The Gap is Where The Action Is

On the most important invention of the 19th Century

My roommate has fractured his elbow. Seeing as he is off work for a bit, we’ve had occasion to catch up on some must-see classic films.

My Qt/C++ “programming” is trudging along reliably, but the work of adhering to good practices of design and software engineering while “vibe coding” takes exorbitant amount of time—albeit far less time than programming an application this complicated by hand!

And the weekly McLuhan reading group I’ve attended these past few years has begun a new essay from the mid-50s, right about when Marshall was beginning his assault on the Gnostic foundations of modern social engineering.

This morning, as I

• reflect on Ingmar Bergman’s Persona (1966),

• implement a breakthrough realization that a calendar “sync” is really just the automation of a series of individual changes and commits, greatly simplifying the logic and UI for handling handling conflicts by re-using my existing methods for persisting out-standing changes/“deltas” in-and-across runtime sessions, and

• ponder on a particular reference to the evil priest of the time-fluxed, A.N. Whitehead (according to Wyndham Lewis, anyway) which McLuhan makes in Catholic Humanism and Modern Letters,

I feel a strong drive to share the sublime confluence of all these things with you now in writing, while it remains fresh. Let’s begin with the reference.

Mind The Gap

In Science and the Modern World (1925), Albert North Whitehead (collaborator with Bertrand Russell on the Principia Mathemetica (which Kurt Gödel exploded, subsequently inspiring Turing to invent the computer)) writes the following about the acceleration of technological development in the 1800s (emphasis mine):

What is peculiar and new to the century, differentiating it from all its predecessors, is its technology. It was not merely the introduction of some great isolated inventions. It is impossible not to feel that something more than that was involved. For example, writing was a greater invention than the steam-engine. But in tracing the continuous history of the growth of writing we find an immense difference… For the scale of time is so absolutely disparate. For the steam-engine, we may give about a hundred years, for writing the time period is on the order of a thousand years. Further, when writing was finally popularised, the world was not then expecting the next step in technology. The process of change was slow, unconscious and unexpected.

In the nineteenth century, the process became quick, conscious, and expected. The earlier half of the century was the period in which this new attitude to change was first established and enjoyed. It was a peculiar period of hope, in the sense in which, sixty or seventy years later, we can now detect a note of disillusionment, or at least of anxiety.

The greatest invention of the nineteenth century was the invention of the method of invention. A new method entered into life. In order to understand our epoch, we can neglect all the details of change, such as railways, telegraphs, radios, spinning machines, synthetic dyes. We must concentrate on the method itself, that is the real novelty, which has broken up the foundations of the old civilisation. The prophecy of Francis Bacon has now been fulfilled, and man, who at times dreamt of himself as a little lower than the angels, has submitted to become the servant and the minister of nature. It still remains to be seen whether the same actor can play both parts.

The whole change has arisen from the new scientific information. Science, conceived not so much in its principles as in its results, is an obvious storehouse of ideas for utilisation. But, if we are to understand what happened during the century, the analogy of the mine is better than that of a storehouse. Also, it is a great mistake to think that the bare scientific idea is the required invention, so that it has only to be picked up and used. An intense period of imaginative design lies between. One element in the new method is just the discovery of how to set about bridging the gap between the scientific ideas, and the ultimate product. It is a process of disciplined attack upon one difficulty after another.

The world is full of foolish, conceited “idea people” just looking for some disposable, replaceable lackey to implement it. This problem, obvious to everyone today, is the gap. What is worth meditating on is the notion that such a universal state of pent-up creativity (or “imagination” or “vision”), antagonized by a far-less even distribution of well-trained capacity for its expression or praxis, is a recent “invention”!

Whitehead’s evaluation, that “The greatest invention of the nineteenth century was the invention of the method of invention”, is one to which McLuhan would refer often throughout his public career.

The gist is something like this: the inventor beholds a storehouse of useful things: Maxwell’s equations, Newton’s physics, a metallurgist’s evaluation of the properties of various metals, etc. And then, one day, boom! A vague solution to a modern problem, or an innovation, pops into his or her head like a vision. Consequently, the dirty and playful work of actually inventing the solution must be undertaken—making the work less like raiding a storehouse, and more like swinging a pick-axe in subterranean depths, uncertain of the depth or quality of the veins one is tracing.

However, as an English professor, McLuhan elaborated the point not in terms of scientific discovery. For him, the principle was most readily apparent in the nineteenth-century invention of the sleuth by American novelist Edgar Allen Poe! Say the editors of Wikipedia:

Dupin made his first appearance in Poe's 1841 short story "The Murders in the Rue Morgue", widely considered the first detective fiction story.^[1] He reappears in "The Mystery of Marie Rogêt" (1842) and "The Purloined Letter" (1844).

