I fear the lateral web

Not too long ago, I re-organized the way that my feeds are linked, to try and make it easier to follow only the parts of my Internet life that one might choose to follow.

This is breaking apart.

Maybe it is because I've had too much coffee today and am unable to focus, but I am getting a healthy dose of THE FEAR from the expanse that is the Internet.

I know that no one cares how I organize my feeds, not really, anyway. They'll follow this particular feed, or not, depending on whatever.

But I have this sense of the Internet really going on forever, and not stopping. Like I'm trying to corral liquid mercury.

I've been experimenting with the Chrome browser extensions, and some of them are pretty cool. I've got my Calendar extension, and my Gmail extension, so my incoming messages and events are popping up with little iPhone-like badges. If I really wanted to get crazy, I could get a Google Voice account and the extension would let me call and send SMS right from my browser. All of this is pretty cool, previews of coming events for a Chrome OS, and a "app-less" computer browser set-up.

Then there are the other javascript goodies, like "email this page", "tweet this page", "search for maps based on addresses on this page" "wikipedia this", etc. All good, fairly functional stuff.

But then there is Sidewiki.

If you've never explored Sidewiki, it is a Google-powered Wiki for EVERY WEB SITE ON THE INTERNET. You open it up along side another page, and you can add editorial marginalia to any web site.

It is designed to be tour-guide notes, perhaps helpful comments. Most sites still have no Sidewiki entry, and those that exist are pretty sparse or obvious.

But I think you can see where this is going.

A lateral internet, comprised of "hidden" marginal notes. Fire up the Borges-Bot--it's time to compose some more conspiracy-inducing strands of the lateral web. Imagine a sprawling web site full of blank pages. With no text they remain largely un-indexed, and take nearly zero hosting space on their own. What function they do have, is to serve as anchors for long Sidewiki explorations. Un-themed, "private invite" chats take place. Links are shared. "Un-searchable" conversations take place, which are of course archived by Google, and used for unknown purposes. Romances and revolutions live and die without ever leaving the Sidewiki.

I had the same feeling about Buzz, to tell you the truth. I don't really use Buzz, but at the same time, I DO. You see, I use Google Reader's "Share" function, serving up shared items from my RSS feeds, and presenting them on a single page, with the ability to comment. But then, in commenting on other's shared items, and reading the comments, I noticed that some are coming from Buzz. You see, with Buzz, you can link in your Reader shared page, so any Shared item is automatically converted into a Buzz. One item is copied to another, making equivalent Internet posts in two different sourced feeds.

You can do the same thing with Twitter: my Twitter feed is copied to my Buzz feed. So, if the rare circumstance occurs where someone is only following me on Buzz and not on Twitter, they can still see all my 140 character wisdom.

But, on Buzz they can comment. So, there might, potentially, be a long conversation based around one of my tweets that no one following my Twitter feed would know about, unless they were also on Buzz. So this is not a simple copy of an item, but a generative spawning of the original item... or at least potentially, in that Buzz has the ability to comment.

Still with me?

All of this creates huge Boolean logic problems, if, like me, you are obsessed with having "one feed to rule them all". How do you funnel all the input formats upward, maintaining each in an OR connection, not missing anything, and not duplicating anything? Especially when each service has a different "favorite", "like", "comment", or "promote" feature? And where is all this data, anyway? Who controls my "liking" of something? We are meant to think it is tied to the original item. But it doesn't.

But where does "comment" exist, exactly, in the nebulous world of Internet services? It's not meta-data, at least not "meta" in relation to the "data" of the Internet. It's side-data, tuned by separate services, and presented along side the overall data of the Internet. Content itself, semiotic aporia that it is, is becoming de-contented by the exo-content. Where is the meta-content? HTML is becoming the meta-content, because rather than the strictly meaningful content, it is the only content universally accessible, by which exo-content is accessed and distributed.

The signified was considered to be the anchor of the signifier, as the real that informed the ideal. But now the signifier informs our understanding of the signified, because we can only interpret the real by deploying our ideal categories. But then next, in this imaginary timeline of logic, the signified exerts control again, by being the signifier for the signifier's signified categories; because only drawn in the material of the signified, can the signifier be extensible or sensible.

Example: we know what dust is (signified). We have an ideal picture of a dry, dirty cloud of particulate, settling on all surfaces (signifier). Because we have an ideal picture of dust (signifier), we are able to say, this is not dust (signified), it is sand. But then, when we reach forward to spell out the difference, we must feel the dust on the ground between our fingers, and compare it to sand, and if we did not have these (signified) we would have no concept of what we meant (signifier). The signified is the substance of signifier, and the signifier is the form of the signified. Then they "act as" the other. The signifier is the substance of the signified, and the signified is the form of the signifier. Not only is the duality between the two important, the position in the metaphysical grammar is important. Because they are different, and yet they flip flop. It's as if your right hand was only not your left because it could sometimes be your left, and by this, it was not always the left. You can only have a left and a right hand if you have both a left and a right hand. Otherwise, it's just a hand.

I know. But aren't you glad we are binary beings? Imagine if we had a third hand? (ps you do: your genitals. A subject for another post.)

Back to the internet: we used to have meta-data: data that told us how to organize our data. Now the data that tells us how to organize data is exo-data: it resides elsewhere, it is only laterally linked, it is sometimes it's own data, and some times the "original" data is the meta-data for the exo-data. In other words, a feature of the relationship between data and exo-data is that sometimes the exo-data is the data and the data is the exo-data. Imagine if "the internet went down", and someone stumbled upon the contents of the Sidewiki server. They would have all of this tangential data, and some understanding of the organization of what it was originally associated with, (it's pretty easy to figure out the relationship between data/group and data/group/subgroup) but some of it would have unknown referents, and some of it would stand on its own, or maybe it wouldn't, but how would you ever know? How can you tell if a comment is a response, or an essay on its own? How can you tell if a reference work is real or made-up, apt or extraneous, if you don't have access to it?

I think the period of time when we have "control of our data and history" will be relatively brief. We'll be back to the days where fires destroyed knowledge forever, where referenced works were unknown, and where knowledge lived and died with single people. Except it won't be fires, but support discontinuing, broken links, and un-archived sites. The amount of data necessary to track all the data is an exponential figure. Storage may be increasing exponentially, but it would have to increase at a rate equal to "amount of data" X "exo-data to make sense of the data". Can it do this? How do we even guess at what these values are? How to we measure the rate of change of these values?

(N+MindFuck)^X. And that's even without all the semiotics ramifications of the sheer fact that I'm trying to express this on a blog, right? WHERE IS THIS POSTING TO? CAN ANYONE HEAR ME? CAN EVERYONE HEAR ME?

But on a consumer level, how the hell is a "social network" supposed to develop across all these servers? The days of Facebook and AIM were pretty simple. You have a friend list, and you can talk to the people on your list. Now there's all this... crap.

Thinking about it this way: I didn't used to have any data backup at home. I had one computer. Then I got a partner. She had a computer. I got a USB hard drive, and started backing up both of our files. But with the extra space, we both ended up with more data than our computers' HDs hold combined. Then, I got a network storage server with more capacity, and do a double back-up, migrating files upwards from the computers to the USB drive, to the NAS. I'm lucky if I can remember the pattern of Boolean settings to make sure I am only over-writing data in the right direction, and still have everything backed up.

I used to really like keeping track of my mp3s meta-data with iTunes. Forget it. Now there's no way iTunes own library database can keep it all in line. I'm lucky if it can still find all of the mp3s, without making duplicate copies to local libraries all over the place.

But most consumers don't even back up their files. They fill a hard drive, and when it crashes, they abandon it. If they can pay someone to do archeology at that point, maybe they do. And then they start over again with a new drive. How are they supposed to navigate these interlocking "social networks", let alone understand the semiotic ramifications of meta-data cum exo-data?

Fuck, I can pontificate about semiotics, but I'm still not sure how to organize my feeds. Does the cloud make it simpler? More complicated? I just deleted my Facebook, because my interest stalled before I figured out all the new settings. Maybe I'll restart when Diaspora comes out. So what will be the lifetime of a social network "data object"? How long will each of us live on Facebook, before the connections become a burden, we pull the plug, and start new?

I fear the lateral web. But I love exo-data.

Let me tell you something, son

"I boldly predict that, in about a decade from now, rather than disappearing completely, our strongest customs and traditions will become stronger."

I'm so used to hearing of (as well as predicting myself) a future in which we are all atemporal, cosmopolitan, jet-packing cultural omnivores, (or, naturally, some syncretism of these) it sounds almost radically prophetic to hear a prediction to the contrary. But hey, if Twitter does anything, it convinces you that your sub-culture actually does rule a dimension of the universe. You are the new scholar, the head of the pack, the crest of the wave, instantly at 140 characters a breath. The internet is a bank of parallel petri dishes, arranged in towering capital capacitors of human-hyrid cannibalism, along the burnt out crust of Zizek's Matrix-esque Desert of the Real, allowing us to live our own epistemological fantasies of truth and correctness, which the real electricity alligns our particles for some sort of nefarious, exo-human machine...

