Extremists Fill the Vacuum
The humanities, and cultural criticism, are in deep deep trouble.
Sometimes you stumble upon an explanation of the familiar with which is so clear that redefines it for you afresh. A few simple sentences which cut nature at its joints.
Here is the finest definition of a oft-used term I’ve yet to come across. I’ve read many whole books on the subject, but this single paragraph, taken from an 1971 anthropology paper, is the best.
I do not use the term “system” to designate collections of entities which share some ontological characteristic, as might be implied by such phrases as “belief system,” or “kinship terminological system.” The term “system” is meant merely to designate a collection of specified variables in which a change in the value or state of any one will result in a change in the value or state of at least one of the others. The ontological characteristics of the components of the physical world from which the variables are derived are irrelevant; we may include in the compass of a single system or subsystem variables abstracted from cultural, biological, and inorganic phenomena.
Cultural Analysis is Mired
Insofar as people talking about culture think that the fields of anthropology and sociology comprise the “ground” of “theory” upon-which they can practice their criticism, they will continue to devolve into post-human, post-reality metaphysical obscurantism. They will tend toward the domains of mystification and the supernatural. The critics of culture will, one by one, become practitioners of shamanistic magic.
Note: I don’t denigrate people trying to seek truth and give it form. I’d just rather they not be absolutist and all-encompassing about the hidden assumptions of their proclamations.
A recent piece over on Cyber Herm3tica about the indeterminate nature of Elon Musk’s alleged Nazi salute exemplifies the metaphysical perception that I’m talking about.
Today, we need fixed points. The viral videos that mix kawaii anime, dance music, and images of the Third Reich or the Roman Empire are not historical nostalgia. They are the manifestation of humanity’s need to cling to clear and permanent archetypal symbols in an era where past, present, and future continuously collapse into themselves in the eternal digital flow, and nothing truly makes sense. Admit it: how many times a day do you think about the Roman Empire?
The purpose behind these memes is certainly not the restoration of the NASDAP; those times are gone and won’t return. The purpose is intrinsic to the meme itself. If you’re asking what the purpose of a meme is, you haven’t yet understood that the meme is the message, and the message is the meme…
Musk and Trump are not Nazis nor Roman emperors but avatars of this new contemporary schizo-paradigm, with the power to manipulate and ride memetic simulacra that are then adopted by algorithms and collective perception…
What matters is understanding the logic of the memetic reality into which we are projected. There’s no way out because there was never a way in.
I agree that this perception of the merging of reality with dream-space is widespread, and that this particular description speaks to the lived experience of many—or, perhaps now, even a majority—of people.
I’ve written a lot about how-and-why our use of computers in measuring and quantifying are world is merging, perceptually, the virtual and the real.
Simultaneously, I disagree with the closing premise: there absolutely is a way out. But that way out can not be easily construed by one more theoretical framework or logical proposition. Scott Alexander’s parable of the impossibility of “getting out of the car” captures this better than I can.
You have been sitting there so long that you have forgotten that it is the seat of a car, forgotten how to get out of the seat, forgotten the existence of your own legs, indeed forgotten that you are a being at all separate from the car. You control the car with skill and precision, driving it wherever you wish to go, manipulating the headlights and the windshield wipers and the stereo and the air conditioning, and you pronounce yourself a great master. But there are paths you cannot travel, because there are no roads to them, and you long to run through the forest, or swim in the river, or climb the high mountains. A line of prophets who have come before you tell you that the secret to these forbidden mysteries is an ancient and terrible skill called GETTING OUT OF THE CAR, and you resolve to learn this skill. You try every button on the dashboard, but none of them is the button for GETTING OUT OF THE CAR.
Because I've used computers differently than most people for 25 years, I’ve been driving a completely different car: one that steers differently, goes different places, and interfaces with the world at different levels (even down to the ground, if I wanted)!
But I also know that a blog which merely harangued readers to go ditch Windows and Apple and Google would be a failure on launch. I don’t want to write for people already-receptive to that message. I need open a door to curiosity for people who are not.
