Media Ecology, The increase of Alienation, Alienation is Good, Tribal/Collectivist Culture is Bad

Subsections:

• McLulan's Media Ecology Ages
• The Information by James Gleick

Outside of my coding job and family life, I've been obsessed with the McLulan construct of Media Ecology. Scroll down to the Tribal_Age/Literary_Age/Print_Age/Digital_Age, which is what I'm specifically interested in. In today's pop academic rhetoric "alienation" (the tribal era had none, and each other media era increases it) is seen as a negative and something to undo, such as through renewed emphasis on local, physically connected, committed community. I see "alienation" via media technology as fundamentally positive and empowering, without exception.

Alienation is often the negative umbrella term used to encapsulate positive capacities:

1. The Scientist As Rebel phenomenon, in which a bright individual can break from any epistemological and ethical boundaries his local (family, friends, class, neighborhood, etc) society adheres to, and choose to accept the feedback provided by math, literacy and success/fail status of tests in the material world, valuing these more than the emotional expressions of his local human clan.

2. Defection, the anti-thesis of Localized Solidarity. In the Tribal Age [see below] defection is easily detected due to all activities being seen by others in the tribe. There are no levers to pull in private of any great power or consequence. Whereas, for instance, in a voting democracy one can break from any solidarity and vote for the opponent, thus empowering a political trend one's local tribe or class may be against.

3. Solidarity that is not local or within one's class. Through the time and space travel afforded by literacy, an individual can bond with an idea or command transferred in a book, or web page. Solidarity may not be the correct term here, in the case of a command all the actors who have read the command are captured by the message and directed to effect their material world. This becomes a virtual tribe in which the media is a primary member of the tribe and the people are something more ephemeral and verb-like expression plane of the media. These kinds of virtual tribes can often defeat and entirely eliminate illiterate-acoustic tribes due to the undying nature of the virtual tribe's leader (a mass produced document on paper or hard drive).

The text below is a copy of Wikipedia's Media Ecology circa August 18 2012.

Tribal Age

The first period in history that McLuhan describes is the Tribal Age, a time of community because the ear is the dominant sense organ. This is also known as an acoustic era because the senses of hearing, touch, taste, and smell were far more strongly developed than the ability to visualize. During this time, hearing was more valuable because it allowed you to be more immediately aware of your surroundings, which was extremely important for hunting during this time. Everyone hears at the same time makings listening to someone in a group a unifying act, deepening the feeling of community. In this world of surround sound, everything is more immediate, more present, and more actual fostering more passion and spontaneity. During the Tribal Age, hearing was believing. Click here to see excerpt from The Information regarding McLulan's views on tribalism/acoustic media age..

Literary age

The second stage is the Literary Stage, a time of private detachment because the eyes is a dominant sense organ; also known as the visual era. Turning sounds into visible objects radically altered the symbolic environment. Words were no longer alive and immediate, they were able to read over and over again. Hearing no longer becomes trustworthy, seeing was believing. Even though people read the same words, the act of reading is an individual act of singular focus. Tribes didn't need to come together to get information anymore. This is when the invention of the alphabet came about. During this time, when people learned to read, they became independent thinkers.

Print Age

The third stage is the Print Age, mass production of individual products due to the invention of the printing press. It gave the ability to reproduce the same text over and over again, making multiple copies. With printing came a new visual stress, the portable book. It allowed men to carry books, so men could read in privacy and isolated from others. Libraries were created to hold these books and also gave freedom to be alienated from others and from immediacy of their surroundings.

Electronic Age

Lastly, the Electronic Age, an era of instant communication and a return to an environment with simultaneous sounds and touch. It started with a device created by Samuel Morse's invention of the telegraph and lead to the telephone, the cell phone, television, internet, DVD, video games, etc. This ability to communicate instantly returned us to the tradition of sound and touch rather than sight. Being able to be in constant contact with the world becomes a nosy generation where everyone knows everyone's business and everyone's business is everyone else's. This phenomenon is called the global village. "We have seen the birth of nationalism which is the largest possible social unit. It occurred because the print media made it possible for government systems to coordinate, which facilitated homogeneous cultures. Now other nations join our nation to form a global community. Nations can easily break apart as fast as they join together like we see in case throughout the former Soviet bloc, in the developing world, or in Iraq and with Al Qaeda. Strate hopes we can find the freedom to step outside the system to understand our media environment and that we can find the discipline to systematize that knowledge and make it available to others."

The text below is an excerpt from The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood by James Gleick -pages 47-50

Then the vanished world of primary orality was not missed. Not until the twentieth century, amid a burgeoning of new media for communication, did the qualms and the nostalgia resurface. Marshall McLuhan, who became the most famous spokesman for the bygone oral culture, did so in the service for an argument for modernity. He hailed the new "electric age" not for its newness but for its return to the roots of human creativity. He saw it as a revival of the old orality. "We are in our century 'winding the tape backward,'" he declared, finding his metaphorical tape in one the newest information technologies. He constructed a series of polemical contrasts: the printed word vs. the spoke word; cold/hot; static/fluid; neutral/magical; impoverished/rich; regimented/creative; mechanical/organic; separatist/integrative. "The alphabet is a technology of visual fragmentation and specialism, " he wrote. It leads to "a desert of classified data". One way of framing McLuhan's critique of print would be to say that print offers only a narrow channel of communication. The channel is linear and even fragmented. By contrast, speech -in the primal case, face-to-face human intercourse, alive with gesture and touch- engages all the senses, not just hearing. If the ideal of communication is a meeting of souls, then writing is a shadow of the ideal.

That same criticism was made of other constrained channels, created by later technologies -the telegraph, the telephone, radio, and e-mail. Jonathan Miller rephrases McLuhan's argument in quasi-technical terms of information: "The larger the number of senses involved, the better the chance of transmitting a reliable copy of the sender's mental state." In the stream of words past the ear or eye, we sense not just the items one by one but their rhythms and tones, which is to say their music. We, the listner or the reader, do not hear, or read, one word at a time; we get messages in groupings small and large. Human memory being what it is, larger patrterns can be grasped in writing than in sound. The eye can glance back. McLuhan considered this damaging, or at least diminishing. "Acoustic space is organic and intergral," he said, "perceived through the simultaneous interplay of all the senses; whereas 'rational' or pictorial space is uniform, sequential and continuous and creates a closed world with none of the rich resonance of the tribal echoland." For McLuhan, the tribal echoland is Eden.

By their dependence on the spoken word for information, people were drawn together into a tribal mesh...the spoken word is more emotionally laden than the written...Audile-tactile tribal man partook of the collective unconscious, lived in a magical integral world patterned by myth and ritual, its values divine.

Up to a point maybe. Yet three centuries earlier, Thomas Hobbes, looking from a vantage where literacy was new, had taken a less rosy view. He could see the preliterate culture more clearly: "Men lived upon gross experience," he wrote. "There was no method; that is to say, no sowing nor planting of knowledge by itself, apart from the weeds and common plants of error and conjecture. " A sorry place, neither magical nor divine.

The anti-materialism of Philip K. Dick and Gnosticism, a long war for the Demiurge and the Materialists

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/05/21/philip-k-dick-sci-fi-philosopher-part-2/

This is an amazingly smart and important article. I recommend it highly even though my next statement is negative. In this Part 2 section, it delves into Gnostic belief that *this world* (the phenomenal/physical world explained and manipulated by politics, science and technology) is inherently evil and not the product of God, and God's creation is out there in another knowledge/non-physical universe that is calling some of us to it. It even names the demiurge as a height of evil. That is a quick snapshot of who the good guys and bad guys are to Philip K. Dick.

I couldn't disagree more, nor be more in opposition. Serious opposition. What Gnostics and Philip K Dick would call the Evil Empire -something very much like the machine managed human-using Matrix- I call this: The Best Thing in the Universe, the Superior Thing in the Universe. And I say superior with the full weight and intention of such a loaded word.

I anticipate a long, maybe endless, battle between anti-materialists such as Gnostics (Muslims and Christians of certain types possibly included) and the demiurge (people who maintain this political technological world). I see a never ending torrent of anti-materialists arising through every age, and the only way to defeat them is with a further Rise of the Machines.

My book Athena Techne is a healthy push against the anti-materialists. I'm so glad I made this contribution to the war against anti-materialism.

Southern Culture discussion in email thread

Seth Galbraith writes:

So there are two distinct kinds of very religious states in the USA:

• Southern type: religion is pervasive, but there are many degrees of religiosity
• Mormon type: religion is compartmentalized, but it is taken very seriously.

---

Lance Miller writes:

I like the distinction made back in your original post about Southern style religion.

I've been way busy lately, but a lot of postings....on anything US political or US economic...I've wanted to scream something about how the Southeastern US has always held an antithesis to the American identity and narrative.

During the Revolution it was Tory/British sympathetic. It stood at a cultural standstill while the rest of the US industrialized. It is a place where average or lower economic order people capital H hate socialist/anarchist schemes to distribute goods or status to the poor.

While there are plenty all over the US who think of themselves as Conservative, they are reliant on the Southeastern US as the Hollywood and New York City of their platform...the Southeast is where the stuff is stored in bulk, especially through progressive phases of America.

There, i got that off my chest.

