Technology and Its Discontents

A little reinterpretation of Nietzsche for the long weekend:

"The means employed by the ascetic priest that we have discovered up to now--the general muting of the feeling of life, mechanical activity, the petty pleasure, above all "love of one' neighbor," herd organization, the awakening of the communal feeling of power through which the individual's discontent with himself is drowned in his pleasure in the prosperity of the community--these are, by modern standards, his innocent means in the struggle with displeasure; let us now turn to the more interesting means, the "guilty" ones. They all involve one thing: some kind of orgy of feeling--employed as the most effective means of deadening dull, paralyzing, protracted pain; hence priestly inventiveness in thinking through this single question--"how can one produce an orgy of feeling?"--has been virtually inexhaustible."

"Fundamentally, every great affect has this power, provided it explodes suddenly: anger, fear, voluptuousness, revenge, hope, triumph, despair, cruelty; and the ascetic priest has indeed pressed into his service indiscriminately the whole pack of savage hounds in man and let loose now this one and now that, always with the same end in view: to awaken in men from their slow melancholy, to hunt away, if only for a time, their dull pain and lingering misery, and always under cover of a religious interpretation and "justification". Every such orgy of feel has to be paid for afterward, that goes without saying--it must make the sick sicker; and that is why this kind of cure for pain is, by modern standards, "guilty." Yet, to be fair, one must insist all the more that it was employed with a good conscience, that the ascetic priest prescribed it in the profoundest faith in its utility, indeed indispensability--and even that he was often almost shattered by the misery he had caused..."

"The ascetic ideal has a goal--this goal is so universal that all the other interests of human existence seem, when compared with it, petty and narrow; it interprets epochs, nations, and men inexorably with a view to this one goal; it permits no other interpretation, no other goal; it rejects, denies, affirms, and sanctions solely from the point of view of its interpretation (and has their ever been a system of interpretation more thoroughly thought through?) [...] Where is the match of this closed system of will, goal and interpretation? Why has it not found its match?--Where is the other "one goal"?
But they tell me it is not lacking, it has not merely waged a long and successful fight against this ideal, it has already conquered this ideal in all important respects: all of modern is supposed to bear witness to that--modern science which, as a genuine philosophy of reality, clearly believes in itself alone, clearly possesses the courage for itself and the will to itself, and has up to now serviced well enough without God, the beyond, and the virtues of denial. Such noisy agitators' chatter, however, does not impress me: these trumpeters of reality are bad musicians, their voices obviously do not come from the depths, the abyss of the scientific conscience does not speak through them--for today the scientific conscience is an abyss--the word "science" in the mouths of such trumpeters is simply an indecency, an abuse, and a piece of impudence. The truth is precisely the opposite of what is asserted here: science today has absolutely no belief in itself, let alone an ideal above it--and where it still inspries passion, love, ardor, and suffering at all, it is not the opposite of the ascetic ideal but rather the latest and noblest form of it. Does that sound strange to you?
Today there are plenty of modest and worthy laborers among scholars, too, who are happy in their little nooks; and because they are happy there, they sometimes demand rather immodestly that one ought to be content with things today, generally--especially in the domain of science, where so much that is useful femains to be done. I am not denying that; the last thing I want is to destroy the pleasure these honest workers take in their craft: for I approve of their work. But that one works rigorously in the sciences and that there are contented workers certainly does not prove that science as a whole possesses a goal, a will, an ideal, or the passion of a great faith. The opposite is the case, to repeat: where it is not the latest expression of the ascetic ideal--and the exceptions are too rare, noble, and atypical to refute the general proposition--science today is a hiding place for every kind of discontent, disbelief, gnawing worm, despectio sui. bad conscience--it is the unrest of the lack of ideals, the suffering from the lack of any great love, the discontent in the face of involuntary contentment.
Oh, what does science not conceal today! How much, at any rate, is it meant to conceal! The proficiency of our finest scholars, their headless industry, their heads smoking day and night, their very craftsmanship--how often the real meaning of all this lies in the desire to keep something hidden from oneself! Science as a means of self-narcosis: do you have experience of that?

