| Subject: Epilogue |
| From: Barrett Brown <barriticus@gmail.com> |
| Date: 1/14/10, 14:00 |
| To: Catalina Saldaña <cat.salda@gmail.com> |
Epilogue
By the time of Socrates, the Greek alphabet had been in existence for well over two hundred years, although it was not until the period in which he lived that its use became widespread. Paintings and simple symbols had long before ushered in the practice of recording information in our environment, rather than in our minds; writing extended the utility of this in such a dramatic way that we are correct to think of it as fundamentally different from the simpler methods of informational permanence that we see in its earliest forms as cave paintings depicting the herd and crude sculptures of astoundingly fertile women.
Before the onset of writing, Greek culture was driven by orality - the state in which a population conveys its accumulated information largely by way of speech and stores it largely in the minds of its members. Poems, with their artificial structures and rhyme schemes, served as mnemonic reminders of the content held within, as well as delivery systems by which to transfer the information to others. Overall, these particular arrangements of a culture's accumulated information served not only to instruct but also to stamp minds with some degree of commonality, which in turn would assist in holding the population together as a unit distinct from others.
Upon the adaptation of written language, the essence of Greek thought began to change to such a great extent that a number of 20th century academics have been able to make a convincing case that the onset of literacy had the effect of molding Greek minds to such an extent as to allow for truly abstract thought, which had not existed as such beforehand and which was at any rate necessary to the development of complex social constuct which in turn allowed for the implementation of such things. The stories to which orality were largely confined due to the constraints of the medium did not allow for that same conceptual complexity; heroes were all too abstract, but their words rarely were, and a culture dependent on such two-dimensional protagonists to transmit its information could therefore not expect to convey any particularly deep abstractions nor the advanced forms of thought-products that proceed from them - and they would not have been able to conceive of any such things anyway, as far as we can determine. Written prose allowed for fundamentally higher levels of consistency and logic in a culture that had previously been based largely on inconsistency and illogic, its shared cultural infrastructure having beforehand been based on mythology in general and Homer in particular. In an age of unreason, literacy promoted reason, which requires consistency in order to function. Constructive examinations into ethics and politics were now possible. A seemingly fantastic degree of blunt memorization, meanwhile, was no longer a necessity, and thus the mind began to take on a new and different character as the manner in which it was employed shifted to some extent from that of passive receptacle to active laboratory.
The mind of the earlier, orality-based Greek, then, was far different from that of the literacy-based Greek, who was able to go on to achieve one of the highest forms of civilization that the world would see for quite a while. The gulf between those who benefit from a significant advance in information technology and those who do not is not always so dramatic as we see with the Greeks of 2,500 years ago. It sometimes is, though, and on such occasions we see similarly dramatic changes in the societies that take advantage of such things. We also see changes in other societies to which such things find their way as well; the Greek alphabet eventually made it to the Italian peninsula, for instance, where the residents adopted its especially useful, vowel-incorporating structure to their own conceptual needs. Those needs happened not to coincide with those of the Greeks from whom they'd obtained the technology.
It's important to keep an eye on these things.
The examination of the manner in which the fundamental nature of Greek thought changed as a consequence of literacy - a study which draws on comparisons between the content expressed in Greek orality (some of which was of course recorded in writing upon the development of the new technology) on the one hand and the content expressed in Greek literacy on the other - originated largely with the British classical scholar Eric Havelock, whose original work on the subject in the 1930s would be expanded upon by the Jesuit thinker Walter Ong in his 1982 work Orality and Literacy. But a third philosopher of linguistics who made no special examination of Greece and whose most important work was conducted in the 1960s, Marshall McLuhan, took the same general concepts and applied them in a different direction, thereby managing to make accurate predictions regarding trends that have already come into play, including a sort of new orality whereby a segment of the population will react to the availability of oral messaging in the same way that anyone whose literacy decreases would in a irritating manner that would render them all the more unreasonable. Even accounting for the limitations of extrapolation and the difficulties inherent to futurology as a whole, we may predict that these trends will presently overwhelm our civilization with possibilities even as it causes what we would probably term a regression in the minds of some great portion of the population - while also dramatically improving the minds of another, partly self-selecting portion of that same population. Those among the latter group will be at an advantage in accessing the other, essentially unrelated means by which members of the species will soon be able to develop their minds to even greater extents. We cannot predict what such people as this will think and do any more than a Neolithic hunter could predict any such thing about one of us. Consider the gulf between our ancestor and ourselves, and then consider the increasingly rapid rate at which we have been developing lately, and you may come to agree that we are facing matters of such unprecedented importance that we can no longer abide those responsible for perpetuating the crisis by which the citizenry at large is being provided with something less than reasonable means by which to make informed decisions at such a time as informed decisions will soon become necessary not just to our success, but to our survival and that of mankind.
