echovar

The GE commercial played in the background, but something about those first lines resonated. Where had I heard them before? Turns out the lines are part of an advertising campaign called “Brilliant Machines”. In a promotional piece called “Pushing the Boundaries of Minds + Machines” they say:

The world is on the threshold of a new era of innovation and change with the rise of the Industrial Internet. It is taking place through the convergence of the global industrial system with the power of advanced computing, analytics, low-cost sensing and new levels of connectivity permitted by the Internet. The deeper meshing of the digital world with the world of machines holds the potential to bring about profound transformation to global industry, and in turn to many aspects of daily life, including the way many of us do our jobs. These innovations promise to bring greater speed and efficiency to industries as diverse as aviation, rail transportation, power generation, oil and gas development, and health care delivery. It holds the promise of stronger economic growth, better and more jobs and rising living standards, whether in the US or in China, in a megacity in Africa or in a rural area in Kazakhstan.

Who’s speaking? Who’s saying those things? Who is the “I” who has “seen things”? It’s a non-human, an android–a non-human machine that is meant to simulate a human machine.

I’ve seen things. I have a past, a memory. This thing I’m seeing now I’ve put into the context of all the things I’ve seen during my life. I’ve seen things that aren’t me. These things are separate from me; they coexist with me inside some larger ecological space. That thing we used to call the world. I’ve seen things. I’ve seen incredible things. Things so rare. I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe.

I wonder if GE, in telling the beginning of the story of ‘Brilliant Machines’, wanted to foreshadow the end of these same brilliant machines? It finally came to me, the line from the commercial resonated with Roy’s “Tears in the Rain” speech from Bladerunner.

I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe.
Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion.
I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate.
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.
Time to die.

Those who’ve never been humbled believe there’s a rational explanation for this fact. In the world of technology vendor sports, Google has had numerous product failures, but it’s never really been humbled. Apple was on the verge of closing its doors. It was only an investment by Bill Gates’s Microsoft that kept the company alive. Microsoft itself lost an anti-trust case and was shackled for years. Facebook’s IPO has proved a humbling experience to the most recent master of the universe.

It was Microsoft’s reaching for the stars, it’s total domination of computer operating systems and office automation software that provided the model of what could be done. Given the size and scope of the known computing universe, their domination seemed to be total and everlasting. Of course, we know now that the universe continued to expand. The distances connecting the various functions of computing were distributed across the network of networks. Text became hypertext and the glyphs themselves were used to encode any media type for transmission across the Network. Suddenly, it was a whole new ball game.

Google claims as its mission the task of organizing the world’s information and making it universally accessible and useful. To some extent, Google accomplished this with its search engine product. The product has entered the common parlance, and now we talk of ‘Googling’ something. Google means search, and search is its big driver of revenues and profits. The funding for all its other products rests on the back of search. This allows them to enter established markets without the burden of turning a profit. Microsoft used this tactic when it launched the Internet Explorer web browser as a free product. Suddenly there was no such thing as a ‘web browser’ business.

One of the interesting characteristics of Google is that it doesn’t partner well. In the end, as a corporate philosophy, it believes that anything you can do, it can do better. It buys companies rather than partner with them. Google’s commitment to the open web and open source computing is the one area where they do create partnerships. Although these partnerships can’t be said to exist on an equal basis. Even in these open partnerships Google dominates.

In Geoffrey B. West’s talk for the Long Now Foundation, called “Why Cities Keep on Growing, Corporations Always Die, and Life Gets Faster” he addresses the issue of the lifespan of a corporation. As they become more regular in structure, they become more brittle. If we look at a listing of the current S&P 500, we find a startling fact:

The average lifespan of a company listed in the S&P 500 index of leading US companies has decreased by more than 50 years in the last century, from 67 years in the 1920s to just 15 years today, according to Professor Richard Foster from Yale University.

In the age of the ecological thought, we should ask whether the empire building dreams of the old Microsoft are a reasonable corporate mission. Is it still possible for any corporation really dominate the technical universe on its own? Apple, one the world’s biggest corporations, has arrived at its current position through carefully negotiated partnerships with the carriers, the music industry, the film industry and software application and game developers. Apple’s more humble approach to partnerships seemed to start when a partnership saved its life.

