uncondition

noreply@blogger.com (Dannie Jost) — Sat, 16 May 2009 11:07:00 +0000

This blog has been migrated to http://uncondition.wordpress.com/ . Those of you who follow my occasional blurbs, diatribes and outbursts on this address may want to adjust your RSS feeds or favourites accordingly. From now on I will only post via the new address.

In addition there are three sites of institutions that I associate with that I would like to bring to your attention:

The University of Bern' NCCR Trade Regulation and World Trade Institute, plus the Collegium Helveticum a joint endeavour of the University of Zurich and the ETHZ.

Many thanks.

Singularity

noreply@blogger.com (Dannie Jost) — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 08:18:00 +0000

If you are an action philosopher, research happens. If you are human, shit happens. If you are me, it all happens. I just spent a few days pondering the deeper meaning of what may be called discovery and what may be called invention. It is strange because I was not thinking along these lines until somebody pointed me in that direction. I am much more interested in the issue of ownership, in particular knowledge ownership. Nothing new here, I am hard-core when it comes to my favourite ideas, and knowledge ownership is one of those concepts that I just can not shake loose: I want to get to the bottom of this issue. Period.

In a paper by Nick Bostrom - “A History of Transhumanist Thought.” Journal of Evolution and Technology (2005) - I found the following citation attributed to Stanislaw Ulam and dating from 1958, that is from about half-century ago:

One conversation centered on the ever accelerating progress of technology and changes in the mode of human life, which gives the appearance of approaching some essential singularity in the history of the race beyond which human affairs, as we know them, could not continue.

Ulam, S. (1958), "John von Neumann 1903-1957", Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society (May).

If you are interested in transhumanism and its discourse, Bostrom's article (or any of his writings) does (do) make for a good read. I for my part, at least today, I am interested in that idea so charmingly named as singularity. In my view, we are already in the middle of it, and somehow most of us have failed to register the event.

When it comes to discovery and invention, the plot thickens, and it thickens very fast because in the very technical language of jurists, policy-makers and lawyers there is a distinction between discovery and invention. it is a distinction that leads to the difference between what is private property, and what are public goods. I think that I missed my call along the way, should have been a farmer. All that I can think of now is the archaeological work from long ago in Jordan that had me in involved debates about what constituted Bedouin tribal land and what did not, or why to the dismay of modern technocrats, the Bedouins still have some say in local politics. Now, land is real, it is physical, and although you can not consume land, if it is not properly husbanded then it loses its value as a resource for renewable agricultural goods. (You did wonder where I got my connection to agriculture, did you?)

Again, returning to the matter of knowledge, information and intelligence, add a bit of salt and pepper, and you have the singularity. It is here. What does this mean?

It means that in the two hundred years since Darwin went for a five year spin around the globe on board the Beagle, a whole lot has happened in discovery and invention. I may be wrong on this, but we can not comprehend the extent of our knowledge and information without machine help. Even with machine help, there is much that we do not comprehend, much less understand. We know a few facts, but do we really understand what is going on?

There are facts in what I have observed in the physical world that I certainly can not comprehend or understand, although I am in a position to write down a few lines of theory and a few equations that account for the causality of the phenomenon. That kind of scientific hand-waving still does not mean that I have understood it. It just means that I can invent a plausible narrative to account for the observed. I associate understanding with cognitive processes that involve some form of causality. I understand pain, and that you may or may not enjoy being punched in the face, or have your hair pulled or a knife cut your skin. In this kind of understanding, observation, experience and causality are involved. But do I understand the Pauli exclusion principle? Not really. It is a fact that I have catalogued in my biologically supported information database. The theory behind the Pauli exclusion principle, that is just another set of information, and it is one that is of a different category from the information pertaining to the observed phenomenon.

Only recently did I realize that it has been a mere 200 years since Darwin, and that during his time we had not invented electronic devices, nor had we discovered DNA. We? We - the humans - have discovered these things. When I first sat in genetics and comparative anatomy lectures, to me the idea of evolution was bought wholesale and without putting up a fight, it made perfect sense to me from day one. Mendelian genetics also did not afford me much controversy, and finally I had figured out why my sister had blue eyes and I didn't. Between peas and Drosophila, there is a whole lot of genetics that we have learned since. We have even sequenced the human genome and then realized that that in itself was but the tip of the iceberg. There is more to the code than inheritance, there is also a whole lot of regulation encoded in the code, and that one we have not yet understood. The transhumanist discourse has now been going on for a few years, and in my view, most transhumanists are a bit short sighted. I get their motivation, that is, their thinking seems transparent enough to me, but it is riddled with belief systems that I suspect to be full of flaws.

Today in another book - John Johnston "The Allure of Machinic Life" - I came across a piece that I found quite appropriate within the context of the relationship between humans and technology.

... Maturana and Varela advance their central claim that "autopoiesis is necessary and sufficient to characterize the organisation of living systems". ... they make two points. First, they argue that since living systems are machines, once their organisation is understood, there is no a priori reason why they can not be reproduced and even designed (by humans). To think otherwise would be to succumb to the "intimate fear" that the awe with which we view life would disappear if we recreated it or to the prejudiced belief that life will always remain inacessible to our understanding.

It could be that Maturana and Varela do not quite do it for you on the scale of intellectual visionaries, but it happens that many of their arguments make some sense to me. The disciplines of biomimetics are exactly all about discovering the organization of living systems, and then reproducing it, even designing variations on nature's original invention. I happen to think that we do not even need to understand such processes, we just need to be able to reproduce them. Of course understanding the whole, even if with the blind aid of theories, would facilitate the task of designing new living systems. However in my view, this is past the singularity point and it is point right to it. Human affairs have changed immensely in the past two hundred years, and that change has certainly accelerated in the past fifty years since I am around. Our modernity includes life lived with machines at all levels. The unspectacular conscient worms that we are can still survive in the wild, but that too is a dying species, and we may be losing our ability to survive naked on the prairie. Would that be so bad after all?

My only trouble is that invention and discovery are so blurred these days and their definitions so out of date, that I may have more work to do than I had imagined. There is a new kind of literacy that is desperately needed if we are to rise to the challenges of our ever evolving relationship to technology. Any ideas?

Technology, oh you siren of sirens!

noreply@blogger.com (Dannie Jost) — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 17:47:00 +0000

It has been a while since I posted a few lines to uncondition, and your guess is as good as mine as to what the reason might be, although I do have plenty of excuses, and some are far better than others.

In an unexpected turn of events last September I found myself once more decorating the halls of academia with a mandate that I have found much too good to turn down, and that on occasions has also made me question my ability for rational decisions. The thing is that I have been looking into various aspects of technology, in particular those that have to do with international trade. It is all fun, and I do like working within a legal framework and be involved in policy at various levels. Political and legal philosophy remain some of my best bedtime readings, but not only. My own involvement in parliamentary procedures has given me a good taste for the workings, functions and movements in politics, and it remains an experience that I would not have wanted to miss.

I have often been asked about this whole thing of e-democracy and using the Internet as a democratic tool and what not. Although the answers seem to lurk unappealingly and simplistically uninspired, the whole issue is quite fascinating. First, there are issues of democracy. What is democracy?

My very own opinion is that humankind is not ready for democracy, but like with any ideal, and democracy is an ideal, humankind is fascinated by it and keeps on trying it out, exploring, experimenting and just about wrestling with it in all its modalities. Democracy and capitalism - pros and cons - do dominate the social discourse of these days, credit crunch and all providing just the right kind of illustrative examples for anybody to make their point one way or the other. Building arguments these days is like building houses, however some architects are better than others, and some materials are more solid than others. I like sand castles.

Some call me a nihilist, others want to label my fiction more on the absurdist side, and I can only hope that my scientific and academic work lacks any of those labels and goes more towards the critical reasoning side of thought. By choice and birth, I am clearly not an existentialist and that may indeed constitute one of my biggest blind-spots or prejudices. That said, I still like Nietzsche and Kafka, but usually not on an empty stomach.

