(Source: Greatest Memes FB)

“Someone Broke the Whiteboard”
(Source: FIll Werrell FB)

(Source: Bizarrocomics.com)

“Accurate as fuck”
(Source: See More FB)

“iPrison”
(Source: 4 CHAN FB)

“Every day is exactly the same” (Source: Cheezburger)

“Found a Fossil”
(Source: Satan FB)

(Source: Pinterest)

“Anti-Lonliness Ramen Bowl” (Source: Pinterest)

(Source: ?)

According to Garcia, consumers are seeking alternatives to ownership and the accumulation of property for a few reasons: First, overpopulation, crowding and urban density has begun to press on the Earth’s ecological limits. I believe that this has resulted in a psychological aversion to clutter and density, demonstrated by the revival in New Age ‘Zen’ lifestyles, the craze for techniques like Yoga, and the design of popular interfaces based on the principle of clear, white space. In general, we strive for a kind of anti-Baroque aesthetic. Second, cultures impacted by Consumption 2.0. value immaterial traits like knowledge, information and reputation equal to or higher than physical things. We’re even accustomed to the idea that the money in our bank accounts is simply a number bouncing through servers. Third, in our work habits we are increasing resembling postmodern nomads, for whom “physical attachments impair mobility”. Fourth, in many places, including those which faced the brunt of the latest economic crisis, a kind of disillusionment has set in with respect to land-value and the ownership of property. A kind of synthesis of all these reasons can be found in Japanese geki-sema share houses, also known affectionately as “Coffin Apartments”.

The celebrants of consumption 2.0. – such as the author of the Futurist article mentioned above – are optimistic about this trend toward so-called “collaborative consumption”, and hail the emerging consumer behaviors as environmentally friendly and socially progressive alternatives to the traditional forms of ownership that were symbolic of a wasteful consumer society.

But rather than a ‘socially progressive’ trend whose end-goal would be the elimination of private property (etc…), the trend seems to be driven more by a mindless Zen-style urge to lose yourself that is increasingly being experienced by a cramped and restless Millennial generation. Further, some proponents of Consumption 2.0. use socially progressive terminology, but the trend itself retains – and amplifies – many of the structures that these individuals rail against. In fact, these ‘alternatives’ to ownership are actually serving to funnel tremendous amounts of wealth upwards into fewer and fewer hands. Private property may be abolished for us on the ground, but not for them in the cloud.

It’s important to remember that all those digital albums you’ve ‘purchased’ aren’t really albums at all, but non-transferable licenses for files that you can’t legally resell. Just this month – in the case of Capitol Records v. ReDigi – a federal judge in New York ruled against reselling copyrighted digital files. Without getting into the details here, the court found that reselling digital music files violates existing copyright laws.

As media libraries become a thing of the past, and we become subscribers to cloud content, we are increasingly being transmitted content that is highly compressed at it’s source (i.e. the satellites that orbit the cloud). Satellite radio, for example, sounds like its being beamed through a tin can and the so-called ‘HD’ picture quality offered by large cable providers is often atrociously compressed and pixelated. The decision makers (i.e. owners of the licenses in the cloud) transmit content in the cheapest way possible. Compare Satellite Radio, which uses only 125Khz per channel to the 200KHz per station quality of FM radio… It’s astounding how much worse the quality of new access-based formats is.

I’m not normally nostalgic, but I’m going to miss used record stores and combing through second hand shops for content. I resent that future generations likely won’t be able to squirrel their things away, and nostalgically rediscover them tattered, scratched, dog eared and covered in dust. Everything will be eternally available in the cloud, presented in whatever new format the cloud owner deems most economical.

Consumption 2.0. often comes off as ‘progressive’ when – behind the curtain – it’s really just an intensification of the status-quo. I worry that as this trend builds momentum, the things we work hard to afford being able to interact with, are becoming valueless licenses that cannot legally be exchanged or re-sold. I would seriously weigh the arguments for and against a trend that seems to be ushering us beyond ownership and the accumulation of property, but Consumption 2.0. really just seems like a clandestine move in the opposite direction.

In fact, for 94 minutes, I couldn’t stop conjuring scenes from Menace II Society, where the protagonists’ grandpa asks him if he cares whether he lives or dies, and he answers “I don’t know”, or when O-Dogg, one of cinema’s great unrepentant nihilists, explains his lack of concern with shooting innocent children or seniors with a string of “Shit nigga, I’ll smoke anybody, I just don’t give a fuck. I don’t care who the fuck out there!”

There’s no way around it. Spring Breakers is going to be a misunderstood film. A quick glance at the IMDB user reviews reveals highly divergent comments ranging from “This is by far the worst movie I have ever had to sit through” to “One of my most compelling theater experiences”. But I don’t blame audiences for not getting it. We haven’t had a lot of practice.

It has been some time since the gritty heyday of cultural nihilism in the mid 1990s, when a large chunk of the film’s target audience would have been in diapers. In many ways, Spring Breakers  seemed to me a throwback to those dark days, whose soundtrack was a mix-tape of Korn, Marilyn Manson’s ‘Antichrist Superstar’, Insane Clown Posse’s ‘Fuck the World’, DMX’s ‘Flesh of my Flesh, Blood of my Blood’, the music video for Soundgarden’s ‘Black Hole Sun’, films like Pulp Fiction, Natural Born Killers, The Doom Generation, games like Doom II, Duke Nukem 3D, Postal, and which would eventually culminate by spilling over into reality with the 1999 massacre at Columbine. It’s been a while since the kids have had a nauseating overload of the ol’ truly meaningless ultra-violence.

If the nihilist satire of the mid-late 90s was a warning, a threat of what was looming on the horizon, Spring Breakers finally holds up the mirror to a world that ignored all the warnings, and laughed in the face of individuals like Karl Popper who – at the wise old age of 91 – lamented the invasion of violent images being injected into children who “adapt if constantly exposed to extreme situations”, and act as the key driver to the “now evident deterioration of the Western world…a moral corruption of mankind“ marked by the “growth of crime and the loss of normal feelings of living in a well ordered world“.

Spring Breakers offers up a glimpse of a culture that teeters on the brink of total failure and breakdown.  It’s a confused state, a kind of neo-tribalism, replete with totems including a hollowed out baby doll bong, an animal carcass helmet, posters of Lil Wayne, and monitors beaming forth  the hallucinogenic bright colors of My Little Pony. In other words, Korine succeeds masterfully in presenting a world that is in the process of internalizing the ‘morality’ of 4chan’s notorious /b/ image board.

The film plays out in the manner of a fairy tale, a kind of kamikaze death spiral down the vibrant, glowing, neon rabbit hole of popular culture. Every step of the journey into the new American Dream feels cartoonish, meaningless and directionless. But that’s precisely where Spring Breakers succeeds, in uncomfortable scenes like the one where James Franco’s character Alien – the drug dealing embodiment of infantile and irresponsible gratuitousness – grotesquely sucks the barrel of a handgun as if he were performing fellatio on his neon bikini clad Spring Break “soul mates”.

The irony – and what makes Spring Breakers so delightfully subversive – is that the girls (who include in their ranks former Disney princesses) are driven by the highest and most respected ideals of their MTV pop culture: the carpe diem of #YOLO, the lolita-hedonism that underpins the forever-young gyrating ‘bitches’ and ‘hoes’ of rap culture, and the hypnotizing idol worship of cash wads and glimmering ‘bling’. A particularly memorable scene has one of the girls, upon seeing Alien’s bed lined with rows of bills, exclaiming something to the effect of “all this cash makes my pussy so wet”. Without being preachy, the film offers an forceful absurdist lifeline to the (clearly under 18 year old) kids in the theater, viscerally demonstrating that the drunken, sweaty, infantile ideal of an eternal Spring Break is a nauseating nightmare.

One of our most pervasive conceptual oppositions is the one between the political left and right. In North America, the term ‘left’ is often used interchangeably with the term ‘liberal’; the term ‘right’ is often used interchangeably with the term ‘conservative’. But I dare you to try to trace the historical and conceptual lineage of this opposition. The terms themselves, which appear clear cut become mindboggling and begin to unravel as soon as you begin to seriously interrogate them. For example, how strange is it that a word like ‘neoliberal’ should designate the economic policies of political ‘right-conservatives’, while environmentalism, conservationism, and the ‘conservative’ protection of indigenous customs and ways of life is often understood as a hallmark of the political ‘left-liberals’? My head spins just thinking about it… While I am not a historian, or a political scientist, over the next few posts, I invite you to follow along as I do some casual online research to unravel the roots of our present day notions of ‘left’ and ‘right’. In no way are these exploratory posts intended to be authoritative, and I want to assure you that I will proceed without allegiance to any predetermined ideological position. I would prefer to let the historical record speak for itself. We’ll get to the present day eventually, but it will only confuse us to begin here.

A journey through the past is often required to arrive at the origin of our ideas. Our current conceptual structures were built onto the edifice of existing ones, or have used them as jumping off points. While there appears to be a single, clear, historical point where the terms ‘left’ and ‘right’ took on their political connotations in the Modern world, I have begun to observe that this was not simply an act of historical contingency and chance. This clear historical point, which will be the focus of a later post, derives from the Assemblée National in France, just prior to the time of the French Revolution in 1789, Essentially, the nobles (in favor of continuity and stability – supporters of the church, king and constitution) sat to right of the president of the assembly, a position of honor. The Third Estate (in favour of radical change – anti-church, anti-royalist, in favor of overthrowing the constitution) sat on the left. The question, of course, is why did the nobles sit to the right of the president?

Well, hunting around the internet, I’ve found out that the act of sitting on the right side has had a long history, as has the opposition itself between left and right: “Right and Left have been invested with deep meanings throughout Western history, and indeed, in every other culture we know about as well. The Right is always good and straight and true and up, the Left tends to be the opposite. For example, the Maori, the indigenous people of New Zealand, have a very complex cosmology that ties many dimensions of life to the left and the right, as do many other peoples. In the bible, the elect sit on the right hand of God.”

The biblical record tells us much about the mindset of ancient peoples and is important to consider given the importance that Christianity has had – and continues to have – on our conceptual structures. I’ve come across an interesting reference in Ecclesiastes 10:2, “A wise man’s mind tends toward the right hand, a fool’s toward left”. One biblical commentator notes that the right hand is “ordinarily the best exercised, strongest, and most ready, and the left the contrary”, the right symbolizes a sense of command, while the left a want of prudence and management. More generally, the dichotomy embodies the division between good and evil. Another biblical commentator notes that being at the left is being at a “loss for wisdom, understanding to direct him, he is at a loss for wisdom and understanding to direct him, when he has an affair of any moment upon his hand; which he goes about in an awkward manner, as left handed persons do, and has sinister ends in what he does; and he is to every good work reprobate and unfit, and seeks earth and earthly things, which lie to the left, and in all himself.” The ancients more generally used to identify things wise and prudent with the right hand and things foolish with the left hand.

In happier days…

In the book of Matthew 25:33, we again encounter the left/right dichotomy, this time with the assertion that “when the Son of Man comes in His glory, and all the angels with Him, then He will sit on His glorious throne. All the nations will be gathered before Him; and He will separate them from one another, as the shepherd separates the sheep from the goats; and He will put the sheep on His right, and the goats on the left.” This has to do with sheep on the right representing righteousness, virtuousness, honor and innocence, while goats on the left representing wickedness. The left hand is referred to here as a mark of rejection, while the right as a mark of eminence. Or consider Ephesians 1:20: “He exerted when he raised Christ from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly realms,”, and again in Psalm 110, “The Lord says to my Lord:’Sit at My right hand / Until I make Your enemies a footstool for Your feet.’” Or in Acts 2:33, where Christ is said to sit at God’s right hand, which for the Hebrews was a position of power, honor and rank.

But the dichotomy of left and right is more general, and perhaps more ancient than the Judeo-Christian biblical record. There is evidence that the opposition (like those between light/dark and male/female) is characteristic of human thought throughout many different early cultures. For more on this, I would direct you to a paper by Franco Fabro called “Left and Right in the Bible from a Neuropsychological Perspective” (Brain and Cognition 24, 161-183, 1994). Basically the world of primitive humans was dominated by basic oppositions. Among these, the left came to embody the negative values, perhaps in confirmation of the perceived “incidence of ‘deviant’ individuals, i.e. left handers and ambidexters, was higher among individuals with specific diseases and mental problems.”

Ardhanārīśvara, the composite androgynous form of the Hindu god Shiva

Fabro gives a number of explanations and outlines a long tradition of this dichotomy throughout the Hebrews, the Semitic world, the ancient Arabs, Ugarites, Egyptians, Hittites, Greeks, and Romans. In India, the god Shiva was depicted as early as the 1st century CE with the right side of a man’s and the left side of a woman’s body. Studies of African cultures as well reveal that the right hand is “preeminently the strongest, male, good, lively hand, the one which is used to eat and to offer food, and make presents, whereas the left hand is feeble, feminine, wicked, deathful, and used to take things away or to carry out the dirty actions, such as cleaning one’s anus or genitals…etc…”

And consider the following lines from Book VI Virgil’s Aeneid (29B.C.-19B.C.), which demonstrate the extent to which “in the Roman world, left and right are emblematic of endless beatitude and endless misery”:
Here is the place
Where the road forks: on the right side it goes
Past Dis’s walls, Elysium way,
Our way; but the leftward road will punish
Malefactors, taking them to Tartarus.

