Absolute, Bloody, Terror: A 'Poem' for 'The New Aesthetic'

Pseudo-Abstract: 

There is no abstract for this piece as I consider it to be a poem of sorts.

Important Links:

Will Wiles' piece The machine gaze or a working familiarity with The New Aesthetic is crucial.

After skimming through GetPrismatic, an elegant filter-by-content for blogs, and finding Will Wiles' piece on 'The New Aesthetic,' I came to the not so odd conclusion that I had something to contribute to this behemoth of a topic, now well rampant in the sewers of the digital sphere. How and why I came to that conclusion--given the utter absence of research I have done on the topic--is perhaps simply indicative of what Wiles' and James Bridle are describing: a growing 21st century condition or sense of self. Or, perhaps more poignantly, a self that is 'awakening,' within the implicit neon glow, to its complete and utter lack of identity. Thus, when Bridle describes his search for the "edges" of this amorphous, budding entity that is 'The New Aesthetic,' what becomes apparent is not a thing or some thing. Rather, what becomes apparent is the utter absence of a thing--the Void.

If this sounds implicitly religious, let us make it explicit. It is religious. As the French philosopher Quentin Meillassoux beautifully argued in After Finitude, "by forbidding reason any claim to the absolute, the end of metaphysics has taken the form of an exacerbated return of the religious." Again, from the same text:

Contrary to the familiar view according to which Occidental modernity consists in a vast enterprise of the secularization of thought, we consider the most striking feature of modernity to be the following: the modern man is he who has been re-ligionized precisely to the extent that he has been de-Christianized. The modern man is he who, even as he stripped Christianity of the ideological (metaphysical) pretension that its belief system was superior to all others, has delivered himself body and soul to the idea that all belief systems are equally legitimate in matters of veracity.

And, the positive and negative hype that has swirled around 'The New Aesthetic' does speak to a particular religious tinge. And, the fact that the monstrosity that graces the top of this 'page,' so many wasted polymers, might be considered art is indicative of the lack of reference for evaluation. Whether this is Good or Bad is for someone else to decide. What is of interest to me here is the human tendency to grasp for... something... What is evident in this grasping is the lack that inspired it. And, I am not speaking to a mere Existentialism resurfaced. No. I am speaking to a state in which Existentialism is so pervasive that it has become the ground on which we walk. We assume Existentialism in the process of forgetting that assumption. Then we drown ourselves in powerful technologies that we build but cannot understand.

In the sea of ever-increasing Ghz, amidst the glow of smartphone screens, beneath the whir of digitized spectacles, within the warmth of humming server farms, [while worldCanStillSupportPopulation == True: population = population + 1] people are beginning to notice their mediated experience. And they grasp for 'The New Aesthetic' or similar totems in the hopes that their behaviour might be justified. That it might all make sense is the dire need of untold billions, sucker-punched by the banality of the seething, techno-organic stew.

But the hope is wrong, founded on good intentions. The bliss that is felt in the fleeting glimpses of this 'new thing,' is actually much more terrible than anyone could ever imagine: traumatic. It is the realization that the system, our system, is broken. When planes glitch through Google maps, stock trading algorithms crash the market, and people create 8-bit graphics in the 'real world,' that's a breakdown. It's a gap or hole in the system. It's the Void: absolute, bloody, terror.

Welcome to insanity.

But, insanity compared to what or whom. Is an insane person insane lacking a point of reference for sanity, as the proverb goes. Perhaps that's the point.

I think I will close with a long quote from Reza Negarestani's On the Revolutionary Earth, which will probably be more confusing than enlightening as Reza is wont to be.

The obligation of the revolutionary subject with regard to exporting the revolution is not to shun [the] traumas of capitalism and fundamentalism, since this refusal... contributes to the strategy of capitalism and fundamentalism in isolating traumas, forces and resources in order to govern and monopolize them within this or that world.

Translation:
Opposing the system supports its use of isolation.

On the contrary, the obligation of the revolutionary subject is to absorb and interiorize traumas so as to expose ‘isolated traumas’ (this or that regional world), interconnect them to its regional horizon and widen them across the geocosmic continuum and deep into the cosmic exteriority [i.e., the Void].

