Viral trigger mechanisms in the Verbal Universe
If you’ve been with us for awhile you’ll know that the subject here has evolved from the broader applications of contemporary information distribution to the more specific uses and effects of meme application.
To provide context for these investigations we’ve tried to establish overall parameters of technological development ( eg: The clan unit, the city, the state and now the technostate, which could be loosely described as “the state on steroids.” Some also call the present era, “Post colonial” or even the the era of globalization – but that can be a little problematic.
The two initially most advanced technostates, Germany and Japan, while producing imports and exports also have advanced internal markets ( having to some extent learned their lessons in the Second world war). The two largest economies The United States and China fit the post colonial description better, requiring raw materials for import and access to markets for export.
An interesting side mention about Germany and Japan is both have lateral economies - one the one hand, thanks to strong educational systems they can produce world class products whereas at the same time the refuse to divest themselves of traditional business models. In Japan this means the small rice farms. In Germany, speaking from personal experience for instance, my family has owned a bakery in northern Alsace for almost three hundred years - suffice to say in America for a business to survive that long would raise eyebrows since it represents a failure of the dynamics of the market place. To paraphrase the statement in America is the only good business is the dead business.
The greatest attraction for many who write about public affairs is the fear of becoming victims of things that one has no control over. As the case may be most of us, most of the time, overcome our fears and proceed to live our lives, a well as we can. Obviously this is because should fear, or paranoia be unfounded then unless something new is added to the equation the whole thing becomes untenable.
For writers who are employed or have found their true subjects the problem is solvable. Two things to remember in portraying yourself as a genius are 1) Control the topic of conversation and limit it to things you are comfortable with, and 2) Long before your statements about one thing have proven absurd more on to another subject.
Motivational trigger words are nothing new. They are, after all , the life’s blood of advertising. To get someone to buy a candy bar however is far more difficult then convincing them to volunteer or accept conscription to fight and die in a war.
Consider this. A spy has information that A he knows has been transmitted to his controller and B, that he knows has not been transmitted. What the potential informant wants to do is establish a trust relationship with the controller so he transmits to the controller information the controller already has.
Whether the intell is “true” or not in the absolute sense isn’t important. There is no truth – only degrees of reliability. One might suggest that it is always more difficult to convince the recipient that something I true, then that something is a lie. In part this is because the truth often requires a response of sort.
By transmitting to the receiver only information they already have or believe one may establish credibility. This is why much of ongoing information distribution is for the purpose of convincing people of that which they already believe. This doesn’t make such information useless – after all the product producer is being paid, but for the ostensive purposes of informing others the product serves no purpose.
So, one of the first things we can say as regards the topic in general, as in the case of the Roman Senate circa 200 CE, is that victory often goes not to the better case but to the better lawyer.
There isn’t too much you can do about the prejudicial context you find yourself in but a knowledge of how the context is established can allow one to , in effect, ”hack the context.” This is critical and the basis of the entire ethos. The most dangerous enemy is not the one out to get you – but rather the one out to rig the system. You are not the specific target. You are roadkill.
The second critical factor in a successful exploit is not when you destroy the system. That is for children. In the case of the most successful operation no one even recognizes that it has happened! (One thinks of Reaganomics.)
A good book to describe closed systems is “Godel,Escher, Bach.” Imagine yourself in a painting by Escher, the castle with ascending descending stairways is a good example. You want out of the painting – you want to enter a new dimension of existence but like Kafka’s Mr K you discover there is no means to do that.
One reason why might be that the system was established in order to prevent escapees. It wants to maximize productivity and eliminate non productive units. This is not necessarily a useful hypothesis because if it can be proven in any specific case then the system comes off looking bad and can be held liable. One could suggest that the system is exploiting it’s human labor force for the non human ends.
A more sustainable justification for the establishment and continuation of the system is not that it wants to maximize productivity per se but that the self evident purposes of systemic “life” are contingent upon maximized productivity. It’s like saying that when a society commits genocide that mass murder is not the primary goal of the system but rather an unfortunate, but necessary side effect. This can mean the difference between being a billionaire and a firing squad.
Hence the most powerful weapon in the arsenal of the tyrant is not the gun, but the lie, and more so the willingness of people to believe the lie. That was my initial purpose in beginning these studies. I sought to insulate myself, if not others, from over dependent suggestibility. I’m as human as the next guy. I thrill to flag waving and bands and excitement and the lure of the high life - but sometimes a humble life is much better then an empty promise.
