The Geist in the Machine

My thunder, stolen:

That’s why you find people saying things like, “Neural networks are decentralized, just like democracies” or “Neural networks are emergent, just like capitalism“.

A summary of the Standard Prepackaged Revolutionary New [REDACTED] Paradigm might look like the following—and when reading, ask yourself how many of these ideas are affectively laden:

• The Dark Side is Top-Down. The Light Side is Bottom-Up.
• The Dark Side is Centralized. The Light Side is Distributed.
• The Dark Side is Logical. The Light Side is Fuzzy.
• The Dark Side is Serial. The Light Side is Parallel.
• The Dark Side is Rational. The Light Side is Intuitive.
• The Dark Side is Deterministic. The Light Side is Stochastic.
• The Dark Side tries to Prove things. The Light Side tries to Test them.
• The Dark Side is Hierarchical. The Light Side is Heterarchical.
• The Dark Side is Clean. The Light Side is Noisy.
• The Dark Side operates in Closed Worlds. The Light Side operates in Open Worlds.
• The Dark Side is Rigid. The Light Side is Flexible.
• The Dark Side is Sequential. The Light Side is Realtime.
• The Dark Side demands Control and Uniformity. The Light Side champions Freedom and Individuality.
• The Dark Side is Lawful. The Light Side, on the other hand, is Creative.

By means of this tremendous package deal fallacy, lots of good feelings are generated about the New Idea (even if it’s thirty years old).

(Over Coming Bias, via Groupuscule. It has nothing to do with Star Wars)

This could be about the hippie vision of the Web, where everyone is a blogger and all YouTube videos are invaluable contributions to culture. It could be about the gloabl brain idea/”metaphor”. It could be about the vaguely post-y romance of revolutionary politics. It could be about opensource. It could be about decentralized, vaguely Deleuzian capitalism. It could be about the upheval of human selfhood brought about by a materialist approach to the brain. Any of these subjects could be what I redacted from that second paragraph. But it’s not about any of those things. Well, it is, but not specifically.

It’s about Artificial Intelligence. This series of fixations, this sort of “affective reasoning,” this particular and peculiar bias (that I exhibit as much as anyone) manifests frequently in many diverse places. It was that last sentence, the thought of a pattern to thought across domains, that made me change this from a tumblr post to an entry here.

The places where this issue crops up have something in common. If not exactly what one would call “the human sciences” just yet, then a collection that might be analgously categorized in the near future.

Here I found myself about to write that the open question was whether the above morality for thought (the author might have been thinking in terms of a hypothetical machine’s thought rather than our own but little matter, that) is more than a trend—whether it was significant on a historical register. But if the impulse is to make sense of things and decide their significance is always and only in terms of history, then another morality still haunts those “human sciences” (and thinking about all this falls within that general area and certainly seems a bit stuck within a history-based paradigm). So much so that it seems very difficult and often very wrong to think in any other way.

Perhaps this isn’t so for the expanded universe of human sciences. Particularly when it comes to a focus on the brain and things like brains there’s much less of need (or feeling of a need) to put everything in terms of History than in the case of the economy or politics. Indeed, the linguist has often derided the idea that there’s much to learn from language by looking at the history of how it’s been understood. Then again, he (and his field) hardly seems paradigmatic of the New Revolutionary Paradigm outlined above…

Programing note: In yet another effort at making this “blog” into… anything, I’ve just had to accept that a lot of posts will end rather unsatisfyingly in ellipses. Or programming notes.

Or promises to continue later in another direction. In this case, what the geistiness of networks might have to do with the authenticity paradigm and the problems presented by their seeming opposition to one another. Hint: are cities light side or dark side?

No, it’s never OK

In response to a recent tumbl I was asked whether is was ever OK not to worry about the “Grim Meathook Future.” The answer, I believe, is no. More importantly though, the question has finally prompted me to get on with this project. The concept of the GMF might not be the best vehicle to explain myself, but it seems to be one that works.

Some might not be familiar with this charming turn of phrase. Its centrality to what I am about to write thus merits a bit of an introduction. A fellow name Joshua Ellis, who is credited with coining the phrase explains it thusly.

I think the problem is that the future, maybe for the first time since WWII, lies on the far side of an event horizon for us, because there are so many futures possible. There’s the wetware future, the hardware future, the transhumanist future, the post-rationalist (aka fundamentalist) future.

And then there’s the future where everything just sort of keeps going on the way it has, with incremental changes, and technology is no longer the deciding factor in things. You don’t need high tech to change the world; you need Semtex and guns that were designed by a Russian soldier fifty-odd years ago.

Meanwhile, most of the people with any genuine opportunity or ability to effect global change are too busy patting each other on the back at conventions and blue-skying goofy social networking tools that are essentially useless to 95% of the world’s population, who live within fifteen feet of everyone they’ve ever known and have no need to track their fuck buddies with GPS systems.

[...]

