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 emphasis on hardware

I would like to take this article as a jumping point.

It's interesting to run into an article of similar mind, if from a different position. The gist of the article being predictive: the recent advancements in software development in the current digital context is perhaps shifting advantageously towards hardware development. That is, micro development is now possible materially as well as virtually. My thoughts are an effort to move this development forward through a re-conceptualization of the environment, much as Brondmo did in the article, above.

It is my sense that the greater majority has largely forgotten about hardware. Software has become predominantly cross-platform while decent hardware comes in increasingly cheap package deals at your local tech shop (i.e., you don't even need to know what you're buying to run it). Yet, in place of this standard conception of hardware as 'the thing on which the software operates,' I would like to propose an alternative: materiality is just as equally infinite potential.

A few thought experiments.

First, take any old intersection with a traffic light during rush hour. Assuming two individuals knew of this intersection, a time to watch it, and had a means to control the traffic light, one could transform this innocuous location into a transmitter of information. That is, the cars themselves could become data packets, either ones and zeros or Morse code's dashes and dots.

Second, take any communication line (Ethernet, Coaxial, Fiber-Optic, etc.). In the standard conception, information goes into the line and comes out of the line with a bit of noise in the middle. This middle part seems particularly interesting to me. Is it possible to create information through the use of interference patterns in the actual signal? Perhaps the role could be that of a firewall. If the signal is sent incorrectly, the interference distorts it incoherently and, thus, it becomes noise. With the right signal, both the information being sent as well as the reception become coherent. Thus, in actuality, you are getting two things in one: encryption and decryption/firewall except at the hardware level.

Third, take, once again, a firewall, but a standard software-level firewall, in this case. This firewall, when it detects a malicious threat, assesses the degree of the threat, traces it, and disables its router at the hardware level. If this is too volatile a tech to give to consumers, then perhaps the firewall sends information to a centralized agency/computer that flags the threat, continues assessment and proceeds with physical dismissal of the router or a complete decommissioning of the computer.

The latter idea is likely dangerous, but it illustrates my point quite well: hardware is a virtually untapped domain given the new tools we have developed in the previous software era.

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.