Oh, sorry.

But why shouldn't the Internet, which is often considered to be a folk-force in itself, simply become the repository and conduit for all of the folk-forces that have already existed throughout the history of time? Sure, some people will dodge back and forth, amazing us all with their well-readness, but others will just marinate, assuming most of the "democratic-internet" is backing them with their Tea Party Twitter-ness, or their Bride-Burning reality shows, or alt-sex mercenary conventions, or whatever it happens to be?

This is not to say, "well, if this great E-Democracy doesn't unite us, it will certainly divide us" in a founding-father Patriot/Anti-Patriot QuoteThink Ourosboros. I think it is more indicative of the fact that whatever we think things will be, of course they will be, but at the same time being other things, until we can get it together to sum it up in a snappy quote, and then we realize, "oh but it is actually that" as well. Will traditions come together, or dissolve? Uh, whatever! Yes/no, of course!

I think the operating quote here is not "Things fall apart, the center cannot hold" but "What if the empire never ended?" Not because of the meaning inherent in these sappy quotes, or because the former was uttered by a poet, and the latter composed by a drug-addled mystic/half-employed creative, but because we have reached an age where these quotes mean the same thing, or at least can be referenced together, and this is not merely some half-assed syncretism, but could pass for not only actual rational thought but deft criticism, and is instantly published along with anything else a minute after I just thought about it.

And so, the tough part is going to be remembering which tribe you come from, and figuring out how to quickly through the gang sign, when a group that doesn't exactly seem coherent, but certainly is an Other gang, meets you in the streets. Because despite the cold comfort of a blog, all drain pipes eventually lead to the street. Because a bullet from a gun is the final point of punctuation, because paving stones are the network of last resort, because eventually the electricity will go out, and we'll all wander into the streets, and have to find something to do then.

Trouble, with a capital T. Right here in Internet City.

Atemporality Onward and Always Inward

I'm glad to see the atemporality thing is taking off.

Bruce Sterling gave a keynote last week (or thereabouts, I mean, it is atemporality, right?) which was the sort of the coming out party for atemporality. I've been tracking the Twitter search on #atemporality for some time now, "listening to the aethers", so to speak. It was mostly Bruce, after the initial minting (or, thereabouts) of the concept by William Gibson a while back, with me and a few others throwing in every now and again. And of course the retweets, trickling down through the matrix like drops of condensation on a window. But now atemporality seems to have blossomed, with a mushrooming of traffic, and several new original contributors picking up the hash tag with new links, etc.

It's atemporality in action!

As I was discussing with M earlier this evening, this is a term that's philosophical time has come. It's a natural extension of several things going on in philosophy, history, and other relevant disciplines. After the end of grand narratives and post-modernism, we need a place to pick up the narratives that remain. Atemporality is simply a coined term for the various technological phenomena we're currently witnessing as our semiotics continue to transform themselves. It's an extension of the resurgence of interest in Bergsonian time, and the investigations of Foucauldian information and technological theory in the age of the Internet, and the aesthetic applications of Deluzian thought regarding desire, society, and information by the next generation of information theorists, and a philosophical grafitti technique being wielded by the post-Burroughs and ex-Dadaists, and estoterics, and occultists, and artists, and writers, all looking for the next new thing, and trying to find something a bit more concrete to explain what the hell we're all doing on the Internet all day long.

And other stuff too.

Of course, the thing about a new, interesting concept like this, is that it can all of a sudden be everything, and we can draw diagrams of the microcosmic and macrocosmic universes from an atemporal angle, play atemporal samples in our DJ sets, and cook atemporal pizzas. Or it can be nothing, and just be a flash in the pan Internet meme.

Well, its all in the usage really, and we'll have to wait and see. Meanwhile, I think it can bear some fruit in various guises, (especially in the atemporal pizza category). There are more than a couple academic disciplines that could use a new buzz word to play with too, and might even get some good work out of it.

But where it really gets interesting, I believe, is when we push the concept. So, now that the term might start being deployed, we shouldn't just add it to our jargon tool box, and take it out on weekends to parties. It is time to take it out on the road, and see exactly what this baby can do.

From my perspective, it's not just the next buzzword. All of those philosophical names I dropped a couple paragraphs up are stuff I've been working with for about five years now, and trying to pick up the wires, test the connections, and figure out where they lead. I'm a bit invested in the concept from a metaphysical and semiotic philosophy perspective, and I think it could really be the ground of some heavy work, if I ever get back into the philosophy game seriously. In the meantime, it is some heady stuff, man, and it's freaking me out.

Of course, not everyone will use the word like that, or maybe no one will be me. But still, I think there are some experiments we could all try at home.

For instance, I had this idea about the mail recently. Atemporality? Well, not strictly about time. But what we're starting to realize, as more and more people read and listen to the idea of something so formerly concrete as TIME and then say to themselves, "hey, there might be something to that" is that the things we thought were concrete, level, and plateau-like might actually be as flat and hard as the surface of the ocean. Which is hard, when smacking it after a large fall, but is also easy to penetrate if you know how to do it, has currents of its own, and also, also sorts of crazy creatures living in an ecosystem beneath it, totally invisible to someone about to drop onto it from a few thousand feet. Not that the mail has creatures living in it, but the fact is, it is much more than simply sending a letter from one place to the other. It is a massive infrastructural force, employing a large number of people spread across an entire continent, able to do amazing feats of physical transport, wasted almost completely on sending junk mail. So what is the postal system, really? What could it do? What if we re-envisioned it in light of our current technology, and the current way we are learning how to use our current technology? What might happen then? Well, it might be a stunt, or it might make something new and really useful. It's hard to say.

What else can be re-envision? What, pray tell, after our metaphysical and conscious assessments of the fabric of time itself, could we think of in a new light? And is it just a re-evaluation? A new perspective? It is not just a new look, more of the same look, with a new ruler. Or measuring, without using a ruler at all. Measuring something that does not require space, or quantify in such units. It is not a new perspective, so much as all of a sudden being able to see multiple perspectives at once. To look towards the future and back at the past with the same feet that are currently standing in the present. An extension of a point in time, a leaking of nowness, into and through always and forever. Singularity in terms of entirety, and multiplicity in terms of universality.

Sure, it sounds out there. But there are two sorts of infinite, that of the very large, and that of the very small. And in this case, while the universe at large and quantum physics might be an interesting place to look, I'm more particularly interested in those things that we think are important, such as time, space, technology and philosophy (big things) and those we are willing to overlook, like literature, numerology, folk songs, music video dance moves, the sorts of paper we write on, the words we still won't say in public, what objects vandals select to break windows with, and the verb tenses in poorly written street graffiti (little things). This is not pulling atemporal rabbits out of every hat, finding examples of the meta theory in every little cultural studies scrap and crumb. It is finding the new things. Who has done things in the name of atemporality? Who has thrown a brick with the word "atemporality" written on it? Anyone? What if they did? What sorts of paper support the sorts of atemporal writing that we already have been doing and will continue to change the way that we are doing in an atemporal way?

We are not looking for old artifacts of atemporality, or proposing new atemporality research. The whole idea is that what we are looking at when we are looking at atemporality is exactly what we're already looking at. Atemporality is not something new we're figuring out and we're trying, it is what we're always already doing. It is seamless with seamlessness, and continuous with continuousness. It is outside the old strata of time with starts and stops, with beginnings and ends. Therefore, it is outside outsidedness. It is inside insidedness. It is not irony, but the conditions under which anything could be ironic. And in this sense it's the same as it's always been. Except that things now are different. Irony doesn't mean the same thing as it used to. It never does. It never did. The meaning of things is always changing. The meaning of meaning is always changing.

So let's keep looking after it. Anything atemporal going on, make sure to report it to the usual non-authorities. Take pictures, if you can, and geotag them. Hashtag them. Upload them anonymously to sites with no links that will only retweet them six months later. If you find any evidence of anything, sequester it, buy space on a throw-away for-profit satellite, and fire that sucker into orbit. Feed it to a giant squid, and upload the video of the squid on YouTube, and then put the squid in orbit. Blog it all, and then force Google to delete your blog, and then tweet about it until it comes back. Echoes are everywhere. Try to drown them out with new noise. Events have not been planned.

Can someone crowd-source me the mailing address to send for an automatic digital atemporal pizza delivery? No? Well, let's keep looking until we can.

Ditch Mercator, go with the Interdome Projection

As with many new technologies, it seems that the fanfare about Augmented Reality has gotten caught up in the magical, special effect aspects of the user experience, and is ignoring the way the technology actually works.

Lucky for you, you have a dedicated semiotician and materialist at your disposal. Me! Allow me to fly into your view-finder and set a few things straight.

For a long time now, we have been finding ways to organize data inside of our physical space. It actually does this by completing the inverse; geography seeks, by way of data, to orient our physical bodies in a ideal dimension, which via the data, supposedly corresponds to the real world.

I often go on at length about the Cartesian conception of the world, and geography is the premier example. We have developed a pair of axes known as longitude and latitude, and various projections which allow us to portray the topology of the earth, and by microcosm, all physical space we currently inhabit, in a two dimensional Cartesian projection. (And by extension, outer space, because right ascension and declination are a sort of radial integration into 3-D projected space out from our datapoint of datapoints, good old geocentric earth.)

