Last weekend I drove out to Milwaukee to attend The Nonhuman Turn conference hosted by the Center for 21st Century Studies at University of Wisconsin—Milwaukee. I drove through two thunderstorms, and a third hit shortly after I arrived; the first thunderstorm came at the worst possible time. One side of the highway was under construction, so all traffic was reduced to two lanes (one either direction) with flimsy dividers separating the 18-wheelers passing at 50 mph. When the rain hit, and visibility was reduced to about 15-20 ft. (for me, at least), the trucks slowed to about 40 mph, but with no shoulder there was nothing I could do but keep the pace even though the rain was coming down so fast that my windsheet looked like a fishbowl.

After about 10 minutes of the most nerve-wracking driving I’ve ever performed in my life (yes, this beats out the deer in Montana), I noticed lights just off to my right, and I immediately pulled over onto the shoulder I now knew existed.

The rest of the way, I continued listening to Tim Morton’s broken lecture (that’s a Heideggar joke, y’all) about the notion of withdrawl in object-oriented ontology, and then the EconTalk interview with Tyler Cowen to work up my appetite.

Arrived early and introduced myself. The intervals between plenary and panel sessions were an absolute joy, and I met dozens of fabulous people, from all over the country and the world. There was a huge contingent from Quebec, and a decent-sized group from Georgia, and a few folks from The Netherlands. Particularly wonderful was meeting Sarah Juliet Lauro of UC—Davis who is also auditing Tim’s grad class, and Shane Denson who teaches at Leibniz Universität Hannover, but claims he’s from Texas. I’ve heard him talk, I call bullshit.

The opening plenary was from Brian Massumi (University of Montréal, Communication Science) whose talk was entitled Animality and Abstraction (Abstract/My Notes, Adrian Ivakhiv’s Notes). I struggled to keep pace with it, although I suspect that the parts I flat out didn’t get simply weren’t written assuming my lack of background, as the concepts I was familiar with were lucid (supernormal stimulation, etc). I actually have Massumi’s A user’s guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia sitting on my desk, and the UMN Press translation he put together for Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus.

Massumi was followed by his co-conspirator, Erin Mannin), whose talk, Another Regard (Abstract/My Notes, Adrian Ivankhiv’s Notes), moved between being-gorilla, autism, dance, and how Whitehead and Deleuze’s conceptions of processual being tie those threads together. Manning has a talent for conveying a strong and supple empathy along with her rigorous theoretical dissection - a lot of the concepts were new to me, but I appreciated the introduction.

Spent the evening with some locals found via Couchsurfing, and the four of us won first place in a local bar trivia contest. Much drinking, not much sleep.

Day two opened with the host, Richard Grusin, asking Why Nonhuman Now? (Abstract/My Notes, Adrian Ivakhiv’s Notes), and reflecting on some of the Facebook debates that occurred in the initial threads announcing the conference. Some comments (mostly positive, albeit cautious) were made about the rather active Twitter backchannel that had sprung up and that inspired the rather amusing response from a friend of mine:

Can someone please tell me what the fuck @hewhocutsdown is doing?

— Nathan McKay (@nateosaurusrex) May 4, 2012

Note to self: turn off @hewhocutsdown twitter feed from my phone for the rest of the weekend.

— Nathan McKay (@nateosaurusrex) May 5, 2012

Jane Bennett followed on with a curious talk, entitled Systems and Things: A Materialst and an Object-Oriented Philosopher Walk Into A Bar… (Abstract/My Notes, Adrian Ivakhiv’s Notes), in which she tried to outline the borders and bounds between her own thinking and the object-oriented ontologies (OOO) of Harman, Morton, Bryant and Bogost. It was not without irony, then, to listen to her close with a comment about Whitman understanding the potency of poetry, as Morton has written extensively about poetry and causality from an OOO perspective. Bennett closed with a recitation of a selection from Finnegan’s Wake:

The warped flooring of the lair and soundconducting walls thereof, to say nothing of the uprights and imposts, were persianly literatured with burst loveletters, telltale stories, stickyback snaps, doubtful eggshells, bouchers, flints, borers, puffers, amygdaloid almonds, rindless raisins, alphybettyformed verbage, vivlical viasses, ompiter dictas, visus umbique, ahems and ahahs, imeffible tries at speech unasyllabled, you owe mes, eyoldhyms, fluefoul smut, fallen lucifers, vestas which had served, showered ornaments, borrowed brogues, reversibles jackets, blackeye lenses, family jars, falsehair shirts, Godforsaken scapulars, neverworn breeches, cutthroat ties, counterfeit franks, best intentions, curried notes, upset latten tintacks, unused mill and stumpling stones, twisted quills, painful digests, magnifying wineglasses, solid objects cast at goblins, once current puns, quashed quotatoes, messes of mottage, unquestionable issue papers, seedy ejaculations, limerick damns, crocodile tears, spilt ink, blasphematory spits, stale shestnuts, schoolgirl’s, young ladies, milkmaids’, washerwomen’s, shopkeepers’ wives, merry widows’, ex nuns’, vice abbess’s, pro virgins’, super whores’, silent sisters’, Charleys’ aunts’, grandmothers’, mothers’-in-laws, fostermothers’, godmothers’ garters, tress clippings from right, lift and cintrum, worms of snot, toothsome pickings, cans of Swiss condensed bilk, highbrow lotions, kisses from the antipodes, presents from pickpockets, borrowed plumes, relaxable handgrips, princess promises, lees of whine, deoxodised carbons, convertible collars, diviliouker doffers, broken wafers, unloosed shoe latchets, crooked strait waistcoats, fresh horrors from Hades, globules of mercury, undeleted glete, glass eyes for an eye, gloss teeth for a tooth, war moans, special sighs, longsufferings of longstanding, ahs ohs ouis sis jas jos gias neys thaws sos, yeses and yeses and yeses, to which, if one has the stomach to add the breakages, upheavals distortions, inversions of all this chambermade music one stands, given a grain of goodwill, a fair chance of actually seeing the whirling dervish, Tumult, son of Thunder, self exiled in upon his ego,a nightlong a shaking betwixtween white or reddr hawrors, noondayterrorised to skin and bone by an ineluctable phantom (may the Shaper have mercery on him!) writing the mystery of himsel in furniture.

Following Bennett was the first breakout session; I attended the Objects panel, and had to miss out on the Death panel (which was apparently quite interesting, talking about corpses and meat and what-have-you). Neverthless, the Objects panel was fantastic, with James J. Brown, Jr. talking about Occupy Wall Street’s becoming-loudspeaker in Rhetorical Carpentry and Becoming Object (Abstract/My Notes), T. Hugh Crawford following that up with a meditation on the process of woodworking that led to a casing for a copy of Being & Time that was sent to an unruly primate in Thinking with Trees: Material-Imagination (Abstract/My Notes) and closing with Lynn Keller opening my eyes to a world of cutting-edge poetry that was, frankly, inaccessible to me previously, in The Eco-Poetics of Hyper-Objects: Evelyn Reilly’s Styrofoam (Abstract/My Notes).

Lunch was spent with Gerry Canavan and others, talking about roleplaying games, science fiction, and OOO. My Eclipse Phase t-shirt was perfect for the subject at hand, as we talked about smart dust, sapient parrots, empires of time/peak oil, and the political subconciousness in zombie fiction.

After lunch, Steven Shaviro spoke on the Consequences of Panpsychism (Abstract/My Notes, Adrian Ivakhiv’s Notes). It was quite good, although I agree with one questioner’s critique of terminology, recommending panexperientism as an alternative, as what Shaviro’s arguing isn’t that everything has a mind.

The second breakout session I spent missing the Deleuze/Whitehead bonanza that Adrian Ivakhiv kicked off, as well as the panel on Animals, but we make choices. The panel on Ethics was not at all what I expected; the first speaker was ill and unable to attend, and the second, Kenneth M. George, gave a talk (Companionable Objects, Companionable Conscience: Ethics and the Predicaments of Dwelling with Things, (Abstract/My Notes) that was 1 part theory and 2 parts ethnographic survey. It was fascinating, and it made me think back to how many of the best “theoretical” books are explorations of concrete phenomena; I’m thinking of Jacques Ellul’s Propaganda, Bruno Latour’s The Pasteurization of France, Fernand Braudel’s Civilization and Capitalism, etc. The third panelist shall not be named nor spoken of; the less said of it, the better.

The closing plenary was from Tim Morton and it’s title (They Are Here (Abstract/My Notes, Adrian Ivakhiv’s Notes)). It was not a “talk”, but rather an experience, what Morton later described as a carefully measured-out dosage of straight anxiety. The rhythm and cadence of the talk and the resulting affect was as much, or rather more its content than the words themselves. It was an experience, and it made the concepts breathe.

At some point during the day Bruce Sterling chimed in with his newscast commentary, riffing off of Grusin’s “turn fatigue”:

Let’s make that the “early 21st century,” as there’s bound to be a turn AFTER the posthuman turn and the nonhuman turn; circa 2033 or so, there’s bound to be a learned gathering of something beyond the Post and Non, and it would be great if we left them some canned food and tasty nitrogen-frozen finger-snacks Wait wait wait! This just in from @anthropunk! “The PolyHuman”

I closed out the evening with some fantastic Mexican food and a trip to the distillery, and some passionate conversation about the genius of Alan Moore and Thomas Pynchon.

The final day opened with Wendy Chun’s plenary, on Becoming Networks (Abstract/My Notes, Adrian Ivakhiv’s Notes); it was reassuring, what with so many sessions about semi-technical subjects from humanities scholars, to hear a humanities lecture from a former engineering student. A really enjoyable talk, although her use of the term “public domain” implied a copyright culture wholly unlike that which actually exists, and so while her point is correct, it implies caveats that were not made explicit.

