[FRIAM] Future Generating Machines...

[Steve Smith]

Jon -

Thanks for the introduction to the podcast creator:  plastic pills..  I
appreciate the style of his analysis (up to Glen's "Be afraid, be very
afraid!")...  I may not be steeped enough in the PostModernists to be
tired of their "know it all style".  Or maybe more correctly, now that
they've been around long enough, I've become inured to the "know it all"
and am finally hearing some of the message riding on that carrier wave.   

I agree with Glen (or more specifically, what I heard, probably not what
he said ) that this needn't be read as doom and gloom.   I am fed by
morbid fascination in a way that this style meets well...   preferring
to have the dark clouds presented so that I can savor the (possible,
likely, under-appreciated) glints of silver linings.   I live by a bit
of a truism (to me) that every Dystopia is also a Utopia and
vice-versa... it comes down to context.   

Rather than awfulize and vilify, it seems quite obvious to me to try to
read these three (and more perhaps under extrapolation) modes of human
collective organization AS adaptive self-organization... somewhat
inevitable in it's broad strokes, if not in every detail.   Perhaps the
basis for Marx's general theme (I can't find where he said this in so
many words, but it seems to be widely reported that he believed such?)
that "all societies will eventually organize as communist, but some will
have to take a longer route to get there (through capitalism)" provides
some backdrop for this.    The significant failures of central-party,
authoritarian communist states perhaps only contradict this ideation
insomuch as *they* represent what might seem like simply a different
"long way there" compared to free market capitalism.

In the terminology of StephenG (and others),  it does seem that all of
this can be contemplated as a "least action path" through a
high-dimensional space (human circumstance embedded in the larger
ecological/biospheric circumstance, embedded in a geological
circumstance, embedded in a more cosmic (solar, galactic, etc.)
circumstance.   This "hierarchy of space/time scale" is not necessarily
*real* in any absolute/objective sense, but a rough hierarchy which we
impose on it.   Following Herb Simon's "nearly decomposable system"
apprehension... it is both natural (and motivated) that we would
decompose this way and try to apprehend human
sociopoliticaleconomicspiritual evolution somewhat/mostly as an isolated
system, merely "embedded in" the larger
ecological/biospherical/geological/etc contexts.  

Our awareness of anthropogenic effects on the biosphere breaks that
illusion (for those who are willing to recognize/acknowledge those
effects) but most of us are probably not ready yet to believe in any
significant couplings with, say, continental drift or the magnetosphere,
or even more far fetched, the orbits of the planets or yet more, on the
circumstances of the Milky Way.  

Coming back down to the scale of Deleuz's observations...   1st world
cultures (both western *and* eastern) seem to follow the patterns he
outlines of humans/groups resorting to murder (intergroup conflict);
enslavement (also through warfare); serfdom (feudalism); wage-slaves
(bourgoise/prole/etc. industrialism); modern control (via time-clocks.
activity tracking/monitoring/etc).   China, for example, has followed a
somewhat different path (others here, notably StephenG) can speak
more-better to China's path through the last 20 (or 40 or 120) years to
get to where they may well be more effective at some critical aspects of
*our* (western industrial materialism) than we are.   

The theme that Plastic Pill's expose' of Deleuze's ideas that I am
triggered by/for/with is that humans ARE self-aware (up to some delta)
and CAN modify their individual behavior (to the extent you believe in
Free Will) based on our apprehension of our own personal coupling with
these larger structures of human activity. 

Perhaps as Glen implies (again, me putting my version of his words out
there) in "I say go with it" we are too puny and limited, or the grand
arc is too absolute for our willfulness to change the course of such
things in any meaningful way.   Does the flotsam on the crashing waves
of the ocean aspire to change even the smallest detail of surf, or at
best can we just aspire to "hang ten and go tubular" (to mis-hack surfer
lingo)?

I, at least, aspire to understand (apprehend aspects of?) the "nearly
decomposable" system of systems our existence is predicated on and look
for opportunities, at the very least to anticipate bifurcation points,
phase changes, saddles in this crazy existence my self-awareness was
thrown into (more aptly, grown up out of).   Maybe the more I apprehend
the less I will have any illusion that I control my own trajectory in
that milieu in any way, or that the milieu itself is an *emergent
property* that includes the effect of my own
presence/behaviour/willfulness?

I will acknowledge that the "illusion of the individual" (in particular,
"my" own illusion of independent "self") is central to all this, under
that awareness, maybe this all dissolves into something acutely
self-evident (but to what self?).

Mumble,

 - Steve

On 3/29/21 8:49 AM, uǝlƃ ↙↙↙ wrote:
> My first thought was: Who thinks this is dystopian? And why? It looks to me like one of a) what's been happening for the entire history of the universe and/or b) progress (!) what must happen in order for biological life to survive. If this is dystopian, good riddance to those who find it so. >8^D
>
> But then my 2nd thought went a tiny bit more to the high road. I can see that our tendency to anthropomorphize and personalize (e.g. gods, Jung, naming our computers, etc.) machines might play a little trick on the minds of those who believe the story ... the Great Man trick, again ... the tendency to falsely gather and unify processes that *lack* agency and ascribe/impute agency to them.
>
> That sort of language permeates that video, giving the machine(s) agency, intent, purpose. But that's blatantly false. To promote a false equivalence between, say, YouTube's greedy and largely coherent agency with an imputed *appearance* of coherent agency in the education system is not even wrong. It's nonsense made to seem like sense. This rhetoric is custom designed to frighten those of us who might already be predisposed to fear.
>
> But taken objectively, if we removed the fear-based rhetoric, the *way* of thinking, would help us understand complex patterns that arise in the composition of sub-machines (machinelets?). All an objectification would take would be to cast prior epochs in the same Control terms, which they most certainly *were* ... to recast the always, and forever has been, false "individual" into its proper terms as an illusory collection of sub-machines. Once that's done, the rhetoric in the video shows itself to be Yet Another Eschatological dopamine rush. "Be afraid! Be very afraid."
>
> Pffft. I say go with it. The Controlled world we live in is as beautiful and complex as a flower or an ant bed. Enjoy being routed. Don't fight the flow. Enjoy it. You'll die happier.
>
>
> On 3/28/21 2:07 PM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
>> "There is no need to fear or hope, but only to look for new weapons."
>>
>> Amen to that.
>>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> On Behalf Of jon zingale
>> Sent: Sunday, March 28, 2021 12:16 PM
>> To: friam at redfish.com
>> Subject: [FRIAM] Future Generating Machines...
>>
>> A Sunday scratch for your dystopian itch.
>>
>> Plastic Pills on Deleuze - Control Societies & Cybernetic Posthumanism.
>> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hu4Cq_-bLlY&ab_channel=PlasticPills
>