And Good Riddance!

The Western Confucian brings up an interesting topic which, much to my surprise, I find myself on the opposite side of from him. At issue is the apparent move to omit Thomas Jefferson as a writer "influencing the nation's intellectual origins." It would appear from his tone that my ex-pat colleague is displeased at this, although I'm not entirely clear why. Yes, yes, I know, I'm no great friend of Jefferson, but this has got less to do with my inherent dislike of the fellow, and more to do with the fact that I don't look around me and see much evidence that his thought has really had...well, influence.

I recognize that we still quote the Declaration of Independence. That's not what I'm talking about. The Declaration only gets trotted out when you can't find something more definitive and compelling on which to ground your case. It is not a document of hard law - much like its author, it is full of fluffy idealism coating a crunchy and scary Jacobin center. We are talking about a man who thought the French Revolution was a good thing, and that the best metaphor for liberty was to liken it to a vampiric tree. Eek much?

Not that I'm a Federalist, either. Honestly, I wish it had been Jefferson in the duel with Hamilton rather than Burr. Also, I wish that it had ended in a tragic firearms malfunction, and happened in, oh, 1785. And while we're wishing, I want a cyborg pony.

So Put Your Hands Up!

The following comes courtesy of Mark Shea, with a hearty tip of the pipe.

Dante on the Internet

First of all, I am not referring to that godawful video game that quite literarily rapes the Divine Comedy for material in order to situate God of War in some sort of bastardized Christian mythos. I do have thoughts that wind in that direction, but that is material for another scrivening. My use for Dante in this context is more focused on a more esoteric - but, in my opinion, a more meaningful - achievement. Dante was, for all intents and purposes, the explicator of what is commonly referred to as the "fourfold method" of literary analysis. I don't believe that all works of literature have exactly four layers of meaning, or that their layers are particularly, well, meaningful; however, I do believe that looking beyond the literal is a fruitful - and sometimes an amusing - way of getting at certain truths.

Let's take the second thing in the title as our subject of study: the Internet. There is undoubtedly very little beyond the literal in much of the content out on the Web, and much of the intentional layered meaning tends to be more of a blunt instrument than Dante probably intended when he described the fourfold method. There are, however, some double meanings that may be unintentionally insightful, and downright funny. Let's take Google's latest foray into the social scene as an example. It's called Buzz, and the dictionary's first entry for the word is: "a low, vibrating, humming sound, as of bees, machinery, or people talking," which is pretty apt for the service if it does what it's supposed to do. Twitter - of which I've spoken previously - carries a similarly amusing common meaning: "to talk lightly and rapidly, especially of trivial matters; chatter."

Now, I'm not trying to say that these services are in and of themselves utterly useless or silly - merely that they are often used in a way that makes them seem so. Twitter, particularly, is a service that I enjoy, somewhat off-label, as a way to indulge in my favorite Internet activity, which is to pick fights with random strangers.

These sorts of layered meaning are cute, but they are not, per se, interesting. What I am thinking of - and what Dante will, unfortunately, be of little use with - is that class of "bleeding edge" communications styles that the Internet likes to spawn at somewhat regular intervals. They may be fads, or they may become permanent fixtures, but they say something concerning the mentality of their participants which can occasionally provide insight.

Let us take one relatively new-fangled trend: the "vlog." No, that's not a typo, just an example of the Internet's tendency to shorten forms to a monosyllabic singularity. Just as "blog" is a shortening of "weblog," "vlog" is a shortening of "video weblog." The difference is that, while a traditional - and believe me, the irony of using that word in relation to a ten-year-old phenomenon is not lost on me - blog can be composed of mixed media, it focuses primarily on text; whereas a vlog uses video as the principle medium. This means videos of varied an sundry things, to be sure, but primarily it involves the "vlogger" opining to the world in their real-life manifestation.

That may not seem overly strange - sites like Youtube have been enabling this sort of thing for years - but I find it problematic on two fronts. First, I think it threatens to undermine the principle of anonymity that has been part of the Internet zeitgeist since the early days of the Web. Second, I worry that it indulges a sort of narcissism that is not only unhealthy on the level of the individual, but also betrays a degradation in the greater social fabric.