“Apple doesn’t have to lose for Microsoft to Win. Microsoft doesn’t have to lose for Apple to win”

- Steve Jobs

Even Microsoft doesn’t believe in the old Microsoft. For example, they now offer Linux on Windows Azure. They’ve been very friendly to the JQuery and Drupal open source projects. It appears they’ve learned something about coexistence. Interestingly, the one area where Microsoft always had partners was in hardware. With announcement of Surface, that dynamic is going to change.

Google’s Android is the direct analog to Microsoft’s Windows. The difference being that Google subsidizes Android; it’s generally provided for free to its partners. Although if you’ve read anything about gift economies, you know that something given for free creates an obligation of a different sort.

When you look at the scope of Google’s products, it becomes clear that organizing the world’s information actually requires them to mediate every human contact with the world. The world itself becomes an unbundled, chaotic swirl of qualities. It’s just color and light, textures and shapes, never resolving into objects. To get an understanding of how Google sees itself mediating and rendering the world, making it accessible and useful, take a look at their new television commercial for the Nexus 7. A father and son, camping in nature—what could possibly come between them?

It could be that Google is the harbinger of a new era of philosopher kings, or perhaps we should call them engineer kings. And perhaps a king who has never been humbled can rule with humanity and wisdom. On the other hand, Google’s harmartia may lie in its belief that there’s a rational explanation for why it’s never been humbled.

After word began to spread that “This American Life” was retracting their story based on Mike Daisey’s theater piece on the human cost of the production of Apple products in China, you could hear a sigh of relief. Our fall from ignorance could be reversed. We could unknow our knowledge about the means of production because a highly-reputable radio show had retracted a program.

Only you can’t unknow.

Apple is a beautiful target, sitting there all by itself, high on its pedestal. There probably isn’t a single corporation more in control of every aspect of its image. Rather than focusing on the technical specifications of their devices, they work on creating an emotional bond between the machine and its owner. This information about the human cost of the production of these devices is something out of Apple’s control. It’s a dark underside hidden behind the perfect illusion engineered by Steve Jobs and his team. Normally, we like to see the high and mighty fall. In this case, there’s a small problem.

As much as Apple, we the users, are the beneficiaries of human cost of the production method of their devices. There are very few consumer electronic devices with supply-constrained markets. We criticize Apple because they can’t make their products fast enough to meet demand. As supply and demand start to equalize, the next version of a device is released and starts the cycle again. It’s not just Apple that’s linked to these labor practices, it’s us, the people who buy the products.

And that’s the link we’d like to undo with the retraction of that radio program. But the reality is that the link isn’t going away, in fact, it’s multiplied. How many products in our lives are manufactured in China? We buy based on price, and goods manufactured in China are usually cheaper. For the most part, we don’t ask about the labor practices involved in manufacturing the products that populate our lives. Even if we could unknow what we know about Apple, we are linked to Chinese workers through thousands of other avenues.

One criticism of Apple is that they have too much control. They review every app that operates on their platform, they take a piece of everyone’s action, their platform isn’t open. But it’s only by virtue of this extraordinary level of control that we can point to these labor practices in China and say: “Hey Apple, what about this?” Apple does have published labor standards for their vendors, along with a yearly independent audit which they publicly disclose. They also have a vision and policies about the environmental impact of their products.

So far Android has avoided the spotlight. In most categories, Apple’s iOS products are compared with Google’s Android. In many categories Android leads the field, but the question of labor practices never comes up. Anyone can use Android, it’s an open system. Would it make sense to ask Google to withhold licenses to manufacturers that violate some set of labor standards? Could they even do that? What about the environmental impact of Android devices? The Kindle Fire and the Nook are also built with Chinese labor at Foxconn.

Once we open the door to these issues we begin to understand that even the electronic equipment used to report and broadcast the journalism telling us about the problem is afflicted with the problem. The story plays like a film noir where the detective investigating a murder comes to find that he’s implicated in the crime. The “Open” movement has a kind of morality, but it doesn’t extend beyond technological processes. It has nothing to say about labor standards in factories or the environmental impact of e-Waste on the emerging and frontier nations. The Open Web may be a network of networks, but it needs to acknowledge the even broader range of networks in which it’s already implicated.