It's important to keep an eye on these things.
***
If we determine that the mind of the Neolithic hunter has been less stimulated than that of the mind of the Neolithic coastal villager, and we make this determination based on the fact that the latter would have had access to more and better accumulations of the thought-product network and been more stimulated thereby, and if we agree that a great deal of stimulation is more conducive to the development of new contributions to the thought-product network than is a lesser degree of stimulation, then we have of course also determined the Neolithic coastal villager will be in a better position to develop new contributions to the thought-product network than is the Neolithic hunter. In the process of this reasoning, we have additionally determined that, all things being equal, increased access to the thought-product network is likely to result in greater and more complex contributions back into same on the part of those who take advantage of that increased access.
Proximity, as we noted earlier in the book, has become increasingly irrelevant by way of the relatively sudden advances in information technology that have popped up throughout. The internet is the most recent of those advances that we can reasonably point to as potentially having as relatively dramatic of an effect on the mindset of its users as, say, the printing press. We could go further and float the idea that this internet of ours is so extraordinary in terms of the communicational possibilities that it suddenly opens to us as to be more properly comparable to the more dramatic development of orality, which is to say speech itself. Forced to justify this latter conjecture to some passerby who happens to overhear us going so far as this, we could perhaps compose some convincing defense by which to get such a person off of our respective backs. Speech, we would explain to him, was a means by which to convey 0rality-compatible portions of our thought-products to other humans in the network, if only to those with whom we are connected by range of sound at a given moment; as time proceeds, those who have directly received the thought-products of our orality may go on to convey these to others with whom they in turn find themselves in range of sound - over and over again and at virtually any point in the future life of that person, as well as to more than one person at a time. Taken together, the medium of orality allows an individual to convey thought-products over great time and distance to a large number of recipients, each of whom has the option to convey it further. But the process takes some amount of time, is subject to all manner of barriers (if a lion eats a bearer of the thought-product before he reaches another village, said bearer will have difficulty conveying it), and is subject to the corruption of data that occurs from each speaker to each listener, and of course such corruption of data usually remains in subsequent deliveries and is compounded by future errors. This latter dynamic may be illustrated by a children's game of telephone, or in the tracing of irrelevant and false gossip from its original source to its publication in The Daily Mail. Meanwhile, the requirement that these thought-products be memorized taxes the brain in ways that may enhance memorization skills but may stifle other potential forms of mental development - worse, and perhaps related, is that orality does not appear to be conducive to critical thinking to begin with, much less conveying some abstract treatise on ethics or metaphysics from one end of the Mediterranean to the other.
The internet, we would explain to our eavesdropper, is of course an effectively fundamental leap from orality, as all of our immaterial thought-products may now be conveyed to a hundred million people almost instantaneously regardless of location, without error, and accessible for eternity for all intents and purposes. The eavesdropper, who is no longer an eavesdropper but a participant in our conversation, would reply that this is obvious, and that at any rate what we were supposed to demonstrate is that the leap from orality to the internet is comparable in its significance to the leap from pre-orality to orality. We might respond that we never said any such thing. The eavesdropper would mumble an apology and leave.
