Our sense of vision is acutely human, because it is by our perception of the visible that we orient our world, and understand ourselves within it. We are creatures of light, who move within light, who build their lives out of light and its plethora of shadows, glimmers, reflections, and obscurities. And in this cast flame we judge each other, we attack each other, we watch each other, condemn each other, rule each other, and rape each other.

We not only speak of our inner selves as illuminated, but we use spotlights to chase down other bodies. Whether it be the eyesight of a group of men facing down a single woman moving down the same sidewalk at night, a telephoto lens attempting to peer through the shroud of a person’s clothing, a police officer’s flashlight, a drone’s camera, or simply the contemporary presence of CCD sensors in our pockets and on our architecture, vision connotes a certain power, that is used negatively just as often as it can be positive.

When we are critical of it in regards to the sexual relations of humans, we might call it the male or masculine gaze, as if men were looking with their sex or gender. This is a particular sort of vision, bound up with ideology, with history, and sexual class. It not only observes, but it sorts, it privileges, it values and it targets. Perhaps we call it masculine to make it clear who it is that it that can become the target of the others’ eyes, and whose fault it is not. Rape culture, and the forms of vision that propagate it, is only one form of visually-oriented aggression, and heteronormativism, transphobia, and any other designation of violent vision need not be labeled as particularly masculine. When we join the ocular aspects of rape culture with our definition of what is masculine and what is feminine, it is important that we call out this gaze for what it is made to be–that which is by and large in the heads of men, wielded by men, and constituting of men in their persecution of women. But in the attempt to weed out rape culture in one of its haunts, we do disservice to the gaze itself, by failing to understand what it is.

The gaze is not the agency of gender roles. The gaze is not rape culture. The culture of rape is found in patterns of thought and behavior, not in visual perception. The gaze is electromagnetic radiation, perceived by a sensor. It is the perception of color, of light intensity and wavelength. It is no different in mechanics than tuning a radio through a frequency band. Gaze is shape, and architecture, and space. Gaze is both the sensible presence and absence of light, of bodies, of skin, of fashion, in all the meaningful abundance of existence and lack. The shape of a woman’s body in tight clothes is like a color of the spectrum, just as the shape of her body in baggy clothes also is, as is the shape of a man, as is the look of someone displaying no recognizable gender whatsoever. Color and shape are indications, understood frequencies onto which we map any number of meanings. In the colors of things, their hues, borders, shapes, shadings, shadows, and sightlines, is where the gaze resides. The gaze has no gender. Gaze has no wants, beliefs, desires, or needs.

But sexuality exists in this colored space, across the surface of what we visually perceive. There are thoughts that surround the act of putting on a piece of clothing, or walking down the street and watching other people. We define our sexuality in a visual space, not outside of it. We must use the visual topography to define our emotional and physiological structures. These two types of patterns must be constructed in concert with each other. While we look, we must be sexual beings, and while we are sexual beings, we must continue to look.

The ocular architecture, the visual topology, the environment of light and darkness–however we choose to describe it, it is a changed space. The fact of our many sexual beings cascading through this space, crowned with sensors noticing the changes in visual light, makes this a terrain with endless implications for our sexualities and other internal frameworks. There is no place that is removed from the gaze. Even if we blind ourselves and remove our own capacities for sight, the gaze still exists in the world. Opting out of our sense of sight is no incorporeality. The terrain of the gaze and our existence within it is too close-knit, too simultaneously embodied to ever exist without it.

Like stepping out of our homes into a sky filled with satellites, an atmosphere seething with flying drones, a city with buildings dripping with closed-circuit cameras. We could elude the lenses, shine an impeding glare into the sensors, dazzle the algorithms. But for how long could we escape the constantly inscribed regime of sight-recording that exists in our contemporary surveillance state? A map of CCTV cameras cannot be the full surveilled territory. The cones of observation we avoid are limited to those we know of, and even our tools of observation and avoidance now observe us back. We live in an age of Drone Ethnography, in which any attempt at recording what is happening to us is overshadowed by another lens, watching a lens, watching a lens, watch us. The opportunity for opting out of a visual culture elapsed long ago, when our eyes were evolving in the membranes of a long lost taxonomic ancestor. We cannot ban drones anymore than we can dispel the gaze. If the technological gaze is banned by legal means, it will only occur extra-legally. If human sight is judged as immoral, it will only become a fetish. We are always already being recorded, and there is nothing we can do about this. What matters is whether someone will persecute, rape, or kill us on the basis of that recording.

The connection between technological surveillance space and the terrain of the gaze is apt, because our relationship to their singular status helps us understand how they function. Rape culture isn’t solely about looking, and drone culture isn’t solely about flying cameras.

We have come to rely upon an abstract notion of “drones”, as a way of signifying the presence of flying cameras. UAVs carry cameras, because the only way to observe space in a more omnipotent way than humans already do, is through such technologies as high power digital sensors, infrared cameras, visually-intelligent algorithms, and as dramatic climax, the robotic flying platforms for carrying these things. All of these technologies are unique, but we make the flying platform into a singular category, Drones, which represents the entire novel system of “technocular” omnipresence, because the flying robot is so evocative as an image. But there is a difference between drones that just represent the novelty of drones, and drones that are built for observation. There is a huge difference between flying a quadrocopter with an iPhone, and the Gorgon Stare. The Occucopter, The Pirate Bay’s drones, anything performing aerobatics for the purposes of a Youtube video–these represent our fascination, but they are not the meat of the surveillance system. The true task of these novelty drones is to represent what Drones mean to us. Observing police brutality and file sharing are better accomplished through other technologies. The key to UAVs’ proliferation is that the government can afford to fly so many, keep them flying all the time, process the data, and act on it, just as they can mount CCTV cameras, create facial recognition databases, create mandatory IDs, hack into their citizens computers, fund the development of all of the necessary technology, and so forth. With a technology useful to the consolidation of power, governments have sought to buy the most, the best, and to be first to do so. This is what governments do.

Similarly, we have come to equate rape culture to the existence of the terrain of the gaze. The visual environment is chock full of unrestrained desire, because there is no better place for the surplus of human desire to go. If we cannot safely pay for sex, we pay for the simulation or the recording of it. If we cannot fulfill our fantasies in a corporeal way, we satisfy ourselves with the visual fulfillment of them. If we cannot always perform our sexuality in the way we choose, we signify the simultaneous absence and presence of the performance through alternate indicators. And perhaps most of all, when we do perform our sexuality, we vent the excesses of internal, libidinal desire that will never be fully fulfilled, through the visual aids we employ, the long looks we take, the replay of memories, the dreaming of dreams. The vast majority of our sexuality that cannot be expressed in the simple act of sex must inscribe itself through our sensory perception–and as visually dominant creatures, it is obvious the means we will most often choose. Pornography, sex toys, sex performance, fetishes, fashion, dance, body language–the examples of ways that sexuality expresses itself in visually perceptible cultural forms are far too numerous to list. Despite the fact that there are plenty of elements of human culture that are not sexual and are still visibly sensible, literally anything that we visually perceive can be interpreted as sexual or exploited as such. And we have taken a basic human function, vision, and made it categorically synonymous with another basic human physical and mental function: sex. This is what human bodies do.

But the analysis must become ethical, as the unrestrained activities of governments and human bodies are clearly not good for those they take as their objective, nor for the governments or bodies themselves. We must identify what forms of sex are good and bad, and what forms of politics are good and bad. But in doing so, we unpack the reduction of surveillance to Drones, and of rape to the gaze.

Drones, in that they are abstracted into such an essential category of political strategy that we can refer to Drones and simultaneously mean everything from stealth fighter to a children’s toy, are more like a trend in pornography than a trend in weapons. Porn similarly abstracts a range of behaviors and contexts, creating essentialized categories from what were simply sex acts, personifications, performances, objects, or scenarios.

In bed, one can do any number of things, and the overall meaning of this is construed by the parties involved, based upon the context. This is the fetish behavior–a particular symbol put into play in the act of engaging one’s sexuality, that is observed and read as both that symbol itself, and much more than that symbol. For example, having sex with a partner dressed in a “school-girl” fetish outfit, is not really read as equivalent to a desire to fuck a girl who attends school. The partners’ choice of fetish outfit is a visual willingness of those consenting partners to sexually engage with certain symbols, acts, and language in a particular time and place, together. The fetish outfit may exist hanging in the closet as much as it does when deployed in sexual activity, but its true meaning when used is entirely dependent on the details who, how, where, and why.

The same fetish symbol in the larger discourse of pornography, on the other hand, must be considered differently because it is abstracted in the published visual medium, and not presented as related to any particular individuals’ sexuality. The vast quantities and ranges of school-girl fetish porn does not say anything about particular partners or bedrooms. Pornography is a commodified discourse, the production of which is described in terms of cultural-level “market forces” that describe the needs of culture in general. An individual may enjoy certain portrayals of the commodity more than others, but this is never a fetish produced for that individual. It is for the abstraction of many individuals in pursuit of profit. It is indicative of a sexual regime in society–the sexual archetype of the School-Girl, which can be said to “always” look, act, and inscribe sexual meaning in an archetypical way. The School-Girl is not a “who”, it is a “what”: it is a characterization recognized by symbolic indicators. Individuals may use the School-Girl archetype to enhance, inspire, or inscribe their own school-girl fetish, but any instance of roleplay activity will be a separate act, not reducible to the abstract archetype.

[Note: even if individuals mimic the archetype completely, and mimic the archetypical performance so exactly to the point of filming the sexual performance, shot for shot, like a particular piece of pornography, this is still on the individual level a fetish behavior, and not an attempt to produce mass media. The purpose is for the participants, and not for audience. This changes, of course, if that fetish film is sold. Without getting into a discussion about causality, let’s just table this (albeit, interesting) issue by saying that the distribution of a personal fetish film as pornography is itself an act of production, that changes the film itself. I don’t feel this is an evasion of the relationship between personal fetishes and commodity production, I just don’t want to go off on a tangent in this essay to make that argument.]

Similarly, drones are not simply a means of doing politics, they are the leading indicators of a particular discipline of politics, in the Foucauldian sense. The Panopticon, as described by Foucault in Discipline and Punish, is not merely a prison, but it is the archetypal diagram of particular trend in not only prisons, but in societal power itself.

“But the Panopticon must not be understood as a dream building; it is the diagram of a mechanism of power reduced to its ideal form; its functioning, abstracted from any obstacle, resistance or friction, must be represented as a pure architectural and optical system: it is in fact a figure of political technology that may and must be detached from any specific use.” – Foucault, Discipline & Punish

The fetish of drones is performed anytime that one flies a camera through the air, but each individual flight of a drone remains separate from the discourse of Drones, which serves as an archetype of perpetual surveillance in an arena of technocular ubiquity. The Drones are separate from any individual flying machine, database of citizens, or ID-capturing device. But we must have a way of representing the singular mass of all of this signifying technology, and we do it through the evocative signifier of Drones. The military-industrial complex, the political regimes that make decisions about policy, the state bureaucrats that enact that policy, and the media which responds to all of these, use the archetype of Drones to abstract the individual realities of surveillance technology into a single signifer. When we talk about Drones as an archetype of the current times, we are talking about this cultural entity, not any model of drone or act of drone usage specifically.

[Note: similar to the previous note, the point at which a snapshot taken on an individual’s cell phone becomes a part of state surveillance apparatus is an interesting question, but to avoid that tangent, we will simply say that there is a defined line between the two and leave it at that, for now.]

We are in love with drones, just as we are captivated by each others’ bodies. From our species’ physiology is born a cultural reliance upon seeing, as a stand-in for doing. And from our technological abilities to collect information, grows the prime mover of our strategizing. Anything we look at, can be looked at in a sexual way. A pair of binoculars, a map, a photograph, a satellite, or a UAV can aid any sort of politics if deployed correctly, and there is nothing inimical to a particular regime in these technologies. Staring out of our windows at our neighbors, whether for titillation or for neighborhood watch, is merely an activity that is part of our current cultural humanity.

The ethical problem with voyeurism is not simply that rape may follow. And the ethical problem with drone warfare is not simply that it is asymmetric, inhumane, imperialist, or a war crime. Behaviors, technology, and strategies that exploit the distribution of power to cause pain and suffering has existed for a long time. But there is a difference with drones. Unlike earlier horrors–atom bombs, mustard gas, machine guns, etc–we conceive of this new sort of terror technology as somehow normal, even though it is distinctly new. It is not thought of as a killing machine. it is just computers, cameras, GPS, apps, and radio-controlled aircraft. This is what makes it New Aesthetic–it stands out as terrible and shocking, but while remaining incredibly familiar. We are supposedly “terrified” of the reality of drone warfare, and yet we like drones. We want to ban drones in the same way we want to ban guns–we propose a solution that we know very well is impossible. We hate drones and love them at the same time, like our booze, like our drugs, and like our violent, occular sex.

In the discourse of psychoanalysis, the gaze is a primarily a means for visually recording knowledge and interpolating it into our thought processes. Luce Irigaray criticized Freud and Lacan for rooting this gaze in the presence or absence of the phallus–automatically putting women at a disadvantage in this distribution of knowledge.

“Nothing to be seen is equivalent to having no thing. No being and no truth.” – Irigaray, The Sex Which Is Not One

The ethical flaw of both drones and the gaze is in its distribution and its control. Outside of the discourse of psychoanalysis, distribution is still controlled by privileged power regime. Drones are controlled by the State, and the supporters of rape culture control the gaze. These do not have to be tools of violence, but because of who holds the controls, they are made to be. It is a fact that technology allows us to observe, record, and track each other. But it is through the archetype of Drones that we have internalized the notion that the State can be the arbiter of this power. It is a fact that sex is visual, and visual performance is the means by which we will always read and express our desire. But it is through the archetypes of culturally abstracted sex that we have internalized the idea that if you see something you can touch it, if you observe a sexuality, it is yours to own. By dealing with these abstractions as ideas rather than accessible behaviors and technologies, we limit our ability to reorient their distribution to benefit our own bodies, and those of our consenting partners and communities. We only know drones the way the State knows drones. We only see sex the way rape culture sees sex.

Internalizing these distributions in the abstract, we do what these power regimes would already have us do. We ignore the sexuality of others if it is not a visible thing–we equate what one-can-see to all-that-is. Contemporary politics ignores democracy that does include surveillance–If you’re not doing anything wrong, you should not be hiding, and if you are not voting, you should not be speaking. It is not that drones and the gaze are part of politics and sexuality, it is that by reducing our awareness of these things to their archetypes, there cannot be any surplus politics or sexuality outside of these limited terrains which we are allowed to control. With seeing, comes a notion of being. We are beginning to call it telepresence–our ability to be in a space or travel through a space constituted by our technological visual engagement with that space. But what we require, just as we always have, is a deeper engagement with the environment. We require telepraxis. It is not enough to simply observe the archetype, we must engage and perform with it to the point of fetish–the point at which it is no longer simply a signifier for what culture decides that it means, but it is part of a living relationship and performance with individuals other than ourselves.

This is a difficult thing to do right, and rape culture and drone wars are the sign of our continuing failure. These archetypes, like Foucault’s Panopticon, do not just symbolize a particular way that things might happen, but signify a strong magnetic tendency of culture, pulling all signification in line with this particular regime. Like the phallus of psychoanalysis, the only meaning given credence is meaning translated through this regime. This is not an idle pattern, but feedback loop reinforcing itself.

“The discipline of the workshop, while remaining a way of enforcing respect for the regulations and authorities, of preventing thefts or losses, tends to increase aptitudes, speeds, output and therefore profits; it still exerts a moral influence over behavior, but more and more it treats actions in terms of their results, introduces bodies into a machinery, forces into an economy.” – Foucault, Discipline and Punish

Just because there is lots of money and privilege tied up into rape culture and the surveillance state, is not the reason we say this is a class issue. Like an economic class, these systems exist solely to perpetuate themselves, and those who benefit by them, at the expense of others. Nor is it enough to say that these systems disproportionately harm lower economic classes. Each is in fact, it’s own sort of class–a technological and epistemological class. Rape culture is a class. Surveillance culture is a class. It is not enough to find the way that drones and the gaze are being maligned, subverted, and distributed in order to harm others and criticize it. One cannot simply point out the existence of a class. Class is something that must be fought. We must create a contesting praxis, that will pull the sexual gaze and drones back from these power regimes, and use them to smash the negative archetypes. This is a terrain worth fighting over, because it is the only terrain on which human beings live and knows themselves.

Had a little Twitter tiff with @ekstasis and @nils_gilman yesterday which I think suffered largely from poor definition of terms, that I thought I’d write a short note to try and clarify (the wonders that more that 140 can do).

Began with this tweet by @nils_gilman:

Postmodernism was counter-revolutionary in practice if not in principle http://crookedtimber.org/2012/10/17/age-of-fracture-or-age-of-counterrevolution/ … just look at the GOP’s “skepticism about facts”

I often find myself defending post-modernism, not because I particularly love post-modern theory (we’re called post-structuralists, please) but because it is so frequently maligned from what seems to me to be misunderstanding. And now that most post-modern theorists have gone on to other things, the haters feel free to continue whipping their straw men, and we’re slowly cementing a revisionist history of what post-modernism really was (ironic, no?).

To me, post-modernism stands for two different things that are important to keep straight.

1- The historical epoch that came after modernism.

2- A particular approach to theorizing the nature of thought in that historical epoch.

The difference is huge–the first is shorthand for a period of time that we are attempting to discuss as relevant. The second is a particular theory with pros and cons that can be debated. As I was trying to make clear yesterday, treating a historical epoch as “reactionary” is ridiculous. To begin with, time passes of its own accord, and our identification of historical epochs as succeeding one another is not due to one’s particular “overthrow” of another, but the inevitable turning of the pages of our calendar. You might as well accuse 2011 of being stupid, or Tuesdays of laziness. What a pejorative statement against a historical time period could mean, I have no idea. Maybe this stems from our tendency to treat cultural nebulae as if they were solid masses, as in “hiphop died in ’93″, or “kids these days are doing it wrong”, but all of that seems to be on the relative-losing side of the Culture Wars, again, ironically.

The point of my calling this out is that I don’t want to fall in the trap of criticizing any person who published a book in the post-modern era, and think that we are levying a charge against post-modern theory. Anyone displaying a set of characteristics in their work that seems particular to the post-modern era, we might call an example of post-modern thought, but we should keep this separate from people actually attempting post-modern theory. @nils_gilman said in one of his later tweets, “You need to judge theory by both its high and vulgar forms. The latter often reveals something telling about the former.” And while I would say there is some truth to that, you really cannot judge a person by others who are lumped with them for specious reasons of misidentification. This is the reason that people can be futurists today, and we know they have nothing to do with the pro-war, proto-fascist writers of the Futurist Manifesto. This is how you can have something like the “New Aesthetic” and know that it doesn’t merely apply to anything at all that we might call new. Sure, there is a relation between post-modern thought and post-modern theory. Post-modern theory was largely done in the post-modern era, and as such would qualify as post-modern thought. But this does not and cannot mean that all post-modern thought is post-modern theory.

