I Can See a Better Time

You're a bum, you're a punk
You're an old slut on junk
Lying there almost dead on a drip in that bed
You scumbag, you maggot
You cheap, lousy faggot
Happy christmas your arse
I pray god it's our last.

If you are subjected to a fair dose of radio during the December months, you are bound to build up a solid hatred for nearly every canonical Christmas classic. Smoothened voices sing smoothened words, and you are supposed to believe that the paper-thin veneer of tradition can overcome, just for that small pocket of time, those few days, all your sorrows and troubles.

But even a more honest song, like The Pogues' Fairytale of New York, becomes an endangered animal, on the brink of annoyance, on the brink of kitsch. Admittedly, Shane MacGowan is toying with the idea of kitsch here, time and again. He comes up with lines like "I've got a feeling this year's for me and you," that feel comfortably at home in the Yuletide repertoire (even if, to me, it does not sound like he really means it, he is merely trying to convince himself).

It amuses me to think of families with rosy-eyed, freshly-showered little kids sitting around the hearth, trying to match Shane's shambolic Irish accent and Kirsty's in-your-face performance (perhaps solemnly turning the volume down when the uncouth verse quoted above comes up). It amuses me that every December, when the song is played to death all around the world, Shane MacGowan will be handed the money to sustain his non-stop drinking and smoking habits.

It is a feelgood song, all in all, but Shane does give you a rough and bumpy road towards that Christmas spirit. "I could have been someone," Shane offers, sounding unsure of himself, more a question than a declaration. Kirsty counters: "Well, so could anyone."

Unlike most Christmas songs, this one does not play itself out next to the Christmas tree, shacked up together in warm, unfashionable sweaters, with the aroma of good food around, and happy faces in abundance. It starts out in the drunk tank, with a moping old man, in a desperate bid for a little attention, a little love, stating - like every year, no doubt - that this will probably be his last torturous December. Next thing we know, Shane bets on a horse with long odds and wins what for him must be a small fortune, after which he no doubt turned right around to go on a binge.

They dance and kiss their way through the night. Outside. Perhaps, they too have dreams, tucked somewhere far away, of the Christmas as we always try to picture it, where they are warm and inside and everything is finally okay, but they will never admit it. But either way they have dreams, dreams that, as they start to realize, they need to put together, in order for them to be realized.

All of the above, only really to try to help you understand the beauty of that line at the end, that line that could easily be kitsch when placed in a different song. Here, it is heartwarming, the sincerest of gestures when you most need one:

“I've built my dreams around you.”

Regarding an Unnamable Non-Manifesto

On the 5th of February, 1909, in a local newspaper in the Italian city of Bologna, the Italian poet Filippo Tommasso Marinetti published a Manifesto that would herald everything that was about to come in the century ahead, both good and bad. It was, of course, the Futurist Manifesto and it started (or just made visible) a storm that is brewing until this day.

Ugo Gianattasio (1888-1958), untitled, 1920

Even if Marinetti's manifesto is, for all intents and purposes, an Art manifesto or, perhaps pluralized, an Arts manifesto — it discusses the best way to produce beauty, after all — it has always had more value as a timeless meditation on how to approach the Great Unknown of the future.

Let us leave good sense behind like a hideous husk and let us hurl ourselves, like fruit spiced with pride, into the immense mouth and breast of the world! Let us feed the unknown, not from despair, but simply to enrich the unfathomable reservoirs of the Absurd!

For Marinetti, the future is the unfathomable reservoir of the absurd, it is a monster, with immense mouth and breast. Years later, Kevin Barnes of the band Of Montreal, would invert Marinetti's words, calling the past “a grotesque animal” in whose eyes you can see “how completely wrong you can be.” But Marinetti and his companions, when they saw the past, saw only something dormant, a sleeping giant turned to stone, a statue memorializing something nobody can even remember. They saw the age of the Novel with capital N, of men with beards encompassing all life in the flimsy pages of their works. They saw Tolstoy and Balzac and Dickens. “Literature has up to now magnified pensive immobility, ecstasy and slumber.” It's easy to see where they were coming from.

And yet it spawns from such a different world than we witness today! It is, like most manifestos (and especially in those days) an attempt to shake things up, to blow life into everything that comes within earshot. It is, in Marinetti's own words, an ode to the beauty of speed. “Beauty exists only in struggle,” he states. It calls to mind André Breton, nearly two decades later, in Nadja, proclaiming that “beauty will be convulsive, or it will not be at all.” Reading this, you'd like to travel back in time, and warn them. Be careful what you wish for: speed will come to you, convulsions will come to you, and then they will immediately pass you by and disappear in the distance. We are now, perhaps, at the other end of the spectrum, where we could do with some dormancy, where we could do with memorials that have no meaning to them. Everything is buried under the dust of words, while the vacuum cleaner of Time, which used to clean up the Ozymandiases of this world, has been constrained. Nothing disappears anymore. Everything is cumulative. Time and Space died long ago and we are “living in the absolute”, “moving at eternal, omnipresent speed.”

Therefore, it is not so odd that John Freeman calls for the beauty of slow, in a Manifesto for Slow Communications. He condemns “the tyranny of e-mail”, where we are all slaves to the non-stop onslaught of communication. However, it does not do to wait for the past to come (back). Perhaps we should take the thesaurus's hint, when it does not even have a good antonym for Futurist. There is simply no such thing as a Manifesto for the Past. But let's at least agree that speed does not look as beautiful when you are inhaling the exhaust fumes of that “roaring motor car which seems to run on machine-gun fire”. Looking at it from behind, I think I would prefer the Victory of Samothrace after all.

All the News That's Fit to Compute

Between the hours of four and six a. m., one after the other, according to their station upon the roll, all the mails from the N[orth] — the E[ast] — the W[est] — the S[outh] — whence, according to some curious etymologists, comes the magical word NEWS — drove up successively to the post-office, and rendered up their heart-shaking budgets ; none earlier than four o'clock, none later than six. I am speaking of days when all things moved slowly.

Thus wrote Thomas De Quincey in his Confessions of an English Opium Eater in 1821. I really love that apocryphal etymology of the word news. I wish it were true.

Old news

“I am speaking of days when all things moved slowly,” he writes, probably quaking in his boots in the advent of the steam age, the advent of train transport and the telegraph and all things T. In our digital age it is hard to comprehend the physical limitations of the past in such simple things as transmitting a message, but there it is. In vast ancient kingdoms, news was always, inherently, old news, a gaze into the past, like the light of distant stars.

But messages can be useful. Communication is important. It is the invention of news for news' sake (for no sake in particular) that has always confounded me. A moral stigma is attached to 'keeping up to speed with the world'. I can see how newspapers are useful in times of religious, governmental or feudal repression. The idea of decentralizing news was perhaps therefore honorable, but the whole idea of independent news seems a utopia. Surely all newspapers have an agenda or at least strong political leanings. These days, for instance, nearly all newspapers include advertising (or even advertisements dressed up as articles).

Back in 1854, in Walden, Thoreau complained about the pointlessness and vacuity of reading the papers:

And I am sure that I have never read any memorable news in a newspaper. If we read of one man robbed, or murdered, or killed by accident, or one house burned, or one vessel wrecked, or one steamboat blown up, or one cow run over on the Western Railroad, or one mad dog killed, or one lot of grasshoppers in the winter, we never need read of another. One is enough. If you are acquainted with the principle, what do you care for a myriad instances and applications? To a philosopher all news, as it is called, is gossip, and they who edit and read it are old women over their tea.

Jorge Luis Borges must have felt the same way about it, and he never tries to hide his contempt of journalists in his stories. He felt that newspapermen wrote for oblivion. During the Second World War, according to Cees Nooteboom in Een avond in Isfahan, instead of reading the newspapers, Borges was reading the Annals of Tacitus on the Punic Wars. “He called the newspaper ‘that museum of everyday trivialities’, he despises that which I love.” Yes, Nooteboom is famous for his travel writing, and everywhere he goes he picks up the newspaper to get the hang of the place. Poet David Berman does the same thing, though at the same time he subscribes to Thoreau's point of view, or has to admit, at least, as Mark Twain so elegantly formulated, that if history does not repeat itself, at least it rhymes:

Sometimes I am buying a newspaper
in a strange city and think
"I am about to learn what it's like to live here."
Oftentimes there is a news item
about the complaints of homeowners
who live beside the airport
and I realize that I read an article
on this subject nearly once a year
and always receive the same image:

I am in bed late at night
in my house near the airport
listening to the jets fly overhead
a strange wife sleeping beside me.
In my mind, the bedroom is an amalgamation
of various cold medicine commercial sets
(there is always a box of tissue on the nightstand).

