We were going to a meeting in the local community space, and happened upon a demonstration in progress: the playback of a live recording of a rainforest using multiple sophisticated microphones and sound systems. It sounded too irresistible to pass up.
The actual presentation was gorgeous. All of the lights were shut off in the ballroom, and the audience was treated to an incredibly rich soundscape, an audible artifact to take away from several of nature's equivalents of great cities: some of the greatest rainforests in Africa and South America.
The sounds were rich and symphonic. The listener was treated to a landscape of a dizzying array of species, all calling to each other, occupying distinct audio niches with their methods of communication. One can make out birds, insects, land mammals, rustling trees, thunder...
After detailed analysis of the audio, the scientists concluded that each species within this ecosystem had evolved communications methods which avoided competition on a given frequency, so various species could call in everything from low bass tones to high treble tones, the distribution of which eventually produces what sounds like an organic symphony.
Just incredible! What an amazing store of knowledge, and what incredible technologies that made it possible.
But there was a fundamental tension lying just beneath the surface. The subtext of the presentation warned of a coming sixth mass extinction: it was in the rainforests that alarming and rapidly accelerating species die-offs were most noticeable.
Here we have an earnest desire to observe natural phenomena and spread awareness of troubling trends, but this process of observation implies a far out extension of technological complexity that requires massive inputs of energy, inputs which are dooming the very entities under observation.
We're talking about multi-dimensional spatial mics, huge
scaffoldings for recording perches, sophisticated computer analysis and
eventual plans for geodesic domes that house immense sound systems to
provide rich atmospheric sound.
This exposes a tragic and fatal irony: the incredible instruments of measurement, the technologies that make these observations possible, and which spread awareness through wonder, are themselves part of a gargantuan ideological, technological, socio-economic infrastructure whose very operation threatens the ecosystems it is so enchanted with, and more importantly, ultimately sustain it.
One can't pick and choose one's favored high technologies and groups and amputate them, to perpetuate them unscathed into a green utopia. Their very existence depends on the entire edifice, the totality of uninterrupted human activity.
We are treated to a wide-eyed immersion into an infinitely complex eco-system, and the richness of our experience of it only grows. We just keep on finding out more and more. The potential for knowledge is bottomless; its endlessness beckons us further and further into the abyss.
We find ourselves on the knife edge between extreme technological complexity and the mad ideological wilderness that accompanies it, and the sublime intellectual communion with nature that its exquisite instruments make possible.
The presentation was incredibly beautiful and brilliant, yet terrifying. One felt as though one was watching Icarus as his wings were beginning to catch fire.
Or alternatively, a stark meaning arises concerning Ernest Hemingway's Old Man of the Sea: a man bent on following his destiny to its completion, to catch a great fish in the sea, undergoes a harrowing struggle to catch his prize, ultimately triumphing. However as he returns to his village, dragging the prize with him behind his boat, the fish is destroyed by various predators and the elements of the sea from which it came, and he returns with nothing but a shredded skeleton.
Saturday, February 28, 2015
Pickings
We are in the habit of saying this or that "era" produced certain bodies of thoughts, arts, technologies, and ideas, and we often place values on those things in turn. We say this or that person or body of thought was "mistaken" or "on to the right things," which is more or less picking among history's detritus to assemble a new form that is appropriate to one's time.
I follow through with this habit all the time. I say, "well look here, here's where it went wrong, here is where the individual broke away, contributing to a cascade of individuals breaking away, a disintegration."
Or, "oh I see, here is where we see the beginning stirrings of Capitalism, or further back, the emergence of a relationship with increasing complexity, agrarian lifestyles, and indefinite growth."
As a human being enmeshed in a set of relations in one's time, one feels a tremendous pressure to make value judgements, to assemble an ideology whose thrust would see to it that a given state of affairs which has become unbearable would be altered.
One wishes to help, so to speak. One wishes to preserve the objects of love over time.
To do this, we choose what to focus on and what to ignore, we choose what to emphasize, or re-emphasize, and what to diminish, so as to re-establish balance. It takes raw materials, and some pre-built structures, to do this. I am referring to ideology. And in constructing ideology, we look across time. We set down ideological roots, so to speak. We look far back and say, here is where it went wrong, and here is how it happened, and here is how to fix it.
One can pick and choose values, but in the end, it all happened. History has proceeded across its fields of transition and emergence, and in turn, generated its own corollary field of arts and ideologies. One assents and dissents with each of them, but all of it together produces a totality worthy of analysis.
The study of disintegrating societies teaches us valuable lessons about how units of life organization end, or at least break-down and rearrange, and no matter how distasteful we find the ideologies and opinions emitting from such events, they teach us about the world and ourselves.
Individualism then, though stretched out to a grotesque and horrifying degree today, is interesting to study in terms of its strains of thought that curl back into history. It reveals much, unsurprisingly, about the individual, and the individual's place and behaviors in a society.
Just as religious and collectivist ideologies teach us about larger wholes. And the juxtaposition of these competing systems of thought, assumed to be at tension, teaches us much about the greater whole, about the endless historical chain that produces these tendencies and their related ideologies as they antagonize, subsume, and propel each other.
Cold environments produce their own set of phenomena, while hot environments produce theirs, and studying those, as well as the transitions in between, gives one the whole picture. Things melt. They freeze. They evaporate. They blast apart. All within certain contexts and sets of circumstances. And all of it provides a greater understanding.
I follow through with this habit all the time. I say, "well look here, here's where it went wrong, here is where the individual broke away, contributing to a cascade of individuals breaking away, a disintegration."
Or, "oh I see, here is where we see the beginning stirrings of Capitalism, or further back, the emergence of a relationship with increasing complexity, agrarian lifestyles, and indefinite growth."
As a human being enmeshed in a set of relations in one's time, one feels a tremendous pressure to make value judgements, to assemble an ideology whose thrust would see to it that a given state of affairs which has become unbearable would be altered.
One wishes to help, so to speak. One wishes to preserve the objects of love over time.
To do this, we choose what to focus on and what to ignore, we choose what to emphasize, or re-emphasize, and what to diminish, so as to re-establish balance. It takes raw materials, and some pre-built structures, to do this. I am referring to ideology. And in constructing ideology, we look across time. We set down ideological roots, so to speak. We look far back and say, here is where it went wrong, and here is how it happened, and here is how to fix it.
One can pick and choose values, but in the end, it all happened. History has proceeded across its fields of transition and emergence, and in turn, generated its own corollary field of arts and ideologies. One assents and dissents with each of them, but all of it together produces a totality worthy of analysis.
The study of disintegrating societies teaches us valuable lessons about how units of life organization end, or at least break-down and rearrange, and no matter how distasteful we find the ideologies and opinions emitting from such events, they teach us about the world and ourselves.
Individualism then, though stretched out to a grotesque and horrifying degree today, is interesting to study in terms of its strains of thought that curl back into history. It reveals much, unsurprisingly, about the individual, and the individual's place and behaviors in a society.
Just as religious and collectivist ideologies teach us about larger wholes. And the juxtaposition of these competing systems of thought, assumed to be at tension, teaches us much about the greater whole, about the endless historical chain that produces these tendencies and their related ideologies as they antagonize, subsume, and propel each other.
Cold environments produce their own set of phenomena, while hot environments produce theirs, and studying those, as well as the transitions in between, gives one the whole picture. Things melt. They freeze. They evaporate. They blast apart. All within certain contexts and sets of circumstances. And all of it provides a greater understanding.
Sunday, February 22, 2015
Do You Know That You Repeat Yourself?
Well, I do. I say similar things again and again all the time, just in a different way.
My repetitive thoughts work their way through and then I am hit with the impulse to articulate them as they come.
But I reassure myself with the rationalization that perhaps when one is making a work, it helps to go over something again and again and again, until the most beautiful iteration arises, which one can offer to others.
Much like doing photography. You take a hundred pictures of the same damn thing. But you do it from different angles, with different concentrations of light, with different aperture sizes. At least one of those pictures will look really great.
My repetitive thoughts work their way through and then I am hit with the impulse to articulate them as they come.
But I reassure myself with the rationalization that perhaps when one is making a work, it helps to go over something again and again and again, until the most beautiful iteration arises, which one can offer to others.
Much like doing photography. You take a hundred pictures of the same damn thing. But you do it from different angles, with different concentrations of light, with different aperture sizes. At least one of those pictures will look really great.
Incomplete
Much pain and misunderstanding comes from the simple gap between reality and the limits of understanding reality that the rational system suffers.
One feels slighted by another for example: if one could simply step back and see clearly the true meaning of the situation, one would be diffused. But one can't see everything as it is.