The simple reason for this, is that post-modern theory extends both before and after the post-modern era. Any undergrad philosophy student could tell you that Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud were the “Masters of Suspicion”, from the work of whom stems the entire intellectual tradition of post-modern theory. This was work that was published starting in the first half of the 19th Century. And today, we see post-modern ideas continuing under new guises, such as queer theory, network theory, and other particular attempts to name a defined “theory”.

So what is particularly post-modern about post-modern theory? In my estimation, it identifies and promotes a set of suspicions about a foundational set of cultural “known truths”, and is able to show convincingly that these truths have very real effect in human life, but their reality stems from a set of factors that could be shifted. It is not a debunking of the “real”, it is a debunking of the “natural”, as a nature of things that is implicit and immutable.

1867, Marx publishes Capital, Volume One and argues convincingly that value is not our attempt to judge the inherent worth of an object, but that value is something that we instill in an object via our labor.

1887, Nietzsche publishes The Geneaology of Morals, and shows that morality does not come from what is permanently “right and true” in the world as in Aristotelian tradition, but from our own individual hang ups about value and punishment.

1900, Freud publishes The Interpretation of Dreams and theorizes a part of the mind that is not directly accessible to human consciousness, and yet can affect our consciousness. The detail of this split and how it functions obsoletes the Cartesian cogito.

In my opinion, perhaps the greatest post-modern document of all time is the American Anthropological Association’s “Statement on Race”, published in 1998. In this very short publication, the largest group of anthropologists, for once and for all, destroy the scientific underpinnings of hundreds of years of cultural, imperial, economic, and sexual oppression. This is not a relativistic statement. It is a statement of fact, that what is described as “race” simply does not exist from a genetic standpoint.

None of these documents call themselves post-modern, or even were published in the post-modern epoch. But these are singular examples for the basis of questioning “Grand Narratives” that Lyotard pronounced dead in his book The Post-Modern Condition. All of these critiqued narratives were once taken as fact, and by the 1950s, when the theories of these modernist Masters of Suspicion are widely known and accepted, it seems that everything true is potentially suspect. Which of course, it is. There is nothing fundamental to Truth that makes it self-evident. This has always been the case. Lies that masquerade as truth have been told since the beginning of human history. The fact that a majority of people believe a lie does not make it factual. And yet, that is a fact. Truth is dead, but facts are still numerous. Post-modern theory simply makes it its business to identify this trend, and to push it, to see how far it goes. As for this general observation by which we might identify a general theory of what post-modern theory is (I always use Lyotard for the definition myself), I don’t know that this is debateable. That there is a post-modern theory, relating to a post-modern trend in thought, does not seem to be the question here. The question posed, as I understand it, is whether this trend of identifying weaknesses in grand narratives is a good thing or not.

When people start digging up one’s lawn, accusing it of not necessarily being Truth, one starts to get edgy. And hence the reactionary kickback against those working with post-modern theory. When I say “lawn”, what I really mean is “class”, of course (being the good Marxist I am). If you start making the case that urban riots might have a point, that women are not necessarily subservient to men, that governments rule by tyranny rather than democracy, that morality is a better description of sexual power regimes than of goodness, that theology is used to extract more labor from workers, that science can be used to hurt people as much as help them, and that human history can be read as one long trail of tears in which these facts are covered over and rejected–well, those are pretty dangerous things to say. They are not dangerous because they threaten the Great Books. They are dangerous because they threaten the Great Corporations, the Great Nation-States, the Great Religions, and the Great Men of History.

The Great Men of History, to counter this threat of facts against their own narratives which keep them firmly and logically in control, do not paint these theories as disputes against their version of the facts. They portray them as against “fact” in general. These college professors! They claim that they are politically-minded but they are full of their own ideas, stoned into nihilism with their Hasan-i Sabbah “nothing is true, everything is permitted” Eastern mystic hashish garbage! Reject this islamo-fascism and return to your Christian heritage, the defender of truth for thousands of years! They would love the assertion that intellectuals are replacing “‘strong readings of society’ with ‘weaker ones’”. Since when was “strong” preferable to “correct”? As if this was the 1950s, and jocks are beating nerds outside of their fraternity house before graduating to go shape the world at Dow Chemical.

And we’ve internalized this reactionary narrative, to the point where we are blaming those who wrote about this epochal shift in thought for causing it! As if Lyotard, by writing his book in 1979, somehow was responsible for Nietzsche’s popularity. We are supposed to reject these upstarts, that inspired students to protest in the streets (many of the professors were in fact against it, ironic again) and stoke the fires of nostalgia for the time period of “true beliefs”, for the Greatest Generation. If only we had fascism rampant in the world, so we could be so morally steeled in our fight against it! If only we had a specter of atheistic communism to oppose, to be the rationale behind our military-industrial complex! Then we would not live in this world of doubt, fear, and calamity that these professors caused with their books. This is the narrative of the GOP, not relativism and historical hermeneutics. Professors and theorists are at once irrelevant, and poisoning our water supply. Islamists are both fascist and communist. Black presidents are at once socialist and elitist. The GOP does not seek to replace truth with fact. It seeks to replace fact with anything that will help it win its political struggles. It seeks to build a false history of the past as Whiggish rationale for American exceptionalism. It seeks to supplant real politics with nationalism and oligarchy, and send resisters to poverty, if not to prision (as does the DNC, in case my opinions on American politics weren’t clear).

The 1950s may have been great if you were a white, male, American with an industrial job. But we forget that the unfolding of history since that time has been filled with multitudes of struggles of the people who were not those chosen few, as they attempt to live something like a decent life, and establish some facts of their own. And the fact that some things have gotten better for some of those people shows that this has not been the wrong course to take.

It could be better, but that is history. If there is a post-modern universal truth of history, it is that there is no universal truth of history, and history will never finally turn sunny side up, like a quarter flipped into the air. But to heavily paraphrase general semantics theorist Alfred Korzybski, history is never depressing, people only become depressed because of history. Thankfully, regardless of what the theory is called, and however people feel about it, no one is done fighting yet.

While history continues to sort itself out, blaming a particular trend of theory (which on the whole, is really a pretty small fraction of culture) for the trials of the world seems silly. Now, if the article wanted to quibble with a particular theorist, I’m all ears for that. But given that the original article summed up the entirety of Hannah Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism as ‘destroying all space between men and pressing men against each other’ I’m thinking that nuance was not particularly the goal here, so much as polemic. But hey, absorbing that ire is all in a day’s work for a theory that attempts to rethink some of the most entrenched misunderstandings of Western society.

This is an introductory essay and explanation of the Open Card Deck Standard, and the Library and License that will support it. As you might be able to tell, I’ve spent some time thinking about this, in conjunction with conversations with a number of people on related topics. But this is only the beginning. I’d like to continue the discussion on this in a Google Doc, so if you are interested in this or anything related to various types of open-ended social gaming, please join in.

Definitions

Before we detail the actual standards, let’s make some axiomatic definitions.

Card

A single database entry, with defined content fields (name, artwork, etc.). Each entry is designed to be printed on a single piece of generally flat material, using either one or both sides.

Deck

A collection of cards, selected with particular use in mind, to be the limited pool for that use. A deck might be created, added to, split, or diminished in various ways, but the deck defines the difference between the cards under consideration in play, and those that are not.

Play

The physical, mental, or social activities conducted with the deck, during a limited time duration that is in some way repeatable in a series. Creating the deck is not considered part of play; however, it is conceivable that rules might define play that changes the makeup of the deck.

Rules

The agreed upon patterns of play. Not all play is defined by the rules, and certain types of play will no doubt violate rules. Rules define the general plane of the use of the deck, either in reference to the deck and the cards’ content, or not. Apart from the agreed upon rules of play, other pre-existing and/or meta physical, mental, and social rules will no doubt affect the play as well.

Some Introductory Notes on Card Decks

A card deck is a way of databasing relatively small quantities information in a printed format, such that it can be handled and sorted in multi-dimensional physical ways, and considered by human minds accordingly.

In an era when digital databases are behind many of the informational tools we consider to be cutting edge, it may seem to be a reversion to think about laying our thoughts onto paper using ink. But while the power of search engines and algorithmic database programming is great, digital data must dogmatically conform to particular language rules. Data processed by a particular algorithm will always be processed precisely the same way–if the algorithm shifts from its design, the data can easily be rendered categorically unintelligible.

But by breaking text into smaller chunks by printing it on physical cards, we can more easily violate the categories of information, while not breaking the rules of language or intelligible thought. This allows our brains’ creativity to come in and repair the categories in an ad hoc manner, or manipulate them according to predetermined rules. We might call this the “play” of the cards–how they fall in order in a deck, in one’s hand, or on the table, and the relations between the cards. These physical shufflings provide interesting segue ways in and out of the information that might not have been generated by an algorithm.

These segue ways go by different names, depending on the card deck. We might call them “random”, “divinatory”, “inspirational”, “play”, “synthetic”, “strategic”, “speculative”, “thematic”, or “tangential”. Regardless of the context for naming these segue ways, the value they have to us is that they allow us to break from our previous categorizations, and attempt to create new categorizations, for whatever intellectual good this might do us.

Here some examples of various types of card decks with different formats, for different purposes:

Tarot Deck – The most popular Tarot Deck in English is the Rider-Waite deck, created in 1909, incorporating images and titles from various other sources. Used for divination, but also for a variety of card games, which various decks trace back to before being used for more occult purposes.

Oblique Strategies – A deck of cards created by Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt. Each card has a brief text phrase, intended to create some level of cognitive dissonance so that a person might break through a cognitive block. There have been five editions of the cards, as well as a number of homages and imitators.

Card Catalog – Used in libraries before the widespread use of computer databases, they were used to sync up three different sorting systems: the alphabetical list of authors’ last names, a list of subject categories into which all materials were evaluated, and a library classification system like the Dewey Decimal System or the Library of Congress Classification that is used to sort the works on the shelves. By visiting one or more card catalogs, users could either find a particular work, or find related works based on the subject.

Sports Cards – Originally designed as a promotion by chewing gum companies, cards with photos of various athletes, and on the reverse side, their stats, became popular with fans and collectors. While they are most known for being occasionally valuable collector-items, they are also used by children for games only semi-related to the information on the cards.

Magic: The Gathering Cards – While there are many different collectible card games in different genres, “Magic Cards” was perhaps the first and remains one of the most popular. A wide number of different cards are collected by players, from which they make decks used in play. A simple turn-system allows a player to deduct “life points” from his/her opponent, via the game design rules written on each card, accompanied by fantasy artwork and characterizations.

For many in the various fields of critical intellectual pursuits, there is a fascination with the potential of card decks. They are appealing not only for the physical qualities they add to informational categorizing, but also because they can be created and destroyed at will, by anyone with printer and paper. There is nothing canonical about cards themselves outside of their decks, the only editorial constraint is on which cards belong in what deck. Cards seem adaptable to nearly any creative purpose, as long as they are designed well and the rules for using them are agreed upon.

But there are so many different possibilities for card decks, for different situations, games, rules, and practices. How does one go about discovering the limits of a new card deck? What should be included, and what excluded? What sorts of categories does one pre-define? Are all the cards the same, or are some different within the deck?

We are attempting an answer to these questions by drafting an Open Card Deck Standard (OCDS). The OCDS will be a format for creating cards that can be incorporated into any other deck made from cards that are similarly to OCDS standard. Any person will be able to create a card deck from any grouping of OCDS cards that they choose, selecting or ignoring cards at will to formulate the best deck for their purposes. The OCDS standard will be coupled with an OCDS Library and License, to promote the sharing and creation of any cards with the OCDS standard.

Goals of the Standard

To allow for a large pool of cards outside of any one deck.

While a deck is a strict limitation on the particular cards to be used in play, the precise makeup of the deck should be allowed to shift, if the deck creator desires. The OCDS allows for a larger “pool” of cards outside of the deck, which the creator can choose from at will. It also allows the creation of cards that are not “for” any particular deck, but could possibly used in a different deck in the future.

To allow for collaboration between deck creators.

OCDS cards are relatively basic, allowing for a single format of origin into any particular deck from the main OCDS Library. The Library will hold as many different cards as possible, allowing anyone wishing to work with OCDS to use these cards, and anyone wishing to create in OCDS to share their cards. The OCDS cards come with their own license, allowing them to be used by anyone, and modified. The modifications can be tracked via the database, and better variations will be used more widely.

To encourage the sharing of cards in a way that alleviates any Intellectual Property concerns, by providing public ownership for the content, and allowing means for remixing and modifying that content either for re-sharing or other use.

This is the point of the OCDS License. Anyone can come and take an unlimited amount of the content from the OCDS Library, but the OCDS Database only exists because material is submitted into it. The License aims to encourage both the use of content from the Library, and the addition of material to it.

To encourage the shattering of complex cards into simple cards.

One of the more notable constraints, and more notable features of OCDS is it’s very limited field allowances per card. This is to make each card as simple as possible, and as open to interpretation as possible. Rather than have detailed, overly-specific cards that force particular interpretations or uses, OCDS can better get at the root constructions, and increase the number of cards referencing a complicated idea, and allows those components to mix and mingle with others. One card with a complicated scenario will tend to read the same way in many uses–however, if that scenario is written across five different cards, more of the scenario-building is done in the play, allowing other cards to perhaps attach themselves to the scenario or replace particular aspects of the scenario.

To encourage the sharing of cards without sharing rules.

There are no fields in OCDS related to the play or rules of the cards. This is so the cards can be shared without assuming any models of play, after which, rules can be applied by individual deck creators without any need for inheriting rules made by other creators. This will limit the sorts of cards that can be considered OCDS, but will allow for the maximum utility of the cards in OCDS.

To allow for customization/forking from OCDS.

The definition of OCDS is limiting, to improve the utility of the standard. However, many card deck applications will require adding more detailed information into particular cards, such as longer description, play rules, or other symbolic notation. OCDS is designed with the explicit knowledge that it ought to be forked. The license will allow any deck creators to modify the cards, use them as they wish, and then re-modify them back to OCDS if they wish. The standard can be forked, up to and including forking the OCDS Library in its entirety, for the purposes of modifying the standard and the OCDS cards for different uses.

And probably more that we’ll discover as we start using it.

The Open Card Deck Standard

What follows is the very first draft of the OCDS, which we’ll call OCDS Version 0.1.

1. The Open Card Deck Standard (OCDS) defines the Format for each OCDS card, the method for submitting a card or set of cards to the OCDS Library, and the OCDS License under which the cards and Library may be used.
2. OCDS Card Format
1. Each OCDS card consists of one of each of the following fields:
1. Name
1. Definition: 99 characters or less that name all the information contained in the particular card. No syntactical formatting is to be used (e.g. periods, commas, colons, semi-colons, dashes, parentheses, brackets, quotes, symbols, etc.)
2. Single Line
1. Definition: 99 characters or less that describe the entirety of the card further. It cannot be identical to the Name, but can used syntactical formatting.
3. Image
1. Definition: a digital image in JPG, PNG, or GIF format, in 1:1 size ratio.
4. Text
1. Definition: 299 characters or less that describe in as much detail as possible the spirit of how the card ought to be considered.
5. Date
1. Definition: The date on which the card was submitted to the OCDS Library, in format MM/DD/YYYY.
6. Version
1. Definition: OCDS version number the card was submitted under. All cards entered into the OCDS are updated to the current version.
7. Language
1. Definition: Code indicating the language in which the card is written.
3. OCDS Library
1. The OCDS Library is a database available for reading and download on a public website that attempts to include every OCDS card ever made.
2. Submitting to the OCDS Library.
1. Cards to be submitted to the Library are pre-formatted to OCDS by the submitter, and passed to the archivists.
2. The archivists check the formatting, scrub any previous Date or Version information, and add the Cards to the Library.
3. Everything submitted to the Library in proper format must be accepted.
3. Viewing and Downloading the OCDS Library
1. The Database is available for anyone to view, download, and use, according to the OCDS License.
4. Mirroring and Forking the OCDS Library
1. Mirroring and Forking is permitted. Please see the relevant sections in the License.
4. OCDS License
1. The material in the OCDS Library is not owned by anyone, as it is open and free to use by all. However, to avoid the theft of this open material by way of any person or group claiming ownership to it and preventing its free and open use, this License is necessary.
2. Any material in the OCDS Library falls under this OCDS License for the entirety of the period for which it is in the Library.
3. Any material falling under the OCDS License must be maintained in OCDS and made available to the public continuously for as long as is humanly possible.
4. By submitting material to the OCDS Library, you acknowledge that it will fall under the OCDS License, and revoke all claims of ownership of the material.
5. By using the material in the OCDS Library, you acknowledge your understanding of the OCDS License, and agree to use the material accordingly.
6. Any material downloaded or copied from the OCDS Library can be removed from the OCDS License, and is then under a Creative Commons, Attribution License.
7. Mirroring or Forking of the Library can be done under the provisions of Section 6, above.
   1. A Mirrored Library is one that is exactly the same as the OCDS Library. It can only be considered under OCDS if the date of its last download is listed, and it is unaltered.
   2. A Forked Library is one that’s progenitor was the OCDS Library, but has had new material added to it or deleted, or its format was changed from OCDS. A Forked Library cannot be considered under OCDS.
8. Any material downloaded, copied, altered, modified, or forked can be re-submitted to the Library if it is re-formatted for OCDS, and when added to the Library, it can again be considered in OCDS and under OCDS license.
9. License short-form takeaway: When cards are properly OCDS and in the Library, they belongs to all of us. If you want to take some cards away and play with them, wonderful–but say where you got them. If after you play with them you bring it back and re-share them with everyone, that’s totally awesome, and they belong to everyone again.

Use-Cases

By now we’ve presented a crap ton of information about card decks, standards, and libraries, and it probably seems a bit overwhelming. Here are some use-cases and examples that hopefully will help explain while any of this is useful at all.

Three Example Cards

These three cards are good examples of cards in OCDS. They are properly formatted, but additionally they are loosely defined enough to be applicable in many different situations, but still descriptive enough to give any user something to work with. They may not fit precisely with a user’s need in a card deck, but they can provide the rough sketch to help them start making their own cards.

Expanding on a Card

The above card is fine, but not great. A user might take this card from the Library, and improve it.

Or, the card could be modded for a particular use. Say, if it is going to be used in a deck that focuses on environmental awareness or climate change.