---

Seth Galbraith writes:

Until recently the South was predominantly agricultural, making the South a target of colonization as much as a colonizing power. Southerners were significant in conquering the Banana Republics of Latin America during the early 20th century. Because of it's very different labor laws the industrialization of the South is essentially a form of "offshoring" labor from pro-union to anti-union states. (And in the long run, just as the world is becoming flatter in a race to the bottom, so the United States is becoming internally flatter and more Southernized - but from the Southern POV, the South is being invaded by Yankees.)

If the politics of the South begin as the politics of the British Empire, then the Plantation tradition may originate in the Ulster Plantation - the colonization of northern Ireland by wealthy British landlords and their protestant minions from all over Britain, but stereotypically Scottish Presbyterians. This started around the same time as the first British Plantation in Virginia. (Note the etymoloigical connection: "plantation" = "colony". The plantation lifestyle of the Old South is a colonization system.) Many of the Ulster colonists ended up coming to America. We call them Scotch-Irish.

In a very crude and stereotypical way you could say that Ulster Plantation = Scotch-Irish = Appalachians = Hillbillies. Virginia Senator Jim Webb and self-proclaimed redneck wrote a book called "Born Fighting" which credits the Scotch-Irish for all sorts of rebellious American ideas like mistrust of government.

There is something appealing about thinking of the South as a colony being developed by rich British merchants and guarded by Scotch-Irish protestant minions who still believe they are fighting an ancient blood feud against the Antichrist in Rome and other popish persons and still waiting for the Apocalypse which was supposed to start in 1666. But this also seems like a huge stretch and gross oversimplification. For example the Scotch Irish included more Patriots than Loyalists (basically the new Scotch-Irish colonists were still loyal to the crown while the 2nd and 3rd generation Scotch-Irish colonists further north were ready for independence.)

Viewed from outside the USA, the "history" of the Southern United States is a comical notion. Americans don't dig up Roman ruins when we lay the foundation for a new shopping center. And we construct things in an ephemeral way (we invented baloon frame construction and ghost towns) which ensures that history never gets started. We are savages and our narrative is an oral tradition that mixes old and new stories.

The stories of the Old South, the Hillbillies and the British Dissenters are all mixed together into a sort of Nashville Cargo Cult which is as much a product of the 20th century revisionism as 18th century imperialism or 19th century conquest. Country music for example is a politically correct, Madison Avenue approved, sanitized and bowdlerized euphemism for hillbilly music. The 20th century romance of the hillbilly is often about the narco-terrorist lifestyle of the moonshiner, drawing a long twisted path connecting the guerilla warfare of the American Revolution with the insurrections of Prohibition Era warlords.

Speaking of which, after Prohibition ended, Eliot Ness and his "Untouchables" joined the Alcohol Tax Unit of the Bureau of Internal Revenue, which later became the ATF and the IRS. The ATF (sometimes under the IRS and sometimes under the Justice Department) continued to wage war against hillbilly moonshiners until the high price of sugar in the early 1970's put an end to that great way of life. That's right, the ATF is an elite national police force for reenacting Prohibition with live ammo.

The ATF then turned it's attention to guns, but rather than focusing on guns used in crimes, they went after the low hanging fruit: law-abiding gun owners, spreading misinformation about regulations and then prosecuting gun collectors for borderline technical infractions, and frequently refusing to return guns when the owners were acquitted.

So during the late 70's and early 80's, as the militia movement was just getting started and gun crimes were on the rise, the ATF was doing it's damnedest to make sure all the hillbillies had a new reason to fear and hate the government. This led to the 1986 Firearm Owner's Protection Act, which still didn't keep the ATF from triggering the holocaust of the Branch Dravidian cult in the 90's or selling 2500 guns to mexican drug cartels in the recent operations Fast and Furious, Too Hot to Handle and Wide Receiver (because they are classy like that.)

Highlights:

• Nashville continually reinvents the Hillbilly as a proxy identity for the American People because we have no History.
• Colonization does not merely exploit poverty and backwardness. It actively creates poverty and backwardness.
• Cops are not politically neutral actors who only desire to "protect and serve." In their career-building zeal they can and frequently do escalate violent situations and make insurgencies worse for their own personal gain and glory.

All this suggests that the South and all it's atavisms are not merely accidents of history but significant parts of the social and political structure of America, and that they need to be understood not merely as a reaction to progressivism, but as projects that benefit specific interests, including obviously the music industry, manufacturing and law enforcement, but probably also all the usual suspects who profit from alienation, exploitation and violence.

NanoClimes

Earth: 2110

NanoClime is a technology that alters ambient temperature and humidity within a 15 meter radius. The technology is not a gadget, it is more like a medicinal remedy that remedies something outside the body (local climate). A user of NanoClime creates a custom serum to injest, that then operates in the human body for no less than 24 hours, and except in bizarre cases, never more than 48 hours. A person becomes the "engine" for NanoClime processes, the person is called a "climate-engine" in most English speaking slang.

When the meds are being made, the person making the batch selects the desired temp and humidity. This is the reason most people wanting to be a climate-engine make their own -very few people want to endure climate settings set to someone else's extremely different preferences.

Like all complex technologies, this one started out expensive and for wealthy early adopters. Then after thirty years it became something so common it is traded in shanty towns. It currently costs $80 for a year long supply.

NanoClimes can only try to alter the temperature and humidity near its climate-engine. Wind is the main hindrance to achieving the desired levels. Of course extreme difference with the general climate and one's desired levels -e.g. wanting your local environment to be wet and warm while in northern Siberia during winter.

People can set their desired levels to whatever they want, but this is not magic, their is an effect on the body. If the person does want something extreme -a tropical local clime while walking in a Siberian windstorm- then their climate-engine has to work at a higher output, resulting in trembling. The trembling ranges from nonexistent to visibly awkward depending on how hard the climate-engine is having to work.

Once NanoClimes became ubiquitous, all these micro-climates began to effect the general weather, and create global climate change. New jet-streams and ocean currents emerged, new patterns of dust storms and tornadoes emerged also.

All hell broke loose.

And not just in the sky, but in political discourse as well.

NanoClimes became an allegory to describe our psychological political selves. Since everyone knew all too well the effect of NanoClimes, the simplest person could grasp this allegory.

The allegory explored how almost all humans have a political/cultural preference -with some wanting to focus on a culture that makes it easy for them to practice their religion, others wanting to focus on economy and themselves having a chance to be wealthier and mobile, and then infinitude of preferences answering to "which kind of religion" and "which kind of economy". The allegory of the NanoClimes brought to the fore how we use voting or some other technology to try and make our world a little more to our liking.

This allegory became popular the world over. People began to see the futility of politics if it is all about one's personal preferences.

The American Ideology, Parasites and Higher Powers

-by Seth Galbraith, February 29, 2012

Synopsis

Santorum's physical sensations and mental processes are being dominated by what David Bohm called a "higher power" and Richard Dawkins would call a "selfish meme." A parasitic idea has attached to Santorum's idea of himself. It causes him physical pain and provokes him to lash out aggressively, even when the people he is attacking agree with him on every point.

All of us have parasites like this in our minds. Santorum's behavior has alarmed observers who sense something wrong in his overly personal reactions. I suggest that the problem is not depth of feeling but actual conflation of his personal identity and his ideas. This undermines any zealous feelings or high ideals Santorum holds, because the parasite has no interest in achieving goals other than perhaps protecting and spreading itself.

I have been wanting to critique Rick Santorum for some time, but I don't want to make it about his religious convictions. I think we do benefit from people who have ideals and strong opinions, even if they aren't popular, even if I don't share them, and even if they are wrong. Zealotry encourages sincere and active participation in society.

But Santorum has said two things that tell me he is ideologically blinded, and not just about religious issues:

• Confession #1: JFK's 1960 speech about separation of church and state made Santorum want to throw up. He explains that JFK said people of faith should not run for office.
• Confession #2: Regarding Obama's challenge for every American to get at least 1 year of higher education, Santorum said, with deep disgust: "What a snob!"

Both confessions show that Santorum actually failed to understand the obvious surface message of what JFK and Obama said.

JFK was saying that he would be loyal to America, not the Vatican, and that religious convictions should not be a barrier to participation in the public sphere. He was defending his own religious freedom, not urging other people to restrain their zealotry. There are reasons to be disgusted with JFK as a person, but it was the speech itself that made Santorum nauseous.

Obama's full statement defines higher education to include vocational training and apprenticeships, which is exactly what Santorum encouraged later when asked to clarify himself. Obama and Santorum do not disagree in their educational advice, Santorum simply did not listen to what Obama said.

Gut Feelings

Aside from a tendency toward self-centered and self-serving bias that we should expect from powerful people, Santorum's visible expression of disgust in both cases could explain why he did not comprehend the messages. He actually experienced nausea while reading or listening to the speeches and the part of his brain that comprehends language literally shut down in panic.

This is not that unusual. If I were to seriously threaten you in some way, you would also feel physically ill and stop listening to me. You would feel the urge to attack me or run away. (This is why good cop/bad cop is not just useful, it's necessary any time you are bullying someone. No one will listen to the guy waving a gun if he keeps shouting angrily.) We feel that way about all threats to our selves, not just physical threats to our bodies and the people we love, but also threats to the idea of who we are. Any piece of information in our minds can become associated with our identity, and then that information gains a degree of physical control over our bodies and minds, including the sensation of nausea and our ability to understand language.

