The Human Scale Triangle

A rough sketch of my new relation to the world and to others, and the first side of that triangle.

In 2017, I decided—against better judgement—to treat my psychosis as a project to rebuild my relation to the world from a very low level. Clearly, reinventing the world from first-principles is a self-defeating project. It's absurd and insane. This wasn’t a philosophical endevour, luckily. I wasn’t trying to base some abstract system in fundamental postulates, or the like. My project was practical. It was artistic and rehabilitative.

I couldn’t really trust my own interpretation of the world or what was going on, so I had to undercut my lines of reasoning with radical skepticism and extreme humility. I had to, instead, take baby steps. Speaking of metaphors, “baby steps” is a very good one for what I'm describing, here. A wide smattering of previous awareness about developmental psychology informed my thinking here.

The primary answer was to stay human scale, which meant to begin focusing only on learning the world within immediate reach. I was trying to re-establish the relation of my interior representation to the world outside of me. That world outside features two facets: it consists of material things, and it consists of other people who are as complex and interior as I am, but with whom I can communicate. The triangle then, of me, the world, and others, formed the scaffold within which I wanted to work with.

While I wasn’t thinking of it as a triangle per se, I later learned McLuhan had posited something very similar in his early literary criticism.

Baudelaire knew that the “significance of an experience”, and this is the whole of the matter, does not reside in the poet, the thing, or the larger reality but in the ratio between the three. And there I think we should find the solution to the Case of the Missing Anecdote. — Marshall McLuhan, “The Case of the Missing Anecdote”, ~1948

My primary problem was an inability to communicate reasonably with other people, or enter into the same experience of the world as they had. So others, too, were the poet and the thing I wanted to experience and share experiences with. McLuhan drew the triangle, and posited relation of the three corners as entailing ratios—ideas I took to heart as soon as I read them. Encountering the proportions of the world outside relative to my self—my abilities, my strengths, my body—was an essential part of reigning in the monstrosity and false divinity of my runaway meaning-making processes. Alice in Wonderland, with its shrinking potions and Super Mario mushrooms, well represents the distortions I didn’t want to continue experiencing; didn’t want to render a permanent feature of my perceptual faculties.

Since there are three sides to a triangle, let's look at each. I’ll focus on the first side in this article, and continue my story along the other two sides in subsequent posts.

The First Side of the Triangle

The relation between myself and material world was definitely the easiest one. All I had to do was remember to include giant, chasmic voids as representations of the complexity of other people's embodied psychological interiority. Where other people were, I left a blank spot—to be filled in later.

In other words, the world outside was made of stuff, but some of that stuff was more than stuff, and that stuff needed an empty place-holder—something of a black hole. Other people were like event horizons, or high-level interfaces, screening a black-box of a private, inner world that I ought to eventually again understand and empathetically relate with. If I didn’t make this allowance—create a mysterious frontier beneath the skin of other people—I knew I was at risk of developing a perception of other people as meat-robots. And I did not want to become a solipsist.

But the less-complicated purely-material world of normal, mundane objects and my embodied relation to them came first—I wasn’t ready for the third corner of the triangle yet, the relation of myself to others, yet. I would stick with working on the “inert” outside world at first, until that stabilized a little bit.

And, since I'm a grown-ass man, I already knew conceptually what most of the material world was made of. I had taken shop class in highschool, I've helped in the garage and helped rewire houses and tried a bit of plumbing. I remember that buildings are held up through header-systems distributing weight, and city streets bury underground parking garages. Trees have roots anchoring them deep beneath the surface of the ground, food comes from factory farms and machine-harvested fields of bio-engineered crops. Commodity objects come from mass manufacture at the sort of factories you see on How It's Made, and trucks unload them in the backlot recieving bays of every store and mall you walk past.

I also remember high-school chemistry and I remember lots of random space-facts from science popularizers—although that was, by conscious decision, never a huge focus for me.

I kept my sense of the world limited to the terrestrial human scale: that is, my embodied relation to the immediate world of sensibly-sized objects. The last thing I wanted to do, while crazy, was start obsessing over things too big to see or small to feel, or anything beyond the mundane of things right in front of my face.

No space stuff, no microscopic stuff, no subatomic physics—none of that shit. Baby steps. Developing infants don't need to care what germs are—they just need their parents to keep them clean while they focus on handling physical objects and trying not to spill stuff. What they’re doing is learning object permanence, the subject of my first “book” draft.

(Remind me to write about Heraclitus and his silly river, sometime.)

Anyway, when it came to insensible stuff—like the physics of the header system, or the wires behind the drywall, or the roots of trees beneath the ground—I was working on establishing some equivalent of x-ray vision. Of course, I use “vision” as a metaphor, because it's not isolated to that one sense, but rather something about the whole-world which our senses collaborate to make up—I may have well had said x-ray tactility or x-ray kinesthetics—to feel the reality or the movements or the weight of the human-scale world beyond my senses.

(I also need to write a different post to explain what my total apathy toward mathematics in school—and interest in computer programming—spared me from. Suffice it to say here: Seymour Papert’s Mindstorms was an indispensable read.)

