wetwiring.wordpress.com

My new home.

American films beginning with "American"

A recent discussion of Shame led to one of those conversations this not alien to me. I said that I hadn't seen the film, but had read that it was a kind of American Psycho for the teens ... or whatever we are calling this decade (consider other compelling definitions of Shame here and here). Now, sometimes these comparisons are superficially illuminating. So we might say that The Social Network is the Citizen Kane for Generation Y. Something like this is a stepping stone to getting to another point in the conversation - they are a slimy, moss covered rock on which we might precariously balance as the deluge of half-formed opinions and almost-thoughts gush past. They are a way of saying "X is the new black". They are a conversational conceit, to be picked up and dropped as required. Sometimes, however, I don't know when to drop it. Years of having such conversations (starting in their Ur-form when I worked in a video shop) means I find it all too easy to get swept away, and what is a blog good for if it isn't a black box to transform a drunken idea into a tendentious argument. You need some structure for this if it is to be useful, however, so the matrix of my model is the following:

Outsourcing the self

If social networking is creating a new ecology of communication, how is it doing so? It is effectively a way of outsourcing our connections with other people, whereby we no longer need to worry about doing anything so vulgar as actually having to remember birthdays, or ages, or where you met them, or...in certain cases, what their name is. The upside to this should be that by outsourcing our memory in this manner, then we should have more time free to do more things with these people. We don't need to write a letter, or even an email. Perhaps we think we can just send a message, and all is well. The problem is that this theoretical free time is a black hole. Most have had that that experience of trawling Facebook for what we think is just a few minutes, then *snap* you're back in the room and two hours have passed. How is this? Well, as with all technologies, there are benefits and there are drawbacks. This form of communication is low-grade, and labour-intensive. We may get more connected, but this means more active effort is needed maintain these connections.

Perfect internet, algorithms and long tails

"There is no standard Google anymore", "invisible, algorithmic editing of the web", "The internet is showing us a world we want to see, not what we need to see." This is what we all glory in, that whatever we want is available to us, the long tail in action. As in the post below, however, the tail has to be attached to something. The long tail says that you can profit from deviating from a norm, but the result of the algorithms that choose for us is that new norm are created. Thus we have the phenomenon of your Facebook page becoming an echo chamber. Such algorithmic editing has swallowed wholesale the arguments behind generation me, as well as the result of the culture wars where all norms are negative. What we have, then, is software as a crypto-morality. "There cannot be such a thing as a norm", this narrative tells us, "because nobody has a right to tell me what's normal!" There is a confusion in our conceptual apparatus, because a quantitive norm is being interpreted as a qualitative norm. There is a case where there is a cross-over, as Hegel tells us, but basic exchange of information requires this standard in terms of brute numbers. There is not a political or ethical agenda to this concept of the numerical norm. 

The assumption behind algorithmic editing is that there is a perfect search result. It is a cybernetic version of Plato's forms. There cannot be such a perfect internet experience, however, and we mislead ourselves in even imagining it is impossible. Perfect, in the sense of Lt. perfectus implies completion, of something being finished. This is nonsense, and so perhaps the ideology of perfection that underlies the thought and practice of  information technologies should be reminded of the irreducible reality of noise, of that which does not necessarily communicate a message, but without which the message cannot be communicated. We need to be able to go for a stroll with no particular destination in mind. We need that element of play in the hard sense, not hippy-dippy "y'know like whatever man". StumbleUpon curiously tries to inhere play into an algorithm, but for me it lacks that spookily magic sense of achievement when you find something that hasn't been linked by a thousand others already. We must realise there is a fundamental and structural contradiction in terms by attempting to make our online environment perfect for us in all ways because this leads to the isolation everyone on their own personal desert island. This simply establishes us in our own limits. Where then do we meet communally? Where do we have arguments? Where do we hear new stories, or jokes, or gossip? We need to have a norm from which we deviate, we need to have a same for there to be difference. 