Translation:
Revolution embraces the pain (trauma) of the human condition of techno-insanity and unites all in its ubiquity.

Modern man is a surgeon who does not amputate himself from the worlds of capitalism and religion. Instead, he transplants himself and these worlds inside each other in order to reconnect his actual regional horizon (cohabited with capitalism and fundamentalism) once again to the freedom of absolute depths.

Translation:
To share with the 'enemy' brings freedom through terror.

To this end, the revolution on the geocosmic continuum that is the revolution rekindled out of the Copernican commune should not be paved on the politicophilosophical corpus of those who impose on us wanton discrepancies and excesses of the earthly life but those who delude us with the axiomatic verity of ourselves and reform the ground of the terrestrial thought in one way or another.

Translation:
In order to continue the decentration humanity experienced in discovering that they were not the center of the universe, it is not those who embellish our faults that we should critique. It is those who convinced us that our 'Truth' removed those faults to banality and made us feel 'Special:' the center of the universe.

Pictures courtesy of:
http://kalligraphy-kalligraphy.blogspot.ca/2011/07/to-stare-10.html
http://new-aesthetic.tumblr.com/post/9991203934/paintings-by-katharine-harvey-triangulation-blog
http://www.thelmagazine.com/newyork/what-new-aesthetic/Content?oid=2231343

Contextualizing the digital: Qualcomm, Gimbal, and human devolution

A recent post by Scoble discusses a budding new age of mobile development that will bring our cyber realities back down to Earth. I had originally mentioned this idea in reference to Y!kes here. In this context, Qualcomm, through the Gimbal SDK, is bringing a method to track everything about a user at a hardware level. No longer will the developer just know general data like your longitude and latitude. They will know when you are in the kitchen, living room, car. They will know who you are with and what you are doing. They will be able to anticipate your every behaviour. Especially given the current spin in AI (1 2).

Those of you who have been following my posts will recognize this as a theme I have talked about before: the death of privacy. No matter that Qualcomm is 'protecting your information' by some means (never letting it leave your phone, if Scoble is correct). Ultimately, it is accessible and there will be a growing pressure to release it to advertisers. Beyond that, you will want to release it as the features that you will get in the process will be worth it. Finally, your privacy will be less valuable and the loss of treasured secrets will probably slip right by the average person (e.g., Scoble's favourites). I think this is a good thing. Our contemporary context requires that we get better acclimatized to machinic forms of organization as I described here.

There is, however, a concern outside of such reified concepts as 'Privacy.' Initially the contextual augmentation provided by frameworks like Gimbal will be incredibly beneficial. It can expand our capacity to include related and relevant information in a particular context. However, this kind of augmentation simultaneously has the ability to restrict information by accentuating people's current frailties. Let us take an example: global positioning systems (GPS).

For someone who is familiar with maps, the cardinal directions (N E S W), the general layout of a city, etc., GPS is an excellent augmentation of the skills you already have. It offers constant updates to the maps; it can mark exact positions on the map; it can offer routes, modifications of those routes, and approximate times for those routes, among other things (traffic density, etc.). In a reversed sense, it can even describe the routes that other people who have the same GPS are most likely to take; though, I would be surprised if anyone has ever used it in this way (I have not). All of these things are beneficial and they do not detract from your skills nor reduce or restrict your informational intake. 

On the other hand, if you lack these skills then the GPS accentuates this fact. You can function that much longer without learning the skills and you could even come to the not entirely unreasonable conclusion that they are unnecessary. In your world, this is 'True.' That is, until something untoward happens and a lake is where it should not be, a road just ends where it should continue, or (heaven forbid!) your GPS breaks. Then suddenly you are at a huge deficit. The Road God has failed to answer your prayers. You had forgotten, or never knew, that the system has its limitations. Your faith was mistaken and something like this happens. However, to blame this occurrence on technology is absurd.

I have often heard such arguments as "the evolution of technology results in the devolution of man" and there is certainly legitimacy in the claim. This post is a brilliant examination of the problem. Amusingly, it took the GPS as an example much as I did. However, I believe that the overall claim of the author is mistaken. To be brief, I will restrict myself to a few points or rebuttals.