I ignored the […] Human and Arts breakout sessions for the first Mediation session. The opening panelist, James J. Pulizzi, used the V2 from Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow as the protagonist in his talk Mediation for Nonhuman Cognitions (Abstract/My Notes). Anne Helmond then presented what may have been the best single panel session, The Good Hyperlink (Abstract/My Notes), which explored the varieties of existences a socially-shared URL encounters. Her study, with the network diagram, is available at her site. Michael Stevenson closed the panel with Simple solutions: Slashdot and the articulation of web culture as informated media (Abstract/My Notes).

After lunch Mark Hansen’s plenary, Against Clairvoyance: The Future of 21st Century Media (Abstract/My Notes, Adrian Ivakhiv’s Notes), melted my brain. Apparently I need to read Whitehead. Adrian’s notes may make more sense than my own.

The last breakout session I spent jumping between the Queer/Feminist/Gaga and Mediation II panels, although perhaps I should have continued on to the Performance for The Revelations of Dr. Kx4l3ndj3r (luckily, it’s on Youtube). I missed out on Rhetoric altogether.

The first session was Shane Denson’s Object-Oriented Gaga: Theorizing the Nonhuman Mediation of Twenty-First Century Celebrity (Abstract/My Notes/Video of the presentation), which was actually quite interesting; check out the video at the link.

I then skipped over to Jason Farman’s talk, The Materiality of Mobile Media: An Object-Oriented Approach to Mobile Networks (Abstract/My Notes), which featured some excellent detective work on his part in tracking the full signal path of his Foursquare checkin from the warehouse that houses Foursquare’s servers. Tero Karppi closed with Happy Accidents—Facebook and the Autonomy of Affect (Abstract/My Notes) which brought up some intriguing notions about how we relate to one another now that we have the Facebook-Timeline “sixth sense”.

The conference closed with Ian Bogost’s The Aesthetics of Philosophical Carpentry (Abstract/My Notes, Adrian Ivakhiv’s Notes) which was, like Morton’s plenary the day before, more performative than informative. Which, frankly, was great. Most of us had spent the last three days getting our mind melted, and hearing Bogost talk about custard and his grandmother and legends about Korean dragons and train stations was the perfect closure to the whirlwind experience.

Adrian has posted some closing thoughts at his blog, as I’m sure some others have as well. I feel incredibly fortunate to have been able to attend, and I hope some of the acquaintances I made become friends or co-conspirators in the future.

There’s really very little to argue with, here. If you accept the premises, the conclusions follow smoothly, and the clear demarcations at conception and birth allow for very little ambiguity in interpretation. The only tricky issues given this ethical stance are social; what puts a woman in a position where an abortion is desirable? What support systems (economic, social, psychology, etc) are present for her to carry the baby to term? What happens to the children born thus?

Unfortunately, the premises are not without their problems, and changing just one premise slightly can throw the entire stable belief system out of whack. And the picture given above isn’t just a little off; most of the premises are ill-founded or mere assertions. It’s unlikely that there is a transcendent entity, although that’s fundamentally unprovable - to insist otherwise is an assertion either without evidence or in many cases, in spite of evidence to the contrary. With or without such an entity, the existence of a universal law (whether a literal divine mandate such as shari’ia or something more like utilitarianism) has thus far proven elusive to the most competent philosophers. If such a universal ethic exists, it’s not universally agreed upon, which makes its implementation and enforcement a problem of history and politics more than ontology.

Presenting humans as privileged animals panders to our feelings of self-importance, but most evidence points to humans as being different in degree, rather than kind. This is most stark when comparing the foetal human to other animals. This confounds the later questions, as well; a foetal human is less sentient than an adult chimpanzee, so if the human difference is defined as “sentience”, then certain nonhumans will rank as more sentient than certain humans. Similarly, if the fact of life itself is not sufficient to determine the ethic, then the clean boundary that conception presents is replaced by a more hazy boundary defined by sentience, capacity for sensation, sapience, degree of dependence, and any number of other facts - all of which are terribly difficult to identify, harder to define, and next-to-impossible to agree upon.

As an aside, much of the rhetoric on the pro-life side uses “innocence” as a qualifying factor - confusingly, as the doctrine of original sin seems to negate this possibility, but perhaps it serves the purpose of minimizing the cognitive dissonance involved in simultaneously supporting drone strikes and capital punishment.

Given all these problems with the common pro-life prior assumptions, many who self-describe as pro-choice respond by artificially narrowing the complexity of the problem. This simplistic examination opens itself up to attack, and deservedly so. Human life is still assumed to be exceptional, but “human” is defined as beginning at some point between conception and birth (or in rare cases, after birth). The implication is that we need have no moral concern for the nonhuman.

Additionally, there is a disavowal of the actual action; even when a pro-choice activist acknowledges an ethical divide (up to the third trimester abortion is okay, but not afterwards) the far side of the divide is described as problematic but rarely as murder or manslaughter (or whatever the relevant legal distinction is). After all, it’s impolitic, seen as catering to their political opponents.

“When is it clearly not okay to terminate a gestating human life?” is a question that those who are willing to consider beyond mere assertion will likely disagree on forever. Nevertheless, I think there are inroads where consensus may be formed generally, if not on the specifics.

For one thing, most people agree that less abortion is better, particularly late-stage abortion. At the one extreme, very few people (thankfully) will say that infanticide is not immoral, and agreement on which point it ceases to be immoral grows as you trace the process backward through the third trimester, to the second, to the first. When you reach the point just prior to conception, the only folks remaining on the immoral side of the fence are those who oppose all forms of birth control, “seed-spilling” and the like. So while you may never be able to please everyone, there are opportunities for a broad consensus on keeping the abortions that happen as near conception as possible, and emphasizing pre-conception preventative measures.

What causes a gestating human to “achieve personhood” in the moral or legal sense varies; some say its tied to the capacity to feel pain, others to sentience or even sapience, others to to the capacity to have desires and intentions. Perhaps it’s an emergent property of dozens of factors, any one of which may be absent but when a critical mass arises the personhood becomes recognizable. In that last case, it becomes impossible to make a clear distinction except at the extremities.

This inscrutability should inspire a conservative response; if it’s not clear whether you are dealing with the possibility of ending the life of a person (however defined), or not, the default should be to avoid actions that would endanger that person. When this person’s further growth endangers the person carrying them (the mother), the party best equipped to answer the dilemma would be the mother herself.

There are a few interesting implications, here. The first is that if the divide is no longer conception but “personhood”, the unexceptional nature of humanity means that the same ethical imperative occurs regarding the killing of other species who meet the same standard. It is here that animal rights activists and pro-life activists should find common cause, and indeed some already recognize this, as shown in this essay by Andy Alexis-Baker, who is exploring a posthuman Christian ethic for life:

We must see the incarnation is not that the Son became human, but that the Son became flesh: that is, God became a creature. That is the widest horizon within which to see the incarnation.

Additionally, since the clarity increases the nearer to conception we get, the emphasis on action should be similarly weighted, with access to educational resources, means of prevention, early-information and early action encouraged and made available as trivally and at as low a cost as socially possible. Even more broadly, it behooves society to examine the broader causal factors of problematic or undesired pregnancies, and address these at their roots, be they cultural attitudes, familial instability, economic insecurity or what have you.

That brings up the second major ethical dilemma that is too often elided in these discussions, which is the relationship between the individual and society. In the starkest variant of the narrative that all abortion is murder, society has a clear role: to protect the potential victims, and to prosecute the guilty. In the more illegible narratives, collective actions become less clear as well. For myself, it makes sense to have laws that restrict abortions to a certain stage of pregnancy, with exceptions only made for medical emergencies; the gap between conception and the legally-mandated bound ought to be policed with the aforementioned means of education, prevention and cultural support for the women involved - encouraging them through the pregancy and providing medical and fiscal support to encourage this, offering adoptive parents when necessary, discouraging abortions as the pregnancy progresses, and whatever else makes sense. In prosecuting cases of the laws against late-stage abortion, care should be made to focus on making the consequences strong disincentives rather than punishments.

Resources

I was inspired to write this after reading David Session’s response to a classmate’s debate with a Planned Parenthood volunteer.

Some of the most clearheaded writing on the subject has been by Alonzo Fyfe (creator of the moral system of desirism), who wrote the ethics of abortion and infanticide at his blog several years ago (part 1, 2).

More generally, John Michael Greer writes of ethics:

Test every choice against the requirements of whole systems, the necessity of flow, the inevitability of balance, the reality of limits, the nature of cause and effect, the relationship among the planes, and the process of evolution, and you will find that any decision that makes sense when measured against these standards will be both the ethical choice and the effective one.

Finally, David Sessions kindly emailed me a PDF of Kristin Dombek’s phenomenal piece on “The Two Cultures of Life” in n+1. It’s a story of growing up as an anti-abortion activist, converting to an animal rights activist, and comparing the cases of Scott Roeder and David San Deigo. I’ve posted some excerpts here, and you can purchase the digital version of issue 10 at the n+1 shop.

It’s May Day today, and the various branches of Occupy have announced a general strike that has met with mixed success. Regardless of the larger logistical, tactical and strategic issues, I found myself thinking hard about why strikes and unions are particularly absent from information technology.

Unions are particularly notable, and a large part of that is due to the high specificity of the required skill sets (someone with DB2 and AIX experience is not interchangeable with someone who’s used Access and Windows Server), the necessity of a deep system knowledge (in the case of infrastructure for systems administrators, and code base for programmers), and the illegibility (in the James C. Scott sense) of much of the work, particularly with software archtecture and the like.