These ancient religious and primitive associations seem to be mirrored in the etymologies of our terms ‘left’ and ‘right’. Fabro explains that “in most Indo-European languages the term ‘right’ originates from a single common root which has a large geographic extension and great stability over time”, whereas the term ‘left’ is “generally expressed by several different words with limited geographical extension, which apparently tend to constantly disappear and be replaced by new words.” This, variety and instability surrounding the term ‘left’, “may be explained by the feeling of anxiety and aversion to the left side typical of the communities/cultures mentioned above.

Etymologically, the word ‘left’, derives from the Old English ‘lyft’ which – as far back as 1200CE – connoted weakness and foolishness. In fact, it may have replaced the Old English word ‘winestra’, literally meaning “friendlier,” a euphemism used superstitiously to avoid invoking the unlucky forces connected with the left side. This left side, referred to in Latin as ‘sinister’ meant harmful, unlucky and unfavorable. This Latin word ‘sinister’ derives from Greek influences, such as the practice of facing north while observing omens such as the flight of birds. (For the Greeks, ravens were a favorable omen when they appeared on the right. The crow was unfavorable when it was seen on the left.) One Greek word for left, ‘skaios’, was used to “define something horrible or as an omen for diseases. The Latin, ‘skaevus’, stood for the Western part of the world, which was conceived of as ill omened, inept and witless.” The term ‘left’ continues this association with tropes like “left bank”, “two left feet”, and “out in left field”.

The etymology of our word for ‘right’ derives from the Old English ‘riht’, meaning good, proper, fitting, straight .This is evidenced cross culturally, as “In Norwegian, the word for right, høyre, literally means ‘higher’”. Further, in Hebrew, the root ‘ymn’ (meaning ‘left’), may be translated as “confidence”, and is associated with the word ‘meheyman’, which “stands for a person knowing how to do his job and conscientiously practicing a steady profession.”

As you can see, the story behind Left and Right appears to have begun long before the Assemblée National and the French Revolution.

More to follow…

10. Jacobs Ladder (1990)

One of the most unsettling psychological thrillers, which also happens to feature some of the most diabolical demonic imagery ever raised from cinematic abyss. In many ways, Jacobs Ladder is an more mature, and scarier, version of more recent films like Silent Hill, which obviously borrowed heavily from it.

9. Rosemary’s Baby (1968)

There’s a real feeling of timeless doom that pervades Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby, that manages to wallpaper over its late 60s datedness. It’s a film that sticks with you, well past its eerie ending. Note: Your best bet is the Criterion Blu-Ray, released around Halloween, 2012.

8.  The Haunting (1963)

Perhaps the most important element to ensuring a horror film is actually scary is its use of sound effects. Clever sound effects can be responsible for transforming a good haunted house film into a classic. The Wikipedia entry for The Haunting, claims that some of the sounds featured in the move are very low in the bass range, which can cause physical sensations at high volume. I wonder whether this use of the low bass range is now standard horror practice?

7. Event Horizon (1997)

I hope I’m not going to turn you away by including this black gem, which features Sam Neil clawing his own eyes out. It’s really a shame that big budget, ultra-violent, sci-fi horror has become an endangered species. While not a perfect film, Event Horizon, fortunately, features enough jump scenes, whispering demons, and claustrophobic space tunnels to keep us scared in a time when horror migrated away from sci-fi to ‘torture porn’. Plus, you will get to see Sam Neil claw his own eyes out. “Where we’re going, we won’t need eyes to see.”

6. Martyrs (2008)

If Martyrs doesn’t rattle you, please send me an email because I’d like to meet you. This nihilistic film – part of the s0-called “New French Extremity Movement“ is the definition of horror. Plus, if you’re a reader of Georges Bataille (or keep a tattered Marquis de Sade book under your pillow) you’ll be “ecstatic” about the second half.

5. Session 9 (2001)

There’s something off-putting about dark, spooky mental hospitals… It’s not just me right? While this film seems to have fallen by the wayside, it is a very effective – if slow moving by today’s standards – thriller. I might give this a watch again before I visit the Wavery Hills Sanatorium this summer.

4. The Descent (2005)

It’s been a while since I saw this one in theaters  but I remember The Descent as a claustrophobic ’trapped in the cave’ film that plays on our fear of dark, enclosed spaces…and flesh eating eyeless monsters. It’s a clever, and nerve racking, film that becomes increasingly scary as it goes on. It looks like a 3D re-release is in the works as well.

3. The Shining (1980)

If you’re here, you’ve probably seen this Stanley Kubrick classic. Unfortunately, with each passing year (as a result of an accumulating number of pop culture references) the film loses a little bit of its bloody bite.

2. Pet Semitary (1989)

This Stephen King adaptation really has it all: the creepy possessed kid, the ghoulish demented old crone, the secluded country house, etc… A film that many skip over because they assume it’s just another lousy King adaptation, about pets! It’s actually one of the darker and more serious King adaptations out there. If Aunt Zelda doesn’t make you at least think about crawling under the bed, you’re probably an emotionless sociopath.  Avoid, Pet Semitary 2, which is a total mess.

1. [Rec] (2007)

Like The Haunting (#8 on this list), my hunch is that a major reason [REC] is so terrifying is due to its use of sound effects. This Spanish film has no musical score, and relies solely on ingeniously placed, and often jarring, sound effects. Consider the sound of the body that is thrown from the top floor of the apartment building early in the film. If you have surround sound, and that doesn’t jar you, nothing will. Contrary to the film’s first 20 minutes, this is not your usual shaky cam nonsense. Plus, the sequel  [Rec] 2 - which picks up right where [Rec] leaves off is not half bad either…in fact it’s one of the better horror sequels out there. Avoid, however [Rec] 3, which is an abysmal mess.

Other films you may want to check out are Noroi: The Curse (2005), Ringu (1998), Ju-on: The Grudge (2012) and House of the Devil (2009).

But are these resistances just examples of the alarmist rhetoric that accompanies any technological revolution? In order to answer this question, it is useful to remember how conceptually useful it is to take a new idea/trend/revolution to its end, or an absurd point that may never come to pass, in order to see how dangerous the germinating idea/trend may be. Every generation has critics who do just this, like dystopian authors (Atwood, Orwell, Huxley, etc…) who magnify new ideas/trends and imagine how they might interact with the world if they were to become hegemonic.

It’s here that I want to discuss a March, 2013 report by JWT Intelligence called “Embracing Analog: Why Physical is Hot”, which I eerily encountered on the same day as I watched Season 1 of “Black Mirror”, a fantastic British TV show that offers alternate realities where familiar aspects of contemporary technological life (hypnosis of real-time Twitter feeds; disconnection from human interaction offered by the Microsoft Kinect and Nintendo Wii; privacy issues that surround Facebook Timeline/Google Glass) have become the modus operandi of daily life. I say eerie because the JWT report echoes the dystopic intention of Black Mirror, when demonstrates that “Immersion in the digital world [the world of the black mirror] makes us more keenly aware of what’s unique about physical objects.”

The JWT Report, “Embracing Analog” echoes a longstanding position of Cybject that as time passes we are increasingly clawing for ‘real people’ and ‘real things’, as demonstrated by phenomena like Instagram filters, iPhone speakers shaped like gramophones, the revival of interest in vinyl records, etc… . While digital content is easier, faster, more convenient and cheaper, the report suggests that American adults find comfort in the physical world, and “romanticize the physical, ascribing more meaning to giving and receiving physical objects versus digital versions of the same things”. Basically, as has also been suggested on Cybject, digital content is devoid of the imperfections that provide physical objects their personality.

Wood cabinet created by architect Ferruccio Laviani to look just like a digital glitch.

I find the JWT report fascinating, and am entirely in agreement with its diagnosis, namely that there is an analog counter-trend underway. But I’m not so sure we have adequately understood why this counter-trend is underway, and I suspect that the authors of the report have only scratched the surface. They suggest that “when everything becomes digital and immediately available, one starts to yearn for the analog”, and explain this yearning to be the result of an upset between the IQ (intellectual) and EQ (emotional) sides of our personality. Of course, in their schema IQ  maps on to digital content, and EQ maps on to analog content. When we spend too long with digital content, we upset the balance. When our EQ is not being satisfied, the authors explain that we seek the “analog more than ever. We’re looking for more meaningful emotional experiences and connections. We’re seeking to re-balance our IQ and EQ states.”

“As alluring as the digital world may be, we’re beginning to realize its limits.” 

While the report is an excellent start, but I’m not sure the situation is as cut and dried as the authors let on. I’d like to suggest – and this might offer a very bleak picture – that we’re not quite as hardwired as the authors make out. What if we aren’t equipped with a kind of natural defensive reaction to the loss of our EQ and wouldn’t miss the imperfections symbolized by analog content? What if the analog counter-trend under way is just a simple nostalgia, or a type of transitory conservatism? Perhaps, more darkly, we’re more adaptable than the authors give us credit for, and our nature has no natural limits? If this is the case, we cannot sit back and wait for the ship to change course, but must chart the course itself.

“Black Mirror” exemplifies the analog counter-trend by taking a quickly growing digital trend, and providing a glimpse of how – once dominant – the trend could seriously conflict with our fleshy, desirous, bodies and our existing ethics and morals.

Episode 2, “15 Million Merits”, reflects a world where individuals live in isolated cells, bombarded by advertisements which they are financially penalized from closing their eyes to. Individuals’ lives consist of using exercise bikes to power television monitors. When they have generated enough power, they can use their credits to audition on a 24/7 American Idol-like reality TV show watched by millions of howling avatars. Of course, this is an absurd future, but the protagonist who has the misfortune of falling in love, has a very difficult time reconciling this emotion which emerges from the reality of his body – very familiar to us in the year 2013 – with the insensitive, hyper-sexualized, parallel earthlings trapped in their vicious hyper-real circles. It’s an episode which years for flesh, bodies and the mystery of proximity.

Episode 3, “An Entire History of You”, offers a glimpse of a world very much like our own, except that people have their entire past stored on a storage chip. Everything they experience through their eyes is recorded onto this chip. Another very familiar emotion, jealousy, is held up to the black mirror, and what emerges is a serious disjuncture. This is a future where once cannot lie, one cannot forget, and one cannot heal. The reason we are able to move on after a difficult chapter in our lives, is because the vividness of experiences fades with time. The Google Glass-style technology ensures that events from the past exist on a timeline parallel with the present. And in this scenario, the familiar mechanisms we use to cope with jealously or infidelity lead to madness. It’s an episode which years for the fleetingness of brain based memory.

By offering these nightmarish technological scenarios, “Black Mirror” reminds us that we may not innately possess the natural balance, sensory ratios, soul, reality principle, etc…, to resist a hegemonic digital future. It puts the onus on us both to shape and adapt our culture, while deciding what is worth saving in our nature.

“Merely quantitative differences, beyond a certain point, pass into qualitative changes.” – Karl Marx, Capital

“A fashionable idea in technical circles is that quantity not only turns into quality at some extreme of scale, but also does so according to principles we already understand. Some of my colleagues think a million, or perhaps a billion, fragmentary insults will eventually yield wisdom that surpasses that of any well-thought-out essay, so long as sophisticated secret statistical algorithms recombine the fragments. I disagree.” – Jaron Lanier, You Are Not A Gadget

Jaron Lanier’s You Are Not A Gadget¸ published back in the pre-historical (by today’s standards) year 2010, offers a welcome return to a humanist critique of media technologies that has been abandoned by critics across the ideological spectrum. In an age that endlessly waxes poetic about social networks, we are apt to ignore the important role that we – individual human beings – play in these networks.

Lanier is both a visionary and a 21^st century Renaissance Man. He is a computer scientist known as “the father of virtual reality”, a composer of symphonies and ballets, a visual artist, and an author. Despite being a founder of the virtual revolution, he has turned a critical eye to the achievements of the revolution, and has become a heretic. Notwithstanding this, Lanier is one of the most influential voices in the technology world, and lectures the world over. He maintains an old style personal website, refuses to partake of Web 2.0., and does not have a Facebook account. But despite his heretical status, he is currently partner architect at Microsoft Research.

You Are Not A Gadget is the best kind of criticism, one that emerges out of the belly of the beast, from a disciple turned apostate. The book brings to mind critiques of the Soviet Union by writers like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Czesław Miłosz, which are of an entirely different order than critiques of the Soviet Union by North American conservative writers. Lanier has on his side the lived experience of having been an architect of the digital revolution.