Duplicate and Modded Cards in the Library

As cards are modified, it is assumed that they will be added back into the Library as long as they maintain OCDS. It is conceivable that in the Library, there will be a build up of cards with similar or duplicate names. This is not a bug, but a feature. Using the date field on the cards, any person browsing the Library will easily be able to see the history of modifications, and choose to pull the cards from the Library that suit him/her best. Additionally, if a card is un-modded but added back into the Library as part of another submitted deck, the duplicate will serve as a vote of confidence for that particular modification. The Library will be able to present not only the most recent card variation for a particular name, but the most common. This will allow both the more standardized, but also the more diverse card version available for Library users.

Using a Card for a Game

Depending on the game, various information might be helpful added to the card, and other information might be superfluous. Here is a possible variation for a narrative roleplaying style car game.

The added text gives gameplay instructions, and alters the description to make more sense in the context of the game. The date, version, and language information have been removed, because they are unnecessary to the game context. This card is no longer in OCDS standard, but because it was modified from an OCDS card, it must list the source to comply with Creative Commons Atttribution License.

Preparing a Modded Card for Resubmission to the Library

The above card used for gameplay has now been re-modded for submission to the Library. It does not have to be, but if the person who modded it thinks it may be useful for others, s/he might want to do so. The gameplay information has been removed. The text of certain fields have been changed, but still satisfy OCDS. The Date and Version information do not need to be added, as they will be updated by the OCDS Librarians on submission and format check. The Language of the card has been marked on the card.

I’ve been re-adjusting my life to unplugging from the network. This is not one of those techno-isolation trips, done in some latter-day Christian mystic Transcendentalist notion of re-establishing balance to one’s informational life by means of putting one’s devices in a plastic bag for a week and walking in the park. This is, instead, an unwanted divorce from the network for economic reasons. Having an iPhone has become too expensive for me, and so I have downgraded to a pay-per-month regular cell phone (it’s a RAZR, which is amusing for its last-generation cutting edgeness). With no internet at home (thanks, Century Link for having an unacceptable service level causing me to embargo your requests to pay the double-charged bill you will not adjust correctly), and temporarily being forestalled from getting a planned mobile broadband hotspot by T-Mobile’s insipid economic red-lining (i.e. a $400 deposit due to my credit), this means I only have a few hours a day online, when I’m at the coffee shop or other work space.

Which is a harsh adjustment, for a person who has already migrated to the cloud, and quite liked it. I’ve been using an iPhone for the past three and a half years. I use a Chromebook. The cloud made me portable, light-weight, and completely flexible. I was online near-constantly, writing, reporting, and managing various other Occupy Portland tasks, communicating with friends and colleagues all across the world in many time zones. This is the extent of the plug that has been pulled.

But I’m finding ways of adjusting. One does adapt to economic straits. The interesting thing is that it is doable. There are ways. Here’s how I’ve been doing it so far.

Apps that sync is the key. After ignoring ScratchPad, a little Chrome OS app that came with my ChromeBook, I’ve discovered that it now allows you to write a Google Doc fully offline, including a certain amount of formatting, and then sync this Doc when your computer re-connects to the internet.

Instapaper is, as always, truly one of the best iOS apps around. (I still have the iPhone, but no SIM card, so it is basically a fat iPod Touch.) When I am near a Wifi zone, I open up the app to let it sync its read/unread tallies and download fresh articles. Off network, it functions as normal.

Net News Wire does the same thing for my Google Reader feed. The trouble is being able to share articles back and forth between my RSS feed and Instapaper, and then from either of these to Twitter, all of which requires a live network connection. For these tasks, email is the key. Email–that most defunct of network activities! Emailing a link to my private Instapaper email address will sync that article as soon as I re-connect to the network, and my email Outbox sends all those messages that were composed while offline. I haven’t found a way to send an email that converts into a Tweet yet.

As far as email goes, handling it once a day is something that many efficiency tips recommend, and so far it is working for me. Email Time is the first 30 minutes after I re-connect with the network. Frankly, I’m kind of surprised I ever gave it much more time than that.

I do miss being able to be on Twitter at odd times of the night, when sitting at home with nothing to do. However, I’ve enabled the ability to send a message to Twitter via SMS, and so now I tweet blindly into the night, carefully tapping out 140 character messages on my RAZR. I don’t receive any tweets that way, as that would be disastrous for my SMS plan. It’s kind of fun this way, more like graffiti. I leave messages, and don’t get feedback until I re-connect to the network, sometimes twenty-four hours later. And if you want to talk about “Old Twitter”, well, this is how the service was originally designed to be used.

I’ve also hooked up Google Voice, though I’m not sure exactly how that benefits me off-network. There isn’t any way to receive chats or emails via SMS or phone yet. However, from a schematic point of view, it does serve to remind me that my regular old cell phone is a tiny funnel for communication when I am offline. When I’m back on the network, suddenly my phone becomes superfluous, as the computer is my phone; I call and text straight from the browser. The phone is merely a handset, and the network is the main channel of communication. I don’t know if, like the email efficiencies I’m forced to apply, this will end up being a benefit or not. But, at least it seems to be all part of the process, which I’m forced to accept whether I like it or not.

All of this seems to break down the networked communication I’ve come to expect into its basic components. I’ve been so used to App-For-That thinking, and user-friendly API integration, that I forgot what the basic components of networked communication is all about. It’s about the information: either short bits of communicative text, or a link that will take you to more information later. Emails and hyperlinks. I’m restoring the mental schematic of packets to my networked communication. Each email, link, and SMS is a packet. If I can work out how to make sure the packets arrive where they are supposed to, even if it is delayed, then the network continues to flow.

Photo by Skilluminati.com

The antimedial arsenal proves unlimited: short-circuiting telephone exchanges, bringing satellites off course, burning down cable boxes, sawing down electric pylons, not paying television and radio fees, sending out fake press releases, getting cameras to show up for nothing, pouring cement into dish antennas, cutting assorted cables, cleaving TV screens in two, painting over security cameras, altering data, installing magnetic fields, implanting and spreading viruses and worms – communicating with the hammer: »Talking back to the media.«

The quote comes from a book about the Netherlands squatters’ movement. This anti-media attitude was a pretty standard view for radical politics, up through the anti-globalization protests, and through writings like The Coming Insurrection. If you’ve been there, you’ve seen it before. The hassling of camerapersons, especially those who attempt to photograph people’s faces. Stickers, and vasoline stuck to lenses. And worse.

But this concept of anti-media doesn’t carry on through the Occupy protests. Sure, there are individuals who don’t like the constant camera presence. But in general, media coverage is viewed as a good thing, and not just for publicity purposes. Media is an all-seeing eye, and the panopticon is on our side. Each occupation with a significant amount of action has its own Livestream–a 24 hour news camera, embedded at eye-level inside the inner workings of the occupation. Photos are tweeted and re-tweeted, live blogs come up early and often. We are the media, and our media is thorough and deep.

I’m not sure when this transformation happened. But now, it seems like something we are occupying, in addition to physical parks and buildings, virtual web sites and Twitter feeds, is media-space. We occupy the media, the information, or consciousness, depending on what way you want to put it (I’ll leave the deep semiotic argument for another time).

Maybe it began in Egypt. I remember watching the Arab spring and thinking, “Thank goodness for Al Jazeera! If those cameras showing Tahrir Square shut off, they’re finished.” It wasn’t a sense that if they were removed from my eyes, they would disappear. It was that media, in terms of accessible record (not just spectacle) constituted the protest. It formed the safety of the people, in a searchable, coherent record of events. It was the history that was bring made. Without the cameras there, anything that the powers that be might say could be the truth. The government would again control the media-space, and define history. Al Jazeera made a point, over and over again, of showing their camera feed of Tahrir Square juxtaposed to the Government TV Station. The thousands and thousands of people in the square were the truth, compared to the shots of a few “pro-government supporters” milling about in front of a TV camera. Al Jazeera knew it, and we knew it. And the protesters in the square knew it. With this media channel, we could all say in our own minds, together: this is history. This is what’s happening. Al Jazeera is an international media organization, but the point was made. The media that shows us, ought to be our media. Al Jazeera, for that period, was our media. But they won’t always be around. So we have to step up ourselves.

And this isn’t just an awareness issue. Having control of the media-space is a tactic that literally saves lives. Take the case of Mona Eltahawy, a journalist who was arrested, assaulted, and tortured by the Egyptian police just this past week. The situation was difficult: publicizing her plight could have made the situation worse, rather than stimulate her release. However, in the end, it helped hurry her release.

Where this history goes is anyone’s guess. The role of our crowd-sourced media, and of popular protest’s new wide endorsement of publicizing itself as a way of enacting it’s own history has yet to fully play out. This history is still unfolding.

For those who enjoy playing around with QR codes, here’s a little javascript bookmarklet I cobbled together from various FAQs.

What this does, as you will (hopefully) see if you try it, is open a prompt, allow you to enter text, and then convert that text to a QR code using the Google Chart API.

javascript:void(Qr=prompt('What do you want the code to say?','this code says nothing',location.href));if(Qr)location.href='http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?cht=qr&chof=gif&chtt=QR Code&chs=350x500&chl='+Qr;

Easy enough. While we’re at it, here are a few more QR-related javascript applets I’ve used in the past.

This one simply converts the current URL to a QR code:

javascript: location.href='http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?cht=qr&chof=gif&chtt=QR Code&chs=350x500&chl='+escape(location.href);

And this one prints the current screen. Which would be helpful if your current screen shows a newly-minted QR code.

javascript:window.print()

The goal of all of this (for me) is to try and develop a way to reduce the printing of a QR code to a “one-click” sort of procedure. I’ve been working with a heat-activation Polaroid Zink printer, but not having a lot of success. For one thing, the Zink printer is kind of a pain. It only accepts jpgs in a particular portrait size (you might note the constraining 350 x 500 pixel variables in my code above), and the Google API only generates gif and png (adjust the “chof=” variable in the code to get a png, if you like). And while the Bluetooth on the printer works pretty well, iPhones still can’t send pictures over Bluetooth, so that means I have to drag a computer around with the Zink printer. At least until I can get a non-iPhone, but with my current budget, that will probably not be for a while.

But, one step at a time. If you find a better mobile printer, or use any other fun QR tools or tricks, let me know.

LulzSec rogue suspected of Bitcoin hack | Technology | The Guardian.

Look at this f’ing article!

Some of the most experienced members of the Anonymous and LulzSec hacker collectives are believed to have had “botnets” – hijacked networks of PCs – of more than 100,000 compromised computers.

If that many machines were set to work generating Bitcoins, they could create up to $7,500 worth a day at current trading levels – meaning members of the hacker collectives could be among the biggest losers if the value does not recover as and when MtGox reopens. In the hours before the hack the total value of Bitcoins in circulation was more than $150m.

IF some hackers have botnets, and IF those botnets are mining Bitcoin, and IF those Bitcoin were stolen, then OMG that sucks for them!!!

What is the deal? If your topic is slightly shady, any sort of journalistic research goes right out the window? I’ve seen articles about Lulzsec quoting anonymous Twitter accounts, and articles about Bitcoin citing claims made on anonymous forum threads as fact. I know that we’re all excited by this real-life-cyberpunk virtuality, but come on.

I just went and beat back the lawn, which was a demeaning and long-overdue task. And one that is fundamentally fruitless at best, because it will only grow back. If I were in charge (I rent, and so am not) I would tear the entire lawn up, and put in a garden, or gravel, or used auto parts, or anything not grass, which I consider a weed for its rate of growth and relative uselessness. But I’m not, and so I slog outside, to cut back the biomass that seeks to encircle the back porch.

Having raked the zen rock garden of that vine-choked lot with a power trimmer, I was able to let loose some of the anger welling up in my spleen from a similarly endless task at which I throw myself time and time again, though not to avoid fines from any rental agreement. I type essay after long essay in Sisyphean exercise, ranting against that which I disagree with, desperately trying, through the pains of logic and theory to beat back that which I find misconstrued, illogical, syllogistic, and wrongheaded. My motivation for this self-inflicted punishment is an imp that gnaws upon the base of my brain. It’s name is truth. Little “t”, of course; it is more yeasty infection than incubus. And yet, it grows. And as it grows, I type.

And I know I ought to quit. I should produce something that gives a bit more joy, that might be received a bit more easily than “reading,” which seems so much like hard work. Why paint a picture too large for most to view it? What good is a six-hour film epic no one will view past the first half an hour? Why pen a book when the readers will wait for the movie, or wait for the two-minute internet video summary, or simply read the title and consider the point absorbed?

Why should I write an article, finely mincing dense philosophical ideas into something the average palette might enjoy with a little open-mindedness, when I still end up with an essay 3500 words long, that being 2000 words longer than the standard piece of intellectual writing on the internet? Not to say that the few hundred page views that it might receive, whether from the number of regular readers or from Google Image Search tourists are not worth nothing. I just know my own choir. And though there is perhaps no greater pleasure than having a conversation between friends, maybe it isn’t necessary to yell so loud, and for so long. But this very dynamic is what brings on the yelling; I’m trying to draw in from the street the people who need to hear this. And so I call to them as they wonder what all the screaming is about, and move a little quicker down the road.

It is that there is not only an infection in my logic brain centers driving me to attempt to express myself in abstract language, it is that there is a desperate need for it in the world. Or so I would tell you. It is that there is such a need to explain the function of the world, and such a small number of good explanations currently accessible. It’s the need for a technical manual, but only having a typewriter cast in unknown script with which to write it. It’s that I could pour all of my skill, my craft, my education, and my talent into an attempt to guide us towards a better interaction with the world around us, and it would still be insufficient. No matter how measured my tone, and how melodious my words, how sharp my rhetoric and how aimed my logic, hitting the brief ring between abstract and obtuse is near impossible. My words either wash away, or are treated as stain. They either become dust, or they gather it.

It would be easy to blame those whom I try to reach. Goodness knows that others have. Nicholas Carr, Martha Nussbaum, and others have railed against the lack of audience for the finer, more delicate arguments and subjects in the world. They preach for what is important, and seems, in light of its recent popular reception, less so. In doing so they are easily mocked for sounding desperate, and for sounding mournful. They sound annoyed that no one is listening to them, and it is easy to reduce their points to that. And in so doing, make the inevitable mocking response flow so much more easily and overwhelmingly of a deluge.

Larry Sanger is the most recent to accuse the modern-day audience of not paying close enough attention. (And secondary reiteration, here.) And you know, he’s right. He is so right. But what does it matter, when it is phrased like this? Is it better to write the theoretical essay and be ignored, or to write the easily understood essay about why the theoretical essay is ignored, and to be mocked and derided? Which is more depressing? Which is more hurtful to the intellectual soul?

TL;DR.

There is nothing that hurts me more than that. It hurts because there is no intellectual response to it. There is no argument that can overcome that, no rebuttal that stands up to it. “I know you are, but what am I.” It makes the intellectual anger rise. It makes the brain wish to ball into a fist.

TL;DR?

You’re An Idiot; Release The Kraken.

But I don’t have a Kraken. All I have are more words. All I have is a lawn that keeps growing. And I have this yeasty imp, fueled by the anger-agar that seeps from my optic nerve to the embryonic root of my brain. There it grows, and begins to stink.

Let me share some of this stink with you.

Sanger is correct, but he writes in a way that will obviously offend, and thereby make his point mute (yes, mute, not moot). Not that he oughtn’t to tell it how it is, but using very generic terms like “geek” and “intellectual”, in my opinion, allows more excuses than accusations, because responders quibble and evade on these points, rather than dealing with the root of his argument. The same thing with tossing Higher Education on the table: an entirely different Gordian Knot, that has connecting lines to be sure, and yet isn’t the same problem.

So let me rephrase, or remix if you like, what is basically his argument, but from my own perspective, using words I hope are more helpful.

Here is how I would phrase the problem:

The respect and credence given to technical knowledge and expertise is limited to those technological fields that are capable of producing marketable product.

In a sense, I’ve made the issue much more complicated, because I’ve linked anti-intellectualism to my own brand of technological Marxist critique, which is to splice two very different and equally controversial arguments together. But I believe that it simplifies the issue as well, by pointing at the real determining factor behind what has been largely acknowledged as a changing paradigm of public opinion, but misidentified as everything from “getting stupider” to “intolerance” to “peak attention span”.

It is not that geeks are anti-intelligence. “Geek” now describes wonky, technically-minded folk from every discipline and genre of knowledge you can imagine, from programming language to dead language, to library science, economics, literary theory, medicine, cultural studies, astronomy, and higher level math. Because of the proliferation of these serious lines of inquiry, there has been a Balkanization of knowledge. Geeks are allowed to immerse themselves in the most concentrated areas of their particular field, and can communicate with others as deeply steeped as themselves. Geekdom has allowed knowledge to intensify to previously never before experienced degrees. Everyone has a conference these days.

But what has changed is the intercommunication between the fiefdoms of Geek. Why would you want to share your deep knowledge by making it accessible to those outside the fold, when you can concentrate your efforts among those who know what you’re talking about? And moreover, why would you want to learn about anything you were not already deeply familiar with, and have to once again become a noob, with a user profile page showing to anyone that you have only been a member for a few paltry weeks?

There are exports by the Geek Guilds, to be sure. But these exports are only products. If you can sum your architectural knowledge into a fifteen minute keynote, we can sell that as product. If your astronomical research spanning years can be compiled into an animated video of five minutes or less, that can be uploaded to Youtube. If your philosophical theory can be applied to social media so that pre-conceived understandings of that media are reinforced, then by all means, name-drop and share. But if your work is somehow more nuanced, more difficult to grasp, or more requiring of deep study and understanding to be conceived… well, then forget it. A picture of a kitten is the common denominator of the internet. If it requires more background knowledge to grasp than that, it better pay off in equal magnitude. Otherwise: TL; DR.

The epitome of this tendency is, of course, the Gadget. The Gadget is technology that is in an easily conceivable, direct to market, product package. No one cares how an iPhone works. All that matters is what it does. The Gadget need not even exist in a physical sense. Gadget blogs have made it abundantly clear both in their content and in their form, that all you need is a clean-looking mock-up of the product and a blurb about what it does to garner clicks and re-posts.

But good for the Gadgets! I wouldn’t begrudge them their own domain. That this consumer-tech domain is particular ripe for commodification ought to surprise no one. But, it does attract the ire of Larry Sanger and other confederates towards the technosphere, or whatever the so-called media theorists and technorati would name the disparate amounts of networks and techological infrastructure making up a certain evolving aspect of our culture. As the elements of our society that most easily conform to exportable knowledge-products and aid their outsourcing, marketing, and distribution celebrate their own intellect-economy Golden Age, it only makes sense that those knowledge-guilds that are losing influence as a result would be bitter, and point their privateers towards the flags that spite them.

