Hearing the commotion from the hall, the designer puts down his scalpel. A security officer comes in the swinging, double doors of the lab, out of breath, as the designer stands. “No problem here, zir. One of them writers broke out of containment. It took the full charge on two tasers, but we got it wrangled now. We’re taking it back to the tank, and then we’ll be back to clean up the mess on the floor. Wish they didn’t always void their bowels like that….” The officer was gone.
The designer sits back down on his minimalist steel stool, and picks up the blade. It might be part of the realities of doing design-fiction, but an interruption is an interruption. Increasing the magnification on the goggles, the designer brings the scalpel low over the text for another slice. The page shrinks back instinctively, as the sharp edge parts its fibers…
I couldn’t consider myself much of a young writer knowledgeable about the technological zeitgeist if I couldn’t preach to a particular choir about the particular concept developed in the last five years known as “design-fiction”. Like anything else these days, the truth no doubt resists easy categorization, being multi-faceted, and having different characteristics and attributes at different times and in different settings, depending who is measuring, and from where they are looking. Luckily, abstraction is my chosen art form, and building characters that are easily readable is a skill fundamentally component to my nature, almost as much as design-sense comes naturally to those who can afford Adobe Creative Suite. Without too much beating about the bush, I’m going to weave a little narrative about design-fiction; just a couple of multi-touch gestures on our collective interface here.
via Flickr user lifeontheedge
Let me begin by unilaterally defining design-fiction as the theory and practice behind conflating design, “building things that exist”, with fiction, “making up shit that doesn’t exist”. Design-fiction–either through its own limited fictional proposition or on the back of pre-existing works of fiction–links a fictional narrative regarding a proposed object, with some image, shadow, ghost, dream, or otherwise hologrammically-real design of that object. It could be a mock up of a car from Blade Runner, it could be a functioning hologram like in Star Wars. It could be the proposed features of a cell phone that could exist, if only the technology was available as specified. Or it could be the working prototype of something entirely useful, if certain fictional conditions were true. Most generally, design-fiction take “the future” as the generic narrative for its activity, and uses only enough fictional glue as is necessary to prop the designed object up upon that plane. No doubt, the makers of design-fiction experience a bit of perceived freedom in this activity. With this tool, they can give context to design ideas that wouldn’t otherwise be taken seriously. Fiction was something that reality merchants used to avoid, but now it is a new territory, just waiting to be settled. The designers and engineers, after decades (or centuries, depending who is doing the counting) of attempting to maintain their privileged control over the domain of reality, have suddenly noticed that there is an entire new world available in the realm of unreal, and are building new colonies as we speak to tap these fictional deposits.
The resource of fiction has proven invaluable to the design community. It is a fertile land for farming new ideas. It is a forest of raw timber, just waiting to be processed into something profitable. It is a mineral resource: a treasure trove of value just underneath the soil, which the natives refuse to profit by, at least until they are put to work mining and smelting it to store and back the value of the new economy of this land, in which fiction creators are now lucky enough to participate.
We, the fiction makers, used to do simple arts and crafts. Little stories, films, and comic books. Did you know that when we used to be able to freely hunt the elk of imagination, we’d use every part of the animal? We’d use the hide for plot, the bone for characters, and the antlers would be our lifestyle. (We’d even eat the genitals, for the sexual content which we believed it imbued our fiction.) We had a true respect for the environment of fiction, when we lived in harmony with its spirits. But that time has past, and we’ve been woken up to the new economy. Now we sell to the tourists along the highway, and if we’re lucky, get a job in design-fiction’s factory lines, hopefully with enough time to still practice the fictive arts around the fire, at home in the evening. We show off the goods that we have as the designers come around on buying tours. A positive nod from a designer, a mention in a bibliography or a name-drop in a project… well, that could make a career for one of us. Our fiction could be discovered, and we could be whisked off to the lab, to have our fiction milked for years-worth of homogenized product-fantasies, and our genetic material cloned into sterile keynote after keynote. If we are good and docile, we might even find a privileged pet position as “Director of Visionary Hype” at some publicly-traded corporation. We could be the monkey that gets to go home with the scientist.
Today, the magic no longer exists in our fiction, but in what they can do with our fiction. By the manifest destiny of design, the wonders of the future have been created in real life, with the subjugation of fiction to the anvil of reality. All classes have indeed benefited from this abundance. What wonders we have, on the bleeding edge of this economic extraction! We have “cyberspace”. We have virtual reality. Augmented reality. We have billions of phones that would be no more than simple radios if not touched by the magic hand of design, transmuting them into “cyborg” appendages, and we celebrate them for the virility they imbue within us. The value of everyday things like touch-screen interfaces, environmental sensors, and vehicular transportation increases exponentially when inseminated with “design-fiction”. It is the ultimate gamification, the hand of design-fiction, turning what would be ordinary stuff into exploding, plinging, gold coins, making all of technology and fiction seamlessly function For The Win. What once was merely the artistic present, is now the valuable future.
Cue the Disney-produced GM animation. Or rather, cue the Vimeo cut. Or even better, just play the entirety of Minority Report. Or, let us crowd-source a film version of Neuromancer, so we can slip once more into a sweet visual fantasy dimension, of endless flowing tides of VC and Kickstarter love and dollars.
I stretch the truth a bit, of course. Because I am a writer, and this is what I do. I make stuff up, at least to a certain degree. I invent worlds that don’t exist, for other people’s amusement. I simplify and I abstract to make a point, and to write something hopefully concrete and understandable. I draw the lines that no one else is willing to draw, and then give it away free: my own little bit of folk art. To get these bothersome ideas out of my head, and onto the web. Just doing my part, as a serf of fiction. Carrying my little crowd-sourced bag of fictional dirt up the wall of the pit mine that is the internet.
But I must answer for my quota of cotton; I need to bring you something for re-sale, and not just my little straw men. I can’t just spin fiction off into the wind, and so it must mean something. So I must ask, seriously: when it comes to the reality of design-fiction: what is it that we are doing here? How is it–and why is it–that fiction is actually being taken “seriously” when it is conflated with cool little technological gadgets, with visionary architecture, with high-profile names in the design world? Why is it only now that “fiction” is allowed to become almost “real” when printed on a design pamphlet or wired to an Arduino board, minted into the coinage of design-fiction? Should we who create fiction accept this colonization? What was fiction before design-fiction? Is design-fiction merely the modern extension and the next prototype of fiction: the future of fiction?
It seems that many people thought books and literature were only ever entertaining side-pursuits in our cultural history; that literature only came close to science in the form of library science. But fiction has always been a part of historical reality, long before design-fiction so kindly discovered the power of future-affirmation to it. Fiction has a very human purpose: it is the singularly important task of assembling, what I would call, a “mechanism of desires”. Fiction expresses the raw, chaotic power of human life through its material components. Through its own technology of imagery, thematic archetype, language, and other media forms, fiction expresses the depths of our species’ life in the continuum of past, present and future, and indeed, it is the only way we ever have. We talk about ourselves via the form of literature, or fictive writing, and also in music, film, art, and any other expression in which we might be able to conceive or perceive a narrative. Sure, often it is, strictly, “made up”. But this is the creative element–in order to better express those dark human desires underlying our societies, to project the hard-to-define emotions that pulse within our living existence, we must not be constrained to the plane of reality that those in the physical sciences hold themselves within. And in this way, fiction is entirely real–as real as emotion and thought, as real as our egos, as real as the mutable species-entity known as “humanity” that unites all of us with a similar genotype. It utilizes as its energy the chaotic reality of human life, and constructs a branching, cultural pipeline for this energy to flow within. And all this time, you thought you were just reading words!
Apart from this deep, underlying function, fiction is also useful for a great many other things as part of its expressive nature. We’re aware of the general humanistic good of consuming fine literature, of the entertaining feature of films, of the social aspect of music. Fiction can motivate and inspire humans to “real-life” activity in a variety of arenas, and physical design and technological invention is surely one of these. But over and above inspiration, design-fiction’s functionality has what could be considered to be a more insidious mechanism.
What is the purpose of attempting to design a cyberspace deck? What do we gain from building a Minority Report display interface? Why work on a product that only will ever exist within a story, pre-existing as separate narrative, or written specifically for that gadget? When we assume the design-fiction mantle of Future-Vision, what is the motivation? It is four-fold: 1) We believe these devices would be cool or otherwise meaningful in real life. 2) We believe they would perhaps be successfully marketable products, if they could be created. 3) We want to see if it can be done. 4) We buy into the fictional fantasy world of generic future-tense, and we commit to design-fiction as a way to express our mental investment and solidarity with that forward-leaning worldview. These reasons all have a common thread: once a technological gadget can be identified in a fictional way, a part of us wants to port this fiction to reality.
These are the reasons behind the majority of design-fiction, and as such, design-fiction is no more than steampunk. I don’t intend to drag steampunk through the mud by association, either; steampunk is a fine hobby. There is no reason not to port fiction to reality, as a prop. Play-acting is a form of fiction consumption, and always has been. A prop, just its progenitor the classical theater mask, is simultaneously real and not real. But design-fiction is kidding itself if it believes it can simply make the fictional real, to make it less than a prop. And that to do so is any more than gluing gears to vests for sale on Etsy, to sell shit by calling it Shinola.
via Dvice.com
Play acting is all well and good, but when the props are treated as real, there is a psychotic sort of commodification underway. The psychosis is a disavowal–a forced rejection of the entire fictional mechanism except for that one value point, “to make the future real”. It is a cauterizing excision of a segment of the fiction, cut out and fused into an independent object with only one quantifiable dimension. Ripped out of its context, the purpose of fiction as a whole is conveniently forgotten, and the gadget object is reduced to a commodity, existing only in terms of its market value. The expressive component of play-acting is dead. Design-fiction is a fetish pushed to the point of absolute objectification; it is no longer a node of pleasure, only a dried and homogenized portion of the original fiction, ready to be sold in consumer-ready packages. The future is no longer a vanishing point of progress in a real-unreal network of invention and art, but a quantified MSRP. It is to reduce all speculation to the assumption that what could exist must exist, and would, in existence, be valuable. It is to make this supposed value the end-all of all creativity. You can hook a disembodied dog head up to a blood pump, and watch it try to live. But why would you do that? Design-fiction has such questions to answer.
