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Category: desire

Transparent: Believing is Seeing that Believing is Seeing

Published May 11, 2014 by cgerrish

“We've almost made ourselves transparent in reaction to the fact that we know we're being watched.”

Annie Clark, St. Vincent

You are what you eat. You are what you wear. You are the music you listen to, the audio and video you consume. You are the investments you make, the work you do, the space you live in. You are the furniture that decorates your living space, especially the knick knacks on your mantle. You are the photos you share, the snarky comments you make on social networks, the political commentators you choose to listen to. You are the software you chose, the operating system, the device, the cloud that holds your stuff. You are the car you drive, the public transportation you take, the footwear you select for any particular walk. You are the cocktails you order, the craft beer you quaff and the espresso you sip.

You are the bill that was left unpaid this month. You are the parking ticket for parking in a handicapped spot. You are the bad report from a dentist. You're the person who doesn't floss enough. You're the person who raised his voice in anger. You are the phone call you forgot to make. You are the person living beyond her means. You are the person working two jobs and collecting food stamps. You are the person whose marriage didn't work out. You're the person who's too tired to read and too tired to sleep. Staring at the ceiling, waiting for the alarm to ring signaling the start of another day. You're the person obsessively checking email, even though there's only ever spam. You're the person who can't afford to eat lunch today. You are the person who forgot the difference between baking soda and baking powder.

You're the person whose essence is never completely captured by a sentence, or even a paragraph. You're the person who is represented by thousands of entries in hundreds of corporate and government databases. But the pieces never seem to add up to a solid picture. You're the person whose potential isn't represented by your test scores. You're the person who can't be summed up analyzing your web search history. You're the person whose taste can't be modeled with an algorithm.

You're the person who's become transparent. You're the person who is watched but unseen. You're the person who is present, but unrecorded. You're the person who leaves a trace that is never fully comprehended. You're the person with wholly unexpected depth. You're the person filled with unknown unknowns.

 

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Turning Anthropocentrism Up to 11

Published May 3, 2014 by cgerrish

 

It's often pointed out that when we say “Save the Earth”, what we mean is “Save the Earth (for humans)”. There has been, and will be, an earth without humans. That earth apparently doesn't require saving. This has lead to a new trope in discourse about global warming and the sixth mass extinction. It's the “if you won't do it for the earth, do it for yourselves” argument. The earth will be fine either way, but humans will face a catastrophe in the biosphere and widespread extinction. When the dust settles, there will still be some form of the planet earth.

In a New York Times Op-Ed, Alan Lightman recently put it this way:

Mother Earth doesn't care about you at all. So save yourselves.

Lightman wants to disabuse us of the notion that nature is a sentient larger whole with which we humans can become one. He prefers this view of nature:

Nature is purposeless. Nature simply is. We may find nature beautiful or terrible, but those feelings are human constructions. Such utter and complete mindlessness is hard for us to accept. We feel such a strong connection to nature. But the relationship between nature and us is one-sided. There is no reciprocity. There is no mind on the other side of the wall.

Lightman is a physicist who teaches humanities at M.I.T., and here he seems to present us with a hard-headed realist position. Nature is an unraveling of mindless patterns and algorithms, it will not save us from our self-made catastrophe. Forget nature, save the humans. If we can't be made to care about the planet, perhaps we can spurred to action with the idea of saving ourselves.

Of course, the wealthy 1% will experience catastrophic climate change, due to global warming, much differently than the other 99%. When we say “humans,” and great deal depends on who is speaking and what groups they refer to when uttering that word.

Lightman's position is the ne plus ultra of nihilist idealism. Nothing exists but the human mind, its constructions and a purposeless chaos. It's an interesting position for a scientist to take. It also points to the reason that scientists could benefit from a dialogue with philosophers. Lightman seems unaware of the philosophical ideas he's enacting.

The physicist (who teaches humanities) sees our position in the universe as a lonely one. It's only us. A simple refutation of Lightman would be to look at anyone who has ever had a dog or a cat as a pet. We co-exist with a dog, and the dog is an other, not a mental construction.

