LADY ONE 

Clavicus: hello
Lady1: hey..
Clavicus: how are you?
Lady1: i’m great.. =]  you?
Clavicus: pretty good
Clavicus: I have a headache though
Clavicus: I’m about to fix it
Lady1: aww, i’m sorry bout that..
Clavicus: Ok, I took some bc powder
Lady1: some what?
Clavicus: it’s a kind of headache medicine
Lady1: oh, really? i’ve never heard of it..
Clavicus: so how’s it going with Lee?
Lady1: great.. =) just amazing.. i talked to him today, and i’ll most likely talk to him later tonight after he gets off of work..
Clavicus: oh cool
Clavicus: I wish I had a job
Clavicus: I need money
Lady1: me too, lol.. i never have any..
Clavicus: So I got to hang out with Hollie last night. She’s one of the only friends I have here
Clavicus: I’m pretty happy about that
Clavicus: and it was her idea to hang out, too
Lady1: oh really? sweetness..
Lady1: i have my little cousin coming over and my friend tonight..
Clavicus: word
Clavicus: hey, I want to try something with you real quick, okay?
Clavicus: it’s easy
Clavicus: ready?
Lady1: ok..
Clavicus: ok, read this sentence: “Mary and John walked by the bank.”
Lady1: okie.
Lady1: i did..
Clavicus: now in your mind, did you imagine them walking by a financial institution or by a river bank?
Lady1: i imagined them walking by the institution thing..
Clavicus: PERFECT.
Clavicus: thank you
Lady1: ok, lol..
Lady1: would you mind telling me why i had to answer that?
Clavicus: it has to do with consciousness and awareness. you can secretely put key words in someone’s head in order to plant ideas. by mentioning money earlier, I made you more likely to think of a financial institution. If I had used a word like water, you would have probably imagined a river bank.
Clavicus: make sense?
Lady1: oh, yeah, it does make sense..
Lady1: that’s cool, lol..
Clavicus: yep

LADY TWO

Clavicus: hey buddy
Lady2: heya
Clavicus: what you doing?
Lady2: just woke up
Lady2: cereal
Clavicus: mmm
Clavicus: I’m fighting this headache
Lady2: that sucks, got any tylenol?
Clavicus: I took some BC Powder
Clavicus: so it should be ok
Clavicus: but I had to go and buy a Dr. Pepper so I could have something to drink with it
Clavicus: cuz I didn’t want to take it with water
Clavicus: that would’ve been gross
Lady2: why would it be gross?
Clavicus: BC Powder and water just taste horrible together, I don’t know why
Clavicus: do you know what BC Powder is?
Lady2: seen it, my aunt uses it
Lady2: but not realy
Clavicus: ah
Clavicus: can I try something on you real quick?
Clavicus: it’s easy
Lady2: um ok
Clavicus: ok, read this sentence: “John and Mary walked by the bank.”
Lady2: ok
Clavicus: now, in your mind, did you imagine them walking by a financial institution or by a river/lake bank?
Lady2: at first river lake thingy an then I thought of building
Clavicus: the first thought was the lake bank?
Lady2: yep
Clavicus: hmm
Clavicus: okay then.
Lady2: >.> ok
Clavicus: how do you think your mind decides which image to settle on when there are two equally valid meanings like that?
Lady2: no idea
Clavicus: did the lake bank really stick out more than the building at first?
Lady2: yeah
Lady2: an then I was like oh maybe he’s talking about a bank like the building bank
Clavicus: ok then
Clavicus: that’s perfect.

“And so what if he was Muslim?”

Ah, yes, reason, we can has some. Now, with this subject mostly quelled in the mainstream media due to Powell’s strong reasoning skills in this situation, all is well.

—

Oh, if only that were true. Not only has Obama been attacked as though his faith is in question, he has also been attacked as though his politics are in question.

Yes, the conservatives of this country have been bandying about that awful word of hatred. They’re calling Obama a S…
S…..

No, not Satanist, although, I hear Fox News thought McCain could have won the election if he had used that one. (Not to say he won’t win, it’s been a long time since America has had a legitimate election.)

Socialist.

Barack Obama is a socialist and he will bring those pinko commie freaks into the White House!

—

Now, let me take a step back a moment. I’d like to share a film with you. It’s an Encyclopedia Britannica filmstrip from 1946. It’s about a nations path to Despotism. It is positively Foucaultian in nature, and is distressing to watch and realize the people of 1946 in this country were obviously more well informed than our current population. Despotism, of course, being any government where all power is consolidated either in one person or an extremely small group of people. Now, here is said film:

—

Now that we’ve got that out of the way, I’d like to talk about the Respect Scale, which just so happens to be the first social scale discussed in this short film.