We don’t celebrate Neuromancer because it contains the idea of cyberspace; we celebrate the idea of cyberspace because it is part of Neuromancer. Neuromancer is less about the actual proposition of a virtual realm called cyberspace accessible through communication technology, and more about the feeling of micro-gravity. It is about the human wish to fly. Cyberspace gets the press, because it is an easily identifiable term, and not a more ethereal thematic concept. The coined phrase is its own commodity value. We recall that the end of the book take place in earth-orbit, as the cowboy of the virtual space is forced by physical circumstances to take his metaphorical combat into the world. The book is about dimensions that are unreal, and no less real. It is about manufactured space in general, and the new physics that we must learn to live within. It is about the new thermodynamics of information, and such immutable laws that would birth the sublime triple point of black ice. It is about the life that develops in unreal physical environments, life that is both human, and non-human. In the time since the book was written, the Internet has come to life. Cyberspace is now an actual thing, different than the cyberspace in the book. But the human desire, and ultimately, the need to fly through our invented territorial realms is still real, both in reality and the original fiction.
via saranblog.wordpress.com
Design-fiction reduces the mechanism of fiction to one more corporate R&D department, convinced that it’s products are something more than just products. The fictional, thinner-than-thin, design-fiction smart phone is a product of dimensional flattening, reducing the real environment of information technology and communications to point at which it is just another virtual icon, that we flick across the surface of our real phones despondently: the killer app of the week. Such so-called “fiction” downsizes the network assemblage of human creativity and desire-engineering, replacing it with the boring repetition of the start-up model. How it works and what it does is less important than how quickly it can be pushed to market, or more likely, to the blog. It minimizes the desire that drove creativity to express itself through dynamic fiction into no more than a meter of quantitative investment and click-through interest, that can be channelled as is liked for best returns. So you’ve stimulated the nerve endings with desire for a phone that will never be sold. It’s creative output is made-you-look. The fiction might as well have never existed, and all that was manufactured was the lie. It’s thinking you don’t have to feed your dog as long as you keep ringing the Pavlovian bell. It’s inventing the Happy Meal toy before the shooting the film. At best, it’s bad fiction. At worst, the most you are affecting your audience with is lead poisoning.
Design-fiction would have you avoid the vast mechanism of real fiction, and invest in what is made up as a secondary commodification. It would have you forget about the book, and concentrate on the deck. It would sell you an Ono-Sendai T-shirt, not to bring the book to life, but in order to brand you into the fan club. The book is alive already, and its position as a classic work of fiction is the proof. If there was a cyberspace deck, it would be a piece of memorabilia to put under glass on a shelf. Something to sell online, if you were lucky enough to have an actual box to ship. What would be the purpose of a cyberspace deck today? We already have the interfaces that best conflate our needs to connect to our networks with the technology we have available. Design, without the fiction, is already delivering on the dream. It may be an interesting exercise to consider why we have smart phones rather than cyberspace decks–but this is a theoretical exploration between the work of fiction and reality, and something for writers to bother themselves with, rather than designers.
And then on to the next one. Remake each book into a film, and each film into a phone. What can you quantify the rights to, and convert into a design-fiction option? How about Minority Report? The Minority-Report-Interface (MRI) is now a completely isolated, flat piece of fiction separate from the fiction from which it is derived. Amputated from the work of fiction, in which it is an important image of the thematic import of the work–a larger theme of truth, evidence, and the foreseeable future–the device itself is now only a milestone about technological progress. When will we have the MRI? When, when, when? And how much will it cost? The future will only be here when we can gesture in space and construct a narrative of the future at our whim. But this forgets the point of Minority Report as a work of fiction: the idea of the work is that the future cannot be predicted, and cannot be constructed at our whim. In our manic gesturing towards the gadget-of-the-future, we’ve missed the whole point. The reality of fiction has been replaced by an urge towards false, isolated commodity.
Are objects pulled into the “real” world and isolated from the assemblage which invented them, even to be considered real? These simulacra of fiction seem to double down on the fakery. In fact, the entire woven mechanism of fictional meaning from which these objects grew before they were harvested like clones, the question of the worth of technology as an element of human existence from which have the fruitful discipline known as Science-Fiction seems more real. In open speculation and the intricate programming of fiction, I see more reality than in the commodification of potential-product. What is more real: the cyborg in the horror film, or the hardwired, uncanny horror that causes us to invent cyborgs in fiction, to keep us looking even though we wish we could turn away? What is more alarming–uncanny human subjects, on the border point between humanity and object, or uncanny objects, on the border point between creativity and capitalistic exploitation?
But let me call curtain. Enough with my own play-acting here, and philosophical slight-of-hand. Let me end this fictive fantasy I’m spinning, and return to reality. These post-colonial memories–they aren’t yours. This was a nightmare, from which we all can easily wake up. Fiction and object design are both equally real. They are all real, but only together, united as they always were.
I’ve been giving design-fiction an especially hard time, trying to seed its practitioners with a horrible dream, in which they are the enemies of the future, rather than its saviors and heralds. As the brainwashing super-villian in this narrative, I speak for an a-vocal, imagined constituency against a trumped up enemy. Us designers of fiction (not designers of design-fiction) are, in general, so pleased to finally be taken seriously that we almost forget to take our newly discovered importance as an insult. And so, I’ve lobbed the perceived insult playfully back towards my characterization of the design-fictioners, if only to have them finally look up into the sky for what might one day actually condense in reality with enough weight to hit them in the face.
Behind this little bit of territorial posturing, the relationship between the real and the fictional is the same terrain that we’ve always traversed. Our ideas, both of fiction and of physical invention, grow as nodes in the network–starting independently, connecting, separating, and eventually fading in importance. The lasting effect of anything, technological or artistic, is its ability to network with everything else in a connecting, transmitting relationship, rather than as a cancerous, pooling sink of resources. Both fiction and reality are simultaneous. Isolation and consolidation of nodes will occur, and there is nothing wrong with picking particular pieces of fruit as they grow. But reality only occurs simultaneously amid real-world praxis and the extensive networks of the creative production of fantasy. Keep your hammer in one hand, and your dreams in the other.
And in the end, recognition of this truth is my fantasy of the future. We who create fiction don’t have to view the design world as an expropriating, gentrifying force. We can work as a team with the designers. The designers are no doubt just as interested in our characters and the overall fictive headspace as they are in our marketable gadgets. And the world of engineering can be the same fertile ground for creativity, as fiction can be for design. They can let us into their studios and laboratories just as we let them into our heads. This was the origin of Science-Fiction, of course; and it is the continuing legacy of speculative fiction of all categories. Writers, artists, and creators of all media continue to be informed by the world around them just as we inform it with our work, and in this society of continual connecting networks, we ought to turn up the bandwidth, and upload as much data to the commons as we realistically can.
via Vintagraph.com
But in that effort, design-fiction: I urge you to remember who constitutes reality in this relationship. I may write on a computer, and access the cloud through the prouduct of your brilliant, visionary interface. But your imagination, your creativity, your humanity–you read these inscriptions off of the broad back of fiction. This world and its aspirations were built by fiction, and fiction keeps it. Remember, design-fiction, that when you dream, you are in our hands. We are you, while you sleep.
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’ve read several reports of the celebrations that spontaneously occurred after the announcement last night. (One, Two, Three, Four, Five) And while I respect the effort that goes into writing about something that is not easy to write about, I must say I’ve been disappointed by all of them.
It is far too easy in the face of a tough situation, to remark upon the fact that it is a tough situation, and withdraw with that as lackluster synthesis. “There’s a lot going on here.” The five essays I cited above say more than that, but in the end it boils down to this: calling a crowd a crowd.
I’m not writing this with the intention of saying that a crowd is not a crowd, or that the death of a particular person is politically/historically/culturally/emotionally relevant in a way that everyone has missed, and that I will grace you with that revelation. I’m writing to say that from the perspective of the human species, to throw up one’s hands and murmur something about the wisdom of crowds is precisely the problem. This is exactly what has been going on for the last ten years, and what appears to be continuing.
I could call it a post-post-9/11 line of thought, because I have been calling it that, and it sounds a bit clever. It is the emotion at the end of the film The 400 Blows. After all that happens, all that the main character has done and hasn’t done, he runs away from the juvenile work camp. What begins as a somewhat exciting escape attempt, draws out into a single, two minute shot of him running along a road, having easily eluded his pursuer. Where is he going? We imagine that he just wants to escape, he has no destination. And then the camera changes shots, and we see him running towards the sea. He must have seen the sea from hundreds of yards away. He knows it is there. And yet he keeps running. All the way across the barren length of sand, and into the waves. Once he steps foot in the waves, he completely soaks his shoes. To me it looks uncomfortable; it does not appear to be a warm day, and wherever he walks now, he will have wet feet for hours. As if in the juvenile recognition and regret of this fact, the same down-turned countenance with which he has conducted his poorly-managed misbehaviors throughout the length of the film, he leaves the water’s edge, but doesn’t move to leave the beach, either. The camera zooms in, and freeze-frames his face in the breeze. “Fin,” the title reads.
In 2003, in the depths of the War on Terror, a college acquaintance of mine made some unfortunate comments on a community web site, that were taken to be terrorist threats. He was charged with felonies. Anyone who knew him could tell the comments were not serious, but this didn’t matter. In fact, that he was just a teenager from the Midwest with an odd sense of humor seemed to steel the resolve of the police and college administrators in persecuting him. The question was not whether or not he was a likely terrorist or capable of committing or planning to commit terrorist acts. The issue was that he had the gall to joke with the assumed understanding of such a possibility being ridiculous, and this itself was a crime. The presumption of being innocent of terror was a terrorist act. That there might have been a joke was akin to conspiracy to kill. As the chief of police said, “in a post-9/11 environment, there are no jokes.” We, those who knew better, wrung our hands, cried to the heavens, beat our chests in frustration. Could they say anything more revealing, more tinged with Orwellian anti-humor? Could there be anything more of a joke than to ruin the life of this young man? Except that it wasn’t funny. It was reality.
Last night, the jokes returned. After the immediate tension of the revealing of the truth passed (about five minutes in Internet-time) the jokes began, and roiled back and forth across the surface of the info-sea. The jokes never left, of course. How could they, when they are the only response anyone has been able to muster to cowboy presidents, to color-coded death threats, to security theater eroticism? The jokes are here, like bricks, and from them we have built this reality we’ve come to know.
My fear is that jokes will only ever be our only response. Is this it? At the end of ten years all we can do is mill about holding up our electronic eyes, as if with these networked gaze-of-crowds we could somehow evoke the significance that we cannot find. It used to be called irony, back when it was a unique take on a normal situation. Now the uniqueness of the alien crowd is normal. What is normal? Normal is not knowing what is normal anymore. As things get less normal, the petrifying ossification of normalization only becomes more all-encompassing. And not a singular nomalcy. Chaotic normalcy, with all the drowning, soaking uniformity of the tossing molecules of the ocean. A thousand points of light/flowers blooming, and then catching alight in a single wind of flame. Each meme is another brick in the wall of making everything seem just as uniquely odd as the next thing. And it only gets weirder/more normal from here.
