level inside the inner workings of the occupation. Photos are tweeted and re-tweeted, live blogs come up early and often. We are the media, and our media is thorough and deep.
I’m not sure when this transformation happened. But now, it seems like something we are occupying, in addition to physical parks and buildings, virtual web sites and Twitter feeds, is media-space. We occupy the media, the information, or consciousness, depending on what way you want to put it (I’ll leave the deep semiotic argument for another time).
Maybe it began in Egypt. I remember watching the Arab spring and thinking, “Thank goodness for Al Jazeera! If those cameras showing Tahrir Square shut off, they’re finished.” It wasn’t a sense that if they were removed from my eyes, they would disappear. It was that media, in terms of accessible record (not just spectacle) constituted the protest. It formed the safety of the people, in a searchable, coherent record of events. It was the history that was bring made. Without the cameras there, anything that the powers that be might say could be the truth. The government would again control the media-space, and define history. Al Jazeera made a point, over and over again, of showing their camera feed of Tahrir Square juxtaposed to the Government TV Station. The thousands and thousands of people in the square were the truth, compared to the shots of a few “pro-government supporters” milling about in front of a TV camera. Al Jazeera knew it, and we knew it. And the protesters in the square knew it. With this media channel, we could all say in our own minds, together: this is history. This is what’s happening. Al Jazeera is an international media organization, but the point was made. The media that shows us, ought to be our media. Al Jazeera, for that period, was our media. But they won’t always be around. So we have to step up ourselves.
And this isn’t just an awareness issue. Having control of the media-space is a tactic that literally saves lives. Take the case of Mona Eltahawy, a journalist who was arrested, assaulted, and tortured by the Egyptian police just this past week. The situation was difficult: publicizing her plight could have made the situation worse, rather than stimulate her release. However, in the end, it helped hurry her release.
Where this history goes is anyone’s guess. The role of our crowd-sourced media, and of popular protest’s new wide endorsement of publicizing itself as a way of enacting it’s own history has yet to fully play out. This history is still unfolding.
For those who enjoy playing around with QR codes, here’s a little javascript bookmarklet I cobbled together from various FAQs.
What this does, as you will (hopefully) see if you try it, is open a prompt, allow you to enter text, and then convert that text to a QR code using the Google Chart API.
javascript:void(Qr=prompt('What do you want the code to say?','this code says nothing',location.href));if(Qr)location.href='http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?cht=qr&chof=gif&chtt=QR Code&chs=350x500&chl='+Qr;
Easy enough. While we’re at it, here are a few more QR-related javascript applets I’ve used in the past.
This one simply converts the current URL to a QR code:
And this one prints the current screen. Which would be helpful if your current screen shows a newly-minted QR code.
javascript:window.print()
The goal of all of this (for me) is to try and develop a way to reduce the printing of a QR code to a “one-click” sort of procedure. I’ve been working with a heat-activation Polaroid Zink printer, but not having a lot of success. For one thing, the Zink printer is kind of a pain. It only accepts jpgs in a particular portrait size (you might note the constraining 350 x 500 pixel variables in my code above), and the Google API only generates gif and png (adjust the “chof=” variable in the code to get a png, if you like). And while the Bluetooth on the printer works pretty well, iPhones still can’t send pictures over Bluetooth, so that means I have to drag a computer around with the Zink printer. At least until I can get a non-iPhone, but with my current budget, that will probably not be for a while.
But, one step at a time. If you find a better mobile printer, or use any other fun QR tools or tricks, let me know.
Some of the most experienced members of the Anonymous and LulzSec hacker collectives are believed to have had “botnets” – hijacked networks of PCs – of more than 100,000 compromised computers.
If that many machines were set to work generating Bitcoins, they could create up to $7,500 worth a day at current trading levels – meaning members of the hacker collectives could be among the biggest losers if the value does not recover as and when MtGox reopens. In the hours before the hack the total value of Bitcoins in circulation was more than $150m.
IF some hackers have botnets, and IF those botnets are mining Bitcoin, and IF those Bitcoin were stolen, then OMG that sucks for them!!!
What is the deal? If your topic is slightly shady, any sort of journalistic research goes right out the window? I’ve seen articles about Lulzsec quoting anonymous Twitter accounts, and articles about Bitcoin citing claims made on anonymous forum threads as fact. I know that we’re all excited by this real-life-cyberpunk virtuality, but come on.
I just went and beat back the lawn, which was a demeaning and long-overdue task. And one that is fundamentally fruitless at best, because it will only grow back. If I were in charge (I rent, and so am not) I would tear the entire lawn up, and put in a garden, or gravel, or used auto parts, or anything not grass, which I consider a weed for its rate of growth and relative uselessness. But I’m not, and so I slog outside, to cut back the biomass that seeks to encircle the back porch.
Having raked the zen rock garden of that vine-choked lot with a power trimmer, I was able to let loose some of the anger welling up in my spleen from a similarly endless task at which I throw myself time and time again, though not to avoid fines from any rental agreement. I type essay after long essay in Sisyphean exercise, ranting against that which I disagree with, desperately trying, through the pains of logic and theory to beat back that which I find misconstrued, illogical, syllogistic, and wrongheaded. My motivation for this self-inflicted punishment is an imp that gnaws upon the base of my brain. It’s name is truth. Little “t”, of course; it is more yeasty infection than incubus. And yet, it grows. And as it grows, I type.
And I know I ought to quit. I should produce something that gives a bit more joy, that might be received a bit more easily than “reading,” which seems so much like hard work. Why paint a picture too large for most to view it? What good is a six-hour film epic no one will view past the first half an hour? Why pen a book when the readers will wait for the movie, or wait for the two-minute internet video summary, or simply read the title and consider the point absorbed?
Why should I write an article, finely mincing dense philosophical ideas into something the average palette might enjoy with a little open-mindedness, when I still end up with an essay 3500 words long, that being 2000 words longer than the standard piece of intellectual writing on the internet? Not to say that the few hundred page views that it might receive, whether from the number of regular readers or from Google Image Search tourists are not worth nothing. I just know my own choir. And though there is perhaps no greater pleasure than having a conversation between friends, maybe it isn’t necessary to yell so loud, and for so long. But this very dynamic is what brings on the yelling; I’m trying to draw in from the street the people who need to hear this. And so I call to them as they wonder what all the screaming is about, and move a little quicker down the road.
It is that there is not only an infection in my logic brain centers driving me to attempt to express myself in abstract language, it is that there is a desperate need for it in the world. Or so I would tell you. It is that there is such a need to explain the function of the world, and such a small number of good explanations currently accessible. It’s the need for a technical manual, but only having a typewriter cast in unknown script with which to write it. It’s that I could pour all of my skill, my craft, my education, and my talent into an attempt to guide us towards a better interaction with the world around us, and it would still be insufficient. No matter how measured my tone, and how melodious my words, how sharp my rhetoric and how aimed my logic, hitting the brief ring between abstract and obtuse is near impossible. My words either wash away, or are treated as stain. They either become dust, or they gather it.
It would be easy to blame those whom I try to reach. Goodness knows that others have. Nicholas Carr, Martha Nussbaum, and others have railed against the lack of audience for the finer, more delicate arguments and subjects in the world. They preach for what is important, and seems, in light of its recent popular reception, less so. In doing so they are easily mocked for sounding desperate, and for sounding mournful. They sound annoyed that no one is listening to them, and it is easy to reduce their points to that. And in so doing, make the inevitable mocking response flow so much more easily and overwhelmingly of a deluge.
Larry Sanger is the most recent to accuse the modern-day audience of not paying close enough attention. (And secondary reiteration, here.) And you know, he’s right. He is so right. But what does it matter, when it is phrased like this? Is it better to write the theoretical essay and be ignored, or to write the easily understood essay about why the theoretical essay is ignored, and to be mocked and derided? Which is more depressing? Which is more hurtful to the intellectual soul?
TL;DR.
There is nothing that hurts me more than that. It hurts because there is no intellectual response to it. There is no argument that can overcome that, no rebuttal that stands up to it. “I know you are, but what am I.” It makes the intellectual anger rise. It makes the brain wish to ball into a fist.
TL;DR?
You’re An Idiot; Release The Kraken.
But I don’t have a Kraken. All I have are more words. All I have is a lawn that keeps growing. And I have this yeasty imp, fueled by the anger-agar that seeps from my optic nerve to the embryonic root of my brain. There it grows, and begins to stink.
Let me share some of this stink with you.
Sanger is correct, but he writes in a way that will obviously offend, and thereby make his point mute (yes, mute, not moot). Not that he oughtn’t to tell it how it is, but using very generic terms like “geek” and “intellectual”, in my opinion, allows more excuses than accusations, because responders quibble and evade on these points, rather than dealing with the root of his argument. The same thing with tossing Higher Education on the table: an entirely different Gordian Knot, that has connecting lines to be sure, and yet isn’t the same problem.
So let me rephrase, or remix if you like, what is basically his argument, but from my own perspective, using words I hope are more helpful.
Here is how I would phrase the problem:
The respect and credence given to technical knowledge and expertise is limited to those technological fields that are capable of producing marketable product.
In a sense, I’ve made the issue much more complicated, because I’ve linked anti-intellectualism to my own brand of technological Marxist critique, which is to splice two very different and equally controversial arguments together. But I believe that it simplifies the issue as well, by pointing at the real determining factor behind what has been largely acknowledged as a changing paradigm of public opinion, but misidentified as everything from “getting stupider” to “intolerance” to “peak attention span”.
It is not that geeks are anti-intelligence. “Geek” now describes wonky, technically-minded folk from every discipline and genre of knowledge you can imagine, from programming language to dead language, to library science, economics, literary theory, medicine, cultural studies, astronomy, and higher level math. Because of the proliferation of these serious lines of inquiry, there has been a Balkanization of knowledge. Geeks are allowed to immerse themselves in the most concentrated areas of their particular field, and can communicate with others as deeply steeped as themselves. Geekdom has allowed knowledge to intensify to previously never before experienced degrees. Everyone has a conference these days.
But what has changed is the intercommunication between the fiefdoms of Geek. Why would you want to share your deep knowledge by making it accessible to those outside the fold, when you can concentrate your efforts among those who know what you’re talking about? And moreover, why would you want to learn about anything you were not already deeply familiar with, and have to once again become a noob, with a user profile page showing to anyone that you have only been a member for a few paltry weeks?
There are exports by the Geek Guilds, to be sure. But these exports are only products. If you can sum your architectural knowledge into a fifteen minute keynote, we can sell that as product. If your astronomical research spanning years can be compiled into an animated video of five minutes or less, that can be uploaded to Youtube. If your philosophical theory can be applied to social media so that pre-conceived understandings of that media are reinforced, then by all means, name-drop and share. But if your work is somehow more nuanced, more difficult to grasp, or more requiring of deep study and understanding to be conceived… well, then forget it. A picture of a kitten is the common denominator of the internet. If it requires more background knowledge to grasp than that, it better pay off in equal magnitude. Otherwise: TL; DR.
The epitome of this tendency is, of course, the Gadget. The Gadget is technology that is in an easily conceivable, direct to market, product package. No one cares how an iPhone works. All that matters is what it does. The Gadget need not even exist in a physical sense. Gadget blogs have made it abundantly clear both in their content and in their form, that all you need is a clean-looking mock-up of the product and a blurb about what it does to garner clicks and re-posts.
But good for the Gadgets! I wouldn’t begrudge them their own domain. That this consumer-tech domain is particular ripe for commodification ought to surprise no one. But, it does attract the ire of Larry Sanger and other confederates towards the technosphere, or whatever the so-called media theorists and technorati would name the disparate amounts of networks and techological infrastructure making up a certain evolving aspect of our culture. As the elements of our society that most easily conform to exportable knowledge-products and aid their outsourcing, marketing, and distribution celebrate their own intellect-economy Golden Age, it only makes sense that those knowledge-guilds that are losing influence as a result would be bitter, and point their privateers towards the flags that spite them.
If the problem was limited to sour grapes, we would be lucky, and we could shrug off this issue as the technosphere does, by hoping that the ease of export of knowledge-products translates into the ease of its manufacture. The world is changing! And with this change, with improved information gadgets including all kinds of features for sharing knowledge-products, everything should be better for intellectuals! Right? Of course, I’m here to tell you no.
What’s more, the manufacture of knowledge-products is the least of our worries. As if the budgetary downfall of NASA only threatened our supply of totally sweet YouTube videos. And it is not the Balkanized guilds I’m worried about either. Luckily, (for the guilds themselves, at any rate) there are more qualified Ph.D graduates out there than there will ever be jobs. There are plenty of knowledgeable, well-trained, motivated people out there willing and ready to further the most diverse aspects of technical knowledge that we can imagine. The Geeks will remain strong, if isolated except by the camel trains of their products, flowing out into the vast market of culture as the commodified demand of curiosity dictates.
The real problem is for people like me.
And here you would be more than welcome to disagree, by arguing that my issues are not a real problem. Perhaps the age of the Renaissance Wo/Man is over, and there is no need to mix and sample different realms of knowledge. Specialization could be the way of the future, and people like me, who made their domain out of the hybridization of different networks of knowledge, are in fact obsolete, no longer bringing any value to the market.
Indeed, we always were a little hard to reach for the average person: specialist or merely part of the common cultural audience. Our references are hard to place, and we leap from metaphor to metaphor as if swinging from the branches of a tree. We make odd, artistic comparisons between the world of art, and microbiology, or computer science, and particle physics. We know enough of the local dialect to get us in the door of the clubhouse, but as soon as we got a few drinks in us, our accents become almost impossible for the locals to decipher. We are untrustworthy, jumping disciplines like ships or trains, never in one place for more than a season, before dropping the work with which we were entrusted for something that, to our former employers, seems no more than a game. Some even suspect us of witchcraft, blending unholy syncretisms of canonical theory with local folk beliefs, chanting in tongues and miming archaic symbols, summoning dead spirits to affect the living, for a cost.
So maybe our time is past. Or, maybe, as Larry Sanger says so ineloquently, if you are opposed to those of us that marry the middle-levels of disciplines together in an obscure blend of unprofitable knowledge muck, then “you are opposed to knowledge as such.” (Emphasis his.) It is not just our jobs that we are worried about, our audiences, and our students (I have none of these things, and so I extrapolate to others’ concerns.) The real danger in our neglect is that we understand, or at least think we understand, how it is that knowledge works.
It isn’t mysticism, and it isn’t ideology. It is the mechanics of knowledge. It is the praxis of knowledge, the infrastructure on the ground. The craftspersonship. You might be a genius of economics, working the markets both micro and macro. But it is on the backs of those experimenting with knowledge, from the sweat of our labors, that the products consumed by culture are derived. I hate to make it into something as abstract as “political”, because it is fiercely more than that. This is how people learn. You don’t learn electronics by using a cell phone. You learn electronics by breaking a cell phone. You learn by mucking about with spare parts and with tools, by fucking up and by taking your time and by pursuing things that don’t make sense to anyone but you. You learn by making “art”, not products. The only thing you can do with products is make money.
Supposedly, this culture privileges creativity. It supports breaking down boundaries, it applauds those who think like children, who set aside “time to play”, who start out with tiny blocks, and build up from there. Our culture privileges this, but only once the IPO hits. Once you’ve demonstrated profitability. They don’t respect the act of play, they respect the product of play. And hence, no one actually understands how to do it. If you think that dropping out of college will make you a genius because a genius dropped out of college, you obviously skipped introductory logic, and never learned what a false syllogism is. People are not smart because of the products that they create. They are smart because they messed around in the creative process long enough that from all that mucking about, a product actually crystallized.
Because very few people will talk about the actual act of being interested in breeding and branching and building with broken knowledge products, it is no longer accorded much value. That value is channeled towards marketable products, and the technological specialty that is believed to have delivered those things immaculately. The person who makes a classic work available as an eBook is considered more of a genius than whomever wrote the words. That person has what we want–the product, not the knowledge. It becomes superfluous to even sit and read the book, because it can be referenced and searched at whim. The book is owned, and in this way it is consumed. And so it never has to be studied.
Here, at somewhere North of 2500 words, I could tell you whom you ought to read. That rather than watching some asshole shill his product in an hour-long self congratulatory “speech”, you ought to read Goethe, Dostoyevsky, Melville, Kierkegaard, Arendt, Kristeva, Marx, and Freud. But what would be the point? These are just products, now. You could download the ebooks. You could even read them. But what would you gain, other than checking off the names that I listed? Would you take from each of these writers, as I did (because I named these authors specifically and not on a whim) that it is not the knowledge you accumulate, but what you do with it? Probably not. That is only my opinion, and probably a cognitive bias echo chamber, as the technorati has so kindly “discovered” for us (though we’ve known that for thousands of years). You would probably take whatever it is you would take from it, and then cross it off your list. And who would I be to blame you?
Because it seems that people of my opinion are few and far between. Perhaps we’re a dying breed, or maybe we were always rare. Maybe we are useless, never being Great Persons of note, or at least never birthing a Great Invention into the world. Who can really say. All I do know, for all of this knowledge I have acquired, is that I can still see the snarls in it; that there are great whorls and vacancies between the so-called markets of the value of knowledge, and we could build something truly wonderful and great in that space, if only we took the time and the effort to see it.
But soon again, it will just be time to cut the grass.
When I crafted a response to design-fiction from the perspective of fiction, I knew there was a good chance I was going to raise some hackles. I had decided to stand behind the line of fiction, and from there, fling over the wall a quasi-action-adventure essay, in which the noble forces of fiction were beset on all sides by the cannibalistic hordes of capitalism and design. All of which makes a good story, and a good missile. But is it correct? Or was I disingenuous, playacting with straw men, lighting off pyrotechnics without warning my audience to the presence of smoke and strobe affects in my performance?
