A comment on "The PR Crisis of Democracy"

It is incredibly refreshing to see someone challenge something as fundamental to North American culture(s) as democracy and Neuroskeptic did an excellent job of just that. In a nutshell, how can the growing discontent driven, in many ways, by our adoration of immensely reified and misused concepts like "Freedom," continue to be touted as the 'ideal.' As that link illustrates, I am not entirely sure I know what Freedom means anymore: differentiation to the point of emptiness.

I would liken the current uproars in various countries to the "terrible twos" of childhood where the budding personality, to the 'horror' of everyone, learns to say, "No." I draw this connection not to mitigate the effort and sacrifices made by these groups. But, rather, to highlight the conflict in a developmental sense: many of the ideals we hold are incredibly naive and incompatible with the way we live our lives. They are juvenile in the sense that they lack subtlety and tend to approach a problem in the most direct route (e.g., by creating a false, black-white dichotomy). That is, one could arguable describe a network, in an anthropomorphic sense, as juvenile if it lacks the appropriate complexity of connections necessary to approach a particular problem in a non-dichotomous framework. Democracy, then, is a cultural celebration of that era. And no, I'm not secretly suggesting a silent recapitulation theory here. The comparison is just interesting.

I have, in the past, drawn the association between cultures and individuals of varying age groups. That is, if, for example, countries were people then you can get some interesting implications on the basis of age alone.

India, China, Japan, etc. as older cultures might be the grandparents of the circumstances. Though some may be decrepit and need to be institutionalized, every once in a while they can toss a kernel of wisdom your way. At very least, they tend to be more patient and slower moving.

Europe, in contrast (and you can see my North American bias here as I lump all of Europe into one category), can be likened to an individual in their late 40's, maybe even into their late 50's. They're old enough to 'know better,' but still young enough to do unintelligent things. Arguably they are currently experiencing a mid-life crisis.

The U.S. is in the end of its rebellious teenage years: still vigorous and aggressive but starting to catch on to the subtleties of the world. Canada is the younger brother that cannot help but follow its older sibling's often terrible advice. Australia is the youngest and, due to their position and temperament, still think its 'play time.' Russia and Mexico are the ever budding bullies on the play ground.

And where does everyone else fall? Who knows. Many of the other cultures are the remains of ancient civilizations that have become so prolific that they are best taken as the ground of the rest of the world. A ground that is ripe to be raped, pillaged, and set on display at the whims of the 'family.'

Democracy, in this framework, is merely an appeal to the beauty of a freedom that was always hoped for, pseudo-achieved, and difficult to let go. Though this story is entirely implausible, a bad rendition of an Eikos Logos at best, it does illustrate something important here: self-regulation is a process that operates and/or needs to operate at all levels of organization and it is key to development. Development means change and even something as apparently permanent as democracy will come to an end.

In an effort to motivate a conceptual shift that operates more smoothly in non-democratic frameworks, I offer the idea of machinic organization (you have to read a bit to get to the reference). Note that, though elements of the ideas I will set forth may look like other familiar architectures like communism, totalitarianism, etc. They are not the same much like a pendulum is not the same for a clockmaker and a scientist.

The best description of what I mean by machinic and how it applies here is illustrated by William Gibson's Neuromancer. Though, the association is not my own. In this fictional universe, heads of corporations are regularly assassinated by other corporations, but to no consequence. As soon as one body dies, a new one takes its place and a database of memories are waiting to help reintegrate the new body with the role.

By suggesting the concept of machinic I am neither trying to perform an upward causal reduction (extreme top-down framework) nor am I trying to suggest that we will one day be some rendition of the Borg. A technological singularity, though plausible, is not what I am referring to. The goal is to illustrate that highly individualistic concepts in the standard Western context like freedom, prosperity, wealth, justice, progress become extremely unfamiliar when the framework shifts. As I said in a previous post that is particularly relevant here: when your individuality is no longer relevant and you assume the role of a statistic, all these concepts drop away.

I will reinforce the fact that this does not mean you are not free, prosperous, wealthy, just, or progressing (though this latter one is a tad odd to be combined with the rest by Neuroskeptic). It simply means that these concepts no longer have application in this domain (much like dividing by zero in most mathematics). Neither does it mean that one cannot examine these properties--this is not a moral or ethical discussion. It just means that in a machinic framework, the end of democracy makes sense. At the extreme point, it never existed in the first place (I'll evade the "problems with ontology" rant here).

Naturally, given that none of these activist groups are likely to cease their activities, even if they were to read my blog for some reason, the efficacy of this shift in framework is likely at question. But, the intention is not to change these behaviours in any practical sense. It is to begin adopting a framework where they simply no longer are relevant. I do not protest them. I do not suggest we ignore them. I am really not saying anything about them at all.