We attempt to reconcile conflicts through causal reasoning and a little projection to fill in the gaps. One cannot get inside the mind of another, so one must recreate that mind with one's own mind. But one makes mistakes! One cannot truly see all there is to see in another.
If an individual could see all there is to see in another, one would see that another is merely oneself, just from another angle, at another point in space and time. One is an expression of the universe, as is another.
This is an important reason for doing philosophy. Understanding heals. One is in great psychic pain, say from guilt or anger, and inquires into why one is in pain, and just understanding this reality can be a great relief. It objectifies the subjective; it takes pressure off of one's self, and locates dysfunction within a larger whole.
But this is philosophy's great shortcoming as well: to understand is to render the concrete in the abstract, and to render the concrete into the abstract implies a vast loss of information. One can only focus on so much at a time.
We have to be satisfied with the truth that one can never quite get at everything there is. One can understand obliquely, temporarily, in a limited way, and that is it. Satisfied with this state of affairs, we can move forward in relative peace.
One feels slighted by another for example: if one could simply step back and see clearly the true meaning of the situation, one would be diffused. But one can't see everything as it is.
We attempt to reconcile conflicts through causal reasoning and a little projection to fill in the gaps. One cannot get inside the mind of another, so one must recreate that mind with one's own mind. But one makes mistakes! One cannot truly see all there is to see in another.
If an individual could see all there is to see in another, one would see that another is merely oneself, just from another angle, at another point in space and time. One is an expression of the universe, as is another.
This is an important reason for doing philosophy. Understanding heals. One is in great psychic pain, say from guilt or anger, and inquires into why one is in pain, and just understanding this reality can be a great relief. It objectifies the subjective; it takes pressure off of one's self, and locates dysfunction within a larger whole.
But this is philosophy's great shortcoming as well: to understand is to render the concrete in the abstract, and to render the concrete into the abstract implies a vast loss of information. One can only focus on so much at a time.
We have to be satisfied with the truth that one can never quite get at everything there is. One can understand obliquely, temporarily, in a limited way, and that is it. Satisfied with this state of affairs, we can move forward in relative peace.
Washing Machine
I whip up some set of arguments against some sort of absurdity posed by contemporary culture, and then realize that these arguments were made in the 90s by someone else, and in the 70s by yet another.
And that the arguments themselves, abstracted and applied across time, could have been made by someone 100 years ago. 1,000 years ago.
Traced across human history, there is a mass of continuous human activity, a body, that ebbs and flows, that transforms and returns, that continues to produce these absurdities, and through the production of these absurdities, it produces thoughts, reactions, arguments like the ones that surface in my thoughts.
I - and many others throughout the modern world who have had similar thoughts - am in the end a phase in an endless cycle, a rising moon gazing coldly at a setting sun for the nth time, to be repeated again and again, within cycles that span decades, orbiting within cycles which span centuries, orbiting within cycles which span millennia.
A little dizzying, but this is ok.
And that the arguments themselves, abstracted and applied across time, could have been made by someone 100 years ago. 1,000 years ago.
Traced across human history, there is a mass of continuous human activity, a body, that ebbs and flows, that transforms and returns, that continues to produce these absurdities, and through the production of these absurdities, it produces thoughts, reactions, arguments like the ones that surface in my thoughts.
I - and many others throughout the modern world who have had similar thoughts - am in the end a phase in an endless cycle, a rising moon gazing coldly at a setting sun for the nth time, to be repeated again and again, within cycles that span decades, orbiting within cycles which span centuries, orbiting within cycles which span millennia.
A little dizzying, but this is ok.
Chin Scratcher
Is a philosopher's writings brilliant, or are they the equivalent of a mere dysfunctioning panel that disrupts the continuity of the machine, providing a rare glimpse into its circuitry, so to speak? Or maybe it is both?
Whatever Works
There are actually a lot of ways to structure your life, even your daily routine. I thought I had myself figured out: I was that night-bloomer that takes in information during the day, and then suddenly at night the muse hits and all of the words and music burst forth.
But then just change a couple things. Some stretches, exercises, and meditation in the morning, and then the muse turns on out of nowhere and here are all these morning thoughts and inspirations.
We build all these rationalizations on these subconscious states which seem quite compelling, but really are quite flexible if you know the right adjustments to make. Kind of crazy.
Granted, these life structures, these routines will stabilize over a period of time, both through ageing and repetition through necessity. Nevertheless, it is something to keep in mind when thinking about one's life patterns, and even ideology.
But then just change a couple things. Some stretches, exercises, and meditation in the morning, and then the muse turns on out of nowhere and here are all these morning thoughts and inspirations.
We build all these rationalizations on these subconscious states which seem quite compelling, but really are quite flexible if you know the right adjustments to make. Kind of crazy.
Granted, these life structures, these routines will stabilize over a period of time, both through ageing and repetition through necessity. Nevertheless, it is something to keep in mind when thinking about one's life patterns, and even ideology.
Saturday, February 21, 2015
Thoughts on Open Source Pt. 5: Solutions?
So through the course of these posts, I've praised the philosophical tenets and practical results of open source programming to the moon, and then proceeded to give the whole technological edifice a philosophical browbeating by delineating multiple interconnected problems associated with it. What exactly am I driving at here?
To look over problems of this scope of complexity and indeterminacy, one is forced into a state of indecision, on the intellectual level of course. Come tomorrow it could be raining bullets, Molotov cocktails, boiling water, or what have you, and I would proceed to whatever solution was appropriate and that would put an end to the discussion decisively, and things would become a bit more simple. But while we are here...
Solutions? I admit that this is pretty speculative, as I only have a limited knowledge of what is being worked on in the open source world, and limited knowledge of the community itself, and how well all this is going to work in the real world. It doesn't hurt to think about what possibilities these solutions pose however.
There is also the question of whether it would be more prudent to abandon high technology altogether and pursue deliberate simplicity, considering the seriousness of the rising cascade of problems facing the modern world. But for this series of posts, let's hold the assumption that substantial portions of computing and networking technologies are precious resources and will prove valuable for managing the crises ahead. But how to separate the good from the bad? How to salvage high technologies from the greedy grasp of global capital, and the paranoid clutches of governments around the world? How to maintain simplified versions of these technologies on lower energy inputs and slimmer resource stores?
First let's consider the Internet as it exists in its centralized state. Many programmers are spooked by the vast surveillance systems being implemented by US agencies, and are angered over the deliberate weaknesses and inferior functions foisted on the Internet infrastructure in order to create security back-doors.
A large proportion of the American public is deftly afraid of its own shadow. All the news media has to do is show an angry, bearded brown face and declare it the next supervillain, and all the TV consuming suburbanites are up off their couches, circling their carpets, squawking about the coming reign of terror from the East.
What can you expect from a nation whose majority feels that post-911 CIA interrogation techniques were justified? Though of course we have to ask how the survey was phrased. Surely asking outright whether "torture" was justified would invoke a little more hesitancy. This is the problem with a nation that is kept completely in the dark from its own international activities; its citizens are forced to gauge their "feelings" with certain weasel words like "interrogation technique."
But I digress. My point is that the centralized Internet as it exists is already under extensive surveillance, and the US government could easily go much further, most likely with the blessing of a majority of the population. Artificial hysterias have most Americans besides themselves with fear; what will happen when another real crisis actually hits? Plenty of governments around the world already censor their regions. Net neutrality is still a policy, but every year the telecoms throw more and more lawyers and money out to get the Internet cableized, and when that happens they will control a large portion of information as well.
This is on top of the talk that the infrastructure itself is dated and rickety, and in serious need of a dramatic restructuring and redesign, something that our rentier economy won't allow. Telecoms are making too much money on the infrastructure as it exists, and there is no public financing available for such an undertaking. Everyone is using this infrastructure! A mere construction project for a rail line can be scuttled within weeks due to corruption, incompetency, and suspicion among communities. Do we really believe this society is capable of such a massive project?
Yes, there's no telling what can happen. But when one sets out to cross a rickety bridge, and sees that its ropes are frayed and its slats rotten through, one doesn't entertain wishy washy thoughts about whether the bridge will hold. One decides not to cross.
Anyway, these are the sentiments felt by many open source programmers, who are working diligently on decentralized peer-to-peer networks, experimental parallel Internet infrastructure, cutting edge encryption, and the like.
The idea is to adopt the principles and technologies of an Internet network in a more fragmented and decentralized form, to preserve its usefulness for communities actually interested in not destroying the world. Communication is very important, as well as the sharing of knowledge. Could these systems be preserved?
We should ask about the technical requirements of such an undertaking, and the resources needed for such a project. We should want to still benefit from computers and their many uses, as well as databases of knowledge to preserve through crises, and the superior communication capabilities of Internet infrastructure, however decentralized it becomes.