This worked great for a long time, because the data was only a reference, allowing us to navigate over the topology through our relation to this ideal Cartesian plane (which I'll refer to as Geography, from now on). If I can find my own current position in Geography, I can then move myself to a different point in Geography, which, if I've saved my data correctly, will be where I buried my treasure. Point A and Point B in ideal Geography only matter to me if I have been able to accurately label the actual, physical ground as such in my mind, and continue to do so, repeatable as many times as I wish to go from Point A to Point B.

We don't need a map to walk to the store, because we can visualize the ideal Geographic journey from A to B within our head, using cues from the environment rather than a 2-D projection. The point of Geography is not to help us walk down the street, but to extend a realm of potential travel, which we could navigate to, using nothing more than correctly collected ideal Geographic data. If you are visiting my house, I could draw you a map to the store, and if I do a good job, you will arrive where you intended, even though you had never been there before. I did not transfer my memories of "the way to the store" to you. Instead, we communicated via the ideal data of Geography.

But, as we all know, Geography is imperfect, because it is ideal. I would hardly give you a compass, sextant, and two sets of Cartesian coordinates, and expect you to find the store. Instead, I would give you information that relates more to the specific, actual environment, rather than the ideal plane. I would say, "walk south on 50th, then turn right on Division. The store is right past the bus stop." I use a combination of Geography (south), locally specific Geographic conventions (street names), personal locution (right/left), and actual physical indications (near a unique, recognizeable object). These are all elements of our physical and metaphysical ideal perception of space. But the problem is, they are not unified in a Geographic plane. They are only unified within us.

Geotagging, and hence, most of the data AR systems are using, are based on the single plane of Geography. Using various geometries and measurements of radio signals, our devices can reasonably place us on the Geographic Cartesian plane, and maybe even draw us a fairly accurate diagram of other local Geographic conventions. But although this may satisfy the device's programming, what does this mean to us?

Sometimes, a great deal. Watching my phone trace my current position on Google Maps, I can find my way to almost anywhere I want to go. Of course, I must still look up and compare the map with my current location to see if I've actually arrived. And the maps do break down. I've gotten caught at numerous dead-end streets that were drawn as if they went through. And in the Peloponnese, I watched my blue dot snake for hours across a blank expanse of land with no apparent roads. Luckily we were looking out of the windows too, or we would have hit a herd of goats.

Now, one could attempt to improve the data keeping, and the technology by which the device calculates its position. This will achieve better and better results for the Geography. But the real question is, will this change the way we interact with our physical space?

I don't think AR will change our sense of physical space, at least as long as it continues to function via a Cartesian Geography. We have already have the ability to accurately identify our ideal position. This is not a new skill. A digital map in the palm of one's hand is pretty amazing, but semiotically, it is the same technology seafarers have been using for centuries.

But, digital technology is changing our worldview. Our sense of time is radically evolving, as we enter an age when all information that can be said to exist is simultaneously available from anywhere, at any time. Our place in time, and our place in history, is defined by the information we can express about ourselves, in relation to any other period of time. As the ubiquity of the Internet advances, the timeline of history reduces to a singular point. Our sense of history becomes what we can access from the palm of our hands, our vast (but limited) expanse of digital memory, in addition to the memories we already have in our minds.

Access has changed things, and will continue to change them. But we could always instanteously find our cardinal direction. What else is digital Access changing about our physical space?

Here's something that is actually completely magical. A week ago, when I went camping on the Salmon River in the Kalamath National Forest in Northern California, my digital device completely quit functioning for three days. It was not a concrete building, or bad data, or a downed server. It was that there was no data access at all. From here I can call up a digital map of the area from the Internet in about three seconds. But from there, I could not access a thing.

The infrastructural grid may be ever-expanding, but availability of physical access to the network will always be an issue. Actual gaps in service might be fixed, but the proximity to a transmitter will always affect access, and speed will never cease being a problem. There are access nodes strewn across the physical space, and we still must be close to them to access them. These access nodes create their own data as well, and change the way we access the network. Much of the Geographic data we use to identify our location is actually pulled from the access nodes themselves. Our place in the ideal Geography is defined by the actual physical facts of our access.

In a sense, this "closeness", this nearness to access, is more important than the ideal Geography. We are not looking to draw a straight line over an ideal plane, we are looking for things in our immediate physicality. I want the closest coffee, the nearest 24-hour grocery store, or the easiest southbound freeway access. Our programs might be able to find us these things, but they do it by comparing all the data to the ideal plane of Geographic data, and then by running a complicated algorithm to find which is the closest to us.

What if physical things were not tagged with Geographic longitude and latitude, but their locution to particular access points? What if each cellular tower and wifi hotspot was its own axis mundi? Each point of interest was identified by its radius and directional from the access point, and spontaneously provided from this access point to the device as soon as it was accessed?

We already do this; we call them cities. We break down the land into countries, states, counties, cities, municipalities, metro areas. Depending on the use of the structure, we define it differently, and access it accordingly.

Imagine coffee municipalities--all the known coffee shops are broken down into their neighborhoods. So in the Inner Eastside coffee district, you know that the best spot is Bob's Beans. But if you crossover into the Westside River district, then the best choice is Jill's Java.

You see, we already do this all the time in our mind. We think of where we are, and imagine the best restaurant/bar/coffee in the area. We think in terms of access. If for some reason we want a particular place, our spatial dimensions shift. Rather than looking for the best ____ that is easy to get to, we think of the easiest way to get to that one particular ____. The real axis is always access, because either in our minds or in the physical world, it is what controls our experience. This is why we have favorite cities, favorite ways to get in and out of town, favorite neighborhoods, favorites subway lines, favorite pedestrian streets. Our favorites are not categorized as data in terms of longitude and latitude, or in a 5-star tier, or even in an algorithm of these combined. We orient ourselves in the world by what we can access at any particular time. This praxis is our true augmented reality.

In the same way as the semantic web attempts to mediate between the dimensional databases and our sense of lived expression in language, augmented reality attempts to replicate our conception of accessible space. However, the databases do not translate to our lived experience. They are databases, and are created in dimensions fit for cataloging and searching data sets. However, if we begin to move our navigations through the data of the network in terms of access, we might be able to find a way our consciousnesses can merge with the network, that works better than staring into a little visual portal, or even looking at down at a map.

The praxis is the key. The state of immediate consciousness in which our metaphysical conceptions of space and time intersect with our expressive awareness of specific phenomena in space and time. It is not a singular point, or a pair of eyes, but a looped and tied web.

The technology should mimic our consciousness, in way that we can use. If we developed "digital phenomena", access point tags that were present as we walked down the street, we could interact with these phenomena, and remember certain things. It doesn't need to be an RFID tag, or even a barcode. It could be a set of characteristics. A geometry of a store front compared to the height of the building and the depth of the sidewalk. What would you remember best? A logo? A face? Your device remembers it. Then it asks how you feel.

What is this place to you? Yes or no? Hot or cold? Hungry or thirsty? Do you have money? Do you need money? Who are you thinking of now? Who would you most like to talk to?

Then, our devices share on the network.

Are these meaningless bits of data? Only if they have no way to relate to others data. They don't need a univocal Geometry, or a rubric of rating. They need a way to interrelate. What did other people feel about this place? Do you feel that they felt the same way as you? How does this make you feel now?

And then, where do you go next? How does it all fit in to your day? Will you go to the same places again tomorrow?

Part of the beauty of the network is the availability of access not just to the network itself, but to the constituting substance of the network--millions upon millions of anonymous data points, that only become meaningful where shared, added to, and commented upon. Access is nothing unless you are accessing something. We need to begin sharing our praxis as well as our thoughts and times. We need to unite all our conscious thoughts and perceptions. We need to access each other, and not just a Geography.

Will it mean something immediately? Probably not. I'll open my device to all access points in range, and I'll get a firehose of data. Red, yes, hungry, bad service, scared, blue, too expensive, lonely, sex, newness, big, west, no, green. But maybe we can scrape something from this flow, something not just projected upon a map, but something that is immediate and expressive.

Once my device tells me, as an accumulation of all the access available:

"There's a good place, not too pricey, near the mailbox on 2nd avenue right past the store with the cheap beer with a real pretty cashier. I think maybe on the left-hand side of the street went walking downtown."

I probably wouldn't know it off hand. Maybe I would be able to find it. But finally, the device would be augmenting my reality, by networking our praxis.

Multi-tracking Eno with Cyber-time: an Atemporal Metaphor

When I speak about metaphor, I'm trying to use the word in the typical sense, but also imbue a new meaning to it. There is the literary meaning, that of artful comparison, but there is also a more semiotic meaning, which I might call connotation by association. Not to put too technical of a label on it, or to call it something definitive here, but we are trying to get towards something we could consider a bit more technically than to simply say, "he rained blows upon him" is the exact same as "he hit him with blows in a way like rain falling". The metaphor is different than the basic comparison of a simile.