Once work is made legible, concrete and measurable, IT becomes much like other industries with network engineers and software developers working largely within defined borders, and here unionization makes a little more sense; nevertheless, the absence of unionized IT staff is conspicuous.

I’ll let others address the union question, I’m more interested in strikes. Strikes take many forms, and are performed for different reasons. In most cases, it’s a form of leverage that the workers can use to coerce management to accept terms that are more in line with what the workers want. But a general strike isn’t about a particular company, or a particular issue—it’s a show of solidarity between workers across companies and industries. Work-to-rule strikes operate by being meticulous about the rules, to the point of excruciating inefficiencies, and are the easiest to map to the IT workplace. And in extreme cases, the destruction of equipment can force the shutdown of a workplace.

“With great power comes great responsibility,” the quote goes, and for the most part, IT workers take it to heart. Even amongst the more security-obsessed corporations, a systems administrator yields power far in excess of a line-worker. This actually makes a strike harder, not easier, as there’s little in the way of “small acts” that are both noticeable and without devastating effect.

For instance, a work-to-rule strike would work; but not right away, and not without involvement from most of the department. Most IT work is resilient against short absences, and barring a catastrophe (server goes down at 4:55, everyone clocks out at 5:00 without fixing it), will likely not even be noticed at the time span of a single day. Simple absence is somewhat more effective, although there are often liabilities involved regarding departmental availability; this is less true with developers, but particularly poignant with departments that service other departments or companies, and need to maintain a response threshold or suffer lost business and stiff fines. Equipment destruction is the most striking, with the capacity for devastation unfathomable for most organizations. The doxing attacks by Anonymous and its spawn have shown how much damage is available to the determined outsider; an insider who knows the database schemas, holds the private keys and writes the server scripts can, in the cases of small- to medium-sized businesses, bring severe damage to it.

This “nuclear option” actually functions as a deterrent, and as an incentive towards order. The second-order effect being that such a nonymous attacker would likely never work in that field again prevents all but the most disgruntled from attempting anything; and even they tend to pull their punches.

Finally, IT workers have years of observational experience of the brunt side of precarity; entire departments outsourced or downsized due to minor algorithmic enhancements, competent minds put out to pasture when the latest acronym fad rolls in, and a job market that is good for their skill set, but not that good. As a relatively privileged set of workers, upsetting the status quo implies significant personal liabilities (with recent laws such activists could be tried under national security legislation and/or various hacking/fraud laws) for uncertain collective gains.

I finally grasped the root of my offense, taken early and often, in response to myriad of techno-optimists and mystics who speak of “new generations”, “higher thought patterns”, “next levels”, “stage n+1”, etc, etc. Toffler makes an argument in the excerpt for a Third Wave of organization that is beginning to crest after the crush of a hierarchical, rigid, Second Wave institutions. The same arguments occur elsewhere, and they’re not wrong; there are new organizational dynamics that companies and other organizations are taking on and adapting to.

What’s wrong isn’t what Toffler says, but what he doesn’t. The implication for many readers is that the Second Wave institutions are going to disappear, that there is a Marxist inevitability in the supremacy of these new social orderings; that it simply becomes a matter of getting on the bandwagon and waiting for the future.

That future never comes. At least, not as we expect it to.

Instead, the Second Wave institutions persist, despite the Third Wave institutions making inroads in certain arenas. Hell, there are still some vestiages of the First Wave lurking about. What’s going on? Why is this the case?

I’d like to give this fallacy a name, as it occurs repeatedly, particularly in futurist circles; I call it the evolutionary fallacy. Evolution, as we all know, involves the process of intergenerational differentiation over time, resulting not only in speciation but all manner of localized adaptations.

What we consider less, however, is that the temporal character of evolution and that of our own lives are discontinuous. That is, evolution operates at all scales simultaneously; it is fallacious to assume that I, as a human, am more evolved than my goldfish or the ant crawling across my desk. Even arguing that I am more complex as an organism does not always produce a clear answer. To compound the confusion, the majority of me isn’t even me; my own body consists mostly of other microorganisms, many of them highly evolved for the ecosystem that is my body.

This fallacy also appears in discussions of the mind, where conscious cognition is favoured over the unconscious (the ocean that the rubber duck floats upon) and the body and the environment which gives rise to it.

In organizational theory, it may mean that Third Wave organizations eventually develop the kinds of reflexivity, self-awareness, and capacity to enact environmental changes that has so marked the rise of humanity in the past ten millenia. But even if that is the case, it will result not in an organizational environment of supreme dominance and monopoly, but more probably an environment mutually determined by its predecessors.

Some organizational models may be dinosaurs relative to their furry, mammalian counterparts. But rather than die out, some, like crocodiles, may opt for minor modifications and restrict their scale and scope, and others, like birds, may make an evolutionary leap of their own.

OS/400 PASE is an integrated runtime that provides simplified porting of UNIX applications. It provides a broad set of AIX interfaces, in a runtime that allows many AIX binaries to execute directly on the PowerPC processor of iSeries. OS/400 PASE is available as OS/400 Option 33.

1. Preliminary Setup

Ghostscript should be compiled using gcc and gmake, not make (which uses AIX’s cc by default).

YiP’s Wiki has some fantastic resources on setting up PASE to install RPMs. I’ll borrow liberally from YiP, but I’m only listing the salient portions here:

Download rpm.rte, wget.rpm, setup.sh and wwwinstall.sh and save them to /QOpenSys/download (create the directory using CALL QP2TERM and mkdir /QOpenSys/download if it does not exist already).

On your 5250 emulator, sign in as a security officer and run:

CALL QP2TERM
$ cd /QOpenSys/download
$ chmod +x *.sh

Run setup.sh

$ ./setup.sh
rpm  ... is installed ...
wget ... is installed ...

You’re ready to download some RPMs now. You can read the help online or use the help flag:

$ ./wwwinstall.sh --help

There are some predefined packages that can be downloaded using wwwinstall.sh. A full list is available from YiP’s Wiki. Downloading the Base group (which includes RPMs for bash-doc bash bc bzip2 findutils gettext git grep gzip info less lsof lsof mawk patch popt prngd readline rpm-build rpm rxvt screen sed sharutils sudo tar tcsh unzip which zip zsh) can be done like so:

$ ./wwwinstall.sh GetBase

This will download the RPMs to /QOpenSys/download. All RPMs can be installed by using the rpm command with the following flags:

$ rpm --ignoreos --ignorearch --nodeps --replacepkgs -hUv *.ppc.rpm

For compiling Ghostscript we’ll need more recent versions of a few of the packages. Download & install the CompileTools package, and then do likewise for gcc, gcc-c++, libgcc, libstdc++-devel and libstdc++ version 4.2.0 for AIX 5.3. RPM links are listed at IBM’s AIX Toolbox for Linux Applications page.

$ ./wwwinstall.sh GetCompileTools
$ rpm --ignoreos --ignorearch --nodeps --replacepkgs -hUv *.ppc.rpm
$ mkdir updated_rpms
$ cd updated_rpms
$ wget ftp://ftp.software.ibm.com/aix/freeSoftware/aixtoolbox/RPMS/ppc/gcc/gcc-cplusplus-4.2.0-3.aix5.3.ppc.rpm
$ wget ftp://ftp.software.ibm.com/aix/freeSoftware/aixtoolbox/RPMS/ppc/gcc/gcc-4.2.0-3.aix5.3.ppc.rpm
$ wget ftp://ftp.software.ibm.com/aix/freeSoftware/aixtoolbox/RPMS/ppc/gcc/libgcc-4.2.0-3.aix5.3.ppc.rpm
$ wget ftp://ftp.software.ibm.com/aix/freeSoftware/aixtoolbox/RPMS/ppc/gcc/libstdcplusplus-devel-4.2.0-3.aix5.3.ppc.rpm
$ wget ftp://ftp.software.ibm.com/aix/freeSoftware/aixtoolbox/RPMS/ppc/gcc/libstdcplusplus-4.2.0-3.aix5.3.ppc.rpm
$ rpm --ignoreos --ignorearch --nodeps --replacepkgs -hUv *.ppc.rpm

1. Download Ghostscript

   CALL QP2TERM $ mkdir /QOpenSys/compile $ cd /QOpenSys/compile $ wget http://downloads.ghostscript.com/public/ghostscript-9.05.tar.gz $ tar zxvf ghostscript-9.05.tar.gz

If you installed gzip earlier, the z flag will work; otherwise unzip it elsewhere and untar using tar xvf instead.

1. Configure Ghostscript, prepare for make

   $ cd ghostscript-9.05 $ pwd /QOpenSys/compile/ghostscript-9.05 $ ./configure –build=”powerpc-ibmaix5.3.0.0”

Download and apply the following patch to OpenJPEG (opj_malloc.h) to avoid the ERROR: Undefined symbol: .memalign failure during compilation. (Original Google Code thread)

1. Compile

   $ gmake

Once gmake finishes, you’ll have a final binary in /QOpenSys/compile/ghostscript-9.05/bin/gs.

The sun rises.

My derelict surveyance-morph (designed by the hypercorp, built by the hypercorp, and paid for on credit from the hypercorp) lies languid over the granite teeth that populate the lower jaw of this alien crevasse. The maw above looms and gapes, beams of light dribbling down its throat and exciting my remaining operational solar cells. The fraction of a rotation’s worth of sunlight I receive is, tragically, still enough to charge my core systems, keeping the central processing units (ergo, my ego) fully powered and fully useless, stuck at the base of a fucking ditch.

I think a good many people ignored the edge cases when they made the jump to ego-based transhumanism. Everyone was aware of personality distortion; the inevitable discrepancies that arise when converting an analog cortex to its digital near-equivalent. And language – not spoken languages, so much as thought language, particularly metaphor – broke down considerably, especially with some of the less humanoid morph designs of late. But that’s not quite what I’m referring to. You see, transhumanism has always had its malcontents usually derived from some philosophic contestation, but for all their thought experiments, somehow my present situation eluded them.