Lanier argues that the fundamental ideology of the digital revolution – which he calls “Cybernetic Totalism” – is a dangerous failure. Cybernetic Totalism is the belief held by influential technologists that everything in the world can be understood as a cybernetic pattern, even human beings. This has led to the widespread use of metaphors borrowed from computer science being carelessly applied to the rest of reality, and the common belief that information can ‘want’ something (i.e. to be free), as if the bits themselves were real and alive. Cybernetic Totalism, Lanier argues, has been a disaster spiritually by denying the mystery of experience and the specialness of human beings, behaviorally by privileging the anonymous crowd over the individual person, and economically by concentrating control of the internet into a few Lords of the Cloud who live off content produced by the intellectual/cultural middle class. This last concern is the topic of Lanier’s upcoming book Who Owns the Future, which surely develops his observation that “The Facebook Kid and the Cloud Lord are serf and king of the new order”.

Lanier urges the reader to consider what “so called web 2.0. ideas are stinkers”, so we can reject them before they can be “locked in”. We can tell a bad idea, because it engenders technologies that reduce both what a human being is and the variety of the world. His key example is the audio format MIDI which replaced auditory experience with discrete notes on a grid. What happened to musical notes, Lanier writes “could happen soon to the definition of a human being”. Practical suggestions include: encouraging users to put some of themselves into their Tweets, instead of passively describing things; discouraging anonymous posting; creating websites that don’t fit in the dominant social networking templates; posting a video once in a while that took you one hundred times longer to create than it takes to view; and writing blog posts that have taken time and reflection.

What is refreshing about Lanier’s position is that he accuses both the technophile left (the open culture/creative commons crowd) and the technophile right (the libertarian capitalists of Silicon Valley) of being seduced by what he calls “Digital Maoism”. Digital Maoism celebrates hives, swarms, anonymous collectives and crowd mentalities at the expense of individuality. Lanier stakes out a third – humanist – position, accusing both left and right of the Maoist urge to chop individuals up into an anonymous abstract mush.

Lanier attacks the technology world’s most cherished ideals about open culture, creative commons, AI, and file sharing, with an iconoclastic fury that may be overwhelming to some TED-loving readers. But it is an important book for anyone interested in a better direction for the web both theoretically and practically in their daily content production.

Here lies one of the ironies of globalization: Being thrust into a literal webwork of particular individuals with different, and ambiguous, morals and ethical systems, has left us intolerant, and in search of relief through the acceptance of a universal discourse that is painfully unambiguous.

One would have expected the (virtual) co-mingling of people from across the planet to have left us more accepting and tolerant of the world’s differences, but it has, really, left us with an intolerance to difference. Perhaps it’s akin to food intolerance, which one can develop by consuming too much of the food in question? Too much difference, confronting us too quickly? Or consider the conservatism of the late 1970s-1980s as a kind of reactionary scorning of the lightning fast excesses of the sexual revolution?

“[L]eveling is abstraction conquering individuality” - Søren Kierkegaard

There is now an explosion of books and courses for business people dedicated to the preparation of bland content, so as not to send readers (customers) into post-globalized cramps of irate intolerance. In an age that prides itself on so-called personal expression, the producers of content are now trained in the art of creating content to be consumed by the abstract ‘Consumer’, as opposed to particular individuals.

Users harangue celebrities and corporations for demonstrating any indication of difference, any semblance of humanity. It’s as if we are disappointed to find the stirrings of difference in the sterile, safe room, that the internet is increasingly becoming. In this safe room, it is permissive to Tweet ad nauseum, provided you agree to – at the end of the day – say very little.

“[A]n insensitivity to all distinctions in level and genuineness … opens up a standard world in which all distinctions between the unique and the general, the superior and the average, the important and the trivial have been leveled.” – Martin Heidegger

One could argue that we’ve squandered a chance to welcome otherness, and have closed down a space for difference, but I can’t be so naive. What has happened is – to this reader of the psychologist Ernest Becker - unsurprising. To reach as many radically different eyeballs as possible – the raison d’etre of the Web – you must create a space as risk-free as possible, a kind of play-pen where you speak in a generic idiom.  Have you ever noticed how plastic, and inhuman, so many of the Tweets sound that emerge from ‘verified’ official accounts? Sometimes I wonder who – aside from employees and their friends – is actually liking and retweeting these bland little digestive biscuits. We have become so fearful or saying anything – and risking the ire of somebody out there – that we are voraciously gobbling down a type of universally applicable speech that says nothing.

Unlike our neighbours to the South, we Canadians have had three major political options to choose between. We aren’t demanded to make a choice between clear-cut ‘opposites’, but to mull over the platforms of three distinct ideological positions. We traditionally haven’t thought – exclusively – in terms of an easily definable choice between Left and Right. In fact, our three party system may have acted as a kind of prophylaxis against the mind-numbing ‘CNN vs. FOX’ political rhetoric the American electorate is gorged with. But all the signs and portents – from the plight of our moderate political options to the establishment of SUN-TV – suggest that the allure of American-style easy choice politics is slowly winning us over. These are all complex, difficult and multifaceted issues, but what do they have to do with Twitter?

Twitter is the communication medium par excellence for an electorate with a choice between POLITICAL BINARIES as opposed to (three or more) POLITICAL SINGULARITIES. Binaries are notoriously easy to articulate: when I say ‘Devil’, you think ‘is the opposite of Angel’, when I say ‘Black’, you think ‘is the opposite of White’, when I say ‘Male’, the traditional connotation is ‘not Female’. Hence, when you’re provided 140 characters to convey the day’s political news, it is not advantageous (and nearly impossible) to create a single Tweet about three (or more) unique positions. It’s in your interest to ignore the middle (or moderate) positions, and articulate the news in the form of a QUIP about either pole of a Left-Right political binary. [Quip: A clever, witty remark often prompted by the occasion] How depressing is it to see the American news media continuously exalt the ‘democratic’ aspect of  these warbling quips without acknowledging that one can be witty, charming, and timely, but remain a total numskull.

The 140 character limit works in some instances (breaking news, crises, etc…) but in the realm of political opinion, it reduces the complexity and robustness of our ideas. One commentator has offered the keen insight that  ”Twitter is to reasonable discourse what yellow post it notes are to serious literature“. i.e. There’s no room for character analysis: everyone is either hero or villain. There is simply no space here for greys, twilights or bisexualities. And as in a FEEDBACK LOOP, the political structure adapts to its mouthpiece, and squeezes out the space for moderate policies rooted in gradual, well thought change.

A robust liberalism depends on communication mediums that exercise, expand and challenge our ideas. We are rapidly losing the ability to articulate the third (and fourth and fifth) options that keep our political system from sliding into binary caricatures of Left and Right. It would be a shame to follow our neighbours to the South in celebrating the democratic aspect of Twitter at the expense of our political imagination.

What does it mean for something to look so real that it appears false?

It’s Superbowl Sunday and we’ve gathered around the brand new, state of the art, HD television, but there is some dissension. Complaints have been launched that the display looks “too real”, so real in fact that it’s distracting from the big game itself. We try with little success to adjust the picture settings, having heard that it is possible to turn off the so-called ‘soap opera effect’ – a default feature on HD-TV’s that increases the frame-rate to eliminate motion blurring. But it’s a tough crowd and there are other, more difficult to alleviate, complaints: “You can see too much!…The coaches hairline looks too sharp…Everything’s in focus, I can see everything, I don’t know what to pay attention to!”. At first, I attributed this to a room of young people who – having cancelled their cable subscriptions some time ago – have been languishing in Youtube pixelated cat videos limbo. But was this simply the effect of their lag to catch up to new HD technology, or was there something more here? When I got home, I took to Google, and found thousands of forum threads pleading: “Help! My HD-TV looks too real” or “Help! The detail is so sharp that the movie props look fake..”

Photo: TechGuy Labs

I recall in December encountering similar concerns when The Hobbit was released in High Frame Rate (HFR) – a process which projects at a higher frame rate than the ‘cinematic’ industry standard 24 frames per second (fps). [Note: 24 fps was not the result of a technological limitation, but economic/commercial decisions by film studios in the 1920s to settle on an affordable maximum frame rate that would allow for relatively realistic looking ‘motion-pictures’. While the 24 fps ‘cinematic’ look has served film making well, digital film making has opened up new opportunities: The Hobbit @ 48fps, and the possibility of Avatar 2 and 3 @ 60fps.] Despite Peter Jackson’s warning that “HFR 3D is ‘different’ — it won’t feel like the movies you’re used to seeing, in much the same way as the first CDs didn’t sound like vinyl records”, audiences and critics experienced a particularly visceral shock at the 48 fps format. In fact, some of the most aggressive attacks ever typed were launched at Jackson’s choice of 48 fps, calling it: “theme-park-ride-cinema” (New York Times), a “non-cinematic picture” (Reelviews), full of “exceptionally sharp, plasticine images…which do resemble what we see…on our HD television screens…as the ‘soap opera effect’ (Village Voice), “unnaturally crisp and clear as an over-amped hi-def LED screen” (Minneapolis Star Tribune), “so hyperreal that you see everything that’s fake about it” (Rolling Stone).

The critics were aligned in their contention that The Hobbit – when presented in HFR – was devoid of the ‘magic’ that had – for the past century – acted as a kind of filter between the world of ‘real’ experience and the ‘illusionary’ domain of cinema. With the combined immersiveness of 3D, bigness of IMAX, and the pristine hyper-realism of HFR, The Hobbit was the first, true example of the cinematic filter withering away. It was as if once the sweeping, cinematic 24fps blurriness was doubled to 48fps, audiences felt unable to experience the visuals before them as escapist fantasy. But neither were they of the opinion that they were looking at the real world of their day to day lives.

There is a paradox here, namely that the pristine, crystal clear, REALISM of HFR left audiences with the persistent nagging reminder that what they were looking at was UNREAL. And suddenly, adjectives like like “hyper-real”, which hitherto were found in the works of French postmodern philosophers like Jean Baudrillard and Umberto Eco began to appear in the Entertainment sections of major newspapers. The New York Times reported that the “shiny hyper-reality robs Middle-earth of some of its misty, archaic atmosphere, turning it into a gaudy high-definition tourist attraction”. It was as if Hobbit audiences were confronted with a hitherto unknown feeling of unease where the qualities of a fantasy world – designed by CGI artists from descriptions in a novel – began to bear a similarity to our own real world that was too close for comfort.

[Note: Very briefly, I'd like to point out a concept called the "Uncanny Valley", which tries to explain the revulsion and anxiety we feel upon seeing something not quite human (a humanoid robot for example) with many human features. It may also apply in examples like this, where we are confronted with a fantasy world so detailed, sharp, and lifelike that it bears a very close semblance to the real world.]

Source

It has long been understood (and is a familiar theme on this blog) that DISTORTIONS and ILLUSIONS are vital to sustaining our sense of reality. At first blush, this may appear contradictory, but the world we experience with our minds and our senses is not the weird quantum world ‘out there’. Our senses act as a filter, letting in only some of the world ‘out there’, our minds categorize and make sense of little bits of the world. It is this filtered, delayed, categorized, mediation of the world ‘out there’ that we refer to as reality. It can be traumatic – and psychologically debilitating - when one’s ability to categorize or mediate the world breaks down, and suddenly they are awash with a sense of things in their immediacy. In this regard, consider this reflection by Vincent Laforet in his excellent article about The Hobbit:

In my opinion, film is not necessarily about WHAT you see – but it’s almost more an exercise in what you DON’T or CAN’T see. The best Directors and DPs show you only what is relevant to the story and never introduce a random shot or character if they can at all avoid it. I’ve always preached that a director or photographer should INCLUDE elements in a frame or shots that add to the story, and EXCLUDE elements or shots that detract from it.

Source: Morguefile.com

Laforet offers the reminder that “Shallow depth of field, motion blur, lack of sharpness, and movement all help to create movie magic.” Most interestingly, in support of our argument that distortions create a sense of reality, he quotes a VFX friend who exclaimed: “Motion blur is extremely important to what I do… that’s how I hide all of my mistakes and make VFX/CGI look more real.”

All in all, the ’so real it’s unreal’ phenomena presents an intriguing lesson on the interaction of MEDIUM and MESSAGE, a reminder that the format itself is always tied up with the content the audience consumes. Perhaps with repeated exposure to HD and HFR audiences’ expectations of what cinematic ‘magic’ is will begin to alter. Alternatively, if there is something integral to the cinematic experience that relies on some degree of blurriness, delay and imperfection, we would be better off with less conservatism and more experimentation with the aesthetic filters and techniques that would ensure the sensation of unreality and escapism persists in an age speeding headfirst into crystal clear pixelation and constantly accelerating frame rates.

P.S. Another interesting factoid is that the cosmetic/make-up industry has had to keep up with constantly increasing HD resolutions and HFR frame rates. The now familiar technique of “airbrushing” was a response to actors’ every pore being featured during close ups, and the visibility of wigs and traditional cosmetics. As resolution and pixelation became capable of presenting a more ‘real’ human face, the face that viewers actually came to see became more and more ’artificial’, airbrushed of their blemishes and flaws. On the symbolic level, each increase in resolution has caused a frantic covering up of what the increase revealed, leading to a strange dialectic whose synthesis is the creepy 21st century airbrushed face. It’s almost ironic that the drive to capture the most immersive and real experience, has yielded intolerable results, and spurred us to don artificial, inhuman, faces, replete with actual layers of HD makeup and virtual layers of Adobe airbrushing that eliminate entirely our all-too-human particularities and lines of age.