First of all, notice how respect (or the lack thereof) applies not only to race and religion, but also to political party. Strange, how it took until last week for one American to stand up for the Muslim religion, and yet, we have no one defending a certain specific political party from attack in this situation.

While Joe Biden defended comments recently from anchor Barbara West about whether Obama was indeed a Socialist, his best line of defense was a single line: “Is this a joke?”

Honestly, his answer was a good one, because it is utterly a joke to consider someone as centrist (in comparison to liberal socialists in other countries) as Obama to be a socialist. If Obama is the “bright center of the universe” then socialism is Tatooine, to make an un-needed Star Wars reference, but only such an astronomical distance can define such disparity in political ideologies.

However, no one has yet stood up to the country and said: “So what if he is socialist?” Has the Red Scare of the 1950’s returned? Or did it ever really leave?

We “fought communism and won,” or at least that’s how our educators like to frame the collapse of the Soviet Union, even though it truly slowly deflated like a flan in a cupboard, without need for external influence from the United States.

The Red Scare was the patently most absurd political theatre America has been put through (well, up until The War Against Terrorism [TWAT for short]), convincing Americans that socialism was not only anti-religion (which it is not, despite some communist regimes giving religion what-for.), but that the whole political and economic system was entirely dedicated to destroying America and its values. (Sounds familiar doesn’t it? No wonder, considering Donald Rumsfeld was involved in both the communist scare and the war against terrorism.)

The first was easier to instill in the population, pushing through quick legislation to add “In God We Trust” to our currency, to remind our citizens this is a Christian nation (not a Godless Atheist nation, nor apparently a Muslim nation.).

The second was more difficult and positively far more absurd because anyone with an ounce of sense realizes that nations are built from individuals, not from some hive-mind where every citizen of the nation knows that they have a distinct and specific purpose to which they all working toward. America would have had its citizens believe this, that you cannot trust anyone from a Communist nation, and anyone who is willing to consider themselves a socialist is not only a godless heathen but desperately wants to destroy your way of life.

—

What is truly disgusting about all this, to me, as a bastard atheist, is that while we defend a religion that in many nations advocates the death penalty for non-Muslims and will stone to death women who are raped, we are unwilling to defend an economic and political agenda that simply says “Hey maybe since we’re all on this shitty rock spinning through space together we should stop acting like fucking animals and share instead of hoard.”

So, Colin Powell, do me one better, give socialists some respect. Don’t give us more reason to believe we’re one pussy-hair’s width away from falling into full-on Despotism, instead, say what no one else has had the balls to say:

“So what if he is Socialist?”

What does it mean to put information to work? Information is put to work in computer models so that it might be used to predict events. The ability to predict is central to the concept of security. Analysis of information then becomes the production of security. The worldview of security, or making-predictable, recognizes that the movement of life, resources, and information is chaotic, yet it seeks to anticipate the movement of the noise by analyzing noise and patterns in a joint effort to win wars and make profits.

However, there is only so much value one can place on predictive models, and eventually, information bubbles burst.

in a way, this is a way for change.

the change that is an inevitable reaction to the failing of the international market created by the globalization of the last two decades may or may not be good for our ilk.

those who follow the these of illogical post operationalization.

perhaps, anyone who follows any ideals outside mainstream religion or politics.

the biggest question is: what kind era are we opening to?

—

this era is ending with rampant disillusionment. while it began with a few of us, who saw the crippling nature of our society long ago, ranting into the wind with no one paying attention, it is ending with us almost feeling smug and happy to finally watch it crumble.

we (in america especially) live in a society driven by entitlement and creature comfort. days after borrowing 85 billion from the Federal Reserve, AIG was found to be spending that money on golf retreats, facials, massages, and other things i will never have enough money to do in my entire life. while the stocks for companies like google, yahoo, and facebook were tanking, many of their respective members were too busy hanging out in a mansion on the Turkish coastline making drunk and stupid online videos to realize that all the people in their companies were going to be extremely fucking pissed when they got back into the good old u. s. of a.

