Category: value

Ear Worms – I Can’t Go For That (No Can Do)

Published October 7, 2013 by cgerrish

A simple definition of an earworm is a piece of music that continues to play on a loop in your mind long after it has stopped coming through the stereo speakers. “Earworm” is also the title of a talk given by philosopher Timothy Morton earlier this year at Tuned City Brussels. Morton describes earworms as independent objects living rent-free inside your head.

Earworms, A Talk by Timothy Morton

Earworms, A Talk by Timothy Morton

At one point in the talk, Morton considers the kind of music that attempts to instruct or provide critique. That’s the kind of art that wants to upgrade your consciousness, make you a better person, make the world a better place. If you looked across the landscape of art and music that takes “upgrade” as its mission, it’s rare you’d find an earworm. Generally the earworm is not considered serious enough to be encouraged to find a home in this soil. Critical pesticides keep the earworms at bay; rather it’s in popular music that you’re more likely to become infected.

Laurie Anderson’s “Difficult Listening Hour“

Good evening. Welcome to Difficult Listening Hour. The spot on your dial for that relentless and impenetrable sound of Difficult Music (Music). So sit bolt upright in that straight-backed chair (Music), button that top button (Music), and get set for some difficult music.

The earworm is not necessarily viral, moving from ear to ear. But all of us have seen it happen. The song of the Summer gets a hold in your mind and it won’t let go. You unconsciously start humming the hook, and the earworm suddenly blooms in the mind of the person next to you. Many times it’s not even a song we like, it’s just that the hook it too catchy to resist. We can’t make it stop. This is why Morton sees the earworm as an independent object, something that’s not you but nonetheless inside you.

Shortly after listening to Morton’s talk I was infected by a song called “I Can’t Go for That.” The song was released in 1981 and in 1982 it took the number one spot on the Billboard Hot 100, the R&B / Hip Hop Chart and the Dance Club Chart. It’s a rare song that crosses over from the pop charts to the R&B charts. It made no impression on me at the time.

At the “We Are the World” sessions, Michael Jackson told Daryl Hall that he’d lifted the bass lick from “I Can’t Go for That” for his mega-hit “Billie Jean”. Jackson loved to work out his dance routines to the song and he eventually worked it into a song of his own. One earworm turns into a new earworm. Hall told Jackson that he did the same thing when he wrote the song.

I Can’t Go For That (No Can Do)
Lyrics: Daryl Hall, John Oates, Sara Allen
Music: Daryl Hall

Easy ready willing overtime
When does it stop, where do you dare me to draw the line
You got the body now you want my soul
Don’t even think about it say no go
Now i’ll do anything you want me to
I’ll do almost anything that you want me to
But i can’t go for that
No can do

I can’t go for being twice as nice
I can’t go for just repeating the same old lines
Use the body now you want my soul
Oo forget about it say no go
Yeah i’ll do anything you want me to
I’ll do almost anything that you want me to
But i can’t go for that
No can do.

The strange thing about “I Can’t Go for That” is that it’s a song about saying “no”. It’s about limits and entanglement. The music seems to ecstatically say “yes”, but the words and especially the hook say “no” — there are limits. It has the funny syntax of Samuel Goldwyn’s saying “Include me out”. It’s the most positive way of saying no.

Perhaps it’s because I heard the song in the shadow of a talk by Tim Morton, but suddenly it seemed to be a song about global warming. It describes our deep entanglement with the machinery of the anthropocene and the moment where we realize that a limit has to be set. We have to say “no”.

The song is more than 30 years old, but it has legs. It still has the power to spawn earworms. And now when it plays in your head, you’ll remember that’s it’s a song about global warming and changing the relationship between humans and the earth. It will play on a loop in your head until your consciousness is upgraded. The song was born into the high glitz of the MTV era, but the hook has been strong enough to survive and transform itself through time and into many different styles.

