In 1795, the philosopher Immanuel Kant published an essay called “Perpetual Peace.” Kant sketches the outlines of what it might require for humans to live together on earth in peace. It’s well worth reading, but there was a particular section that caught my attention. This has to do with the unruled, the uninhabitable, the inhospitable and what Kant calls ‘lands without owners’ (terra nullius). How should we interact in the lands at the edge our world? Lands that appear to the eyes looking from the outside in, and the inside out, to be terra nova.
Here’s Kant:
Uninhabitable parts of the earth–the sea and the deserts–divide this community of all men, but the ship and the camel (the desert ship) enable them to approach each other across these unruled regions and to establish communication by using the common right to the face of the earth, which belongs to human beings generally. The inhospitality of the inhabitants of coasts (for instance, of the Barbary Coast) in robbing ships in neighboring seas or enslaving stranded travelers, or the inhospitality of the inhabitants of the deserts (for instance, the Bedouin Arabs) who view contact with nomadic tribes as conferring the right to plunder them, is thus opposed to natural law, even though it extends the right of hospitality, i.e., the privilege of foreign arrivals, no further than to conditions of the possibility of seeking to communicate with the prior inhabitants. In this way distant parts of the world can come into peaceable relations with each other, and these are finally publicly established by law. Thus the human race can gradually be brought closer and closer to a constitution establishing world citizenship.
But to this perfection compare the inhospitable actions of the civilized and especially of the commercial states of our part of the world. The injustice which they show to lands and peoples they visit (which is equivalent to conquering them) is carried by them to terrifying lengths. America, the lands inhabited by the Negro, the Spice Islands, the Cape, etc., were at the time of their discovery considered by these civilized intruders as lands without owners, for they counted the inhabitants as nothing. In East India (Hindustan), under the pretense of establishing economic undertakings, they brought in foreign soldiers and used them to oppress the natives, excited widespread wars among the various states, spread famine, rebellion, perfidy, and the whole litany of evils which afflict mankind.
In particular what’s interesting is this idea of a blank slate, a new world, a chance to start over again from scratch. America is, of course, the embodiment of this idea. To see a blank slate or a new world requires certain kind of blindness. It’s a kind of negative seeing that projects a space that might allow freedom, an escape, from the world in which one is always already enmeshed. It’s a kind of seeing that moves from the inside out.
When we were able to say that “on the internet, no one knows you’re a dog”, we were projecting a kind of blank slate. The Network appears to us as terra nullius, a land without owners. It’s a place where we can get a fresh start, a level playing field, a place where the incumbents don’t dominate.
When we see by projection, it’s as though we’ve entered a bright room out of the darkness. It takes a while for our eyes to adjust. But once they do, we start to see that our new world is someone else’s old world. What we perceived as a blank slate is really a palimpsest.
As our eyes begin to adjust to the lighting of the Network, what writing is becoming visible? What’s the old world of this new world we believe we’ve created?
As happens so often these days, it was a phrase that passed by quickly in the stream of messages, but somehow stuck in the mind. Most of the messages flow by leaving the lightest impression. Other fragments have sharp and jagged edges and they tend to get caught on the walls of thought. They stay there forming an irritant until you can get your hands on them and disentangle them from the mesh. This time, it was a short broadcast from Doc Searls that went like this:
“The time has come to choose your species. If you’re just what you own, you’re veal.”
These phrases linked to longer developments of the idea in the posts: “Let’s All Be Spotted Hawks” and “A Sense Of Bewronging.” In the spotted hawks post, Searls contrasts a video in which people are defined by what they own and the way Walt Whitman defined and talked about himself in his long poem “Song of Myself.” The key bits being Whitman’s expression of the infinite Kantian interior:
“Do I contradict myself?
Very well then. I contradict myself.
I am large. I contain multitudes.”
I’m not defined by what I own, the inside of me is as big as all of the big, mysterious outdoors. The other post addressed the issue of who can process big data and why that matters when you’re the one emitting the data exhaust. What does it mean when you can no longer read your own tea leaves, but require the mediation services of fortune teller with access to real-time sense making algorithms that operate across multiple big data archives? How can we possibly make an unaided decision? Without computer-based augmentation, our puny human decision is bound to be suboptimal. When we take a close look at our desires, do we see a desire for a machine that knows our desires better than we do? Here’s Searls’s take:
“Sorry, but no. My Web is not their Web. I’m tired of being shown. I’m tired of “experiences” that are “delivered to me. I’m tired of bad guesswork—or any guesswork. I don’t want “scarily accurate” guesses about me and what I might want.