It does take energy to run these things. Where will the energy come from? Can these systems be scaled down to accept renewables? It also takes resources to maintain these systems. Computer screens go out. Hard-drives degrade over time, etc.
Whatever solution arises, it would be ill-advised to depend on massive market-based supply chains, mechanized mines, and petroleum-based energy.
This requirement ties in with an interesting development in the meaning of "hacking." For as long as I can remember, hacking had this high-tech and often subversive meaning, bringing to mind images of sleuthing programmers breaking into high-security networks with sophisticated technologies and programming chops. In some ways this meaning still stands, but it stands predominantly in the mainstream.
In these hacker communities themselves, the term has undergone a change, doubtlessly due to the necessities posed by a contracting economy and an uncertain future. Now it simply stands in as a general activity of tinkering with existing technologies, infrastructures, and built objects. To hack something is to alter it and re-purpose it for one's own ends. This is a skill that confers respect for the hacker that can cobble together scrap resources and components from broken devices and build a functioning unit out of these scraps.
A similar skill has gained respect in various parts in Africa, where much of the West's electronic waste is shipped. There skilled hackers can strip broken devices of copper wiring, circuit boards, batteries, and other components, and build working units to trade in or use themselves.
Perhaps this is one route to regular maintenance and even construction of decentralized networks of computers and databases, with these repurposed devices made to work with some sort of decentralized network protocol. There will certainly be no shortage of electronic waste to utilize, to be sure. Of course energy is another question altogether. But peer to peer networked computers would require much less energy than a centralized server.
And open source programming and hacking communities have become much more porous. These communities are interfacing with political activists, spiritual thinkers, philosophers, gardeners, musicians, you name it. All as individuals themselves are adopting a multi-disciplinary approach, with interests spreading to multiple disciplines as the luxury of specialization fades with the trust in a centralized power.
Much speculation, yes. But food for thought.
To look over problems of this scope of complexity and indeterminacy, one is forced into a state of indecision, on the intellectual level of course. Come tomorrow it could be raining bullets, Molotov cocktails, boiling water, or what have you, and I would proceed to whatever solution was appropriate and that would put an end to the discussion decisively, and things would become a bit more simple. But while we are here...
Solutions? I admit that this is pretty speculative, as I only have a limited knowledge of what is being worked on in the open source world, and limited knowledge of the community itself, and how well all this is going to work in the real world. It doesn't hurt to think about what possibilities these solutions pose however.
There is also the question of whether it would be more prudent to abandon high technology altogether and pursue deliberate simplicity, considering the seriousness of the rising cascade of problems facing the modern world. But for this series of posts, let's hold the assumption that substantial portions of computing and networking technologies are precious resources and will prove valuable for managing the crises ahead. But how to separate the good from the bad? How to salvage high technologies from the greedy grasp of global capital, and the paranoid clutches of governments around the world? How to maintain simplified versions of these technologies on lower energy inputs and slimmer resource stores?
First let's consider the Internet as it exists in its centralized state. Many programmers are spooked by the vast surveillance systems being implemented by US agencies, and are angered over the deliberate weaknesses and inferior functions foisted on the Internet infrastructure in order to create security back-doors.
A large proportion of the American public is deftly afraid of its own shadow. All the news media has to do is show an angry, bearded brown face and declare it the next supervillain, and all the TV consuming suburbanites are up off their couches, circling their carpets, squawking about the coming reign of terror from the East.
What can you expect from a nation whose majority feels that post-911 CIA interrogation techniques were justified? Though of course we have to ask how the survey was phrased. Surely asking outright whether "torture" was justified would invoke a little more hesitancy. This is the problem with a nation that is kept completely in the dark from its own international activities; its citizens are forced to gauge their "feelings" with certain weasel words like "interrogation technique."
But I digress. My point is that the centralized Internet as it exists is already under extensive surveillance, and the US government could easily go much further, most likely with the blessing of a majority of the population. Artificial hysterias have most Americans besides themselves with fear; what will happen when another real crisis actually hits? Plenty of governments around the world already censor their regions. Net neutrality is still a policy, but every year the telecoms throw more and more lawyers and money out to get the Internet cableized, and when that happens they will control a large portion of information as well.
This is on top of the talk that the infrastructure itself is dated and rickety, and in serious need of a dramatic restructuring and redesign, something that our rentier economy won't allow. Telecoms are making too much money on the infrastructure as it exists, and there is no public financing available for such an undertaking. Everyone is using this infrastructure! A mere construction project for a rail line can be scuttled within weeks due to corruption, incompetency, and suspicion among communities. Do we really believe this society is capable of such a massive project?
Yes, there's no telling what can happen. But when one sets out to cross a rickety bridge, and sees that its ropes are frayed and its slats rotten through, one doesn't entertain wishy washy thoughts about whether the bridge will hold. One decides not to cross.
Anyway, these are the sentiments felt by many open source programmers, who are working diligently on decentralized peer-to-peer networks, experimental parallel Internet infrastructure, cutting edge encryption, and the like.
The idea is to adopt the principles and technologies of an Internet network in a more fragmented and decentralized form, to preserve its usefulness for communities actually interested in not destroying the world. Communication is very important, as well as the sharing of knowledge. Could these systems be preserved?
We should ask about the technical requirements of such an undertaking, and the resources needed for such a project. We should want to still benefit from computers and their many uses, as well as databases of knowledge to preserve through crises, and the superior communication capabilities of Internet infrastructure, however decentralized it becomes.
It does take energy to run these things. Where will the energy come from? Can these systems be scaled down to accept renewables? It also takes resources to maintain these systems. Computer screens go out. Hard-drives degrade over time, etc.
Whatever solution arises, it would be ill-advised to depend on massive market-based supply chains, mechanized mines, and petroleum-based energy.
This requirement ties in with an interesting development in the meaning of "hacking." For as long as I can remember, hacking had this high-tech and often subversive meaning, bringing to mind images of sleuthing programmers breaking into high-security networks with sophisticated technologies and programming chops. In some ways this meaning still stands, but it stands predominantly in the mainstream.
In these hacker communities themselves, the term has undergone a change, doubtlessly due to the necessities posed by a contracting economy and an uncertain future. Now it simply stands in as a general activity of tinkering with existing technologies, infrastructures, and built objects. To hack something is to alter it and re-purpose it for one's own ends. This is a skill that confers respect for the hacker that can cobble together scrap resources and components from broken devices and build a functioning unit out of these scraps.
A similar skill has gained respect in various parts in Africa, where much of the West's electronic waste is shipped. There skilled hackers can strip broken devices of copper wiring, circuit boards, batteries, and other components, and build working units to trade in or use themselves.
Perhaps this is one route to regular maintenance and even construction of decentralized networks of computers and databases, with these repurposed devices made to work with some sort of decentralized network protocol. There will certainly be no shortage of electronic waste to utilize, to be sure. Of course energy is another question altogether. But peer to peer networked computers would require much less energy than a centralized server.
And open source programming and hacking communities have become much more porous. These communities are interfacing with political activists, spiritual thinkers, philosophers, gardeners, musicians, you name it. All as individuals themselves are adopting a multi-disciplinary approach, with interests spreading to multiple disciplines as the luxury of specialization fades with the trust in a centralized power.
Much speculation, yes. But food for thought.
Wednesday, February 18, 2015
Thoughts on Open Source Pt. 4
I keep hinting at the technical knowledge that open source software requires, as well as the fact that this requirement reveals much about the unfolding of a technological society of our nature, and then I keep delaying the discussion with some detour here or there. Well, here we go.
We are left with another challenge: open source production and utilization, with its direct command of raw computing power, takes sophisticated technical knowledge to navigate. This is because of the nature of a computer's construction and administration: it must be talked to with a specific language that commands it to do specific things, all abstracted into towering interconnected structures of protocol and process. You can't simply tell a computer to "do this."
It is possible to democratize this command of computer resources with the development of user-friendly interfaces: buttons, screens, mouses, visual interfaces, all of which made it easier for less technically-sophisticated users to work with these systems. But this democratization requires an entire industry of specialists: programmers willing to build these interfaces, graphic designers willing to develop visual interfaces and user-friendly design, technical support representatives, hardware designers, you name it.
But the broader reach a given sphere of human activity entails, and the more time and resources a given sphere requires, the more likely the sphere is in danger of commercial expropriation. Capital seeks out concentrated pockets of human activity like an oil company seeks out concentrated oil reserves. Whatever grows in social regard tends to be desired to a greater degree; this is the primary resource that capital seeks. One gets one's grubby claws around an object of desire and becomes the gatekeeper, charging a premium for access.
So pockets of non-commercial activity tend to run on lower resource inputs, and they tend to be populated with a limited subculture which is somewhat insulated from the mainstream.