See also, Web 3.0 : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web

Is open source inevitable? II

[If open source is to have its day, some implications must be examined]

Technologies of privacy:

• Old style : passive, reactive, the default position. 
• New versions?: Opt-in, active privacy; specifically designed ways of deciding what we share, and with whom.

Transition away from previous economic models. Manufacturing and the mass ownership of capital has been on the wane for generations. Consider the MIT model of spinning-off industries. According to this study "Entrepreneurial Impact: The Role of MIT", if one were to regard companies developed by MIT alumni, collectively they would form the 11th largest economy in the world. Technologies must be proven, thus they must be peer-reviewed as well as tested by the market. If everybody can use the same ideas (goodbye proprietary anything), if open source and the intellectual commons get their day, then the matter of 'economic viability' is set aside in favour of "technical viability" and 'environmental viability'. The new models will have to incorporate recognition that there are diseconomies of scale, and what we called economies of scale were all too often a fetishization of size. This is a realization from the realm of network theory, which brings the long tail to bear on our everyday lives. It is not merely a niche element - the long tail is not long tail, as it were. (E.F. Schumacher had an intimation of this in his collection of essays, Small is Beautiful.)

How do we then differentiate between old and new? It becomes a matter of service. Will digital mean that we are all eventually a part of the service economy? We may be able to set our businesses apart according to how we deal with our customers. It may be a matter of approach rather than cost. A fully open source world, with respect for the intellectual commons, is utopian. Too much seems to stand in its way, but elements of this can be used to consider alternatives to developing nations making the mistakes that the industrial and post-industrial nations have made. Consider the principle of the long tail applied to national economies. Of course there will factors that lead a country to be wealthy by virtue of some natural resource, as long as unsustainable practices are maintained, but an open principle towards information will in theory allow innovation to take place anywhere. We see this in the emergence of 'regional hubs' and 'centres of excellence', but the best example yet, in terms of something that will actually last (unlike Dubai), is Singapore. CNN has fifty reasons to account for this (about 20 are compelling, but that's enough for me). For long enough have people considered the first part of McLuhan's "Global Village". We need now to give greater attention to the 'village' part. That is the locus of differentiation, and of what we can manage, to make our actions environmentally and socially sound.

Towards a definition of technology

One popular view holds that the human mind truly came into its own via a "rewiring" (Kevin Kelly in Out of Control, online version here).  With this there was an extension of the brain beyond its grossly physical, biological limitations. Technology serves body, body serves brain, with brain and body as a multiplicity serving the genes in the final reckoning. Technology is the overcoming of limits - of whatever kind. That which overcomes limits in whatever mode thus serves us as a technology. We should be able to extend such a provisional definition beyond hammers and wheels and machines. Accordingly, in the most serious sense, art is a technology. A poem, a painting, a dance is a recalibration of purely crude literalism (as a kind of tyranny of an ontology of representation, of reality as a 'given' rather than as a 'made'). Art can move us beyond these assumptions which we have forgotten were once new.

With this, considering all things in terms of limits and our overcoming them, does this open the door to new analyses? Are there examples where it can be said not to apply? In technological terms, what is the function of this definition, and can it tell us anything new? It is basically an engineer's-eye-view, whereby a technology is a solution to a problem. Its function is to solve a problem, the problem being a limit which has been encountered. From this definition, some fascinating implications follow. Technology at this basic level of analysis appears to us as being self-perpetuating. Each technology brings with it a new set of problems, which in turn requires new sets of solutions, and on, and on...literally ad infinitum. We can say then that the first characteristic of technology is that it is autocatalytic. In chemical terms, a reaction is chemically autocatalytic if its product is also the catalyst for further reactions. This is so for technology and as such it manifestly is a source and product of feedback. Edward Tenner examines this in detail in terms of "revenge effects". I am not taking an ethical stance on the matter one way or the other, as Tenner's thesis requires of him. Nor am I suggesting this is simply a corollary of technology. I am saying that this feature is structurally integral to all technologies. (For an alternative overview with an ethical focus, see "The Unanticipated Consequences of Technology" by Tim Healy.)

Problem: solved.

