Continuing on with our special light hearted Spring programming we’ll make a few observations about that bane of western Civilization- the vast wasteland and let’s not forget the moral desert – namely television.
First the mea culpa – I have not watched major network TV for a long time. When I do it is always at a lag time of a few years, mostly dl'd from Russian Ftp sites which have the entire American Schedule sans, of course, the commercials. I prefer this method because I like to watch several episodes at a stretch- plus my appreciate of the art form has increased, as I watch the different actors play different roles in series. My admittedly prejudiced opinions?
Best show in past ten years – Dollhouse
Most entertaining show in past ten years – Dark Angel
Most mythologically in tune show in past ten years - Supernatural
Runners up - Joshua, Jericho
Special mention – the Stargate series of Sci-fi dramas and Battlestar galactica
As You may have guessed I’m not the guy next door - which is to say my ordinary day is about sixteen hours of dedicated working – although it’s not always the same thing. In fact I fact I probably have far more variety in my day to day life then the usual employment schema. To be blunt about it speaking about being self employed in the internet economy is easier then actually doing it.
For those interested in self employment , or stay at home employment I must warn that it is not easy to break the habits of a lifetime of schooling and employment. I still awaken earlier on Monday mornings then other days. Plus I have had the questionable advantage of having been hospitalized many times, the result of my mother’s having been given a hormone (DES) prior to my birth , which lead to complications. Again, fortunately up until I was seventeen or so I had no operations and thus was able to lead a relatively normal life prior to a series of surgeries.
The point being that while a surgery will keep you hospitalized a few days one has to find ways to amuse one’s self in the protracted recovery periods and that is mostly why I am comparatively well read.
Returning to the present, actually TV seems to have weathered the storm better then some other media. Sure the programming is very similar, sure the el cheapo “reality/talent” shows won’t go away and sure the censorship threatens the continued existence of the nation – but that said things could be worse.
I don’t know how programming works. Ideally some seat of the pants genius looks out at the nation and says “This is what people are interested in.” But that’s not the way to bet. As I said whether programming is the result of intensive interrogation of potential viewers or more of a trial and error thing where one show succeeds and the rest copy that show shamelessly isn’t all that different – because the results are the same – which could be worse.
Television could be worse in either of two ways One) the programming is actively disliked or Two) The programming is irrelevant.
To show that this is possible, to state the obvious, the net has taken a chunk out of peoples leisure time, and the swing to the right since nineteen eighty has “consolidated” media and turned in in many cases to something indistinguishable from fascist propaganda. Newspaper publishing, magazine publishing , radio broadcasting and the music industry all have big problems both in making money and in surviving at all. In a way, as a capitalist, this cheers me, because it demonstrates that closed markets and monopoly’s tend to destroy markets.
Suffice to say I could go on an extended rant here about Centralized Corporate control.God knows there are enough facts to be brought into the picture. Realistically I must now joke that I won’t mention the names of people who are beginning to get a handle on things because my experience has been that the more capable you are the more likely you are perceived as a threat and hence targeted for termination. Then to add insult to injury six months later your ideas show up under someone elses name – yes friends, as Van Morrison said one time “Music can be a very spiritual thing, but the music industry is not a spiritual thing.
What I will do is I will suggest two principles to be aware of as we try to revitalize the music industry. They are not “deep” enough to be classified as axiomatic, meaning they are not neccesarily true for all times and places, but they do remain critically important.
Firstly, as in many technology companies it seems that the best guarantee of good management/employee relations here is if management is thoroughly grounded in the latest developments in the field. There have been exceptions, but only in the cases where the CEO is content to play the role of a figurehead. It’s not good enough that the chap or lady, like music, they have to be sharp – world class. As to how to determine this the answer is very simple – jury of one’s peers.
Secondly, I don’t want to hurt anyones feelings but there’s certain things to be aware of. Both these examples came about in cases where products were about to go out of business.
Cigarrette smoking almost died out in the early part of the twentieth century because it was exclusively a man’s thing and since men tended to want to hang out with women, who found the smell repulsive the habit was dying out.
To counter act this process and advertising campaign was begun that ignored men’s smoking an concentrated entirely on women. It stressed that women who smoked were authoritative, independent, forward looking and in a word “freed,” from the bondage of letting their lives be dominated by men. Lo and behold it worked! The things that identified the flapper were the pressing down of breasts, the cutting of hair, short skirts and the ever present cigarette.