If the problem was limited to sour grapes, we would be lucky, and we could shrug off this issue as the technosphere does, by hoping that the ease of export of knowledge-products translates into the ease of its manufacture. The world is changing! And with this change, with improved information gadgets including all kinds of features for sharing knowledge-products, everything should be better for intellectuals! Right? Of course, I’m here to tell you no.

What’s more, the manufacture of knowledge-products is the least of our worries. As if the budgetary downfall of NASA only threatened our supply of totally sweet YouTube videos. And it is not the Balkanized guilds I’m worried about either. Luckily, (for the guilds themselves, at any rate) there are more qualified Ph.D graduates out there than there will ever be jobs. There are plenty of knowledgeable, well-trained, motivated people out there willing and ready to further the most diverse aspects of technical knowledge that we can imagine. The Geeks will remain strong, if isolated except by the camel trains of their products, flowing out into the vast market of culture as the commodified demand of curiosity dictates.

The real problem is for people like me.

And here you would be more than welcome to disagree, by arguing that my issues are not a real problem. Perhaps the age of the Renaissance Wo/Man is over, and there is no need to mix and sample different realms of knowledge. Specialization could be the way of the future, and people like me, who made their domain out of the hybridization of different networks of knowledge, are in fact obsolete, no longer bringing any value to the market.

Indeed, we always were a little hard to reach for the average person: specialist or merely part of the common cultural audience. Our references are hard to place, and we leap from metaphor to metaphor as if swinging from the branches of a tree. We make odd, artistic comparisons between the world of art, and microbiology, or computer science, and particle physics. We know enough of the local dialect to get us in the door of the clubhouse, but as soon as we got a few drinks in us, our accents become almost impossible for the locals to decipher. We are untrustworthy, jumping disciplines like ships or trains, never in one place for more than a season, before dropping the work with which we were entrusted for something that, to our former employers, seems no more than a game. Some even suspect us of witchcraft, blending unholy syncretisms of canonical theory with local folk beliefs, chanting in tongues and miming archaic symbols, summoning dead spirits to affect the living, for a cost.

So maybe our time is past. Or, maybe, as Larry Sanger says so ineloquently, if you are opposed to those of us that marry the middle-levels of disciplines together in an obscure blend of unprofitable knowledge muck, then “you are opposed to knowledge as such.” (Emphasis his.) It is not just our jobs that we are worried about, our audiences, and our students (I have none of these things, and so I extrapolate to others’ concerns.) The real danger in our neglect is that we understand, or at least think we understand, how it is that knowledge works.

It isn’t mysticism, and it isn’t ideology. It is the mechanics of knowledge. It is the praxis of knowledge, the infrastructure on the ground. The craftspersonship. You might be a genius of economics, working the markets both micro and macro. But it is on the backs of those experimenting with knowledge, from the sweat of our labors, that the products consumed by culture are derived. I hate to make it into something as abstract as “political”, because it is fiercely more than that. This is how people learn. You don’t learn electronics by using a cell phone. You learn electronics by breaking a cell phone. You learn by mucking about with spare parts and with tools, by fucking up and by taking your time and by pursuing things that don’t make sense to anyone but you. You learn by making “art”, not products. The only thing you can do with products is make money.

Supposedly, this culture privileges creativity. It supports breaking down boundaries, it applauds those who think like children, who set aside “time to play”, who start out with tiny blocks, and build up from there. Our culture privileges this, but only once the IPO hits. Once you’ve demonstrated profitability. They don’t respect the act of play, they respect the product of play. And hence, no one actually understands how to do it. If you think that dropping out of college will make you a genius because a genius dropped out of college, you obviously skipped introductory logic, and never learned what a false syllogism is. People are not smart because of the products that they create. They are smart because they messed around in the creative process long enough that from all that mucking about, a product actually crystallized.

Because very few people will talk about the actual act of being interested in breeding and branching and building with broken knowledge products, it is no longer accorded much value. That value is channeled towards marketable products, and the technological specialty that is believed to have delivered those things immaculately. The person who makes a classic work available as an eBook is considered more of a genius than whomever wrote the words. That person has what we want–the product, not the knowledge. It becomes superfluous to even sit and read the book, because it can be referenced and searched at whim. The book is owned, and in this way it is consumed. And so it never has to be studied.

Here, at somewhere North of 2500 words, I could tell you whom you ought to read. That rather than watching some asshole shill his product in an hour-long self congratulatory “speech”, you ought to read Goethe, Dostoyevsky, Melville, Kierkegaard, Arendt, Kristeva, Marx, and Freud. But what would be the point? These are just products, now. You could download the ebooks. You could even read them. But what would you gain, other than checking off the names that I listed? Would you take from each of these writers, as I did (because I named these authors specifically and not on a whim) that it is not the knowledge you accumulate, but what you do with it? Probably not. That is only my opinion, and probably a cognitive bias echo chamber, as the technorati has so kindly “discovered” for us (though we’ve known that for thousands of years). You would probably take whatever it is you would take from it, and then cross it off your list. And who would I be to blame you?

Because it seems that people of my opinion are few and far between. Perhaps we’re a dying breed, or maybe we were always rare. Maybe we are useless, never being Great Persons of note, or at least never birthing a Great Invention into the world. Who can really say. All I do know, for all of this knowledge I have acquired, is that I can still see the snarls in it; that there are great whorls and vacancies between the so-called markets of the value of knowledge, and we could build something truly wonderful and great in that space, if only we took the time and the effort to see it.

But soon again, it will just be time to cut the grass.

Part Two: The Political Tract

When I crafted a response to design-fiction from the perspective of fiction, I knew there was a good chance I was going to raise some hackles. I had decided to stand behind the line of fiction, and from there, fling over the wall a quasi-action-adventure essay, in which the noble forces of fiction were beset on all sides by the cannibalistic hordes of capitalism and design. All of which makes a good story, and a good missile. But is it correct? Or was I disingenuous, playacting with straw men, lighting off pyrotechnics without warning my audience to the presence of smoke and strobe affects in my performance?

My response was always intended as a first step: the Devil’s Advocate position. A method truly less and less reputable in this era of networked cells of concerted, street-level optimism; something somewhat out of fashion without the old grand narrative to rebel against. And yet, I wanted to turn the tables, and break down some of the current conceptions about what design fiction is, and how it works. Then, with stability shattered, propose the way forward. Which I did, but only at the very end of the essay.

But it seems that was not enough. How could it be? After I stormed in with much light and noise, how could I attempt to redeem myself in a couple of tack-on paragraphs? Could I really just set the cart back on its wheels with a gesture and depart from the room as if nothing was wrong?

The conclusion of the fiction I wrote was that design and fiction ought to work together. They ought to unite their combined mechanisms and critical eyes, and proceed in alliance to creatively map the dense network of technology that defines our present and our path towards the future. In furtherance of that goal, and to not only mend the bridge but build a better one, I wish to explain exactly how it is that design and fiction work as creative acts; and then from this, show how they might work in concert. And so, let us move on from the fiction, and begin the political tract.

via Microcosmpublishing.com

The So-Called Imaginary

Time, being the dimension upon which the past and future run their spectrum in either direction from the pivot point of the present, is not an easy tightrope on which to walk. Today our technology is more grandiose, and yet more intricate than ever before in history. Our position as subjects in this time is tentative at best, evolving in tandem and in opposition to the nodes of the technological web of the material world which is always changing, even the most concrete plateaus being only as stable as fluid underneath. But we have the tools to negotiate this. We are the tools to negotiate this. Our sense of history, through which we perceive and interpret the world, is as much the network of time as the tools that built it. We’ve only ever had these tools, and with them in our hands we’ve built the whole thing, as far as we can see. These tools can be used to destroy it, to fix it, to control it, and to build it even bigger.

It is difficult to begin to move forward without assessing where we are now. And it is difficult to say where we stand, without either taking a pithy few examples as the whole, or creating a generic “average” standpoint that doesn’t actually exist: the well known fictional format I like so much. But the state of things is difficulty, and it can’t be avoided. As such, I wish to imagine an average description of the popular way we might construe the current cultural state of affairs and our historical matrix: the so-called, the Imaginary.

The Imaginary as a proper noun was most notably formulated by Lacan, as a domain of his psychoanalytic theory. The Imaginary is a ghostly realm, the place of dream, imagination, and image, set apart from the language and logic we might use to describe such things. It is differentiated from the Symbolic domain of signification; the logical structure of language that organizes, compartmentalizes, and gives form to the Imaginary. The Symbolic is the means by which we express things, but the Imaginary is the font from which ideas well.

This structural differentiation will no doubt sound familiar to many, as it is a common schema found in various philosophical theories of the Twentieth Century, with precursors extending back to Classical Philosophy. It is two-part: there is the firm, formal plumbing of the Symbolic, and there is the Imaginary flux within that conduit. The structuralist metaphor fits bipartite imagery according to a number of metaphors, rendering it to our understanding quite easily.

And accordingly, we apply this metaphor to understand our technological invention. In fact, all creative disciplines are usually explained this way. That there is a flitting dream-world of ideas half-formed and interconnected from which we draw inspiration and shape this raw, creative material into actual invention seems not only mythologically relevant, but appealing to our sense of agency. Be it on the lips of the muse, through the mystic gnosis of juxtaposition and suggestion, or only as result of hard monastic study and meditation, our common understanding of the act of creation seems to fit to this notion of “channeling”. From the Imaginary to the Symbolic, we build ideas out into reality.

by Flickr user Glasseyes View

The Biologic Field of Cultural Objects

Unfortunately, this mythos does not bear scrutiny. There is an imaginary field of material that we access, but it is more real than this nebulous domain. If it was more ethereal, shrouded in the fog of sub-conscious and hidden within the dungeons of memory, it would be comfortably distant. It would be something we would not have to be acquainted with directly. And yet we regularly visit it for supplies, with the pedestrian ease of the massive suburban grocery outlet. It is a myth to think that it is both of the ethereally-beyond and simultaneously in each of our grasps. Perhaps similar, in this way, to the realities of the mega-store, disavowed by the average consumer more interested in a convenient bargain than in the dirty, often tragic mechanisms of world trade. The facts are blurred by the Imaginary, conveniently forgotten, and no less uncomfortably present when we finally clear away those metaphor-implied clouds.

If it were somehow inaccessible, we wouldn’t be responsible for an ethical relationship between ourselves and our creative raw materials. We could extract from the Imaginary at will, as if it were an endless supply, some sort of water from the rock. As a different dimension from reality, the Imaginary cannot be causally linked to reality. There is no measurable ecosystem between the Imaginary and reality. Even if one were to acknowledge they were connected, how can you begin to map the transversal connections if one half of the terrain remains obscured and conveniently unconscious? Our diagrams of the Imaginary rely on weak notions of spontaneous creativity, mythic inspiration, and the heavenly-dictate of random association. But there are real mechanisms at play in the field of “where ideas come from”, and we can’t overlook them.

This milieu from which ideas are drawn, call it an Imaginary or whatever you like, is quite real and close at hand. It is the field of Culture Objects: the pieces of media, story threads, narrative concepts, and instances of human desire that have been crystallized into that which we consume when we consume culture. There is nothing imaginary about them. They are as real as our books, music, film, art, technology, food, and everything else that we have glossed with meaning in our significant world. Naturally, their borders and divisions are in a sort of sublime flux, and that makes it difficult to apprehend them as objects. Is the folio Hamlet, by Shakespeare, reducible to the narrative of a son-murdering-his-adoptive-father? Or is that merely a major theme of that work? Or is it only an archetype found in Hamlet, among other many other instances? Is a snatch of melody a Culture Object? What about a chord? How about a particular tempo? At what point do we recognize something as an original work, a derivative work, an influence, a reference, or something related on so small as to be comparatively inconsequential for the purposes of cultural analysis? Rather than worry ourselves about the difficulty of analyzing and separating the complex web of Cultural Objects in play within our creative system, it is much easier to write it off as simply Imaginary. The fluid dynamics necessary to appreciate blowing smoke or murky water are easy, compared to the relativistic perspectives we must use order to perceive the multiplicitous nodes of the field of Cultural Objects. We are on the level of cultural biology, here. You look at a desert, and you see Nature. But describe what it is that you call Nature, and you see rocks, woody plants, succulents, the occasional animal hiding from the sun in the rocks. But look closer–inside those plants are insects evolved to live only in that one particular place. Creatures that look different than those anywhere else, in any other desert. And between the grains of sand: near-invisible lichens and bacteria, clinging to life and each other. The very sand of the desert is alive. Where do the bounds of biology fall? Like Cultural Objects, everywhere and nowhere. As a complex system, the field of Cultural Objects is far more complicated the Symbolic we so egotistically claim to master, and the Imaginary we tithe to heaven.

The Future

If we understand the Biologic field of Cultural Objects as being quite nodal, capable of complex evolution and yet simultaneously beholden to the present, we can begin to analyze how our present creativity might be able to transcend the present. We can begin to identify “The Future” more clearly. Within an Imaginary, The Future is desperately useless, as an undifferentiated blob of characteristics. But in the field of Cultural Objects, The Future is a critical, analytical technique.

If we believe that ideas are drawn from an Imaginary, a magically adjacent dimension to ours, then The Future becomes equally separate from our world. Mystically distinct from reality, we are unable to fully seize grasp of what The Future is, other than to call it out when we see it, with all the immaculate criticism inherent in a dowsing rod. If we make fiction, design, or any other creative product inspired by/for a vision of The Future, and that future is drawn from an Imaginary, where else is it coming from but out of that fog, with no bounds, no definition? “Forward-leaning” is no more a point of reference than “dream-inspired”.

It isn’t easy to isolate exactly where The Future exists in the field of Cultural Objects, but at least we have something to study, and a point from which to proceed. The Future can be a genre, much like variously distinguished classifications of historical fiction. The Future has the characteristics of seeming to be what is temporally oncoming based on our understanding of history: “the shape of things we believe are to come”. Much like electronic music, that seeks to express its creativity in terms of an generally recognized aesthetic, implied by the particular means of its creation: “the aesthetic of what sounds electronically generated”. Like desert fauna, biologically determined by a host of factors supporting the line between its life and its extinction: “the sort of animals that live in a desert without dying”. It is a pattern that we generate ourselves, pushing it out in front of us, calling it out ahead of us in our imagination, until we no longer are able to see it repeated any longer. We don’t know everything about this pattern and the means of its creation, but we know much more than we do about a perceived Imaginary, in which things move about like sprites, without systematic interaction.

The Future, in the sense of its most critical self-conscious expression regarding the things of its genre, is a critical-eye with a notion of the passage of time, and therefore not only is the aesthetic of the shape of things to come, but the means by which we understand how we recognize the shape of things to come, from amid the field of Cultural Objects. This is what we’d like to think of as Futurism, at least in its modern incarnation. It is not a holistic ethos pulled from the depths of the mind, or a merely aesthetic eye, but a way of reading, manipulating, and relating to objects on the ground, and the tools at hand. Within the genre, it is an understanding of how that genre works. It isn’t enough to create something that might exist. One must simultaneously think about why and how it might exist. Otherwise, it is merely repetition of certain cultural indicators. To speak of wireless because other instances of The Future contain wireless technology, or to consider augmentation of reality because other Future Cultural Objects might augment reality. The Future lends itself towards critical expression, because its pattern is one of constant re-definition by inventive creation, and not merely mimicry. In this way, The Future is distinctly in the present, because it must be as self-conscious of its current genre in order to patently adopt its future-tense. It’s mechanism is to functionally inseminate the present with the possible, and so it must be the technician of the relationship between these things. This is its functional operation, and is the mechanical means of the reprinting of its pattern.

The Future, insofar as it can be conceived and molded into Cultural Objects, already exists. The notion of the presence of historical objects deeply networked within our current apprehension of what is “now” has been referred to as “atemporality”. The meaning is the same. Historicity is genre. Objects create their timeliness in situ, among a network of similar objects, a pattern of the genre relevant and interconnected to a certain period of time. But this genre is always already reinterpreted in terms of the present as it is recognized. To see “old”, we must understand “new”. The ability to perceive history as being historical is dependent upon a headspace firmly grounded in the continuum of temporality, the ability to think relativistically about historicity and temporality, and the critical perspective necessary to project oneself in mechanistic concert with the functional systems that evolve over the passage of that dimension t. A tall order, to be sure.

Ethics

This relevatory atemporality, the biologic field of Cultural Objects, the cease-and-desist order towards the Imaginary: it’s not just a fancy existential perspective or a genre of philosophical terminology. It is a philosophical idea, to be sure; but it is part of our evolution towards an ethics of a post-moral world. Making the sort of shift necessary to push The Future beyond an aesthetic genre and into a critical perspective is not just an thinking exercise, but a crucial mentality for any creator, in the absence of other ethical guidelines.

Morality is a many-storied discipline in and of itself, and so I’ll have to reduce and concentrate the concept as I did with that of the Imaginary. We understand the principle–a guide and assessment strategy for human action. Whether justified by philosophy, theology, humanism, or other constituent articles, we come up with a plan for interpreting good actions and bad actions in reference to a judged spectrum of general good.

Short-cutting my way out of rehashing the entirety of Nietzsche’s The Genealogy of Morals, let me just say that there are some issues with a morality that breaks down the entirety of human action into the twin poles of good and bad. The world is complex, and we end up with a spectrum of good/bad, that has points marked out for ends-justifying-means, necessary-evils, greater-goods, and a host of other qualifiers that make the distinction between good and bad so relative as to make the distinction near useless on a daily basis. Attempts have been made to soldier on without losing sleep over this issue (notably, neoliberalism) but that… well, is a subject for another essay.

But ethics, as an alternate guide for assessment divorceable from morality, remains usable. An ethical system could rely on morality, but does not need to do so. It merely establishes a point of reference as its judgement schema. “Good”, perhaps most generally, but alternately “success”, “civil society”, “sportsmanship”, or “business” would work, to list a few examples. It arranges a pattern of action and assessment in furtherance of a more specific reference point than a general morality. One might consider it utilitarian, but the utility is merely a different orientation than an indefinable “general good”. Accordingly, an ethics can align the assessment towards a terrain that still has purchase, in the void of absolute right and wrong. Our interest in ethics then, in wake of my castigation of concepts like the Imaginary, should be obvious.

Supply and Demand

The ethics of creativity haven’t aligned according to “absolute good” in some time (though some proponents of an ethereal Imaginary speak as if it did), but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have its own poles. Currently, in most of the world, the values that sway the ethics of creativity are effectively market-based. We assess our creations and alter our creativity process according to the reference point of demand.

