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Sitting in the audience at the California College of Arts, listening to Tim Morton’s talk “Enter the Non-Human,” I couldn’t help but think of a comment by Brian Eno. Eno had just finished producing the Talking Heads album “More Songs about Buildings and Food,” and he noted that the new album contained “more ideas per minute” than the first record. It’s my sense that the density of ideas in Morton’s talks is increasing as he pushes towards the “final” formulation of his book on Hyperobjects. As has been noted elsewhere, the ideas were streaming off the stage, washing over the audience. I experienced them like a Proustian sentence, holding an object out for our minds and then sketching it this way, then that way, then another, through a tumbling outpour of sub-clauses.

In the age of the Network, we often want things to be instantly consumable. If I don’t get it right off the bat, my attention moves to the next thing. The real-time stream and rest of the internet is just a click away. Morton traffics in philosophy, aesthetics and ecology; conversations on these topics aren’t easily digested. We have to chew on them a while. Sometimes we need to leave them and come back. Because of their difficulty, outside of the curriculum of an academic program, they tend to have limited circulation. This kind of learning is not achieved in a single transaction. The Book of Common Prayer suggests that as one encounters scripture, one must “read, mark, learn and inwardly digest.” Poetry and philosophy require a similar process. Watching Morton give this talk in person, my understanding rested on having heard recordings of other versions of the Hyperobjects talk and read his papers and books. But even with this foundation, I felt compelled to come back to the talk as a recording.

Enter The Non-Human: A New Phase in Aesthetics
Timothy Morton
Enter The Non-Human

Several days later as the recording unfurled through my earbuds, I noticed some interesting differences between the microphone’s experience of the talk and my own. Morton’s voice was much more dynamic and intimate on the recording, in the room it was compelling, but much softer. Perhaps this is due to the earbuds and the recorded audio seeming to manifest inside my head, rather than coming from an outside source. The microphone, sitting in Morton’s shirt pocket, interacted with the fabric containing it while he moved about the stage. In the moment, only the microphone was aware of these subtle sounds of textiles. During the Q&A session after the talk, strange mechanical sounds emanating from the space above the auditorium intruded into the conversation space providing an appropriately non-human perspective. The microphone recorded barely a trace of these intrusions. The recording is there on my iPhone, waiting for me to give it a play and allow these thoughts a chance to sink in further.

A Series of Hyperobjects
Timothy Morton

Hyperobjects 1.0
Hyperobjects 1.0

Hyperobjects 2.0
Hyperobjects 2.0

Hyperobjects 3.0
Hyperobjects 3.0

Hyperobjects 4.0
Hyperobjects 4.0

Something about this experience feels like a new form of pedagogy. Certainly it’s spilled over the walls of the Academy and on to the the Network, but it’s form is the biggest difference. The playing field has fundamentally changed when one can to listen to multiple versions of a lecture, can loop back through the recorded lecture and focus on particular parts, and read versions of the idea as downloadable papers. Certainly nothing like that ever occurred in my years in the academy. Like a hyperobject, the lecture on hyperobjects is massively distributed in time and space.

One of the laugh lines in Morton’s talk is “anything you can do I can do meta.” The idea behind this quip is to characterize the move to “undermine,” or in Graham Harman’s phrase, to “overmine” an opponent’s position. Either some atom is the basic building block to which all things can be reduced; or some system is the foundation from which all things extend. Generally what is taught in the Academy are the particulars around these atoms and systems. In his talk, Morton reviews the historical progression of these “particulars” in an effort to get to the present ecological moment. The strange thing about Morton’s talk is that he’s not trying to lay out a new complex conceptual framework that wraps up everything that precedes it. Instead he brings up a series of examples of the rift between appearance and essence—the remainder that each of these conceptual transactions always generates as it tries to snugly fit around the contours of the real. For students trained in memorizing and recapitulating particulars, the process of discarding conceptual frameworks to see more clearly must seem counter intuitive. In a line of thought that operates in a space without a center or edges, sometimes it’s difficult to know when it’s arrived at it’s topic. And further, once there, what is the listener meant to take away? What kind of transaction is this?

From my perspective, Morton’s set of examples melded with, and transformed threads from my other reading, in particular with David Graeber’s book “Debt.” One of Graeber’s profound observations is on the origin of the exact transaction from which both parties can walk away from free and clear. While it’s the dominant model now, from a historical and anthropological point of view, the desire for “exactness” comes from events in which some harm has occurred and fair reparations must be calculated. The more normal transaction would be to always have some remainder on one side or the other, an ongoing debt–the idea is that there would always be a continuation of the relationship. The desire to walk away from a transaction free and clear with no debts on either side is born from anger.

When trying to imagine a just society, it’s hard not to evoke images of balance and symmetry, of elegant geometries where everything balances out.