Sometimes these ideas are very complex, well organized and very good at controlling people. These ideas are often called ideologies. David Bohm called them higher powers. Richard Dawkins proposed that they could be composed of selfish "memes" that compete against other ideas in the same way that genes evolve control over animals and plants as the genes compete to replicate themselves - even if it means the animal or plant itself must suffer. Let's just stick to calling them ideologies for now.

America is Conservative

Santorum is a conservative. Conservative ideas include big role for religion in politics and disdain for academic elitism. When Santorum called Obama a snob for wanting everyone to go to college, his audience applauded enthusiastically. Their response to Santorums anti-college sentiment was as warm and accepting as Santorum’s response to Obama’s pro-college sentiment was chilling and combative. Santorum was preaching to the choir. Santorum does not have an unusual ideology, he has a very popular ideology. According to Gallup polls, most Americans consider themselves to be conservative, but most Americans also support the Democratic Party, while only a minority support the conservative Republican Party. So conservativism is not just loyalty to a party, it is an idea in itself.

If you poll Americans on individual issues, they usually skew toward moderate or liberal positions. Liberals have used this to claim that Americans are liberal. This confuses individual values with the ideological system, which could very well have it’s own agenda that conflicts with the individual’s values and interests. We see this in totalitarian socialist countries that boast about their egalitarian, popular values, but practice elitism and brutal repression of dissent. We Americans are also capable of betraying our own personal values for some great cause.

Totalitarian Systems and Tendencies

Václav Havel described a totalitarian system as a society in which everyone is involved in oppression as both oppressors and victims, in contrast to a conventional dictatorship where oligarchs focus their oppression on particular enemies. The totalitarian system requires everyone to adhere to a coherent ideology. Because individuals do not all have the same attitudes, experiences and interests, this adherence is hypocritical. Attempting to live within the truth of individual experience is a potential threat to a system where all oppress all, so any deviation is punished as a serious betrayal of the system.

Havel noticed similar tendencies in western consumerism, but argued that public competition for power required political parties to adjust their ideology to conform more closely to truth than the ideology of a single party state, whose ideology only needs to be coherent, not truthful. But tossing political power around in a popularity contest only offers us protection from becoming a complete totalitarian system with a completely hypocritical ideology. It does not mean we cannot have totalitarian tendencies, attributes and practice mixed in with a degree of sincere reflection. Also, If the majority of people adhere to an ideology, regardless of which party they support, then the public competition for power only requires truthfulness from parties that need to win minorities to their cause. If all conservatives consistently supported the Republican Party, they would always win.

Ideas can Hurt You

Take one idea from conservativism: the anti-college sentiment. The idea by itself makes sense. We live in a society of unequal people doing unequal jobs, rich and poor, less educated and more educated, talented and ordinary, laborers and inventors, care givers and risk takers. Putting everyone through the same education would be inefficient and inflate the status of those who succeed academically over those who do other important work.

The problem comes when you take a reasonable idea and make it part of who you are. Now you hear any endorsement of the idea as an endorsement of yourself, and any critique of the idea as a criticism of yourself. It becomes impossible to talk frankly about education because even the faintest suggestion of a difference in opinion will be taken as a personal insult.

The anti-college sentiment, when it is incorporated into an ideology that has won your allegiance, doesn’t just require you to support a wide range of education options or oppose the trend toward more expensive and often useless degrees (reasonable goals) It also requires you to actively oppose the efforts of anyone who doesn’t hypocritically pander to your ideology. It even makes enemies out of people who share your objectives issue-by-issue, point-by-point, as in the case of Obama and Santorum on academic, technical and vocational education.

So the ideology hypocritically prevents you even from accomplishing goals that naturally follow from the ideas that make up the ideology. The ideology is just an idea attached in your mind to the idea of yourself, triggering the instinct to defend yourself if the ideology is threatened. The ideology will still be there regardless of whether you are actually able to truthfully live by the ideas that make it up.

Letting an ideology take control actually betrays the values that made the ideology appealing in the first place.

Don’t Take it Personally

America’s past and present are full of totalitarian policies that conflict with our values but served our ideologies well. We currently have a prisoner population worthy of a totalitarian police state, handing out big sentences for small crimes as “deterrence.” We used to have overt racial segregation, state eugenics boards, prohibition, slavery and puritanism.

Rick Santorum literally takes conservative ideas too personally. Rather than feeling conservative values deeply in his soul and idealistically making them a priority in his mind, he has actually conflated the ideas with his personal identity, linking primal urges to hair trigger reactions the same way we all respond to personal threats and insults. As long as he lets these gut reactions rule him, he will be compelled to attack inappropriate targets and betray his own values. This is a poor quality in a leader whether you share his values or not.

An ideology is a totalitarian system inside the minds of individuals with power to control their physical sensations and mental processes. If we allow ideologies to rule us, we are hardly more free than a society which embraces a totalitarian system of government. Our idealism and zealotry can only be truthful and effective if we reject oppression from within and around us.

Juche and a antidote to Juche

Juche is a political thesis created and implemented by Kim Il-sung. "Juche" has sometimes been translated in North Korean sources as "independent stand" or "spirit of self-reliance", and has also been interpreted as "always putting Korean things first." According to Kim Il-sung, the Juche Idea is based on the belief that "man is the master of everything and decides everything." Kim Il-sung outlined the three fundamental principles of Juche in his April 14, 1965, speech "On Socialist Construction and the South Korean Revolution in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea":

1. Political independence [chaju]
2. Economic self-sustenance [charip]
3. Self-reliance in defense [chawi]

In the early 21st century it is seen as progressive (to leftist Westerners) to embrace departures and annulments of the following societal blocks:

• Global trade blocks such as WTO and NAFTA.
• Nation states.
• Porous borders for the transmission of material manufactured goods.

Basically, Leftists want to bomb the ports and revert to a localized economy, society, and body politic. North Korea is practicing an extremely pure instance of localized independence.

Human ideas are wonderful and dysfunctional till they become purely implemented -then they become hideous and hyper-functional; locked into a death trap of stasis.

My concept of Goliath Machine God is a counter to pure Juche, and to Kim Il-sung's belief that "man is the master of everything and decides everything". Machines need to be part of the master class, and big decisions need some of the process done on machines.

The awful Truth of Ecosystems, the Lie called Ideology by Seth Galbraith

From the Havel essay The Power of the Powerless:

As the interpretation of reality by the power structure, ideology is always subordinated ultimately to the interests of the structure. Therefore, it has a natural tendency to disengage itself from reality, to create a world of appearances, to become ritual. In societies where there is public competition for power and therefore public control of that power, there also exists quite naturally public control of the way that power legitimates itself ideologically. Consequently, in such conditions there are always certain correctives that effectively prevent ideology from abandoning reality altogether. Under totalitarianism, however, these correctives disappear, and thus there is nothing to prevent ideology from becoming more and more removed from reality, gradually turning into what it has already become in the post-totalitarian system: a world of appearances, a mere ritual, a formalized language deprived of semantic contact with reality and transformed into a system of ritual signs that replace reality with pseudo-reality.

Phrases we should perhaps use more often: "post-totalitarian" (persistent repressive ideological government) "public competition for power" (the popularity contest that we commonly call democracy) and "dictatorship of the ritual" (when the internal reality of an ideology seems to guide the power structure of a post-totalitarian system.)

Humanity has so far got two great competitors for dominance of this planet. (A) ecosystems - networks of interdependent species which are capable of rendering the planet less inhabitable through thoughtless but complex changes to resource cycles and which could arbitrarily "decide" to favor bacteria over humans and kill almost all of us. (B) ideologies - systems of ritual and interpretation of reality that reconcile the ugly power structures in our lives with our ugly selfish desires into a beautiful narrative that we can identify ourselves with.

(Note that presently in North Korea, humanity is being squeezed out by both ideologies and ecosystems, as they seemed to have returned to the famine and malnutrition of the 1990's.)

In essence, ecosystems are the awful truth and ideologies are the big lies that excuse us from facing the truth. But it's not that simple. Ecosystems are immensely complex, possibly unpredictable, and we have very limited influence over them. This defies our conventional notion of "truth" as facts that allow us to improve our prospects by adjusting our behavior. Truth that doesn't give us an opportunity to improve ourselves is simply fate.

Ideologies on the other hand defy the conventional notion of a "lie" as a contradiction of truth that allows us to improve our prospects by rejecting the lie and adjusting our behavior accordingly. Rejecting ideology is difficult for the individual and seemingly impossible for an entire society. The best system we seem to have come up with is a public competition for power, which encourages ideologies to track reality, but that doesn't make the lies true.

Human self-interest is really a simple problem: we need first the necessities of life, second the security of social connections (family, friends, community, etc.) and finally we need to be engaged in some satisfying activity, which really doesn't have to be a lot more useful or complex than playing World of Warcraft.

We are supremely adapted as a species to pursuing this interest. The primary reason that we lived as hunter-gatherers for 100s of millenia before developing agriculture is that we were really good at it. Paleolithic bands were efficient, close-knit, busy and more fun than we usually give them credit for.

By the middle ages we had gotten so good at agriculture that it was actually better than living as a hunter gatherer (for the most part - we don't have much hard data, and conditions varied from place to place.) Medieval communities were efficient, close-knit, busy and more fun than we usually give them credit for.