My response was always intended as a first step: the Devil’s Advocate position. A method truly less and less reputable in this era of networked cells of concerted, street-level optimism; something somewhat out of fashion without the old grand narrative to rebel against. And yet, I wanted to turn the tables, and break down some of the current conceptions about what design fiction is, and how it works. Then, with stability shattered, propose the way forward. Which I did, but only at the very end of the essay.
But it seems that was not enough. How could it be? After I stormed in with much light and noise, how could I attempt to redeem myself in a couple of tack-on paragraphs? Could I really just set the cart back on its wheels with a gesture and depart from the room as if nothing was wrong?
The conclusion of the fiction I wrote was that design and fiction ought to work together. They ought to unite their combined mechanisms and critical eyes, and proceed in alliance to creatively map the dense network of technology that defines our present and our path towards the future. In furtherance of that goal, and to not only mend the bridge but build a better one, I wish to explain exactly how it is that design and fiction work as creative acts; and then from this, show how they might work in concert. And so, let us move on from the fiction, and begin the political tract.
via Microcosmpublishing.com
The So-Called Imaginary
Time, being the dimension upon which the past and future run their spectrum in either direction from the pivot point of the present, is not an easy tightrope on which to walk. Today our technology is more grandiose, and yet more intricate than ever before in history. Our position as subjects in this time is tentative at best, evolving in tandem and in opposition to the nodes of the technological web of the material world which is always changing, even the most concrete plateaus being only as stable as fluid underneath. But we have the tools to negotiate this. We are the tools to negotiate this. Our sense of history, through which we perceive and interpret the world, is as much the network of time as the tools that built it. We’ve only ever had these tools, and with them in our hands we’ve built the whole thing, as far as we can see. These tools can be used to destroy it, to fix it, to control it, and to build it even bigger.
It is difficult to begin to move forward without assessing where we are now. And it is difficult to say where we stand, without either taking a pithy few examples as the whole, or creating a generic “average” standpoint that doesn’t actually exist: the well known fictional format I like so much. But the state of things is difficulty, and it can’t be avoided. As such, I wish to imagine an average description of the popular way we might construe the current cultural state of affairs and our historical matrix: the so-called, the Imaginary.
The Imaginary as a proper noun was most notably formulated by Lacan, as a domain of his psychoanalytic theory. The Imaginary is a ghostly realm, the place of dream, imagination, and image, set apart from the language and logic we might use to describe such things. It is differentiated from the Symbolic domain of signification; the logical structure of language that organizes, compartmentalizes, and gives form to the Imaginary. The Symbolic is the means by which we express things, but the Imaginary is the font from which ideas well.
This structural differentiation will no doubt sound familiar to many, as it is a common schema found in various philosophical theories of the Twentieth Century, with precursors extending back to Classical Philosophy. It is two-part: there is the firm, formal plumbing of the Symbolic, and there is the Imaginary flux within that conduit. The structuralist metaphor fits bipartite imagery according to a number of metaphors, rendering it to our understanding quite easily.
And accordingly, we apply this metaphor to understand our technological invention. In fact, all creative disciplines are usually explained this way. That there is a flitting dream-world of ideas half-formed and interconnected from which we draw inspiration and shape this raw, creative material into actual invention seems not only mythologically relevant, but appealing to our sense of agency. Be it on the lips of the muse, through the mystic gnosis of juxtaposition and suggestion, or only as result of hard monastic study and meditation, our common understanding of the act of creation seems to fit to this notion of “channeling”. From the Imaginary to the Symbolic, we build ideas out into reality.
by Flickr user Glasseyes View
The Biologic Field of Cultural Objects
Unfortunately, this mythos does not bear scrutiny. There is an imaginary field of material that we access, but it is more real than this nebulous domain. If it was more ethereal, shrouded in the fog of sub-conscious and hidden within the dungeons of memory, it would be comfortably distant. It would be something we would not have to be acquainted with directly. And yet we regularly visit it for supplies, with the pedestrian ease of the massive suburban grocery outlet. It is a myth to think that it is both of the ethereally-beyond and simultaneously in each of our grasps. Perhaps similar, in this way, to the realities of the mega-store, disavowed by the average consumer more interested in a convenient bargain than in the dirty, often tragic mechanisms of world trade. The facts are blurred by the Imaginary, conveniently forgotten, and no less uncomfortably present when we finally clear away those metaphor-implied clouds.
If it were somehow inaccessible, we wouldn’t be responsible for an ethical relationship between ourselves and our creative raw materials. We could extract from the Imaginary at will, as if it were an endless supply, some sort of water from the rock. As a different dimension from reality, the Imaginary cannot be causally linked to reality. There is no measurable ecosystem between the Imaginary and reality. Even if one were to acknowledge they were connected, how can you begin to map the transversal connections if one half of the terrain remains obscured and conveniently unconscious? Our diagrams of the Imaginary rely on weak notions of spontaneous creativity, mythic inspiration, and the heavenly-dictate of random association. But there are real mechanisms at play in the field of “where ideas come from”, and we can’t overlook them.
This milieu from which ideas are drawn, call it an Imaginary or whatever you like, is quite real and close at hand. It is the field of Culture Objects: the pieces of media, story threads, narrative concepts, and instances of human desire that have been crystallized into that which we consume when we consume culture. There is nothing imaginary about them. They are as real as our books, music, film, art, technology, food, and everything else that we have glossed with meaning in our significant world. Naturally, their borders and divisions are in a sort of sublime flux, and that makes it difficult to apprehend them as objects. Is the folio Hamlet, by Shakespeare, reducible to the narrative of a son-murdering-his-adoptive-father? Or is that merely a major theme of that work? Or is it only an archetype found in Hamlet, among other many other instances? Is a snatch of melody a Culture Object? What about a chord? How about a particular tempo? At what point do we recognize something as an original work, a derivative work, an influence, a reference, or something related on so small as to be comparatively inconsequential for the purposes of cultural analysis? Rather than worry ourselves about the difficulty of analyzing and separating the complex web of Cultural Objects in play within our creative system, it is much easier to write it off as simply Imaginary. The fluid dynamics necessary to appreciate blowing smoke or murky water are easy, compared to the relativistic perspectives we must use order to perceive the multiplicitous nodes of the field of Cultural Objects. We are on the level of cultural biology, here. You look at a desert, and you see Nature. But describe what it is that you call Nature, and you see rocks, woody plants, succulents, the occasional animal hiding from the sun in the rocks. But look closer–inside those plants are insects evolved to live only in that one particular place. Creatures that look different than those anywhere else, in any other desert. And between the grains of sand: near-invisible lichens and bacteria, clinging to life and each other. The very sand of the desert is alive. Where do the bounds of biology fall? Like Cultural Objects, everywhere and nowhere. As a complex system, the field of Cultural Objects is far more complicated the Symbolic we so egotistically claim to master, and the Imaginary we tithe to heaven.
The Future
If we understand the Biologic field of Cultural Objects as being quite nodal, capable of complex evolution and yet simultaneously beholden to the present, we can begin to analyze how our present creativity might be able to transcend the present. We can begin to identify “The Future” more clearly. Within an Imaginary, The Future is desperately useless, as an undifferentiated blob of characteristics. But in the field of Cultural Objects, The Future is a critical, analytical technique.
If we believe that ideas are drawn from an Imaginary, a magically adjacent dimension to ours, then The Future becomes equally separate from our world. Mystically distinct from reality, we are unable to fully seize grasp of what The Future is, other than to call it out when we see it, with all the immaculate criticism inherent in a dowsing rod. If we make fiction, design, or any other creative product inspired by/for a vision of The Future, and that future is drawn from an Imaginary, where else is it coming from but out of that fog, with no bounds, no definition? “Forward-leaning” is no more a point of reference than “dream-inspired”.
It isn’t easy to isolate exactly where The Future exists in the field of Cultural Objects, but at least we have something to study, and a point from which to proceed. The Future can be a genre, much like variously distinguished classifications of historical fiction. The Future has the characteristics of seeming to be what is temporally oncoming based on our understanding of history: “the shape of things we believe are to come”. Much like electronic music, that seeks to express its creativity in terms of an generally recognized aesthetic, implied by the particular means of its creation: “the aesthetic of what sounds electronically generated”. Like desert fauna, biologically determined by a host of factors supporting the line between its life and its extinction: “the sort of animals that live in a desert without dying”. It is a pattern that we generate ourselves, pushing it out in front of us, calling it out ahead of us in our imagination, until we no longer are able to see it repeated any longer. We don’t know everything about this pattern and the means of its creation, but we know much more than we do about a perceived Imaginary, in which things move about like sprites, without systematic interaction.
The Future, in the sense of its most critical self-conscious expression regarding the things of its genre, is a critical-eye with a notion of the passage of time, and therefore not only is the aesthetic of the shape of things to come, but the means by which we understand how we recognize the shape of things to come, from amid the field of Cultural Objects. This is what we’d like to think of as Futurism, at least in its modern incarnation. It is not a holistic ethos pulled from the depths of the mind, or a merely aesthetic eye, but a way of reading, manipulating, and relating to objects on the ground, and the tools at hand. Within the genre, it is an understanding of how that genre works. It isn’t enough to create something that might exist. One must simultaneously think about why and how it might exist. Otherwise, it is merely repetition of certain cultural indicators. To speak of wireless because other instances of The Future contain wireless technology, or to consider augmentation of reality because other Future Cultural Objects might augment reality. The Future lends itself towards critical expression, because its pattern is one of constant re-definition by inventive creation, and not merely mimicry. In this way, The Future is distinctly in the present, because it must be as self-conscious of its current genre in order to patently adopt its future-tense. It’s mechanism is to functionally inseminate the present with the possible, and so it must be the technician of the relationship between these things. This is its functional operation, and is the mechanical means of the reprinting of its pattern.
The Future, insofar as it can be conceived and molded into Cultural Objects, already exists. The notion of the presence of historical objects deeply networked within our current apprehension of what is “now” has been referred to as “atemporality”. The meaning is the same. Historicity is genre. Objects create their timeliness in situ, among a network of similar objects, a pattern of the genre relevant and interconnected to a certain period of time. But this genre is always already reinterpreted in terms of the present as it is recognized. To see “old”, we must understand “new”. The ability to perceive history as being historical is dependent upon a headspace firmly grounded in the continuum of temporality, the ability to think relativistically about historicity and temporality, and the critical perspective necessary to project oneself in mechanistic concert with the functional systems that evolve over the passage of that dimension t. A tall order, to be sure.
Ethics
This relevatory atemporality, the biologic field of Cultural Objects, the cease-and-desist order towards the Imaginary: it’s not just a fancy existential perspective or a genre of philosophical terminology. It is a philosophical idea, to be sure; but it is part of our evolution towards an ethics of a post-moral world. Making the sort of shift necessary to push The Future beyond an aesthetic genre and into a critical perspective is not just an thinking exercise, but a crucial mentality for any creator, in the absence of other ethical guidelines.
Morality is a many-storied discipline in and of itself, and so I’ll have to reduce and concentrate the concept as I did with that of the Imaginary. We understand the principle–a guide and assessment strategy for human action. Whether justified by philosophy, theology, humanism, or other constituent articles, we come up with a plan for interpreting good actions and bad actions in reference to a judged spectrum of general good.
Short-cutting my way out of rehashing the entirety of Nietzsche’s The Genealogy of Morals, let me just say that there are some issues with a morality that breaks down the entirety of human action into the twin poles of good and bad. The world is complex, and we end up with a spectrum of good/bad, that has points marked out for ends-justifying-means, necessary-evils, greater-goods, and a host of other qualifiers that make the distinction between good and bad so relative as to make the distinction near useless on a daily basis. Attempts have been made to soldier on without losing sleep over this issue (notably, neoliberalism) but that… well, is a subject for another essay.
But ethics, as an alternate guide for assessment divorceable from morality, remains usable. An ethical system could rely on morality, but does not need to do so. It merely establishes a point of reference as its judgement schema. “Good”, perhaps most generally, but alternately “success”, “civil society”, “sportsmanship”, or “business” would work, to list a few examples. It arranges a pattern of action and assessment in furtherance of a more specific reference point than a general morality. One might consider it utilitarian, but the utility is merely a different orientation than an indefinable “general good”. Accordingly, an ethics can align the assessment towards a terrain that still has purchase, in the void of absolute right and wrong. Our interest in ethics then, in wake of my castigation of concepts like the Imaginary, should be obvious.
Supply and Demand
The ethics of creativity haven’t aligned according to “absolute good” in some time (though some proponents of an ethereal Imaginary speak as if it did), but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have its own poles. Currently, in most of the world, the values that sway the ethics of creativity are effectively market-based. We assess our creations and alter our creativity process according to the reference point of demand.
It’s easy to understand why. Creativity, for all of its noble features, is dependent upon economic support. And we’re not just talking publisher’s advances, royalty checks, production costs, and the other financial forces that play into the creation of Cultural Objects. Economy includes the household-totalling of many push-pull factors in addition to finances. There is an economy of creativity based on the use-value of Cultural Objects, separate from their exchange-value and any potential for capitalistic profit and loss. One can create anything that one wants to make; but if one wants to make “something”, it better be something that someone wants. The market can be as small or as large as we choose, but there must be a supply and demand market structure within it for the product of creativity to be said to exist. Creative production is merely idle work that cannot make a product, unless that product is consumed. The interests of one person act as a pull on the creativity of another. As the fruit of human expression, a Cultural Object expresses nothing unless it expresses it to someone. Even if the creator creates only for him/herself, it still satisfies that desire in order to take place.
The creator imagines, through his/her own apprehension of the complex network of Cultural Objects and the desires and feelings connecting them, a potential demand for an envisioned Object that solidifies as an idea, then which congeals via his/her labor into the actual Object: the work of art, literature, music, or whatever it is. Causality is not implied, and doesn’t have to be. The link between the supply and the demand happens from both sides simultaneously and connects both nodes into a unit at once. It is a continuum between the creator who didn’t necessarily know s/he had anything to sell, and the consumer who didn’t know s/he had any desire to buy, until they meet up one day and at the same time begin to make an offer, in a suddenly networked transaction. The cost of the transaction is also moot, and quite likely, the exchange is not made in terms of anything like currency. What is important is that the Cultural Object is given over from the creator to the consumer because the creator was able to create and the consumer was ready to consume, and it is by this relationship that the Object can come about.
If the goal is to make Cultural Objects, the goal is to find demand, and connect it with the supply. We are all “middlemen” in the field of Cultural Objects, making connections between nodes, trafficking in flows–in the same way that every organism is in a sense a symbiont, in that through its biologic transactions of all kinds with other organisms, they all constitutes the ecosystem together. More connections between supply and demand engender more Cultural Objects. We continue to create and consume, and this ethic of demand, as a pattern guiding and assessing action, furthers itself, as life begets life.
via Flickr user lifeontheedge
The Obsolete and the Profitable
But on top of this general ethic of supply and demand, additionally ethic layers can be stacked like architectural vellum, shifting the meaning of the layers below. Perhaps just as natural as the desire to create, is the urge to profit. Capitalism, for better or for worse, is a fundamental ethical perspective coloring all of our actions, whether we like it or not. Enter the agents, the managers, the marketers, the gallery owners, the publishers, the retailers, the factory owners, the advertisers, and so on and so forth. In addition to guiding the flows of supply and demand to connect the nodes, they seek to extract surplus-value from these connections, by way of reprogramming the connections in a profitable way.
The “profitable”, then, is not only a connection that is demanded, but demanded with a certain furiousness. Capitalism must seek relentless profit-taking for the foreseeable future. Capitalism has long understood the concept of atemporality. There is no such thing as “new” or “old” outside of a relative judgment–instead, the ethic directs itself based on only what is profitable. And profitable doesn’t merely mean “profitable today”, but also “still profitable”, or “potentially profitable tomorrow”. Capitalism, as the ultimate ethical regime, seeks to reduce all other means of understanding systems to its own. Time, space, goodness, creativity: all of these are redefined in terms of their usefulness in extracting and channeling flows of capital. It could be a fad, a trend, a vintage, a reboot, a retro, or whatever you want to call it. To Capital, it is only profitable or it is not profitable.
Profitability, not unlike a certain abstracted genre of The Future in the sense of the Imaginary as already discussed, is self-servingly forward-leaning. One counts the profit one makes today, but plans for the profit to be taken tomorrow. The more critical aspect of The Future in the sense of the field of Cultural Objects, and its self-consciousness and the groundedness of it as a worldview, is dangerous to Capitalism unless reduced to merely the ethic of profitability: also known as “feasibility”. The sort of historical truths and radical potentialities that critical Futurism concerns itself with, such as climate change, social unrest, democracy, radical economic or political structures, personal freedoms (just to pick a few from the bag) are distractions from the overarching ethic of Capitalism. Any sort of critical break with the current systematic support, empowerment, and ethical justification of Capitalism are dangerous and potentially costly if they are allowed to occur, in that they might interfere with profitability: the bottom line. The goal is to replicate the profitable Cultural Objects of today, and anticipate those that will make money tomorrow. The goal is forward; while change, or a more specific critical analysis of historical systems, is not. Minimizing change for the foreseeable future in order to reap a steady curve of return is what the flows of Capital specialize at doing.
