I’ve been getting a good stream of new subscribers—a few new ones every day! So I thought I’d welcome everyone onboard.
Knowing is Half the Battle
The best introduction I can give you is probably the fantastic new PSA from Blowtorch! He and I had a lot of fun putting this one together.
We get into the military origins of cybernetics and the applied notion of feedback loops in creating the strange post-human splices which have created a social map lifted from the reality our territory.
You’ve got different levels of biology and social dynamics and psychology all spliced together in the circuit as moving parts. A splice, in this case, is like the tunnel Wile E. Coyote paints on a cliff-face to extend a fake road for the Road Runner—a joining to create a false whole which transcends domains.
The Western mind can’t shake being logical—all it’s done is create modern systems theory and then stammer and yammer endlessly in pseudo-spiritual, reverential awe about how complex systems can be. Terms like “emergence” appeal to the artless. Further, when individuals are conditioned to know themselves as part of an abstract, complex system which transcends psychology, society, biology, institutional hierarchy, machines, information flows, etc., then their body becomes a bit-character.
All that—plus you get to learn my favourite GI Joe! It is a must-read—check it out!
Older Stuff
If you want more, I’ve got two long-form pieces of writing to recommend for your down-time. The first is my essay Cheating at Peekaboo Against a Bad-Faith Adversary, which goes deep into Piagetian developmental psychology and the history of computer interface design. It was my first major attempt to articulate how computers have likely interfered with the development of object permanance and, thus, the relation of one’s own body to physical space.
However, the world moved on from Papert’s LISP machine for children. As I first detailed in my paper for the Media Ecology Association in 2019, more and more layers accrued atop of the rudimentary programming experience associated with computers. Alan Kay, who worked closely with Papert, went on to Xerox to the Object Oriented Programming Smalltalk, as well as graphical user interfaces. These layers, as well as the file system metaphor for disk-based program and document “file” storage, completely obscured the nature of computing beneath layers of “cyberspace.” This cyberspace became the hands of peekaboo which were never to be lifted, were computers to remain an easy-to-use commodity device.
Throughout the ‘80s, as these high level concepts grew in ubiquity, Logo faded away. More importantly, the existence of a single computer as a closed, singular, addressable agent also went away. The contents of the computer screen became an orchestra of agents, and with networking gave way into an infinite world of objects and layers to glom on to.
The next thing to recommend is my tentative first step toward practically addressing contemporary social issues in a constructive, helpful way. Naturally, I chose the least provocative framing that I could: the title Turning the Friggin’ Frogs Gay in Three Easy Steps and accompanying Alex Jones meme ought to please everyone equally!
Queerness is literally just trying to translate, symbolically and aesthetically and performatively, your online-self into your real embodied social life and be recognized as having succeeded at this translation. It’s not a transition, it’s a translation—as though a book is being adapted into a screenplay. It’s a leap across a gap which, if I’m right, doesn’t even exist except in the perception of people who have a giant hole in their brain where the “what computers are” knowledge should be. A whole currently filled with bullshit terms like “apps” and “the cloud” and “information processing” and other abstractions and metaphors which are mistaken for material concreteness by the high-level illusions on the computer screen.
We make these sorts of leaps from fantasy—or media content—into embodied reality all the time in less literal ways. Costume play and role-play and finding inspiration in fictional or historical or celebrity role-models are all along the same spectrum of becoming. But our society is so dumb that it doesn’t know this, and would rather terraform the planet’s society into Baudrillard’s Disneyland than demand its experts take responsibility for having forgotten everything they knew in the ’90s. For recognizing their own culpability for bullshit culture-war issues by sustained will-full ignorance of these overwhelmingly obvious facts.
I’ve got another surprise coming up for you in a few days, but this material ought to get you all caught up on my ideas about cyberspace, cybernetics, and the unacknowledged role of our media environment on the development of our bodies and minds.
My Substack is, of course, also a place where I write about my experience of psychosis and talk about the ways I framed and processed the deluge of spurious and, sometimes, overwhelmingly poignant information which my broken sensory gate was pummeling me with. If you’re subscribing for that content, check out my archives and look for the pieces about art and about the triangle of self, others, and environment. :)