It is the use of two meanings together, which develops an connotation between them, as opposed to the logical denotation of "x as y". There is a certain bit of both in each, of course, but then interesting aspect is that we can refer to something as intangible as "insult" "raining upon" someone, and we all know immediately what it means, though there is nothing in the definition of "rain" which immediately refers to something so intangible, and something so clearly not liquid precipitation. We don't even need to include our word which denotes approximate similarity, "like", because simply by the juxtaposition of their meanings, we get it.

To me, it is a sort of ambivalence of meaning that combines to create greater power of expression in the long run. Children will often refer to things by the combination of words which sound strange to adults. A sheep may be a "dog cow". Teacher may be "mommy". My brother had a certain size category, which qualified as "big little". For adults, its patronizingly funny when kids describe things as "it's the same, but different". However, they are practicing how to mean things when they speak, and they haven't learned the harsh logical rules of A/not-A which are so important to adults. Even though, many punch lines to our jokes revolve around the very ambiguity of this supposed rule of logic.

So metaphor is both a close equation, and a contextual, semiotic comparison. I describe this as a prelude to some words of Brian Eno I wish to re-represent.

In this speech about the studio as composition tool, Eno directs our attention at a shift in our conception of music in relation to recording, which I believe is a perfect metaphor for what I view as the concept of "atemporality". (A guy responsible for The Long Now Foundation should have some idea, right?)

The canon of atemporality is small enough, (look towards the Twitter search--it is about as categorical a listing of sources as such a newly ephemeral topic is capable of at this time) but if I try to distill something as reckless as a definition of atemporality, I come across a general idea of "n different times pressed together", exemplified by the "Looking into the Past" Flickr pool.



While this is atemporal in a sense, I am envisioning something a bit more metaphysical to guide the concept. (How odd of me!) This is flipping the timeline of history into a cool Mobius strip, crossing it back over itself for artistic effect. All well and good. But I think our current state of technology is allowing us to approach a different sense of the term--we can move beyond the comparative logic of "historicizing" temporality, (the past is way different than the future, yet the same!) to a immediately existant atemporality (the past/future/now is past/future/now). We are not just playing with time, we are ditching it. The temporal currency has crashed, and our metaphysics can now operate outside of the constraints of the free market (otherwise known as history).

Cue Mr. Eno:

The first thing about recording is that it makes repeatable what was otherwise transient and ephemeral. Music, until about 1900, was an event that was perceived in a particular situation, and that disappeared when it was finished. There was no way of actually hearing that piece again, identically, and there was no way of knowing whether your perception was telling you it was different or whether it was different the second time you heard it. The piece disappeared when it was finished, so it was something that only existed in time.

The effect of recording is that it takes music out of the time dimension and puts it in the space dimension. As soon as you do that, you're in a position of being able to listen again and again to a performance, to become familiar with details you most certainly had missed the first time through, and to become very fond of details that weren't intended by the composer or the musicians.

I would say this aspect of recording is a good metaphor for the technology of writing. Recording begins to take expressible culture out of its reliance upon a firm dimension of time--though it still relies on time, it does so in other ways. For example, you don't need to live across the street from Socrates to hear his wisdom, but you still must get a hold of a copy of The Republic.

Now, let's talk about another aspect of recording, which I call the detachable aspect. As soon as you record something, you make it available for any situation that has a record player. You take it out of the ambience and locale in which it was made, and it can be transposed into any situation. This morning I was listening to a Thai lady singing; I can hear the sound of the St. Sophia Church in Belgrade or Max's Kansas City in my own apartment, and I can listen with a fair degree of conviction about what these sounds mean. As Marshall McLuhan said, it makes all music all present. So not only is the whole history of our music with us now, in some sense, on record, but the whole global musical culture is also available. That means that a composer is really in the position, if he listens to records a lot, of having a culture unbounded, both temporally and geographically, and therefore it's not at all surprising that composers should have ceased writing in a European classical tradition, and have branched out into all sorts of other experiments. Of course, that's not the only reason that they did, either.

When we talk about the distribution of recorded works, we are in the terrain of a metaphor about the Internet. The Internet has made the distribution of writing (and of course, many pieces of music as well) as easy as plugging in. It has unbounded culture from the typical constraints of space and time. At first, communication was as fast as a man could run 26 miles. Then, it was the speed of a train. Then, the telegraph. Now it is, for all intents and purposes, instantaneous. On the Internet we still must worry about "finding things", so there is a spatial aspect, but the temporal terrain has been reduced to a singular--now. One more reliance upon the dimension of time has been reduced, by adding the technology of the Internet to the technology of writing.

So, to tape recording: till about the late '40s, recording was simply regarded as a device for transmitting a performance to an unknown audience, and the whole accent of recording technique was on making what was called a "more faithful" transmission of that experience. It began very simply, because the only control over the relative levels of sounds that went onto the machine was how far they were from the microphone - like device. The accent was on the performance, and the recording was a more or less perfect transmitter of that, through the cylinder and wax disc recording stages, until tape became the medium by which people were recording things.

The move to tape was very important, because as soon as something's on tape, it becomes a substance which is malleable and mutable and cuttable and reversible in ways that discs aren't. It's hard to do anything very interesting with a disc - all you can do is play it at a different speed, probably; you can't actually cut a groove out and make a little loop of it. The effect of tape was that it really put music in a spatial dimension, making it possible to squeeze the music, or expand it.

Scratch off another constraint of time. In addition to being able to reduce and change the space and time of the recording in our consciousness through technological improvements in distribution (from a localized there and then, to an accessible here and now), we can also shift the very expression of time and space itself within the recording. Technology allows us to modify and alter the rules of recording and playback. It is no longer a pure Distance over Time experience. The goal is not necessarily accuracy, or logical, time/space consistency. Now the goal is art--expression and experience itself. When you look at an old photo held up to "the same place" in a more modern time, you are not simply seeing both times, or the space between the two. The "ne c'est pas" is not an either/or, a now/then. It is both. You can record a chopped and screwed beat over the radio broadcast of The War of the Worlds. Time is now a dimension we can play with.

You should remember that everything, including the Beatles Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, was done on four-track until 1968. Normally engineers would do something like this: the drums on one track, the voices spread on two tracks with the guitars and the piano, say, on one of those tracks, and then the strings and additional effects on the fourth track. This was because they were thinking in terms of mono output; eventually, it would be mixed down to one signal again, to be played on radio or whatever. When stereo came in big, it gave them a problem. When they converted to stereo, things were put in either the middle, or dramatically to one side, or you'd hear some very idiosyncratic panning.

Anyway, after four-track it moved to eight track - this was in '68, I guess - then very quickly escalated: eight-track till '70, 16-track from'70 to' 74, 24-track to now when you can easily work on 48-track, for instance, and there are such things as 64-track machines. The interesting thing is that after 16-track, I would say, the differences are differences of degree, not differences of kind. Because after you get to 16-track, you have far more tracks than you need to record a conventional rock band. Even if you spread the drums across six tracks, have the basson two, have the vocals, have the guitars, you've still got six tracks left. People started to think, "What shall we do with those six tracks?"

From that impulse two things happened: you got an additive approach to recording, the idea that composition is the process of adding more, which was very common in early '70s rock (this gave rise to the well known and gladly departed orchestral rock tradition, and it also gave rise to heavy metal music - that sound can't be got on simpler equipment); it also gave rise to the particular area that I'm involved in: in-studio composition, where you no longer come to the studio with a conception of the finished piece. Instead, you come with actually rather a bare skeleton of the piece, or perhaps with nothing at all. I often start working with no starting point. Once you become familiar with studio facilities, or even if you're not, actually, you can begin to compose in relation to those facilities. You can begin to think in terms of putting something on, putting something else on, trying this on top of it, and so on, then taking some of the original things off, or taking a mixture of things off, and seeing what you're left with - actually constructing a piece in the studio.

I can think of two aspects of atemporality which are interesting in different ways (at least, so far). There is the dissolution of the timeline of history, or the flexibility of the timeline as a dimension for expression, which we have just discussed. Is it really a lo-fi tape from the 70s, or a tape recorded to sound that way? Is it truly antique, or simply steampunk? The difference is arbitrary, or at least artistically mutable.

But then there is also our sensation of speed in expression, which is expanding rapidly. So you have sped up the tape, recorded parallel tracks, and sampled some vintage recordings, or made a huge high-def video collage comprising an entire century of material, which plays in different ways depending on the current orbit of the planets. But you're not out of tracks yet.