Open source has become a general concept that spans many fields, and the fields do overlap. I won't deny there is a vibrant underground, or shadow economy that grows as the formal economy loses legitimacy. However open source programming itself tends to be populated predominantly with programmers, due to the technical requirements. There are many types of programmers, many of whom are willing to set up easier-to-use interfaces for lay people and interface with the general public. But on the whole, the subculture remains insulated.
Part of this insulation stems from technological complexity itself. As a culture increases in complexity, a greater amount of divisions are required in numerous specializations, due to human cognitive limits. In an ideal society, more basic living functions would be shared among the populace, and individual specialists would share their knowledge and technical know-how with each other and cooperate through a trust that each specialization does its part.
What we seem to have instead time and time again through the history of human civilizations is a relegation of basic functions - which have become uninteresting to a society delighted with its technological progress - to vulnerable and disliked portions of the population, or to entire societies outside of the imperial core. Let immigrants and the poor in the imperial core handle agriculture, landscaping, service, and maintenance, and let the post-colonials handle resources such as agricultural goods, raw manufacturing materials, energetic resources, and whatever else is uninteresting to the shiny modern sensibility; they're all brutes anyways!
Now you can witness the sheer hubris of our global empire by gazing over the vast landscape of outsourced manufacturing, energy, resources, and now even tech work, as all of it bleeds into the periphery through financial engineering, economic bullying, and what is now waning military power.
If you have slaves and indentured servants handling all of the grunt work, you can ignore all of it and concentrate on the finer things in life, such as your insanely limited and reductionistic specialized disciplines. This impetus serves in part to characterize an ambitious and complex society, and contributes major pressures to the formation of a social hierarchy.
If you're happy with living in one of the many economic dictatorships (corporations) that span the modern world, great. However for open source programmers, who have an egalitarian sensibility and a penchant for sharing, this is a fatal weakness. If capital can intersperse itself in all sectors of the economy, and those sectors are all played against each other through exploitative pressures, and each sector of resources is fenced off for private gain, then one has to rely on the market for most of one's basic needs, even as one participates in a radical, egalitarian community. To do open source programming one has to have one's nutritional needs, medical needs, shelter, energetic requirements, social needs, and whatever else, all of which must be procured from the market if one is not fulfilling those needs oneself, or getting those needs fulfilled from the local community.
The only way to preserve this state of affairs and revolutionize one's own social activity would be to take control of the state itself and force a change on the rest of society, as the old socialists and communists understood all too well. Which, I'm not sure is possible any longer, for reasons I could get into another time.
And so, in the abstract, radical creativity, or creativity that takes place outside of a dominant economic or social system, takes a granular knowledge of all of the elements and tools of creation. It also takes time and energy, both of which are required to subsist in the old society as one makes preparations for a transition.
It also requires the ability to handle one's own basic needs, or to have those needs relegated to a sympathetic community that one can trust and reciprocate with.
In the abstract, pure open source programming lacks these needs, but as I write, open source communities everywhere have beaten me to the punch. Increasingly resilient and self-sufficient communities are forming everywhere, and individuals are adopting increasingly multi-disciplinary approaches, and are becoming once again interested in those disciplines that were once relegated to less powerful groups. Increasingly a greater human mass is becoming further disenfranchised, with previous ethnic and subcultural divisions in its midst melting away, where they aren't strengthening and sharpening anyways.
I'll take a look at the implications of these developments in the final post.
We are left with another challenge: open source production and utilization, with its direct command of raw computing power, takes sophisticated technical knowledge to navigate. This is because of the nature of a computer's construction and administration: it must be talked to with a specific language that commands it to do specific things, all abstracted into towering interconnected structures of protocol and process. You can't simply tell a computer to "do this."
It is possible to democratize this command of computer resources with the development of user-friendly interfaces: buttons, screens, mouses, visual interfaces, all of which made it easier for less technically-sophisticated users to work with these systems. But this democratization requires an entire industry of specialists: programmers willing to build these interfaces, graphic designers willing to develop visual interfaces and user-friendly design, technical support representatives, hardware designers, you name it.
But the broader reach a given sphere of human activity entails, and the more time and resources a given sphere requires, the more likely the sphere is in danger of commercial expropriation. Capital seeks out concentrated pockets of human activity like an oil company seeks out concentrated oil reserves. Whatever grows in social regard tends to be desired to a greater degree; this is the primary resource that capital seeks. One gets one's grubby claws around an object of desire and becomes the gatekeeper, charging a premium for access.
So pockets of non-commercial activity tend to run on lower resource inputs, and they tend to be populated with a limited subculture which is somewhat insulated from the mainstream.
Open source has become a general concept that spans many fields, and the fields do overlap. I won't deny there is a vibrant underground, or shadow economy that grows as the formal economy loses legitimacy. However open source programming itself tends to be populated predominantly with programmers, due to the technical requirements. There are many types of programmers, many of whom are willing to set up easier-to-use interfaces for lay people and interface with the general public. But on the whole, the subculture remains insulated.
Part of this insulation stems from technological complexity itself. As a culture increases in complexity, a greater amount of divisions are required in numerous specializations, due to human cognitive limits. In an ideal society, more basic living functions would be shared among the populace, and individual specialists would share their knowledge and technical know-how with each other and cooperate through a trust that each specialization does its part.
What we seem to have instead time and time again through the history of human civilizations is a relegation of basic functions - which have become uninteresting to a society delighted with its technological progress - to vulnerable and disliked portions of the population, or to entire societies outside of the imperial core. Let immigrants and the poor in the imperial core handle agriculture, landscaping, service, and maintenance, and let the post-colonials handle resources such as agricultural goods, raw manufacturing materials, energetic resources, and whatever else is uninteresting to the shiny modern sensibility; they're all brutes anyways!
Now you can witness the sheer hubris of our global empire by gazing over the vast landscape of outsourced manufacturing, energy, resources, and now even tech work, as all of it bleeds into the periphery through financial engineering, economic bullying, and what is now waning military power.
If you have slaves and indentured servants handling all of the grunt work, you can ignore all of it and concentrate on the finer things in life, such as your insanely limited and reductionistic specialized disciplines. This impetus serves in part to characterize an ambitious and complex society, and contributes major pressures to the formation of a social hierarchy.
If you're happy with living in one of the many economic dictatorships (corporations) that span the modern world, great. However for open source programmers, who have an egalitarian sensibility and a penchant for sharing, this is a fatal weakness. If capital can intersperse itself in all sectors of the economy, and those sectors are all played against each other through exploitative pressures, and each sector of resources is fenced off for private gain, then one has to rely on the market for most of one's basic needs, even as one participates in a radical, egalitarian community. To do open source programming one has to have one's nutritional needs, medical needs, shelter, energetic requirements, social needs, and whatever else, all of which must be procured from the market if one is not fulfilling those needs oneself, or getting those needs fulfilled from the local community.
The only way to preserve this state of affairs and revolutionize one's own social activity would be to take control of the state itself and force a change on the rest of society, as the old socialists and communists understood all too well. Which, I'm not sure is possible any longer, for reasons I could get into another time.
And so, in the abstract, radical creativity, or creativity that takes place outside of a dominant economic or social system, takes a granular knowledge of all of the elements and tools of creation. It also takes time and energy, both of which are required to subsist in the old society as one makes preparations for a transition.
It also requires the ability to handle one's own basic needs, or to have those needs relegated to a sympathetic community that one can trust and reciprocate with.
In the abstract, pure open source programming lacks these needs, but as I write, open source communities everywhere have beaten me to the punch. Increasingly resilient and self-sufficient communities are forming everywhere, and individuals are adopting increasingly multi-disciplinary approaches, and are becoming once again interested in those disciplines that were once relegated to less powerful groups. Increasingly a greater human mass is becoming further disenfranchised, with previous ethnic and subcultural divisions in its midst melting away, where they aren't strengthening and sharpening anyways.
I'll take a look at the implications of these developments in the final post.
Thoughts on Open Source Pt. 3: A Detour on Macro-Problems
I left off talking about open source programming and the problems that are posed to it because of concentrated economic power, and then hinted at various solutions and further problems that were related to those solutions. Let's briefly touch on these.
We look upon this relentless production of exploitative economic structures built on top of each other, every which way, checking each other or consuming each other and we let out a vast sigh of exhaustion. What to do!
We thought we could use the state's monopoly on violence to flatten out these oscillating exploitative pressures by cutting off their wavelengths at the extremes. Progressive income taxes, redistribution of some wealth, state employment, social welfare, etc. But then these mechanisms were further compromised as economic concentration found yet again its expression in alternative channels, such as in think tank propaganda, the slow infiltration of anti-government ideology, control of media organs, gradual control of courts, and the re-taking of political power through bought politicians and institutions.
