A Decalogue of the Alienation of Thought in Post-Industrial Information Society

§1. Cleverness is the ingenuity with which human beings manipulate matter; but, though stone, nor iron, nor proteins, nor acids thwarts not our wily thumbs, we are ourselves, even (for the dualists) in this flesh imbued with “spirit,” materials. Biology is the technology of the living apparatus.

§2. Industry, which improves our strength but lacks our grace (perhaps art in our age is the reproduction of grace), is a mechanical reproduction of the biological mechanism, Body; and so is information (in its modern sense) the absolute externalization of the thinking mechanism, the explosion of human consciousness from the confines of the human body. Industrial flesh built with bolts is now informed with binary circuitry, Spirit.

§3. There will be no advent of artificial intelligence, because there has never been intelligence without artifice, which means, accordingly, that “artificial intelligence” is already here. Could intelligence simply “occur” in nature, as if it were the at once minute and immense glide of a tectonic plate upon the molten core of a space rock? If the intelligence of the living human being is natural, in the sense that it so “occurs,” then it nevertheless sets immediately to work upon itself as artifice, as the intelligence of artifice, as artificial intelligence.

§4. Just as factories are mechanical reproductions of human biological mechanisms, or Bodies; so are networks mechanical reproductions of human ideological mechanisms, or Minds. The post-industrial age is the age in which industry, the lonely organic outgrowth of biological humanity, finds at last its complement in the colonial mind.

§5. A computer unconnected is an instrument (even if it can pass, by means of human hands, information to and fro); but connected, a computer is a particular bundle of neurons within the massive collective brain of humanity's post/industrial Doppelganger: this spiritual-mechanical complex that grows, shrinks, remembers, and forgets.

§6. In a former Soviet Socialist Republic, a small, aged server, perhaps damaged even by carelessly spilt vodka, is a dark recess in this brain, nearly forgotten, an archive of mostly useless information. In Montana, another computer is disconnected for good, and the whole worldwide – no, now wider than the solar system, so long as the two Viking spacecraft ping back their acknowledgements like ghostly premonitions – system experiences a hardly noticeable minor brain death.

§7. Metaphor fails to warn us of the possibility of dystopia; for, so long as it is fictionalized in a hypothetical future, we ignore that it is already present as a real possibility, as real as possibility.

§8. Industrialization brought with it the alienation of laborers from labor. Human beings were reduced to brute mechanical existence: “cogs in a machine,” so the saying goes. Smitten as we are by our own genius, now we humans are reduced to discrete intellectual instances that participate in a vast network, a collective intelligence also linked to the old mechanical infrastructure (shining and new, “refurbished” and glistening nonetheless). There is a complement to the alienation of labor: we are to be made foreign to our own minds, “files in the archive,” automatons at last.

§9. Every thought not kept private – and what use is there for private thoughts, these days? All sit obscurely like personal art objects on a window sill – heads to the archive, to be consumed alike with mechanical products. Labor, both physical and intellectual, has almost entirely been collectivized; the monomaniacal comedy of capitalism is the death of the individual.

§10. We are at a loss to contemplate the meaning of all of this.

Edit (23 February, 12:07): This was meant as a kind of pastiche of rehashed Nietzschean and Heideggerian modern doom-mongering, although only stylistically; but, through Reddit, I recently stumbled upon this: The Meme of Modernity, from something called the American Nihilist Underground Society (A.N.U.S., it would seem). Although entirely unfamiliar with whatever the web site proposes to be, I did find this short and simple article to be interesting. It deals with a lot of the ideas evoked above.

Open question

What counts as poetry now? Is it still a viable art form? Given that stylistically, almost all boundaries have been crossed, what should contemporary poetry look like, what should it aim for?

Zombie Times

Late night, Keith Olbermann talking to me on a different tab, pondering the meaning of wine and ash. Zombie nights after zombie days, a thick and oily fog curling around my brain pipes. It's times like these I feel least human, sucking alcohol like oxygen, a progressive rage stewing in its own angry juices.

Why do planes crash? Why do bankers get blowjobs from Dartmouth alumni while the rest of us get nothing? I received a call from the college fundraising rats tonight -- how they got my cell phone number I don't know, but I suspect facebook is to blame. I am always appalled that my dear alma mater has the sack to ask me for money on the same day that I receive two bills for my student loans, which I'll be paying back into my thirties. Two hundred a month, in case you were wondering. That's like fifteen books, given my dangerous but lovely 40% employee discount.

There's ash on my floor and I don't want to clean it. I've been reading about Nixon and it leaves a bad taste in my mouth. I can't decide if I should be hopeful or not -- on the one hand, our policemen no longer seek out minorities to fuck over. Or do they? We lost George Wallace, but gained Sarah Palin. The four-year anniversary of Hunter S. Thompson's suicide is upon us, and I hope everyone realizes what we lost. I'm reading Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail, and political journalism needs someone like Hunter more than ever. It's amusing reading the editorial plugs of the book -- the "professionals" seem to love the word "sensational" -- irony unintended, I'm sure.