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Escape from the Factory of Life

Published September 2, 2013 by cgerrish

It’s as though we just looked up and noticed that someone is watching us. It’s that creepy feeling. You know that someone or something sees you, but you can’t see them. The Internet seemed like a place where no one knew whether you were a dog or not. Identity didn’t matter and that’s what created a level playing field, a kind of equality. But then it turned out that you could be identified, that you identified yourself on social networks for fun and profit, that your identity information and preferences could be aggregated and sold without your knowledge. Rather than a casual conversation, the Internet turned into an indexed and searchable permanent record. It’s the equivalent of having everything you type into your network-connected keyboard published to the front page of USA Today in real time. And that’s a very strange context in which to speak.

Doc Searls recently weighed in on the issue of Privacy in the age of connected digital networks. It’s an issue that he’s been deeply involved with for many years. Much of our current dilemma could be seen coming from a mile away. But here’s why Doc sees this as a pivotal moment:

I see two reasons why privacy is now under extreme threat in the digital world — and the physical one too, as surveillance cameras bloom like flowers in public spaces, and as marketers and spooks together look toward the “Internet of Things” for ways to harvest an infinitude of personal data.

There’s a joke that Marc Maron tells: “Big Brother is watching us. That’s what we pay him for.” Maron gets to the conflict at the heart of our complaint about surveillance. In a sense, this is what we’ve asked for. We want maximum safety and so we authorize and pay for unlimited surveillance in the hopes of preventing catastrophic events. Now that we see how our wishes are being carried out, we’re troubled — isn’t total information awareness just for the bad guys? Be careful of what you wish for…

Marshal McLuhan called advertising our cave art. It expresses our most basic desires. Some would say that it creates them, but the truth is that the desire needs to be there to start with. Advertising calls that deep desire to the surface. There’s a television ad that’s running now that says a great deal about who and what we’re thinking right now. It’s for a car called the Infiniti Q50.

We see a “Factory of Life”. Men and women, young white professionals are being assembled and outfitted in a factory. A disembodied voice narrates the stages of the process. Industrial robots apply lipstick to the women’s lips. The men’s suit coats and ties are fitted with precision. All the personal style is very high end — but it’s all identical. Industrial capitalism has raised the standard of living to a level of luxury. There are no workers in the factory, there are only the people on the assembly line getting a commodified wealthy lifestyle. Either the people of color are being hidden behind the walls of the factory or the factory has remanufactured their ethnicity to conform to a pre-established standard.

As our hero moves down the assembly line, it becomes clear that this isn’t a socialist utopia where everyone can enjoy the benefits of wealth. It’s a surveillance state where conformity is strictly enforced. Everyone accepts what’s happening to them with a blank stare. There are no emotions — merely impeccably-dressed cogs in the machine. No one loves the artifacts of their wealth, no one enjoys the luxury.

A robot arm puts our protagonist’s necktie into place and he experiences a sudden spark of consciousness. He turns and sees his reflection in some glass. He smiles, thinks “I look pretty good.” As he looks around, suddenly he’s able to see the Matrix. He moves farther down the assembly line to where car keys are being distributed. The keys are to identical C-class cars by Mercedes Benz. Each figure takes a key without complaint. We can see that our hero has begun to question what’s going on. A woman’s face appears on a small screen that only he can see. She’s a human like him and she’s hacked into the Matrix to help get him out. She tells him to check his pants pocket for a set of keys. These are the keys to the Q50 and escape from commodification and conformity. He takes the keys and makes a run for it.

The surveillance system detects his his break from the assembly line and dispatches robots to capture or possibly kill him. He’s not pursued by humans, it’s only technology that enforces its own mechanistic repetition. Making a different choice is clearly a dangerous act. The mechanical forces of commodity chase him as he makes his way to the Q50. He gets in, starts it up and drives out of the factory. The robots engage in the chase, but are left in the dust. The Q50’s acceleration is fantastic and quickly the factory recedes in the distance. The road opens in front of him as he drives out of the darkness and into the light. Freedom.