The question of anonymity on the Internet is a topic that tends to generate a lot of differing viewpoints. There are those who think that it undermines the writer's credibility; this is a rather common view among journalists. I was actually told this by a local journalist last year, when I refused to comment under anything but my pseudonym for an article she was writing on the then-boiling controversy involving my alma mater. Others, most notably the founder of the 4chan online message boards - a fellow who goes by the moniker "m00t" - is pretty solidly of the opinion that anonymity allows for a more frank and open flow of discussion.

I tend to fall in the middle of these viewpoints, skewing a little closer to the position articulated by m00t. I realize that it is to the advantage of some people to blog under their real identities. They are broadcasting ideas to bolster a brand that is their own selves. And that is fine.

Most people, however, have no "brand" or strictly practical reason to attach their ideas to their real names. In many situations, it can be a real encumbrance to do so. People have lost jobs and landed themselves in needless trouble because of what they post online. The only motivation I can conceive of for exposing oneself that way ties into the second problematic point I mentioned before - narcissism.

The desire for notoriety seems to be inextricable from the general democratic psyche. In the "olden days," you had to do something objectively significant to achieve fame. You could be a great humanitarian, or a statesman, or a serial killer...except that "you" couldn't do those things, because "you" involves the vast majority of the human race, and are essentially average folks. Fame was specifically tied to being exceptional in some way, good or bad; and to be exceptional is literally to be out of the normal range. Democracy, however, does not like to hear that truth told. Everybody is as good as everybody else, which means that if one man can be exceptional, then everybody can be exceptional. And, to quote Syndrome, "When everybody is super, nobody will be."

The problem is that the world doesn't work that way. The threat of a world plunged into mediocrity due to universal super-humanity is fallacious, because the world would never allow for it to happen. There aren't that many geniuses. Not everybody can be an astronaut when they grow up.

Not that the democratic mind is to be bothered with such trivialities as this. If notoriety is hard to come by under normal circumstances, then all there is left to do is lower the bar for what qualifies. Hence, you become a celebrity if enough people follow your blog; or if Conan O'Brien starts following you on Twitter; or if Stephen Colbert edits your Wikipedia page.

"Vlogging" is not a major symptom in the great social malaise. It is a small sign of worse indicators - our short social memory for greatness, and our even shorter attention span for current events. We don't need the Internet to isolate ourselves. If you keep your head down long enough, then real life will pass by as quickly and intelligibly as the mighty Twitter stream. Which is to say, too fast entirely.

Beautiful Sarcasm

I own a MacBook Pro and an iPod Touch, but I am by no means a Machead, as evidenced by the fact that I find the iPad to be a comically-named and slightly lame iPhone afflicted with giantism. (Spoiler alert, I am a Verizon subscriber and my next phone will probably be a Droid, unless something unspeakably shiny and affordable shows up in the interim.) Perhaps it is because of my "meh" approach to the device, I find this video hilarious:

Enjoy!

A Little Something

I know that there has been a call for more BSG-related writings here, and I am working on that. I still need to finish my somewhat hairbrained project to justify the possibility of AI, after all. In the meantime, I thought I'd leave you with this delectable little something I stumbled upon:

Passing It Along

I received a link the other day to a wonderful article by the incomparable Mr. Lichens. It is a lengthy-ish critique of Richard Dawkins - and therefore it has a special place in my heart. There are not enough people on this earth who seem to truly grasp the silliness of Dawkins, and this article does a fabulous job of elucidating it.

Let me just quote you the first paragraph of the article:

Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is the Book of British Birds, and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology. Card-carrying rationalists like Dawkins, who is the nearest thing to a professional atheist we have had since Bertrand Russell, are in one sense the least well-equipped to understand what they castigate, since they don’t believe there is anything there to be understood, or at least anything worth understanding. This is why they invariably come up with vulgar caricatures of religious faith that would make a first-year theology student wince. The more they detest religion, the more ill-informed their criticisms of it tend to be. If they were asked to pass judgment on phenomenology or the geopolitics of South Asia, they would no doubt bone up on the question as assiduously as they could. When it comes to theology, however, any shoddy old travesty will pass muster. These days, theology is the queen of the sciences in a rather less august sense of the word than in its medieval heyday.

