“Necessity is that in virtue of which it is impossible for one to do otherwise.” Joyce

“The state is the coldest of all cold monsters. Coldly it lies too; and this lie creeps from its mouth: ‘I, the state, am the people.’… the state was invented for the superfluous.” Thus spake Zarathustra

Hey – I’m just an emale trying to make my own way in the virtual universe… its a brave new world for I am emale, this we(-)blog business; sometimes I get so fired up, I forget myself: sit venia verbo.

Of course, we both find this kind of (frame)work necessary… trying to think outside the box, to encapsulate the exteriority of thought, we question the state of affairs in the tradition of the masters of suspicion. Blog on, muli
peace
ecko

so we’re on the same page emale – a slight misunderstanding, undoubtedly the result of too many cut-ups and fold-ins…

I say…

The will to truth is a horrible and terrifying thing. Witness the destructive power of the atom bomb. The bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are sins against humanity. But I remember reading this book about Richard Feynman, a physicist who worked on the Manhattan project and when the other scientists were objectively recording the first detonation in the desert, Feynman was watching with a child-like wonder, the cloud mushrooming into the sky, saying to himself, beautiful, beautiful…

I think you’ve misunderstood my comment.

I really don’t know what to make of yours either, Muli. I read your comments – all of them – from the top to the bottom before posting my own two sense worth. I’m no technophile as you seem to imply. In fact I’m probably too naive to comment on these information technologies – PP and such like – which is why I thought I’d be on pretty safe territory isolating the concept of the panoptickon and quoting dead poets, in keeping with my felicitous habit of throwing things out there into the blogosphere.

We’re all here to go into space.

Derrida writes, “there’s nothing outside the text” in the context of the metaphysical original sovereignty of the author, the full presence of a subject who always says exactly what he or she means. If people participating believe they are presenting themselves as whole beings in PP, well, let them eat cake. “I’m not a whole person. Youre not a whole person. If we were whole and complete, we would just be sitting in the corner, being whole.” Lacan

Of grammatology: “To make enigmatic what one thinks one understands by the words ‘proximity,’ ‘immeadiacy,’ ‘presence’ (the proximate, the own and the pre- of presence), is my final intention in this book.” Deconstruction undermines the whole PP project of subjectification as I understand Derrida so, hey, I’m on your side.

To paraphrase Deleuze, its not a matter of hoping for the best or fearing the worst but of finding new weapons, creating lines of flight, making new connections… though sometimes those lines of flight will fall into black holes – too much gravity

Another time capsule (is a drug, is a pharmakon, is present in the system that swallows it – involuted – caffeine, brain stimulant, speedy – wait wait time is a landing field) brought to you by ecko4inc

I am emale – what the hell do I know?

peace

Grab another last cup of coffee before you leave – it won’t do any more damage – and read my last comment, the one before yours.

The Participatory Panopticon world abolishes the Frame.

There’s nothing outside of the text. Derrida
Behind the curtain there’s nothing to see. Deleuze
You’re just in another box, in another box. DJ Spooky, who generously allows us to keep, at least, the illusion of discovering a brave new world.

You’d say (I know you won’t, but still): but these are old voices you’re bringing in; the PP is a bra[ve|nd] new(! its’ new!) world, so how could these deads be used to justify any contemporary take, as certainly they were not referring to what we’re referring to today, in our new time capsule?

I’ll go grab my own coffee now, thanks for passing by.

It is more the interior, epistemilogical panoptickon (religious fundamentalism is an example) that frightens me more than any actual panoptickon for there is always a framing, a border between the visible and the invisible, saccading in the field. There will always be poetry and prose even if we play with the differance, being as we are amidst the waves upon a sea of eternal becoming…

I’ve really had too much coffee this morning

As we’re not yet in the PP world, forgiveness for your typo is hereby granted.

Rashomon is an excellent analogy, and I will use it now, with your permission, to further explain my take. There is one more point (at least) to add to the description of the future: anything (i.e. any recorded event) will be correlated (i.e. graphically [graph theory] and semantically linked) to anything else, and therefore Rashomonism, or Interpretation, will become futile and impotent; for Interpretation presumes hidden meaning, or truism not yet discovered, only that this can only happen when there’s a frame, that which limits our vision while explicitly insinuating for an out-of-frame existence.

