Like a lot of people, I caught the trailer to Al Gore's new film, a sequel to An Inconvenient Truth. I gotta say, and maybe this is like a lot of other folks out there - probably most of the folks who voted for Trump - I really wanted the rich fat fuck to shut up. I wanna say he's just more of the same what went wrong.
So today, you know, I went for a drive because it's sunny and I'm finished with the tinkering on my escape-buggy, ready to roll, and nothing else much to do. I drove past the rich parts of Burlington's exurbs, and oh my are they nice. The lily white state.
Good ol' NPR, which fuels Vermont's self-righteous sense that it really is the vanguard of right thinking people everywhere, brought Vince Staples to my attention, and Oh my Fucking God this guy is what we need. I don't so much give a shit about his rapping, as I do think that he's the one who should be president. Or maybe nobody should be president, but I want a team of what he's talking.
The failing is not Hilary's, or either of the political parties. There is not a one among them who has the forward looking sense to know what's going on on the planet, and so naturally all this tech and media which still shuffles money around in all the good old ways to the good old boys just basically accelerates what we already had, which is Trump as culmination, coda, triumph of a system which has run that way for its entire life long, which isn't very much. 250 odd years maybe. Not a long time.
So China's bid to take our place as global leader makes a lot of sense since by many accounts they haven't really tried much that's new across the millennia. They accelerate just as we do, but structurally they never did have the structure to put an idiot in charge. What I'm saying is that the damage Trump can do is nil, approximately, up against the good which might happen as a result of calling the question. And maybe that's even what he did set out to do.
But I'm not going to give him Al Gore's rightful allotment of malice aforethought, dazzling us with powerful rhetorical structures which cannot - they are science! - be denied. The Donald is just surfing the rhetoric of the great unwashed and uneducated masses, but they aren't really doing much worse than those of us who thought we should be in charge have been doing up to now. What, really, is the difference between white articulation acceptable to Yale and street jive if the sum total of clarity up against what we don't know is precisely equal.
Yes, this is the import of The Stack to me still at this point, although my pace for reading is a bit on the slow side of reading Chinese classics; both paces a result of depression, feeling at the end of my game, not having any more portfolio to practice. Why bother, kind of thing.
It's time for people who do get it to come forward and take charge. Angry white men don't have anything worth saying, but angry black men sure do. It sounded marginal and revolutionary until this fellow Vince Staples came along and that nigga's got a bead on what's going on in the world.
I hope he has the sense to let the sistas take charge though. They will understand more immediately how the global computational sphere - the cloud layer - can only amplify propensity for accident on a global scale. We can't meter ourselves back into rhythm with the life force. We have to get our souls into the game, and break away from the mindset engineered into us by the dazzle of technologies which overtake our entire focus and attention.
Or in other words, the conflict minerals are cultivating raw animal forces which might yet articulate something human. Once the lie that the coloreds might partake in the winnings of the bloviating class is told for what it is.
Yes, I know, we need more women in STEM, or throw them a bone, STEAM, but what if they just simply said fuck that, why would I try to play a white man in drag. You don't see that patriarchy is baked in at the level of the silly con, man?
Sunday, April 2, 2017
Saturday, April 1, 2017
April Fool
I wonder how many times I've used this caption. I generally am an April Fool, not noticing that someone is pranking me. Today it's snowing, and that's for real. But I'm getting ready to go rogue, and why not? Verizon has unlimited cellular and good coverage, and it looks as though I can do blogger now from a low-powered long battery iOS device, which is news to me. I think that there will be lots of room to overnight my RV in Trump country, and I look forward to that.
I suppose I should get some help about how to monetize myself, right? I need to syndicate my travelogue, but I never do have the patience to sort that stuff out. Still, it should be interesting. I have no sense that the Trumpsters are all wrong, and I'm doing the mental gymnasitcs to rid myself of the little hidden prejudices of an habitual cosmopolitan and coastal population centers denizen. I want to open my mind about why people feel so strongly.
Trump, frankly, is doing a beautiful job of calling nearly all the questions. His moves on climate change, making government appointments, sweeping away rules which inhibit concentrations of money toward the inchoate ideology of wealth begets wealth will have to clarify the discourse. It's not a test I've wanted, but it's a test that had to happen. And most of us in the cosmopolitan centers would also admit that the two party Frick and Frack political structure really isn't working to render community-building civic infrastructure anymore.
There are too many stark divides, and we don't know how to talk with one another. And I do have to confess to a kind of terror about gun-toters and small town law, but I can deal with it. The alternative is to lose my mind staying in place.
And I think I have a good approach. Mine is anti-AI, anti-Virtual make it real cosmology. While the coastal elites are dazzled by their own SAT genius to cleverly manipulate logic channels on silicon wafers and whatever better substrate is yet to come, these relative children have no way to know how retrograde and frankly ignorant their thinking is. It would seem that they actually do believe that we can engineer the world faster than it will engineer us right back; that they are more engineered already by their own creations than they will ever be able to tell, because they have dulled their own humanity thereby.
My cosmos has room for a-physical a-temporal instant action at a distance forces by the Name of emotion. It's a kind of God is Love formulation, but it does actually work to describe why humanity - which has yet to appear on the planet so far as I can tell - will ultimately prevail.
I mean really, if Jesus were to return we'd all be looking for the spaceship he rode in on, no matter what we profess on Sunday or to the voters we want to sweep. No sane person believes in the literal Jesus, although the man may have been the first human on the planet.
This is not such a big stretch, and it might help to move folks beyond the starkness of their fear toward opposition to the "other." I know I'm not nearly so intelligent or educated as most of those who have license to write. And that's a good start.
We'll see!
Stay tuned . . . . .
I suppose I should get some help about how to monetize myself, right? I need to syndicate my travelogue, but I never do have the patience to sort that stuff out. Still, it should be interesting. I have no sense that the Trumpsters are all wrong, and I'm doing the mental gymnasitcs to rid myself of the little hidden prejudices of an habitual cosmopolitan and coastal population centers denizen. I want to open my mind about why people feel so strongly.
Trump, frankly, is doing a beautiful job of calling nearly all the questions. His moves on climate change, making government appointments, sweeping away rules which inhibit concentrations of money toward the inchoate ideology of wealth begets wealth will have to clarify the discourse. It's not a test I've wanted, but it's a test that had to happen. And most of us in the cosmopolitan centers would also admit that the two party Frick and Frack political structure really isn't working to render community-building civic infrastructure anymore.
There are too many stark divides, and we don't know how to talk with one another. And I do have to confess to a kind of terror about gun-toters and small town law, but I can deal with it. The alternative is to lose my mind staying in place.
