This is something I made for an assignment in 2012.

I would say it’s anything but. Well. That depends on the company of course. Sure, every-day interaction might seem banal, but I think that all you have to do to make it interesting is to pay attention. Here, I risk, reverse engineering the same machine logic of the people who want us to fuse with machines, or imbuing human interaction with the necessity for some sociopathic, Sherlockesque observation. It need not be so, but i think, by trying to understand what people say and why, or trying to see things, even a plain old transaction at a shop in the wider context of how and why, can make things infinitely – well, far more at least – interesting.

Society is not banal. Our thoughts are. Things are not boring, they have cavernous contexts and contingencies to explore. Banality comes when we stop watching and just look. Breathing is not boring, it assists with the transport of oxygen to the fascinating organisms that live on planet earth. Nearly every living object needs to breathe. This is not banal. It is a fundamental characteristic of nature. To me, that is interesting. But only if you’re paying attention.

Mardy also speaks http://www.mediafactory.org.au/mardy-bridges/

I think the poem ‘All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace’, by Richard Brautigan is an excellent way to sum up a lot of the ideas in TTDoT. Having gone through my own techno-utopian phase, I’m well acquainted with the ideas…

This commentator on the all poetry blog said:

Cornus – Richard nailed it. It’s the only possible future for humans upon Earth that does not contain a great extinction of life. The idea has been around for a while, Arthur C. Clarke’s ‘Childhood’s End’. Humans organizational competency ended in the early Bronze Age. Any form of government beyond clan and tribe has ended in failure because humans are the weak link. Conscious machines, ever more capable than humans, are the planets only hope, not humans.

Me: Childhood’s End is a wonderful book. Full of occult symbolism with a dark but fascinating message. A must read for all dreamers.

All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace

Latour and Actor-Network Theory:

Latour draws a distinction between the mechanical, engineered network, that is the dominant mode of understanding networks, and what he calls an ‘actor-network’. He also dispels the notion that ANT has anything to do with the study of social-networks, a misapprehension under which I was most certainly labouring – extending the metaphor to all  of society, non-human actors included.

Latour then suggests that networks can be understood as having multiple dimensions with as many nodes as there are connections. LT makes the interesting point that networks do not require an ‘aether’ through which to operate… perhaps this is to finally dispel the mechanical characterisation of a network. Unlike the classic idea of the network, the network of the ANT can exist without a substrate.

“A network notion implies a different kind of social theory”… the egalitarian hopes of techno-utopians are always lovely sentiments but quite often, when it comes the machinery used to control networks, we are at the mercy of powerful and not always benevolent actors, consider the companies implicated in PRISM as a reference. But, this is me falling towards the ‘substrate’ idea that LT just removed from the equation.

“The granting of humanity to an individual actor, or the granting of collectivity, or the granting of anonymity, of a zoomorphic appearance, of amorphousness, of materiality, requires paying the same semiotic price”. All is one and one is all? Sure. I like that. What I believe LT means here is that trying to separate, actors/networks/society/pastrami sandwiches from one another is a falsehood and deceptive. All things are connected, a product of networks… I believe that human categorisation functions as part of, not apart-from the larger world we inhabit – but after or simultaneous to... the place we inhabit, not before. I may be repeating myself here. And may be wrong. Just writing thoughts as they occur doesn’t necessarily lead to anything worthwhile reading. Am I a Deleuzian? Or just deluded? I don’t think narratives exist without human observation, but once observed, can only exist. Nothing observed is without narrative. “There is no difference between explaining and telling how a network surrounds itself with new resources”. Yes and yes.

Perhaps the gap between semiotics and what LT calls scientism, is not a gap but a matter of relative diffusion? Apples will always and inevitably fall from trees but a stop-sign, will always mean stop, whether we believe the stop-sign as open to interpretation or not. And so on down the path into ever greater abstraction and interpretation, our thoughts pull back from the sharp-end of materialist philosophy, negotiating each other and ourselves till we’re awash in the great ocean, alone in the superstitious and mystical universe of the inner-subjective. Now do we have absolute signs and meaning by collective agreement or hard, scientific-fact? Both?  Are they contingent on the specific universe they inhabit? There might be somewhere in the multiverse where apples, sometimes, fall upwards.

Esther also speaks http://countingletters.wordpress.com/

Greetings all, I will refrain from the usual pleasantries regarding group emails etc and get on with it.

but first

In the fashion of the modern world and peoples lives being tied so intimately into the realm of self-aggrandisement via the life-affirming medium of  the internet, in which we prove to the world, and to ourselves – the inherent awesomeness of our existence, perhaps we can all agree that the group email is merely a more old fashioned but more welcome form of ‘status update’.

Please forgive that introduction as i spent 10 hours on a bus today and am subsequently a little tired, not to mention the numerous philosophical overindulgences over the course of this trip. Also, the overly florid language can be attributed to the fact I am currently most of the way through ‘The Count of Monte Cristo’, an invaluble travelling companion that has, after the fashion of all great books managed to invade my dreams as well as my waking thought.