Capitalist disruption and innovation may very well change the flow of this endless vacillating game of leapfrog, and transfer power from one politico-economic bloc to another, but it only temporarily halts the concentration of power, and the dangerous mimetic effects that come with the concentration of power: monkey see the other monkey perched high atop the jungle gym, and monkey want what other monkey has, so to speak.
We produce these marvelous technologies partially out of the internal impulse to personal freedom: to create and command resources for those creations, which provides temporary relief from our structural tendencies to crush each other, and this project extends further out into conceptual abstraction and technical sophistication, perhaps solving some of the problems we've created trying to do this in the first place, or if we are lucky, solving more fundamental problems.
Technology serves to democratize computing power, ideological power (through printing and distribution), mechanical power, and mass communication.
However we've come to realize that this endless procession of incremental technological, cultural, political, and economic adjustment does not ultimately produce more stable socio-economic structures; it merely reproduces previous exploitative people-relations while delaying the explosive effects of power concentration that has both catastrophic internal and external consequences for itself. The technological innovations which are meant to give power to ordinary people are themselves infiltrated by concentrated economic and political power, and we are left with existing forms of exploitation that merely grow more complex.
What's more, further extension of technological innovations requires a growing base of economic growth and energy usage. All of these computers and Internet servers for example require working supply chains and energy sources: mines for extraction of rare elements and metals, transportation networks, construction, maintenance, the production of electricity, the administration of systems of knowledge and production that make these technologies possible, and so on. To keep from cooking ourselves with bombs, we must cook ourselves with energetic waste, or the dumping of carbon into the atmosphere.
Oh, dreary old fundamental problems of maintaining a civilized society and such. Back to open source in the next post.
We look upon this relentless production of exploitative economic structures built on top of each other, every which way, checking each other or consuming each other and we let out a vast sigh of exhaustion. What to do!
We thought we could use the state's monopoly on violence to flatten out these oscillating exploitative pressures by cutting off their wavelengths at the extremes. Progressive income taxes, redistribution of some wealth, state employment, social welfare, etc. But then these mechanisms were further compromised as economic concentration found yet again its expression in alternative channels, such as in think tank propaganda, the slow infiltration of anti-government ideology, control of media organs, gradual control of courts, and the re-taking of political power through bought politicians and institutions.
Capitalist disruption and innovation may very well change the flow of this endless vacillating game of leapfrog, and transfer power from one politico-economic bloc to another, but it only temporarily halts the concentration of power, and the dangerous mimetic effects that come with the concentration of power: monkey see the other monkey perched high atop the jungle gym, and monkey want what other monkey has, so to speak.
We produce these marvelous technologies partially out of the internal impulse to personal freedom: to create and command resources for those creations, which provides temporary relief from our structural tendencies to crush each other, and this project extends further out into conceptual abstraction and technical sophistication, perhaps solving some of the problems we've created trying to do this in the first place, or if we are lucky, solving more fundamental problems.
Technology serves to democratize computing power, ideological power (through printing and distribution), mechanical power, and mass communication.
However we've come to realize that this endless procession of incremental technological, cultural, political, and economic adjustment does not ultimately produce more stable socio-economic structures; it merely reproduces previous exploitative people-relations while delaying the explosive effects of power concentration that has both catastrophic internal and external consequences for itself. The technological innovations which are meant to give power to ordinary people are themselves infiltrated by concentrated economic and political power, and we are left with existing forms of exploitation that merely grow more complex.
What's more, further extension of technological innovations requires a growing base of economic growth and energy usage. All of these computers and Internet servers for example require working supply chains and energy sources: mines for extraction of rare elements and metals, transportation networks, construction, maintenance, the production of electricity, the administration of systems of knowledge and production that make these technologies possible, and so on. To keep from cooking ourselves with bombs, we must cook ourselves with energetic waste, or the dumping of carbon into the atmosphere.
Oh, dreary old fundamental problems of maintaining a civilized society and such. Back to open source in the next post.
Monday, February 09, 2015
Thoughts on Open Source Pt. 2
So open source is a development and production model that provides for free distribution of resources, creations, and design blueprints, which promotes cooperation, easy modification and reproduction, and ultimately, greater ease of innovation. It allows human beings to be social, as opposed to being atomized workers, managers, and executives, or homo economicus in the abstract.
Open source isn't perfect. Like any open form of human production, it has its share of talented contributors and less-talented ones. It has its share of good will and it has its share of opportunists - plenty of open source projects have sold out. But as an organizing principle, and a general principle of production, it produces quality goods.
The best goods rise to the top and become "stable" over time, and conventions develop around quality and stability, passing by word of mouth and popular usage. The development atmosphere itself tends to be much more loose and open, a joy. Many of the programmers I know complete "contracts" or work in offices to make money, and then put their passions and ideas into the open source world.
But open source does have a couple of drawbacks. First, as a mode of production it enjoys the command of very little resources, at least, in comparison to commercial tech. This is the type of activity that everyone does on their free time, on top of paid work. Another problem is that this activity requires rigorous technical knowledge, and has a very high barrier to entry.
In the previous post, we were talking about the state of affairs in which a monopolist gains control of a large sector of production, so that much of the economic activity within a given mode of production must bend in the direction of the monopoly, encapsulating resources and knowledge in turn. As a monopoly grows, it commands greater resources, until it no longer seems as if there is an alternative to working within the monopoly. One is afforded freedom of choice of many different iterations of the same thing.
The modern corporation brandishes copyright and proprietary technology and technique as the spearhead of innovation. This assumes creative types and engineers are motivated by money, which is completely the opposite of what is usually the case. Creators, engineers, inventors, what have you, are more often motivated by passion, curiosity, and regard for their fellow humans, or by less savory motivations such as self-aggrandizement, a motivation which can also be decoupled from money. But of course business executives, given nearly absolute power, can speak for the creators, and innovation to them means finding more ingenious ways of directing the fruits of production to their own selves.
I say modern corporation because the way that today's corporation is structured enables explicitly imperialistic, monopolistic, and extractionary behavior from its controllers. When corporations were first conceived, they began as limited economic organizations with arrangements set into place for a specific project, the completion of which caused the corporation to be disbanded, as opposed to today's perpetual empire-building mechanisms.
This is an economic pattern which crops up frequently in our society, because of a meta-pattern with which the society operates, whose logic ultimately generates reproductions of the pattern across economic sectors. I've hit on this theme repeatedly and in various ways, and so I'd like to attempt to tie in the previous discussion of open source with this phenomenon.
In short, an economic milieu in which there is an impulse to encapsulate and exploit resources (for individual gain) introduces intense competitive pressures that can only reproduce more of their kind. If individuals can control key resources for personal gain, then other individuals have to erect countervailing economic structures that encapsulate and exploit whatever resources, manufactured goods, or services haven't already been monopolized, so as to introduce opposing forces of economic power, to avoid becoming subsumed and subjugated. The old leftist ideology saw efforts to introduce a stabilizing central government, which would inject currency and works into the population, and introduce tighter controls on key public resources, a project that worked for some time, but then failed as dormant economic actors regained power, and a laissez-faire ideology returned, and with it, predatory economic actors which penetrated government structures themselves and inserted themselves into the social spending process, wherever they didn't destroy it anyways.
The money system itself, originally constructed to facilitate this game, becomes captured in this process, where today it exists as the primary exploitative pressure, as the resources themselves have been abstracted away under financial constructs (though this fiction is unsustainable of course). So we have the high-tech field of computer production -and programming itself - embedded within this system, wherein individuals erect their own structures of encapsulation and exploitation amidst the fields of social, creative human activity. There are plenty of convenient blueprints for doing this: the modern corporation's design and legal construction is available to anyone with the gumption, resources, and the deadened soul to embark on such an undertaking. Now that's open source for you.
You can see this process progress almost as the hardening of a volcanic flow (with due apologies to volcanoes): the open source field bubbles with ideas, or otherwise you have brand new start-ups that are born with ideas, and the core individuals within these fields are bought, along with the operations themselves, and all of that flowing knowledge and those technical blueprints (patents) are frozen and locked up within ever-growing imperial corporate structures.
Ah so we finally have a clear-cut solution in sight! Give the creators and engineers more resources and artistic/technical control and let's unleash that stunted innovation. Break apart the monopolies! Well, no, it gets much more complicated of course. Those monopolies need to be crushed with state power, a monopoly. Who shall control the state? Yet another resource to encapsulate, and what is to keep it from being exploited? We must also take stock of natural resources and energy that go into this activity. Finally, there are those pesky technical barriers to entry mentioned above as well, which sounds innocuous enough, but within them are the glimmers of difficult and complex problems to account for. In the next series of posts, I will try to get to these issues, and any corollary solutions.