And I think I have a good approach. Mine is anti-AI, anti-Virtual make it real cosmology. While the coastal elites are dazzled by their own SAT genius to cleverly manipulate logic channels on silicon wafers and whatever better substrate is yet to come, these relative children have no way to know how retrograde and frankly ignorant their thinking is. It would seem that they actually do believe that we can engineer the world faster than it will engineer us right back; that they are more engineered already by their own creations than they will ever be able to tell, because they have dulled their own humanity thereby.
My cosmos has room for a-physical a-temporal instant action at a distance forces by the Name of emotion. It's a kind of God is Love formulation, but it does actually work to describe why humanity - which has yet to appear on the planet so far as I can tell - will ultimately prevail.
I mean really, if Jesus were to return we'd all be looking for the spaceship he rode in on, no matter what we profess on Sunday or to the voters we want to sweep. No sane person believes in the literal Jesus, although the man may have been the first human on the planet.
This is not such a big stretch, and it might help to move folks beyond the starkness of their fear toward opposition to the "other." I know I'm not nearly so intelligent or educated as most of those who have license to write. And that's a good start.
We'll see!
Stay tuned . . . . .
Friday, March 31, 2017
How Deep is the Snow; the Ontology of Accident
It is indeed taking me a while to master this book's rhetoric. I am mostly distracted, and tired from my galley serfdom. Email the oars, and the computer the shackles. Scant pleasure apart from drink.
I am, at this moment, in the midst of his explication of the Earth Layer of The Stack, feeling as though my mind is at its sharpest; most equal to making sense. I am reasonably both educated and experienced now, albeit on the cusp of mind's recession back into the soup. Or perhaps I should say the snow from which it did - my mind - primordially emerge once, and was named for that.
Snow is liquid crystallized, noise against signal, and still it may be formed into whitish simulacra. Though it was far deeper when I was young, the seasons have grown even stranger since that mini ice age, and we are about to experience an April fool's dump; our second as the season means to turn to spring.
I mean nothing, though I thought I did once. I have better clarity about these things now. I work to quell only the terror of people loving guns and hating librals as I fix to enter our nether regions to go exploring. It is true that I am more Chinese than American in my loyalties, but they won't have me by reason of bloodline. I don't think the DNA tests would prove otherwise, although perhaps I could claim some share of Native American gambling windfalls, and then track it backwards. Don't care.
During my formative years, surrounded by adepts in the ways of American Capitalism, also by virtue of bloodline, I was one among diminutively few who opted for Chinese, from where you might at least hold your own against the oligarchs.
It was there among the professorial riches of Yale, that I discovered a better Turing test than the one now on offer. Standing in the food line at some classical Chinese poetics meeting or other, I struck up a conversation with the older gentleman next to me. This was during the heyday of structuralist poetics; an attempt to bring the study of literature within the sphere of the enforceable rhetoric of scientific methodologies.
This older fellow - he must have had an accent, and for some reason I imagine him flying over from England, though I think I have conflated him with someone else - declared that he doesn't really care to read the poetry he studies. Although his vocabulary might have been equal to that of my own professors,' what he did was to feed the poems into a computing machine. It would have had to have been a main-frame. I think this was post punchcards, but certainly pre-PC.
It is in the nature of Chinese classical poetics that there are many rules which are quite amenable to encoding in machine language. It is also true that resonances among words, the way that they are written in Chinese, can also be sketched with far more accuracy and temporal endurance than is the case in other written forms. By no stretch of any imagination is it hard to see why all but the most adept readers might be fooled, even unto adoration, of what the computer might spit back.
It is Benjamin H. Bratton's contention that we are engineered by our creations at least as much as we have engineered them. We create, as it were, new occasions for accident, and already our structures exceed our ability to predict their computed outcomes in reality.
And so I do suppose that education has receded sufficiently into the soup of schooling that actual humans are susceptible more and more to a mistaking of machine poetics for human. Perhaps human rhetoric may even start to seem slavish to the overlords, as Chinese poetics most certainly was.
But you know, between Trump and Xi, I might still choose Xi.
I did once own the literal responsibility to decide which drivers should or might drive the school bus. It was a measure of moral accountability and reliability against my estimation of mastery against the machine. In simpler terms it was my responsibility to estimate the likelihood of going off the road because of incompetence as a driver or by virtue of some mysterious moral failing of a competent driver who would, however, lie to my face in defense of some secret horror which might get him to go all ISIS suddenly.
Although I still have nightmares of myself at the wheel of a school bus, I exited that responsibility with honor intact, and a pocket full of personally accountable receipts after the school's bankruptcy left my name on the company credit card. I do hope my psychopath driver did enjoy his personal sound system at my expense! A small price to pay, praise Allah!
Well, it's about to snow here, and I must off to work, hi ho! The sharpness of my mind to be measured against those more competent than I, by virtue simply of their belief and trust in the institutional machinery.
Post Scriptum:
My little school was for "the gifted" and used IQ testing as a way to see through the fog of race, culture and obedience. I have always puzzled the SAT, which has scant predictive value in itself for performance at school. It dawns on me as my personal sun is setting, that what the SAT does measure near perfectly is some combination of that mythical raw intelligence metaphorically hinted at by IQ testing, combined with subservience to the machinery of schooling, and its regime of testing and evaluation, plus a true desire to internalize the written rhetoric of the ruling class.
Clarity at last! The snow might have been no deeper back in the day, but I'm pretty sure it lasted longer. At least long enough to tunnel into it and build a cave for cozyness. Parents now are terrorized by its collapse, the snow cave in which we snuggle.
I am, at this moment, in the midst of his explication of the Earth Layer of The Stack, feeling as though my mind is at its sharpest; most equal to making sense. I am reasonably both educated and experienced now, albeit on the cusp of mind's recession back into the soup. Or perhaps I should say the snow from which it did - my mind - primordially emerge once, and was named for that.
Snow is liquid crystallized, noise against signal, and still it may be formed into whitish simulacra. Though it was far deeper when I was young, the seasons have grown even stranger since that mini ice age, and we are about to experience an April fool's dump; our second as the season means to turn to spring.
I mean nothing, though I thought I did once. I have better clarity about these things now. I work to quell only the terror of people loving guns and hating librals as I fix to enter our nether regions to go exploring. It is true that I am more Chinese than American in my loyalties, but they won't have me by reason of bloodline. I don't think the DNA tests would prove otherwise, although perhaps I could claim some share of Native American gambling windfalls, and then track it backwards. Don't care.