...Never mind that it is absurd to ask a biologist about phenomenology. He's just not a subject-matter expert, regardless of how accomplished he is on an amateur level. It would be like asking a linguist his opinion on the price of tea in China. Of course, in a world where George Lakoff actually gets that sort of play time, maybe I can't expect too much.

That Amazing Two-Letter Word

This is an edited version of a blog post I originally wrote back in 2008. Since then, I have seen no reason to doubt the correctness of my analysis, and in fact a suggestion by a reader has led me to consider additional, related questions. As I ruminate and prepare, I offer back up this second post regarding the communications media, isolation, and modern society.

I was contemplating some of the more mundane properties of language the other day, particularly the ability to create or adopt new words into a vocabulary. Although I'm by no means well-schooled in the history of etymology, it seems to me that the technological explosion of these present times has proved a fruitful breeding ground for new words. One, however, came particularly to mind at the time as I was putzing around on Facebook.

Social networking has become fairly commonplace today, as has the terminology associated with the use of such networks. The term that strikes my fancy at the moment is "friend" - not the noun, as that has been in existence for a good while now, but rather the verb, which essentially explains an act by one individual granting another individual access to the first individual's online presence on the service. This is a process of granting what is fundamentally a security clearance, and has little to do with affection. What interests me about this neologism is its form - identical with its noun homonym - as well as its structural similarity to the preexisting verb "befriend" - and the total lack of commonality between the new and the old.

Consider first the older words. "Friend" is relatively simple at first glance, and you may even think me the slightest bit addled for claiming that it has nothing in common with the internet term - but bear with me for just a bit and I'll get to that. For the moment, consider the noun. At its simplest, it denotes one with whom you share a particular relationship, different from that you are in with the faceless masses. Your friend is someone you really know, and who knows you. There is a level of affection and intimacy that exists between two people who are friends that does not - and perhaps even ought not - exist between two people in line at the supermarket.

And how do two people become friends with each other? Quite simply, they befriend each other. The verb is one of those lovely Anglo-Saxon terms that simply tackles a concept by putting two existing words together, so that to befriend somebody means literally "to be the friend of someone." It is that "be" before the "friend" that makes all the difference in the world when it comes to the gulf of meaning between it and the neologism I brought up above. Two little letters to the word, but a whole world of difference.

When I "friend" someone on Facebook or MySpace - does anybody actually use MySpace any more? - it carries absolutely no inherent or necessary meaning. One computer asks another computer for permission to access certain data, and that is the end of what is intrinsic to the process. Independent of some alternate form of communication, it is a leap of faith on my part to presume that a given person is who they claim to be. Because the people whom I "friend" on Facebook are people I already know in real life, the "friending" process is merely a virtual extension of an existing friendship, and the social network becomes nothing more than a tool to remotely communicate and share. However, when somebody "friends" people they do not otherwise know, all they are doing is amassing a quantity of contacts for whom there is no demonstrable real-life analogue. I could create a Facebook persona named Homer McGilicuddy complete with a set of interests and statistics, and go out onto the network and acquire some quantity of these virtual (read: imaginary) friends - but the relationship is inherently empty and meaningless, because Homer does not exist outside of his profile online. Nobody can become friends with him because there is nobody to get to know. The best he can be is a notch in someone's belt - and that is a sad best.

To befriend somebody, though - now that is something significant. You must encounter the person, you must get them to share something of themselves, and you must share something of your own self. You must find those points of common interest over time. Most importantly, you must have enough care for the other person to overcome those points at which your respective personalities must inevitably clash. I do not believe that there is a single person who I count as a friend with whom I do not diverge on at least one point. Even La Principessa and I have areas where our interests and opinions are not aligned. Sure, it's messy, but that's what makes life interesting. More importantly, it has a reality and a significance beyond the ethereal confines of a server drive. The act of befriending is an act that should effect one's very essence. It ties two people together in a way that cannot be effaced by clicking some button or un-checking some box. It is about choosing to be in a very specific way.