It’s easy to understand why. Creativity, for all of its noble features, is dependent upon economic support. And we’re not just talking publisher’s advances, royalty checks, production costs, and the other financial forces that play into the creation of Cultural Objects. Economy includes the household-totalling of many push-pull factors in addition to finances. There is an economy of creativity based on the use-value of Cultural Objects, separate from their exchange-value and any potential for capitalistic profit and loss. One can create anything that one wants to make; but if one wants to make “something”, it better be something that someone wants. The market can be as small or as large as we choose, but there must be a supply and demand market structure within it for the product of creativity to be said to exist. Creative production is merely idle work that cannot make a product, unless that product is consumed. The interests of one person act as a pull on the creativity of another. As the fruit of human expression, a Cultural Object expresses nothing unless it expresses it to someone. Even if the creator creates only for him/herself, it still satisfies that desire in order to take place.

The creator imagines, through his/her own apprehension of the complex network of Cultural Objects and the desires and feelings connecting them, a potential demand for an envisioned Object that solidifies as an idea, then which congeals via his/her labor into the actual Object: the work of art, literature, music, or whatever it is. Causality is not implied, and doesn’t have to be. The link between the supply and the demand happens from both sides simultaneously and connects both nodes into a unit at once. It is a continuum between the creator who didn’t necessarily know s/he had anything to sell, and the consumer who didn’t know s/he had any desire to buy, until they meet up one day and at the same time begin to make an offer, in a suddenly networked transaction. The cost of the transaction is also moot, and quite likely, the exchange is not made in terms of anything like currency. What is important is that the Cultural Object is given over from the creator to the consumer because the creator was able to create and the consumer was ready to consume, and it is by this relationship that the Object can come about.

If the goal is to make Cultural Objects, the goal is to find demand, and connect it with the supply. We are all “middlemen” in the field of Cultural Objects, making connections between nodes, trafficking in flows–in the same way that every organism is in a sense a symbiont, in that through its biologic transactions of all kinds with other organisms, they all constitutes the ecosystem together. More connections between supply and demand engender more Cultural Objects. We continue to create and consume, and this ethic of demand, as a pattern guiding and assessing action, furthers itself, as life begets life.

via Flickr user lifeontheedge

The Obsolete and the Profitable

But on top of this general ethic of supply and demand, additionally ethic layers can be stacked like architectural vellum, shifting the meaning of the layers below. Perhaps just as natural as the desire to create, is the urge to profit. Capitalism, for better or for worse, is a fundamental ethical perspective coloring all of our actions, whether we like it or not. Enter the agents, the managers, the marketers, the gallery owners, the publishers, the retailers, the factory owners, the advertisers, and so on and so forth. In addition to guiding the flows of supply and demand to connect the nodes, they seek to extract surplus-value from these connections, by way of reprogramming the connections in a profitable way.

The “profitable”, then, is not only a connection that is demanded, but demanded with a certain furiousness. Capitalism must seek relentless profit-taking for the foreseeable future. Capitalism has long understood the concept of atemporality. There is no such thing as “new” or “old” outside of a relative judgment–instead, the ethic directs itself based on only what is profitable. And profitable doesn’t merely mean “profitable today”, but also “still profitable”, or “potentially profitable tomorrow”. Capitalism, as the ultimate ethical regime, seeks to reduce all other means of understanding systems to its own. Time, space, goodness, creativity: all of these are redefined in terms of their usefulness in extracting and channeling flows of capital. It could be a fad, a trend, a vintage, a reboot, a retro, or whatever you want to call it. To Capital, it is only profitable or it is not profitable.

Profitability, not unlike a certain abstracted genre of The Future in the sense of the Imaginary as already discussed, is self-servingly forward-leaning. One counts the profit one makes today, but plans for the profit to be taken tomorrow. The more critical aspect of The Future in the sense of the field of Cultural Objects, and its self-consciousness and the groundedness of it as a worldview, is dangerous to Capitalism unless reduced to merely the ethic of profitability: also known as “feasibility”. The sort of historical truths and radical potentialities that critical Futurism concerns itself with, such as climate change, social unrest, democracy, radical economic or political structures, personal freedoms (just to pick a few from the bag) are distractions from the overarching ethic of Capitalism. Any sort of critical break with the current systematic support, empowerment, and ethical justification of Capitalism are dangerous and potentially costly if they are allowed to occur, in that they might interfere with profitability: the bottom line. The goal is to replicate the profitable Cultural Objects of today, and anticipate those that will make money tomorrow. The goal is forward; while change, or a more specific critical analysis of historical systems, is not. Minimizing change for the foreseeable future in order to reap a steady curve of return is what the flows of Capital specialize at doing.

The opposite of “Profitable” in the Capitalist ethic is “Obsolete”. Obsolete is what used to be profitable, but no longer is. There could very well be a demand for that particular Cultural Object, but because there is way to seriously profit from that demand, it has no use for Capitalism. The LP album is the perfect example. The CD made the LP obsolete. But it never reduced the LPs use-value. It only provided an alternate, “better” use-value from the perspective of the capitalist ethic, in that it could sell itself as an improvement. LPs continued to play music just as well as they always did. But, because there was a better product in terms of the Capitalist ethic, they were officially labeled Obsolete. LPs continued to be bought, sold, created, and played. Until then one day, Capitalism had a change of heart. The system “noticed”, as it were, that despite being obsolete, LPs were still selling. And so, the technology was de-Obsoleted. LPs are now legitimate commodities once again, having reattained their position within the Capitalist ethic as Profitable. All of which would be extraordinarily surprising to the LP, if it was the sort of thing that could be surprised. It has not changed much over the course of twenty years of being Obsolete, rotating at thirty-three and a third revolutions per minute, in a similar stoic nature to the turning earth.

There is nothing wrong with making money on its face. Selling something is merely to participate in the exchange between the supply and the demand, trading value for value. But when there is a way of viewing the world and systematically understanding one’s actions that involves the flattening and reduction of all other ethics towards maximizing the flow of profit, such that the goal is to extract as much surplus-value as possible from the work of others… well, it would seem that there is a untenable situation for the long term. Legitimate use-value of the field of Cultural Objects, among a number of other important ethical considerations, takes a back seat, if isn’t run over in the middle of the road. In biologic terms, the Capitalist ethic is an invasive species: a predatory pattern that is overwhelming the rest of the ecosystem.

The Praxis of Fiction

So we take our critical-eye off the The Future as genre, and look into the atemporal distance all around us to study the mechanics and economics of creativity, rather than to simply reproduce its product. We stand up on the Biologic field of Cultural Objects, and see what is going on underneath our feet. We make our ethic firmly in terms of supply and demand as befitting our nodal networks, rather than per abstract regimes of profit and loss. We have an existential metaphysics, a politics, and an ethics. So what is it that we are going to make?

We each have our art form, our preferred medium, our home discipline, our comfortable home workshop, with our well-worn set of tools. Surely we won’t be straying too far from these. These are, after all, a fundamental element of our milieu, reference points and instruments across our own topology of the field of Cultural Objects. These constitute our praxis: our means of production, through which we engage in the market of ideas and objects with our audiences, our contemporaries, with the supply and the demand of the arena of creative human endeavor.

But is there ever a time in which it is not useful to re-evaluate, to re-strategize, to re-assess the situation on the ground, and to improve upon the plan? The praxis is always changing; the ecosystem is always evolving; the demands of our world always adjust; the terrain is always shifting and having to be re-mapped.

The map is fiction–or rather, fiction is what we draw, in attempting to map it. But we can only keep track of our creative motion insofar as we can conceive it as space. The field of creativity is our desert, which we were born to survive within. It is our ecosystem. Fiction, as the combined topology of our Cultural Objects, is the means and mechanisms by which we supply the demand of our imagination and fantasies. It is not separate from design, any more than design is separate from the world. Fiction and design are resolutely material in that they relate directly to reality, even when they momentarily retreat to the depths of our imagination. We dream in terms of the world around us, and we set our sights on what can be potentially achieved in a future connected to today.

Whether the art form is design, literature, or anything else, the praxis is the crucial test of whether we can best connect the nodes of supply and demand, for our own critical vision of the future, rather than regimes that would force us back onto the autopilot of the genre-fied Imaginary. What can we best do with our tools, that can find a place in the reality of the field of Cultural Objects? How do we already fit into the flows? What sort of creatures are we, and what sort of ecosystem is it that we inhabit? Who else lives here, and what do they eat? We must sharpen the ethical scalpel, while at the same time broadening the critical lens. These are metaphorical descriptions of creative practices, but they constitute our reality no less than any of these. We must consider the form of creativity as the means of an ecosystem, directing the flows between the nodes of means, material, ourselves, our audience, and each other: because it is. We need to stop creating products, and start evolving worlds. Because these worlds already exist.

Reference points

Design-Fiction: Fiction Responds – Part 1

http://www.scribd.com/doc/56638098/Smart-fridges-fifteen-lane-highways-and-the-Singularity

http://www.nearfuturelaboratory.com/2009/03/17/design-fiction-a-short-essay-on-design-science-fact-and-fiction/

http://maxb.home.xs4all.nl/ftf1964.htm

http://maxb.home.xs4all.nl/ftf2000.htm

A long article has been making the rounds, which at first catches the eye because of the copious (if mis-directed) use of a great many technospheric buzz words, popular smart phone app titles, and a splattering of post-modern philosophy, but then when unpacked devolves into all-too-typical post-Baudrillard simulacrap. BUT, just because it is misdirected, doesn’t mean that we can’t learn something from it, and take this opportunity to redirect.

The author of the above has a problem with a particular sort of digital photo. It is a sort of digital photo that somehow violates the glorious rules of reality, by mimicking something from a time that it is not. Time has come unstuck, and not in a good way. A bad, fake, inauthentic, faux-vintage way.

It might sound similar to another buzz word: “atemporality”. The author of the above link didn’t use the word atemporality. But, the words he used are responsible for directly the sort of miscommunication that obscures what atemporality is, and how it works. His notion of the faux-vintage, meager on depth as it is, is the scum that floats on top of atemporality, and keeps us from seeing the clear waters underneath. I hope to skim the scum off in this essay.

Part of the trouble with a concept like atemporality, is that it sounds right. Much like post-modernism, this makes it easy to put out on the table like a bowl of butter pats, without taking the time to think about what it is we’re having for dinner.

It’s not such a big word: “atemporality”. We know what that means, right? Something about time getting all weird on us, and the past, and the future, and maybe the sort of technology through which we imagine both the past and the future. Sounds good… type it up.

by Flickr user hannahblu59

But atemporality is something with more nuance than time-getting-all-old-timey by way of a digital picture. To define it myself in short terms: atemporality is the act of refuting the order of temporality, through the means which temporality is usually applied. We all use an interior sense of time, or temporality. It’s, you know, Time! We keep track of the order in which things happen, and form a baseline t axis by which we keep track of the world. (For a greater exposition of this concept, see Kant, Bergson, Heidegger, Deleuze, and many others.) Temporality: we know the past, and we can only guess at the future; we know something just happened, while other things are mere traces in our memories; we “remember the 80s”, even though what I remember as The 80s no doubt differs from your memories of it, and we can debate when the 80s supposedly began and ended; we may remember last Tuesday, but the details could easily be suggested to us, and our “memories” might be proved false once we see the pictures. All of these things are involved in our sense of temporality: a big, flowing river of time in which we float.

Atemporality is the point at which this temporality begins to break down, though still in a temporal way. We still have a sense of time, but the wide span we call “history” begins to get weird loops, whorls, and whirlpools in it. The usual cycle of fads booming and busting grow eccentric, and spin oddly off-center. The idea of what is “current” begins to break down. We have trouble remembering if something used to be common a long time ago, or if that was today but maybe in Japan, or if maybe someone simply suggested that it would happen soon in the future. The river of time spreads out into a brackish salt marsh delta, and we know time is still flowing, but we don’t remember where it was we were trying to go. Were we trying to go? What does that even mean?

Maybe it’s because of the internet, maybe its because we all carry computers in our pockets, or maybe it’s just because there are so damn many of us we can’t see over the heads of our immediate friends to get any good “big picture”, and mainstream media is only as existent as the last meme that we saw. But there are people who aren’t old enough to know that record players went obsolete, out there buying records, as if there was nothing odd about it in the world. Wearing Victorian fashion is a now subculture, not an attempt to mimic something so uncool as “real life history”. And, pursuant to the article I had linked to at the beginning of this essay, cell phones can take pretty pictures with weird, livid color achieved through simple algorithms. No big deal, except that someone thinks those digital pictures are “old”. And what’s more, “fake old”.

by Flickr user stevendepolo

Using a word like “nostalgia” is such a desperate sign of being out of touch, out of date, and so awfully-temporal in an atemporal time. “Nostalgia” assumes that there still was a temporal order in which someone could purposefully choose to “rewind”. It implies someone wants to “turn back a clock”, as if all our “wrist watches” weren’t synced to regulated network time via cell phone towers. Hilarious! You are the Encino Man of epistemology. Accusing an iPhone app of being inauthentically faux-vintage is about as cool as reminding your kids that some dead guy originally recorded the song being sung on American Idol way back in the 20th century. Pipe down, old man! The only people worried about what is correctly nostalgic or otherwise faking it are people who, for some reason, need to cling to a sense of permanent history that is not fluid, crowd-sourced, and always on instant remix mode. They probably still buy paper encyclopedias.

But the kids aren’t idiots, just because they won’t buy into your historical temporal-subscription business model. With a single Google search, anyone could tell you more about Kodachrome than you could, even if you used it yourself for over twenty years. As if they didn’t know that an antique is found on eBay, while up-cycled vintage is found on Etsy. They haven’t forgotten history. They’ve Gutenberg’ed history, if you pardon the zeitgeisty historical reference. Rather than re-write out the Old Story again and again in expensive, illuminated manuscripts, they’ve made their own printing presses, and they are distributing their pamphlets in the street. Or, if you prefer, they’ve pulled letterpresses out of the scrapheap, and they are printing comic books/novellas/vintage stationary that re-writes the story of Gutenberg as if he were an out of work Ph.D grad with a blog, or they’ve 3D-fabbed lost typefaces reassembled from scanned Library of Congress volumes, or they’ve… dammit, I’ve lost the metaphor, but that is the point. Atemporality is not your 20th Century post-modern critique. It is no longer enough to wrily point out a bit of irony that no one else caught, and think yourself Zarathustra for doing so. We leverage the networks, man. We access all recorded time periods with equal veracity and reach, until time periods cease being temporal. Anything that we can do with anything is only Now. Any of us, all of us, one of us. The temporality that anchors us to reality is atemporality.

When I say kids, I mean me, you, any of our contemporaries. The cutting edge is level, because the most amount of experience any of us can have with brand-new technology is none. Not all of technology is brand new, but that’s why we network. If someone finds a swell photography blog, or a scanned guide to restoring old typewriters, we pass it along. The best way to learn is to find someone who knows what they are doing, and help them. We’re all kids about some things, and many of us are experts in at least one thing. We come to the networks with certain abilities, certain likes and dislikes, and all the many facets of our personality. When we connect, reality happens. We’re all faking it to a certain degree, and all of our fabrications are realer than we know. There’s not a single person who isn’t surprised when their ____ goes viral, because the only thing one can attempt to understand about viral media, is the ridiculousness of the claim that one has identified and understood an epistemological hierarchy of network culture. “Pop culture” didn’t go obsolete, it splintered into more pieces than anyone can count, keep track of, or catalog and interpret. There is no such thing as un-cool. You just haven’t found the other people who think it is awesome yet. The topology of culture is similar to the technology that propagates it, in that culture only works. Technology and culture do not not-work. There is no plateau other than the niche, and if something is surviving, it is because it is crossing somebody’s spark gap. If something is replaced by a better tool, that former tool is either sold online or goes into the free box, where it is quickly grabbed by someone who could totally use it, or take it apart and make it into something else.

by Flickr user Valerie Everett

And this is how you know that the sort of person who uses the word “simulacra” with disdain doesn’t use tools, and only inhabits the realm of ideas as one inhabits a titanic, steam-driven airship; a fictional craft that never lands, never makes contact with the industrial revolution changing the world down here on the surface. There is no “inauthentic” in the machine shop. There are only tools, better tools, and tools that need to be fixed. What is it that Instagram does as a tool? It makes cool pictures. What do the titles of the filters mean? I don’t have the first idea. I swipe at them with my thumb until it looks sweet, and then I send it to my friends. Then I put down my iPhone, and go back to trying to un-stick the shutter on an old medium format camera. If I can make it work again, it might take cool pictures. And if I left it in that flea market where I found it, some asshole who uses words like “authentic” probably would have pulled it up into his airship and stuck it on the wall of his wine bar. I use all kinds of things. The reel to reel is next to the turntable on which my laptop sits, which is processing scanned 35 mm slides for filtering and reprinting, so I can reproject them with an overhead projector, and trace over it on a piece of tossed-out plywood. Where is the authentic in my living room? I couldn’t give a shit. Where is the “era”, the “epoch”? I couldn’t tell you. All of these technologies function today, and work Now. I can tell you that my 6 year-old laptop is probably more obsolete than the reel to reel player, because the reel to reel works like new, whereas the laptop often struggles with simple tasks.

Anyone offering authenticity has something to sell you, and likely, a something you do not need. They try to convince you that the way you are doing it is not as “real” as something else. Funny–because reality was just fine before they came along. Before they tried to monetize a particular world-view, to increase the value of a certain temporal commodity by claiming to be the exclusive arbiter of what is authentic and what is forged and fake. And we wouldn’t want to fool ourselves either; this is a capitalistic world, and everything ends up bought and sold. Any particular atemporal trend will end up named, stamped into a commodity, and sold, until stretched into a thin veneer of shiny, zombified goo. But that’s okay, because we already have a friend that we met in a comment thread, that can get us that real shit. The Real Shit, because it is the stuff we want and nothing else, and because we’re getting it from the source that we know and trust. That is the network, and that is atemporality. All real shit. No authenticity.

This is the second in a series of many reports. Each entry in the report represents a pattern.

Places for Secrets – Just as certain sorts of knowledge and information lend themselves to a desire by their holders to have their facts be kept hidden from some, certain places also lend themselves towards those that would seek to hide. Low light, obscure vantage points not in the typical lines of sight–these are ways to visibly hide. But a game of epistemological hide and seek is constantly occurring. What places have background noise that would cover a whispered conversation? A crowd that would make a meeting between two subjects seem less than intentional? Light that obscures the work of cameras, that would seek to record a person being in a place as time-stamped, cross-referenceable fact? Weather conditions might play a factor; places that are known to often be socked in by fog or made unpleasant by rain so that a potential spy would have no reason to loiter could be valuable. Any sort of sensory or epistemological interference natural to a place, whether affecting the senses, technological recording devices, or the media of recording itself. What could augment a place so that secrets could be hidden there? Dead drops for paper or other recording media. A single tree in the middle of a field could be a landmark, so that a thing could be hidden a set distance from it. Maybe even a library could be a place for secrets. Amongst a plethora of information, secrets could be hidden as if in plain sight.

by Flickr user Glasseyes View

If/Then – This linguistic and logical construction is known as an antecedent, and a consequent; in other words, from one proposition, logically proceeds another by way of their connection. This is also a form of hypothesis. If a condition forms, we posit that then we may expect a conclusion. It can be a description of causality, but–and this is a large caveat–only if the two things being described are coinciding in time. It is impossible for a causality to occur between two things not coincident in time. Because, time is resolutely causal.