To speed this up, and bring you up to snuff, to give an example. A PDF file often has an embedded font included so that when you read the file you get the exact font they want. It’s a nice touch and it brings the context (pardon the pun) along with the text.
If you read bad novels, meaning those we no longer consider worth reading, of the 19t century many of them are written in purple prose, meaning a lot of adjectives, and elaborate description and long sentences. Modern writing, although the number of words continues to grow, tends to be shorter and more concise, leading to that wonder of the modern age, the one word sentence. Absolutely.
Arguably the two best, or most influential American novelists were newspaper writers, Twain and Hemingway, who both took great pains to spare the reader undue verbosity.
As I indicated in a recent essay the trend in information dispersal is towards shorter messages with pre-established meanings analogous to oriental pictograms and in the even longer run, in a way comparable to when the advent of the written word lessened the need for memory, which has attrified in the modern man the use of words themselves in a few hundred years, will be superfluous..
Pt two You don’t wanna know
In the film “Personna” by Ingmar Bergman a Vietnamese monk douses himself with gasoline, strikes a match and immolates himself in the middle of a busy Saigon street.
Question; could some form of future political protest be allowed where a flash mob, brought together on the internet, could replicate the monks protest?
Answer: You don’t want to know
Wish they all could be California Girls Girls Girls,
Girls Girls Girls, Girls Girls Girls, Girls
Brian Wilson - Mike Love
I miss ALF. He’s very superstitious and lives in another world, a place he calls “the other shore” – way over yonder. He’ crazy, but he has a beautiful consistency.
The thing is when the first mass net suicide takes place it need not be for the best of reasons. It need not be for any reason at all. One of the emo-trigger programs will be coded incorrectly and bingo – a few hundred dead – but don’t worry – we have already established that corporations don’t kill people - people kill people.
Which leads us to the fact I’m on the last few pages of Umberto Eco’s latest book – The Prague Cemetary. I’ve read a half dozen of his efforts – the Name of the Rose, of course. I found the Island of the day before and the Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana difficult to wade through, but the non fictions are interesting.
Like Mr Eco I’ve written much more in essays and non fiction then fiction and I can sympathize with the problems of the genre – but In The Prague Cemetery you can feel the writing and portrayal of the main character getting stronger as the book goes on.
It’s a one character book and he is not someone who we hate although he is a character of unmitigated evil. He’s not the currently popular vampire evil either, except very tangentially. He’s just does his job, which is to forge documents for whoever needs them – and who has not felt the urge to fudge that tax form, or perhaps to clarify the intentions of a recently deceased?
There’s a lovely passage where he is requested to copy the handwriting of a person and write a letter to incriminate one Alfred Dreyfus. This he does and everything is satisfactory until they discover that he has copied the handwriting of some one other then the Jew. In a rational world this would be problematic. It is however explained away simply by stating that Dreyfus wrote in the style of someone else in order to confuse any potential suspicions. Beautiful.
A useful concept is the wave theory of actions. In physics, at the extreme end of the theoretical spectrum there’s the possibility of what are called “waves of probability.” Thus the birth of great men is held to be evidenced by celestial events. In studying the chaotic forms of information dissemination we can suggest a similar thing such as waves of absurdity. To define them by negation we can say they are situations where the normative laws of proof no longer apply. They come into being when, obviously one side or another, or both in a information war have gained the upper hand.
In the bible this supremacy is sometimes demonstrated by taking the vanquished upon a hill, making them lie down with their heads on the ground and then grinding their heads into the dirt with one’s sandal. Sometimes the victor kills the loser , sometimes not, but the point is demonstrated. The same procedure occurs when a policeman grinds the head of a demonstrator into the street with their boot.
For instance when the rural, conservative forces in America had the upper hand this idea of forcing the vanquished into an act of submission took place in the revival of creationism. The losers were forced to recant their beliefs in the scientific explanation and to accept the equal validity of intelligent design, or God in the evolution of the human species.
The point I wish to make is the issue of who made who is not the main thing. What happened a few million years ago is inconsequential. The point is who controls what we are allowed to think? Who humiliates who. The spirit of the person, like the spirit of a horse that would be ridden comfortably must be broken. They must be taught to accept whatever the state tells them ,no matter how absurd and baseless the evidence.
Once you have forced a man to accept the absurd, as in Reaganomics for instance you have come a long way towards total domination of his mind.
Again by establishing waves of absurdity the inconsequential becomes the basis of acceptance of the important. One cannot count the number of political leaders who gain power on and emotive basis and then use it for the simple gaining of wealth. In the case of creationism, like in the Dreyfus case, the lack of evidence that God created the world six thousand years ago, and all the evidence to the contrary, I held to be further evidence of God’s work, since he has been so clever as to hide his tracks. Either way you lose.
