temporary people in temporary places

Advertising the self

Fri, 31 Aug 2012 21:19:52 -0400

Facebook’s new Timeline layout is no surprise, and is a perfect fit for its audience.

Facebook is not a communication tool, it is an ego-building tool.

Ego-building involves marketing, and Facebook’s use as personal marketing is not incongruent to its use for product marketing.

The problem is that Facebook has gotten worse at its mission statement of connecting people. See the problem with “Other” messages. Eventual consistency and the lack of confirmation in the web UI means that comments you thought were posted actually weren’t.

The Gutenberg Metaphor

Wed, 15 Aug 2012 20:55:00 -0400

Today the popular metaphor for things is computers and computation.

The 16th century equivalent of the computer was the book, and reading served as the popular scientific metaphor:

Philosophy is written in this grand book, the universe, which stands continually open to our gaze. But the book cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language and read the letters in which it is composed.

—Galileo

Rocks without organs

Wed, 15 Aug 2012 20:51:38 -0400

I was recently reading notes from one of Gregory Chaitin’s lectures on metamathematics, where he made an interesting aside on von Neumann and the theory of life:

http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~chaitin/lowell.html

Rock vs. deer: which one is alive and which one isn’t?

That question made me recall Manuel de Landa’s essay The Geology of Morals:

From the point of view of the nonlinear dynamics of our planet, the thin rocky crust on which we live and which we call our land and home is perhaps its least important component. Indeed, if we waited long enough, if we could observe planetary dynamics at geological time scales, the rocks and mountains which define the most stable and durable traits of our reality would dissolve into the great underground lava flows of which they are but temporary hardenings. Indeed, given that it is just a matter of time for any one rock or mountain to be reabsorbed into the self-organized flows of lava driving the dynamics of the lithosphere, these geological structures represent a local slowing-down in this flowing reality. It is almost as if every part of the mineral world could be defined by specifying its chemical composition and its speed of flow : very slow for rocks, faster for lava.

The same thing can be said about the deer versus the rock. They both react to stimuli - mechanic, chemical, electromagnetic (the latter two being the same, by quantum field theory), but at vastly different levels of complexity when looked at in the same timescale. On a longer timescale, the interaction of the rock with its environment looks more similar. In the same line of thought, there is a fractal similarity of the reaction of the constituent cells as part of the deer and of the whole rock as part of a geological formation, found in what de Landa calls the machinic phylum.

Cargo Cult Life

Sun, 05 Aug 2012 23:23:10 -0400

It is a truism to say that many of our behaviors aren’t instinctual but are acquired through socialization (although the list of the former is larger than many people care to admit). Some of them are useful, others aren’t, and many are actively harmful. Many people lack a combination of self-awareness, time, or intelligence to figure out which is which.

Richard Feynman wrote about “cargo cult science.”

What we don’t realize is that our traditions and upbringing lead us to live a cargo cult life.

What are some of these behaviors today?

Marriage:

Marriage ritualizes the treatment of women as property, but the economics of making women property no longer work. In terms of income, in the United States women now outearn men (this trend should continue as women also outnumber men in attaining higher education). In terms of expenses, birth control and paternity testing make limited and trustworthy reproduction possible. In terms of assets, the outcomes of divorce aren’t always fair. Marriage combines ritual with moral obligations regarding child-bearing and rearing and legal encumberance of assets and income, using assumptions (women can’t do useful work, and if you let them out of the house to try, they’ll get pregnant by someone else and cuckold you) that no longer hold true.

Most people assume marriage is a good thing because most people do it and pairing up feels good, but don’t take any time to think about why the details of marriage are what they are, and how they were arrived at.

Clothing:

Business clothes. Signal of what? Distinction. Economic signals. There were no such things as ready-to-wear suits. With cheap suits, the economic signals are unreliable.

why study philosophy

Sun, 05 Aug 2012 23:20:23 -0400

People ask: why study philosophy? One reason to study philosophy is to understand questions like that. What people really mean when they ask “why study philosophy?” is “how can philosophy be useful to me?” - any other interpretation is akin to asking “why play games?” - the thought to ask such a question would never occur.

Implicit in the asking of the question “how can philosophy be useful?” is the suggestion that as a thing in itself, philosophy is useless - a waste of time. This is indeed true for the vast majority of philosophical works out there. To find the important ones (and be able to understand them), you need a process of “philosophical bootstrapping.”