During my formative years, surrounded by adepts in the ways of American Capitalism, also by virtue of bloodline, I was one among diminutively few who opted for Chinese, from where you might at least hold your own against the oligarchs.
It was there among the professorial riches of Yale, that I discovered a better Turing test than the one now on offer. Standing in the food line at some classical Chinese poetics meeting or other, I struck up a conversation with the older gentleman next to me. This was during the heyday of structuralist poetics; an attempt to bring the study of literature within the sphere of the enforceable rhetoric of scientific methodologies.
This older fellow - he must have had an accent, and for some reason I imagine him flying over from England, though I think I have conflated him with someone else - declared that he doesn't really care to read the poetry he studies. Although his vocabulary might have been equal to that of my own professors,' what he did was to feed the poems into a computing machine. It would have had to have been a main-frame. I think this was post punchcards, but certainly pre-PC.
It is in the nature of Chinese classical poetics that there are many rules which are quite amenable to encoding in machine language. It is also true that resonances among words, the way that they are written in Chinese, can also be sketched with far more accuracy and temporal endurance than is the case in other written forms. By no stretch of any imagination is it hard to see why all but the most adept readers might be fooled, even unto adoration, of what the computer might spit back.
It is Benjamin H. Bratton's contention that we are engineered by our creations at least as much as we have engineered them. We create, as it were, new occasions for accident, and already our structures exceed our ability to predict their computed outcomes in reality.
And so I do suppose that education has receded sufficiently into the soup of schooling that actual humans are susceptible more and more to a mistaking of machine poetics for human. Perhaps human rhetoric may even start to seem slavish to the overlords, as Chinese poetics most certainly was.
But you know, between Trump and Xi, I might still choose Xi.
I did once own the literal responsibility to decide which drivers should or might drive the school bus. It was a measure of moral accountability and reliability against my estimation of mastery against the machine. In simpler terms it was my responsibility to estimate the likelihood of going off the road because of incompetence as a driver or by virtue of some mysterious moral failing of a competent driver who would, however, lie to my face in defense of some secret horror which might get him to go all ISIS suddenly.
Although I still have nightmares of myself at the wheel of a school bus, I exited that responsibility with honor intact, and a pocket full of personally accountable receipts after the school's bankruptcy left my name on the company credit card. I do hope my psychopath driver did enjoy his personal sound system at my expense! A small price to pay, praise Allah!
Well, it's about to snow here, and I must off to work, hi ho! The sharpness of my mind to be measured against those more competent than I, by virtue simply of their belief and trust in the institutional machinery.
Post Scriptum:
My little school was for "the gifted" and used IQ testing as a way to see through the fog of race, culture and obedience. I have always puzzled the SAT, which has scant predictive value in itself for performance at school. It dawns on me as my personal sun is setting, that what the SAT does measure near perfectly is some combination of that mythical raw intelligence metaphorically hinted at by IQ testing, combined with subservience to the machinery of schooling, and its regime of testing and evaluation, plus a true desire to internalize the written rhetoric of the ruling class.
Clarity at last! The snow might have been no deeper back in the day, but I'm pretty sure it lasted longer. At least long enough to tunnel into it and build a cave for cozyness. Parents now are terrorized by its collapse, the snow cave in which we snuggle.
Wednesday, March 15, 2017
Scintillations of a Difference Engine
I'm still snowed in, and therefore continuing to struggle with Benjamin Bratton, The Stack. I am at that point of despair, where the proliferation of authors he's read that I have not yet heard of may lead me down some rabbit hole of wonder at such manifest genius. So I must choose instead to wonder at what he's not.
Just prior to entering that lengthy section which promises to dissect his Stack, layer by layer, he makes mention of Kurzweil and Cerf, both now denizens of the Google earthspace, perhaps done in footnotes, perhaps referring to rather opposite types, I don't know.
I do know that Kurzweil banishes accident from his conception of ultimate cosmos. This certainly distinguishes him from Bratton, who explicitly introduces accident as one of the most important design outcomes of those Brave New Worlds we perhaps only think that we are engineering, while they engineer us instead. But neither of them write poetry (of any sort which would be recognized as such) so let's start there.
Poesis is a kind of making which Bratton certainly comes closer to than either Kurzweil or Cerf. But his is a controlling and cataloging mind, even his haircut is severe (is this fair? I doubt it), and his writing is quite solid in its overlong convolutions. (out from the snow across the parking lot walks a homeless soul, likely emerged from one of those tents down in the hollow behind my warren)
Poesis mends mind and body by means of accident in a direction toward what we with stronger minds in-formed by many words habitually dismiss as religion. So I wonder if all and any writer of the philosophic is wedded to every other by tacit or overt agreement that at least we can know that accident is meaningless of inception. Which is to say that while accident is often the most meaningful of construals in its outcomes, it is definitionally removed from intentional design, except by those cop-out thinkers who put it to the mind of God.
So I must borrow from the Godless discourse of China, in hopes that I may carve out a space where I am more competent than polymathic Bratton, where intention plays no part in meaning, and accident defines that which is beyond the reach of words and their involuted mental constructions. Which brings us to a better definition for mind than the ones on offer through books. Cosmic poesis without intention of any sort.
There is only so much to be pinned by words, or by the global computational infrastructure of The Stack. Beyond that are other spheres to which we are also linked, and conjoined by those impacts of our bodily manipulations which are only prefigured by mind's imaginings and must be tested against reality. And what if the engineered design of our global Stack is mostly poised to imprison mind in matter, and no wonder Silicon Valley, whatever else it is, is sexist and racist to its core. There is no remedy by argument.
I do confess to a kind of schadenfreude by Trump's juxtaposition against some beautiful person in running shoes, or on a fat-tire bike through snow. Some solidarity with persons sleeping out in tents, even in a blizzard. It is this connection which will define our de-engineered future, undesigned, cosmically relevant in ways that verbalized meaning can not be.
I will continue to read for the lever point, that Archimedean inflexion beyond which I still can find the human, once of direction toward and not away from God so-called and now internalized in opposition to global computational anything. Which renders uncontrollable appetites, which can be sublimated only if you are fortunate in your beauty, which cannot be resisted, nor should it be for it is metaphor not collapsable by augmented reality which can offer but a glimpse. Where beauty always is. God in the shadows, emergent.
Just prior to entering that lengthy section which promises to dissect his Stack, layer by layer, he makes mention of Kurzweil and Cerf, both now denizens of the Google earthspace, perhaps done in footnotes, perhaps referring to rather opposite types, I don't know.