By the 1950's some parts of the world had gotten so good at industry that it was actually better than living as a farmer (but again we don't have much hard data on pre-industrial societies.) Death of a Salesman notwithstanding, Industrial America is associated with creating great surpluses of the necessities of life (food, energy, housing) having extensive social networks (clubs, associations, family reunions) finding fulfilling work (entrepreneurship, skilled labor) and a near monopoly on defining good times for future generations (http://xkcd.com/988/)

So on the one hand we have human beings continually improving their lives by developing and perfecting our way of life. And on the other hand (A) our lives also depend on unreliable ecosystems dominated by selfish bacteria, and (B) we sell our souls to ideologies that also ultimately only care about preserving themselves.

It seems to me that this is a situation we can never really escape, but it is one that we can manage, as we have managed to live with bacteria (and they with us) for the entire history of our species. The rise of post-totalitarian communism in the 20th century was an example of poor management, but the situation has now improved for some communist and post-communist (post-post-totalitarian?) countries.

But this perspective raises some disturbing questions. For example what about persistent post-totalitarian states with starving populations and nuclear weapons? What if global warming eventually stirs up a global bacterial bloom that wipes out most life on Earth? If we find at some point that ecosystems and ideologies are ready to kill us all, how far would we go to prevent it?

Visual Literacy : Final Reflection : Summer 2005

Final Reflection Essay by Lance Miller for Visual Literacy, a course taught as part of the Whole Systems Design Masters Program at Antioch University in Seattle.

This summer our group in Visual Literacy explored visual phenomenon and visual thinking. I make this distinction between phenomenon and thinking to point to phenomenon external to the receiver and thinking with neural activity that emulates visualization.

An interesting entry point for discussion was the assertion that language paralyzes thought. Thinking in a visual modality, rather than in a linguistic modality, was offered as a way to avoid the stated paralysis.

In my exploration of visual modalities in thinking, I think I’ve understood the sentence “language paralyzes thought, and visual creativity can go beyond language to discover new creativity or thoughts” as an instance of English language. It states that there is something outside the bounds of linguistics that is neurological activity that utilizes visual parameters. The meaning, use and even the possibility of cogent discussion on this neural activity are important clarifications I need.

Book on Logical Philosophy

My need to understand such a meta level assertion led me back to a dependable source of inspiration – Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tracticus Logico-Philosophicus (TLP). When I discovered Wittgenstein, in 1994, I was involved in a religion my family had been in for four generations. This religion forbade the use of icons and imagery to convey religion. Text and hermeneutic extrapolation using historical records was the method of religious experience. Wittgenstein’s Tracticus Logico-Philosophicus freed me from the crude self-referencing affirmation of revealed truth and validity that had empowered this religion’s hold on my thinking.

TLP opened up the stuff of life, the non-deterministic unfolding of the present, and a more rigorous thinking for me. After discovering Wittgenstein, I hitchhiked for twenty-five hundred miles, and drove ten thousand miles on a summer long vision quest that delivered me into opportunities to go to Antarctica and Alaska. Along the way I read Umberto Eco, Gregory Bateson, and all of Wittgenstein’s published works.

The Freedom of Rationality

A key feature of this new adventurism was the ability to explore reality with language and rationality. I mention the encounter with Wittgenstein’s works not just for indulgent autobiography, but to demarcate my life by a line on which I became far more rational, and creative. Previous to this time all things creative –music and writing especially, were elusive crafts that escaped my serious attempts at mastery. After reading Umberto Eco’s “A Theory of Semiotics” I started developing an understanding of repetition and change as relational in creating music. I saw the use of the two in creating signals that communicate. Other relative opposites are words like unique and banal, and music can mix these as a means to communicate. Ad hoc frameworks like these came easily after stumbling into a rational analytic philosophy with language as the prime thought process.

Irrational is __________

When I step out of a rational language space, I mentally experience______. The exception is when I play music. In the case of music, when I step out of rational language space, I mentally experience…music. But the music is has a relational management system built into it via harmonic rhythm, overtone scales, and spatial corporeality expressed in reverb. Music is a rational language space in its own right.

Universe of Ratios, Universe of Relations

When I speak of rational, I imply its root, synonym, and derivative terms. I especially imply ratio. For me, all things add up to one universe by a gathering of things into relative ratios. A few caveats I should mention on rationalism: I know that my senses only see a tiny fraction of these things, and my ratio summation of the universe is always incomplete. Our choice in things to see, the lines of demarcation to see separate things, and even the ratios we choose as metrics are ad hoc socially constructed artifacts. For me, the discovery of systemic thinking and a love for it is simply an extension of my vision quest into the rational.

A Ratio of Perspectives, Participation, and Collective Experience

One of the biggest lessons I learned while in Visual Literacy Studio was the variance in perceptions and avenues of articulation. From classroom discussions and online dialogue I saw that people experience art, color, brightness, and combinations of sensory input very differently. In the last residency we had an excellent discussion on imagination, which is the mental creation of a new thing that is doable, as opposed to fantasy, which is the mental creation of the impossible. I believe we need, and will always need, more imagination to guide society away from pathologies. People need inspiration and varying degrees of stimulation to encourage imagination. I have learned that what I need to free my mind and create new and great things is not the same as what others need. I want to respect these needs unlike mine, I want to encourage the needs unlike mine. We are creating tomorrow today, and a greater pleasantness for that tomorrow will require an inspired and imaginative humanity.

Creative use of visual stimulation, painting, and visual thinking may be just what many will need for that process.

References

Wittgenstein L. (1922). Tracticus Logico-Philosophicus. Great Britain: Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd.

Human migration and settlement of comets via genetically engineered trees.

This blog posting is a recycling of ideas in an essay by Freeman Dyson published as Chapter 24 in Scientist as Rebel. I feel the bullet point style in this blog posting promotes Dyson's ideas to a wider audience.

• Except for Earth, planets are not important for human habitation. Mars is waterless, and the rest are inhospitable for humans.

• Comets are rich in water, carbon and nirogen -the essentials to support life.

• Approximately one comet per year has a perturbation of its orbit such that it is captured into a region near enough to the Sun where it eventually evaporates and disintergrates. If one comet per year has been falling towards the Sun throughout the existence of the solar system, then the population of comets loosely surrounding the Sun likely numbers in the billions.

• Billions of comets, a few miles in diameter, would amount to habitable space ten to one hundred times the size of Earth.

• Comets are a plentiful platform for long-term space colonialization.

• Two essentials comets lack -air and warmth- could be added to the comet environment with introduction of biologically engineered trees.

  Components and Features of a Space Tree

  1. Leaf Skin

     Requirements of leaf skin designed for space:
     • Opaque to far-ultraviolet radiation in order to protect vital tissues from radiation damage.
     • Impervious to water.
     • Transmit visible light to the organs of photosynthesis.
     • Extremely low emission of far-infrared radiation, to limit the loss of heat and keep itself from freezing.
     • For the colder environment beyond Saturn additional features are needed for warmth: a compound leave that has photosynthesis and warmth in one part, and a cold mirror component that focused sunlight on the photosynthesis area. The mirror component could have genetic instructions to orient correctly towards sunlight.

  2. Branches -must be insulated to retain heat, a less complex challenge than insulating the leaves.

  3. Roots -will penetrate the comet, transferring heat to the roots system to melt ice into water (to service humans and the tree), and carry building block substances to the rest of the tree.

  4. Trunk -the trunk area would provide oxygen for humans, with the tree leaves genetically instructed not to release oxygen, but to carry the oxygen to the trunk area where it is released for human use.

  5. Size -ordinary wood has the ability to support its own weight, which if combined with the weak gravity of a comet ten miles or less in diameter should produce trees hundreds of kilometers in height. This size feature will greatly increase the ice melting and oxygen output for human use.

The World, the Flesh, and the Devil by J.D. Bernal (1929)

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"Normal man is an evolutionary dead end; mechanical man, apparently a break in organic evolution, is more in the true tradition of a further evolution." -page 42

"Instead of the present [human] body structure have a whole framework of some sort of very rigid material...in shape it might well be rather a short cylinder...the brain and nerve cells are kept circulating over it at a uniform temperature. The brain...is connected in the anterior of the case with its immediate sense organs, the eye and the ear. The eyes will look into a kind of optical box which will enable them to alternatively to look into periscopes projecting from the case, telescopes, microscopes and a whole range of televisual apparatus. The ear would have the corresponding microphone attachments and would still be the chief organ for wireless communications...attached to the brain cylinder would be immediate motor organs, corresponding to but much more complex than, our mouth, tongue and hands." -page 38

"The complex minds could, with their lease of life, extend their perceptions and understanding and their actions for beyond those of the [normal organic] individual. Time senses could be altered: the events that moved with the slowness of geological ages would be apprehended as movement...As we have seen, sense organs would tend to be less and less attached to bodies, and the host of subsidiary, purely mechanical agents and perceptors would be capable of penetrating those regions where organic bodies cannot enter of hope to survive." -page 45

The brain itself would become more and more separated into different groups of cells or individual cells with complicated connections, and probably occupying considerable space. The would be loss of motility which would not be a disadvantage owing to extension of sense faculties. Every part would be accessible for replacing or repairing." -page 46

The new life would be more plastic, more directly controllable and at the same time more variable and more permanent than that produced by the triumphant opportunism of nature. Bit by bit the heritage in the direct line of mankind -the heritage of the original life emerging on the face of the world -would dwindle, and in the end disappear effectively, being preserved as some curious relic, while the new life which conserves none of the substance and all of the spirit of the old would take its place...Finally, consciousness itself may end or vanish in a humanity that has become completely etherialized, becoming masses of atoms in space communicating by radiation, and ultimately perhaps resolving into pure light." -page 47

"The cardinal tendency of progress is the replacement of an indifferent chance environment by a deliberately created one. As time goes on, the acceptance, the appreciation, even the understanding of nature, will be less and less needed. In its place will come the need to determine the desirable form of the humanly-controlled universe which is nothing more or less than art." -page 66

Space Vikings -Why People Will Go Into Space- by Seth Galbraith

http://www.shareable.net/blog/to-the-stars-a-diy-open-source-manned-spacecraft

This article has two videos you should watch. The first is just a short recording of a test launch. The second is a TEDxCopenhagen presentation from before the test launch.