What is really interesting about the "Looking into the Past" Flickr set is not that time changes, or that b/w photography is old school. The interesting thing is that any number of people can contribute to this artistic comparison, upload it to the Internet, and add to an infinitely replicable viewing experience for an unlimited number of people, who will all no doubt see and experience any part of the set in different ways. The set has 1,063 members. You could join too. Digital photographic technology is one thing, but networked-participant-enabled digital photography is something else. More important than the ability to Photoshop, to record and re-record, is the ability to alter the speed of the consumption of the photograph, by networking its distribution and consumption. In typical math, if D/T = S, and you let T go to zero, you get an unworkable solution. The Cartesian child asks, "how could viewing the picture differently possibly change the content? Isn't it the same picture, just faster?" But in math which does not rely on the real number set, you get an infinite amount of possibilities in the same situation. Your specific time=T definition is no longer applicable, and now we are in the terrain of the atemporal. The atemporal child responds, "all your RTs are belongs to us." Is the Internet fast, or really fast? How do you measure how fast "things end up on the Internet" or how quickly "things begin trending"? It doesn't really matter--because there is only "as soon as you know about it". Speed is now a joining, a multi-tracking, a conjunction, and a metaphorical form of expression. If you are moving at speed, the only things you can see are those also at speed. The difference between them is purely relative. What is truly atemporal is not just immediately available, but always on; it is not just multi-faceted, but multi-authored and multi-consumed; it is not just immediate, but currently-being-expressed/experienced; it is not just Heideggerian presence, but a headlong dive into Bergsonian duration, the first-ever expansion of Kant's Transcendental Ideal of time into new territory (sorry about that last one, folks). We can produce and experience more, and in a new way, all beyond our previous constraints of mere "time".

Of course, everyone is constrained in one way or another, and you work within your constraints. It doesn't mean that suddenly the world is open, and we're going to do much better music, because we're not constrained in certain ways. We're going to do different music because we're not constrained in certain ways we operate under a different set of constraints.

If you have been stuck in a D/T dimension, making your speed infinite seems like you are exceeding the limit. Hence, the singularity folks who think that when we get neural implants we will all "become" singular. I don't think this is true. There are limits to the human capacity for experience and expression, surely. However, I don't think these limits are space and time, at least in the way our technology has forced us to conceive of them. We are not limited to history, or to our conscious memory, or our imagination and planning of the future. (The limits of our unconscous memory is another topic.) As our technology allows us to adapt new, atemporal ways of thinking, we will be in a new domain of metaphysics, which I've been referring to as Cyber-time. Note that I say we will adapt atemporal ways of thinking--a plural, multiple sense of the term. There is not one atemporal asymptote we will overcome, vaulting into the blinding white light of gnostical infinity on the other side. But, in comparison to our current defined boundaries of Cartesian time-space, we will make changes as mind-bendingly different as a "Wall of Sound".

The effect of the Internet on the human culture of expression and experience, in the medium of sound, photography, and writing, is huge, in metaphysical ways. Many consider the Internet to be just a vast, digital library--but I believe we forget just how drastic a concept the library was when it first came about. We are building an instantaneous library, which cannot burn (at least, not completely), which is so big that our scholars are not simply concerned with adding material to it, but simply being able to search it.

SF Epilogue:

On a distant, alien world, there exists a library so large, it would take the entire lifetime of its curators to simply walk from one end to the other. However, they have never managed to invent the wheel. Suddenly, Earthlings land, and hand out roller skates. The wearers of wheels are known as "rollers", and their new conception of the world in terms of gradients, inclines and declines, and smooth and flat surfaces are ridiculed, in favor of the old custom of viewing the world in "paces". But under the rollers' guidance, vast amounts of knowledge are now accessible. Slowly, the cultural structure of the planet begins to collapse.

Stones versus Guns

First of all, fresh in the news, is reports of a massive massacre in Tehran.



Sounds really, really bad. There's no way to say that without sounding understated. I've also seen pictures of axe wounds. Many sources claim the Basiji were wielding axes.

Fascist fucking thugs. As long as groups attempt to wield power, there will always be these little-man shits. I would call them animals, but that is a horrible thing to compare an animal, simply living out its nature, to these despicable wastes tickling their feedback circuits carving their violent psychotic world-views into other people's flesh.

I was listening to an unrelated interview with a biographer of Stanley Milgram today. Milgram is the scientist who did the "shock" experiments; the subject is told he is to administer "electric shocks" to an actor, on the authority of a researcher. Even though the actor pretends s/he is in incredible pain, 2/3's of the time the subject continued to give the "shocks", even though s/he was free to get up and leave at any time. The biographer said, when asked about the relevance to WWII and the Holocaust, that the experiment actually doesn't really explain Nazi behavior. It might explain the behavior of the train operators, taking jews to the camps, but the experiment cannot say anything about the creativity of torture--the soldiers who would compete with each other to torture more brutally, and the doctors who devised psychotic medical experiments.

I thought the same thing around the time of Abu Graib. I'm certain those soldiers were told that their torture was okay, but no one told them specifically what to do, nor to take photos of it, and put them on the Internet. Creativity--or what rudiments of it these people could find within their rotted minds.

There are certain people out there, who not only find themselves in the employ of fascist or fascistic leaders, to do their violent dirty work, but also, perhaps not unrelatedly, are also the sorts of psychotic power-thugs that get off on it. Is it enough to shoot people? No. They pick up axes, aim at children, and throw people off of bridges. There is no word awful enough.

As I said before, I'm always with the people. Guns against stones is what we so often see, and I think there is a reason for this. Any violent piece of shit can go get a gun and shoot people. But it is only the people that pick up stones to throw. It is not a pretty or romantic image--it is often the last act before getting gunned down. But it represents the fact of the matter--a finger on a trigger, versus the overwhelming anger of people en mass. I would throw a stone, if I could.

But this is nothing new. What is new, in some bizarre spin of the Evidence/Confession obsession of post-christian law, combined with a cyber-timed, techno-fetish Bataillesque-reincarnation, we can see these horrors playing out "in real-time", as it were. Our connection with the Internet provides a strange, more-real than real sense of the events. Of course, if we were there it would be unspeakably real. But because we are not, and can read the words of panic, and see the wailing relatives on grainy, uploaded reality footage, and know that it is not a snuff film, presented as "death in the lens", there is an uncanny realness that goes beyond theorizations of the simulacra. It is not uncanny in the sense that it is unreal; it is uncanny in the sense that it takes a medium of representation (YouTube, a normally all-too-surreal site) and forces it to be real in our minds. It is not just a depressing news reel. Looking at the video of Neda's death, I felt actual fear for myself being shot in the street. It is as if after nights and nights of hearing the neighbors get into a physical fight, one night the wall is transparent, and you can actually see them beating each other. Anybody with any sense knows that such violent crimes happen everywhere, all around the world, on a daily basis. But this is one happening NOW, and RIGHT IN FRONT OF US.

But of course it isn't actually happening live--Tehran is some twelve hours ahead of my location in time, and so I see the video after it has been uploaded, during my day time, while it may be 2AM in Tehran. It is part of the cyber-time extension--in which other places and times become co-extensive with my reality because I can access them so easily, in such "at will" format.

The problem is, there is little I can actually do. I can't go into the streets (protesting in front of an embassy is clearly not the same thing), and although one can do a bit to further the message, it is up to the people of Iran now.

I wonder what they will do. The pundits compare it to the '79 revolution--they take the shouts of "Allah Akbar" as the secret password: it is something to do with a rising spirit of Islam. Maybe a Islam different than other Islams the pundits have identified previously, but they are the Other, still.

I think it must be different. The Iranians are the ones holding the stones, but they know, regardless of what they might think about it, that we are behind them. When have the Iranians ever had the world behind them? Even if the people are defeated, or co-opted, or dissuaded, or killed, people do not forget things like this. Being assaulted by the state is not something you forget. The people are conscious of themselves, both in victory, and in defeat. When the Basiji shot Neda, they killed only one person, but they shot at millions of people. I've seen comparisons (by Americans, mind you) between Iran and 9/11. The people's wounds are the people's wounds--and like I said, the people do not easily forget.

Twitter and it's ilk, may not be the best reporting tools in the world. This may not be journalism at all. The networks are plagued by overzealous retweeters, misinformation, provocateurs, and just plain old spam. But you know what is exactly like that? A street protest. Nobody know's what is going on, but when that black line of cops starts advancing, you feel the electricity in the air. Nobody knows what's happening, but as they said once, everyone knows which way the wind is blowing.

So is this the cyber-time consciousness of the people? Are we linked in, not to information or social networks, but the mass itself? Only history will truly say, and by that time, it's really unimportant. But it is something to think about. There are right and wrong ways of doing many things. But think about the next protest, with a Twitter network dump channel, set-up in advance, showing anyone with an Internet connection what it looks like to get spit on by a cop, or get sworn at by some crazy anti-immigration protester. It's a pretty far shot from a coherent organization strategy, but it is a sort of consciousness. And consciousness might be the thing missing from activist movements for some time now.

But regardless of what it might be in the future, I know what it is now. This is consciousness; this is a way to not forget.

The Future is Totally Crazy

I also wrote a new article for The Brutalitarian, during an accidental caffeine and pseudoepinephrine frenzy.

Don't worry, I did go back and edit it later.

But, the article is still a thick circus of time-travel, Internet/informational riffing, Kantian metaphysics, and Science Fact/Fantasy.

It all started when @greatdismal, (who I guess is some guy who writes SF books), posted a flurry of updates about atemporality. It got me all in a tizzy, because I have this little twitch about time and history (yes I am the sort of person that has a twitch about time and history). It has a lot to do with politics and post-structural theory, but to cut off the story of my theoretical life, let's just say I have a certain feeling that the world would be a much better place if we all thought about time more in terms of Bergson's concept of "duration", rather than according to a humanistic timeline of history. More feeling, less fascism.