And we are still surprised that our feet are wet, even though we saw the sea at a thousand yards. Blinking at the crowd may be all-too-human, but a teenage, irritated exhale through the bangs at the sight of shirtless men climbing light poles, and women staring at them expectantly? Can you honestly say you never expected this? Ten years may have seemed like forever in 2001, but in 2011 it’s just another mini-epoch to reflect upon. Covers of Wired Magazine are made on such petty units of time. Would we really keep not finding him forever? And what did you think would happen when we did? Did anyone expect there to be a trial? Peace? Even a second’s serious reflection on the wars (or more than 140 characters’ worth of thought)? What else was there beside a bullet in the head, a DNA test, and a burial at sea? These sorts of narratives are wrapped up in an hour, less commercials, on prime time TV. We can excuse reality for doing it in 24. The flags, the flags, the flags. College students looking for an excuse to be late to Monday morning classes. Breasts dangling. Let a thousand Flickr feeds bloom, and burnt out my eyes with the lily-white skin of 20-something America. What did you expect? Nobody expected anything more than this. That’s why the most erudite thing anyone could think to say is U-S-A, U-S-A, U-S-A. And hold out a cell phone, into the night. Obama wrote remarks. Everyone else spelled acronyms repeatedly.
The only worse thing than the sullen, confused teenager is the lecturing, patronizing parent. And yet, I’m no prophet, and no doctor with a prescription, either. I’ve been a teenager though. And while I had my wet-footed moments as I learned how to see through the jokes, I also learned to shout. I think that is what I want from people now. Not a whimper. Not a shake of the head, a self-conscious close of the eyelids to block out what they are doing in the street. Not an ironic, snide comment under the breath. Not a pleading complaint.
I want shouting. Anger in the street. To release these feelings that have been building for ten, long years of idiocy. I don’t want catharsis. I want it to build. I want the sound reverberating from the buildings to make people uncomfortable. I want it to hurt their ears. I want them to stop talking and stare at the guy shouting in the street. They’ll probably hold up their phones to capture a picture of the crazy guy, they might even shout back. But enough is enough. They’ve had their blood now. Now I want mine. I want the sort of blood that will reclaim ten years of lost history. The sort of fluid that runs out of sliced books. The kind of event that closes prisons, that turns wiretaps into hissing static, that makes the people who decided to do this actually see what it is that they’ve done. I want the sort of blood that doesn’t exist, that runs in veins so thin and rare around the surface of the world that it has hardly ever been spilled, except occasionally, only ever in the tiniest, most effervescent of drops, which quickly boil into nothing when seen by the eye. But I’m going to shout for this blood anyway.
Our feet are wet. Ten years passed so quickly, and another ten will pass the same. And we’ve run out of ground to pound our feet against mindlessly. It’s time to pass through that crowd, rather than stand on the periphery. I don’t need to ask if anyone is with me. Because that’s not the sort of question that has a correct response.
So no one knows the words to the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” (see link Five, above). At the May Day March I was at, which also happened yesterday, some union organizers tried to start up a rendition of “Solidarity Forever”. No one knew the words to that one, either. But all of us know how to cry for blood.
Tim questions exactly what is so important about being absolutely up-to-date about “World Event X”, when the information that is available might only be immediately relevant to a few people, and for those few people, all they really need is an update every 15 minutes or so. And then he speculates, might we even make better decisions if we haven’t been following events so closely? What if the person who was most knowledgeable and was tasked with making the actual decisions was kept in the dark, and then briefed with all known info all at once? This might avoid misinformation that could occur in the meantime. No perception bias would be allowed to form. There would be no old, bad data–only current information.
It is an interesting proposition, and could work well for a turn-based strategy game. Or any game theory application, in which the previous games played could affect the player’s perception of the current game. It takes the meat out of gambling, completely. If one viewed each spin of the roulette wheel as the only game that would ever be played, the odds are much clearer. Unlike, say, after a night of gambling, when one feels that one’s “luck has to change”.
The problem is, that in life there are no turns. There are no preset intervals like turns, or spins of the wheel, or games, at which all preconceived strategies can be cleared from the head, and the “rules of the game” can be conceived as unique and unconstrained by the rest of time.
Time is a continuum of what Henri Bergson called “duration”. If you think of the last fifteen minutes, you do not think of each minute interval separately, stretching backward until you count up to fifteen. You think of a solid duration, formed of the memories that linger from that period, cutting off the duration at some point which you guess to be roughly the same as the elapsing of fifteen minutes on a clock. That period of time is crushed flat in the memory as a chunk, not arrayed on a segmented timeline of numerical values.
In fact, even the order of events in the mind are only ordered in time, in that we construct smaller partial pieces of duration for events, which we then layer as “before” and “after” in the larger durational span. I climbed a ladder; and I fell off a ladder. Because I parcel these as two separate actions, each with their own separate duration, I can understand that I must have completed the former action before the latter, but only because they are related in my mind as an activity with a before and after. Whereas, I might only remember answering the phone before I opened a book, because I also remember walking from the phone over to the book shelf, and so that links a continuum of events that imbued causality.
In the last fifteen minutes, I have climbed a ladder/fallen off a ladder. Now, in the present, my butt is sore. I know why it is sore: because in the duration period preceding “now”, there was a fall from a ladder. But do I still remember that I had to climb the ladder first? Obviously I must have, if I think about it. I understand each of these separate events as tied to way that time unfolds in a “forward” direction. But what is the point of recalling those durations separately? It is easier to compress them together. I might climb the ladder again in the future, and perhaps I will take greater care to avoid a future falling event, because I remember those previous durations, climbing/falling/pain. As those moments of duration replay in my memory, they will link together, and the meaning will be established. But which happened first? It no longer matters precisely, as long as the meaning of what I had learned before still rings clear. Do I remember that I climbed a ladder, fell off a ladder, hurt myself, and resolved to be careful? Or do I simply remember that climbing a ladder can result in pain if one isn’t careful? What is the difference between what actually happened, and the conclusion one draws from it? There is no difference. Unless, of course, we decide to separate everything that has ever happened to us out into these little parcels of cause and effect, of minute succeeding minute, of one turn after the next.
Via Wikimedia
Why don’t we think of each spin of the roulette wheel as a separate probability game? Why? What are we doing on the casino floor to begin with? Why are we even attempting to think of roulette logically, now, if we didn’t think of it logically the last hundred times we have bet this evening? If we don’t think logically about gambling, then why would we be suddenly do so? The duration of each bet is overlapped into a larger duration that refuses to be split: the process of gambling. The game theory player thinks rationally, judging the rules according to durations of probability and risk within a single spin. The gambler, on the other hand, lives in the continuum of playing multiple games, a time-space filled with durations of winning and losing, highs and lows. The game theorist is rational, of course. But what is more reasonable: that humans are all, in essence, Game Theorists, or that casinos will remain open and a profitable business? The data shows that we tend towards irrationalism… towards a subjective, durational model of time and action. Which reality is broken? The one that is real, or the one that is theorized as a perfectly non-existent alternative?
Cable news provides another example. Viewed in its abstract, the programming is asinine. Perhaps fifteen minutes of news is stretched into hours, view repetition, commentary, highlight re-caps, and news tickers. If a person sat there and watched it all, they would be wasting their time, and learning nothing. It is irrational.
However, the day’s news is not released at midnight every day. News, which we might define as information that is “current”, is released at an unpredictable rate around the clock. Because the technology exists to transmit that information around the clock, it broadcasts new information immediately, and must wait for the next piece of news in the meantime, if it wishes to approximate the most current awareness available. In this way, cable news is like the human memory. It records events in duration: in sound bites, in video clips, in produced segments, and edited interviews. It recalls these elements constantly, repeating them as memory, to fill the gaps until there is something new to be perceived and recorded. The news is “current”, like consciousness. It’s nowness is the extent to which it has relevant memories through which to orient its new perceptions. The media that cycles through a cable news channel might be meaningless, or contradictory, or inflammatory. What is relevant to “news”, that informational consciousness, continues to circulate, and rise to the top. So-called “latest pictures” don’t represent any particular logical component of information. Not facts, not measurements, not logical rules. They are perception, flattened to a particular segment of duration, and recalled to consciousness, until they are no longer needed. A history book can recall events in a timeline, process activities according to quantitative turns of the earth, or choices made by individuals at particular intervals. But the news can only direct the eye and the ear. And for some reason, we prefer to watch the news than read history books.
Even when we do read history books, these only join the vast news tickers of the 24-hour cable news channel that is our consciousness. The problem for the nuclear scientists, engineers, and technicians at Fukushima, is that they cannot directly consult the historical timeline of events at Three Mile Island or Chernobyl, and immediately know the logical action they ought to make in the present. Of course they can consult those timelines, and I have no doubt that someone was doing so fervently. But the present is always different than the past, separated by the duration between that time and space and this one, as well as all the other durational memories lingering as the substance of our reality. The present requires its own decisions to be made, and past success or failure cannot guarantee the same conditions in the present. The present is always evolving rapidly, and those who need to make the decisions cannot simply collect all the necessary information, and present it as the present. The minute it is all collected, it becomes the past as the present continues to evolve away, out from underneath us. There is no basic state from which we can make our decisions, and trust them to be rational. We can only hope to construct the most intricate understanding of past durations that we can, a network of associations of observations of past events, as complex as it can be while still being useful.
And then we have to pick up the dice…. forced to gamble.
Henry Moore’s “Tube Shelter Perspective”, via Tate Collection
The B.s, who only came up to London a few weeks ago and have seen nothing of the blitz, say that they find Londoners very much changed, everyone very hysterical, talking in much louder tones, etc., etc. If this is so, it is something that happens gradually and that one does not notice while in the middle of it, as with the growth of a child. The only change I have definitely noticed since the air-raids began is that people are much more ready to speak to strangers in the street. . . . The Tube stations don’t now stink to any extent, the new metal bunks are quite good, and the people one sees there are reasonably well found as to bedding and seem contented and normal in all ways – but this just what disquiets me. What is one to think of people who go on living this subhuman life night after night for months, including periods of a week or more when no aeroplane has come near London? . . . It is appalling to see children still in all the Tube stations, taking it all for granted and having great fun riding round and round the Inner Circle. A little while back D. J. was coming to London from Cheltenham, and in the train was a young woman with her two children who had been evacuated to somewhere in the West Country and whom she was now bringing back. As the train neared London an air-raid began and the woman spent the rest of the journey in tears. What had decided her to come back was the fact that at that time there had been no raid on London for a week or more, and so she had concluded that “it was all right now”. What is one to think of the mentality of such people?
When one suggests that SF involving people living underground in tubes because they fear an unspecified danger above ground is unrealistic, I suppose that we should remember that of all the horrible things we could possibly think of to do to other people, someone has already thought of, and most likely, done so.
There’s a museum purporting to present evidence of a bizarre, marginal theory on the origins of life. No, not the Museum of Creationism. And not the Little League Hall of Fame, either; though their ideas of creation are curious. I’m talking about the Museum of Cultural Speciation, which as it happens, does not as yet benefit from having a building dedicated towards housing its expanding collection of evidence.