Assuming the technical specifications for this morph (courtesy, once again, of the hypercorp) aren’t wildly optimistic (and without mesh access, who can tell?), the solar cells have a continuous operating period of 450 Mercury-years, assuming the correlated solar level of a distance of 0.3123 AU. This location is quite a bit further aspace. Assuming an extrapolated future of near-constant darkness punctuated by short interims of brilliance, I suspect I’ll be stable and powered for a Mercury-millenia or three.

This could have been simply solved with some sort of self-destruct button. An ego-wipe option would be acceptable, although that’d be a tempting target for the nefarious and would never pass audit. Even still, I’d rather that than centuries of imposed isolation. It wouldn’t even be a suicide, if you think about it. I’m sure by now the corp has got me out surveying again, pay docked for the lost morph and surveyance data.

My muse refuses to talk to me any more; the loss of mesh access made her snap, finally. The HUD still shows sporting stats from an eon ago. A week’s worth of messages sit in my local inbox – the archives are stored in the corp cloud. I can’t bear to watch them any more. Instead, every skein of this crevasse has been meticulously memorized. Observations are compared with priors, and I track the deltas. Some have names. There is a hairline fracture that I’ve been hoping to see turn into a genuine crack; 10 years or less, local time. This report is my rosary, a prayer for purpose uttered out of the subconscious.

The breaking light shifts the mood and I observe my various limbs and organs, tauntingly detached or unresponsive. If only the Sisphyean boulder would roll back upon me; in asteroid strikes, tectonic shifts or a simple misapplied detonation. When the light returns, it speaks of discovery and of second chances, but both are a mirage dissipating at last into the same stolid lonely bleak.

For now, I wait.

Source

The sheer scale, not to mention regularity, of data breaches even in just the last couple years exists at the cusp of our capacity to comprehend. Such stories strike fear in our heart: was our information in that set? Our relatives? Our friends? Since most data breaches are not publicized, how would you even know if you were a victim of identity theft, until it happened?

Partly, these hazards of modern living have come about as systems that were never built to be connected to an always-on, global network, attempt to stumble their way onto the interwebs, and suffer the same fate as a cavalry charge against machine-gun nests. But even more critically, they are failures of design, and failed conceptions of identity.

As with farm plots, so with identity. James C. Scott’s astute observations in Seeing Like A State have guided many a government’s attitude toward identity, pushing inexorably towards more comprehensive, increasingly unique identifiers. Housing addresses no longer suffice, nor do identification cards without photographs. The valid concerns of citizens have prevented this tendency from fully taking root, but this force is insistent; for centralized institutions, better categorizations and taxonomies are downhill forces.

What has actually taken root, far more quickly and comprehensively than government ID cards has been the notion of the social network identity, has been the social profile. Here there is a spectrum of choices, from anonymous channels on 4chan to the information-rich personal profiles Facebook. But the culture has shifted away from the handle and avatar in the cultures of Facebook and Google+ (and elsewhere) and towards “true” identities.

This is a slippery conceit. Our own identities, apart from their various digital augmentations, are composites that are constantly in flux. Our self esteem, our beliefs and our moods shift and sway as our sugar and sleep levels adjust, as the blood pressure settles after that argument with our spouse. The foolish phase involving hallucinogens, or plaid, or karma needs to be buried and moved on from. But our “profiles” have tended towards the static, the absolute; rigid demarcations of our education, sex, political positions, preferred literature.

Not only that, but as our online identities grow consilient, and as certain profiles become master-profiles through the magic of OAuth or OpenID, we increase the risk potential of reliance upon such devices. Losing control of my Google or Facebook profile could be as damaging as losing a credit card or my social security number.

I’m not sure how this would look, technically. I’ll just throw this notion out into the void, and see what comes of it.

I suspect identity would be much more resilient if we actively thought of it as cumulative, and composite. This is done in some spheres, already. To sign up for Couchsurfing, for instance, you need to create a profile with an email, link that to a credit card, and receive a postcard at a stated address. But the default for many contexts is a single identifier; what if the baseline were three or more identifiers? Christina Trapolino’s bet of making her Google Voice number makes sense, there. The idea is that no single identy fragment “is” your identity, and that identity demands scale according to the challenge made upon it. Structurally, this is similar to how the Bitcoin vets transactions across the network, but instead of a financial transaction, it would be a test to see if you’re you; a test across n nodes, where each node is an element (bank account, Twitter handle, what have you). These identifiers could decay naturally or be forcefully revoked, but the identity itself could be robust against all but the most determined attack.

We are only capable of maintaining two levels of awareness in mind at a given time. You can perform and learn at the same time. You can focus on learning and meta-learning at the same time. But you can’t do all three.

That idea sat and percolated for a few months, and only came back to mind this week as I sought closure for February-March and began preparing for April and May.

February and March were stressful and chaotic, and while there were some external circumstances, for the most part it simply felt like I was continuously mishandling life. Projects at work felt opaque and full of dead ends and rabbit trails, habits at home went neglected and resolutions were undermined.

I suspect some of the reasons for the difficulties relate to Rader’s insight. For example, one project involved learning functional programming (Javascript, the meta-learning), a library (jQuery, the learning) and use them along with HTML and CSS to create a new form of interactive documentation (practice) and rough out its content (also practice). The entire process felt like running on uneven stilts, and although I’m pleased with the end results, the process left something to be desired.

It’s also come up a bit on this blog. The earlier post Atheisms: Personal, Political, Social & Structural failed, I believe, because it attempted to span the entire spectrum simultaneously, but most people only engaged with it on a single level.

I’m not sure what a good solution is, yet. I’m in a position where I feel the most energy needs to go towards practice and meta-learning (or, what I’ll call theory), but practice assumes a theory, and practice gets disrupted easily, and its benefits lost, when the underlying assumptions change. It’s the intellectual equivalent of attempting to learn martial arts, but changing classes from judo to tae kwon do to jiujitsu.

Perhaps this is also why there is traditionally a gap (in religions, business, politics, etc) in which the most theoretically capable are also the least practically-minded, and vice versa. It requires a careful mind, an initial scaffold, and the ability to construct and deconstruct up and down the grade to get beyond that impasse.

This is not to say I didn’t like the book. Kelly’s two-chapter introduction to convergent evolution alone made the read worthwhile; the entire book is a very readable introduction to complex issues that have become inextricably wound up with our own lives. There are three concerns I would like to highlight; two are concerns with Kelly’s project, and one is a critique of his critics, ending with what is (hopefully) an improvement of Kelly’s own argument.

But first, we must establish a few terms. Kelly coins the neologism the technium to describe all human culture, and the emergent push of culture to develop further (seemingly) of its own accord. This holistic conception of technology is not new; Ellul called it technique, and German theorists before that technik, both intending the term to include the social and psychological feedback effects that invention inevitably brings about. This is in stark contrast to the modern use of the term, which largely confines technology to devices that were invented after you were born (to paraphrase Ken Robinson).

Kelly problematizes that definition somewhat, by adding an additional component—a teleology, tendencies that may be delayed but not declined, tendencies of the technium toward ever-increasing:

• Efficiency
• Opportunity
• Emergence
• Complexity
• Diversity
• Specialization
• Ubiquity
• Freedom
• Mutualism
• Beauty
• Sentience
• Structure
• Evolvability

While there is room for unpredictability, Kelly argues that the overall order of invention (fire, then electricity, then communication networks) is inevitable, and that this is largely due to the evolving nature of the technium. Jerry Coyne contests in his review the notion that the development of technology constitutes evolution in any coherent sense, but I’m with Kelly; this is evolution, albeit less in the biological sense and more in the cultural production sense, with once-dead technologies re-emerging to solve new problems (green wizardry, anyone?).

The inevitability of the technium is still a deeply problematic concept, but can be made less so if the ground is shifted somewhat towards the contingent inevitabilities of topological singularities. Manuel DeLanda discusses the concept at length in his book Philosophy & Simulation (for a primer, read my review). For our purposes, envision the possibility space for the emergence and development of the technium as a (grossly simplified) two-dimensional uneven surface, with dips and contours. Marbles dropped at random locations will converge upon one of the lowest settling points or stablilize upon a flat surface. It is in this sense that evolution can be both entirely contingent and yet improbably convergent (assuming a flat probability plane). We’ll return to this point.

Theorists and activists bristle at the idea that the technium is inevitable, in any sense. This is usually posed as an ethical stance, rather than a grappling with technology on its actual terms; only Ellul really seems to grasp both poles in his work, The Technological Society—insisting that technique is subsuming humanity and that it must be resisted. The chapter on Kaczynski mirrors Ellul’s concerns, and the concerns of the STS community more broadly, closer than I expected. Nevertheless, Kelly broaches the issues, only to handwave past many of them. Zerzan’s anti-civilizational critique is derided as hypocritical, Perrow’s discussion of normal accidents is brought up, but his policy recommendations are ignored. The dependence of modern society upon fossil fuels is shrugged at, quoting Matt Ridley “If we go on as we are, it’ll be very difficult to sustain things, but we won’t go on as we are. That’s what we never do.”—ignoring the path dependence of that statement, or the many lives that could be made worse for the long short term. Kelly says that the technium’s evolution is slightly more good than it is evil; perhaps just a 51-49% split. I suspect that is true, but Kelly then believes that this split compounds (that there is a primordial “good” 51% that builds and builds upon itself), whereas I suspect each new technique is similarly split; it is in that sense that I am a technical optimist, albeit no where near as optimistic as Kelly. In particular, the social and politic realities of the technium are simply depicted as dust to be swept under the carpet once the technium comes into its own; no mention of how to live in the interim, with assassination drones, state surveillance of social media, evolving botnets or the risks of building an unfriendly AI. Perhaps genetically modified organisms are good; what if Monsanto controlling GMOs isn’t?