ONE:

The soul, when retroactively revolutionized through the contemporary, hyper-individualistic framework of the West, is obviously individualistic (here is a counter example to what follows and a case in point to what preceded). Interestingly, philosophical claims like Socrates', "Do your own work" are better approximated in the "collectivistic" frameworks that technology requires of us (not to be confused with "communistic" ideologies that may sound equivalent):

"And therefore we must consider whether in appointing our guardians we would look to their greatest happiness individually, or whether this principle of happiness does not rather reside in the State as a whole. But the latter be the truth, then the guardians and auxillaries, and all others equally with them, must be compelled or induced to do their own work in the best way. And thus the whole State will grow up in a noble order, and the several classes will receive the proportion of happiness which nature assigns to them." (1, italics mine)

Thus, and to re-frame what I said about GPSs, it is not technology that makes humanity face all of the challenges described by Jorund and Junger, it is the very soul that these authors choose to defend. The mistake, as is often the case, stems from the presentist interpretation of the philosophical works in question. Though, I will restrict this claim purely to the individualism of the arguments of the aforementioned individuals. Their theories in general I cannot speak to. Regardless, this idea is best illustrated by my next point:

TWO:

Jorund goes on to critique technology with reference to Grasse's stigmergy: spontaneous, indirect responses to the historical remains of other members of a society's previous actions. And, with disdain, humanity is immediately compared to Grasse's topic of investigation: termites. However, in rebuttal I would indicate a similar, stigmergic insect: ants.

Ants, despite Jorund's disdain, are one of the most successful species that live on land (terrestrial metazoa) both for themselves and the ecosystems in which they participate. In a nutshell:

"Today ants occupy keystone positions in most terrestrial environments, serving as major conduits of energy and organic material. They are, for example, important turners of the soil, matching or exceeding the activity of earthworms in this role. They are among the leading predators of invertebrates in most ecosystems, and in the Neotropics they are the leading herbivores as well, with leaf-cutter ants taking more than 15% of the fresh vegetation (feeding it to a symbiotic fungus, which they in turn eat). Interactions with ants have shaped the evolution of diverse organisms to an astonishing degree."

Once more in contrast to Jorund, it is not the case that the success story of ants is driven by their "well-rounded, educated individuals." Ants tend to be rather specialized in their behaviour, and, even though this cannot be directly tied to their success, its abundance in the species must be indicative of some evolutionary use. This article discusses the topic and mentions an alternative explanation: specialization is beneficial simply because it prevents having to consider which task to do. Again, interestingly, this fits right into a machinic conception of organization. Neither the individual's skill nor the sub-population's specialization is key. It is merely the continued functional role that they provide in sum and this role can easily be filled by another, no matter the skill or genetic design.

THREE:

Jorund also notices the "convergence between the real and virtual world." However, it is viewed in a negative light with reference to The Matrix and something like E. M. Forester's The Machine Stops. The emphasis is naturally on our use of technology to forward our indulgences while humanity gets further lost in its fantasies-made-real in VR. Naturally, it is the very use of the term 'real' that irks me.

It is not that video games, synthetic pleasures, or virtual reality are more real. It is that real is no longer relevant. The term is obsolete as is the task of approximating and/or representing 'reality' (again, see my previous post). Both are artifacts of the past. And the search for capital 'T' truth is just as much so.

For those of you interested in this topic, I highly suggest the book Objectivity by Daston and Galison. It provides an excellent historical description of the search for this kind of 'Truth.' Thus contextualized, it is much easier to understand the usefulness of the methods we developed in search for truth while abandoning the unnecessary ideologies that are currently attached to them.

FOUR:

If the The Matrix is at all telling, humanity will not be able to survive without the suffering Jorund seems to enjoy--a suffering of thought projected.

"Did you know that the first Matrix was designed to be a perfect human world? Where none suffered, where everyone would be happy. It was a disaster. No one would accept the program. Entire crops were lost. Some believed we lacked the programming language to describe your perfect world. But I believe that, as a species, human beings define their reality through suffering and misery. The perfect world was a dream that your primitive cerebrum kept trying to wake up from. Which is why the Matrix was redesigned to this: the peak of your civilization." (1)

And, I might add, that the privileged Western position being critiqued is also being enjoyed by the author, if I am not mistaken. I, too, am privileged and believe suffering is productive, but I do not believe it is the only way: it would be hubris to think that the way things are now or the way things have been is the way they should or have to be.