Anyway, you may say I'm a loony, anarchist metaphysician, but I'm not the only one.

So, reading Mssr. Gibson's tweets got me all a-thinking, and I had to go read the second section of Bergson's Time and Free-Will again. Which naturally, got me thinking of Kant by way of Deleuze. (Both of Deleuze's essays about Bergson and Kant respectively, are very highly reccomended. By someone, probably. By someone with an interest in blowing your mind.)

Now, I was planning one of my "positivity" posts about Kant's metaphysical exposition of time, because it's pretty cool, and one of those things I keep returning to in philosophy, case in point. But because I was also thinking about cyber-space, and because I am always, always thinking about the Internet (help me. please, somebody help me) I put away that blog post for a minute, and started thinking about cyber-time.

At this point, I was already on my second cup of coffee, and then had a bout of sneezes, which sent me to the medicine cabinet.

The rest, as they say, is totally cognized cyber-time.

But this article is actually pretty good. Yes, it is bizarre how 5000 words can land in a flurry of three hours, and yes, it will probably not appeal to anyone not interested in the metaphysics of time and cognition, and yes, I had to go back and do a significant amount of editing upon the realization I had used the word "consciousness" over fifty times in six pages. But, I already did all that editing! Now it's pretty tight. If I added a little Bergson and made the language a bit more academic, I would totally turn this in as a course paper.

But seeing as the only course I'm currently enrolled in is, "A Literature Tinker's Guide to the Ever-Increasing Spiral of Crackpotism", (my average is currently a C+) I have instead uploaded it to the Internet.

Basically, the gist is, although the timeline of history is a perfectly good metaphor for our temporal understanding of the world, the Internet and a capacity for abstract thinking we will simply abbreviate as "SF" is allowing us to get more towards the root of our intuitions of time-relations--and as such, we are now, bit by bit, being able to violate that temporal timeline in what we might, according to the metaphor, call "time-travel".

LOL

So, there you have it. Crackpot Metaphysics Ltd, free for you on the Internet.

This Revolution Should Be Downloadable

You may have heard of Creative Commons, which helps us creative folks distribute our work in open formats. But here is Open Access, which is a similar proposal to not only distribute scientific articles in open-format, but also to maintain access via open, accessible databases.

Although they do not offer the different levels of protection as Creative Commons does, they do take it a step further by arguing that permissions are only half the battle. The database is equally important, or opening one's re-print permissions is no different from having a CC blog.

Here is their Open Access Publication Definition, pulled from the Statement on the Bethesda meeting on Open Access in 2003:

An Open Access Publication[1] is one that meets the following two conditions:

1. The author(s) and copyright holder(s) grant(s) to all users a free, irrevocable, worldwide, perpetual right of access to, and a license to copy, use, distribute, transmit and display the work publicly and to make and distribute derivative works, in any digital medium for any responsible purpose, subject to proper attribution of authorship[2], as well as the right to make small numbers of printed copies for their personal use.

2. A complete version of the work and all supplemental materials, including a copy of the permission as stated above, in a suitable standard electronic format is deposited immediately upon initial publication in at least one online repository that is supported by an academic institution, scholarly society, government agency, or other well-established organization that seeks to enable open access, unrestricted distribution, interoperability, and long-term archiving (for the biomedical sciences, PubMed Central is such a repository).

Notes:

1. Open access is a property of individual works, not necessarily journals or publishers.

2. Community standards, rather than copyright law, will continue to provide the mechanism for enforcement of proper attribution and responsible use of the published work, as they do now.

I like this for several reasons (besides the fact of its general opposition to intellectual property arguments).

1. It notes that "Open Access" is a distinction of the work itself--in other words, not the author, printer, publisher, or content provider. The work itself is denoted to be free and clear of copyright restrictions.

2. Related to the previous, "Open Access" does not mean that the work is free from copyright by its authors. You can copyright it, CC it, chisel it in stone if you want. All the denotation means it that the work itself must, in addition to whatever else, be available free, forever, and to whomever.

3. Furthermore, it specifically states that an Open Access Publication is available digitally. This is not a free-for-all, bootleg as you like permission. You can't print and sell copies. But it does this without the proscription of CC's "non-comm" category by taking advantage of the digital medium. By forcing it to be available "in any digital medium", it is by substantial fact making it free, un-controllable by material means such as DRM or anything else. "Any digital medium", means, materially, free and endlessly distributable.

This is perhaps the most important feature of the statement. In an essay I wrote about digital reproduction and intellectual property, I argued that the change digital reproduction engenders to our material conditions is forcing us to consider "property", and accordingly, labor, in new ways. Open Access takes this principle up directly by not simply stipulating that a work is "free property", in the form of Creative Commons, which despite intentions, still recognizes the material fact of intellectual property as a form. On the contrary, Open Access does an end run around old-form notions of property by defining a new sort of property: it takes digital reproduction as the de facto material process for its publications, because if information must be available in digital form, it is simply inconceivable that the content could be owned as property in the old way. You want to print journals? Fine, make a business of it, go wild. But if you want to publish, it better be Open Access, and therefore, digital.

4. Which leads to the fourth point. By taking this approach they are ignoring the form of production entirely, and focusing on content. If a document is available in any digital format, it cannot really be formatted or typeset. The goal is the propagation of the information: plain text. As a writer, printer, and publisher, I abhor plain text. Typesetting is part of the art. But these are scientists, and they are interested in the conclusions of research--publications, not publishing. And so, through this selective targeting of text via the material conditions of information reproduction, they are absolutely brilliant in crafting this definition. They allow authors and publishers to retain any rights they want, as long as it is available absolutely free, digitally. This should in no way impact publishing. People who want to read books, subscribe to journals, and collect first editions can go on doing so. But the people who need access to the information, like students, researchers, historians, database compilers, and etc. will have all of the text for free. They are drawing a line between published materials, and digitally-available text, and are doing so clearly, distinctly, and concisely.

5. The second half of the definition deals with the digital access--which is the current issue, in my opinion. Copyright is dead; that fight is over. Of course, there are still partisans out there in them hills, but everybody knows we're not going back to the pre-mp3 days. The fight currently, is one for access, which could potentially be more complicated. The Google Book controversy, for example, is exactly what's important these days. All books will be scanned eventually, and I don't think anyone has a problem with that. The big deal is not that the books will be scanned, it is that Google will hold the keys to the library. Of course, they've made many homages and odes to the "ease" with which content rights holders will be able to "manage" their works through a no-doubt free Google app. But who are you going through to manage your rights? Google. Who has control the second your rights lapse? Google. Who controls who gets to access, and more important in the days of masses of content, when and at what rank? Google. Google is shaping up to be the Amazon of digital books, because they are doing what Amazon did right the first time--be the paradigm of digital access to ____. Amazon chose print books, and "look up something on Amazon" is the Internet-synonym for the common task of finding something the way the all-mighty search engine is for search. Amazon chose wrong with Kindle, because they still thought digital content was the same as print content (DRM). Google choose correctly, betting there would be much more money in free content than in paid. Which Napster was popular, the old, illegal Napster, or the new, crappy subscription service Napster? And Google Book Search, it is becoming increasingly clear, will remain legal. The problem is, the analogy to Napster is not true, because with Napster you could download your mp3, but with Book Search it's all on the Internet. Cloud based, in this case, means you don't actually own the material, you simply get to stare at it from the ground. And the best and only view is on Google's grassy hillside.

Hence, the requirement in part two of the definition of Open Access, stating that the publication should be "deposited immediately upon initial publication in at least one online repository that is supported by an academic institution, scholarly society, government agency, or other well-established organization that seeks to enable open access, unrestricted distribution, interoperability, and long-term archiving". Google likes to pretend it is an academic institution, scholarly society, and maybe even a government agency, (Always look to the future with a fear of the feet of the giants of today!) but it is none of these things. "At least one" is the key. Does Google Book Search allow you to copy one of their works to another database? Why not? Because controlling digital media is about controlling access--the work itself does not matter. Open Access has realized this next fight, much as Google has, and is putting itself on the side of information's freedom.




So, I like this Open Access. It's a major step forward, not just for science (the importance of which for humanitarian goals is immediately obvious), but for property theory in general. We are moving towards a new conception of property and labor, and this is a part of it.

That said, I don't think I am ready to contribute any of my work to Open Access, as a writer. A good amount of my writing is available online for free, via CC non-comm (see the bottom footer of the blog, for example). But to let it completely out of my creative control, I'm not quite ready. Then again, this blog has only been in existence for a little over two years, and anything I would consider "publishable" has been written in about the same time period. Maybe once it's aged a bit, I will feel differently. Also, if I had a teaching job paying the bills, I might be totally fine with giving the fruits of my "research" out for free and letting it completely out of my control. Who knows--time will tell.

The one thing I'm sure of, is that standards like Creative Commons and Open Access have definitely helped me move in the direction of a new relationship towards my production and my product, both intellectually, and to its actual physical/digital incarnations.