So how can philosophy be useful? Let’s let Manuel de Landa answer the question:

The goal of philosophy is not to find out “the truth,” but to distinguish the important from the unimportant.

—Manuel de Landa

The one absolute thing that cannot in any way be bought or obtained and which we are constantly running out of is time. Clearly, it’s a good idea to learn philosophy in order to stop wasting time.

Chemical aids

Thu, 02 Aug 2012 22:55:17 -0400

Female Viagra has been around since the 80s. It’s called Ecstasy.

Baudrillard on Animals

Thu, 02 Aug 2012 22:49:33 -0400

Our sentimentality toward animals is a sure sign of the disdain in which we hold them… It is in proportion to being relegated to irresponsibility, to the inhuman, that the animal becomes worthy of the human ritual of affection and protection, just as the child does in direct proportion to being relegated to a status of innocence and childishness. Sentimentality is nothing but the infinitely degraded form of bestiality, the racist commiseration, in which we ridiculously cloak animals.

Jean Baudrillard. Simulacra and Simulation.

Facebook, self-imposed Panopticon, super-ego writ in HTML

Wed, 28 Mar 2012 14:59:44 -0400

Facebook, self-imposed Panopticon, super-ego writ in HTML

Book review: Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon

Thu, 26 Jan 2012 13:51:54 -0500

It is easy and tempting to dismiss Neal Stephenson’s 1999 techno-thriller Cryptonomicon as 900+ pages of a tedious, boring nerd writing about tedious, boring nerds. But underneath the convoluted Indiana Jones plot of stolen Nazi gold, the bloated prose loaded with unneeded adjectives and distracted by unwanted details, and the mini-lessons in mathematics, cryptography, computers, and Greek mythology (all passages where Stephenson is in his element, and the best parts of the book), there lies a surprisingly relevant and prescient observation about the modern condition that was a decade ahead of time.

Stephenson spends several sections of the book lampooning post-modernism and literary criticism, but the novel itself carries a powerful and intentional subtext message on the state of contemporary masculinity.

One of the chapters describes the rite of passage for boys in a tribe of islander head-hunters: they are made to spear a captive bound to a tree to signify their entry into manhood. This contrasts sharply with the descriptions of the life of Randall “Randy” Waterhouse, the novel’s protagonist. Waterhouse’s life is undirected and passive, free of threshold moments and clear stages. He graduates university but does not leave academia. He blunders into a relationship but it goes nowhere. He finds his career because he gets distracted from his job.

This is contrasted sharply with his grandfather, a WWII code-breaker, and the other WWII military characters the grandfather interacts with. The WWII men (and Stephenson takes pains to point out that they are Men) may not be completely in control of their destinies, being bound by society to obey military orders, but Stephenson makes clear that they have complete agency in how they carry out those orders. In stark contrast, Randy is a co-founder of his own company, but his actions are dictated by a series of mysterious and ill-posed questions, bullying by shareholders, and a constant fear of lawsuits.

Waterhouse’s grandfather may have been an idiot savant, but is portrayed as being essentially macho: having dangerous and exciting war-time adventures, nonchalantly holding his own in meetings with top British war-time brass, frequenting whorehouses, having affairs with German she-spies, pursuing the woman he has chosen directly and unapologetically. Even in terms of his work, the grandfather demonstrates mastery and creativity - mastery of both applied and pure mathematics, creativity in proving new theorems and advancing the mathematical state of the art.

By contrast, the grandson does technical support of other people’s computers, focuses his career on studying and administering (baby-sitting) other people’s Unix systems, and doing some vaguely-defined configuration of Internet routers - the digital equivalent of the trades such as plumbing and masonry (even machining is more creative than being an MCSE). Sitting in business meetings related to his company, he is intimidated by what he perceives to be big bad Asian gangsters. By half-way through the book, the closest the grandson comes to adventure is a 3-day long jeep ride through the jungle, which he painfully documents in a 6-page long whiny diatribe on lack of air conditioning and comfortable bedding.

Given that the target audience of Stephenson’s techno-thrillers is male techies much like the protagonist, it would be cliche to expect Randy to overcome his lack of agency and take control of his life. As the action progresses, the protagonist seems to get a bit less whiny (although this is never directly pointed out by the author). You’re left expecting that Waterhouse will redeem himself and rise up to the WWII generation’s legacy, but in the climactic action scene, the only people pointing guns at the bad guy are Randy’s love interest and a priest, one of the original members of the WWII action-hero cast. Meanwhile, Randy’s thinking:

“…the ability to kill someone is basically a mental stance, and not a question of physical means… Randy feels certain, all of a sudden, that he’s got the mental stance now. But he doesn’t have the means.”