The New Atlantis’ Futurisms Blog: Talking about ideology, here’s a Conservative blog bent on “Critiquing the Project to Re-engineer Humanity”. Always a very fun and refreshing read.

New York Times Opiniontator – The Stone: Moderated by Philosopher Simon Critchley (New School in NYC), this blog “features the writing of contemporary philosophers on issues both timely and timeless.” While not exclusively about science and technology, keep an eye out for The Stone Links (published weekly) for some amazing curated links.

Arts & Letters Daily: Probably the best site I know of for thoughtful positions on science and technology, even though you will have to sift through other (thankfully interesting) articles on a variety of topics.

The Society for Science and Technology makes available articles from its journal Techne: Research in Science and Technology, where you can read from the top academic minds.

i09: Gawker Media’s excellent Sci-Fi/Futurism blog that you’ll want to check in to from time to time, if only to make sure you’re keeping up with the pop culture end of things.

The World Future Society publishes The Futurist bi-monthly. Can be hit or miss, but when it’s on, it’s really on. Worth bookmarking.

IEET: Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies - Chaired by Oxford Prof. Nick Bostrom, IEET believes “that technological progress can be a catalyst for positive human development so long as we ensure that technologies are safe and equitably distributed. We call this a “technoprogressive” orientation.”

Author Kevin Kelly’s The Technium offers some insights uncharacteristic in their thoughtfulness for technology blogging.

You should also check in with the developments on KurzweilAI and Singularity Hub for a taste of the most optimistic projections for what “advances mankind is making in stem cells, genetics, biology, artificial intelligence, aging, robotics and more.”

You should also bookmark: The Atlantic / Technology Section & BBC Future

Have I forgotten any sites/blogs? Any suggestions? Comment below and let me know.

Jeff Roberts (JR): You mention that you are “interested in thinking about technology in new ways” – how so?

Dustin Cohen (DC): Technology – whether it is media, information, genetic or military based – has become our raison d’etre. On CNN.com, for example, the “Tech” news is sandwiched between “Entertainment” and “Health”. We are awash in ontic descriptions of the latest gadgets or the opinions of pop psychologists about their effects on our happiness and ability to concentrate. But there is another way to discuss technology (and “technology” is a nebulous word that risks meaning everything-and-nothing) that requires tuning down this ontic chatter and thinking ontologically. One of my guiding lights here is Martin Heidegger’s assertion that “the essence of technology is nothing technological”. I look, for example, at Augmented Reality software, and ask why at this particular time, we have become interested in augmenting, or increasing, our reality. I look at the smart phones, and ask why we aspire today to being mobile, or in constant motion. Rarely do we consider what the root of our fixation with being mobile is, or what is driving us toward augmenting the world, or whether these trends toward mobility and augmentation have anything in common. Our manipulation of the world, the tools we create and desire, the techniques we design and adopt, are influenced by a whole constellation that includes our historically contingent understanding of ‘nature’ and ‘matter’, political and economic factors, and the static psychical structures that form the core of our humanity.

JR: In your more recent works (Humanizing the Avatar comes directly to mind), and in our previous conversation, you note a shift in the trajectory of your work. As the title suggests, “Humanizing the Avatar” is quite distinct from traditional Baudrillardian approaches to confronting issues of technology and exchange. Where several offer analysis of Baudrillard’s writing upon the world in terms of pure form, a showing through, possibly even implosion of meaning all together – you take the philosophy in a different direction. Why do you feel compelled to work through Baudrillard’s thought on a more content-based level? Is it possible, potentially important, for us to read Baudrillard through a lens of individual agency/political utility?

DC: I believe Baudrillard often articulated his ideas in a ‘symbolic’ language that certainly can, at first blush, appear bizarre, opaque or even reductive. For example, cloning is understood as an expression of the symbolic antagonism between Life and Death; transsexuality the antagonism between the Undifferentiated and the Differentiated; 9/11 the antagonism between the Global and the Singular… Baudrillard scrutinized our technologies, our ways of regarding our bodies, and our political ideologies through these symbolic lenses. For example, consider this description of plastic surgery in Radical Alterity:

…they take away everything negative in a face and make it ideal, in theory, with only positive, ideal traits. All of the alterity, negativity, contradiction, and asymmetry are removed from the face. Everything related to character, action, or expression is generally smoothed over in plastic surgery to produce an artificial model…The aim is to remove every figure of alterity from fate and ensure that everything that is not negotiable, that could not be negotiable, becomes negotiable for the sake of general redemption of forms and signs.

On the symbolic level we find that plastic surgery represents winning out of “positivity” over “negativity”; “ideality” over “fate”; “negotiability” over “alterity”; the “symmetrical” over the “asymmetrical”. This is not what I would describe as an implosion of meaning. In fact, Baudrillard’s ideas have made meaningful everything from the asexual ‘mother monster’ in the music video for Lady Gaga’s “Born this Way” to the craze over avatars and virtual worlds.

JR: What do you think about chatroulette?

DC: Well, I’ve just gone to Chatroulette and my spin of the virtual wheel brought me face to virtual face with a couple single men bathed in an unwelcoming webcam glow, a few crotches being stroked by hairy hands, giggling teenage girls, and finally a graphic image of a prolapsed male anus. Of course, this is nothing unusual: the internet has, for as long as I can remember, been a petri dish for the human libido and all its various perversions. Today, we have higher resolutions, faster connection speeds and more complex software, so the old desires and perversions circulate faster than ever. At the turn of the century Georg Simmel noted that we act “as though the electric light raised man to a stage nearer perfection, despite the fact that the objects more clearly seen by means of it are just as trivial, ugly or unimportant as when looked at it by the aid of petroleum.” As an aside, it is not for nothing that among the most popular pornographic videos that squish their way through the fiber optics are those that deal with circumventing the most ancient taboos against incest, or are fulfilling old Oedipal fantasies involving sons and mothers.
But what is novel about Chatroulette? In contrast to the old text based chat rooms where users took screen names to chat, and were capable of using their imagination when answering the question “A/S/L?” (shorthand for “Age/Sex/Location?”), Chatroulette destroys this ability for a man to answer as a woman, or a senior citizen to chat as a twenty-something. We are dealing less with the imaginary when we are put in confronted with a parade of real faces and bodies that flicker on the screen for a moment before vanishing when either party casually clicks ‘next’.

JR: In your essay “Just doing it with Hyperactive man” you caution against universalist calls for radical change – a willing for the sake of willing – rooted in a fidelity to perpetual change and faith in some sort of utopian future to come. In todays hyper-mediated spaces, you warn that “just doing it” without plan or end point in mind risks ceding the political, or “handing over a seething mass of raw biological material into the cold hands of anti-revolutionaries brimming with plans and ends.” Given this, how would you suggest we proceed or engage the political more responsibly/effectively?

DC: A recent article by Adam Shatz in the London Review of Books, reminds us that “Egypt isin’t Tahrir Square”. This was confirmed when the Egyptian Bloc, the progressive liberal, social democratic, and leftist alliance, came third in the polls, and did well only in Cairo. First place was captured by the Muslim Brotherhood, and second place to a fanatical Salafi party called al-Nour which is hostile to women’s rights and Christians. Meanwhile, the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF), a military junta, has assumed control in lieu of the Mubarak regime. However post-modern we take ourselves to be, we must recognize that the forces of stability, linearity and belief continue to retain their power. The media celebrated the scene in Tahrir Square as if it were an Olympic spectacle – “After these messages, we’ll return to the revolution in Tahrir Square!” – but had very few cameras elsewhere in Egypt. We have since seen how strong the old forces of stability and belief are: the stage is populated by the SCAF, the Muslim Brotherhood, al-Nour, the Saudis, the Copts!
Furthermore, the nebulous term “revolution”, when undefined, can mean anything to anybody. So, it is not surprising to read that the SCAF has “all but declared war on Tahrir, assailing protesters calling for civilian rule as ‘enemies’ of the revolution, which is perversely claims to embody”, or hearing Egypt’s new prime minister “blaming protesters for the violence, accusing them of an ‘assault on the revolution’ ”. There is a tremendous volatility in this trend toward permanent and undefined revolution. This is because there are anti-revolutionary forces that are more than happy to channel and direct these energies with a “revolution” of their own.
It is difficult for us to engage more effectively, because the way that we regard ends and means is changing. As Czeslaw Milosz prophesized in The Captive Mind (1951): “Today man believes there is nothing in him, so he accepts anything…” We are the heirs of Futurism, and our aspiration is to dance, to be in motion, to the point where we do not realize we have actually been moving from one side of the stage to the other, or even are falling into the orchestra pit. There are no shortage of believers and ideologues licking their chops at the thought of dizzy young revolutionaries, spinning like tops into the utopia of permanent impermanence. Jacques Ellul observed in The Betrayal of the West (1974) that “…[I]t does not matter where we are going. We are caught up in the madness and hubris of the dance of death; the important thing is the dance, the Saturnalia, the Bacchanalia, the Lupercalis. We are no longer worried about what will emerge from it or about the void it points to. [E]veryone is glutted with promises and regards the mad dance as a way to authentic renewal. Yet there is no goal, nothing transcendent, no value to light the way; the movement is enough.”

JR: Would attending to blind spots of the hyperactive man require us to embrace a more end-oriented approach? Are precautionary hesitations and pre-emptive measures – such as scenario planning, risk assessment/calculation, and pragmatic policy formulation – be a necessary steps towards (possibly even prerequisite to) any hope for a successful revolutionary change? Or, do these forms of engagement risk a more suicidal implosive scenario of generalized exchange and indifference?

DC: Yes, I think there are types of precautionary hesitations and pre-emptive measures can be a corrective against the idea of change as an end-in-itself. Having said this, I recognize that one can over-assess, over-calculate, and spend so long agreeing on policy that a window of opportunity for a new state of affairs can come and go. There is definitely a big question mark hanging over the political possibilities created by the dance of ‘hyperactive man’ and dooming ourselves through it.

JR: In your article “The Two Attas?” you discuss how systems of general exchange give birth to, at a bare minimum, fragments of singularity. In reference to Mohammad Atta and the World Trade Center you explain how “Atta received a Western education and assimilated the ideas and technologies of modernity and globalization into the 9/11 plan…. We find an irreducible singularity emerge out from a system of generalized exchange, the exacerbation of an uncertain culture of virtuality carried out by a man who was produced and influenced by that very culture.” Would you mind elaborating on the relationship between education and a system of general exchange?

DC: In “The Two Attas?” I wanted to determine whether Baudrillard’s controversial ‘symbolic’ account of 9/11 could be verified against some of the factual evidence about the attackers themselves. The idea is that our contemporary Western economic system is a kind of tower of Babel where all things must be capable of being transferred and exchanged. The argument goes that this universal, generalized, system is fragile because it has no ability to digest remainders or asymmetries and no means of reciprocating to excesses and sacrifices. On a very practical level, many students today are increasingly looking for a generalized education where they are taught how to succeed in the generalized economy, an education that teaches them how to comprehend all things in terms of their exchange-value. But who has not experienced the urge to disturb this stillness of a glassy lake by throwing a stone into the water? This generalized system is blanketing the planet without acknowledgement that its agents are ultimately human beings who will, for various reasons, offer the challenge of the religious, the poetic, the unquantifiable, and the singular.

JR: In US academic debate, students are asked to play the role of the federal government and switch sides – at separate times both affirming and negating – the validity of a given “resolution” through out the course of a given tournament. For example, this year the topic/resolution positions the student on each side of the following statement:
“Resolved: The United States Federal Government should substantially increase its democracy assistance for one or more of the following: Bahrain, Egypt, Libya, Syria, Tunisia, Yemen.”
The rules of the game (understood here as distinct from laws) ask students to advocate democracy assistance as either a good or bad idea/policy, depending on which side they are assigned during a given round of tournament competition. When playing such a game, how should one proceed? Is it possible to remain outside a system of generalized exchange?

DC: A ‘generalized’ debate, functions on the principle that you provide an argument for “democracy assistance” and I give you an argument against “democracy assistance”. It can only operate on this binary logic (good/bad; 1/0; presence/absence; affirmation/negation) because both sides have agreed on what “democracy assistance” is, which presumes firstly, that they have agreed upon the definition of what “democracy” is. As anyone knows, there is a vast gulf that separates the radical on the street chanting “This is what democracy looks like!” and a hawkish presidential candidate promising to bring democracy to the rest of the world. Or, for example, I might be expected to debate with you about the treatment of “peaceful” protesters, although we may not share identical ideas of when a protest is and is not “peaceful”. We do a tremendous violence to the uniqueness of our ideas when we say require that a debate must accept one single definition. Our critical faculties become hypnotized and automated to simply exchange opposites when we engage in this type of predictable and programmable debate. I think that the key is to practice trusting in the multiplicity of our ideas and the uniqueness of our definitions, and reciting the wise old all-too-human proverb “It takes all kinds to make a world”. You may reflect: “If my whole life I have not been making a world, what have I been doing?” And then a strategy might begin to form.

