A Call for a Typology of Technology (in resolution of my read of Benjamin H. Bratton The Terraforming)

I'm trying, once again, to read Benjamin H. Bratton. He makes it very hard. So hard that after reading The Stack the first time, I wrote a review on Goodreads that was as impenetrable as he is. My Goodreads reviews are just bookmarks for me, seldom being inviting enough for someone else to read, much less appreciate. My writing is often impenetrable even by me! I find it somewhat strange to be afforded the tool, though I should remind myself more often how ephemeral it is. I own nothing of myself there. Or here. Or anywhere, which may be part of Bratton's point.

Bratton is hard to read on purpose, in a way. It's almost as though he deliberately - by means of his personal agency - wants to hide the serious flaws in his reasoning. Of course I don't quite believe he's doing that deliberately. Meaning that he fools himself first. He actually believes what he writes. That, I believe, might form the crux of the problem for me, in his stance.

The hard problems which must be resolved, but which can't be resolved:

• Devising and implementing a structure for sovereignty that won't deploy power for devious, insider-privileging and ultimately planet-destroying ends. How can any technology for sovereignty be trusted?
• Finding a lever by which to change culture (if the lever is intellectual, it has to be on a grade-three reading level). Bratton seems to believe that redesign of automation processes will entail changes to culture (without regard to whether those changes contribute to a positive or negative feedback loop) perhaps in the way that the earth-as-marble space shot (should have?) changed culture previously.

I follow, or at least I think I follow, most of his reasoning, and I have to say that he fills me with hope. I can begin - almost - to construct a trustworthy narrative for myself which doesn't have to include mass collapse on the way to steady state. I mean steady state for whatever becomes the highest generalization for whatever we mean by (grounded!) human. 

My hope is grounded on his sturdy deconstructions of the meanings of "natural" and "artificial" and on his exposure of the ground for the necessary consequent decentering of humans. He either announces or proposes a new Copernican shift away yet again from anthropocentrism. Hurray! (But the distinction between announcing and proposing is incredibly consequential.) 

Copernicus discovered something by means of technology newly available to him. It will take me a few more re-reads to know if Bratton has discovered something or if he is making more of a declaration. If the latter, then I will only be able to retain his brilliant analysis and be required to jettison any, or most, of his conclusions.

There is some shifty sleight of hand when he fails to clarify that to decenter humanity, he must declare what he calls "agency" as some sort of eternal cosmic property, recently discovered as such. The dance around this is what makes reading him so difficult. 

I believe he does this by some definition for artifice as patterns which can't have occurred without agency. His examples include distinguishing an arrowhead from a rock, or most notably, distinguishing climate change from something that would have happened without us. It takes agency to know agency, and what we have to change - very deliberately change - is the destructive AI that we have loosed upon the earth by relinquishing our agency (over it?).

When the asteroid strikes, that can't involve agency by his definition. It would be pure accident on a more massive scale even, than the catastrophe of climate change which is precisely the emergent/accident from the new field for accident which is the human overlay of AI. An awful lot of nifty accidents got us to this place by way of cosmic-scale evolution. It's just that we can't have been the end of that.

But now I am starting to understand Bratton, and before I completely retract my earlier review (somehow I was supposing that his insights would look as silly as phrenology - I must have been reading something about phenology at the time - when reviewed on the basis of some future understanding. Presuming that future understanding is better understanding. A technologically enhanced higher level of generalization/abstraction?

There's the rub for me. Maybe I'm too much of a Platonist to think that we aren't destroying and covering up even, or especially, as we "progress," though I prefer to think I'm too much infected by the entirely non-Platonic Chinese tradition. (which used to be all about steady state and no progress). In that case, too much proliferation and complexity is degenerate and not progressive. Wait, that sounds Platonic! I think I'm trying to discover if Bratton is a closet Platonist. By which I think I mean a Westerner uncontaminated by a differing cosmology. It is important to distinguish what is an accident. It can't just be distinguished by desire, can it?

I'm sure that Bratton's ears perked up, or would have, when Nancy Pelosi declared "all of us" ready to die for our country last night. Really? Die for some principle maybe, but no longer for this country. I'm glad she's there for sure, but I think she just did declare the end of the nation-state as an entity worthy of self-identification. Enter Bratton's reconfigurations for sovereignty description.

I'm not so good at any kind of -ology, for sure, which is probably why I never could succeed as a scholar. Every time I come across such words as phenomenology, teleology, epistemology, . . . I have to look them up. Not necessary as much for their meaning as for their usage, which never sticks for me. Maybe it's slippery out there in the wild. Who knows?

So, as I try to grok Bratton's rather novel generalizations as he deconstructs terms like "nature" and "artifice" I am starting to realize that most of my complaints involve his (apparent, since I can hardly claim to have mastered his entire corpus - by which I don't mean having read everything he's written - more toward getting a grasp on his terminology -ology) . . .his generalizations about technology.

In a world where writing now is commonly called a technology, alcohol is called a drug, and therefore hallucinogenics are as dangerous as opioids (dangerous to which sovereign, is the question), a typology for such a term as technology is certainly in order. It feels strange to me that it gets used as though there were some unitary meaning for it, no metaphors required. I *really* surprises me that Bratton seems to use it that way. (I can only say "seems" since I do believe that he believes that its meaning is as basic as the distinction between artifice and nature.)

If writing is a technology, then there must be distinctions between and among types of writing. Those would have to include distinctions between handwriting and typewriting, sound transcription, and Chinese writing with characters, just for some quick examples.

Of course Chinese writing also transcribes sound, and maybe the difference between sound transcription and alphabetic writing isn't so distinct. One can certainly get a computer to transcribe Chinese - more easily and accurately, actually, than happens for English. By the same token, however, handwriting Chinese engages differing parts of the brain toward language mastery as compared with keyboard entry than is the case for English. These distinctions can be important, for sure, at least because they might form the basis for exceptions to higher-level generalizations about the technology of writing.

We certainly did transform as a species in the transformation from orality to literacy, qua Ong, and much got destroyed. Our impact on earth certainly became more consequential. I wonder how we are transforming in the era of earth-encompassing new technologies. I wonder if Bratton is unreconstructed, and if I am.

So starting at the highest level of generalization that I can come up with off the top of my head - high enough, I hope, to avoid too many obvious exceptions - let me first list a catalog of distinctions:

• digital is not the same as analog
• mechanical technology is not the same as communications technology
• technology for the purposes of discovery (microscope) is not the same as technology to accomplish some already established end (bulldozer)

A couple of things might be obvious from the construction of this short list: 

• distinctions among types of technology aren't the same as to say that one type may or may not be embodied by a different and distinct type. Thus any analog mechanism may be embodied to some arbitrary degree of precision by means of digital technology. It still won't be analog.
• schematic representations may seem identical across distinctions
• because of the above, which might refer to a kind of flow chart of a purpose for technology, the intention of the maker of any technology must be a part of the cataloging of distinctions
• invention is distinct from discovery (we in the West are culturally disposed to credit inventors, where in China, for instance, the possibility for a "firearm" was discovered by way of bamboo-tube rocketry, perhaps)

I would like to make note here of some interesting tangential matters:

• Reading Henry Adams recently, I was struck by how often he mentioned the compass, gunpowder, and even paper as the things that had changed everything across the turn of the twentieth century. That may have been before China laid legitimate (for the West) claim to "discovery" of same.
• Neurologists seem to have discovered that we make decisions before we are conscious of having decided. That seems related to a distinction in the brain between its function to catalog and organize impressions on the one hand, and to make predictions to guide actions on the other. Only the important stuff gets handed up to consciousness.
• The construction of narratives is basic to mind's predictive function. They form the basis for some projection into the future by means of which we may guide our actions to maximize our likelihood for survival (or pleasure or pain-avoidance, whatever).
• Once we have language, we participate in shared narrative.
• Once we have writing, we can extend our narratives into a more distant and reliable past to assure better projections into some future (now a collective future).
• Narrative must therefore be pre-cogitive, since our brains decide before we do consciously.
• This may easily appear as precognition. Strange and meaningful coincidence may seem less so once and if we account for all the perceptions which never make it to consciousness in the first place. Preparation of the ground conditions revelation. Only stuff that is relevant to our narrative may appear.
• Fate and the subconscious are the same thing, so far as we can know and tell
• New digital and especially communications technologies are as large a break with writing as was relativity and quantum physics with material determinism.
• The direction of the change is backwards. (our sovereign identifications shrink, and our identities fracture). Of course, backward/forward and up/down are not cardinal directions.
• Humanity is in the process of becoming all over again.

