Crawling up from Underground

The Second Side of the Triangle: Others and the World

In the first part, you read about the triangular relation which structured my development out of my psychosis, harnessing and steering the over-driven meaning making of my broken sensory gate. The triangle was, simply, the proportional relation between three elements: myself, the larger material world, and other people.

With all the research and editing which went into Silicon & Charbydis, my computer history documentary series, I felt I had made excellent strides in demonstrating just what computers were in a novel, useful way. That would be the relation between myself and the material world, mediated via my material world’s most manifestly-complex, non-biological and human-made object.

Now let’s consider how I worked to understand more about how everyone else related to that material world.

Life underground

When I was working on Silicon & Charybdis, I felt I was living and walking under people. I mean that in a very visceral, strange way. It’s like, instead of walking down the street, I was walking beside the sewer beneath the street. I was a 12 feet underground, looking up at everyone else.

It was, in a very literal sense, a sensation of being in “an underworld.” Of course, conceptually I totally was. I was digging down into the history of the guts of the computer, trying to directly perceive what was beneath the surface of high-level input and output interfaces. By re-conceiving modern machines in terms of vacuum tubes, teletypes and mid-‘60s time-sharing machines, early micro-computers and the like, I was also immersing myself in the past, living in a time most people considered dead and buried.

But that that intentional submersion into historical and technical depths would coincide with an actually visceral, embodied subterranean sensation was weird. Yet, relative to everyone else, I was walking around on a lower plane; in some unseen dimension. I felt it in my body, proprioceptively. All I could really do was keep working, trusting that I could eventually build my way back to level ground with everyone else.

Everyone else was, then, walking around on a common social and behavioral “ground” I’d need to establish a firm footing in. Their relation to that world was, thus, a vital subject of research. Direct questions to regular people, like “where are you?” or “what is it like in your world?” are obviously absurd. They’d be unlikely to deliver useful responses, even though such questions would have been honest, direct expressions of my most immediate concerns. I’d need to be patient and work via inference and subtle observation.

While I was down there in my underworld—and a defining feature of that perceptual state, remember, was frequently florid psychosis—I was doing my best to remember what I had read in Otto Rank years prior. I decided I was on a specific mission, like Aladdin in the cave of wonders, to get the goods and get out again. To not get distracted. Strange, supernatural meaning and self-aggrandizing or threatening secret messages came from everywhere. It could be the placement of litter in a park, or some random scene caught on a public television, or snippets of overheard conversation.

Out of My Head

One particularly poignant example is the time I was walking up Merivale Road, approaching an intersection with a cross-street. I remember being stuck in a very negative thought loop, beating myself up over something over and over. Suddenly my eyes and head, without any conscious intention on my part, leapt up to stare at some novel stimuli. Without any thought at all, I heard myself thinking, “yes, you’re right, thank you stop sign.” And only then did I realize what was going on. To break out of an interior loop, my brain suddenly jumped tracks, into a thought manifested in the exterior world. I told myself to stop beating myself up by physically jerking my eyes and head toward an appropriate at-hand message as soon as my unconscious mind had detected it in my peripheral vision.

This externalized mode of thought, I realized, was easily facilitated our modern, highly-mediated world. Not only is there meaningful content (often discussed abstractly as “symbols” or “signs” in semiotic terms—remind me tell you why that’s all wrong) everywhere, most meaningful content is potentially ambiguous and interpreted very specifically. That is, a thing could mean many different things in general, but what it means to you is very important, and very often more about you than it. The exterior world is, then, often a projection—it’s full of meaning within you which feels more like meaning outside and independent of you. And it’s apparent external coherency, while actually generated by the narrowness of you’re own mind, seems to give it an agenda which it is prescribing—an agenda which you may still consciously disavow. So “it”—the apparently-external agency communicating to you through meaning in the outer-environment—seems to know you better than you know yourself, because it is yourself. It is the greater your-self, which includes you’re own subconscious!