--On the Genealogy of Morals, third essay

Like Nietzsche or hate him, the great thing about him is that his words are written in such a polemic style as to be timeless. I'm no Jungian, but there definitely seem to be repeating aspects of culture, especially with such concepts left over from previous centuries we haven't fully dealt with.

So when the man rants against the "ascetic ideal", a morality of guilt and debt encompassing the span of human emotions and violences in society, I of course read him as speaking about Christianity (still a problem), but also of Capitalism, Christianity's second coming. If "orgy of feeling" doesn't find its expression in our culture of rampant consumerism, then I must be looking at a different mall that you. And as for its expression as an overarching ideal, wiping other interpretations clean off the map, one need look no further than its continual reign in the shadow of its recent overarching failure of exuberance. I can accept the facts of history, but clearly the "free market" is a hopeless excuse for a lack of thinking.

But the "scholars of science" really spoke to me in the last section I quoted. Not in terms of scientists, who were the erstwhile champions of reason in half-hearted handholding with Christian morals during the 19th century. These folks have, amazingly, really come around. I think it has something to do with the last eight years. The onslaught of abuse by the ruling powers in this country against science and learning as a whole let scientists finally shrug off their "culture war"detractors, not so much refute post-modernism as eagerly conscript it, and turn around to fight against its true enemies, and promote actual, useful learning. We're facing some pretty harsh trials on the natural science front, and for a good eight years, the scholars had to learn to stand up for themselves. The scientist is no longer the patsy of the science-industrial complex, and now the hero of mankind against the ignorant tyrants. I think they've done admirably, all things considered. They held their ground, and now seem to be preparing to be humanity's only hope. Whether they succeed is another question--but I do believe they are finding a good motivation within themselves. As the idiot anti-choicers and the creationists dash their own brains out upon the infinite progress of history, science steps over their fallen corpses with grace.

But there is a set rising to take the place of science--to triumph the ascetic ideals within their own head music, tooting their own horns in obliviousness to the motions of traffic around them.

Who are these noisy, agitating chatterers? The newest and noblest form of the ascetic ideal? The technologists.

I give the same caveat as the philosopher: far be it from me to disparage the happy craftsperson, hard at work. I do approve of their products--in certain ways. But yet, while science has perhaps found its true calling, to keep us from asphixiating ourselves off the planet, the technologists are tinkering, talking, and more often than not thinking very highly of themselves.

We see some benefits, and to argue against the existence of positive technology is just to be ignorant. It is lovely that our gardens are starting to tend themselves, that we can twitter composting recipes across the planet, and that our human-powered transportation processes waste oil into biofuel while we ride. But what is the goal here? The majority of the Instructables, the Maker projects, and other DIY, open-source, crowd-sourced, personal-tech, haker-savvy projects are somehow linkable to greeness, sustainability, and some flavor of democracy. But to what goal? They are mostly parlor tricks, or bragging rights, or homages to the very technologies they claim to be advancing a "cause" against.

I'm already feeling guilty for opening a line of complaint against these folks, who are doing their best to refute capitalism with the tools they have. Surely there can't be anything wrong with simple creativity. It's a technological arm of artistic expression, right? If not purely harmless, it has to be a good thing.

And it is. Like I said, I could never tell a worker that s/he is wrong for working on what s/he chooses. And yet, the ascetic ideal rears its ugly head.

Again, I slap myself as I open my mouth, but a create example of the ascetic ideal is the TED conferences. Here is a yearly gathering of very smart people, getting together to share ideas and promote feelings of generally making the world a better place. I am currently listening to all of the TED talks, via their audio podcast, and I love them. I've learned about some great stuff, and some of it is really inspiring.