Let me fill you in on some of the details of mainstream evolutionary theory, with which I have only just now become acquainted. (For more info and sources, type a few phrases into Wikipedia. It’s easy!) You already know about evolutionary selection, if you are not from a Texas school system. (Virginia school system? Colorado school system? It is becoming hard to track this sort of thing.) Selection describes the process by which the benefit given to the reproductive “fitness” by certain inherited traits will serve to increase the instance of this trait in a sexually reproducing population. You may also know about genetic drift, a somewhat more difficult concept, and the less teleological cousin of selection. This is the aspect of randomness in genetics, whether it be the metaphorical mutational tree that may fall on a particular individual or the other random aspects to a species overall genetic makeup that no less effect how a species may evolve, causing the expression of traits to leap in bounds rather than trickle. If selection is the slow, plodding work of a species’ R&D department, genetic drift is the sudden flash of insight from an inventor, or junior-level programmer. In a way.
Now, these two mechanisms control the evolution of a single species, but where do new species come from? It turns out there are several different models for how we reach speciation: a “branch of the tree”, so to speak. Primarily, these splits first manifest across geographic pattern. Let’s start with allopatric speciation. Some sort of geographic isolation occurs to split a population, like a river changing its course to split a species of rodents into to isolated groups. These two groups evolve on their own, and when they are somehow reintroduced into the same territory, they have become two different species.
(The easy distinction of species is an inability to interbreed, either because of genetics, sexual choice, or physiology. This is, interestingly, an “agonistic” definition, in that it is difference from others that creates a unifiable sameness. One might try and re-phrase, saying that the ability to breed positively defines a species, but this is not exactly true, and not every member of a species can or will successfully breed with every other member. Whereas, absolutely no member of a species can breed with any member of another species, definitively. Each species can only be defined by its difference from other species, and therein lies its unity. But then, hybrid species create a problem for this definition—and we begin to see the difficulty of discussing species taxonomies.)
Then there is peripatric speciation, a subset of allopatric. In this instance a smaller subset of the population is somehow separated from the majority of the species. This is notable, because genetic drift plays a larger factor in small populations, where a sudden individual change can more quickly resonate through the entire population. Speciation then occurs relatively rapidly. A cool example is the London Underground mosquito, whose provenance is self-explanatory.
Next, and more interesting, is parapatric speciation. Check this out–there can be a continuum of related, interbreeding populations in a linked geographic area. Several species, spread across a long, lateral terrain. But, the species on one end of the continuum cannot breed with the other end, because over the course of the habitat zone, insurmountable changes in the species occur. Some of these are called “ring species”, like the Larus gulls; their range extends around the Arctic Circle Eastward from Scandinavia, across Russia, across the Bering Straight to Canada, and then to the United Kingdom. Each neighboring species differentiation (there are seven) can interbreed with its neighbor except between the UK and Scandinavia! The differences become too great as those minor variances add up. (Note: there are other unclear species with different levels of interbreeding ability in the same domain, which complicates matters. But the Larus gull is a well-known proof of concept.)
Lastly, there is sympatric speciation: in which two species develop from one species in a single habitat. There are many theories of why this may occur, and disputes about what constitutes clear and distinct sympatric speciation. One theory is that sympatric speciation might actually be heteropatric speciation: a case of micro-allopatric speciation. In other words, although the general habitat of the entire species might be intact, there could be small-scale geographic differentiation that allows the speciation to occur. The distinction of difference in geography is as hard to make as the distinction between separate species, so it seems. What constitutes a difference in geography that is strong enough to attribute speciation to its presence? What other factors might be involved? Geography, as it turns out, may mean many different things, and may only be the easiest ways for humans to measure and define speciation. Take a good example of sympatric speciation: there are two species of Orca whale in the Northeast Pacific. There are the resident population, that have a particular territory that they stick to, and the transient population, that migrates. Though their habitats overlap and are contiguous, these two species stay away from each other, and do not interbreed. What sort of geography might these whales be seeing that we cannot? Something to do with continental shelves? Average ocean temperature? Salinity? They have different whale songs. Is this a language barrier? What sort of lessons do parental whales teach their offspring about the opposite species? Do they somehow teach the message, “don’t hang out with those filthy transient whales,” or is it in a more implicit sense that they make the distinction? What sort of consciousness to whales have, that they might be able to conceptualize these identities, or even, the concept of difference itself? Come to think of it, how does any animal that is not human think of different “species”, whether the competitors for habitat sites, or those that they eat? Do they think in rigid taxonomies the way we do, or is “nature’s” view of nature more fluid? Can we even conceptualize how a non-spatially linguistic consciousness would think?
Perhaps you see what I’m getting to here, other than animal psychology. In case my rambling discourse and marginal, Wikipedia-synthesized theory isn’t clear, I’ll lay it out, and in doing so take a sharp turn from established evolutionary theory. My question: is it possible that the human species could undergo sympatric speciation, and we wouldn’t even know it?
This is dangerous ground, because speciation theories about humans has had a bad history. From the postulated difference between the Caucasian races and the mongoloids, to the more para-science ideas of phrenology and other so-assumed inheritable behavioral characteristics (as it turns out, skull shape is nothing like the shape of a finch’s beak), to even horrifyingly recent case law regarding inter-race marriages, there has been many efforts to draw distinctions between groups of humans based on superficial differences, and they have proved false. The American Anthropological Association Statement on Race says that 94% of noticeable differences in physical characteristics widely construed as “race” occur within commonly defined races. So in other words, when we identify someone as being of a particular race, we are basing these distinctions on a set of physical assumptions that are not statistically significant in any way. Blond hair, blue eyes, nose size, eye shape, skin tone: none of these actually define a categorical difference, because their varietal distribution and common co-occurrences only exist in our mind, not in the actual human species. These false categorizations of humanity are construed and perpetuated for nefarious reasons, not for any real insight into our species. I don’t think I need to go into reptilian-focused conspiracy theories to drive the point home.
Even the most geographically isolated of human cultures are easily part of our species. But no group has been completely geographically isolated for more than a few hundred years at most. Geographic isolation, as we might think of it within our own lifespans is not necessarily firm over the history of population groups. Just because a group of humans lives on an island or in the middle of the jungle, doesn’t mean they have no contact with other humans on the next island or on the edge of the jungle. Humans are notoriously migrant, especially for the purposes of sexual contact. Physical isolation is another misaligned condition of a colonialist mindset; just because a place is hard for a European to reach or does not have roads does not mean it is isolated.
But what if there were traits of categorical difference that were not immediately identifiable by eye? The misnomers of race and physical distance are both visually construed. What if there were subtle human cultural geographies, within the contiguous species habitat of humanity?
What is the extent of genetics’ effect upon our behavior? I’m hardly a genetic determinist, but there seem to be a number of, well, let’s not call them behaviors, but instead call them patterns of thinking. A young man is of the sort who enjoys a messy household, where everything is visible. A young lady likes a fastidiously clean home, for no reason except a sense of comfort. This is not a trait that will improve genetic selection for this trait (at least not with a modern general level of hygiene to the “messiness”). But it might direct the course of genetic drift. Those who prefer a messy household will have more chances of swapping genes with others of a similar predilection, and vice versa. As mutations and other selection occurs, this population within the population will have a greater chance of evolving separately from the rest of the population because of its preference to a certain sort of mate: a potential for speciation by sympatric speciation. Their levels of cleanliness becomes a geography, separating a population within a population. IF, and I stress, only if, cleanliness is a trait that is genetically inheritable, and so the child of a neat parent will also be neat, and this geography can persist in separating a population for long enough for speciation to occur. If this geography collapses after one generation, then the effect of separating out part of the gene pool is negligible. So this is clearly a long shot. But there are many things we find attractive or abhorrent in potential mates.
What inheritable traits could serve as a “ridge” of cultural geography? Or, what traits, through one mechanism or another, find themselves echoed strongly enough from one generation to the next, that they could be considered to be a feature of cultural geography? In the case of sympatric speciation, sexual choice plays a large role. Certain birds may select mates based on their call, which in turn is informed by their beak shape. A small physiological different then transforms into a bigger difference from the perspective of the harshly competitive world of bird song American Idol. Certainly a taste in food will inform which individuals are more likely to mate, in that they will be close to each other, eating in the same places. So a taste for salt could lead to a romantic encounter in the snack aisle. Or would the competition drive them apart, because your mate keeps raiding your snack stash? What about appearance? What sorts of appearance that is found attractive is based upon gene selection, and what sorts are just pure aesthetics? At what point do aesthetics begin to reflect inheritable traits, and not just good old-fashioned sexiness? Is there really a difference between the two?
We know certain otherwise un-genetic patterns are extensible through generations in humans. A pleasure in reading is something that is often passed from parents to children, by nurture if not by nature. What about taste in music? An appreciation for genres of art? How about family card games? Sure, you could teach your significant other to play trump games. But if his/her family didn’t play trump games, maybe it isn’t because they simply never learned. Maybe they dislike them, instead preferring word puzzles. And so their children prefer word puzzles. Are your other forms of genetic attraction powerful enough to never want to play cards at home again, and to never pass them to your children? Will you adopt these puzzles to please your spouse? It’s not just about items of small preference—it’s about small preferences adding up to define our lives, and accordingly, defining who we spend our lives with. Is it just deciding what to do with the family on a Saturday night, or is this cultural-genetic selection at work? What features of cultural geography are mere rivers, and what are oceans?
Clearly, a great number of rhetorical questions may be applied, but I am over-running my question mark quota. Let me just say this to you: I can foresee several… let me say “traits”, at work in human culture that put the possibility of me breeding with particular individuals completely off the table. In fact, I perceive such strong “cultural geography” separating me from certain females in the population, that there would never even be the least inkling of the likelihood that we would accidentally, drunkenly, completely blacked out, marooned on a deserted island, be in any sort of position to swap gametes. Never. Under no circumstances. I’ll leave the exact topology of this geography for another time, but let me say there is no crossing those mountains, and no swimming that sea. Granted, I’m an hot-blooded American male. We all have… traveled to new territory to see what’s going on across the river. As a fellow once said, “you always say to yourself, ‘I will never sleep with a girl who wears Uggs.’ And then one day you wake up, and there is a pair of fuzzy boots next to the bed.” (That being a river I have never personally crossed, thankfully. But everyone has a story they are not proud of.) We all have our standards. And then we have our standards that end up broken underneath a bottle that was kicked off the arm rest of the futon of someone whose name you didn’t quite get by a leg stuck in a pair of pants in the dark.