Apple fans celebrate new iPhone release

“neo·phil·ia (noun): love of or enthusiasm for change and what is new or novel.”
-First Known Use: 1932

“The ravages wrought by a rhetoric of good intentions: the misfortune of a few people matters little if it makes possible the advent of the celestial City or the Revolution. We are not guilty as soon as we are trying to do good. In Pascal’s Provincial Letters, a Jesuit seeks to justify misdeeds by the beauty of the end sought: ‘When we cannot prevent the action, we must purify the intention; and thus we correct the vicious nature of the means by the purity of the goal.’ We can never overemphasize the number of crimes that the love of humanity in general can inspire when it is not counterbalanced by the love of human beings in the particular.”
– Pascal Bruckner, The Paradox of Love, 2012

“In philosophy, involution refers to a situation in which a process or object is ontologically ‘turned in’ upon itself.” - Dictionary definition

“If you don’t want to feel the horrible burden of Time breaking your back and bending you down toward the ground, keep yourself drunk.
“But on what? On wine, on poetry, or on virtue, whatever you want. But get drunk.”
-Baudelaire. “Enivrez-Vous” Le Spleen de Paris, XXXIII

“Civilization commenced when man first dug the earth and sowed seeds. Religion began when man discerned the sun’s compassion on the seeds which he sowed in the earth. Art began when man glorified the sun with a hymn of gratitude. Philosophy began when man ate the produce of the earth and suffered indigestion.”
-From The Spiritual Sayings of Kahlil Gibran

“[S]omething essential is being definitively lost, a relationship to places and reality is disappearing, dissolving, evaporating. As you know, for an architect, proportions are essential. Being human takes place within 1.5 and 2 meters, not 18 meters, which would be the world of sycamores and sequoias. Looking at a computer chip, the scale is down to half millimeters… The pollution of the ‘life-size’, the pollution of proportions is nothing more than the pollution of the relationship of being in the world… We are rediscovering the hubris of the Greeks; the notion of disproportion or excessiveness is reentering history. Our difficulty is that unlike the Greeks, who staged it to distance themselves from it, hubris is now taking over. … We no longer fight it: we take pleasure in it…”
-Paul Virilio, The Administration of Fear, Interviews from 2012

“[T]here exists only one reality, and that is me, my own life, this fragile gift bestowed for an uncertain time, which had been seized, expropriated by alien forces, and circumscribed, marked up, branded – and which I had to take back from “History”, this dreadful Moloch, because it was mine and mine alone, and I had to manage it accordingly.”
-Imre Kertész, Nobel Lecture, 2002

“The quality of silence is organically linked to the quality of language. You and I are sitting here, in this house surrounded by a garden, where there is no other noise other than the sound of our conversation. Here I can work. Here I can dream and try to think. Silence has become a huge luxury. People are living in a constant din. There is no more night in cities. Young people are afraid of silence. What will become of serious and difficult reading? Is it possible to read Plato while wearing a Walkman?”
–George Steiner, A Certain Idea of Knowledge, Interview 2011

“Reality has lost much of its constancy and invariability, events of recent years are mocking it, the way the waves do a boat; nearly every day the papers give waking up a new reality, whereas dreams … Haven’t we managed to unify dreams? Haven’t we hoodwinked humanity with that sweet million-brain dream of brotherhood, a united dream about unity? Flags the colour of poppy-petals flutter above the crowds. Reality is fighting back. But its blazing suns don’t frighten the newly ascendant underground. Sleepers’ eyes are sheltered by eyelids. Yesterday’s utopia has become today’s science. We’ll break the backs of facts. We’ll rout their status quos: you’ll see those status quos turn tail and run. If an ‘I’ should rise up against our ‘we’ we’ll hurl him down a well of nightmares headfirst. We’ll hide the sun behind black blots, we’ll plunge the world into a deep, static slumber. We’ll put even the idea of waking to sleep, and if it resists, we’ll gouge out its eyes.”
-Krzhizhanovsky, The Branch Line, 1927, Moscow.

“For in a community in which the ties of family, of caste, of class, and craft fraternities no longer exist people are far too much disposed to think exclusively of their own interests, to become self-seekers practicing a narrow individualism and caring nothing for the public good. Far from trying to counteract such tendencies despotism encourages them, depriving the governed of any sense of solidarity and interdependence; of good-neighborly feelings and a desire to further the welfare of the community at large. It immures them, so to speak, each in his private life and, taking advantage of the tendency they already have to keep apart, it estranges them still more. Their feelings toward each other were already growing cold; despotism freezes them.
Since in such communities nothing is stable, each man is haunted by a fear of sinking to a lower social level and by a restless urge to better his condition. And since money has not only become the sole criterion of a man’s social status but has also acquired an extreme mobility—that is to say is changes hands incessantly, raising or lowering the prestige of individuals and families—everybody is feverishly intent on making money or, if already rich, on keeping his wealth intact. Love of gain, a fondness for business careers, the desire to get rich at all costs, a craving for material comfort and easy living quickly become the ruling passions under a despotic government.”
- Alexis de Tocqueville, The Old Régime and the French Revolution, 1856.

“It is true that we shall never reach the goal; it is even more than probable that there is no such place; and if we lived for centuries and were endowed with the powers of a god, we should find ourselves not much nearer what we wanted at the end. O toiling hands of mortals! O unwearied feet, travelling ye know not whither! Soon, soon, it seems to you, you must come forth on some conspicuous hilltop, and but a little way further, against the setting sun, descry the spires of El Dorado. Little do ye know your own blessednes; for to travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive, and the true success is to labour.”
-Robert Louis Stevenson “El Dorado” in Virginibus Puerisque, 1878

“As entropy increases, the universe, and all closed systems in the universe, tend naturally to deteriorate and lose their distinctiveness, to move from the least to the most probable state, from a state of organization and differentiation in which distinctions and forms exist, to a state of chaos and sameness. In Gibbs’ universe order is least probable, chaos most probable. But while the universe as a whole, tends to run down, there are local enclaves of whose direction seems opposed to that of the universe at large and in which there is a limited and temporary tendency for organization to increase. Life finds its home in these enclaves. It is with this point of view at its core that the new science of Cybernetics began its development.”
-Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings, 1954

“So this, thought Jan, with a resignation that lay beyond all sadness, was the end of man. It was an end that no prophet had foreseen – an end that repudiated optimism and pessimism alike.
Yet it was fitting: it had the sublime inevitability of a great work of art. Jan had glimpsed the universe in all its immensity, and knew now that it was no place for man. He realized at last how vain, in the ultimate analysis, had been the dream that lured him to the stars.
For the road to the stars was a road that forked in two directions, and neither led to a goal that took any account of human hopes or fears.”
-Arthur C Clarke, Childhood’s End

“[N]ow men resemble each other in the ways that they try to set themselves apart. This desire to dissociate ourselves is precisely what brings us closer, and it is this distance that confirms our conformity. Romantic fascination with exceptional beings – with the insane, the criminal, the genius, the artist, the pervert – stems from our fear of being lost in the flock, in the stereotype of the petit-bourgeois man. ‘I am different from the rest.’ That is the motto of the man of the herd.”
-Pascal Bruckner, “The Victory of the Individual, or Crowning the King of Dust”

“Our affirmation is despair, our negation is despair, and from despair we abstain from affirming and denying. Note the greater part of our atheists and you will see that they are atheists from a kind of rage, rage at not being able to believe that there is a God. They are the personal enemies of God. They have invested Nothingness with substance and personality, and their No-God is an Anti-God.”
- Miguel de Unamuno, The Tragic Sense of Life, 1912

“[W]e begin to suspect that the numberless Cassandras who prophesy all around us do not intend to warn us so much as to condemn us… These are not great souls who alert us to troubles but tiny minds who wish us suffering if we have the presumption to refuse to listen to them. Catastrophe is not their fear but their joy. It is a short distance from lucidity to bitterness, from prediction to anathema.”
-Pascal Bruckner, Apocalyptic Daze, 2012

“The soul sees nothing that does not distress it on reflection.”
-Blaise Pascal

“Today man believes there is *nothing* in him, so he accepts *anything*, even if he knows it to be bad, in order to find himself at one with others, in order not to be alone.”
-Czeslaw Milosz, The Captive Mind, 1951

“You always think in too short terms, Little Man just from breakfast to lunch. You must learn to think back in terms of centuries and forward in terms of thousands of years. You have to learn to think in the terms of living life, in terms of your development from the first plasmatic flake to the animal man, which walks erect but cannot yet think straight. You have no memory even for things that happened ten or twenty years ago, and so you keep repeating the same stupidities you said 2000 years ago. More than that, you cling to your stupidities, such as your ‘race’, ‘class’, ‘nation’, religious compulsion and suppression of love as a louse clings to a fur. You do not dare see how deeply you stick in the morass of your misery. Every once in a while, you stick your head out of the morass to yell, Heil! the croaking of a frog in a marsh is closer to life.”
-Wilhelm Reich, Listen Little Man, 1948

‎”…I read the criticism by a German who lived in Russia, on our students of today. ‘Show a Russian schoolboy’ he writes, ‘a map of the stars, which he knows nothing about, and he will give you back the map next day with corrections on it.’ No knowledge and unbounded conceit…”
-Dostoyevski, Brothers Karamazov, book X, chap 6

‎”…instead of asking whether God is dead, we might better raise the question whether Man is dead.”
-Erich Fromm, You Shall Be As Gods, 1966. p.180

“Best of all for mortal beings is never to have been born at all
Nor ever to have set eyes on the bright light of the sun
But, since he is born, a man should make utmost haste through the gates of Death
And then repose, the earth piled into a mound round himself.”
-Theognis of Megara, 6th Century BC

“When truth conquers with the help of 10,000 yelling men – even supposing that that which is victorious is truth; with the form and manner of the victory a far greater untruth is victorious… “
-Soren Kierkegaard, ‘Journals’, 1847

“One of the great unresolved psychological enigmas of the modern western world is the question of what or who has persuaded us to accept as virtually axiomatic a self-view and a world-view that demand we reject out of hand the wisdom and vision of our major philosophers and poets in order to imprison our thought and our very selves in the materialist, mechanical and dogmatic torture-chamber devised by purely quantitative and third-rate scientific minds.”
- Philip Sherrard, Human Image: World Image – The Death and Resurrection of Sacred Cosmology

“Existence, for all organismic life, is a constant struggle to feed — a struggle to incorporate whatever other organisms they can fit into their mouths and press down their gullets without choking. Seen in these stark terms, life on this planet is a gory spectacle, a science-fiction nightmare in which digestive tracts fitted with teeth at one end are tearing away at whatever flesh they can reach, and at the other end are piling up the fuming waste excrement as they move along in search of more flesh.”
-Ernest Becker, Escape from Evil, 1975.

“If our society were to be transformed into yours, it would mean an improvement in certain aspects, but also a change for the worse on some potentially significant points. Of course, a society cannot remain in an abyss of lawlessness, as is the case of our country. But, it is also demeaning for it to stay on such a soulless and smooth plane of legalism as is the case of yours. After decades of violence and oppression, the human soul longs for things higher, warmer, and purer than those offered by today’s mass living habits, introduced as by a calling card by the revolting invasion of commercial advertising, by TV stupor, and by intolerable music.”
-Solzhenitsyn’s commencement address at Harvard University, June 8, 1978.

“For sweetest things turn sourest by their deeds;
Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds.”
-William Shakespeare, Sonnet 94

“The corruption of the Best is the Worst”
- Ivan Illich

“Rabbi Pinhas said: When a man embarks on something great, in the spirit of truth, he need not be afraid that another may imitate him. But if he does not do it in the spirit of truth, but plans to do it in a way no one could imitate, then he drags the great down to the lowest level—and everyone can do the same.”
- Martin Buber, Tales of the Hasidim: The Early Masters, 1961

“Our heroic projects that are aimed at destroying evil have the paradoxical effect of bringing more evil into the world. Human conflicts are life and death struggles – my gods against your gods, my immortality project against your immortality project. The root of humanly caused evil is not man’s animal nature, not territorial aggression, or innate selfishness, but our need to gain self-esteem, deny our mortality, and achieve a heroic self-image. Our desire for the best is the cause of the worst. We want to clean up the world, make it perfect, keep it safe for democracy or communism, purify it of the enemies of god, eliminate evil, establish an alabaster city undimmed by human tears, or a thousand year Reich.”
-Introduction to Ernest Becker’s The Denial of Death, 1973

“Victor Segalen observed that from the moment we became certain that the Earth was a sphere, travel ceased to exist – for to leave any point on the surface of a sphere is also necessarily to begin the return to that same point.”
-Baudrillard, Transparency of Evil

“Since the seventeenth century we have been living in an age of system-makers, and what is even worse, system-appliers. The world has been divided first of all into two general parties, the conservatives and the radicals, or as Comte called them, the party of order and the party of progress – as if both order and change, stability and variation, continuity and novelty, were not equally fundamental attributes of life”
-Lewis Mumford, “The Triumph Over Systems”, The Conduct of Life, 1951

“…[E]veryone who has set out to create heaven on earth has brought only hell.”
-Karl Popper

“The democratic socialist Eduard Bernstein issued a warning at the turn of the nineteenth century to his fellow Marxists. The danger of a ‘truly miraculous belief in the creative power of force,’ he prophesied, is that you begin by doing violence to reality in theory, and end by doing violence to people in practice. What distinguishes the new communism is that its leading partisans are fully aware of that potential…and embrace it as a strategy.”
-Alan Johnson, Resurrecting the Utopian Delusion

“Claim too great freedom, too great license, and too great subjection shall befall you.“
- Alexis de Toqueville, The Old Regime and the French Revolution

“If there were ever to come a future in which every stumbling block were smoothed away, then, indeed, mankind would be as one flock; but then, no longer like men but like a flock of innocent brutes they would feed on the good things provided by Nature, with the same unconscious simplicity as they did at the beginning of [the] long course of civilisation.”
-Hermann Lotze, Microcosmus, Vol. II, Bk. VII, Chap. 7.9, 1885.