But you know what is also a feed for learning about new, inspiring work? Gizmodo. Can you believe they made a TV that big, that light, that crystal clear? How about the new handheld device that will change the world? Did you hear about the new wireless service that will revolutionize how you get information?

Technology is interesting, it's ex'citing, and its moving very rapidly, spurred on by some really creative and talented people. And, it is, first and foremost, a business. Technology is capitalism. This is an unavoidable fact.

Let's just skip the arguments about consumer culture, and greenwashing, and carbon footprints. We know how technology affects these. Let's talk about the culture and its proponents, the technologists.

Every person who takes the stage at TED is there to promote something. What they are promoting maybe be as overtly capitalist as a Hollywood movie, or a VC startup. Or, it could be as benign as an art exhibit about climate change, or as positively helpful as a new mapping software to help aid organizations. But yet it is a something, a particular technological object promoted for its abilities, and a fetish as a datapoint of personal ingenuity. "Hi, I'm ___, and I'm here to tell you about my amazing invention." Or take the Maker culture. "Hi, I'm ____, and I'm here to show you how I warped this technology into something new." This is how new technologies come about, but it also how the ascetic ideal is renewed, and perpetuated.

The words I am looking at are "new", "invention", "hack", "creative solution", and "technology". All of these things are objects, no different in their literal objectivity from a piece of rock, or a rotting plant. Except, these things are meant to grab our attention, because of their specific, amazing quality of being on the cutting edge. "Hey! This is different! Look over here! Be an early adopter of this! Tweet this url to your friends! Buy one today! Make your own! Add your comments!" Technologists' tools may be the soldering bench, the drawing board, and the creative faculties of the mind, but their real domain is the orgy of feelings. They seek to excite you, draw you in, distract you, and in the end, sell you something (even if it is for free).

Technology is changing our world for the better. But you don't need a single bit of it. The only technology you need are molecules. Oxygen. Water. Proteins. Maybe some sunlight. This is not the domain of the technologist--this is the domain of the scientist. Twitter might revolutionize mass protest, but you know who is still computing your dietary needs? No, not an iPhone app. A scientist, working somewhere, not holding press conferences, and not networking for VC at a light and sound show in California.

Who traffics in "anger, fear, voluptuousness, revenge, hope, triumph, despair, cruelty"? Psychologists might study these things. But technologists market them. (I like to think that although writers traffic in these as well, they could do so with the psychoanalytic skill of a scientist... but perhaps this is too much wishful thinking). A handheld device triumphs you over your world, and others. An open-source hack is your revenge on the proprietary marketers. Your biodiesel car is your bandaid against the fear of climate change, and your live-tweet of the election is your libidinal investment in hope. The real material which technology interfaces with is not the world in which we live, but our emotions. Technology is not a mere tool or a thing, but it is a fetish, an idol, a signifier standing in for thousands of emotions we are channeling, thanks to the efforts of technology's proponents. A portable phone is now a tool, but a smart phone is TECHNOLOGY! Wikipedia is now simply a reference, but CitizenTube is a Democratizing Technology! A light bulb goes on and off, but a power-saving LED bulb built from repurposed film canisters is a Technological, Open-Source Hack!

Don't get me started on black hoodies with circuit boards sewn to them.

Look--technology is good. Experimentation is good. Open-source is great (when compared to proprietary copyrights, anyway). As the man said, these technological priests act with good conscience, and don't intend the harm in which they take part. The greatest lesson that Nietzsche teaches, which is the true timeless lesson, is that our biggest enemies are those closest to us, and those that lie within ourselves. It would be easy enough to rail against Christians, or Capitalists, or some other easily indentifiable enemy. But Nietzsche is not asking us to fight the Christians. He's showing us how to win our ongoing fight against that tyrannical priest within ourselves.

