This Titillation of Power, This Illusion of Freedom
June 18, 2021 4:07 AM Subscribe
Like the rational reorganization of bureaucracies in the second half of the nineteenth century, computers began as an implementation of the power to abstract away means and uniformly apply a mindless, rule-based order on unruly reality ... and this power has only grown greater, thanks to both an unprecedented capacity for data gathering and analysis and the increased propagation of digital tools in every facet of human life. Mobile applications, whatever their purpose, are little bureaucrats with a checklist or a punch card in our pockets. Whether they are centralized or distributed, deployed by the government or peddled by a small startup, the applications have the same effect: an increasing perfection of the totalitarian vision of nineteenth-century administration. from Paul Valéry and the Mechanisms of Modern Tyranny [Hedgehog Review]
Note sure l'idée de dictature by Paul Valéry
Paul Valéry’s Blood Meridian, Or How the Reader became a Writer by Todd Cronan
Bonus: Valéry as Dictator by Amiri Baraka
Note sure l'idée de dictature by Paul Valéry
Paul Valéry’s Blood Meridian, Or How the Reader became a Writer by Todd Cronan
Bonus: Valéry as Dictator by Amiri Baraka
Computers: the cause of ─ and solution to ─ most of life's problems.
Computation has both bound and freed people from their shackles. Every time we invent a way to remove some shackles, we eventually find our novel method introduces new shackles. I believe what it boils down to is that reality shackles us, we try to remove the shackles, and reality always wins.
posted by Mental Wimp at 8:36 AM on June 18, 2021 [5 favorites]
Computation has both bound and freed people from their shackles. Every time we invent a way to remove some shackles, we eventually find our novel method introduces new shackles. I believe what it boils down to is that reality shackles us, we try to remove the shackles, and reality always wins.
posted by Mental Wimp at 8:36 AM on June 18, 2021 [5 favorites]
"Our deeds are bonds we forge ourselves, but the world brings the iron"
posted by clew at 9:02 AM on June 18, 2021 [1 favorite]
posted by clew at 9:02 AM on June 18, 2021 [1 favorite]
Thinking is computation. Those with access to augmented computation power might thereby out-think those without. The disposition of those wielding such power, good or evil, nuanced or divisionary, practical or frivolous - that we may judge.
posted by grokus at 9:55 AM on June 18, 2021 [2 favorites]
posted by grokus at 9:55 AM on June 18, 2021 [2 favorites]
Every time we invent a way to remove some shackles, we eventually find our novel method introduces new shackles.
The never-ending co-evolution of control vs. resistance.
posted by deadaluspark at 10:47 AM on June 18, 2021 [4 favorites]
The never-ending co-evolution of control vs. resistance.
posted by deadaluspark at 10:47 AM on June 18, 2021 [4 favorites]
our novel method introduces new shackles
Setting aside the whole entropy thing, I suspect that part of this is simply due to the fact that a lot of people like to impose order, and a lot of people also like having order imposed on them. If your new method didn't involve shackles, it would not be accepted or (rather commonly) it will be adapted in order to include shackles as a requirement for "success" (however that success is defined).
posted by aramaic at 12:09 PM on June 18, 2021 [4 favorites]
Setting aside the whole entropy thing, I suspect that part of this is simply due to the fact that a lot of people like to impose order, and a lot of people also like having order imposed on them. If your new method didn't involve shackles, it would not be accepted or (rather commonly) it will be adapted in order to include shackles as a requirement for "success" (however that success is defined).
posted by aramaic at 12:09 PM on June 18, 2021 [4 favorites]
>Thinking is computation.
Thinking is not doing; the abstraction from embodied activity pretends thinking is foundational (and consciousness is the logger). We need collaboration amid difference like organs in a body or the whole of life in ecosystems, rather than central control like gathering data to recommend products for you to consume.
posted by k3ninho at 12:16 PM on June 18, 2021 [3 favorites]
Thinking is not doing; the abstraction from embodied activity pretends thinking is foundational (and consciousness is the logger). We need collaboration amid difference like organs in a body or the whole of life in ecosystems, rather than central control like gathering data to recommend products for you to consume.
posted by k3ninho at 12:16 PM on June 18, 2021 [3 favorites]
We need collaboration amid difference like organs in a body or the whole of life in ecosystems, rather than central control like gathering data to recommend products for you to consume.