These are tough times, my brothers. My father's company laid off 10% of its work force today -- thankfully he was spared. My heart goes out to the thirty or so workers who weren't, not to mention the millions of newly-unemployed Americans who have just made the career change to welfare queens. Those lazy bastards. I try to write fiction but struggle. The process can be baffling. I can construct brilliant sentences that invoke everything from hope to insanity, but how to prevent the butterfly from crashing into the killing flame, and how to distinguish between the butterfly and the moth. That would be the rub.

I went to my first Celtics game last week -- money that shouldn't have been spent, but I wanted to treat my father to good seats, a belated birthday present. He suffers from psoriasis, but doesn't care. I admire him for that. There are times when he's fully broken out and reptilian, shedding scales that would never be allowed on daytime teevee. I admire my father in general -- he's the consummate Midwesterner, stoic, hardworking, not much given to idle conversation. He likes basketball and football, but doesn't really care who's playing. I'm a stat-freak, and can happily go on about Derrick Rose's assists per game compared to Chris Paul's rookie year for hours. Rajon Rondo was brilliant last night, by the way -- I just wish the kid would take more shots. Anyway, my dad could care less, which is fine. We had a good time at the game and the Cs won, thanks to Paul Pierce, who really has the ugliest shot in the game, but it's impossible not to love him if you live in Boston -- at least if you know what's good for you. I'm a recent convert to Boston sports, and I really do love the civic engagement with Boston teams. If you go to a bar in Allston (the student ghetto where I reside) you better know what Jed Lowrie hit after being called up and you better really really hate Kobe. I grew up during the Bulls' glory days and find it hard to convert to the little Irish men with pipes, but it's nice to cheer a winner. I still love John Paxson for that shot in '93, but he's not exactly competent as a GM -- Rose was a no-brainer, but Joakim Noah? The guy can't hit the basket unless it's less than four feet away. But I digress.

This new tradition of focusing the hi-def cameras on random members of the audience annoys me though. I don't want to be on the jumbotron. Anyway, I had an idea for a short story that involves someone with a skin condition being displayed and getting heckled for it by the gym and suntan booth crowd (who are the ones who can afford tickets, since it's obscene how much they cost now). I can't decide if it's a good "dramatic" moment for a short story or not -- and the dramatic moment is the crux of the MFA mill short story, and they are the gods who must be appeased if one wants the privilege of publication. I do the tone poem thing much better, but publication is the goal, after all.

This was rambling and incoherent, but that's where I am at the moment. I would like to follow Aaron's lead and get an internet-impaired PC, but I do love the Youtubes on occasion. We don't have cable, so I need to get the right-wing media from somewhere. On an off note, few things upset me more than hearing Democrats referred to as "left-wing." America doesn't have a left. The Democrats are center-right, center-center at their best. I'll leave that rant for a different time though.

The Trouble of Graduate School in the Humanities

A recent article in The Chronicle of Higher Education:

Graduate School in the Humanities: Just Don't Go

By THOMAS H. BENTON

Nearly six years ago, I wrote a column called "So You Want to Go to Grad School?" (The Chronicle, June 6, 2003). My purpose was to warn undergraduates away from pursuing Ph.D.'s in the humanities by telling them what I had learned about the academic labor system from personal observation and experience.

It was a message many prospective graduate students were not getting from their professors, who were generally too eager to clone themselves. Having heard rumors about unemployed Ph.D.'s, some undergraduates would ask about job prospects in academe, only to be told, "There are always jobs for good people." If the students happened to notice the increasing numbers of well-published, highly credentialed adjuncts teaching part time with no benefits, they would be told, "Don't worry, massive retirements are coming soon, and then there will be plenty of positions available." The encouragement they received from mostly well-meaning but ill-informed professors was bolstered by the message in our culture that education always leads to opportunity.

(full article)

--

An interesting discussion on Reddit regarding the article.

What do you think?

A Poem

So I'm really self-conscious about my writing -- a terrible trait to possess for a would-be writer -- but I'm proud of this poem. I wrote it in German originally, which is why that's the first version I'm posting. Not to be a pretentious asshole, it's just that that's how it expressed itself to me when I wrote it. English translation below.

“Szene aus dem 21. Jahrhundert”

(Am Zeil)

Ein Schwarzer mit einem weißen Kreuz
»Das Ende kommt bald
Die Tage gehen schnell… schnell«
Sagt er niemandem.
Klingelnde Glocken
Ein Lichtspiel durch Regenschleier
Schwebend in leeren Gesichterwellen
Suchte ich ‘was vom Schönen

Ich kam mit Zigaretten zurück.



"Scene from the 21st century"

(On the Zeil)

A black man with a white cross
"The End comes soon
The days go quickly, so quickly..."
He says to no one.
Ringing bells
A play of light through a veil of rain
Empty waves of faces hovering...
I was looking for Beauty itself

I came home with cigarettes.