Dupin is not a professional detective and his motivations for solving the mysteries change throughout the three stories. Using what Poe termed "ratiocination", Dupin combines his considerable intellect with creative imagination, even putting himself in the mind of the criminal. His talents are strong enough that he appears able to read the mind of his companion, the unnamed narrator of all three stories.

Poe created the Dupin character before the word detective had been coined. The character laid the groundwork for fictional detectives to come, including Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot and many others. Dupin also established most of the common elements of the detective fiction genre.

Dupin, or Holmes, behold the scene of a crime. They meet the relevant parties: victims, witnesses, investigators, suspects. From this store-house of elements, they experience private visions of whodunit and how. And then the hard work of actually ascertaining the irrefutable evidence necessary for reconstructing the truth begins. It is here—the sleuthing—where the bulk of the story occurs, and the gap between suspicion and demonstration is closed. And, of course, this occurs not in the imagined mind of the non-existent, fictional detective, but in the mind of the reader with whom the author competes in their careful exposition of the story! A good detective story, of course, stays one-step ahead of the reader, providing them the involvement of wondering and guessing and exploring, like Whitehead’s miner in his cave!

Look at all these pieces! They must fit together somehow! There must be a practical invention to be made from these pieces! There must be an answer to the question of the murderer!

Who Am I?

The drama of Bergman’s Persona turns around a question; one which is fundamental to the ascending psychological paradigm of the decade in which it was made. We might formulate it as so: “Why is it that I can’t make myself do the things that I want to do? Intend to do? Why can I not manifest my will? Why can’t I will my desired actions, my desired being, into fruition? If I never end up being the person I want to be, or intend to be, or think I will be, then who am I?”

Early in the film, a doctor prescribes a course of action for an apparently healthy young actress who has, for no discernible medical reason, not spoken to anyone for several months:

As you don't want to go home—you and Sister Alma can move out to my summer place by the sea.

Hmm? Don't you think I understand? The hopeless dream of being. Not seeming, but being. Conscious at every moment. Vigilant. At the same time the chasm between what you are to others and to yourself. The feeling of vertigo and the constant desire to at last be exposed. To be seen through, cut down, perhaps even annihilated. Every tone of voice a lie, every gesture a falsehood, every smile a grimace.

Commit suicide? Oh, no. That's ugly. You don't do that. But you can be immobile, you can fall silent. Then at least you don't lie. You can close yourself in, shut yourself off. Then you don't have to play roles, show any faces or make false gestures. You think...

But you see, reality is bloody-minded. Your hideout isn't watertight. Life seeps in everything. You're forced to react. No one asks if it's real or unreal, if you're true or false. It's only in the theatre the question carries weight. Hardly even there. I understand you, Elisabet. I understand you're keeping silent, you're immobile. That you've placed this lack of will into a fantastic system. I understand and admire you.

I think you should maintain this role until it's played out. Until it's no longer interesting. Then you can leave it. Just as you drop all of your other roles.

The 21st century’s solution to this conundrum is, apparently, for each young (and young at heart) person to discover, become, express, and act upon their sexual and other base desires, innocently and without repression, leading to commensuration of will and act.

Aim low and be!

This necessitates the lifting of shame, with all negative consequences or unrealistic visions of self as problems to be solved by invention. We could, theoretically, premise the whole economy on these technologies to fulfill personal visions of self—but let’s go back to how this is all set up.

Elisabet’s doctor strikes an interesting chord when considering other people’s blind acceptance of Elisabet’s uncertain expressions of self. “No one asks if it's real or unreal, if you're true or false. It's only in the theatre the question carries weight.” It’s too easy to act in real life, fooling others. It is more profound for Elisabet to actually act in front of an audience who knows she is acting, and is actively scrutinizing her. In acting, there are at least two levels: how convincing is the acting, and, then, what is the underlying psychology of the character in the story: are they the culprit? Are they telling the truth? The invitation of scrutiny by the audience gives Elisabet more a feeling of actual being than being itself, where everything she does is taken at face value, and she is the only one who knows better than to fully trust herself.

Only on stage can she experience what she vociferously hungers for in real life: “To be seen through, cut down, perhaps even annihilated.”

Self Made Man

It is in school, and in work, where many people have felt like they’ve known themselves the most. In such institutions, there are clear standards against which they can be measured. Doubtless, for artists, the acclaim or criticisms of publics or reviewers provide a similar measure for knowing. It’s the same with video games, or with gaining admirers and lovers.