What I crave is independence, and better ways of engaging—ones that are mine and not just theirs. Ones that work across multiple services in consistent ways. Ones that let me change my data with all these services at once, if I want to.
I want liberation from the commercial Web’s two-decade old design flaws. I don’t care how much a company uses first person possessive pronouns on my behalf. They are not me, they do not know me, and I do not want them pretending to be me, or shoving their tentacles into my pockets, or what their robots think is my brain. Enough, already.”
It was the word “veal” that supplied the jagged edge to Searls’s message. In a sense, “veal” is the right answer to a slightly different but related question. If we start with “You are what you own” and move backwards in time, past Walt Whitman. We could end up with “You are what you consume” or as it was more commonly stated “You are what you eat.”
Inevitably, these days, this brought Timothy Morton into the conversation. Specifically his essay “Beautiful Soul Syndrome.” Big data and technology is being applied to a Romantic era conception of the consumer:
Now this mention of plate glass is not accidental, because plate glass is a physical byproduct of a quintessentially Romantic production, the production of the consumerist. No the consumer, but the consumerist, that is, someone who is aware that she or he is a consumer, someone for whom the object of consumption defines their identity, along the lines of that great Romantic phrase, invented once by the gourmand Brillat-Saverin and once again by Feurerbach, “You are what you eat.” Now this phrase implies that the subject is caught in a dialectic of desire with an object with which it is never fully identical, just as Wile E. Coyote never catches up with Roadrunner in the cartoon. If Wile E. Coyote ever did catch Roadrunner, he would eat Roadrunner, at which point Roadrunner would cease to be Roadrunner and would become Wile E. Coyote. There is in effect, then a radical ontological separation between subject and object. And yet and at the same time, consumerism implies a performative identity that can be collapsed into its object, so we can talk of vegetarians, hip hop fans, opium eaters, and so on.
The plate-glass shop window of the Romantic era is transformed in the contemporary commercial Web into the idea of three screens and a cloud. The shop window is now the small screen in your pocket and is called mobile e-commerce. Searls’s use of the word “Veal” implies that when we buy into the value of computerized personalization based on algorithmic interpretations of our data exhaust, we’re abandoning the expansive Whitman-esque view of the self and instead chowing down on the self as a calf constrained in the industrial process of producing veal. The word “veal” is meant to provoke a reaction of disgust. It ties a form of mechanized cruelty to a sanitary, abstracted computerized process.
Again, here’s Timothy Morton on consumerism:
Romantic consumerism can go one step higher than the Kantian aesthetic purposelessness of window-shopping, when it decided to refrain from consumerism as such. This is the attitude of the boycotter, who emerges as a type in the proto-feminism of the Bluestocking circle in the 1780s and 1790s, and which Percy and Mary Shelley, and many others, continued. The specific product boycotted was sugar, which was sentimentally described as the crystallized blood of slaves. By describing it thus, the boycotter turned the object of pleasure into an object of disgust. In order to have good taste you have to know how to feel appropriate disgust, how to turn your nose up at something. So the zero degree performance of taste would be spitting something disgusting out, or vomiting. So the height of good taste performativity is abstaining from sugar, and spice if your are one of the Shelleys, who held correctly that spice was a product of colonialism. (Their vegetarianism was thus not only anti-cruelty, but also anti-flavor.)
Oddly, there seems to be a direct correlation between the quest for sugar and spices to give flavor to our food and the quest to squeeze the flavorful bits and patterns out of the big data emitted by crowds of internet users. But instead of real spices, we have synthetic spices. It’s like the relationship between laughter and the laugh track added to television comedy. The algorithms that have been constituted as our selves try out all the possible permutations in advance and deliver a small selection set for us to consume. The jokes are provably funny, the laughter pre-laughed and all that’s left for us to do is click “ok.”
Morton might call this the automation of consumerism-ism:
In brief, Romantic consumerism is window-shopping, which is hugely enabled by plate glass, or as we now do, browsing on the internet, not consuming anything but wondering what we would be like if we did. Now in the Romantic period this kind of reflexive consumerism was limited to a few avant-garde types: the Romantics themselves. To this extent Wordsworth and De Quincy are only superficially different. Wordsworth figured out that he could stroll forever in the mountains; De Quincy figured out that you didn’t need mountains, if you could consume a drug that gave you the feeling of strolling in the mountains (sublime contemplative calm, and so on). Nowadays we are all De Quinceys, all flaneurs in the shopping mall of life.