A short piece of writing on our infinities: Gazing toward the stars, we discovered an infinite external universe. Looking inward, we recognized the capacity to hold multiple infinities in the grasp of our understanding. In our everyday life we attribute high value to things that exude a feeling of immortality. While some things we manufacture are meant to be ephemeral, in things of quality, we want something about them to last forever.

In thinking about infinities, and by this, I’m really referring to Tim Morton’s idea of very large finitudes, I was drawn in by the great plastic vortex in the Pacific ocean. This is location, created by ocean currents, where large deposits of granulated plastic swirl in an endless gyre. “Plastic” means something that can be molded, “plastic” is plastic. Not only can plastic take any shape, it can have a high level of durability while in use. The “mold-ability” of metals on the one hand and plaster on the other, find a mid-point in plastic. Plastic is a neutral material that functions like a simile. The plastic is like leather, it functions like ceramic, it gives the appearance of wood grain. Plastic never appears to us as plastic, it’s always “like” something else.

Plastic becomes itself again when it’s discarded. It’s no longer “like” anything; it “is” plastic. Different kinds of plastic have different lifespans. Some plastic, plastic bags for instance, have a lifespan of 30 to 60 years. A plastic bottle, on the other hand, has a lifespan of 300 to 500 years. The “use” of a plastic bottle may occur over 30 minutes, the time it takes to drink a soda or some filtered water. If that plastic bottle is part of the eight million tons of garbage that reaches the ocean every day, it may go on to have a long life as a piece of bottle-shaped plastic.

In the world of literature, we talk about immortal works. Art is long, but life is short. “Words” also have a plastic quality, they can be selected and sequenced in such a way to conjure up almost anything. The word “elephant” isn’t an elephant, but it can cause the reader to register neurological activity that is “like” that of seeing an actual elephant. We can even use words to describe things like an infinite series of numbers. Here we register neurological activity of something that we can’t actually see.

But much like the plastic bottle, texts have a lifespan. They aren’t immortal. On leap day of this year, philosopher Graham Harman shared some thoughts about the lifespan of books:

Books have a much, much higher childhood death rate than people. If a book makes it to age 21 and is still being discussed and still changing career paths, then it’s obviously a huge success.

I’m a great believer in classic books, but not at all a believer in “immortal” books. Plato will not be read one million years from now, though under certain scenarios he might still be read in another 2000 or 5000 years.

You can’t do “immortal” work because that’s quite impossible. The human species will probably be turning into something rather different that won’t much care about most of our supposedly immortal books and empires.

That said, there’s still a big difference between writing a book that’s readable for 3 years versus one that’s readable for 20, 50, or 500 years. That’s the scale on which very high-quality work announces itself as opposed to more transient period pieces– not the non-existent immortal scale.

In the age of the digital network, the ephemeral seems to gain a kind of immortality. Publishing written words is almost as simple as speaking. Once published to the Network, whatever it is, is there forever. And theoretically, it is findable via some method of search. In this sense, this immortal ephemera is like the plastic bottle–useful for a short amount of time, but possibly destined to a very long after life. Perhaps it is also swirling about in the gyre of some immense database. However, there’s a qualitative difference between the kind of life of a work that Graham Harman discusses and the life of a tweet saved forever in a networked database server.

When we discuss economies of abundance in the digital age, we’re assuming the low-cost production of very large finitudes. Plastic is this kind of thing, it’s the least expensive physical simile for a large range of objects. It also has the strange quality of sometimes having a lifespan that is five or six times that of an ordinary human. In this ecological age where we are newly surrounded by economies of abundance, what shall we do with our infinities? We can no longer send them away when we’ve annihilated distance through technology. The plastic as “plastic” waves to us from the gyres in the ocean. It will swirl there for our children and our children’s children. What ever shall we do with our infinities?