Complimentary to my metaphor of x-ray vision is my general ignorance of aesthetics and fashion. I feel rather blessed in that regard because I wasn't too tied up in analyzing the surfaces of things. The what-things-are-made-of mission of getting a sense of the practical aspects of the material world was what was pertinent to me. Cultural symbolism and narratives about style and dress and decorum was not. When my mind was trying to interpret everything as symbolism, devout attention to literal and functional aspects of the world, and building part-whole relations—gestalts—was far more important.

And, most important of all, I understood a great deal about the most complex non-human thing which existed within my material reality: my computer and my phone and every other computer and its peripherals I encountered. It was the perfect challenge. And since I'm a computer addict free-software user, I had a minority insight into the operations of my machine that most people do not.

The trick, then, was keeping the “chasmic void” perception localized only for other present, immediate, embodied people, and not for computer content and other media which superficially present-themselves as having subjective interiority. I’ve taken lately to calling the false interiority of the computer “cyberspace.” People were black boxes by their very nature—computers were not.

If I could prove that to myself, if I could teach my body and my intuition to naturally, subconsciously relate to computers as they are, as material objects without interiority, then I reasoned that I’d be firmly planted.

It was a big ask—modern computers are the most complex human-made thing in existence! So my relation could only be in very broad, generalizing strokes. And they're inherently abstract and mathematical—so how was I to maintain the human scale? How was I to stay concrete?

The trick was to relate to the humans who invented and innovated them. Computers are very complex, but they grew out of the history of simpler machines. By learning that history, and striving to find mimesis, or sympathy to the figures behind each layer of the computer and the problems they were tackling, then I could relate to the machine as physical objects. This is why Gary Kildall, Seymour Papert, and Alan Kay feature so heavily in my first major sanity-building project, my documentary series Silicon & Charybdis.

I wasn't able to speak sensibly to other people at the time, but I could sit and use my own computer. I could type up a script and read from it. And I could focus on reading and annotating whole books if it felt like my survival depended on it, which I indeed felt that it did. I could watch hundreds of hours of documentary footage, finding the clips which told the story I needed to tell myself. And I could at least write timecodes down, and sit in Kdenlive and assemble clips from those documentaries into the story. And then I watched the story hundreds of times until I milked it of all the meaning I needed to be sure I was onto something. I wasn't talking to people about any of this—I was just doing this.

I'll talk more about the pattern recognition behind finding—more like divining—the narrative of my story and the video footage which makes it up later. Just picture me at my computer every day, editing video and posting in esoteric web forums about psychology, and filing bug reports for the software I was relying on.

I also took lots and lots of screenshots. It was like my equivalent of taking photos, for memory's sake. Here are three screenshots of the video editing process, one early one from August and two from November of 2017.

Here you see my second monitor as an output for the video timeline. I later nixed the idea of appearing in the documentary on-camera, and stuck with voice-overs.

Most of the timeline was just scratch-space for arranging and re-arranging various clips and assemblages of clips. I’d swap them around, building scenes like lego blocks, looking for resonances between them. The actual final documentaries probably amount of only about 10% of the clips I had considered using and had put into the timeline. The project file was over a megabyte of .MLT data, which basically broke the video editor—I wasted a lot of time undoing corruption and opened a bug report, offering to send the Kdenlive developers my file for troubleshooting. An upcoming major release was occupying their attention though.

In this one you can also see a lot of my notes. At one point in early 2018, I took a measure of the number of words across all the text files in my notes folder, divided by the number of days since I started the folder. This spanned from August of 2017 to mid 2018.

As it turned out, I averaged writing about 5,000 words per day of note-taking. Really, what was going on was that my mind was racing, and so when I was in front of a keyboard I could just externalize that stream onto the screen as it sped along. It's still how I write to this day—it's how I write this very blog. Not a lot of ability for pre-planning or structuring, but I'm getting better at readability, I think.

Shortly after finishing the first episode of Silicon & Charybdis, I left Ottawa and moved in with family back in my home town. My first major project having been completed in rough form—an exploration of the history of the growth of the computer from bottom to top—I changed my focus to morality a bit, to guide my continued mission. I focused on the era of the telegraph, and the first electric celebrity, Florence Nightingale.

Just before I left town, I had met up with an old friend from my airport job, Stephen, who was a renowned history buff. I asked him a great deal of questions about the state of communications on the battlefield during that time. Florence Nightingale had become famous in the Crimean war, affecting the course of battle and all of medicine through sheer force of will. Steven very kindly answered all my questions about how battlefield formations were organized and ordered, how messages were carried about, and everything else I needed to know. I’m sure I was a sorry sight, a little frazzled and manic in my questioning, but he showed a great deal of compassion, if perhaps a bit of worry.

Once I got home, I read three biographies of Miss Nightingale before recording, in a single take, a forty minute “prelude” to my documentary computer series.

It was probably the most sustained, cogent address I had given up to that point—to a microphone and webcam in my father’s livingroom. I had studied for hours a day, for a few weeks to deliver it, and had a short bullet-point list of major themes. I didn’t expect to cry, but it felt pretty natural and I decided to suck it up and post it anyway.

After this, I went back to the computer stuff with two more episodes.

In the next article, I’ll continue this story as I begin to feel my way along the other sides of our little triangle of the human scale. If you like what you’re reading, please consider becoming a paid supporter. :)