§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.
Showing posts with label modernity. Show all posts
Showing posts with label modernity. Show all posts
Sunday, February 22, 2009
Tuesday, February 17, 2009
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?
Monday, February 9, 2009
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.)
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.)
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