Богородица

Cory Doctorow’s talk has the feel of science fiction. This coming war on general computing seems like a movie we’ve already seen. We imagine killer robots, explosions in space and the rest of the typical fare of a science fiction epic. But that’s just a teaser—a feint, something to get us to pay attention. Doctorow’s talk is really about making laws and the possibility of creating zones of safety. How can we create zones on the Network that free us from immorality, from surveillance, from pirates who take our work product without paying?

Here’s Doctorow’s summary of the desire that drives the creation of so many new laws intended to govern and limit the Network:

Regardless of whether you think these are real problems or hysterical fears, they are, nevertheless, the political currency of lobbies and interest groups far more influential than Hollywood and big content. Every one of them will arrive at the same place: “Can’t you just make us a general-purpose computer that runs all the programs, except the ones that scare and anger us? Can’t you just make us an Internet that transmits any message over any protocol between any two points, unless it upsets us?”

Ostensively, the talk is about a certain class of computing machines and whether these machines will be deemed too dangerous to be at large. The general purpose computer in this instance might be compared to general purpose pen and paper. When we try to restrict the uses of pen and paper, we run into the same sort of problems that Doctorow outlines discussing imposed limitations to networked digital computers.

Doctorow’s technically savvy audience seems to believe this is a case of the technically illiterate interfering with something they don’t understand. One often hears the statement that it’s not okay for Washington politicians to not understand the Internet. As though, once their understanding was upgraded to the latest version of the Network they would naturally understand the impossibility of placing absolute technical limits on a general computing machine. At which point they would turn to their constituents and campaign donors and patiently explain that what they want isn’t possible. And further that he’ll be sending someone around to their house to make sure they’ve been upgraded to the latest version of the pre-approved software.

Of course, once we peel away the top layer, it’s easy to see that the computer in this parable is a stand-in for human being. There are a number of ways into this connection. For instance, if we subscribe to the idea of the extended phenotype, the computer is an expression of human DNA. Augmentation is not separate from that which it augments, the web is not separate from the spider. Limitation of the spider web is a limitation of the the spider.

Or we can return to the moment of the general computer’s conception. In Ian Bogost’s book “Unit Operations” he provides a summary of von Neumann’s revolutionary change to the architecture of computing systems. From its inception, the universal computation machine’s inspiration was the human brain. Human turned into a machine through biological understanding of the thinking organ—copied over to the machine such that the machine might become human in its approach to computation.

Here’s Bogost on the significance of this change:

The conditional control transfer allowed individual computational functions to be preserved across programs, just as the film camera allowed individual photographic functions like exposure to be preserved across images. The von Neumann architecture marked the beginning of computation’s status as unit operational, rather than system operational.

The universal computer that would mimic the structure of the human brain was a vision of both von Neumann and Alan Turing, who separately developed his own computational architecture called ACE (automating computing engine). Both von Neumann and Turing obsessively equated their universal computing projects with attempts to model the human brain; the famous Turing test serves as an illustration of such a goal. The von Neumann architecture, as the consolidated control transfer has become known, is the basis for all modern computing. The key to von Neumann’s success was not the specifics of his solution so much as his approach to the problem of computation. Rather than treating universal computation as an engineering problem, he recognized it as a logical one, antecedent to any specific instantiation.

Doctorow’s complaint is in essence that we’re attempting to employ engineering solutions to a problem of logic. Because universal computing is antecedent to any specific instantiation, a solution engineered to enforce limits in a specific instantiation will find itself obsolete in the next instantiation. Which sets off another round of engineering solutions.

If these clusters of limitations are going to be deployed into our “local” computing environment, Doctorow is asking for Admin privileges. For the computers embedded into his extended phenotype, he’d like permission to view and terminate processes working against his interests. Crafting one’s own soul, rather than being crafted by an unknown and unperceived external system with its own agenda. In a sense, what he’s asking for here is the equivalent of a computational immune system.

Imagine an object, a ball for example. You look at it and see the side that faces you. In this new scheme, if you turn the ball to see the other side, you see the same side with which you started. There is no other side.

But there’s something left unspoken in setting the frame for the discussion. Doctorow hints at it here:

There will be programs that run on general-purpose computers, and peripherals, that will freak even me out. So I can believe that people who advocate for limiting general-purpose computers will find a receptive audience.