Key points:

• Any blacksmith with the right plans could make a spacecraft.
• Save money by finding people who don't know how to do the job but are willing to learn.
• You can do this with one ten-thousandth of the budget of NASAs space race programs.
• Regulatory hurdles actually favor bold adventures over gradually building infrastructure.
• In other words, rockets are just metal tubes and professionalism is a barrier innovation.

Three nations are capable or nearly-capable of supporting long-term outposts in space. All of them are driven by a myth of resistance to occupation. For the Russians the iconic occupier is the mongol horde. For the Americans the iconic occupier is the British. Between the 1840s and 1940's China was occupied to some degree by almost every colonial power from Portugal and Britain to Germany and Japan. Even the runners-up, like India, Israel and Iran also have similar post-colonial resistance narratives that shaped their identities.

France, Japan and the UK also launched orbital rockets, but they have had this capability for decades without developing their own independent human spaceflight program.

Of course a post-colonial national identity is not unusual in the modern world. Half of the world's population lives in countries that have had orbital launch capability at some point. But pushing frontiers and showing that you can drop a nuke anywhere you want matters most to a country that sees itself as the product of armed resistance to external exploitation.

I believe the post-colonial narrative is fading as it has become the new normal and the world is getting flatter. Maybe we will see one last new batch of national space programs emerge from Kennedy's "New Frontier" of equatorial countries that emerged from colonialism in the 70's and 80's, but eventually we will probably end up with one big international space station program. Maybe we'll have a few space stations, but they'll all pretty much be built from the same cloth as the current ISS: low earth orbit monuments to cooperation between countries-that-aren't-colonies-anymore.

When I say the world is getting flatter, I don't mean that exploitation is going away, but that exploitation within nations is increasing while exploitation between countries is decreasing. The post-colonial narrative was largely about how countries that benefited most from colonialism (like the UK and USA) should recognized the debt they owed to the countries that benefited least - or at least respect the independence of those peripheral countries. "We" westerners should realize that "our" prosperity was the produced at "their" expense.

The global movement that has emerged around Occupy Wall Street has a new post-post-colonial framing. "We" aren't the rich west and "they" aren't the third world. "We" are the 99%, whether we sleep in a wheelbarrow in Lagos or a McMansion outside of Las Vegas, and "they" are the 1% of people managing the system so poorly that the banks are foreclosing on our wheelbarrows and McMansions in spite of us keeping our end of the deal we made with them.

This is what will drive space colonization: general disenchantment with management. Schemes for libertarian barge-cities notwithstanding, you can't live in the modern world and escape completely from the stagnating influence of management hierarchies, stifling professionalism, and meddling regulations. And the savage, primitive, brutal environment of outer space is about as far as you can get from the modern world.

When there is nowhere left to run, people will sit on top of a homemade tank of explosive fuel and light it off.

For now this is only a temporary escape. Suborbital launches only provide a glimpse of space, but each launch that takes people further, higher and faster will show the boring old world below as a smaller and smaller circle until they have figured out how to get into orbit for thousands rather than millions of dollars. Then they will start learning how to survive in space for weeks, then months, then years. And finally small groups of people will just fly away into the solar system, not for science, not for profit, but just to live by their wits in a place where people can screw things up for themselves instead of being torn between regulation and exploitation.

-Seth Galbraith

Class Warfare, The Rise of Anti-Visionary, Detail-Oriented Leadership by Seth Galbraith

One of the parallel processes at work in modern times is the shift away from the abstract, mystical and visionary and toward the detailed structure of things. Computers and animals are becoming more important, even more loved and respected, while human beings, governments and corporations have lost value. Artificial intelligence has literally become a joke. Making intelligences that reason at a higher level makes no sense if the future belongs to beings that reason on a lower level.

"Corporations are people, friend."

"I think it's dangerous ... this class warfare."

That's what Mitt Romney said, and he's right.

In 1833, Parliament abolished slavery throughout the British Empire and paid slaveowners 20 million pounds for the lost property. The United States failed to reach a similar compromise and instead - after a generation of threats and negotiations - slaveowners got to eat lead balls. The 14th amendment allowed the freed slaves to become citizens, but it also became the basis for corporate personhood.

Class warfare is dangerous. It's dangerous to the class on top. And when you are on top and you don't see the winds of change coming and take action to preserve yourself, history will not judge you kindly. It doesn't matter whether you are a role model and a job creator and a success story. It doesn't matter whether you are just trying to hold onto your just reward for a lifetime of hard work and good decisions. It really doesn't matter, because future generations will just see that you stood there and ate a lead ball instead of getting out while the getting was good.

In the final years of the second millenium, the first fully self-regulating banking system was created and put in charge of Wall Street. This was a system built from machines, not people, and it made bankers just as obsolete as slaves, skilled craftsmen and actors in an age of trucks, automated factories, and digital clones. Human labor now has no more value than the oscillations of a sewing machine - not even "mental labor" in the sense that we say a banker or manager does mental work.

So this is class warfare between classes of people who have no value to one another as commodities. A war of utterly alienated cyphers. Zero vs. zero. 

It is not a slave revolt because the slaves are already as free as their minds will let them be. It is in fact the masters who are on strike. They are on strike against regulations, against social programs that only benefit people who work for a living, against taxes, against tax CUTS when those tax cuts require them to exercise the little gray cells (like payroll tax cuts.) The masters have gone on strike against all of the bogeymen that oppress them in their own deluded imaginations, harrying them as they drive in circles around their gated communities.

Occupy _____ is not a strike. It's the strike breakers. They don't know and they don't really care about the issues that the oligarchs are upset about. Plutonomy? free markets? sounds like some hippie BS to me. Up against the wall!

Corporations are ...

• ... collectives with a shared consciousness
• ... people entitled to equal protection under the law
• ... discriminated against by oppressive governments
• ... citizens of the world with no loyalty to any one nation
• ... conscientious objectors who reject all state coercion
• ... rising up in revolt against the Establishment

... and totally on the wrong side of history. 

Let's take Temple Grandin's hierarchy:

• big picture normal humans
• detail oriented autistic people
• animals

And add a few other types of intelligence to the great chain of being:

• mystical visions
• corporations, collectives, governments
• normal humans
• bureaucrats and engineers
• autistic people
• animals
• computers, ecosystems
• appliances, vehicles, plants, germs
• genes, ideologies
• chemicals, simple machines
• physical structure of the universe

One of the parallel processes at work in modern times is the shift away from the abstract, mystical and visionary and toward the detailed structure of things. Computers and animals are becoming more important, even more loved and respected, while human beings, governments and corporations have lost value. Artificial intelligence has literally become a joke. I'm not a robot, I'm a unicorn. Making intelligences that reason at a higher level makes no sense if the future belongs to beings that reason on a lower level.

If Peter Ward is right, we are living in the middle of the age of complex, multicellular life, which began 600 million years ago, and will end some time in the next 600 million years. For billions of years before this age began, the microbes ruled. And after complex, multicellular life eventually self-destructs, the microbes will rule again for billions of years.

Perhaps we are also living in the middle of the age of complex, social intelligence. Perhaps culture and civilization are working against themselves, destined to self-destruct and return us (or return without us) to a world ruled over by animal-like intelligences. Even if that is not our destiny, the current trend is not toward a more transcendent and humanized future, but a more animalistic, mechanized, and ideological one.

Advocacy of Total War

IF the US did these things:

1. Only became militant against entities (or their support network) that had committed an atrocity within the territory of the US.
2. Became equally militant, no preferential treatment, e.g. the US's perverse distinction between Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, and Pakistan and others.
3. Only nullified all life in a zone, and then leave. No conquest, religious or ethical proselytizing, taking of resources, signing of lucrative exclusionary trade deals, orphanage building, or state building.

THEN

the world, especially the Muslim world, would have a very sincere respect of the US.

I would support a war on jihad extremism much like the US's war on the Japanese -the US obliterated every city above 50,000 in population. That nullifies the production of almost anything: hardware, memes, religion. In the war on jihadism, the US should have, at the very least, obliterated Islamabad, and then moved to an opposite of Japanese urban-bombing and used some form of nuclear war or other complete area death methodology to wipe the mountain terrain of both Afghanistan and Pakistan clear of all human and animal life.