However, there’s one area I would like to defend Kelly on. Whatever the solution to a technical society is, it isn’t the anti-civ solution heralded by John Zerzan, Waziyatawin, Derrick Jensen and others; as correct as many of their critiques are. The reason goes back to Kelly’s (mis)understanding of the technium’s inevitability, and the singularities DeLanda describes. Resetting society back to some sort of idyllic hunter-gatherer state would, in the long term, merely be a rewind; given time, the same or similar problems are likely to play out as civilization makes the same mistakes over again.

Better, I believe, to follow Neal Stephenson & Tyler Cowen by investing in technologies that will move us towards a world where we are further empowered, and are able to build healthier and more resilient bodies, societies and ecosystems. But partnered with the proactionary principle would be Perrow’s insistence that proven poor technologies be abandoned. There is not a place in our civilization for every technology, and some are far more trouble than they’re worth.

We may come to notice after the fact that some sort of autocatalytic loop has been initiated. If so, at that point we must hope that our guidance thus far has been sufficient prevent the worst outcomes. This generation is beginning to see a return of creating technologies that go with the grain of the human mind and body; we must also adapt our technium to go with the grain of the larger systems we are a part of.

I pose this question for a couple reasons. First, it’s probably the single most misunderstood question in economics; not because it’s conceptually difficult, but rather because the term has been used to mean multiple, semi-overlapping and at times contradictory concepts. Wikipedia says:

A market is one of many varieties of systems, institutions, procedures, social relations and infrastructures whereby parties engage in exchange. […] It can be said that a market is the process in which the prices of goods and services are established.

and

A market economy is an economy in which decisions regarding investment, production and distribution are based on supply and demand and the prices of goods and services are determined in a free price system.

This is good as far as it goes. Manuel DeLanda provides a useful qualification that cuts out some of the worst misuses of the term, by adding an opposing term antimarket to address the cases where autonomous actions are suppressed in favour of management interactions. Hayek stresses the challenges with the antimarket approach in his Nobel prize lecture on the pretence of knowledge. And David Graeber’s recent book, Debt: The First 5,000 Years illuminates the everyday communisms that necessarily undergird our economies, that humanize them.

Are the constituitive parties of a market necessarily human?

Interestingly, the humanity of the parties in a market is typically left implied; they may be villagers, or farmers, or they may be social collective entities such as collectives, armies, corporations or governments. But there’s nothing essentially homo sapiens about markets, as Laurie Santos so cleverly demonstrates with our genetic neighbors.

What would a truly alien market look like? Not merely a highly abstracted, financialized market such that speculations on commodities result in widespread hunger and starvation risks, but something truly divorced from human concerns, engaging in transactions for its own purposes and towards its own ends.

Many would argue against algorithms as having their own ends; after all, they are deterministic, mathematical, and crafted by human minds. But algorithms, working on shifting data sets alongside competing algorithms operating at near-light speeds in highly complex, dynamical systems, can hardly be reduced to human intents, even if their broad purviews have been explicitly coded. Brian Kernighan famously said:

Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it.

As a result, the algorithms making up the “secret sauce” of many financial institutions end up exhibiting uncanny and unnerving characteristics, much like Kevin Slavin’s amusing anecdote of a Roomba veering off at a 45° in the middle of an empty room. We saw a hint of this on May 6, 2010, when the Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped thousands of points, losing 9% of the market, only to recover minutes later. The subsequent SEC/CFTC report found that

“a large fundamental trader (a mutual fund complex) initiated a sell program to sell a total of 75,000 E-Mini S&P 500 contracts (valued at approximately $4.1 billion) as a hedge to an existing equity position.”

Wikipedia then describes:

As the large seller’s trades were executed in the futures market, buyers included high-frequency trading firms - trading firms that specialize in high-speed trading and rarely hold on to any given position for very long - and within minutes these high-frequency trading firms also started aggressively selling the long futures positions they first accumulated mainly from the mutual fund.

A subsequent paper stressed that, while not strictly causal, the high-frequency traders exacerbated the problems:

under normal market conditions or during periods of high volatility, High Frequency Traders are not willing to accumulate large positions or absorb large losses. Moreover, their contribution to higher trading volumes may be mistaken for liquidity by Fundamental Traders. Finally, when rebalancing their positions, High Frequency Traders may compete for liquidity and amplify price volatility. Consequently, we believe, that irrespective of technology, markets can become fragile when imbalances arise as a result of large traders seeking to buy or sell quantities larger than intermediaries are willing to temporarily hold, and simultaneously long-term suppliers of liquidity are not forthcoming even if significant price concessions are offered.

What brought all these thoughts to the surface this week, however, was a simple story related by an author watching the price of his book swing on Amazon.com:

Last week I noticed a marketplace bot offering to sell [my children’s book] for $55.63. “Silly bots”, I thought to myself, “must be a bug”. After all, it’s print-on-demand, so where would you get a new copy to sell? Then it occured to me that all they have to do is buy a copy from Amazon, if anyone is ever foolish enough to buy from them, and reap a profit. Lazy evaluation, made flesh. Clever bots! Then another bot piled on, and then one based in the UK. They started competing with each other on price. Pretty soon they were offering my book below the retail price, and trying to make up the difference on “shipping and handling”. I was getting a bit worried. The punchline is that Amazon itself is a bot that does price-matching. Soon after the marketplace bot’s race to the bottom, it decided to put my book on sale! 28% off. […] It’s possible that the optimal price of Lauren Ipsum is, in fact, ten dollars and seventy-six cents and I should just relax and trust the tattooed hipster who wrote Amazon’s pricing algorithm. After all, I no longer have a choice. The price is now determined by the complex interaction of several independent computer programs, most of which don’t actually have a copy to sell.

The parties in our economies are now largely inhuman; guided, certainly, by human intents but realizing those intents through intuitions far from our own. Those setting their hopes upon a Friendly AI are perhaps a little late; the alien economy has coalesced.

Atheism is too small a word to adequately take on the numerous tasks given it. Luke Muehlhauser explained well the confusion in his post on 17 kinds of atheism. The necessarily-incomplete list includes the following dimensions:

• Differences in Knowledge (gnostic/agnostic)
• Differences in Affirmation (negative or implicit/positive or strong)
• Difference in Scope (broad/narrow)
• Difference in the Assessed Rationality of Theism (unfriendly/indifferent/friendly)
• Difference in Openness (closet/open)
• Difference in Action (passive/evangelical/active/militant)
• Difference in Religiosity (religious/non-religious)

However, in addition to the categories above, I think it’s worthwhile to consider atheism not merely at the level of the psychology of the individual, but also within the spheres of the social and political, and ultimately, the structural.

This is new territory for most, particularly as the social and political atheisms that have succeeded have not been marketed as such (they succeeded in large part due to keeping the a-theistic axioms implied rather than openly espoused), and those that most foregrounded discussions of atheism have generally ended disastrously (largely due to espousing a rhetorical atheism from a structural theism).

The ferocious vocalizations from the so-called New Atheists (Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris and Daniel Dennett) have brought forth a minority that seems to be only just now realizing itself; previously atomized, atheists are starting to recognize that they exist in quantities large enough to perhaps influence or incite social and political change.

This self-awareness has also brought to light the at-times discomforting heterogeneity of the atheist community, some of whom primarily self-identify with other religious groups (Buddhist, Christian, pagan), or hold differing political views, or vary on a hundred different dimensions.

This is why Alain de Botton’s TED talk and book aroused such hope in me and such frustration in others, and why the axioms undergirding Sam Harris’ TED talk and book on morality were seriously challenged in the blogosphere (well summarized here. I think the criticisms of de Botton and Harris are deserved, but moments of criticism may also be moments of hope.

Atheists are beginning an elemental process; atoms joining together, linking with foreign atoms to form compound molecules of all kinds. A theology student asked me about atheism recently and I had mentioned that the best sort of atheism was as many as possible. This means atheists linking together socially and politically in ways that they haven’t before, domestically and internationally. Looking at the dimensions of difference above, this is far from a simple process, and there likely will be more conflict than cooperation. Imagine if all the monotheistic religions tried to make group decisions! We have never seen such a thing, because the diversity is so broad as to make such meta-projects untenable.

An “atheist” social project has a couple things working against it. Atheism is functionally a belief, not a desire, and a gathered group of atheists may have quite radically different desires for their own lives, and for their communities and society. Therefore, the first logical separations you should see are between atheists of conflicting desires. In fact, many atheists may find that social groupings that do not distinguish between theism and atheism may best suit their desires. For instance, an atheist that desires the care and preservation of sentient life may find a lot of common ground with theists who desire the same, even if the beliefs frame the situation slightly differently. In politics, the same applies.

Social groups that are dominantly atheist will likely need a positive reason for being, a shared desire that supplements their shared unbelief. This may take the form of LessWrong meetups, group therapy for traumatized deconverts, yoga and humanist meditation groups, or simply intentionally secular but non-sectarian community groups.

Politically, we are seeing the gradual creation and growth of organizations and programs aimed at defending the rights of the non-religious or encouraging the coalescence of a civically-engaged community, capable of acting locally, nationally, or internationally. One example is Sean Faircloth’s political pragmatism on behalf of the Richard Dawkins Foundation, which is in the process of being carefully analyzed and dissected by ethicist Alonzo Fyfe on his blog.