Yet the PP world (and I think that we should switch now to a more general definition of the PP world, let’s say: a digital world that reflects, in real-time, any event occurring both in the digital world as well as in the organic world in which we live today; moreover, all those real-time reflections are immediately correlated to all other reflections) has no frame, or rather, the frame of the PP world, because of its inherent inter/hyper-textuality, has an infinite frame, that leaves no place for interpretation. “There is nothing outside of the (Bit)Text”.

My take is that the Frame is what keeps us human. Paradoxically, I find myself back in the cave. But isn’t it why anything else is just a footnote for Plato? Paradoxes

As for those “clever young people who’d figure out ways to bend the system” – although this has been insinuated already in the title of this post, i.e. the Rebels’ Island, let’s not forget the rest of us – 99% ordinary beings that want to realize their happiness without hacking the matrix! (And I recon that this wish, in light of the previous paragraph, is also a paradox, for the Matrix provides the illusion of a world in which we can fulfill our happiness, hence there’s no need to hack it down). Yet still, are we building a future were we would have to rely on Hackers to bend the system in order to regain our freedom, or should we introduce, right now, straight into the blueprints of the future PP, those chaotic mechanisms, those safe-guards, that will prevent the future from becoming a frame-less, un-Rashomon-able world?

There are much more ethical concerns in the future PP world which I will not discuss here, and yet the whole issue is of an extreme importance to us all, yet what I mostly see in the entire web2.0 zeitgeist is the careless joy of self-digitization (to which MyLifeBits project is an emblem), with only scarce voices pointing out to the potential danger and pleading for precautions to be placed inside (and I don’t refer to the Identity2.0 movement here, which, imho, fosters the process of self-digitization and the becoming a digital object, rather than a human being).

Happy new year,
Muli

p.s. my sincere excuses for the length of this comment. I hope it will be forgiven.

Have you ever seen the Akira Kurosawa movie, “Rashoman”? It tells the story of a simple crime, as witnessed by a half-dozen people.. except each person has his or her own interpretation of what has transpired, even when they agree on the facts.

The PP world won’t be one of “Truth,” but one where lying is more difficult because facts are easier to establish. Note that I don’t say that lying is impossible — it won’t be, and I fully expect clever young people to figure out ways to bend the system to make it possible to get away with the kinds of wrong-doing that pundits have declared to have been eliminated. As a simple example: if everyone expects that you won’t do something bad because it will be recorded, they have less incentive to check up on you — making it *easier* to get away with doing something bad!

This doesn’t contradict what I say in my talk — my emphasis is on how these tools add a layer of complexity to our relationships that we currently don’t experience.

You don’t need to worry about the NASA-type tools to read subvocalizations: those read active, conscious muscle movements, not brain activity. That won’t lead us to a world of mind-reading, fortunately.

To put it plainly: the technology will record visible activity, not thoughts and intent; this will make individuals more accurate witnesses as to the apparent facts of an event, not to its underlying motives and context. These systems will be just as prone to abuse, error and misuse as any other technology, and while they may render some forms of misbehavior and malevolence obsolete, they will surely open up new forms and opportunities, as well. When it comes to evaluating the behavior of others, context, interpretation and wisdom will still matter — and will remain the kernel of real justice.

I really am interested in understanding why do you think that Justice is possible in the PP world, given the axiom, that you have so well presented, that real-time recordings of events and statistical correlation of those recordings will yield a world of “Truth”.

In a world of Truth, lies will become outdated. Eventually, wrong-doings will become extinct. Even our thoughts will become as pure as the snow, as already today NASA is capable of translating subvocal muscles movement, invoked by thought processes, into text (hence, capable of transmitting our thoughts, in real-time, to the main PP servers).

As I understand it, we will become zombies, deprived of free will, deprived of choice!

We all agree that Good, Just and all the other virtues exist only because their antipodes vices exist just the same. The mission of the PP is to annihilate those antipodes, and with that, everything will fall.

Again, Jamais, if you’d be kind and spare one more comment here, explaining how justice is possible in a world of Truth, I’d be most grateful (and probably also reassured in regards to our expected panopticon cells)

muli

As for justice and reconciliation, they will remain possible — but I think that the participatory panopticon world will have to remember the concept of forgiveness.