The upshot of all of this is that the Future gets divided; the cute, insulated future that Joi Ito and Cory Doctorow and you and I inhabit, and the grim meathook future that most of the world is facing, in which they watch their squats and under-developed fields get turned into a giant game of Counterstrike between crazy faith-ridden jihadist motherfuckers and crazy faith-ridden American redneck motherfuckers, each doing their best to turn the entire world into one type of fascist nightmare or another.

Of course, nobody really wants to talk about that future, because it’s depressing and not fun and doesn’t have Fischerspooner doing the soundtrack.

There are two things here that I take as definitive of the GMF:

1. “Everything just sort of keeps going the way it has.” That is to say, there isn’t going to be some radically game-changing discontinuity between our present horizon of expectations and how things will be down the road. This isn’t a particularly radical notion, but it’s an important prophylactic against various forms of millenarian thinking, of which techno-optimism and apocalypticism are the best examples. This is not to say that things aren’t going to change—they most certainly will and that’s the point of all this—but that change will take place in this world, not one we might imagine. The Grim Meathook Future is the future that comes unannounced, the one that is basically already here, if not yet recognized as such.
2. “The future gets divided; the cute, insulated future that…you and I inhabit, and the grim meathook future that most of the world is facing.” This is the more important of the two points. The Grim Meathook Future exists in a certain sort of opposition to a bright, shiny future that is reserved for what is ultimately a very small proportion of the world’s population. The interesting thing here, though, is the supposition that anyone reading the original post “inhabits” the cute future. This is true almost by definition. Writing and thinking about “issues” the way Ellis does—the way I am doing right now—is an indulgence of the Decadent, Detached future against which the Grim Meathook one is defined.

This other future—not the discontinous fanciful one, but the painfully immanent detached and decadent one—is closely related to what I intend by “hypegeist.” Like the GMF, it’s functionally already present, but is sufficiently unfamiliar, sufficiently unscrutinized to remain in something of subjective tense. Hypegeist is the emerging system of social reproduction, relevant to a small but significant minority of the world, that serves the critical function of helping one (everyone whose anyone) avoid confronting the disturbing and potentially frightening future that is descending on everyone else.

The Silicon Valley/BoingBoing version of this that Ellis alludes to is only one aspect of it. I mean to include a whole range of contexts that owe their existence to a closed circuit of self-reference. Information technology (the internet, basically, but also mobile phones, an evolved form of television and perhaps a few other things) plays an enormous role in this, but I don’t want to reduce it all to that, at least not quite yet. What I’m talking about developed along side these technologies and is not only influenced by them but is also an influence on how we use and understand them.

But why Hypegeist? Because of what happened to zeitgesit. The idea of a “spirit of the age” has come into a new sort of vogue that obliterates its meaning at the same time as the concept ascends to a new omnipresence in its total and obfuscating senselessness.

Also your new car, dog

A HuffPo blog entry from several days ago tries to keep everyone updated on the spirit of the times: “If you haven’t noticed—we’re living in the era of the hybrid.” A few examples follow, (incidentally all purchases that the author is considering): a new hybrid car, some new sort of dog called a Puggle (“Breeders call them mutts. But owners call them hybrids”), and a half off-road, half racing bicycle.

But also, Barack Obama.

New mixes. New cultural combinations. And with this new era of Hybrid Politics — an opportunity to see the word in a new way. Barack Obama is both genetically, socially, educationally, and politically a Hybrid.

As if to remove any doubt abot what’s going on here, the author proceeds to answer the post’s titular question, “Is Barack Obama a ‘Hybrid’?”

Lets take a look.

His father is Kenyan
His mother American (Wichita, Kansas)
Born in Honolulu, Hawaii.
At age six he moved to Jakarta

(the list continues…)

A previously useful term-turned-concept has now worked its way back around to its original, prosaic usage while retaining its now totally unjustified theory-esque cache. The result is this weird comment that actually treats Obama as a sort of biological specimen. This could have required a denouncement and/or rejection back before “hybrid” came to mean (and be) “fashionable”—when it was just a regular word that didn’t require midsentence capitalization. Why isn’t this just a sophisticated (elitist?) version of “Is Barack Obama a Halfbreed?”

The self evident answer is to refer to the new function of “hybrid” as a watchword for our cr-azy post-modern times. However, such an excessively literal application of the word’s figurative usage is suggests that the sentiment it reflects is an extremely shallow one. The consequence is a commitment to a notion of authentic hybridity that vitiates the insights that the term is supposed to help elucidate:

Obama has remained himself. He is well spoken, passionate, literate, and able to speak with his own voice. Compare this “Hybrid” Kenyan/American to Hillary Clinton’s southern drawl and you see the natural conflict between the Hybrid make of Obama and the attempt to impersonate roots that she simply can’t claim.

Aside from repeating the “clean and articulate” trope, this comparison introduces passion and authentic speech as the virtues of his partially sub-altern origins. Hillary, by contrast, is only faking the “white working class” thing.

This is incredibly pernicious. For politics to descend into a conflict over whose claim to their roots is more legitimate is a disaster. Not only does it contribute to the trend of utterly contentless media maneuvering that seems to dominate the national campaign, it materially impacts the outcome and policy discourse.