David Graeber
From his book “Debt“

As Morton points out, in the age of ecology there is no clean transaction you can walk away from. The fact that everything is connected isn’t something you can turn off when it’s inconvenient. There’s always something still owed, a remaining debt. Morton describes this as the viscous quality of the hyperobject, the more you know about it the more it sticks to you. And as Graeber shows, capital fails to capture the full extent of a transaction because it doesn’t fully represent the object. In the social context of the transaction, there’s always a remainder, the market never fully clears. At the level of capital and pricing, the numbers always add up, but the object of the transaction is broadcasting on multiple frequencies. And if you hold the concept of capital in abeyance for just a moment, you’ll find there were many more parties to the transaction than you had assumed, and if you listen closely, you can hear that the non-human has continued its relationship with you.

Postscript

After the talk I was standing on a street corner in the darkness of the early evening discussing object-oriented ontology and Shelley with Morton. He said he thought the Romantic poets were very modern, that their poetry could have been written today. While I understood what he was saying on a basic level, I could see there was much more to it that was invisible to me. I had the sense of Shelley as a large tree that had grown up inside of Morton over many seasons. While no stranger to poetry, I’d only come to Shelley and his compatriots recently. Within myself, Shelley was no more than a small sapling.

Hymn to Intellectual Beauty
By Percy Bysshe Shelley

The awful shadow of some unseen Power
      Floats though unseen among us; visiting
      This various world with as inconstant wing
As summer winds that creep from flower to flower;
Like moonbeams that behind some piny mountain shower,
      It visits with inconstant glance
      Each human heart and countenance;
Like hues and harmonies of evening,
      Like clouds in starlight widely spread,
      Like memory of music fled,
      Like aught that for its grace may be
Dear, and yet dearer for its mystery.

Spirit of BEAUTY, that dost consecrate
      With thine own hues all thou dost shine upon
      Of human thought or form, where art thou gone?
Why dost thou pass away and leave our state,
This dim vast vale of tears, vacant and desolate?
      Ask why the sunlight not for ever
      Weaves rainbows o’er yon mountain-river,
Why aught should fail and fade that once is shown,
      Why fear and dream and death and birth
      Cast on the daylight of this earth
      Such gloom, why man has such a scope
For love and hate, despondency and hope?

No voice from some sublimer world hath ever
      To sage or poet these responses given:
      Therefore the names of Demon, Ghost, and Heaven,
Remain the records of their vain endeavour:
Frail spells whose utter’d charm might not avail to sever,
      From all we hear and all we see,
      Doubt, chance and mutability.
Thy light alone like mist o’er mountains driven,
      Or music by the night-wind sent
      Through strings of some still instrument,
      Or moonlight on a midnight stream,
Gives grace and truth to life’s unquiet dream.

Love, Hope, and Self-esteem, like clouds depart
      And come, for some uncertain moments lent.
      Man were immortal and omnipotent,
Didst thou, unknown and awful as thou art,
Keep with thy glorious train firm state within his heart.
      Thou messenger of sympathies,
      That wax and wane in lovers’ eyes;
Thou, that to human thought art nourishment,
      Like darkness to a dying flame!
      Depart not as thy shadow came,
      Depart not—lest the grave should be,
Like life and fear, a dark reality.

While yet a boy I sought for ghosts, and sped
      Through many a listening chamber, cave and ruin,
      And starlight wood, with fearful steps pursuing
Hopes of high talk with the departed dead.
I call’d on poisonous names with which our youth is fed;
      I was not heard; I saw them not;
      When musing deeply on the lot
Of life, at that sweet time when winds are wooing
      All vital things that wake to bring
      News of birds and blossoming,
      Sudden, thy shadow fell on me;
I shriek’d, and clasp’d my hands in ecstasy!

I vow’d that I would dedicate my powers
      To thee and thine: have I not kept the vow?
      With beating heart and streaming eyes, even now
I call the phantoms of a thousand hours
Each from his voiceless grave: they have in vision’d bowers
      Of studious zeal or love’s delight
      Outwatch’d with me the envious night:
They know that never joy illum’d my brow
      Unlink’d with hope that thou wouldst free
      This world from its dark slavery,
      That thou, O awful LOVELINESS,
Wouldst give whate’er these words cannot express.

The day becomes more solemn and serene
      When noon is past; there is a harmony
      In autumn, and a lustre in its sky,
Which through the summer is not heard or seen,
As if it could not be, as if it had not been!
      Thus let thy power, which like the truth
      Of nature on my passive youth
Descended, to my onward life supply
      Its calm, to one who worships thee,
      And every form containing thee,
      Whom, SPIRIT fair, thy spells did bind
To fear himself, and love all human kind.