Past/Future – Another pairing, because one denotes the other. Just as causality denotes a temporal coincidence between two things, any sort of temporal singularity, that is to say a moment, automatically implies an extension of similar moments preceding and proceeding from that moment. What is the past’s relationship with the future, outside of metaphysics, and the simple number line of physics’ fourth dimension? Does nostalgia for the past imply hope for the future? Which is more optimistic, and which is more pessimistic? Does positing a time-shift between a “now” and “then” make us less, or more beholden to any standard of truth? And is causality, like history, only written by the victors in the past tense, and like prayer, only proposed for the future by the victims? If we acknowledge trouble in our apprehension of the past and future, what does this mean for our perception of the present? Is there a present?

Live feed – The live feed is closely linked to technology. Telegrams gave way to telegraphs, which gave way to radio. The 24-hour cable news cycle is no different than radio, where the truth occurs as fast as information can be pushed to the announcer on camera/microphone. But the time of absorption has changed. There isn’t additional information to fill up that extra space, there is just a willingness to “clue in” those who are “only just tuning in”. The message repeats, not for mimetic purposes, but to constantly be current. Contrapose this to the live blog, that assembles like a timeline, so that anyone may log in and check the current development, and then re-create this currentness by rewinding as necessary. The consistency of these always-on feeds means that they don’t have to be always on. One can click on and off as they like, filter even. They can binge and purge their information’s currentness. But what is the point? What is the benefit of current? Current information is not always better. But the ability to have it there, is an ability. An epistemological ability to access time with a wide eye. Like a back-up for one’s data–the data that is epistemological awareness. Perhaps it is no coincidence that Apple coyly named their automatic data back-up system the “Time Machine”. Time travel through data is possible, but only to the referential data points of awareness that are of interest. And interest, is currently, taken with currentness. Call it time travel without moving.

Half-tone screen – When printing with a single color of ink, it is possible to create different tones by printing a pattern of dots of varying sizes, rather than a flat expanse of ink. This dot pattern, which blurs to the human eye at a normal distance, is called the screen. Dots of black on white paper make a gray. When two different dot patterns of two different ink are combined, the colors are perceptually blended, e.g. red dots and yellow dots appear to give a space the color of orange. This is called a half-tone screen. Most commercial printing combines four colors, cyan, yellow, magenta, and black, and from these can be created nearly any color of image, including photographic prints that are nearly impossible to distinguish from reality at the typical viewing distance. What is referred to by a customer as “full-color” printing, is most often known to the printing technician as “four-color” printing. One last detail to complete the possible metaphor: when ink is printed in a screen pattern, the ink will bleed into the paper a bit, increasing the size of the dot in a condition known as dot-gain, that is pre-calculated by the printer to make sure the dots end up being the correct size for the material being printed upon, so that the colors don’t end up shifting in tone. Now, this could be a metaphor–a pattern for thinking about the combination of ideas, data points, and reference values. For something involving the mix of two alternating concepts. But then, remember that everything that is printed, anything that you will read or look at and recognize a pattern or a symbol or a word, takes advantage of this same trick upon human visual perception. In every idea there is a bit of difference, and in any text there is the difference between white paper, and black text.

image by Trevor / cdsgraphic

National Epic Media – We propose that Fox News is as close to a national epic poem as we can get in this current era of fragmented culture and alternate viewpoints. According to Bakhtin, the past is the epic’s subject, the national tradition is the epic’s source, and what is epic is the distance between the world of that epic and that of reality. The epic, constrained by those things, cannot be changed by current conditions, and what is current can only be interpreted by the epic, and not the other way around. The position of the epic “is the environment of a man speaking about a past that is to him inaccessible, the reverent point of view of a descendant.” Even the law of the land is reinterpreted on a daily basis–but the national epic is viewed as immutable, and wielded as roughly as if it were so. But how does this happen? Does any nation with a significantly strong sense of self purposefully develop an epic media as some sort of literary ur-ground? Or does that past and national tradition solidify only with enough time gone by, enough tradition built up that the patterned strata of it can be referred to obliquely, and yet be nevertheless as foundational as it is inaccessibly vague? What are the motivations for a constant reference to such an epic media? Clearly, money is a primary. But epics developed before there was such money to be made, and if the form is similar, then oughtn’t the cause be as well?

Modernism – An epoch of art, of architecture, of literature, and less definitional but with no less certain utility, history. What is it about this genre or time period that deserves an “ism” suffix, as if it were less a style, and a belief? It isn’t the only genre to win such notation, and yet, it is a noun, and not an adjective. Such philosophies and ethos often have manifestos, but Modernism is applied only from historical perspective, even if we claim to be part of its age.

Image copyright by GaryReggae, under CC license

Modern – This is the adjectival version, describing the former period. But it is also a temporal adjective, meaning a certain sort of currentness. Is everything that is current also modern? Is everything that is modern also current? Post-modernism, an epoch with an even more oblique set of reference points than Modernism, somehow debilitates the adjectival effect of “modern”. After all, how modern can it be, if something is known to come after it? If the subject of modernity is in the past, then what does “current” mean?

Punk/Not-Punk – The inflection point in a spectrum between what is attractively, authentically agonistic, and what is not. Punk is a genre of many things, but it most often described by rebellion, against a certain “mainstream”, as it were. There may be money in Punk, there may not be. There is ego in it. It often finds its subject in the past. What is Punk against? Ronald Reagan? Disco? Alternative Rock? Victorian History? How defined must something be in its agonism for it to become a full-fledged expression of Punk? How watered down and mainstreamed must Punk be to become Not-Punk? The violation of cultural norms in the search for the authentic. The institution of norms for the violation of cultural norms. A noun, and an adjective.

Sub-Culture & Alt-Culture – If culture was a narrative, this would be the subversion and the alternative-generation presented to that narrative as counter-narrative. The antithesis, rather than the synthesis. It can be defined in a certain hegemonic separation. A neighborhood full of hip individuals, marked in their individuality by all dressing in a recognizably similar way. A trend is only a pattern, until it becomes a noun, rather than just an adjective. A subject, manifesting creativity, by manifesting imitation. Not for mimetic purposes. An authentic sub-culture cannot be altered by the present. It is locked in the past. It can only be corrupted, and de-authenticized. Like the waxing and waning of the moon, sub-cultures pass from authentic in full, to inauthentically dark.

I like to think that inside each eyeball of a statistician, lies one of these little whirligigs, constantly spinning as he or she apprehends the world.

Via, and more on the subject, at Wikipedia: Causal Loop Diagram

I’m going to pitch three different ideas at you, all from the same talk by Kevin Kelly. Here we go:

The other thing that is evolving over time is the evolvability of the system. One of the things that life is doing is it’s evolving its ability to evolve. In the beginning, life didn’t evolve very much. As it made more structures and more things, the varieties of the ways it could evolve changed, so its evolution was changing. That’s what technology is doing. It is accelerating the evolvability of life.

Another way to think about this is that one of the things that life likes to do is make eyeballs. Life evolution independently invented eyeballs 30 different times in different genres and taxonomies. It invented flapping wings four times. It invented venomous stings about 20 times independently, from bees, to snakes, to jellyfish. It also has invented minds many, many times.

The problem is that there are many kinds of minds that biology can’t make but technology can. You could think of technology and us inventing the kinds of minds that biology could not invent. We are going to invent all different kinds of minds.

[...]

We invented the external stomach, it’s called cooking, that allows us to digest stuff that could not otherwise increase nutrition. It changed our jaw and our teeth. We are physically different people because of our inventions. While we can live on a raw diet, it’s actually very hard to breed on a raw diet.

What we have done is become dependent on our technology, and we will become ever more so. That’s just the definition of who we are. We are the first domesticated animals. We are a technology ourselves.

[...]

I went to visit a place where they were making one of the more advanced robots, called Willow Garage, in Stanford. I was there because this particular robot has the ability to actually find a plug and plug itself in to repower itself. No one has taught it where these things are. It can actually proceed and look and travel around on its own. It actually gets its arm and takes its tail and plugs it in.

I stood between it and a plug. It was very clear that it wanted power. It had a want that was very visible to me. It was never going to hurt me, because part of its program was not to hurt, but it was very clear it was going to get power. If I stopped, it would go around. It was somehow or another going to get it.

It’s not conscious, it’s not aware, it’s not even very smart, but it definitely wants something. It’s comparable to if your cat or birds wants something. I’m using it in those kinds of terms.

In the first excerpt, he discusses a separate yet similar evolutionary trend in nature, and in technology. In the second, he talks about both the technology of our biological functions, and the dependence of this technology on other, less biological technologies. In the third, he talks about a technology exhibiting something that we view as human, or nearly so and hence, animal: will.

In these three passages Kevin Kelly depicts contradictory and overlapping notions of what “nature”, “technology”, and “human” are. If I was to ask him about this, I don’t doubt that he would say that, indeed, these three notions are overlapping and contradictory, and that’s the point. No quibble, there. The problem, however, is that because these terms are so often used to talk about natural/technological/human issues that are only contradictory and specifically NOT overlapping, we end up going around in a terminological circle, which seems to me to be less sublime than the dichotomy of yin/yang, and more like a dog chasing his/her tail.

The problem is an epistemologically endemic one. It is most easy for us to think of things in terms of dualities, and so we deploy dualities in order to understand things. Unfortunately, the world doesn’t always work in dualities. This doesn’t make them useless, but it does give them a vulnerability.

Here is a couple of diagrams to show you what I mean.

In the first, we see three concepts, numbered 1, 2, and 3, each paired in dualistic opposition to another concept. A is NOT B, B is NOT C, and C is NOT A. Cool? Yep. A mouse is not a cat is not a dog is not a mouse.

The trouble with oppositional concepts is that we tend to think in terms of binary oppositions. A light is either on, or it’s off. A statement is either true, or it’s false. In this diagram, I’ve labeled each of three concepts, 1, 2, and 3, with a binary determination, either 0 or 1 (fill in whatever binary description you like). As you see, we immediately have a problem. 1 is oppositional to 2, 2 is oppositional to 3, but that would make 3 equivalent to 1. Mice and cats are natural enemies; cats and dogs are natural enemies; but are dogs and mice therefore natural allies? Only in Tom & Jerry cartoons. No matter how many times you go around, you end up opposing two of three concepts, if you are going to make two of them equivalent to one another.

I don’t think Kevin Kelly is intending to make his concepts binary oppositions. In fact, I think he intends to do something akin to the first diagram, in which by showing how thinks are different in some measures, they actually end up proving similar by others. The problem is that he uses words like “nature”, “technology”, and “human”, which throughout their use have been deployed strictly as binaries, we tend to think of them that way. Classically, nature and technology are opposing forces. Humans and their technology are separate entities, pitted against each other, allegorically not unlike Cain and Abel. And humans and nature are… but wait a minute, which one is on what side? Do we use nature to fight technology, or technology to fight nature? Or is our nature to use technology? Or is nature a technology for us to use? Or is the nature of technology… human? And the argument now starts to look like the second diagram, and we’re all confused. When you use concepts that are related by an us vs. them binary dichotomy, you invariably end confused when a third concept comes to the party.

Words are fluid, and their meanings change over time. But to immediately attempt to reverse the meaning of words deployed for hundreds of years, is to not only to attempt to try and talk over the epistemological voice of that former scholarship, but to confuse future readers who will attempt to glean the difference in philosophies that deploy the same word in different ways. This works, of course, and is sometimes done by accident, and then students simply have to learn their etymology. Reappropriations of terms, or “liberation” of terms sometimes occurs, and when it does, it would be futile to stand in the way. But in this case, I think we’d make more progress if we started on a different foot.

Without dipping deep into Rousseau, hobo faber, techne, and a hundred other data points that have attempted to harshly divide the world dualistically between technology/humankind/nature, I think we can say that just as strongly, we are now seeing the reasons these concepts are similar to each other. (I would add “cosmology” in there to make a perfect foursome.) Our cooking is a cyborg extension of our stomachs; robots can be programmed to convincingly simulate animal will; technology mimics nature at the same time as it surpasses it at its own game. To our perception, it often seems that the inter-concept transit is out-pacing the local transit. The news is filled with stories of nanobots made from molecules building vitamins to increase our brain activity. Aren’t they? Or does it just seem like it is?

And this is the bottom line. I think it’s all a matter of perception. If we seek to measure it in a certain way, we might show that the complication of the universe is increasing, or that it is decreasing. Maybe technology is getting further away from nature, or maybe it is coming closer. Maybe we are becoming less human, or maybe we are becoming more. These are old labels, from a way of thinking more influenced by Aquinas’ theory of Natural Law than by micro-electronics. These words are not defunct or obsolete, but they are certainly archaic. I’m tempted to say there is nothing new under the sun; except for our problematization of the idea that the sun is the sort of thing to which everything else could be “under”.

So, how to proceed? To use words like “nature”, “technology”, and “human”, we are quickly getting further away from what it is we want to talk about. Ought we to coin neologisms, like Kevin Kelly? To liberate “nature” from the domain of the rain forest and the tidal pool, or to liberate “technology” from the laboratory and the consumer electronics shelf? Or to just call it whatever, dreaming up new age theological realms and choirs of technologist angels as we go, not quibbling about the language so much as that we deeply belief in the Word itself? I’m not sure it is any of these, specifically. But I am pretty sure it is not none of them, either.

We’ve told the story before, and we’ll tell it again.

More than a quarter of a million people have marched through central London to deliver a powerful message about the government’s cuts in public spending. The generally good-natured mood was soured by violent and destructive attacks on symbols of wealth including the Ritz, banks and a luxury car dealer; and an occupation of the upmarket food store Fortnum and Mason.

[...]

Last night police appealed to people not involved in the disorder to leave Trafalgar Square as they came under increased bombardment from a group of protesters who said they planned to stay there all night. The protesters were throwing items such as coins and water bottles. Scotland Yard said that light bulbs filled with ammonia had also been thrown at officers earlier. But Commander Bob Broadhurst, the Scotland Yard officer in charge of policing the protests, said the TUC had done an excellent job in ensuring that the march was “very professional, very well prepared”. But he said a hardcore element had been intent on making trouble.

“Unfortunately we’ve had in the region of 500-plus criminals – people hiding under the pretence of the TUC march who have caused considerable damage, attacked police officers, attacked police vehicles and scared the general public. Unfortunately, because of their mobility and the fact they are aware of some of our tactics, we have been unable to contain them and so we have had these groups wandering around the central London area.”

via The Guardian

Let’s introduce the characters.

- A quarter-million generally good-natured folk

- A government

- The police

- 500-plus criminals

The story, of course, is that 250K folks would have been peaceably disputing the actions of their government, which the police is all to happy to grant them, but for the criminals who came and ruined the party. A seemingly logical story of course, because it sounds like those 500 did do some damage, for a purpose and effect that seems specious at best.

That is, until we realize how illogical the story itself is. These 250K are going for a good-natured stroll. That is a powerful message?

Another story about a powerful message, that took place no more that two months ago almost to the day, is the story of Egypt, and Tahrir Square. Egypt was not afforded the right to go for a good-natured stroll, and so they were forced to fight for the right to do so. Eventually the police relented, when they were supplanted by the army. Now the people were allowed to have their stroll. Everybody happy, yes?

No. The Egyptian people had had enough. They were not content at sending a “powerful message”. They wanted their government to actually change, and so they said they would not stop their good-natured stroll until that happened. They set up camp, and decided to stay.

And we know what happened next. There was violence, and strolling, and violence, and solidarity. They held together, and they got their change.

The 250K who are only interested in sending a “power message” are not in it for the change. They are in it for their conscience. The 500-plus who refused to leave when the police informed them their stroll was over? They were in it for the change. For the long haul. For the sit down, and stay until you are listened to, and not just tolerated. And they were branded criminals, not only by the police, but by the 250K strollers who condemned those unfortunate, misguided kids.

Perhaps they were criminals. Perhaps they only show up for the breaking glass, for the paint. Perhaps they like being beaten by cops… who knows. But they were the only ones willing to stay.

When they are all arrested, and the good-natured stroll is over, the government will continue to have its way. The cuts will take place, because even though there were many people willing to send a message, no one was willing to stay.

It’s an old story. We’ll see it again.

From Coilhouse:

John Murray Spear, a middle-aged Universalist pastor in [mid 1800s] Massachusetts, claimed to be receiving messages from dead men. Sure, it was somewhat strange that instead of talking to a deceased relative for comfort, he claimed that a “Band of Electricizers” made up of Ben Franklin, Thomas Jefferson and others, had chosen him to bring a messiah into the world. But, in a twist fitting a new era, this savior was a machine, one that would, Spear relayed, “revolutionize the world and raise mankind to an exalted level of spiritual development.”

With “spirit guidance,” Spear constructed a contraption of zinc batteries, metal balls, and thousands of copper wires, encased in a wooden frame. He named it the New Motor. The purpose of this machine was as vague as the man himself, but he claimed that it not only harnessed spiritual electricity, but also housed an as-yet unborn soul.

Spear was hardly the first to build an odd contraption with spiritual properties, and he will not be the last. The article above mentions a number of other future-leaning types, abolitionists, women’s rights advocates, and others who dabbled in Spiritualism during that period. You can think of your own similar examples from other points in history.

I love this sort of thing, and of course I do, because I have some half-built machine/art project in my living room running off of the eccentric motors pulled out of half a dozen malfunctioning atomic-synced radio clocks. Art is my excuse of course. My excuse to play with technology that I only half understand, building nothing of consequence from pieces of things I have broken. I’d like to pretend I’m tinkering in the great tradition of gentlemen scientists who actually made most of the scientific discoveries in the world, prior to Spear’s time period, not unlike those whom Spear believed appeared to him in a dream to tell him how to build his own machine.

But I’m not. I don’t have the patience or the interest to learn how something works outside of a mental understanding. I don’t seek to create, or invent, or discover. I just like to tinker. I like to read. My field of real creation lies elsewhere. And so I understand when I draw a bit of those looks, those “woo woo” looks, the sort that one gives to a man who will just as easily discuss Game Theory as Orgone Theory. To an extent, I deserve them.

I don’t think that Orgone Theory is a real thing (not any more than I believe in Game Theory :) but I like learning about it anyway, just because it isn’t. There is something wonderfully tragic about such a theory that could so consume a smart man like its theorist, Wilhelm Reich. And while I’m not sure I agree with the author of the above piece, who suggests that maybe those whom are progressive and forward thinking are always a bit crazy, I think there is something about wild, unproven technologies, and the desire to build machines without knowing if they work, or in the full knowledge that they don’t. The pathos of dreaming, perhaps. Or the skill, and yes I call it a skill, to make one’s delusions real in the world.

