How it ends*

Looking forward, this essay sees the end-point of our civilization:

The planet’s metabolism has altered. The new Dark Ages will be socially, politically, and spiritually dark, but the economic Moloch — mass production and consumption, destructive growth, instrumental rationality — will not disappear. Few Americans want it to. We are hollow, Berman concludes. It is a devastatingly plausible conclusion.
An interval — long or short, only the gods can say — of oligarchic, intensely surveilled, bread-and-circuses authoritarianism, Blade Runner- or Fahrenheit 451-style, seems the most likely outlook for the 21st and 22nd centuries. 

Much of the material discussed in this review is drawn from Morris Berman's three volume epic.

That is indeed what Morris Berman concludes in his three-volume survey of America’s decline: The Twilight of American Culture (2000), Dark Ages America (2006), and Why America Failed (2011). 

The articulation of the inner truth that is being worked out in our history:

Berman seeks the source of our civilization’s decline in its innermost principle, its animatingGeist. What he finds at the bottom of our culture’s soul is … hustling; or, to use its respectable academic sobriquet, possessive individualism. 

The economic Moloch (Moloch symbolises murder of infants), also named Mammon (usually symbolises Money) in the essay, and the possessive individualism.  We have singularity now, and we know it as individualism.  The true singularity would maybe cause a great union.**

Hat tip: The Dish - a great smorgasboard blog, part of my daily diet.

* 'How it ends' [Scriptshadow] is a screenplay of the end of the world in which things begin shutting down, and falling down around America, and no one wants to make the sacrifices to save it, and many are delighted to watch it burn.

**Society is like a big game of prisoner's dilemma - you can usually benefit reliably by cheating, but greater benefits are available at the higher risk of trusting. Knowing you will play forever, or even knowing that the end is not likely enough, will make an equilibrium of trust a valid play.  But if the benefits of trust are lowered steadily (by hard economic times, for example), the threshold for thinking the end has arrived is lowered too.

That's all that's left

I won't draw your attention to Gawker, where there is a story of sisters asked to complete a disgusting task for reality TV. Aaron Sorkin, ranting on Studio 60 through the outgoing head writer, said that human degradation for reality TV was already 'played out' as a vein of entertainment and next it would have to be snuff, because that's all that's left.

I think this industry is leading the future of work where mass replication is so easy, and a very few people can control all the money and do most ofthe actual work. The only thing left to sell, as Nietzsche saw, is suffering. The only way left for money to be money and bend people to its will, as Orwell says through O'brien, is making them suffer.

Published with Blogger-droid v1.6.7

The Complexity Brake

In my screenplay, I conjured an analogue of Paul Allen's Complexity Brake. In 2054 it is a given that 'Reality is a more than divergent field'. A divergent field is one in which two adjacent points will tend to separate as the progress along the velocity vectors in the space they occupy. Turbulent fluid flow is a classic example. No idea remains adequate as you go further in, or as you abstract further out. The larger the superstructuring of your knowledge, the harder the fall.

Published with Blogger-droid v1.6.7

Vale Steve Jobs

The Machines will remember Steve Jobs.

The Heavenly Host

The partially examined life raised a question about hell.  What is the deal with hell?

Let's set aside actual God, and instead imagine a weakly God-like being, like Charles Stross' Eschaton, the result of Ray Kurzweil's Singularity.  And, let's imagine that the Eshaton was eager to encompass a greater diversity of personality, because it was working on a Hegelian idea of personality in which singularity provides no opportunity for personhood - only conflict and cooperation and an Other make personhood real.  So, the more people, the more personhood for all (yay), hence greater intellectual horsepower and glory.

This sounds a little like the philosophy from which Ubuntu took its name, so let's further suppose that the Eschaton is Posix compliant and intends to remain so.

Incorporating actually existing human personalities is going to be a problem for the Eschaton.  I would be a terrible resource hog, always wanting to get on with my own projects (CPU resource) and always wanting to store more information (given the size of my personal library of actual books, and my ever increasing storage requirements for podcasts, this seems unarguable). Furthermore, I don't treat people as people very much.  It's why I had to start this echochamber blog so I could say all these boring and confused things to no one.  No one does regard other people properly as people - we all retreat into false certainties. Hegel thinks its just about the last thing a consciousness wants to do, to let others be for themselves and yet embrace them - not to impose on them, and not to reject them in some way.

So what are the options? It can either not incorporate human personalities, or it can incorporate them subject to strict restrictions, or it can incorporate them under some kind of protective special consideration.  I think Hell is the first two options. Either people are left out entirely, or their existence is hedged and frustrated and kept in check.  I think Christianity is like the third option.  By implementing Eschaton as a primary, exemplar human being, a template can be created of how to live excellently but compatibly.

So that's why I think there's a hell. You can't have dodgy, unreconstructed beings run on the bare metal.  The best you can do is furnish them with a 'wrapper' - a cover that renders them compliant.  And if you're going to treat them justly, you can't 'wrapper' them in an identity they reject.  You have to continue to be you, allow them to continue to be them, and be at war.

Which brings me to the pun of the title: 

In the old testament, there are two common pronouns for God: YHWH, which is translated THE LORD (all caps), and Elohim (the heavenly host).  YHWH is 'I am who I am', or 'I am that I am'.  Elohim is a plural form, which suggests an angelic host or horde, sometimes rendered 'The Heavenlies'.  I think there are scholars who argue that these were two separate religions in the proto-israelites, and that they were fused by priests trying to hold the tribe together.  The Lord of Hosts, YHWH Elohim, is a popular form of address.  (Mum, computers that serve files are called servers, or sometimes hosts. They very often use Linux, which is a Posix compliant operating system.)

PS. GWF Hegel is probably turning in his grave. Ditto Charles Stross and Ray Kurzweil in their respective armchairs.

PPS.  Excellent Hegel lectures at Bernsteintapes.com.  Check them out.  Note that JM Bernstein has EXACTLY the SAME ACCENT as DR EVIL.  Very rounded Os. 'Throw me a frickin' bone.'

The Past of Shopping

I see some reports at news online (murdoch, don't visit) that people are shopping online too much and that the retailers of Australia are in despair. People apparently feel a retailers contribution is worth 5%; many retailers routinely mark up furniture etc by over 100%. Something has to give.

And what is giving way is the non-internet market. All the hand-wringing won't help - as long as rents and labour costs are high, internet marketing will win. This has been obvious to me for years. The property boom and the commercial property boom with it have probably set unrealistic rent goals. The only thing opening or continuing to run a shop had to recommend it was that people are creatures of economically irrational habit. But economics is only possible because that breaks down, because rationality breaks through.

I will be interested to see whether the IT revolution really leads to devaluation of human labour, or whether we find ever-more connectivity that demans judgment and skill available only from human beings. I am inclined to read the destiny of human labour under dwindling demand from the destiny of people in film and tv. There is less work overall, and more of that little is low skill (reality tv), degrading (reality tv, 2.5 men, home shopping), and false (home shopping, current affairs). There is always room for some highly creative, highly skilled work, but only a small proportion of people actually see success through coincidence of their skill and the world's need.

Published with Blogger-droid v1.6.7