In my feed reading today, an article about Proposition 8 caught my attention. It did catch my attention perhaps because over lunch time I was discussing with a graduate student peace building processes and how to address the issues of their failure. It is the kind of discussion that leaves me inspired, but then also gets me very distracted and away from work that is perhaps a bit less fascinating. Peace building is to me a very sexy item on the intellectual agenda. Somehow I see here a bridge that needs to be built between peace building and our understanding of self-governance. Democracy is just one of the paths that we are currently exploring in self-governance: sometimes it works, often it doesn't and to boot, there is not much of a shared understanding of what it is.

In this IHT article about Proposition 8, what is striking to me is the one sentence "Eightmaps.com is the latest, most striking example of how information collected through disclosure laws intended to increase the transparency of the political process, magnified by the powerful lens of the Web, may be undermining the same democratic values the regulations were to promote. " Clearly, the regulation mechanism failed, and technology was there to enable the failure. We have here an issue of privacy, or privacy versus transparency.

On this issue, it may be wise to get one's head around Timothy Macklem's Independence of Mind and give chapter 2 a good read, in particular the section that deals with privacy and liberty where we are kindly reminded of Pierre Trudeau's words that "the state has no place in the bedrooms of the nation".

With that thought in mind, do recall that the Internet is just a communications logistic tool that is easily accessible to a minority of the world's population. Eighty percent of the world's population has no idea or access to the Internet.

Media Ontology (German)

noreply@blogger.com (Dannie Jost) — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 09:12:00 +0000

Kittler: Ontologie der Medien from bkm on Vimeo.

Communication: Cyclying and Disinhibition

noreply@blogger.com (Dannie Jost) — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 19:56:00 +0000

It has been several weeks if not months since I last opened up the RSS readers that I have in use including Bloglines, endo, netvibes, and Google Reader. This is a statement that I can safely make with some sort of periodical recurrence. I struggle to not drown in information. Finding what I need is much more important than being bombarded with potentially interesting information. I am starting to think that the key to our information universe is indeed mastering the economics of search. When I need information, I need it fast, and I want it yesterday, not tomorrow. Impatience is often one of my driving forces, or alternatively a great source of frustration.

I find that the excuse of not having time is one of the lamest ever for not doing something. When we want it bad enough, we all find the time for it, and most are willing to totally step out of the space-time narrative to attain that which is desired. I easily get bored or overwhelmed or both with the influx of information coming in my direction in the space-time map. Mind you, I am fascinated by people and some people write very decent copy about topics that I find of interest and relevance, but at this point I am much keener on just plain information, and the people while not relegated to the realm of necessary evil, are not on my top priority. Just as a reminder, I still love animals, human animals included. Then there is the litany of the day having 24 hours and all the things that one must do, and that there is not enough time for it all, etc, etc.. ad nauseam, or what I would call caught in the space-time doldrums.

There is one not so very recent bit that I particularly like from Nicolas Nova, and that contains a few words that I like "Disinhibition with virtual partners..." For those interested in real non-utopic urban spaces, then both Nicolas' and Fabien's are blogs to keep an eye on. If the hypothesis that I am at present exploring within the jazzy gardens of academia will bring any insights to our understanding of the present technology and our relationship to it, then there is much of surprise to be learned in the interaction between machine and man.

When I say that I do not have the time, it is always the equivalent of using polite language to say that I am either not interested, or that I am not willing to take the responsibility for calling it in any other way. It takes great courage to be able to say that I do not want to this now, or that I do not want to talk with you now. When one human approaches another and asks for attention in the form of time, I do wander what exactly it is that it is being asked. Perhaps it does not matter, for there is no such thing is as the true reason for something, yet reason is something very ingrained in our culture. We either do something or do not do it. Reason is the step-child of causality, and to me it often seems to have been poorly educated among most inhabitants of the planet, or it could be that I am the only and sole being afflicted by this calamity. In my case, when I utter the standard issue "I did not have time" then it is either that I totally forgot or that I just am not keen on the task for whatever reason, and more often than not I may not even know what that reason is, it is just something along the lines of "I do not feel like doing this now" or it is that the task luring and not beaconing at me in the future has, for all its projected magnificence, lost all appeal in my mind's eye. I remember spending summers during my school years in the house library reading books from cover to cover while other kids were out getting into normal kinds of trouble. I would go out towards the late afternoon and then would roam the fields alone as most of the time there were no peers nearby, or those that were nearby did not share my very strange world. If I was not at the country house with said library during the summer, then I was at the beach and with it in a totally different social setting where I tended once more to be the odd one too young for the wilder escapades of my cousins and too odd otherwise. Strange to me now is that although there were always people around, it seems that I chose to be alone regardless of the social setting. In this respect, there is not much that has changed in my life and that is perhaps what I find so fascinating about engaging with virtual partners. I have done this for the whole of my life, and I have often done this in written. I talk to the walls and my computer, I talk to the trees, and I scream at the ocean.

At this point I do not know how the cycling got into the title of this little note, but somehow it seemed relevant when I wrote the first sentences of this a few weeks back. Communication beyond the space-time map has been on the back of my mind quite a bit lately, it happens to be an area that I am researching now. Somehow it all has something to do with entanglement, the big bang and why the Higgs may remain enigmatic.

Death and Others

noreply@blogger.com (Dannie Jost) — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 14:36:00 +0000

As I write this there was just one day last week when I thought that after I lay down, I may never wake up. I had a very minor accident and the accompanying strong headache that followed as a result of a mild concussion fed into my awareness that life is finite, that one day I will die and that that day may have just arrived. Mid-afternoon and with no drugs, I laid down, slept the sleep of the innocent and carefree and then woke up when a friend was at my door expecting dinner. Dinner had to wait, and I was alive.

However for some odd reason, death has been very present in my life this year. At one point I bumped into a colleague in the bus and casually asked her how she was. I was not ready for the answer, her husband had just died, she was returning from her sister's who happens to live around the corner. All I could do was take her into my arms. I could not really imagine what it is like to loose a husband, but I could imagine what it is like to loose a good and dear friend, or a member of the family. When the freshman class at CMU is given the assignment to read Randy Pausch's Last Lecture, then all of a sudden, brutal or inconsiderate as it may seem, death is about life. It is a call to go for your dreams, and it is a reminder of what the nature of nature is.

At this point theoretical man is on my top priority list, or if I had the say, it would be my top priority. If I think of death, it is my own death that I rarely thing about as that to me is easy because after that event, there will nothing that I will have to do or think about and I am not inclined to dwelling on what those surviving me will have to deal with. Last year at one point I declared to a friend of mine that if I were to die that day, I would die happy. It is a remarkable claim given the very fact that the word happy seldom computes in my world, but then I do live in a world that explores the very limitations of words. Happy is one of those words whose meaning I often question, interrogate and massage while often the yield of these efforts to conclude that there is some form of emptiness to the word. I have experienced immense joy and something that I would want to label ecstasy, but happiness? What is happiness other than the grand Utopia?

Why is it that I think that I do not have the say when it comes to what my priorities are? When last year I first saw the video of Randy Pausch's last lecture I run a mental inventory of my own dreams and those that I have brought to bear on reality. The score is good, very good, and often I tend to forget how very good the score is and then all sorts of drama surfaces in my narrative. I have however no particular attachment to drama, but do have a great deal of curiosity as to what the nature of nature is and within it, what the nature of man is. I postulate that one aspect of human nature is man's ability to abstract, conceptualize and theorize.

A few weeks ago a casual friend confided that he often goes through depression phases when he totally shuts out the world and that in him then all is rather dark and that he finds himself in a place inaccessible to others around him. I am not one prone to believing every word of confidence that I hear, however in this case I am willing to assume that this may indeed be as I was told. Intimate interactions, or that which is told in confidence when two humans interact is always fascinating as it reveals detailed aspects of human nature and communication. Depression of any kind is not really what is considered an acceptable conversation topic outside of the clinical and private spheres, much less within a context of technology. The confidence took me by surprise, yet I was curious as to what drives somebody to make such a confidence in a crowded hallway. Am I just asking what it is that attracts one man to another?

Why are humans so susceptible to suggestion? Are other animals equally susceptible to suggestion? What drives the suggestion susceptibility? What does any of this have to do with death or what attracts one man to another? How do any of these questions connect to those dreams that we are all born with?