—

so my question is this:

how do we direct the conversation of this change to focus on what labor is really worth. it seems that while many of these people made their fortunes with hard work, once the fortune was in their hands, they spent their days piddling around wasting money and expecting people who were being paid fuck-all to keep making money for them (surprisingly, Kevin Rose doesn’t spring to mind as he actually seems to still work on his website a good bit on a personal level.).

how do we really make people understand, that even with a great person running a company/corporation/what-have-you, who had great ideas and their ideas spurred this massive profit-producing behemoth; that these people, in their capacity to keep the company afloat, are only worth as much as those who work for them. would any one of these individuals be able to have built their financial empires completely on their own without ever having anyone elses help?

of course not.

in a way, it brings to mind Marx’s critical history of technology. it seems at this point, we need another Marx. what we need is simply a man, who can make us realize that none of us is inherently “better” than anyone else, nor are we inherently “worse.” we all have our strengths, our weaknesses, our successes, our failures, some are big, some are small, and some are things only we as individuals will ever know about but will treasure until our deaths.

—

as i pen this, drowsily, lazily, not even really sure what or why im writing, all i know is that things are changing, there is a shift.
i know that maybe its time for our ideas to truly come to fruition, but how to expound upon such ideas so they will be understood and digested amongst the regular populace?

regardless.

the shift is happening. whether it will result in a new society founded on reason or it will become our worst nightmare of a police state created by the rich and powerful and corrupt, we can only wait to find out.

we can only spend our time waiting lucratively. speaking out, being daring, crazy, and unpredictable. above all else, we must be able to question our own beliefs and change ourselves accordingly.

if we cannot do that, i fear the worst.

—

by the way,
i finished playing Arcanum.

we are aiming to surpass 7 billion people on the planet by 2012.

if the internet is any measure, we’re on course to be completely unable to function within a few decades.

humanity already eating itself alive, and its just getting stupider by the minute.

do we continue to strive for hope and survival?
or do we accept humanity as the parasite that it is and hope instead for annihilation?

—

im awake too late at night sometimes.
and this is what happens.

i have a half-formed idea for an article in my head, and exhaustion makes for an inability to articulate such thoughts in a cohesive coherent manner.

i just like color bars, really.
and it makes me feel better to know i get stupider every time i interact with groups of people online. at least i can identify what is happening to me instead of being fully convinced i am awesome.

in this desolate post-internet world of 2012, will the people truly sit back and let much of the functionality of the most important communications device conceived be taken away from them so easily?

considering recent attacks on prominent internet companies, we must take into the consideration the possibility that attacks like these may eventually be applied in tandem with physical capture of the server sites. eventually, digital revolutionaries would not be able to settle for havoc caused by a few days disturbance of services, and would up the ante to the physical realm.

also, while much of the world could feasibly move to a new set of restrictions on the internet, many third world countries with developing infrastructures would still be allowing free exchange of information. we even have examples of countries with extremely strict internet guidelines making the internet widely available. many cubans, preceding the rule of raul castro, routinely downloaded popular blog posts to usb drives and shared the text outside of the internet, making the data available to many.

it seems appropriate for digital revolutionaries to be making this change. surely, if the us government thinks it will soon be a major problem, you know everyone else must be on top of this too. i am desperately curious about that aspect of it. the us government is usually pretty outdated in the way it views technology, and this stark and realistic assessment of the evolution of the digital revolution is out of character. it makes me wonder if underground digital revolutionaries are more prominent than i thought already. considering the effectiveness of many terrorist cells and individual spies, there is the possibility that there are groups out there.

of course, kevin mitnick was caught. and he has considered to be one of the most difficult to track hackers ever. if tracking technologies are even more sophisticated now than ever, do we even really stand a chance against the burgeoning police state?

Pre-dating this tumultuous period following 9/11, the Democrats had seemed like a group who actually had strategic plans against the Republicans. Post-9/11, however, things changed quickly and a lot of decisions were made without questioning the long-term outcomes of the ramifications of war in Afghanistan and later, Iraq.

The Democrats suddenly fully backed entering into these wars, fully privatizing them, surely with hopes of this being a profitable windfall for the American people. Not only would American companies be revitalized and producing weaponry, armor, and medicine for these new wars, but we would walk away with a huge stake in the dwindling world oil market.

When folks like myself sit and wonder how the government and many American companies would bankrupt the American people on such a whim, I catch myself wondering what it really must feel like to be in their shoes.

So, I must take Dunbar’s Number into consideration. If I am a rich mogul, or perhaps a US Senator, my outlook on the world is definitively shaped by the world I exist in. There are a finite number of human beings who are “real” to me. If I am in such a position of power, likely all those people who are important to me are also rich, powerful, and have stake in this war. Most of the people involved could stand to profit directly or indirectly, thus I would begin to think “Ah, if this war is profitable for me and everyone I know, then this war must be profitable for America and the world at large.” This is the underlying ideology that is unspoken but speaks greatly of our reliance on Reaganomics even today.