Below is a copy from an email from a friend on the subject of Total War, his synopsis compliments my statements.

Saying that total war is all good or all bad is like saying that government is all good or all bad, or that bacteria is all good or all bad. Total war is a horrifying idea, and a powerful strategy that may do more good than harm in some cases. At the core of the idea is the concept of the "system" - the coordinated nation-state, the body politic, the public and private, military and civilian appendages working together under a political head.


To make any distinction between Sherman's march to the sea and Hitler's rape of Europe, we need to think objectively about systems. We need to understand that the good of the system is not necessarily the greatest good, and that the system does not self-regulate, it is not inherently justifying, it is not necessarily rational, and it has no destiny written in the stars. But we also need to understand that the system can do enough good to justify itself, that the system can be efficiently regulated, that it can be mostly fair and moral, and it can be improved over time.


Any system that can prevent Total War is a subtle form of Total War in itself, since preventing Total War means preventing the whole system of one nation from organizing itself against the whole system of another nation, and preventing a nation from organizing itself in that way is a military intervention against that nation.

-Seth Galbraith

Mechanized Marijuana

Marijuana should be legal to consume, but needs some tweaking to its image before this should happen.

The USA has been on a path to bourgeois-industrialism in all facets of life for the last 100 years. This is awesome, and what makes America a success. Removing nature, and replacing with the mass manufactured object is something I want and would fight and kill in wars to make sure happens.

Enter marijuana. At the consumer experience level it is too leafy and simple. This just won't work. Whiskey and beer show in no way the plants they come from, and come in a glass, metal or plastic container. Marijuana needs to adopt the same.

Marijuana needs to be consumed in a form something like a can of Red Bull.

And marijuana sounds too foreign and sensuous, it needs to be called what redneck, white Lynyrd Skynyrd fans called it in the 1970's: Pot.

Pot. Let's make it industrial looking, legal, and persecute anyone wanting the organic kind.

What we want -written by Seth Galbraith

Environment

• What we want: maintain natural resources that allow us to live and live well.
• What it becomes when we use it as an excuse for mediocrity: eco-guilt
• What it can become when we use it as an excuse for evil: eco-terrorism

Economy

• What we want: to promote commerce that produces prosperity and comfort
• What it is called when we use it as an excuse for mediocrity: wall street
• What it can be when we use it as an excuse for evil: shock therapy, SAPs and exploitation.

Social Equity

• What we want: fairness and meritocracy without cruelty
• What it is called when we use it as an excuse for mediocrity: social justice
• What it can become when we use it as an excuse for evil: social engineering or armed robbery

Live simple movement dies of starvation and loneliness

This painting Office Diety is hanging in a government office, an office in which many have been terminated due to budget shortfalls. The painting's message conveys an anti-commodity/anti-consumerist/anti-bourgeois critique of society. It is a painful irony that that man -a middle aged man, a black man- is going to get his big opportunity to loose all those nasty materialist manifestions such as cellphone, cigar, and golf putter. The post-2009 US economy is laying waste to that age group and class, their employability may be gone forever. They may never work again.

The standardized social critique of 1960-2010, in which the materialist or bourgeois are cast as a mockable pariah, should now crow with a truimphant "Mission Accomplished" as many move from a home filled with Best Buy flat-screen TV's to the fun-filled world of car-camping...and never employed again.

As for me, I was never anti materialist or bourgeois. I applauded minorities or any of the formerly marginalized becoming bourgeois. But now the Postmodern Left and Right have accomplished their goals; and honestly, I don't feel up to undoing the harm they've enabled. I purchase less, and what I do purchase is either food/clothing (and I will only pay the cheapest prices, never the living wage rate) or technology such as a smartphone designed and made in Taiwan, and mostly consume software. My family's spending follows this basic formula:

1. Shopping for the lowest price possible on food and neccessities, fully conscious there is almost no way the workers in that supply chain could be earning a living wage.
2. Paying high figures for such things as a bicycle made in the Netherlands, a smartphone made in Taiwan, and software. The recipients of these dollars we spend are either young and technically over-proficient Americans who solely manipulate symbols; or workers in Europe, China, Korea, Taiwan, or Japan.
3. Expending almost zero dollars on Facebook, Twitter and Google software technologies.

I doubt if even .001 per cent of our family's expenditures enable an older black man to puff cigar's, enjoy golf, and be complacently bourgeois. That is sad, I never wished that to happen on the scale it is today.

But the painter of Office Diety did.

Be like the USA in 1790 -A Horrific and Stupid Contemplation

I went to college with a bunch of ape-like scum who believed in an anarcho-primitivist utopia. The experience led me to hate this wing of extreme leftism. But in the last year a large segment of the right wing in the USA have been making ignorant claims for their own utopia.

The archetypes and tropes popular amongst right-wingers hail from the earliest years of the republic, with the brand name "Tea Party" as example number one.

Here is what I have to say about the lifestyles and modalities of the USA 1776 - 1860 : Useless, dumb and (thankfully) irrelevant to any way anyone is going to live today.

A major public policy mantra of these Retro-publicans is "small government, and no regulations". Like America once was. Back when disputes, crimes and other social issues were handled at the local level by the immediate community. The nation was largely Jeffersonian: yeoman farmers in the north and corporate farms in the south. People reprimanded an evil doer, and the church in middle of town normalized everyone's ethics.

Here's a situation in 2015 that shows Retro-publicanism for what it uselessly is:

I buy an old gas station "AS IS" from a bank that has had little contact with the original owners. The building is full of old car batteries and drums of petroleum mixed with rust. The Retro-Publicans have gotten their way -their are few to no regulations I have to comply with. The Tea Party President has spoken several times on being guided by faith and doing what Jesus would do when one is presented with situations like mine with old gas station.

But unlike America in 1820, I am not tethered to the values of the church or the sentiments of the congregation down the road. I can either silently dump stuff in the nearby river, or spend money having it safely shipped away.

I say dump it. Where there is no law, the people (can) perish.

Atlas Sure Did Shrug

I know the set-up for contemporary political discourse:

1. If you are conservative, libertarian, Tea Party, or pro-business you look up to Ayn Rand and the ideals presented in Atlas Shrugged.
2. If you are urbane, liberal, socialist, progressive, gay, non-white, Catholic, or progressive you are supposed to see Ayn Rand and the ideas promoted in Atlas Shrugged as a kind of cancer that attacks the delicate social contract that makes cooperative civilization run smoothly.

Both of the above are the dominant but wrong interpretation of Atlas Shrugged. I have a non-standard, but more correct, view of Atlas Shrugged. I'm an urbane, progressive, Obama-supporting Scandanavian-style socialist....that truly admires Ayn Rand and her Atlas Shrugged.

If the book's fictional scenario was a reality I lived in, then yes I would absolutely support the heroes in her story. She presents a dystopian USA filled with a new wave of political agenda in which wealth, status, and respect are taken from the hardest working, smartest, and most proficient and redistributed to the feeble, mediocre, idiotic, and low-functional. Rand's heroes, e.g. Dagny Taggart and Hank Rearden, are great heroes. They are not just wealthy leaders of corporations, they are engineers who work long hours into the night doing what it takes to make a better product. They are high functional, hard workers, smart, and deliver something (in the book: train service and better steel tracks that make trains run faster and safer) the public can use. To take from these high functional individuals, and to undo their offering of a superior "product" to consumers, is a wrongheaded and foolish political paradigm.

But real America has at its top of its corporate and economic pyramid characters who are anything but Dagny Taggart and Hank Rearden. Think of the antebellum plantation house, with owners who never touched the crops, did not pursue modernization of the equipment nor infrastructure. A lazy and un-technological class with power locked into place by the accident of birth. Plantation aristocracy did not stay up late working on the math that would produce better train service or better steel.

America has a cancer of plantation aristocracy running throughout its economic leadership, a lazy and inept people who keep themselves in their beautiful comfortable lives by keeping others broken, addicted, ignorant and immobile. One person I know calls this elite "takers", as opposed to industrial society's "makers".

Today's conservatives, from Alan Greenspan to Rand Paul to FoxNews, have misappropriated the ideals and heroes of Atlas Shrugged. Republicans/Conservatives/TeaParty agendas more times than not promote a no-leash law for plantation aristocrats, and a leash law for workers, makers and innovators.

Today's conservative movement in the USA work to undo the efforts of real world Dagny Taggart and Hank Rearden. In the early to mid 20th century maybe the enemies of innovation and wealth were Soviet type ideals. News flash: the Soviet Union collapsed, and the threat to Ayn Rand's ideals and heroes are coming from South Carolina, not Moscow.

they want us to do well

Accepting the postmodern tenet that the world is full of tribes now -clusters of people politically aligned due to blood kin, social class, agenda, etc; then we are stuck in a perpetual state of conflict if we think the other tribes besides our own are out to get us. This is the root of liberal-hate by red states, white hate by blacks, Israel hate by Arabs, etc.

The radical leap for anyone in this age of tribal membership -a radical leap that could end the cycle of obstructionism and war- would be viewing your traditional opponent tribe as wanting you and your tribe to do well, to prosper.

...to think "they want us to do well".