Figments of the 80s Imagination

Until the age of five, I lived in Florida, only about an hour from Disney World. Back then we had some sort of off-season Florida-resident family pass, combining all the savings of time shares, economy packs, and in-state college tuition into one laminated, photo ID'd badge. I'm certain nothing like this exists anymore. In those days ('82-'87) there were no theme hotels except for the Riverboat one, and everyone was looking forward to the NEW MGM Studios park. Pretty much we went went to the Magic Kingdom, and then spend one afternoon over at Epcot.

I loved Epcot. And not just because I think the only thing more fun than amusement park rides is science, and multicultural theme restaurants. Epcot was my favorite because it was the home of Figment, to whom I imagined I was partially related.

"Who the fuck?" you say? Why, this guy:



No? Perhaps more recognizable in cartoon form?



Hmm. Well, there he is. He was the mascot of the "Imagination Pavilion", so I gather, though I knew it only as the Figment ride. 'Figment of your imagination..." get it...?

I had a stuffed Figment, which was "my" stuffed animal among all the others (you understand), and I carried him everywhere. I wish I could find a picture of him to show you, but all the plush Figment's on the Internet are NOT the right one. I remember he had hard plastic eyes, felted horns (on head and tail) and a yellow shirt with a velcro strip down the back so it could come off and on. I'm not sure why--perhaps there were other costumes. However, it no doubt gave me my first unconscious Othering experience with nakedness, allowing me castration transference as I dressed and undressed this horned purple dragon. But, we'll leave that exactly where it is.

I didn't watch TV much as a kid. Just Electric Company, Seasame Street, Mr. Rodgers and other such educational and PBS staples. I certainly knew of other shows, from friends houses, sick days, and etc. Transformers, Smurfs, Care Bears, ThunderCats, and all are definitely in the back of my clogged brain, probably still rubbing stardust and plastic missiles into my aesthetic zones as we speak. Like the other millions of children growing up in front of an 80s TV set (I loved the way those RCA buttons clicked), in my adult life I am still hobbled by a need to spend good, hard-earned money on animation and its characters, toys with folding spring-loaded parts, and video games which allow you to pretend that you in fact are any of these things.

Have we all been brainwashed? Yes. But I wonder how--it strikes me there is a very definite aesthetic in these sorts of characters and programs, that we don't see in material targeted for a similar age group today. Will children of the 90s remember Mighty Morphin Power Rangers with the same fondness? Harry Potter? The books perhaps: but what about the slew of plastic shit slung along with it? Will the Harry Potter toys captivate these child-zombies' cultural pre-conscious? Will people line up at college parties to play the Power Rangers' video game? Normally I always pick three examples with these sorts of rhetorical comparisons, but I can't even think of a third thing from the 90s perhaps affecting a similar age range. Do they exist, and I am just of a decade earlier?

I think there is something about the pixelated, LiteBrite, stardusted 80s cartoon world that speaks outside of its own consumer catagory. There's something about the absolute ridiculousness of creatures mining starbits, of a village populated by little blue men and only one blue woman, of a war fought with weapons that ARE toys, and in which no one ever dies, ever. It's just so zany, so obviously fake, it takes the uncanny valley and flips it inside out, dragging it back around to cover over reality, painting it all yellow, red, and blue and covered in stars, making horrible things like the Reagan years, and the Bush years (when all of this stuff miraculous became hip again) disappear and seem as unreal as cheaply-animated children.

But that sort of cultural analysis is all after the fact, of course. A five year-old doesn't know anything except what's on the playroom floor. So there is something else, something aesthetic, something even a child can understand because, it seems, only children (or adults who act like children) understand it.

Look at Figment's shirt. What the hell is up with the yellow sweater? (My stuffed animal's shirt did not have his name on it, I don't think.) A purple dragon isn't too far out of whack--not so far from the horrid purple dinosaur of the next decade. (There's my third example!) But dressed in a yellow sweater with red piping... hmm. Why dress him at all? He wore other costumes in the Disney attraction, yet he still maintains the "I may be an anthropomorphic magical being, but I'm not naked, and don't you dare mention my lack of pants."

Let's see what other cartoons were sporting in the 80s.



The Care Bears are a good place to start. The rainbow colors, the symbols, the cute and cuddly animals bearing (ha) almost no resemblance to real animals are all of note. In the show, they would often use a lot of bogus gadgets, like "crystals of caring", and speciously designed robots. The bizarre, greeting-card simple world-view goes along with the rainbow colors; everything equally represented along a arbitrary color wheel of a plot, thought very cute.



Rainbow Brite is very similar to the Care Bears in its use of Rainbow Colors, appropriate, color-specific characterizations, and also the greeting-card plot, not insignificantly because both Rainbow Brite and Care Bears were originally conceived by greeting card companies (American Greetings and Hallmark respectively) before they became toys, shows, and all the rest. Rainbow Brite is perhaps more interesting because of its tendency towards a very colorful "lolita"-esque sexual fetish, especially in latter day interpretations. Of course, the "furry" sub-culture (whether sexual or not) could be said to have strong roots around the Care Bears as well. What is it about these simple characters, over-emphasizing a simplistic, ecumenical Good such as "caring and feelings" or "bright colors and friendship" that drives the mind towards sex? Is it a childhood spent exploring a new body on the floor of the playroom in front of the TV, or is it the fantastical innocence? A play world of bright colors, no AIDS epidemic, consistently cute and cuddly personalities, and overflowing and unrejectable friendship sounds like a pretty awesome sexuality to inhabit, come to think of it. I would be in favor of such characters teaching sex ed to teens, even graphically. Who wouldn't listen to a Care Bear telling you that while you can't get pregnant from oral sex, you can still get herpes? If Rainbow Brite told me to wear a condom, you bet I'd wrap it up. Is that twisted? Maybe. But sexual role models as good and caring as Care Bears and Rainbow Brite don't come along every day, or... ever.



So, perhaps the Voltron Force is not the best place for kids to learn about sex and gender roles. Sure, the princess can drive the Blue Lion, but she is also eye candy for the rest of the team. I'm pretty sure the translations are not accurate--I'd swear Hunk makes a poorly-translated masturbation joke at her expense at one point. And I don't even want to take on the subject of Nanny. But we do see the color theme represented again (I never could figure out why their uniforms don't match the colors of their Lions).
But what I think is really interesting is the Force's street clothes. Unfortunately, I couldn't find a picture, but they seem to wear anything they want, even though the rest of the planet wears archaic garments, and other planets wear downright historical garb. Its a very casual feeling, whether you think about it or not. One of them is wearing a race car uniform, another a cowboy suit! It is Japanese, so perhaps there is something I'm not picking up on. But regardless, they wear loose fitting, not uniform, casual looking clothes when their not forming Voltron. This is a new thing for children's TV; clothes rarely look so natural on their wearers, instead they look as if picked to be normal, not natural.



Teddy Ruxpin--the cyborg toy culture forgot. I've spoken about his analog-robomorphic weirdness elsewhere, so instead let's focus on the oddity that is this friendly bear's tunic. It seems the cartoon was designed to look like the toy, which came equipped with a velcro shirt, as easily removable as my Figment toy. Before we start asking questions about why any child would want to force-strip a bear reading him/her a bedtime story, let's set that line of inquiry aside; it was NECESSARY to access the toy's battery and cassette compartments. But the clothing does usher in a similar feeling of casualness. In imaginary worlds populated by anthropomorphic animals, nakedness is really not a big deal. Naturally, one must be clothed or have fur--but this clothing is more representative of one's characteristic color or of a general casual nature, rather than any standards of society. Tunics: why not? If we're going to be building a giant airship, we might as well be comfortable. What are you wearing there, little child, while you watch? Pants? A skirt? That's cool, I guess. But why bother? A simple band of cloth with arm holes and convenient velcro closure is all you really need in this world. If it's not bright colors, it might as well be comfortable.


Link has the tunic thing down, and Zelda is... merely instructing him on how a belt maintains the tunic's stasis in the "down" position? ...showing him who wears the pants in the kingdom, despite who has the sword? ...simply making everyone, including Link, uncomfortable?
This picture might be a fan construction, I don't really know. Actually, the only thing I know about this show is that Link keeps trying to earn a kiss as a reward for saving the princess, and never gets it, though receiving many cold buckets of water on the head, and other such sobering dismissals. Like, a belt tightening. I guess.
Okay, what is really interesting here is that a game with a pixelated, 8-bit character spawns a animated series, which in turn makes kids want to wear tights and tunics for their Halloween costume. Of course, they were probably much more interested in the sword, but they would still suffer tights for the chance to smash ghosts with light beams in real life.

And after all, isn't that what children's programming is really about? The educational programming has its own agenda, but these sorts of sugar-cereal Saturday specials were focused on initiating play--that is, buying the toys associated with the show. Lots of shows do this, but now they are focused on things like action, or kid-centric humor, or other crap. Watch an episode of My Little Ponies, and you'll see what I mean. There is NOTHING there, no content at all. Each episode is twenty minutes of your favorite toys moving, talking, and looking beautiful on top of waterfalls and galloping down rainbows. It is meant to occur in the background, while you're playing with the toy. Perhaps it is the first shot at "interactive" programming, putting thoughts in your head while toys are in your hand. I guess Howdy Doody did the same thing in its day, but this is a whole new level of interactivity.

