I and Thou and Life in Aspergerstan

August 20, 2013 By

Mike is a 2013 blogging resident visiting us from his home blog Omniorthogonal.

“I want to see you not through the Machine,” said Kuno. “I want to speak to you not through the wearisome Machine.”

– E M Forster, The Machine Stops

Martin Buber (1878-1965) was a Jewish philosopher best known for integrating traditional Judaic thought with existentialism and other modern influences. His I and Thou is one of those little books that can utterly transform your worldview in just a few pages. It has some of the concentrated linguistic power of poetry or mathematics. Given its mystical religious overtones, that makes it feel somewhat dangerous to me — I can’t entirely embrace what it is saying, but fear that its linguistic spell might overpower my usual defenses.

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The Quality of Life

July 31, 2013 By

The idea of quality of life is very twentieth-century. It sparks associations with ideas like statistical quality control and total quality management. It is the idea that entire human lives can be objectively modeled, measured and compared in meaningful ways. That lives can be idealized and normalized in ways that allow us to go beyond comparisons to absolute measures. That lives can be provisioned from cradle-to-grave. That an insistence on a unique, subjective evaluation of one’s own life is something of a individualist-literary conceit.

I suspect the phrase itself is a generalization of the older notion of modern conveniences, a phrase you frequently find in early twentieth-century writing. It referred to the diffusion of various technologies into everyday pre-industrial life, from running hot and cold water in bathrooms and garbage collection to anesthetics and vaccines.

That conception of the quality of life, as the sum total of material conveniences acquired and brutalities of nature thwarted through technology, seems naive today. But with hindsight, it was much better than what it evolved into: baroque United Nations statistics that reflect institutionally enabled and enforced scripts, which dictate what people ought to want.

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War and Nonhuman Agency

June 19, 2013 By

Mike is a 2013 blogging resident visiting us from his home blog Omniorthogonal.

There are no men, only artillery, infantry, cavalry. Huge masses and the instruments of their direction. Each member of these masses remembers everything and completely forgets himself. In this there must be and is pleasure…

— Tolstoy

Warfare is about killing people. Everyone seems to acknowledge that normal rules of moral behavior go out the window during war, but also that war is not completely free of rules – there are different codes of conduct that hold, and violating those rules gets will get you in trouble, especially if your side ends up losing. Nobody is quite sure what those rules are, and even less sure how such they are to be enforced. Soldiers are trained to kill, yet expected (at least in the modern era) to keep their killing carefully circumscribed. Killing civilians is a criminal atrocity when done at ground level, but perfectly acceptable when done from above. Or maybe the distinction is not altitude but scale, or whether the killing is authorized by someone who went to college.

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So I Shall be Written, So I Shall be Performed

April 17, 2013 By

Mike is a 2013 blogging resident visiting us from his home blog Omniorthogonal.

I want to take it as a starting point the idea that there is a certain fictional quality to our selves. The elusive nature of the self has been a perennial issue for psychologists and philosophers; there are nihilistic and mystical and mechanistic and pluralistic theories of what we mean when we talk about the self, the thing inside of us that defines who we are. But I find that the most useful theories of the self come from literature and drama, and take as their central point the idea that selves are to some extent roles we make up and perform in the dramatic improvisations of daily life. It’s perhaps a trite observation given its presence in one of Shakespeare’s most famous lines; Goffmann turned it into sociology; for now I just want to use it as a jumping off point to talk about Facebook and the way selves are now in the Internet era.

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A Beginner’s Guide to Immortality

April 10, 2013 By

I recently reached an odd conclusion. A sense of history isn’t about knowing a lot of history or trying to learn from the past in order to create a better future. It is about living your mortal life as though you were immortal.

To understand why this is an interesting definition to play with, consider the following allegory.  Human life is like walking into a movie halfway through, and having to walk out again two minutes later. You’ll have no idea what’s going on when you walk in. And chances are, just as you begin to get a clue, you’ll be kicked out.

So unless you are lucky enough to walk in during a scene that is satisfying without any longer narrative context (think sex or violence), your ability to derive satisfaction from your two-minute glimpse will depend partly on your ability to construct meaning out of it.

One way to do this is to pretend to be immortal. This game of make-believe also reveals a few interesting things about literal immortality seeking, in the sense of seeking longevity therapies or waiting to upload your brain into Skynet, post-Singularity.

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The Locust Economy

April 3, 2013 By

Last week, I figured out that I am a part-time locust. Here’s how it happened.

I was picking the brain of a restauranteur for insight into things like Groupon. He confirmed what we all understand in the abstract: that these deals are terrible for the businesses that offer them; that they draw in nomadic deal hunters from a vast surrounding region who are unlikely to ever return; that most deal-hunters carefully ensure that they spend just the deal amount or slightly more; that a badly designed offer can bankrupt a small business.