We easily forget that a commodity with special sauce provides our hero with the means to escape the boring commodities that everyone else accepts. A commodity provides the escape from commodity. It’s an open question how he will make a living outside the machine. No doubt he will live by his wits. The “Factory of Life” that opens the commercial is a good representation of what we’re asking of technology. It’s an expression of our wishes and desires. The machine will supply us with the good life as long as we accept the conformity and don’t get out of line. “Assimilation is beauty.” Individual desires can’t be tolerated. There’s great wealth for everyone in the envelope of a surveillance state. Not unlike the way we trade our personal data for a wealth of free online services.

And predictably, we want to view ourselves as the individual who breaks out of the mold. We’re not part of the machine, we have free will and a need to express our individuality. We wake from a dream anchored to one set of commodities and a mechanized life into another dream level where a revolutionary set of commodities anchor a new and improved fantasy with 30% more freedom. You and I wake up to see that we’re in a surveillance state of cloud computing and the NSA. We see our reflection in the glass and enter Lacan’s mirror stage. We perceive the image of our body and form a mental image of our individual identity. We make a run for it. We’ll live by our wits.

The idea of the “mirror stage” is an important early component in Lacan’s critical reinterpretation of the work of Freud. Drawing on work in physiology and animal psychology, Lacan proposes that human infants pass through a stage in which an external image of the body (reflected in a mirror, or represented to the infant through the mother or primary caregiver) produces a psychic response that gives rise to the mental representation of an “I”. The infant identifies with the image, which serves as a gestalt of the infant’s emerging perceptions of selfhood, but because the image of a unified body does not correspond with the underdeveloped infant’s physical vulnerability and weakness, this imago is established as an Ideal-I toward which the subject will perpetually strive throughout his or her life.

There’s a common political move that allows the complainant to achieve a state of blameless innocence. “Since I completely disagree with what the government is doing; I therefore bear no responsibility for its actions. It’s those people, not me who are doing this terrible surveillance. I am innocent; they are guilty. Me good, world bad. My purity remains as pure as it ever was.”

When things are going well, we’re quite proud of the idea of government by the people, for the people and of the people. In the experiment called the United States, the actions of the government are the actions of the people. The President is President of all of the people, not just those who voted for him or her. Instead of declaring our absolute innocence with regard to the bad acts committed by our government, what if we took personal responsibility for them. Those are our dreams and desires manifesting in the real world. Yes, those bad acts were committed in my name. And that defines my morality and the morality of my fellow citizens. We do that. We asked for, and paid for, a surveillance state. It’s only by owning it that it can be changed.

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Zombie Microsoft Must Die

Published July 29, 2013 by cgerrish

These days so much of the world is seen through the lens of the horror movie. Even thinking about software seems to have that character. RSS is declared dead, but lives on. Software eats the world. Microsoft is declared dead by the cloud vendors, but continues to live on in zombie form. When the fundamental computing environment changes to such a degree that a particular software solution would no longer be generated from the new set of assumptions, it’s the beginning of the end. While zombie software still operates, its roots are in the previous computing environment. Uprooted, it continues to live, but lacks purchase for continued organic growth in the new soils of computing. In a zombie apocalypse, the undead triumph over the living.

I will knock down the Gates of the Netherworld,
I will smash the door posts, and leave the doors flat down,
and will let the dead go up to eat the living!
And the dead will outnumber the living!

Ishtar in the Epic of Gilgamesh

While the Stacks have settled into small group of feudal kingdoms, the raison d’etre of each of them is to be the One. A single platform would be so much more efficient, surely it’s the most rational way to proceed. At this level, platform software has the character of an extra-terrestrial virus that when mixed with earth’s biosphere rampantly multiplies killing all other life forms and replacing them with a version of itself. But in a nice way, with more efficiency and productivity. Imagine being undead as a positive thing. In the movies this fantasy plays out in a number of ways. The Andromeda Strain, The Thing, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and my favorite, Five Million Years to Earth, all address our fear of being consumed and turned into alien beings. The malevolence we feel is not so much evil as the amoral neutrality of an algorithm executing until completion. In Kurt Vonnegut’s “Cat’s Cradle” it’s called “Ice Nine”, a substance that turns all water it touches into more ice nine.