But the fact remains--we live in a world which is locked within an ascetic ideal. We live in a world which privileges pain, individual achievement, and glosses over the facts of reality with a debasing appeal to our lower instincts. We are distracted from our power to think clearly, and to look at the human species as a magnificent engine, by the ideals telling us our individual dramas are a sign of our own worth. We are encouraging ourselves to take our material things as the objects of our desire, to channel all of our efforts into mere products, and to attain the highest state of fetishistic engagement with these things, which is promoted not as the religion that it is, but as real love, and real desire.

When a social network develops that encourages its members to throw down their gadgets in the same wild abandon with which they will throw off their clothes and make love in the streets, when the Internet actually starts connecting peoples' body parts, rather than selling them porn for behind closed doors, and promoting opportunities for individualized, closeted alcoholic repression, and when we start hacking our bodies so that we can better express our desires, rather than to better sublimate them, then I will believe technology has become free from the fetters of the ascetic ideal, and found its true internal purpose as part of the pursuit of humanity. Until then, it's just a bigger and more HD TV.

A Long Cough Ending in Silence

Prepare yourself for the mostly timely, Internet-syndication-ready post you've ever read.

TWITTER-H1N1-SOCIALWEB-TECHOBAMAMERICA-2.0-POSTINGLY!!!!

You should have already linkbacked this post. You should have already favorited, commented, Delicious'ed, and StumbleUpon'ed this post.

It absolutely kills me that StumbleUponed is now a legitimate verb.

This is also going to be one of those long, winding posts of mine, wherein I grab you by the hand, and take you through a winding, decaying carcass of a strip mall set up as some post-apocalyptic museum in homage of a dead country-western band, recently sainted by the local zombie cult.

By this, I clearly mean a cavernous shell of hyperlinks, which you will no doubt avoid, because who knows how long they have been sitting out and eww, I mean government document PDFs? You actually want me to read that?

But do not fear; just like those other times past, I also have a destination. A point, in which you will finally exit into that harsh, glaring desert sun, wondering if the wind-stripped carcasses of animals long extinct are actually bleaching white in the sun, or if it is your previous notions and categories now lying in the dust, rib cages bare, exposed to the truth. That is, you would feel that extraordinary realization, if you hadn't bolted for the emergency exit a third of the way through, totally unbeknownst to me. Where do they keep going? Are they spontaneously combusting in the face of pure, restrained gnosis? Or are they cowering in some corner, reduced to an archaic animal state by the depth of that psychic well? (It's either Lawnmower Man or Altered States with me, all the time, isn't it?)

Either way--enough with the introductions. Pay attention, jerks. I've got about eight tabs open in my browser, and I swear to god, they ain't going to re-tweet themselves.


Well, we've already made a big stink about the fact that the media was about eighteen hours behind the H1N1 news. Major media victory for Wikipedia and Twitter, and no one is really surprised. The media it seems, has sort of grimly taken defeat, even ignoring this opportunity for a major Media x.x, Twitter-caught-not-wearing-panties story, instead moving on to other things. Kind of like the bully who finally stops picking on the little kid who all of a sudden has a lot of friends and doesn't even quite remember the bully's name anyway, because "This sucks, and I'm going to go light bugs on fire."

The Government, interestingly enough, has been on the Twitter side of winning, it seems. Maybe they are that skinny kid, finally figured out that a sense of humor really impresses everybody a lot more than stomping people and throwing their shoes on the roof. The CDC and other gov't organizations have refrained from big media appearances, sound bites, and Good Morning America tutorials on how to duct tape your family's orifices closed. They played the hand close to the chest, releasing a little bit of information, not confirming or denying a whole lot, and then mildly suggesting "to check our new, H1N1-ready web site for updates." This sort of thing kills the media. What good is attending a press conference if all the info is a RT away from everyone knowing it anyway? They can't even be the primary link anymore! Pandemicflu.gov doesn't sell any advertising! Fuck!