Pulling Rank

I was trying my best to ignore or just gracefully slip-past most of the meaning my pre-conscious mind was fervently generating. This was harder when all that meaning seemed to cohere as an agent or agents—projections of my own subconscious. When that failed, I compromised with the meaning. Negotiated with it—found ways to work within, or even cheat its parameters and injunctions. Mostly, I did good by it.

But I neither succumbed nor was I seduced by this preconscious, externalized meaning-making when it interfered with my goal. Having a goal was extremely important, then. It allowed me to, if you’ll pardon the pun, pull rank. Otto Rank had said, remember, that the job of the artist is to create what culture was lacking. I tried not to focus on the meaning which was present, and work hard to uncover what people and books were not saying, not discussing, not seeing or feeling or explaining. That would be mine to excavate, to pull up from the ground with me during my rehabilitation.

What was culture lacking? I had already fixed the domain I was to focus on: a perception of what computers were in relation the human scale.

Up from the Sewers

I had just worked out, through painstaking research, the historical and material story of what computers were. And yet everyone else, everywhere, spoke about them in far different, more abstract and ahistorical terms. Mostly terms made up by marketers in order to teach them how to use them. Terms which, even worse, were reinvented every decade in order to dress up the same old crap into pseudo-innovative forms.

The computer, perceptually, is a “socially constructed” artifact—how it is seen and used and discussed is nearly-entirely determined by language far divorced from its actual form and composition and functioning. Only “hackers,” themselves shadowy and mysterious figures in popular culture, actually knew how they worked. The hacker mystique is prime evidence of this disjointed view, this universe out-of-order which mainstream culture and society inhabits. If I was going to return to firm social footing, I’d also need to simultaneously labour to readjust society with correctives I had developed in my underworld.

The role of art, then, was made explicit. As much as I’d need to re-enter the social world, I’d need to bring people into my perception of the verifiable, material, mundane world of computers. To be understood, I’d need to demystify the bullshit social-constructs marketers and tech companies had shrouded reality with. The relation of others to the material world, the second side of the triangle, was thus something to compromise with.

The proper part-whole relation of the user and the machine was a knowable gestalt, but not given anywhere that I could find in culture. And I was uniquely qualified—it was up to me to create and demonstrate the means of perceiving that gestalt. To integrate computers into a coherent, human world-view.

I’d continue to write a history of how “cyberspace” was invented, which is to say how we forgot what computers really were. How, like sewers, the awareness of the machine was eroded, and became buried where I had now found myself: forgotten beneath the ground. My writing would be an answer for why everything was post-modern now. I decided to understand post-modernity as a lack and, rather than explain the lack, labour on positively defining, by methodical reconstruction, the substance of what was now lacking; what in reality had been lost to popular, mass perception. Forget defining the condition; I was working on the cure.

Of all the potent, often-deluded conceits which were rushing into my mind, the conceit that I knew what was here missing and that I could, feasibly, create art to fill that gap was the one I decided to own. I have ever-since striven to live up to it.

This mission was difficult and radical enough to satisfy the grandiosity which the psychosis thrust upon me. At least, I made it to be so, through perpetually forced reasoning. I’d consciously run the line of reasoning over and over, steering my psychosis that way, leaning full bodied on the rudder.

I sacrificed many other identities and goals wildly suggesting themselves to me in order to be the guy who makes the puzzle-piece which fills that specific gap in culture. I could have worked on a million other things. But, amidst the din of conflicting vocations, I limited myself to revealing the relation of the computer user to their machine.

I mean, that’s ambitious enough, isn’t it?

Everyone else saw the surface of these insanely-complex machines, the world which is apparently inside them, the content, the easy-to-use metaphors. But vanishingly-few people have any substantial perception of what was beneath these superficialities. They might parrot empty-headed, impotent references to “ones and zeros”—but such abstract concepts bore no useful relation to the manifest reality before them when they used computers in their day to day lives. What the hell does surfing the internet or poking at phone apps have to do with “ones and zeros” to the user engaged in these activities? Nothing!