The title of the Umberto Eco book refers to the Protocols of Zion, a document believed to be forged in the late nineteenth century Russia, but in any case forged, that was used as evidence of a Jewish conspiracy to take over the world and henceto prove complicity of every one of them.
The common expression for this sort of thing is misinformation. The problem is that we have all gotten so good at it that it begins to cancel everything out. The purported holy grail is the viral message that is transmitted by hitherto uncommitted parties. In the US in election period we are told to beware the October surprise, where in misinformation enters the news cycle and an election occurs before it can be refuted.
“Where’ your ma? Where’s your pa?
Gone to the white house ha ha ha”
early political attack
The difficulty is quite obvious. It is that we can only believe or not believe what we are told and so we tend to either believe everything or nothing.
There are however many other truths then verbal or visual. The question we face today is how to utilize them to form a coherent, humane society and if that is impossible -as it may be - to form a society within a society for the protection of the sane.
It seems amusing that in a world gone mad it is the sane and not the lunatics that need to be sheltered - but there you have it.
Part Three Monkey Talk
Way back when I was an undergrad the School I was at at the time, Hofstra University, had extensive animal testing lab, comprised of some very unhappy primates living in five foot square metal cages. I like the mathematical near certainty of experimental psychology but in retrospect can’t understand how the research was particularly useful. Such behaviorist research was mostly a solution in search of a question.
The teacher however said something that triggered a long line of inquiry into the philosophy of thought. For what it’s worth I don’t think he himself understood very well what he said because he said it in such as was as to indicate he hadn’t given much thought to the issue and took the phrase for granted as true. Remember first that this is a guy who spent most of his life dealing with chimps. He was not cold blooded by any means but as in the case of many professionals, doctors in particular, he had to establish a definite boundary between the individual subject and the species as a whole. The same is very obviously true with cops.
His research was primarily towards understanding how much apes could learn, how they learn and it’s permutations. He said “All knowledge is a language.” While this may seem a little problematic it can be understood as saying that knowledge is that which can be communicated. That which cannot be communicated, let’s call it “awareness” for instance, may be real but it is overstretching the definitional bound to call it knowledge.
Suffice to say I had already done my homework in terms of the Greek philosophers and while not needing the opportunity to prove it , did not consider myself at a disadvantage in the usage of such terminologies. I hadn’t as of yet read Wittgenstein, but from the common post Freudian deconstructive perspective one could easily annihilate such pithy statements as All knowledge is language. This is because we could simply tag on to the equation and all language is metaphor. It’ basic going back to Locke and hardly anyone questions the lack of absolute reference points when we deal with language.
As the expression goes “Describe the taste of an apple.” It cannot be done without resorting to simile or metaphor and each is inaccurate.
Rational people, of common sense recognize that this notion is untenable in real life. If I say an apple is sweet , hopefully you have enough experience to make some surmise as to it’s flavor. The problem is you or I may agree on what an apple tastes like but machines, unless they have it defined quantitatively are incapable of doing so.
In the same way Godel desribed the limitations of euclidian math so too Wittgenstein does the same with the written word. It's not a matter of obsoleteness it's more a matter of incompleteness. A clue is that math relies on the axioms of euclid but it cannot prove them. To prove them one must go beyond the dimensions of the euclidian Universe, which is easy enough to do, once you know how ( eg fractals)
The Dark Prince
Well, I’ve finally gotten around to digging some VHS tapes out that I put into storage over twenty years ago. It’s interesting. One of the movies I was sure to watch again is “The Company of Wolves” written by Neil Jordan and Angela Carter after a story by Ms Carter.
It is a masterful retelling of the tale known in Europe and “Little Red Cap” and here in the states as “Little Red Riding Hood”. I would not be at all surprised either should there be a Sanskrit version from old India. It has the hallmarks. The story itself is one that is taught in many psych/lit classes – in part because Freud make a big deal of it – but as these things go anyway, the story is pretty obvious. Woman attains puberty, gains the attraction of men and then has to decide which one is right for her.
The fact that Red’s teacher is her grandmother and not her mother is notable not only because the mother would most likely be too involved (overprotective) but also because the wolf is much more at home in the role of altruistic, distant , guardian, then the mother. It is his goal, obviously to bed the girl, but he does this by as much as possible, masking his true intent - to a degree in fact which most of us find absurd. It goes without saying that full body hair and long teeth are not the sort of thing grandmothers are noted for.