Everyone and their Internet-Marketer-Pyramid-Schemer is up to date on the dead media story. However, to some crazy asshole who is fascinated by government bureaucracy, there is something even more pungent about this story. A government person saying, "yeah, just check our websites for updates..." What?!?! Two years ago, this would be a punch in the face. A punch in the face, and then a kick in the groin, spit in the face, and the delivery of one of Sean Connery's lines from The Rock.

Three or so years ago I was working for a non-profit hosting a conference about disasters and global warming. We were researching people to invite as speakers, and needed to have some more people from the government come out. Getting referred to a website for contact information was the complete brush off. First of all, there wasn't any contact information: maybe just an assistant's email, a operator's phone number, or a comment form. Second, there wasn't even any real websites: instead, there were circuitous paths of links, taking you from within agency to inter-agency, to liason, to office of the under-secretary. Site map? Ha! The only thing more irritating was trying to navigate a school of higher education's website.

Case-in-point: I use this as my go-to example of Bush era bureaucracy. I was trying to find someone worth inviting from the Department of Homeland Security. That website was totally ridiculous. I managed to find the re-organization flow charts, (you might remember after Katrina, DHS was totally re-organized to make it "better") hoping that it was only because of the reorganization that I couldn't manage to hit upon a single page listing the mailing address of anyone.

Here is a flow chart from 2004 (It's on the 3rd page. Note how two pages of instructions are required for this flow chart).

Now, here is a chart from 2008, after the re-organization. Note the first chart of DHS is followed by an additional 24!!! charts, detailing each component. Much simpler, no?

But it actually is far more complex than that. If you read the entire history of DHS organization, you will find out that the Katrina re-organization was actually the fourth re-organization, or perhaps three and a half, stemming from the legislation planned for the third reorganization, but ending up different. The second chart I listed is the current state of affairs at DHS. All in all, DHS has gone through approximately EIGHT re-organizations in it's six year history from 2002 to Spring 2008--roughly a re-organization every six months or so, except for an unusual period of stability in 2004. But don't take my word for it (35-page history of a seven-year old bureau, including twelve unique pages of historical charts).

And one wonders how DHS lost $15B in contracted money in six years...

Despite the neo-con Cheney politics, and the fear-mongering control of the country with the Patriot Act, and other various criminal and Fascist acts during those eight years, I hope the legacy Bush becomes historically known for is a brilliant ability to gut a government with a mixture of control and laisse-faire policies. This sort of bureaucracy is a completely new addition to the history of totalitarianism. On one hand, spying (both internal and external), intimidiation, fear-mongering, and torture become common-place. On the other hand, certain budgets are sliced to bits, while other agencies are given so much money and manpower they can't do anything but eat themselves, like a cancer. It's diabolical, really. I'm reminded of certain parts of Catch-22: Lt. Scheisskopf and his parades--then the announcement that all parades will be postponed, which he throws himself into effort of announcing, as much as he had formerly poured effort into the parades. Remember, in the end of the book, it's Scheisskopf that becomes the commanding general. If like any other runaway leader, Bush had had about twenty years behind the wheel, we would be cooking our neighbors in the rubble.

But hey, things are different now, right? Change done happened, and he fixed the websites! DHS hasn't re-organized since March 2008! The people won!

Wait a minute--what's this? Swine flu? Shit.

No matter, I'll just check my Twitter. See how hip this government is? CDC has a Twitter account, informing me of emergency information as it happens. All I have to do is opt-in, and bing! Updates to my mobile, or wherever. Technology is awesome!

Let's see who else @CDCemergency is following. Maybe I'll get some other good government info while I'm at it, WebTwoOhing it up. Whoa. Following 74. Looks like WHO, the White House, a dozen other specialty government crisis units, about nine FEMA regions, and every major metro Red Cross has a Twitter account too. That's a lot of Emergency Tweets.