Nearly everyone is completely ignorant of how their material world works, and also too proud and self-conscious to admit it. They want to feel confident and secure and knowledgeable and up-to-date—entirely without justification. And I was existentially terrified of entering into a world where virtually nobody knew how anything worked. How was I going to ameliorate, respectfully, the dangerous social pretense of comfortable mass-ignorance?

Very gently, I supposed.

Listening to People

At my family’s behest, and driven by my own need for a gentle re-introduction into the world, I had re-applied for the retail job I had had before leaving for university in 2008. With the little bit of money I was making, I could get out a bit more. And, of course, I was getting to know my co-workers, the most senior of which I had already worked with the first time back in high school!

At work, and at the local bars, I was doing serious anthropology. I was probing, watching, and paying attention to everybody else’s relation to the world. What they paid attention to, how they dealt with it. What they ignored and took for granted. Especially regarding computers, of course, but also socially.

There is a lot of particular facets to my job which require working with the customers to perform menial tasks of sorting and counting and stacking and balancing. There is heavy equipment which can potentially cause severe injury or death. And there are all manners and classes of people to deal with. It really is the ideal place for occupational therapy—rehabilitation has been indescribably helped by the unique challenges my workplace offers.

I'd talk to people about computers and what they do on the internet a lot. I'd pay attention to every word and metaphor. And I’d ask people about their work. Some of the best people to talk to about their relation to the world are construction workers and tradespeople. They were my favourite conversationalists at the bar—going into all the wonderful, tangible technical details and logistics of managing a worksite. The coordination of teams, the discovery of shoddy work, everything.

One old classmate and friend of mine was apprenticing as an electrician, and one new friend I made was a retired crane signaler. I’d hang out with both on multiple occasions—my first new (and new-again) friends to call on when I wasn’t working. Hearing how put-together, capable people handled their embodied relation to the world and to their team impressed greatly upon my aspirations for myself in my recovery. I needed that kind of composure and sense of firm placement in my scene of competence. To know what I'm looking at, know what's going on, know how to fix what needed fixing, know how to work with others to accomplish goals.

For all of my recovery, tradesmen, day-labourers, and food service workers have been my life-line, my direct tether to human physical and social reality. Every one of them has been a blessing to know. Their world is technical, yet it’s everywhere around us and they can talk about it, point out its facets to anyone—make the material world legible, tell you and show you what it’s made of.

Talking Shop

By contrast, most of my attempts to actually talk computers with people went tits up. Often embarrassingly so—but small social failures mean nothing in the grand scheme. Social media addiction, or how phones are ruining everything, were the only thing I could rely on people to talk about with any interest. That always got a minute or two of conversation or a few anecdotes.

At the least, nearly everyone knew their phone was messing up their life, or their nephew or niece’s life, or their best friend’s relationship. The subject of video games would often lead to conversations about streaming, unsolicited on my part. People my age and older were completely baffled. Why the hell do kids want to sit around and watch other people play games? I'd explain it had more to do with the socialization—experiencing something with friends. I'd point out that kids didn't have split-screen video games like there were in the ‘90s and early ‘00s, where they'd get together and play side-by-side on the living-room couch anymore. No more LAN games either, where everyone drags their computer or console into the same place. And I'd emphasize the voice chats, the constant yammer with team-mates or spectators, the community building of gamers across distances; distances beyond mere geography.

Lots of times I'd try to strike up a conversation about how I might do a thing, or how people do things they do. I'd ask someone “say, how do you season your eggs in the morning? Mine are kinda bland.” And they'd respond with a matter-of-fact suggestion that I “just Google it.” They didn't quite get that I wanted to absorb their language about talking process—listen to what they left in and left out. What I needed was to understand their relation to their routine, to their food, to their kitchen, to their shopping—all the things that might come up in a pleasant, conversational answer to such a question. I guess I didn't really give them the context necessary for knowing that, but I felt weird enough as is so I didn't want to make things any weirder.

