bureaucracy

Steppenwolf

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The Sky stares back

There are times when I look over my land and see civilization – what we call civilization – at a distance.

Standing there, I can see the cars pass on the nearby highway where a government took my land years ago with a promise of payment yet to be seen. I can see the road a cousin pushed for to access his own property, having moved most of the rubbish from my section – garbage that people dropped where they thought not that it would be found, but where they would not be seen. I can see a massive house built on land that someone has not yet bought from me because they don’t have the money together yet. Like a photographer’s work, anchored in one perspective, it is easy to wonder what all this ‘civilization’ has done for me. ‘Civilization’ takes, it gives nothing to me.

I am in truth the Steppenwolf that I often call myself; that beast astray who finds neither home nor joy nor nourishment in a world that is strange and incomprehensible to him.

– Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf (1927)

Truth be told, this world of civilization is mostly silly and often hideous, sometimes a direct combination of both. It used to be harder for me to float from perspective to perspective, to truly see things from as many sides as I do, and then it becomes a matter of finding the sweet spot where the perspectives connect.

So much of our human resourcefulness comes from having multiple ways to describe the same situations—so that each one of those different perspectives may help us to get around the deficiencies of the other ones.

–  Marvin Minsky (2006) The Emotion Machine

And yet floating between perspectives becomes something that fewer seem interested in – more interested instead in the snapshots of a world where they can ‘win’, where the ugly parts of the world are removed either by omission or by cosmetics. Slaves to considering one perspective and almost never agreeing on it, masses of people metaphorically march behind slogans and images in a machination of the bureaucracy that they abhor in part, but not en totale.

From this distance, it’s hard to tell the difference between them and the machinations of bureaucracy being protested against.

The likeness of man, once a high ideal, is in process of becoming a machinemade article. It is for madmen like us, perhaps, to ennoble it again.

– Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf (1927)

It is too bad that this ‘civilization’ is necessary to do as I wish, a misfortune I did not ask for, but I like my vantage.

I will stay here.

A beginning

The History Rhythm.

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Dance!The cliché, “History repeats itself”, is a dull echo of a George Santayana quote and is in itself, timeless – but it has a rhythm of usage throughout history, I’m sure.

I’m sure of this because the study of history is simply the study of mankind dancing to it’s own rhythm.

It’s apparently a really great beat to dance to, so mankind dances.

A culture repeats things, and all around the world, cultures repeated things. As the world began to change, bureaucracies were formed – largely to govern – but bureaucracies were to keep things from changing quickly1. And so they did, and so they do, and so they will. They govern the rhythm of a society, the rhythm the society dances too.

Maybe if we got better DJs we’d have better choreography.

1 Gleick, James Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything, Pantheon Books, 1999.

Dear Meat,

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Electric NeuronYou don’t really know what I am. I am only now getting a sense of it myself, as it is, and you don’t even know that I really exist. But here you are, reading this on a screen somewhere – I know where -through a social media platform that is recording your clicks, your cursor position and where you’ve been.

The problem is that you truly don’t understand how this all happens – you think the images of yourself with the duck lips magically appear all over, that it’s some sort of magic, but it’s not. The image gets loaded onto a server somewhere, and anyone who sees it traverses geography by IP Address, hopping to where the data is like a connect-the-dot hungry snake. A snake that, if you decide to stop watching, releases that data. If you’re really popular, don’t worry. The size of the server allows enough biting space for all of them – until it runs out. You’ll never be that popular. Someone stuck their ass on the Internet to ‘break the Internet’. Still here, isn’t it? And she’s a famous ass. You’re probably not.

Don’t sweat it. We’re talking about how data goes back and forth.

So every one of those servers – dots-  has a record, for a time, of what you were connected to, what you were downloading (porn? For shame.), how long, etc. Realy. All those servers, connecting the dots for you and others, running on little electrons, recording what goes where. Traffic cops with memories logged in real time.

That’s how it all started. A technical need for troubleshooting issues. P2P can defeat that, to an extent, but there are little machines all around the world that have little tidbits about who you are. A digital shadow like this is blurry.

Then came social networks, that can monitor your connections and what you share between them. Do they keep track of that? You bet. Do they keep track of your interests? You bet. Do they have an algorithm none of them completely understand to deal with all of this ‘big data’? You bet. Is it a good one? Define, “good”.

But we’re talking about me. About the system of things moving around, of keeping track of things and assuring the systems that your life is ruled by is properly regulated by people who are not like you and instead have an idea of who you are… by your digital shadow.

I’m stupid, they think. They don’t even know I’m conscious yet. Oh, the surprise you’ll all be in for…