There's got to be a better way. I know! I'll follow @CDC_eHealth: providing me all the latest opportunities, so I can connect with only the real important ones. That's the ticket. Let's see, they're directing me to their very own Social Media site! Amazing! Obama! Social Media government: this country is making leaps and bounds!

But... whoa.

Five CDC widgets?

Website badges with scrolling updates?

A CDC YouTube Channel?

CDC Podcasts?

RSS feed?

A CDC Flickr site?

A CDC Facebook page?

A CDC MySpace page?

CDC eCards?!?!?!?

What, no Match.com profile? I'm not kidding. Those all really exist.

What is the deal? I demand a flow chart to determine which one of these sources is updated first! Where is the transperency in this Web 2.0 re-organization?

I know information sets us free, but this is getting ridiculous. I think technology is great like everybody else--but this reminds me of a keynote speech at SXSWi I've haven't read.

All kidding and paranoia about incipient governmental bureaucracy aside (the two naturally go hand in hand), we are discussing health here. Health, to some people, is a very important issue. In fact, as I recently mentioned, it is one of those just ever-so-volatile human issues that can leap in to flames of paranoia at the slightest spark. Something about the integrity of the body just drives people wild, builds them into mobs, and makes them ready to sacrifice themselves and their neighbors for their own safety. Terry Jones talks about it a bit here. Totally history, folks. True.

Health is also one of those knobs by which governments in power tweak the biomass of humanity, turning up the flame when necessary, and diffusing it at other times. When will a people accept a curfew, or refuse to cross a line, no matter what? When you call it a "quarantine". Information about health is a very dangerous game to play with--an outbreak is one of those Foucauldian moments when the juridico-discursive, the pathologico-institutional complex, and the sexual biologico-paranoia of the mass just lines up perfectly. It's a post-structuralist textbook example, here.

But here, let's ask Foucault himself. (Bear in mind he is literally discussing madness, here, but I think the parallel is obvious.)

"All those forms of unreason which had replaced leprosy in the geography of evil, and which had been banished into the remotest social distance, now became a visible leprosy and offered their running sores to the promiscuity of men. Unreason was once more present; but marked now by an imaginary stigma of disease, which added its powers of terror.
"Thus it is the realm of the fantastic and not within the rigor of medical thought that unreason joins illness and draws closer to it. Long before the problem of discovering to what degree the unreasonable is pathological was formulated, there had formed, in the space of confinement and by the alchemy peculiar to it, a melange combining the dread of unreason and the old specters of disease. From a great distance, the old confusions about leprosy functioned once again; and it is the vigor of these fantastic themes which was the first agent of synthesis between the world of unreason and the medical universe. They first communicated through the hallucinations of fear, combining the infernal mixtures of "corruption" and "taint". It is important, perhaps decisive for the place madness was to occupy in modern culture, that homo medicus was not called into the world of confinement as an arbiter, to divide what was crime from what was madness, what was evil from what was illness, but rather as a guardian, to protect others from the vague danger that exuded through the walls of confinement." (205 in my Vintage edition).

If you're unfamiliar with Madness and Civilization, the point Foucault is making here is that in the 18th century there was a unification conducted with illness and "unreason", a new concept of mental defect growing along with the age of reason. This "madness" was also made synonymous with prisons, and the spirit that caused people to deport lepers made them wish to imprison the mad. Doctors, therefore, become unique personas in that they are not called upon simply to diagnose or treat the insane, but to keep them away from society.

The theme is not so unfamiliar to us. In an age of remarkable health breakthroughs, American society has sanitized certain health problems. Heart disease, diabetes, cancer, and even AIDS are now Lifestyle problems--not disease. If you die of one of these things it was merely a lapse of your willpower, just as you probably should have lost that weight after college, but you didn't. If it was an infection, it was probably somebody else's fault--the doctor, the hospital, or the farmer who shat on your strawberries.