America is a big place. There are a lot of young people out there, and they all are looking to breed. So many potential mates to choose from—they must be pairing up based on something. The same sort of music. They grew up in the same sort of town. Maybe they do the same drugs, which are the same drugs their parents did. The fact is, there are so many different ways of separating ourselves culturally, I would be surprised if there wasn’t a combination of cultural behaviors that separated us beyond all possibility of willful interbreeding. Maybe a human ring species will develop, leading from punk rock to vegetarianism to pacificism to Christianity to mysticism to cult member to masochist to soldier to engineer to teacher to soft rock fan. We love the notion of star-crossed lovers, but let’s admit it. Each of us has that category of “no way, absolutely not”, and while we may have mutual friends with mutual friends, between some people, it just ain’t going to happen. I could probably construct thousands of these potential cultural continuum chains if I sat and thought about it. This is a different sort of geography. It doesn’t matter than these links aren’t always assured, or that people aren’t always so cut and dry, or that the linkage doesn’t always stay the same. Is it inconceivable that my next thousand engenderings will never exchange genetic information with gene lines from rural Alabama? Or from urban Novosibirsk? Or from suburban Chicago, even? How big must our population become, and how diverse much our cultural geography grow, before these sorts of rifts are not just possible, but assured? And we’d never notice as these difference develop, because which each neighboring cultural territory keeps making babies with its neighbors, the ends never interbreed, and genetic drift is meanwhile allowed to make the difference actually genetically real. Until one day, when a Boy Scout leader from Saskatchewan just happens to settle down with a post-punk singer from Curitiba, they decide to have a child, and then their fertility counselor sits them down to discover something very interesting the doctors discovered in their genetic profile.
One more thing. A common, every day way of deciding the difference between our species and another species, at least for the non-biologist humans in our population, is basically no different that how we choose what to eat. What sort of life form, culturally, can we kill as indiscriminately as if it were a food source? What is different enough from us, that our widespread murder of its kind is more akin to farming than genocide? We kill other species, and it may be cruel, but it is never murder. Our cultural violence reifies the difference between our species and others. We kill chimpanzees for research purposes. And yet, genetically, we could potentially interbreed with chimps.
Chimps often eat each other. Humans have eaten each other throughout history, for mostly cultural-symbolic reasons. But this is interesting: all documented forms of human cannibalism either choose to eat humans within the cultural group, or from without of the cultural group: but never both. What we allow ourselves to kill affirms cultural identity. What we allow ourselves to kill affirms species identity. What we would eat / what we would kill / who we would fuck. Cultural geography–don’t say I didn’t warn you. Cultural geography is potentially dangerous to our species: both, potentially to our shared genotype, and to us as individuals. Who knows, once these differences become established, what it might justify in our minds. The war of all against all might be a myth. As chaotic as the vastness of the human species and its culture might be, the simplistic duality of us against them might be our natural state. The agonism of us versus them, among the human species, is spread out over a geography so complicated, we haven’t even begun to comprehensively map it.
Next week we’ll look up something much more sexy than evolutionary theory, though not quite as alluring as cannibalism. Step right this way gentlemen (and ladies with a strong constitution and a purely scientific interest), for a naughty peek at the Museum of Short Sequined Dresses.
I don’t have a full essay in my head about Wikileaks, but I do have a little blog post in me. Something called so historical, even if it is not, bears a little bit of thought on whether or not it is.
Largely, I’m in favor of Wikileaks and the recent leaks that have provoked such historical emotions. Embarrassment is one of the worst reasons to keep a secret. And furthermore, anyone who argues that the truth ought to remain hidden should really think about whom this would benefit. Regardless of your opinion of Julian Assange or Wikileaks’ philosophy, what is really in question is the documents themselves. Arguing that you, either as American citizen or citizen of the world, would prefer to be lied to about government activities and opinions around the world, displays such a head-in-the-sand attitude that if I kicked you in the ass, you’d probably break your neck. Lies have utility. But the truth’s utility is greater. Considering that lies’ utility hasn’t gotten us anything other than a generally rotten foreign policy and two long wars, I think it’s time to give truth a shot.
Furthermore, look at the amount of these cables that seem related to ensuring the stability Western investment abroad–not lives, infrastructure, or ecosystems. That benefits investors, not you and me. And if you think that investors should lie to improve their profits, then you are on the side of Bank of America, Enron, BP, and every capitalist that has even stolen, lied, and assaulted their employees to benefit themselves. So, bear that in mind.
But all that aside, let us look at the historicity of this event. Much is made of Assange, because every story needs its central character, and because that makes Wikileaks easier to assault. There is a head of that snake, which the Canadians could assassinate, or who could be brought up on charges, or about whom jingoistic jerks could make any number of threats to make themselves feel awesome. There’s also Bradley Manning, who allegedly leaked the documents originally, and who will almost certainly be brought up on charges.
But I think the emphasis on these two characters is misplaced. Certainly, these documents would not be leaked to Wikileaks if each of them had not taken the steps that they have taken, at least according to the narrative of this event. But does that mean that in an alternate, Assange/Manning-free dimension, these documents would still be secret?
I say that they would still be released. This is obviously a broken hypothesis, because unless we could prove that other dimensions exist, peak into them, and then come back into our realm without tearing time-space, there is no way to prove or disprove it. And yet, this is what proves it for me. Because there is no way to prove what would happen without the presence of these two actors, the question is mute. But what this means is that transitively, we cannot prove the positive causality of these actors actions, either. The basis of causality is “for every action an equal and opposite reaction”. But what if without the action, the reaction was still there? Schrodinger’s Cat begs us withhold judgement on causality until we find out for sure. Naturally, at first glance these two are (allegedly) “responsible”. But to attribute a unique historical causality to these events, imbued by wills of these two people, would require additional, and impossible, proof in the negative. IF Assange and Manning are historically necessary for the exposure of these documents, THEN their absence would result in these documents never being exposed in such a way. Regardless of what is likely, what is plausible, or what is “close enough”, there is no way to say for sure. In another dimension, literally ANYTHING could happen. The cat could be both dead and alive.
I don’t strictly believe in the will, and I also don’t strictly believe in fate. Both are ways of explaining causality. The former links historical causality to direct human action. The latter links historical causality to a lack of direct human action. Clearly, human action plays a role in all historical occurrences we call “events”. But to what extent? Solely and directly? Or only tangentially and haphazardly? We can say neither with assurance. I love the Final Destination series for this reason. The plot of these films implies a strong role for the tangential and haphazard in controlling events. There is a “fate” (again, a characterization for the purpose of telling a story) that would see these attractive young people dead. But, Fate could not murder them if the scissors had not been placed at such an angle, if a desire to drink tea hadn’t led to a spill of liquid on a wood floor, which you live over because you hate carpet, and if the mouse hadn’t run past your leg, leading your cat to tangle your steps at the exact moment… and so on. Human action is not irrelevant, it is just so much smaller than the larger network of “Fate”, which is the culmination of all the abstract, obscure, and eventually murderous effects of human action that we would ordinarily consider irrelevant and unrelated. And this is the horror aspect of the film–the horror is not that we can’t control our fate, but that EVERYTHING we do controls our fate, from leaving a toothbrush at a certain angle, to taking the car rather than the bus, to sitting facing the sun rather than away. Your life is always at risk, and everything you do minimizes or increases that risk. THE WORLD IS OUT TO GET YOU, simply by being the world. Death is stalking you simply by you being mortal. And who could prove any different, without visiting another world exactly similar except for a few small differences, to see if that world is out to get you any less?
So, if Assange/Manning didn’t exist would these documents still be exposed? Yes, because while these two individuals may have had the dedication to certain anarchistic and populist goals, this is a world of 6 billion people. The chance that others, given the same opportunity, would have done the same, is great. 3 million Americans had access to these documents–the surprising thing is not that they leaked. It is surprising that they didn’t leak sooner. Secrets are meant to be shared. You can quote me on that. The motivations that would lead someone to keep information to themselves is exactly the same as the motivations that would lead someone to share that information. It is entropy. As secrets pile up, they will eventually spill. Secrets are created, just as higher energy systems will develop from humble beginnings, but only to eventually return to earth. As I said, there are 6 billion people out there. The real irrational attribution of historical will is to assume that you alone, puny human, are strong enough to keep a secret. Harriet the Spy learned this lesson. Why didn’t the State Department? All it takes is a few anarchistic hackers, and all of your brilliant powers of international intrigue are posted on a website.
What is historical here? The status quo. Someone tried to build a big tower, and then it fell down. It’s happened before, and it will happen again. This is what humans do. We can remark on the particular humans that seemed to have affected this particular collapse, but we can’t praise them or blame them. We can only acknowledge them as equal variables in the massive human equation, outliers perhaps, until they return to the center and click into place in the algorithm. So if you want to blame anyone, blame yourself. We’re all equally human, and we’re all part of the system that kept the secrets, and part of the system that leaked the secrets. To call anyone more deserving of blame, or blameless, is to take a view of history that blames the bullets for the wounds they cause. Persecute them if you will. Try and keep all pointy sticks and cats out of your path. But the minute the point of a blade finds you, it doesn’t matter how many you dodged in the past.
And yet, we all keep trying to dodge. Every single day.
“The unspeakable depression of lighting the fires every morning with papers of a year ago, and getting glimpses of optimistic headlines as they go up in smoke.”
I’ve recently been reading A Pattern Language, a series of described patterns for improving city planning, architecture, and social structures. I’ve been taking copious notes as I read, and hope to write some sort of more lengthy critique, response, and modern reformulation of the ideas in the book.
But just a little comparison, between the idealistic tone of the book, and the odd surreality of the actual world.
In the pattern section, “Old People Everywhere”, the authors of A Pattern Language make the case for integrating older residents with the rest of the the age range, in such ways:
We therefore need a way of taking care of old people which provides for the full range of their needs:
1. It must allow them to stay in the neighborhood they know best–hence some old people in every neighborhood.
2. It must allow old people to be together, yet in groups small enough not to isolate them from the younger people in the neighborhood.
3. It must allow those old people who are independent to live independently, without losing the benefits of community.
4. It must allow those who need nursing care or prepared meals, to get it, without having to go to nursing homes far from the neighborhood.
And so on, similarly. Integration, scalability, support, independence. These are common themes in A Pattern Language. All good.
But contrast it to this recent feature on BLDGBLOG, which, to make a reduction by way of analogy, is kind of “A Pattern Language” of the fortean, forgotten, and unconscious infrastructure of cities.
One particular detail that stands out is also the first they mention: “New York City has given pedestrians more time to cross at more than 400 intersections in an effort to make streets safer for older residents.”
While most adults average four feet per second when crossing the street, older residents manage only three, transportation experts say. So signals have been retimed at intersections like Broadway and 72nd Street, where pedestrians now have 29 seconds to cross, four more than before.
Introducing time-delay into city services by splicing an extra stretch of the present into New York’s infrastructure, this is a temporal re-engineering of urban space: a longer stroll across the street with friends, no longer having to run to avoid that yellow light, becomes experiential evidence that a subtle though highly deliberate retuning of time in the city has occurred.
[...]
I’m also reminded of the fake bus stop that was added outside a hospital in Germany so as to calm—and, frankly, to trap—Alzheimer’s patients who had wandered out onto the street: “The result is that errant patients now wait for their trip home at the bus stop, before quickly forgetting why they were there in the first place.” Does decoy infrastructure, similar to these bus stops, already play a role in New York City—and, if not, will it—for the psychiatric well-being of elderly residents? What unexpected forms might these well-camouflaged psychological props take?