I know these recurring news articles are clues,
flaws in the design though I haven't figured out
how to string them together yet,
but I've begun to notice that the same people
are dying over and over again,
for instance Minnie Pearl
who died this year
for the fourth time in four years.

New news

A squirrel dying in front of your house may be more relevant to your interests right now than people dying in Africa.

Thus spoke Mark Zuckerberg. Without wanting to judge it, that single sentence by one of the most influential people in the world right now might summarise best of all the way news is going. The problem outlined above about news is that popular news tended to repeat itself, because popular subjects never changed. People are drawn to disasters and gossip. There was just no market for marginalized culture. Now, with the Internet, that changed.

You might not have heard about it, but a few months ago Google silently abandoned its Reader project. Google Reader was the most popular RSS reader service. That it was not popular enough for Google to want to sustain it, is telling for the fate of RSS. The RSS protocol allows for subscription to specific news sources, essentially allowing everyone to compile his own news channel. The reason it is on the way down, I think, is because it misses an important Web 2.0 aspect: interactivity (which is just a front for: information). If everyone uses RSS, news aggregate sites cannot rank news articles, and Facebook cannot count likes, and we cannot show our love. There would be no button for us to click on. Because that is the future. We select the news. You might consider that democratic, and a good thing, but please read that Zuckerberg quote again. According to research, more and more people use Facebook as an access point to news. Facebook is very oblique about its algorithm for sorting updates. Effectively, they decide what kind of news is important to you, and they have peculiar views on it.

Another part of that democratization that we all love, is the ability for everyone to comment. Everyone who has ever perused a comment section of almost any website, knows that just because everybody can be an author does not mean that everyone should be. As Charlie Brooker has it:

These days most newspaper sites are geared towards encouraging interaction with the minuscule fraction of readers who bother to interact back, which is a pity because I'm selfishly uninterested in conducting any kind of meaningful dialogue with humankind in general. I'd say Twitter's better for back-and-forth discussion anyway, if you could be arsed with it. Yelling out the window at passersby is another option.

When it comes to comments, despite not being as funny as I never was in the first place, I get an incredibly easy ride from passing wellwishers compared with any woman who dares write anything on the internet anywhere about anything at all, the ugly bitch, boo, go home bitch go home. Getting slagged off online is par for the course, and absorbing the odd bit of constructive criticism is character-building. The positive comments are more unsettling. Who needs to see typed applause accompanying an article? It's just weird. I don't get it.

The point being, that comment sections, instead of being innocent and independent addendums to a news site, help form the articles itself, because it's very hard not to have their vocal power in mind when writing something on the Web. The volume of the Mob is a strong and intimidating one, and it might keep a lot of interesting people from posting, from sharing news.

Future news

In 2009, when Tiger Woods was in the news for having an affair, the media had a problem: there were no images to be shown, be they still or moving. Luckily, technology offered a solution: we just create a simulation and that will do. Next Media Animation, a Taiwan company, has made a living doing just that: turning news into animation, animation into news. I think this is the logical next step for news. Since control over everything is what we long for, that includes the news, and we will be able to create the news that we desire, featuring the sound and images we desire, in the order we desire, and we can have them written for us. The world is malleable.

The Internet has evolved into a Star System: though there is so much material available, a small part of it takes all the attention, while the rest amount to towncriers screaming into the void. The future of news will be social, Facebook and the Huffington Post declared. We are social creatures, and we like to follow each other. If everyone truly had its unique news feed, we'd have nothing to talk about anymore. Still, it's a missed chance. The exciting thing about the Internet was that we finally had a choice. The whole experiment of the Web proves that we don't want to have that choice; we want to be led by the hand, we want to be told what to watch, what to listen to and what to read. It's just that we want to be told by different people every now and then, so we don't feel repressed, so we can retain the illusion of freedom. I guess it's a good thing then if in the future the news will be automatically created, selected and spread, without any human input. We prefer to be underlings to robots over being underlings to other humans. We prefer to be all watched over by machines of loving grace.

In the meantime, I'll be sticking to my RSS guns. For what it's worth.

The Library of Babel

‘There's an app for that’

Black Mirror is a British TV series written by Charlie Brooker (see also this older post), and it is concerned with “the way we live now – and the way we might be living in 10 minutes' time if we're clumsy.” In the first episode of the second season, called Be Right Back, a young woman is struck by the death of her boyfriend, and is aided in the process of grieving by an AI emulation of her deceased love. This is made possible by an online service that analyzes all the social networking data a person has accumulated before his death. It is a fascinating parable on the grief process, and on our ever-increasing urge to stifle all the pain through artificial means.

In his weekly column for The Guardian a week later, Brooker mentions that seconds after the episode aired, he got a message pointing him to an existing company that actually offered said service. It seems that in this case, his offhand remark that “we might be living like this in 10 minutes' time” was more true than he himself could have imagined.

Jaron Lanier, in his new book Who Owns the Future?, tells a similar story. He was a judge on a mock business proposal panel that served as an exercise for graduate students at UC Berkeley. One of the humorous proposals was the following:

Suppose you're darting around San Francisco bars and hot spots on a Saturday night. You land in a bar and there are a bounteous number of seemingly accessible, lovely and unattached young women hanging around looking for attention in this particular place. Well, you whip out your mobile phone and alert the network. ‘Here's where the girls are!’ All those other young men like you will know where to go. The service will make money with advertising, probably from bars and liquor concerns.

Amused, Lanier then goes on to point out that usually, as he calls it, “Silicon Valley comes through like clockwork”. Though by a different method, the service SceneTap offers to do pretty much what the mock proposal suggested.

This happens more and more and therefore Brooker's ten minutes are not such an outlandish prediction. As Adriaan van der Weel writes, in a discussion on the change from books to digital text, and how to properly bridge the gap:

Any future is unforeseeable, but the problem is that the unforeseeable future is no longer experienced as being far ahead – or even in the future at all: it is constantly with us now.”

Or, as Charlie Brooker himself concludes in the above-mentioned column:

With that in mind, my new rule is that if you can picture something on the cusp of plausibility, it'll definitely be real by Christmas.

Everything must be true

David Kellogg Lewis was an American philosopher who has been very influential during the 20th century. His best known thesis, modal realism, is also his most remarkable. It claims that there are an infinity of possible worlds (think parallel universes), and not just hypothetically: each of them is as real as the one we live in. Every logically possible universe exists. Lewis' thesis was foreshadowed by many sci-fi stories. In one of them, Fredric Brown's What Mad Universe (via Martin Gardner), the characters discuss the consequences of such a thought:

There are, then, an infinite number of coexistent universes.

“They include this one and the one you came from. They are equally real, and equally true. But do you conceive what an infinity of universes means, Keith Winton?”

“Well- yes and no.”

“It means that, out of infinity, all conceivable universes exist.

“There is, for instance, a universe in which this exact scene is being repeated except that you-or the equivalent of you-are wearing brown shoes instead of black ones.

“There are an infinite number of permutations of that variation, such as one in which you have a slight scratch on your left forefinger and one in which you have purple horns and-”

“But are they all me?”

Mekky said, “No, none of them is you-any more than the Keith Winton in this universe is you. I should not have used that pronoun. They are separate individual entities. As the Keith Winton here is; in this particular variation, there is a wide physical difference-no resemblance, in fact.”

Keith said thoughtfully, “If there are infinite universes, then all possible combinations must exist. Then, somewhere, everything must be true.”

“And there are an infinite number of universes, of course, in which we don't exist at all-that is, no creatures similar to us exist at all. In which the human race doesn't exist at all. There are an infinite number of universes, for instance, in which flowers are the predominant form of life-or in which no form of life has ever developed or will develop.

“And infinite universes in which the states of existence are such that we would have no words or thoughts to describe them or to imagine them.”

Somewhere, everything must be true. Of course, this is why David Lewis was talking about logically possible universes. Everything cannot be true simultaneously. But if we accept the premise of these possible worlds, we can instead state that everything, somewhere, must be true.

The Library of Alexandria, the biggest library of ancient times, had as its core mission collecting all the world's knowledge. It flourished in an age when there was less written material, less text, around than there is now. Its mission failed. The library burned down. Now, so many years later, Google has picked up the baton, with its mission to “organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful”. It pretty much amounts to the same thing. The problem, I think, is in the word useful. There is an exponential growth of available text. The Internet is realizing Lewis' infinite worlds: for every webpage that claims X to be true, chances are there is at least one out there which claims X to be false.

