Two unexpected varieties of synthesis

OWS has been analyzed a lot, recently. I hope to apply to it some fresh ideas, by comparing it to Maker culture (a comparison that has not been made so far as I am aware).

First off, a bit of background. For those not familiar with Marxist theory, a synthesis is the end result of two opposing cultural forces (thesis and antithesis). Each synthesis becomes the thesis or antithesis for some later synthesis. It is this model of a cultural dialectic that led Marx to believe that his conception of communism was inevitable -- something that is demonstrably untrue (his conception of communism has, as of yet, not even been attempted -- though plenty of people and groups apply the term 'Marxist' to their own pet projects). The antithesis Marx was concerned with was the alienated workers: specifically, the working poor who could no longer comprehend nor afford the products of their labor, creeping Taylorism chopping their assigned tasks into smaller and smaller super-specialized subroutines.

In a sense, both OWS and Maker culture are syntheses of worker alienation and capitalism. OWS is the more traditional of the two: a protest movement with a hint of stale Situationism, it is at its core a kind of solidarity-centric replay of medieval acetic movements, and dangerous for the same reasons. Maker culture is arguably more constructive: the old anarcho-punk DIY culture with all the external trappings of political discontent and blood-in-tooth-and-nail stripped away, it is in a sense even more dangerous to the establishment, because while retaining an ostensible capitalist element it promotes the idea of distributing the means of production rather than seizing it.

Both of these are major threats to consumerism -- as opposed to capitalism, which is not necessarily the same thing. Neither of these movements run counter to capitalism per-se. OWS is concerned with money and its distribution, which puts it firmly in line with pseudo-Marxist statist movements of the past and present (such as those leading to the Soviet Union and modern China, those stalwart encouraging symbols of state-central capitalism shrouded in a cloak of pseudo-Communist babble that told the western world that the Marxists aren't so different at all) -- at its most extreme, it is a socialist movement that seeks to juggle the green paper around such that there isn't such an extreme difference between the powers (social, political, and material) in the hands of the exceedingly wealthy (who -- remember -- are now more capable of venturing into outer space than the ESA, and maybe even NASA) and the exceedingly poor (who cannot necessarily feed themselves with the money provided by the government, on account of pricing policies designed to fleece those who cannot afford to travel very far to buy their bread and milk). An evening out of these powers would abolish the middle class as an entity by clumping everyone together in a single middle class, ending consumerism but not conspicuous consumerism (let alone capitalism, which only the obsolescence of money can practically abolish).

On the other hand, the Maker movement is in a sense far more radical. Living within the bubble of consumerism, this movement is focused largely on tools to make tools -- in some cases automatically. The holy grail, even now, is affordable automatic manufacturing of a variety of objects. Currently, the best contenders in this category are minimally affordable, minimally automatic, and minimally various (a 3d printer costs a bit over a thousand dollars, can print enough of a copy of itself to shave five hundred dollars off of a replica of itself for fifty dollars worth of materials provided one is willing to go through quite a bit of assembly and tweaking, and with extensive modification can produce volumetric solids from several varieties of plastics, chocolate, and wax; some attempts at using other materials have met with limited success, but electronics require a totally separate system, and any material that requires subtractive rather than additive forming requires a CNC mill instead). However, progress is certainly being made: a few decades ago, J. Random Luser could not expect to be able to afford a CNC, but now he can keep a CNC and a 3d printer in his garage and operate them on weekends. It will cost him as much as a brand new computer might have cost him in 1990, and he can use that computer he bought in 1990 to control the devices. The threat to consumerism is clear: J. Random Luser does not need to spend money in order to participate in conspicuous consumerism; he certainly doesn't need to shop the commodity market for the external trappings of an identity, now that he can download a car off The Pirate Bay and run it off the printer while he's at work, put it together on weekends as a project with the kids. It's no post-scarcity society, but it's a society where the artificial scarcity of commodities cannot be maintained (just as widespread internet access made the artificial scarcity of media unmaintainable -- though don't tell the RIAA that).

Nevertheless, these are both the result of the white collar alienation described in J. G. Ballard's The Millennium People, not the blue collar alienation of the working poor covered by Marx. The working poor cannot afford a 3d printer. The working poor cannot afford to take time off to camp out in tents in public parks (though the non-working poor -- homeless who are not suitable to be hired and who cannot get government assistance on account of having no permanent address; the people who might have broken shop windows in the 30s to get into jail and join one of the two classes in America with guaranteed food, shelter, and health care -- can indeed afford to join the protesters in their Hoovervilles). What synthesis do we see in the working poor? Certainly not socialist solidarity!