That word again. "Be." It is an amazing little word. Within those two little letters lies ontology itself. It is about the most amazing word in the English language.

Mandate of Heaven?

This might upset those who believe that, for some reason, America is very special to God. From the article:

Interrogators pumped detainees full of so much water that the CIA turned to a special saline solution to minimize the risk of death, the documents show. The agency used a gurney "specially designed" to tilt backwards at a perfect angle to maximize the water entering the prisoner's nose and mouth, intensifying the sense of choking – and to be lifted upright quickly in the event that a prisoner stopped breathing.

The documents also lay out, in chilling detail, exactly what should occur in each two-hour waterboarding "session." Interrogators were instructed to start pouring water right after a detainee exhaled, to ensure he inhaled water, not air, in his next breath. They could use their hands to "dam the runoff" and prevent water from spilling out of a detainee's mouth. They were allowed six separate 40-second "applications" of liquid in each two-hour session – and could dump water over a detainee's nose and mouth for a total of 12 minutes a day. Finally, to keep detainees alive even if they inhaled their own vomit during a session – a not-uncommon side effect of waterboarding – the prisoners were kept on a liquid diet. The agency recommended Ensure Plus.

I'm not overly concerned about America's soul in all of this, mainly because I don't believe that there's enough of a soul left to radically hurt. What does bother me is that the precedent was happily set that we can do horrible, inhuman things to other human beings, based on nothing more than the suspicion that they might, possibly, have information that we want - and by "suspicion" here, I mean a Muslim who dislikes America. Frankly, I have a survival instinct about this sort of thing. I will be insanely tolerant to people and viewpoints I don't agree with or believe are wrong, because I don't want someone being able to turn on me because of my viewpoint, and...oh, I don't know, waterboard me. You do it to someone, you can do it to anyone.

Thanks a lot, Darth Dick Cheney.

(Tip of the pipe to Mark Shea)

Things I May Pay Money For

Solaria Syndrome

This is an edited version of a blog post I originally wrote back in 2008. Since then, I have seen no reason to doubt the correctness of my analysis, and in fact a suggestion by a reader has led me to consider additional, related questions. As I ruminate and prepare, I offer back up this first post regarding the communications media, isolation, and modern society.

One of the most aggravating things about the Internet is that it is bursting with stuff. Lots of stuff - memes, blogs, companies, charities, games, forums...you get the point. There's so much that, as useful as it is, it can get distracting. It can suck you in, alluring in the wealth of information to be absorbed; or with the wealth of mental junk food to sap your energy. As a personal example: over the course of a week a few years back, I decided to read basically everything that Wikipedia had on string theory, quantum physics, and post-original-trilogy Star Wars novels. Yeah, I know - random. What can I say? I'm a geek and a nerd. This should not surprise you by now.

Another time, right after I made the poor economic decision to spend money to go see Superman Returns I decided to read up on canonical Superman comics and their lore. That led into absorbing information about most of the major players in the DC Comics universe - and then, the Marvel Comics universe...I was up late those nights, but it was fun. Pretty useless from a meaning-of-life perspective, but, again, I am a geek and a nerd, and none of this should be in the least surprising to any of you. Not that I wouldn't agree that there was probably something better to spend my time on.

I just can't be too down on the Internet. Without it I wouldn't have this blog and all of its adoring reader. I wouldn't have nearly as easy of a time finding things to write about, let alone sharing them once they were written. However, to be fair, I have to admit that there is a downside: the more time you spend online, the less time you spend in the "real" world - and while blogging, surfing, and message boards (not to mention the more arcane implements, such as Usenet and IRC) are diverting, fun, and enjoyable, they're no substitute for a life. If you try to make the substitution, then it will fail. You won't get outside, you won't feel the fresh air - which even at the relatively chilly temperatures of this time of year, I still value beyond all the cubic feet of indoor air I breath most of the week. There's a reason that geeks and nerds are stereotypically white and skinny (though some would use the word "atrophied").