This above list of "tangentials" is meant to explain my first distinction between digital and other forms of technology. Digital can't do random, can't resolve Zeno's paradox, and can't extend the ground for its predictive computations beyond its internal decision tree (s). Godel Escher Bach. Tralala.

I am hereby making the claim for a stark distinction between an embodied brain and a disembodied difference engine. The brain is contiguous with a nebulously bounded external ground. It may be contiguous in ways analogous (metaphorically, please!) to holographs or ether-nets, rendering boundedness meaningless for mind. On/off logical computation is radically bounded from any ground beyond its fully describable structures. Signalling must be overt, material representable, and non-emotive. Period.

Emotions are likely the most proximate cause for human "decisions." Impulse, attraction, revulsion.

Emotions are likely also the basis for the rationalizations made when we take ownership for a choice that was not properly ours, in the sense of our conscious self; the one credited with "free will." (I will have to follow with a taxonomy for emotion).

Some tech defines and/or defends the bounds of sovereignty. Obvious that would include military tech, but also housing, and communication that defines a group, where emotional bonds can extend a boundary of security.

While digital machinery may connect to and join with an external ground by means of inputs and outputs, in and out are and must be as clearly (and as starkly) defined as the distinctions between on and off.

Real and imaginary are distinct in the same way. I'm almost as much of a materialist as Bratton is. Not nearly so much of an idealist, though!

Furthermore, while the term technology has become a dog whistle for digital technology, that usage also buries digital technology beneath the rather foolish notion that technology can describe in a single word everything we cover with that one term. We've lost track of our metaphors. 

So, here's my grid:

A Typology of Technology

Type	Digital	Mechanical	Communications
Artistic/cool	input/output only	Uncarved Block	mediated mesh
Intentional/hot	designed and iterated	driven and iterated	disembodied mesh
Sovereignty	institutionally evolved	fiat, skins and walls	group definitional

Of course I have something of McLuhan's treatment of media in mind, to a certain extent. But he was only dealing with communication as that thing which does, perhaps, make us most human. He was more concerned with Chardin's noosphere than with Bratton's metaphorical stack. His "extensions of man" weren't quite so physical.

But again, the eyes are privileged, the ears second, as inputs to a disembodied brain. The embodied person deals with much more than what is treated by McLuhan and others as "media." A clue is provided in the usage of "Information Technology," which sometimes elides into or from "communications technology." As Bratton urges us to understand, all technology is embodied and energy consuming and has real impacts on the earth. Maybe signal fires and waving flags would have less embodiment, despite their tangible physicality. Are books the same when read on the web, or read to one by a computer voice, or when read without taking notes or making some sort of response?

Mechanical technology is perhaps only distinguished from digital in the matter of the location for/of "accident." All relations in a mechanism are tangible and explicit and can be perfectly represented by some schematic. When things break, the site and cause can be discovered. In the case of digital technology to the point where it has now evolved, most or much of the mechanism is obscured. As Bratton so brilliantly exposes, most of the embodiments of digital technology (where the carbon gets emitted) is utterly unavailable to ordinary consciousness, and almost never included on any schematic. But by now even the schematics are themselves computer generated (the templates for the chips, say) and the ordinary presumption that some expert can locate the break feels no different than a presumption in prior times that the high priest should know. That's the field for accident that Bratton locates. Automation as ecology.

For sure, I'm not too thrilled with this "grid" of mine. I'll have to be more three-dimensional or find an altogether different way to generate some useful typology. But I do think that the distinction between "artistic" and "intentional" is an important one. Fundamentally, that's a distinction between intentionality and agency on the one side, and something more interactive on the other. 

And if I'm right that emotions provide the inception for agency, I think it also opens a way to include money in the typology. Frankly, that's what I think Bratton is missing. It's not just that tech is happening and will happen and that we have to get on top of it. There is no manifest destiny to technology any more than there is a single direction for history; for progress. 

Bratton knows this at least implicitly by addressing the very history-changing project of terraforming. It is at least accepting of the notion that decisions have to be made and we can't just let the tech run amok. Technology has made us responsible. For technology, along with everything else. There is precisely no manifest destiny, and tech can't solve anything by itself.

I'm proposing that most of the issues that people - including me - might have about the proliferation of technology have more to do with money, which often stands in for more basic human emotion. Money sublimates most of our animal behaviors, and provides the impulse that had been provided by survival needs. 

Of course money is a communications technology. It's been an instance of AI since way before digital tech. But how should it be categorized? Perhaps we need to investigate the term "Artificial Intelligence" along the same lines that Bratton destabilizes Western assumptions about the difference between "natural" and "artificial." Can there every be any higher tech than automation? I don't think there can.

What if there is no such thing as "intelligence" apart from biological humanity. What if it's less a matter of the logical, thinking, metaphorically computer-like brain and - as the term works in Chinese - intelligence *always* incorporates emotion in its definition. Most anything can be automated, probably including what we often refer to as thinking. But if intelligence *must* incorporate emotion, then it would be hard to outsource it to any kind of technology, no matter how evolved or sophisticated.

I still can't figure out if I'm fundamentally agreeing with Bratton or not. I wonder if I'll ever have the energy . . . (how much carbon do I burn by thinking so hard?) I think that Bratton is still a literate human; therefore a human who believes in intentional design and who is most emotionally engaged with his individual identity. He feels more like an inventor or discoverer than he does a participant in collective action. His belief structure feels vaguely fascistic, if there is a good and positive sense for that.

I think that emergent humanity will (once again?) be more emotionally engaged with some sovereign entity that is much larger than an individual. I'm not sure that automation can be ecology any other way.

The extreme first person shooter individualism on display at the moment is but the last gasp of what it once did mean to be human. Team sport politics are as dead as the flag. Computer gaming is an exercise in who gives a fuck. And yet the human spirit has never been so alive and well.

Benjamin H. Bratton's Terraforming

I have no idea what I'm doing writing reviews up here. I don't expect or even want anyone to read them. I do want to understand how the world operates, and Bratton has really helped me to do that. His massive tome - we call it the BIG WHITE BOOK among friends - it's actually called The Stack - is quite readable, and extremely eye-opening for its descriptions of aspects human life on the planet that I could never have represented to myself as well as Bratton has. I think everyone should read it, if only as journalism, for what it reveals about our now digitally overlaid planet.

This book opens with the bang of the crises we face; specifically the twin crises of climate change and artificially intelligent automation. Bratton (or is it the automatic computers he pulls from?) gives us ten years. His solutions are design-based and dependent on human agency.