From the Wikipedia entry on Ice Nine:

Ice-nine is a fictional material appearing in Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Cat’s Cradle. Ice-nine is supposedly a polymorph of water more stable than common ice (Ice Ih); instead of melting at 0 °C (32 °F), it melts at 45.8 °C (114.4 °F). When ice-nine comes into contact with liquid water below 45.8 °C (thus effectively becoming supercooled), it acts as a seed crystal and causes the solidification of the entire body of water, which quickly crystallizes as more ice-nine. As people are mostly water, ice-nine kills nearly instantly when ingested or brought into contact with soft tissues exposed to the bloodstream, such as the eyes.

In the story, it is developed by the Manhattan Project for use as a weapon, but abandoned when it becomes clear that any quantity of it would have the power to destroy all life on earth. A global catastrophe involving freezing the world’s oceans with ice-nine is used as a plot device in Vonnegut’s novel.

Many feared that Microsoft was on the verge of achieving 100% domination of computing before the consent decree from the justice department breaking up the monopoly. For many in the technology community that was the climax of the horror film, the invading virus was finally defeated by the United States Government. A space was opened up for other platforms to grow and prosper. But the seeds of a sequel were planted. As a practical matter, Microsoft was prevented from securing world domination, but the attitude that desired world domination remained dominant. In the new post-consent decree world the nascent platforms saw this as their chance at world domination. They took aim at Microsoft.

Time passes and a key element in the computing environment changes. The mechanism and speed of software upgrades is fundamentally altered through network-connected computing. More recently cloud services offer that same speed for the most software infrastructure. Just as mobile devices disrupted desktop computing, the speed of network-based software updates have made the shrink wrapped software business obsolete. In a sense software itself becomes mobile, it has a speed and trajectory. The large installed base of enterprise software has remained locked into the slow upgrade cycle of the last era of computing. We now see the personal technology of the worker far outstripping the technology of the corporation.

The real innovation in software was creating the environment where updating, refactoring and completely revising software programs isn’t a painful event. In fact, it isn’t an event at all — just an everyday activity. The capacity to implement real-time upgrades and lower the cost of change is much more important than whatever software is currently in use. Because next week or next month, the software will be improved with a seamless incremental upgrade. It’s one reason that software version numbers don’t really make sense any more. The major version numbers used to signal to users and administrators the cost and level of pain involved in adopting the new version.

As speed became important, Microsoft got faster too. So much so that the most current set of Microsoft products are qualitatively different than the previous generation. Microsoft has pulled so far ahead of Microsoft that a large gap has been created. Microsoft can now look back and see Microsoft in the distance. This is the moment in the horror movie where the monster is split in two. And while all the other technology platforms are fighting Zombie Microsoft, there’s a new piece of Microsoft that’s also fighting against the Zombie. Something similar happened at Apple when a separate team flying a pirate flag was broken off to work on the Macintosh. Microsoft has joined the field of companies competing against Microsoft. They find themselves in a strange situation — in order for Microsoft to live, Microsoft must die at the hands of Microsoft.

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The Strict Hypocrite’s Diet

Published June 16, 2013 by cgerrish

Young-Girl-Eating-a-Bird-The-Pleasure-Rene-Magritte

Because we live in an age where we believe in the goodness of clarity and purity, much of the work we do takes the form of “optimization.” Our ideologues, of whatever stripe, push us toward the purest form of an idea. As we stake out the extremes of purity, we decry the moral weakness and hypocrisy of those who fail the tests of purity. Hypocrite! It’s the insult par excellence for our age. Once we get a simple agreement that something is good in principle, we then go about exploring how the great unwashed public, or alternatively our leaders, fall short of that ideal. Every aspect of our lives becomes political, every action measured against a larger political agenda.

Food writer Mark Bittman has written a diet book called “VB6”. “VB6” stands for Vegan Before 6pm. The brilliance of this “diet” is that it’s hypocritical. Surely to be a vegan is to be a vegan all of the time. How else can you genuinely be a vegan? If you cheat, if you break the rules, if you don’t live up to the ideal, you aren’t really a vegan. It’s the same with all diets. A diet is a set of rules, if you break the rules you aren’t really on the diet. Instead of breaking a rule, you should water it with Workouts at MyFitnessHub and you will soon find yourself become better, more fit and healthy than you were. Rule breaking translates into a form of weakness.