You're advocating for broader democratic empowerment and some viable alternative to consumerism. I think a lot of us want that, myself included. There are young communities formed around creating and using such tools, such as /r/Rad_Decentralization/ and /r/cryptoleftists/
I personally have been looking for a project to join, and would welcome suggestions and guidance. What seems to have a solid direction?
posted by grokus at 1:20 PM on June 18, 2021 [3 favorites]
You're advocating for broader democratic empowerment and some viable alternative to consumerism. I think a lot of us want that, myself included. There are young communities formed around creating and using such tools, such as /r/Rad_Decentralization/ and /r/cryptoleftists/
I personally have been looking for a project to join, and would welcome suggestions and guidance. What seems to have a solid direction?
posted by grokus at 1:20 PM on June 18, 2021 [3 favorites]
This is probably old news, but while I was logging on to a site this morning. I realized that if some clever devil, (any of them,) had my phone cam hacked, (and who doesn't,) then they could easily read l my passwords in the reflections of my glasses. When I came to this, I covered the camera, and I could no longer type into the sign in space. A lot of things are so ubiquitous we forget to reassess norms. Power and control, the sun has us powered up to 105° so far, today a lot of that energy wasted.
posted by Oyéah at 1:30 PM on June 18, 2021 [4 favorites]
posted by Oyéah at 1:30 PM on June 18, 2021 [4 favorites]
“In sum, as soon as the mind no longer recognizes itself—or no longer recognizes its essential traits, its mode of reasoned activity, its horror of chaos and the waste of its energy—in the fluctuations and failures of a political system, it necessarily imagines, it instinctively hopes for the promptest intervention of the authority of a single head, for it is only in a single head that the clear correspondence of perceptions, notions, reactions, and decisions is conceivable, can be organized and try to impose on things intelligible conditions and arrangements.”7
It is interesting to consider how much this applies to how Americans think of the President....
Reading the mathematician Henri Poincaré, the linguist Michel Bréal, and the physicists Lord Kelvin and Niels Bohr had led him to dream of discovering a science of thought. This science was not to be one of empirical measurement à la Pavlov, nor guided analysis like Freud’s, but one of internal, and thus in some sense subjective, observation and study. Yet though internal, it remained objective, recording the facts and operations of the conscious and unconscious mind alike as a botanist makes note of the flowers and animals of remote Pacific islands. It owed to the modern scientific spirit a Cartesian and very fin-de-siècle predilection for systematic and rigorous definition.
It sounds like he was trying to invent phenomenology.
posted by thelonius at 2:05 PM on June 18, 2021 [2 favorites]
It is interesting to consider how much this applies to how Americans think of the President....
Reading the mathematician Henri Poincaré, the linguist Michel Bréal, and the physicists Lord Kelvin and Niels Bohr had led him to dream of discovering a science of thought. This science was not to be one of empirical measurement à la Pavlov, nor guided analysis like Freud’s, but one of internal, and thus in some sense subjective, observation and study. Yet though internal, it remained objective, recording the facts and operations of the conscious and unconscious mind alike as a botanist makes note of the flowers and animals of remote Pacific islands. It owed to the modern scientific spirit a Cartesian and very fin-de-siècle predilection for systematic and rigorous definition.
It sounds like he was trying to invent phenomenology.
posted by thelonius at 2:05 PM on June 18, 2021 [2 favorites]
Recording the unconscious mind, now there's a trick...
posted by Oyéah at 2:10 PM on June 18, 2021 [1 favorite]
posted by Oyéah at 2:10 PM on June 18, 2021 [1 favorite]
Well, I think there was still a craze for "automatic writing" and the like, at the time.
posted by thelonius at 6:03 AM on June 19, 2021 [2 favorites]
posted by thelonius at 6:03 AM on June 19, 2021 [2 favorites]
"Through mechanization, automation, cybernetic direction, this authoritarian technics has at last successfully overcome its most serious weakness: its original dependence upon resistant, sometimes actively disobedient servomechanisms, still human enough to harbor purposes that do not always coincide with those of the system.
Like the earliest form of authoritarian technics, this new technology is marvellously dynamic and productive: its power in every form tends to increase without limits, in quantities that defy assimilation and defeat control, whether we are thinking of the output of scientific knowledge or of industrial assembly lines. To maximize energy, speed, or automation, without reference to the complex conditions that sustain organic life, have become ends in themselves..."etc, etc.
-Lewis Mumford. roughly 65 years ago.
posted by clavdivs at 8:35 PM on June 19, 2021 [3 favorites]
Like the earliest form of authoritarian technics, this new technology is marvellously dynamic and productive: its power in every form tends to increase without limits, in quantities that defy assimilation and defeat control, whether we are thinking of the output of scientific knowledge or of industrial assembly lines. To maximize energy, speed, or automation, without reference to the complex conditions that sustain organic life, have become ends in themselves..."etc, etc.
-Lewis Mumford. roughly 65 years ago.
posted by clavdivs at 8:35 PM on June 19, 2021 [3 favorites]
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