Many years ago I got to read the novel Das Parfum (1981) by Patrick Süskind. My reading of that novel within the then context of my life has in itself all the great elements of what could de turned into fascinating narrative. Like it often happens to great literature, I get so involved and overwhelmed, that often I can not finish reading the story. There is a Swiss writer whose word-craft seems magic to me, and each time that I sit down to read his work, I get so entrained in his words that I can not proceed with the reading. This is for me the power of words, and how I deal with the books that one of my neighbours writes.

Death is just the only certainty that I do not yet know.

Finding "Theoretical Man"

noreply@blogger.com (Dannie Jost) — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 14:01:00 +0000

My exploratory notes on Theoretical Man are here in this blog. Recently I have found out that it is getting increasingly more difficult to find anything in this blog even with the help of the search box on the right navigation column, thus I have gone back and relabeled some of the older posts to include in addition to the technorati tags, also the blogger-labels: theoretical man, public man, knowledge ownership, culture. A technorati search for "theoretical man" will not yield a clean or complete list of results as the label is also used by others.

Why this now?

Although these notes also exist on my hard drive and are readable outside of a browser, I find it convenient to keep them accessible when I am away from my own storage media.

Originally this whole thing came about from my questioning of what knowledge ownership might be, some of the notes from those early days were neither tagged or labeled with"theoretical man."

I have also used "knowledge ownership" within the context of intellectual property and that has preciously little to do at this point with the bulk of what Theoretical Man is about in spite of the fact that it was my starting point.

Since this is work in progress, the taxonomy and structure is still evolving. Yes, I keep thinking of a wiki, but...

Technology and Human

noreply@blogger.com (Dannie Jost) — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 18:55:00 +0000

There was one LIFT08 moment for me. It happened during the Gaming session while both Guy Vardi and Paul Barnett spoke. The energy and content of their presentations delivered something into the discussion that Nada Kakabadse and I were having over what is the basis of Theoretical Man. What intrigues me is how technology enables humanity's evolution. Nada and I cracked the one pièce de résistance that I have been pondering for the past few months. I could not have done it alone - not that quickly - it was two brains thinking as one. It was one of those magic moments when you know that alone you are nothing, and together you are everything. I was elated!

Now, for the long story. Some years ago I decided that I was going to get to the root of what had my geeky son spend hours on end playing multiplayer games over the internet. There was a certain sense of responsibility for having gotten him started with the whole thing, when I myself apparently could never quite get much into the game mode. To add insult to injury, I was also the one who taught him the basics of building PCs, changing motherboards and CPUs. For all I knew, I had created a monster, this monster knew something that I did not and I was bent on not letting it stay that way. I wanted to find out. We have moved on, he confesses to getting bored with most multiplayer games and I use a mac. He has new interests, I have new hardware. While researching some of the aspects of gaming and the internet, I stumbled on another idea that beaconed much brighter. I decided to write an epic that is taking place a few thousand years from now. All of a sudden my most dreaded subject was really fascinating, and I regretted instantly knowing so little history, being clueless about antiquity, and really not knowing much at all. I started reading and traveling, I started counting the grains of sand in Arabia. At that time, whenever I was asked what I was doing, I would tell that I was counting the grains of sand in Arabia.

Why count the grains of sand in Arabia? I like the desert and I like Arabia and the Middle East. It is just another place where I feel very at home. It is a place where it is easy to just be myself. But in going through books and discussions about humanity's history on earth, technology started to show its face to me in a way that I had not seen before. Science fiction is just not my genre, I read little of it, but slowly I start to develop more of an interest as the motivation for writing science fiction becomes more and more transparent to me. Still, that is not the direction that I have taken, I have gone into the philosophy direction right straight into what are some of the more controversial debates of our times. Would I have settled for anything less?

In the process of re-fluxing - not really reflecting - the cognitive hangover after the three days of LIFT08 I wrote a synopsis of my present state of affairs across all areas of my life to a colleague and friend in Italy who promptly replied that it was "amazing, but not unexpected, knowing your talent and constitution."

The pièce de résistance that Nada and I tackled during the games at LIFT has to do with the nature of one of three technological quantum leaps that have marked us all and influence our evolution and culture. This is fun stuff to think about, and while one year ago in my quest to get to the nature of what is ownership and knowledge and what they have to do with each other - relationship - stumbled on an incredible piece of natural logic, it was the inquiry of what makes humans different from dogs that has yielded an interesting distinction that goes beyond abstraction and language, and takes us right to literature and its relationships to being human and to technology.

For somebody who started intellectual intercourse at the level of science, my fascination with technology ought to be arousing your curiosity. First however I tried agriculture and planted a few coins, they did not grow and multiply. It is all a logical game, isn't it?

What Happens when a Transhumanist meets Calvin? | LIFT conference

noreply@blogger.com (Dannie Jost) — Sat, 05 Jan 2008 23:26:00 +0000

What Happens when a Transhumanist meets Calvin? January 6, 2008 - 00:11 — Dannie Jost It took a while, it did. I do not know much about Calvin - any of them, not even the Klein one - however given that what I have heard about Jean Cauvin is that he had a great commitment to the absolute sovereignty and holiness of God... I propose the following discussion and have taken the liberty to invite the first three discussion starters to start the ball rolling. My idea is more that we all get involved, and I do hope that we have among the participants people who are knowledgeable in Calvin theology and Transhumanism. For my part what I bring in is a burning passion for dialog and inquiry. In this discussion there is the possibility that we will learn something, and explore the confines of our understanding of technology. What do Transhumanism and Calvinism have in common? What is there to learn from looking at the evolution of human thought through technology? xposted to tensoriana.org

What Happens when a Transhumanist meets Calvin? | LIFT conference

Creativity Utopia Workshop | LIFT conference

noreply@blogger.com (Dannie Jost) — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 05:52:00 +0000

Perhaps you joined Henriette and me last year for the workshop... or perhaps you had then neither heard of LIFT, Henriette or Geneva. Fondue brought you here? Impossible!

Let us start with the truth, the naked screaming truth. The creative do not care about creativity, they simply create. This year Henriette and I want to guide you through an exploration of what is behind the creativity hype. Hype?! Hype!
Why this? Why now?
For me the past year has been one of exploding tabus. Yes, exploding tabus. Your mileage may differ, but I on my part have found no other way to deal with tabus. I set an explosive charge to them, and then press the detonate button. Tabus are supposedly consecrated to a special use or purpose, and sometimes restricted to the use of a god,
king, priest and forbidden to general use. Tabus are discrimination pure and simple. Tabus are the intellectual prisons invoked to control. I like the use of intellectual dynamite in exploding tabus. How about you?
Utopia, on the other hand, is the divine soup from which our dreams are made of. Utopia is the primordial soup of imagination and limitation. Utopia is paradoxland uncharted!
In this workshop we will explore tabus, utopias and forget creativity.

Creativity Utopia Workshop | LIFT conference

xposted from tensoriana

Tags: lift08, liftconference, workshop, utopia, creativity, henrietteweber, danniejost

Parallax II

noreply@blogger.com (Dannie Jost) — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 21:01:00 +0000

I am what in my book may go as positively annoyed by the place that politics has taken in my life. I also very tired of the lack of involvement by those who feel free to criticize while being ponderously possessed by massive amounts of ignorance and paralysis. It could also be that I am peeved at having being accused of arrogance, but it could be that nothing else would be appropriate as a reaction to a supercilious being. Be it as it may, there is a discourse about politics that I want to continue within the context of Theoretical Man. Mind you, ignorance is nothing bad in itself, it is even the driving force behind the acquisition of all knowledge. Power and influence are however another matter, and when it comes to politics these two take center stage. From then on, that is once power and influence start courting each other, things do get confusing once the private and the public get so meddled that one no longer distinguishes between media masturbation and capital greed. Both of these two last constructs, media masturbation and capital greed, are clearly not real, however a strong perching on intellectual fantasy and rational bigotry will get hung on these two imaginaries. Greed in itself is one interesting phenomenon, it tends to affect individuals and collectives alike, and according to my reading of one distinguished academic whom I have been reading and talking to recently, it can be taken to account for both the demise of communism and liberalism. Your mileage may differ, but of all the things that I have been slow in learning, the necessity to impose order is one of them. While my attitude is to live and let live, between consensus and imposing order, I find little space for anarchy in my vagabond's life. Now those who are really awake now will be quick at pointing out to a major logic flaw in that anarchy is not between imposing order and consensus given the fact that consensus and imposing order are already fairly close and both within government. Through this abstract contortion for which I am fully willing to take credit for, the conclusion is that anarchy is not a form of self-organization, and has nothing to contribute to peace or sustainability. When we engage in politics, and that we all do, at all time, even when claiming to be apolitical, we are engaged in social intercourse. Now, intercourse is the sort of word that most like to associate with sexual, however I tend to omit such use as to me that is a misappropriation of the word, and I would like to rehabilitate the word for what it most aptly expresses. It is dynamic, and it expresses a whole lot of qualia associated with social behaviour, perception and communication. By now you have noticed that I like words, and that I like to look at them in some detail. I like potent words, and I like hacking the language. Call it literary schmoozing or call it an attack on my own ignorance, call it naivety or call it anything you want. What I want to address is the nature of our - human - relationship to politics and government. Politics is human behaviour, and government is the virtual structure that that behaviour expresses to create action, control and rule. In an epoch marked by affluence, what is it that I am rambling about and why does it have anything to do do with participative democracy? Since my last installation of parallax more than a month has gone by and a lot of water flown down the Aare while I have pondering the unlikes of pistic and volitious.