The opposite of “Profitable” in the Capitalist ethic is “Obsolete”. Obsolete is what used to be profitable, but no longer is. There could very well be a demand for that particular Cultural Object, but because there is way to seriously profit from that demand, it has no use for Capitalism. The LP album is the perfect example. The CD made the LP obsolete. But it never reduced the LPs use-value. It only provided an alternate, “better” use-value from the perspective of the capitalist ethic, in that it could sell itself as an improvement. LPs continued to play music just as well as they always did. But, because there was a better product in terms of the Capitalist ethic, they were officially labeled Obsolete. LPs continued to be bought, sold, created, and played. Until then one day, Capitalism had a change of heart. The system “noticed”, as it were, that despite being obsolete, LPs were still selling. And so, the technology was de-Obsoleted. LPs are now legitimate commodities once again, having reattained their position within the Capitalist ethic as Profitable. All of which would be extraordinarily surprising to the LP, if it was the sort of thing that could be surprised. It has not changed much over the course of twenty years of being Obsolete, rotating at thirty-three and a third revolutions per minute, in a similar stoic nature to the turning earth.
There is nothing wrong with making money on its face. Selling something is merely to participate in the exchange between the supply and the demand, trading value for value. But when there is a way of viewing the world and systematically understanding one’s actions that involves the flattening and reduction of all other ethics towards maximizing the flow of profit, such that the goal is to extract as much surplus-value as possible from the work of others… well, it would seem that there is a untenable situation for the long term. Legitimate use-value of the field of Cultural Objects, among a number of other important ethical considerations, takes a back seat, if isn’t run over in the middle of the road. In biologic terms, the Capitalist ethic is an invasive species: a predatory pattern that is overwhelming the rest of the ecosystem.
The Praxis of Fiction
So we take our critical-eye off the The Future as genre, and look into the atemporal distance all around us to study the mechanics and economics of creativity, rather than to simply reproduce its product. We stand up on the Biologic field of Cultural Objects, and see what is going on underneath our feet. We make our ethic firmly in terms of supply and demand as befitting our nodal networks, rather than per abstract regimes of profit and loss. We have an existential metaphysics, a politics, and an ethics. So what is it that we are going to make?
We each have our art form, our preferred medium, our home discipline, our comfortable home workshop, with our well-worn set of tools. Surely we won’t be straying too far from these. These are, after all, a fundamental element of our milieu, reference points and instruments across our own topology of the field of Cultural Objects. These constitute our praxis: our means of production, through which we engage in the market of ideas and objects with our audiences, our contemporaries, with the supply and the demand of the arena of creative human endeavor.
But is there ever a time in which it is not useful to re-evaluate, to re-strategize, to re-assess the situation on the ground, and to improve upon the plan? The praxis is always changing; the ecosystem is always evolving; the demands of our world always adjust; the terrain is always shifting and having to be re-mapped.
The map is fiction–or rather, fiction is what we draw, in attempting to map it. But we can only keep track of our creative motion insofar as we can conceive it as space. The field of creativity is our desert, which we were born to survive within. It is our ecosystem. Fiction, as the combined topology of our Cultural Objects, is the means and mechanisms by which we supply the demand of our imagination and fantasies. It is not separate from design, any more than design is separate from the world. Fiction and design are resolutely material in that they relate directly to reality, even when they momentarily retreat to the depths of our imagination. We dream in terms of the world around us, and we set our sights on what can be potentially achieved in a future connected to today.
Whether the art form is design, literature, or anything else, the praxis is the crucial test of whether we can best connect the nodes of supply and demand, for our own critical vision of the future, rather than regimes that would force us back onto the autopilot of the genre-fied Imaginary. What can we best do with our tools, that can find a place in the reality of the field of Cultural Objects? How do we already fit into the flows? What sort of creatures are we, and what sort of ecosystem is it that we inhabit? Who else lives here, and what do they eat? We must sharpen the ethical scalpel, while at the same time broadening the critical lens. These are metaphorical descriptions of creative practices, but they constitute our reality no less than any of these. We must consider the form of creativity as the means of an ecosystem, directing the flows between the nodes of means, material, ourselves, our audience, and each other: because it is. We need to stop creating products, and start evolving worlds. Because these worlds already exist.
A long article has been making the rounds, which at first catches the eye because of the copious (if mis-directed) use of a great many technospheric buzz words, popular smart phone app titles, and a splattering of post-modern philosophy, but then when unpacked devolves into all-too-typical post-Baudrillard simulacrap. BUT, just because it is misdirected, doesn’t mean that we can’t learn something from it, and take this opportunity to redirect.
The author of the above has a problem with a particular sort of digital photo. It is a sort of digital photo that somehow violates the glorious rules of reality, by mimicking something from a time that it is not. Time has come unstuck, and not in a good way. A bad, fake, inauthentic, faux-vintage way.
It might sound similar to another buzz word: “atemporality”. The author of the above link didn’t use the word atemporality. But, the words he used are responsible for directly the sort of miscommunication that obscures what atemporality is, and how it works. His notion of the faux-vintage, meager on depth as it is, is the scum that floats on top of atemporality, and keeps us from seeing the clear waters underneath. I hope to skim the scum off in this essay.
Part of the trouble with a concept like atemporality, is that it sounds right. Much like post-modernism, this makes it easy to put out on the table like a bowl of butter pats, without taking the time to think about what it is we’re having for dinner.
It’s not such a big word: “atemporality”. We know what that means, right? Something about time getting all weird on us, and the past, and the future, and maybe the sort of technology through which we imagine both the past and the future. Sounds good… type it up.
by Flickr user hannahblu59
But atemporality is something with more nuance than time-getting-all-old-timey by way of a digital picture. To define it myself in short terms: atemporality is the act of refuting the order of temporality, through the means which temporality is usually applied. We all use an interior sense of time, or temporality. It’s, you know, Time! We keep track of the order in which things happen, and form a baseline t axis by which we keep track of the world. (For a greater exposition of this concept, see Kant, Bergson, Heidegger, Deleuze, and many others.) Temporality: we know the past, and we can only guess at the future; we know something just happened, while other things are mere traces in our memories; we “remember the 80s”, even though what I remember as The 80s no doubt differs from your memories of it, and we can debate when the 80s supposedly began and ended; we may remember last Tuesday, but the details could easily be suggested to us, and our “memories” might be proved false once we see the pictures. All of these things are involved in our sense of temporality: a big, flowing river of time in which we float.
Atemporality is the point at which this temporality begins to break down, though still in a temporal way. We still have a sense of time, but the wide span we call “history” begins to get weird loops, whorls, and whirlpools in it. The usual cycle of fads booming and busting grow eccentric, and spin oddly off-center. The idea of what is “current” begins to break down. We have trouble remembering if something used to be common a long time ago, or if that was today but maybe in Japan, or if maybe someone simply suggested that it would happen soon in the future. The river of time spreads out into a brackish salt marsh delta, and we know time is still flowing, but we don’t remember where it was we were trying to go. Were we trying to go? What does that even mean?
Maybe it’s because of the internet, maybe its because we all carry computers in our pockets, or maybe it’s just because there are so damn many of us we can’t see over the heads of our immediate friends to get any good “big picture”, and mainstream media is only as existent as the last meme that we saw. But there are people who aren’t old enough to know that record players went obsolete, out there buying records, as if there was nothing odd about it in the world. Wearing Victorian fashion is a now subculture, not an attempt to mimic something so uncool as “real life history”. And, pursuant to the article I had linked to at the beginning of this essay, cell phones can take pretty pictures with weird, livid color achieved through simple algorithms. No big deal, except that someone thinks those digital pictures are “old”. And what’s more, “fake old”.
by Flickr user stevendepolo
Using a word like “nostalgia” is such a desperate sign of being out of touch, out of date, and so awfully-temporal in an atemporal time. “Nostalgia” assumes that there still was a temporal order in which someone could purposefully choose to “rewind”. It implies someone wants to “turn back a clock”, as if all our “wrist watches” weren’t synced to regulated network time via cell phone towers. Hilarious! You are the Encino Man of epistemology. Accusing an iPhone app of being inauthentically faux-vintage is about as cool as reminding your kids that some dead guy originally recorded the song being sung on American Idol way back in the 20th century. Pipe down, old man! The only people worried about what is correctly nostalgic or otherwise faking it are people who, for some reason, need to cling to a sense of permanent history that is not fluid, crowd-sourced, and always on instant remix mode. They probably still buy paper encyclopedias.
But the kids aren’t idiots, just because they won’t buy into your historical temporal-subscription business model. With a single Google search, anyone could tell you more about Kodachrome than you could, even if you used it yourself for over twenty years. As if they didn’t know that an antique is found on eBay, while up-cycled vintage is found on Etsy. They haven’t forgotten history. They’ve Gutenberg’ed history, if you pardon the zeitgeisty historical reference. Rather than re-write out the Old Story again and again in expensive, illuminated manuscripts, they’ve made their own printing presses, and they are distributing their pamphlets in the street. Or, if you prefer, they’ve pulled letterpresses out of the scrapheap, and they are printing comic books/novellas/vintage stationary that re-writes the story of Gutenberg as if he were an out of work Ph.D grad with a blog, or they’ve 3D-fabbed lost typefaces reassembled from scanned Library of Congress volumes, or they’ve… dammit, I’ve lost the metaphor, but that is the point. Atemporality is not your 20th Century post-modern critique. It is no longer enough to wrily point out a bit of irony that no one else caught, and think yourself Zarathustra for doing so. We leverage the networks, man. We access all recorded time periods with equal veracity and reach, until time periods cease being temporal. Anything that we can do with anything is only Now. Any of us, all of us, one of us. The temporality that anchors us to reality is atemporality.
When I say kids, I mean me, you, any of our contemporaries. The cutting edge is level, because the most amount of experience any of us can have with brand-new technology is none. Not all of technology is brand new, but that’s why we network. If someone finds a swell photography blog, or a scanned guide to restoring old typewriters, we pass it along. The best way to learn is to find someone who knows what they are doing, and help them. We’re all kids about some things, and many of us are experts in at least one thing. We come to the networks with certain abilities, certain likes and dislikes, and all the many facets of our personality. When we connect, reality happens. We’re all faking it to a certain degree, and all of our fabrications are realer than we know. There’s not a single person who isn’t surprised when their ____ goes viral, because the only thing one can attempt to understand about viral media, is the ridiculousness of the claim that one has identified and understood an epistemological hierarchy of network culture. “Pop culture” didn’t go obsolete, it splintered into more pieces than anyone can count, keep track of, or catalog and interpret. There is no such thing as un-cool. You just haven’t found the other people who think it is awesome yet. The topology of culture is similar to the technology that propagates it, in that culture only works. Technology and culture do not not-work. There is no plateau other than the niche, and if something is surviving, it is because it is crossing somebody’s spark gap. If something is replaced by a better tool, that former tool is either sold online or goes into the free box, where it is quickly grabbed by someone who could totally use it, or take it apart and make it into something else.
by Flickr user Valerie Everett
And this is how you know that the sort of person who uses the word “simulacra” with disdain doesn’t use tools, and only inhabits the realm of ideas as one inhabits a titanic, steam-driven airship; a fictional craft that never lands, never makes contact with the industrial revolution changing the world down here on the surface. There is no “inauthentic” in the machine shop. There are only tools, better tools, and tools that need to be fixed. What is it that Instagram does as a tool? It makes cool pictures. What do the titles of the filters mean? I don’t have the first idea. I swipe at them with my thumb until it looks sweet, and then I send it to my friends. Then I put down my iPhone, and go back to trying to un-stick the shutter on an old medium format camera. If I can make it work again, it might take cool pictures. And if I left it in that flea market where I found it, some asshole who uses words like “authentic” probably would have pulled it up into his airship and stuck it on the wall of his wine bar. I use all kinds of things. The reel to reel is next to the turntable on which my laptop sits, which is processing scanned 35 mm slides for filtering and reprinting, so I can reproject them with an overhead projector, and trace over it on a piece of tossed-out plywood. Where is the authentic in my living room? I couldn’t give a shit. Where is the “era”, the “epoch”? I couldn’t tell you. All of these technologies function today, and work Now. I can tell you that my 6 year-old laptop is probably more obsolete than the reel to reel player, because the reel to reel works like new, whereas the laptop often struggles with simple tasks.
Anyone offering authenticity has something to sell you, and likely, a something you do not need. They try to convince you that the way you are doing it is not as “real” as something else. Funny–because reality was just fine before they came along. Before they tried to monetize a particular world-view, to increase the value of a certain temporal commodity by claiming to be the exclusive arbiter of what is authentic and what is forged and fake. And we wouldn’t want to fool ourselves either; this is a capitalistic world, and everything ends up bought and sold. Any particular atemporal trend will end up named, stamped into a commodity, and sold, until stretched into a thin veneer of shiny, zombified goo. But that’s okay, because we already have a friend that we met in a comment thread, that can get us that real shit. The Real Shit, because it is the stuff we want and nothing else, and because we’re getting it from the source that we know and trust. That is the network, and that is atemporality. All real shit. No authenticity.
This is the second in a series of many reports. Each entry in the report represents a pattern.
Places for Secrets – Just as certain sorts of knowledge and information lend themselves to a desire by their holders to have their facts be kept hidden from some, certain places also lend themselves towards those that would seek to hide. Low light, obscure vantage points not in the typical lines of sight–these are ways to visibly hide. But a game of epistemological hide and seek is constantly occurring. What places have background noise that would cover a whispered conversation? A crowd that would make a meeting between two subjects seem less than intentional? Light that obscures the work of cameras, that would seek to record a person being in a place as time-stamped, cross-referenceable fact? Weather conditions might play a factor; places that are known to often be socked in by fog or made unpleasant by rain so that a potential spy would have no reason to loiter could be valuable. Any sort of sensory or epistemological interference natural to a place, whether affecting the senses, technological recording devices, or the media of recording itself. What could augment a place so that secrets could be hidden there? Dead drops for paper or other recording media. A single tree in the middle of a field could be a landmark, so that a thing could be hidden a set distance from it. Maybe even a library could be a place for secrets. Amongst a plethora of information, secrets could be hidden as if in plain sight.
by Flickr user Glasseyes View
If/Then – This linguistic and logical construction is known as an antecedent, and a consequent; in other words, from one proposition, logically proceeds another by way of their connection. This is also a form of hypothesis. If a condition forms, we posit that then we may expect a conclusion. It can be a description of causality, but–and this is a large caveat–only if the two things being described are coinciding in time. It is impossible for a causality to occur between two things not coincident in time. Because, time is resolutely causal.
Past/Future – Another pairing, because one denotes the other. Just as causality denotes a temporal coincidence between two things, any sort of temporal singularity, that is to say a moment, automatically implies an extension of similar moments preceding and proceeding from that moment. What is the past’s relationship with the future, outside of metaphysics, and the simple number line of physics’ fourth dimension? Does nostalgia for the past imply hope for the future? Which is more optimistic, and which is more pessimistic? Does positing a time-shift between a “now” and “then” make us less, or more beholden to any standard of truth? And is causality, like history, only written by the victors in the past tense, and like prayer, only proposed for the future by the victims? If we acknowledge trouble in our apprehension of the past and future, what does this mean for our perception of the present? Is there a present?
Live feed – The live feed is closely linked to technology. Telegrams gave way to telegraphs, which gave way to radio. The 24-hour cable news cycle is no different than radio, where the truth occurs as fast as information can be pushed to the announcer on camera/microphone. But the time of absorption has changed. There isn’t additional information to fill up that extra space, there is just a willingness to “clue in” those who are “only just tuning in”. The message repeats, not for mimetic purposes, but to constantly be current. Contrapose this to the live blog, that assembles like a timeline, so that anyone may log in and check the current development, and then re-create this currentness by rewinding as necessary. The consistency of these always-on feeds means that they don’t have to be always on. One can click on and off as they like, filter even. They can binge and purge their information’s currentness. But what is the point? What is the benefit of current? Current information is not always better. But the ability to have it there, is an ability. An epistemological ability to access time with a wide eye. Like a back-up for one’s data–the data that is epistemological awareness. Perhaps it is no coincidence that Apple coyly named their automatic data back-up system the “Time Machine”. Time travel through data is possible, but only to the referential data points of awareness that are of interest. And interest, is currently, taken with currentness. Call it time travel without moving.
Half-tone screen – When printing with a single color of ink, it is possible to create different tones by printing a pattern of dots of varying sizes, rather than a flat expanse of ink. This dot pattern, which blurs to the human eye at a normal distance, is called the screen. Dots of black on white paper make a gray. When two different dot patterns of two different ink are combined, the colors are perceptually blended, e.g. red dots and yellow dots appear to give a space the color of orange. This is called a half-tone screen. Most commercial printing combines four colors, cyan, yellow, magenta, and black, and from these can be created nearly any color of image, including photographic prints that are nearly impossible to distinguish from reality at the typical viewing distance. What is referred to by a customer as “full-color” printing, is most often known to the printing technician as “four-color” printing. One last detail to complete the possible metaphor: when ink is printed in a screen pattern, the ink will bleed into the paper a bit, increasing the size of the dot in a condition known as dot-gain, that is pre-calculated by the printer to make sure the dots end up being the correct size for the material being printed upon, so that the colors don’t end up shifting in tone. Now, this could be a metaphor–a pattern for thinking about the combination of ideas, data points, and reference values. For something involving the mix of two alternating concepts. But then, remember that everything that is printed, anything that you will read or look at and recognize a pattern or a symbol or a word, takes advantage of this same trick upon human visual perception. In every idea there is a bit of difference, and in any text there is the difference between white paper, and black text.
image by Trevor / cdsgraphic
National Epic Media – We propose that Fox News is as close to a national epic poem as we can get in this current era of fragmented culture and alternate viewpoints. According to Bakhtin, the past is the epic’s subject, the national tradition is the epic’s source, and what is epic is the distance between the world of that epic and that of reality. The epic, constrained by those things, cannot be changed by current conditions, and what is current can only be interpreted by the epic, and not the other way around. The position of the epic “is the environment of a man speaking about a past that is to him inaccessible, the reverent point of view of a descendant.” Even the law of the land is reinterpreted on a daily basis–but the national epic is viewed as immutable, and wielded as roughly as if it were so. But how does this happen? Does any nation with a significantly strong sense of self purposefully develop an epic media as some sort of literary ur-ground? Or does that past and national tradition solidify only with enough time gone by, enough tradition built up that the patterned strata of it can be referred to obliquely, and yet be nevertheless as foundational as it is inaccessibly vague? What are the motivations for a constant reference to such an epic media? Clearly, money is a primary. But epics developed before there was such money to be made, and if the form is similar, then oughtn’t the cause be as well?