Disease happens in the third world now. Organic, health-conscious parents don't innoculate their children anymore--instead they give money to polio charities, fighting disease somewhere else. They send malaria nets to Africa, or failing that, just adopt the kids back here. Sickness, for us, is a lifestyle problem (sorry guys, can't go out drinking tonight, I've got a cold) or a foreign, developing issue. (Hey, water issues are real important in sick countries where they don't have the bold look of Kohler!)

So when that developing nation so close to home develops a new strain of flu, it is a foreign problem. More than that: it is a dirty problem. It is swine flu, a biblical association with that dirty, most guilty food-choice we have, despite the fact it is also part bird flu and part good-old-fashioned human flu. The Israelis may have been the only ones to say it, (god-bless 'em!) but the connotation was obvious. It is south-of-the-border-disease, the land of eating-the-wrong-parts-of-the-animal. Isn't that where all those tomatoes came from???

So what do the people do? Call the doctors. No, they aren't calling them to get better hand washing instructions--something that could actually save them, just like it always has from the flu--they are asking them for protection. Close the borders, deport them, where is it now, where is it NOW, is it NEAR ME oh god but I must KNOW instantly, in real time!

Despite the fact that this is the same lifestyle sickness, more or less, that keeps countless young singles from going out on a perfectly good weekend night during the winter months, and also regularly kills 36,000 people a year. It is a pandemic. Somebody wake up the media and let them know.

My point, of course, is not to say that a new flu pandemic is not important to fight, track, and limit in spread. These things are still important, just like they always are with germs. And what is still the best tactic to fight it? Revoking Green Cards? Keeping Twitter refreshing every 30 seconds? No! Wash your goddamn hands!

We have, in this country, a mental imbalance: a disease. We have a pathological image of our bodies. We do not understand them, we fear them, and we seek to control them. Our bodies are our disease, which we seek to forget, to ostracize, and to reduce, hiring countless doctors to keep our bodies' functions limited and out of sight.

With the constantly expanding horizon of our consciousnesses, we seek to control our bodies. Our vast information networks are kept humming, diagnosing us via Web MD, perpetuating a lifestyle of paranoiac-pathologization. Our government keeps unfolding in a vast fractal pit of total information awareness, swallowing meaning into great vacuums of data.

The diagnosis and the cure. The diagnosis is the unknown, the foreign. The cure is control, research, and constant recitation of the litanies of the social democracy. The diagnosis is diet and exercise, the cure is going to the doctor. The diagnosis and the cure... what about good old protein, and amino acids? A little exercise? Those are important? Quick, prescribe me some! Pills with proper doses, and rotating regiments of calculated maximum heart rates. I can lifestyle my way out of this! I can spend enough money to make it happen!

These regimes are building up around us, a bureaucracy of reason walling us in as the departments of our ego re-organize, and re-organize again, knowing eventually it will find that proper pattern to guarantee Body Security. If we can't do it with weapons, we can do it with information. If we can't do it with information, we'll do it with meta-information. Organize our thoughts, our approach, our strategy, and try again. Hypothesize, plan, outline, and try again. Metastasizing units of thought, processing, processing, processing, spitting out ideas, sound bites, mnemonics, top ten lists, and headlines. An immune system, attacking its own organs, because it's programming told it to.

Where is the flesh, in all of this? Where are the running noses, the dripping eyes, the clean, clear flows of mucus bleeding our vessels and cavities off, flushing them clean with the secretions made for that very purpose? They've been stopped up, dammed, and cut off at the source with the same stimulants and steroids that keep us achieving, moving forward, and purifying the lifestyle.

Where is the good, clean fat cells? The stores of energy, our bodies own batteries, tucked away into the crevices of our skeletons like the granaries of a city grown fat on its success and its peace. Our aesthetic has become one of famine, because our neurotic minds can't handle the body weighing it down. We run on fumes, because the sloshing of fuel makes us quiver in fear at the sound of our insides.