If we were to fuse Lewis' modal realism and Google's total library, we might just end up with the world that Jorge Luis Borges described in his short story The Library of Babel. Borges describes the universe as a library, with galleries extending indefinitely in all directions. He describes the books as such:

This thinker observed that all the books, no matter how diverse they might be, are made up of the same elements: the space, the period, the comma, the twenty-two letters of the alphabet. He also alleged a fact which travelers have confirmed: In the vast Library there are no two identical books. From these two incontrovertible premises he deduced that the Library is total and that its shelves register all the possible combinations of the twenty-odd orthographical symbols (a number which, though extremely vast, is not infinite): Everything: the minutely detailed history of the future, the archangels' autobiographies, the faithful catalogues of the Library, thousands and thousands of false catalogues, the demonstration of the fallacy of those catalogues, the demonstration of the fallacy of the true catalogue, the Gnostic gospel of Basilides, the commentary on that gospel, the commentary on the commentary on that gospel, the true story of your death, the translation of every book in all languages, the interpolations of every book in all books.

This is, I think, where the Internet and Google by extension, are heading. At first — like the reassuring ‘there's an app for that’ — the thought that everything exists somewhere might be strangely soothing:

When it was proclaimed that the Library contained all books, the first impression was one of extravagant happiness. All men felt themselves to be the masters of an intact and secret treasure. There was no personal or world problem whose eloquent solution did not exist in some hexagon. The universe was justified, the universe suddenly usurped the unlimited dimensions of hope.

On second consideration though, the idea that every combination of letters already exists somewhere starts to depress the people in the Library. It stifles all impulses to write something. As Borges notes:

To speak is to fall into tautology. This wordy and useless epistle already exists in one of the thirty volumes of the five shelves of one of the innumerable hexagons -- and its refutation as well. (An n number of possible languages use the same vocabulary; in some of them, the symbol library allows the correct definition a ubiquitous and lasting system of hexagonal galleries, but library is bread or pyramid or anything else, and these seven words which define it have another value. You who read me, are You sure of understanding my language?)

This is how I feel more and more often. When I have an idea for a story or an essay, I have to repress the urge not to Google it. I have to repress that urge because I am positive I will find something at least very similar to it. It might have always been that way, and the thought that every idea has been thought up before must have crossed the minds of people who lived centuries ago, but now with Google's world of universally accessible information, we can actually check. A good example of how this restrains us is shown in the South Park episode Simpsons Already Did It, in which Butters tries to come up with an evil masterplan, but can't think of one that has not already been done by The Simpsons. The other boys then tell him that, exactly because The Simpsons already did everything, worrying about it is pointless.

Too much talk for one planet

Nevertheless, the main problem remains that having all data does not bring you closer to the truth. As mentioned before, not everything can be true. However, there is a tendency in the Web 2.0 communities to anonymize and objectify information. Wikipedia is the most famous example, but Google Translate is another good one. What looks like magic or a really good understanding of languages, is actually just data. Big, big data. When you request a translation, Google looks for similar translations done before by humans in the past, and takes the necessary words out of this past translation. This is why Google Translate often comes up with very free translations: because people can come up with very free translations. Machines, as of yet, can only translate literally. As Jaron Lanier likes to point out: “digital information is really just people in disguise”. Another point that Lanier hammers home consistently in his books is that information underrepresents reality. We need the person behind the information to frame it, make sense of it.

I think if Google wants to succeed in its mission, it needs our help. Perhaps we all have a responsibility. In another column for The Guardian, Charlie Brooker calls for a reduction of word emission:

If a weatherman misreads the national mood and cheerfully sieg-heils on BBC Breakfast at 8.45am, there'll be 86 outraged columns, 95 despairing blogs, half a million wry tweets and a rib-tickling pass-the-parcel Photoshop meme about it circulating by lunchtime. It happens every day. Every day, a billion instantly conjured words on any contemporaneous subject you can think of. Events and noise, events and noise; everything was starting to resemble nothing but events and noise. Firing more words into the middle of all that began to strike me as futile and unnecessary. I started to view myself as yet another factory mindlessly pumping carbon dioxide into a toxic sky.

There are more people walking around on this planet than ever before and at the same time more people than ever can be considered authors. There is just too much word emission.

It will definitely take more than ten minutes, but I think the way we are heading now we will be left with a Library of Babel of anonymous, big data and no cypher to make sense of it. It will be a future as chaotic as Lewis' infinite worlds. Not even Google will be able to help out.

I Agree to Everything

Days of their lives

On April 26, 1949, a psychologist named Roger Barker embarked on an extraordinary experiment in the wonderfully named little town of Oskaloosa in Kansas, USA. It was an extraordinary experiment documenting very ordinary things. Barker went to Oskaloosa, a town of just 725 people, and asked parents if he and his fellow psychologists could be allowed to follow their child for one day. One proud set of parents said yes, and the results were summed up two years later in a book called One Boy's Day.

On that faithful April morning, eight clipboarded men working in shifts followed the boy around to jot down his every action, to the most minute details. The book, again, is extraordinary exactly because of its ordinariness. It tries to be nothing but what it is, and offers no interpretation or judgement on the boy's actions. All it is is a transcription of the events of the day. Thus the book starts:

7:00. Mrs. Birch said with pleasant casualness, "Raymond wake up." With a little more urgency in her voice she spoke again: "Son, are you going to school today?"

7:01. Raymond picked up a sock and began tugging and pulling it on his left foot. As his mother watched him she said kiddingly, "Can't you get your peepers open?"… He said plaintively, "Mommie," and continued mumbling in an unintelligible way something about his undershirt.

And so on, and so forth. You can easily see the value of such a document for historians. A common problem of writing history is that only the history that is deemed eventful and momentous is written down, so we often know disappointingly little of the habits of everyday life in past ages. Of course, the question immediately arises: is the behavior of a boy not changed by the sudden appearance of a clipboarded man? Probably, yes. But as our fantastical canon of children's books can attest to, the younger we are, the more adaptable to unlikely changes. Within a short time, the boy does not seem to notice the clipboard man at all anymore.

Barker and his colleagues went on to repeat the experiment with other kids in Oskaloosa, and the psychologists became a part of life there, blending in the background as it were, like the dark raincoated men in espionage movies. I could not help but think of the movie Synecdoche, New York, where when the protagonist, a theater director, is writing himself in his own play, a man comes up at casting who has shadowed him all his life:

I've been following you for twenty years. So I knew about this audition because I follow you. And I've learned everything about you by following you. So hire me. And you'll see who you truly are. Peek-a-boo.

Days of our lives

One Boy's Day was an experiment. Synecdoche, New York is fiction. No one follows us around. People who claim that they are being followed are called paranoid, and paranoia is a disorder. And yet, with the NSA scandal on our hands, and everything we know now about the privacy policies of the large Silicon Valley corporations, the crazy people might slowly turn out to be correct. Of course, we are not followed by shady men, but by digital networks abstractly compiling the streams of information we willingly send out every day. As British band Hard-Fi sang back in 2005: We're the stars of CCTV, making movies out on the street / We're the stars of CCTV, can't you see the camera loves me?

Willingly? Well, sort of. We agreed, after all. As the documentary Terms and Conditions May Apply points out, these long texts of semi-legal wish-wash that we all skip over when we sign up for something, allow these companies to spy on us without having to call it spying. They simply 'collect data' and all they want is for you to agree to them being able to freely use this data.

As it turns out, just this day I had a university class concerning the form of content, on how we recognize a letter even if all the actual content in it is crossed out. In the spacing, the address at top, and signature at bottom, we recognize the letter. A Terms and Conditions text can also be recognized by form. It generally uses a small type, hardly any spacing, and is quite often written entirely in capitals. Ask any typographer what text is hardest to read and his answer probably amounts to just about the same specifics. This is not accidental. They don't want you to read it. Content-wise, too, it is difficultly formulated and unnecessarily long. Even if you do take the effort to read it, you might still not have a clue what you are agreeing to. Most likely, you will give up and agree anyway.

And so the data accumulates and accumulates and accumulates. If you've been on the web for a while, you might have noticed the slow disappearance of open input fields from social networks. A website like Myspace allowed for a lot of free customization, and people would often write a short bio and a list of their favorite movies and music and books. Importantly, this was a list in text format, without markup. It was hard (though not impossible) to aggregate and sell this data. This is why now on Facebook there is a page or at least an 'object' of some sort for everything, so that all the likes can be easily packaged and sold together to whomever it may concern. There is no risk anymore of valuable data being missed thanks to spelling errors. You know, humane errors. Phew.