In his first address to Congress, our new President said that a college education was no longer optional. Education is a high priority and an important driver for the recovery of our economy. When we talk about a “college education,” we seem to know exactly what we’re talking about. We know about the Ivy League schools, the great technical schools, the football schools, the party schools, the medical schools, the law schools and the business schools. We need to learn to learn, and that’s what a college education seems to be good for. If adaptive behavior is the key to survival in a changing environment, then learning how to adapt would be a requirement for prospering in uncertain times.

Just we all seem to agree that everyone must have one– that it’s no longer optional, Mark C. Taylor throws the whole thing into question. I’m sure he doesn’t question that we all must have one, he simply questions what a college education is– or rather what it should be in this emerging network culture. He outlines his ideas in a piece for the NY Times. In brief, here are his six points:

1. Restructure the curriculum, beginning with the graduate program and proceeding as quickly as possible to undergraduate programs. The division-of-labor model of separate departments is obsolete and must be replaced with a curriculum structures like a web or complex adaptive network.
2. Abolish permanent departments, even for undergraduate education, and create problem focused programs. These constantly evolving programs would have sunset clauses, and every seven years, each one should be evaluated and either abolished, continued or significantly changed. Possible topics might include: Mind, Body, Law, Information, Networks, Language, Space, Time, Media, Money, Life and Water.
3. Increase collaboration among institutions. All institutions do not need to do all things and technology makes it possible for schools to form partnerships to share students and faculty. Institutions will be able to expand while contracting.
4. Transform the traditional dissertation. Do not write traditional traditional papers or graduate theses, rather develop analytic treatments in formats from hypertext and Web sites to films and video games.
5. Expand the range of professional options for graduate students. Most graduate students will never hold the kind of job for which they are being trained.
6. Impose mandatory retirement and abolish tenure. Tenure should be replaced with seven year contracts, which like the programs in which faculty teach, can be terminated or renewed.

Is our emerging network culture really still emerging? Oprah is on Twitter. The Web is already primarily social and is moving fast. The public relations and marketing industries are scrambling to transform themselves to be operational in a two-way many-to-many network grid. Our students are already networked. Imagine if our universities were not only institutions of learning, but also learning institutions– adaptive in the mode we intend our students to be.

What must the world be like in order for a person to understand what the phrase “copy and paste” means? As we look about us, we can distinguish between those things that can be “copied and pasted,” and those things that cannot. That bunch of flowers growing in the pot in my garden cannot be copied. I can grow similar flowers, but I can’t grow identical flowers.

While mechanical reproduction at the industrial level creates many seemingly identical products, the pen I write with, or the coffee mug from which I’m sipping– these things cannot be “copied and pasted.” As we continue to look about, our inclination would be to skip directly to the digital; for surely that’s the world from which “copy and paste” comes. But in our haste, we would be passing over vast continents.

“Copy and paste” makes sense to us because its most common usage is not digital. Its basis is in our language– both spoken and written. Language, words, can be quoted. I can copy a phrase, a prayer, a poem, a joke, a hint, an expression of emotion that I overhear somewhere and paste it into my speech. I can copy something identically, or I can make it my own by saying something similar. Our laws regarding copyright establish a legal and economic framework for the copying of language.

One of our primary activities as humans is to pass along news. “What’s going on in the world of politics today?” We scan through all the news we’ve consumed during the day– copying and pasting to create the story we want to tell. The filtering that takes place as we scan is both the discovery and creation of the value of information in the context of specific audiences.

As we turn to the digital, the obvious first stop is the editing program– the word processor. This tool augmented our ability to copy and paste text, to rearrange it, to treat it as a plastic medium. There’s a kind of flow to building and constructing that text editors make possible. Think about the much more mechanical process involved with using a fountain pen, typewriter, scissors and a glue pot.

The metaphor of editing has been extended to image, video and sound manipulation; and if we think about it, to the local file system itself. The desktop is an editor for pointers to files– here also, we copy, paste and delete. It’s with that editor that we’ve created ambiguity around the ownership status of digital media.

To preserve a particular economic algorithm, there’s an attempt to limit the file-system editor’s ability to “copy and paste” certain kinds of files. These kinds of limitations don’t exist with any other editor. Imagine a text editor that was prohibited from copying and pasting copyrighted material. Imagine a language that didn’t allow quotation.

When Ray Ozzie surfaced for a moment before being consumed by the organizational, political and directional turmoil of Microsoft, he developed and demo’d “copy and paste” at the level of the web. Live Clipboard was aimed at employing a simple metaphor for moving microformatted data from one place to another. Programs like Evernote allow me to copy sections of a web page with very loose HTML formatting, and paste them into my digital notebooks. In the world of social media we look at the social graph we’ve built and we’d like to copy it from this service and paste it into that service. Instead we find ourselves in the position of Medieval monk copying a manuscript with a quill pen.