There is an element of time to these things too—one knows what to do today in order to achieve one’s goals, in order to “reach” one’s destination, or “become” one’s self. The projection of an ideal into the future presents a gap between now and then—the same gap as envisioning an invention and finishing it, or desiring and willing.

When such a vision is strong enough to “take over”, then the work of self-actualization, as prescribed by Maslow, is arduous and fulfilling. It’s the sort of painful struggle that gives meaning to life.

Those with fitness goals have an idealized self and, through learning to exercise and eat well, a plan for becoming it. Those with financial goals work long hours, multiple jobs, and hustle persistently to meet them.

This holds true at a more base level, as well. Those desiring to maximize or render abundant a sensuous feeling—such as a reliably induced sexual arousal, or merely the comfort of the reliable happy welcoming of their spontaneous gestures and utterances by a society of people who effortlessly “get” them—have entire regimens of training to fill their empty time, and endless shopping-lists of accoutrements to purchase to empty their credit-card-filled wallets, while they diligently shape themselves and their environment toward its conjoined idealized form.

The work which bridges one’s present being—or the world’s current “storehouse” of inventions or art pieces—and the future self (or future cultural storehouse) one envisions is the massage in the subversion of McLuhan’s maxim “The Medium is the Message.” When one’s goal is to become a character from a film, or to have the cognitive power of a new computer application readily at hand, the work one undertakes to reach that symbiosis is metamorphosis. To become, you must change.

And one’s imagination of the future can only be as good as one’s perception of the world, and the self, which you are seeking to transform. A sleuth who never examines the scene of the crime may have many suspicions, and may interrogate many witnesses and suspects—but will seldom solve the case to anyone’s satisfaction. Someone with an unknown ailment can do themselves great harm with the wrong diet or exercise regimen. Someone with little-to-no life experience in developing and sustaining mutually beneficial relationships of trust and emotional intimacy—especially non-sexual ones—with another person will have a very, very hard time of reliably discovering the nuances of their own sexuality.

And when the arena within which these necessary events take place extend into cyberspace, and into the domains of fiction, then the lessons learned, and the goals for one’s self become likewise shaped and constrained. The necessary work and play which fills the gap between now and the idealized future is intractably bound up in the medium and the embodied senses which that medium exploits to deliver its content.

If you haven’t already thought of it, let me just trigger the cascade of thoughts which doubtless will come when considering what plans the marketers and propagandists behind the algorithms have for you, should you continue to chase the idealized futures they custom tailor to your online-profiled, rewards card using, points-collecting identity.

The dream on the other side presents itself to you as a storehouse of goods for purchase or plunder. Getting deeper into it, you realize that it is in fact a great deal of toil to achieve one’s dreams. It is play. It is mining. It is discovery. And at the other end, you are a different person—with the difference being shaped as much by the facilitating medium as by the initial ideal vision!

Taking the Reins

I’m happy to get into so-many-words the initial, inchoate impetus behind my new Qt/C++ calendar application. I’ve dedicated a great many more days of work to in since my last update.

Even though most of the work cannot be represented in a screenshot, I’ll share one regardless!

This is my actual calendar data you see here. I’ve half-way implemented the logic of selecting and editing multiple events at once. It will be useful for other interfaces for batch-processing individual events. The “Stage” tab you see at the bottom will show all changes which have been made to the in-memory calendar which are as-yet uncommitted to a storage backend.

This seperation of staging my modifications and commitment of those changes into a two-step process is one which I’ve always, always wanted in a personal calendar application. Maybe I just want to play around with my schedule without actually modifying any files—the same way you can write a paragraph in a word processor without necessarily saving it to disk. I want to try out hypotheticals.

My storage backends are encapsulated behind a generic, abstract SyncInterface class. This merely means that most of the program has no idea where the calendar actually is. Is it in the cloud? On your computer? Doesn’t matter. Each storage backend hides the particulars of its implementation. The application can handle collections with one backend or two—hopefully more than that in the future. This means that you can use my application as a client terminal to a remote calendar service, analagous to using a web-interface, without any local storage at all. And “sync” is just the enumeration of differences between the calendars on two-backends, with differences in each thrown onto the “Stage”, to be reviewed and committed into the other.

All the views of my calendar are also particular derivative instances of a common ViewInterface class, which has capacities for instant updating, item locking, etc. For now, my calendar views are mere tables of event properties—but once the foundation of underlying calendar logic is done, it will be trivial to add the familiar daily, weekly, monthly, yearly views.

Ultimately, what I want to do is provide a tactile and transparent application for handling the actual units of modern computer-based time management: iCalendar files.