This concept that there are only humans, or what is more commonly called anthropocentrism, is precisely the reason that we face a catastrophe in the biosphere. Lightman thinks we can escape our fate by turning our anthropocentrism from 10 up to 11. I suggest we wake from that nightmare to see the other entities all around us. It's not just us we will destroy.

 

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Pity Would Be No More: Google The Human Abstract

Published March 9, 2014 by cgerrish

The public relations profession was created to repair the reputations of the 1%. The robber barons who consolidated control over industry in the United States needed to boost their numbers in the polls, and thus began the professional publicizing of acts of charity. The technology industry and its titans have finally taken that lesson to heart.

Fighting tooth and nail, then threatening to leave San Francisco for more accommodating tax havens, technology companies have negotiated big tax breaks. They're special. Not the sense that they need an extra helping hand to get their business of the ground. It's just that they want to use every piece of leverage they have over the city. When what they've wrought becomes plain for everyone to see, the oldest public relations plan in the book is trotted out. They'll participate in the community, but only on their terms. Here it comes, sweet charity.

Instead of public services coming organically through our tax base and distributed through a public political process, the tech company decides what cause gets money and how much. The money they donate creates capacity within the public budget which is then redirected to other needs. In a few years when the corporations stop giving and the public budget can't accommodate the programs, they're eliminated. What seems to be a windfall is really a death sentence.

Criticism of charitable acts is a rare thing. That's why it's a classic public relations play for the 1%. Google funds a transportation program for low-income youth, Facebook buys a police officer, etc. PR firms are paid big bucks to make sure we all know about it. Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss.

William Blake wrote “The Human Abstract” as part of his Songs of Innocence and Experience. Put this poem on the “experience” side of the ledger. His criticism of pity and charity continue to ring true. Out of the pity of the technology giants comes charity for the poor and disadvantaged. Blake shows us that it's not “pity” and “charity” you want to put up on a pedestal. It's a difficult case to make, but Blake does it. These virtues are symptoms, born of inequalities.

 

 

THE HUMAN ABSTRACT

by William Blake

Pity would be no more

If we did not make somebody poor,

And Mercy no more could be

If all were as happy as we.

 

And mutual fear brings Peace,

Till the selfish loves increase;

Then Cruelty knits a snare,

And spreads his baits with care.

 

He sits down with holy fears,

And waters the ground with tears;

Then Humility takes its root

Underneath his foot.

 

Soon spreads the dismal shade

Of Mystery over his head,

And the caterpillar and fly

Feed on the Mystery.

 

And it bears the fruit of Deceit,

Ruddy and sweet to eat,

And the raven his nest has made

In its thickest shade.

 

The gods of the earth and sea

Sought through nature to find this tree,

But their search was all in vain:

There grows one in the human Brain.

 

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The Far-ness of Distance

Published February 24, 2014 by cgerrish

The annihilation of distance is one of the hallmarks of modernity. To contradict Kipling, the twain of East and West have not only met, they Skype regularly. When distance was filled with far-ness and strangeness, we feared and shunned it when it came too close. The river, the port and the railroad moved both the rare and the strange from beyond the horizon into our locality.

Radio and television brought sound and pictures of the strangeness of distance into our living room. The Network first brought distance to our desktop and then to the devices in our pockets. Distance stripped of its far-ness. The upside is that strange seems less strange; our horizons are expanded. The downside is that nothing surprises. We've seen it all, or it's only a screen and a click away.

Joseph Banks's voyage on the Endeavor lasted three years. Charles Darwin spent five years on the Beagle traversing the oceans. From their perspective, all kinds of strangeness was discovered. Those kinds of time scales aren't in play in exploring the earth any more. It's only space exploration where we accept big time scales and the far-ness of distance.

But it isn't the clicks on the map or the tick-tock of the clock that make up distance. Time and space emanate from objects, they are part of what happens when things interact. We tend to measure time and space as some calculable number of units from where we are. We are, after all, the ones who measure. But it's the things themselves that tell us about their timing and spacing. As an aside, they tell each other too.

We take for granted that distance has been annihilated. But it's there, in the things whether they're near or far. Somehow we need to re-learn to see what we believe has been destroyed.

 

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