On an even deeper plane, philosopher Levi Bryant poses the notion of structural atheism or atheology, explained as:

A thoroughgoing a-theism, a genuine ontology of immanence– where immanence is not immanence to anything but itself or the world(s) is all there is –is a form of thought that strives to reject all forms of theism or transcendence, whether in the domain of ontology, epistemology, ethics, or politics. It is for this reason, necessarily an-archic. It is a position that rejects any ultimate or absolute grounds, any unconditioned grounds that condition all else, for social formations (even kings only get their authority from the masses), ethics (all norms are invented, not beings that reside in Platonic heaven and fall from the sky; that’s why they’re so fragile and we must fight for them), and even where people think that the social world in which they find themselves is an absolute which they must obey, it is the beings of the world that create these structures. The ultimate truth of this a-theism and an-archism is the contingency of everything. There is no “natural” social arrangement (where “nature” is here used in the sense of divinely ordained or Platonically dictated) and there is no form of life that cannot be otherwise.

Personally, I find my way forward is through encouragement and relationships. I’ve found that I have been able to personally comfort several who have gone through a deconversion process similar to mine, or simply needed the example of someone else honest about their unbelief to come clean about their own. My friendships across ideological and religious bounds (Christian, Buddhist, Muslim, pagan and unbeliever) I see as opportunities for shared learning, and for solidarity within areas of shared interest (drawing influence from the a/theist Peter Rollins’ work with Ikon).

Finally, this means realizing that I am always arriving but have never arrived, and must continually reckon with the full provocation that non-belief yields within myself.

This Christmas I received a copy of Manuel DeLanda’s recent book, Philosophy and Simulation: The Emergence of Synthetic Reason. It’s a fascinating book, for two reasons: it puts forth a quite different ontological position from any that I’ve encountered, and it does so by exploring phenomena at all scales, and the patterns and phase spaces that they seem to share.

It’s a demanding read, not because the philosophical or the scientific or the mathematical concepts are particularly difficult, but because there’s an awful lot of them, and if you’re unfamiliar with them as they arise you may be best off ducking off to Wikipedia and looking them up before proceeding, as they will come up again and again. (In particular, make sure you at least have a passing familiarity with finite state automata, neural nets, fitness landscapes and genetic algorithms).

DeLanda begins with some fairly simple definitions; an individual (we’ll come back to that term, it’s philosophically important here) possesses properties, tendencies and capacities. These are very distinct terms. DeLanda uses the example of a knife to illustrate. Sharpness is a property, as it describes a spatiotemporal phenomena, such as the arrangement of metal molecules so as to make an edge, and different arrangements make the edge wider or narrower. It is a tendency of the knife to be solid; given sufficient heat, the tendency of the knife to becomes liquid will become actualized (there’s another philosophical term to watch out for). The tendency for the knife to become a gas is still a virtual tendency, here. And finally, a knife’s capacity to cut implies a relationship to another individual that is capable of being cut. Since this is a relation, it can only be spoken of with regards to another individual, and the phase space for the knife’s capacities is theoretically infinite.

Why the term individual? Well, this is roughly how DeLanda defines entities that the OOO crowd (folks like Kris Coffield, Timothy Morton, Ian Bogost, Levi Bryant and Graham Harman) would call objects, but with some key differences. An individual is shorthand for an individual singularity, a type of assemblage (see DeLanda’s earlier book, A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory & Social Complexity, for more on that) that is irreducible and decomposible. The irreducible part is how DeLanda gets away with talking about emergence. A convection cell isn’t emergent because it magically adds something to the base phenomena, but it’s emergent because it’s only visible from a certain spatiotemporal scale. If you look at the constituent atoms, you won’t find the convection cell anywhere. Decomposibility means that emergent phenomena are just looking for materials to fit a certain structure. Cells split and die, but I am still an individual. Presidents take and leave office, but the government still exists, new electrons are constantly taking the place of old but the current is the same.

More importantly, an individual isn’t defined by arbitrarily drawing a bounds (Which I still see as a distinctly anthropocentric activity, although Kris Coffield argues otherwise. I still can’t tell if the problem is me or him. My money’s on me.), but by describing the history of its construction. In this sense, DeLanda marries the entity-driven descriptions of object-oriented ontology with a sort of contingent process philosophy.

The properties of individual singularities have material presence in spacetime; they are composed of matter and energy, and to this degree are compatible with general observation, most science, and naïve realism. In addition, however, the individual singularity describes the phase space for its tendencies and capacities; a space that is infinite without possessing all possibilities, and where probability clusters shape the phase space to form attractors.

An explanation for what properties, tendencies and capacities of individual singularities are actualized is necessary, as is an explanation for the evolution of their phase spaces. Universal singularities are just such an explanation, existing as mechanism-independent topologies that individual singularities map to, completely or incompletely. Individual and universal singularities are what DeLanda demands an ontological commitment to, not merely the spacetime matter-energy subset. Indeed, our entire universe may merely be the actualization of a much large singularity that describes a phase space for universes, virtual and actual.

As an aside, while DeLanda never uses the term, this appears to be the exact same ontology described by Amanda Gefter in her answer to this year’s Edge question as Structural Realism.

Throughout the rest of the book, then, DeLanda explores the plausibility of this premise by attempting to map rough estimates of certain phase spaces via simulations and seeing whether the attractors that arise correlate to what we know of the history of the universe, chemistry, life and sociology. The simulations necessarily become more simplistic as the scale and complexity increases, but DeLanda is not looking to prove the thesis as much as show that it is plausible and not grossly contradicted, and in this he succeeds.

However, there are two important things he missed, that I think would actually strengthen his case should he include them. The first is that, in a work so replete with cutting-edge algorithms, the absence of the Price equation is frankly, stunning. Every simulation DeLanda describes operates at one scale, abstracting the scales below it. What the Price equation does is allow for variable-selection across scales. This is not important in a majority of the cases, but the minorities can be game-changers (think of the higher-order effects of one cancer cell, or one person like Napolean or Gandhi). Any discussion of simulations as a way of exploring phase spaces should, in my opinion, at least take a serious look at what the consequences are of blindly abstracting lower-order phenomena.

Secondly, while DeLanda didn’t omit the subject, I don’t think he spent enough time explaining and exploring the relationship of emergent phenomena and available gradients, particularly as they relate to entropy. Gradients are [paraphrasing DeLanda here] “intensive differences that act so as to store and release energy”. These could be the presence or absence of a valence electron, or the fact that all of your relatives signed up for Facebook (something which fits nicely into what Levi Bryant has been exploring as “regimes of attraction”). As John Tooby explains in his answer to 2012’s Edge question:

The world given to us by physics is unrelievedly bleak. It blasts us when it is not burning us or invisibly grinding our cells and macromolecules until we are dead. It wipes out planets, habitats, labors, those we love, ourselves. Gamma ray bursts wipe out entire galactic regions; supernovae, asteroid impacts, supervolcanos, and ice ages devastate ecosystems and end species. Epidemics, strokes, blunt force trauma, oxidative damage, protein cross-linking, thermal noise-scrambled DNA—all are random movements away from the narrowly organized set of states that we value, into increasing disorder or greater entropy. The second law of thermodynamics is the recognition that physical systems tend to move toward more probable states, and in so doing, they tend to move away from less probable states (organization) on their blind toboggan ride toward maximum disorder.

Entropy, then, poses the problem: How are living things at all compatible with a physical world governed by entropy, and, given entropy, how can natural selection lead over the long run to the increasing accumulation of functional organization in living things? Living things stand out as an extraordinary departure from the physically normal (e.g., the earth’s metal core, lunar craters, or the solar wind). What sets all organisms—from blackthorn and alder to egrets and otters—apart from everything else in the universe is that woven though their designs are staggeringly unlikely arrays of highly tuned interrelationships—a high order that is highly functional. Yet as highly ordered physical systems, organisms should tend to slide rapidly back toward a state of maximum disorder or maximum probability. As the physicist Erwin Schrödinger put it, “It is by avoiding the rapid decay into the inert state that an organism appears so enigmatic.”

The quick answer normally palmed off on creationists is true as far as it goes, but it is far from complete: The earth is not a closed system; organisms are not closed systems, so entropy still increases globally (consistent with the second law of thermodynamics) while (sometimes) decreasing locally in organisms. This permits but does not explain the high levels of organization found in life. Natural selection, however, can (correctly) be invoked to explain order in organisms, including the entropy-delaying adaptations that keep us from oxidizing immediately into a puff of ash.

Natural selection is the only known counterweight to the tendency of physical systems to lose rather than grow functional organization—the only natural physical process that pushes populations of organisms uphill (sometimes) into higher degrees of functional order. But how could this work, exactly?

It is here that, along with entropy and natural selection, the third of our trio of truly elegant scientific ideas can be adapted to the problem: Galileo’s brilliant concept of frames of reference, which he used to clarify the physics of motion.

The concept of entropy was originally developed for the study of heat and energy, and if the only kind of real entropy (order/disorder) was the thermodynamic entropy of energy dispersal then we (life) wouldn’t be possible. But with Galileo’s contribution one can consider multiple kinds of order (improbable physical arrangements), each being defined with respect to a distinct frame of reference.

There can be as many kinds of entropy (order/disorder) as there are meaningful frames of reference. Organisms are defined as self-replicating physical systems. This creates a frame of reference that defines its kind of order in terms of causal interrelationships that promote the replication of the system (replicative rather than thermodynamic order). Indeed, organisms must be physically designed to capture undispersed energy, and like hydroelectric dams using waterfalls to drive turbines, they use this thermodynamic entropic flow to fuel their replication, spreading multiple copies of themselves across the landscape.

Entropy sometimes introduces copying errors into replication, but injected disorder in replicative systems is self-correcting. By definition the less well-organized are worse at replicating themselves, and so are removed from the population. In contrast, copying errors that increase functional order (replicative ability) become more common. This inevitable ratchet effect in replicators is natural selection.