The necessary feature of the open systems and networks that Doctorow advocates is that they must preserve the possibility of evil. The systematic exclusion of evil breaks the open (unit operational) nature of the system. From a political perspective, you won’t score too many points campaigning for the preservation of the possibility of evil. The most successful argument of this kind is the theological argument around why God has given humans free will. Being good without choosing good means that goodness isn’t a virtue. The possibility of choosing evil makes the choice of good meaningful. Pre-deleting evil processes from the operating environment pre-empts the possibility of choosing to run good processes and the act of terminating the evil ones.

Doctorow trots out the crowd-pleasing quip: “the beatings will continue until morale improves.” This is the logic of the dictatorship; but Doctorow fails to see the subtle passing of the baton to hegemony. Here I give you the baton and train you to beat yourself until morale (morality) improves. You do know which processes should be terminated and which should not. Don’t you?

Once you dig below the surface, this war on general computing seems to have been going on for quite a long time. As Bogost notes of von Neumann’s architecture, it’s “antecedent to any specific instantiation.”

The news came over the wire, the report says:

If fossil fuel infrastructure is not rapidly changed, the world will ‘lose for ever’ the chance to avoid dangerous climate change

The time frame is five years. Rapid change must occur within five years or dangerous climate change will be irreversibly with us. Perhaps I missed it, but I don’t remember seeing any emotion in the eyes of the news presenters. I’m not even sure many news programs featured the story. For most of us, the dispatch came over the internet–-and the internet rarely abandons its poker face.

Of course when I heard, I thought of the line in the song: “news guy wept and told us, earth was really dying.” For some reason, we received the news flatly. It’s an interesting moment, since we didn’t react to the news that rapid action is required; we automatically accelerated the time frame to this moment. The moment of irreversibility just happened. No tears were shed.

Five Years
David Bowie

Pushing thru the market square, so many mothers sighing
News had just come over, we had five years left to cry in
News guy wept and told us, earth was really dying
Cried so much his face was wet, then I knew he was not lying
I heard telephones, opera house, favourite melodies
I saw boys, toys electric irons and T.V.’s
My brain hurt like a warehouse, it had no room to spare
I had to cram so many things to store everything in there
And all the fat-skinny people, and all the tall-short people
And all the nobody people, and all the somebody people
I never thought I’d need so many people

A girl my age went off her head, hit some tiny children
If the black hadn’t a-pulled her off, I think she would have killed them
A soldier with a broken arm, fixed his stare to the wheels of a Cadillac
A cop knelt and kissed the feet of a priest, and a queer threw up at the sight of that

I think I saw you in an ice-cream parlour, drinking milk shakes cold and long
Smiling and waving and looking so fine, don’t think
you knew you were in this song
And it was cold and it rained so I felt like an actor
And I thought of Ma and I wanted to get back there
Your face, your race, the way that you talk
I kiss you, you’re beautiful, I want you to walk

We’ve got five years, stuck on my eyes
Five years, what a surprise
We’ve got five years, my brain hurts a lot
Five years, that’s all we’ve got
We’ve got five years, what a surprise
Five years, stuck on my eyes
We’ve got five years, my brain hurts a lot
Five years, that’s all we’ve got
We’ve got five years, stuck on my eyes
Five years, what a surprise
We’ve got five years, my brain hurts a lot
Five years, that’s all we’ve got
We’ve got five years, what a surprise
We’ve got five years, stuck on my eyes
We’ve got five years, my brain hurts a lot
Five years, that’s all we’ve got
Five years
Five years
Five years
Five years

{Thunder. THIRD APPARITION,
a Child crowned, with a tree in his hand.}

MACBETH

What is this
That rises like the issue of a king,
And wears upon his baby-brow the round
And top of sovereignty?

ALL

Listen, but speak not to’t.

Third Apparition

Be lion-mettled, proud; and take no care
Who chafes, who frets, or where conspirers are:
Macbeth shall never vanquish’d be until
Great Birnam wood to high Dunsinane hill
Shall come against him.