Searls’s complaint about the “guess work” of these personalization systems points to the gap between a computer simulation of a consumer who wonders what it would be like to consume this item or that, and the person who wonders. And at the point where the personalizations become “scarily accurate”? we enter the uncanny valley. Who are we when an algorithm consistently makes choices that are more typical of what we might do than we do?
It comes down to whether one thinks that the gap between canned laughter and laughter can be closed, whether the uncanny valley can be crossed and that it’s the promised land that we’ll find on the other side. Or as we loop back to replay the tunes of the Romantics with cloud-based algorithms, will we find ourselves lodged within the thought experiments of Mary Shelley. Her novel “Frankenstein” gives us a different and disturbing glimpse of what may lie on the other side of the uncanny valley.
How can I describe my emotions at this catastrophe, or how delineate the wretch whom with such infinite pains and care I had endeavoured to form? His limbs were in proportion, and I had selected his features as beautiful. Beautiful!–Great God! His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath; his hair was of a lustrous black, and flowing; his teeth of a pearly whiteness; but these luxuriances only formed a more horrid contrast with his watery eyes, that seemed almost of the same colour as the dun white sockets in which they were set, his shrivelled complexion and straight black lips.
The different accidents of life are not so changeable as the feelings of human nature. I had worked hard for nearly two years, for the sole purpose of infusing life into an inanimate body. For this I had deprived myself of rest and health. I had desired it with an ardour that far exceeded moderation; but now that I had finished, the beauty of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart. Unable to endure the aspect of the being I had created, I rushed out of the room, and continued a long time traversing my bedchamber, unable to compose my mind to sleep.
Last night without any intention on my part, the 1938 Howard Hawks film Bringing Up Baby settled into the television set. It was meant to be a brief stop on the way from this signal to that one, but somehow it stuck. The rapid-fire non-stop dialogue never left a pause, not a single moment, for me to consider moving on. And then there was the song: I Can’t Give You Anything But Love, Baby. Katherine Hepburn and Cary Grant wandering through the woods singing this song at the top of their voices, looking for a fox terrier, a leopard and a dinosaur bone. When the speed of change hits a certain velocity, nothing makes as much sense as a screwball comedy.
“There’s a pitch in baseball called a screwball, which was perfected by a pitcher named Carl Hubbell back in the 1930s. It’s a pitch with a particular spin that sort of flutters and drops, goes in different directions, and behaves in very unexpected ways… Screwball comedy was unconventional, went in different directions, and behaved in unexpected ways…”
Andrew Bergman We’re in the Money: Depression America and Its Films
The song was written in 1927 by Jimmy McHugh and Dorothy Fields, and finally broke through in 1928. It’s been an enduring classic of American popular song. Looking back at the list of songs Fields provided lyrics for, you can hardly believe your eyes: The Way You Look Tonight, I’m In The Mood For Love, On The Sunny Side of the Street, A Fine Romance, Big Spender and more.
The stock market crash of 1929 occurred in October of that year, which means that I Can’t Give You Anything But Love, Baby was written in the middle of a market bubble. In the midst of a surging material world, the song stakes a claim for love and romance. Fields tells the story of overhearing the conversation of a poor black couple gazing at the stylish and expensive jewelry on offer in Tiffany’s display window. Apparently the man said “Gee honey, I can’t give you anything but love.” What might have turned into Breakfast at Tiffany’s, instead became a standard in the American songbook. Love seems to need a medium to pass from one person to another. While it might pass through diamond jewelry, wall street millions, real estate or a family crest—McHugh and Fields make the case for the impossible thing that we’ve all got plenty of, baby.
Through the cultural history DVR provided by YouTube, we can get a sense of how this song has resonated with artists and audiences over the years.
I Can’t Give You Anything But Love, Baby Jimmy McHugh and Dorothy Fields
Verse
Gee, but it’s tough to be broke, kid.
It’s not a joke, kid–it’s a curse.
My luck is changing–it’s gotten
from simply rotten to something worse.
Who knows someday I will win too
I’ll begin to reach my prime.
Now that I see what our end is
All can spend is just my time.
Refrain
I can’t give you anything but love, baby.
That’s the only thing I’ve plenty of, baby.
Dream a while, scheme a while,
You’re sure to find
Happiness and, I guess,
All those things you’ve always pined for.
Gee, it’s great to see you looking swell, baby.