Bittman’s VB6 has an interesting relationship to rules. Here’s Bittman on his “diet”.

Nor will I tell you that you must eat foods that you don’t want to eat, or to ignore your body’s legitimate cravings and desires, or to stop eating before you’re full. I am, after all, someone who has built an entire career on my love of cooking and eating good food. And VB6 is the way I eat now, and have for six years.

There are three very basic aspects to VB6. First, you make a commitment to eat more plant foods — fruit, vegetables, whole grains, beans … you know what I’m talking about. Second, you make a commitment to eat fewer animal products and highly processed foods, like white bread. And third, you all but eliminate junk foods, most of which are barely foods in the strict sense of the word anyway. (I say “all but eliminate” because everyone needs to break the rules occasionally.)

Mark Bittman is a food writer. When his doctor suggested that he become a vegan to head off some potential health problems, Bittman was faced with a dilemma. VB6 was his solution, and so far, it’s worked for him. This approach to the rules of diet can be instructive across a whole range of activities. He teaches us something about the nature of rules themselves. Bittman also rejects our current fascination with personal data.

To make matters worse, many diets bury you in data, requiring you to count calories, points, or grams of fat or carbohydrates. Counting calories can of course be an effective dieting strategy; if you consume fewer calories than you burn, you’ll lose weight. But it turns eating into a clinical, obsessive exercise, reduces food to numbers, eliminates pleasure, and makes the diet unsustainable. No one wants to count calories his or her whole life, while all the time following a program that eliminates huge groups of foods.

No hard and fast rules, no counting. What kind of diet is that? How can you be a part time vegan? Isn’t that like vegetarians who eat fish? If you think it’s good to be a vegan, why aren’t you a vegan all the time? Of course, Bittman’s diet isn’t about being a vegan, it’s about developing a sustainable, enjoyable way of living that helps him lose weight and improve his health. Although Bittman isn’t blind to the larger implications of food:

…Food touches everything. You can’t discuss it without considering the environment, health, the role of animals other than humans in this world, the economy, politics, trade, globalization, or most other important issues. This includes such unlikely and seemingly unrelated matters as global warming: Industrialized livestock production, for example, appears to be accountable for a fifth or more of the greenhouse gases that are causing climate change.

Fear of hypocrisy is a common rationale for taking no action whatsoever. Unless a solution is perfectly clear and pure, there’s no sense in ever trying. And once you understand that pure solution, you must adhere to it without fail. That’s what we call “being good”. The fragility of a pure solution is that a single deviation from it ruins the purity upon with the solution depends. As Nassim Taleb as noticed, the more you optimize (purify) a system, the more fragile it becomes. The cynic / nihilist takes the position that since there is no perfect position, no position is worth taking. Since all positions can be criticized, I’ll take the position of criticizing positions.

Philosopher Tim Morton takes on the cynical position by pointing out that the cynic is hypocritical about his hypocrisy:

I’d rather be a straight-forward hypocrite than a hypocritical hypocrite. Now we’ve gotten rid of cynicism, because now there’s only two options: there’s hypocrisy or there’s hypocritical hypocrisy.

In a 2006 interview, the black metal band Wolves in the Throne Room made the observation that “we’re all hypocrites and failures.” As human beings there is no position outside of hypocrisy. In our morality we’ve defined “good” as a pure state and “bad” as an impure state that looks a lot like hypocrisy. You’re in the wrong when you’ve violated a rule you know to be good. Morton gives us the basis to think about ethics in the age of self-conscious hypocrisy. Being “good” looks a lot more like being a straight-forward hypocrite; while being bad looks like the hypocritically hypocritical. This kind of ethical practice has been difficult to articulate. Mark Bittman with his VB6 diet gives us a beautiful example of what being straight-forwardly hypocritical could look like.

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