Amputee

In a week or so, UPS will be delivering to me from New Jersey a package containing a circa 1998 IBM ThinkPad 600E laptop, which weighs some five pounds and boasts a Pentium II processor clocking in at about 233 megahertz. Its harddrive has no more than four gigabytes of space, and it comes equipped with Windows 2000, which will likely consume a considerable amount of its mere 128 megabytes of random access memory. It is a clunky, sturdy machine built of strong, composite plastics, one of IBM's most popular models to date. I bought this machine, because, dissatisfied with my current laptop, which is too powerful, too large, and too much like a very small desktop, I wanted something more portable, a "work" computer.

For some time, I considered my hand at the "netbook" craze -- pared-down laptops that sacrifice power for portability and convenience. As the name suggests, these machines are designed with the explicit intention of allowing their owners to maintain a constant connection to the Internet, be they in their homes, at work, in the park, in a cafe, on a train, or wherever. They are sleek, light, small, and cosmetically attractive. Moreover, they provide the tantalizing possibility to own something distinctively of the twenty-first century for but two to three hundred dollars. Netbooks have already begun and will undoubtedly continue to rival the glowing acrilic logos of the Mac Appletoshes in independent bookstores and street-corner coffee shops.

But then I realized that the purpose of a "work" computer is to facilitate the accomplishment of work, and I began to wonder if a netbook truly suited this purpose. While their low price and modern sleekness were appealling, the fact is that I can get very little done before once again melting into the cloud -- obsessively checking email, refreshing web sites, reading newsfeeds, checking blogs, visiting "social" centers like Reddit and Facebook. The notion of network neurosis is hardly new; it has been a punch-line since at least the advent of electronic mail. But the Cloud pulls the mind to shreds like cosmic entropy: one shuttles through the Internet, gazing at a procession of sights and sounds, so different from television not only in its interactivity, but because one knows that, out there, there are other people doing the same thing, that the very sites before one's eyes were created, as is often the case, by individuals, that each one is a strange work of art with human character -- and this very word, 'site', allows us to believe (and perhaps it is true) that the Internet is fundamentally a space ('cyberspace') that we can inhabit and travel, even as we sit in our chairs at our desks. But it is also time, and time lost.

All of these observations have been made before; the difference between now and 1992, to arbitrarily pick an incipient date, is that, while before these observations where predictions, projections, interpolations, and hypotheticals, now they are incontrovertibly true. The cliched image of the endless dark room of cubicles full of modern drones before glowing green terminals, this image that we always imagine as distant and dystopian, has only served to hide the fact that, taking away the bookshelves, tables, windows, paintings, trees, and people of our physical surroundings, we are in fact already living, and have been doing so for some time, without even realizing it, within cyberspace.

So, instead of buying a "netbook," I bought, for sixty dollars, an eleven year-old laptop, barely functional -- but enough for word-processing, and with a USB drive for file transfering -- in order to attempt to mitigate against this fact. It constitutes my first step in disconnecting myself from the Cloud; though, obviously, one, perhaps two or three little wires will always remain atached.

The IBM ThinkPad 600E is a glorious machine, not least of all because it is so impractical in the year 2008, so very obsolete, but also because it still maintains with it that old conception of computing, the "work" computer. Today, a computer is not a machine, it is a limb; computers have been incorporated fully into human life. We only notice that it is a machine when it ceases to function in some way, when the harddrive fails or when the monitor cracks; just as, it should be said, we only notice the fragility of our bodies, our biological machines, when an organ shuts down or a bone breaks. At all other times it is simply there as a part of our lives, like a nose that smells or an opposable thumb that holds. It comes with us where we go; it goes to "sleep" at night; it takes naps. It is warm; we can feel its heat beneath our wrists. It breathes with fans for lungs, distributing cool air in much the way our own bodies distribute hot blood.

But this black box of an instrument that is the IBM ThinkPad 600E is so obviously a piece of equipment, like a notebook or a ledger, a ruler or a hammer. In fact, I wanted something even more ostentatious than this model, at first. I looked into vintage Apple products, even Texas Instruments laptops, old computers made by companies one wouldn't even imagine. The more robotic they looked, with hard, inhuman edges and grey coats of paint, the better. I wanted something that seemed out of place and unnatural, something self-consciously a computer, not a seemless "peripheral" to my organism. I settled on the IBM ThinkPad 600E for a number of reasons -- price, functionality, ease-of-use -- but most of all for the very practical reason that its replacement batteries are still relatively inexpensive.

It will arrive in a few days. When it does, I will close my Acer Aspire 5672WLMi, which is hardly a cosmetic prize, but which serves far too well, not with its bells and whistles -- if only it had bells and whistles, like a 1950s robot! -- but as an appendage, and I will put it away, not "asleep" but turned off, until I need it again to perform basic functions like the checking of electronic mail, the reading of news, and other forms of communication.

Then will begin my amputation.

(Perhaps in any future reflection on this matter, I will have to address the irony of writing about it on a web log, and of having purchased my IBM ThinkPad 600E on eBay using PayPal and a credit card from an anonymous man -- well, not anonymous: Joe Birnbaum writing from Victoria Birnbaum's email account -- in New Jersey.)

Paradise

"Paradise, indeed! Nobody else in the world, I am bold to affirm – nobody, at least, in our bleak little world of New England – had dreamed of Paradise, that day, except as the pole suggests the tropic."

-- Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Blithedale Romance