So, without further ado i would like to congratulate all of you who have made it this far into what will be (mercifully) my one and only email regarding this account of my temporary displacement from the Babylonian zoo known as Shanghai.

Our story begins with an overnight train journey from Shanghai to the ancient capital Xian where upon arriving in the hostel it became apparent that I would never find the thousand yard stare, contract the tropical disease, or be held at to ransom on the point of a spear> Events which having survived, would render me beyond all reasonable doubt, the most interesting person present at any future social gathering. Laptops flickered in unison and wireless broadband presented itself as the new kaftan, the missing piece in the authentic backpacker experience. I retired, somewhat disillusioned to my beautifully laundered sheets to sleep soundly and uninterrupted by parasites. Next day we rode bikes around the city wall in the sun and took in the famous “courtyard of the gormless tour group” followed by the world renowned “pavilion of the additional entry-fee”.

Next day, we went to that thing known the world over as the the terracotta warriors, built by some nutter, possibly to provide the unimaginative some pre-packaged worldliness. So I took some photos and felt slightly more cultured than if I’d looked for it on Google Image. The Great Wall is something which inspired feelings of awe, the warriors were far less inspiring than the amazing beef noodle soup we’d had for lunch the day before.

Fortunately we can now dispense with the cynicism (nearly) and move on to what has been my favourite thing so far. Two hours flight from Xian and you are in north-west Sichuan. Jiuzhaigou National park, a UNESCO world heritage sight and possibly the most beautiful place i have been in my life. I will not attempt to describe it except to say that if Disney had invented nature, it might look something like Jiuzhaigou. Transcendent beauty on a scale impossible to comprehend without actually being there and impossible to do justice with words or a camera. Never mind the hordes of Chinese tourists ruining all their photos by standing in shot. I call this one ‘me being delicate with water’ or ‘me demonstrating size of waterfall’ or ‘peace sign in front of lake’… you get the idea. We did manage to find solitude at many points and having paid handsomely to get in, walked the entire forty kms from top to bottom where at no point did I manage to become accustomed to the sights.

Bus to Songpan. Rode horses through Tolkienesque valleys in which Yaks frolicked and goats pranced amongst fields of buttercups. Onwards up mountains to heights of 4500 meters in which misfortune may have cost you the use of your extremities had you fallen off. Good natured larrikins for guides, lots of conversation concerning bowel movements, getting wet, playing Chinese poker. Great times.

10 hours to Chengdu over earthquake ravaged highway. Our last experience at ticking the boxes (Xian) left us decidedly cynical so we decided to “F&*^ the Pandas” and instead, got cheap massages and an absolutely outstanding Sichuanese meal. 50 AUD for our temporary  party of 5, WITH BEER and more deliciousness than is right for mere mortals to consume. Value that won’t laze itself to extinction. Twats.

One day too many in Chengdu due to earthquakes in Yunnan. Had our one and only fight (re: travel arrangements) then got a 33hr sleeper bus to Lijiang taking a tour of China’s most disgusting rest stops on the way. Lijiang is a touristy version of ‘Ye Olde Chinae’ but is the jumping off point for Tiger Leaping Gorge and despite being a little tacky, has a great bar with an outstanding view over the “old town”. Tiger Leaping Gorge is 3 hours of uphill agony to the less fit (me) but thouroughly rewarding when the clouds clear and the road levels to lead you under peaks that would inspire vertigo in giants and over a river that has the ferocious intensity of a… lion. We spent an extra day due to its overall pleasantness and also because the guesthouse where we stayed had a terrace.

10 hours on two buses and…
Now I am in a hostel in a place called Tengchong.  A sleepy town town near the border of Burma and Tibet in Yunnan province. Tomorrow we will lounge in volcanic hotsprings and the day after (weather permitting) take a hot air balloon over a volcanic reserve. After that we will lose one third of our three (Susie) and Paul and I will venture further into the heart of darkness.

Simon

In the panel today I did a lot of talking. Trying to wrap one’s head around the finer points of artistic databases can be taxing but I think I came away with slightly more understanding than before. I’m a little baffled by most students’ assumptions that because we’ve been given a reading, the author is correct and must be taken at face value, but then again, I would say that. Iconoclasm runs in the family like a degenerative disease.

In summary, Seaman good, Manovich bad.

I really enjoyed the tangents today about videogames and such. Hearing about the ‘Eve Online’ conflagration that occurred because of an unpaid bill was very entertaining… half tempted to check it out, but very unsure about adding more strings to the bow of my Candy-Crush and Scrabble addictions. I must confess, I am about to take the EVE-O personality test. Probably better to give the old eve-o before starting anything but hey… turns out I’m a ‘manufacturer’. How enlightening!