FIVE:

In brief, humans are less dangerous to the planet and themselves when pacified. If this comes through VR, so be it.

I will leave you with two quotes from Dostoevsky, who Jorund was so genius to quote:

And we alone shall feed them in Thy name, declaring falsely that it is in Thy name. Oh, never, never can they feed themselves without us! No science will give them bread so long as they remain free. In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet, and say to us, "Make us your slaves, but feed us." They will understand themselves, at last, that freedom and bread enough for all are inconceivable together, for never, never will they be able to share between them! They will be convinced, too, that they can never be free, for they are weak, vicious, worthless, and rebellious. Thou didst promise them the bread of Heaven, but, I repeat again, can it compare with earthly bread in the eyes of the weak, ever sinful and ignoble race of man? And if for the sake of the bread of Heaven thousands shall follow Thee, what is to become of the millions and tens of thousands of millions of creatures who will not have the strength to forego the earthly bread for the sake of the heavenly? Or dost Thou care only for the tens of thousands of the great and strong, while the millions, numerous as the sands of the sea, who are weak but love Thee, must exist only for the sake of the great and strong? No, we care for the weak too. They are sinful and rebellious, but in the end they too will become obedient. They will marvel at us and look on us as gods, because we are ready to endure the freedom which they have found so dreadful and to rule over them- so awful it will seem to them to be free. But we shall tell them that we are Thy servants and rule them in Thy name. We shall deceive them again, for we will not let Thee come to us again. That deception will be our suffering, for we shall be forced to lie.

...

And all will be happy, all the millions of creatures except the hundred thousand who rule over them. For only we, we who guard the mystery, shall be unhappy. There will be thousands of millions of happy babes, and a hundred thousand sufferers who have taken upon themselves the curse of the knowledge of good and evil. Peacefully they will die, peacefully they will expire in Thy name, and beyond the grave they will find nothing but death. But we shall keep the secret, and for their happiness we shall allure them with the reward of heaven and eternity. Though if there were anything in the other world, it certainly would not be for such as they. It is prophesied that Thou wilt come again in victory, Thou wilt come with Thy chosen, the proud and strong, but we will say that they have only saved themselves, but we have saved all. We are told that the harlot who sits upon the beast, and holds in her hands the mystery, shall be put to shame, that the weak will rise up again, and will rend her royal purple and will strip naked her loathsome body. But then I will stand up and point out to Thee the thousand millions of happy children who have known no sin. And we who have taken their sins upon us for their happiness will stand up before Thee and say: "Judge us if Thou canst and darest." 

From Chapter 5: The Grand Inquisitor

Pictures courtesy of:

https://developers.facebook.com/docs/opengraph/

http://www.my-car-computer.com/gps-receiver.html

http://www.mostlymuppet.com/2005/10/04/lost-numbers-are-gps-coordinates/

http://www.seniorark.com/senior_tips_computers.htm

http://thebestgroupofbilingual.blogspot.ca/2012/04/timeline-notextb.html

http://www.dan-dare.org/freefun/games/matrixwallpaper1024.htm
http://firecatching.blogspot.ca/2011/09/god-of-freedom-grand-inquisitors-fear.html
http://philastockton.wordpress.com/dostoevsky-and-the-grand-inquisitor/

Machinic: An illustration through Bausola's Weavr

Inspired by a podcast of the CBC radio show Spark, especially given my previous post, I have decided to expand the idea of machinic organization as it relates to David Bausola's weavr: a social bot. 