“Ring the bells that still can ring

Forget your perfect offering

There is a crack in everything

That’s how the light gets in”

- Leonard Cohen, Anthem

During revolutionary times one usually finds lurking the utopian tendency: the urge to perfect the world and the expectation that the Kingdom is at hand. Although it is has taken different guises through the ages – from Plato to Christ to Marx to Ray Kurzweil and the Transhumanists – the Kingdom is epitomized through the words of the prophet Isaiah: a paradise where the lion lies down with the lamb, and Man having recognized the image of God within his soul attains perfection (Isaiah 11:6). The dreams of these utopian revolutionaries are often about a new dawn, a new man; freed from ignorance, sin, and alienation.

In the present day, when the political left and right, as well as the religious fundamentalists hostile to both socialism and capitalism, all herald the revolutionary coming of a new, better world, I feel compelled to breathe life into an old, but important, lesson. But you will have to go against your inclinations, as I am confident you will be reluctant to hear me. It has to do with good intentions, or, in the words of Pascal Bruckner,“[t]he ravages wrought by a rhetoric of good intentions”.

In the shadow of the two World Wars, the Holocaust, the Gulag, and other of the twentieth century’s myriad horrors, Karl Popper reflected on the utopia outlined in Plato’s Republic: “Everyone who has set out to create heaven on earth has brought only hell.” Flashes of the Terror during the French Revolution, where, amidst the cries of “liberty, equality, fraternity”, the injunction against murder – the First Commandment – was suspended, and even the Marquis de Sade was given shudder. When Moses returned from Sinai to find the Israelites’ golden calf, he immediately called for the people to separate into believers and the non-believers, and the non-believers were slaughtered (Exodus 32:26-28).

Popper, late in his life, reflected on this massacre of the Israelites who rejected Moses very simply: “That perhaps was how it all started”. Jesus Christ, who found himself a carpenter in this world, famously explained his mission in this way: “I come not to bring peace, but to bring a sword.” (Matthew 10:34) Whether Christ was advocating ideological or physical violence is of little concern. What is of concern is the sense of antagonism and divisiveness that pervades his words:

Do not think that I came to bring peace on Earth; I did not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I came to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law; and a man’s enemies will be the members of his household. He who loves father or mother more than Me is not worthy of Me; and he who loves son or daughter more than Me is not worthy of Me. And he who does not take his cross and follow Me is not worthy of Me. He who has found his life will lose it, and he who has lost his life for My sake will find it. (Matthew 10:34-39)

There are echoes here of Moses’ call for the Levites to set themselves against the non-believers, and murder of their own ‘family’, upon finding the idolatrous golden calf at the foot of Sinai.

We see that the urge to graft the perfect ideal onto the imperfect actual is most often carried out through violence, division, and discord. Alexander Solzhynitsyn – the great historian of the Soviet Gulag – lived the violence endemic to Marx and Engel’s ideas, and wrote about the necessity of war for Marx’s communism. And despite that we have the world’s history in sanguine detail at our virtual fingertips, a recent article on the new rise of Marxism in theGuardian quotes a liberal arts student who “wasn’t around when Marxism was associated with the Soviet Union”, and who “tends to see [Marxism] more as way of understanding what we’re going through now”, untainted by the Gulags. Solzhynisyn quotes Lenin himself, who somewhere between 1914 and 1915, said: “We cannot support the slogan ‘peace’ since it is a totally muddled one and a hindrance to the revolutionary struggle.”; “To reject war in principle is un-Marxist. Who objectively stands to gain from the slogan ‘Peace’? In any case, not the revolutionary proletariat.”  Violence and utopianism, seemingly paradoxically, have gone hand in hand from the very beginning. But why is this the case? Was the Psalmist wrong when he penned the famous verse “Mark the perfectman, and behold the upright: for the end of that man ispeace.”? (Psalms 37:37)

There is a curious passage in the works of Immanuel Kant which has stuck with me over the years that goes: “Out of timber so crooked as that from which man is made nothing entirely straight can be built.” And yet, the Utopian – often uninterested in man’s nature, or unwilling to investigate this ‘crookedness’ endemic to our souls – spends his days laying the groundwork for the coming of a Perfect Kingdom, where all that is bent and unequal will become straight and equal. The Utopian takes it upon him or herself to declare war on the timber “from which man is made”. The arrival of the Kingdom, I hope you can discern, requires a new type of transformed human being whose timber is perfectly alike and easy to work with. A firm pair of carpenter’s hands is thus needed to knead out our ‘all too human’ kinks and knots.

While combing through a book by the French philosopher and theologian Jacques Ellul, I came across a wonderful quote by a little known author named Francois Leplantine, which goes: “Utopists abhor what the poets love: the fauna and flora, the trees that send their branches outward in such an unpatterned, capricious way, the bridge and the streams, and the untamed instincts of men”. You can see the distinction between the utopian-planned-rational and the poetic-unplanned-instinctual very clearly by contrasting one of the few remaining trees left in the glass mausoleum also known as your downtown core.  Allow a branch, growing haphazardly, grotesquely, every which way, with its tumorous knots, and freakish families of sprouting buds, to appear in relief against your utterly planned downtown Kingdom, replete with geometric traffic grids, precisely rectangular glass skyscrapers, and monotonous condominium cocoons.

The idea is that when the Kingdom arrives, all that was barred will be open, all that was limited will be unlimited, all that was opaque will be transparent, and all that grew grotesquely and uncontrollably will be designed and set down according to the plan devised by our human will. But the challenges we encounter, the limits of our bodies, the opaqueness of our minds, our radical diversity and our unwilled grotesqueness are integral to our humanity. In fact,at the close of the 19^th century, Hermann Lotze observed that “If there were ever to come a future in which every stumbling block were smoothed away, then, indeed, mankind would be as one flock; but then, no longer like men but like a flock of innocent brutes they would feed on the good things provided by Nature, with the same unconscious simplicity as they did at the beginning of [the] long course of civilisation.”

Rather than attempting to build in the difficult key of humanity’s distressed leitmotif, we have – time and time again – characterized it as an off-tune aberration to be corrected. Throughout history, our human imperfections have been understood as terrible stains and distortions of an otherwise pure, inhuman, realm: our political structures as impoverished reflections of an unchanging idea of Justice, our limited bodies as vessels for a truer divine Soul, the hellish means of history as a slaughter-bench toward the germinating end of history where all contradiction has been ironed out… Can we blame ourselves? The greatest religions and philosophical systems are attempts to offer a straighter, truer Ideal, against inequality, the sad limit of the flesh, and having to say a final ‘good bye’ to the ones we love.

In his Penses, Pascal offered a fascinating maxim: “The soul sees nothing that does not distress it on reflection”. The most optimistic in our human family are interested in a future without the limitations and imperfections that lead to having to tarry with pain, anxiety, sorrow and affliction. In their own ways, these ‘do-gooders’ promise pharmacologically induced perpetual euphoria, germ line engineering to perfect the genetic makeup of a child, and quiescent culminations of political and social contradiction.  But students of literature know best that it is the imperfect characters, replete with their cleft lips and chronic moroseness, which appear most clearly to our souls. Indeed, it is a dark thought that the artifacts that persist through time in moving us – from the sunflowers of Van Gogh to the symphonies of Beethoven – are borne of tears, longing, uncontrolled passions, and unfulfilled desires.

But the answer is not to romanticize our imperfections, or become content with the status quo. The drive to intuit and interact with Ideals, such as Perfection, Universality, Freedom, Justice and Peace, is one of our most important conceptual moves. Problems arise, however, when we attempt to bring these Ideals directly into human affairs – in the case of the new biosciences, the sculpting of the genome itself into perfect, Ideal, forms without blemish. We bring violence into the world when we attempt to complete it, to perfect it, to remove once and for all its imperfections, faults and defects. The Sun provides warmth, but would destroy the Earth were it to draw too near. Likewise, culture remains intact so long as we are content withapproximating, but never desire to arrive at, ideals. While the ideal of Freedom has been one of the primary animating forces of history, can we even imagine a world of absolute and total Freedom? Alexis de Tocqueville, writing about the French Revolution, offered this reminder:‎“Claim too great freedom, too great license, and too great subjection shall befall you.” When Ideals are brought down to Earth, and the Utopian carpenters begin untwisting and unbending life, unbearable terror and violence follow in the wake… Yet life without the guidance of Ideals glimmering on the horizon would be unimaginable.

A more current version of this article can be found at PROVOCATIVE PENGUIN

You’re sitting on a train at the station. Another train slowly passes by on the next track over. You feel yourself leaving the station, only to realize – once the other train has passed – that you haven’t moved an inch. While illusions of motion and directionality are most often associated with spatial location (“Am I going up or down, shifting to the left or to the right, moving forwards or backwards”), we are often victims of illusions regarding the progression and regression of our culture and our inner lives: A culture celebrates its progressiveness, its forward thinking attributes, however this optimism can obscure revelations of a nationally sanctioned genocide or atrocity; an individual feels exceedingly active, strong and free, only to find some months later that this period of euphoria has betrayed a destructive psychological pathology.

Today, our clearest illusion of motion is demonstrated by our orientation to technology. Fervor over the latest gadgets permeates our popular culture. Spinning through the whirlwind of digital do-gooders promising a freer, more connected and transparent future, it is difficult to determine whether we are being propelled forwards or dragged backwards. We are usually told we are marching forward, but what if we are the victims of an optical illusion?

Our most aggressive technophiles, the Transhumanists, pine for the glorious day when human beings will be H+ : having overcome our tragic old selves, the limits of our imperfect, fleshy bodies, and our endless lamentations on the horizon of our eventual death. When this new, endless day dawns, our mind (synonymous with our ‘self’ for the Transhumanists) will have been transformed into a code capable of being uploaded into virtual worlds and synthetic bodies. Likewise, advocates of radical body modification strive to extend our limited human morphology into unlimited formations and combinations. The always gusty and unpredicatble wind of technology has gained tornadic intensity, and all around us crackles the lightening of technical wizardry, the thunderous crash of our subsequent inventions and the howling hysterical cries that we are moving beyond the human.

But how are we to tell which direction humanity is moving from within this violent funnel? Has this disorienting condition finally knocked directionality – and thus the question of human progress – out of our skulls altogether? Is this great trans-formation, this next Great Exodus of Man, allowing us to stand firmer, freer and more independent on our own two feet, or returning us to crawling on all fours at the throne of a cruel Sun God?

The philosopher Jean Baudrillard, surveying the technological tornado, observed that “the human does not give way to the superhuman, as Nietzsche had dreamed … Rather, it gives way to the subhuman, to something not beyond, but underneath the human, to an erasure of the symbolic marks that make up the species”. Instead of moving toward the overman, our trans-, or post- humanity, Baudrillard suggested that we may actually be moving us into the realm of the subhuman, that which is under man. In this critical light, the liberatory deathlessness of the Transhumanists becomes the creation of digital sarcophagi (“deathless alter-egos”) for the human species; the morphological freedom of the body modification advocates becomes destructive self-mutilation.

Keen detectives of popular culture know better than to take “the new” at face value. Simply because a consumer or cultural product is released this year does not require that it has gesticulated wholly in the womb of present day techniques, habits and practices. Consider our robust nostalgia industry and the myriad ‘new’ product that emerge from it. We find ‘new’ products that are not simply marked by nostalgic yearning, but the drive to identically simulate an earlier form. The word “nostalgia” itself derives from the Greek “nostos”, usually translated as “homecoming”. While we tend to use nostalgia to describe a temporal looking back, it originally described a spatial returning home; rather than a time-sickness (yearning to repeat the experiences of an earlier time), the term originally signified a home-sickness (the motor behind Odysseus’ journey home).