Organisms exploit the trick of deploying different entropic frames of reference in many diverse and subtle ways, but the underlying point is that what is naturally increasing disorder (moving toward maximally probable states) for one frame of reference inside one physical domain can be harnessed to decrease disorder with respect to another frame of reference. Natural selection picks out and links different entropic domains (e.g., cells, organs, membranes) that each impose their own proprietary entropic frames of reference locally.

When the right ones are associated with each other, they do replicative work through harnessing various types of increasing entropy to decrease other kinds of entropy in ways that are useful for the organism. For example: oxygen diffusion from the lungs to the blood stream to the cells is the entropy of chemical mixing—falling toward more probable high entropy states, but increasing order from the perspective of replication-promotion.

Entropy makes things fall, but life ingeniously rigs the game so that when they do they often fall into place.

In short, entropy does not preclude phase spaces in which the attractors lead to complex phenomena, particularly when the frame of reference one is using includes a gradient that makes a relatively closed system open.

I very much enjoyed this book, although I grew a little weary of the detailed discussion of simulation limitations in the last two chapters. For a broader exploration of what this means for human social systems, politics and economics, I highly recommend DeLanda’s earlier work, A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History.

I hope these ideas are seriously engaged with by the philosophic and scientific communities.

This review was originally posted as a G+ post

This week the three major political parties in Minnesota will be having their caucuses (I’d sneak in to one but I’m double-booked playing chess with a gentleman in his 90’s that I’m loathe to stand up). The conversations are about America and meaning; the meaning of the nation and of the individuals who all draw from this source of identity. But the world is not so easily ordered.

Nation-states are a historically contingent phenomena, and trends seem to imply that they are an evolutionary stepping-stone to a plurality of descendents of all scales. Some descendents are super-states, proto-empires - over the coming decades, China looks as though it may return to its earlier role. Others are meshworks, like the old Ottoman trade networks, but modernized and, as Nils Gilman pointed out, potentially deviant. The FARC/Nigeria/Al Qaeda Mahgreb network example is one. Speaking of deviant globalization, some states may collapse entirely, only to be held upright like posed corpses for the parasitic entities underneath; the Zetas in Mexico and similar organizations in Central and South America could qualify. Temporary Autonomous Zones (TAZs) such as the Occupy Wall Street (and all it’s brethren, spawning and disappearing from the city ecologies like fungi) and Tahrir have proven themselves, and are likely to appear, and reappear; political flash mobs. And none of this is even addressing the metastasizing of corporations into meta-states.

Which perhaps explains somewhat why I find liberal Americans so schizophrenic in their characterizations of their country. Their ideals do not map to the nation-state easily or appropriately. Their local concerns are very local; regional at most, with their broader concerns towards human rights, environmental degradation and the like paying no attention to the border. The height of this disconnect for me was viewing the protestors of the XL Pipeline being arrested. The XL Pipeline isn’t the problem, really; they are concerned about the Albertan tar sands. So why weren’t they protesting those? The XL Pipeline wasn’t an endgame, if it simply meant that Canada built a pipe west to the Pacific to ship to China. It seems that liberal Americans have been caught in a trap of their own making. In measuring their progress against the consistently receding marker of the American right, they’ve failed to notice their own stagnance and lack of vision.

The problem liberals have with a multipolar world is that it will make all things more complicated; not the least of all praise/blame. Economic decisions may find easy consensus, while ethical problems are intractable; or vice versa. The intuitions aren’t present. There is a tendency to view American exceptionalism in the negative, to “blame America”, treat American racism as somehow superior to the racism of the Japanese towards the Koreans (or the Indians towards the Philipinos, or the Gulf Arabs towards everyone), and conversely, to see American restraint or intervention as an automatic solution.

The next decades will require a massive mental shift as we transition from a state-to-state interaction model, to a more abstract entity-to-entity model. Prepare for a citizen’s collective with a diplomat to Wells Fargo, G.E., the Zetas and Paraguay. INTERPOL proceedings against Lulzsec even while the State Department coordinates with Anonymous.

The inability to blame the U.S., and the incapacity for an entity like the U.N. to “make the hard choices” will result in a stunningly broad consortium of entities; governments, affinity groups, corporations, gangs, etc; only a subset of which will matter in any given decision, but it’ll be different subsets for different decisions, and none will play by the same rules.

Do we have any roadmaps for this? Not much, but I stumbled across something today that began to ask the correct questions. In the highlight report of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples in Canada, the recommendation was given to recognize federal, provincial/territorial and Aboriginal governance as discrete and all collected within Canadian sovereignty. Where it gets interesting is in the sections where it discussed the necessity of addressing rule of law for large groups of Aboriginals living in cities such as Winnipeg. This was described as a community of interest government, as opposed to a public government (where an Aboriginal majority controlled territory with non-Aboriginal residents) and a nation government.

That’s a beginning, but I think we need to be broader, and look at governance as not merely something tied to local, but as something married to a shared vision.

It comes in the forms of blog posts about laughing cats that eviscerate security contracting companies, or in the guise of a swarm of autonomous drones building an art exhibit. It comes as news stories, with headlines too absurd to be believed. Avian flu has been mixed with the common cold in a lab, and a new form of tuberculosis resists everything doctors have attempted to treat it with. Methane plumes pepper the Russian north coast and mines scar the Canadian prairies. A circus of candidates are jockeying to oppose the liberal/moderate/socialist [do words still mean things?] incumbent, who has won a Nobel Peace Prize while sending human or robotic troops into 7 countries in his first term. Temporary autonomous zones popped up in city centers across the United States for months, and financial sector technocrats have taken over two European states amidst large-scale protests. Drug cartels have their own makeshift submarines and tanks, and one in particular is doing a good side business selling black market oil it steals from the state that can’t seem to snuff it out. The leader of the Maoist opposition in India dies, in an event and a war that has perhaps never seen the evening news in the West.

It feels as if world history has taken a hit of a potent accelerant. Understandably, most people just find the whole situation too knotted, obtuse and frightening to warrant unravelling. Occasionally someone comes by with an ideological cleaver and attempt to sort the Gordian knot of present history once and for all, but the optimism fades after repeated unsuccessful hacks.

But the fears are still there, and the fear that is most present to us is that of losing control. Just one step removed from death anxiety, the constant flux of the world in 2012 brings events and change agents into our lives at faster-than-human speeds. Our filters fail, and we respond reflexively, or by retreating into isolationism. In 1848 Karl Marx wrote:

All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.

A better posthuman manifesto could not be written. When the terrible wrath of Texan wildfires and Japanese tsunamis draw forth our awe and mass die-offs of bats and bees generate tingling sensations down our spines, our simple worldviews and heuristics fail to find referents, and we are presented with an opportunity to truly examine ourselves. To contemplate the human condition, and your very limited place within it. To acknowledge its limitations and revel in its freedoms.

Originally, this post was to be about something else entirely, but this message decided it needed to be spoken, first. I’ll follow up next week with some thoughts on human autonomy.

My first real articulation of doubt occurred in eighth grade. I have no recollection of what prompted it, but I remember finding adequate resolution to my questions in the pages of C.S. Lewis’ Mere Christianity. Well over a decade later, I’ve moved on to other thinkers, other ideas, other arguments. What I remembered of Lewis’ argumentation hadn’t aged well. But when Dave Burkum, pastor of the church I am a part of, put forth the challenge of reading Mere Christianity together as a congregation, I decided to pick it up again, and see how it held up.

Originally produced as a radio series during World War II in England, Lewis, a veteran of World War I, gave a simple and clear articulation of what he described as “mere” Christianity—that shared core of assumptions, beliefs and orientations that have inspired and provoked Christ-followers over the ages, in all limbs of the (lower-case c) catholic church.

Since this month’s discussion only focuses on Books I and II, that is all I’ll cover this month. I’ll follow up with Book II in a week or two, and then with Book III and Book IV in February and March, respectively.

Section 1.1 of Book I begins with a heap of generalizations. Lewis appeals to a universal sense of reciprocity, which he later acknowledges is graded [in 1.2 he claims a line exists that separates the “Law of Human Nature” (an absolute) with “Rules for Decent Behavior” (socially constructed), but with no explanation of where that line lies, or how one might discover one from the other], with the possibility open of some people genuinely not knowing this “law of human nature”. A straw man is constructed that “does not believe in right or wrong”, but is cast aside before much damage is done. The chapter ends with Lewis’ axioms:

1. Right and Wrong are real.
2. None of us keep to the right.

If you followed Luke Muehlhauser and Alonzo Fyfe’s podcast on morality at all, you’ll notice right away the fuzzy language. What does it mean that Right is real? Euthryphro’s dilemma is casually tossed aside, and what it means for morality to even be “real” in any sense beyond is unexplained. What is clear in this prose is that right and wrong is not merely subjective to human experience, but somehow rests above it. Unfortunately, that’s simply not sufficient for moral argumentation.

In Section 1.2, Lewis proactively addresses some potential objects to his argument; couldn’t this all be herd instinct or social convention? He attempts to ward of these encroachments with an appeal to conscience as a meta-instinct; since we require cues for whether our instincts are helpful or harmful, our conscience provides the judgement to sort our possible responses. It’s a little unclear which direction Lewis is going; it could be as simple as describing cognition itself, absent from any spiritual component, but it reads more along the lines of a sensus divinitas. He also insists, here and later in the book, on paralleling morality with mathematics. I’m not sure that’s the secure foundation he thinks it is, particularly after mathematicians such as Kurt Gödel and Gregory Chaitin have shaken the absolutist foundations of that discipline.