If we return to the human mind, and consider the following. The rewiring that brought about consciousness brought about the ability to think in terms of what is not present, in time and space. It allowed for planning for a harsh winter. It allowed one to consider the potential benefits and dangers the next valley over. It escapes what I above called crude literalism. There are lines in Robert Browning's "Andrea del Sarto" that capture this:
"Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp,
Or what's a heaven for?..."
The human being is that creature par excellence whose reach exceeds its grasp, except it is the cognitive reach that exceeds the physical grasp. Technology is the attempt to bridge the two. We will never, in our present form, have the steady-state evolutionary form that living fossils such as the coelacanth; in them, reach and grasp coincide perfectly. Homo sapiens, in contrast, are necessarily an imperfect solution to the problem of life (if this can be said without woe-is-us connotations), the problem of adaptation to an environment. The reason for this is that by being sapiens we continually alter our environment such that no steady state becomes possible. We are implicated. Each new product of our mind that enters the world as either a physical or a mental technology is a solution that creates new problems. The cycle cannot stop. 

Fantasy and the possible

"Yet the invocation of magic by modern fantasy cannot recapture this fascination, but is condemned by its form to retrace the history of magic's decay and fall, it's disappearance from the disenchanted world of prose, the 'entzauberte Welt', of capitalism and modern times."
- Fredric Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future: The desire called utopia and other science fictions [71]

The major works of serious literary fantasy reflect upon this concept of magic-as-waning (John Crowley, Sheri Tepper, Susanna Clarke, et al.). How can this magic be linked properly to its reserve of power, namely human creative power? This creative power has become alienated, and the dialectic of enlightenment applies here just as much to religion because of fantasy's secular-thus-literary realm of exploration. Well, it ought to explose, but more often the literary fantasy (or just plain fantasy, the literary mulls things over more profoundly than this) will at least reflect on its own alienation. 

John Crowley is a prime example of this in both his masterpiece Little, Big as well as the Ægypt cycle. Susanna Clarke upsets our expectations by positing a final waxing of magic rather than its disappearance from the world, which emphasises all the more how the magical truly has waned from our world and even our imaginations. It is striking that Clarke's Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell was so acclaimed, but what is even more striking was that its reception seemed always to be accompanied by a note of surprise that this, a book that involved magic, was not hopelessly puerile. We could, this raised-eyebrow subtext suggested, actually enjoy something that wasn't on the Eastenders end of the realism continuum, yet that was not of the dwarves and unicorns variety. It was becoming acceptable to note that there was indeed a literary fantasy that could be read by those coming from the literary vector rather than the other way round, coming from fantasy but being discerning. Previously it was Borges and Calvino who were in this non-purely-realism citadel (acceptable, as Gore Vidal notes regarding another topic, because they don't write in English, which we might call the language of instrumental reason), but others have joined them. One would hope, however, that as fantasy became literary, non-discussions as to the artistic merit of previous bastions should really become moot (such that we can say J.R.R. Tolkien was not "snubbed", he simply didn't deserve the Nobel). 

If we can reflect on the passing of magic in a fantasy text, is this more than a shallow generic narcissism? Does it point to an intriguing approach whereby the old Freudian idea allows magic to be regarded as wish-fulfillment, rather than having little to do with the "thinking through of the dialectic" that Fredric Jameson is proposing. The alienation of magic has much to do with the alienating power of technology and reason, how these forces of industry and enlightenment are regarded as inhuman, rather than as the ne plus ultra of humanity. We might make a connection here with Arthur C. Clarke's "Three Laws":

1. When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. 
2. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
3. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

This nexus of technology and possibility is left unresolved and unexamined in the realm of magic, and we still put our eggs in the basket of wish fulfillment. That fantasy revists and rehashes the magic-as-waning trope again and again shows that we fundamentally do not understand where we are now, where we have come from, and the fact that imagination is not a diversionary exercise in wish-fulfillment. Fantasy, by its obsessive compulsion to repeat the same ideas again and again is begging somebody to notice it, to see that it matters, that it affected us before, and can again.