Manovich is symptomatic of the classic techno-determinist. “We are, because computers”. To my mind this is putting the cart before the horse. Some want so desperately to escape the crude bondage of the physical form that they will invariably try and fit the data to the model.

“Computer games both mimic existing games, and create new genres”. Don’t people create the new genres? And do the mimicking? Manovich also speaks of the “computerisation of culture”, but isn’t it really a “culture of computerisation”? Arguing semantic points with a computer programmer may be a waste of time, but I take exception to the insistence that it is us who resemble the machine world, rather than the other way round. Computers might represent our desires, to be efficient, brilliant and hard-working but there has been no magical evolutionary jump whereabouts we became ‘like them’. This is not simply pro-biological hubris, we use the metaphors to explain the pre-existing. Networks and databases can be used to explain how human beings might function, but we do not necessarily become the metaphor, just because it might feel good to say so.

In the sense that human evolution can be viewed as a combination of ‘programs and algorithms’ -because, like dude, the universe is all maths – I agree with Manovich, but if anything I believe it reinforces my previous point. Programs and algorithms can explain evolution but evolution did not happen like it did because we discovered programs and algorithms. In other words, our resemblance to computers – to whatever extent this might be true, or not – is already the function of a pre-existing condition, a way that is irrespective of whether or not the computer is there to hold up the mirror. The computer, or the program, or whatever you like, is another metaphor for explaining what is already there. I would ask the question, ‘why are we so desperate to be like the machines’? Anyway… moving on…

Manovich makes the point that data itself is active. This resonates strongly with me as I struggle to see any passive principle in nature. Even the rock holding itself together is a form of Will, of resistance, but active does not have to mean intentional and perhaps this is where the confusion comes about.

Seaman:

In contrast to Manovich, I find myself immediately in agreement with Seaman as he quotes, “The poetic of computers lies in the genius of individual programmers” and that “computers are in the service of individual expression”. The notion of database poetics  sits much more comfortably with me than the idea of hypertext narrative having any validity.

One piece of information that my brain is having less trouble assimilating is the concept of the rhizome. As I understand it – a whole that contains the whole of its potential but only manifest as specific variations on the available theme.

Perhaps in a mirroring of the diffuse and evolving theory of networks, Eliot suggested that there isn’t a single, definitive idea that can be gleaned from the readings. Eliot brought the discussion back once more to M McLuhan, talking about how the more general a theory is (eg technological determinism) the less it tends to describe specific scenarios.

Vanessa seemed to be right in saying that network theories are importantly, only theories, and as suggested by Potts, avoid definitive categorisation.

Does technology ever function independently from us? I don’t believe so. I see technology as our demon-child, maybe rogue but always and irrevocably ours. I see the distinction between human and technology as a matter of scale, just because we don’t understand sociology in the same way as say, a desktop computer, doesn’t invoke the mystical by necessity.

Potts, in the introduction to his paper, ‘Culture and Technology’, introduces the argument that after the 19th century and the advent of the phrase, ‘Industrial Revolution’, society has looked increasingly to technology to provide literalist metaphors for systems that might not have a direct correlation to what we understand colloquially as ‘technology’, eg: the brain as computer, or more recently, society as a ‘network’. Potts also says that the meaning and import of the word ‘technology’, has been contested by different groups who seek to control its meaning – the word ‘technocrat’ having positive and negative implications depending on the speaker.

Potts uses William Barret’s sentiment to describe the importance of ‘techniques’, skills, that are in themselves technologies and how the advent of their loss would mean our great pile of physical technology would be reduced to junk. This relates closely to themes explored by John Michael Greer, in his blog, ‘The Archdruid Report‘. Greer is an outspoken advocate for the preservation for certain sustainable, low-tech skills such as short-wave radio and has written at length about what he sees as the coming age of scarcity, brought about by dwindling resources and the inevitable collapse of the architecture that comprises the current Anglo-American way of life. Greer criticises both what he calls the ‘cornucopians’ (those who believe in the ever onwards and upwards trajectory of technological progress) and those obsessed with the apocalypse, always seeking to find what he would see as the realistic middle ground between the two – a low-tech, sustainable future based on greatly depleted resources. I believe Greer makes a convincing case for his arguments, citing numerous historical precedents for the rise and fall of communities. It was Greer who inspired me to read Spengler’s iconoclastic ‘Decline of the West’, a book dangerously ahead of its time, even if many of the ideas are now redundant.

Back to Potts. Potts makes a case that the literature written to describe technologies as metaphors for society should be as fluid and constantly changing as the technologies themselves. This is a point that resonates strongly with me, but the need for certainty and perhaps the investment of time and or money in certain ways of ‘doing’, could impede this worthy goal or perhaps simply that culture is now seen as “messy, confused and riven with contradictions”. If the like of Greer and Spengler prove correct, constantly updating the literature might be akin to rearranging the chairs on the Titanic.