When I book a class at my gym, the gym website gives me an iCalendar file, ending with “.ics”. When looking at an event in Facebook, you can choose “Add to Calendar” from the ellipsis menu to download an iCalendar file. The City of Ottawa will generate an iCalendar file containing my local garbage and recycling pick-up schedule on their municipal services website. Every time someone sends you an invite in an email to be accepted, there is an attached iCalendar file. Literally every major calendar application uses iCalendar.

Every other calendar tries to hide the implementation details. Tries to make it easy to use. And, in a world with many different implementations of one protocol, that makes it very easy to corrupt. Things can go wrong outside of the safe umbrella of using a single provider like Apple or Google or Microsoft. That shouldn’t happen, ideally. But it does.

Therefore, the only thing to do is hack beneath the surface appearances of other calendar apps, go down the stack, and reveal the guts. This was the main message of my 2022 presentation to The Free Software Foundation.

Some slides from that presentation, showing how C and Unix smashed through the perceptual, socially-constructed envelope of the proprietary architecture business model with truly cross-hardware portable code.

All these easy-to-use calendar applications hide the underlying, universal technical implementation. Users, they say, shouldn’t need to understand or work directly with arcane “.ics” files. If they had their way, you certainly wouldn’t know what a JPEG or an MP3 was, either. You’d live in the envelope of their black-boxed, proprietary high-level system. You’d live at your end of the gap, they’d live at their end past your perceptual and conceptual horizon, and you’d spend the rest of your life never closing that gap.

Anybody, of course, who did close that gap could just be hired, by them, to make more stuff to sell to the rest of you who aren’t so lucky. And that’s the modern dream economy. The modern business of the endless supply-side metamorphosis of you, the consumer.

If that’s hard to understand, just put yourself back in the past, when Whitehead was writing what he wrote above. People heard voices on the new-fangled radio, but nobody knew how the voices got in there.

Cinema directors would have a much easier job of impressing the audience if the audience was no judge of special effects, or no critic of acting or lighting or pacing or wardrobe or, or, or…

Someone today who didn’t know that movie characters weren’t real, or that fantasy places were just sets on a sound-stage, or that special effects are just done on a computer would is either a small child or a total ignoramus. The gap between end-product and creative impetus given the access to cinema equipment is closed, perceptually. Like a sleuth, we can watch a movie and see how it was put together. We can work backward from final effect to initial cause.

But our ability to criticize computers, however, is entirely captured and warped into fantasies which serve only tech companies. “Apps” and “platforms” come from “coders” hired by “founders” who create “startups”, goes the common myth. And you, the consumer, desire a luxurious and easy-to-use “user experience”. And you believe that you do!

The technology of today isn’t the problem. The social constructs which shape and malign the collective mainstream’s erroneous perception of technology is the problem.

And the side-effects of the endless chase into a gap, between now and an idealized relationship with a technical environment which the user is always totally precluded from understanding is what is fucking everyone up, body and mind. The gap can never be closed so long as the enveloping lies and illusions are never broken through. So long as the inventor never sees the storehouse or the mine. And thus can never envision an ideal future which exists in the actual real world.

I say this truly: this is the nature of the Gnostic duality of being; the homoncular principle as instantiated by media today. You can strive forever to “return” to a home that doesn’t exist if you’ve never known the one that does.

Build Your Own Skinner Box

Well, I’m doing my part, I think, by writing my calendar application. It will be Free Software when released, of course.

Anyone who wants to take control of their life needs a good system for time management. They need a way to easily play with potential futures. To see the big picture, and to figure out the incremental steps.

Yes, we can do that on paper. Or in a spreadsheet. Or using a million proprietary applications. But, clearly, if we’re talking about planning our routines and implementing projects, the fundamental unit should be individual calendar events. The iCalander standard, defined in RFC 5545, is the current reigning fundamental unit of time governing every single calendar application you use.

Why are you not proficient in working with that fundamental unit? The unit of your calendar?

The more I think about it, the more I marvel. Why am I surrounded by people with ADHD diagnoses, or with waylaid lives, without goals, who given endless prescriptions to create “SMART Goals” or to implement various time-management strategies? That, I think, is a class issue. Anyone with a handle on their life is attending different social events and working in different buildings than I am.

Wyndham Lewis called it the “time-fluxed” condition. He acutely diagnosed the issue as one of an underdeveloped temporal sensibility, resulting in looping days of inescapable, stagnant ritual and permanent immaturity. Even then, in 1927, he identified such people easy pray for advertisers.