As it happens (well, not exactly, I was fairly deliberate about this), I'm reading Bratton along with the highly readable Michael Pollan. I've learned amazing things about the human brain and how agency works in his How to Change Your Mind and now I'm learning amazing things about how contemporary humans on the planet have been engineered by corn (as in corn is genetically triumphant because of us humans) in The Omnivores Dilemma. That is one of those books I've had on my literal shelves (now in storage) for a long time. I borrowed it digitally for the read.

I wear cotton to keep from needing too many chemicals to prevent my stinking, even while I know how dirty the cotton industry is. I feel repelled by Patagonia, and have all those nasty prejudices when a Tesla goes by. I repress them, because there's nothing wrong with Teslas drivers - they're almost all likeable people to me. I think I resent that they think they might be mitigating some harm (if not doing any particular good) by driving a Tesla. It's still a car, and they're not. And I don't have enough money for either Patagonia or Tesla, which is really what bugs me about the whole deal.

I think that Bratton agrees with me that driving a Tesla resolves nothing. Not sure. But I have no idea yet why he thinks we can plan our way out of this mess in ten years. We can't even get rid of Trump.

As a lapsed wooden boat sailor, I'm mindful that with much more primitive man and horse driven technologies, the wooden boat building industry wiped out our old growth forests even before we did the Bison in, and, mostly by means of disease germs, the native Americans. I'm mindful of the catastrophe of agriculture itself, perhaps grace Harari Sapiens or his other book(s) (they seem to proliferate).

What is it about this current asymptotic limit now at close of a shockingly transformative industrial communications computational revolution starting no longer ago than Darwin - what is it that makes things feel so terminal? Well, duh, right? It would seem that we have to plan our way out of it. There's no god I know of about to swoop in to rescue us. We just don't seem all that relevant.

Except that I've always felt that our consciousness is the trouble. Bratton takes great pains to explain how much more carbon intensive what he calls "culture" is than most everything else about how we organize ourselves. In just the way that Michael Pollan traces everything back to oil and corn (I've only started), Bratton traces what happens when we "push" (as in electrostatically interact with by touch) a button on our iPhones.

I *think,* but can't know, that what's really happening *is* a change to consciousness; a change in what it means to be human. Sure, the computer has taken over our brains in some sense, but it's really money, isn't it? That's the technology for communication that harnesses my survival impulses on a moment by moment basis, as though I were hunting on some savannah. I love the trace through Amazon's website to find cheap gizmos for solving my very local issues of survival in my tiny house on wheels with solar panels. I love getting pinged about the recycled from China maybe cardboard box's progress to my (borrowed) door. I love solving those little problems, even while I *hate* Amazon with a passion normally reserved for Walmart; for its destruction of local business. (I used to love conducting the hunt by car, right?)

I think, but am still not sure, that Bratton wants me to embrace these things as inevitable and harness their titanic energy to save the earth instead of destroy it. I embrace his deconstructions of romantic distinctions between "natural" and "artificial" and his call for a further Copernican turn away from our continued anthropocentrism. We still act, as he writes, as though nature were the misty backdrop for our finest performance.

What I have trouble with is that, sure humans have been terraforming ever since the advent of writing and now it's coming to a head. But we've also been engineered by the planet. I don't know which has the upper hand, I honestly don't. Have we become disposable? Are we needed now as landfill? Who's the joke on, oh captain Irony my captain? (no really, Irony is my captain, no matter what Foster Wallace said.)

If by means of agency we might re-join rather than exit cosmic-grade evolution, I'm all for it. I just don't have a clue how Bratton proposes that we do that. At the moment I'm finding more hope in the magic mushrooms documented by Michael Pollan. I'm not about to - but maybe Bratton should - try a guided trip. I don't know, but his brain seems a lot like a really powerful computer to me, and I still do believe, in a not religious way, that there is more to cosmos than what materialistic science can describe.

I'm going to keep trying to read him because it feels hopeful. Once he understands that love is a cosmic motive power that's stronger than our pitifully local agency, I might get really excited (apparently mushrooms can accomplish that - who knew???). Anyhow, job one is to get Trump out of office and restore some sanity to our basic operations. We can't begin to save the earth if we live in LaLa Land, the movie.

Roger that, Benjamin! Just remember that neurologically speaking agency starts with emotive impulse. I *care,* I really do. I just don't understand what to do.

Reading Up on Psilocybin in the Age of Trump

In my usual scattershot way, I got turned on to Michael Pollan's recent book called How to Change Your Mind when I turned on a holiday re-run of a 60 Minutes segment about research into psychedelics for addiction, PTSD, and terminal cancer despair recovery.

Silly me, I thought 'oh yeah, so that's the solution!' People dissolve their egos, realize that the main cosmic force truly is love and then we reform humanity as part of, rather than apart from, nature. A sort of reversion to the hive forms of social creatures with presumably less impact on the planet.

These excursions can excite dormant parts of my memory, which also always reminds me why I can and could never be a scholar. I just don't have the mind for it, always dropping more threads of thought than I can track; leaving go of promising directions for my unguided research and then really quite forgetting about them.

It's all a good reminder than ones own personality is really the only reliable organizing principle, which really explains why all the excitement about the transformative qualities of psychedelics has mostly led - via computer technology, perhaps - to an acceleration of already settled trends, whether those be good, bad, or indifferent.

So tech moguls seem to harness their psychedelics inspired insights into the godhead of the cosmos to enhance their own abilities to expand their personal impact. Sort of like the way the Ivy League works now, where there are diminishingly few graduates anymore who went for the education, per se. Some might graduate and want to do good, but that always seems attached to the ego enhancements that is the actual purpose of the Ivy leagues to confer.

I'm an Ivy Leaguer who has remained a schlump, and that somewhat deliberately. There are plenty of us. We regard ourselves vaguely as failures, even while being somewhat proud for not selling out. Perhaps I would be a more proper Ivy-grade self-huckster if only I were able to be that certain of something that I might have that might be worthy. I'm not against being conventionally successful in principle, despite the moral burdens that might entail.

My life's work, as it were, is to understand what the fuck is going on, and in general I feel pretty successful with that. Less successful with communicating what I've found.

Like lately my project has been focused on what the fuck is going on with Donald Trump. I don't mean the man himself, and I don't mean finding some intellectual framework to understand the sociological phenomenon. I really just mean that I'm trying to understand why so many people are bent on giving him a pass for being such a narcissistic and sociopathic asshole.

I'm not helped in this endeavor by my diffident social recessiveness. I wouldn't go around announcing what I'm up to, in the guise of a writer or a journalist, perhaps, like Michael Pollan. But I do have an easy time talking and connecting with a wide variety of types, which certainly does include Trumpsters. They hardly ever offend me personally, even while their representations might, from a distance.

I guess that Trump's evident success in politics might have something to do with a personal magnetism that many sociopaths display. He is certainly about display. But in the end, I think it's more about our collective beliefs about what it means to be human.

We are really attached to individualism. We reward individual talents and personalities extravagantly in the arena's of sports or cinema, say. We reward individual beauty, genius, financial rapacity (department of redundancy, in the charge of Captain Obvious) and so on. Ordinary wage-work sloughs off the self-actualization bandwagon along with all the other uglies and what Hillary calls deplorables.

But the main thing is that we enshrine individualism in our one person one vote dream for democracy. We remain, in principle, equal, despite vast differences in privilege and socioeconomic clout. Of course those dreams of democracy can't work when money combined with technology can so easily manipulate the vote. But that hardly loosens our grip on the dream.

I find hope in this, in the sense that this set of understandings enables me to understand Trump in a positive light. Of course people want a talented leader. They want to believe that there is someone competent enough to make the right decisions all the time. And only someone like the Real Donald Trump is so unhinged as to make that claim about himself.