Business and government with only short-term profit goals and a perverse view of “trickle down economics” come from residing in a society where the controlling powers never actually interact with the majority of the American population, let alone experience their way of life or know what it means to live in poverty. Because everyone in their reality is rich and profiting from what they are doing, it seems completely unreasonable to them that people could be doing badly. Those people must just be “lazy” or “unskilled.” Not a surprising view to take considering recent studies showing that, while the rich express more happiness with their lives, they generally take much less time enjoying life with leisure activities. More time spent working and making things happen, scheduling and networking.

The frightening thing is that so many Americans bought into this way of thinking against their own interests. Only now are more people beginning to realize that everything they thought is a sham. While they thought American hegemony was on the increase, it’s been on the decline, with policies like war, privatization, deregulation, etc. have been at once attempts to remain powerful and at the same time partial causes of, or at least accelerators of, the decline.

But these attempts to remain powerful themselves are driven by a delusional ideology produced by Dunbar’s Number. They cannot see past the people they themselves know, and cannot see how many of the new laws they enact make it more and more difficult for the average middle-class American citizen. They feel like they are making huge concessions to the public giving the citizens as much leeway as they do. This twisted sense of entitlement most often comes from this complete lack of understanding the social situations of the middle-class, or the “Other.”

How the middle class came to believe in these same ideas is more confusing. It was likely the consolidation of media with the military industrial complex, with many national media outlets now owned in whole or in part by companies who profit from war. With the media as a veritable propaganda machine for the interests of short-term profit, the fanfare leading up to war makes sense. As television has been (up until more recently) the most relied upon source for Americans to get their information, it is understandable that it had a heavy influence on the anti-intellectualized masses.

Now, as the short-term profits of The War Against Terror lag, we see more media outlets becoming “suspicious” of the war and decrying its social consequences. This only comes as the short-term profits are migrating to a new sector as we find out we got into more of a mess than our military could handle. While we have secured a future of “Oil Partnership” with Iraq, the instability of the region makes it difficult to profit quickly from such investments. As always with Reaganomics, business then turns to a new short-term goal, with intent on making windfall profits as quickly as possible.

—

Now, considering Dunbar’s Number, we also have to stop and realize its influence on the way we view this situation. As struggling middle class Americans, are we jaded against the culture of the rich and powerful because they are things we lack? I tend to think not. The reason I do not consider myself jaded is because I do not want the rich, powerful, elite and highly educated to give up that which they have. What I want is to live in a world where those things are more evenly distributed and we give more people the opportunity to excell in many fields of education and work. Equal opportunity education is probably most important, for while many great minds exist, many of them never achieve a great education due to the impoverished status of their parents. Reliance upon family instead of a greater reliance on society to help itself as a whole renders a caste society where it is more and more unlikely for us to be able to break the bonds of our social class.

I guess being a POW for a long time is all you need to become a “war hero.”
One would think being tortured for so long would not make one a better candidate to be a President, but then, logic doesn’t come easily to humans.

—

Let us consider this another way:

Many “detainees,*” at Guantanamo Bay have been there for six years now.
Does this make them more “heroic” than John McCain?

Considering the circumstances, I believe I’d say yes.

So:

I’m voting for Guantanamo Detainees in 2008.

Those motherfuckers are heroic as shit.

—

*Detainee, is of course, a dehumanizing way to say “POW” and make people feel less bad about the torture they endure.

(sidenote: If one wants a simple way to understand modernism and postmodernism, one needs only to watch the film Moulin Rouge! (2001). The film ingeniously tells the story of the birth of modernism using the strategies of postmodernism in both its cinematography and its soundtrack.)

If postmodernism is the cultural logic of late capitalism, as Fredric Jameson claims, then we should look to capitalism, with its constant cultural remixing for what comes next.

What characterizes a possible shift into something new? It is the tension in capitalism between its need to constantly remix and its need to mark property. With the internet, everyone is invited to participate in this grand remixing project. However, this would sooner or later have to run up against property. The question is asked: who owns the culture?

As the old way of looking at property has its last fits and death throws, we should be looking at what is now replacing it. Gilles Deleuze had the foresight to know that, while self-organization holds great promise for human activity, it could also be a new mode of control. His concept of the control society, in short, revolves around extracting free labor from self-organizing groups. This is precisely the logic behind Web 2.0.

The follow-up to modernism and postmodernism is the moment at which everyone is encouraged to participate in the remix — prosumers of participatory culture. What is going unsaid in the hype machine of the internet is the collapse of the distinction between information sharing and free labor (both “free” as in unpaid and “free” as in leisure activity). The multitude may be building a participatory culture, but it does not own it, and so far, attempts to build a commons have not solved the problem of property.