I do know that Kurzweil banishes accident from his conception of ultimate cosmos. This certainly distinguishes him from Bratton, who explicitly introduces accident as one of the most important design outcomes of those Brave New Worlds we perhaps only think that we are engineering, while they engineer us instead. But neither of them write poetry (of any sort which would be recognized as such) so let's start there.
Poesis is a kind of making which Bratton certainly comes closer to than either Kurzweil or Cerf. But his is a controlling and cataloging mind, even his haircut is severe (is this fair? I doubt it), and his writing is quite solid in its overlong convolutions. (out from the snow across the parking lot walks a homeless soul, likely emerged from one of those tents down in the hollow behind my warren)
Poesis mends mind and body by means of accident in a direction toward what we with stronger minds in-formed by many words habitually dismiss as religion. So I wonder if all and any writer of the philosophic is wedded to every other by tacit or overt agreement that at least we can know that accident is meaningless of inception. Which is to say that while accident is often the most meaningful of construals in its outcomes, it is definitionally removed from intentional design, except by those cop-out thinkers who put it to the mind of God.
So I must borrow from the Godless discourse of China, in hopes that I may carve out a space where I am more competent than polymathic Bratton, where intention plays no part in meaning, and accident defines that which is beyond the reach of words and their involuted mental constructions. Which brings us to a better definition for mind than the ones on offer through books. Cosmic poesis without intention of any sort.
There is only so much to be pinned by words, or by the global computational infrastructure of The Stack. Beyond that are other spheres to which we are also linked, and conjoined by those impacts of our bodily manipulations which are only prefigured by mind's imaginings and must be tested against reality. And what if the engineered design of our global Stack is mostly poised to imprison mind in matter, and no wonder Silicon Valley, whatever else it is, is sexist and racist to its core. There is no remedy by argument.
I do confess to a kind of schadenfreude by Trump's juxtaposition against some beautiful person in running shoes, or on a fat-tire bike through snow. Some solidarity with persons sleeping out in tents, even in a blizzard. It is this connection which will define our de-engineered future, undesigned, cosmically relevant in ways that verbalized meaning can not be.
I will continue to read for the lever point, that Archimedean inflexion beyond which I still can find the human, once of direction toward and not away from God so-called and now internalized in opposition to global computational anything. Which renders uncontrollable appetites, which can be sublimated only if you are fortunate in your beauty, which cannot be resisted, nor should it be for it is metaphor not collapsable by augmented reality which can offer but a glimpse. Where beauty always is. God in the shadows, emergent.
Tuesday, March 14, 2017
Unexpected Snow Delivery
Colleges used to take a wait and see attitude, but mine today decided to trust the global information networks, and call a closure for Storm Stella, named for a cat I used to know. I had to take a break over this past weekend from reading The Stack, since I'd promised to deliver (as in construct in situ) this bookshelf to my daughter:
During the course of imagining and then trying to find various "parts," I realized that it was as difficult and sometimes tiresome to do this in English as it is in Chinese. Internet search is quite broken, and search inside Amazon's infrastructure for purchasing is even worse. I've written ad nauseum about why this is so, but here in brief I'll just say that it's because we're still stuck in keyterms. Vocabulary. Words, in the end.
Back in the good old days, one would intersect with some specialized discourse group or club or discipline, take your pick, and you could quickly learn the vocabulary for whatever it is you're trying to do, starting with thingamabob, say. Roofing, say. And then you can easily go about rounding up parts. But these days, without that personal interaction, it can be very confusing to determine if the thing you might be imagining even exists, and if it does, how to call it, especially if you're imagining that some roofer doohickie could be useful for the thingamajig you want to make.
In the case of Googling, the reasons are pretty easy to find; their main mandate is to preserve monopoly power on search, which means that they have monopoly power on being able to replicate in-house the near entirety of the near entire Internets in nearly real-time. There aren't enough resources to be able to do this more than once on the planet, except for possibly inside the NSA as the alter ego, but in any case search on near-frame proprietary storage has got be be quicker and easier than to do it on the clunky net.
For income, Google is addicted to keyterm auction, and again the scale for income dwarfs any alternative, even though I'm sure they are working like mad to stay ahead of the wave, just in case someone like me trumps them when they aren't even paying attention. I might do this by using Chinese written characters to seed the locii for search, along with modest AI to catch the intersection among words in any language, but again, I've described this ad-nauseum, and for now it's not really my point. Except that The Stack brings it up again.
I've already mentioned the one-way osmotic membrane alphabetic to sinitic written language, which makes for a global bifurcation in The Stack, which Bratton still seems to attribute to political forces. I say seems, because I've still only penetrated this tome to some shallow extent. I am waiting to see if he even has a place for what I'd like to call the human in any language. But I do know that bipolar defines whatever the fuck is going on right now, in the very local of ones own headspace, in the polity, on the planet, in the shouting matches, and I do want very much to find some common ground for more diversity. Diversity good. Monoculture bad.
Anyhow, for my book shelves, I guessed right about what might be called finger pulls, and already had the obscure "swage" in my vocabulary, but just as you're about to give up on the very existence of adjustable aircraft cable grippers, you go in by way of architectural lighting, say, or museum display and bingo that thing you thought might not exist is all over the place. I still can't remember the vocabulary, though, since for me it was pretty much single-use, and I've already established that the price-point is beyond me, since I'm not curator of museum-grade art or lighting, though I know people who are . . .
The curiosity is why it doesn't seem worthwhile for Amazon to make these searches easier. I suppose it's the old Pareto principle, and most people look for things they already know how to call. But creative types like me might like to review some thingamajig domain as though coming at it from many different dimensions at the same time. Or maybe nobody does create beyond their discipline?
Well, Benjamin Bratton sure does seem to cross a bunch of discipline-specific boundaries, and only a very few of these seem to intersect the domain of visual art, which is the academic discipline in which he seems gainfully employed. How strange and fascinating is that!?
The snow out my window is still rather fine-grained, and hardly threatening, although I sure am glad that I don't have to drive today. I expect new winds to start blowing it horizontal, and then I'll be prostate myself without anything gainful in which to be employed this day of enclosure. Bored and fatigued. My skis already in storage a drive away. Sigh.
Well, so what I would like to know is whither now? Bratton seems to have anticipated to excruciating detail what's up with Trump and Walls and what can make the world all a Twitter, since our focus is so infinitely manageable by systems not ourselves for someone else's gain and profit, but I'm waiting to know what I can do about this from my inside.