In other words, much like the way I view our dependence on fossil fuels, these have been a gift from the cosmos. While we seem mostly to have squandered the gift, not knowing what to make of the transformations its energy storage has enabled, there's no denying the explosive transformation of our world that fossil fuels have effected. I'm just waiting for the quantum shift in consciousness that should and must accompany such transformation is all.

And in that sense Trump  spells the end of our dangerous fantasy. There is no further to go in the downward slide from Reagan through Dubya to Trump. They were all empty vessels for our projections along with the projections of the moneyed and self-aggrandizing powers that are really in charge. I'm not talking about any sort of deep state. I'm talking about the obvious.

Trump spells the end of the descent into the dangers of a cosmology of human individualism and the implicit assumption that history ends with it's triumph in the approximate form of individualistic peak consumers. Living the good life on a virtual private yacht with lots of nubile babes to fuck. Not much different than our projections onto what those self exploding Jihadi others long for. We literally can't imagine another way to be our best selves. Note that women are entirely left out from all of this as objects, just as they are strangely absent from narratives about psilocybin.

The enlightenments from psychedelics are just grandiose versions of the enlightenments form motherhood, it would seem to me. Visions that MEN would have who wish to come back down to earth to lead some movement. Some disruptive transformation.

Under these conditions I think it would be useful to offer something that's equally accessible by everyone rather than an amplifier for male grandiosity. Or lets say accessible by anyone who's somewhat literate. Literacy is a two-edged sword, for sure. In my cosmos, it is both the mechanism for subsumption into a power structure developed mostly for the benefit or one or another form of patriarchy, while it is also the mechanism to break free of that, in communion with some communicable "truth." In my usage here, "truth" only has to do with being trued to other words and not to some ultimate Platonic god-form. So no-one gets to be the expert guru leader type, even while someone might get celebrated for a discovery of sorts.

So that's my life's work; to find those words. I mean I have found those words, but I haven't been able to find a way to lead anyone to read them in their proper sense. Were anyone to do so they also would realize that same set of marvels revealed under the influence of LSD, magic mushrooms, toad venom, whatever. But the realization would be more permanent and more transmissible/transferable.

It is my fervent hope and sense that there can and will be a sort of catalysis, where one single understanding spreads to become quickly universal. I'm hoping for at least the speed that went from Einstein's discoveries toward the end of Henry Adams life (an amazing read, that I had just now) to the actual release of those massive sums of energy which his theories enabled. The term of merest youth.

But the goal now is not to entrust the transformations to some elite cadre of, in that case, physicists and their administrators, who may not be in the best position to make the decisions. The transformations have to transit the populace or we end up with 'in Trump we trust,' in one form or another. I mean he wouldn't even listen to the physicists, or at least not for their truth value. He'd go right to the punch and deploy the power for his own personal ends and damn consequence to the rest of the planet.

Here's how I got to my words, roughly. First off, I died, and had that signal experience of my life passing before me in an instant, in full detail. That tends to warp one's sense of the meaning of eternity.

Next, I hazarded into the twin pursuits of Chinese language (starting with the classical written language) and physics. It turns out that I had a talent for each of those, the twinning effectively preventing my delving too deeply into either.

The Chinese provided antidote to the Platonism still ruling the Western mind. That's what gives us God as the eternal perfect form for human, and the crazy notion that ideas are expressed after first being formed in the mind. Which leads to insanities like virtual reality, dreams of cyborgs and immortality, truth in and through words, and such-like.

Chinese creativity seems to work on the stuff of existence rather than on ideas. The artist starts with an uncarved block and not with some vision which requires outering. The limits to the mind are not even transcendable in principle, nevermind in practice. That doesn't mean that the random stuff beyond understanding is meaningless, but only that it can't be known and understood.

There is beauty in each of these disparate cosmologies and many ways that they might be mapped onto one another, but there is also fundamental disparity. Just as there is with the writing systems. Chinese writing has a connection to the cosmos that is prior to language. Western writing is always a record(ing).

So perhaps it was easier somehow for me to make the leap through particle physics to a shift in cosmos. A cosmic shift, if you will. I mean you won't but I did when I was lots younger. My insight was simple, informed as it was by having gotten outside the set of metaphors that govern even physics.

Perhaps I started with the candy-colored metaphor that gravity is love. I know I was trying to make sense of meaningful coincidence in my life. Many people settle for Jesus or another form of religion for those answers, and move on. I have been more struck by the importance of accident to both my life and to life in general. Evolution moves by accident.

At the opening of the atomic age, Henry Adams was moved to understand force just as the physicists and disrupted religionists were. There wasn't yet the notion of bosons, I don't think, but there was already a sense, as he called it, that motion and matter were identical. There remained the mystery of why it was that the Virgin moved the world as much as the locomotive did. How was one to understand the differences in those motives?

Anyhow, while living aboard the wooden sailboat that I'd rebuilt as my home, it seemed trivial suddenly one sleepless night around 1982. If there were no definable forces, then matter would be the disposition of some primordial mind. I wasn't concerned about brains, just about mind preceding matter as a cosmic descriptor.

Forces implied eventual impingement of matter upon matter and would happen mind or no. But movement without force could only happen in the mind, and it did seem obvious to me that such motion could be reduced to what we call emotion.

And so, of course gravity started to look precisely like love in a metaphorical sense at least. Way back in 1982 we were already embarked on the quest to find the boson mediating the force of gravity. I thought that would be impossible given Einstein's general theory of relativity. That posited the equivalence of gravity and acceleration. Space curvature was entailed and later proven, seeming to make the force of gravity a descriptor (like mind) rather than some discoverable exchange of tangibles. There was enough instrumentation already in 1982 - before the CERN supercollider - to make "tangible" a very fuzzy notion. We have gravity waves, but as yet we have no graviton. A matter of time, perhaps?

For me, at least, the quest has lost its interest. As far as I know, I'm still the only one to have paused on definitions for mind and emotion that require no further discoveries. That's not to nullify the possibility for endless investigations to build our collective understanding of our cosmos. But for me, at least, it does change the tenor of such investigations.

What that mainly means is that those investigations can no longer be considered amoral, or inevitable, or always leading to understanding that is not automatically wedded to power. There is really nothing left to be understood in those terms. The only thing left is to be manipulated.

We have recently entered into a dangerous endgame of confusing the enhancement of human agency with understanding. We have yet to uncover how evil that is. Intelligent young people now simply assume that our hoped for technological breakthroughs won't happen before we burn everything down.

I have more faith in life than that. We will wake up to the fact that agency is not understanding and that what we mean by "truth" can only be distorted thereby. We have to stop projecting ourselves onto "nature" is all. In just the way that the human mind is only metaphorically centered on a CPU - and the metaphor is very parochial - the ability to do something is not the only measure for understanding, good measure though it may sometimes be.

Even if you don't follow the argument that scientific understanding has jumped the shark in a way, it should be trivial to reach agreement that the solutions to our problems are more political and sociological than they are technological. We just don't have the collective will to do things right. We are culturally trapped into wanting a strong man (and I mean MAN not woman) to deploy force confidently. That will end us as a species.

Fortunately, life will prevail. Love will prevail. And if our biological species does survive, we won't recognize it, so what's the worry? I will always have fonder memories of the rainbow homecomings than I could ever form at Burning Man. Those people don't even know that it truly is a celebration of an ending. The new beginning is happening where people don't trumpet themselves so.

China's Path to Democracy

In the course of the collapse of the previous dynasty in China, progressives were chanting for Mr. Democracy and Mr. Science. They were led by students.