In this one passage, Stephenson has managed to describe the passive, narcissist creed: what matters is not what you do, but that you think of yourself as someone who can do. It is precisely this rationalization that keeps the men represented by Randy from attaining manhood. For someone who has spent hundreds of pages drumming up nostalgia for the mythical real He-men of the WWII generation, Stephenson completely misses the point of what made them men. At least he avoids a plot cliche.

But Stephenson more than makes up for it by going overboard with another one: the geek male love interest.

Amy is a young, half-Asian, tomboyish, “bad-ass” babe with major daddy issues, and an even more “bad-ass” Navy SEAL for a daddy. Waterhouse himself flat-out states he thinks the girl is more courageous and physically fit than he is. We are then expected to believe that his year-long obtuse, chaste, and apology-filled courting changes her attitude towards him from a thinly-veiled contempt to him being (literally) pursued half-way around the world by her in a fit of jealousy. The ultimate passive American nerd fantasy!

The gender role reversal plays out most strikingly in a climactic sex scene between Amy and Randy - a scene that would be an unambiguous depiction of rape if the gender roles were reversed. The backdrop is the classic American mating grounds of the automobile, but the way events unfold is startling. Amy, without saying anything, forces herself into the car atop the just-woken Randy, then without conversation “moves suddenly and decisively,” not even bothering to take off her panties, “she sits down on him, hard… Then she stops moving - daring him.”

What is most bizarre is that prior to this scene Amy is a virgin.

Far from offering a sensible solution to his perceived problem with contemporary male masculinity, Stephenson seems to suggest that what modern herbivores need to become men is to be sexually humiliated by aggressive, dominant virgins.

Graham Harman on materialism

Tue, 17 Jan 2012 20:00:22 -0500

Graham Harman on materialism

Foucault on Facebook

Sat, 07 Jan 2012 16:25:17 -0500

For a long time ordinary individuality - the everyday individuality of everybody - remained below the threshold of description. To be looked at, observed, described in detail, followed from day to day by an uninterrupted writing was a privelege. The chronicle of a man, the account of his life, his historiography, written as he lived out his life formed part of the rituals of his power. The disciplinary methods reversed this relation… [Writing] is no longer a monument for future memory, but a document for possible use… In certain societies, of which the feudal regime is only one example, it may be said that individualization is greatest where sovereignty is exercised and in the higher echelons of power. The more one possesses power or privelege, the more one is marked as an individual, by rituals, written accounts or visual reproductions… In a system of discipline [on the other hand], the child is more individualized than the adult, the patient more than the healthy man, the madman and the delinquent more than the normal and the non-delinquent… The moment that saw the transition from historico-ritual mechanisms for the formation of individuality to the scientifico-disciplinary mechanisms, when the normal took over from the ancestral, and measurement from status… [substituted] for the individuality of the memorable man that of the calculable man…

Foucault, Discipline and Punish, pp.191-193

Quoted in Manuel de Landa, War in the age of intelligent machines, p. 261

Perspectives on architecture

Wed, 04 Jan 2012 16:09:42 -0500

A house is a machine to live in. —Le Corbusier
A house is a mineralized human exoskeleton. —De Landa

Aristocratic entertainment

Mon, 19 Dec 2011 15:32:21 -0500

Aristocratic entertainment

Platonic realism

Thu, 06 Oct 2011 21:25:00 -0400

Plato spoke of Forms casting shadows as an allegory, but it just occurred to me that quasicrystals (I’ve done some work on them for during my bachelor’s studies) are literally just shadows of higher-dimensional regular lattices.

Surprisingly, I think this observation serves to validate not Platonic idealism, but the New Materialism of Deleuze - in particular when you consider Manuel de Landa’s commentary on Deleuze’s concept of the virtual.