Nora of Spark starts her discussion with the observation that traffic on the internet is shifting from a predominantly user-based environment to one that is dominated by bots and their ilk. That is correct. Humans are no longer central in the framework of the internet. In some sense, we have been replaced by bots and not with a resulting decrease in quality. In fact, given that these bots aid in the creation of networks that support things like Google's search engine, one could argue that things have improved. A great deal of these bots are also maliciously related (e.g., spam bots) so one could argue in the other direction as well. It is a moot point whether this is for better or worse as it is happening regardless. The point is that not only was the persistence and functioning of the internet not tied to any particular individual, but it was not even tied to any particular system--where 'system' is used very abstractly to represent any organized assemblage of parts including humans and bots. Thus, the shift emphasizes or highlights what some have described as a decentration and one in which both humanity and individualism must be replaced by a framework of broader scope. In this ever changing landscape, the weavr comes to the fore.

The weavr is a strange bot that operates in social networks of various kinds. It defaults to having a blog and can be interfaced with Twitter. It dialogues, wanders around with Google maps, and draws associations between its 'interests,' 'emotions,' and various other associations (e.g., its position on Google maps and the position people are posting various materials from). On the broad side, it even dreams.

I simply adore this little creature and Bausola's emphasis on the idea of emergence is certainly invigorating. However, I recently had a shift that changes my relation to this idea as it relates to AI. The shift occurred with a thought that was similar to the following:

If a 'truly' novel intelligence on par with humanity were to be created, what benefit would come to humanity?

The thought stemmed from the work of Mark Bickhard. I briefly commented on a similar element of Bickhard's work in the latter part of this post. Briefly, Bickhard's critique of representation in the Encodingist framework results in the following dilemma: any construction qua representation that I overlay over this hypothetical 'super' AI must necessarily be separate from the functioning of that AI.

It is worth noting that I am neither being a phenomenologist nor an epiphenomenalist when I make the previous claim. It is an entirely different framework. To emphasize this, I will switch my use of the Encodingist 'representation' to the Interactivist 'anticipation' while relying, somewhat, on the common sense view of anticipation to get me through the analogy. The result follows: my anticipations of the AI are separate from the functioning of the AI much like my anticipations of other people are separate from the functioning of other people. The key point here is that my anticipations can be wrong and hence have to be separate. This "have to" is crude, but a more sophisticated discussion is beyond the scope of this post. I urge anyone who is interested to read Bickard's text for a much more detailed and eloquent rendition of the problem, especially Chapter 7, p. 55 and onward.

Given this framework, the 'super' AI, at the moment of its attaining this level of sophistication, becomes inherently 'Other' to me. But, this degree is just the beginning as even other humans can be 'Other.' There is also the difference of species: my framework of anticipations was built in interaction with other humans. And, though my association between the AI and humanity was originally justified in the construction of the 'AI as tool,' the 'AI as self-organizing/maintaining system' is outside of this domain. Thus, it warrants the description as 'truly alien.'


One could argue that we have at least elementary forms of such self-organizing systems and, as such, the transformation would not warrant the degree of 'Otherness' that I am proposing. However, I would argue that this is false. At most we have more sophisticated forms of 'AI as tool' that allow for modest degrees of self-organization in respect to a specific task. Simultaneously, then, I can push the requirements for this purely hypothetical 'super' AI further out by requiring that they posses the ability to be "recursively self-maintaining" a la Bickhard (p. 21).

Regardless, my point is that this transition of the AI from a tool to a functioning entity is not useful. First, the very idea that there could be a transformation is Encodingist: it is the magical transformation that takes a material substrate, 'AI as tool,' into the efficacious realm of a symbol manipulator, 'AI as individual or recursively self-organizing system.' In Interactivism, there is no such transformation. If anything is problematic, in the Interactivist context, it is systems that are more than locally self-organizing, which are more likely to be unwieldy. Thus, and to my second point,  I can only imagine how problematic it would be if I had to convince my calculator  to crunch numbers for me.

To return to the discussion of weavrs but in this new context, we can work towards a better conceptualization that does not have the Encodingist overtones of Bausola's infomorph while maintaining its machinic qualities. Weavrs are a new type of social tool. They emphasize the growing shift on the internet away from users and towards pseudo-autonomous functions by invading into a domain that previously excluded bots by definition: the social sphere. They also give us insight into some elements of how we as humans work, but not by possessing the individualistic properties of humans (e.g., intention). Rather, it is by showing that humans do not have those properties either.