Who we truly are

How much data are we talking about, then? When Max Schrems, a student from Austria who was concerned about his digital footprint, requested his file from Facebook (a request which, by law, they have to comply to), he got a whooping 1200 pages in the mail. The files, among many other things, "kept records of every person who had ever poked him, all the IP addresses of machines he had used to access the site (as well as which other Facebook users had logged in on that machine), a full history of messages and chats and even his 'last location', which appeared to use a combination of check-ins, data gathered from apps, IP addresses and geo-tagged uploads to work out where he was." Most alarmingly perhaps, was that deleted data turned out not to be deleted data at all. All that happens when you delete something on Facebook is the addition of a 'delete' flag that hides it from you. It is still there for Facebook to look into. This has large implications. If you are like me, and started worrying about Facebook only later when reports on privacy became more frequent, you might have had a lot of information on your profile at first, and then removed it later. According to Schrems, all that information is actually still there.

In the september issue of Harper's Magazine, writer William T. Vollmann unfolds a similar, though far more disturbing, story. In this article, titled Life as a Terrorist, he too requested his file - at the FBI - and got 294 pages back (though 785 pages were still 'in review' and there might actually be more that they are holding back. Reading through his own files, he suddenly found out that he had been repeatedly suspected as a terrorist, primarily in the nineties threat of the Unabomber. Even after the real Unabomber had been apprehended, Vollmann still experienced long waits, holdups and hostile behavior when he tried to re-enter the USA (his home country) after a trip abroad. He surmises, painfully, that…

I learned that to be suspect, it is enough to have been formerly wrongly suspected.

People will keep on telling you that privacy is unnecessary if you have nothing to hide. Or, as former Google CEO Eric Schmidt once said: "If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place." If this is the prevailing thought nowadays, we've come a long way from the famous words of Justice Louis Brandeis in 1890:

Privacy is the right to be let alone.

Instead of changing privacy policies, we are attuning our ideas about what privacy entails. If we keep going along this path, we will end up like those kids in Oskaloosa. We will stop noticing the clipboarded men.

Life Is Elsewhere

It is easy to say life is elsewhere when you're strolling through a cemetery.

It is even easier when that graveyard is situated in a fortress complex called Vyšehrad high above Prague — a city more past than future anyway, — when there is a pervading quiet hanging around the place like a mist you can't wade through. It is a graveyard where famous men are buried, composers like Bedřich Smetana and Antonín Dvořák, writers like Jan Neruda and Karel Hynek Mácha. In a place so far-removed from modern life in both time and place, it is alienating to find Karel Čapek, the originator of the word robot in all of our languages, buried here.

A short walk from this cemetery, I sit down looking over a curve in the Vltava river, the many Gothic churches and castles of Prague looming in the background. The sky is blue, which is not how I imagined it to be in this city. Always when I pictured it, it was an oppressing grey.

I sit here and read Milan Kundera's Life Is Elsewhere. Kundera has adopted Rimbaud's adagium as a motto to what he calls the Lyric Age, to the young who always feel that inner trembling urging them to harder, better, faster, stronger. The main character of the book is most of the time simply described as 'the poet', but goes by the name of Jaromil. This poet for Kundera is just a vehicle to conjure up Lermontov and Shelley and Rimbaud and Wolker and all the others. He interchanges them in his narrative, the location shifting from Prague to Dublin to Paris and back. And the poet is always searching, always on the run, always uneasy, always in the wrong place. Even when history is being made:

The marchers had already passed the reviewing stand on Wenceslas Square and the blue-shirted young people were dancing to hastily improvised bands. Everything was gay and free, and people who were strangers just moments before joined in hearty camaraderie. But Percy Shelley is unhappy, Percy is alone.

He's already been in Dublin for several weeks, he's handed out dozens of flyers, the police know all about him, but he has not succeeded in befriending a single Irishman. Life always seems to be somewhere else.

This is unrest, the unrest of youth. But sitting here high above where the people look like ants, I extract an altogether different emotion out of the same phrase. Far, far away I hear the droning monotonous sound of an ambulance. Normally, there is a doppler effect, there is an increase and decrease of volume, there is unrest. Now, there is just a faint reminder that life is elsewhere, that reality is elsewhere, that all that is left up here is the outline of a dream that I myself am allowed to color in. The ambulance siren is just pleasant background noise.

Dream is reality, students wrote on the walls of the Sorbonne in the '68 riots in Paris. Kundera writes that it is never really clear whether the dream is a reality or the reality is a dream. Where I am now, it is all very dichotomous. Reality is below, and here in Vyšehrad is all that is left when all the real things are subtracted. A quiet hum of the breeze cutting through the grass.

Talking Shit About a Pretty Sunset

In Before Midnight, the third part of the Before-trilogy, Jesse and Celine are sat on a terrace in Greece watching the sun go down. Celine feels the need to accompany the moment with live commentary. Still there… still there… still there… gone, she says, staring at the horizon.

The sunset is one of the most universally loved phenomena. Everybody likes a good sunset. Still, I often find it hard to enjoy it. The fleetingness of the moment, and the very knowledge that I am supposed to find this beautiful, make me very aware of the moment. Its ephemeral quality might be the most important one, a sunset is a symphony that is always changing, never to be captured. But ultimately it is just what we make of it, what weight we attach to it: all it really is is a changing of the light, panoplied before us.

Author Don DeLillo is obsessed with sunsets. In the nature/nurture dichotomy, he seems to come down on the side of nurture when it comes to sunsets. He seems to continually grapple with it, and takes it as a symbol of our conscious search for happiness. It is a much more modern invention than we might think that everyone on this planet is entitled to a little happiness. And it might just be that real happiness can only be found in the unconscious, that the moment you start wondering whether you are happy, you have lost it already.

They discussed the sunset awhile, sitting on the desk with junk food and drinks. It was better than the previous day's sunset but lacked the faint mauve tones, according to Ethan, of the day before yesterday. They went inside and ate dinner, slowly, an uncoordinated effort. Jack complained that they were talking about the food while eating it, that they talked about sunsets while lookiing at them, so on, so forth.

This is from the novel Players, written in 1977. That urge to quantify things, to put them into perspective by comparison, seems to always loom over us. Some people keep proclaiming every new thing they do or experience as the best. "This is the best food I ever ate," or "I've never heard something so beautiful," or so on. At least there is excitement there. Some are more honest with themselves, and go in a detailed analysis, breaking it all down in parts until it falls apart. There is an old philosophical paradox called the Ship of Theseus. The paradox is whether an object that has all its component parts replaced is still essentially the same object. Perhaps that, if anything, is how to quantify beauty. The beauty is in the invisible marrow of life, in a sum being more than its parts, a current of undefinables running along the infinite lines of the unmappable. If you replace every component with a copy of itself and the end result is not still essentially the same, then there might have been beauty in it to begin with. Alas, you'll never get that beauty back.

Eight years later, sunsets played an important part in another Don DeLillo novel, White Noise. Here again, he ascerts how it is impossible to say why a sunset is so breathtaking.

Early that evening I drove Babette to her class in posture. We stopped on the parkway overpass and got out to look at the sunset. Ever since the airborne toxic event, the sunsets had become almost unbearably beautiful. Not that there was a measurable connection. If the special character of Nyodene Derivative (added to the everyday drift of effluents, pollutants, contaminants and deliriants) had caused this aesthetic leap from already brilliant sunsets to broad towering ruddled visionary skyscapes, tinged with dread, no one had been able to prove it.

"We're not at the edge of the ocean or desert. We ought to have timid winter sunsets. But look at the blazing sky. It's so beautiful and dramatic. Sunsets used to last five minutes. Now they last an hour."

"Why is that?"

"Why is that?" she said.

White Noise is about the mediation of the world and trying to discern the real world from the world on television; trying and failing, for the world on television informs and affects the real world, now more than ever. People come to the small town where Babette and Jack live. They park their cars on the place with the best vista. It becomes something of an event, a you-had-to-be-there moment. Do people come because the sunsets are beautiful or because they are said to be beautiful?

DeLillo seems to finally make up his mind about it in his 2010 novel Point Omega.

He was here, he said, to stop talking. There was no one to talk to but me. He did this sparingly at first and never at sunset. These were not glorious retirement sunsets of stocks and bonds. To Elster sunset was human invention, our perceptual arrangement of light and space into elements of wonder. We looked and wondered. There was a trembling in the air as the unnamed colors and landforms took on definition, a clarity of outline and extent. Maybe it was the age difference between us that made me think he felt something else at last light, a persistent disquiet, uninvented. This would explain the silence.

The old man here might as well be DeLillo himself, in his retirement still overanalyzing everything, but perhaps finally finding something else, something uninvented. This ties in perfectly with the scene from Players: perhaps all it takes it just to stop talking.