Back in the olden days, when there wasn't even a crappy substitute for reality, people were simply shut-ins, misanthropes, or Henry David Thoreau. They found ways for good or ill to shut themselves off from society and spend all their time with themselves and whatever cats, snow globes, or stupid pond-front houses they chose in involve in their solitary existences. I point you to a little piece a bit more explicitly about this if you're interested in what I've been trying to convey.

In the grand scheme of things, I look at this tendency to treat the Internet as a habitat or a shelter to be yet another symptom of societal atomization. As the range of our individual interests collapse further and further in, we are less and less interested in the people we can see, hear, and physically interact with, mainly because sensual presence has a way of making it hard to objectify people. That's what makes abortion such an easy atrocity to live with - you don't see carnage. You don't see babies, or for the most part even the chopped up bits of baby that are the result of the "procedure." Everything is tucked away nicely out of sight. Of course, such raw objectification leads to things like this being more and more commonplace. Objectification makes everything easier to deal with: rape, murder, and theft - everything. After all, do you weep if you break a hammer? Not a bit, because that would be silly - you just go out and buy a new hammer.

But what creates the atomization? Deep down, I think it's caused by a sort of "societal law of thermodynamics"; like energy and matter, societies and people lose steam and break apart over time. Tocqueville would say that it's a consequence of a society losing its mores - those ethereal, necessary things that define, shape, and sustain our existence in communion with each other. They give everyone something to aim at that is more exalted than themselves. They are ideals that draw men out of their private caves of self-interest and into the light of a society aimed toward a common good.

Of course, once the mores are lost, the clock starts ticking. Sure, society might continue to limp along for some amount of time on the strength of its members' awareness that cooperation is dictated by mutual self-interest (the idea that each member of a group can be better off in the group than by themselves) but self-interest is also lazy, and will look for the easiest way to get what it wants. Like anything with animal urges, the human being as a specimen wants to get along with the least amount of pain possible, be it physical, mental, or social. Living in a society is great and all, but there are so many annoying people in it - they don't like the things that we like, they don't listen to the same music that we do, and they smell funny. So, we cut the real-world social interaction to a minimum, dealing with people only when it is in our interest to do so. And we try to seek out friendship over the Internet by associating with people of common interests, musical tastes, and olfactory preferences.

The problem is that those people don't really exist. Not in the real world, at any rate. They're at so much of a distance that they may as well not even be human, even. Talking to an avatar in Second Life, or some guy on a forum somewhere, you have no meaningful concept of the person you're interacting with. You see exactly what they show you, and no more - but without the delightful unpredictability of real-world interactions, which are able to serve up surprises even after years of common intercourse. You take that away, and you're just chaining yourself to the wall of a cave, talking yourself into believing that the shadows on the wall are the real deal, rather than phantasms. Of course, your unconscious mind isn't fooled, and all that you really accomplish is reinforcing a worldview in which you are the sole occupant with the sort of dignity and importance that come with being...well, real.

I could terrify you with logical conclusions, doomsday scenarios, and assorted whatnot, but instead I'm going to give you a reading assignment that encapsulates the end-game of atomization very nicely. The Naked Sun is a fantastic novel by Isaac Asimov that is set in a society - the planet Solaria - where there is a meaningful semantic distinction between "seeing" and "viewing," and physical interaction of any kind is so distasteful that far in the future they make themselves hermaphroditic just so that they can avoid the disgusting trauma of coitus. As with a lot of science fiction, it sets its story a bit too optimistically in the far future, though, I think. Asimov's Solaria lives in the minds of everyone who uses the Internet as a gauge of worth - every blogger counting hits, every denizen of MySpace or Facebook who feels good or bad based upon how many people have "friended" them, every gamer who would rather kick back and run some multiplayer Halo session rather than leave the basement and make real, meaningful relationships happen.

This syndrome of retreating from reality and hiding on the Internet, the first step on a journey to Solaria incarnated, is yet another toll of the bell mourning the slow death of this latest iteration of refined barbarism. I think I'll go make me some in-the-flesh friends before it's too late.