A homecoming, returning-home, a home-sickness. But what is our true home? And how long are the tendrils of nostalgia? Baudrillard answers that “Contrary to everything that seems obvious and ‘natural’, nature’s first creatures were immortal. It was only by obtaining the power to die, by dint of constant struggle, that we became the living beings we are today … [F]irst the reign of the immortals, than the mortal and sexed beings overtaking the immortals”. Our original home was an indivisible one, an immortal one, an identical one; there was no division, no sex, no alterity. (Residues of the journey away from this originary state exist in the Old Testament, where Eve and Adam are barred from access to the Tree of Eternal Life, introduced to the nakedness of the distinct sexes and the burdened with the cultural differences that provide the basis for human history. God scolds the first humans thusly: “I will put enmity / Between you and the woman, And between your offspring and hers.”)

Humanity is a celebration of endings, distinctions, duality and differentiation. Baudrillard’s warning was that we often believe post-humanism to be creating new types of life, when it is in fact a nostalgic homesickness for our distant past as inorganic, unsexed, undying creatures. The unpopular contrast to today’s post-humanism, whose aims include exploding the male-female sex binary as an artificial and unnecessary construct, was voiced by Michael Valentine Smith near the conclusion of Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land: “Male-femaleness is the greatest gift we have—romantic physical love may be unique to this planet. If it is, the universe is a poorer place than it could be … and I grok dimly that we-who-are-God will save this precious invention and spread it. The joining of bodies with merging of souls in shared ecstasy, giving, receiving, delighting in each other—well, there’s nothing on Mars to touch it, and it’s the source, I grok in fullness, of all that makes this planet so rich and wonderful.”

What is curious about our popular culture, our collective subconscious, is our romanticizing of infantilism and intoxication leading to the loss of consciousness and the control of motor reflexes. Consider Breathe Carolina’s ‘Blackout’, which begins: “Caught up and I can’t feel my hands, No need to chase. Can you relate?” or Taio Cruz, who in ‘Hangover’, wants to “[G]o until I blow up. / And I can drink until I throw up / And I don’t ever, ever want to grow up / I wanna keep it going, keep it going, going, going”, or the anthem of our gurgling age, located in Lady Gaga’s ‘Bad Romance’: Rah-rah-ah-ah-ah! Roma-Roma-ma-ah! Ga-ga-ooh-la-la!

The music video for Lady Gaga’s (her name is itself evocative of an insecurity about the demarcation between infancy and adulthood) song ‘Born this Way’ begins with a transparent, antiseptic looking, glass throne floating through space, followed by the birth of a new, asexually produced, race. The narration over this curious mythical scene – which must be quoted in full – tells us: “This is the Manifesto of Mother Monster. On G.O.A.T, a Government Owned Alien Territory in space, a birth of magnificent and magical proportions took place. But the birth was not finite. It was infinite. As the wombs numbered and the mitosis of the future began, it was perceived that this infamous moment in life is not temporal, it is eternal. And thus began the beginning of the new race, a race within the race of humanity, a race which bares no prejudice, no judgment but boundless freedom.” The sexless, deathless Mother Monster: indivisible, immortal, identical, floating on its throne through infinite space, enclosed in antiseptic, transparent, glass.

Baudrillard’s warning was that today “the [ancient] immortals are avenging themselves through the [technologically new] process of sex and cloning, through interminable reduplication, through the obliteration of sex and death”. After the revolutionary advent of sex and death, which freed us from our originary incest and primitive entropy comes the liberation of sex and death, which is “recreating precisely these [pre-sexual, pre-mortal] conditions”. After the revolution, an involution: the process whereby when something turns upon itself. “Liberty is hard to take.” From immortal to mortal and back to immortality – asexual to sexual back to asexuality – total to individual and back to totality – indistinct to distinct and back to indistinction.

We are homesick, are repentant for leaving our origin, and have embarked on an involution back to our home port.  But on the journey “backwards” we are surrounded by things that are associated with being “forwards”: cloning, simulation, programming, and genetic management. Around us are minstrels singing ballads about the loss of individual consciousness, about blacking out, and worshiping at the indivisible, immortal, throne of Mother Monster, at upwards of 170 BPM (beats-per-minute). We may believe we are setting out further beyond the Pillars of Hercules, into wholly uncharted waters, when we are actually returning home. Teenagers aboard this ship spend their evenings in the Church of the Undying Vampire, using their parent’s Visa Infinite card to purchase a ticket to the latest ‘Twilight’ film Breaking Dawn, whose tagline is: Forever is only the Beginning. They avoid sleep with Red Bull and dance the night away to the music video for Lady Gaga’s “Born this Way”, which begins with Mother Monster’s cellular mitosis and concludes with a skeleton that is very much alive.

We are in motion, that is certain, but whether we are the victims of an illusion obscuring the amplification or attenuation of our humanity is a question for us unrepentant humanists, increasingly few and far between, who are not “sick of sex, of difference, of emancipation, of culture” and who remain able to defend our diversity, our complexity, and our alterity.

Special thanks to Alison Cohen for bringing to my attention to the obsession with infantalization and getting black out drunk on the Billboard top 100. 

All Baudrillard quotes are from “The Final Solution: Cloning Beyond the Human and the Inhuman” in The Vital Illusion (Lectures given in May, 1999)

In contrast to claims that the avatar represents a posthuman body, I have proposed that avatarization is not (for better or worse) an overcoming of any human condition, but rather an interactive technique that works with the unconscious drives that persist in comprising our complex humanity.

Whether ones impression of avatarization is pessimistic or celebratory, both positions are enriched tremendously by at least a consideration of the Oedipal dimension
of the self, something both positions, hitherto, have tended to consider outmoded or invalid.

The analysis of Second Life carried out over the past twenty odd posts suggests that Oedipus ought always be thought alongside Epimetheus. A binocular approach, merging humanist Oedipal conclusions with a posthuman Epimethean position,
regards avatarization through the lens of a humanist posthumanism.

This humanist posthumanism challenges us to reconsider the virtual avatar as symbolic of the transubstantiation implied by “avātara” or “incarnation” without neglecting to account for the ways the virtual avatar does alter the user’s sense of self, and is reflective of the contingency of social life. The conclusions yielded by this binocular merger of Epimethean and Oedipal readings of avatarization, suggests three general tenets of a humanist posthumanism that might be applied to future studies of media technologies.

Humanist posthumanism welcomes the always-already posthuman and its perpetual overcoming of new types of bodies and senses of self only insofar as it also recognizes that all-too-human lack and psychical structure are associated with these processes. Humanist posthumanism regards the self as both a “thingless thing”, a “wind being…between jouissance, which longs for words, and the Name-of-the-Father, which orders them” and the historically contingent articulations of this “thingless thing” (Lander 44). Read through this lens, the SL avatar can indeed be considered a harbinger of the new and different, but only insofar as the new and different act in concert with what is old and long familiar.

Some final observations:

-Virtual worlds engage with our always already posthuman qualities and our humanity; despite being always-already post-human, the (virtual world) user encounters a structural humanness.

-Interacting with new types of (virtual) bodies and senses of self involves tarrying with the return, and a reminder of, a fixed set of psychical structures: we encounter the new but the old returns or remains.

-The overcoming of a fixed body or solid sense of self is due to the presence of the
user’s psychical lack: we are always overcoming, but we do not overcome lack
itself.

The psychoanalytic study presented through the preceding posts ought to be considered alongside an Epimethean reading of what is new about avatarization. This binocular reading could align Foucault’s assertion that “man” is only one historically distinct form of the human with the claims of Lacanian psychoanalysis. It becomes possible to fuse the potential latent in a reconfiguration of subjectivity as a materialist process with Lacans conception of the subject of the “lack”. Reading these positions together invokes a view of the subject as it is constituted through relations of power and its inner psychic dimensions.

Note: I do not think my views regarding a place for limitation and structure alongside becoming and contingency are in disagreement with posthuman/cyborg scholars such as Donna Haraway and Kathrine Hayles. For Haraway, remaining open to the unexpected does not come without conditions. The “death of the subject” (that is, “the opening of non-isomorphic subjects, agents, and territories of stories unimaginable from the vantage point of the cyclopean self… the satisfied eye of the master subject”) is, for her, a “painful” process (Haraway, Leaf 113). “Such considerations” she writes “are always about coming back to a consciousness about finitude, about mortality, of limitation not as a kind of utopian glorification, but a condition of possibility of creativity in the most literal sense, as opposed to negation. And I feel this is something I learned from feminism too… The insistence on a kind of non-hostile relationship of the mortal body with its breakdowns  [denaturalizations].” (Haraway, Leaf 115). She opposes radical transgression, without consciousness of finitude, mortality, and limitation: the “…affirmation of dying is absolutely fundamental. Affirmation not in the sense of glorifying death, but in the sense – to put it bluntly – that without mortality we’re nothing. In other words, the fantasy of transcending death is opposed to everything I care about” (Haraway, Leaf 116). Neither does Katherine Hayles advocate a full blown posthumanism where anything goes. Consider her comment that “If my nightmare is a culture inhabited by posthumans who regard their bodies as fashion accessories rather that the ground of being, my dream is a version of the posthuman that embraces the possibilities of information technologies without being seduced by fantasies of unlimited power and disembodied immortality, that recognizes and celebrates finitude as a condition of human being…” (Hayles 5)

An individual today looks out their window and sees a different vista than the one they would have seen a hundred years ago. Smart Cars zoom by instead of horsedrawn carriages, but both the Smart Car driver and the coach driver could appreciate Swann’s desire for Odette, or Koheleth’s lamentations in “Ecclesiastes”.

Likewise, the Pac Man user and the SL user both are high-tech externalizations of the all-too-human search for lost wholeness (Rehak). This humanist sense of something persisting throughout the succession of techniques and ways of life ought to be thought akin to the ebb and flow of the tides. The tide flows out only to return to the ocean, each surge forth is a surge back. I have tried to argue throughout these posts that life does not only appear to be endless flow, but that it also entails endless ebb.

Nietzsche’s much misaligned Overman is not he who embraces merely the flow of life, but he who can stand between the world’s flowing contingency and its ebbing which prohibits endless contingency, namely the eternal recurrence of the same. That is to say, while the world always changes, one has to confront the possibility that what is has been, that what is new is linked – in some way – to what has already occurred. On one hand the world flows, it is “a play of forces and waves of forces, at the same time one and many, increasing here and at the same time decreasing there; a sea of forces flowing and rushing together, eternally changing…”  (Nietzsche, Will 550). On the other hand the world ebbs, it is “…eternally flooding back, with tremendous years of recurrence, with an ebb and a flood of its forms”  (Nietzsche, Will 550). With the right framework, an analysis of the flow of virtual technologies reveals an uncanny ebb. Note: It reveals, in Heraclitian terms, that the variability and plurality of human beings can be explained as a systematic flowing (the river) toward a trace of otherness directed by the structural Signifier (the riverbanks).

Despite that I have insisted, that we, as posthumans, are subject to new and different Epimethean ways of being and knowing the world, my sense is that we remain hardwired into Oedipal triangulation.

Note: Perhaps we could inquire further into the question of whether a user’s avatar is “really” them. Here lies one possible answer: The Epimethean dimension, I suggest, is phenomenal and visible; the Oedipal is intellectual and invisible. The Epimethean sociologist turns his attention to understanding, and making sense out of phenomenal and visible data; the Oedipal playwright attending to what is intellectual and invisible. So which position is concerned with what is the real truth? Are there two realities, and so are we to conclude – as Plato does with his Forms – that one trumps the other? And where does this leave us given that the avatars found in virtual worlds such as SL are so frequently discussed in terms of their similitude to real life? Georges Bataille cites Georges-Henry Luquet’s suggestion there are both “visual” and “intellectual” forms of realism: “An image is a good likeness for an adult when it reproduces what the adult eye sees, and for the primitive when it translates what his mind knows.” (Bataille, Cradle 38). These posts have, using Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis, demonstrated that the relationship between the real user and her virtual avatar is a dual one, co-responding to visible and intellectual, Epimethean and Oedipal, historical and entropic forms of realism.

Hidden Oedipus remains coiled around the frenzied, in-your-face, Epimethean, succession of new media technologies. Throughout the preceding posts I have attempted to articulate a theoretical framework capable of evaluating techniques such as SL avatarization in relation to this often overlooked Janus face of (post)human subjectivity.

Note: Readers interested in approaching the question of the human, posthuman, and inhuman, from this standpoint will find Dominique Janicaud’s On the Human Condition of interest. Janicaud argues that humanity occupies a chronically unstable middle ground between the “inhuman” and the “superhuman”, between regression and overcoming, beastiality and angelism. Once we recognize this, he argues, we are in a position to consider a cautious humanism that can open up to the disturbing, strange, and radically creative (and cooperative) forces that lie dormant in us. Evoking Freud’s uncanny, Janicaud writes: “…man thinks he can leave his condition behind, whereas all those ‘departures’ only take him back to his fundamental truth. Humanity is the unfathomable overcoming of its limits.” (Janicaud 30).

The notion that electric culture initiates a break – for better or worse – from a linear sense of time, Cartesian subjectivity or the regime of vision unravels spectacularly upon a posthumanist humanist analysis of a virtual world like SL. This is not to argue that new types of identities are not engendered and one does not see the stirrings of new forms dynamic life. However, the mutations and transformations of body and self that users experience through their avatar(s) appears to remain intelligible against the horizon of linearity, identity, tragedy and myth. Something ancient stirs in the fibre optics.