Silly eavesdropper. We did indeed make that claim, but we did so through the medium of orality - which is to say that there is no accessible written record of what transpired. You and I are free to lie, then, and thus get away with it. No one can prove anything. Meanwhile, we ourselves have already forgotten the exact wording of what it is that we had claimed. I have, anyway. Perhaps we ourselves are not actually lying, then; we may simply have remembered incorrectly. Or, rather, you remembered incorrectly, whereas I was lying my ass off. Plus I stole the guy's wallet. Hey, you can't prove anything.
Oops! I wrote all that down. Did I already make the joke about my delete key being broken? Well, I'm making it again.
The eavesdropper - lied to, stolen from, insulted behind his back - would have been better served had there been a complete written record of what transpired, as would the truth itself. Luckily, for me-
"Barrett Brown!"
Oh, shit! The eavesdropper came back! But how does he know?
"I am Apollo, god of truth and light! I wander the earth in human form in order that I might punish those who do me ill and reward those who do me, uh, good. Well, I mean."
"You're thinking of Zeus."
"Even better!"
It turns out that Zeus, using his god-like omniscience, had... actually, that makes the metaphor too complicated. Let's say that he had an assistant hiding behind a corner writing down everything that occurred. Literacy has been introduced into our scene, which is some marketplace. Are we in ancient Greece? No, wait, we were talking about the internet. We live in some alternate modern world in which the Greek gods roam the world as they did in ancient mythology. That's pretty cool, actually. At any rate, literacy has arisen; a record has been taken of the conversation and my subsequent theft; those who seek out the resulting prose work will know that I lied about what I'd said earlier in the conversation and stolen from Apollo or Zeus or whatever we decided upon. Of course, the prose work is located only at the library and a few private homes here and there, and thus I may continue to lie and steal to the extent that such information is inaccessible to those with whom I interact.
Now let us abandon this whole scenario before Salvador Dali pops up with a paintbrush with which he begins to paint pictures of what look to be books on some nearby wall and I lose my train of thought and you give me a bad Amazon review. Incidentally, I am used to being able to go back to what I have written just a few moments previously in order to ensure that this train of thought makes at least a little sense, as well as that I have used my pretentious invented term "thought-product" with some consistency. Like you, I have the good fortune to be born to literacy.
Now let us think of the Greeks, as we were probably about to do again anyway. A sophist stands on a street corner, challenging all comers to debate him. He is a very talented sophist with a remarkable memory, and is thus well-equipped to engage in purposeful dishonesty - shifting a definition here and there for the benefit of his stance and to the detriment of a given opponent's, claiming something to have been said when in fact it was said differently or even uttered by someone other than to whom he attributes the quote, and otherwise taking advantage of the limitations of his medium - limitations which are actually advantages to those skilled in the art of dishonest orality.
Ah, but around the corner we see Zeus' intern, who has been writing everything down! For the sake of argument and demonstration, we know the account to be entirely accurate because Zeus' intern cannot lie, nor can he work a fucking spreadsheet, apparently. He can lie on his resume, one supposes, but that is it. Anyway! He steps forth all of a sudden and demonstrates that the sophist has contradicted himself by way of changing definitions, that he has attributed quotes to his opponents that actually derive from himself, that he did the third thing I listed in the last paragraph
but in slightly different words. This whole incident, too, is written down, and those with the means to access it can now see for themselves that this sophist is nothing more than a sophist, which is not all that surprising when one thinks about it, really.
In another case, a sophist who is shown to be wrong may not have actually been lying; he is simply not proficient in terms of orality, to say nothing of literacy, and is thus confused as to his own opinions and thereby a slave to the whims of the moment. That citizen over there, he says, neglected to donate money for the new trireme; he forgets that another citizen with whom he is generally allied has neglected to donate money for both this trireme and the previous one for which funds were collected, and perhaps he simply didn't know this in the first place as he lacks such conscience as to check.
At any rate, this confused sophist is not used to having his words taken down with absolute precision and then analyzed for flaws; he is adrift in a world that is coming to be defined by a fundamentally new phase of our thought-product network.