Monopoly: A Non-Trivial Pursuit

Not too long ago, I wrote about Google's rise to power. It might be worthwhile to repeat the Rebecca Solnit quote that I included there again:

Imagine that it's 1913 and the post office, the phone company, the public library, printing houses, the US Geological Survey mapping operations, movie houses, and all atlases are largely controlled by a secretive corporation unaccountable to the public. Jump a century and see that in the online world that's more or less where we are. A New York venture capitalist wrote that Google is trying to take over "the entire fucking Internet" and asked the question of the day: "Who will stop Google?"

I have been worrying about this. Is it really that bad? When the Internet came into fruition, there was a lot of hope that on this new medium things would be different. Everyone would have a voice. What, then, does it signify that all the loudest voices have converged into a few large conglomerates, creating a wall of sound. Within this wall of sound, it is no longer possible to discern the specifics, no longer possible to discern the individual. Fighting with large companies is often like shadowboxing, because you do not know who or where to strike.

It is always worrying when too much power coalesces. Many philosophers have written about this. Even when there is awareness about it, as is the case with the dictatorships of countries like North Korea, it is hard to do anything about it. But when the masses are fooled and lullabied into a slumber, it is particularly dangerous.

Here is, for instance, a data chart mapping all the different companies that produce our products onto their larger parent companies. Suddenly, very little competition remains:

The same thing goes for our media outlets. Our culture is increasingly in the hands of fewer and fewer, who use their far-reaching tentacles to extend copyrights further and further into the future so they can keep their precious little milk cows. Lawrence Lessig, in his book Free Culture, summarizes the state of things in his home country the USA:

• 5 companies control 85 percent of our media sources
• 4 companies control 90 percent of the nation's radio advertising revenues
• 10 companies control half of the nation's newspapers
• 10 film studios receive 99 percent of all film revenue.
• 10 cable companies account for 85 percent of all cable revenue.

Taking this together with the changes in copyright law, Lessig comes to a severe conclusion:

Never in our history have fewer had a legal right to control more of the development of our culture than now. Not when copyrights were perpetual, for when copyrights were perpetual, they affected only that precise creative work. Not when only publishers had the tools to publish, for the market then was much more diverse. Not when there were only three television networks, for even then, newspapers, film studios, radio stations, and publishers were independent of the networks. Never has copyright protected such a wide range of rights, against as broad a range of actors, for a term that was remotely as long. This form of regulation--a tiny regulation of a tiny part of the creative energy of a nation at the founding--is now a massive regulation of the overall creative process. Law plus technology plus the market now interact to turn this historically benign regulation into the most significant regulation of culture that our free society has known.

A game for the whole family

But let's get back to the Web. Because, more and more, web companies are creating the same illusion of choice as the food and beverage and media outlets above. It has become common practice for the big companies to acquire hot startups and keep them running independently. For instance, when Facebook acquired Instagram, Zuckerberg pressed the point that they were committed to building and growing Instagram independently, as opposed to their — before then — common practice of scooping up hot startups, killing their products, and redeploying their staff on other projects. It is easy to imagine why. Even now, when I am on YouTube, I often forget that this is simply a branch of Google. Though there is some similarity to the layout and color scheme, you will not find a Google logo anywhere on the YouTube page, as opposed to the pages of other popular Google products like Google Maps and Gmail. Yet, at the same time, when I log in to Gmail, I am automatically logged into YouTube as well. The same goes for the very site I am writing this on, Blogger/Blogspot.

Just out of curiosity, I have taken the Top 100 of most popular websites compiled by Alexa, and tried to group them by ownership. I have broken them down below.

Owner	Qty	Domains
Google	22	google.com, youtube.com, blogspot.com, google.co.in, google.de, google.uk, googleusercontent.com, google.fr, google.com.br, google.co.jp, google.com.hk, google.ru, blogger.com, google.it, google.es, google.com.mx, google.ca, blogspot.in, google.com.tr, bp.blogspot.com, google.com.au, google.pl
Amazon	5	amazon.com, imdb.com, amazon.co.jp, amazon.de, amazon.co.uk
eBay	4	ebay.com, paypal.com, ebay.de, ebay.co.uk
Microsoft	4	live.com, bing.com, msn.com, microsoft.com
Alibaba	4	taobao.com, tmall.com, alibaba.com, alipay.com
Yahoo!	4	yahoo.com, yahoo.co.jp, tumblr.com, flickr.com
Facebook	2	facebook.com, instagram.com
Wordpress	2	wordpress.com, wordpress.org
Sina Group	2	sina.com.cn, weibo.com
Baidu	2	baidu.com, hao123.com
Digital Sky	2	mail.ru, odnoklassniki.ru
IAC	2	ask.com, about.com
Tencent	2	qq.com, soso.com
Twitter	2	twitter.com, t.co
AOL	2	huffingtonpost.com, aol.com

That is a landslide victory if ever I saw one. And of course, of course, I know, these are just local versions of Google, mostly, but the fact that google.com is still #1 even with their visitors divided over so many highly visited domains, just goes to show how big they are. Let me also add that this is based on hastily done research by myself, so there might be errors, but it is an indication anyway (there are also many shared interests and stakes and partnerships that I did not even include). Though all these giants might be rivals, they nevertheless share the same interests. They are all based ever-increasingly upon the collection of information, and will often help each other to missing info in something akin to a worldwide game of Go Fish. CEOs move from Yahoo to Google, and from Google to Amazon, and back. It is all really just one big family.

The Real State Secret

This is all fine and dandy, you will say, but who cares? Perhaps, in the wake of PRISM and the Snowden files, people do start caring. Still, a large group of people hold on to the idea that "if you have nothing to hide, you do not need privacy." Though many sci-fi and dystopian books have pointed out the dangers of such an attitude, there is also a more real danger. Adam Curtis, with his usual wit, intelligence and eye for detail, recently wrote a blog post on the subject of spying. He proposed a wholly different question from the one almost all other journalists were occupied with: Do spies actually know what they are doing?

Well, according to Curtis: not really. He focuses on the British MI5, and goes on to debunk much of their alleged successes. He starts out with a story of Iraqi students in London during the Gulf War who became the first Prisoners of War in Britain since WWII. They were incarcerated for no other official reason than "to err on the side of caution". Curtis then goes on to tell a confusing and ridiculous-but-true story on the various internal struggles of the MI5 looking for a Russian spy inside their own organization. Just being at the wrong place at the wrong time, or "rising high in the organization" was enough to make you suspicious. But here is the important point, the inherent problem of spy organizations:

For most of the twentieth century the combination of ineptitude and secrecy created an organisation that retreated more and more into a world of fictional conspiracies in order to disguise it's repeated failures. The question is whether the same is true today?

Disasters like the total intelligence failure over the WMD in Iraq would suggest that nothing much had changed. But the trouble is there is no way we can ever find out. The spies live behind a wall of secrecy and when anyone tries to criticise them, the spies respond by saying that they have prevented attacks and saved us from terrible danger. But they can't show us the evidence because that is secret.

If organizations whose work depends on undisclosed information still are in many senses above the law, the situation is bound to get messy. Data itself is not criminal. An analysis of the data by humans decides whether it is or isn't. If spies in fact do not know what they are doing, there is no more solace to be found in the knowledge of your own innocence. Google probably has more information by now than any spy organization ever had. They are hardly open about what information exactly they collect, or how they use it precisely. I don't know anymore what would be worse: if they know what they are doing, or if they do not.

The pluralization of Protagoras

One hundred and four years ago, in 1909, E.M. Forster released a short novella called The Machine Stops. In this science-fiction parable, Forster predicted the isolations of the digital age with a rather uncanny accuracy. There are parallels in the story to Wikipedia, TED lectures, Facebook, and all sorts of electronic devices. The most salient point of the story is that all our technology, built on the wisdom that was to free us from religious superstition, is yet again enslaving us to a new God, making us more dependent and helpless than ever.

In Forster's dystopia, nearly everyone lives underground, in either of two stations. Everyone is allocated their own room, which provides for their every need at the press of a button. People never leave their room, so they no longer communicate with each other directly. In fact, communicating 'directly' is seen as something unseemly and unbecoming. Instead, they do what most of us in the real world are now doing on a daily basis, and communicate by technology, in something that is akin to what we now call videoconferencing (though the face of the other is only calculated, not actually projected). Forster points out that this is all good and well, but it is no replacement for face-to-face interaction.

She fancied that he looked sad. She could not be sure, for the Machine did not transmit nuances of expression. It only gave a general idea of people – an idea that was good enough for all practical purposes, Vashti thought. The imponderable bloom, declared by a discredited philosophy to be the actual essence of intercourse, was rightly ignored by the Machine, just as the imponderable bloom of the grape was ignored by the manufacturers of articial fruit. Something 'good enough' had long since been accepted by our race.