Diamond bracelets Woolworth doesn’t sell, baby.
Till that lucky day you know darn well, baby,
I can’t give you anything but love.
Night-vision goggles give you an advantage, you can see in the darkness. There’s a sense in which Google has these goggles for the Network. Google has the most complete map of the territory, and they’ve flooded the map with light. A search engine’s spiders feel their way through the darkness, tracing out the graph of links and nodes, and sending their sketches back home to be pieced together into a larger map.
To most of us, the Network is dark, it’s only through habit or maps that anything can be found. Theoretically, any public node on the Network is reachable, but as a practical matter you can’t get there unless someone gives you a hyperlink. An individual’s map of the the Network consists of the URLs that can be remembered and browser bookmarks. The average Network traveler moves through a fairly well-defined circuit of web sites. The value of a weak-tie social network is that people you don’t know well, but follow, are likely to be carrying links that you, and members of your strong-tie network wouldn’t have ordinarily encountered.
The Network also has a dark side that can’t be mapped by Google, these are the secure pools of data protected from a search engine’s spiders. Bank accounts, medical records and other personal information falls into this category. Unless you’re in law enforcement, you can’t Google someone’s financial records. We call this kind of darkness privacy. Some say it no longer exists, but last time I checked, I couldn’t Google Eric Schmidt’s checking account or Scott McNealy’s health records.
Facebook is also sheltered from the search engine’s spiders. Google’s spider can’t join Facebook and become friends with all 600 million members so that the contents of Facebook can be added to Google’s map of the Network. A spider is a kind of robot, and robots aren’t allowed to join Facebook. Interestingly corporations are allowed to join, and robots and other kinds of applications can be constructed to operate within the boundaries Facebook. Facebook has created a territory that can only be mapped by Facebook, or from within Facebook. While Facebook is a dark pool to Google, the open Network is available to Facebook. Humans don’t view Facebook as closed because they cross the boundary that keeps robots out with a minimum of friction.
And so we come to the question of darkness and enclosures. If we view the Network as open, perhaps we see a large field of light with pools of darkness at the margins. But for the user without a map, the Network is complete darkness. Thus an argument for an open Network is the equivalent of saying that the map makers must be able to do their work so that we can navigate through the darkness. Allow their robots passage so that they can light the way for us. Although it should be noted we can only navigate to places on the map, uncharted territory remains in darkness. Facebook is un-navigable without the maps provided by Facebook; the open internet is un-navigable without the maps provided by Google. The difference, of course, is that anyone with internet-scale data infrastructure can provide maps of the open internet, while only Facebook can provide maps of Facebook. And while some may perceive a difference in the barriers to entry, it may be a difference without much of a difference.
In the end, the purpose of these maps is to provide you with a hyperlink—a doorway to get you to your desired location. You stop and ask for directions: “How do I get to such-and-such a place?” The search engine replies with two million prioritized results listed on tens of thousands of pages. You might scan the top ten of two million results to see if there’s anything of interest. If Google was really confident in their results, they’d only give you their ten best answers. However it’s the two million results that shed some degree of light on the landscape of the Network. In the end, it’s only a small selection set of hyperlinks that’s needed—one can easily imagine other methods of producing a small set useful of links.
As the map gains more prominence, many attempt to build structures on the map itself. The map provides a boundary, separating the visible from the invisible. For instance, the page must be constructed in a specific way if it is to be findable. What cannot be found, cannot be read. The finding is the thing. For instance, despite the rise of the e-reader, and networked apps designed specifically for reading, these approaches don’t fit into the map. The pages fall outside the method of map construction. It’s in this way that the map serves as a limit, a kind of zoning law, for new construction.
Maps distort the territory, they create an abstraction of a specific layer of the territory for a particular purpose. We can also say that a map never exhausts the territory, there’s always something that remains unwritten on the parchment. Oddly, we can also say that the map always already lies within the territory. There’s no outside of the territory, one doesn’t come to an edge and see a transcendental map maker beyond the clouds. The map is constructed from within the territory to be used to navigate the territory.
The Network’s pools of light and pools of darkness each have their own kind of maps. While some may call for eternal sunshine, with everything standing in the light, always waiting to be seen—it’s in the chiaroscuro that we see unknown figures emerging from the darkness.
How Poetry Comes to Me Gary Snyder
It comes blundering over the
Boulders at night, it stays
Frightened outside the
Range of my campfire
I go to meet it at the
Edge of the light