If the society in which he lives is anything like ours, though, he will nonetheless retain his position. He is well-known; most of his fans will not read the book or hear of its contents; others are keen on his ideology and will disregard any evidence that he is no more clever or knowledgeable than anyone else and has in fact been wrong in the past and is so that much more likely to be wrong in the future. Meanwhile, the fellow who pays his wages and those of other sophists, and who is in turn paid by merchants to have the sophists stand outside their shops in order to attract crowds and thereby customers, will most likely never realize that some of his employees are mediocre, as he is probably mediocre himself insomuch as that he hired this fellow to begin with. Even if he learns of an employee's mediocrity, he may deem it to his perceived advantage to keep his most respected sophist in place, knowing that sheer recognition is valued by many of his customers.
Meanwhile, many of those who are either highly proficient in orality or at least moderately efficient in literacy will either learn of the sophist's flaws by way or oral or written transmission of this new thought-product - namely, the evidence showing Incompetostenes the Sophist to be incompetent - or even hit upon limited in the degree of their orality to have this explained to them in a definitive way. There are also the more prosaic barriers unrelated to mediums of thought-products - inattention or in n it themselves. They will spread the word among their clever counterparts throughout the town, but then they can only reach so many people, some of whom will not listen anyway. A few of those who are largely aware of the present situation will see the future one as hopeless; they see that there are diminishing returns in attempting to inform others of this problem insomuch as that those of basic literacy or advanced orality are not likely to be taken in by the fellow to begin with, and many of those who have been taken in cannot read the accounts that prove the fellow to be incompetent or are of insufficient skill in orality to follow a spoken account of the fellow's incompetence, either.
A few others, though, most of whom will be literate rather than oral and thus better-equipped to know the past and present and to determine the future thereby, will recognize that the same new phase of our thought-product that has allowed them to recognize and partly disseminate the facts surrounding the crisis of information structure also confers other advantages as well. These few will tend to be young enough to have grown up at such a prodigious time as to have their minds formed by the availability of literacy, a still-new development of information technology. But some of them will be older individuals who happen to be adaptable or clever and who, despite possessing minds that lack the advantages of having been influenced from early childhood by aspects of the new medium of literacy, will consequently possess minds with such advantages that are considerably lesser, but at any rate different and perhaps even complementary, to the advantages conferred on our younger individuals who grew up with literacy; in this case, adeptness at memorization would be one such skill that an older individual might combine with the extent of his proficiency in literacy to what may amount to great effect, comparable perhaps to the totality of the skill sets we find among the younger.
Some individuals, then, would be astute enough to understand the dynamics of the world around them, to identify the crisis in that world, and to recognize the potential that exists in being the first generation with minds formed by a new medium and minds informed by the improved information access that the medium brings. Some of these individuals may decide that, insomuch as that they are in possession of a new and perhaps superior sort of mentality; and insomuch as that most of the incompetent sophists who do damage to the city by way of disinformation are too old to share in such happy accidents of birth even if some of them have managed to take some relatively lesser advantage from the medium itself and the information it makes available; and in due consideration of the peculiarities of the politics, the population, and the environment as a whole, that, contrary to the pessimistic view, it is indeed quite possible to diminish the power of these lesser sophists, to replace them with better ones who make good use of the new medium, and to thereby solve the crisis that has led the city into foolish wars, proper wars conducted foolishly, and other such things that, should they be allowed to continue, will leave their city further weakened and thus at the mercy of others. They will realize, for one thing, that this revolution began on the day when the first sophist was discredited in front of a few people here and there, and continues so long as that sophist and those who back him are kept on the defensive. It need only be stepped up.
***
The internet is the new medium. It is not some cure-all, though, any more than orality, literacy, the printing press, television, or any other form of information technology one would care to categorize as having fundamentally shaped the minds of man past and present could be reasonably pointed to as having cured all. Poems, written prose, mass-produced books, and the availability of instantaneous one-way communication have all been used in manners both conducive and deleterious to mankind's strivings. Looking back, though, one would probably agree orality was an improvement upon body language, that literature was an improvement upon orality, that the printing press was an improvement upon the copied volume, and that television was an improvement over James Fenimore Cooper. Literature in particular has provided for great strides by way of both the effect that reading and writing themselves have on the human mind as well as the onset of our ability to place our thoughts outside of ourselves, permanently and perfectly.