Towards the end of the section, Lewis makes an astute observation; that it’s not an impressive feat of morality to no longer burn witches once we no longer believe in them. This principle extends to the domain of desires, I believe. If I, having no desire to have sex with children, avoid pedophilia; what of it? That’s not particularly morally praiseworthy. Someone who has that desire and withstands temptation and instead seeks help, is morally praiseworthy in a way that I am not, even though in both cases, no children were molested. In the same sense, Lewis is on to something, and I think this is a type of thinking that pervades thoughts about the “Other”. As with desires, so with beliefs. Richard Beck wrote (in a blog post I can no longer find) about a similar dilemma between so-called “liberal” vs. “conservative” believers; the former, not considering the literal texts of the bible as binding, are much more able to adapt and adopt to shifts in cultural mores. The same effect exists in international politics, particularly between secular, European and American democracy activists and their Muslim counterparts, a phenomenon well discussed at The Immanent Frame.

Section 1.3-1.5 makes a series of assertions that range from problematic to flat-out wrong. Lewis says we ought to be unselfish because it’s good for society. Well, that’s all well and good, but it simply pushes the problem upward. Why is unselfishness good for society? An answer that is currently being floated is that unselfishness developed as a function of social bonding, longevity and through the benefits of mutual exchange and support. Even then, it’s relative, and the effect weakens with one’s degree of relationship. An innate propensity for sin layered over an original, uncorrupted creation doesn’t explain this gradation of selfishness as well as the evolution of human social relations does. (Plus, society rewards certain kinds of selfishness as “good”; what did Lewis make of that, I wonder?)

Conscience, Lewis also claims, implies a universal consciousness. I have no idea how this leap was made, nor whether there are any justifications for it. This, like the statement about our consciences being unobservable, strikes me as sheer assertion.

More interestingly, Lewis explains that conscience does not track with convenience, and can sometimes be quite inconvenient. He looks at the psychological and sociological reasons, and then jumps to a higher plane of argumentation, but I think moral questions simply fall into a sort of 47-body problem; theoretically solvable, but practically impossible to solve, therefore justifying the need to use heuristics instead.

Lewis closes with two evidences:

1. The universe implies an artist.
2. Our conscience implies a moral law.

Strangely, the first comes from nowhere, having been pulled from a back room at the last minute, and looking a bit disheveled. The second suffers from the problems discussed above, compounded by the caveat that according to Lewis, Christianity assumes you understand the moral law exists which you are guilty of; an assumption which, when coupled with his earlier admission that some people may not have the moral equipment with which to understand moral law, makes from some odd results when you argue that all people are culpable for their sins.

It’s a daring book but it feels as if Lewis, rather than grasping the doubts and concerns of the age and pushing through the terrors towards new answers, instead retreated gracefully and barred the windows, reinforced the doors. His epigram towards the end of Section 1.6 should be meditated on by the readers of this work:

If you look for truth, you may find comfort – if you look for comfort, you will find neither.

Specifically, on Santorum’s campaign website he cites his belief in American exceptionalism at the international level and “traditional” (read: Christian, heterosexual couples with children) families at the domestic level as the foundations for his policy positions; positions that include an orientation towards war (with Iran) and capitulation to corporatism (through reduced regulations). Embedded beneath these position statements are axioms about the world, axioms which assume a societal ordering that is grounded in a divine plan, an eternal structure, a “natural order”.

With that in mind, let’s turn our attentions to philosopher and former psychoanalyst Levi Bryant. In his recent blog posts on object-oriented ontology and politics (Part I, II) examined the differences between Lucretius and Aristotle’s attitudes about the nature of the social order. Whereas Plato and Aristotle saw a sort of natural sense to the social order—women being inferior to men, the necessity of a philosopher-king (read, technocrat), etc—Lucretius held that:

Whatever exists you will always find connected to these two things, or as by-products of them; connected meaning that the quality can never be subtracted from its object no more than weight from stone, or heat from fire, wetness from water. On the other hand, slavery, riches, freedom, poverty, war, peace, and so on, transitory things whose comings and goings do not alter substance– these, and quite properly, we call by-products.

(De Rerum Natura, Humphries translation, 33)

Lucretius was on to something. As the years have wound on all that was solid has melted into air: we have learned of our evolved origins and shared ancestors, found seemingly immutable laws to be probabilistic, debilitated the hopes of hobgoblins for consistency in mathematics, begun deconstructing anthropomorphism (with bees, dolphins, octopi and other animals), and are gradually deflating our beliefs in morality and ethics, free will, God and even our own rationality. Even our rigid notions of the universe are at risk, first with the relativity of space and time, and now with talk of parallel universes with alternate physics, and the contingency of elementary particles and mirror images of the Big Bang. I hope to unpack each of these in future posts.

The common thread here is what philosopher Quentin Meillassoux calls ”the necessity of contingency”. Whether or not Meillassoux’s thesis is entirely correct, he’s on the right track; time after time after time, the “natural order” of things turns out to be surprisingly…contingent. This is troubling news, particularly for those who, having been fortunate to enough to benefit from contingent events of history, hold power and maintain it by insisting upon a fictitious natural order. It makes little difference whether these are kings hypothesizing a god-granted throne, environmentalists yearning for a return to Eden, or hedge-fund managers lobbying against government regulations against finance; the implicit assumptions are the same.

This is why there can be such a deviation between the policies and the politics one supports. For example, the ideas Ron Paul expresses on this video about foreign policy resonate well with me, but I am far from a libertarian. Libertarianism, like humanism and many other ideologies, is founded upon assumptions of the natural order; the basic rights of man, property rights, and others. Much Enlightenment thinking was grounded in similar assumptions whose hegemony has been and is being contested by the landless, the proletariat, the queer, the female, the young, the indigenous, the non-citizen, the ecological and the non-human.

And much of what passes for politics on the left (whatever that is) is equally guilty. Whether in the name of the environment, or of human rights, or of tolerance or what-have-you, the well-meaning have tossed aside the strange liberties that a full reckoning of the world provides. Bryant describes the tension between the “natural order” and the “necessity of contingency” as the difference between internal relations within a consilient “object” (using the onticological term) and external relations between different objects. Quoting Bryant:

Lucretius articulates the thesis that has been common to all leftist thought for the last two thousand years: relations are external to their terms. […] And in demonstrating the contingency of these sorting and structuring mechanisms, what thinkers such as Foucault, Butler, and Marx above all show is the possibility of other ways of relating. Their point is never to say that we are ineluctably trapped in these relations– though it can be damned hard to escape them –but that these relations aren’t “natural”, they aren’t internal, they don’t have to be this way.

Thus, where Burke attempts to situate politics in a stable universe and a natural mode of governance and economics, Marx instead argues for communism on the basis of a contingent history of capitalism.

This does not make the ideas of leftist politics necessarily better, by any metric. They may be worse, even far worse, but what they never are is natural. When they go wrong, they can and ought to be changed, and that change, that difference, makes all the difference.

So when I hear Rick Santorum extol the American nation or the American family or heterosexuality as normative and natural and right and good, I hear the worst of Aristotle’s apologetics for the perverse contingencies of power, and my imagination is piqued and my anger aroused, because another world is possible.

Justine, Claire and Claire’s son sit in a makeshift tipi, bracing for the impending impact of a foreign planet, and the destruction of all life. Tengo, Aomame and the little one inside her climb, freezing, up emergency ladders and scuttle over catwalks to reach a parallel world, and consign the one they have been living in to memory and oblivion. And January 1st, 2012, is a threshold crossed that, while possessing none of the gravitas with which the apocalyptic have attempted to endow it, is subtle and transformative personally, in its own way. A world has died, and a new world has been born, and this inaugural post is the birth certificate.

My wife and I brought in the new year quietly; apple cider, a couple rounds of Blockus (the triangle edition, which is, in my opinion, vastly superior to the rectangular) and a late-night showing of Lars von Trier’s Melancholia in our living room. The “science-fiction plot as poetry in film” echoed many of the traits I appreciated most of Darren Aronofsky’s earlier graphic novel and film The Fountain. The change in registers between the profoundly personal stories (a disaster of a wedding, coping with the depression of a sibling) and cosmic disaster (in the form planetary collision) is jarring; mixing but never being mixed, a streak of oil across a plot of water. This resonated.

John Caputo, lecturing on the future of continental philosophy, gives a synopsis of Ray Brassier’s book, Nihil Unbound. It is not enough to reckon with the death of meanings that occur when philosophy is uncoupled from anthropocentrism; one must stare into the void and reckon with the heat death of the universe itself. Peter Rollins spoke in an interview about a kind of belief in God that lies hidden within atheism, a belief-on-our-behalf that is a comfort for atheists who are able to claim the intellectual high ground of denouncing theological answers, but who draw comfort from the belief of their parents, their children, or their culture. Brassier pushes towards a more devastating philosophy, one that pulls the roots out of every safe place.

But, strangely, that is not yet the end. That there is a philosophy at all, after the end of the world, is a curious, miraculous thing. Haruki Murakami explores this notion almost incidentally in his novel, 1Q84. The characters are dropped into a world that is a shadow of the world that they knew, and as situations evolve beyond their control, their options constrict until it seems that only death or self-imposed exile remain. But Murakami, like an accomplished illusionist, reveals a hope that escapes the pull of the world of 1Q84. Like the little one growing inside of Aomame (presumably woven from strands plucked from the air by mysterious hands) a new philosophy is pulled from the void, and strand intersects with strand until, with a trying journey fueled by a shared love and a hope without ground, a new world is entered into.

I’m skeptical of Murakami’s sleight-of-hand, and of the notion that a simple vector of escape will present itself, to draw us out of this world and its historically-contingent constraints. But I am open to constructing my own air chrysalis, pulling thoughts from the air and working them into words.

I hope to present my weavings in this venue over the coming year. You are welcome here.