Berne Communal Elections 2008

Communal elections are slated to happen in roughly one year to then decide who will take a seat in the new city parliament and executive from 2009-2013. For the past few weeks since the national parliament elections, the local press are doing all they can to sell their paperware by agitating and intriguing. At least one reporter seems to opine or vomit all over this much too intellectual party that I have joined, and although he seems to collude with some poor idiot - without much good sense and tons of ambition - who has been leaking internal emails and other indiscretions to him. I am amused and annoyed all at the same time. I have, like most of my colleagues in the party the grand privilege of insider information. I also do not know who our wonderful media blabber mouth is, however I would be willing to take a guess in private. One element of what prevents me from doing so in public has to do with wonderful piece of personality rights that regulate the like of what is called libel and slander. The fact is that all I can do is guess. Personality rights here or there, somehow, defamation, slander and libel are just not the kind of activity that I like to engage in, although these are well known tools within propaganda. It is a question of moral and ethics, and those are always a matter of choice and conscientiousness. But it is not just my penchant for walking the moral high ground that restrains me, it is the absence of hard facts that would inculpate one person beyond doubt. The more I think about it, the more it seems that we all, perhaps with one exception - our district attorney in the fraction - and including myself would have a plausible reason for such disloyal behaviour. So it happens that the riots of October 6 brought one of our city executives under attack within the local press, those aspiring at his job, and all politicians running or hoping to run for the coveted executive offices or already serving a term. While the members of the city parliament get a pittance that barely pays the added expenses of doing politics, the executive offices in this city pay a good salary and bring with them a rather sweet retirement pension. Anybody with a few gray hairs, and worried about being comfortable in old age fantasizes with being elected to one of these five executive offices or for city president (mayor). It is also not much of a picnic of a job, long hours, extreme exposure to the public and media, and a rather complex manifold of decision making processes all to make sure that the sewers function, the garbage gets picked up, and that the dog taxes get collected. Of course there are more glamourous aspects of the job, but there is also a lot of drudgery and legal nit picking. In the past weeks our party has also taken the decision to form some sort of electoral alliance with other liberal, middle and right wing parties in order to have a chance at defeating the socialist-green block now holding the majority. However the constellation in such electoral alliance, in particular the names that will go on the ballots, are causing quite a bit of a stir, only because some people seem to be too dense to figure out that the decision was a tactical decision, not one aiming at excluding anybody in specific from any ballot. Go figure, but this is really difficult, and the one person in the hot seat and cross fire of much speculation and intriguing, the executive who is also in charge of the police department, fully understands the fact that the circumstances are confusing to the feeble minded. Indeed politics is a good mixture of strategic decisions aiming at resolving issues and a whole lot of personal choices. Personality is also involved, heads and faces are part of the equation, and leadership has always been a rare resource while egoism and greed are easily accessible to all. To add insult to injury, the media is grossly neglecting what in my understanding ought to be their primary task, to inform. Instead they are feeding petty personal feuds and playing one character against another like puppeteers. The results for me are that my ignoring the local media is part of a strategy to keep my wits and maintain ignorance of hen fights that tend to bore me. In our little parliamentary fraction we have had a surge of screaming emails begging for clarity within our ranks. When I read these emails I analyse the language for traces of culpability in the ongoing intrigue. This grasshopper has much to learn about the carnival of political intrigue based on deviant interpretation of recent history. (to be continued)

Technorati Tags: democracy, media, politics, theoretical man, thought

Parallax I

noreply@blogger.com (Dannie Jost) — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 14:50:00 +0000

Politics has entered my back door unannounced, it has moved in and now I need to deal with it. In Facts 2.0 Christoph Lüscher asks why the Swiss writers are keeping silent. I read with some amusement and not much surprise what Lukas Bärfuss comments about the relationship between writers and politics. It is one man's opinion, he is entitled to express it and I am glad that he has done so. In my view, his opinion is both self-centered and claustrophobic. Being in the middle of the storm always changes one's perceptions. I am right now in the middle of the storm of what is called swiss politics. At this point I am ready to stop asking myself if I like this, because I see my liking of it as being totally irrelevant. I have been following these 2007 swiss parliament elections that just took place this sunday from a perspective that is new to me, that of actually being an active democratically elected politician. This is a hat - the politician's hat - that I keep turning around and adjusting and that somehow I can not really leave to rest on my head. I feel no identification with the classe politique, yet I belong to it in spite of my feelings and likes.

But what is politics?

A lot of people speak as though politics is evil. However politics is very much an expression of our culture. Have we forgotten that we are social beings who spontaneously self-orgnize in communities? Isn't culture the cohesive expression of human behaviour? Is politics not part of that expression? Politics is hard work, and it is the kind of collective work that is never done and always in progress. Politics is a virtual social construction site. If the work was easy, anybody could do it, and if it was trivial it would be unnecessary. Damn, it is complex hard work, that is what politics is. And like any such labour, it is very susceptible to criticism. Informed, constructive criticism is good. Ignorant, intolerant criticism is annoying, informative and on occasions irritating. Defamation is just plain bad manners. Lots of people talk about Politics and politics - capital P, little p - and I think that they mean Policy and Psychology. One does need some conceptual tools to help with the bit of governing the place, that is usually what policy is intended to do. Policy is intellectual fruit designed for implementation. The place may be a small community, a household, a school, a country, an intergovernmental organization, or any group that somehow has some common goal. The thing is that structures do nothing, and people do all the work, so one has to sooner or later deal with the whole of their psychological and social expression. If it was easy, we had been all born in Utopia, and intellectual endeavour would consist of chasing butterflies.