Modernism – An epoch of art, of architecture, of literature, and less definitional but with no less certain utility, history. What is it about this genre or time period that deserves an “ism” suffix, as if it were less a style, and a belief? It isn’t the only genre to win such notation, and yet, it is a noun, and not an adjective. Such philosophies and ethos often have manifestos, but Modernism is applied only from historical perspective, even if we claim to be part of its age.
Image copyright by GaryReggae, under CC license
Modern – This is the adjectival version, describing the former period. But it is also a temporal adjective, meaning a certain sort of currentness. Is everything that is current also modern? Is everything that is modern also current? Post-modernism, an epoch with an even more oblique set of reference points than Modernism, somehow debilitates the adjectival effect of “modern”. After all, how modern can it be, if something is known to come after it? If the subject of modernity is in the past, then what does “current” mean?
Punk/Not-Punk – The inflection point in a spectrum between what is attractively, authentically agonistic, and what is not. Punk is a genre of many things, but it most often described by rebellion, against a certain “mainstream”, as it were. There may be money in Punk, there may not be. There is ego in it. It often finds its subject in the past. What is Punk against? Ronald Reagan? Disco? Alternative Rock? Victorian History? How defined must something be in its agonism for it to become a full-fledged expression of Punk? How watered down and mainstreamed must Punk be to become Not-Punk? The violation of cultural norms in the search for the authentic. The institution of norms for the violation of cultural norms. A noun, and an adjective.
Sub-Culture & Alt-Culture – If culture was a narrative, this would be the subversion and the alternative-generation presented to that narrative as counter-narrative. The antithesis, rather than the synthesis. It can be defined in a certain hegemonic separation. A neighborhood full of hip individuals, marked in their individuality by all dressing in a recognizably similar way. A trend is only a pattern, until it becomes a noun, rather than just an adjective. A subject, manifesting creativity, by manifesting imitation. Not for mimetic purposes. An authentic sub-culture cannot be altered by the present. It is locked in the past. It can only be corrupted, and de-authenticized. Like the waxing and waning of the moon, sub-cultures pass from authentic in full, to inauthentically dark.
I like to think that inside each eyeball of a statistician, lies one of these little whirligigs, constantly spinning as he or she apprehends the world.
The other thing that is evolving over time is the evolvability of the system. One of the things that life is doing is it’s evolving its ability to evolve. In the beginning, life didn’t evolve very much. As it made more structures and more things, the varieties of the ways it could evolve changed, so its evolution was changing. That’s what technology is doing. It is accelerating the evolvability of life.
Another way to think about this is that one of the things that life likes to do is make eyeballs. Life evolution independently invented eyeballs 30 different times in different genres and taxonomies. It invented flapping wings four times. It invented venomous stings about 20 times independently, from bees, to snakes, to jellyfish. It also has invented minds many, many times.
The problem is that there are many kinds of minds that biology can’t make but technology can. You could think of technology and us inventing the kinds of minds that biology could not invent. We are going to invent all different kinds of minds.
[...]
We invented the external stomach, it’s called cooking, that allows us to digest stuff that could not otherwise increase nutrition. It changed our jaw and our teeth. We are physically different people because of our inventions. While we can live on a raw diet, it’s actually very hard to breed on a raw diet.
What we have done is become dependent on our technology, and we will become ever more so. That’s just the definition of who we are. We are the first domesticated animals. We are a technology ourselves.
[...]
I went to visit a place where they were making one of the more advanced robots, called Willow Garage, in Stanford. I was there because this particular robot has the ability to actually find a plug and plug itself in to repower itself. No one has taught it where these things are. It can actually proceed and look and travel around on its own. It actually gets its arm and takes its tail and plugs it in.
I stood between it and a plug. It was very clear that it wanted power. It had a want that was very visible to me. It was never going to hurt me, because part of its program was not to hurt, but it was very clear it was going to get power. If I stopped, it would go around. It was somehow or another going to get it.
It’s not conscious, it’s not aware, it’s not even very smart, but it definitely wants something. It’s comparable to if your cat or birds wants something. I’m using it in those kinds of terms.
In the first excerpt, he discusses a separate yet similar evolutionary trend in nature, and in technology. In the second, he talks about both the technology of our biological functions, and the dependence of this technology on other, less biological technologies. In the third, he talks about a technology exhibiting something that we view as human, or nearly so and hence, animal: will.
In these three passages Kevin Kelly depicts contradictory and overlapping notions of what “nature”, “technology”, and “human” are. If I was to ask him about this, I don’t doubt that he would say that, indeed, these three notions are overlapping and contradictory, and that’s the point. No quibble, there. The problem, however, is that because these terms are so often used to talk about natural/technological/human issues that are only contradictory and specifically NOT overlapping, we end up going around in a terminological circle, which seems to me to be less sublime than the dichotomy of yin/yang, and more like a dog chasing his/her tail.
The problem is an epistemologically endemic one. It is most easy for us to think of things in terms of dualities, and so we deploy dualities in order to understand things. Unfortunately, the world doesn’t always work in dualities. This doesn’t make them useless, but it does give them a vulnerability.
Here is a couple of diagrams to show you what I mean.
In the first, we see three concepts, numbered 1, 2, and 3, each paired in dualistic opposition to another concept. A is NOT B, B is NOT C, and C is NOT A. Cool? Yep. A mouse is not a cat is not a dog is not a mouse.
The trouble with oppositional concepts is that we tend to think in terms of binary oppositions. A light is either on, or it’s off. A statement is either true, or it’s false. In this diagram, I’ve labeled each of three concepts, 1, 2, and 3, with a binary determination, either 0 or 1 (fill in whatever binary description you like). As you see, we immediately have a problem. 1 is oppositional to 2, 2 is oppositional to 3, but that would make 3 equivalent to 1. Mice and cats are natural enemies; cats and dogs are natural enemies; but are dogs and mice therefore natural allies? Only in Tom & Jerry cartoons. No matter how many times you go around, you end up opposing two of three concepts, if you are going to make two of them equivalent to one another.
I don’t think Kevin Kelly is intending to make his concepts binary oppositions. In fact, I think he intends to do something akin to the first diagram, in which by showing how thinks are different in some measures, they actually end up proving similar by others. The problem is that he uses words like “nature”, “technology”, and “human”, which throughout their use have been deployed strictly as binaries, we tend to think of them that way. Classically, nature and technology are opposing forces. Humans and their technology are separate entities, pitted against each other, allegorically not unlike Cain and Abel. And humans and nature are… but wait a minute, which one is on what side? Do we use nature to fight technology, or technology to fight nature? Or is our nature to use technology? Or is nature a technology for us to use? Or is the nature of technology… human? And the argument now starts to look like the second diagram, and we’re all confused. When you use concepts that are related by an us vs. them binary dichotomy, you invariably end confused when a third concept comes to the party.
Words are fluid, and their meanings change over time. But to immediately attempt to reverse the meaning of words deployed for hundreds of years, is to not only to attempt to try and talk over the epistemological voice of that former scholarship, but to confuse future readers who will attempt to glean the difference in philosophies that deploy the same word in different ways. This works, of course, and is sometimes done by accident, and then students simply have to learn their etymology. Reappropriations of terms, or “liberation” of terms sometimes occurs, and when it does, it would be futile to stand in the way. But in this case, I think we’d make more progress if we started on a different foot.
Without dipping deep into Rousseau, hobo faber, techne, and a hundred other data points that have attempted to harshly divide the world dualistically between technology/humankind/nature, I think we can say that just as strongly, we are now seeing the reasons these concepts are similar to each other. (I would add “cosmology” in there to make a perfect foursome.) Our cooking is a cyborg extension of our stomachs; robots can be programmed to convincingly simulate animal will; technology mimics nature at the same time as it surpasses it at its own game. To our perception, it often seems that the inter-concept transit is out-pacing the local transit. The news is filled with stories of nanobots made from molecules building vitamins to increase our brain activity. Aren’t they? Or does it just seem like it is?
And this is the bottom line. I think it’s all a matter of perception. If we seek to measure it in a certain way, we might show that the complication of the universe is increasing, or that it is decreasing. Maybe technology is getting further away from nature, or maybe it is coming closer. Maybe we are becoming less human, or maybe we are becoming more. These are old labels, from a way of thinking more influenced by Aquinas’ theory of Natural Law than by micro-electronics. These words are not defunct or obsolete, but they are certainly archaic. I’m tempted to say there is nothing new under the sun; except for our problematization of the idea that the sun is the sort of thing to which everything else could be “under”.
So, how to proceed? To use words like “nature”, “technology”, and “human”, we are quickly getting further away from what it is we want to talk about. Ought we to coin neologisms, like Kevin Kelly? To liberate “nature” from the domain of the rain forest and the tidal pool, or to liberate “technology” from the laboratory and the consumer electronics shelf? Or to just call it whatever, dreaming up new age theological realms and choirs of technologist angels as we go, not quibbling about the language so much as that we deeply belief in the Word itself? I’m not sure it is any of these, specifically. But I am pretty sure it is not none of them, either.
More than a quarter of a million people have marched through central London to deliver a powerful message about the government’s cuts in public spending. The generally good-natured mood was soured by violent and destructive attacks on symbols of wealth including the Ritz, banks and a luxury car dealer; and an occupation of the upmarket food store Fortnum and Mason.
[...]
Last night police appealed to people not involved in the disorder to leave Trafalgar Square as they came under increased bombardment from a group of protesters who said they planned to stay there all night. The protesters were throwing items such as coins and water bottles. Scotland Yard said that light bulbs filled with ammonia had also been thrown at officers earlier. But Commander Bob Broadhurst, the Scotland Yard officer in charge of policing the protests, said the TUC had done an excellent job in ensuring that the march was “very professional, very well prepared”. But he said a hardcore element had been intent on making trouble.
“Unfortunately we’ve had in the region of 500-plus criminals – people hiding under the pretence of the TUC march who have caused considerable damage, attacked police officers, attacked police vehicles and scared the general public. Unfortunately, because of their mobility and the fact they are aware of some of our tactics, we have been unable to contain them and so we have had these groups wandering around the central London area.”
The story, of course, is that 250K folks would have been peaceably disputing the actions of their government, which the police is all to happy to grant them, but for the criminals who came and ruined the party. A seemingly logical story of course, because it sounds like those 500 did do some damage, for a purpose and effect that seems specious at best.
That is, until we realize how illogical the story itself is. These 250K are going for a good-natured stroll. That is a powerful message?
Another story about a powerful message, that took place no more that two months ago almost to the day, is the story of Egypt, and Tahrir Square. Egypt was not afforded the right to go for a good-natured stroll, and so they were forced to fight for the right to do so. Eventually the police relented, when they were supplanted by the army. Now the people were allowed to have their stroll. Everybody happy, yes?
No. The Egyptian people had had enough. They were not content at sending a “powerful message”. They wanted their government to actually change, and so they said they would not stop their good-natured stroll until that happened. They set up camp, and decided to stay.
And we know what happened next. There was violence, and strolling, and violence, and solidarity. They held together, and they got their change.
The 250K who are only interested in sending a “power message” are not in it for the change. They are in it for their conscience. The 500-plus who refused to leave when the police informed them their stroll was over? They were in it for the change. For the long haul. For the sit down, and stay until you are listened to, and not just tolerated. And they were branded criminals, not only by the police, but by the 250K strollers who condemned those unfortunate, misguided kids.
Perhaps they were criminals. Perhaps they only show up for the breaking glass, for the paint. Perhaps they like being beaten by cops… who knows. But they were the only ones willing to stay.
When they are all arrested, and the good-natured stroll is over, the government will continue to have its way. The cuts will take place, because even though there were many people willing to send a message, no one was willing to stay.
John Murray Spear, a middle-aged Universalist pastor in [mid 1800s] Massachusetts, claimed to be receiving messages from dead men. Sure, it was somewhat strange that instead of talking to a deceased relative for comfort, he claimed that a “Band of Electricizers” made up of Ben Franklin, Thomas Jefferson and others, had chosen him to bring a messiah into the world. But, in a twist fitting a new era, this savior was a machine, one that would, Spear relayed, “revolutionize the world and raise mankind to an exalted level of spiritual development.”
With “spirit guidance,” Spear constructed a contraption of zinc batteries, metal balls, and thousands of copper wires, encased in a wooden frame. He named it the New Motor. The purpose of this machine was as vague as the man himself, but he claimed that it not only harnessed spiritual electricity, but also housed an as-yet unborn soul.
Spear was hardly the first to build an odd contraption with spiritual properties, and he will not be the last. The article above mentions a number of other future-leaning types, abolitionists, women’s rights advocates, and others who dabbled in Spiritualism during that period. You can think of your own similar examples from other points in history.
I love this sort of thing, and of course I do, because I have some half-built machine/art project in my living room running off of the eccentric motors pulled out of half a dozen malfunctioning atomic-synced radio clocks. Art is my excuse of course. My excuse to play with technology that I only half understand, building nothing of consequence from pieces of things I have broken. I’d like to pretend I’m tinkering in the great tradition of gentlemen scientists who actually made most of the scientific discoveries in the world, prior to Spear’s time period, not unlike those whom Spear believed appeared to him in a dream to tell him how to build his own machine.
But I’m not. I don’t have the patience or the interest to learn how something works outside of a mental understanding. I don’t seek to create, or invent, or discover. I just like to tinker. I like to read. My field of real creation lies elsewhere. And so I understand when I draw a bit of those looks, those “woo woo” looks, the sort that one gives to a man who will just as easily discuss Game Theory as Orgone Theory. To an extent, I deserve them.
I don’t think that Orgone Theory is a real thing (not any more than I believe in Game Theory :) but I like learning about it anyway, just because it isn’t. There is something wonderfully tragic about such a theory that could so consume a smart man like its theorist, Wilhelm Reich. And while I’m not sure I agree with the author of the above piece, who suggests that maybe those whom are progressive and forward thinking are always a bit crazy, I think there is something about wild, unproven technologies, and the desire to build machines without knowing if they work, or in the full knowledge that they don’t. The pathos of dreaming, perhaps. Or the skill, and yes I call it a skill, to make one’s delusions real in the world.
It’s a capacity of performance art, and I think it lives in everything that we do. Whether or not your technology empirically “works”, there is a bit of performance art to it, that constitutes the will to make it exist, if not to make it functional. There is a sense of pleasure in this sort of creative work, whether or not anything ever comes from the science, or whether or not there is any science within half a mile of the project. It’s dreaming in real life. It’s the ability to creatively fetishize technology–to believe you are fulfilled, even though perhaps you are sitting inside an empty wooden box.
Take, for example, 3D films. It is a technology that “works”, empirically. And yet, what is the real use? Entertainment is important, sure. But I couldn’t care less. I’m entertained anyway. And while the inventors of 3D film technology might have had delusions of grandeur about the importance of their device, or simply been convinced that it would make them rich, they didn’t know this for sure. They had to build something, with an idea, and not much else. Most people see film, and they are satisfied. But these folks wanted it to be something more.
Maybe if I had an idea of where my clock machine was going to take us technologically, I would actually get somewhere. Spear’s machine was smashed by an angry crowd, and the new spirit he was theorizing never came into existence. But he DID end up working on the Underground Railroad, with several communes and other socialist projects. In the large, never-ending piece of performance art called life, his technology–if you want to call it that–did end amounting to something.
The world of ideas and mechanics are related. Video games, once a diversion, are now supposed to improve the cognitive facilities. Real, world-changing technologies are born and die on the backs of envelopes and napkins. I’m no scientist (really, not a scientist) but I wouldn’t be surprised if building a failed perpetual motion machine wasn’t in some way, good for the mind. At the very least, it is all an interesting piece of art. Perhaps the technology really does exist in the mind, rather than this world.
I was laid off for the second time, roughly two weeks before Christmas.
I don’t celebrate Christmas, so that part was moot. But it seems to get a sympathetic look from strangers. On the other hand, I think it also distracts from the “second time” aspect, which to me was the important bit.
Getting laid off even from a job you dislike is nothing like quitting, so I had to find a way to quit something to make up for it. We (my partner M and myself) already had promised to be back on the East Coast for various family/holiday things, so we re-oriented our plans, argued on the phone with airlines, and drove across the continent. We called it the Minor American Cities Tour. We often give trips little names like that. To pretend they are more planned than they are, I suppose. We did the family stuff, and then we drove back to the West Coast.
In all of that driving, there was a lot of time to think. I had a big plan, in the weeks after being laid off. The plan was to write a series of ten intelligent, thought-provoking, wide-ranging essays, showcasing my skills as a writer. I would front the series with my resume and a thoughtful and honest cover letter asking for writing work, put it out there on the Internet, and then use the essays as the force to back it up. The punch behind the fist, so to speak. Except—more of a friendly, firm, “hire me please” handshake, I suppose. The plan had all the hallmarks of a New York Times article, and therefore, couldn’t fail.