Interesting how city planning for the elderly takes a much more surreptitious form in the real world, then the positive inclusion of A Pattern Language‘s intentional communities. Sort of a Big Brother as the boy scout helping the elderly cross the street. A matter of subtle persuasion in altered street light timings, and disguise as helpful trap. Not that these aren’t good additions. In NYC I often remarked to myself how dangerous it was that people who move slowly across intersections were often left in the street as the light changed to green. And the fake bus stop, while sounding a little cruel and misleading, is much more friendly than say, posting guards.
So, not to say that A Pattern Language is overly idealistic and positive, but it is interesting how real cities are much more tuned to the unseen and the unconscious than free choice and consensus.
Reading the latest Bookforum, I happened across Michael Schaffer’s review of Richard Florida’s new book, The Great Reset: with a overly long sub-title marked out by a colon to display just exactly how non-fiction this book is, after the catchy short title. Here’s a link to the review, but you have to register with Bookforum.com (though it is free to do so).
I hate titles with sub-titles. I’ve harbored this hatred since I started to realize just how necessary they were to write a proper academic paper in grad school. You need to write something kind of catchy and short for the title, but you also have to tell the reader what the paper is ACTUALLY about, because they are naturally too impatient to read the abstract or the introduction. I stopped doing this, and just left a catchy title. Naturally, the one, perhaps two people who read my paper would ask me, “don’t you want to have a sub-title, so I know what this is about?” And although I didn’t, they wanted a sub-title for a reason. Because with an article or a book that has a sub-title, the person picking it up knows right away whether or not they should be expected to agree with the thesis from the get go, and can either put down the manuscript, or read on, accordingly.
As it turns out, the only people who read books with sub-titles such as, “: how the Internet is ruining this new, younger, more attractive generation”, or “: the coming biological conspiracy”, or “: the end of any non-subtitle titling in our time” are the people who are ready to either argue for or against the point made in the sub-title. It’s like adding a sticker to the cover of a book, saying, “hey! Are you semi-informed, willing to accept anecdotal evidence as causal fact, and most importantly, consider yourself intellectual and opinionated? Then why not try, Non-Fiction: As Advertised in the Huffington Post!!!”
But while my repulsion at the compulsive colon-izing of titles into shit-strewn streams of senseless sub-advertisement may have you fooled into believing that current titling practices are my real beef; no, in fact, I think the book ITSELF actually sounds like a load of crap. I only digress to explain how I could guess this without actually reading it.
I could guess this without reading the book, simply because books with sub-titles don’t have to be read. It is all right there. In the sub-title, as I have just complained. In Florida’s sub-title, “How New Ways of Living and Working Drive Post-Crash Prosperity”, I can tell that there is no point in reading the anecdotal evidence he’s pulled together about how he sees America’s future in the way we’re recovering from the “crash”. How? Because we haven’t recovered yet! Anyone telling you about the “current new way of doing X” is full of shit, because there is no way to predict the future, let alone predict the future historical conception of this present time period. That is what he is attempting to sell the reader in this sub-title. He is sub-titling us, while we’re still writing the book. And I’m not buying.
The funny part is, I actually agree with his few, repetitive points. As Michael Schaffer puts it (who I assume has read past the sub-title):
The basics: Economies that foster arty, bohemian types, good. Public policy that props up outmoded manufacturing work, bad. Hooray for immigration, tolerance, diversity, and employers who seek to harness the creative energies of even the lowliest janitor. Boo to spending tax money on stadium megaprojects, deus ex machina factory schemes, and failing auto companies. Better to lure experimental theaters, WiFi-enabled coffeehouses, and graphic-design concerns.
As anyone cogent and breathing at this point of time could tell you, yes, this stuff is generally occurring right now. There are plenty of people who share this opinion and are living its lifestyle. Briefly–me, you, and everyone we know. I’m writing via open-sourced self-publishing software, and you’re reading it, yes? But does that mean that we have stumbled upon a narrative of history here? Is my bamboo, locally screenprinted T-Shirt and your tech startup THE NEW WAY OF THE FUTURE/I MEAN THE NEW WAY OF NOW? Of course not. This is just something that is happening. We could be walking towards the edge of a cliff. Our pants could be on fire. We could all die in a methane-induced hyper-tsunami. Maybe. The point is, we don’t know. This may be the grand narrative of 2008-20??, or it might be a minor footnote. It might be the punchline of a joke. But who knows for sure? Richard Florida’s sub-title.
What really gets me about this, and is the reason that I take the time to write about it, is that this sub-titular declaration of a undeclarable though potentially positive history is the same grain of utopian, anti-historical thinking that is woefully endemic to this particular strain of post-20th century hopefully-not-quite-so-capitalism. The same people who point wild-eyed towards “new consumption patterns that are less centered around houses and cars, new forms of infrastructure that once again speed the movement of people, goods, and ideas, and a radically altered and much denser economic landscape that will provide the springboard for a whole new way of life and drive the development of new industries and jobs,” are the same people who can search for an example of the same recently written up in the New York Times, and with a ctrl-C and a hyperlink, declare Q.E.D., click “submit” on the History of The Human Race, and sit back and surf the Internet on their iPad while they wait for Obama to personally deliver their new locally-produced electric bicycle. It is nothing short of blindly utopian. In the same spirit as those intellectuals of the 18th and 19th century, who had a few epiphanies over the classic histories and then led a bunch of settlers into a malaria-infested swamp, these subtitle: utopians are treating history as a deductive science. If car-centered capitalism led to pollution and failed companies, then bike-centered capitalism leads to sustainability and profits! From the specific to the general, by way of good faith and positive thinking.
Now, it’s not quite as bad as someone leading a group of settlers into a malaria-infested swamp because an angel with a bunch of really excellent golden plates said to do so. But the result is the same. I could create my own deductive logical statement about that. But this deductive utopianism–and now I risk generalizing via my own logical negativism–is a real problem we can’t seem to get over. Less McMansion, less SUVs, more sharing of ideas, more change, new innovating industries: these are all good things. And yet, we have no strategy or plan for these good things, other than the common belief that these are all good things. What exactly is that “economic landscape”, that will be the “springboard”? What do these utopian generalizations actually look like? Maybe Florida gets to it in his book, but I seriously doubt it. If he did, then that would be the sub-title, and not the generalizations, “new ways of living”, and “post-crash prosperity”. If we really stumbled blindly away from our LCD screens and headfirst into a new way of living and post-crash prosperity, out of GLOBAL SYSTEMIC ECONOPOCALYSE, we wouldn’t have to read books about it. We’d already be doing it. But instead, like everything else “new”, “innovative”, and “game-changing”, we’re just talking about it.
Anyone to whom you pose the question: “what does this post-urban, web 2.0, economy of the commons look like?” will invariably respond with either more generalizations, “Green-living”, “user-focused”, and “crowd-sourcing”, or more anecdotal specific examples, like “Amsterdam’s bike lanes”, “The Twitter hive-mind”, and “Wikipedia”, which might as well be abstract categories, for how much motive intellectual currency the terms actually carry. Have you ever bought a bicycle with Like buttons? Or put the hive-mind in your gas tank? Or went grocery shopping on Wikipedia? I’m not saying that there is no business plan or profitability to these things–I’m saying that they haven’t been organized in terms of an actual economy. The old capitalist would ask about profitability, because that is how they fit it into their economy. But how do you fit it into any economy, other than a generalized solipsistic success, only in terms of itself? Wikipedia is a great encyclopedia. But it is a shitty phone book. Twitter is a great way to meet new people. But it is a crappy way of organizing people. Facebook has some benefits (probably), but do they warrant the amount of electricity sucked up by their data centers? This is not about pushing tools to do more than they were designed to do. This is about assembling a toolbox with any sort of complexity, completeness, and fungibility. If you are going to build a house, you have to have some money; or so the conventional capitalist economy dicatates. With this money, you can buy the tools you need but don’t have, get materials, and if needed, hire help. If you don’t have enough money, you can work to get it, or otherwise make exchanges in order to get the materials and help you need. You can make exchanges to coordinate the resources necessary for a complex task. But how would Twitter help you build a house? How does Twitter serve as a tool in any sort of economy? For example:what do you do if you need someone in your local area to drive you to the airport? Advertise on Twitter, and hope for a response? What if your follower list isn’t big enough to get one? Hope that someone developed a third-party ride-sharing app? Or postpone your trip while you develop one yourself? Some social network that is. Sounds like I’m still better off with a Yellow Pages and cab fare.
What I see when I look at this Now world, is a period without history. This is a time when people are doing a lot of different things, but without any idea of what it is good for, or how it will connect to anything else. Everyone’s got themselves a sub-title, but no one is writing or reading any books. Tossr: earn coupons by taking out your neighbors garbage. FriendShare: reducing your childhood social awkwardness. Fckr: the crowd-sourced third-wave feminism porn-alternative. Yeah, sure, but what does any of this mean? What is the shelf-life of any of this? Is this our modern replacement for manifest destiny? Say what you want about grand narratives–at least they know what time they’re getting up tomorrow. Reserving a ZipCar does not count as a plan for the future.
Look, I’m as much of a slacker as the rest of us. But we need to reject the easiness of sub-titles. We need to stop giving people the option of only looking at the cover and feeling as if they’ve learned something. And we need to stop taking that option ourselves, especially when it comes to what we planning on doing about all the very real problems that we claim to have so many potential, proof-of-concept solutions for. We have all these great tools, and yet we’re not building anything. At least nothing too big to sell on Etsy, take to Burning Man, to fund on Kickstarter, or hype on TED. We are not building anything that is not a generalized sub-title for what might one day be an okay idea. We make so many things, and yet nothing infrastructural, nothing systemic. We need to drop the commodified, response video, Internet-meme, micro-payment mentality. The railroad barons did not get rich by customizing their smart phones. We need to make a plan. We need to write the full book. Knowing us, we can make it a plan that will be okay if we only carry halfway to completion, before we get distracted by all of our other projects. You can do that, you know. Plan big, plan structured, but plan in steps. It’s better than pretending that our lack of plan is the plan. I’m no time traveler, but I have a feeling of what that would look like in hindsight. Kind of like a gulf full of oil.
Right now, the diaries are in the period of World War Two after France has fallen, but before the Battle of Britain has begun.
Another site, http://xplanes.tumblr.com/, is doing a Battle of Britain retrospective on the same sort of time line right now. They are covering the early history of the Luftwaffe, as a prelude to the Battle itself.
Between the two of these, it is a very interesting sense of history. Previously, we’ve read history as a summation, an analysis, and a critical engagement. This means we can reflect back upon an entire period of history from a vantage point of general awareness. But what blogs and the wide-spread use of syndicated publishing that allows you to take small chunks over a long period of time have introduced, is the ability to experience well-documented history at the same rate it occurred.