Home Front

Another paired set: eco-terrorism near Seattle and potential anti-military terrorism in Times Square. Both happened in the past few days. In the Seattle suburbs, five new houses were burnt down and the Earth Liberation Front left a banner. In New York, someone tossed a pretty little bomb (that police have apparently called an IED) into the military recruiting station that sits in the middle of Times Square.

Both of these may be cases of “domestic terrorism,” something difficult for some to conceive:

The small bomb that went off in Times Square early this morning “doesn’t appear to be” a terrorist act, said White House press secretary Dana Perino…When asked whether a bomb is, by definition, an act of terror, Mrs. Perino paused. “It’s a little bit to early to determine what happened,” Mrs. Perino said. “I’m going to let the authorities do their investigation and then we’ll get back to you.

It’s not unreasonable to think that “not terrorism” was intended as “not The Terrorists.” It wasn’t Al-Qaeda or whatever, just some dude on a bike. The point is that red-blooded Americans might be destroying stuff to make political statements. It’s not radically new or anything, but it could have some significance, as demonstrated by this slip where an official seemed unable to apply the term terrorist to an American. For all the talk of it being all non-nation state-y and deterritorialized, the war on terror still has been maintained with a healthy concept of inside/outside. Even when suspected terrorist are hunted down in the U.S., they’re invading foreign agents (or, in the case of John Walker Linde, one of us who went over there–and, if you didn’t know, it seems that was a transgression deserving of pretty special reprimand).

How often would minor acts of political inflected destruction like this have to happen for them not to be immediately forgotten? Not the militia movements or the Branch Davidians, not the fabled one person army, just some property-damaging protest against objectionable aspects of the present.

These recent events aren’t a reason for optimism in this area. The two targets are a little, well, obvious. Suburban sprawl and military recruitment? Really? The choices feel somewhat adolescent: the big new houses and Uncle Sam are mostly symbolic here. The Seattle arson might inflict some financial cost, but they’ll rebuild the houses. The minor explosion in New York did little more than break some glass and get attention–basically little more than a prank.

It might come down to a suspicion that the people responsible for these acts were acting out of psychological rather than material interests (more on this later). By way of counter-example, here’s a pretty good little story from the Global Guerilla’s blog (which it seems this blog is basically a rip off of now).

I’m not advocating violence here, but we all know where history is headed.

Broken Links

The concurrence of two seemingly unrelated events has finally shaken me out of my several year “planning phase” and prompted me to actually write a blog post. Event, the first: Last Wednesday the internet went out for a couple tens of millions of people on the other side of the world. The situation has only gotten worse. Something happened to some pretty important cables in the Mediterranean and left people from Dubai to Bangladesh vying for little remaining bandwidth or scrambling to reroute access through satellite systems. Initial reports blamed a boat trying to moor off the coast of Egypt in bad weather for severing two oceanic cable systems on January 30th. That explanation looked good for the cut that happened off the coast of Egypt near Alexandria, but not for the cut that happened within a few hours, but hundreds of miles away near Marseille, France. No one seems to have even bothered to try to explain the third major data artery to go dead. It did so two days later, due to some sort of damage off the coast of Dubai in the Persian Gulf.

Now, two days after that, another one. Qatar is now offline as a result of damage to a conduit from that country to the UAE. Also late-breaking: Egypt checked, there was no boat near the original incident site.

So, four major linkages in the global data network have gone down in and around the Middle East over the last five days for seemingly unrelated reasons, none of which have been explained.

Event, the second: Yacrosoft!

It doesn’t bear repeating. Microsoft made a bid for Yahoo!. The internet went, predictably, nuts. Every news outlet reported it and every blog speculated about what might result from it.

Google responded to the news with a strongly worded condemnation of the potential acquisition and the Times is reporting that Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt phoned Yahoo’s CEO Jerry Yang “offering the company’s help in fending off Microsoft, possibly in the form of a partnership between the companies.”

Google’s interest in the situation is obvious—the deal would merge the distant second and third place players in the search arena into one potentially realistic challenger for the thrown Google practically invented for itself. However, the response from the Googleplex cannot be reduced to, or dismissed as, merely corporate self-interest. They’ve got some good points:

The openness of the Internet is what made Google—and Yahoo!—possible. A good idea that users find useful spreads quickly. Businesses can be created around the idea. Users benefit from constant innovation. It’s what makes the Internet such an exciting place.

So Microsoft’s hostile bid for Yahoo! raises troubling questions. This is about more than simply a financial transaction, one company taking over another. It’s about preserving the underlying principles of the Internet: openness and innovation.

Could Microsoft now attempt to exert the same sort of inappropriate and illegal influence over the Internet that it did with the PC? While the Internet rewards competitive innovation, Microsoft has frequently sought to establish proprietary monopolies—and then leverage its dominance into new, adjacent markets.

The sentiment behind this statement is powerful and emphatically true. Especially the part about the internet being such an exciting place and especially the part about how that excitement is made possible by the ready and effective dissemination of information.

That system is down at the moment. This corporate affair that is clogging the first world’s bandwidth with an unbelievable amount of chatter regards an internet that has four deep, mysterious cuts in it right now.