Ultimately, I think that the creation of complementary veins of artist creation and of cultural criticism by people who actually understand computers will be necessary for survival of our species. Hence my ardent focus on the physical nature and history of the media itself, and efforts to disenchant it.
But I know it’s a big ask. Bigger than me. People who read social theory and philosophy about the nature of reality do not want to dick around configuring and customizing the low-level operations of their computer. They want to use their computer in order to read and socialize and do all the other stuff as easily as possible. They pay for the computer itself to become as invisible and out-of-the-way as possible as they apply it. They want the information. They want to find patterns.
“Actually, facilitation of your incomprehension is the most in-demand feature!”
The invisible computing paradigm has been a guiding philosophy in computing for nearly thirty years—Don Norman’s book The Invisible Computer came out in 1998, shortly after his tenure at Apple. He has long-been the most influential person in consumer and interface design. Catapulted into fame with his book The Design of Everyday Things, Norman is the vehicle by-which the obscure cognitive science term “affordance” into widespread industry use.
He is one major reason that things are easy to use, and “discoverable.” In his first book User Centered System Design: New Perspectives on Human-computer Interaction in 1986, he wrote:
People are so adaptable that they are capable of shouldering the entire burden of accommodation to an artifact, but skillful designers make large parts of this burden vanish by adapting the artifact to the users.
Since The Invisible Computer came out to elaborate on this prescription, billions of dollars have been invested in perfecting his paradigm. In short: hide everything technical, be friendly, never break, forgive all mistakes, make features dead-obvious. Taken with the minimalist approach of John Carrol at IBM (which I wrote about here)—which emphasizes discoverable play and neutering computer manuals into pop-up hints and tutorial “missions”—we get the near-total decoupling of formal-language knowledge about your computer from the demonstrable act of using your computer.
Students and professors at the Media Laboratory write papers and books and publish them, but the byword in this grove of academe is not "Publish or Perish." In Lab parlance it's “Demo or Die”—make the case for your idea with an unfaked performance of it working at least once, or let somebody else at the equipment. “We write about what we do,” comments Director Negroponte, “but we don't write unless we've done it.”—The Media Lab, Stewart Brand
The people creating your user experience may write about it in all the sophisticated and technical terms they need—but your final experience, end-user, will not be informed by the language which would make it describable or analyzable! Your sensory perception will not decompose the whole into the parts out-of-which it was built!
This free-access paper from 2005 should make abundantly clear the amount of careful psychology and engineering which is intrinsic to your “user experience” of consumer electronics. The essays in heterodox interface design professor Olia Lialina’s free-to-download book The Turing Complete User offer more persuasive arguments regarding the danger of this situation.
“Don’t mind the gap—we want you to fall in!”
It is paradoxical for me personally, because I find the “invisibility” of computers extremely conspicuous. The imperceptibility of what’s going on inside your machine, which is sold as a feature for most people, is glaringly and abysmally obvious. It’s like large swaths of the material world are painted over and redacted. And most people don’t even see the voids.
They fall right into them, and don’t even know it!
And as they do, they argue semantics, frivolously and ineffectually, over the small tip of the iceberg which they do see, while just begging and pleading with government to regulate tech companies into fixing what’s submerged.
The feeling of radical alienation I had from everyone around me over this, and from “the discourse” at large, contributed heavily to my psychotic break. The need to lessen the sensory perception of overwhelming complexity and lack of control which confronted me with every internet-connected device I owned drove me to do all of my most personal writing and reflecting on a laptop from 1991 for a few years.
A simple, offline computer is still a very deep device. But it has a bottom. Beneath Windows is DOS—an all-text shell for moving files around and loading the executable ones into memory. And if you understand how DOS interfaces with the BIOS, as first sketched out and implemented by Gary Kildall in the 1970s (to be ripped off by Microsoft later in the ‘80s) then there’s no lower to go in either a computer-design or computer-history dimension. I’m being very basic here—but not BASIC! Har har har.
What’s below that is electronic engineering, which we will allude more too soon.