There are many ways of thinking about the internet in relation to these previous mediums, but for our purposes let us think of it as the next step in the evolutionary process by which literature was its predecessor and orality the predecessor to that. We may also think of it as the latest leap in the inevitable march towards transhumanism, a relative neologism which generally refers to the phenomenon whereby humanity will expand upon its inherent nature in order to add to its capabilities - and which is today generally associated with the the decreasing dichotomy between man and his thought-products, most commonly in terms of cybernetics but also in relation to a great number of other things that I will not list here because I am already tiring of this topic. Though the term transhumanism as used today was coined in the '80s, transhumanism itself has existed since man first supplemented his strength and reach with the "artificial" means of a stick and has since continued with such other enhancements as knives, instruments, spectacles, false limbs, false teeth, and heart transplants. Less readily apparent as falling into that category is the carving tools which first allowed man to record information somewhere beyond his own mind, to be accessed later as if it were an extension of his own memory, to be accessed by others as if it were a component of shared race memory, and to be accessed well into the future as if it were some immortal component of the creator.
If a notepad is an artificial extension of one's mind which frees one from the necessity of memorizing all things we may wish to know later, and if a mass-produced book is an artificial extension of one's mind that allows thousands of others access to an organized and compartmentalized segment of our thoughts, then the internet defies easy description. We could think of it as a crude form of universal consciousness; already, it has begun to automatically catalog an increasing portion of our interactions, our work, our play, our assertions, our falsehoods, and has done so in such a way that these things are now virtually permanent as well as accessible in such a way as that no information has been made accessible before. Beyond this partial record of our saying and doings, it also presents us with an expanding record of everything else - one which has solved the essential problem of organization by way of the search engine, itself capable of doing in less than a second what the most erudite of research assistants would have in some instances required days to accomplish and in other instances would be incapable of accomplishing at all. This is to say that a great many feats of information which would have been impossible twenty, fifteen, or even ten years prior to the time of this writing in early 2010 are now suddenly possible. It is just a matter of realizing that they can be done - and then, of course, doing them.
***
The second crises with which this book is concerned is not something I am capable of describing with any specificity, as I do not yet know what it is exactly.
Someone might. Our most respected columnists certainly don't. Thomas Friedman knew in 2002 that the most important thing he could write about after having attended a global technology conference was the prospect of homes having two dozen web addresses associated with various household appliances and whether this might be bothersome. Two decades ago, he was covering the Middle East as a journalist - and rather competently, in fact, at least when he stuck to writing about interesting things that Lebanese people did with bombs and guns and cars and combinations thereof. He is not particularly erudite, we could say, and he does not seem to know what is going on any better than any other person who keeps up with world affairs. He does not need to be tapped for his views on technology, the start-up scene, global commerce, military strategy, or the psychology of world figures, or even the Middle East, apparently. He has failed in these things. One might defend him by noting that perhaps he has made some uncommonly correct predictions that more than counteract his commonly or even uncommonly wrong ones. I would love to see them, and anyone is free to go over the same body of work as I did in search of something that might prove Friedman to be anything other than damaging to the viability of our discourse, and thus our decisions, and thus our future as a nation. I am using the same internet as is everyone else, and drawing only upon that upon which anyone can draw.