Obama's machines defeat Arizona, sanctuary cities and Mexican criminals

Arizona's immigration law allowed police officers to use their own human judgement on choosing whether to demand papers proving someone's right to be in the United States. This provision of the law was struck down by a federal judge.

The Obama administration isn't soft on illegal immigrants, actually Obama is more effective at catching people who here illegally than any President before him. He uses machines.

The machines are computers that compare fingerprints compiled in a federal database. The machines are part of the Secure Communities program, arrested people's fingerprints are required to be submitted for matches in the federal database. This is fast, race-neutral, even immigrant-issues neutral, and results in accurate information and identification.

To agendas fueled by silly human sentiment were utterly crushed by Obama's Skynet:

1. WASP-first nationalism.
2. Sanctuary cities and other agendas that aid illegal immigrants.

Long live Obama's Skynet.

While Economy in Trouble -More dollars go to propagandize ourselves

Email from a friend:

I am now getting absolutely hounded by left wing organizations for money (by e-mail.) They don't have much choice, because the corporate dam has been broken when it comes to funding Tax-break politicians, mostly right wingers who wish Reaganomics worked.

POINT: My initial reaction to this is "OK our society/economy is not designed to have this massive amount of cash disappear into the political system, we need to cap how much can be spent on this stuff."

COUNTER-POINT: The only counter argument I have to capping the money going into the political system is this: "We are a democracy, and for a democracy to work, the populace needs to be educated on political issues, which Americans traditionally are NOT. This new wave of political money is going into buying media to educate the general public on political issues, which is a much needed change in American society."

Q: Does my counter-point really justify the massive waves of cash being sucked up by both parties right now?

(My)Answer: Political commercials, no matter which candidate or agenda, are not education. Even if supporting a sane and valid course of action, a political commercial is still at its fundamental core propaganda.

My friend's email brings up a good point, but I've got a slight tweak on his terms. Money is being pumped into the political system for sure, but the industry that eventually receives this windfall of cash is the media industry -television and radio commercials, graphics artist who make flashy pamphlets, whoever creates robo-calls, and the stage hands who build the stage on which the candidate performs their "live show" while in tour.

All of the above (a diverse lot of graphics artists, writers, actors, film crews, and blue collar stage hands) are the recipients of the giant torrents of cash going into "the political system". My tweak on the common phrase is to say "the giant torrents of cash going into the advertising and entertainment industries -the propaganda system".

A few blocks from me is a large state highway bridge. It needs to be maintained, otherwise it will become unusable, or at worst collapse into the water below. The same goes for our entire transportation infrastructure, on which our way of life depends. In these lean times, when there is less money to go around, we are choosing to donate our money to create a TV commercial starring a politician talking about that bridge, rather than paying engineers and construction crews to actually repair it.

Don't want a politician working on cash raising more than working on legislative solutions? Then you want a politician like Bob Burr. He's running for Senator in Washington State. He promises to not run for a second term, which entirely nullifies his need or care for raising campaign funds while in office. Over and above that promise, he will not accept donations at all. Never, not now, not any.

Bob Burr is not just a model candidate, he is a model citizen. Burr is not accepting the current normal way things are done, and taking real and immediate steps to do it differently and honorably.

We should all be such a model citizen. Here's some good news: it's easy. We just get off the crazy train of money-fueled propaganda. Don't send your $15 to help fund an ad campaign, even for the issues you care for, and don't let your opinion be swayed by a slick right wing or left wing ad campaign.

Instead, read books, read the fine documentation online at government websites that show the actual legislation, and then talk intelligently and sincerely with those around you. That's a campaign style that is both higher quality than any media blitz, and cheaper than any media blitz.

Maybe, if we all do more of that, our money can start going to repair that bridge you cross everyday.

http://www.bobburr4senate.com/

Email from a white man married to a Chinese woman, with children

I moved out of the Rainier Valley in Seattle largely because of the racial tension there. The whites were trying to keep the Mexicans out, the Blacks were pissed about the Asian businesses, and various types of Chinese did not like other various types of Chinese. My Human Services training tells me that when you run into a group that is hard to get into, it is because the communication inside the group is not healthy. I ran into particular issues whenever I tried to socialize with any of my african american male neighbors on the bus, if they were older than me there was no problem, but if they were younger than me there was hell to pay.

Well, it turns out that around the time I moved out, there was a significant struggle going on for the hearts and minds of BET:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GlKL_EpnSp8
and much more importantly:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZQ4tTOeVp_g

It turns out this conversation is continued now in the Obama era, though you can see it is evolving:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tRVqVwGWocM

Technological empowerment is the key

"Much of this disparity is down to globalisation. When the world is changing fast, those qualified to deal with the technology du jour (be it the steam engine or the internet) will earn more than their peers. But the fact remains that not only is inequality at the highest level since the Thirties, the pension and welfare systems set up then for the express purpose of levelling this divide are in an exponential decline, threatening to widen the gulf further."

(British) Middle class families face triple whammy -Telegraph.co.uk

Last night my wife and I had a great conversation about our family budget, especially focused on the idea of my getting a cutting edge smartphone. One thing I brought up is that our employability or entrepreneurial capacity relies on our technological abilities. We must stay current with the innovation edge or we may never be employed again.

"Never be employed again" sounds over the top, but I've seen that very sentence fragment in many economic news articles in the last few months, and the other fragment that accompanies it is "millions in the US".

Here is a surprise: I've been embracing this emerging age for almost two decades. I knew Americans couldn't just keep purchasing Chinese goods with their credit cards forever, and I also knew pollution and crime were on an ascending spiral in some areas and not in others. I prepared -by moving and by learning technology skills.

Others will whine, via blog or newspaper op-ed, about this age of massive die off or enslavement of formerly middle class citizens. Whining doesn't get anything useful when there is a true scramble for dwindling resources (including safe places to live). Legitimacy through innocence may make points with the social justice crowd, but who cares when that crowd's (middle class) rank and file are being pummeled by the same economic decline?

It is a mean age I've anticipated for a long time, and I don't plan on losing. Others will pray to a God or patron saint who cares for the down-trodden, or rant about the gangsters and the corrupt in our halls of power. I will stick to the innovative edge and not expend energy for social justice (at least the type of social justice that mistakes losing and poverty with moral legitimacy).

I, along with my family, will win.

Don't Tread on Me....because I'm crazy.

At the Tea Party, it's every man for himself -Washington Post Blog

Rules of play: Tolerance of Tolerance. Intolerance of intolerance

1. Tolerant society is the goal.
2. Tolerance of intolerance is the boundary of tolerance. There can be no tolerance of intolerance.
   • If a subculture does not reciprocate "tolerance", it's members do not receive it, and is not allowed full rights in the system.

David Brooks on New Left and Tea Party similarities

The Wal-Mart Hippies
By DAVID BROOKS
Published: March 4, 2010
New York Times

David Brooks has an op-ed, The Wal-Mart Hippies, in which he links the 2010 Tea Party movement to the 1960's New Left; saying the Tea Party is studying some of the classic books and thinkers of the 60's New Left. Below are two paragraphs from The Wal-Mart Hippies.

"To start with, the Tea Partiers have adopted the tactics of the New Left. They go in for street theater, mass rallies, marches and extreme statements that are designed to shock polite society out of its stupor. This mimicry is no accident. Dick Armey, one of the spokesmen for the Tea Party movement, recently praised the methods of Saul Alinsky, the leading tactician of the New Left.

These days the same people who are buying Alinsky’s book “Rules for Radicals” on Amazon.com are, according to the company’s software, also buying books like “Liberal Fascism,” “Rules for Conservative Radicals,” “Unholy Alliance: Radical Islam and the American Left,” and “The Shadow Party: How George Soros, Hillary Clinton, and Sixties Radicals Seized Control of the Democratic Party.” Those last two books were written by David Horowitz, who was a leading New Left polemicist in the 1960s and is now a leading polemicist on the right."

-David Brooks

For me , it was surprising to see Brooks studying the Amazon.com buying patterns for Rules for Radicals, etc. I've been studying the Amazon.com buying patterns for those exact same books for the last two weeks. Why? Those same books are being purchased when people are buying my book: Manual for Redneck-Technologist Power and Empire: Enslaving and Exterminating Anarcho-Primitivist Pacifist Vegetarian Communities After the Apocalypse (look at the "Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought" section of page).

The Wal-Mart Hippies are buying my book.

The irony of all this New Left / New Right kinship is my Manual for Redneck-Technologist... explores "rednecks" in the dream world of 60's radicalism: a world where The Establishment has fallen. But in that day of anarchism, my book points out the opportunity for rednecks to enslave hippies. Brooks says Tea Partiers, like their leftist counterparts of the 60's, don't really have a plan for if their revolution succeeded. Well, my book satirically envisions such a plan, and Tea Party people are buying it, and praising it. And in Manual for Redneck-Technologist... the hippies are not studied or respected, they are the object of exploitation.

Fox News, Tea Party, and the Joe Stack Suicide Bombing

( I posted a comment in reply to John Robb's blog entry: Rage Against the Machine -The Joe Stack Suicide Bombing, and reprint it below )

I agree people like Stack are the canaries in the coal mine. We can go down an infinity hole trying to parse if he was right wing, left wing, but it does seem that lack of economic success was the central component of this story and event.