Is it possible that in restructuring our world to run along our electronic wires, we are also constantly settling for something 'good enough'? Whatever emotions we emit, whatever pheromones we expound, are not transmitted. They twist the tongues of the wires. They are of a different dialect, and they do not cross the language barrier. Something is always lost when we translate the analog to the digital. It is an approximation. Even if we humans cannot discern the difference, that does not mean that it does not unconsciously influence us.

Man is the measure

Man is the measure. That was my first lesson. Man's feet are the measure for distance, his hands are the measure for ownership, his body is the measure for all that is lovable and desirable and strong.

In her wonderful book Wanderlust, American writer Rebecca Solnit gives us a history of walking. Of walking for pleasure, not just for practical purpose. One of her more interesting ideas is her suspicion that “the mind, like the feet, works at three miles an hour”. When we step in a car, it is like teleportation, we get in at point A and out at point B, and we lose all sense of space. Though everyone could see this when Forster ridiculed it a century ago, when it concerned people living underground and never going out, apparently it is still too obscured a point for most in our present world.

According to Plato, it was Protagoras, a Greek philosopher from before the time of Socrates, who said “man is the measure of all things.” Since we know little of the context in which he uttered those words, it can be interpreted in wildly different ways. Most, however, take it to mean (broadly) that the world or – if you will allow me to be a broken record – reality, originates in the mind.

By linking the mind, as the origin of all things, back to the measuring of space, to transportation, it is likely Forster came to the same conclusions as Solnit. Though 1909 seems a long time ago, it was of course an age on the threshold of the automobile era, with the faint shadows and outlines of the flying machines we now call airplanes already looming above.

These airplanes feature as zeppelin-like airships in the book, and they are one of the few remnants of the old age. No one uses them for pleasure. They are the only means of getting from the one station to the other, but people experience the direct contact they have with other people on that ship as highly uncomfortable. Go on an aeroplane in our age, and you will find this not such an outlandish feeling. Most people are earplugged with music leaking out, or are engaged with their smartphone or laptop. The security instructions are often no longer given by a flesh-and-blood stewardess, but from a recorded 'performance' on the video screens. Stewardesses have now truly become mere 'waitresses in the sky'.

Man is no longer the measure of all things. We plan our cities according to the whims of cars and we would fain believe a machine than our own selves, as the most loyal iTravelers can easily attest to. We all have an unending faith in the power (and the loving grace) of machines. They cannot be wrong, or can they?

Wikipedia is the measure

To many people nowadays, Wikipedia is one of the grand achievements of the digital age. And it is. In a relatively short time, an accumulation of information has been collected that is unrivalled by any before. It is also data of a different nature than any we've had before. Wikipedia is a tremendously useful source of information, as long as we are all aware of this nature. In his book You Are Not a Gadget, Jaron Lanier addresses the problems:

Wikipedia, for instance, works on what I call the Oracle illusion, in which knowledge of the human authorship of a text is suppressed in order to give the text superhuman validity. Traditional holy books work in exactly the same way and present many of the same problems.

And indeed, The Machine that controls everything in this story, is slowly revered and turned into religion, as, again, our loyal iTravelers can tell us all about. The only physical book that is left in the future of the story is the so-called Book of the Machine that every room comes furnished with. They are mere manuals, but over time they become the holy books of this new religion, they whisper to their readers and comfort them. Along the way, a reprint of the book is ordered, which features on the first page the phrase: “blessed is the Machine.”

Wikipedia was already parodied before it came into existence. The Hitchhiker's Guide in Douglas Adams' eponymous series is a collaborative effort encyclopaedia with entries on all kinds of random subjects. At some point, Arthur Dent helps to change the entry for Earth from “harmless” to “mostly harmless.” The short entry for Earth, especially compared to extremely long essays on niche subjects like Vogon poetry is a good joke that, itself, has parallels to Wikipedia. Some people have even made this into a sport, called wiki-groaning.

There is a series of Greatest Hits records in music that have been inspired by a classic Elvis compilation, called 50,000,000 Elvis fans can't be wrong. Bands like Bon Jovi, White Stripes, The Fall and Soulwax have borrowed this phrase for their own compilation records. Though perhaps not always applied earnestly, it nevertheless speaks of an instinctive trust we have in numbers. This trust can easily be disproved by looking at almost any history book, yet we cannot shake it off. The hive, or the cloud, or the noosphere, that we base our Web 2.0 world on, is also based on this fallacy. Forster had envisioned it all along. In the dystopia, people can give 'lectures' from their home on whatever subject they specialize in, that are then broadcasted to whomever is interested (remind you of something?). One famous lecturer, impelled by the disgust of anything 'direct', preaches on the power of numbers:

First-hand ideas do not really exist. They are but the physical impressions produced by live and fear, and on this gross foundation who could erect a philosophy. Let your ideas be second-hand, and if possible tenth-hand, for then they will be far removed from that disturbing element – direct observation. Do not learn anything about this subject of mine – the French Revolution. Learn instead what I think that Enicharmon thought Urizen thought Gutch thought Ho-Yung thought Chi-Bo-Sing thought Lafcadio Hearn thought Carlyle thought Mirabeau said about the French Revolution. Through the medium of these ten great minds, the blood that was shed at Paris and the windows that were broken at Versailles will be clarified to an idea which you may employ most profitably in your daily lives. But be sure that the intermediates are many and varied, for in history one authority exists to counteract another. Urizen must counteract the scepticism of Ho-Yung and Enicharmon, I must myself counteract the impetuosity of Gutch. You who listen to me are in a better position to judge about the French Revolution than I am. Your descendents will be even in a better position than you, for they will learn what you think I think, and yet another intermediate will be added to the chain. And in time there will come a generation that had got beyond facts, beyond impressions, a generation absolutely colourless, a generation

seraphically free

from taint of personality,

which will see the French revolution not as it happened, nor as they would like it to have happened, but as it would have happened, had it taken place in the days of the Machine.

Maybe, just maybe, the ancient Greeks were wrong – or perhaps, we misunderstood. Maybe, more specifically, we need to say that “men are the measure of all things.” The more, the merrier. That is the mentality of the hive mind: 19,453,568 Wikipedia contributors can't be wrong.

Towards singularity

An interesting example of computers trying to outsmart us occurs when you google the word singularity. As is the norm these days, the first result that comes up is the Wikipedia entry. In this case, though, two Wikis top the list. The first is technological singularity. This is indeed the thing I was looking for. The second is just singularity, which brings you to a so-called disambiguation page, a portal to all the other possible singularities. Do more people generally care about the technological variant than the mathematical concept it was based on? Probably. However, Google is rather silent about its algorithms for search results (though Eli Pariser gave it the old college try). Primarily, I suppose, because they do not want webmasters to manipulate their website just to get higher up in the results. Secondly, Google more than anyone else knows the value of data; this algorithm that defines the quests of so many people, is especially valuable. But there might also be another problem. Perhaps, within the large confines of the Google complex, the specifics of that algorithm are so divided up that no one knows the complete truth anymore.

This last explanation is a cornerstone element of the hive mentality: all together (we k)now. It is almost a modern version of gnosticism, with us all fractions of the same divine light cast off from God, wanting to reunite. And by God I mean The Machine.

No one confessed the machine was out of hand. Year by year it was served with increased efficiency and decreased intelligence. The better a man knew his own duties upon it, the less he understood the duties of his neighbour, and in all the world there was not one who understood the monster as a whole. Those master brains had perished. They had left full directions, it is true, and their successors had each of them mastered a portion of those directions. But Humanity, in its desire for comfort, had over-reached itself. It had exploited the riches of nature too far. Quietly and complacently, it was sinking into decadence, and progress had come to mean the progress of the Machine.

The technological singularity is defined as an age in which artificial intelligence outstrips our own, and the salient point of it is that because it goes over our heads, no one will know what happens next. Some predict heaven, others hell. If we define our world by this concept, if this is the future we are staring into, then progress truly has come to mean the progress of the Machine.

But is it possible that progress of the Machine correlates with the regress of man? Every new appliance, every app developed, makes live more convenient for us, but they are all crutches to lean on that we never knew we needed. They are the pharmacists who sell us pills to keep their little money machine running, pills that just make us need more pills. We are helpless without our new crutches, without our omniscient glasses, without our electronic insoles. We used to laugh at the stupidity of the Microsoft Office paperclip. If a future Machine would stop, we might then even be left wanting for this also-ran wisdom of the dancing paperclip.