It is not enough to have the internet sitting around nearby. One must understand its dynamics. Those of us who are young enough to have grown into adolescence at such time as the internet had already come about are at an advantage, of course, insomuch as that our intellectual lives were enhanced by access to most any such instance of the thought-product network, past and present, as is today known to humanity at large. But those old enough to have made good use of the Dewey decimal system are perfectly capable of using the new medium in much the same way as we do, even if their minds were not formed in such a way as to make best use of it. The most intellectually honest and useful commentators today are more intellectually honest and useful than any of the people we have been discussing, and some of them are well into their '30s, which is to say I consider them to be old. Glenn Greenwald, a former litigator who now writes for Salon, should be read by any American who wishes to be informed on issues regarding constitutional law. Juan Cole, a professor and author who writes for his own blog Informed Comment, should be read by anyone who wishes to be informed on issues regarding the Middle East. Both of these commentators came to prominence by way of the direct means of the internet; the success of both should demonstrate that we have a chance to dismantle the obsolete media structure that has already crippled our nation to some great extent and will cripple it further unless those of us who recognize this problem take some sort of, like, action.
If people so old and decrepit as to be in their '30s and '40s can learn to use Google and put it to good use, then certainly those respectable columnists who are slightly older and more decrepit can hire interns to teach them how to do so insomuch as that they are paid vastly more for their foolish opinions than their superior blogger counterparts are for their reasonable opinions. Or they can just not pay the intern. Or, since I'm obviously kidding and all of these columnists know full well how to search for information on the internet, said columnists can simply go ahead and do that.
Indeed, search engines are extraordinarily easy to use. Richard Cohen, one may recall, thinks this a sad thing:
I am forever coming across columns I've totally forgotten writing
and I now, routinely, have to check to see if I have already staked out a
position on some matter of importance - and what, exactly, it may be...
I yearn for the freedom to be what I want to be. I don't want to lie, but I
want to be comforted by my own version of the truth. I want to own my
life, all of it, and not have it banked at Google or some such thing. The trove
of letters that some biographer is always discovering, the one that unmasks our
hero and all his pretensions, has been moved from the musty attic to sleek
cyberspace. I am imprisoned by the truth, a record of what I wrote and the
public's silly insistence on consistency - a life sentence without hope of
parole. For me, the future is the present. It's not that I cannot die. It's
rather that I cannot lie.
Here's an idea: Google yourself and figure out what the fuck it is you think before you attempt to influence the thinking of others. Better yet, resign.
All of our chapter subjects could benefit greatly from the humble search engine, in fact. Thomas Friedman presumably is unaware that he called on the U.S. to "keep rootin' for Putin" in 2001, seven years before attacking two American presidential administrations for their "short-sightedness" in having pushed for NATO expansion in the '90s, Russian resentment of which he claims to have been "critical in fueling Putins rise after Boris Yeltsin moved on." Richard Cohen presumably has no idea that he accused Hillary Clinton of "forever saying things I either don't believe or believe that even she doesn't believe" back in 2007, before next year going on to accuse those who likewise claimed that the candidate "lied about almost everything and could be trusted about almost nothing of having participated in "a calumny, a libel and a ferocious mugging of memory itself" which he himself had forgotten having participated in. Martin Peretz presumably doesn't remember that he was essentially alone in backing Ahmadinejad's claim to legitimacy after the 2009 election and that this might be something for him to remember next time he composes some deranged attack on other, better Middle Eastern analysts who actually cares about the facts rather than simply advancing their own confused foreign policy agendas. William Bennett presumably doesn't remember that the Virgin Mary sees all of his lies. Charles Krauthammer presumably doesn't remember having been essentially wrong about every military and foreign policy matter on which he's opined from 1999 to 2010, as he was back on Fox News in September of 2009 making his latest already-failed prediction:
Chris Wallace: Best guess: Will the president end
up giving McChrystal the troops he wants, or will he change the war
strategy?
Charles Krauthammer: I think he doesn't and McChrystal resigns.
The president did, and McChrystal did not.
This nonsense will continue until we ourselves put an end to it.
***
The most important fact of the 21st century is that any individual on the planet can now communicate with any other individual on the planet. The great preponderance of human activity is the result of communication between two or more individuals. A great amount of human activity, both devastating and wondrous, has already occurred in a past defined by great limitations on communication between individuals. The internet came to public availability in the mid-'90s and has improved drastically as a means of communication in only fifteen years time. Some people will find these facts to be of crucial importance and will act on them. This is an important thing to keep in mind.