It’s a capacity of performance art, and I think it lives in everything that we do. Whether or not your technology empirically “works”, there is a bit of performance art to it, that constitutes the will to make it exist, if not to make it functional. There is a sense of pleasure in this sort of creative work, whether or not anything ever comes from the science, or whether or not there is any science within half a mile of the project. It’s dreaming in real life. It’s the ability to creatively fetishize technology–to believe you are fulfilled, even though perhaps you are sitting inside an empty wooden box.

Take, for example, 3D films. It is a technology that “works”, empirically. And yet, what is the real use? Entertainment is important, sure. But I couldn’t care less. I’m entertained anyway. And while the inventors of 3D film technology might have had delusions of grandeur about the importance of their device, or simply been convinced that it would make them rich, they didn’t know this for sure. They had to build something, with an idea, and not much else. Most people see film, and they are satisfied. But these folks wanted it to be something more.

Maybe if I had an idea of where my clock machine was going to take us technologically, I would actually get somewhere. Spear’s machine was smashed by an angry crowd, and the new spirit he was theorizing never came into existence. But he DID end up working on the Underground Railroad, with several communes and other socialist projects. In the large, never-ending piece of performance art called life, his technology–if you want to call it that–did end amounting to something.

The world of ideas and mechanics are related. Video games, once a diversion, are now supposed to improve the cognitive facilities. Real, world-changing technologies are born and die on the backs of envelopes and napkins. I’m no scientist (really, not a scientist) but I wouldn’t be surprised if building a failed perpetual motion machine wasn’t in some way, good for the mind. At the very least, it is all an interesting piece of art. Perhaps the technology really does exist in the mind, rather than this world.

I was laid off for the second time, roughly two weeks before Christmas.

I don’t celebrate Christmas, so that part was moot. But it seems to get a sympathetic look from strangers. On the other hand, I think it also distracts from the “second time” aspect, which to me was the important bit.

Getting laid off even from a job you dislike is nothing like quitting, so I had to find a way to quit something to make up for it. We (my partner M and myself) already had promised to be back on the East Coast for various family/holiday things, so we re-oriented our plans, argued on the phone with airlines, and drove across the continent. We called it the Minor American Cities Tour. We often give trips little names like that. To pretend they are more planned than they are, I suppose. We did the family stuff, and then we drove back to the West Coast.

In all of that driving, there was a lot of time to think. I had a big plan, in the weeks after being laid off. The plan was to write a series of ten intelligent, thought-provoking, wide-ranging essays, showcasing my skills as a writer. I would front the series with my resume and a thoughtful and honest cover letter asking for writing work, put it out there on the Internet, and then use the essays as the force to back it up. The punch behind the fist, so to speak. Except—more of a friendly, firm, “hire me please” handshake, I suppose. The plan had all the hallmarks of a New York Times article, and therefore, couldn’t fail.

Since that hour in the dark and snow on the freeway somewhere in the middle of the country when I came up with that plan, I’ve read two different resume/blogposts that had the same general idea, both of them written by people with a much fucking better resume than mine, getting way more retweet coverage than I could possible hope for. So I trashed that plan, deleted the cover letter I had already wrote, and in the remaining essays, started using the word “fuck” more often.

But the essays came out great.

I’m calling this series, The Museum of Small American Museums. I explain the concept in detail in the titular essay (I believe it’s number four), but basically, each essay is a “museum”, styled after the minor museums you see advertised along the highway in overly exuberant attempts to get you to stop and spend money in small American town X. Like anyone would ever stop their car for a museum!

Well, we did, and maybe you will too. Not for camp value, but to see what the hell an American citizen fills a museum with, given the chance. They aren’t handed the keys to the Met, for goodness sake. But they get a piece of donated property, a handful of volunteers, and a sign. If they’re really pushy with the change jar, maybe even some brochures.

These are not those museums. You will have to get out there on the roads between some of America’s lesser cities, if you want to see what it is that America wants to show you. I’m not doing your work for you. Like the kid in elementary school who wants to show you something behind the gym, what he wants to show you is not the same thing he would want to show you in front of the flagpole. If you want to see what he wants to show, you have to go behind the fucking gym.

These are my museums. These are ten small museums of America that I want you to see, for which I am making the fliers. We don’t have to go behind anything, you just have to come to my website. The first museum explains why the second occasion of being laid off really got to me. And the subject matter generally gets worse from there. But the writing gets better each time. With each essay, I get deeper into the really fucking weird shit that is going on around in this country, masquerading as “the unimportant”. In each new subject, I find more evidence that points to what is commonly referred to as the coming of the end of the world. It is not the end of the world, obviously. The common referrals are totally wrong. But it is evidence of something so different than what we know as normal, that if it ever got here all at once, it would seem just like the end of the world would, if it ever got here. My goal is to distribute this evidence, this difference, in a nice, thick, trickle. That way, we can release the pressure a bit, and maybe stop a massive American Seminal Emission Weirdness Event. No promises, though. I’m not a professional.

We’re going to do two of these museums a week, on Mondays and Wednesdays. That will give us five weeks of essays. You can find them here on POSZU, or if you’d like an RSS feed of only this series and nothing else that will die when the series is over, you can use this one here. Well, that’s enough bullshitting. Let’s get started.

This way to the exhibits →
← Back to Lobby (Lobby RSS)

Check this out. Philip Crowley answering questions in the daily State Department Press Briefing. Quoted un-interrupted for effect.

QUESTION: Some of the governments that have been mentioned in these cables are heavily censoring press in terms of releasing some of this information. How do you feel about that? (Laughter.)

MR. CROWLEY: The official position of the United States Government and the State Department has not changed. We value a vibrant, active, aggressive media. It is important to the development of civil society in this country and around the world. Our views have not changed, even if occasionally there are activities which we think are unhelpful and potentially harmful.

QUESTION: Do you know if the State Department regards WikiLeaks as a media organization?

MR. CROWLEY: No. We do not.

QUESTION: And why not?

MR. CROWLEY: WikiLeaks is not a media organization. That is our view.

QUESTION: So P.J., going back to the answer to your last question, have you contacted governments that have been censoring this to protest that – or sites that they have –

MR. CROWLEY: I’m not in a position to say what governments have done or what conversations have occurred between governments and media. There’s – certainly, there are countries around the world that do not have as robust a focus on these issues as ours does. That’s probably not a surprise to us, and when we do meet with these governments, we talk about media issues among key human rights issues. Our dialogue is not going to change over this.

QUESTION: P.J., on that subject of WikiLeaks, Amazon, as we know, did have them on their server for a time and then stopped doing that. And there’s a human rights group that says that Amazon was directed by the U.S. Government to stop that relationship. Do you know anything –

MR. CROWLEY: All I can say is I’m not aware of any contacts between the Department of State and Amazon.

QUESTION: Or the U.S. Government or just State?

MR. CROWLEY: I’m not in a position on this particular issue to talk about the entire government. I’m just not aware of any contacts directly.

QUESTION: From your perspective, what is WikiLeaks? How do you define them, if it is not a media organization, then?

MR. CROWLEY: Well, as the Secretary said earlier this week, it is – one might infer it has many characteristics of some internet sites. Not every internet site you would call a media organization or a news organization. We’re focused on WikiLeaks’s behavior, and I have had personally conversations with media outlets that are reporting on this, and we have had the opportunity to express our specific concerns about intelligence sources and methods and other interests that could put real lives at risk.

Mr. Assange, in a letter to our Ambassador in the United Kingdom over the weekend, after documents had been released to news organizations, made what we thought was a halfhearted gesture to have some sort of conversation, but that was after he released the documents and after he knew that they were going to emerge publicly. So I think there’s been a very different approach. And Mr. Assange obviously has a particular political objective behind his activities, and I think that, among other things, disqualifies him as being considered a journalist.

QUESTION: What is his political objective?

QUESTION: The same letter –

MR. CROWLEY: Hmm?

QUESTION: What is his political objective?

MR. CROWLEY: Well, his – I mean he could be considered a political actor. I think he’s an anarchist, but he’s not a journalist.

QUESTION: So his objective is to sow chaos, you mean?

MR. CROWLEY: Well, I mean, you all come here prepared to objectively report the activities of the United States Government. I think that Mr. Assange doesn’t meet that particular standard.

QUESTION: But just so I understand, P.J., what – I mean you just said the – that you thought he was –

MR. CROWLEY: Well, but I mean – let me – he’s not a journalist. He’s not a whistleblower. And there – he is a political actor. He has a political agenda. He is trying to undermine the international system of — that enables us to cooperate and collaborate with other governments and to work in multilateral settings and on a bilateral basis to help solve regional and international issues.

What he’s doing is damaging to our efforts and the efforts of other governments. They are putting at risk our national interest and the interests of other governments around the world. He is not an objective observer of anything. He is an active player. He has an agenda. He’s trying to pursue that agenda, and I don’t think he can – he can’t qualify as either a journalist on the one hand or a whistleblower on the other.

QUESTION: Sorry. What is that agenda, that political agenda? Can you be more –

MR. CROWLEY: I’ll leave it for Mr. Assange to define his agenda. He has been interviewed by some of your news organizations. He has the ability to talk for himself. But you asked — I was asked a specific question, “Do we consider him a journalist?” The answer is no.

QUESTION: In the same letter, he said that U.S. is trying to suppress the whole thing about human rights abuses. And do you agree with his contention that the U.S. is –

MR. CROWLEY: I found very little that Mr. Assange has said that we agree with.

Get that? Let’s summarize. The State Department deplores censorship of the media. But Wikileaks is not a media organizaton.

So if it is not a media organization, what does the State Department think it is?

[I]t has many characteristics of some internet sites. Not every internet site you would call a media organization or a news organization. We’re focused on WikiLeaks’s behavior….

And that behavior?

Mr. Assange obviously has a particular political objective behind his activities, and I think that, among other things, disqualifies him as being considered a journalist.

And that political objective? Despite being an anarchist, of course.

He’s not a whistleblower. And there – he is a political actor. He has a political agenda. He is trying to undermine the international system of — that enables us to cooperate and collaborate with other governments and to work in multilateral settings and on a bilateral basis to help solve regional and international issues.

What he’s doing is damaging to our efforts and the efforts of other governments. They are putting at risk our national interest and the interests of other governments around the world. He is not an objective observer of anything. He is an active player. He has an agenda. He’s trying to pursue that agenda, and I don’t think he can – he can’t qualify as either a journalist on the one hand or a whistleblower on the other.

So to do anything that might directly risk US interests and other governments’ interests is a political objective. So-called “objective reporting”, and even legitimate “whistleblower” status, must not contradict government objectives. Because that would make it political.

I don’t think I have to drag out the political theory to describe this as patently ridiculous. We don’t have to realize that everyday life is always political to acknowledge that, for example, suing the government over an eminent domain case and thereby challenging government objectives is a legitimate act. Endorsing a candidate is a legitimate act. Exposing corruption is a legitimate act. A media organization, a private citizen, whomever–they can do these things without attracting the ire of the State Department, without being anarchists.

The word I believe Mr. Crowley is looking for is “activist”.

To be in the media these days, to be a private citizen, is to be an activist. Either you stand up, or you sit down. If in this time politics includes web-borne leaks, a precipitous control of information, personal secrecy, and the ability to run a world-wide info-anarchist organization simply by being able to maintain a website (DDOS or not), then any person who forwards email is an activist. We already know that anyone who blogs can be part of the media. We’ve already fought this battle. What we’re learning now is that it isn’t about being media. You don’t have to be media to be in the right place at the right time, snap a photo with a cell phone and put it on your Twitter feed, and change the world. Maybe the media will reserve a certain sort of objective reporting, and write editorial columns to MLA standard. That is, as long as that sort of thing continues to be profitable. But the people who change the world with media won’t necessarily be media. They… YOU will be activists.

All activists have political objectives of their own. These political objectives are of minimal importance. Each piece of media is taken by various agencies, individuals, government entities, blogs, aggregators, and remixers, and interpreted in all of the ways that media is consumed and reproduced. Maybe that political objective is passed along, but it could easily be reversed or ignored.

This is no surprise to anyone who is not the Department of State. But what is a surprise to the rest of us is that all of a sudden, censorship of activists–that is, censorship of anyone who produces, holds, retransmits, or consumes media that is potentially contrary to the objectives of the State–is now permitted. Freedom of the press is obsolete, become obsolete with the presses and the publications they produced. In this present day future, the only protection is “objectivity”, of the kind that is never activist. Of the kind that is not contrary to the objectives of governments. Freedom of media is problem for other countries. Whereas, control of anarchists is the problem the State Department faces.

Julian Assange has made every person with a blog a potential anarchist. The real control of whether or not you are an anarchist, is how much the government disagrees with you.

Check out this dialog, written under a pen name by Wilhelm Reich in 1935, now published in translation:

Customer: If I understand you correctly, you produce after subtracting all costs about 10 to 12 marks for him per day and of this you receive 3 to 3.50 marks. And if times become permanently bad for the business he’ll sack you, in which case the reserve fund is of no use to you. So what in fact does he use this money for?

Assistant: Well, for example the boss has to acquire modern machines. At present we’re replacing the hand clippers by electric ones.

Customer: What does that mean?

Assistant (surprised): What, you don’t understand that? It’s quite simple. Now I can deal with 10 customers a day, afterwards I’ll be able to deal with 20 because the cutting will be much faster.

Customer: And each one of these 20 will be paying 1 mark as before. And you, how much will you get then?
Assistant (even more surprised): Naturally, I’ll continue to get my 100 marks.

Customer: Excuse my being so inquisitive, I’m getting a bit lost and am rather amazed. With the new improved machines you’ll be earning 20 marks for, him but you yourself will continue to receive only 3.50. That means the surplus has grown from 8 to about 13? Where does the money go?

Reich’s goal, is to show how Marxist theory can be explained without relying on dense prose and theoretical texts. Which, as this illustration of surplus value shows, it easily can be done. I’ve found that most economic concepts are best illustrated with little parables, along these lines of Customer A, Salesperson B, or even Currency A, Debt Note B. Theory, in that it attempt to define self-descriptive terms of debate, often cascades into complicated language pretty quickly, whereas anyone who has ever borrowed money can understand compound interest if explained in terms of $10 paid back over the course of 5 days.

One of the reasons I lost my fascination with academic pursuits (at least within the academy) is because of the complicated cascade of theory. Now, I am all for having a wide vocabulary, and I love technical terms. There are certain oblique concepts that must be grasped with long words. Each word is a tool, and you wouldn’t try to discuss existentialism in single syllables any more than you would try to build a house with only an ax. But, the complication of theory isn’t an end in itself. I got frustrated that the goal was not to bring these supposedly great theories into a wider focus. I didn’t want things to be simplified. I wanted every day to strive to be more complex, and for philosophy to meet it on its way, coaxing it and helping it along. But few people seemed to be interested in this, or at least effectively.

So now I write online, and publish little SF stories about Marxian cyborgs! I think Reich is correct. Maybe I didn’t have too many people on the edge of their seats with my little parable, and Reich’s story is not exactly a page turner either. But it’s a start. Most of the fiction that does have me gripping the paperback pages in concentrated enthusiasm does introduce a philosophical or otherwise theoretical concept. If you try to introduce semiotics to someone who has read Philip K. Dick, you will have a much easier time doing it than otherwise.

I’d love to push it even further, but short of a burst of writing ingenuity that produces a gripping narrative of Deleuzian bodies-without-organs, I’m not sure what it would look like. In the meantime, I think continuing to push entertaining writing in a certain theoretical direction, to slip in the theory when one can, is the best way. Little tidbits, rather than big academic walls.

[Totally would have posted without an intro, except that I post purported "non-fiction" so often, I thought you probably deserved an acknowledgement in the case of my posting strictly "fiction". And so: a short story. Cheers.]

It was a yellow house, with lots of bushes. It hadn’t been painted for thirty years, and then the woman ran out barefoot down the steps and across the crooked and overgrown paving stones to the curb, lifting up her feet quickly, as if the stones were hot. They never mowed their lawn, maybe they rented or maybe it was just that there was no reason, and the screen door banged as she came over all hot-footed, waving at me with one hand and lifting it up high in the air over her head, covered in thick black hair, all gnarled like mine. And I thought she was kind of cute, and maybe this was what she wanted me to think, waving her hands in the air in small-girl elbows-up motions. She looked like she had just been sitting on a couch. When she saw I had turned around and noticed her waving and saying—oh, oh, oh—to get my attention, she asked me if I had a cigarette. I didn’t have one and I wished I did, and I remembered how when I smoked I liked bumming cigarettes to people even though nobody likes doing it, because all the same it was like you were in a secret society, and sometimes good-looking women ran out of houses to talk to you. All the same I smiled nicely and she smiled and then hot-footed it back inside the screen door.

It was only one house away that a man with gray hair and skin as black as I’d ever seen came out of a little blue cottage and stood on the stoop tapping his boot, a big black work boot with stains all up and down from the toe to the top. This house was bright blue, like really sky blue, not light blue. Blue of the sky in the middle of the summer when you look straight up at the deepest part of it and space is right on the other side of all that clear air. He tapped that boot and smiled at me and put both hands on his hips before he spoke. I was wondering about wearing boots on a concrete porch and how that felt. He said—hey man, do you play a musical instrument? I didn’t play anything, I never could handle the practicing without being good, and so I wrote instead, but I didn’t tell him that. Just—oh no—He shook his head in big wide shakes back and forth, smiling as if people did every day and I could have imagined he did—aww man but I was sure you did, I thought you played the keyboards—But I didn’t and I wondered if he had gotten me confused with some other guy who looks like. But I didn’t ask and just apologized in that way I do and walked on.

And it was the next block, that then a woman came out of her garage carrying a wicker basket, a big old wicker basket with nothing in it, but so big you could put in almost anything. Her driveway was unpaved, just lots of gravel, put down a long time ago. Now there was hardly any gravel left, just dirt, and the little rocks scattered into the grass. This lawn was mowed, but it was weeds. I like weeds. They cost nothing and there are so many different kinds. House was red like a barn, and it was a house supposed to be like a barn, from the shutters and the doors and the boxes overgrown with plants on the windows, I could tell. She opened up on me about all kinds of things in one sentence without stopping for breath or missing a beat—did you ever think you’d never get to sleep, only to wake up from a dream and notice you were asleep the whole time, and that’s the sort of awake that couldn’t be a dream, because we only ever think we’re awake in our sleep and never think we’re asleep in the wake—That was exactly how she said it—in the wake—and I had that feeling before and I was about to say so but she just kept going—and another thing, time doesn’t work right in dreams, it keeps slinging back and forth like a rope hanging off the back of a car, like some kind of alive thing, and not like it ought to be—I thought it was strange she said—ought to be—because I don’t know a lot about physics and time but normally it just is how it is, and who can say what it should be. And I could have replied but then she told me—you go on with your walk because no one ought to listen to a rambling old woman anyway—and went back in her garage with the basket, so I did, I just kept walking.