I was looking back at the economic crisis of the last couple years, and recalling how now we remember these particular instances of “historic event”. We remember (or I do, because I was reading the economic news every day) the near bankruptcy of Bear Sterns, the seizure of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and AIG, the fall of Lehman Brothers, the -1000 point Dow day. But these all occurred over the course of 9+ months. Now it’s one blip–the economic meltdown. When it happened, however, there were days and weeks of “nothing” in between that are now evaporated from the general historical picture.
But the RSS-history of X planes and the Orwell Diaries re-introduce these days of “nothing”, which now we can see, are anything but nothing. They are days filled with hope, doubt, criticism, speculation in the face of no new news, predictions, and general rehashing of facts to fill the void. Orwell himself has discussed possibilities ranging from the invasion of Britain on the part of the Nazis, to a peace treaty, to war on the West African coast. We know that these are just speculations, but during the time it happened, speculation was as good as fact.
Think of the BP Oil Disaster. We are in Day 84 now. We might remember the fire, the first signs of leak, the constant revising of the figures, the failure of one method after another. But will we remember the days of waiting, the worry, the speculation of worst and worster case scenarios, the inability to do anything but wait for BP to fix it? How do you analyze that part of history, the slowness of time, in any other way than reliving every day, hour, and moment? Is that important to analyze, or can it be left out? Is anybody recording the camera feeds from the bottom of the ocean? Or is that video just spilling out into time, to dilute and flow away, into an oily mess we will never be able to gather up again?
When I’ve talked about atemporality, I’ve often emphasized the “immediate” nature of the perception of time. History and the world of facts are immediately apparent, and the phenomenological reduction explodes like a collapsing supernova to encompass all awareness. History becomes the entire world as we perceive it, and then our entire perception is historical. All perception, and thus the entire world is encompassed throughout our historical sense.
But it is important to remember that the “instantaneous” aspect of history develops from reducing the span of awareness to particular moments, and then concentrating these moments. In the same way that “fast motioning” a film is not done by increasing the frame rate, but by decreasing the total number of frames. By taking out the frames where “nothing” is happening, our mind perceives that the action is occurring faster, or, “all at once”. In order to trick the mind into believing that it has “total awareness” it must leave things out, or also convince itself that the missing pieces are not important. “Waiting” become irrelevant, if there are other things to do while waiting.
Time is not changing between “slow” and “instantaneous”. What changes is our minds and what we have to work with. Orwell would meditate on the current situation, while we would consider new situation after new situation after new situation. He has time to reduce having already a reduced about of information, whereas we have an infinite amount of information to reduce, already having a reduced amount of time. Is specific analysis any better than generic comparison? What is better, to try and focus the brain to remember something, or to look it up immediately? Does one serve us better, either through results or through pain of practice?
As with any theory of perception, it is important to recognize not only what we are perceiving, but what we are not perceiving. The gaps and the missing information are not just “the cutting room floor”, that which was edited out on purpose and could be archived and one day re-released as the “unedited cut”. That is the action that happens between frames, what is not captured, which depending on how you look at it, may or may not have ever actually happened. Perception is not an illusionists trick, or a special effect. It is a metaphysical category. It is a grounding concept in how we can say that anything exists.
And so, in the modernist era, the “now” was the point of contention. This was the kernel of metaphysical being for so many theories of reality and existence. But in the atemporal era, “now” is stretching to encompass all of history. So what is our kernel? Accessibility? Immediacy, whether now, past, or future? The span of the immediately accessible network?
It’s interesting to speculate about the “dark networks”. Those data that are only accessible to those who look for them, and not in the analysis of the generic network. Information pertaining to a secret history? Or an irrelevant history? How would one know?
What didn’t Orwell write in his diaries? What sort of thoughts did we think that might have been important that we will never think of again?
What is the unconscious in our current perception of history? Will these dreams ever surface, or will we forget them forever? And what, in an atemporal world, does forever mean? What does “infinite” mean in an unmeasured world?
[This was written in 1977. The article the authors quote (in the block quote) was written in 1971. The funny part is, they were thinking about PHYSICAL networks. They were actually thinking about a network of roads and paths leading to everyone's houses, upon which students could walk to and fro. As it turns out, Ethernet cable is the new asphalt.]
“Illich describes a style of learning that is quite the opposite from schools. It is geared especially to the rich opportunities for learning that are natural to every metropolitan area:
The alternative to social control through the schools is the voluntary participation in society through networks which provide access to all its resources for learning. In fact these networks now exist, but they are rarely used for educational purposes. The crisis of schooling, if it is to have any positive consequence, will inevitably lead to their incorporation into the educational process….
Schools are designed on the assumption that there is a secret to everything in life; that the quality of life depends on knowing that secret; that secrets can be known only in orderly successions; and that only teachers can properly reveal these secrets. An individual with a schooled mind conceives of the world as a pyramid of classified packages accessible only to those who carry the proper tags. New educational institutions would break apart this pyramid. Their purpose must be to facilitate access for the learner: to allow him to look into the windows of the control room or the parliament, if he cannot get in the door. Moreover, such new institutions should be channels to whic hthe learner would hae access without credentials or pedigree–public spaces in which peers and elders outside his immediate horizon now become available.
[...]
In short, the educational system so radically decentralized becomes congruent with the urban structure itself. People of all walkd of life come forth, and offer a class in the things they know and love: professionals and workgroups offer apprenticeships in their offices and workshops, old people offer to teach whatever their life work and interest has been, specialists offer tutoring in their special subjects. Living and learning are the same. It is not hard to imagine that eventually every third or fourth household with have at least one person in it who is offering a class or training of some kind.”
If/when time travel occurs, communication will be an issue.
It’s often assumed in SF that one teleports discriminantly to another time, with the ease of fiction. Like turning back a page, and then you are right where you were, or rather, where you now want to be.
But if it is indeed possible to move matter through time at will, then it is only a small step to being in continuous contact with another time. For example, time traveler goes back to 1940, takes time-phone out of pocket, calls back to present, asks buddy to check to make sure the oven is off.
It seems like a small problem once you’ve traveled through time. Hell, you just traveled through time! You could, like, send said buddy a telegram at exactly the time you want him to read it, a la Back to the Future, and the messenger would appear as soon as you left and give your message in “present time”. Or if you had traveled forward, then you could zip back to 1940, and send the same latent message, and quick zip back to the future. If you can move through the fourth dimension at will, making sure messages are delivered on time seems easy.
Maybe: if you want to spend all your time-traveling time zipping around telling people things and leaving notes in conspicuous places. If trying to get a message delivered from the future to the past involved two separate time jumps (back, and forward again) this sort of leaping around just to shout messages will get pretty old. The whole point of communication is to transmit information without having to actually go to the recipient. Even if pressing a button on the time-watch-unit is all it takes, you are still taking your own relative time to do it.
So there needs to be a time-phone, capable of transmitting across the fourth dimension. I’m sure some roaming charges would apply, at least at first. But if you can move matter, moving electronic signals shouldn’t be too expensive.
But if there are time-phones, wouldn’t there be time-smart-phones too? This gets more confusing. If you are speaking to someone directly, you could dial in a particular time. But how do you send an email to the past? Where does the server exist? Would there be an atemporal 5th dimension server, or do you communicate with various epochal servers depending on when you are sending the message to? And what time do you want it to be sent? Does it matter when you send it, as long as it gets there when it ought to? How would a vacation-away-message work, if you were in the future? If you planned on returning to the exact same time you left, you wouldn’t need to set an auto-response, because from the vantage point of the present, you would be gone for no time at all. But say your plans changed, and you returned to the present a week later than you left. Would you first answer all your emails to the past from the future, where you could see them as having filled up your inbox, and sent them back pre-dated to the past before returning to the present? Or would you send back an auto-responder to the past, to tell the present that you will respond to their email when you get back from the future?
And what about the internet? Would your time-smart-phone connect to the internet of the time you were traveling to automatically, or to the internet of the time you brought it from? If you were, say, looking something up in Wikipedia, would you want it from the time you were familiar with, or the time you were currently inhabiting? Would you want the most recent information because it was the most accurate, or the info most current to a particular time, because it would be more authentic? How would cloud storage work? Would it be stuck in a particular time-moment of the cloud, or would it exist independently of the fourth dimension? How would you keep track of version edits if people were editing a document sequentially from various points in time? Will time require a new internet protocol address? Atemporal DHCP? Will HTML6 have temporal-flux codes? What browsers will provided native time-travel support? Which search engines will allow time-shift searching, and which will filter traffic based on the “standard model of history”?
Don’t even get me started on monthly usage plans and data caps.
“Although it was introduced at New York’s Sherry-Netherland Hotel on September 16, 1959, commercial models were not available until March 1960. The first machine, delivered to a Pennsylvania metal-fastener maker, weighed nearly 650 pounds. It needed a carpenter to uncrate it, an employee with “key operator” training, and its own 20-amp circuit.”
Birthing the verb, “to Xerox”, meaning to make a quick facsimile, but on paper, using the well-known electro-static monochrome process.
People around my office will still use the verb, even though we have a Xerox 700 Digital Color Press, a 4-color process dry press using toner with a diameter in the microns, that produces a full color image on anything from thin office paper to coated gloss sheet to polyester, in 600 dpi quality indistinguishable from a photograph to the average eye, up to 13″ by 19″, at a rate of 40 images a minute, for a few cents a piece. When I run something on this press, nobody says I’m “xeroxing it”, because that term sounds poor quality, black and white, hurried and rushed, and just good enough. When I’m running the Xerox 700, I’m printing. Same as Gutenberg, Paine, the New York Times, or Phaidon.
But there is something to be said for that “just good enough” quality. It enables copying, which is different than printing. You get a glut of documentation, as the Atlantic article linked above notes. Documents are not unique. They are forms, instantly replicable. Once you have signed your name to a contract, you can imagine that document replicated to infinity.
This, of course, is the essence of mechanical reproduction. It brings the concept of art, content, or product into the sphere of the “infinite”, whether it be to a mass audience, for mass consumption, for digital archiving, for digital distribution. We think nothing of firing off a few emails, simply because they are replicable. A few memos, a few trashy paperbacks, a few summer blockbusters, a few mp3s. For good or bad, our media has been xeroxed, and is as disposable as it is replaceable.
And it affects form as well as content. Think of the forms of that only exist because of easy replication, in low quality. Zines. Blogs. Twitter. Twitter is being archived by the Library of Congress. Telegrams were never archived, and those were only electric pulses.
Production spreads in many directions, and it is hard to quantify the dimensions. Quality becomes cheaper, quantity becomes more plentiful. But how do you quantify “available”? How about the quality of being multiple, so that copies can be distributed, lost, remade, and rehashed, losing quality, but increasing footprint?