She had never known silence, and the coming of it nearly killed her – it did kill many thousands of people outright. Ever since her birth she had been surrounded by the steady hum. It was to the ear what artificial air was to the lungs, and agonizing pains shot across her head.

The point being, that technological advancement is not always advancement in general. Just like Wikipedia does for singularity, we should start disambiguating between the two again. Progress should not mean the progress of the machine, nor even, I would venture, solely the progress of mankind. It should be the progress of harmony, of happiness, of the world at large. Otherwise, with our current tunnel vision, we might soon be living underground as well.

E.M. Forster's The Machine Stops is in the public domain. You can read it here or Google it yourself and see what comes up for you.

The Press Conference

Half an hour before the event, two journalists are already idling about in front of the glass panels of the large building. They are not yet allowed in. Both of them are smoking cigarettes through the little gap between scarf and hat. I greet them in half-recognition, then, to truly blend in, fiddle about in my inside pocket for my Pall Malls. After about fifteen minutes, a Man Acting Very Official pushes through the crowd of reporters and tapes a note to the glass. We all crane our necks and push about to see, like adolescents being presented with a list of grades.

The first line of the note says the press conference is canceled. In the rest of it, great care is taken to point out the tentative status of this message. It is too soon, it reads, to make permanent decisions on the matter. Too many uncertainties to clear up first.

A few minutes later the Man Acting Very Official comes walking up again, as determined as the first time, with another note, which he tapes over the first one. This second note confirms the cancellation brought up in the first. Due to unforeseen circumstances, the situation is out of our hands, etc. The second part of the new note announces a second press conference, which, ostensibly, is to deal with any questions regarding the cancellation of the first one. This second event will take place in ten minutes, at the building we are all huddled in front of. By the time we finish reading, the Man Who Acted Very Official has long since vanished.

My colleagues and I all have our own way of dealing with this situation. Some shrug, mumble ‘news is news’, stay put. Others run off clutching their cell phones, calling up a colleague of theirs they consider more suited for this second event. A third group, to which I belong, obediently call their bosses wondering how to deal with the situation. Mine says go ahead, you're here anyway, might as well.

Everything in the press room is carefully arranged. As we reporters enter, we are asked after employer and function, and then guided into carefully mapped out sections. I am in the magazine-section, something my fellow magazine writers do not appreciate. After all, I am merely an internet blogger and everyone knows that does not count as real journalism.

Once everyone is seated and organized, the speakers enter, exuding the same solemnity that the Man Acting Very Official did. After the required niceties, the middle speaker - the prime spokesman of the company – makes to talk.

“First of all, I want to thank you all for coming here on such short notice. Our sincerest apologies for the manner in which this press conference was announced. As I hope you are well aware, this is not according to our standard procedure, and will have to go down as an unfortunate exception.”

“Now, to the matter at hand, for which you are all here. For today, a press conference was planned discussing the proceedings of an inquiry into best marketing practices. Unfortunately, as you have learned, this conference had to be canceled due to circumstances well out of our locus of control. There is, as of yet, no new date for the conference, but I can tell you that right now the conference’s official status is postponed, not canceled.”

He leaves it up to the ensuing silence to add weight to his words. “There will be time for questions now,” he adds finally.

Murmurs go through the audience, everyone looks around nervously. Finally, a man in the newspaper section stands up. “What circumstances caused the cancellation of the conference,” he wants to know.

“First of all,” the spokesman counters, “let me remind you that as of now the official status is postponed, not cancelled.” He seems extremely pleased with this remark. “As for the consequences, that is a matter of little concern.”

“Not to a man in my profession,” the newspaperman says, “we have an obligation to be as complete as possible when we collect the facts.”

“As you will, sir. The conference has been postponed because it was brought to our attention that rumors of its cancellation were a trending topic on the Internet. Since we have a policy of extreme care, any rumors compromising the conference are met with immediate action. We do not want to risk the possibility, however small, that the rumors are founded and we turn up unprepared.”

The newspaperman is aghast with this reply for a second and a radio journalist takes this opportunity to jump in. “Our team did some quick research,” he says, not being able to smother the triumphant hint in his voice foreboding what's to come, “and we came across these Internet rumors too. It turns out your company yourself was the one who issued a brief statement of uncertainty regarding the conference, and it was upon this statement that the rumors were based. What do you have to say about this?”

The spokesman laughs, as if it concerns comedian and punchline. “If it is based on a message by ourselves, there is absolutely no reason to doubt it, and that only confirms for me that we have taken the right decision.”

All the journalists around me are scribbling feverishly. A woman next to me stands up and starts asking a question in a tantalizingly slow, drawn-out tempo, as if she is still figuring it all out as she speaks. “Mr. Spokesman,” she starts, “if my information is correct, you were slated to appear at the cancelled press conference.”

“Postponed,” the spokesman corrects.

“Postponed press conference. You have therefore, I assume, your statement for this postponed conference ready and at hand?”

“I do.”

She seems to be searching for the right words, as if what she is about to express is a particularly alien thought. “I would appreciate it if you read out this statement, since that is what I - and I think I speak for most of the people here - came here for in the first place.”

The spokesman looks perplexed. “Why would you come to this conference to hear me read out a statement from another press conference? Pardon my saying so, madam, but that is not according to protocol.”

Here, the organizer of the conference butts in and sternly says: “Please, from now on, no more questions regarding the content of the postponed conference. This conference concerns only the news of the postponement.”

Visibly disappointed, the woman sits down. No one else stands up after that, and proceedings are wrapped up.

Back outside, all of us eagerly take to our cigarettes. Colleagues make calls to their headquarters. With absolute precision, they summarize the conference. Meanwhile I have opened up my suitcase and, my laptop half balancing on a ledge of the building's wall, start typing out my report. Some of us, encouraged by the many sudden changes this afternoon, linger after their work is done, hoping the Man Who Acted Very Official comes by again with a scoop.

Me, though, my article finished, I walk away, out of the solid cloud of cigarette smoke we erected in front of the building.

Realer than the Real

Being 'real' is big business these days. But is there anything undisputedly real, undeniably authentic? Or are these just subjective words, big words, we like to throw around? The real, the genuine, the authentic is often defined as proven to be original, not derivative of, not fake, etc. But language is fickle. For instance, talking about authentic Mexican food just signifies it was made in the traditional way with the traditional recipe. Shift this interpretation to art, however, and you get something else. An authentic Rembrandt is not just such a painting made in the traditional way with traditional paintbrushes. In fact, the word authentic is actually added here to denote the inverse, to indicate that this is not a copy made under the right circumstances, but the original.

Sometimes the original can feel like the copy. For many young kids growing up, the history of pop music for instance, extends itself backwards from the present. We get into Gang of Four thanks to Bloc Party, or listen to Crosby, Stills & Nash as a shadow cast by Fleet Foxes. For us, Editors was simply a rip-off of Interpol, not of late 70s post-punk. For us, Madonna's American Pie was the original and Don McLean was the copy and, for us, Ray Charles' I Got a Woman was a curious precursor to Kanye West.

In this way, too, a carbon copy for us young kids is first and foremost a way to allow some third party to eavesdrop on our e-mail conversations. It is of course named after the thin carbon papers that we used to attach to our paper in order to write out an 'original' and a 'copy' at the same time. However, when this process was first invented, by Ralph Wedgwood in 1806, the process was inverse. The sturdy, normal paper would be at the bottom, and a piece of tissue paper would be above it and you would write on that. Despite the fact that you were writing, physically speaking, more directly on the tissue paper than the regular one, the former would remain the 'copy' and the latter the 'original'. The copy might be more 'real' here.

When is a song real and authentic? Most would point to the original version by the original recording artist, though this often includes artists who did not even write the song themselves. It could be argued that they at least laid the first blueprint, but most of these songs would have to be at least hummed or played in a stripped version to the original recording artist in order for them to further interpret from there. We no longer live in an age that allows for the mathematical abstraction of sheet music. Everything is but a chain of human interaction, an omnipresent butterfly effect.

Finally, what is the real thing in an intangle, electronic world? Which version of the e-book is the most real? There is no rough manuscript, no notes chalked up in the margins. If the modern writer starts out on the computer and ends on the computer, he leaves no artifacts behind. It is a democracy of origin, each version as authentic and inauthentic as the next.

A Certified Copy

All of this and more is what Copie Conforme, the 2010 movie by director Abbas Kiarostami, concerns itself with. It is almost too clever for its own good. It stars an English writer who writes a book, in English, about a theory of the real and the fake, a book called Certified Copy. The idea comes to him as he walks around in Italy. He brings it back to England, writes it and releases it. It doesn't stir up much in its homeland but it does get translated to Italian and for some reason it is a huge success there. So he returns to Tuscany, to the place where it all began, to talk about it – in English. Now where do we go to locate the 'real', the original of the book: England or Italy? Hard to tell, both could raise valid arguments.