The irony ought not be lost. Women were creating separate identities by imitating me. I reminds me of the case where when Madonna was starting out she had a branded uniform, a demin jacket, a fluffy shirt and a lot of bangles and beads. Hundreds of identical teens would be together and when asked why they dressed that way they replied “Because we want to look different.”
(Incidentally the man who ran the Cigarette advertising program was Freud’s nephew who was the one responsible for getting Sigmund out og Vienna when things got untenable.)
Secondly in the early 80’s the NBA was going broke. The stadiums were filthy and the sport itself was unpopular both live and on television. They brought in the marketing specialists who ran the usual tests. Obviously the solution from creating the cigarette industry wasn’t applicable at all. There was no subconscious connection to group identity.
It goes without saying that in any field the one portrayed as over powering , confident , in control of every situation and usually in a good mood to boot, is the guy you want selling your garbage.
Capitalism is the doctrine of pathetic losers who think that by owning things they are going to increase the size of their penis. That’s it in a nutshell. Advertising is selling infants to the lame who then pretend the offspring are their own. What basketball needed if it was to survive was a single super hero who was found in the person of Michael Jordan.
There’s a fascinating parallel between the careers of Michael Jackson and Michael Jordan. Both were alleged to lead their previously doomed people into the new promised land of economic prosperity; what is furthermore chilling to the bone is they did in the era of the new direction which was to be the harbinger of the collapse of the American way of life.
Thus when you deal with these things you may notice reoccurring patterns that, barring the artificial intrusion of a subsequent hypothesis , cannot be properly explained. Ones of these patterns is the tendency for compensatory self imagery. A typical example is the young man considered a loser by his friends and family who then buries himself in the occult in hopes of gaining power over others. It stands to reason that is something is good for you you shouldn’t need to be brainwashed into using it.
Plus it is always easier to agree with a method that has proven itself. The people that come up with the strategies for these campaigns are paid very well. Tangentially the proof of the efficacy of both very real and hard to establish. Psychoanalysis has made something of a comeback in recent years; if only be cause of a very general trend to multidisciplinary treatments of major illnesses for the purpose of improving recovery and survival rates.
In essence, and to speak frankly, whilst we may be content to keep that majority of patients in a drug induced state of limbo, there will always be a segment of the population which wants, and can afford, a better outcome.
My mentor in these matters Dr Albert Jesson, Phd, MD, never seemed to tire of reminding me that there were many studies extant that suggested that the rate of improvement in mental/cognitive ability was the same for groups with and without psychoanalysis. How I wish he were still here with us, for now I know that the best reply is that psychoanalysis is more a treatment of the doctor then the patient.
All kidding aside though taking the wide spectrum of a persons life, or a business product and then creating a strategy for advancing their prospects is extremely difficult, which is why we seem condemned to copy everything.
I don’t want to bore you with the techniques by which your heros are created, so briefly there is the temporal aspect where a constant drumbeat of positive imagery abut the messianic hero is delivered. What people don’t understand is the trivial contexturizes the signifigent. In other words on Monday you hear that Jason UpSwitch (our imaginary hero) likes chicken sandwiches with mustard. This is controversial and a panel is brought in to discuss what it means.
On tues Jason breaks all sales records at the national entertainment hall, etc.
Suffice to say as well, in the time of the ascendency of the hero those messages contrary to the agreed upon story are not heard or are characterized as questions. During the net book several characters were by all intents and purposes Criminals, they were former bouncers, former business failures, etc, and yet the business press touted them as genius, for that matter that same polcy holds true in politics.
People pay to see dreams come true – not to see them crushed and one of the origins of myth are dreams.
I find it amusing that in his best year in the NBA Mr Jordan was paid ten million as a ball played and forty million as a spokesperson. Once again an understanding of the psychological dynamic at play ( however disagreeable) saved an industry.
What this means in terms of the music industry ought be considered obvious. Not only that but the product itself is stale. There are too may penny pinchers. I look at what they are offering, compared to what they pay themselves and I am not impressed. Victoria Regina would say “We are not amused.”
Controlling a persons actions via myth is not unlike controlling them by hypnotism. Fortunately, we may suggest, the issue of controlling a persons action is far easier to measure then controlling their thoughts. Suffice to say it’s a good guess that a persons thoughts give us some indication as to what their actions might be, but by no means can then be thought to be totally reliable.