Anyway, I pretended I was using this beautiful, overweight beige brick for hipster cred, or to avoid distractions. Its loud mechanical keyboard is the finest I’ve ever typed on. But, really, I used it for the sense of safe, embodied closure with the device I could trust.
We merge with our tools in habitual use. It’s a sense of putting them on and becoming part of them, as one does with one’s clothes, and one’s mirror reflection. It is a vulnerable and intimate merging.
When it comes to the machine into which I pour my most private thoughts, this sense was one which, in my raw state, could only be violated by the intrusion of any inessential and invasive tether to the larger-world. An offline machine is exhaustible in a basic sketch of what it is as an object in front of you. An online machine is not—it’s connection outward is too limitless for the senses to capture and close-about.
Refer again to Scott Alexander’s parable and Fred Flintstone’s car: how can you feel safe driving a car you can’t brake with your feet??? You’re just going to… trust it?
The fact that so many people live with a perpetual internet connection implies one of two things: either they never want to be alone, or don’t know that they aren’t.
I wouldn’t have been able to pull myself together if I couldn’t a) have kept using computer to record my thoughts as I always had done, and b) reserve the ability to close out the explosion of planet-scale complexity which an internet connection entails. Anything else would have been escapism and retreat.
So I wrote offline. And I kept up an online persona—a public front of sane eccentricity—in order to keep my foot in the door of the technically-connected world which I knew I couldn’t just wish away.
Playing with the Physical World
When I was about 7 or 8, I had this exact “Electronic Project Lab.” It came with a book full of circuits to build by placing bits of wire within corresponding springs.
Whatever of electronic engineering I learned from it is mostly forgotten. I remember the basics of how all each of these components work, but have never built anything novel with them. My last electronics “project” was to solder a longer cable onto my mixing headphones. My next will be to repaint some cooked circuit traces on a broken ergonomic keyboard I bought for $5 at a thrift store (which sells for over $400 new).
A game like Turing Complete can teach you how the logical building-blocks you can make with these electronics are built into a simple computer. We’d like to think intelligent people are aware of the fundamentals of every other science—elements and molecules in chemistry, neurons and neurotransmitters in cognitive science and psychology, etc. Familiarity with a broad-swath of the fundamentals is key. So what about low-level mechanics, electronics, and operating systems?
It’s a business model. When something is broken, I’m not squeamish about taking it apart and poking around—what the worse that can happen? It’s already broken.
Most people, I accept, do not have this inclination. They didn’t have parents whose problem-solving capacities were exercised in domains which most people are more comfortable to leave to professionals. And so, lacking any embodied experience with exerting control over much of the physical world beyond the “affordances” of easy-to-use interfaces to mechanisms, they lack inoculation against bullshit and social-construction of the language they use to discuss technology.
And they pay for it.
The resonant word of the marketer and propagandist fills the invisible voids of “tech” with ghosts and demons.
Selling it
Back in 2020 I was still groping for for words to capture this all-encompassing perception. I was trying then, as I am now, to make my point in the seductive language of philosophy and theory which non-tech people so-love to read and challenge themselves with. I wrote a paper called The Artist’s Emergent Journey, dense with my best emulation of post-modernist jargon and modern criticism in order to veil the practical technical lessons inside.
One thing I knew was that metaphor and analogy were central to such writing. I had been stockpiling poignant metaphors for a few years by this point.
Our sense of our material environment encountered in the flesh, be it visual or acoustic—sequential and Cartesian or enchanted, discontinuous, and mythically-rich—is peanuts compared to the space we sense as laying on the other side of our interactive looking-glass. In its vastness, cyberspace is like a vacuum, waiting for our high-pressured lives to blow us right out the window into its infinite content. Today’s popular commoditized and commercialized cyberspatial interface is Junji Ito’s Amigara Fault, beckoning us with its siren’s call toward our own personal hole.