The violence in the streets of Berne and the big F-word

So now I head straight to a series of events which I did not witness first hand, but which news reached me while I was away. To add insult to injury, I learned of the events first through a press release from the liberal party and then an American writer friend, not knowing that I was not in Berne, asks me what is going on via email. I still can not quite make heads or tails of the details of the escalation that lead to substantial material destruction through violent action on the streets of Berne on October 2007. I have seen my colleagues of all parties doing a more or less plausible shaking of the responsibility away from their parties or and persons. My sarcastic self commented that finally Berne had made the world news. After all not much ever happens in the helvetic capital, other than the occasional demonstration, most of which run their course rather peacefully. However once in a while things get out of hand, it gets hot, objects catch fire, and property is destroyed. Civil unrest they call this. It does remind me of the code words used in management to designate strikes and worker dissatisfaction. The experience of the latter is something that I made while exerting the function of management consultant which only taught me that where there is smoke there is fire. I do like to get to the bottom of things, and this is one stubborn piece of behaviour that has gotten me into trouble a few times, and then, it has also earned me quite a few laurels too. In what concerns the local cabaret around the violence of October 6, the facts reduce to the following: - Several public gatherings had requested and received the necessary permit from the municipal authorities including the SVP and the crafts market (Münsterplatform). - The so called peaceful demonstration against the SVP one did not get the required authorization from the municipal authorities in spite of the fact that their attorney was quite insistent about it and met with said authorities. -There were indeed peaceful demonstrations present on that day in Berne. -There were indeed violent demonstrations that day in Berne. -Property got destroyed. -The police had their share of breakdowns, but did handle the situation appropriately even if locally much political nonsense is still being discussed at this hour about the operative details of the said police's intervention. Actually when I come to think of it, it bores the living bejesus out of me to think of all the details of who was and was not involved. When I checked - with the friendly help of google and clusty - as to what was being written about the events, I got a picture that confirmed a few of the facts that are not so obvious from all the local and international mainstream press hype. Alternatively I could have spoken with a native Bernese dojo friend who votes Green and knows the local alternative scene and have confirmation that the hooligans causing the damage were not locals, and some not even Swiss. There is something of a violence tourism going on and these folks are indeed organized and they do use the internet. For the juicy details, then you have to know that the big advocate of all of these unauthorized demonstrations is a certain local politician who earns his living by picking up his clients at the Waisenhausplatz when they exit the police main station after their release from police custody. In the US we call such unethical attorneys ambulance chasers, but you get the idea. How very convenient indeed it is to preach, propagate and politicize the idea of civil unrest to the common folk, and then when law and order do their job, you are there as their attorney and saviour! It this leadership? Such unethical behaviour - the call for civil disobedience and violence - does indeed give both politicians and lawyers a bad name. If you are harbouring nationalistic thoughts, then you can consider the possibility that such citizens also give their patria a bad name. But what are we to make of a legitimate political party with some proud roots and some good fundamental ethical and middle class values that has been seduced by the charms of a charismatic leader who does not walk the talk? I have had the good fortune to meet members of the SVP and active elected politicians whose values are not that different from mine, and who have at some level or another inspired the idea of trust and community. Read trust as connection, relationship, understanding and possibility. I have also met some members of my own party who leave me a bit more perplexed as to the nature of our joint goal. On most issues the SVP, the CVP and the FDP do not differ in any significant way. However I do have a tough time placing the whole of the SVP in the ultra-nationalist bin. Tyler Brûlé may know something about publishing magazines and the value of Swiss craftsmanship and plumbing, but I think he ought to go back to school when it comes to understanding Swiss politics. The SVP is not an ultra-nationalistic party. That said, what is then the problem with the folks of the SVP? While one can not choose in which family to be born, there is a choice of which political party to join. The coin does turn around that once in a party the whole of the loyalty and interest merry-go-round starts to turn. Once an individual joins a party, and as long as some minimal conditions are met, a member will not be excluded. In a place - this Switzerland - with well entrenched democratic values, the attitude is all about finding consensus. However the fine line between consensus and compromise is not obvious and that may exactly be where the SVP has created a point of entry for ideologies that deviate from their own core values. But how does one phrase this in polite terms? It is not easy to keep this line of argument comfortable. For the one discomfort that the SVP itself is dealing with is that it has managed to attract quite a few sympathizers with radical neo-nazi, skin-heads an ultra-nationalistic ideologies. Fuck, but the big F-word, the big white elephant in the room, the stinking element in all of this is the present current of resurgent fascism dynamics sweeping the globe. Fascism is the big F-word. It is however not a problem that just the SVP has been infested with, it is also a problem with those political parties traditionally designated as being on the left. The problem concerns us all.

Participative Democracy and Consensus

In an ideal world, even in a dictatorship everybody would be content and sastified. However Utopia will remain an ideal, and ideals will also remain just that. Ideal is not real. We are dealing with life as it happens, and we all know it is one bloody mess from the time of birth. Why are the Swiss writers keeping silent? They are not. Is anybody listening? (to be continued)

Technorati Tags: democracy, fascism, politics, theoretical man, thought

BlogCampSwitzerland 2.0

noreply@blogger.com (Dannie Jost) — Sat, 20 Oct 2007 19:07:00 +0000

I had a great time today at *BlogCampSwitzerland* in spite of the name and in spite of some physical discomfort due to a sore throat that I hope is gone by tomorrow. I saw some old faces, a few new ones and had several good conversations. I had a little session that I announced as an interactive mashup to the title of "The Swiss Myth". Both Claudio Notz and Sarah Genner blogged the essence of it from different prespectives. I also am looking forward to see the publication of Sarah's recently completed work about blogs in politics in Switzerland about which she gave us a fascinating preview today. I really had no idea as to where the discussion would go when tackling the swiss myth and mash-up politics and blogs. I did have a bit of an inquiry session and do look forward to the video that Greg Vernon made in order to study it within the context of action research methodology. I opened up by telling the story of how I came to think of the swiss myth "rich country" that I often get to hear and that inspired my last post on this blog and how that led me to think that exploring the mythology of Switzerland may lead to some interesting thinking. It was fantastic to witness the discussion shape itself and to see that most of those present did participate. Thanks to all who participated and or blogged. It is this kind of joint thinking and interaction that make the barcamp format a success. updated: Sunday 21.10.2007

Technorati Tags: barcamp, barcampswitzerland, blogcampswitzerland2-0, swissbloggers, switzerland

The Imponderability of Poverty

noreply@blogger.com (Dannie Jost) — Thu, 11 Oct 2007 04:28:00 +0000

Subheading: The Rich and the Poor in the Age of Abundance or the Swiss Myth The rich and the poor, the have-nots and have-it-all maintains itself as an interesting theme in the age of abundance and in the age of theoretical man. Recently I found myself strolling the night life of a Balkan capital with a group when while engaged in a conversation about banking with an Austrian colleague two children came begging us for money. In Berne, the Swiss capital, the beggars are not quite so in-your-face about begging, but begging does go on in either of two obvious modalities. There are the begging racketeers with opaque origins, and then there are the locals. In a country with a mature and efficient welfare system as the Swiss have it, there is no necessity for anybody - national or non-national who is a resident - to take to the streets and beg for food and shelter, or the means to secure such, money. Really, there is not. I have been speaking at length with several social workers at various levels in the city and the canton, and you would be surprised at how well the system has developed the necessary resources for providing for everybody with dignity. My Austrian colleague and I did our best to convince the two children that we were not going to give them any money - the only English word they knew - and eventually they did give up on the cold blooded freaking foreigners. I for my part did not want to encourage small children being out working that late at night, however I do not have a clue as to why my colleague was equally unresponsive. We both carried out our conversation as though the two children had been nothing more that two pesky mosquitos whirling about. A few days after returning from the Balkans I was heading back home after having done a bit of grocery shopping when I was approached by a teenager with the all too telling question (in Swiss German) "Can I ask you a question?" That is how begging gets done in the streets of the Swiss capital. It is a question that gets attention. I usually smile and say no, or ignore it as the mood strikes me. If the person asking does not look like too disarrayed or confused, I might actually listen. When this teenage boy asked me the question, I told him that he could ask me the question, however I had a few questions of my own for him. I asked the teenager about how he had found himself in the need for begging. I got a sad and expected story of death and drugs. I reminded him of our functioning social welfare system and I was told another plausible story. I asked a few more questions, and always I got a good plausible story. Stories only need to be plausible, truth is anyhow nothing that one relates to at the story level, much less at the begging level. I had to reward this boy for his excellent story telling ability, so I offered him to pick something to eat out of my shopping bag. Now, this is when the surprise got me. This boy actually was happy to take some food from my bag. I got curious anyhow about what this young man's story was, and had a conversation with one of the social workers in the city a few days later. I was curious as to what was going on. I got confirmation that even if this young man had wrecked havoc of some form or another that may have had him excluded from some social support structure, there is always one last resource and that he needed not to beg for food or shelter. Still what seems apparent is that the resource missing is an intangible social resource that has nothing to do with material resources. The system is there and it is open to all in need, however the intangible need for social integration is often not realized by those in the need. This seems to be the greater poverty of them all, the inability to use what is available, and the need to be destitute. This need is one that is independent of socio-econmic status. The fact is that in Switzerland there is no physical need for anybody regardless of very materially deprived their situation may be to be begging in the streets. The true poverty is not a material one, it is one of spirit and conscientiousness. When poverty is looked at from this point of view, then it itself is rather abundant. In the time of physical abundance, poverty resides in the spirit. Are humans ready to eradicate poverty?