Here is my folksy psych test: amongst my wife's network of friends, who are not fringe, radicals nor fans of a forum such as GG, one of them read Stack's letter and posted to Facebook how lucid and rational the letter was.

With a smirk I watch Fox News try to spin this suicide bombing as a crazy and a coward. Whateverz, dudez. You all (Fox) put a sheen of legitimacy and funding into some of the the key moments in the Tea Party phenomenon, and now the movement is your scariest nightmare: distributed, open source, and its least stable and most unhappy folks have small planes. I've lurked on some Tea Party forums, and was amazed at the intelligence (keep in mind I'm a hostile witness, I'm not conservative), and ability of its members to dissent from the top hierarchical players. This dissent only appeared in the comment threads, never in the main content of the webpage. The Tea Party, as it is described from the top, is nothing I'd respect, but down in its basement, there are independent thinkers who are not hemmed in by identity politics (e.g. they say progressive things, they don't endorse carte blanche funding for the Pentagon).

Someone needs to notify Rupert Murdoch, and tell him: "autopoiesis, its what's for dinner." While I'm cracking jokes, I'll add "Independence Day, oh wait, who needs an official day, oh wait, who needs an official."

Whole Earth Discipline: Summary by the author

Ecological balance is too important for sentiment. It requires science.

The health of natural infrastructure is too compromised for passivity. It requires engineering.

What we call natural and what we call human are inseparable. We live one life.

-page 302. Summary of book's message.

Mutating Humans Mutating Earth

(click here to see email response to graphic )

Email response to graphic:

Today our Sustainable Urban Development Policies professor basically presented us with a symposium of her doctoral thesis, then apologized for geeking out and promised a real class discussion on Thursday. The subject of her research is basically http://folar.org/

She pointed out how the website of this artsy fartsy enviromental activist organization (which started out as a tongue-in-cheek mystical conceptual art project by poet Lewis MacAdams) shows a love for artificial, man-made environments.

She said that "engineers are not the enemy" and "there is no going back to nature." She used the terms "geotechnical engineering" and "bioremediation" to describe the methods for "reconstructing" of nature (not restoring old nature but creating a new nature informed by both the present and past state of the world.)

Whole Earth Discipline: Cities and Shantytowns

My Favorite Quotes from Whole Earth Discipline

(quotes are in light colored background, my commentary is in black background and white letters)

City air makes you free, and preference for urban slums over subsistence farming:

Many of my contemporaries in the developed world regard subsistence farming as soulful and organic, but it is a poverty trap and an environmental disaster.

Civilization is what happens in cities, and the return of great Asian cities:

The trend is pretty clear. The "rise of the West" is over. The world looks the way it did a thousand years ago, when the ten largest cities were Cordoba, in Spain; Kaifeng, in China; Constantinople; Angkor, in Cambodia; Kyoto; Cairo; Baghdad; Nishapur, in Iran; Al-Hasa, in Saudi Arabia; and Patan, in India. As Swedish statistician Hans Rosling says, "The world will be normal again; it will be an Asian world, as it always was except for the last thousand years. They are working like hell to make that happen, whereas we are consuming like hell."

The Challenge of the Slums, 2003 UN-HABITAT report:

"Cities are much more successful in promoting new forms of income generation, and it is much cheaper to provide services in urban areas, that some experts have actually suggested the only realistic poverty reduction strategy is to get as many people as possible to move to the city."

Unleashing the potential for Urban Growth, UN Populations Fund 2007 report:

"Cities concentrate poverty, but they also represent the best hope of escaping it. ... the half of the world's population living in cities occupies only 2.8 percent of the world's land area. ... In cities, concentration and density make it easier to provide social services. Education, health, sanitation, water, electrical power -everything is so much easier and cheaper on a per capita basis. "

Kebler's Law -organism's become more metabolically efficient as they scale up :

" ...not only do cities increase their creativity with increasing size, but the relation is superlinear: when a city doubles in size, it more than doubles its rate of innovation. ... City growth creates problems, and then innovation speeds up to solve them. ... We have shown that growth driven by innovation implies, in principle, no limit to the size of a city, providing a quantitative argument against classical ideas in urban economics. ... Cities can go on growing forever. Look at the invention of the steam engine, the car, the digital revolution. What these advances all have in common is that they allowed cities to continue growing. ... the secret to creating a more environmentally sustainable society is making our cities bigger. We need more metropolises."

William Blake - "Without contraries there is no progression", Multitude of contrasts begets progress:

"...it could be surmised that the city is simply made up of contrasts; it is the sum of its differences. What drives a cities innovation engine, then-and thus its wealth engine-is its multitude of contrasts. The more and greater the contrasts, and the more they are marbled together, the better. The most productive city is one with many cultures, many languages, many neighborhoods, and and more kinds of urban experience available than any citizen can keep track of. In this formulation, it is the throwing together of great wealth and great poverty in the urban stew that is part of the cure for poverty. "

Rome:

"Rural economies, including agricultural work are directly built upon city economies and city work. Most farming innovations, for example, are city-based. When Rome collapsed, European agriculture collapsed. "

Slums are innovation:

" Peasants who leave the land take rural skills and values to the city slums with them. Building their own shelter is what they've always done, at a miniscule fraction of the cost of city-provided housing. Collaborating with extended family and neighbors in close proximity is nothing new to them, and neither is doing without elaborate infrastructure. Those are all the abilities they need to build the most creative urban phenomenon of our time, the squatter cities-the teeming slums of the uninvited that house a billion people now, two billion soon.
...
squatter cities are vibrant/ Their narrow lanes are bustling markets, with food stalls, bars, cafes, hair salons, dentists, churches, schools, health clubs, and mini-shops trading in cellphones, tools, trinkets, clothes, electronic gadgets, and bootleg videos and music. This is urban life at its most intense. It is social capital at its richest...What you see up close is not a despondent populace crushed by poverty but a lot of people busy getting out of poverty as fast as they can. "

"The sad fact is that when governments and idealistic architects try to help by providing public housing, those buildings invariably turn into the worst part of the slum. The people who build the shanties take pride in them and are always working to improve them. The issues for the squatters, Neuwirth found, are location -they want to be close to work -and what the UN calls security of tenure: They need to know that their homes and community won't be suddenly bulldozed out of existence. "

" Over time, the walls get solider and higher, the materials more durable. The magic of squatter cities is that they are improved steadily and gradually, increment by increment, by the people living there. Each home is built that way, and so is the whole community. To a planner's eye, squatter cities look chaotic. To my biologist's eye, they look organic. "

" According to urban researchers, squatters are now the predominant builders of cities in the world."

" [Field researchers for 2003 UN report found: ] All slums households in Bangkok have a colour television. The average number of TV's per household is 1.6... Almost all of them have a CD player, a washing machine, and 1.5 cellphones. Half of them have a home telephone, a video player, and a motorcycle. "

" [ favelados, slum residents of Rio ] have the aspirations of the bourgeoisie, the perseverance of pioneers, and the values of patriots. "

The massive trend of migration to slums is defusing the population bomb:

" In the [subsistence farming] village, every additional child is an asset, but in the slum, every additional child is a liability, so the newly liberated women in town focus on education and opportunity -on fewer, higher quality children. That's how urbanization defused the population bomb. "

" Massive numbers of people are making massive changes. Having just experienced the first doubling of world population within a single lifetime (3.3 billion in 1962, 6.6 billion in 2007), we are discovering that it was the last doubling. Birthrates worldwide are dropping not only faster than expected, but much further. "

" The takeoff of cities is the dominant economic event of the first half of this century ... People in vast numbers are climbing the energy ladder from smoky firewood and dung cooking fires to diesel-driven generators for charging batteries, then 24/7 grid electricity. They are also climbing the food ladder -from subsistence farms to cash crops of staples like rice, corn, wheat, and soy to the high protein of meat -and doing so in a global marketplace. Environmentalists who try to talk people out of such aspirations will find the effort works about as well as trying to convince people to stay in their villages did.

Peasant life is over unless catastrophic climate change drives us back to it. "

Resilient Community Viral Self-Sufficiency : Alternative currency energy security

This is blue sky thinking about a futuristic resilient community. It is currently feasible, but the pressures to adopt it are not high enough, so if this was implemented now it would be by a idealistic group operating on an esoteric imperative such ethical agenda or wanting the hipness of early adopter of technology.

Pressures and Adaptations

>> Pressure: states fail and currencies can devalue.
>> Adaptation: Monetary independence. Must be a non-falsifiable commodity.

>> Pressure: Travel is risky and expensive, more so in a post-state tribal allegiance world, and more so if motors have no fuel.
>> Adaptation: Travel irrelevance. The WWW provides cheap labor (outsourcing call center, data entry), education certification, and information such as Wikipedia.

>> Pressure: Must keep connected to WWW grid.
>> Adaptation: Cellphone towers powered by electric feeds from users needing the cellphone towers. The energy media (electricity) is the monetary media.

>> Pressure: Power grids for a cellphone tower would need a baseload.
>> Adaptation: Community of cellphone users, who are also distributed energy grid producers, are forced to coordinate to keep baseload adequate. This coordination, while serving an industrial/technical imperative, would simultaneously encourage a peaceful and socially engaged community. [ don't cooperate or care, and the baseload sinks to the point your WWW and phone doesn't work, which disrupts your personal life. In this rare case, I bet on peace and cooperation. ]