But why hasn’t all the advice—SMART goals, etc.— not worked to create a bridge between where I’m at, and where those well-adjusted, organized, successful people with well-developed capacity for projecting and instantiating stated futures work and live?

I, as a generally crazy person, have decided that the crazy answer is the correct one: it’s because nobody has created just the right calendar software yet!

The software that will allow private, local, unfettered play with one’s goals, one’s futures, and one’s day to day routines, habits, etc. Software which works in the natural, fundamental unit of modern digital time-keeping as its base file-format: iCalendar files. Which works with them in the raw. Which respects the user’s intelligence and autonomy.

Which affords the data—data which supposedly represents my future self, my very life itself—with the sanctity, security, and respect which its most-precious purpose deserves.

Advertisers, marketers, and propagandists are using every psychological trick in the book. Your friends and family and lovers and professors can, to varying degrees of competency, use the same techniques. Consciously or unconsciously. Being in some environments, and being with some people can be like being in a Skinner box—they condition and shape you every moment. Commercial cyberspace, in all its forms, is that to the max.

I hope, after the actual low-level mechanics of dealing with the iCalendar stuff is implemented, my calendar software will empower me to play the same engineering tricks on myself. Because if someone is manipulating me, it should be me and those I trust. If my habits are going to dictate my life, it better be the lot of us shaping them.

If I’m going to live in a digital Skinner box, I better fucking have designed it myself.

I hope this same aspiration for you—regardless of the medium. Cybernetic being: designate the most reverent and humble and holy and loving and bravest fragment of thyself to be designer and implementer of one’s own external governor.

Lovers

Suffice it to say, then, that the gap between one’s present self and one’s “self actualization” is a matter of very, very careful choice and design of projected future, based on a great deal of research and uncovering of the material which is at hand to work with—new and old. And those doing the work to make such discovery easy are selling you a bill of goods you may not be able to afford in either money or time.

I didn’t come to feel proficient in my McLuhan studies by stopping at reading McLuhan. I did so by working through the envelopes of his public persona, his quixotic maxims and contradictions, across the gap to his source materials, and then reading and playing with them. I studied literary criticism as he learned it, spoke the poetry he read, read the many, many books he drew from. I crossed the gap to the things he pointed to. And I followed the same journey made by many, many other people who were trying, in their own way, to close the same gap.

I played where he played to develop his stuff. And then I played in the medium in of our century and it’s history: computing and computers.

Sometimes it’s okay to follow someone else’s methods. There are trustworthy experts out there who have done the thinking for you in lots of stuff, and if you’re mortal you’re wise to find a few of those and do as they tell you.

But, if you feel like you’re at risk of being bamboozled, close the gap between you and the so-called experts and figure out the development of their method itself.

If you don’t trust your software, get and scrutinize its source, or find competent scrutiny of it by trusted experts. If the source is hidden, and all the experts are sell outs, then stop using that software.

It’s often easier to get by socially by being an actor—but the intimacy of truly being yourself is very, very hard to scale up beyond a small number of people who you must love and help as well—larger public be damned. Because that gap between you and just one other person is one which, as you work and play to close it, will shape you in the most important way possible. That’s the metamorphosis of communication. And it happens in the flesh.

It’s a metamorphosis of who you are at the deepest level. Deeper than how a pill you can swallow every day might change your mood or your sensation or the shape of your body. Deeper than how a new practice might lift the low-hanging, underdeveloped parts of your basic habits or state of mind or health. Deeply and intimately communing with someone trustworthy—chosen with the utmost discrimination on the part of each of you—will introduce you to new worlds and let you see parts of yourself which are never otherwise expressed.

Being vulnerable to someone means they can shape you. They can influence you. They can improve you, and they can ruin you.

The change which Whitehead diagnosed made us all inventors—at least in potential. We have visions of change—and the ones which most come true are how we invent and create new visions of ourselves and of each other. We should aim, in weilding this godly power, for the basics.

As Maslow implied—and then hastily ignored—personal development starts at the bottom with stuff you learned, or should have learned, before you turned 16. Or 20. Or 30. Maybe we shouldn’t affix a precise date—they’re moving the goalposts all the time on what constitutes maturity.

Instead of trying to express yourself as you are, work on changing yourself. Which means self-actualizing yourself a job. Or a savings account. Or a regular habit of making healthy home-cooked meals. Or a healthy relationship. Or a family. Or literally any other goal which actually gets you or a loved one further ahead in life. And then budget and spend your time accordingly.

I’m self-actualizing a future for myself by working, first, on the tools to create and live that future, day by day. It takes up a lot of time, but it’s time well invested.

Leisure activities and entertainment are for people who can afford to budget the time for them—can you?