Basically, we've got guys behind bars calling all the shots, and the guys behind bars are getting shot from behind by people who are uniformly not behind bars, and so the game seems to be how do we flip this without pissing off all the people who voted for Trump who are so pissed off that they just want to wreck the whole system, even if it does mean that in some brain-dead standoff between the Donald and the Un, the whole shebang and shooting match comes down in one stupid maneuver. I mean those two guys are batshit crazy, judging from what comes over their names, and might just prosecute what seems a good idea at the time on the basis of some strange hormonal soup, surrounded by terrorized yes-men who were promised some piece of some action.
As I've already suggested, the answer is understanding, because at least in that way we might stand some chance to not do something colossally stupid ourselves in pursuit of our definitionally misguided self-interests. Misguided if for no other reason than that the uber information aggregation bureaux know way more about our interests than we do ourselves, and know how we might vote on any given issue to some absurd degree of accuracy based on just a few data points, in the aggregate of "we" the people, even when we might surprise them individually. I mean, how can they know if I don't even know, though I do worship coupons and sell my attention for pennies on my dollar against a price which has a snowball's chance in hell to be determined.
None of this matters, of course. It's got to be someone's fault that it's snowing in March, near the equinox, near the start of Spring, and I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it any more. It makes me so tired even to think about saying such a thing out loud.
So the other day for no good reason I decided to transfer my flatscreen wall-mount to my new portable packet real-estate, and didn't like the dimples in my tiny house's outer skin, even with the big washers. So I thought aluminum and then I thought maybe Walmart or some such place, remembering how easy it was to escape marine-grade pricing when I was living on my floating real-estate before the days of packet switched reality, and I was able to repurpose cookie sheets and cheap stainless bowls to shield my little coal stove, but now one day magically the square piece of aluminum turned round in my head, and then one lunch time I was strolling "downtown" in my little college-town with the pedestrian mall, and by some internal magnetism remembered the Home Port store, and there hiding in the bottom of some kind of torte shell was the very piece of aluminum I had in my mind's imagination. Bingo. Bam. It was even anodized and of course cut precisely in ways that I could never imagine doing and so now but for the grace of snow, I would be glueing it under the big washers and dimples gone and tra la la!
So what's the point in all that? The point, if there really is one, is to let the mind go and it might just provide you access to a feedback loop from your own future, which you might also apparently do by placebos in the medical arena or prayer in the religious. And even if you prefer to explain it away by some obscurely stored memory in your brain which stores way more than you can catalog and index for easy retrieval, it's still a neat trick when you can pull it off. Opposite to Internet searching. And very opposite to how we direct our anger and analysis against the idiot winds, because, and now I'm mindful of Bratton again, we're still stuck in where we were and not looking ahead to where we're going, which is a very very bad way to drive this wreck.
Looking ahead, one might see through to something better, pivoting on that proverbial dime, against that proverbial dollar, hi ho! Which is to say that the only way to unseat the powers that be is to let one's mind go and ignore them while repurposing what they're overcharging for in one domain to some other domain where it's really cheap, and then share it faster than they can stop you. Fat Daddio's is my design firm brand, purloined from some manufacturer of cookware. Go figure! If you just want to get rich to appease your insecurity, then you're on the wrong side of the structural barriers, boss. Make good with your gods before it's too late.
 |
| Happy to Send Trivial Plans Upon Request! |
Back in the good old days, one would intersect with some specialized discourse group or club or discipline, take your pick, and you could quickly learn the vocabulary for whatever it is you're trying to do, starting with thingamabob, say. Roofing, say. And then you can easily go about rounding up parts. But these days, without that personal interaction, it can be very confusing to determine if the thing you might be imagining even exists, and if it does, how to call it, especially if you're imagining that some roofer doohickie could be useful for the thingamajig you want to make.
In the case of Googling, the reasons are pretty easy to find; their main mandate is to preserve monopoly power on search, which means that they have monopoly power on being able to replicate in-house the near entirety of the near entire Internets in nearly real-time. There aren't enough resources to be able to do this more than once on the planet, except for possibly inside the NSA as the alter ego, but in any case search on near-frame proprietary storage has got be be quicker and easier than to do it on the clunky net.
For income, Google is addicted to keyterm auction, and again the scale for income dwarfs any alternative, even though I'm sure they are working like mad to stay ahead of the wave, just in case someone like me trumps them when they aren't even paying attention. I might do this by using Chinese written characters to seed the locii for search, along with modest AI to catch the intersection among words in any language, but again, I've described this ad-nauseum, and for now it's not really my point. Except that The Stack brings it up again.
I've already mentioned the one-way osmotic membrane alphabetic to sinitic written language, which makes for a global bifurcation in The Stack, which Bratton still seems to attribute to political forces. I say seems, because I've still only penetrated this tome to some shallow extent. I am waiting to see if he even has a place for what I'd like to call the human in any language. But I do know that bipolar defines whatever the fuck is going on right now, in the very local of ones own headspace, in the polity, on the planet, in the shouting matches, and I do want very much to find some common ground for more diversity. Diversity good. Monoculture bad.
Anyhow, for my book shelves, I guessed right about what might be called finger pulls, and already had the obscure "swage" in my vocabulary, but just as you're about to give up on the very existence of adjustable aircraft cable grippers, you go in by way of architectural lighting, say, or museum display and bingo that thing you thought might not exist is all over the place. I still can't remember the vocabulary, though, since for me it was pretty much single-use, and I've already established that the price-point is beyond me, since I'm not curator of museum-grade art or lighting, though I know people who are . . .
The curiosity is why it doesn't seem worthwhile for Amazon to make these searches easier. I suppose it's the old Pareto principle, and most people look for things they already know how to call. But creative types like me might like to review some thingamajig domain as though coming at it from many different dimensions at the same time. Or maybe nobody does create beyond their discipline?
Well, Benjamin Bratton sure does seem to cross a bunch of discipline-specific boundaries, and only a very few of these seem to intersect the domain of visual art, which is the academic discipline in which he seems gainfully employed. How strange and fascinating is that!?
The snow out my window is still rather fine-grained, and hardly threatening, although I sure am glad that I don't have to drive today. I expect new winds to start blowing it horizontal, and then I'll be prostate myself without anything gainful in which to be employed this day of enclosure. Bored and fatigued. My skis already in storage a drive away. Sigh.
Well, so what I would like to know is whither now? Bratton seems to have anticipated to excruciating detail what's up with Trump and Walls and what can make the world all a Twitter, since our focus is so infinitely manageable by systems not ourselves for someone else's gain and profit, but I'm waiting to know what I can do about this from my inside.