Here in the West, where we seem hell-bent on electing strong-man nationalistic demagogues in the place of leaders, we are easily horrified by China's new social credit score system. It's not all that hard to discover what is going on. As soon as the Internet escaped academia into the realm of Dot Com, our form of democracy was foredoomed.

I listened (for a clue) to Lester Holt, a mainstream anchor, interview Mark Zuckerberg. In case you don't know, Mark runs a really big advertising outfit. They track our social behaviors, trading on our "social" enthusiasms just like Google trades on our shopping and searching enthusiasms. Behind much of all that lurks a credit scoring system. It would seem that while China strives to develop a more comprehensive scoring system for its citizenry, we are content to allow utter opacity to an overall system controlled algorithmically on behalf of our oligarchs (cute and likable as they try to be).

President Xi is certainly a strong man, but hardly a demagogue. Chinese are raised in terror that they might have our particular brand of democracy, where we electioneer amateurs to lead us. Even when they become professional politicians, or perhaps especially then, our leadership governs by some playbook as though politics were a sport.

I suppose that, as Max Weber did once opine, we can't depart from our Protestant roots where money might stand in for good works and thus for grace. It seems that we've become all about money and not much else.

Now, I do actually believe that China is slouching toward a form of Democracy, and here is how it might look: In place of one person one vote, they will evolve toward a weighted voting system where a person's vote counts proportionately according to that person's social credit score. Furthermore, the voter will be allowed to spread his vote among candidates for a particular office.

For instance, I am zero percent Trump and maybe thirty percent to each of Sanders and Warren right now. That's to encourage them to form a single ticket, maybe. The rest might be doled out according to what happens with electability.

In China, they will all vote at the same instant and information about candidates will be gotten out in ways cut off from the marketplace. No ads. Let's hope they allow even criminals to vote - since no legal system is perfect - diluted by a low social-credit score, of course.

There remains a lot to work out. I don't know what the credit score of an eighteen-year old might be, but I suppose one might start one as soon as one starts a bank account. I'll have to ask an eighteen year old if they even know what a credit score is.

Perhaps in China, one will start life with a social-credit score of zero, and then begin tweaking it in high-school, or perhaps earlier; upon first encounter with the legal system. So, the youth vote might be diluted for a while, even while the college-educated vote might be amplified.

Of course China has a lot of work to do, mostly with regard to creating a solid legal system which is trusted by the people. They need more and better codes for all sorts of things.

We, on the other hand, seem bent on destroying what we have. That often happens in the name of new technologies which enable the atrocities of Uber, Air-B-n' B and their ilk which enable the concentration of wealth among the mega-yacht-riding crowds on the backs of gig-workers competing for pennies on the street left behind by the newly homeless. Just imagine how much local knowledge Walmart has destroyed; the wreckage of small store owners and their living-wage employees.

Hmmm. What if politicians' social-credit score were visible and not just their balance sheets. Clearly, the Donald would be worth about zero, but then he knows we only care about money. I guess Republican means love of money and knowledge about how to gain power. There sure isn't any ideology there, apart from those basics.

And that would be fine if our current economy weren't so hell-bent on destruction of the earth. We need a government! I'm afraid China will get there first. Well, I'm not so afraid. I'm hopeful! I also hope that we won't have utterly destroyed ours by then.

The world is confusing and so people naturally listen to bloviators on the Internet and while they're driving. There seems to be no shortage of people willing to say anything for an audience, and their seeming certainty must be comforting somehow, in an angry sort of way.

We should be suspicious of anyone who wants to be president, shouldn't we. Who could actually want such a job for good and honest reasons?

Ah, remember when old Bill Gates (he's almost exactly my age, but sure looks a lot older now - I guess riches don't get you everything) raved on about how the Internet and tech generally was going to give us a friction-free market? What a hoot now when we spend nearly all our time trying to gauge how much we might be made a sucker by our endless and arduous calculations of value.

We might even be amazed when we discover something of good quality at a good price backed by honest people trying to make a living. So many are forced to sell their souls to take on some corporate ideology. You know, health-insurance providers, cell-phone giants, tech titans, those kinds of corporate people.

Trump is such a patently divisive "leader" with lousy instincts pandering to the basest in each of us. And yet we debate niceties and technicalities of the law and the constitution to provide cover for the obvious moral bankruptcy of the man. That's what we should impeach for. It's not about "administrative incompetence" which our founding fathers explicitly wrote out from impeachment as impeachment was described in our constitution. This is moral failure, plain and simple, administratively incompetent though Trump may be.

Bottom line for me is that absent Christianity (and it really is both absent and vacant in relation to its own erstwhile professions) we need some moral code that we can count on. We need to stop amplifying the voices and deeds of the sociopaths among us. We need to stop projecting our own deficiencies onto others (and wondering why they hate us in return).

Love is the only cosmic force worth comprehending. Our tail-chasing toward human abstraction from the muck of living by means of science and technology is backfiring miserably, no? I'm all for those pursuits, but not when guided by the anti-life force of money. I don't think we either must or should subvert what's working in our economy. Radical behaviors based on partial understanding, and especially based on ideological certainty, are always dangerous.

I like Bernie simply because he is who he is by proven track record. In that sense, he's as transparent as Trump, and likely could have beaten him for the same reasons Trump won. Were it not for the cynical and manipulative and apparently condescending calculus behind Hillary. Were it not for the way the Facebook amplified Putin-backed agitprop. Were it not for the general apathy about voting, especially among the young.

I'd like Bernie better if he were younger and didn't seem so eager to wrench the wheel of state in some new direction over the short-haul (which is all he's got now). I trust that he's been in government to know better than that, which is another reason to trust the man.

Well, that's about enough blathering from here. But mark my word on China's slow progress toward a better democracy than the one we seem hell-bent on selling down the river.

Hong Kong v. Tiananmen - Taking to the Streets

Of course these two captioned phenomena aren't opposed, except perhaps rhetorically, and then only for the purpose of drawing contrasts. Just for instance, Capo Xi's anti-corruption drive responds to many of the complaints which underlay the students' uprising in 1989. The students and middle-class rising up in Hong Kong seem to carry the same concerns we attributed to the students then occupying Tiananmen.

The analysis now is so much more sophisticated than it was then, which is to say that we've lost the moral clarity that Perry Link, for one, seems able to maintain. So many well-read and intelligent apologists now deride the ignorant protesters in Hong Kong, as though they fight in vain against history itself.

One thing that has definitely changed between now and then is how we get our news. As I write, plain new barriers are being erected in the way of my getting more elite reads beyond the working-class aggregations offered by all the major tech companies. It soon will seem as though only the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal will have the clout to charge the public what they are worth.

I'm not complaining about the cost of the news. I'm pretty sure that back when we did subscribe to magazines and the local paper we spent more in proportion than what we're being asked to dish out now. Hell, I can pay Apple $10 a month to get a whole pepper-pot of magazines, leaving only those like the three I advert to above to compete for my remaining dollars. Given that to buy an apple (I mean the kind you eat!) is no longer a non-decision for me, one problem is that it feels like I'm spending more than what used to feel like spending money. That was before the VCR and credit cards changed our spending habits for good (or ill!).

My complaint is that even as local news has been undermined (our Buffalo News seems to get most of its literate content now by contract with the New York Times) the analysis of news of global interest is becoming so much more sophisticated. Local becomes outlet for nasty screeds sometimes, while the cosmopolitan position just feels detached and for some diminutive audience of the socially privileged.

Somewhere within all the tech aggregators for our daily reads, there may be a divide between the horrific (and opaque) curation by Facebook "likes," and whatever it is that determines the spread of each day's New York Times. In between, many of us are growing weary of being gamed by our internet habits to present us with those articles we are most likely to like.