Since that hour in the dark and snow on the freeway somewhere in the middle of the country when I came up with that plan, I’ve read two different resume/blogposts that had the same general idea, both of them written by people with a much fucking better resume than mine, getting way more retweet coverage than I could possible hope for. So I trashed that plan, deleted the cover letter I had already wrote, and in the remaining essays, started using the word “fuck” more often.
But the essays came out great.
I’m calling this series, The Museum of Small American Museums. I explain the concept in detail in the titular essay (I believe it’s number four), but basically, each essay is a “museum”, styled after the minor museums you see advertised along the highway in overly exuberant attempts to get you to stop and spend money in small American town X. Like anyone would ever stop their car for a museum!
Well, we did, and maybe you will too. Not for camp value, but to see what the hell an American citizen fills a museum with, given the chance. They aren’t handed the keys to the Met, for goodness sake. But they get a piece of donated property, a handful of volunteers, and a sign. If they’re really pushy with the change jar, maybe even some brochures.
These are not those museums. You will have to get out there on the roads between some of America’s lesser cities, if you want to see what it is that America wants to show you. I’m not doing your work for you. Like the kid in elementary school who wants to show you something behind the gym, what he wants to show you is not the same thing he would want to show you in front of the flagpole. If you want to see what he wants to show, you have to go behind the fucking gym.
These are my museums. These are ten small museums of America that I want you to see, for which I am making the fliers. We don’t have to go behind anything, you just have to come to my website. The first museum explains why the second occasion of being laid off really got to me. And the subject matter generally gets worse from there. But the writing gets better each time. With each essay, I get deeper into the really fucking weird shit that is going on around in this country, masquerading as “the unimportant”. In each new subject, I find more evidence that points to what is commonly referred to as the coming of the end of the world. It is not the end of the world, obviously. The common referrals are totally wrong. But it is evidence of something so different than what we know as normal, that if it ever got here all at once, it would seem just like the end of the world would, if it ever got here. My goal is to distribute this evidence, this difference, in a nice, thick, trickle. That way, we can release the pressure a bit, and maybe stop a massive American Seminal Emission Weirdness Event. No promises, though. I’m not a professional.
QUESTION: Some of the governments that have been mentioned in these cables are heavily censoring press in terms of releasing some of this information. How do you feel about that? (Laughter.)
MR. CROWLEY: The official position of the United States Government and the State Department has not changed. We value a vibrant, active, aggressive media. It is important to the development of civil society in this country and around the world. Our views have not changed, even if occasionally there are activities which we think are unhelpful and potentially harmful.
QUESTION: Do you know if the State Department regards WikiLeaks as a media organization?
MR. CROWLEY: No. We do not.
QUESTION: And why not?
MR. CROWLEY: WikiLeaks is not a media organization. That is our view.
QUESTION: So P.J., going back to the answer to your last question, have you contacted governments that have been censoring this to protest that – or sites that they have –
MR. CROWLEY: I’m not in a position to say what governments have done or what conversations have occurred between governments and media. There’s – certainly, there are countries around the world that do not have as robust a focus on these issues as ours does. That’s probably not a surprise to us, and when we do meet with these governments, we talk about media issues among key human rights issues. Our dialogue is not going to change over this.
QUESTION: P.J., on that subject of WikiLeaks, Amazon, as we know, did have them on their server for a time and then stopped doing that. And there’s a human rights group that says that Amazon was directed by the U.S. Government to stop that relationship. Do you know anything –
MR. CROWLEY: All I can say is I’m not aware of any contacts between the Department of State and Amazon.
QUESTION: Or the U.S. Government or just State?
MR. CROWLEY: I’m not in a position on this particular issue to talk about the entire government. I’m just not aware of any contacts directly.
QUESTION: From your perspective, what is WikiLeaks? How do you define them, if it is not a media organization, then?
MR. CROWLEY: Well, as the Secretary said earlier this week, it is – one might infer it has many characteristics of some internet sites. Not every internet site you would call a media organization or a news organization. We’re focused on WikiLeaks’s behavior, and I have had personally conversations with media outlets that are reporting on this, and we have had the opportunity to express our specific concerns about intelligence sources and methods and other interests that could put real lives at risk.
Mr. Assange, in a letter to our Ambassador in the United Kingdom over the weekend, after documents had been released to news organizations, made what we thought was a halfhearted gesture to have some sort of conversation, but that was after he released the documents and after he knew that they were going to emerge publicly. So I think there’s been a very different approach. And Mr. Assange obviously has a particular political objective behind his activities, and I think that, among other things, disqualifies him as being considered a journalist.
QUESTION: What is his political objective?
QUESTION: The same letter –
MR. CROWLEY: Hmm?
QUESTION: What is his political objective?
MR. CROWLEY: Well, his – I mean he could be considered a political actor. I think he’s an anarchist, but he’s not a journalist.
QUESTION: So his objective is to sow chaos, you mean?
MR. CROWLEY: Well, I mean, you all come here prepared to objectively report the activities of the United States Government. I think that Mr. Assange doesn’t meet that particular standard.
QUESTION: But just so I understand, P.J., what – I mean you just said the – that you thought he was –
MR. CROWLEY: Well, but I mean – let me – he’s not a journalist. He’s not a whistleblower. And there – he is a political actor. He has a political agenda. He is trying to undermine the international system of — that enables us to cooperate and collaborate with other governments and to work in multilateral settings and on a bilateral basis to help solve regional and international issues.
What he’s doing is damaging to our efforts and the efforts of other governments. They are putting at risk our national interest and the interests of other governments around the world. He is not an objective observer of anything. He is an active player. He has an agenda. He’s trying to pursue that agenda, and I don’t think he can – he can’t qualify as either a journalist on the one hand or a whistleblower on the other.
QUESTION: Sorry. What is that agenda, that political agenda? Can you be more –
MR. CROWLEY: I’ll leave it for Mr. Assange to define his agenda. He has been interviewed by some of your news organizations. He has the ability to talk for himself. But you asked — I was asked a specific question, “Do we consider him a journalist?” The answer is no.
QUESTION: In the same letter, he said that U.S. is trying to suppress the whole thing about human rights abuses. And do you agree with his contention that the U.S. is –
MR. CROWLEY: I found very little that Mr. Assange has said that we agree with.
Get that? Let’s summarize. The State Department deplores censorship of the media. But Wikileaks is not a media organizaton.
So if it is not a media organization, what does the State Department think it is?
[I]t has many characteristics of some internet sites. Not every internet site you would call a media organization or a news organization. We’re focused on WikiLeaks’s behavior….
And that behavior?
Mr. Assange obviously has a particular political objective behind his activities, and I think that, among other things, disqualifies him as being considered a journalist.
And that political objective? Despite being an anarchist, of course.
He’s not a whistleblower. And there – he is a political actor. He has a political agenda. He is trying to undermine the international system of — that enables us to cooperate and collaborate with other governments and to work in multilateral settings and on a bilateral basis to help solve regional and international issues.
What he’s doing is damaging to our efforts and the efforts of other governments. They are putting at risk our national interest and the interests of other governments around the world. He is not an objective observer of anything. He is an active player. He has an agenda. He’s trying to pursue that agenda, and I don’t think he can – he can’t qualify as either a journalist on the one hand or a whistleblower on the other.
So to do anything that might directly risk US interests and other governments’ interests is a political objective. So-called “objective reporting”, and even legitimate “whistleblower” status, must not contradict government objectives. Because that would make it political.
I don’t think I have to drag out the political theory to describe this as patently ridiculous. We don’t have to realize that everyday life is always political to acknowledge that, for example, suing the government over an eminent domain case and thereby challenging government objectives is a legitimate act. Endorsing a candidate is a legitimate act. Exposing corruption is a legitimate act. A media organization, a private citizen, whomever–they can do these things without attracting the ire of the State Department, without being anarchists.
The word I believe Mr. Crowley is looking for is “activist”.
To be in the media these days, to be a private citizen, is to be an activist. Either you stand up, or you sit down. If in this time politics includes web-borne leaks, a precipitous control of information, personal secrecy, and the ability to run a world-wide info-anarchist organization simply by being able to maintain a website (DDOS or not), then any person who forwards email is an activist. We already know that anyone who blogs can be part of the media. We’ve already fought this battle. What we’re learning now is that it isn’t about being media. You don’t have to be media to be in the right place at the right time, snap a photo with a cell phone and put it on your Twitter feed, and change the world. Maybe the media will reserve a certain sort of objective reporting, and write editorial columns to MLA standard. That is, as long as that sort of thing continues to be profitable. But the people who change the world with media won’t necessarily be media. They… YOU will be activists.
All activists have political objectives of their own. These political objectives are of minimal importance. Each piece of media is taken by various agencies, individuals, government entities, blogs, aggregators, and remixers, and interpreted in all of the ways that media is consumed and reproduced. Maybe that political objective is passed along, but it could easily be reversed or ignored.
This is no surprise to anyone who is not the Department of State. But what is a surprise to the rest of us is that all of a sudden, censorship of activists–that is, censorship of anyone who produces, holds, retransmits, or consumes media that is potentially contrary to the objectives of the State–is now permitted. Freedom of the press is obsolete, become obsolete with the presses and the publications they produced. In this present day future, the only protection is “objectivity”, of the kind that is never activist. Of the kind that is not contrary to the objectives of governments. Freedom of media is problem for other countries. Whereas, control of anarchists is the problem the State Department faces.
Julian Assange has made every person with a blog a potential anarchist. The real control of whether or not you are an anarchist, is how much the government disagrees with you.
Customer: If I understand you correctly, you produce after subtracting all costs about 10 to 12 marks for him per day and of this you receive 3 to 3.50 marks. And if times become permanently bad for the business he’ll sack you, in which case the reserve fund is of no use to you. So what in fact does he use this money for?
Assistant: Well, for example the boss has to acquire modern machines. At present we’re replacing the hand clippers by electric ones.
Customer: What does that mean?
Assistant (surprised): What, you don’t understand that? It’s quite simple. Now I can deal with 10 customers a day, afterwards I’ll be able to deal with 20 because the cutting will be much faster.
Customer: And each one of these 20 will be paying 1 mark as before. And you, how much will you get then?
Assistant (even more surprised): Naturally, I’ll continue to get my 100 marks.
Customer: Excuse my being so inquisitive, I’m getting a bit lost and am rather amazed. With the new improved machines you’ll be earning 20 marks for, him but you yourself will continue to receive only 3.50. That means the surplus has grown from 8 to about 13? Where does the money go?
Reich’s goal, is to show how Marxist theory can be explained without relying on dense prose and theoretical texts. Which, as this illustration of surplus value shows, it easily can be done. I’ve found that most economic concepts are best illustrated with little parables, along these lines of Customer A, Salesperson B, or even Currency A, Debt Note B. Theory, in that it attempt to define self-descriptive terms of debate, often cascades into complicated language pretty quickly, whereas anyone who has ever borrowed money can understand compound interest if explained in terms of $10 paid back over the course of 5 days.
One of the reasons I lost my fascination with academic pursuits (at least within the academy) is because of the complicated cascade of theory. Now, I am all for having a wide vocabulary, and I love technical terms. There are certain oblique concepts that must be grasped with long words. Each word is a tool, and you wouldn’t try to discuss existentialism in single syllables any more than you would try to build a house with only an ax. But, the complication of theory isn’t an end in itself. I got frustrated that the goal was not to bring these supposedly great theories into a wider focus. I didn’t want things to be simplified. I wanted every day to strive to be more complex, and for philosophy to meet it on its way, coaxing it and helping it along. But few people seemed to be interested in this, or at least effectively.
So now I write online, and publish little SF stories about Marxian cyborgs! I think Reich is correct. Maybe I didn’t have too many people on the edge of their seats with my little parable, and Reich’s story is not exactly a page turner either. But it’s a start. Most of the fiction that does have me gripping the paperback pages in concentrated enthusiasm does introduce a philosophical or otherwise theoretical concept. If you try to introduce semiotics to someone who has read Philip K. Dick, you will have a much easier time doing it than otherwise.
I’d love to push it even further, but short of a burst of writing ingenuity that produces a gripping narrative of Deleuzian bodies-without-organs, I’m not sure what it would look like. In the meantime, I think continuing to push entertaining writing in a certain theoretical direction, to slip in the theory when one can, is the best way. Little tidbits, rather than big academic walls.
[Totally would have posted without an intro, except that I post purported "non-fiction" so often, I thought you probably deserved an acknowledgement in the case of my posting strictly "fiction". And so: a short story. Cheers.]
It was a yellow house, with lots of bushes. It hadn’t been painted for thirty years, and then the woman ran out barefoot down the steps and across the crooked and overgrown paving stones to the curb, lifting up her feet quickly, as if the stones were hot. They never mowed their lawn, maybe they rented or maybe it was just that there was no reason, and the screen door banged as she came over all hot-footed, waving at me with one hand and lifting it up high in the air over her head, covered in thick black hair, all gnarled like mine. And I thought she was kind of cute, and maybe this was what she wanted me to think, waving her hands in the air in small-girl elbows-up motions. She looked like she had just been sitting on a couch. When she saw I had turned around and noticed her waving and saying—oh, oh, oh—to get my attention, she asked me if I had a cigarette. I didn’t have one and I wished I did, and I remembered how when I smoked I liked bumming cigarettes to people even though nobody likes doing it, because all the same it was like you were in a secret society, and sometimes good-looking women ran out of houses to talk to you. All the same I smiled nicely and she smiled and then hot-footed it back inside the screen door.
It was only one house away that a man with gray hair and skin as black as I’d ever seen came out of a little blue cottage and stood on the stoop tapping his boot, a big black work boot with stains all up and down from the toe to the top. This house was bright blue, like really sky blue, not light blue. Blue of the sky in the middle of the summer when you look straight up at the deepest part of it and space is right on the other side of all that clear air. He tapped that boot and smiled at me and put both hands on his hips before he spoke. I was wondering about wearing boots on a concrete porch and how that felt. He said—hey man, do you play a musical instrument? I didn’t play anything, I never could handle the practicing without being good, and so I wrote instead, but I didn’t tell him that. Just—oh no—He shook his head in big wide shakes back and forth, smiling as if people did every day and I could have imagined he did—aww man but I was sure you did, I thought you played the keyboards—But I didn’t and I wondered if he had gotten me confused with some other guy who looks like. But I didn’t ask and just apologized in that way I do and walked on.
And it was the next block, that then a woman came out of her garage carrying a wicker basket, a big old wicker basket with nothing in it, but so big you could put in almost anything. Her driveway was unpaved, just lots of gravel, put down a long time ago. Now there was hardly any gravel left, just dirt, and the little rocks scattered into the grass. This lawn was mowed, but it was weeds. I like weeds. They cost nothing and there are so many different kinds. House was red like a barn, and it was a house supposed to be like a barn, from the shutters and the doors and the boxes overgrown with plants on the windows, I could tell. She opened up on me about all kinds of things in one sentence without stopping for breath or missing a beat—did you ever think you’d never get to sleep, only to wake up from a dream and notice you were asleep the whole time, and that’s the sort of awake that couldn’t be a dream, because we only ever think we’re awake in our sleep and never think we’re asleep in the wake—That was exactly how she said it—in the wake—and I had that feeling before and I was about to say so but she just kept going—and another thing, time doesn’t work right in dreams, it keeps slinging back and forth like a rope hanging off the back of a car, like some kind of alive thing, and not like it ought to be—I thought it was strange she said—ought to be—because I don’t know a lot about physics and time but normally it just is how it is, and who can say what it should be. And I could have replied but then she told me—you go on with your walk because no one ought to listen to a rambling old woman anyway—and went back in her garage with the basket, so I did, I just kept walking.
Next was around the block onto the short gravel road between the two avenues, like kind of an alley, even though its got a street sign with a name. It was wide enough to drive on and some people had even parked their cars along it. I think they lived there. And then all of a sudden I met one of them, or at least I assumed he lived there, because he came around the tall hedge and stood looking at me holding a rake in both hands. Like it was a musical instrument. And he was ready to play. The hedge was so tall I could only see the roof of the house. He said, as he started raking the gravel in front of his paved driveway—what did they do with all the roads? Where did they take them all, all that asphalt they make in the plant by the river, trucking it all over town in those smelly trucks, smelling like shoes and like shingles left out in the sun and rubber cookware too close to the burner? Spent all that time paving, and now where is it?—He continued to play the rake as he spoke. I didn’t know if he was talking to me or the gravel or the rake or the hedge, but I assume it was me because he didn’t seem the sort of man who talked to his things. Or maybe he was talking to himself, so I just said—don’t know, it’s a good question—and walked to join the sidewalk at the other end of the alley.
The old lady cried—and what the hell did you do to your hair!—Looking up at me with the garden gloves on and turned outward to either side of her like flippers, covered in dirt from the flower bed, with a brand new trowel poking out one set of fingers. I smiled awkwardly, just like I always do when people ask, because they don’t really want an answer, they just want to hear themselves speak. I don’t like smiling and I would like to tell these people to go fuck themselves but I don’t. They go on making noise they like to hear, but I don’t worry about it too much because I’m sure they would anyway no matter what I told them. No matter what sort of hair or what I did to it. From the look of her brown house I hated it and it was ugly, and her hair was dyed blond, so very blond like a whore in a movie who is not actually a whore but an actress, whose job it is to look like what people think a whore looks like. But she was old and maybe a little crazy, digging in a flower bed filled with little flowers in a straight line in the center of a lawn, so I felt a little bad. She said again—what your mother must think!—Still not asking but saying, still holding the trowel, and I just said—I haven’t been to a barber in twelve years—and kept walking, and tried to forget it.