Basically, we've got guys behind bars calling all the shots, and the guys behind bars are getting shot from behind by people who are uniformly not behind bars, and so the game seems to be how do we flip this without pissing off all the people who voted for Trump who are so pissed off that they just want to wreck the whole system, even if it does mean that in some brain-dead standoff between the Donald and the Un, the whole shebang and shooting match comes down in one stupid maneuver. I mean those two guys are batshit crazy, judging from what comes over their names, and might just prosecute what seems a good idea at the time on the basis of some strange hormonal soup, surrounded by terrorized yes-men who were promised some piece of some action.
As I've already suggested, the answer is understanding, because at least in that way we might stand some chance to not do something colossally stupid ourselves in pursuit of our definitionally misguided self-interests. Misguided if for no other reason than that the uber information aggregation bureaux know way more about our interests than we do ourselves, and know how we might vote on any given issue to some absurd degree of accuracy based on just a few data points, in the aggregate of "we" the people, even when we might surprise them individually. I mean, how can they know if I don't even know, though I do worship coupons and sell my attention for pennies on my dollar against a price which has a snowball's chance in hell to be determined.
None of this matters, of course. It's got to be someone's fault that it's snowing in March, near the equinox, near the start of Spring, and I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it any more. It makes me so tired even to think about saying such a thing out loud.
So the other day for no good reason I decided to transfer my flatscreen wall-mount to my new portable packet real-estate, and didn't like the dimples in my tiny house's outer skin, even with the big washers. So I thought aluminum and then I thought maybe Walmart or some such place, remembering how easy it was to escape marine-grade pricing when I was living on my floating real-estate before the days of packet switched reality, and I was able to repurpose cookie sheets and cheap stainless bowls to shield my little coal stove, but now one day magically the square piece of aluminum turned round in my head, and then one lunch time I was strolling "downtown" in my little college-town with the pedestrian mall, and by some internal magnetism remembered the Home Port store, and there hiding in the bottom of some kind of torte shell was the very piece of aluminum I had in my mind's imagination. Bingo. Bam. It was even anodized and of course cut precisely in ways that I could never imagine doing and so now but for the grace of snow, I would be glueing it under the big washers and dimples gone and tra la la!
So what's the point in all that? The point, if there really is one, is to let the mind go and it might just provide you access to a feedback loop from your own future, which you might also apparently do by placebos in the medical arena or prayer in the religious. And even if you prefer to explain it away by some obscurely stored memory in your brain which stores way more than you can catalog and index for easy retrieval, it's still a neat trick when you can pull it off. Opposite to Internet searching. And very opposite to how we direct our anger and analysis against the idiot winds, because, and now I'm mindful of Bratton again, we're still stuck in where we were and not looking ahead to where we're going, which is a very very bad way to drive this wreck.
Looking ahead, one might see through to something better, pivoting on that proverbial dime, against that proverbial dollar, hi ho! Which is to say that the only way to unseat the powers that be is to let one's mind go and ignore them while repurposing what they're overcharging for in one domain to some other domain where it's really cheap, and then share it faster than they can stop you. Fat Daddio's is my design firm brand, purloined from some manufacturer of cookware. Go figure! If you just want to get rich to appease your insecurity, then you're on the wrong side of the structural barriers, boss. Make good with your gods before it's too late.
Thursday, March 9, 2017
Privateers of Property
Now that the idiots are in charge, what are the rest of us to do? This term defines not just Trump, but necessarily Zuckerberg, Jobs (R.I.P.), Gates, Musk, Ellison, as well as all the lesser luminaries who have the good sense to defy a cult of personality by putting first or forth some trait of identity politics, their sexual orientation, international background, low-keyed competency, to defend their empire precisely against the personal.
Idiots are those locked so far within esoteric discourse that they no longer have the ability to know the world outside of it. There can be no communication with them. Their interiority matches their exteriority because they can naturally and without effort see themselves reflected in nearly every aspect of the world which they not only inhabit, but effectively define. There is only a distinction without any difference between what we literally mean by idiot (beyond the pale of human?) and what I seem to mean here figuratively.
I think maybe what we can do is to stop paying them any mind. We did think, in our Hollywood-channeled patriotic enthusiasm, that we were electing someone from outside the beltway, but now suspect instead that we have simply replaced one dynasty which understands that oil will define the world for just a moment longer - at least until the poles shift or slip and the sea level rises to create a greater emergent force than our cloud machinery - with one which by its insubservience to the puppeteers becomes a proto Dictator even beyond those who could be regulated by moneyed handlers; along the lines of the Un of false bipolar opposition.
This new quasi-nuclear hypersexualized and therefore binary family power understands that Russia's oil is much better moderated than that occupied by the fanaticized and therefore dangerously insubservient populations of the Middle East. What, we thought our geopolitical occupation of their desert would create some sea of pacifists??? Affinity with Israel is just propensity to suppose that walls can define in from out anymore. And far from a Faustian bargain on the part of our Rightward Beltway Denizens, these citizens of the polity of the discourse of Washington understand perfectly that their very sanctioned existence has been fundamentally undermined. Their rhetoric could make no sense otherwise, barbarians within the gates.
Yes, well, the only way that I know if I was sensible enough to shut my machine down last time I used it is to check the state of the battery. This time, it would seem that I was in some hurry and Macintoshed my Windows by just shutting its lid. Zero battery, since the instrumentation for sleep is as broken in my machine as it is in my body, and I must kick myself. We will see if politics as usual comes back to life. I suspect not, but cannot be certain until the lid is lifted.
This Benjamin Bratton is a very dangerous fellow, but fortunately for those of us outside the rings of power, no-one inside any of them will be able to read him. No expert in any field will be able to follow what he is writing about since, as with physicists who scrambled to get on top of the Einsteinian Paradigm Shift to leverage their insider knowledge, not to do so would be to become as scientifically irrelevant as the religious fanatics who now define our geopolitics. Irony, you are a cruel God. You convolute me.
What I mean to say is that the discourses toward understanding our world have become so esoteric that one would have to leave one's identity entirely behind now, and jump into the sea with the rest of us the way that some wall streeters or Silly Con artists sometimes do when they grow a conscience. To his credit, I think Bratton understands this, although to pay his bills he is obligated to carry forward his simulation of genius in masculine form. I mean, who but me would shun an academic appointment, right? The sacrifices seem so inconsequential. To your heart.
From my minuscule academic platform, I sent an invitation to the Stacker to speak, about which common courtesy among academics would demand at least an acknowledgement. But I did Trump him by inventing my own term - binary Logocene - which would brand me as that same sort of nutjob who writes physics professors to compel them toward some new Grand Universal Theorem of Life, the Universe and Everything. Yes, I am that person. *sigh*
Well, you won't have me to kick around anymore, academia. I have officially aged out from any more Paper Chasing, (skirt chasing long since abandoned). But here in the cozy cloud of false virtue-ality, I can have a voice if I want it, right?