What then, poses any real threat to property? The concept of the swarm has been linked to the concept of noise by Alexander Galloway in his article “Starcraft, or, Balance” His argument is basically that noise is what cybernetic systems attempt to control. How they control is defined by the noise itself, the noise and the system are tied together in an immanent relationship of coevolution. Please forgive the following long quote:

“This leads to a second claim: the swarm is synonymous with organization and control. This is what is meant by the various references thus far to “balance.” In StarCraft, balance refers to the recuperation of the swarm as a set of variables and processes in algorithmic relation to the other members in the system. Cybernetic systems have always been defined, from Norbert Wiener forward, using the language of normativity, equilibrium, and homeostasis. (What happens when cybernetic systems skitter out of control? They go “offline.”) And this is why I may make the observation at the outset, perhaps offensive at first glance, that cybernetic systems are essentially sadistic in that they derive pleasure—they are affective, they are expressive—via the subduction of objects in their domain. It is no coincidence that one of the best simulations of swarm presence, StarCraft, is also one of the best examples of the RTS genre, the very genre that deals most strongly with normative, machinic management of complex systems. (Consider where StarCraft falls on the World of Warcraft/Counter-Strike gradient.) Thus with StarCraft there exists the swarm as the very exemplar of optimal flow and efficiency management. Balance then reemerges as the “virtue” of the cybernetic network. But it is a distinctly nefarious virtue bent on the subsumption of difference, be it the racial asymmetry of the Zerg swarm or the offline import of race itself. The game is, like Wikipedia or any number of contemporary digital phenomena, a “self-correcting text” in all senses of the phrase, politically reactionary and otherwise. This is where StarCraft becomes useful as allegory. The notion is not that the Zerg is a stand-in for this or that political force or that the Terrans refer to a certain terrestrial political formation to which one can point. Rather one must take the systemic equilibrium of these various political modes in sum: power today may leverage a variety of different formal modes (the sovereign fiat, modern disciplinary power, or informatic distributed control), all of which are eventually integrated and, via informatic simulation, brought into some sort of ecological balance such that the singular divisions of them are held up as utterly significant only to be denuded in the final calculation as completely inessential,” (101-2).

In the informal terminology of Web 2.0, the signal-to-noise ratio refers to the ratio between rational discussion and that which disrupts discussion. To deal with noise, once again, free labor is elicited from users to organize the content in such a way to reduce noise. Not only are we called upon to remix information to entertain ourselves, but also to organize that information so that others may also be entertained.

The noise is treated as a non-rational interruption — nonhuman, if you will. Which brings me to another long quote from Alexander Galloway’s often coauthor Eugene Thacker. Since I’m not sure how to end this piece or where this project is going exactly, I’ll take the easy way out by quoting him, especially because it refers nicely to my previous post, “The Autonomy of the Unhuman“:

“If the multitude, the many-as-many, is indeed `bottom up’ or self-organized, and if it does indeed refuse transcendental models of organization (the State, representational politics, institutions), to what degree is it centrally a human affair? Is there a presumption that the multitude reinscribes the agency of the individual subject by meta-individualizing it. But if the `life’ of the multitude is constituted at many levels - not the least being the relation between multitude, milieu and `world’ (to use Heidegger’s terms) - then to what degree is it centrally human? Are there `accidental multitudes’ or `nonhuman multitudes’? How to the social and political issues raised by `emerging infectious disease’, `natural disasters’ and environmentalism relate to the many-as-many? It ultimately leads to a consideration of the multitude as being nonhuman, a nonhuman politics of the multitude.”

Deleuze and Guattari use the terms deterritorialization and reterritorialization to describe the way in which capitalism can transform a culture in a relatively short period of time. To see an example of this week should examine the case of Chile.

The Miracle of Chile is a term coined by Milton Friedman to describe the sweeping economic reforms carried out by Augusto Pinochet in Chile. While the historical particulars are too complex to describe here, allow me to oversimplify things by calling it a rapid deterritorialization via capitalism. This brings us to the Pokemones, a Chilean youth subculture. The important thing to focus on is the simple statement that, “Pokemones have been at odds with traditionally conservative Chilean society.” Regardless of the media sensationalism about the subculture, it is safe to assume that at least some conflict exists between Pokemones and traditional Chilean society. To put things in Deleuzian terms, Pokemones are the result of capitalism deterritorializing the desires of the traditional culture and reterritorializing them in a way that can be expressed with commodities (hair dye, piercings, Pokemon t-shirts, etc.).