MACBETH

That will never be.
Who can impress the forest, bid the tree
Unfix his earth-bound root? Sweet bodements! good!
Rebellious dead, rise never till the wood
Of Birnam rise, and our high-placed Macbeth
Shall live the lease of nature, pay his breath
To time and mortal custom. Yet my heart
Throbs to know one thing: tell me, if your art
Can tell so much, shall Banquo’s issue ever
Reign in this kingdom?

ALL

Seek to know no more.

I was dreaming that the earth was too big to fail. And in any case, the power I’ve consolidated will protect me from the storms and draughts that have begun to plague the planet. These things are just a manifestation of chance. Whether they’ve increased in severity and frequency is a matter of conjecture. Something we might discuss in our spare time. Simply undecidable, unprovable. And it’s that uncertainty that will protect me like a the highest wall of any castle.

Then the dream shifted, and a messenger arrived with a report:

A huge “migration” of trees has begun across much of the West due to global warming, insect attack, diseases and fire, and many tree species are projected to decline or die out in regions where they have been present for centuries, while others move in and replace them, a new study says.

But surely this migration isn’t visible to the naked eye. These trees aren’t on the move. They remain rooted to the earth, this idea of trees marching toward the castle is shear fantasy.

The messenger replied:

“Ecosystems are always changing at the landscape level, but normally the rate of change is too slow for humans to notice,” said Steven Running, the University of Montana Regents Professor and a co-author of the study. “Now the rate of change is fast enough we can see it.”

{Enter a Messenger}

MACBETH

Thou comest to use thy tongue; thy story quickly.

Messenger

Gracious my lord,
I should report that which I say I saw,
But know not how to do it.

MACBETH

Well, say, sir.

Messenger

As I did stand my watch upon the hill,
I look’d toward Birnam, and anon, methought,
The wood began to move.

MACBETH

Liar and slave!

Messenger

Let me endure your wrath, if’t be not so:
Within this three mile may you see it coming;
I say, a moving grove.

MACBETH

If thou speak’st false,
Upon the next tree shalt thou hang alive,
Till famine cling thee: if thy speech be sooth,
I care not if thou dost for me as much.
I pull in resolution, and begin
To doubt the equivocation of the fiend
That lies like truth: ‘Fear not, till Birnam wood
Do come to Dunsinane:’ and now a wood
Comes toward Dunsinane. Arm, arm, and out!
If this which he avouches does appear,
There is nor flying hence nor tarrying here.
I gin to be aweary of the sun,
And wish the estate o’ the world were now undone.
Ring the alarum-bell! Blow, wind! come, wrack!
At least we’ll die with harness on our back.

{Exeunt}

I awake from this dream and know that I am not Macbeth. I am no character in a play; I’m a real person of flesh and blood. And yet, I seem to wear his clothes and speak his lines. How is it that I feel implicated in his crimes? And the impossible is now visible, the trees have unfixed their earthbound roots and move toward the castle. What is my next move?

The technical systems we build have perfect memories. They keep account of everything. The ones are the ones, and the zeros are the zeros. We network the systems together and even account for things across multiple domains. While on the one hand we talk about economies of abundance and prices of many things converging on free—we know the score.

When Jacques Derrida talks about forgiveness, he cuts to the chase. To forgive is to forgive what is unforgivable. It’s an act of transformation, and by definition impossible. Forgiveness without cost isn’t forgiveness. Forgiveness costs everything. A forgiveness that translates the debt from one domain to another isn’t forgiveness. To forgive is to break all the rules of the system.

David Graeber, in discussing his work “5,000 Years of Debt” talks about how morality and monetary debt have always been intertwined.

In Sanskrit, Hebrew, Aramaic, ‘debt,’ ‘guilt,’ and ‘sin’ are actually the same word. Much of the language of the great religious movements – reckoning, redemption, karmic accounting and the like – are drawn from the language of ancient finance. But that language is always found wanting and inadequate and twisted around into something completely different. It’s as if the great prophets and religious teachers had no choice but to start with that kind of language because it’s the language that existed at the time, but they only adopted it so as to turn it into its opposite: as a way of saying debts are not sacred, but forgiveness of debt, or the ability to wipe out debt, or to realize that debts aren’t real – these are the acts that are truly sacred.