So, one thing which distinguishes me from my betters in knowledge regarding China is that they all seem to accept that something like our current world order will persist into the indeterminate future. The many well-informed apologists for China point out how thoroughly the West is being out-played. We are hamstrung by our troglodyte beliefs in an over-simplistic definition for capitalism, and our fantasy presumptions about the moral and historical superiority of the American form of democracy.

The trouble with the American form of democracy is that it gave us Donald Trump, et al., which is surely also relata-ble to the ways our news is curated. William Taylor channeling the voice of Walter Cronkite just reminds us how is is that Donald Trump's avatar from the Apprentice took over reality about who belongs in the Oval office.

Once again, there is a divide between the cosmopolitans and the country rubes, since those who matured in the orbit of New York and Gary Trudeau have always known who Donald Trump was: the grim confidence man dreamed up by the likes of Mark Twain and Herman Melville. At least I have moral clarity about that, of the sort I don't have about the demonstrations and now seeming rioting in Hong Kong.

Of course, the Big Difference is that back in 1989, I and perhaps all of us were certain that the world was about to change, and it did! That was exciting! We weren't so much thinking about what was wrong with our future as about what was wrong with our present. Starting in China, or so it seemed to me, all sorts of walls were coming down and it felt like the world was opening up.

Now, it feels like the whole world is jaded, and there is a crushing certainty that nothing will ever change up against our seeming certainty that suddenly everything will. Climate change and rising oceans, medicine-resistant super bugs, species extinction, cyber-wars, strong-man nationalistic politics and those railing against the youth of Hong Kong all seem to be on the side of the beneficiaries of our historically localized - in time, not in space - technological global regime. Haven't those billionaires figured out that they can't take their mega-yachts with them?

So, what am I waiting for? I guess it seems to me that Hong Kong is not enough to fight for. I would fight for the world and Hong Kong just feels to me like a lost cause in the same way it does to all those China apologists who see wisdom in the ways that China is managing her ascendance. I mean I see their point, I just don't see any sustainable futures there. I'm looking for something akin to the American revolution for the Twenty First Century. And it has to happen soon!

I confess that I do take some comfort in the evident fact that billionaires are no different than the rest of us. They want toys and amusements as we all do to pass what time we have here on earth (as though there were anywhere else!) and to keep their enthusiasms focused against terminal  depression in this post-holy world.

The billionaires choose yachts and multiple mansions where the only difference between the Trumpsters and the never-Trumpsters is motorized versus non-motorized sport utility vehicles. This seems to have some relation to body-image which must be related to identification with earth and authenticity. Authenticity after all is the only thing that's left of Christian soul, post-Christianity. I mean the Christians have all apparently made their peace with soul-less recreation-vehicle capitalism.

I'm guessing that Tattoos - the branding of the self - and e-bikes might bring us all together in just the way that Teslas seem to. Ha! But really. But.

Well, OK, so I just bought an e-bike, because I can ride comfortably up steep hills and for a long time while still getting great exercise. I feel guilty about it. I sure couldn't afford it, even though I got it at a steep discount from lightly used rental stock. Of all the stupid things, I rationalized it based on the current cost of motor and battery, getting me the bike for not much more than that. Mostly I hate the political stamp it gives me. Where?

Meanwhile, the Democrats mounted a masterful inquiry into Donald Trump, and it would seem the Republicans just simply don't care. This is highly disturbing. That, finally, is why I MUST be on the side of the youth in Hong Kong, no matter what the hidden, overly analytical reasons may be for what actually motivates them. I have been stripped of my cynicism. Things have gotten serious.

We must take to the streets! The time is short. Now.

Watching Impeachment

The events surrounding Watergate were riveting in my youth. I grew up in a well-off suburban family where Dad went full-off the default Republican bandwagon, joined an organization called Common Cause and vocally supported busing that would include the suburbs. Those were tumultuous times, and Buffalo was an epicenter for aspects of those times.

I remember meeting my uncle at the Buffalo airport when he returned from Vietnam. He was a West Pointer some years ahead of William Taylor, who served in Vietnam in some very tough times. His older brother was also a West Pointer. I'm not certain what privilege they shared, but both were rather blond, handsome, and extremely upright.

I had the vaguest sense of these matters, even though I was politically active in my high school; that only meant that I was willing to speak out on some things about which I had marginal knowledge. I had a girlfriend whose parents were lefty intellectuals, and they were glued to what was happening on TV and so I had at least a clue. In my house, television "rotted the brain," in pure analogy to the way that soda pop rotted the gut. Both were banned in my house, and that was the extent of the reasons given.

But I do remember the helicopters lifting off from Saigon and I do remember Nixon's wave as he was boarding his departure helicopter; I remember stories from my uncle about fragging, and his scramble to toss a grenade out from the officers' mess; from my father about shitting on the beach in the Philippines as it was being strafed by the Japanese; finding a severed leg in an outhouse that stank worse than the outhouse would have; being evacuated for having wiped his ass with some kind of poison ivy which became a life-endangering and certainly debilitating injury. He was evacuated to Hawaii and then returned to the front.

Both Dad and uncles on the mastiff side were sober types, honorable to the point of fault, and both stopped talking about their experiences in their wars by the time I got old enough to understand them. It's as easy to imagine Dad staring down the strafing Japanese as it is to imagine my uncles' sacrifices. Dad would not commit the indignity of stopping mid-shit or leaving his ass un-wiped. He gave away his beer and cigarette rations to those he drove up to the hilltop to indulge in Filipino tent-cities of comfort women, keeping the truck running just in case. That image is indelibly seared into my brain; rows and rows of pup tents with candlelit glows from each, and lines of GIs outside them.

Anyhow, I did recognize both William Taylor and George Kent as members of my family. I differ starkly with their brand of patriotism, since they evidently still do believe in an American that never did really exist as far as I can tell. My America propped up dictators in South America and the Middle East and can't let go of constant vilification of China and Russia in just the way that my uncle never could let go of their dangers - or of Jane Fonda - even after the fall of the Berlin Wall and Deng Xiaoping.

The dangers of the strongman politics of Russia and China are real - don't get me wrong. But there may be a greater danger in turning those countries into some kind of meme while we ignore the dangers of strongman politics at home.

I started to think that maybe my Fox News uncle was right as I watched the opening of the public impeachment hearings yesterday.  During one of the breaks Reince Priebus was trotting out his arguments as to why the impeachment is a travesty. He seemed to be saying that Trump can't be impeached on the basis of any of his actions, and that the Democrats could only investigate his state of mind. My image was that we were conducting some kind of invasion of privacy, and that we have no right to investigate the President's thought processes or the secret processes of his (supposed) deliberation.

How ironic, right? Whatever is in his mind is surely a hot mess, and there ain't no deliberating there. Thank goodness the Democrats had the presence of collective mind to remind everyone that attempted murder is still a crime, even though the intended victim may not have died.

But Priebus did remind us all that Trump was elected precisely because he 'raised his middle finger to D.C.' So, is he like Ai Weiwei now? Has the presidency become performance art, and we are testing how far our cherished American freedoms can be stretched? Is Trump just glorying in the Buffalo-based exoneration of Larry Flynt? Even Howard Stern would be an improvement in the White House.

I'm guessing that the Republicans are making a different calculus than the one we think they make. They are more like highly paid football stars than anything else. Even football stars can be articulate when interviewed for the camera. Nobody would expect them to be making any real contributions to society in return for their pay and glory, though we do hold them to higher standards than we do our president.