He added one little factoid I did not know: offering a Groupon deal is by now so strongly associated with a desperate, dying restaurant that professional food critics tend to write off any restaurant that offers one without even trying it.

Yet, I’ve used (and continue to use) these services and don’t feel entirely terrible about doing so, or truly complicit in the depredations of Groupon. Why? It’s because, like most of the working class, I’ve developed a locust morality.

DesertLocust

Thinking about locusts and the behavior of customers around services like Groupon, I’ve become convinced that the phrase “sharing economy” is mostly a case of putting lipstick on a pig. What we have here is a locust economy. Let me explain what that means.

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Social Dark Matter: On Seeing and Being Seen

March 22, 2013 By

You probably remember a grade school teacher who seemed to have eyes at the back of her head. Somebody who could walk into an unruly classroom and with just a look, quell the disorder and get everybody back into their seats. When such a teacher enters a classroom, any mischief underway is abandoned instantly. Those caught in the teacher’s direct gaze freeze or try to scramble back to their seats. Those who think they are in peripheral vision try to duck and hide. Those who believe they haven’t been seen try to flee.

This sort of teacher possesses an authoritarian eye: a way of seeing shared by certain sorts of effective teachers, drill sergeants, sports coaches and the sorts of large organizations that James Scott explored in Seeing Like a State.

The classroom example illustrates something important. Authority and responses to it are primarily about seeing and being seen, rather than doing or having things done to you.

When you know you’re being watched by an authoritarian eye, you voluntarily behave in simpler (or equivalently, more orderly) ways than when you know you aren’t.

The difference between the two regimes of behavior is social dark matter. And in today’s digital social environments, it is starting to behave in ways we don’t really understand. Because we feel watched in ways we don’t really understand, by forms of authority we have never experienced before.

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Stone-Soup for the Capitalist’s Soul

January 31, 2013 By

The fable of Stone Soup is probably my favorite piece of European folklore. In the Russian version, which I prefer, called Axe Porridge,  the story goes something like this:

A soldier returning from war stops at a village, hungry and tired. He knocks on the door of a rich, stingy Scrooge of a woman. In response to his request for food, she of course claims she has nothing. So the canny soldier asks her for just a pot and water, claiming he can make “axe porridge” out of an old axe-head he spots lying around. Intrigued the woman agrees.

You know how the rest of the story goes: the soldier quietly hustles a bunch of other ingredients — salt, carrots, oats — out of the old woman, under the guise of “improving the flavor” of the axe porridge. He does this one ingredient at a time, offering an evolving narrative on the progress of the porridge (“this is coming along great; now if only I had some oats to thicken it.”)

The result is some excellent porridge that they share, while applauding the idea of axe porridge together. The shared fiction that soup can be made out of an axe-head results in the fact of real porridge for all.

There are some deep insights into the psychology of wealth and the nature of progress in this fable, insights that are very relevant for our times.

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Eternal Hypochondria of the Expanding Mind

January 16, 2013 By
This entry is part 7 of 15 in the series Psychohistory

The story of neurasthenia or “invalidism” is a curious mid-nineteenth-century chapter in the story of the emancipation of women. As Barbara Ehrenreich argues in Bright-Sided, it was almost entirely a social phenomenon:

The largest demographic to suffer from neurasthenia or invalidism was middle-class women. Male prejudice barred them from higher education and the professions; industrialization was stripping away the productive tasks that had occupied women in the home, from sewing to soap-making. For many women, invalidism became a kind of alternative career. Days spent reclining in chaise longues, attended by doctors and family members and devoted to trying new medicines and medical regimens, substituted for masculine “striving” in the world.

What makes this curious, and rather ironic, is that invalidism was becoming widespread just as new possibilities were being opened up to women, through the slow substitution of fossil fuels for muscle power.

This was not a coincidence of course.

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Schumpeter’s Demon

January 2, 2013 By

For a while now, I’ve been dissatisfied with our shared mental models around the creative destruction being unleashed by the Internet.

On the one hand, we have coarse-grained and abstract models based on long-term historical cycles and precedents. This is the sort of thing I’ve explored quite a bit in previous posts. It involves careful analogies to previous technological revolutions. It involves debates around whether or not technological progress is stalling and whether a return to growth is possible.

On the other hand, we have detailed situational models, full of incomprehensible minutiae, that seem to develop around specific important decisions. An example is the  set of mental models that drove the “fiscal cliff” farce, which just played out in the US Congress.  Another is the set of mental models in evidence around the SOPA/PIPA debate last year.

The first kind of mental model is so large-scale in its concerns, it is effectively a fatalistic level of analysis. The other kind is ineffectually preoccupied with each immediate situation in turn. It quickly drives itself into a dead-end each time, and defaults to buy-more-time decisions.

I’ve thought of an allegory for understanding economic creative destruction, that I’ll call Schumpeter’s Demon. It just might be capable of informing meaningful action.