This is the decentration. This is why it is called "machinic" organization. This is also probably why Jon Ronson got so upset about the weavr of the same name: not only does the weavr partially delegitimate the particular individual, it delegitimates all individuals even if just potentially (i.e., even if some future update may take it to this degree entirely but the current one is still too limited). Thus, I believe I can answer both Olivia Solon of Wired's question, "what do you think of weavrs?" and Bausola's question about what weavrs are in a single comment:

Weavrs are simply a tool for social exploration. But, by being such, they anticipate a time when all such exploration is relegated to their ilk. Through this anticipation they mark the end of humanity as organism... as 'system' par excellence and in place they speak of a time when a human-function is no more valuable than an AI-function and no less replaceable. This is of the utmost significance to both the study of AI and humanity as it relates to itself.



Pictures courtesy of:
http://www.goldrootherbs.com/2010/10/11/the-systemic-theory-of-living-systems-and-relevance-to-cam/
http://twitter.com/#!/PixelNinjWeavr
http://www.myjewishlearning.com/blog/rabbis-without-borders/2012/02/14/the-singularity-vs-the-gift-of-death/
http://www.evolo.us/architecture/architecture-designed-to-simulate-self-organizing-biological-systems/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/philterphactory/6829175342/

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.

Digital warped worlds and the death of truth approximations

It occurred to me somewhat recently that we (that is the royal 'we' or, at very least, I) have been going about this whole thing (whatever it is) terribly wrong. That is, I must beg the question:

"Why in gods name are we trying to approximate 'reality' or the 'truth'?"

I think video games are, in this case, an excellent example. Though things have been changing thanks to the plenitude of indie game companies exploding in the mobile and smaller game scenes, the current plunge of mainstream gaming to ever better approximate reality is bloody absurd. I don't want to imitate what I could go outside and enjoy in a way that is inevitably better. True, the whole "infinite lives" thing is certainly advantageous, but that is, actually, my point exactly. It's not real!!

Thus, I would like to offer a possible idea...
Let's create a first person shooter a la Escher.

Here's a quick picture I drew up in paint (so that one might visualize the strangeness). I will then proceed to explain...

There are basically three ideas being illustrated here. First, and most obviously, the world is like PacMan. When you walk to the end of the hall, you end up back at the beginning. A particularly creative game might be able to capitalize on this idea by making bullets persist and, thus, loop around (i.e., a past bullet becomes a future liability). The game now truly capitalizes on the element of time in this advanced framework (i.e., you are playing against past and future selves).

The second detail is that there are two pathways in the middle of the hall that loop you to opposite ends (i.e., the top might loop to the left entrance and the bottom to the right). However, as I attempted to show with the colours, the loop results in a physical rotation of the playing field. For the characters that move through the entrance (or door as I named it), what was previously the wall is now the floor, and the world rotates accordingly. If the walls and ground all have cover, this adds an additional odd element.

Third, the ceiling of the game is conceptually sandwiched oddly as I attempted to show in the little pic on the bottom right. That is, even though the hall is perceived as straight to the player, if one were to look up they would see down onto a section of the hall that is either behind them or in front of them. Thus, the first section will see down onto the second section and vice versa while the third section will see down onto the fourth section and vice versa, and so on and so forth. This idea is especially interesting when combined with the 'doors,' as when someone steps through the door this property suddenly becomes a part of the walls. I can only imagine what that would look like.

The last thing I would like to say about this idea is that the doors, loops, and ceiling should not be portals. Rather, the graphics, ideally, should fuse into one smooth scene (i.e., the hall looks like it never ends (barring interferences of cover and the repetition of the player(s), the ceilings just look like the next section is stacked upside down above them, and the ground of the doors smoothly fuses with the wall of the front or end of the tunnel).

Now that is an fps for the record books!

An interesting extension of this would be to create game maps with mathematical oddities like Mobius strips, Klein bottles, 4D or higher dimensional cubes, etc. The math for these constructs already exists, hence implementing it in a game should be feasible. Jamming 3D graphics into their context would likely just result in odd things, but that is the point.

If anyone wants any help trying to implement any of these ideas, send me an email. My coding and math skills are not fantastic, but I am always willing to learn and persevere.