Open source isn't perfect. Like any open form of human production, it has its share of talented contributors and less-talented ones. It has its share of good will and it has its share of opportunists - plenty of open source projects have sold out. But as an organizing principle, and a general principle of production, it produces quality goods.
The best goods rise to the top and become "stable" over time, and conventions develop around quality and stability, passing by word of mouth and popular usage. The development atmosphere itself tends to be much more loose and open, a joy. Many of the programmers I know complete "contracts" or work in offices to make money, and then put their passions and ideas into the open source world.
But open source does have a couple of drawbacks. First, as a mode of production it enjoys the command of very little resources, at least, in comparison to commercial tech. This is the type of activity that everyone does on their free time, on top of paid work. Another problem is that this activity requires rigorous technical knowledge, and has a very high barrier to entry.
In the previous post, we were talking about the state of affairs in which a monopolist gains control of a large sector of production, so that much of the economic activity within a given mode of production must bend in the direction of the monopoly, encapsulating resources and knowledge in turn. As a monopoly grows, it commands greater resources, until it no longer seems as if there is an alternative to working within the monopoly. One is afforded freedom of choice of many different iterations of the same thing.
The modern corporation brandishes copyright and proprietary technology and technique as the spearhead of innovation. This assumes creative types and engineers are motivated by money, which is completely the opposite of what is usually the case. Creators, engineers, inventors, what have you, are more often motivated by passion, curiosity, and regard for their fellow humans, or by less savory motivations such as self-aggrandizement, a motivation which can also be decoupled from money. But of course business executives, given nearly absolute power, can speak for the creators, and innovation to them means finding more ingenious ways of directing the fruits of production to their own selves.
I say modern corporation because the way that today's corporation is structured enables explicitly imperialistic, monopolistic, and extractionary behavior from its controllers. When corporations were first conceived, they began as limited economic organizations with arrangements set into place for a specific project, the completion of which caused the corporation to be disbanded, as opposed to today's perpetual empire-building mechanisms.
This is an economic pattern which crops up frequently in our society, because of a meta-pattern with which the society operates, whose logic ultimately generates reproductions of the pattern across economic sectors. I've hit on this theme repeatedly and in various ways, and so I'd like to attempt to tie in the previous discussion of open source with this phenomenon.
In short, an economic milieu in which there is an impulse to encapsulate and exploit resources (for individual gain) introduces intense competitive pressures that can only reproduce more of their kind. If individuals can control key resources for personal gain, then other individuals have to erect countervailing economic structures that encapsulate and exploit whatever resources, manufactured goods, or services haven't already been monopolized, so as to introduce opposing forces of economic power, to avoid becoming subsumed and subjugated. The old leftist ideology saw efforts to introduce a stabilizing central government, which would inject currency and works into the population, and introduce tighter controls on key public resources, a project that worked for some time, but then failed as dormant economic actors regained power, and a laissez-faire ideology returned, and with it, predatory economic actors which penetrated government structures themselves and inserted themselves into the social spending process, wherever they didn't destroy it anyways.
The money system itself, originally constructed to facilitate this game, becomes captured in this process, where today it exists as the primary exploitative pressure, as the resources themselves have been abstracted away under financial constructs (though this fiction is unsustainable of course). So we have the high-tech field of computer production -and programming itself - embedded within this system, wherein individuals erect their own structures of encapsulation and exploitation amidst the fields of social, creative human activity. There are plenty of convenient blueprints for doing this: the modern corporation's design and legal construction is available to anyone with the gumption, resources, and the deadened soul to embark on such an undertaking. Now that's open source for you.
You can see this process progress almost as the hardening of a volcanic flow (with due apologies to volcanoes): the open source field bubbles with ideas, or otherwise you have brand new start-ups that are born with ideas, and the core individuals within these fields are bought, along with the operations themselves, and all of that flowing knowledge and those technical blueprints (patents) are frozen and locked up within ever-growing imperial corporate structures.
Ah so we finally have a clear-cut solution in sight! Give the creators and engineers more resources and artistic/technical control and let's unleash that stunted innovation. Break apart the monopolies! Well, no, it gets much more complicated of course. Those monopolies need to be crushed with state power, a monopoly. Who shall control the state? Yet another resource to encapsulate, and what is to keep it from being exploited? We must also take stock of natural resources and energy that go into this activity. Finally, there are those pesky technical barriers to entry mentioned above as well, which sounds innocuous enough, but within them are the glimmers of difficult and complex problems to account for. In the next series of posts, I will try to get to these issues, and any corollary solutions.
Friday, February 06, 2015
Thoughts on Open Source Pt. 1
It is a curious experience to enter into the open source world, after having inhabited the walled-gardens of the Windows OS for so long, though the two worlds do overlap in a limited way. The experience of a Linux-based operating system, in this case Ubuntu - which is a free OS platform that is distributed by a company that takes in revenue from technical support and other services - is very different from Windows in several key ways, and these differences can be quite illuminating.
Like many mass commercial products, Windows isn't too bad if you are using it in a passive capacity, if you are consuming it, paying ever more for whatever functions you require, and etc. But if you don't have the money to spare, your options are severely restricted, of course, if you don't want to engage in activity that constantly puts you at odds with the law, which a lot of people do anyway. Windows 7 wasn't too bad, but 8 was an embarrassment, and it always felt as if you were constantly fighting with the operating system to make everything work or to keep everything working.
Or you'd run into strange design flaws, or experience errors that should never have happened. Oftentimes these mass commercial products aren't very well programmed, or designed. They're ramshackle amalgamations of old and new structures. Commercial entities have a conservative tendency - though a purely conservative impulse would simply preserve whatever is found to work well - which isn't always bad, but in this case it works against the product. They tend to produce a good product, and then upon the product's success, they insist on building and building and improving on what they have, until they have this convoluted abomination that is supposed to do everything, but it does nothing right, and is riddled with contradictions.
And through proprietary design, these products claim ownership over their domain: over the hardware and the other types of software they accept. They introduce a stifling atmosphere in which consumers shouldn't be programmers; they shouldn't tinker with the software or hardware they are given. Leave that to the professionals, whom you have to pay.
To experience true open source is to experience a breath of fresh air. These open source programmers are crafty. There is support everywhere. Things open up. They breathe. Things work, and they allow other programs to work with them, whatever they are. Information is easy to come by and programs make intuitive sense and work smoother. Innovation is quicker to bubble up. Imagine that: if you aren't putting up a bunch of superfluous proprietary barrier mechanisms and virtual toll booths, things tend to run better.
Programs tend to be more modular and function-based. That is, a program is built with simplicity to work well, and then the developers either move on, or build more complex programs off of those components, which are meant to communicate. It isn't perfect. You see the same problems of ramshackle systems working against each other, and convoluted programs, which tend to crop up as complexity in human production grows. But many of these issues are easier solved, as the developers communicate with each other. Many of these open source programs are simply better designed and run better.
This is because open source puts emphasis on the programs themselves, as opposed to the commercial function of these programs. Programmers wish to build programs that function well and do what they are supposed to do, whereas coupling that discipline with a commercial drive in a corporate environment requires the programmer to dilute the product with commercial aims. This reminds me of the consequences of the light bulb cartel in the 1900's, which forced engineers - who wanted to make a solid product - into building an inferior product, a light bulb that only lasted a fraction of the timespan that was possible, a preference which was determined by market forces.
These software experiences have helped remind me of the true face of market choice: if a commercial entity deliberately sets out to establish a monopoly, as Microsoft (and Apple) has done, and it gets away with it, then as time passes, the ecosystem within the monopoly grows, and transforms the nature of human activity outside of it. In an economy, a majority of the mass of human activity seems to follow a principle of least resistance: where labor is concentrated, where goods and services are emanating, economic activity will direct itself to, as what has already been made and offered is easier to incorporate into others' projects, even if they have to pay higher and higher sums. And when a centralized power manages to fence off these ecosystems of activity, and control the resources within, it severely delimits the flow of resources to areas inside of the monopoly, and the resources caught within must follow a highly constrained logic.
When you have an operating system that aggressively forces itself into a majority of a populace's computer activity, and then shuts itself off to alternative systems, it creates an environment where economic activity must conform to the requirements set by the dominant operating system, and any attempt to use an alternative means a severe curtailing of choices.
So a vast majority of programs that are built by other people are configured to work on the Windows OS, or Apple's OS. The interesting thing about Linux is that it enjoys a decent-sized user base, but the level of technical ability required to use it increases dramatically, at least from what I've seen.