Why the film is so good is that it creates a world both of fascination and fear, which is much like many people’s initial sexual experiences. It relies on the same thing which keeps the teenagers in the haunted house after strange things begin happening. Real life is, when you come down to it, a bore.
What tends to lend weight to some purveyors of fairy tales the accusation of fascism is that many of the offenders are exclusively interested in male quest literature. The monomyth has created more bad stories then anything else in the past century –it’s just so easy to plug in the names and do the same old story. That said it’s a truism that girls will listen to boy stories, but boys will not listen to girl stories. It’s sort of like the gag response when one comes upon homosexuals in flagrante.
This however does not mean there are no fairy tales about women, quite the contrary and in fact it is safe to say that the percentage of tellers of fairy tales that are women is much higher then in other genre’s , especially histories, genealogies and war stories.
The messages sent to the different sexes are almost entirely opposite. The male is told that they must go on a great quest, face dangers, subdue nature and then carry the weak but happy bride over the threshold of their happy home. The lesson the fairy tales teach the female is not to be pushed into anything. A similar story, though not quite so obvious is of the Sleeping Maiden.
Here a king and queen yearn for a child and when a girl is born they have a great celebration to which the entire kingdom including three witches is invited. A forth witch, who had been uninvited shows up and declares her present to the princess to be a sleep of a hundred years. Before I get to the Dark Prince I’d like to mention two things that are often said about this story.
One is the curse, specifically, is to last one hundred years, and bravery and deering do aside the fact that Prince Charming wins the hand of the fair maiden is a matter of pure luck! He just happens to be in the right place at the right time and she just happens to be lying there so he decides it couldn’t hurt if he were to kiss her just once.
There’s also an aspect of heavy mythical thinking here. By this I mean mythical thought, like mystical thought (if there is such a thing) is not of the ordinary variety. In our ordinary thoughts we think things to prove their existence in myth we think to disprove it. Suffice to say all the talk about dragons over the past few thousand years has not brought any into existence. Again, mythical thinking turns in on itself.
Hence to give the boiler plate explanation. The redemption of the Prince can come about not by any specific action or task fulfilled, but by the extension of his own being. You can’t do things in order to achieve goals you have to do them because you’re rather do them then not, and consequences be damned. Whether crossing the razor bridge, or entering the Grail castle the same law applies.
Suffice to say this is often a little disingenuous in actual terms. The hero goes out on a quest for a dozen years is almost killed, driven mad, loses his identity and then helps the lady across the stream because it was the polite thing to do.
Secondly something that is often described in great detail is the castle wherein the sleeping beauty sleeps. There are suitors naturally, those men who would like the hand of the princess so as to claim the throne for their own. They may not be bad men per se but nevertheless their interest is not as lovers and therefore they have to die.
And a castle can accumulate a lot of corpses in a century. The middle ages especially took delight in describing the roadways and gate ways littered with the bodies of the would be kings, all in varying stages of decay, some just bones, some with the rags of their finery still waving in the wind.
After a hundred years as well the world is completely different. The king and queen are long dead. All friends, relations; an entire world has passed. This is the sleep of fairy land where Thomas the Rhymer, and Rip Van Winkle spend a long lifetime unawares it is any more then a single evening.
Does the presence of all this death discourage the dark prince? Not a whit! His is a quest of absolutes. They died – but he will not die- because he is pure of heart. Should the demons slice him to shreds still their victory would be hollow because he did not surrender. As well, let remember he has never seen the sleeping beauty. She is someone who may have come to him in dreams, or maybe not and for this he is willing to sacrifice his home, his family . his God itself. (I tell you they don’t make princes like they used to.)
So, while Sleeping Beauty is a tale primarily told to relate the condition of women I’d like to say something for the Prince Charmings in the audience as well. In real terms what we are speaking of is a man who knows of the world but does not allow the world to corrupt him. Correction he does not allow the world to overly corrupt him.
Here I shall lower the mask a bit. One of the things that as a child struck me was the the appearance of gigantic figures, at the end of Fantasia and Sleeping Beauty in particular that could be described as satanic. I recall wondering how he got away with it, but then he was was Walt Disney - everybodies favorite uncle. One explanation is that the man who gave him his name, Disney Pere, was not his actual father. His actual father was a Spanish gypsy. I have neither time nor inclination to go into detail but this led to issues with his mother and a long stream of troubled mother figures in his films. Where for example was Snow Whites parents?