How do you destroy a product? You stop buying it. How do you stop buying it? You eliminate the ideology that justifies its use. Remember, people are irrelevant. One extremist group can and will be easily replaced by the next. But, if we change the ideology such that it removes the efficacy of that maneuver, then there is nothing to be gained. People simply will not even think about it. This is the goal.

Let's stop attacking the symptoms and acausally deligitimate the framework that non-linearly supports the problem.




Images courtesy of:
http://www.opednews.com/articles/Broken-American-Democracy-by-Brett-Redmayne-Tit-120604-863.html
http://users.rcn.com/jkimball.ma.ultranet/BiologyPages/R/Recapitulation.html
http://psycnet.apa.org/index.cfm?fa=buy.optionToBuy&id=2010-00343-004
http://fusionanomaly.net/neuromancer.html

An end to privacy

Both Facebook and Google intermittently incite uproars in the public due to their potential breaches in any normal human's 'decency.' This never ceases to be a curiosity in my eyes. Do people honestly think we live in a world where privacy even remotely exists anymore?

We're filmed at work by our employers, filmed walking down the street by various satellites and stores, filmed by stoplight cameras, filmed by smart phones and digital cameras of various kinds. We have built in tracking services attached to our every phone call, land or wireless. Smartphones are walking tracking devices along with GPS. Our cars and laptops are tracked for security reasons. We tweet, post, or otherwise link our web services to our current locations. And this is just our position.

Ninety percent of stores have our address, phone number, name, and purchase history. Both of the giants we began the story with will store any and every last bit of information you'll give them. Every other website is making you sign some agreement that you never even took the time to read... (Yes, that was a lot of hyperbole!)

Let's face it, if someone, somewhere, doesn't know or have the potential to know the colour of the last pair of socks you wore, I would probably be surprised. If privacy is your goal in life, you're already bloody doomed.

But, there are two reasons why this is completely inconsequential.

1. The average individual, in the grand scheme of things, is completely irrelevant, expendable, and replaceable. We are just another statistic. A blip on a graph that can just as easily be replaced by the rest of the population that falls within a standard deviation of the mean. And, better yet, if you do happen to deviate from that population, you're even more irrelevant. Who would you market to? The strange person in the corner or everyone else?

For the sake of brevity, let's ignore the complexities of sub-populations and the leading edge of the popularity wave (which should be likened to becoming the next Michael Jackson). If you're one of those people, you probably don't even write your own social networking material, anyhow. That or you're savvy enough that this entire conversation is moot.

The point is... you can feel safe in your irrelevance.

"But what about those folks I know, ten times removed, who lost their entire livelihood thanks to..." I can hear you say.

The answer is obvious. We're statistics, right? A certain percentage of people are going to have bad things happen to them: the Canadian Goose that should not have arrogantly crossed the street.

"But if we had had our privacy..."

Oh no. You can't get out that way. Those privacy settings, as I tried to demonstrate above, don't do jack. You would need to drop out almost entirely or spend the greater part of your time hiding yourself. That is, to avoid getting hit by a car, you would have to stop crossing roads (e.g., RFID credit card fraud is just one demonstration that your information is already everywhere and vulnerable). Though some percentage of people will adopt this method, the greater majority will not. Surprising? Hopefully you're not afraid to cross the road...

But my point is not that people should stop shouting nor is it that your privacy settings should be at zero. It's that none of this has anything to do with 'privacy.' The reified construct hides more than it helps. Address the problems that come your way as best you can and then forget about them. But, name them as they are: "Facebook and Google have massive amounts of your information that is potentially vulnerable to an attack by malicious third parties." That's not a privacy issue. It's a software one.

On to the second point.

2. Personally tailored advertising is genius.

Let's face it. As a member of most Western societies, we buy stuff. We like to buy stuff. We spend a greater part of our lives enabling ourselves to buy stuff. If every single ad I ever saw from this point forward was perfectly tailored to inform me of the things most relevant to me that I could buy (Think of Amazon's, "other users who purchased this purchased..")... I would almost watch commercials instead of regular television. I don't think I am the only one that would feel this way. But, if we even accept that tailored advertising is not the next apocalypse, where do we stand on this issue?

I think most people do have a problem with people making money off of their actions, especially if they don't get a piece of the pie. I, certainly, often feel this way. However, I think we have the order of things reversed. It is not the case that Facebook and Google are providing you a service and then capitalizing on your use of the service. Rather, Facebook exists to make a (tidy) profit and then the user leeches off of this fact in such a way that they get services out of it (more likely this relationship is bidirectional but I choose to emphasize this direction due to the lack of current discussion on this perspective). The entire claim for "better privacy" is an illustration of this point: the companies want to continue making money, so they (sort of) oblige.

One could argue that at some initial point Facebook or Google was not really for profit. However, I would argue that this point is practically irrelevant and the proto-F and G were conceptually unrecognizable to the organizations of today. Additionally, these fledgeling companies would never have left the ground if they did not even have the potential for profit and, hence, investment.