Technorati Tags: danniejost, education, ego, humanism, politics, poverty, humanitarianism, switzerland, theoretical man

Media, Media on the Wall: Chomsky

noreply@blogger.com (Dannie Jost) — Sat, 18 Aug 2007 19:44:00 +0000

I just read an interesting interview with Noam Chomsky in the Le Monde Diplomatique paper version in French by Daniel Mermet. For the English translation, see Democracy's invisible line. Actutally I like the French title a bit better: Le lavage de cerveaux en liberté. I have learned quite a bit by putting my rusty thinking machine through Chomsky's intellectual acrobatics. However here and on other occasions, I do not agree with him on a few issues. It must be noted that there is one bridge to build in this apparently very connected world of ours and that is the one between public opinion and democracy. But you see, it is not that simple. A majority is not necessarily right, and democracy is not just the implementation of the will of a majority. Democracy is an evolving set of tools all used to serve human's natural tendency to self-organize. If a majority is not a critical decision factor in democracy, what is? The interplay of mutual and non-reciprocal masturbation of Media and Government is however an interesting phenomenon. Who is using whom, for what purpose, and who on earth is getting any satisfaction? If as Chomsky claims "not only are citizens excluded from political power, they are also kept in a state of ignorance as to the true state of public opinion" what is it that is happening? Now, all is good and well, and there is a lot of food for thought in much of what Chomsky has to say, however the following does not quite go along the lines of what I have been thinking:

"We are living here and now, not in some imaginary universe. And here and now there are tyrannical organisations – big corporations. They are the closest thing to a totalitarian institution. They are, to all intents and purposes, quite unaccountable to the general public or society as a whole. They behave like predators, preying on other smaller companies. People have only one means of defending themselves and that is the state. Nor is it a very effective shield because it is often closely linked to the predators. But there is a far from negligible difference. General Electric is accountable to no one, whereas the state must occasionally explain its actions to the public."

I contend that governments and big corporations are hit by the same ills: the tyranny virus knows no distinction between the two. While it is the government that legitimizes the nature of the corporation, it is the corporation that finances the government as it is the one directly creating revenue - value - from its assets. There is a codependency between government and corporation that not many people - the critical thinking kind - are willing to look at. It ought to be looked at, and it ought to be looked at really hard, and the nature of its relationships examined. Questions of ethical basis need to be asked. Who is serving whom, and for what purpose?

Update: Here is an interesting bit by John Quiggin that highlights the Media vs Government issue.

Technorati Tags: chomsky, corporation, democracy, government, Le Monde diplomatique, public man, selforganisation, selforganization, theoretical man

Public AND Private

noreply@blogger.com (Dannie Jost) — Tue, 31 Jul 2007 20:58:00 +0000

I have been slumbering around here pretending to write down Hamiltonians and regretting never having given general relativity more than a casual thought while a student. But now I am wide awake after reading this little item at ARS ELECTRONICA titled "Goodbye Privacy". If truth, as stated by McGinn, is the unique property of a proposition from which one can deduce the fact stated by that proposition, then I must wake up!

"A new culture of everyday life is now upon us, bracketed by the angst-inducing scenarios of seamless surveillance and the zest we bring to staging our public personas via digital media. One in which everything seems to be public and nothing’s private anymore. Panopticon or consummate individual freedom of expression?"

Public does not happen at the expense of private, so it is not goodbye privacy! If the organizers of ARS ELECTRONICA picked the title just to activate some of us in our slumber, then they succeeded. However I suspect that here there was more confusion than any intent to wake me up. My take on this has several aspects. First anybody is free to disclose anything that they want on the Web, but then that was already a possibility with the printing press, and the old fashioned pornography industry lost no time with it and has used every technological tool within reach. Duh. Nothing new. Second, even those committing the horrible trespass of TMI while twittering, jaiku-ing or blogging, may or may not be revealing private information. At worse they may be boring an audience, but then, the audience can always zap the channel. It could be that they eventually find themselves screaming out loud into a listening vacuum, but that is besides the point. This could, after all, be a new form of zen meditation... or not. Third, if you are surfing and searching the net unprotected - not anonymously - you are broadcasting your actions, and if nobody else, your ISP and the search engines you use have information that can be used to construct a profile. We all know that technology is hackable, and so it has always been, and you can also have your own bots to create a specific trace for your profile. That is to say, those who care to remain anonymous will, and that for which ever reason. Profiling can be done, its meaning can be debatable and its accuracy widely disputed. Again, the possibility of profiling individuals and organizations delivers fertile grounds, verdant fields, and majestic heap loads of speculative objects for both science fiction writers and the paranoid. Fourth, it is too easy to be light headed about using the the Web as an experimental social interaction field. Especially when very young, it is too easy to compromise one's identity and security and publish information that will turn out to be compromising later on in life. After all, archiving of what has once become public information is still nothing that the author has much control of. I really do not want to go into the debate of what MySpace is or decides. So, how does one navigate authenticity while maintaining the integrity of one's identity and privacy while living in public? Why am I writing about this here? I am following the public debate on how the use of the Web is evolving from the point of view of the interaction between man and technology.

Technorati Tags: ARS ELECTRONICA, McGinn, private, public, public man, theoretical man

Now...

noreply@blogger.com (Dannie Jost) — Sun, 22 Jul 2007 10:55:00 +0000

Loads happening right here. Theoretical Man is happening at a rate that I do not quite feel ready for, or so it always is in life. The future always meets me unprepared. Really! I have been served a few whopping surprises in the past few weeks. This is good, very good indeed! I am also at times impossible with my friends and this will range from behaviours that have me telling them to get lost and stay away from me, to being overwhelming in my need to communicate. Mileage always varies with me, steady-state was never quite my domain of endeavour. I am working on the issue of identity. It is one of the tallest orders regardless in which context you decide to pick that one apart. Identity is one of the first issues that any novelist ever tackles. Read James Joyce's Ulysses, read Paul Auster's New York Trilogy, read Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, and you will find studies in identity beautifully and critically packed as works of literary art. I was blessed by the gift of identity in a way that has me feeling like I have had unprotected intercourse with it, and am now not only impregnated with its DNA, but also virally infected by it. Identity is another key to the man-theoretical, as knowledge and paradox are its accessories. I have wondered for whom I am writing Theoretical Man, and once again, like with fiction, I find that it too is written for me. I want to understand what it is that I have somehow connected in my mind as being the puzzle of human existence. The only way that I am ever going to understand it, find its flaws, and gain some satisfaction, is if I write it and thus expose my mind's machinations and fantasies. All of this is done in the name of nonfiction, all of this is done in the name of human inquiry in action to use Peter Reason's expression. My inspiration is coming from the digital culture that I am embedded in. That is, inspiration is coming from what I read, from what I have learned, from the interactions, from the relationships, from the conversations and from what I am learning at all loci of my existence. I was surprised to see David's first reactions to what I have been rattling off here. In particular I do like the reality aspects he brings in, and the questions that he is asking. On occasions I do experiment with putting myself in the bin of the transhumanists, but often I prefer to call it trans-humanism. In a sense some of this can be looked as being beyond humanism and I have also played with the expression "Quantum Humanism." And here we are right back to the question of identity. How do we classify this theory? How do we label it? Where does it belong to? How do we transact with it? Still, to be in a place where people firmly believe that life can be artificially enhanced and augmented to the point of immortality, goes against my own tao. My own tao does not believe in much at all, it is a non-believing tao, and that is exactly who is informing my reasoning and writing.

Technorati Tags: danniejost, davidgalipeau, identity, peterreason, public man, tao, theoretical man

On s'amuse, ou pas!

noreply@blogger.com (Dannie Jost) — Wed, 18 Jul 2007 22:59:00 +0000

Le féminin est-il l'avenir du masculin?: SEXES. Faut-il remplacer tous les noms masculins d'un texte par le féminin? Peut-on, par souci de parité, dire que la Suisse compte 7 millions de Suissesses? Certaines institutions s'y sont mises. Décodage. © Le Temps SA, 2007

Technorati Tags: le temps, gender, theoretical man

What happened before the Big Bang?

noreply@blogger.com (Dannie Jost) — Tue, 03 Jul 2007 06:15:00 +0000

What happened before the Big Bang?: Was the Universe before the Big Bang of classical nature, described well by a smooth space–time? Or was it in a highly fluctuating quantum state? This is one of the most basic questions that we may ask once it is accepted that there was something before the Big Bang. Loop quantum gravity applied to isotropic models has shown that the quantum evolution of a wavefunction extends through the Big Bang. Although a general demonstration is still lacking, this may suggest that calculations, and possibly future indirect observations, may allow us to see the Universe as it was before the Big Bang. Here, we analyse an explicit model with a pre-Big Bang era, indicating limitations that would imply that it is practically impossible to answer some of our questions. Assumptions (or prejudice) will remain necessary for knowing the precise state of the Universe, which cannot be fully justified within science itself.