In fact, a black box may just as well be called a black hole after the astrophysical phenomenon. The event-horizon of a black-hole is the sphere surrounding it, the radius of which marks the precise distance at which the escape velocity of the singularity’s gravitational field equals the speed of light. The result is the hypothetical “surface” of the black whole [“whole” instead of “hole”? was this intentional? I don’t remember] seen (in simulation of course) as a flattened screen of the last visible trace of everything that had been sucked into it before becoming lost to the perception or sense by the rest of the universe. If contemplation of this phenomenon presents a paradox to the rational mind, or breaks our intuitive conception of space—then how could it be that a black-boxed computers (or any unexamined communication media or infrastructure) does not introduce the same paradoxes into our sense of space and time? Computer interfaces resonate with a limitless fullness of things we only dimly know they can’t possibly contain, while being completely materially-inscrutable while we use them.
Yet another apt analogy would be the monolith from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, which was impenetrable, and yet held primates such as ourselves utterly captive, enchanted by it’s apparently limitless depths of content. “My God, it’s full of stars!”
Basic “physics” in our cyberspace, with its portals and sutures which collapse distances and merge at strange scales within artificially-symmetrical gauges, match those found in Caroll’s Alice in Wonderland.
For reasons I couldn’t comprehend, this piece was politely received while apparently remaining totally near-ubiquitously unread. In the past few years, I’ve had strangers approach me online about it with interest. We’ll talk for an hour or two in a video conference, and I’ll lay out my point.
It took me a while to realize just how pro-active someone has to be in order to sell their point of view. This Substack is, in some ways, another incubator for learning how to sell what it is I’m trying to sell even more effectively.
Cybernetics, Again
So, again, we return to the little paragraph I quoted at the top about the nature of “systems” in the cybernetic sense. A system is “a collection of specified variables in which a change in the value or state of any one will result in a change in the value or state of at least one of the others.”
The word “variable” can refer to the letters in an algebraic function, such as x and y and m and b in the famed y=mx+b which can describe any straight line on an x by y grid by reference to its slope (the fraction m) and point-of-interception with the y-axis. Putting in a value for x gives you the value of corresponding point y on that line, and vice versa.
That’s nice and concrete, isn’t it? At least, for an abstraction. y=mx+b is a system for describing straight lines upon a 2D plane.
The ontological characteristics of the components of the physical world from which the variables are derived are irrelevant; we may include in the compass of a single system or subsystem variables abstracted from cultural, biological, and inorganic phenomena.
Here is where things get messy. All the variables in y=mx+b exist within the same common domain: the 2D plane of a fixed x and y coordinate system. Anything that can be considered planar in the abstract can, then, be said to concretely have lines within it captured neatly by the system inherent to this formula.
But cultural critics very-often attempt to describe dynamics inherent to complex systems which, as we see, lack ontological coherency as being necessary for functioning. And after decades of formalizing this lack of ontological coherency in practice, we’ve come to describing a lack of ontological coherency in theory.
When young people go to school, all the “systems” they study span multiple levels of reality, bouncing between measurements derived from physical matter, from aggregate data, from opinion polling, from computer readings, etc. all tied together and analyzed for correspondences and relations. And then they go metaphysical, and realize that reality is a merger of the virtual and the real. And then they go mystical, and look at the world as a giant computer to be programmed—without understanding computers as anything by magical void-boxes full of magic math that they manipulate in python or Matlab.
The language of archetypes and cultural trends and Skinner boxes and seductive phantasms chased by desirous and enraptured fanatics all exist within such abstract, complex systems. All the theory I read takes place in this null-space where dream-images on a page or screen, and costumes on cosplaying LARPers are merged into living fantasy. It’s a metaphysics of merging inner and outer where the media of measurement and simulation itself is ignored.
Art Must Surround What Surrounds Us
The director of Nosferatu, Robert Eggers, recently told Rotten Tomatoes in an interview that “The idea of having to photograph a car makes me ill. And the idea of photographing a cell phone is just death. And to make a contemporary story you have to photograph a cell phone. It's just how life is.”
Timid.