Sometimes I'd try and call myself an amateur anthropologist, with a wry, ironic smile. That didn't really get across the point, though.

People's relation to the world at large, as mediated through news or ideology or politics was anathema. I tried to avoid it as much as possible. Remember, baby steps. I needed to stabilize the fluctuating, chaotic world I was stumbling around in day to day, between my home, my work, my grocery store, and a few bars. Not try to understand massive forces far beyond the boundaries of the horizon of whatever was immediately surrounding me. And that’s just description—politics are mostly prescriptive! You think I feel confident having an opinion about what to do about national or global scale problems? In this psychological state? Sheesh!

I, of course, was on the internet a lot too, where politics runs rampant. But I tried really hard to keep ideological and political questions open and undetermined. I filled my online life with a wide breadth of conflicting opinion across as many partisan lines as I could find. Noise was preferable to ideological capture. Mainly I used the internet primarily as a way to record my thoughts—the proof of my existence to posterity—and to learn more about my interests in computer history and the McLuhan-style of media studies I was analyzing that history with.

Embodied Life in the Global Theater

McLuhan had tipped me off to how most people have a relation to the content of media as a space, instead of the actually-present material world before them. I had been recording random videos and throwing them on the internet just to keep a foot in the online world. It was like straddling different spaces—talking face to face to people in my home town, embodied and present, was the ground I needed to work in. But I also had to sit and talk into a camera and microphone to create videos which were public.

I had no conceits that many people would watch them. That comforted me. Even now, most videos I’ve stuck on YouTube have only a few views, thankfully. But the limitless potential reach itself was daunting enough. Dangerous.

Since proportions are so important to being, how was one to feel about the limitless proportion of global availability? What were we doing, jumping online, connecting to billions of other humans? What does living in the internet-as-space do to people? This is where post-modern literature, like that written and curated by Arthur and Marilouise Kroker really shines—dense and allusive as it is. This is where Bob—who I’ll talk about more soon—also does his best work.

I saw myself as living in the computer when I was on camera. It’s like I exist inside the box when I see my video feed—my body and being subordinated to the image, to the pseudo-mirror reflection. Who one is online can all-to-easily capture one’s being—the Balinese tribal cultures were correct to worry about photography capturing their soul after-all.

People’s relation to the material world was intermediated by the money they spent to get things and to keep those things in working condition. They don’t own cars, as my father did as he fixed them in his garage. They don’t own computers, as I do when I set up a new GNU/Linux installation. They just spend money on these things. They may be said to “own” them as a legal fiction, but they don’t really own them. Rather, they live in service to them, beholden to the social rituals and rain-dances which keep these things useful and friendly. Their machines are opaque, black-boxes. Magic. Not directly manipulable by the user except as intended affordances designed by “product designers” and “usability engineers” and other condescending bullshitters who don’t trust consumers to have any need or desire to peek under the hood.

Well I never grew up that way. I understand my world as much as I can, directly. I’ll read manuals and repair guides—I think that the Right to Repair movement is one of the most important social movements that exists. Not only for the cause of civil liberty, but for mental wellness. How can you be grounded, or sane, in a world you cannot understand or perceive? How dare you prescribe when you’ve disavowed any basic ability to even describe? When you have eschewed the responsibility of honing your senses, your eyes and ears and touch, into a just relationship to the material world? The world your senses manifest to you every waking moment?

Mass society’s relation to the material world is severely deficient. Everyone around me, I saw, lives in some uncertain, indirect and socially-mediated relation to their houses, their cars, their computers, their food. I, of course, do too in many ways. I rely on the services of others of good faith for lots of things I can’t do for myself. But in many certain regards, I can do for myself what nearly everyone else cannot: I can fix my own shit and do it properly to my own satisfaction. Or I can judge the work of others I trust to fix it for me. I can look at a thing and take it apart in my head—I can reverse engineer material situations and intercede in them.

Now the question was: just what am I supposed to do with that disparity of ability? That will bring us to the final consideration: the relation of myself to others.

A humbling topic for all parties.