Then a young guy standing on his step holding a book and he came off the white clapboard porch with both brown boots landing in the dirt at the same time, jumping off the dirty peach colored stucco-walled house like it was a boat. He waved the book at me—hey man, you ever heard of the Lagrangian points?—Actually I knew about them and so he continued—isn’t that just so crazy, man, there’s these points in space where nothing moves, way out there away from the earth?—He opened the book and showed me the diagram—they move, but not relative to the earth and the moon, because the gravity reaches a point of equilibrium and it floats out there like the goddamn Sargasso Sea of the solar system—And it was pretty crazy when I thought about it, and he just kept going on, getting excited, and now smacking his thigh with the book, smack, against his black name-brand jeans, his voice got louder and then softer again, the words floated out toward me and past me in space, over my head some of it, but I think I got the general idea of where he was trying to get, and eventually he said—well alright man—and it was alright, and so I walked off down the block.
This house was white and covered in gray flecks where the paint was peeling from the shingles and falling into the evergreen bushes underneath the windows of what must have been the living room, because this is the sort of house it was. The windows were wide open, wider than windows normally are, storm windows pushed up past where they normally go and where it becomes difficult to get them down again. The woman inside stuck her head out at me and shouted louder than needed—what was the weather like yesterday?—I looked up at the sky, now covered in dark clouds, as if it would help me remember anything about yesterday. I said—it rained—She nodded her head in a way that both confirmed and thanked me without having to say anything and so I kept walking, glad that I could help, and as she disappeared from the space in the window I saw a white grand piano appear in the living room.
A little girl ran across the grass, which was not very long, but still she lifted up her short little legs like she was running through shallow water, and even tripped once when the sole of her small sneaker caught on a tuft of crab grass. I was afraid she would fall flat on her face but she pulled it out and kept moving forward. She looked up at me as she got closer, and breathing hard gasped—have you seen a brown bike?—I had not seen a brown bike and I told her so, and she looked quite disappointed and I tried to think what I was supposed to do to help. So I looked up and down the street, but didn’t see any bike at all and shrugged my shoulders and kept thinking about what I should do. Luckily her brother, or a boy about as tall as I guess her brother ought to be, came running up and yelled at her—come on Katy!—and she took off running after him as if there had never been a bike. And just then he was the one to fall, right down on his knees and his face in the green grass, and he made a sound that sounded every bit like—oof—not just a sound, but sounded like he said the word. She helped him up and they kept running around the corner of the purple house standing back behind the yard they were running through.
The old man was in a lawn chair at the end of the driveway, freshly sealed, not long ago paved, and he wore shorts of the kind that old men wear, showing off old relics of knees. His house was brick and it could have been new except that it was in a style nobody built anymore, only one story and spreading around the lot giving him almost no yard whatsoever. He looked at me and nodded his head—hey boy, you want to know what really happened on 9/11? They say it was terrorists but I know better, because I read that book they made about it and it just didn’t make sense; my son-in-law showed me the pictures on the Internet and I read about it: didn’t happen like they said—It’s true: everybody knows it didn’t happen like they said. They know for sure because it’s just too crazy, and they may not know exactly what happened but it sure wasn’t like they wrote about it and show on TV. And I told him and he nodded at me and said to me—the TV is a piece of shit—and I nodded and said—yeah—He said—all the young kids aren’t so dumb, good for you kid—and picked up the local newspaper off the driveway and I said—thanks—I kind of liked this kind of old man. I walked back the way I came wondering if he liked that style of house, or if was just past the time when he could change it out for something else.
I kept on walking the whole route of my walk, the blocks I walked down and all the streets. I don’t always go the same way, but if you walk for long enough you end up walking down some of the same roads. After all, I was just trying to leave the house for a little while and get a little exercise. After exactly the right amount of distance and time I always end up back at the house again.
I came back up the block, and as I stood in the middle of the street for a moment, just looking at all the houses, suddenly all the people on the whole street ran out of their houses and met me in the road shouting and hollering. They were asking me about all kinds of things, but mostly asking for cigarettes—yeah, cigarettes!—They all wanted ‘em and they wanted ‘em bad, and they were yelling and jumping and waving their arms about cigarettes, that cool burning smoke going into the lungs and entering the blood, and you know it’s bad for you but you don’t care because after you finished whatever it was you were doing, it felt so good to have that nicotine in your brain, doing whatever the hell it did. And they danced, and they sang, and they made fake cigarettes out of sticks and grass and trash and pretended to smoke them just so they would all know they were serious and so I would know too. I didn’t have any cigarettes but if I did I would have given them all away, so everyone could have cigarettes, so the whole street could have a smoke all at once together and feel good and bad at the same time, and I would save the last one for myself and stand there just smoking it, watching everyone else smoke. And as they finished they would stand around and talk, some crushing the butt beneath their different styles of shoes and others carefully twisting the burning ember off and saving the filter for the trash, because this was where they lived and they cared after it. But I didn’t have any cigarettes so they all went back inside their houses and shut their doors, smiling politely and wishing me to have a good day and a nice walk, or whatever else I might be doing. All their doors closed at exactly the same time, and it made a sound like a smack against skin, not really like a door at all, so many doors at the same time.
And when I was almost home, done walking out and around and back up the street again, the woman who looked real cute came back out of her house really quickly with a panicked look on her face like maybe her house was on fire and I thought for a second it was, but there was no fire. She was looking even better this time, and hot-footed it on over to me, and bounced from foot to foot. She waved her arms and grabbed my shoulders and shook me too, and shook all that beautiful hair. I noticed for the first time she wasn’t wearing a bra underneath her shirt, and I noticed this even though she was wearing a shirt because of that beautiful bounce she was doing, I don’t know why, but only for me it seemed. And she said—that’s all well and good you know, but we’re running out of buildings, because once their burned down, they’re gone forever—And I said—of all the things you might’ve said, I totally think you’re right this time.
I jailbroke my iPhone last week. This act of willful consumer disobedience, to force a heavily-designed piece of electronics and device fetishism to do certain things that it was specifically designed not to do, was an attractive gesture of rebellion that I have always considered, ever since first letting my hand and fingers learn the ways of the magic relationship with a smart phone, now over two years ago. For others, executing unapproved code on their telephone might not be such a transgression. A thing to try, and like, or maybe not, and then reset. Just another ringtone to try for a day. But it was always a bit more to me–it was something dangerous, a refutation of the protective super-ego; a violation of the warranty that protected this palmed cyborg implant against the possibility of loss; my guardian against the threat of an inconsistent hardware lifetime. The liminal relationship between me and my information was guaranteed against faulty screens and battery degradation, and for a long time, the danger of losing this safety measure made the flirtation far too dangerous for anything other than fantasy. This was my iPhone we were talking about… not just an old computer.
But my warranty, and my Apple Care plan, are now both expired. Apple has thrown me to the fates, and so I’ve leaped out into that abyss.
On Saturday night, two days after downloading and executing the “redsn0w” hack, sending myself across that barrier into a modern day tinkerer’s version of forbidden ecstasy, we went to see Lucinda Childs’ Dance.
This dance piece, a collaboration between choreographer Lucinda Childs, artist Sol LeWitt, and composer Philip Glass, is nothing short of beautiful. The work has no story. The gimmick, as it were, is that the dancers on stage perform behind a translucent screen, onto which film is projected, that mirrors the live dance. But the effect is no gimmick; the work creates a masterful symmetry and mimesis between representation and performance. In conjunction with the well-known minimalism of the Philip Glass Ensemble’s music, an experience of motion and repetition utterly ensnares the viewer, transporting the audience into a hypnotic dimension of art. The film, the original of which was used in the performance we saw, was recorded for the original performance in 1979, a time when dance as performance, as well as technique, was being explored by many artists. The medium of film, a material for capturing and augmenting performance, found its place in the dance company. The immaculately timed and edited film cuts sometimes lead the live choreography, sometimes trail it, sometimes mimic it as if meant to be precisely accurate, and other times deviate with a similar accuracy. The Cartesian lines on the floor of the dance studio in which the film was shot accentuate the live dancers’ motion across a static stage, extending the dance and giving it extra vectors of dimension. It is more than dance, music, and film. The performance is a nebula of sound, light, and body. It is
image, tone, and motion.
To see it performed, I was amazed. Not only by the overall aesthetic of the piece, but by its apparent tenuousness. The work that went into producing those film cuts, and editing them exactly with live dancers and with music. The collaboration between three artists, all quite powerful on their own terms. The work of the dance company, re-learning choreography in order to match a film shot over thirty years ago with precision. To be there was not like watching a screen. It was as if a glass projection tube of a miraculous, angelic television extended outward and over the head, and I sat among the electrons as they whirled with exaggerated arm movements, hands locked into vectors of potential travel. It was as if the third dimension had been removed, the live dancers hidden behind the translucent screen reduced to points on a plane, and then this dimension had been reinstated, artificially colorized and splendidly animated back into reality by the re-introduction of depth in the black and white film on the screen. This depth was something personally existential, because where you sat in the theater watching this performance affected the entire perspective between dancers projected on a flat screen and dancers moving in space beyond. My space-time, the experience of the symmetry between live action and film action, would be totally different from that witnessed by any other pair of stereo eyes elsewhere in the room.
And yet, this performance, for all the infinite emotions and aesthestic implications, was entirely finite. No recording of this performance was allowed. No cell phone use permitted. A piece of art with serious implicit commentary on the role of live performance and recorded projective media, itself, in any meta perspective, could not be filmed. These revolutions would not be recorded. It would live only in this space and particular time, for these sets of eyes, and the only media parity permitted would the hacked bootlegging of a verbose text editor, some variation on ASCII art, as an essayist attempts to put art into transmitted text.
I didn’t want to record Lucinda Childs’ Dance, and upload it onto a file sharing network, or embed it on my website. It still would be a hackneyed plagiarism, life decontextualized, preservation with a pin in a vacuum glass box. A violation of the functional quality of the work, as I interpret it. But the explicit refusal, the license of refusal by artist, producers, and the venue, served as a boundary. In a time period of continual media change, when individuals are expected by many to be constantly transmitting and receiving, interacting and network, broadcasting from the pocket and invocating from the finger, this was more than an expectation of courtesy to fellow art lovers. This is a boundary line, beyond which the power of art to transmit, inspire and inhabit would not cross. A ghettoization of experience. The underlying authoritarian impulse of the mind to control in order to make itself heard.
Meanwhile, drunk on its new found freedom, my iPhone was greedily slurping through the remains of its two-year old battery in my pocket.
There was freedom to be found in jailbreaking my iPhone. Jailbreaking made it a computer again. After the relatively easy process of running redsn0w (no one said anything about having a spare copy of the firmware on your computer, and the little button combination you have to time perfectly to get it into the right mode, but I finally figured it out) it was a thrill to see an actual live terminal screen, showing that what I had spent all this money on was not just a shiny black Narcissus mirror, but an actual computer. And after opening Cydia, and figuring out exactly how to install packages from the surprisingly limited amount of support material out there on the Internet, changing my root password and SSHing to the file system over Wifi felt like the future all over again. Not just because I did it, but because anyone can do it too. In this age when all technology is locked down in an attempt to ease things for the poor, tortured, overwhelmed consumer, the iPhone Dev Team, Saurik and others are trying to open it back up with gentle, consumer-driven hacking like redsn0w and Cydia. You can hack your iphone, and it doesn’t have to be hard. That is the future, in my opinion.
But this everconstant lifehacking of the future–what does it get us? As @doingitwrong so aptly tweeted, “I jailbroke my iPhone and all I got was this lousy wallpaper.” I installed Winterboard first thing, and downloaded several themes to try. No app or program I’ve run on my jailbroken phone eats battery like the themes. It’s actually ridiculous. I do like the ability to place my lock screen wallpaper back over the springboard, and of course I get a huge kick out of seeing the POSZU logo replace the Apple logo during boot (neither of which require Winterboard, btw). But the majority of downloads through Cydia are hot-girl-wallpaper sets. There was one Hot Anime Girl set added per day, for at least a few months. Still in there, clogging the search results. Good times.
There are useful apps. SMSettings is masterful–allowing you to hide app icons, (like the useless native Weather app) and deploy a screen overlay no matter what you are doing (mine is set to deploy on a downward swipe from the status bar) that lets you disable any of the antennas, boot a custom list of apps, and kill processes. I was very interested to see that Safari and the iPod are often left running behind the scenes without your knowledge, sticking their own straws into my valuable battery. Now, easily terminated. I also like LockInfo, that let’s you read text of emails and SMS from the lock screen along with other notifications–and supposedly Twitter too, though I can’t get this to work yet. Video game emulators are plentiful, though very slow on my 3G. There is multitasking, and there is tethering. There is VNC, and there is data over Bluetooth. I set my battery indicator to show me a percentage rather than a meaningless battery icon, using the basic redsn0w settings. Sometimes the simplest tweaks are the best.
The problem is that there is no uniformity. Cydia is great, but it is not the App Store, in which every app is verified to work with all recent versions of iOS, and do, most of the time. In the world of Cydia, everything has not been checked for consistency. Information about troubleshooting is rare, and hard to find. Free apps are rare, because the jailbroken app market is slim. I can’t get the supposedly excellent video player apps to work. And the real reason I jailbroke my phone, to find a music player that will handle ogg files and sync with Linux, is still unfulfilled: PwnPlayer has disappeared, it didn’t work with iOS 4.x anyway, and nothing else has come to take its place. To a real programmer, the jailbroken iPhone is fertile ground. But to a user like myself, it only allows me to extend my fantasies about what awesome features might have been–had the app not crashed, had it been extended to 4.x, had anyone with the chops put in the incredible amount of volunteer work to make it a reality.
The sublime artistry of the iPhone doesn’t recede into a seedy red-light district of custom wallpaper for a lack of effort on the part of jailbreak developers. Despite Apple’s mammoth efforts to lock down the iPhone, these folks have continued to find the chinks in the armor, and make user-friendly ways of exploiting them. As Saurik put it when describing the merger of Cydia with the other large jailbroken app service, RockYourPhone, the primary goal is to put everyone back on track with cooperation rather competition. That is the general goal for most iPhone hackers. For openness, and cooperation towards that end. As opposed to the goals of Apple, which is (other than simply to make money) to provide the unique artistry of a seamless user experience. Two modern goals, alike in dignity, but yet overall at odds. And when you put these two at odds, you know the hackers will come up short. It’s a simple (okay, complex) matter of infrastructure, time, and resources. Now that I’ve looked at my iPhone’s filesystem, I see the problem. It’s a twisted mess. Apps store data in multiple places, compressed in bizarre formats. The fact that it’s been opened up at all to a casual tinkerer like myself is amazing, but the fact that this is not your Home folder, in any sense of the term, is sobering. The genius of the iPhone’s ease of use is it’s internal inaccessibility. This is not a causal relationship, but it is psychical. The exterior looks the way it looks because the interior has turned inward, to express such an exterior. The division between designer and art, performer and audience, is a loop that could not bend back towards its initial point if it first it did not move away. It is easy to suggest that Apple could have designed things to better help those who would like to peer inside. I’m sure they could have. But they didn’t, and they won’t. Not because they are assholes, but because this is an iPhone. If it was not built the way it’s built, it would not be an iPhone. And all that that entails.
I’m going to keep my iPhone jailbroken rather than reset. Even though we aren’t meant to delve into that dark network of the id, we invariably do. For one, it is the principle of the thing. I go to avant-gaarde dance performances with a smart phone in my pocket, set to silent mode. I, after much wrestling with a pseudo-sexual techno puritanism, did the leg work and rooted my smart phone. And there are good functions of doing so. I like SMSettings enough that it is reason alone to keep the jailbreak, just as tweeted about Lucinda Childs (after the performance, of course), even though I think it might have cost me a couple of followers. This place between curated event and distributed network creativity, between high-end consumer design and dirty third-party work around, is where I seem to fall, in this year of atemporal technology, 2010. I still want features I don’t, and seemingly can’t, have. I want to capture experience and intellectual rumination exactly in all its sublime instantaneousness, and project it back onto a screen for everyone to see, but I can’t. For Intellectual Property reasons, and also because even if I could, then experience would no longer be unique.
Our human devices are simply beautiful, and infinitely limited by the realities of collaboration and performance–nevertheless, we get our hands dirty in hacking them, every day. The good part is, that people keep staging such performances, and that people keep going. And also that people don’t go, but are willing to hear about it later, and perhaps catch it next time.
This post is one of the 50 Posts About Cyborgs, curated by Tim Maly. The series commemorates the 50th anniversary of the coining of the term, “cyborg”, with 50 unique instances of current thoughts and ideas about cyborgs, which are, it would seem to be proven, alive and well. I’m proud that POSZU could feature among them.
“The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.”
Theses on Feuerbach, XI
* * * * *
A cyborg is haunting the torrent networks of Europe, queuing files and running checksums. The saved files are in ebook format, and she syncs them to her handheld screen device. Meanwhile, she finishes a phone call, stands up from her desk, unplugs her device and put it in her bag. She shoulders the load and leaves to catch the train home. There, after eating, she will open her device, and begin to read.
Over mornings of mundane meetings, afternoons of spreadsheets, and finally, these evenings of critique, a pattern is developing. This cyborg is beginning to re-evaluate things. There was always a pattern; but it is beginning to shift. On this particular evening as she is annotating Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology and Perception with flicks upon her multi-touch screen, she can’t help but feel that pathways are slowly opening that had not been before. From the gestures at the tips of her fingers she summons these various networked texts of the flesh.