But however he does his signalling, Trump has let those Republicans know that he will keep the oxygen sucked out from the news media to the extent that no attention will be paid to their looting of the republic. Those Republican political stars can carry that out in the name of those ideologies that they do seem truly to believe in; though who could really tell the states of their collective hive-mind?

There might be a kind of honor to that behavior, or there could be if they did hold actual ideological beliefs. We cheer our football stars, and at least in Buffalo sometimes honor them even more in the breach when they kick the ball wide right, say. I used to think that Lindsey Graham had some integrity. Now he's shown himself to be a looter like the rest of them, and shill to the power of money. I can only guess. Too bad, so sad.

We might wish that Bernie Sanders could be as good a stooge for the media to bring in socialism under the radar. But alas, his is a different brand of integrity. Imagine in this world of Googling if what you see were really what you get!

It was notable to me how few Republicans actually questioned the witnesses. Jim Jordan was pulled in for his attack-dog style of unabashed inquisition, lacking any rapport or history with the committee. Most Republican members seemed happy to "yield" their precious minutes to a very few attack dogs; were there even more than three on day one? The Democrats all seemed happy to have their own personal moment of vilification. Rhetorically at least, the contest was pure Democratic rout. But in this age of Twitter, rhetoric clearly counts for naught.

So why was I so rapt? I mean, I really want to know. I watch plenty of movies and fall asleep during some. I try to spend my days reading and writing, but that can be exhausting. I have sleep trouble and so I often black out during the day with a book or a computer in my hands. But yesterday I was glued to the screen. What was playing out there had the clear ring of history, and it was reminiscent of what was happening in my youth. Whither the republic?

Two events from my youth were far more important to me than Vietnam or Watergate. One was the death of Lake Erie above whose cliffs and clean broad beaches I was raised. The other was the discovery when I transitioned from bicycle to motorcycle that every hamlet in upstate New York was being homogenized by franchise chains. These two were the same thing in my mind, and I've been waiting for some grand awakening to that horror ever since. Now it seems that we've passed the point of no return.

The America I still do imagine distributes wealth and knowledge by distributing ownership and responsibility back to local shop-owners, manufacturers and job creators and away from  those sitting on top of the wealth pumps of technology. Yikes, I guess that makes me be leaning Right! WTF!

So, while it won't seem so from what I'm writing here, I wasn't taking sides in the hearings. I wasn't a spectator for the competitive sport of two-party politics. That's not what kept my attention. I kept trying to glimpse what country was in the making there, and how it might differ from the one we have. Last time, we got a dystopian America of greed. No matter how nice its been living on its inside as a white male, our impact on the planet has been decidedly disastrous. We deserve to be hated, and at least Trump has given us that.

The Democrats were fighting for what seemed for all the world to be a return to Republican values: Decent celebration of capitalism and a strong military. All the Republicans have left is the value of wealth for the few. It's hard to find vision anywhere.

After day two of the pubic inquiry there is some new hope, with Trump caught on a call saying just what the Democrats claimed he was saying behind closed doors. It's easier now to imagine Giuliani joining Roger Stone in jail, right alongside those he once put there (there is rough justice in that) and one begins to see an America post-Trump. Surely his behavior can't stand.

But what America do we wish to reinvent? Will it be the one represented by the true believers in patriotism who work the foreign services? They do sometimes seem more concerned about what Trump is doing to undermine our power than they do about what we might become.

There seem to be two classes of up and coming young people; the one is masculinist focused on the ejaculatory glory of bringing some technical unicorn to the magic billion-dollar mark. These are the dangerous class, the arrogant believers in a manifest destiny for technology no matter what it does to the social fabric. The other class is feminist and personified in A.O.C., perhaps. They might look askance, as I do, at military-style honor even while such behaviors run in my very own bloodline.

No coincidence that Trump chooses the day of his greatest embarrassment to exonerate several soldiers who have dishonored the military. Never even bothering to think about it, Trump accepts the conspiracy minded bloviation of Fox News as actual reality. He likes that plot line, I guess. I like it myself, but there has been zero evidence of any Rambo-style heroics from Trump, except perhaps on his own behalf. There is no honor of any sort at all there.

The dangers we face are not those personified by Trump but those arrayed behind his taking office. We have been in the throes of the rotted brains of TV addicts since the election of Howdy Doody Reagan at least. Channeling the voice of Walter Cronkite as William Taylor did plays only to us oldsters. If we don't take hold of our technologies for the public good, there can be no hope for either a return to the greatness we once thought our Republic to promise, nor to anything remotely representing of and by and for the people.

That makes me very very sad.

But! (he says with raised finger, and not the middle one)

As that cheerleader Steven Pinker might say, all of our dangerous technology has brought about positive change in the aggregate. It seems that the proliferation of images and massive trade and intercourse across the oceans might indeed have tempered our lust to create and then vilify some other. Our collective wanting on various Black Fridays and Singles Days is at the very least a vital force which might yet be diverted to something worthwhile.

I remain optimistic that this merely decades long fever will pass and a more healthy humanity will prevail. For the moment I am grateful for Adam Schiff and Nancy Pelosi.

F*ck STEM!

Even the mainstream media writes, f*ck so I guess I can too, right? As are a lot of people, or so I imagine, I am disgusted by this bandwagon promoting STEM for women. I happen to know people inside both academia and the domain described by ST*M who are nearly as disgusted as I am, but let's dissect this a bit, shall we?

First and quite obviously is the embedded pig-in-a-poke bargain that if girls - and later women - behave more like men do, then they will be able to share the C-ring more better. Plenty of people call that bullshit what it is, especially when the tech is being pandered to the underclass. As though there is something about the orthogonal logical thinking of STEM which can reveal the true meritocratic underpinnings of humanity which don't obey the laws of power.

Just be more like men, girls, just be more like men.

Next, of course, is the assumption that tech is our future. I just re-read Fowles The Magus, not really expecting much. Indeed it didn't disappoint, not being nearly so compelling as it was in my youth, but the one thing the author says that still resonates is that his worst nightmare was mankind knowing everything. Tech builds in that assumption, as in we can problem-solve to eternity.

I live in proximity to someone who rode the tech wave to wealth and who deploys logic like a weapon, as though he had no choice because the harm was built-in to the algorithm, with which no person of sound mind might disagree. Conveniently leaving go the choices made in the concoction of the algorithm in the first place. But if one has a powerful knack for logic, there's almost nothing any interlocutor might do to rescue himself from loss of any argument. Indeed you are smarter than I am and I can't find a way to prove that false. I lose energy for sparring at the very least.

There is a power-play indelible to the inner workings of the tech industry which still manages to be invisible on the outside. Well, it's familiar enough to anyone who suffers the fascism of corporate America inside the workplace, I guess. But it's more prevalent in patriarchal tech. The boss assumes the attitude of  'prove it to me,' leaving the penalties of being wrong to every underling.

I happen to be an extremely good problem solver, proven in various workplaces, but only recently have I discovered my own assumption that my abilities have been based on something like a command of logic. Not so! But who would ever dare to say "trust me" in the face of profit-line demands given the problem-solving methods I deploy. Let m explain:

I always work within the constraints of resources - time and money mostly - and never in the realm of what-if? Without practically limitless resources, 'what-if' is practically worthless. I have no infinity of choice, of tools, of top brands, of hiring. So I let my mind wander until, as happens often enough to make it a kind of wonder, a solution will show itself from my environment. This gives me a kind of joy, making good with found objects and emergent technique. I often kick myself for not seeing the obvious when I'm caught up in some logical trap of knowing where I should be looking. I'm always dazzled by the invisibility of what's staring me in the face.