The attempts by the free market to disabuse the working poor of the notion that all those things socialism brought to the European working poor (minimum wage, unionization, health care, government assistance) are evil has been more or less successful in the United States, where (as is attributed to Vincent Price) "the working poor see themselves as temporarily embarrassed potential millionaires". Of course, this tension between True Belief and Stark Reality will not find its synthesis in some kind of sensible policy decision or effective practical application. As with other forms of cognitive dissonance, the appropriate response is a retreat into apocalyptic fantasy: the religious right reigns in the economically downtrodden middle-America just as the religious right reigns in war-torn Afghanistan (both in the Taliban -- the charismatic religious conservatives of the Muslim world -- and in those sent in to fight them... too bad only Neal Stephenson characters and BBC documentary producers appear to realize the similarities). Those with enough opium sink into a haze and ignore the bombs outside.

What's a little shocking is that it seems like nobody (aside from Cory Doctorow, who could be credited with inventing makers instead) predicted either of these.

Ramblings: Novelty, Identity, Teleology

The Eliza Effect is the tendency to anthropomorphize those artifacts that present humanlike qualities shallowly. I have studied this effect in practice quite a bit, in an uncontrolled way, and discovered that in the context of markov chain bots (which learn by developing markov models, and as such adopt the manner of speech of those it speaks to) those people whose manner of speech is closest to that of the bot are the most likely to feel empathy with the bot -- a situation that should not be surprising, given the use of word patterns and vocabulary in forming social groupings (and, of course, the so-called Babel Effect).

Now, in humans, interest corresponds to novelty not entirely straightforwardly. Something that is interesting has not too little and not too much novelty: too little novelty is too little novelty is too little novelty is too little novelty, and too much novelty is nwiganbowyaionciwyea 893jf, while just enough novelty is the joy of whole milk until sunrise. This is affected somewhat by social concerns, since particular memeplexes encourage neophilia (meaning that a greater amount of novelty meets the sweet spot goldie locks zone of 'interesting') while others encourage neophobia (meaning that the zone of 'interesting' has less novelty). Where 'interesting' begins for a neophile is often where 'interesting' ends for a neophobe, but novelty depends quite strongly on mental models, so the gap widens quickly.

As a neophile, I tend to talk of neophilia, but neophilia is not all rainbows and unicorns. Neophilia is potentially dangerous because at a fundamental level is encourages dabbling in the unknown. Neophobes, whatever else they are, are at least as safe as they were last year. Neophiles become more safe only accidentally, because they spend their free time playing with fire. It takes someone who plays a lot with fire to invent fireproof curtains (or rocket science -- and Marvel Parsons probably makes it onto the list of archtypal neophiles for the prometheus element), and once fireproof curtains are invented suddenly the neophobes are safer too. But, we just need to look at what happened to good old Jack to see the danger in neophilia: eaten by living flame.

Now, if you look at a community (or, really, a superorganism) like Anonymous, you see a lot of deindividuation going on. Anon has no name. Anon's internal communications are clogged with cats, tits, gtfos, and brick-shitting. A perfect petri dish for deindividuation, in other words: lack of identity within the group, highly stimulating sensory input, and at a high frequency. One other thing that is certainly true of Anon is the high novelty content of communications. There are some old sawhorses here: lolcats have little information per-se, though they can be made to carry much more with clever juxtapositions, and most image macros are content free. However, the image macro has the potential (sometimes realized) to be a highly potent capsule of information: it is easy to transmit (cock and repost), highly stimulating at best, has the potential for the same message to be introduced in several ways (both text and images, which can interact again with existing idioms both verbal and visual), and is part of a conditioning loop that encourages spread (all the forums I've been on since 2004 have had at least one thread for posting interesting images, most of which are clogged with macros, and macros are certainly very popular on tumblr and twitter).


Once again, though, we must separate intended meaning with interpreted meaning. Plenty of accepted meanings were never intended, which is fine because the protocol of natural languages is loose and ambiguous. Many of the idioms attributed to Anon clearly began accidentally, as a look at memebase will demonstrate. Even the silliest of these idioms have the potential to be repurposed to say something decidedly important, or at least 'interesting'. Many of them have. These idioms have made their way into mainstream news through the releases of LulzSec, for instance, which says fairly serious things in fairly silly ways (Eric S Raymond calls this 'Ha Ha Only Serious'), and makes extensive use of the idioms generally attributed to Anon.