The writer, in his theories, points out that even the undeniable real thing, say Michelangelo's David, is just a copy of the real original, the model it was inspired on. On this note Umberto Eco, in his essay Travels in Hyperreality, provides many humorous examples. The one that springs to mind is the museum somewhere in California who had crafted a copy of the Venus de Milo, except with arms, claiming that they did research after the original Venus model, and lo and behold, she had arms. The museum thereupon claimed this sculpture to be even more real (!) than the one in the Loeuvre. Even more real than the real (and if you've ever wondered why realer sounds weird while taller sounds fine, that is because real should not be quantative; the fact that we often talk about more real now is a sign that the word is changing in meaning).

The other protagonist of Copie Conforme, a woman desperately clinging to a husband that is long gone and was forever absent, is intrigued by this theory. She meets the writer and they go to walk around some beautiful Tuscan village, exchanging views. In a curious turn of events, a roleplaying game starts: the woman takes the writer for her husband, and he plays along. Just some innocent fun, you might think, until the writer starts referring to past events he cannot possibly know about, and both of them obstinately refuse to break character while so many reasons pass by to do so. Are they still the same characters as at the start? Or are we being pointed out that they, in fact, are fallible, that is to say fake, because they are actors? The writer's godlike omnipotence, knowing things he cannot know, is a clear breaking of the fourth wall. It is an acknowledgement that he is not really, in fact, the fictional writer he is playing.

All that was once directly lived…

Actors can do that because, even though we all take part in a wilful suspension of disbelief, we, ultimately, know they are actors. It is no secret. What is more clandestine is that most public figures similarly function as actors. Guy Debord gives an excellent example in his prescient 1967 text Society of the Spectacle:

Kennedy the orator survived himself, so to speak, and even delivered his own funeral oration, in the sense that Theodore Sorenson still wrote speeches for Kennedy's successor in the very style that had done so much to create the dead man's persona.

Debord's brilliant theory of the spectacle can be easily moulded to fit our subject: not just athletic events, tv shows and theatre productions are spectacle, the whole world is. Replace the word spectacle by movie and you might just see what Shakespeare was on about when he said that all the world's a stage.

We could speculate for ages about this, but it seems the kind of subject that only gets more confusing as you expound, as you try to figure it out. Perhaps we should follow the advice in the original title of the book the writer presents in the film: Forget the original, just get a good copy.

Daughn Gibson and the Law of Sound

DAUGHN GIBSON
Me Moan
2013

There is an intensity and drive to The Sound of Law, the first song on the sophomore album by American trucker-turned-singer/songwriter Daughn Gibson, that I have not discerned on Daughn Gibson's first (great!) record. He unleashes the word 'motherfucker' like a shotgun blaze out of nowhere.

That opener was just a fit, probably, because on the second song he is back in a more relaxed, though always slightly askew, mode. The song's calm steady beat lulls you into sleep, but then you listen to the lyrics and realize there's dead and paranoia everywhere. Daughn turns the Phantom Rider, a Marvel comic hero, into a serial killer that 'took a family'. It is the repeated coda where the song really takes off but by then, ironically, we are past the point of danger and there is nowhere to go anymore.

It hasn't turned stale yet, Daughn Gibson's mix of electronic beats and countryish croonerism. It is probably so exciting, not just because it is an original sound, but because after listening to it for more than a year now, it still defies some basic internal logic of mine. I always have the feeling that the combination does not make sense and that it will derail any minute. It is even built into the music, like when in Tiffany Lou (on his previous record) the music gets stuck in a loop for a few seconds, caught in its own unlikely web.

In the same threatening sense, you constantly get the sense he is conjuring up demons. Even when he comes closest to a normal song, as in Franco where he actually sings yearningly and the guitar sounds yearningly and the beats don't suddenly run amok but keep going in 80s drum machine fashion, you're not quite buying it. He can sing about “finding a way for two lips to collide,” and then just trail off with “I wish we had a kid who never wanted to die.” On this song, with its dreamy atmosphere, Daughn Gibson sounds like he is walking around in Twin Peaks. It is the same juxtaposition of the American yearning for the romantic 50s with the haunts of the alienated modern society.

I read in an interview that Gibson likes 'the weird', and it shines through in his lyrics. You kind of want to look away when he describes a scene such as “What's got me feeling so wrong is one shot / Grandaddy so hot / he left me in the parking lot / kissing on the blacktop,” but it's just unclear enough to also make you laugh and wonder what the hell he is talking about. Even more hilarious is All My Days Off, which sounds like it could come up on your MOR radio station; until he starts singing of a billboard with “Fucked Up Judgement Day” on it.

The cheesy is never far off but, like his 'weird' influences, Daughn Gibson is at his best when he walks the fringes.

Drama and Ginsberg and Lemon Lime Bacardi

SINGLE MOTHERS
Single Mothers EP
2011

I found out about this band through Last.FM. In the Okkervil River shoutbox, someone posted:

All the girls at this party, they're into drama and Ginsberg and lemon lime bacardi; they're into Okkervil River and trying to get to know everybody.

"Wow!" I thought, before I figured it was a reference. Last.FM poetry. I was excited, this heralded to me a new age of more inspired shouting and tweeting and all that jazz. I should have known it wasn't what it seemed.

The first thing you might notice about Canadian post-hardcore band Single Mothers is the gruff production. Since they only have glorified demos for now it might not be intentional, but the production values nicely mirror the sense of uncertainty that they express about the world around them. Awkward self-awareness raised to the level of art.

The narrator in Single Mothers songs spends a lot of time playing it cool. "This ain't a date, it's just coffee". But sometimes he admits that the whole thing is just a charade, and gets to the heart of the matter. "It's hard, I only have short term goals, and I hardly ever follow through with those." In a song called Nice Dresses he proclaims that "whores in nice dresses are still whores once you undress them". The whole world is just permanently dressed up for the occasion, and no one cares about the naked truth, for it is ugly.

Shallowness is a popular theme these days, but what is refreshing is that the singer puts himself square in the middle of it, not as a neutral external critic.

"All we want to meet is someone out there with a little integrity". Authentic is one of the keywords of the 21st century, and we have yet to agree on a definition that does not shift when you stroll around it.

Winter Coats is my favorite song of theirs. The title references to an analogy that is quite crude, but I like it anyway. He says the girls should be wearing winter coats, since they act 'so cold'. The song culminates in a mantra of ALL MY ANGELS ARE ETCHED IN SNOW, a desperate expression of always staying with the cold abstract, never being able to arrive at the realization of what you are looking for.

Cat Power

The other night I saw Cat Power perform in the Paradiso in Amsterdam. Though I am not sure if it was in fact a performance. To me, performance connotes more or less an act, taking on a persona on stage that is different from who you are. Chan behaved on that stage like I might in my weaker moments in the safe solitude of my room, mumbling to myself with all the repressed twerks and twitches creeping out. Sometimes, when she was scaling the edge of the podium, she was winking. If you would follow her line of sight you'd see that it wasn't really directed to anyone, just an affectation.

So not a performance, just a presence. She was just there. Her whole countenance was too odd to be a deliberate move, too strange to be acted out. It was what people like to call a naked performance (which, then, to me sounds like an oxymoron), and therefore revealing.

When you think about it, there is something very unnatural about a selected number of persons put on a pedestal (which is what a podium is, really) and preaching to multitudes of people (which is what a performance is, really) as if they were the chosen ones.

In light of that, someone being a little awkward and nonsensical on stage makes perfect sense to me. We prefer our rock stars with a cocky confidence, because rock is after all directly connected to coolness. But every rock star who is completely at ease when he's ‘up there’ is either a good actor or an asshole. Chan Marshall, walking around a little dazed and shellshock, is relatable. The whole night she was singing from the corner of her mouth, almost as if she was sneaking the words in. Or as if she was whispering secrets at us. Unfortunately, no one could hear what she was saying, because she seemed either not able or unwilling to properly sing in one of the two microphones she brought.

On musical grounds then, this was not a great show. As rock and roll, which works on different criteria, it was a little bit better, because provocative. As art, it worked wonders. How many people have not noted that a good criteria for art is that it gets you out of your comfort zone? That is what Cat Power, deliberately or not (probably not), does. You come out of it different than you go in. So then, interestingly enough, in a world brimming with performances everywhere ("all the world's a stage" is becoming more and more true with time), simply being becomes art.