And this is where the kicker is. Working with open source requires time and effort. It requires substantial technical knowledge. I'll attempt to account for this state of affairs in the next series of posts, which, though difficult to articulate, reveals much about how a complex society unfolds through time.
Like many mass commercial products, Windows isn't too bad if you are using it in a passive capacity, if you are consuming it, paying ever more for whatever functions you require, and etc. But if you don't have the money to spare, your options are severely restricted, of course, if you don't want to engage in activity that constantly puts you at odds with the law, which a lot of people do anyway. Windows 7 wasn't too bad, but 8 was an embarrassment, and it always felt as if you were constantly fighting with the operating system to make everything work or to keep everything working.
Or you'd run into strange design flaws, or experience errors that should never have happened. Oftentimes these mass commercial products aren't very well programmed, or designed. They're ramshackle amalgamations of old and new structures. Commercial entities have a conservative tendency - though a purely conservative impulse would simply preserve whatever is found to work well - which isn't always bad, but in this case it works against the product. They tend to produce a good product, and then upon the product's success, they insist on building and building and improving on what they have, until they have this convoluted abomination that is supposed to do everything, but it does nothing right, and is riddled with contradictions.
And through proprietary design, these products claim ownership over their domain: over the hardware and the other types of software they accept. They introduce a stifling atmosphere in which consumers shouldn't be programmers; they shouldn't tinker with the software or hardware they are given. Leave that to the professionals, whom you have to pay.
To experience true open source is to experience a breath of fresh air. These open source programmers are crafty. There is support everywhere. Things open up. They breathe. Things work, and they allow other programs to work with them, whatever they are. Information is easy to come by and programs make intuitive sense and work smoother. Innovation is quicker to bubble up. Imagine that: if you aren't putting up a bunch of superfluous proprietary barrier mechanisms and virtual toll booths, things tend to run better.
Programs tend to be more modular and function-based. That is, a program is built with simplicity to work well, and then the developers either move on, or build more complex programs off of those components, which are meant to communicate. It isn't perfect. You see the same problems of ramshackle systems working against each other, and convoluted programs, which tend to crop up as complexity in human production grows. But many of these issues are easier solved, as the developers communicate with each other. Many of these open source programs are simply better designed and run better.
This is because open source puts emphasis on the programs themselves, as opposed to the commercial function of these programs. Programmers wish to build programs that function well and do what they are supposed to do, whereas coupling that discipline with a commercial drive in a corporate environment requires the programmer to dilute the product with commercial aims. This reminds me of the consequences of the light bulb cartel in the 1900's, which forced engineers - who wanted to make a solid product - into building an inferior product, a light bulb that only lasted a fraction of the timespan that was possible, a preference which was determined by market forces.
These software experiences have helped remind me of the true face of market choice: if a commercial entity deliberately sets out to establish a monopoly, as Microsoft (and Apple) has done, and it gets away with it, then as time passes, the ecosystem within the monopoly grows, and transforms the nature of human activity outside of it. In an economy, a majority of the mass of human activity seems to follow a principle of least resistance: where labor is concentrated, where goods and services are emanating, economic activity will direct itself to, as what has already been made and offered is easier to incorporate into others' projects, even if they have to pay higher and higher sums. And when a centralized power manages to fence off these ecosystems of activity, and control the resources within, it severely delimits the flow of resources to areas inside of the monopoly, and the resources caught within must follow a highly constrained logic.
When you have an operating system that aggressively forces itself into a majority of a populace's computer activity, and then shuts itself off to alternative systems, it creates an environment where economic activity must conform to the requirements set by the dominant operating system, and any attempt to use an alternative means a severe curtailing of choices.
So a vast majority of programs that are built by other people are configured to work on the Windows OS, or Apple's OS. The interesting thing about Linux is that it enjoys a decent-sized user base, but the level of technical ability required to use it increases dramatically, at least from what I've seen.
And this is where the kicker is. Working with open source requires time and effort. It requires substantial technical knowledge. I'll attempt to account for this state of affairs in the next series of posts, which, though difficult to articulate, reveals much about how a complex society unfolds through time.
Sunday, February 01, 2015
Alternative Method
I'm terrible at disciplining living things. Which is why I'm uncomfortable with raising dogs from their puppy age. Even the idea of raising a child is pretty thoroughly terrifying to me, though that can change later on. I prefer to visit, or at least babysit, whether animal or child. I'm that permissive "Uncle" that comes along and spoils the kids/animals and then splits.
But then there comes a point where you have to deal with contradicting wills. If the will of the animal or child contradicts your own will - which I sometimes abide by personally - or the will of others - which I am less predisposed to tolerate - then you must be able to resolve the contradiction. Traditionally this is done with discipline, or the raw application of force and the appeal to authority.
It seems distasteful to pair animals and children in this context, but both are living things which are not fully socialized in the human world. Both must learn to exist harmoniously within a given social system - which can pose all sorts of complications if the social system chosen is at tension with the dominant social system, or if the given social system chosen has reached a point of instability. This process of socialisation is done through intuition and the feedback mechanisms provided by an authority who can exert force, not to mention the basic feedback mechanisms located in the immediate environment.
This is precisely the point at which I falter, because it is difficult for me to exert my will directly. More specifically it is difficult to exert force. Not because I lack strength or skill, but because I haven't the will myself. I cannot even act "tough" because I don't believe it inside, so that if I try to bluff and feign, a child or animal will know instinctively that it is only bark. The same goes for the wills of adults, which is another story altogether.
Nevertheless I do come across problems, such as having to deal with a misbehaving 80 lb pitbull. In this case, I am living with the dog, and spending a lot of time with it as it develops, so I have a responsibility to see to it that it behaves, both to spare me agitation, and to spare everyone else in the household.
I do apply light discipline, but where I am weak, I attempt to alter the bounds within which the dog exercises his will. I attempt to preserve the dog as a living thing with its own volition, but with limits. There are many ways to do this. It means above all paying attention to the various states the dog reaches, and connecting those states with the dog's circumstances.
You begin to notice that the dog commits various behaviors because of certain states, which are influenced by various circumstances. I've made observations myself, and I've learned from roommates who have spotted other patterns. For example, if the dog is hungry, or hasn't been outside in a while, he will act up. If you act a certain way with the dog, he will act up. If more people come to the house, or there are certain noises inside or out, he acts up.
Alter the parameters of the environment so less of these events happen, and the dog is less likely to act up, reducing the need of direct discipline.
It isn't possible to control all of the environment of course. In an unstable environment populated by unstable people (myself included) it is impossible to remove all of the stressors and agents of agitation. Consider the way in which this society is structured - and the way it progressively becomes destructured. You have colonies of small fortresses, surrounded by steel fence, many of them patrolled by aggressive and alert dogs. In a poor neighborhood, many people keep aggressive dogs outside because they make for inexpensive and effective crime deterrents. Terrible but true.
These dogs savagely bark whenever we walk past. It upsets our dog, because he's very friendly and wants to be liked by other dogs, but there's nothing else that can be done. They are there to stay, barking and pacing, inheriting the madness of the society they are part of. One looks around and simply sees madness, but there it is, relentlessly bubbling up through the pitiless forces of history. And we still must go on walks.
Hmm, back to discipline. Disciplinary force is useful in some contexts, but as a blunt instrument it can make quite a mess. If the disciplining actor misunderstands the violator, the violator will become confused, even resentful. This is also how you introduce double binds in human beings. For a developing animal or human, feedback is still very important to learn to harmonize with the social environment, but it takes effective, skilled feedback to achieve the best results. This is also how I work with ants.
As a living thing matures, and develops an orbit of its own, then it is time to back away and let it run its course. Further, one must contextualize these efforts: is one attempting to harmonize with a whole, and what is the nature of that whole? Or is one simply attempting to exercise one's own power through an alternative means of instrumentalization? The naked exercise of power is dangerous: where another detects it, one will attempt the same means to overpower you, which means beginning again the cycle of fragmentation. To locate one's self in others though is to encourage that tendency in reciprocation.
These methods are far from perfect. I'm learning everyday. And maybe I'll reach a point where I am no longer able to learn. But I do feel I must attempt to actualize what I think I am, in relation to a world that is, whether or not the exercise itself is absurd.
You could criticize these methods as passive aggressive, but then passive aggression has aggression as its opposite: it still implies an individual ego attempting to assert itself solipsistically, whereas what we are talking about is the individual ego asserting itself by identifying itself with the whole, yet nevertheless attempting to move the whole in a general direction. Yes, it is still a form of manipulation: all living things manipulate their environments. But it is a form of manipulation that acknowledges the power of billions of years of evolution of co-existing life systems, and the stability of that process, and allows greater units of life to take care of themselves, reducing fragmentation.