We may then assume there are different degrees of resistance to both myth and hypnosis. Once more though I must caution against the assumption that , for instance , a person resistant to hyponosis is resistant to myth. Plus, if you wish to speed up the process of the persons submission to your will you have to remove them from known associations of their own mind. In some cases it means locking a person in a dark closet, on a large scale it means information blackouts, and as well the success of the operation is contingent on the process of the childrens’s game “Simon Says.”
For instance in interpersonal relations the would be dominant personality will spend an inordinate among of time giving trivial instruction or enforcing seemingly meaningless rules – this is done in order the ease the path of the dominant mind when more ambitious tasks are equired.
The similarity between the methods of hypnotism , propaganda, and religious orientation I trust are not lost on the reader. Unfortunately most religions place the exclusion of all other religions in the very forefront of their laws – a rule that leads to problems but must be regarded as necessary if any religion is to succeed over time..
two really Yin
Certainly, among humans and primates it is ordinarily accepted that the bond between mother and infant is the strongest one will experience in their lifetime. Lovers may come and go but one only has one mother. Thus we can question the ethics of the surrogate mother series of experiments that were 4performed in the nineteen sixties.
I suppose I find the experiments upsetting but then balance that unease with the knowledge that similar and worse things have happened to creatures merely as a result of inadequate parenting.
The experiment was performed on chimps. Ordinarily a mother and infant chimpanzee pair are very close. The mother will hold the child for hours, cleaning it, feeding it and protecting it. In the case of premature death it is not unusual for the mother to carry the infant corpse around for days.
In the experimental situation the mother was replaced by simulacrum made out of chicken wire, into which a bottle was placed and thus the infant chimp had to go to the simulacrum to gain food.
In some cases the chicken wire “doll” was replaced by a doll that was covered in a terry cloth blanket. It was found that in lieu of an actual mother chimps greatly preferred the blanket covered doll much n the same way a adult will cling to pillows or blankets when there is no actual partner.
In some cases the chicken wire “doll” was replaced by a doll that was covered in a terry cloth blanket. It was found that in lieu of an actual mother chimps greatly preferred the blanket covered doll much n the same way a adult will cling to pillows or blankets when there is no actual partner.
The second series of results was most disturbing. Females who had been raised by these “surrogate mothers” refused to mother their own offspring to the extent of biting off their own child’s head something rarely seen in primate behavior
Why do I mention this?
Suffice to say it is a given that as we develop new forms of electronic interaction we will rely less on the older forms of interpersonal interaction. In recent years our first reactions often have been to worry about the things we injest, about gene intervention etc. but as I indicated recently it may be worthwhile to pay a little more attention to our own input into the evolutionary shape shifting.
To repeat while it is acknowledged that we are being “shaped” evolutionarily by external factors it is wise to remember that we ourselves are to some degree determining what we are turning into and at what speed therefore we ought not look exclusively at external causalities.
What is more - consider the neurotic. This is a person who keeps trying to solve a problem by doing the same thing over and over. Sometimes it works, as in the case when an intervening action that would have happened anyway comes into play. But when we consider the evolution of even so narrow a field as information dispersal and retrieval it's easy to be neurotic there as well, specfically in the present context we may think that the future will bring a torrent of words almost incaluable in number when in actuallity there is some evidence that we won't think in linear verbal terms but rather in pictures.
In computing as well rather then long lists of binary date we may well be creating three dimensional databases, or as one of the guys in 2600 suggested a few years back, we'll be building quantum computers. The speed and size increase in these computers would be almost incomparable to anything we could imagine, the size of the database and the speed of access would be theoretically infinite limited only by the times it took to flip switches.
Yang City
The last section of today’s essay is the easiest to understand and I daresay the one that needs the least external verification. It strikes me that something that is often said of ancient anthropology, that based on the collection of artifacts we know how people lived but we still haven’t that good an idea as to what they thought about things.
The Yang element of electronic consciousness in most peoples lives is still television. It is where the myths and dreams are created and transferred. It would be impossible to steal any substantively large amount of money or engage in the slaughter of thousand without the aid and acquiescence of TV.
Fortunately for us all it is a case where the tools are far beyond the capability of the users to maximize and distort. In fact, having recently read Umberto Eco's The Prague Graveyard which presents a possible scenario for the composition of the Protocols of Zion, a major antisemitic text I am a little surprised that we have as of yet no “Confessions of GUFU” wherein some gentlemen in a grey flannel suit outlines the extermination of most of the human race through the establishment of a world government.
I can relax however that it will happen, sooner or later. It is my fond hope that when it does happen you, dear reader, have enough sense to see through the scam. One hesitates at making too grand a pronouncement but that is a rationale I can live with as to why I have written these missives.