Note: To read the full article you need a subscription.

Why do I blog this? It ties in rather nicely to what I hinted at in the last paragraph of "social architects and practical visionaries" in tensoriana.org.

Technorati Tags: philosophy, research, science, tensoriana, theoretical man

About Ubification

noreply@blogger.com (Dannie Jost) — Tue, 19 Jun 2007 20:52:00 +0000

Ubification is a word that I have used for the first time within the context of Theoretical Man. It is a word that I introduced at reboot 9.0 in the presentation without much ado or ceremony, I just used it. Just about every word on those slides used in that presentation were carefully chosen. Even reification, although at a first glance one may think that I have used it wrongly, but that too was carefully picked out. Things, animal, man, mechanization, ubification, be, learn, transcend, action, drivers, all of these words have a very specific meaning that is expanded or re-contextualized within the framework of what I am doing. So bear with me, I am still writing the book. I have the feeling that I am writing a philosophical thriller while hacking language. Back to ubification, for it may need a bit of help given some of the feedback. I took ubiety, meaning in respect of place or location, local relationship or whereness, to be the stem of the word. Ubiety is defined in both the Oxford English Dictionary, and the Merriam-Webster Dictionary. The suffix -fication is the regular formative of nouns of action. It really is quite a simple word, and we need it.

Technorati Tags: hacking, language, neologism, philosophy, theoretical man, ubification

reboot 9.0 - Ah! Theoretical Man - Archetype II

noreply@blogger.com (Dannie Jost) — Sun, 17 Jun 2007 18:57:00 +0000

Let me make this clear: I am in love, in love with Theoretical Man. After listening to a few good talks, drowning in a few great conversations, soaking up some of that Copenhagen sun, and crashing at Henriette and Thomas' place, on June 1 I was ready to give it a go.

Warning: > 2'000 words follow...

Just today under the shower I recalled what got all of this going. It was the talk on "Knowledge Ownership" at Lift and something that keeps on coming back to me after Thomas' talk at SHIFT. Or was it the long essay that I wrote on leadership for Nada Kakabadse upcoming book after that talk? Something has been having me and what I could think of today under the shower was that moment on stage back in February in Geneva when I totally disappeared and all there was was public. During reboot9.0, my presentation changed as the conversations took place and I was given new impulses and discovering some new and old ideas. I had the framework, I had the slides, but what and how I was going to deliver it, was still open. I thought that I had some of the answers, and as the discussions progressed, I got more and more sure of having just the questions. Theoretical Man is about the questions, not about the answers. When just minutes before my presentation André asked me what I would talk about, I answered that I was going to talk about sex. We laughed, we always do when the mention is of sex and the conversation is in public. A few minutes into the talk I asked you to get comfortable and ready for 40 minutes of intimacy. It was a precious moment, it was confronting to some of you. Initially I thought that I would start as follows: English is the language that I have colonized. German is the language that I continually rape grammatically. French is my alter ego's language. Portuguese is my fist love. Japanese is my infatuation, and I can order coffee or say thank you in Arabic. In Danish, I am blissfully lost, but not for long. Sheer necessity - also known as thirst - made me learn the word for water in Turkish. However the truth is that we were all born with attention deficit disorder or some other affliction, and from day one we do scream for attention, and sometimes we are very loud! But it all came out different, and it is Tommy Oshima's Archetype II photo that introduces Theoretical Man before the formal title is shown on the second slide. This photo needs to be looked at and reflected upon, to me it is one expression of that beast and animal whom I have chosen to call Theoretical Man. Who am I to think that I have anything to say about the future of humanity? If we are indeed born naked and screaming, what is it that makes us so very human? If we die spent, what is it that happens in between? We call it life. Some live, some vegetate. Life, the expression of a few atoms not so randomly organized, but self-organized in molecular and macromolecule arrangements, cells, organs, whole organisms, is chemically regulated. Organic! What kind of expression does our organic chemically regulated void find? I looked around and I discovered my very own digital culture. Digital? Yes, digital, but we will burrow down on that one another time, not now. Culture is the cohesive expression of human behaviour. I took zattoo for a spin and I watched a few hours of programming from around the world. I found two expressions of this human behaviour that made me wonder. I observed and saw the news and series full of reports or stories about war, rape, greed, incest, murder, betrayal and violence. In between, there were displays of brands from Gucci to Prada, from Wired to Patek Phillipe, right along with those of Shell, Aston Martin, boingboing and Chanel. Who am I not to create the future of humanity? Let me make the case that this is all about relationships and that Theoretical Man is relationship. I relate to those with whom I talk, converse, discuss, argue, lecture to, or otherwise interact with, from a stand point of ying-yang, that is, in respect and freedom. I want the absolute freedom to interact with you, and I respect that you are different and may think differently from me. How do you relate to me? Can we be in a place where respect and freedom are on the order of the day? Man's nature What makes man a different beast from other animals and living organisms is its ability to abstract. Its ability is indeed what I mean to write. Man has no gender at the level of abstraction that I like to deal with man.

So, what is it that we are doing when we humans are measuring our own? Is there a quantum level to the human? If there is such a level, where is it and what does it look like? If we could answer any of these questions and generate any insight, what conjectures would it permit? Am I insane in advancing such ideas?