My rambling through the bizzare world of 80s children's programming has sort of lost its direction, and necessarily so. The post itself is getting a bit disoriented, so lets sum it up. From what we've seen, 80s cartoons bring the following to the table:

A) A disorienting, utter-fantastical world.

B) Bright, rainbow colors, increasing deorientation, and creating dazziling light patterns on the screen.

C) A wholy casual world-view, based upon abstract costumes, plot, and characterizations, doing little else than to wrap the view in a warm blanket of obliviousness.

D) Perhaps an undercurrent of prepubescent eroticism.

E) A play experience, involving a simulated feedback interaction with an actual toy object, enveloping the child into the world of play with both the toy and the media on the screen simultaneously.

All of this is very heady stuff. The toy companies probably only saw an opportunity to brand their toys, and this is why the 80s cartoon aesthetic dropped off: they just kept selling toys, without thinking why it was working. But a generation of children found their daily play opening a new dimension within their minds--a dimension of fantastical, disorientating (from the "real" world) pure play, where their imagination was reflected in their eyes and their hands simultaneously.

This imaginative, hand-eye coordination is ridiculously important. I won't go into the depths of the somatic unconscious, and I will spare you all the Freud. But let's just say this: the children lifting up Rainbow Brite's skirt and putting Raffi tapes in the Teddy Ruxpin? Ten years later, they would discover the Internet. Think it's unrelated? Think there isn't a Voltron porn out there on the Internet, somewhere?

I don't know if all of that is inherent in Figment's shirt. I actually never watched the TV show based on the character, though I did love the ride at the park, but mostly because I liked the stuffed dragon. But the shirt is bright, bright yellow. Why?

I can say this: during the same time period, I had an imaginary friend who was a dragon. I invented this imaginary friend's death, including staging a funeral for him. I also used to play while watching TV. A lot. Now I listen to music, blog, and read the news and philosophize all at the same time.

Go ahead, watch a few episodes of Rainbow Brite. Better yet, do something else while its on. See how it feels.

I've been Sterlingged

As a study in the weirdness of the internet, and the small (but steady!) readership of this blog, here is my analytics chart for last week, when Bruce Sterling re-posted a picture from my blog post about the SF Museum and Hall of Fame in Seattle.



370-some posts in one day was a pretty big bump for lil' old Interdome.

Also, he and Rudy Rucker have a new short story in Asimov's about the end of the world visualized through the perspectives of two hardcore bloggers in the not-so-distant-future. The story is great; those guys are awesome. Any blogger should get a kick out of it, even the not-SF-and-techno-jargon inclined.


Also, if you examine the chart above, you will notice that most of my hits from search engines are drawn to my pictures of "Greek animals". This has been, consistently, the biggest single draw to the site since I published that post back in 10/07. Again, the Internet is a weird thing.

Dear James Woods... Love, the Internet

So, I was listening to a New York Review of Books podcast today at work. I know, I know: it sounds stupid. In fact, it is stupid. But I knew that I would be binding books for at least four hours today, so I brought in headphones so that I wouldn't go crazy, nor strain my neck from trying to read ebooks off my tiny iPhone sitting near to being in my lap like I normally do.

So, I was listening to a New York Review of Books podcast, and I promised myself that I would only listen to it for entertainment, and not jump right onto the internet and write a blog post about it. But of course, this got my gears grinding, and because it was Daniel Mendelsohn, Pico Iyer, and James Wood discussing the future of reading in a "world of images", (podcast of 10/06/2008) I was brought back to my other posts about the subject, here, and here, among other various places.

And here we are. The opinions of the three speakers was not really that groundbreaking, though it was entertaining. They waxed on about criticism, how nobody reads anymore, and etc. I don't know what it is about James Woods; I don't much agree with him, but again and again I am drawn back to him in my theoretical thoughts. Perhaps it is just the audacity that one would require to write a book called, How Fiction Works. Maybe I admire that in a way. Regardless, it was a comment that Woods made about the writing process that got my wheels whirring this time.

Woods was sharing an anecdote about how the inter-web and technology changes writing. To paraphrase, he said that using a computer makes him write shorter paragraphs. He expressed the anxiety he feels once words have left the top of the screen, and noted that it drove him to compose quicker, more compressed paragraphs.

I could probably say something psychoanalytically oriented about the anxiety of unseen words on a page (could I?!?! what would it be???) or make some snide comment about old guys who simultaneously can't find the zoom setting in Microsoft Word and/or won't admit they need reading glasses. But these are all cheap shots.

What I really thought, however, was that this anecdote really sums it up. The literary establishment is afraid of the internet.

Of course, everyone says the internet is a great invention. They have to, otherwise they would admit that they don't understand it. Being a Luddite is no longer quaint, like my 8th grade history teacher that referred to computers as "demon boxes". Even classicists must have email accounts. To express dislike for computers and the internet openly would be like refusing to wear clothes.

But, the people who make up the "literary establishment" don't like it, and their anxiety towards it is expressed in numerous ways. It makes sense; you have spend a good portion of your life dealing with books, and probably acheived a certain amount of success in that line. So when some thirteen year-old shows you how quickly they can be stalked online, the first fear is understandable.

And it goes on from there. The folks in the podcast discussed blog posts in which the poster had not even read the book in question, and the "240" following commenters had not either. True, that sort of idiocy does exist on the internet. However, the academy isn't immune, either. Look at the use of "post-modern" in any undergraduate class; and even some books are written and published without proper citation.

But the highlighting of the idiocy on the internet as characteristic of its literary form is about as well-placed as spitting on books for allowing the most annoying charlatans print their tell-all novels. In other words, bad writers are hardly the fault of paper and ink.

All it takes is looking at one or two of the well-formed, talented communities on the internet to see how empty this criticism really is. The best example I have found is Slashdot, a forum for self-described "nerds". One who stumbles upon the board is unlikely to have his post read unless he is well-qualified. The system of post-ranking rivals roly-playing games in its complexity (though intentioned so). The end result is, only the most, most quality posts are read, and the crap is easily filtered out. Not unlike the academy, no?

Understanding the technology is the key to mastering the form. I've said it before, but the fact of near-universal literacy (the mastering of printed symbols) does not make literature universal. There are plenty of people who can read the dictionary, but aren't sure what to do with it. And so, the tech-nerds have some of the best publishing systems on the internet, because for pete's sake, they designed web publishing.

Another fun example is xkcd, a web comic. Written by and for nerds. It is decidedly lo-tech, with an (almost) daily post composed mostly of stick figures and gentle internet witticisms and nerd inside jokes. But check this out:


It pokes fun of the very criticism that the literaries were levying, and in one of the worst examples. YouTube comments are mostly stupid, often hateful and racist, and almost always not contributing to anything that could be called constructive. But something amazing happened.

YouTube actually created an "audio preview" function when you post a comment! This is nothing less that the incredible march of progress in action, and through stick-figure humor no less!

My point is not that stick-figures are the future, though I would not rule that possible future out. My point is that this is something that only people who understand both the technology and how it is used would grasp the genius of, and be able to make use of it. Form, function, and a bit of artistry as well. This is as much of an responsible, quality creative process as there is. Not that YouTube now equals Proust, but I would say Internet Web Comics = Writing and Critique.

Blogging is my strong suit on the internet. Other than that, I would only consider myself a "power user", and that only marginally. (I still have yet to have a comment featured on Slashdot; I'm waiting to submit until I know more about networking.) I can see how the technology of blogging has positively affected my writing abilities.

Before blogs, I would never have attempted to write an aphorism. Now, my non-fiction writing is composed mainly thereof. It may not be AP style, but I've also learned a thing or two about writing succinctly and to the point, and also about trying to maintain an audience. (Audience? Are you out there?)

In addition, there is something lovely about well-formed journal entries that can immediately be exposed to an audience. I don't receive many comments on my posts, but enough to tell me they are read once in a while. And this is more than enough, because it makes the audience real. I wouldn't say that I write "to the masses", or to any other target audience in particular, but it makes me write in a certain way when I know that others will be able to read it instantly, and although I can edit, I can never withdraw what I have posted. Each blog post is a thought, a musing; perhaps they are not that interesting, but they are too me. Each time I post I have reflected on a particular thing, organized my ideas, and composed them into a brief span of text that I am totally willing for anyone to step up and read. It's not that its some sort of amazing digital democracy, or even a second life. It's more of a voice; it is a printing press that I make and maintain myself. It gives my writing and my thoughts a body that they might not have had. Besides what this does for my skills as a writer, it's very enjoyable to myself and my psyche.

So, Mr. Woods, don't sell the internet short. If you can't make the technology do what you want, to represent your thoughts in exactly the way that you wish yourself and others to see them, ask a nerd! Most likely s/he would be more than happy to teach you about these new tools for us writers. New tools are nothing to fear, as long as you're trained.