The point is Walt had something he had to say. Early on it looked like he was on his way to fame and fortune with Oswald the Rabbit, but not to put too fine a point on things, he was cheated out of ownership. The kicker is that they who stole the property didn’t have the ability to make anything of it, whereas Walt, riding back west from NYC came up with the world’s most famous mouse.
Spielbergdisplays similar characteristics with the over riding theme of many of his films being “That thing that is out there in the darkness.” What’s incredible about him is his films rarely venture in to the horror genre and remain solidly adventure stories.
Now let’s take the game even a step further. Game theory is often just set theory with different sorts of boundaries. The big game is of course, the world and heaven help us if we think we can get a handle on that. The world kills most people. It’s like the castle who’s thorn bushes hold the would be lovers of the princess by the dozens – all dead and decayed.
IF one is careful however, we establish little worlds, little sets which are far easier to manage and survive within. They may even, as well, provide clues as to the wider worlds without.
The problem is, of course, we cannot establish smaller sets without knowledge and that knowledge is liable to kill us. Make no mistake as well, Nietche say that which doesn’t kill us makes us stronger – but unfortunately he ran into something that killed him. What is more, and this is a terrible lesson to learn, we like to think that over coming obstacles makes us better people, more capable at least but such is not the case.
I find that the suggestion that suffering is good for the soul is made most often by those who have no inclination what so ever towards such actions. We grow old. The body and mind both weaken even as the number of experiences grows.
That said we must persevere. We may not be great, nor our intentions pure and noble, but we not ask if it is so. As Patton said “I don’t want you to die for you country – I want you to make the other bastard die for their country.” In an America insisting on fairness and equality this has to be borne in mind.
So let’s visit a small world – the Tamlinmedia world. It’s almost the turn of the millennium and two knights have been off voyaging and return telling us of the great wonders they have seen They are Sir Francis Fukuyama and Sir Thomas Friedman.
Sir Francis has discovered the end of the dialectic of the evolution of nations economic systems. Hallelujah we is all free! There is, he suggests, now a common consensus that the neo-liberal system of capitalism is the way to go. There may be the occasional blip along the way but the road ahead is straight and smooth, much like the road to hell.
Unfortunately for those playing the game of musical chairs the stabilization of society is the last thing on earth we want. We want a chance to get ahead – for that matter we want to halt the rapid disintegration of our way of life. What Sir Francis is not at first aware of is that people when hungry will resort to the use of guns and they penetrate such armor as the contemporary knight may avail themselves of.
Still this does not disturb him nor his readers nor his publishers because they have raised to a high art the skills needed to walk over dead bodies that litter highways. What does Fukuyama in however is the next book he wishes to write – because he has in essence left the world in the hands of the corporations and they are quite indifferent to human happiness or survival – and what is even worse- they are indifferent to the survival of optimistic futuristic glad handers.
Sir Friedman is different. Where Sir Fukuyama cast his glance forward into the future to see a bright new world of peace and prosperity , Sir Friedman notices that the corporations have achieved great penetration of foreign markets right now – and do you know what he thinks? He thinks it’s a good thing! And do you know what the people who own media and corporations and coincidentaly pay his salary think? They agree with him!
Neither of these chaps is an idiot. From my perspective, if anything they represent seductive chimeras, the Vasudevas or temptresses of Indian thought, and both to their credit after raking in the bucks with a little nonsense, qualified and retracted some of the more egregious errors.
A thought occurs to me that while conventional thinking guards castles with armies and guns the mythic paradigm does you with lovely ladies who are far more likely to be successful.
At some point policy is made evident by warfare.It’s a lovely suggestion to thing that war is off the table forever, but when one is in the subservient class the freezing in place of situations is not attractive. As the old song goes, “If I don’t do it somebody else will.”
In terms of chaos theory the advantages granted to the small well organized unit in terms of defeating larger cohorts of prey will always work to encourage their existence- and the prayers of the victims go unheard. Having made an intensive study of the large Media Companies we have to admit that they are only as good as their leadership. We are speaking about leaders who think nothing of selling their firms into bankruptcy.
It would be nice if skill sets could really be taught – that MBA’s taught people how to run a business but I observed long ago that in practical terms by far the most successful firms in the field of technology were those started and run by people that knew the specific’s.
As the years went by I noticed that in the firms of wider corporate purviews, the holding companies in effect, not only was there no interest in specific products but even the continued existence of the company itself was of little concern; certainly not when compared to a half billion dollar payday.
I am afraid that some who enter the sacred realms are not pure of heart.
We must prepare ourselves for the eventuality that they would attempt to kill us.
=grs
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