Inferno, Canto 5: The souls of the lustful in the infernal hurricane

How long will Oedipus remain an issue? Nothing is to say that techniques, or forms of society, may emerge that succeed in obliterating the horizon of tragedy and myth. As Lacan notes “[the] Oedipus complex cannot run indefinitely in forms of society that are more and more losing their sense of tragedy.” (Lacan, Ecrits 668). New forms of life come into focus as nature and the body are increasingly experienced, and acted upon, as technological entities. Optimists may celebrate this as the liberatory point where Western metaphysics, tragedy and myth are brought to their conclusions. Note: This form of life could no longer be understood in relation to Heraclitus’ ancient maxim of the “same river” where “different and again different waters flow”. Pessimists may consider the technologically mediated hybrid of self and the world, without the authority of having set (albeit ultimately contingent) boundaries, as nihilistically whirling around in a ceaseless technological orgasm. Note: The image I am trying to convey here derives from the punishment of sinners in the “Circle of the Lustful” found in Canto II of Dante’s Divine Comedy I: “Like the starlings wheel in the wintry season / In wide and clustering flocks wing-borne, wind-borne / Even so they go, the souls who did this treason, / Hither and thither, and up and down, outworn…” (Dante 99)Posthumanist humanism reminds us that we have something to lose and – rather than celebrating or despairing in the face of technologically mediated forms of life - leaves us on the shores of disturbing, yet productive, biopolitical questions: “Is the posthuman gamble on pure difference worth the risk?” and “Can we resist forms of government and economic systems that use logics of identity and repression for destructive purposes without discarding the identity and repression that has hitherto been a central feature of the human subject?”

Sources
==Dante. The Divine Comedy 1: Hell. Trans. Dorothy L. Sayers. London: Penguin Books, 1949
==Haraway, Donna. How Like a Leaf. New York. Routledge, 1998
==Hayles, Katherine. How We Became Posthuman. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999
==Janicaud, Dominique. On the Human Condition. Routledge,
==Lacan, Jacques. Ecrits, trans. Bruce Fink. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2006
==Nietzsche, Friedrich. Will to Power. Trans. Walter Kauffman. New York: Random House, 1968
==Rehak, Bob. “Playing at Being: Psychoanalysis and the Avatar”. The Video Game Theory Reader. Eds. M. J. P. Wolf & B. Perron. New York: Routledge, 2003: 103-127

It has been noted that video games “enable[s] players to think through questions of agency and existence, exploring in fantasy form aspects of their own materiality” (Rehak 123).

At one point near the conclusion of Seminar XI, psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan briefly mentions the ‘mass media’. He writes:

Perhaps the features that appear in our time so strikingly in the form of what are more or less called the mass media,…whose place I have indicated to you in a fundamental tetrad, namely the voice – partially planeterized, even stratospherized, by our machinery – and the gaze, whose ever encroaching character is no less suggestive, for by so many spectacles, so many phantasies, it is not so much our vision that is solicited, as our gaze that is aroused (Lacan, Sem. XI 274).

This brief remark that the mass media arouses our gaze rather than our vision is striking, and reinforces what has been argued throughout my Humanizing the Avatar posts: the user’s activity with their avatar offers an opportunity to engage with their insatiable desires and to experiment with covering the void that is at the core of the Lacanian subject.

Insofar as virtual worlds allow thousands to of users to simultaneously interact with one another’s (a)vatars, they can be considered as a clear example of the gaze soliciting ‘planeterized’ and ‘stratospherized’ attributes of modern machinery. Note: But this does not mean that they are not also evocative of what the ‘posthuman/posthuman (capitalist) theorists claim about the effects of “information technology, computerization and [the] wholesale commodification of everyday life” as engendering a new sort of fragmented self. In this regard, ‘casino capitalism’ “mobilizes the self (or at least its narcissistic element)” (Elliot 171). Second Life (SL) speaks to Lacan’s thoughts on the ‘features of our time’; an uncanny comingling of hi-tech machinery and the solicitation of the primordial, ancient gaze: the objet petit (a)vatar.

What might be the impetus behind avatarization? From a Lacanian point of view, the SL user sets up a dialogue with the objet (a), and is capable of briefly considering the remainder of the real from which his or her subjectivity hangs.  In order to elaborate this idea let’s consider avatarization aesthetically. The American painter, Frank Stella, explains:

the ephemeral quality of painting reminds us that what is not there, what we cannot find, is what great paintings always promise… Painters intrinsically look to the mirror for reassurance, hoping to shake death, hoping to avoid the stare of persistent time, but the results are always disappointing. Still they keep checking… (Stella 6-9 qtd. in Bowie 169)

Malcom Bowie elaborates:

The death haunted painter, striving toward an impossible completeness of vision and retreating periodically to the consolations of the mirror, lives out by the sweat of his brow the dialectic of the Symbolic and Imaginary…And the huge, brightly coloured and many-plated constructions that Stella was working on at this time are a tribute to the erotic power of the cut and the margin (Bowie 169).

In other words, Stella’s work is a tribute to the presence of the (a). Perhaps the (a)vatar is an aesthetic object that functions in a similar way. The SL user is something of an artist; he works on objects that are impossible to complete. Note: “The death haunted [SL user], striving toward an impossible completeness of vision and retreating periodically to the consolations of the [screen], lives out by the sweat of his brow the dialectic of the Symbolic and Imaginary…And the huge, brightly coloured and many-plated [avatars and virtual prim objects] that [the user] was working on at this time are a tribute to the erotic power of the cut and the margin.” (Bowie 169)  One SL user Tasrill Sieyes, known in SL for creating abstract avatars, explains SL as a “new medium” where one can watch “people think about avatars [as] walking art and sculpture, not just a pretend human” (Rymaszewski et al. 74). The virtual world of SL is a space where the user is provided with the tools to mutate and mutilate their screen double(s). In this regard, avatars, comprised of partial objects without the hope of completion, are highly evocative of the user’s original phantasy.

On one hand, the user’s ability to mutilate these virtual doubles is evocative – as the scholars discussed in an earlier post contend – of a manipulatable, and flexible, self. In this case it is easy to concern oneself with each specific manipulation by each specific user. But, in the conclusion to Seminar XI entitled “In you more than you”, Lacan paraphrases the analysand’s attitude to their analyst:  “I love you, but because inexplicably I love in you something more than you – the objet petit a – I mutilate you” (Lacan, Sem. XI 268). Thus, on the other hand SL is not about political-economic instances of culturally oriented flexibility, but an “effect of mutilation” stemming from the (a), the leftover of the real.

Could we not read Lacan’s comment above from the standpoint of a SL user’s attitude to their avatar? Likewise, could we not consider the artist Stelarc, who mutilates his body by attaching biological and non-biological objects, claiming them to be prostheses and “not as a result of lack”, as alternatively demonstrating a cyborg body whose excessiveneness is generated by its lack? The avatar plays a similar function to the skull in Holbein’s painting: it confirms our lack. Here, the impetus for the user’s manipulation of their avatar is the ‘effect of mutilation’ whose cause is the objet petit (a).

Sources:

-Elliott, Anthony. Subject to Ourselves: Social Theory, Psychoanalysis and
Postmodernity. Boulder, Co: Paradigm Publishers, 2004
-Elliott, Anthony. Concepts of the Self. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2008

Lacan, Jacques. Seminar XI – The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller.Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: W.W. Norton, 1998

Rehak, Bob. “Playing at Being: Psychoanalysis and the Avatar”. The Video Game Theory Reader. Eds. M. J. P. Wolf & B. Perron. New York: Routledge, 2003: 103-127

-Rymaszewski, Michael et al. Guide to Second Life – 2nd Edition. Indianapolis: Wiley Publishing, 2008

-Stelarc. “Interview” Voiceworks 62 (Spring 2005) Available Online: <http://www.benjaminteicher.com/folio/interview-with-stelarc/&gt;

-Stella, Frank. Working Space. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1986 in Bowie, Malcolm. Lacan. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991

Umberto Boccioni 'Unique Forms Of Continuity In Space' 1913

The scene is Tahrir Square during the heart of the Arab Spring: A BBC reporter pulls a celebrating young man aside and asks “What’s next for Egypt? What comes after Mubarak’s government falls?” The man, with a wild gleam in his eye, turns to the reporter and giddily responds that he doesn’t know. The revolution is leaderless, there is no programme, no one is commandeering the future. He answers as if this could persist indefinitely, as if Egypt would be better off having entered eternal springtime, a golden age of permanent change.

The word “change” traditionally refers to a transformation from one state to another, whether it is from ice to water or slavery to freedom. Think about Sam Cooke’s song ‘A Change is Gonna Come’. Change was once a means-to-and-end; as we venture into the 21st century it is quickly becoming an end-in-itself.

The revolutionaries in Tahrir Square were a strange reflection of the technophile crowd at something like a TEDtalk: both hypnotized by the next best thing without stopping for a moment to ask whether their political or technological movements and changes are engendering a good, humaine future.

Rather than treating change as good in-itself (as an end-in-itself), we must be in a position to determine the good changes from bad changes. Otherwise we will, no doubt, slip into the whirlpool where the emancipatory promise of change becomes an impossibility, and eventually a forgotten possibility.

The most important lesson we do not appear to have learned in our revolutionary world is that the next thing is not always the next best thing. This unqualified trust in the Future, as if it were a benevolent goddess guiding History by the hand, is our defining pathology. It leads to the position that what is good is what has yet to come, and that the world we should look forward to is one that has no end other than permanent revolution and change. We’re on the right track, so long as we’re always changing, insofar as we kneel at the altar of Nietzsche as obedient, perpetually chaotic “dancing stars”. The slogan of the new century is shaping up to be the iconic sneaker slogan “Just do it”.

This is the legacy that modernity has bequeathed to us, that has transformed us into nihilist “dancing stars”: “willing for the sake of willing”, as Canadian George Grant put it, is the activity fit perfectly for an individual who has unwavering faith in Change and the Future. This nihilism has slithered in to all facets of 21st century life, from the political to the scientific to the religious. In a fitting epigraph to his essay on the contemporary “hyperactive man”, philosopher Paul Virilio quotes St. Nietzsche “What matters most to modern man is no longer pleasure or displeasure, but excitement”.

Advertisers, politicians and religious fundamentalists all have realized that the promise of change resonates with today’s “hyperactive man”. In a strange way, we are seeing that Barack Obama’s slogan “Change we can believe in!” really spells out the Modern creed “We can believe in change!” Whatever exists is tainted with having been permanent. “The word Establishment” according to historian Jacques Barzun “torn from it’s precise meaning, now denotes any institution, even benevolent (such as the fire department), which is tainted with having existed prior to the mood of protest.” Across the world, from the large-scale rebel war against Gaddafi in Libya to the small-scale war to change the left-leaning city council here in Toronto, the drums of change are beating. All the world – Left and Right, Liberal and Conservative, Religious and Athiest – is caught up in this futurist dance. It is a fact that today’s “hyperactive men” will parade around like the rats of Hamelin if the magic pipe of change is played loud enough.

Julian Benda, one of Nietzsche’s early readers, observed in The Treason of the Intellectuals (1928), a book neglected today at our own peril, that “Formerly man was divine because he had been able to acquire the concept of justice, the idea of law, the sense of God; to-day he is divine because he has been able to create an equipment which makes him the master of matter…” Benda’s observation was dead on. Our values today are driven by our integration into the spiralling whirlpool of new and newer technologies. Since the 17th century scientific revolution declared that what is “latest is truest” (Barzun), this obsession with technological flux has reached gargantuan proportions.

There is a curious lesson that our generation – obsessed with the future – may never have the chance to learn: the branches of the present have their roots in the past. A future that severs itself from the past will whither, shrivel and eventually die. Giovanni Reale, a scholar of antiquity, warned the colourful revolutionaries in ‘68 that “if the past is eliminated, so also with the very same stroke is the future. In fact, the past is like the roots of a large tree. If the roots are cut and pulled out because they are underground and do not bring forth any flower or fruit (which are of value to the present) and hence the tree is useless, the loss of the roots rapidly destroys the tree in the future.”

It goes without saying that there are times where radical changes are warranted. However, the belief that the Egyptian revolutionaries could indefinitely occupy Tahrir Square without a plan, a leader and an end in mind, was not only an absurdity, but risked handing over a seething mass of raw biological material into the cold hands of anti-revolutionaries brimming with plans and ends.

As you can see, this is not a veiled call for conservativism against progressivism, or stability against change, but a reminder that swinging too far to one end of the pendulum is folly.

Lewis Mumford once wrote that “Those who understand the nature of life itself will not … see reality in terms of change alone and dismiss the fixed and static as otiose; neither will they … regard flux and movement and time as unreal or illusory and seek truth only in the unchangeable.” It is up to us, surrounded by the ever-widening whirlpool of political and social change, to discover a way between the lessons of the past and the hypnotic possibilities the future will bring. But this way between will never become clear, unless we can take a deep breath and ‘hyperactive man’ can stop “just doing it”.