Today we have the far more modern science of psychological anthropology where we not only seek to discover the way people perceive and understand the world around them but as well we have begun to be sensitized to the notion that an understanding of these processes has become more and more critical, lest we discover that, having relinquished the capability of being able to think for ourselves we have ceded that capability to others and those others may not have our best interests at heart.
It really does help to understand as well circularity and feedback processes. This holds true even in such seemingly determined instances as market economics. Soros has labled his method of dealing with the variation of prices “Reflexivity”. It calls to mind the old song title, “My heart has a mind of it’s own.”
The more convinced we are of the correctness of our idea at the outset then the less willing are we to consider alternatives. In ordinary understandings of feedback we assume the sender, like the German foreign service in 1938, will only be attuned to hearing the answer that it expects to hear. There is a good deal of power in this notion. The ninja philosophy, for instance is based, to some degree on humans being contortionists and thereby assuming shapes not thought of as human and hence unrecognized.
An even better analogy, to my mind, is the feedback caused when microphones are placed too close to amplifiers. Not all information distortion requires some evil genius spinning lies. A far greater percentage of information feedback is when the system takes control and not only places an inconsequential message “at the head of the loop” to drown out all other messages, but distorts the message itself.
In recent decades a controversy has arisen between advocates of the unfettered free market and regulations. The regulators can say, in effect “What good is ideological purity if it hurts people and prevents actual growth?” Be that as it may it is not always a strong argument on paper. The enticements of logic can be devastating.
What has be labeled “the selfish gene” sees little benefit in anything approaching morality, lest it be the morality of those shams created to debilitate and castrate one’s competition. In the battle for survival it is difficult to make an argument for the survival of the weak. Unless one understands at the core of their being a sense of all having worth it is impossible to convey the truth of the matter.
You can take a step away from such despair by using a game theory. Split the world into predators and prey and you’ll realize that a world of predators alone is unsustainable. And, as an aside one can without great difficulty group entire societies into one category or another. When a city state pays three wagons of silver to pay off a band of marauders it is not difficult to choose the predator or prey.
To judge accurately one must stand outside the duality and gain a sense of context. I digress in the previous few paragraphs because for many years which I labeled “the wasteland era” the control of thoughts and actions was so complete that one felt like a fool to carry on. A plague had settled on the land and I now know it was the same plague that faced the American Indian – to wit – both sides understand that one side is lying but there is nothing the weaker side can do. The law had failed as it had so many other times in the course of human history.
But as Edmund Burke, a Irishman who lived while his country bore the yoke of English tyranny would say, “Despair if you must but work on through despair.”
What then is this golden calf; that measures a man by the worth of his possessions? It must be done I suppose but let’s not disgrace ourselves and call it humane.
Part Four E-Valuation
Trance substantive and pulpable
Interestingly enough I detect a theme in the following I'd not originally guessed at. Little boys go through a period where they are terrified of doing “girl stuff.” This leads even to the extent that, in the west at least, where the color pink is associated with females, a little boy will often refuse to drink from a pink cup – for fear that it will emasculate him. What a ten year old boy knows about masculinity I'll leave to others to suggest. Then again I was at the beach one time and a beach umbrella that had been stuck in the sand broke free and begin sliding down the beach. Without hesitation the little boy in the vicinity grabbed that umbrella and began to attempt to return it, his face set in grim resolution.
Who told him to do that? No one.
Likewise it is known that affairs of honor, or pride lead to bloodshed in many societies. The women oppose it – sometimes even thinking the men crazy – but they can not live – they cannot face themselves in the mirror should they see shame there in return.
One of the aspects of the Post Reagan America is the deep shame and despair t the humiliation many men have suffered – sure many think it was a great time and they have the trophy wives to prove is – but when you venture forth into the realm of adult myth, monsters come forth – with names like war, disease, poverty and hunger - all things I lay at the feet of those who have conquered us – and as am I feel greatly humiliated that I allowed this to happen and when we speak of mind controll that is the new currency.
John Kerry, himself no stranger to information warfare said famously he did not want to be the last person to die in a war that was a mistake.
But what of the one who dies in the war that was no mistake, it was simply someones business opportunity . Would we leave our children without fathers, our wives without husbands because we were too stupid or too cowardly to recognize the depths of evil that masquerades as good?
In point of fact like others who have made a careers worth of study in one field or another I begin to sincerely wonder whether much was accomplished.
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