We’ve become very sophisticated in creating instruments of debt and even derivatives on those instruments. Our systems of forgiveness, however, have been left behind. Debt and forgiveness of debt historically were linked. Forgiveness allows a system reset, the negative numbers are zeroed out. The moral judgement that comes along with monetary debt is wiped away. What by definition shouldn’t be forgiven is forgiven.

As the economies of the world are gripped by a debt crisis, the call for austerity measures come down from on high. From within the system, there’s only one kind of solution that’s rational. Austerity is the proper solution on both an economic and a moral level. Only moral weakness and foolishness would cause a person or a country to borrow more than they could repay. A good dose of austerity will put them back on the straight and narrow.

Of course, as Graeber points out, there’s a certain rationality for breaking the rules of the system at particular moments in time:

The first markets form on the fringes of these complexes and appear to operate largely on credit, using the temples’ units of account. But this gave the merchants and temple administrators and other well-off types the opportunity to make consumer loans to farmers, and then, if say the harvest was bad, everybody would start falling into debt-traps.

This was the great social evil of antiquity – families would have to start pawning off their flocks, fields and before long, their wives and children would be taken off into debt peonage. Often people would start abandoning the cities entirely, joining semi-nomadic bands, threatening to come back in force and overturn the existing order entirely. Rulers would regularly conclude the only way to prevent complete social breakdown was to declare a clean slate or ‘washing of the tablets,’ they’d cancel all consumer debt and just start over. In fact, the first recorded word for ‘freedom’ in any human language is the Sumerian amargi, a word for debt-freedom, and by extension freedom more generally, which literally means ‘return to mother,’ since when they declared a clean slate, all the debt peons would get to go home.

As our societies become more rational, secular and technical we become less able to do the impossible, to forgive what is unforgivable. It just doesn’t make sense, it’s not a part of the algorithm. Something like a Jubilee seems like the superstition of a primitive people. In the systems that we’re building, is there a set of events that will cause the system to reset itself? Or do we think we’ve somehow evolved into a system of systems that never needs to be rebooted?

Well shake it up now Sugaree, I’ll meet you at the jubilee
And if that jubilee don’t come maybe I’ll meet you on the run
Just one thing I ask of you, just one thing for me
Please forget you know my name, my darling Sugaree

ikoni

If you strip away all of the surface distractions and zoom in on the computing environment using your microscopic vision, you see bits moving back and forth across a wire. If you zoom back out to the macro level, you can see Hewlett Packard and Google making radical changes in strategy and multi-billion dollar bets on how the preponderance of those bits will travel.

Now step into the time machine and move back a few years. The personal computer has just become the business computer. Most of the bits are written and retrieved from local hard drives in the form of files. Files are moved via sneaker-net. Move forward a few years and files are moved over local networks and individual computers are linked together within a single location. Shared files find their way to file servers and now allow multiple users to access and add work product to these common-use files.

Concurrently, the message finds an electronic home in email. Initially email messages can only be transmitted within specific platforms. You need to be on the same network as the people you want to communicate with. Fast forward a few years and email is sent with a common protocol and the networks become a network of networks. Now you only need to know the name of the endpoint to send a message to anyone.

The growth vector of the file’s environment is the size of the hard disk. Larger hard disks in the computing device and on the local network define capacity. As time passes and more files accumulate, they require even more disk space. As computing power increases, file sizes increase as well. As more and more things are digitized, more kinds of things are stored on hard drives in digital form.

The personal computer connects to a local area network, a wide area network and a global network to create a new entity called the Network. Both message traffic and file creation are initiated through the personal computer and start to be pointed at the Network. As the speed of the Network increases, the length of the wire that file bits can workably traverse becomes global in nature. It’s at this point that the message and the file begin to converge. The functionality of the personal computer as a file processing machine begins to be sucked down the wire and reconstituted into the virtual space of the Network. Both the file and computing processes are remote controlled through a set of messages sent back and forth across the wires.