We cannot have art or culture which about the world we live in so-long as no-one is prepared to even perceive it or receive an accurate portrayal of it. So long as the invisibility of computing which makes it “easy to use” remains a completely desirable quality, and the ownership and control over these devices remains the purview of distant tech oligarchs.
Yet, I think that the perception of the reality is so overwhelmingly terrifying that people just go full Unabomber at the first inkling of the problem’s true proportions. They desire to unplug. To throw away their phone. To run off to the woods and raise chickens and drink rain-water off the grid.
It’d be easier just to learn how computers work.
Until we do, however, we’ll continue to just project century-old history onto the contemporary scene, affixed by the glue of aesthetic “archetypes” and “myth” and “narratives.” Within the collective dream, the right will always be Nazis, and the left will always be “Orwellian,” and meanwhile the fall into post-human future will dislocate agency even further from everyone’s conscious control, displacing it onto the cruel forces of nature and dispassionate calculations of machines.
And until we do, actual computer-knowledge will be continue to be carried solely by a private club of loners and outcasts who banded together the best they could, idealistically, within the broadest terms of inclusion they could imagine within the disembodied world of cyberspace. Who formulated codes of conduct which understood and accepted all transgressions of the norms which they did not work to internalize. Whose childhood development behind a screen lead to fanciful identities and play within vast worlds of imagination. Whose sexuality is now queer and whose hobbies are mostly games which are premised on exploring exciting configurations of complex systems of rules and characters and worlds and economies beyond the mundane and the real.
To be reductive for rhetorical effect, and without loss of generality: All the hackers are furries. And they control everything now because the rest of the world was too stupid to learn alongside of them while they were learning it. The rest of the world just wanted to buy shinier and tinier Apple products while otherwise-continuing to pretend it was still the 20th century. The hackers are trying to realize the 21st, and see no through-line to even relating to any non-revolutionary traditions of the past—largely because those who still live in the past, who claim to exemplify those traditions, are proud of being obsolete, irrelevant, superficial trend-chasers who rely on paying others to manage their technology for them.
Let’s stop pretending that artless, number-obsessed libertarian techies are the ones in charge of “the digital revolution” here. That those shrewd, selfish businessmen need a lesson in “the humanities.” Fuck that. “The humanities” need to catch the hell up in learning to perceive the physical, material world they live in. The calculating rational actors, alleged rendered computer-like by their own creations, are not the problem here. That’s critique belongs to the world of the ‘50s, not the world of today! It’s critics who safely inure themselves from the dirty work of understanding technology—fully aware of how such knowledge would make them inconversant with, and distasteful to their fellows as much as I am—who need to drop their pretenses. Drop the nerd chic and pick up the soldering iron and the computer manual!
Let’s stop pretending that a return to tradition will bring the world back into some form recognizable to past generations—that there is some “back to sanity” pathway which will reign in the apparent excess, when measured against norms from a world before ubiquitous computers existed. The youth are not radicalizing—they’re expanding to fit the widened contours of a world you paid money to stop perceiving in your fake world of shiny, easy-to-use consumer electronics! They’ve expanded to fill the vacuum which all these too-long-obscured and ignored voids contain. Too much is possible now for us to go back.
The problem isn’t the “economic” model. It’s the free reign powerful actors in the economy are given when the institutions which are supposed to prepare citizens to resist exploitative business models fail. It’s the sell-out artists enchanting a tech which so-few are empowered to disenchant.
And so: the path forward can only be the careful, studied disentanglement of the various “ontological characteristics of the components of the physical world” which we’d all be more comfortable not really living in. Painstakingly, like a puzzle, putting all the abstract variables back into their material home. To learn to sense, again, the real. To disenchant their commodities from the magic spells of learned helplessness and warranties and paid support which render most of their surface untouchable and mysterious. To escape the mediation of absolutely everything via expert classes who are incentivized to dis-empower the public.
Without retreat, and without plunging and falling forever into them, we need to learn to see the black boxes. Not the movie, but the dark, black, empty cinema screen itself.
Like Kubrick showed Fred Flinstone.