This not-logic that I deploy, or if it is logic, then  it's the self-same apologetics our ego uses when it rationalizes choice that our mind already made for us. This is all apparently proven by neurological studies, which show our decisions made before we are conscious of them.

I know, of course, that my brain covers a lot more ground than my conscious mind does, and so letting go might simply be letting my brain do a better job of sorting before I get in my own way, as it were. But that's only a different way to say that my brain is closer to the ground in which I exist than my conscious self is.

I recently re-read Donna Haraway's Cyborg Manifesto and will have to read it many times more before I can understand it, because it still does seem to me to incorporate the nightmare of tech taking over the world. Like we should be able to make ourselves whatever we want to be in celebration of the mighty (conscious) individual so as never to be caught in what chance granted us. I get the celebration of difference, but tend more in the direction of social rather than individual solutions or resolutions. More tolerance and more mutual-aid trumps techno-triumph every time for me, but I guess I'm just old fashioned that way. I'll read it and her other stuff over and over until I get it, since I do recognize excitement there. But it remains harder for me to read than to read ancient Chinese.

Part of my excitement is that the manifesto comes from a woman, and I do suspect that she would agree with me about STEM. Even our economy depends as much or more on "creatives" than on logical problem-solvers, and I say that even as I hate the term "creative" as a noun almost worse than STEM. Yeah, sure as an afterthought one might insert an A to get STEaM, sneaking in something not quite orthogonal. But to me, who doesn't draw or sing or dance so good, the term "creative" is like a bludgeon about what I'm not. Just like car mechanics used to feel to many females of the species who wanted to get into it but were barred.

So the predominantly masculine nature of the tech workforce can't be fixed because baked into the workings of tech is a mindset that needs to be undermined, not celebrated. Not everything can be fixed. Sometimes one has to let go.

Hell, I'll go so far as to claim that letting go is communing with the future. That's how evolution works, where chance is chance until it makes us, and then there's some stubborn determiNancy to the process. We can't quite seem to embrace the notion that accident got us mankind, in the same way that we can't quite embrace the notion - we scintillate between the poles - that evolution is more powerful than our apparent and anxiety-provoking conviction that we've replaced evolution with conscious trans-human change. Some might even call it improvement. Progress. It's own kind of inevitable Manifest Destiny.

But that's all variations on projected immortality. No more can we celebrate our own demise than we can that of the species, and so we enact a kind of 'bring it on' mass suicide like a kid driving a Boxter into thin air, as just happens to have just happened.

Even though I problem-solve in the highly masculine domains of tech and machinery, I do believe I follow a feminine process. That might even be the cause of some embarrassment, and so I try to hide it by post-hoc logical rationalizations for my choices, in just the way that pride for my intelligence works. I do a pretty good imitation of a man most of the time. But I do have lots of pussy envy. I think it's the emotion thing.

But see, I've committed the very masculine act of putting emotion among the basic forces of physics, and still waste my life trying to get one single other human being to see it there. I come to that conclusion by way of physics, yes, but also by way of classical Chinese poetics and philosophy and apparently by way of stuff I've been stuck with since birth. As in there's something very wrong with that boy, maybe, although just as I fake being a man pretty well, I seem to fake intelligence. Sometimes people even mistake me for someone who knows what he's talking about, thought that's generally because of my strident efforts to pass. It sucks to be thought an idiot! And so I mostly remain silent to preserve a modicum of doubt. Except here in my innermost thoughts where I can be so invisible.

Very much unlike canonical scientific discoveries, mine is truly meaningless without being shared. Well, I suppose that's true of scientific discovery too, but the proof is always logical - and demonstrable! - and the discoveries - despite our canonical presumptions about individual genius - are always grounded in a shared understanding. An esoteric discourse. That guarantees that once explicated logically, there will be others to understand the discovery and make it real. (It is still terribly difficult for me to credit Einstein's discoveries with the short course from there - while Henry Adams was still alive, fer Chrissakes - to Hiroshima and Nagasaki.) Emotion has been eradicated for seeming ever from the cosmos, or so we desperately hope and sometimes even pray.

I'm either criminally lazy or just simply don't have the chops, but I can't seem to express what I'm talking about in a way that someone else might follow. I do have an easier time finding interlocutors in China, though I suspect that has more to do with the reading-in they must do to follow what I'm trying to say. A kind of generosity offered to a foreigner; one who they still feel holds some privilege over them and perhaps something like superior Yale-baked knowledge. Yale is a kind of mecca for educated Chinese. Go figure! I hated the place for its privileging of the privileged, mocked now in the fake news, even so.

But still, I find the language congenial enough that I'm making my attempt in Chinese, which is so deuced hard that the attempt may belie my worries about how lazy I might be. At the moment I'm hung up on translating a passage from The Story of the Stone. It's too damned hard for me! But fact is that Chinese - the literary tradition - doesn't bake in all of the pitfalls of English. I'm talking about individualism, Godism, objectivity, creation and creativity, beginnings and endings, a direction to history and lots more. It's just easier to talk about in Chinese, damn it!

We are living, I declare, in a default universe where our defaults are invisible because we have no way to get beyond them. We know science won't solve all our problems but it's our default. We know - even provably so - that logic can't get to the bottom of what causes people to agree or disagree, but it remains our default. Zuckerberg sits in the same seat as Truman did and Trump does and will feel just as detached from the enormity of his destructions. They are our defaults. The default ever shall be death; of at least this much I can be certain.

So how does recognition that emotion is a cosmic force change the default? Yes indeed that is my burden to tell, and I have no demonstrable experimental result to prove anything by our default methodologies.

So f*ck it! Right? Nah, it'll come to me, I know it will. Once upon a time . . .

. . . there was this emoton. It had no mass, no valence, no spin, indeed no measurable qualities at all, nor did it move, really. It was no gauge-boson, or at least not the ordinary kind. Indeed, it existed only in the mind. The cosmic mind, if you will, which is no-wise the same thing as the personalized mind of God. Both were there in the beginning, were there any beginning but for a story, and the exchange of emotons did indeed not so much cause a force as predict an impingement. We're still in the realm of mind here and not so much of matter. But the impingement is of thingy things, the forces among which are mediated by gauge bosons, I think maybe, and which are implicated in ways mostly physical until once gets into the realm of quanta where implication may stretch to eternity, or so we hope for the sake of our privacy, ironically enough. The Chinese got there first. Of course.

Meanwhile, until impingement, there may be no forces as bodies move toward or away from one another. Just prediction. In some mind or other. The motion indeed is no motion at all but emotion. Otherwise, there would be forces between them - those bodies - by very definition.

Gravity at the least would be there, which remains so elusive. For all that they might be real, gravitons feel as elusive as those emotons I speak of. They may only be inferred and their measurement as much an artifact of its construction as the detection of any apparatus. Or so it would seem to me. But what do I know? Not much! I seem to inhabit a discourse community of one, which is precisely as impossible as the detection of said emoton.

Which all naturally means that alien life, so called, has been with us all along. We just don't feel it. It is so very far away in space and therefore, by definition now, time. But, I do declare, there is a window into our futures just as there is a window - however unreliable - into our past by way of history and telescopic insights. It must be felt and can't be known and whether asteroid to destroy us in our climate-denial idiocy, or full embrace of cosmic love (I should say with), we would have to open ourselves to it and not hang on so much to what we are or want to be. As it was in the beginning. Amen. It is our holding on to what we are or project to be that is our undoing. Duh! For sure, money is no measure of the man. Money is the efficient cause of machine mind, emotion-free and not implicated in any crime. I'd better shut up right there. Sheesh. Watching too much Bill Gates and Jamie Dimon on TV. Simpletons.