Not so fast, Bozo, not so fast. OK, so where was I? Yes, the only thing which really makes any sense is that Trump smells oil which means money and of course there will be blood. His logic of the Wall and the Meaningless Military Tax is clear enough. It is identical to the formation of anger among we in the opposition, which describes an emotional bridge between the old world and the one that we see looming, and we only see the actual imprisonment of our very minds, since we have long since understood that when labor is free, thought isn't any longer. Thought too must be strategically deployed, and anger falls into the trap of the sucker punch which has been dealt from Washington since at least the time of Nixon, and likely earlier.
Why do you think it was so important to get oil flowing through Native American Territory, like next week!?! We are all suckers to the incredibly falling prices that keep us cozy and smug and white. Let them eat and sleep under cardboard, since the package costs more than its manufactured [sic] contents anyhow. Why is it so important to cozy up to Putin? Duh! If he doesn't have a Shell-game deal for a piece of the action, Trump is a bigger idiot than even we in the loyal opposition peg him for, literal or figurative makes no nevermind.
I mean it just may be that the most important thing to do is to understand, become the ground, and then shake it in a subtle enough way that the powers that be lose their balance and topple. The secret energy is, naturally enough, love. Anger will not get us there.
OK PollyAnna, What? Is Snowden friend or foe? Don't drones save more innocent lives than they destroy? Could Obama really even show his darker side? And why dear God of Irony, die Snowden have to end up in Russia to channel holdover cold war intelligence straight to Polity Rapist Hillary Hating Wiki no boundaries Media???? Pedia? Phile? Leaks!
My cloud is pierced and I am leaking out all over but let us not be so foolish as to pay attention to idiots, no matter how much they feel like Genius Incarnate. Virtually Jesus, as we do worship now in the workplace against our fellow man for the sake of the price of a chainsawed captive Rhino's horn, which is apparently worth more than you or me in our entire lifetimes, and so who wouldn't do it if they had the chance? It just seems clever, like going viral by accident does, or winning the lottery on purpose or perhaps you might know what I mean. What wouldn't you do, Donald, for money or a good hard-on? Is that the lead we wish to follow?
I think it might be worth saying over and again that the only God by whom to True our Heart is the God of Love and not the One to Live in Fear of. Don't be dangled by patriarchy against your brother, Sister, it is your turn at the Helm.
OK, gotta go to Work, Hi Ho!!!
Idiots are those locked so far within esoteric discourse that they no longer have the ability to know the world outside of it. There can be no communication with them. Their interiority matches their exteriority because they can naturally and without effort see themselves reflected in nearly every aspect of the world which they not only inhabit, but effectively define. There is only a distinction without any difference between what we literally mean by idiot (beyond the pale of human?) and what I seem to mean here figuratively.
I think maybe what we can do is to stop paying them any mind. We did think, in our Hollywood-channeled patriotic enthusiasm, that we were electing someone from outside the beltway, but now suspect instead that we have simply replaced one dynasty which understands that oil will define the world for just a moment longer - at least until the poles shift or slip and the sea level rises to create a greater emergent force than our cloud machinery - with one which by its insubservience to the puppeteers becomes a proto Dictator even beyond those who could be regulated by moneyed handlers; along the lines of the Un of false bipolar opposition.
This new quasi-nuclear hypersexualized and therefore binary family power understands that Russia's oil is much better moderated than that occupied by the fanaticized and therefore dangerously insubservient populations of the Middle East. What, we thought our geopolitical occupation of their desert would create some sea of pacifists??? Affinity with Israel is just propensity to suppose that walls can define in from out anymore. And far from a Faustian bargain on the part of our Rightward Beltway Denizens, these citizens of the polity of the discourse of Washington understand perfectly that their very sanctioned existence has been fundamentally undermined. Their rhetoric could make no sense otherwise, barbarians within the gates.
Yes, well, the only way that I know if I was sensible enough to shut my machine down last time I used it is to check the state of the battery. This time, it would seem that I was in some hurry and Macintoshed my Windows by just shutting its lid. Zero battery, since the instrumentation for sleep is as broken in my machine as it is in my body, and I must kick myself. We will see if politics as usual comes back to life. I suspect not, but cannot be certain until the lid is lifted.
This Benjamin Bratton is a very dangerous fellow, but fortunately for those of us outside the rings of power, no-one inside any of them will be able to read him. No expert in any field will be able to follow what he is writing about since, as with physicists who scrambled to get on top of the Einsteinian Paradigm Shift to leverage their insider knowledge, not to do so would be to become as scientifically irrelevant as the religious fanatics who now define our geopolitics. Irony, you are a cruel God. You convolute me.
What I mean to say is that the discourses toward understanding our world have become so esoteric that one would have to leave one's identity entirely behind now, and jump into the sea with the rest of us the way that some wall streeters or Silly Con artists sometimes do when they grow a conscience. To his credit, I think Bratton understands this, although to pay his bills he is obligated to carry forward his simulation of genius in masculine form. I mean, who but me would shun an academic appointment, right? The sacrifices seem so inconsequential. To your heart.
From my minuscule academic platform, I sent an invitation to the Stacker to speak, about which common courtesy among academics would demand at least an acknowledgement. But I did Trump him by inventing my own term - binary Logocene - which would brand me as that same sort of nutjob who writes physics professors to compel them toward some new Grand Universal Theorem of Life, the Universe and Everything. Yes, I am that person. *sigh*
Well, you won't have me to kick around anymore, academia. I have officially aged out from any more Paper Chasing, (skirt chasing long since abandoned). But here in the cozy cloud of false virtue-ality, I can have a voice if I want it, right?
Not so fast, Bozo, not so fast. OK, so where was I? Yes, the only thing which really makes any sense is that Trump smells oil which means money and of course there will be blood. His logic of the Wall and the Meaningless Military Tax is clear enough. It is identical to the formation of anger among we in the opposition, which describes an emotional bridge between the old world and the one that we see looming, and we only see the actual imprisonment of our very minds, since we have long since understood that when labor is free, thought isn't any longer. Thought too must be strategically deployed, and anger falls into the trap of the sucker punch which has been dealt from Washington since at least the time of Nixon, and likely earlier.
Why do you think it was so important to get oil flowing through Native American Territory, like next week!?! We are all suckers to the incredibly falling prices that keep us cozy and smug and white. Let them eat and sleep under cardboard, since the package costs more than its manufactured [sic] contents anyhow. Why is it so important to cozy up to Putin? Duh! If he doesn't have a Shell-game deal for a piece of the action, Trump is a bigger idiot than even we in the loyal opposition peg him for, literal or figurative makes no nevermind.