Allow me a few quantum leaps in logic, and do bear with me. However Tor asked the very same question (in slide 2) in his opening talk with other words by asking if human beings can simulate human beings. His question is equivalent to my human quantum limit question. One of his possible answers is that the head is governed by meaning and value and that emotions are more efficient than intelligence. Now, in my view, this is precious wisdom. Later it will appear that I disagree with Tor, but that is just the appearance of it. In the quantum limit, we are talking about the same thing, the human. Man's abstraction ability allows us to create theories. We have theories for just about everything. Theory formulation is one way of giving meaning and creating value. If meaning and value have any raison d'être, it is that they allow us to learn, expand and evolve. Sometimes, some forget that theories are models, not truths and then dogma and doctrine start percolating through and soon men stop thinking and start fanatically believing in words void of content, value or even reason. Man, in its very nature is a theoretical man (homo theoreticus). We wander from theory to theory testing its assumptions, refining the models, overthrowing worn out ideas, creating new ones, experimenting, exploring, playing. In reality, it is all theory. There is preciously little that we know, actually we do not know much, but we keep on guessing and creating theories in search for meaning and value. We abstract, we learn, and we evolve. The key to dealing with our nascent and ever evolving theoretical nature lies in our ingenuity and creativity in exercising to balance paradoxes. At reboot I touched on two of these without going into much depth. One is the paradox of private and public and the other is that of human and technology. Dualism and Ubification One of the keys in deciphering the nature of atomic particles - electron, proton, neutron - was the discovery that these have both corpuscular and wave behaviours. This is often referred to as the dual nature of matter. This so called duality was a fact that the so called classical mechanics - Newtonian and electromagnetic theories - could not reconcile. To resolve this (apparent) paradox, quantum mechanics was created. We are at this stage of an unresolved paradox when it comes to humans and things. The twentieth century was magnificent in its flurry of theories that either mechanized the human and made it a functionality in an economic machine, anthromorphized our beloved mac computers or laundry machines giving them human attributes, or in general treating abstractions as real things in the process called reification. What if? If we reconcile the dual nature of animal and things through a process that I call ubification, then the nature of the relationship between these two entities - animal and things - changes. It is no longer an either or of mechanization or reification, rather it is a rich manifold of both linear and nonlinear relations that can be envisioned. If we allow this abstraction to draw analogies from topology, then the whole not only increases in complexity, but also becomes a lot easier to understand. It is then as though both humans and things would be represented by either fields, rings or domains and that these could share dimensions and specific relations could be formulated between them to describe the interactions. Interaction needs Relationship And if all that there is, is relationship, then it is perhaps time that we spend some time looking at both the entities that interact through these relationships and the relationships themselves. How is it that we relate to sexuality? Looking around be it in the media, be it in our immediate communities and families, there is much yet to be learned and integrated into life before this very private-public aspect of our existence rests in its noble nature. There are three fundamental aspects to sexuality that form the whole of what it is: reproduction, pleasure and liberation. At one time or another we all relate to sexuality through one of these aspects or fields. Let's face it, we are here as a result of some form of reproductive activity and for all intents and purposes it is totally irrelevant that you are a test-tube baby, the accidental product of passionate copulation, or the result of some animal drive. Still, how much of sexuality drives us and at what level? Drivers We all know it, sex sells. What are the impulses behind it? Necessity is what I am fond of claiming as the main driver in all that we do. Perhaps this only reflects my own experience, and then again, it could be that I am human after all, and my own experience an attribute of that state of being human. What if the impulses for our needs come from three apparently different loci? These need loci, or drivers are experience, intellect and consciousness. The need for food is at the experience locus and it is the body that claims this need. That often annoying feature of being human and curious reflects the intellect's need for knowledge and meaning. But we have a third locus of need, the need spirituality resides in consciousness, and we constantly seek. This is a model that I can live with and which I have experienced on my own as giving some order to my own consciousness and perception. Action It was on the tatami of our Aikido dojo that I have learned much about this experience of integrating body, mind, and spirit. With my body I experience, the body can only be. With my mind and intellect I learn. The intellect i pleasure for pleasure as an interpretation of what the experience is. With my spirit I transcend and approach consciousness. Intuition and emotion are part of the various relationships that allow the de-fragmentation of body, mind and spirit. When I can bring all of the three together, then I can experience the serenity and naivety of being human and at peace. Evolution and Necessity "Save the world and get sex" could be how Tor Nørretranders expresses the same idea. I am not into saving the world, and that is only because the Sun will in a few billion years turn into a red giant thus causing the ultimate singularity for which no trans-humanist of any colouring or shading can really come up with a counter measure other than intergalactic exploration or time travel. However those two last hypothesis do land us right smack in the middle of science-fiction and that is a genre to which I do not easily subscribe. Not bent on saving the world nor on a mission, I view this thing called life to be one grand experiment and I am happy to be an actor in this story creating meaning and value from a place of respect and freedom. I am aware that we live in a world of inequality and abundance, and that in itself is just an observation at this point. When I look at what the great technological advances have been ever since humans keep records or can dig for them, there are only two that I can identify as evolutionary in a quantum or nonlinear way. The first evolutionary technological breakthrough came with agriculture. In creating the technology that allowed a greater number of humans to be fed and to survive by taking into account one of the primary necessities of the animal - food - the way was open to move from the locus of the body to that of the mind. When the body is nourished, then the mind can think. So it was, and eventually the printing press was invented after much thinking and a few adventuresome struggles along the way. The printing press facilitated the sharing of knowledge and allowed an accelerated trans-generational sharing of information thus creating an increased capacity for knowledge among the humans. Eventually we put a man on the Moon, but from my vantage point, that was just kaizen. Now that we have satiated the body, and perhaps satisfied the intellect's thirst for learning, are we ready to create the next technology that is going to liberate our mortal beings, not from death, but from the fragmentation of our essence? What is the next evolutionary technology breakthrough? Has it happened yet? Or is it about to happen? Could it be that we are still quite far from it and still rather steadily doing our kaizen bit like we have done for centuries? What is the next step in evolution? This short installment - but longish post - about Theoretical Man asks more questions that it answers. That is how I like it. Stay tuned. While in Copenhagen I took my a few pictures that are related to the mood of this.

Technorati Tags: evolution, grand-singularity, human, humanism, philosophy, public man, questions, reboot 9.0, reboot9, theoretical man, transhumanism, ubification

One

noreply@blogger.com (Dannie Jost) — Fri, 15 Jun 2007 17:02:00 +0000

IMGP2260.JPG, originally uploaded by jcf. xposted to the next

Really. Just one. The post with the contents of the talk is turning out rather long (ca. 3'000 words) and it will follow here soon. About one. There is just one culture, there is just one me. There is no better half to me. This is it. The other whom some might want to label as my better half is also another whole one. We are independent, we are autonomous, and we are connected. We relate to each other. One plus one is still one in this relational algebra of mine. Yet that other, the third one, is much more than a sum. To sum people up, or divide them, is a much too limited operation. He shares no privileged information with me. Intimacy is after all, just the ability to be oneself, to be authentically one. Really, just one. You and me - we - are ourselves be it in private, be it in public. I am a deeply private person, that is whom you experience when we are face to face, be it in public, be it in private. But we are more than just that, more than a few words, more than the sum of a few parts. We also play roles, we act, we play games, we hide, we pose, we deceive, we laugh, we cry, and we put on masks. I like to tell stories and find myself bound to the interface of fiction and nonfiction.

Technorati Tags: one, private, public, reboot 9.0, reboot9, theoretical man

reboot 9.0 - Epidermical Overview

noreply@blogger.com (Dannie Jost) — Fri, 15 Jun 2007 11:02:00 +0000

First of all I loved all the swag that was and that was not. The last thing that I need is another bag, however the reboot 9.0 green notebook in the same format as my Favorit notebooks was just right. I carry that format notebook with me everywhere, and that I can not say for my notebook with the Apple logo on the case that weighs as much as a brick, however has a little bit more intelligence on some occasions. Do machines have intelligence? Do humans? The mood for the whole of my experience at this reboot 9.0 was set by the opening talk. I could not find in this talk anything said or displayed that was not fascinating or along the lines of my own thinking, although my own thinking in these matters may have a quantum twist. I look forward to a bit more thinking of what Tor Nørretranders said and writes. Brands and trademarks are on my mind. Reboot is starting to feel like a brand, and I do wish that it would be something much more than just a brand, so I do hope that Thomas is watching that. This brings me to the first observation about this reboot 9.0 in the context of the ideas floating around loose in my head: money. Branding of all things has something to do with ownership, and then with reputation or provenance. Trademarks are however a monopoly granted by government to individuals or other judicial entities over the use of a particular designation, logo or jingle. I shall not go into technicalities of trademark registration, however I do recommend that if you are building a brand, even a personal brand, you ought to acquire basic practical knowledge about trademarks. Why is that? Very simply because they are part of our culture - not just part of the economy or commercial tools - and thus require to be taken into account. I am not too terribly inclined to register trademarks for every neologism that I create. I do spend however some energy in giving the newborn words some exposure and claim to the cultural patrimony that we call language. If we leave it at that, then brand is all about the reputation thing, and brand is not all bad in a culture heavily influenced by electronic and other media. A good read on this is Adam Arvidsson's book "Brands" which I discovered after reboot 8.0. Reputation is something that you own, but can not sell, it is an intrinsic and intangible characteristic of either a product, person, or community. Reputation can indeed be a collective thing. I am on the way home and the feeling is that the present is just a very volatile moment that never returns. For each chance taken, there are hundreds missed. Five hundred people and two days is a densely packed event potentiality and that together with over fifty talks, presentations, conversations and demonstrations make it a very abundant field of interaction. I was left thinking about Intuition, Visual Complexity, Newspeak and quite enamored by the ideas that sprouted in my head during Quantum Humanism. One consequence of all of this is that I have taken to reading Karl Marx's Das Kapital in German, and now wonder more and more about language. Need to hack language, really do!

Technorati Tags: copenhagen, denmark, human, humanism, language, hack, quantum humanism, reboot 9.0, reboot9

Two philosophers connecting

noreply@blogger.com (Dannie Jost) — Fri, 08 Jun 2007 07:47:00 +0000

Two philosophers connecting Originally uploaded by jcf. During the last few minutes of my talk/discussion of "Theoretical Man" Oleg and I got practical and down to the floor for a drawing.

Technorati Tags: philosophy, public man, reboot 9.0, reboot9, theoretical man

Geek Army Knife podcasters in action

noreply@blogger.com (Dannie Jost) — Mon, 04 Jun 2007 20:08:00 +0000

DSC_0016.JPG Originally uploaded by thomaskay. What is it like to be human? File this under the title: Real Life at Reboot

Technorati Tags: copenhagen, reboot 9.0, reboot9