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.

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.