“…our body is comparable to a work of art. It is a nexus of living meanings, not the law for a certain number of covariant terms. A certain tactile experience felt in the upper arm signifies a certain tactile experience felt in the forearm and left shoulder, along with a certain visual aspect of the same arm, not because the various tactile perceptions among themselves, or the tactile and visual ones, are all involved in one intelligible arm, as the different facets of a cube are related to the idea of a cube, but because the arm seen and the arm touched, like the different segments of the arm, together perform one and the same action.”
Phenomenology and Perception, 175
It was all the rage on the social networks, to read these 20th Century works of theory and to highlight and link, to be involved in the asynchronous, continuous conversation about the modern, electronically augmented body. The philosophy was simple enough, ideas that conformed to the thoughts she already had. It was nice to read something theoretical as a break from the fiction, the news, the gentle critique of various musical artists, and so forth. On the surface of the multi-touch screen, guided by the subtle vibes of haptic feedback emanating from the words, she responded to the text.
“To know how to type is not, then, to know the place of each letter among the keys, nor even to have acquired a conditioned reflex for each one, which is set in motion by the letter as it comes before our eye. If habit is neither a form of knowledge nor an involuntary action, what then is it? It is knowledge in the hands, which is forthcoming only when bodily effort is made, and cannot be formulated in detatchment from that effort.”
Phenomenology and Perception, 166
The cyborg had tried an obsolete “keyboard”; it wasn’t much different than the adjustments made in one’s typing habits when installing a new multi-touch predictive text algorithm. She tapped and quietly vibrated away, flicking and pecking at the screen. This part of the text was all about body image, or a certain lack of body image. This text, a guided reflection on the structure of consciousness and the perceptions, plugged several compatible ideas into this cyborg’s thought processes.
“A woman may, without any calculation, keep a safe distance between the feather in her hat and things which might break it off. She feels where the feather is just as we feel where our hand is.”
Phenomenology and Perception, 165
This particular cyborg had hefted more hammers in her hand than worn hats with feathers, but the idea was easy enough.
“We must therefore avoid saying that our body is in space, or in time. It inhabits space and time. If my hand traces a complicated path through the air, I do not need, in order to know its final position, to add together all movements made in the same direction and subtract those made in the opposite direction. ‘Every identifiable change reaches consciousness already loaded with its relations to what has preceded it, as on a taximeter the distance is given already converted into shillings and pence.’”
Phenomenology and Perception, 161
She stopped her typing, her synthesis of copy and paste, and lifted her fingers from the surface of the screen, and brushed the hair back from her eyes. Shillings and pence. Keyboards. Hats with feathers. It was cute, in a way. The nostalgia one could experience, through such old, written, static texts. Non-wiki philosophy. Like riding in a horse-drawn carriage—following wherever the horse decided to go, pretending you were driving, rather than being dragged by a roped and shackled live animal.
But this text was reminiscent of something, other than history lessons. The experience of the body, inhabiting space and time as a nexus of sensory relations. She was the good cyborg, conscious of her body and its feedback networks. She tracked her weight and blood sugar, her Circadian rhythms, her networked emotional and social capital. But this philosophy spoke to a lurking, intellectual category: some sort of logical thought feedback, perhaps. There was an idea here–an idea about ideas–something she had a memory of reading before.
She checked her ebook ratio credits, and made a quick download. There was something she wanted to check. With a quick swipe-and-search, she found what she was looking for.
“A commodity appears, at first sight, a very trivial thing, and easily understood. Its analysis shows that it is, in reality, a very queer thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties.”
Capital, 76
She hadn’t read anything by this author since early high school, when one kept such things in their Favorites queue to impress the social networks. Even so, it was hard to completely forget the Commodity. It was the star of this massive tome—the total annotated file surpassing most books by several megabytes. Nothing compared to a video file, but still relatively monstrous. And yet despite this verbosity, the Fetish of Commodities was ever so quotable, succinct to 140 characters. Even if the ebook itself was a status matrix inflater, there was something else in the Commodity that she could feel, a response within her to something she couldn’t quite identify.
A Commodity was, too, a nexus of living meanings. They were utilized as symbols of value, “human labor in the abstract,” she saw on page 51. They were in this way two-fold, “both objects of utility, and depositories of value,” page 54. Through the action of labor, meaning was tied to the object, so that it might be traded for other meaningful objects. And so, the object had meaning within society. If she remembered correctly, the bearded fellow whose picture was visible in the metadata window strongly Disliked.
“The product of labor is labor which has been congealed in an object, which has become material: it is the objectification of labor. In the conditions dealt with by political economy this realization of labor appears as loss of reality for the workers; objectification as loss of the object and object-bondage; appropriation as estrangement, as alienation.”
Manuscripts of 1844, 71-2
That was from another work, same author, annotated via hyperlink. A good edition, this—plenty of links to the body of work by the author, or at least those pieces for which the e-publisher had co-attribution rights. The major keyword in the word cloud for this text, hovering over it as she held a finger close to the screen, was “objectification”, nearly as large in size as “alienation,” and “estrangement.” Via the objectified nexus of values—the Commodity—the worker was as divided from her product as the product was separated from the world. A broken body, perhaps—or an amputated limb. Merleau-Ponty had plenty in his text about “alien limb syndrome”. She made herself a Task to remind herself to Wikipedia the current psychological research on the phenomenon later.
What did that really mean, “objectification of labor”? It sounded nasty, exploitative and industrial. A term suited to the economy and philosophy of 1844. But today? She flicked the screen-view a bit further down the page.
“The worker can create nothing without nature, without the sensuous external world. It is the material on which his labor is manifested, in which it is active, from which and by means of which it produces.”
Manuscripts of 1844, 72
Was that a bad thing? To make anything, one had to cleave off a little bit of nature, to pull off a hunk of clay, and mash it into something recognizable. She tried to think of the daily spreadsheets for which she toiled in this perspective; but that was depressing, so she stuck to the clay. Sure, life was no picnic. It was a constant struggle to survive, to do enough to be happy, to earn enough to rent an apartment, to afford a transportation pass to get to work. It was hard to say that this struggle was fulfilling, but that was the fact of life.
“In estranging from man, nature, and himself, his own active functions, his life-activity—estranged labor estranges the species from man. It turns for him the life of the species into a means of individual life. First it estranges the life of the species and individual life, and secondly it makes individual life in its abstract form the purpose of the life of the species, likewise in its abstract and estranged form.”
Manuscripts of 1844, 75
She thought about editing a text-mask to substitute “she” and “human” over this 1844 prose of “man”, but left it alone, lost in thought. Alienation in objectification might be depressing, or even exploitative, she figured (as she resisted the sudden compulsion to check her work email). But it was also a metaphysical necessity. Without objectification, things would remain part of the undifferentiated expanse of the sensuous external world. Without the objectification and attachment of meaning, how would anyone relate to things? This was the meaning of life as an individual. Even on Twitter, each person was identified by a unique user name, isolated by his or her own thoughts, own posts, own location, own follower count. Following was asynchronous. Even as everyone was together and social, everyone was alone. That was the fundamental principle of human consciousness, wasn’t it? Not bees, not a wolf pack, not a bacteria colony. Everyone united in space and time, everyone connected to the network, and yet everyone an individual, by the basis of each being its own node. The work that each did in forming meaning and value, whether in pottery or in the most mundane of status updates, both uniting and dividing the entire species. Each alone, and also part of the network of meaning.
She selected the link that highlighted the phrase “life of the species”, and a new tab opened. A new text.
“The first premise of all human history is, of course, the existence of living human individuals. Thus the first fact to be established is the physical organization of these individuals and their consequent relation to the rest of nature. […] Men can be distinguished from animals by consciousness, by religion or anything else you like. They themselves begin to distinguish themselves from animals as soon as they begin to produce their means of subsistence, a step which is conditioned by their physical organization. By producing their means of subsistence men are indirectly producing their actual material life.”
The German Ideology, 149-50
Marginal text notes identified this as “the first fundamental condition of history”. These fundamental conditions paved the way for the objectification of the nexus of meaning in commodities—in other words, a history of humans and their objects. Summarized in the notes: “Materialism: an individual naming specific needs is a material, linguistic act, separating the individual from the ecosystem in descriptive history”. This was the first historic material act: to call a piece of food a “fulfillment of a need”, and to seek means to acquire it. The beginning of the “I” statement, the ego’s historical self-description, is “I need…” The beginning of material identity.
“The nature of individuals thus depends on the material conditions determining their production. This production only makes its appearance with the increase of population. In its turn this presupposes the intercourse of individuals with one another. The form of this intercourse is again determined by production.”
The German Ideology, 150
This was the second fundamental condition. A human could not be an individual in a vacuum. There were other individuals about, and as they each described their labor as the satisfaction of need, their needs would split and divide them, or coalesce and unite them. What else do people talk about really, other than what they need, and what they want?
“The relations of different nations among themselves depend upon the extent to which each has developed its productive forces, the division of labor and internal intercourse. This statement is generally recognized. But not only the relation of one nation to others, but also the whole internal structure of the nation itself depends on the stage of development reached by its production and its internal and external intercourse. [...] Each new productive force, insofar as it is not merely a quantitative extension of productive forces already known (for instance the bringing into cultivation of fresh land), causes a further development of the division of labor.”
The German Ideology, 150
Third: as they talk, they begin to organize. They create divisions and unions. They work together, or against each other. The intercourse begins with conversation, but finds its true expression in society. Between nations, and inside nations. They might call this a post-national world, thought the cyborg. But nations are only a sense of belonging acted out in real life. Individuality as part of the group. Selecting a need, and calling it your own. Voting with javascript. Political opinion as a Retweet. Facebook had only been able to declare sovereignty from international law, years ago, because people kept using it. You couldn’t argue with a sheer mass unique users. Individuals organized into groups was politics.
“The various stages of development in the division of labor are just so many different forms of ownership, i.e., the existing stage in the division of labor determines also the relations of individuals to one another with reference to the material, instrument, and product of labor.”
The German Ideology, 150
The fourth fundamental condition of history was ownership. Being able to say that within the rules of the discourse of society, certain needs and responsibilities belong to certain individuals or groups of individuals: the ultimate self-expression of a group of individuals and their needs.
It was a bit disparate, perhaps. Reading the summary of the text, it felt like these four bullet points might be a bit of a jump. But as she stretched out her feet on the couch, she reflected on her body, her nexus of meaning. As she made herself, she was commodity, making other commodities. A body pulling of chunks of nature, and defining them according to the work she did, to the needs she wanted satisfied, to the societal meaning for which these commodities could be exchanged for others’ satisfaction. Her needs, and others’ needs—both defined through the discourse of society. The discourse of history. It wasn’t a primal scene, these four fundamental conditions. They were a matrix of facts, each a facet of the crystallization of history. If the human species was going to describe its relations with nature, and if the human species was going to describe itself, she supposed it would have to start here. The relationship with nature was built on this discourse of needs. And the discourse was constantly re-interpreted via this material relationship. The relationship became Society.
Now she felt she was getting somewhere, though she wasn’t sure where it was. Bodies and needs. Nature and society. All tied up with a network of meaning: objectified and cut off, organized and extended to solidify social bonds and identity. But networked nonetheless. She felt more comfortable with the metaphor of the network, for some reason. It seemed familiar, and accessible. It was something she could see, stretched out to the horizon in front of her, an image of silver threads crossing and knotting, circulating in nodes of objectification and individuality, and shooting back from where they came. Pulling things together and pushing them apart. Just a metaphor, perhaps, but she felt she was beginning to understand.
But something left her a bit unsettled. The last fundamental condition: ownership. The jewel in the crown of objectification, and the main character of the discourse. The text said that division of labor was a form of ownership? Today, her society didn’t seem to find its self-expression in ownership. At least not most people. She owned things, everyone did. But it didn’t seem as vital as the old man implied. Maybe in the 19th century or the 20th century ownership always led to material inequality and objectification. But now? She didn’t seem to really own any of the things that were important to her. Technically, if anyone ever asked, she owned her clothing, her electronics, and her bike. But what did that mean? It seemed like she only owned them out of convenience. Because everyone else had them, and so she had her own. Ownership just meant she didn’t have to share.
Of course, if she left her touch device on a subway bench, someone would scoop it up. It wasn’t that there were enough of these things for everyone to have one. And, come to think of it, she wouldn’t even like to share her device. It was customized to her preferences, it had learned her typing style and the weight of her touch, the speed of her double-click. If someone else used it, it would screw it up. Right now, it satisfied her need, but if she had to share, she supposed it wouldn’t. Or at least, not as well.
She realized she had been scrolling idly, and stopped, suddenly focusing on a paragraph in the text.
“Division of labor and private property are, moreover, identical expressions: in the one the same thing is affirmed with reference to activity as is affirmed in the other with reference to the product of the activity.
Further, the division of labor implies the contradiction between the interest of the separate individual or the individual family and the communal interest of all individuals who have intercourse with one another. And indeed, this communal interest does not exist merely in the imagination, as the “general interest”, but first of all in reality, as the mutual interdependence of the individuals among whom the labor is divided.
And finally, the division of labor offers us the first example of how, as long as man remains in natural society, that is, as long as a cleavage exists between the particular and the common interest, as long, therefore, as activity is not voluntarily, but naturally, divided, man’s own deed becomes an alien power opposed to him, which enslaves him instead of being controlled by him.”
The German Ideology, 160
She had to read it twice, but she finally began to get it. The family was, the old man accused, naturally selfish. It was natural, of course, for members of a family to seek to protect each other and their collective needs, as opposed to all the other families out there doing the same thing. Genetics, natural selection, altruism as evolutionary fitness, etc. But as society developed, eventually the family would become obsolete. The needs of certain individuals would be better served by not relying on the old institution of family, and they would break away. New institutions, like the city, would rise. The country. Class. These patterns of social intercourse would network the division of labor and division of need according to what would best serve them, and what would best perpetuate them. Sometimes it would work in the general interest, sometimes not. But this division of labor was a system of ownership, not just the ownership of particular objects. Whether the pathways of social meaning and the material fulfillment of needs were sculpted by a class or by a family or by an individual to protect themselves, it was a social network, meant to perpetuate itself in a historical feedback loop. “Ownership” of a commodity was a node of social intercourse that sought to solidify itself within the object and its meaning. She identified her touch device as her own, to help her remember not to leave it on the subway. In a way, that someone might take the device if she left it somewhere also served to reinforce the link between the device and herself. It it was not socially desired, she would probably lose it all the time, just like one of those old paper magazines. The magazine didn’t lose its value—it just became more valuable as recycled paper pulp than as reading material as societal need shifted.
Times changed. It seemed in the old days the need for ownership was a much stronger drive. This text predicted a state of world-wide destitution, which just didn’t seem possible today. Scarcity was less common, even though it still existed. People were still starving, and it seemed that only the rich were getting richer. But the idea of most people not being able to fulfill their basic needs seemed like an ancient problem. Was it because she had enough that she didn’t care about ownership?
The family was archaic. She loved her parents, and video chatted with them all the time. But now all education was available free on the network. All living quarters were, at least for the vast majority of the population, about the same cramped size. So leaving home hadn’t been a right of passage, like her parents always referred to it. “Teenage”, they used to call it, the time when you were an adult but still needed to be part of a family. The time when your needs were best fulfilled by including your ownership with a family’s division of labor. But those times were gone.
The social pattern and system of ownership about which people felt emotion these days was “the commons”. People were always defending the right of the commons, defending people’s access to the commons, complaining about the erosion of the commons, or attacking someone else’s idea of what the commons was supposed to be. Common or not, it was still a form of ownership according to this text. By enforcing the idea that certain media, resources, and pathways of access were universally accessible, their value was artificially held at zero, a level at which it was supposedly “owned in common”. People used to pay money to exchange books, music, education, and network access. Now cultural objects only had social value–commodities stripped of all but a universalized, general value. The pieces of the commons had no exchange value, and so all value was subordinated to the value of society’s system of ownership, as a whole. The whole–the commons. It was a feedback loop that reinforced its own meaning, just like the family, or any other social division of labor defined by the fundamental conditions of history.
The cyborg was hardpressed to think of exactly what matrix of human needs this networked organization of value protected—but it was a division of labor, nonetheless. It divided everyone from themselves by pushing them together into a mass. Everyone was a mass-contributor/mass-consumer. If you were against the commonality, and tried to retain any individuality over media ownership, you were boycotted. If you were not part of the commons, then you might as well not exist. The commons was the only form of ownership for cultural commodities, and the only form of meaning to the network.
It wasn’t too different from what the Singularists had preached, though they had pretty much abandoned their religion when it became apparent that not only was connecting human minds much more complicated a task than they expected, but that most humans didn’t want to be linked together, at least not with most of the rest of humanity. And yet, that idealist attempt at unification of the spirit, the humanist urge to push the species into an undifferentiated mass, had lived on in the commons.
The cyborg had never really thought about it much before. She didn’t consider herself a creative, and just downloaded music and books as she liked, and as her ratio credits allowed. But now, thinking about it in these terms, she began to feel a bit of what she guessed was… anger. They talked about the triumph of human consciousness in the commons—the sum and maximalized synthesis of all human creativity. Humanity as humanity, they said. The ultimate self-consciousness in the freely available sum of all production.
But that’s not what it was at all. It was just another way of organizing society. Just another means of ownership, controlling the way things were produced at the expense of those who produced them. No one was an individual in the commons. They acted as if it was democratic, but it was no more representative than an ocean was to a drop of water. This was just a singular, chaotic class, into which everyone was poured, and out of which they would never be distilled.