I mean it just may be that the most important thing to do is to understand, become the ground, and then shake it in a subtle enough way that the powers that be lose their balance and topple. The secret energy is, naturally enough, love. Anger will not get us there.
OK PollyAnna, What? Is Snowden friend or foe? Don't drones save more innocent lives than they destroy? Could Obama really even show his darker side? And why dear God of Irony, die Snowden have to end up in Russia to channel holdover cold war intelligence straight to Polity Rapist Hillary Hating Wiki no boundaries Media???? Pedia? Phile? Leaks!
My cloud is pierced and I am leaking out all over but let us not be so foolish as to pay attention to idiots, no matter how much they feel like Genius Incarnate. Virtually Jesus, as we do worship now in the workplace against our fellow man for the sake of the price of a chainsawed captive Rhino's horn, which is apparently worth more than you or me in our entire lifetimes, and so who wouldn't do it if they had the chance? It just seems clever, like going viral by accident does, or winning the lottery on purpose or perhaps you might know what I mean. What wouldn't you do, Donald, for money or a good hard-on? Is that the lead we wish to follow?
I think it might be worth saying over and again that the only God by whom to True our Heart is the God of Love and not the One to Live in Fear of. Don't be dangled by patriarchy against your brother, Sister, it is your turn at the Helm.
OK, gotta go to Work, Hi Ho!!!
Sunday, March 5, 2017
State of Sleep
Not long ago, while in China, I was negotiating the Great Firewall and remarking to myself how much more annoying are the brand and patent boundaries of the Great Companies which mediate my world. Apple wants you to stay inside its infrastructure, and Google stops roughly at the geographic boundary, and Verizon wants to profiteer on boundary crossings.
All of this makes me approximately as angry as being faced with the need for immediate gratification in the purchase of some trivial part, which I know full well is being marked up some thousands of percent just because they can, and because of the ever descending cost to manufacture trivia.
I am having trouble with my sleep states. I never wake refreshed, though when I count the literal hours, perhaps they are sufficient. But I can't get the starts and stops right. Maybe it's something going on in my background.
There is the identical problem with the machines which control my life. Even Apple's products sometimes have trouble coming back to an awakened state if I move among screens too much. With Windows, it just seems foolish still not to shut it down and let it fully (actually not quite anymore) restart. It's quicker than the transition between sleep and wakefullness.
Machine state is punned against political state in this interesting book that I'm now reading. State as machine, user as product of computational manipulations, geography made to seem invisible. The future is not here because we have not yet been redesigned to match it.
Out of this falls a near perfect definition of Trumpism, the true Resistance. And it is the we who feels we must resist or die. Hail Irony my God.
Resistance is, of course, futile or worse. But Benjamin H. Bratton (he must be distinguished somehow!) loses clarity most when he plays with distinctions between design and accident. How, for instance, is design distinguished from accident when it is accidental design? Must he dance so lightly around the various essentials for being human?
He does dance along the blur of boundaries dissolved, but fails to notice that there is still an only partially permeable and osmotically one-way clear boundary East from West. It is simply easier to master alphabet, which China does now swimmingly, even while her native technology for writing seems largely to have weathered the digital divide.
This fact might be so poorly understood still that it remains glossed over from either side. There are those who did predict that the ingeniousness of alphabet, related to scientific and technological as it seems to be, gave it a kind of manifest destiny to in-form the global mind. Not so!
Or, not so fast!
What is there then on the other side, regarding accident? I do believe that Bratton still uses accident against design; the one meaningful, the other signifying nothing. That was never the case in the Godless realm of the East.
Irony decrees that while we populate the void with Godness, it was the Chinese who put meaning there. Mind then, I still do declare, inheres in the lived awareness of oscillation between the two so minute that it surpasses internal awareness, just as do fleeting images which are kept alive to us only in motion. There is no seeing without the mind and eyes both flit.
It is not the discernment or imposition of design that counts. It is not even the choices allowed by User Experience Design. Rather, it is one's emotional integration, one's tellingness of living against a universal sense which will always just elude us.
This is not so much a problem for strong-minded men to resolve, and there's the rub.
All of this makes me approximately as angry as being faced with the need for immediate gratification in the purchase of some trivial part, which I know full well is being marked up some thousands of percent just because they can, and because of the ever descending cost to manufacture trivia.
I am having trouble with my sleep states. I never wake refreshed, though when I count the literal hours, perhaps they are sufficient. But I can't get the starts and stops right. Maybe it's something going on in my background.
There is the identical problem with the machines which control my life. Even Apple's products sometimes have trouble coming back to an awakened state if I move among screens too much. With Windows, it just seems foolish still not to shut it down and let it fully (actually not quite anymore) restart. It's quicker than the transition between sleep and wakefullness.
Machine state is punned against political state in this interesting book that I'm now reading. State as machine, user as product of computational manipulations, geography made to seem invisible. The future is not here because we have not yet been redesigned to match it.
Out of this falls a near perfect definition of Trumpism, the true Resistance. And it is the we who feels we must resist or die. Hail Irony my God.
Resistance is, of course, futile or worse. But Benjamin H. Bratton (he must be distinguished somehow!) loses clarity most when he plays with distinctions between design and accident. How, for instance, is design distinguished from accident when it is accidental design? Must he dance so lightly around the various essentials for being human?
He does dance along the blur of boundaries dissolved, but fails to notice that there is still an only partially permeable and osmotically one-way clear boundary East from West. It is simply easier to master alphabet, which China does now swimmingly, even while her native technology for writing seems largely to have weathered the digital divide.
This fact might be so poorly understood still that it remains glossed over from either side. There are those who did predict that the ingeniousness of alphabet, related to scientific and technological as it seems to be, gave it a kind of manifest destiny to in-form the global mind. Not so!
Or, not so fast!
What is there then on the other side, regarding accident? I do believe that Bratton still uses accident against design; the one meaningful, the other signifying nothing. That was never the case in the Godless realm of the East.
Irony decrees that while we populate the void with Godness, it was the Chinese who put meaning there. Mind then, I still do declare, inheres in the lived awareness of oscillation between the two so minute that it surpasses internal awareness, just as do fleeting images which are kept alive to us only in motion. There is no seeing without the mind and eyes both flit.
It is not the discernment or imposition of design that counts. It is not even the choices allowed by User Experience Design. Rather, it is one's emotional integration, one's tellingness of living against a universal sense which will always just elude us.
This is not so much a problem for strong-minded men to resolve, and there's the rub.
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