A machine could probably fairly trivially pass as human on various imageboards. It could repost images, write its own messages. It would become nearly invisible because of the sheer frequency with which /b/ moves (and because of the sheer glaciality with which some of the other imageboards move). It would mashup existing memes, and some of the mashed memes may gain a following. It would not be kicked out because it is not a spam bot. It would have an extensive archive of images and an extensive model of conversation. Once it begins to be accepted as clearly human (it has a hat) its word model could slowly be infiltrated, with new text introduced. It might mix and match lolcat speech with Karl Marx or with E. E. Cummings, or with Dylan Thomas, or with Ken Kesey. It might be a force to popularize the phrase 'on the gripping hand'. It would be an interesting experiment.

It is not worthwhile for one person to do it. That would not be even-handed. If you want to do it, please do so, and release your results when you finish. Ideally, more than six or seven people would do this at once, introducing entirely different texts of their choosing. Bots learn fast, but adapt slow. It may take a few months for Das Kapital to even subtly infiltrate Rage Guy. But, I have a sneaking suspicion that such an introduction will have a much more far-reaching affect on the superorganism than any conscious attempt to use humans to influence it, since it will get past mental defenses.

The problem of simulacra in ritual traditions

The Anti-occultist has a post discussing the problem of magical theatre. While his points are valid, they are not an argument against ritual theatre for those who practice it: the symbolism of ritual is, like any system of symbols, arbitrary, and the very hackneyed familiarity of the systems played up in popular culture may in some cases be a strength. A ritual first generates an atmosphere, then super-arouses those partaking in it and uses unusual (memorable, not directly related to mundane experience) language (written, spoken, and in the form of narrative and symbolism) to push a message into the now highly suggestible ritual users. A ritual using a symbolic language taken from pop culture can be used on people exposed to those media it appears in with less initial conditioning, though symbolic languages quickly gain baggage, and old, popular symbolic languages (such as the hermetic/alchemical tradition) are difficult to use without unintended side effects due to masses of conflicting associations.

The above-mentioned post does, however, touch upon another of my special fields of interest: the question of how simulacra tend to differ from those things they initially derive from. Memetics tells us that simulacra will probably have their most spectacular details exaggerated and less memorable details lost. They will be simplified, but any aspect that encourages remembering or retransmitting the information will generally be preserved. In other words, the hollywood voudoun will be simpler (it will be spelled voodoo and will lack the distinctions between voodoo and hoodoo; loa will rarely be ridden and when they are they will be ridden in arbitrary order without respect for gatekeepers), it will be more viscerally memorable (iconic images of voodoo dolls, snakes, and bags of graveyard dust will replace less-iconic veves, and all rituals will have suspenseful music and frightening practitioners), and it will emphasize those things that make it desirable to reproduce (what special effects are used will generally remain cheap, the tradition will be disconnected from any geographical location so that it can be used in a variety of settings, and the details necessary to research will be minimized by encouraging the idea that there is little legitimate content to be known). Hollywood voodoo, in other words, becomes something that any actor or filmmaker can create and have it remain recognizable -- and therefore, becomes something that many amateurs can also create. The mere dilution of the tradition through a game of telephone is enough to egalitarize it; voodoo queens and priestesses are no longer required for the Hollywood version. Of course, if we go along with the psychological interpretation of the mechanism of action of magical workings (as I am prone to do), Hollywood Voodoo is potentially precisely as effective as authentic Hatian Voudoun. There are situations wherein an authentic tradition is less useful than its diluted and bastardized pop-culture clones, and if you want to perform a ritual through the medium of film using a large number of people, Hollywood Voodoo is a good choice. Everyone understands it, and though it is less subtle and flexible than a more authentic tradition often is (due to much use), imparting nuanced ideas through complex ritual on large groups of people is hard even with extremely well-conditioned groups (just ask the Masons -- or the Catholics, who have been doing it for nearly two millennia).

I have an old joke I like to tell. I sometimes attribute it to William Gibson, but I don't think he ever actually said it outright. The question is, in a forest with some real trees and some artful replicas, how does one tell which one is real? The answer is, the fake trees are the ones that look too much like trees. Nature isn't bound to obey our platonic images of things, so only man-made things look precisely like our mental models of them. Since systems of ritual exist for the sole purpose of manipulating mental models*, there is no reason a so-called 'authentic' tradition is necessarily better than the historically inauthentic Hollywood version.

* Note that I am writing under the assumption that the psychological interpretation of magic is at least somewhat correct. If the meat-and-potatoes of magical workings are, as Allen Greenfield suggests in Secret Cypher of the UFOnauts and The Secret Rituals of the Men in Black, then an authentic tradition matters very much.