The technology dynasties that were built up around these different ways of treating bits have large investments in both the technical infrastructure and mental models of either files or messages. The roots of these patterns go deep into the corporate structures of these organizations. With the recent moves by HP and Google, we can see the can see that the message and messaging network infrastructure has finally tipped the balance away from the file. The file has become another kind of message for a signaling device pointed at a cloud messaging network. Google attempts to reach across from the cloud to gain a foothold on the device side. HP recognizes that rather than going from personal computer to signaling device, the move from personal computer to custom central computing platforms is a better fit.

It’s worth noting that the message infrastructure has backed off of its most radical formulation and returned to the competing large network platform environment. In the email messaging environment there was an impetus and energy to connect the disparate systems and endpoints so that any two endpoints could connect. The connections between the new era large messaging platforms are purely one-way, instead of the more common “read-only” capability, this is a “write-only” hook up. One has a sense of retreating from a democratic network back to a feudal system of large kingdoms.

There’s a maxim in investing that you should buy at the moment of maximum pessimism. The file, it seems, is on the ropes. The message, messaging networks and signaling devices seem to be firmly in control of the corporate agenda. That’s why it’s interesting that Apple, with its iCloud initiative, is investing in redefining the user’s relationship with the file. The file becomes non-local, it doesn’t travel across the wire, it’s simply wherever it’s needed. Or, at least, it appears that way. All the mechanics of syncing, versioning, reading and writing have been removed from the workflow. The creation device, the file and the file network may be perfectly ripe for rejuvenation as our obsession with the message reaches its peak.

We think of the phrase “history is written by the victors” as being for the most part historical. When we look back at those other people whose history was written for them, we mourn the injustice of it all. Those whose stories were whispered in the shadows, at the margins of the dominant society, barely register as people at all. We only learn these stories well after the fact. We reconstruct them as we would a dinosaur from a footprint recovered from an archeological dig.

When I think of @IdentityWoman’s dispute with Google and their Google+ platform, I can’t help but notice that identity too, is written by the victors. In the battle for the Network, Google can only be considered one of the victors. On their platform, they can set the rules for what counts as a who. We obscure the hard edges of the platform by calling it a cloud, but it’s a centralized system with a set of hard and fast rules.

The “real” name is the identifier that can be bound to the flesh and blood of a human. It’s the “I” who is responsible for the debts and transactions initiated by the soul that is embodied as a particular being. The “consumer” is another way of describing this “I.” But is the “I” who vouches for the reality of a name, the “I” who then narrates the life of the “I” who lives that life? Is that “I” only the “I” who buys and spends? While the system can try to insist that the “I” use a “real” name, I can only hear the voice of Arthur Rimbaud saying “I is another…”

Extract from the Voyant Letter
Arthur Rimbaud
1871

‘Romanticism has never been properly judged. Who could judge it? The Critics! The Romantics! Who prove so clearly that the singer is so seldom the work, that’s to say the idea sung and intended by the singer.

For I is another. If the brass wakes the trumpet, it’s not its fault. That’s obvious to me: I witness the unfolding of my own thought: I watch it, I hear it: I make a stroke with the bow: the symphony begins in the depths, or springs with a bound onto the stage.

If the old imbeciles hadn’t discovered only the false significance of Self, we wouldn’t have to now sweep away those millions of skeletons which have been piling up the products of their one-eyed intellect since time immemorial, and claiming themselves to be their authors!

In Greece, as I say, verse and lyre took rhythm from Action. Afterwards, music and rhyme are a game, a pastime. The study of the past charms the curious: many of them delight in reviving these antiquities: – that’s up to them. The universal intelligence has always thrown out its ideas naturally: men gathered a part of these fruits of the mind: they acted them out, they wrote books by means of them: so it progressed, men not working on themselves, either not being awake, or not yet in the fullness of the great dream. Civil-servants – writers: author; creator, poet: that man has never existed!

The first study for the man that wants to be a poet is true complete knowledge of himself: he looks for his soul; examines it, tests it, learns it. As soon as he knows it, he must develop it! That seems simple: a natural development takes place in every brain: so many egoists proclaim themselves authors: there are plenty of others who attribute their intellectual progress to themselves! – But the soul must be made monstrous: after the fashion of the comprachicos, yes! Imagine a man planting and cultivating warts on his face.

I say one must be a seer (voyant), make oneself a seer.