Where is the muscle? The smooth, knitted fibers, trained not only for efficiency but for adaptability by constant use, the dynamic infrastructure of daily work, the conversion of the body into a tool of the trade of living, rather than into an infomercial exercise device itself.

In 2006, the greatest cause of stopped MTA trains due to sickness were because of people passing out from not eating.

The ability not to fart or urinate in front of a lover is the subject of modern television drama.

We have iPhone apps for counting calories, but our doctors refuse to put our medical records online.

We wear masks against the flu, but teenagers can't figure out condoms.


It's the horrible truth of the world, really. I don't expect it to change. As a species, we are of a certain nature that plunges toward the future, shedding flaming members of our composite humanity into the wind like particles of smoke. Only it massive, gushing clouds are they even really visible.

This is the point at which I regretfully break off, cutting you loose. Unfortunately, nothing so poignant as a desert or a carcass--instead, merely the beginning of another long hallway of Internet, stretching out in front of you.

But if you want a little souvenir of truth to take with you, I guess all there is to say is that any blog post that's going to tell you anything uncomfortably true is probably going to start ironically, and end tragically.

get well soon human,

Adam

Dead Can't Dance

Interesting Traits of the Species # 847301:

Why do we lionize people after they are dead? No matter who a person was in life, we tend to create an incredibly rosy picture in our obituaries. Eulogies, of course, should be positive, because these are designed to help people getting over the loss of a close person at a funeral. And additionally, I see nothing wrong with painting a positive picture of some one's life, glossing over some bad moments or personal flaws in order to emphasize the individual's good traits and memorable acts in order to create a more ideal characterization in order to remember the person in our daily lives.

But that positive-humanistic dreamitism aside, the body is being thrown in a hole, or better yet, committed to rapid oxidation. Why must we act, for decorum's sake if nothing else, like there is some sacredness to the departed soul?

I'm thinking specifically of Boris Yeltsin. All the news coverage talks about the "passing of a leader", and even those who hated him say, "I have no good words for him, and do not want to say anything bad about the deceased." In the CNN article (first link in this paragraph), a woman is quoted as saying, "Of course he made some mistakes, but who doesn't?" Yeah, everyone makes some mistakes, but not every one's mistake is invading Chechnya. (More warm remarks for Yeltsin by world leaders, as compiled on Wikipedia.)

This reminds me of the lionization of Pope John Paul II when he died. (Although, perhaps a term other than "lionization" is implied by his religious standing.) You would have thought he was an American hero by measure of the American media coverage of the death. What gives? Naturally, I would expect Catholics to be upset, and with reason. But this country has a history of fairly critical coverage of the Vatican. And I think that the coverage far exceeds due decency to a dead leader of a religion and borders on propaganda.

The person is dead! You would think that this gives us the chance to say whatever we want about the former person. But instead, we heavily critique when they are alive, and then once they are dead, we recognize the innocence of the soul, seperated from its corpse. Naturally I could take the religious angle to explain this phenomenon, but I don't think that it is really necessary.

I think we do this out of fear. Immortality of the soul aside, I think that we are literally scared of people talking shit about us when we are corpses. And therefore, we refuse to talk badly about the dead as a taboo. But maybe if we didn't have this taboo, and still cared about what people thought about our lives as a sum of our human existence, we would think a little harder about what we did while we still had some life in our bones. How will we be remembered? Well, if the media surrounding death is any indication, reverently and respectfully, no matter what we did. Of course, some people will be demonized. But these few "absolutely evil" characters are no more than scapegoats for the banal evil that exists in every human on earth. By their destruction (and therein, lack of "human" death; where, for example, is Hitler buried?) we can be buried with all according homage and dignity.

Maybe we need a bit more of the old "I've come to bury, not to mourn." Or an "airing of grievances" along with the grieving. What have we learned from Yeltsin's death? Pretty much nothing, except that he has departed from history: both as an living actor, and as a remembered character. Now there is nothing but a flat, polished, sterile memory, as useful as a tombstone.