Next was around the block onto the short gravel road between the two avenues, like kind of an alley, even though its got a street sign with a name. It was wide enough to drive on and some people had even parked their cars along it. I think they lived there. And then all of a sudden I met one of them, or at least I assumed he lived there, because he came around the tall hedge and stood looking at me holding a rake in both hands. Like it was a musical instrument. And he was ready to play. The hedge was so tall I could only see the roof of the house. He said, as he started raking the gravel in front of his paved driveway—what did they do with all the roads? Where did they take them all, all that asphalt they make in the plant by the river, trucking it all over town in those smelly trucks, smelling like shoes and like shingles left out in the sun and rubber cookware too close to the burner? Spent all that time paving, and now where is it?—He continued to play the rake as he spoke. I didn’t know if he was talking to me or the gravel or the rake or the hedge, but I assume it was me because he didn’t seem the sort of man who talked to his things. Or maybe he was talking to himself, so I just said—don’t know, it’s a good question—and walked to join the sidewalk at the other end of the alley.

The old lady cried—and what the hell did you do to your hair!—Looking up at me with the garden gloves on and turned outward to either side of her like flippers, covered in dirt from the flower bed, with a brand new trowel poking out one set of fingers. I smiled awkwardly, just like I always do when people ask, because they don’t really want an answer, they just want to hear themselves speak. I don’t like smiling and I would like to tell these people to go fuck themselves but I don’t. They go on making noise they like to hear, but I don’t worry about it too much because I’m sure they would anyway no matter what I told them. No matter what sort of hair or what I did to it. From the look of her brown house I hated it and it was ugly, and her hair was dyed blond, so very blond like a whore in a movie who is not actually a whore but an actress, whose job it is to look like what people think a whore looks like. But she was old and maybe a little crazy, digging in a flower bed filled with little flowers in a straight line in the center of a lawn, so I felt a little bad. She said again—what your mother must think!—Still not asking but saying, still holding the trowel, and I just said—I haven’t been to a barber in twelve years—and kept walking, and tried to forget it.

Then a young guy standing on his step holding a book and he came off the white clapboard porch with both brown boots landing in the dirt at the same time, jumping off the dirty peach colored stucco-walled house like it was a boat. He waved the book at me—hey man, you ever heard of the Lagrangian points?—Actually I knew about them and so he continued—isn’t that just so crazy, man, there’s these points in space where nothing moves, way out there away from the earth?—He opened the book and showed me the diagram—they move, but not relative to the earth and the moon, because the gravity reaches a point of equilibrium and it floats out there like the goddamn Sargasso Sea of the solar system—And it was pretty crazy when I thought about it, and he just kept going on, getting excited, and now smacking his thigh with the book, smack, against his black name-brand jeans, his voice got louder and then softer again, the words floated out toward me and past me in space, over my head some of it, but I think I got the general idea of where he was trying to get, and eventually he said—well alright man—and it was alright, and so I walked off down the block.

This house was white and covered in gray flecks where the paint was peeling from the shingles and falling into the evergreen bushes underneath the windows of what must have been the living room, because this is the sort of house it was. The windows were wide open, wider than windows normally are, storm windows pushed up past where they normally go and where it becomes difficult to get them down again. The woman inside stuck her head out at me and shouted louder than needed—what was the weather like yesterday?—I looked up at the sky, now covered in dark clouds, as if it would help me remember anything about yesterday. I said—it rained—She nodded her head in a way that both confirmed and thanked me without having to say anything and so I kept walking, glad that I could help, and as she disappeared from the space in the window I saw a white grand piano appear in the living room.

A little girl ran across the grass, which was not very long, but still she lifted up her short little legs like she was running through shallow water, and even tripped once when the sole of her small sneaker caught on a tuft of crab grass. I was afraid she would fall flat on her face but she pulled it out and kept moving forward. She looked up at me as she got closer, and breathing hard gasped—have you seen a brown bike?—I had not seen a brown bike and I told her so, and she looked quite disappointed and I tried to think what I was supposed to do to help. So I looked up and down the street, but didn’t see any bike at all and shrugged my shoulders and kept thinking about what I should do. Luckily her brother, or a boy about as tall as I guess her brother ought to be, came running up and yelled at her—come on Katy!—and she took off running after him as if there had never been a bike. And just then he was the one to fall, right down on his knees and his face in the green grass, and he made a sound that sounded every bit like—oof—not just a sound, but sounded like he said the word. She helped him up and they kept running around the corner of the purple house standing back behind the yard they were running through.

The old man was in a lawn chair at the end of the driveway, freshly sealed, not long ago paved, and he wore shorts of the kind that old men wear, showing off old relics of knees. His house was brick and it could have been new except that it was in a style nobody built anymore, only one story and spreading around the lot giving him almost no yard whatsoever. He looked at me and nodded his head—hey boy, you want to know what really happened on 9/11? They say it was terrorists but I know better, because I read that book they made about it and it just didn’t make sense; my son-in-law showed me the pictures on the Internet and I read about it: didn’t happen like they said—It’s true: everybody knows it didn’t happen like they said. They know for sure because it’s just too crazy, and they may not know exactly what happened but it sure wasn’t like they wrote about it and show on TV. And I told him and he nodded at me and said to me—the TV is a piece of shit—and I nodded and said—yeah—He said—all the young kids aren’t so dumb, good for you kid—and picked up the local newspaper off the driveway and I said—thanks—I kind of liked this kind of old man. I walked back the way I came wondering if he liked that style of house, or if was just past the time when he could change it out for something else.

I kept on walking the whole route of my walk, the blocks I walked down and all the streets. I don’t always go the same way, but if you walk for long enough you end up walking down some of the same roads. After all, I was just trying to leave the house for a little while and get a little exercise. After exactly the right amount of distance and time I always end up back at the house again.

I came back up the block, and as I stood in the middle of the street for a moment, just looking at all the houses, suddenly all the people on the whole street ran out of their houses and met me in the road shouting and hollering. They were asking me about all kinds of things, but mostly asking for cigarettes—yeah, cigarettes!—They all wanted ‘em and they wanted ‘em bad, and they were yelling and jumping and waving their arms about cigarettes, that cool burning smoke going into the lungs and entering the blood, and you know it’s bad for you but you don’t care because after you finished whatever it was you were doing, it felt so good to have that nicotine in your brain, doing whatever the hell it did. And they danced, and they sang, and they made fake cigarettes out of sticks and grass and trash and pretended to smoke them just so they would all know they were serious and so I would know too. I didn’t have any cigarettes but if I did I would have given them all away, so everyone could have cigarettes, so the whole street could have a smoke all at once together and feel good and bad at the same time, and I would save the last one for myself and stand there just smoking it, watching everyone else smoke. And as they finished they would stand around and talk, some crushing the butt beneath their different styles of shoes and others carefully twisting the burning ember off and saving the filter for the trash, because this was where they lived and they cared after it. But I didn’t have any cigarettes so they all went back inside their houses and shut their doors, smiling politely and wishing me to have a good day and a nice walk, or whatever else I might be doing. All their doors closed at exactly the same time, and it made a sound like a smack against skin, not really like a door at all, so many doors at the same time.

And when I was almost home, done walking out and around and back up the street again, the woman who looked real cute came back out of her house really quickly with a panicked look on her face like maybe her house was on fire and I thought for a second it was, but there was no fire. She was looking even better this time, and hot-footed it on over to me, and bounced from foot to foot. She waved her arms and grabbed my shoulders and shook me too, and shook all that beautiful hair. I noticed for the first time she wasn’t wearing a bra underneath her shirt, and I noticed this even though she was wearing a shirt because of that beautiful bounce she was doing, I don’t know why, but only for me it seemed. And she said—that’s all well and good you know, but we’re running out of buildings, because once their burned down, they’re gone forever—And I said—of all the things you might’ve said, I totally think you’re right this time.

I jailbroke my iPhone last week. This act of willful consumer disobedience, to force a heavily-designed piece of electronics and device fetishism to do certain things that it was specifically designed not to do, was an attractive gesture of rebellion that I have always considered, ever since first letting my hand and fingers learn the ways of the magic relationship with a smart phone, now over two years ago. For others, executing unapproved code on their telephone might not be such a transgression. A thing to try, and like, or maybe not, and then reset. Just another ringtone to try for a day. But it was always a bit more to me–it was something dangerous, a refutation of the protective super-ego; a violation of the warranty that protected this palmed cyborg implant against the possibility of loss; my guardian against the threat of an inconsistent hardware lifetime. The liminal relationship between me and my information was guaranteed against faulty screens and battery degradation, and for a long time, the danger of losing this safety measure made the flirtation far too dangerous for anything other than fantasy. This was my iPhone we were talking about… not just an old computer.

But my warranty, and my Apple Care plan, are now both expired. Apple has thrown me to the fates, and so I’ve leaped out into that abyss.

On Saturday night, two days after downloading and executing the “redsn0w” hack, sending myself across that barrier into a modern day tinkerer’s version of forbidden ecstasy, we went to see Lucinda Childs’ Dance.

This dance piece, a collaboration between choreographer Lucinda Childs, artist Sol LeWitt, and composer Philip Glass, is nothing short of beautiful. The work has no story. The gimmick, as it were, is that the dancers on stage perform behind a translucent screen, onto which film is projected, that mirrors the live dance. But the effect is no gimmick; the work creates a masterful symmetry and mimesis between representation and performance. In conjunction with the well-known minimalism of the Philip Glass Ensemble’s music, an experience of motion and repetition utterly ensnares the viewer, transporting the audience into a hypnotic dimension of art. The film, the original of which was used in the performance we saw, was recorded for the original performance in 1979, a time when dance as performance, as well as technique, was being explored by many artists. The medium of film, a material for capturing and augmenting performance, found its place in the dance company. The immaculately timed and edited film cuts sometimes lead the live choreography, sometimes trail it, sometimes mimic it as if meant to be precisely accurate, and other times deviate with a similar accuracy. The Cartesian lines on the floor of the dance studio in which the film was shot accentuate the live dancers’ motion across a static stage, extending the dance and giving it extra vectors of dimension. It is more than dance, music, and film. The performance is a nebula of sound, light, and body. It is
image, tone, and motion.

To see it performed, I was amazed. Not only by the overall aesthetic of the piece, but by its apparent tenuousness. The work that went into producing those film cuts, and editing them exactly with live dancers and with music. The collaboration between three artists, all quite powerful on their own terms. The work of the dance company, re-learning choreography in order to match a film shot over thirty years ago with precision. To be there was not like watching a screen. It was as if a glass projection tube of a miraculous, angelic television extended outward and over the head, and I sat among the electrons as they whirled with exaggerated arm movements, hands locked into vectors of potential travel. It was as if the third dimension had been removed, the live dancers hidden behind the translucent screen reduced to points on a plane, and then this dimension had been reinstated, artificially colorized and splendidly animated back into reality by the re-introduction of depth in the black and white film on the screen. This depth was something personally existential, because where you sat in the theater watching this performance affected the entire perspective between dancers projected on a flat screen and dancers moving in space beyond. My space-time, the experience of the symmetry between live action and film action, would be totally different from that witnessed by any other pair of stereo eyes elsewhere in the room.

And yet, this performance, for all the infinite emotions and aesthestic implications, was entirely finite. No recording of this performance was allowed. No cell phone use permitted. A piece of art with serious implicit commentary on the role of live performance and recorded projective media, itself, in any meta perspective, could not be filmed. These revolutions would not be recorded. It would live only in this space and particular time, for these sets of eyes, and the only media parity permitted would the hacked bootlegging of a verbose text editor, some variation on ASCII art, as an essayist attempts to put art into transmitted text.

I didn’t want to record Lucinda Childs’ Dance, and upload it onto a file sharing network, or embed it on my website. It still would be a hackneyed plagiarism, life decontextualized, preservation with a pin in a vacuum glass box. A violation of the functional quality of the work, as I interpret it. But the explicit refusal, the license of refusal by artist, producers, and the venue, served as a boundary. In a time period of continual media change, when individuals are expected by many to be constantly transmitting and receiving, interacting and network, broadcasting from the pocket and invocating from the finger, this was more than an expectation of courtesy to fellow art lovers. This is a boundary line, beyond which the power of art to transmit, inspire and inhabit would not cross. A ghettoization of experience. The underlying authoritarian impulse of the mind to control in order to make itself heard.

Meanwhile, drunk on its new found freedom, my iPhone was greedily slurping through the remains of its two-year old battery in my pocket.

There was freedom to be found in jailbreaking my iPhone. Jailbreaking made it a computer again. After the relatively easy process of running redsn0w (no one said anything about having a spare copy of the firmware on your computer, and the little button combination you have to time perfectly to get it into the right mode, but I finally figured it out) it was a thrill to see an actual live terminal screen, showing that what I had spent all this money on was not just a shiny black Narcissus mirror, but an actual computer. And after opening Cydia, and figuring out exactly how to install packages from the surprisingly limited amount of support material out there on the Internet, changing my root password and SSHing to the file system over Wifi felt like the future all over again. Not just because I did it, but because anyone can do it too. In this age when all technology is locked down in an attempt to ease things for the poor, tortured, overwhelmed consumer, the iPhone Dev Team, Saurik and others are trying to open it back up with gentle, consumer-driven hacking like redsn0w and Cydia. You can hack your iphone, and it doesn’t have to be hard. That is the future, in my opinion.

But this everconstant lifehacking of the future–what does it get us? As @doingitwrong so aptly tweeted, “I jailbroke my iPhone and all I got was this lousy wallpaper.” I installed Winterboard first thing, and downloaded several themes to try. No app or program I’ve run on my jailbroken phone eats battery like the themes. It’s actually ridiculous. I do like the ability to place my lock screen wallpaper back over the springboard, and of course I get a huge kick out of seeing the POSZU logo replace the Apple logo during boot (neither of which require Winterboard, btw). But the majority of downloads through Cydia are hot-girl-wallpaper sets. There was one Hot Anime Girl set added per day, for at least a few months. Still in there, clogging the search results. Good times.

There are useful apps. SMSettings is masterful–allowing you to hide app icons, (like the useless native Weather app) and deploy a screen overlay no matter what you are doing (mine is set to deploy on a downward swipe from the status bar) that lets you disable any of the antennas, boot a custom list of apps, and kill processes. I was very interested to see that Safari and the iPod are often left running behind the scenes without your knowledge, sticking their own straws into my valuable battery. Now, easily terminated. I also like LockInfo, that let’s you read text of emails and SMS from the lock screen along with other notifications–and supposedly Twitter too, though I can’t get this to work yet. Video game emulators are plentiful, though very slow on my 3G. There is multitasking, and there is tethering. There is VNC, and there is data over Bluetooth. I set my battery indicator to show me a percentage rather than a meaningless battery icon, using the basic redsn0w settings. Sometimes the simplest tweaks are the best.

The problem is that there is no uniformity. Cydia is great, but it is not the App Store, in which every app is verified to work with all recent versions of iOS, and do, most of the time. In the world of Cydia, everything has not been checked for consistency. Information about troubleshooting is rare, and hard to find. Free apps are rare, because the jailbroken app market is slim. I can’t get the supposedly excellent video player apps to work. And the real reason I jailbroke my phone, to find a music player that will handle ogg files and sync with Linux, is still unfulfilled: PwnPlayer has disappeared, it didn’t work with iOS 4.x anyway, and nothing else has come to take its place. To a real programmer, the jailbroken iPhone is fertile ground. But to a user like myself, it only allows me to extend my fantasies about what awesome features might have been–had the app not crashed, had it been extended to 4.x, had anyone with the chops put in the incredible amount of volunteer work to make it a reality.

The sublime artistry of the iPhone doesn’t recede into a seedy red-light district of custom wallpaper for a lack of effort on the part of jailbreak developers. Despite Apple’s mammoth efforts to lock down the iPhone, these folks have continued to find the chinks in the armor, and make user-friendly ways of exploiting them. As Saurik put it when describing the merger of Cydia with the other large jailbroken app service, RockYourPhone, the primary goal is to put everyone back on track with cooperation rather competition. That is the general goal for most iPhone hackers. For openness, and cooperation towards that end. As opposed to the goals of Apple, which is (other than simply to make money) to provide the unique artistry of a seamless user experience. Two modern goals, alike in dignity, but yet overall at odds. And when you put these two at odds, you know the hackers will come up short. It’s a simple (okay, complex) matter of infrastructure, time, and resources. Now that I’ve looked at my iPhone’s filesystem, I see the problem. It’s a twisted mess. Apps store data in multiple places, compressed in bizarre formats. The fact that it’s been opened up at all to a casual tinkerer like myself is amazing, but the fact that this is not your Home folder, in any sense of the term, is sobering. The genius of the iPhone’s ease of use is it’s internal inaccessibility. This is not a causal relationship, but it is psychical. The exterior looks the way it looks because the interior has turned inward, to express such an exterior. The division between designer and art, performer and audience, is a loop that could not bend back towards its initial point if it first it did not move away. It is easy to suggest that Apple could have designed things to better help those who would like to peer inside. I’m sure they could have. But they didn’t, and they won’t. Not because they are assholes, but because this is an iPhone. If it was not built the way it’s built, it would not be an iPhone. And all that that entails.

I’m going to keep my iPhone jailbroken rather than reset. Even though we aren’t meant to delve into that dark network of the id, we invariably do. For one, it is the principle of the thing. I go to avant-gaarde dance performances with a smart phone in my pocket, set to silent mode. I, after much wrestling with a pseudo-sexual techno puritanism, did the leg work and rooted my smart phone. And there are good functions of doing so. I like SMSettings enough that it is reason alone to keep the jailbreak, just as tweeted about Lucinda Childs (after the performance, of course), even though I think it might have cost me a couple of followers. This place between curated event and distributed network creativity, between high-end consumer design and dirty third-party work around, is where I seem to fall, in this year of atemporal technology, 2010. I still want features I don’t, and seemingly can’t, have. I want to capture experience and intellectual rumination exactly in all its sublime instantaneousness, and project it back onto a screen for everyone to see, but I can’t. For Intellectual Property reasons, and also because even if I could, then experience would no longer be unique.

Our human devices are simply beautiful, and infinitely limited by the realities of collaboration and performance–nevertheless, we get our hands dirty in hacking them, every day. The good part is, that people keep staging such performances, and that people keep going. And also that people don’t go, but are willing to hear about it later, and perhaps catch it next time.