Thus, in a nutshell, the user is an irrelevant leech with dedicated advertising.

Go social networking!

This post was partially inspired by Network.

A comment on "Zeno's Sound": Representation, nothing, and the shift to process

Hello folks,

I have decided to embody what I was describing previously about commenting via blog posts with links. The source of this current post, on which I am commenting, is a blog post titled "Zeno's Sound."

I am familiar with the author and, thus, this post is a continuation of an extended conversation we have been having. You, my fellow hypothetical readers, will now have the luxury of enjoying (or joining) it, given the shift to the current framework.

The issue I am having with the post has to do with the framework in which the author is operating. I would further like to contextualize by stating that I previously endorsed a variation of this framework, but had a recent turn due to the work of Mark Bickhard. Thus, this post will, simultaneously, be the first in a series of related topics to this recent turn.

I would explain the author's perspective as a particular rendition of the implications of such theorists as Alain Badiou, Gilles Deleuze, and other, similar continental philosophers. In fact, there is a related post that engages with Badiou's material directly. However, what is added in the discussion is the ties to music, sound, and art, more generally.

Before I continue, I should put a disclaimer:
I do not purport to know what the authors of any of these works are saying. I am not a student of continental philosophy, nor the respective authors. I am familiar with their works and have discussed many of their ideas with other students. But, that is the extent of my scholarly prowess. Thus, I am engaging with this material from a largely removed position as well as a different framework. The author of the work that I am commenting on, in this framework, is key to my ties to this literature base. However, part of my point in this comment is that I do not believe it is even possible to know what the authors are saying. I can hear people already cringing at this statement (another absolute relativist), but give me a moment to explain.

The framework that I am endorsing--which (potentially) remedies the initial spur for this comment--no longer accepts the proposition that symbols and/or information (including both these words as well as sound, etc.) encode and/or transmit anything. This theory, interactivism, denies encodingism of any form. Instead, one merely has their anticipations of future states as dictated by prior experiences with symbols, dialogue, etc. (this is an oversimplification but I am only going to peripherally engage with this idea for now...). The result, then, is that I can only comment on the previous experiences I have had with this material, largely through the author on whom I am commenting. Thus, if you have a rebuttal that runs very close to the text, you may be viewing an entirely different world from the 'same' set of symbols. I am always interested in such criticisms, but they may be missing my point entirely. I would kindly ask, given this, that one takes an initially agnostic position to the framework which I am endorsing: an external critique is inherently comparative and thus only peripherally relevant from an internal perspective.

Now, a particularly astute observer might notice that I am also making a comparative claim. You would be right. This is actually my point. I am introducing a new (i.e., vulnerable) form through a juxtaposition with the authors work via this comment. It requires some space in which to grow before it can clash into fully fledged bodies of knowledge with massive support bases.

To continue my comment...
The continental philosophers who the author is appealing to, in this new framework, are geniuses of the encodingist world view. That is, they addressed many of the inherent problems and contradictions created by the endorsement of encodingism through such fascinating concepts as "nothing" or the "null set." And, it turns out, that the author's conception of silence is closely related to this idea.

In sum, I would reduce (probably incorrectly) the author's points to the following:

(1st paragraph) Silence (or nothing) is nowhere or is not a thing.
(2nd paragraph) Silence is simultaneously everywhere and in everything.
(3rd paragraph) Representation ruins negative sound.
(4th paragraph) Representation ruins positive sound.
(5th paragraph) This problem is fundamental or it is not merely a matter of pragmatics.
(6th paragraph) Any discussion of sound has already lost the silence.

As my translation demonstrates, representation or encodingism is the issue and silence or nothing is only a minor, if particularly creative, palliative. What is needed is a different framework.

If one removes representation in place of anticipation one gets the following:
The digitization of sound and/or silence is merely a means to create anticipatory structures of what will occur in process when interaction occurs between the listener and the productive mechanism. It is a crystallized, symbolic foreshadowing in a highly complex anticipatory network. Thus, what Cage, Zeno, and the null set are pointing to is merely the limits of the current anticipations, limits which arguably no longer exist in systems which have integrated these paradoxes in a productively anticipatory fashion (i.e., which can utilize their predictions of these phenomena in their systems cohesively and usefully [i.e., to make further predictions]).

Interestingly, one can actually take the author's post to be the perfect embodiment qua illustration of this claim. That is, the author is illustrating how Cage, Zeno, and the null set are no longer limits since he can use their implications in a productive fashion as per the example of sound.
 I can, however, anticipate that they would oppose the null sets inclusion in this list as illustrated by the last two sentences of the 6th paragraph:

"... can there be a change of intensity of no sound? Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, there is not an answer to this within our range of hearing."

Silence is a symbol that is not a symbol. Again, a property that is not necessary if symbols don't contain anything. They have no content so all symbols are the null set--an oddly poignant point given the parallels in mathematics. One simply anticipates future numbers and, thus, the symbolic system entirely.