Posts tagged "commentary":

Apocalypse vibes

The word apocalypse comes, via Latin, from the Greek word apokalyptein, “uncover, disclose, reveal,” itself a compound word made up of apo-, “off, away from,” and kalyptein, “to cover, conceal.”

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Rejection is not expulsion.

Expulsion means being removed from a community. When the community expels you it sets itself as a unit against you, who are stuck apart from the remaining community and separated from as it if by a barrier.

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All art is advertising.

“Art” properly speaking is an advertisement for itself.

Perverse combinations of English words

Not really sure what I'm saying here

I don’t think it’s possible for humans to regulate themselves. Let me give a concrete example: I really believe, after being in several online chat rooms to which someone as a sort of sabotage or terrorism posted pornographic photos and videos of minors, that we are not ready for the internet. The technical means whereby we can regulate such matters are exceedingly primitive, and more often than not simply fall back on mass moderation by humans. That we are sick enough to consider such a thing an acceptable cost of the dubious benefits of the instrument proves my point.

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Woah this came out longer than expected.

Now I suppose that this will be either obvious to everyone or too stupid to be worth speaking about, so I shan’t promote it in any sort of official or academic capacity, but this thought came to me just now as I was reflecting on a dispute I had (consensually) in an online chat room about… well I’m not sure about what exactly, because this character started out trying to make some arguments about “social justice” but ended up outing himself as an unwitting reactionary. The thought was this: since verbal arguments are judged by immanent formal criteria, they don’t mean anything about the world. Winning or losing an argument has literally nothing at all to do in any sort of way with being right or wrong. You might as well say that the winner of a chess game is a better person.

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Back, back, back again!

I’ve been thinking, lately, about what humans are good for. Or more to the point, what I am good for. I’m an information worker, effectively. I am, professionally, an input/output device for a machine, or more generally, for the network of machines. In another turn of phrase, I’m a “content creator”. Yes, I include computer programs as “content” here, which is perhaps more general than people care for. But I think it makes sense to think of it this way: from the perspective of the computer, the user is an input/output device like any other. It’s difficult to draw exactly the line, here: in fact, it’s the keyboard, mouse, screen, speakers, cameras, microphones, and so on that are the input/output devices. But the information channeled back into the machine by those means comes from the human. In some sense, these interfaces are equipment that the computer uses to interact with the world. One could equally ask where, exactly, the line is with a more “traditional” device: where, exactly, is the line in a hard disk? In fact the main computer doesn’t typically interact with the disk directly at all; there’s another small computer on the disk that, in turn, controls the motors and servos that spin the disks and move the read head; information is written on and read back from the magnetic surface, which flows back to the computer.

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Writing

Writing is difficult. Words are like stitches and a story like textile. Like a textile? Like fabric? Like? So many options. “Technique” and “textile” may be from the same Proto-Indo-European root; or rather, there are two roots that may be the same, covering the space of “beget, produce, weave.” Writing is a form of weaving, as is computation. Why is a type-writer like a loom? Sadie Plant would be proud of me.

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Research outline

This isn’t a full article, just an outline for a future research project; I apologize for the incompleteness of the research so far.

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Comment on meeting nice people in a hotel bar

Sometimes I am overcome with a sudden fierce love for human beings.

Knowing and ignorance

Lawd, there’s so much I don’t know. And I don’t mean this as a general admission of ignorance or defeat: I mean, very concretely, that there are so many things that I know I don’t know. The more I inquire into computers, the greater vistas of previously unknown unknowns open themselves up to view: the more I realize I didn’t know what I didn’t know. And the more I know I don’t know, the less it feels like I know.

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Monolingualism Considered Harmful

This has always been a blog about language, so I’m going to tell you a story about language.

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Addictive machines

Computing machines are addictive. Internet and gaming addictions are more or less recognized phenomena, but I don’t know whether we talk about “computer addiction” as a more general phenomenon. In classical behavioralist terms, it’s periodic reinforcement: occasional, unpredictable positive stimuli that result from using the machine—as you use the machine, it occasionally rewards you with a sudden feeling of success that encourages you to use it more. This can be easily compared to gambling addiction: it’s not very far from a slot machine to a computing machine. Like the slot machine, the computing machine provides and addictive feedback structure that: it periodically rewards our efforts just often enough to condition us to continue poking at it. Ask a programmer, and they’ll tell you that they do the work because it’s addicting. There’s a reason we feel such a drive to debug code: we’re chasing the high we get when it finally works.

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How is a laptop like a typewriter?

In David Cronenburg’s 1991 film Naked Lunch the protagonist Bill Lee (Peter Wellers) is an author wrapped up in a conspiracy run by bugs. He communicates with them through his type writer, which transforms into a creature. In one still, the machine becomes a head whose teeth are the keys; Bill sits calmly at his desk and puts his hands into the alien creature’s mouth to type. There are stalks on top of the head and its skin is waxy and pale. In another scene the machine obscenely opens to him, pink and sticky; he massages it.

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Fluency is a Spook

I feel as though I’ve seen this said before…

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Metaverses

FLAME ON

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Some interesting websites or: how I act when I'm insecure, which is all the time

The main purpose of this website is seemingly to display my own ntelligence—certainly that seems to be a common enough reason to make a blog like this one. But I don’t know whether I’m as intelligent as all that: I think that I just have an occasional stream-of-consciousness essay-ette to write that maybe I’d like to share with a few readers. Maybe at some point somebody will read these pieces in retrospect: Mark Fisher’s blog was published as a book, after all. [In a development that would make the master proud, the blog seems to have undergone shoggothic mitosis: here’s another archive of the same content.] Certainly other people develop sprawling hypertext webrealms: check out Ralph Dumain’s Autodidact Project and Justin B Rye’s Home Page. They seem content to make their own sites for their own purposes. If someone reads them, so much the better.

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"Give me it!"

I was at the beach today (St Andrews had an absolutely spectacular September this year), and I heard a young boy scream to his brother as they threw around a disk toy, “give me it!”. This construction immediately struck me as odd. It is, of course, correct, insofar as I (and more importantly, his brother) understood him clearly: he wanted his brother to pass the toy to him. But the construction “give me it” nevertheless made my ears perk up. Let’s take a look.

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