Class and Language

Mon, 18 Jul 2011 17:26:49 -0400

The right of the master to give names extends so far that we could permit ourselves to grasp the origin of language itself as an expression of the power of the rulers: they say “that is such and such”; they seal every object and event with a sound, and in the process, as it were, take possession of it. —Nietzsche, On the origin of morals

Sex is the little death, pt. 2

Thu, 19 May 2011 15:39:29 -0400

Death was never the natural partner of life, but of sex. Once we were able to create truly novel life, through genetically distinct children, we sacrificed our own.

http://quorareview.com/2011/02/09/sex-death-and-anonymity-on-quora/

On the origin of hipsters, pt. 2: post-WWII West Germany

Tue, 03 May 2011 20:42:50 -0400

Ее навещали люди, которых она никогда не знала и с которыми не хотела бы знакомиться: юнцы, одетые с нарочитой небрежностью и упивавшиеся своей небрежностью, как коньяком; воодушевление у них было тщательно отмеренное и никогда не выходило из определенных рамок. И когда такие люди появлялись у нее, она уже знала, что где-то готовится очередное исследование о современной лирике.

Heinrich Böll. Haus ohne Hüter. Авт.сб. “Самовольная отлучка”. Минск, “Мастацкая литаратура”, 1989.

Employment is the financial derivative of slavery, pt. 2

Tue, 03 May 2011 20:34:40 -0400

http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2009-08-20-graeber-en.html

There is no Indo-European word for freedom. Freedom was first reified in language as the state of being released from debt slavery.

Justifying torture, now and then

Tue, 03 May 2011 20:25:48 -0400

Three people were waterboarded and I believe that decision saved lives.

— George Bush

It appears to us that under the current circumstances the necessity defense could be successfully maintained in response to an allegation of a Section 2340A violation. On September 11, 2001, al Qaeda launched a surprise covert attack on civilian targets in the United States that led to the deaths of thousands and losses in the billions of dollars. According to public and governmental reports, al Qaeda has other sleeper cells within the [Continued on Page 41] United States that may be planning similar attacks. Indeed, al Qaeda plans apparently include efforts to develop and deploy chemical, biological and nuclear weapons of mass destruction. Under these circumstances, a detainee may possess information that could enable the United States to prevent attacks that potentially could equal or surpass the September 11 attacks in their magnitude. Clearly, any harm that might occur during an interrogation would pale to insignificance compared to the harm avoided by preventing such an attack, which could take hundreds or thousands of lives.

— Memorandum for Alberto R. Gonzales Counsel to the President

ЦК ВКП стало известно, что секретари обкомов - крайкомов, проверяя работников УНКВД, ставят им в вину применение физического воздействия к арестованным как нечто преступное. ЦК ВКП разъясняет, что применение физического воздействия в практике НКВД было допущено с 1937 года с разрешения ЦК ВКП. При этом было указано, что физическое воздействие допускается как исключение, притом в отношении лишь таких явных врагов народа, которые, используя гуманный метод допроса, нагло отказываются выдать заговорщиков, месяцами не дают показаний, стараются затормозить разоблачение оставшихся на воле заговорщиков, - следовательно, продолжают борьбу с Советской властью также и в тюрьме. Опыт показал, что такая установка дала свои результаты, намного ускорив дело разоблачения врагов народа. Правда, впоследствии на практике метод физического воздействия был загажен мерзавцами Заковским, Литвиным, Успенским и другими, ибо они превратили его из исключения в правило и стали применять его к случайно арестованным честным людям, за что и понесли должную кару. Но этим нисколько не опорочивается сам метод, поскольку он правильно применяется на практике. Известно, что все буржуазные разведки применяют физическое воздействие в отношении представителей социалистического пролетариата, и притом применяют его в самых безобразных формах. Спрашивается, почему социалистическая разведка должна быть более гуманной в отношении заядлых врагов рабочего класса и колхозников. ЦК ВКП считает, что метод физического воздействия должен обязательно применяться и впредь, в виде исключения, в отношении явных и неразоружающихся врагов народа, как совершенно правильный и целесообразный метод. ЦК ВКП требует от секретарей обкомов, крайкомов, ЦК нацкомпартий, чтобы они при проверке работников НКВД руководствовались настоящим разъяснением.

— Секретарь ЦК ВКП(б) И. Сталин

Architecture and the workplace

Mon, 28 Mar 2011 18:26:08 -0400

The original building was two stories and had courtyards. It was designed by a mathematician, John Williams, who figured out the greatest chance of taking different paths to get from point A to point B, so you had more random encounters with other people.

It worked. It’s very difficult to get people with such different skills - physics, social sciences - to connect. But Rand was the most productive damned place I’ve ever seen.

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/9.03/baran.html?pg=3