We capture our thoughts and impressions through text, we scribble it in notebooks, we type it on sheets of paper and on to glowing screens. Our text becomes hypertext and the exoskeleton of structured markup encapsulates our language. Capturing sound, image and video used to be the province of professionals, but now most “telephones” can do this. Body language, gestures and intonation can now provide color to the messages we pass back and forth.

This is the point in time we need the pencil that Marc Canter created. Copy and paste are functions of an editor and they operate on pointers and abstractions to the world around us. We now have the Network and bandwidth to return to early days of multimedia and the toolsets that were developed for the production of CD-ROMs.

• Dan Farber interviews Marc Canter on the origins of multimedia

On the professional end, these tools have become more and more sophisticated. Apple has done a nice job providing tools for the consumer. Where Brian Eno had the insight that the recording studio could be a compositional tool, we now need a recording studio we can carry around with us and that resides on our (i)Phones. An initial model is the way the Flip Video Camera includes editing software on the hardware device. As we capture sound, narration, and still/moving images with our “telephones,” we need to be able to dash off a note in a picture/sound language. That device we carry around should be able to read, write and transmit over the Network. Actually, it already can. It already does. But there’s so much more.

Of course, literacy will always be an issue. But that’s why there are pirates:

Sometimes I dream of a digital Chautauqua that crosses over and travels in a tent show around the land. I think about Levon Helm’s Midnight Ramble, or the Willoz’s Chautauqua. I haven’t quite figured out how the Chautauqua on the network connects to the Chautauqua in the tent or the barn— but the two should be deeply intertwingled.

As I think about what the next big thing on the Web will be, I can’t help thinking about the next small thing. I imagine it will look like a digital Chautauqua, a unique performance that will exist for just a moment in time. It’s participants will be witnesses. Can I get a witness?

It’s an interesting question. Who has more power to affect climate change: the President of the United States or a new partner at Kleiner Perkins. One way to create change is to make new laws. Another way is to create economic incentives and fund creativity in the business world. Al Gore spent a lot of time trying to change things using the political system, now he’s trying another method. Political solutions always seem to involve sacrifice and high cost to the economy. When a new venture is funded, the expectation is that it’s going to be successful and make money. The fact that it’s a green venture doesn’t make a bit of difference.

It’s a different kind of grass roots politics that Gore’s practicing now. He’s building a constituency in the business world, and by creating value (doing well and doing good) he’ll change more minds than by fighting with politicians. That is, he will if he can show that his portfolio companies can make a buck or two. It’s a large bet, and a very optimistic bet, on the future of human endeavours.

Microsoft has launched “Healthvault,” a private archive for personal medical data. Google, sans Bosworth, is trying to figure out how to connect people searching for health information with quality results. Both of these are very serious approaches to a serious issue.

I’m wondering if it’s Mahalo that has the right approach. Calacanis is focusing on the top 20,000 searches— which fills the front page of Mahalo with celebrity gossip, gadgets, music, television, movies, etc. Stuff that’s obviously popular. It’s a little like the People Magazine of search. “People” started as a single page in Time Magazine, it was like dessert. Time realized some people like dessert all the time.

Mahalo does some nice “How to” pages, for instance How to speak French, or How to play the Guitar. Mahalo is mostly for searching and finding the fun part of the internet, elective studies. But what about serious things like health? Well there’s more in the Mahalo health category than I would have thought. The Cancer category has decent set of pages. Currently you can search and find information a large number of healthcare topics, from autism to West Nile Virus. The topic of healthcare is particularly suited to Calacanis’s idea of search results shaped by a smart person. When an individual searches for health information, they’re not looking for a list of links. They’re looking for answers.

Note to Jason: let’s see some more “How to” pages in your healthcare category. The concept and format of your SERPs gives you an order of magnitude advantage over Google’s method of delivering information. The key here is the emotional charge of the search. Of course there’s a charge when people search for gossip about their favorite celebrity, but there’s also a very serious emotional charge when you search for information when you, or someone you love, has an illness and you need guidance.

A number of universities have made lectures, and sometimes even full courses, available freely to the public through the internet in the form of podcasts. This is a valuable resource. I discovered it through Apple’s iTunes, they have a new section of their iTunes store called iTunes U.

Podcasts are available from Stanford, Berkeley, Duke, MIT and many more institutions. I don’t know if it’s because the podcasts are offered through Apple, but currently the most popular download is Steve Jobs’s 2005 commencement address at Stanford University.

It’s wonderful that iTunes is offering this resource, but I’d love to see some other directory of University podcasts. It almost seems like something our public libraries should do. There’s something wonderfully democratic about this. Of course, access to free education is only important if people take advantage of it. Somehow I can imagine a new immigrant to the United States thinking this is the equivalent of streets paved with gold.