Anyway, I have the vague sense that these alternative methods have at their base a gradual mass redirection of the collective will. The power of the individual will has become exhausted, for it no longer moves in tandem with the mass; it is impossible to sustain the illusion of the efficacy of individual power. Ayn Rand's (more about her another time) fountain-head of human egos has burst forth like a geyser towering into the air, and at its zenith, with nowhere left to go, has sprayed in every direction, meeting the walls of its limitations, finally flowing back together into the base.
And so now, for the will to express itself, it must seek out the movements of other wills, identifying those wills with its own. It must realize itself as part of the whole, yet still existing as a distinct entity.
As a side note, in its own complicated and convoluted way, I think Christopher Nolan's Inception was trying to communicate the metaphysics of this changing expression of the will, just through the framework of an enormous contrived jigsaw puzzle, dressed up with Hollywood violence and action. It was impossible for the protagonists to force a decision on their target directly, which necessitated instead a manipulation of the dream world of the unconscious to bring about the decision in a softer manner.
Right then. It has occurred to me that these alternative methods, though not nearly as refined, are not entirely different in principle to the practice of permaculture. Permaculture already enjoys a rich body of work in which practitioners have perfected various methods, but I have yet to see detailed accounts of these principles put to work in other spheres, though I'm sure they do exist. That said, when one sets out to implement a metaphysical principle in the real world, one encounters numerous moving parts and elements which went previously unseen. Bringing general principles into concrete practice is a complex and multifaceted process and one can expect endless repetitions of trial and error before a passable implementation is worked out.
That said, nothing I write here about positive, practical actions should be taken seriously for now. Check back in 30 years; if I'm still alive, and am still doing philosophy alongside mindful practice, I should have a stable body of advice worked out. Hah!
And well, after that, assuming a given body of work is successful and even worth reading, mass implementation of specific advice alters the world in such a way that the advice may no longer apply in its static form, and that is ignoring the fact that language drift may render the advice altogether incomprehensible, or at least adulterated. And of course, there's probably nothing radically new about these suggested methods either. I'm sure these same forms have been exercised at other periods throughout human history.
Oh well. Philosophy does seem sort of insane, much like many other human endeavours. But I do enjoy doing it. What was that about Sisyphus?
But then there comes a point where you have to deal with contradicting wills. If the will of the animal or child contradicts your own will - which I sometimes abide by personally - or the will of others - which I am less predisposed to tolerate - then you must be able to resolve the contradiction. Traditionally this is done with discipline, or the raw application of force and the appeal to authority.
It seems distasteful to pair animals and children in this context, but both are living things which are not fully socialized in the human world. Both must learn to exist harmoniously within a given social system - which can pose all sorts of complications if the social system chosen is at tension with the dominant social system, or if the given social system chosen has reached a point of instability. This process of socialisation is done through intuition and the feedback mechanisms provided by an authority who can exert force, not to mention the basic feedback mechanisms located in the immediate environment.
This is precisely the point at which I falter, because it is difficult for me to exert my will directly. More specifically it is difficult to exert force. Not because I lack strength or skill, but because I haven't the will myself. I cannot even act "tough" because I don't believe it inside, so that if I try to bluff and feign, a child or animal will know instinctively that it is only bark. The same goes for the wills of adults, which is another story altogether.
Nevertheless I do come across problems, such as having to deal with a misbehaving 80 lb pitbull. In this case, I am living with the dog, and spending a lot of time with it as it develops, so I have a responsibility to see to it that it behaves, both to spare me agitation, and to spare everyone else in the household.
I do apply light discipline, but where I am weak, I attempt to alter the bounds within which the dog exercises his will. I attempt to preserve the dog as a living thing with its own volition, but with limits. There are many ways to do this. It means above all paying attention to the various states the dog reaches, and connecting those states with the dog's circumstances.
You begin to notice that the dog commits various behaviors because of certain states, which are influenced by various circumstances. I've made observations myself, and I've learned from roommates who have spotted other patterns. For example, if the dog is hungry, or hasn't been outside in a while, he will act up. If you act a certain way with the dog, he will act up. If more people come to the house, or there are certain noises inside or out, he acts up.
Alter the parameters of the environment so less of these events happen, and the dog is less likely to act up, reducing the need of direct discipline.
It isn't possible to control all of the environment of course. In an unstable environment populated by unstable people (myself included) it is impossible to remove all of the stressors and agents of agitation. Consider the way in which this society is structured - and the way it progressively becomes destructured. You have colonies of small fortresses, surrounded by steel fence, many of them patrolled by aggressive and alert dogs. In a poor neighborhood, many people keep aggressive dogs outside because they make for inexpensive and effective crime deterrents. Terrible but true.
These dogs savagely bark whenever we walk past. It upsets our dog, because he's very friendly and wants to be liked by other dogs, but there's nothing else that can be done. They are there to stay, barking and pacing, inheriting the madness of the society they are part of. One looks around and simply sees madness, but there it is, relentlessly bubbling up through the pitiless forces of history. And we still must go on walks.
Hmm, back to discipline. Disciplinary force is useful in some contexts, but as a blunt instrument it can make quite a mess. If the disciplining actor misunderstands the violator, the violator will become confused, even resentful. This is also how you introduce double binds in human beings. For a developing animal or human, feedback is still very important to learn to harmonize with the social environment, but it takes effective, skilled feedback to achieve the best results. This is also how I work with ants.
As a living thing matures, and develops an orbit of its own, then it is time to back away and let it run its course. Further, one must contextualize these efforts: is one attempting to harmonize with a whole, and what is the nature of that whole? Or is one simply attempting to exercise one's own power through an alternative means of instrumentalization? The naked exercise of power is dangerous: where another detects it, one will attempt the same means to overpower you, which means beginning again the cycle of fragmentation. To locate one's self in others though is to encourage that tendency in reciprocation.
These methods are far from perfect. I'm learning everyday. And maybe I'll reach a point where I am no longer able to learn. But I do feel I must attempt to actualize what I think I am, in relation to a world that is, whether or not the exercise itself is absurd.
You could criticize these methods as passive aggressive, but then passive aggression has aggression as its opposite: it still implies an individual ego attempting to assert itself solipsistically, whereas what we are talking about is the individual ego asserting itself by identifying itself with the whole, yet nevertheless attempting to move the whole in a general direction. Yes, it is still a form of manipulation: all living things manipulate their environments. But it is a form of manipulation that acknowledges the power of billions of years of evolution of co-existing life systems, and the stability of that process, and allows greater units of life to take care of themselves, reducing fragmentation.
Anyway, I have the vague sense that these alternative methods have at their base a gradual mass redirection of the collective will. The power of the individual will has become exhausted, for it no longer moves in tandem with the mass; it is impossible to sustain the illusion of the efficacy of individual power. Ayn Rand's (more about her another time) fountain-head of human egos has burst forth like a geyser towering into the air, and at its zenith, with nowhere left to go, has sprayed in every direction, meeting the walls of its limitations, finally flowing back together into the base.
And so now, for the will to express itself, it must seek out the movements of other wills, identifying those wills with its own. It must realize itself as part of the whole, yet still existing as a distinct entity.
As a side note, in its own complicated and convoluted way, I think Christopher Nolan's Inception was trying to communicate the metaphysics of this changing expression of the will, just through the framework of an enormous contrived jigsaw puzzle, dressed up with Hollywood violence and action. It was impossible for the protagonists to force a decision on their target directly, which necessitated instead a manipulation of the dream world of the unconscious to bring about the decision in a softer manner.
Right then. It has occurred to me that these alternative methods, though not nearly as refined, are not entirely different in principle to the practice of permaculture. Permaculture already enjoys a rich body of work in which practitioners have perfected various methods, but I have yet to see detailed accounts of these principles put to work in other spheres, though I'm sure they do exist. That said, when one sets out to implement a metaphysical principle in the real world, one encounters numerous moving parts and elements which went previously unseen. Bringing general principles into concrete practice is a complex and multifaceted process and one can expect endless repetitions of trial and error before a passable implementation is worked out.
That said, nothing I write here about positive, practical actions should be taken seriously for now. Check back in 30 years; if I'm still alive, and am still doing philosophy alongside mindful practice, I should have a stable body of advice worked out. Hah!
And well, after that, assuming a given body of work is successful and even worth reading, mass implementation of specific advice alters the world in such a way that the advice may no longer apply in its static form, and that is ignoring the fact that language drift may render the advice altogether incomprehensible, or at least adulterated. And of course, there's probably nothing radically new about these suggested methods either. I'm sure these same forms have been exercised at other periods throughout human history.
Oh well. Philosophy does seem sort of insane, much like many other human endeavours. But I do enjoy doing it. What was that about Sisyphus?
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