“The relation of the productive forces to the form of intercourse is the relation of the form of intercourse to the occupation or activity of the individuals. [...] The conditions under which individuals have intercourse with each other, [...] are conditions appertaining to their individuality, in no way external to them; conditions under which these definite individuals, living under definite relations, can alone produce their material life and what is connected with it, are thus the conditions of their self-activity and are produced by this self-activity. [...]
These various conditions, which appear first as conditions of self-activity, later as fetters upon it, form in the whole evolution of history a coherent series of forms of intercourse, the coherence of which consists in this: in the place of an earlier form of intercourse, which has become a fetter, a new one is put, corresponding to the more developed productive forces and, hence, to the advanced mode of the self-activity of individuals—a form which in its turn becomes a fetter and is then replaced by another. Since these conditions correspond at every stage to the simultaneous development of the productive forces, their history is at the same time the history of the evolving productive forces taken over by each new generation, and is, therefore, the history of the development of the forces of the individuals themselves.”
The German Ideology, 195
She read that, and then put down her device. She felt, suddenly, very empty. She thought about work, about the commute there and back every day. About the endless cycle of meals she ate, about the endless chain of downloads she consumed. About the endless calendar of days, one just like the next, as she slowly grew older. As history unfolded itself—and looked more and more the same as before.
Where was the art? That artful, next of meaning that was supposed to be her body, and her network of valuable experiences? In the commons, she was bankrupt. Not so much empty, as rendered valueless. She wanted to feel something mutually-interdependent, to feel transactions of value. She wanted to experience meaning, passing through her network, and into others’. She wanted to make something. She needed to really consume something, to use it until it was gone. She wanted to feel the reality of need, to experience it with other producers, and to share the mechanism of that need’s satisfaction between them.
She put down her reading device, and after finally searching through drawers and across tables, found the means of production she was looking for. She sat down, seized the pencil into her fingers, and began to draw.
“…it is clear that the real intellectual wealth of the individual depends entirely on the wealth of his real connections. Only then will the separate individuals be liberated from the various national and local barriers, be brought into practical connection with the material and intellectual production of the whole world and be put in a position to acquire the capacity to enjoy this all-sided production of the whole earth (the creation of man).[…]
This conception of history depends on our ability to expound the real process of production, starting out from the material production of life itself, and to comprehend the form of intercourse connected with this and created by this mode of production [...]
…It shows that history does not end by being resolved into “self-consciousness” as “spirit of the spirit”, but that in it at each stage there is found a material result: a sum of productive forces, a historically created relation of individuals to nature and to one another, which is handed down to each generation from its predecessor; a mass of productive forces, capital funds and conditions, which, on the one hand, is indeed modified by the new generation, but also on the other prescribes for it its conditions of life and gives it a definite development, a special character. It shows that circumstances make men just as much as men make circumstances. This sum of productive forces, capital funds and social forms of intercourse, which every individual and generation finds in existence as something given, is the real basis of what the philosophers have conceived as “substance” and “essence of man”…”
The German Ideology, 165
The device auto-scrolled without any touch from the cyborg, down past the quote even as she ignored the words rolling past, focusing on her piece of paper and the spreading gray lines that emanated from the tip of her pencil, from the ends of her fingers, from the turns of her wrist, and from the syntheses of her mind. Without input from her, the screen quietly faded to battery-saving mode, its soft light less and less of a presence in the room, before finally going completely black. Just another object now, faded from the cyborg’s area of perception. Old-fashioned typewriter keys pounding into the air, imprinting on nothing.
Works Cited
Phemenology of Perception, by Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Routledge, London and New York: 2004. Capital, Volume One, by Karl Marx. International Publishers, New York: 2003.
“Theses on Feuerbach”, by Karl Marx. In The Marx-Engels Reader, Robert C. Tucker ed. W.W. Norton & Company, London & New York: 1978.
“Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844”, by Karl Marx. In The Marx-Engels Reader, Robert C. Tucker ed. W.W. Norton & Company, London & New York: 1978.
“The German Ideology”, by Karl Marx. In The Marx-Engels Reader, Robert C. Tucker ed. W.W. Norton & Company, London & New York: 1978.
If ever there was a controversy that existed on the Internet, by and for the Internet, this would be it. It is so quintessential because it is technological speculation combined with historical speculation, two things that make up the majority of Internet usage. The Internet exists as a way of commenting on the content of history, whether that be past, present, or future. Each hyperlink is a line of causality, drawn from one sentence, picture, video, idea to another. It is the grand narrative that is all narratives, big and small. Everything ends up on the Internet, eventually, in some form. And this is an undebatable proposition–because to dispute what I’m writing with evidence of something that is not on the Internet, you would have to reference it on the Internet.
So when the Internet takes itself as the example and method for the end/climax/rapture of individual humanity, well, then you’ve got a prophet on your hands. The speculation reaches a fever pitch, and it seems as if the fact of every argument was the most direct evidence for itself.
While the Internet is relatively new, Singularity (which, rather than bury myself in a definition, I will use to mean the debate thereof) takes an older form. You can plug the humans into the data, but you can’t take the humans out of the data. History is not only data about us, but it is us. We can only speculate about our future history because history IS speculation about us, by us. History is a big, wishingly-linear Internet, connecting one concept and idea to another with a golden line, an antique looking hourglass, the rapidly spinning pages of a calendar, or a gigantic snake eating itself, depending on which trope you prefer.
We must posit an “end” of history, because history has a beginning. Death gives meaning to life, and the two concepts are unified through their mutual, epochal borders. But, you can only speculate about death while still alive. Or at least, you can only speculate about death-from-the-point-of-view-of-life during life; in sort of a Kantian, transcendental-movement, “grass is greener from the other side” sort of position. The death we envision during life can only be the sort of death when we imagine during our lives. If it were possible to think about death, while dead, then that deathly-perspective on death would no doubt be different. If there is one thing we know about death, it is that we can’t be dead and alive at the same time. And so our life becomes a sort of transcendental lens, coloring everything we see through its glass, even when we look to what we can’t see.
And history is the same way. Pre-history is not called “the awesome chaos”, because we have no idea if it was awesome or not, chaos or not. Our perspective on it is only historical, and so we must refer to it by way of this lens. In the same way we call the possibility of an afterlife “life after death”, rather than “real life”. For all we know, if it exists it may be “realer” than the life we’re now living. But it doesn’t look that way from here.
So, post-history looks, unsurprisingly, pretty historical. From the shadows of pre-history, the threads of time begin to emerge, and they flow back and forth in their ways over the years, until they coalesce at some point in the future, and these many candles join into a bright sun. And maybe it won’t be totally post-historical. Maybe it will be life after-life. History after history. But I think everyone pretty much agrees that the point is, it will be, like, way totally different. And history is in some way involved.
But why is history involved at all? Why isn’t this just good old fashioned, wild, stoner speculation, that maybe one day we’ll all get to have sex on the Internet, like on the Internet, you know? Why can’t the Singularity be a really good TV program, or maybe a new flavor of energy drink? Or just some savior-device, or a new religion? Why does it have to be OHMYGODSTARS big? Or in other words, “Singular”?
Because history is big, and the Singularity is history. The Singularity is Linearity, in all of its messy, human glory, as per this stage in our species evolution. It’s a point, it’s a thing, it’s a concept. It’s a brand, it’s a prayer, and it’s an orgasm. It’s big because humanity is big, and there has to be something at the end, and if the journey was big, the ending must be. Otherwise, it wasn’t really a journey at all.
We’ve always had a Singularity, actually. Just like everything that lives will eventually die. We’ve just called it different things. The one I’m most professionally (kinda) familiar with, and the one I find instructive, is a theological concept. It’s called eschatology.
Eschatology is a description of the features, organization, and events at the end of the world. It’s the ending of history. It’s related to cosmogony, which is the the story of the beginning of the world. Every world has one of each, even though they differ, naturally.
Personally, I like the ones in the Bible, because modern translations of the Bible love to emphasize the infallibility of the literal words on the pages, and so this gives us great license to read into the sentences. There’s a lot of weird shit in there. And all of this weird shit betrays an interesting feature–at the beginning and end of the world, things get a bit loose. The fabric of the world gets a little unraveled, and the “weavers”, if you will, who are responsible for its integrity, are flitting about, either stitching it together or tearing it apart.
You learn all sorts of things about the world from watching it be made and destroyed. Like, did you know that when god made the heavens and earth, first wind passed over the waters, dividing the waters? BEFORE there was an earth on which there was water! It’s in Genesis, look it up. We’ve learned that there was not a senseless void in the beginning, but something that at least metaphorically, to the writer of Genesis, was like air dividing an expanse of water into two separate waters. Two separate waters in what? I don’t know, it doesn’t say! Could be anything. The end of the world is the same way. If you listen to John’s version, you learn that sinners are punished, and whores ride dragons, and all kinds of crazy shit happens. But this isn’t just a confusing messed up story–this tells us that it is part of the order of the world that all sinners will be eventually punished. It is not just some thing that happens–it is what happens in the end, to close up the world in a neat little package. Same thing with the whore and the dragon, though exactly what loose end that ties up has had a little more varied explanation. Seven angels, seven vials–all of this is important. It is not just a crazy pageant god whips up to entertain us all. It is all part of the structure of the cosmos. This is the stuff that needs to happen to close the book on the world. The world is not a string of unrelated events. Things happen because they were set in motion. It is not fate, but it is the simplicity of a chemical reaction. You throw a catalyst into something, and woosh. That is the way it works. Same thing with the cosmos. From beginning to end, the cosmos unfolds according to its design. We all just have a little trouble agreeing on exactly who or what designed it, and what the hell he/she/they/it were thinking.
The Singularity is doing nothing less than the all important project of trying to figure out what in the hell human history is all about. If we in a world where progress makes sense, where time follows time without going backward, where we strive to unite with our fellow humans in peace and understanding and exploration and creativity, then the Singularity would have to be the eventual conclusion, wouldn’t it? If History did not used to be, and now is, wouldn’t it have to go all post-Historical at some point? That would only make sense. If our technology helps us connect our consciousnesses into a culture more and more by aiding our self-expression as individuals, wouldn’t it eventually have to unite our consciousnesses completely? Until we weren’t individuals at all, but something else? Something post-human? If you look at the evidence, you would have to conclude that.
The evidence being, nothing other than a history that is a cosmos of itself–a self-perpetuating narrative about the motion of human souls through time. Narratives about narratives. Integrals of time, set to find not where we are moving, but how fast we are getting there, and how fast we are figuring out how fast we are getting there. You have to always extend Cartesian coordinates by time T. If you start calculating according to logs, you always have to up it to the next base ten. If your calculus allows for n-order equations, you must assume that n will go to infinity. “Here and now” is defined by there also being a “then” and “later”. Together, they form a solid system. A system that moves loosely, lossily, and languidly. But a system none the less.
The Singularity, and again, I mean the debate thereof, is that system. Our eschatology is our cosmology, and what you can describe in crime shall be the whole of the law.
I’m writing this as a companion to a short story I wrote about temporal-dimension singularity and technology, called The RAID, which you can find here.
Now, I like many of Tim Carmody’s ideas on the future of books, on the current state of books, and on various other topics that are relevant to that particular e-intellectual set to which the idea of a bookfuturist manifesto immediately appeals and attracts. But I disagree with his construction of a manifesto–a disagreement which, I seek to show, is not irrelevant to the overall project of the future of the book.
The manifesto is a literary form that has not received a large amount of literary analysis, perhaps because it cogently directs attention away from its form. Its subject matter is by declaration paramount, and therefore it purposefully points the reader not to its own material, but away towards a particular axis of thought that is suggested to be alive and vibrant in the world. The manifesto is not a logical argument. It is a rhetorical index. It seeks to magnetize, to point, to align supporters by their conversion to the indicated path, and to condemn those that disagree by inciting fierce contrary opposition.
Manifestos, by this mechanism, define themselves as rare literary moments in the history of a particular narrative axis. They are passages meant to punctuate, to galvanize via their repetition, their rhyme, and their rebelliousness. They are epistemological epistrophes, canonical milestones, declarations of purpose, and sanctified psych-up songs. A manifesto is written with a certain passion of historical consciousness–an ebullient enthusiasm that could not be held back for one moment longer, and after the ejaculation of which, the historical record will undergo a new fruitful fecundity, being impregnated with such ideas and words that might change the course of history for ever and ever.
And I don’t detail this just so that I could show off some vocabulary, indulge my unconscious urge for alliteration and assonance, or sneak in a couple of semen metaphors. The aspects I’m identifying are important element of a manifesto, separating its historically sticky pages from any other essay weighing the pros and cons of an idea. Manifestos are important because they are not just analysis of criticism. They are a charge to an audience. They are a condemnation of the past, in the strongest of terms. They are a raging bonfire, into which things will be unceremoniously tossed, and from the ashes of which a new world will rise with talons of flame, upon the feathers of the evolutionary mob of human endeavor. The fact that a manifesto has been written tells us that at least to the author(s) of the manifesto, this is the moment. Regardless of what the future actually holds for these riders of the beating wings of history, the manifesto is solid, unwavering, and propels an idea, at least for the briefest of moments and to the most targeted of audiences, into a position to dispute the sun.
Tim Carmody’s “Bookfuturist Manifesto” does none of these things. It is a blog post, a self-conscious aside from a particular dinner party conversation, a self-satisfied journal entry in which the non-events of a day are recorded. Where is the fire? The purpose? The sense of cataclysmic history! In fact, he purposefully eschews all of this, in a favor of a common ground, a synthesis, or other third-way between the rhetorical caricatures defining the associated ideas. It is a reasoned, academic, perspective, that waves away the vehemence of positional argument, and quiets the vitriol of thought pushed to the point of emotion. It is self-analytical, not self-important. And in all these ways it is probably a good summation of the goals, steps, and pitfalls of the evolution of the book. But it is not a manifesto.
Let’s put it this way. A manifesto would not contain in the first paragraphs the first-person exclamation after seeing oneself on a titular Twitter follow list, “I want to write a bookfuturism manifesto!” Nor would it conclude with the hippie-seminar self-effacement, “At least, that’s what I try to do.”
The futurists had dinners in the company of aeroplane engines. The bookfuturists idea of a wild time would be to get Clay Shirky and Nicholas Carr in the same room and let them each take their time to explain their argument’s similarities and differences.
Which is all to the bookfuturists’ credit, I think. They are actually thinking about solutions to problems, not attempting to write a poetry of war, and embrace pollution. The preference of these times for one method over the other is obvious, and totally respectable. Technology should not be a war, or a Darwinian Thunderdome. The discussion is, as a high-level conversation ought to be, about the proper methods and means for using technology to improve culture. Not a savage orgy of literature-as-atrocity (though this author sighs wistfully).
But, as I have more-often-than-not begun concluding in this Internet Age, in this time of proliferating quantities of reason, analysis, discussion, pros, and cons, thanks in no small part to the technological changes that allow discussions of the changing state of our literary discourse in form and content, a new truth status is dawning. A truth about the revealing of truth. Basically, if someone has to explain to you the way in which “something is happening” in culture or any particular subset thereof, it is not happening–at least not presently. Once, history only “happened” because there were certain people with powers of observation coupled with the skills to record it, and a format by which to explicate its contents to others. The narrative required a narrator. Now, the a certain story is telling itself, daily and hourly. This story is written in the blog posts, the photo sets, the hashtags, and yes, occasionally, self-published Internet manifestos of its practitioners. One doesn’t need to read the New York Times to know about the state of the housing market, or the current anarchy-quotient of Detroit or New Orleans. You can see the personal thoughts, the pictures, the daily doings and the first-person statements of the people on the ground. It is a dirty narrative, scattered, and loosely connected. But it is as much a narrative as anyone could tell at this point. The face of evolution occurs at the ground level, where the problems are solved, and in the hands where the technology (whether new or old) is held. If there is to be any new ground covered, it will be under the feet of the person with the book in their hands. This praxis is not new, but suddenly, it is mostly accessible to any of us at any time. We are all content creators as well as consumers. The first-person perspective as grand narrative is born anew, and this time without pronouns. There is no “I” in Twitter, because it is implied in what 140 characters is not. “is re-writing the bookfuturism manifesto” is a complete sentence in this narrative. The status message is the new Truth. These revolutions will not be analyzed. At least not until later.
In other words, there is a lot of bookfuturism essays, but the bookfuture lies elsewhere. The bookfuture is not necessarily a history in microblogged format, but it is certainly not with the critics and analytics. Literature is too expressive a form of culture to conform to those who would define publishing. It is the force of a river that finds its course through gravitational expediency, but does not abide being dammed for long. Erosion, branching arroyos, flash floods, and the birthing of landslides are its paths, not the dictates of evangelists and (anti-)technologists. Regardless of whether it is on screen, paper, over wireless wavelength or through the old-fashioned mail, the books that will exist in the future will be the ones that are written, published, and read, whether purchased from app store, pulled from a free box, or forcibly read to the populace over loudspeaker, or equivalent. Like a manifesto, we will know the elements of the bookfuture when we see it, when it demands itself to us, when it grabs us in the street and forces its literature into our unwilling hands, when it tweets in the middle of the night whether anyone is around to read it or not. When someone is ready not just to speculate, but to get up and exclaim that the future is now, to quake and shake with the revealed knowledge of a new literary format, ready and hungry to toss something, anything into the fire.
The time of the prophets is over. The time of the manifesto is now.
[Disclosure: I am a self-published author, with a lot of animosity for prophets of publishing. But if you're reading this, you probably know that. Also: my apologies to Tim Carmody, whom I follow on Twitter, and would be really sorry if this reverse-manifesto caused him to block me or something.]
If you are for some profane reason interested in other things I have written about manifestos, you could always check these out.