Somewhere across the limited expanse of your body, the poet Jack Spicer was mailing and receiving letters with James Alexander. He thought of them as poetry. Maybe Alexander was a lover; maybe the poems were published during his lifetime, or perhaps not. I would be someone knows the answers to these questions—someone still alive. Or it even could be written down some place. To my edition of The Collected Work of Jack Spicer there is a lengthy introduction. Maybe it says there, but I read the introduction several weeks ago, and I cannot remember now.
But I read letter #5 in this edition just now—what do you mean, what “just now”? When? Just now. I don’t understand your question. But this is some of what it said, if I may reproduce it here for you:
It is not the monotony of nature but the poems beyond nature that call to each other above the poets’ heads. The heads of poets being a part of nature. It is not for us to make the lines of nature precise. Because of their fatal attraction for the lines of nature, for our heads.
We proclaim a silent revolution. The poems above our heads, without tongues, are tired of talking to each other over the gabble of our beliefs, our literary personalities, our attempts to project their silent conversation to an audience. When we give tongue we amplify. We are telephone switchboards deluded into becoming hi-fi sets. The terrible speakers must be allowed silence. They are not speaking to us.
Don’t you see, dear friend, 1959? You know so much! So much happened during your brief, single year life. You are an epoch unto yourself. And you were in the age of letters, my friend. Letters. And yet—so much!
I don’t need to tell you everything that occurred across the expanse of your skin. You know already. But Jack Spicer was sensing it. He was in it, friend, just as he was in you. The idealism within us, sending up poems like rockets into the even more idealistic heavens. But free from our gravity, the poems were still tied to our constraints. Poor natural us, stuck within our beliefs and our personalities. We could only aim upward, and fire away. It’s only natural. Our heads refusing to rise above our headstrong selves. As if we could be such a revolution of stereo.
You know the story, don’t you, friend? You’ve sent your share of letters, written your share of poems. Like any year, such a poet you, you let fire forward, trying to hit us in the back, and maybe remind us. The shooting gallery of history of course, no harm intended. Back in your day, when you mailed a letter, you had to believe—you had to take it on faith that it would get there. You had to write ahead of time to land your language missiles in the present, and more likely than not, when they got there they would too late, and land in the past. From one personality, to the next, you addressed your letters, and some times they got there. Sometimes not.
It must have been a hell of a time, friend 1959. I can’t even begin to imagine. But I got your letter, written via Jack, and I just wanted to touch base, and say, yes—I got it. I hope this reaches you well, wherever you are.
Love,
Adam
PS. A better way to reach me might be on my… actually, never mind. Forget it.
* * * * *
Dear 1977 (or maybe it was 1976, though my letter wasn’t translated for another ten years),
You had a hell of a life, didn’t you my friend? I’m sorry that I can’t quite recall your name, but this was about the time things were getting complicated. They perfected packet switching back then, and letter writing was going to change significantly. It’s leaving me a bit confused, to puzzle over it. But we’re still friends, aren’t we? I think I can call you my friend. I’m writing you this letter, and I only write letters to my friends.
I’m not the only one who is (was?) confused. Look at Jacques Derrida, puzzling over it himself in The Postcard. Direct mail, from the master of letters himself:
You give me words, you deliver them, dispensed one by one, my own, while turning them towards yourself and addressing them to yourself—and I have never loved them so, the most common ones become quite rare, nor so loved to lose them either, to destroy them by forgetting at the very instant when you receive them, and this instant would precede almost everything, my envoi, myself, so that they take place only once. One single time, you see how crazy this is for a word? Or for any trait at all? [ ] Eros in the age of technical reporductibility. You know the old story of reproduction, with the dream of a ciphered language [ ] Want to write a grand history, a large encyclopedia of the post and of the cipher, but to write it ciphered still in order to dispatch it you, taking all the precautions so that forever you are the only one to be able to decrypt it (to write it, then, and to sign), to recognize your name, the unique name I have given you, that you have let me give you, the entire strong-box of love supposing that my death is inscribed in it, or better that my body might be enclosed in it with your name on my skin, and that in any event my own or its survival or your own be limited to the life of—you.
Do you see what I mean? Such paranoia of the subject, we were forced to write in code just to get away from ourselves! And what does it mean, and what does I mean? Are we any closer to the truth? With all this semiotic packet-switching, the exchange of meaning through into high gear, played out upon the wires, and still, written one letter at a time, just like we always have.
And even with one of the best languages out there, with the vocabulary of psychoanalysis, Derrida was tripped up in the complexity, in the polymorphous perversity of our language, unable to do something as simple as send a letter from one person to another without becoming lost in the pathways of desire. From the unconscious, to our heads, and up in the air in a brilliant Spicer Rocket, and down again—without any improvement in targeting. Our desires, beliefs, personalities, and egos, all of them clinging to the unchained beauty of our poetic language even as they try and set our poems free. Trapped in the bureaucracy, the academy of letters, our meaning certainly knew its form, but because a twisted mass of substance. Perhaps if Jacques knew about packet-switching—but then, such things were secrets back then.
Secrets, secrets, secrets! The ultimate in letters, such clear and concise poems of meaning, composed and sealed, signed, and delivered to the eyes only. These are not poems to be read to an audience, and allowed to bounce around the heavens. They are directed speech, expressed to one and one only. And afterwards, after communique has been carried out, that one recipient is to destroy the message. The one, the I, must hear those fatal words, “this message will self-destruct.”
If you had listened to me, you would have burned everything, and nothing would have arrived. I mean on the contrary that something ineffaceable would have arrived, instead of this bottomless misery in which we are dying. But it is unjust to say that you did not listen to me, you listened closely to the other voice (we were already a crowd in that first envelope) which asked you not to burn, to burn in order to save. Nothing has arrived because you wanted to preserve (and therefore to lose), which in effect formed the sense of the order coming from behind my voice, you remember, so many years ago, in my first “true” letter: “burn everything”. You had answered me the next day, and this is how your letter ended: “The letter ends on the exigency of this supreme pleasure: the desire to be torn by you” (you are the mistress of the equivocal and I liked it that you left it to me to attribute this desire to the letter, and then you added) “I am burning. I have the stupid impression of being faithful to you. I am nonetheless saving certain simulacra from your sentences (you have shown me them since). I am waking up. I remember the ashes. What a chance, to burn, yes yes [ ].”
Yes, yes dear friend, the tragedy of memory, which we all at some time forget. Luckily, fidelity to our promises has a way of being broken, and secrets have a way of getting out. The tragedies that have arisen throughout our history because of letters misdelivered, or misread, or worst of all, not delivered in time, will eventually be forgotten with everything else. Most the encyclopedias will be forgotten, many of the histories if not all, and we will forget some or all of our letters. And by this I mean, my friend, the small letters: the pieces torn from the larger letters, those individual signs, which we tear up and forget, and then build up and re-send, forgetting that we have already received such meaning.
Those were the times, these frantic mailings, and these dispatches from our own memories scribbled on the back of dirty postcards we came across among more scholarly books. There is a certain charm to them, don’t you think? Something poetic about the search for meaning, about the drastic expressions we fired out of the tops of our heads, only falling back to earth to hit us, and leave us stunned.
But I fear I must go, because the future is calling me onward, and because time keeps a-ticking away, as it does, doesn’t it my friend? Yes, indeed! Good luck with your letters, and with those early attempts at packets. Do a good job, because we’re counting on you in the future!
Love,
Adam
* * * * *
Dear Cyber-Time,
Hello! How I’ve looked forward to writing you this letter! You wouldn’t believe the amount of paperwork I’ve had to deal with today, and now, finally, I can get on to the pleasure of correspondence.
But then, you know that, don’t you, dear friend? You’ve seen my letters to my friends 1959 and 1976, because in the present, letters work a bit differently than they used to. Do you mind if I… no? Good. Yes, I’ll explain a little bit for anyone listening in.
You see dear friend, (and I hope you won’t mind if I continue to call you this, though I don’t actually know you. No? Good!) we don’t write letters anymore, do we? Now we send email, and instant messages, and a myriad other things I haven’t even bothered to learn about yet. There is no more waiting for the infinite slowness of physical space, for pieces of paper to wind their way around the world, and through a slew of different D/T time zones, to finally reach another person’s hands. Now our letters are packets, and they are switched instantaneously, or nearly so, and continuously, meaning all kinds of things most of us don’t even begin to understand. There are new languages and new technologies evolving almost daily. But the good part is, they easily replicate our old languages, so we can write up all those old beliefs, feelings, personas, and egos into tiny packets as send them whizzing off with the light, even faster than a rocket, these photon poems burning continuously, singing all kinds of things you could hope to know and more, across a brand new body of time—the body of time that is instant, and infinite in size. You’ll never end, will you, Cyber-Time? Well, maybe. Probably. But I won’t know a thing about that until it happens. No happy new years to you.
What we shoot out of heads does not launch on a doomed parabolic, a Cartesian acceleration we only hope will hit the mark. Now there is no “late”, “undeliverable”, “missed connection”, or “buried desire”. It is all thrown upward, where it hovers infinitely in a stasis of meaning, a giant unconscious of networked letters, which can be delivered at any time, forever. We still call it “mail” sometimes, out of nostalgia, or because we haven’t bothered to come up with a better word. Maybe we don’t think about it enough. But one thing is for sure—we sure aren’t licking stamps, or visiting a post office, or remembering addresses.
But where is Jack? Jack? Are you there? Our telephone switchboards are no less deluded, my friend. Our typewriters think they are networked minds, but they are really no more than speedy telegraphs with really good memory. Better memory than us. We still send our poems out into the Internet, and don’t even remember then when they are half sent. We are still clouded with our own unconscious, forever human, as we are. We still seek expression, and though our letters are unlimited, now unconstrained by space and time, we might never find the most perfect composition. We will probably never write that most perfect love letter, and James Alexander may never return to San Francisco. Oh, you rockets of desire! Is there any missile gap you can overcome? Probably not. Probably not, my friend.
And Jacques? What about Jacques? Who will understand all the fibers behind our new paper, and figure out the true meaning of all of those picture postcards we hopelessly write? Will the elimination of time, and the reduction of history to a constant, repeating unconscious exchange of memories amongst ourselves finally solve the problem of the longing for the perfect relationship with that ineffable one, the subject, who tempts, sucks, and squeezes our desires out from us, in the watery flow of ink upon the page, or in the pure difference between black and white as found in our pixels shimmering photons? No, my friend, most likely not. Whether in truth or in secret, there is nothing we could say that would dispel the darkness, purify in flame, and reduce the mystery of existence forever.
So what is there for my two dead friends, 1959 and 1976? Is there any historical justices for my friends, which will finally give them the answers they seek, and satisfy the desires within them, burning them in a constant flame of poetic pain? No, most likely not. The tragedy of Cyber-Time is that it is no freedom. The end of the play makes it no less tragic, because after all, the design of acts makes them only ever follow after each other. Things are different now perhaps, and we send a sort of letter we never would have desired, because we never believed it possible. History now looks all about the same—as far as I can remember, anyway.
