A New Quiescent Bardo State After a Synaptic Storm

Given the strange conscious states of the fall, amidst PHN attacks and pixelslips and whatnot, it was an odd experience to attend the Defrag conference in Denver in mid-November, dedicated to trying to find larger meaning and structure in the emergent social networks that have taken over most static web sites. I have identified two problem areas in posts on the Smartbook blog, here and here. I'll summarize those areas below, but first a word about the tie between true believers and marketing: Defrag and its cousin Glue are often given kudos for avoiding the marketing hype of conferences like Web 2.0. Nevertheless, Bill Joy of Sun Microsystems warned us long ago, regarding nanotechnology, that even sober engineers and programmers can be drinkers-of-Kool-Aid if they speak of technological promises without probing negative social consequences. Defrag 2009 had a bit of that back-slapping feel. Twitter and real-time streams and Facebook and live-update aggregation were given a heavier dissection than in other venues, true, but there was a little too much self-congratulatory examination of the synaptic web without enough deep critique. Still, here's what I found interesting in what real-time web pundits had to say:

First, the notion of searching static web sites is becoming as archaic as an encyclopedia on a CD-ROM. Information arises in an emergent fashion through the sharing and discovery of information real-time across social media sites. This means that the interface of choice moves away from a Word or Excel document, or even an email inbox, and toward a real-time status update feed. What we see at the top of a Facebook page of Tweetdeck may be the interface of choice for many information sites in the future. How does any data-management system keep up with this torrential real-time feed and filter out relevant information without missing key nuggets? Good question.

In the second part of my Smartbook posts, I addressed a tougher topic that arose with Khris Loux's presentation on the synaptic web. If we really want to consider client nodes (human individuals, usually) in social networks to be the equivalent of a synapse, then all those rules about neural-network behavior - learning through back-propagation, finding a higher state of consciousness through simulated annealing, etc. - apply. There is also the issue of allowing the uber-brain of a global network to establish long-term memory through the different oscillatory pattern of a sleep cycle. Where does that exist in the constant chattery updates of Twitter or Facebook? The notion of an institutional memory gets shallower and shallower. Keynote speaker Stowe Boyd pointed out that Twitter "memory" now has decreased from two weeks to two days, and may be shrunk to minutes if Twitter's growth trend continues. A conscious, sentient entity without a working memory is reduced to sound and fury, signifying nothing.

Some people in the journalism community fret about how the replacement of real newsgathering by quick tweets will significantly harm people's understanding of the world around them. Others who study consciousness itself are concerned that social networks, particularly rapid-update systems like Twitter, will encourage superficiality more than the rapid channel-changing that was the source of so much hand-wringing in the 1980s. But that merely mentions two manifestations of a larger issue: The synaptic web that is emerging based on shared communities using real-time feeds, is a creature living in the present and lumbering forward of its own accord. On a certain level, we have lopped off large sections of the cortex and cerebellum in this global brain, and have reduced the global consciousness to its limbic level. The synaptic web needs to re-evolve a higher brain function, which can accommodate memory and analysis even as real-time streams grow exponentially. Short of a global crisis of some sort, we are not going to be stopping those constant tweetstorms and live-update feeds. We need to find a way to recapture remembering, to design an institutional memory, even in the midst of a synaptic storm.

Cities of the Plain

I'm with Cormac McCarthy - Those rare cities dispersed between the Mississippi and the Rockies have never gotten their due, and many of them hold a charm that will pull you into repeated visits back to Omaha, Lawrence, Fargo... Bruce Springsteen also caught the flavor of the long-distance Plains drive in his wonderful 1982 acoustic album Nebraska. I got invited to give a couple speeches at Creighton University and St. Mary's College in Omaha in early November, and decided to once again do a solo long drive down that I-76/I-80 corridor. In my first experience taking this road at age 17, heading to Colorado, the great transcendent expeirence was listening to King Crimson's Starless and Bible Black on an endless 8-track tape loop at 3 in the morning, after everyone else fell asleep. It was so moving, I went out immediately that year, and had a T-shirt made proclaiming "This Night Wounds Time."

So I drove the corridor once again, skipping a stop at the Archway Memorial to the Platte River Road pioneers, but stopping to visit Fort Kearny, named for Stephen Kearny, a key player for the struggle for California during the Mexican War of the 1840s. Stopped at the desolate area that had once been home to 'Dobytown,' the place where William Tecumseh Sherman met his match with a whiskey that was such an apostasy, Sherman named it 'tanglefoot.' (I should mention, the nearby town of Kearney, Neb. is where Richard Powers located his beautiful 2006 book, The Echo Maker, which won the National Book Award.) Since this was not sand hill crane season, there was little reason to see much of Kearney (yes, the town adds an "e" not present in fort or Stephen), where the quaint places Powers described are overridden with chain restaurants and corny steak houses.




The occasion of my visit was the Strategic Space Symposium in downtown Omaha, which brings out military contractors to talk about planetary dominance through orbital space. Nebraskans for Peace wanted to have speakers at the local colleges to challenge that concept, and a direct-action group, Midwest Catholic Workers, had the die-in shown above. Among those arrested were 92-year-old Peg Gallagher, and Catholic activists Louis Vitale, Frank Cordaro, and Jack MacCaslin. Below is an excerpt from a classroom talk I gave at Creighton (Part 2 of the same speech is at this link).



Every time I go to Omaha, my good friend Frances Mendenhall is always up to something new. She edits and publishes videos, including Democracy Now, for the local public-access channels, and is always agitating the local authorities on topics surrounding net neutrality, broadband access policies of common carriers, etc. She also has a community garden that grew enough squash this year to feed the multitudes, using the infamous "cardboard in the squash garden" growing method. This year, Frances had bought the house next to hers, gutted it, and was rebuilding it for both zero net energy and multiple broadband access. She was pulling coaxial and Ethernet cable simultaneously when I visited her.



No trips to Conor Oberst's Saddle Creek Records this time around. My next plains visit might have to be to Lawrence, where it's been far too long since I relived the days of "Bloody Kansas." But Omaha, Omaha, I'll always love my Omaha, as staid and Republican as it may be on the outside (I know, not one to talk living in Colorado Springs)....

Vigor, Valor, and Violence

It's probably only coincidence that I came across Josef Joffe's essay in Foreign Affairs, 'The Default Power,' just as I cruised past the central point in reading Shelby Foote's 3000-page Civil War history. Joffe makes a lot of legitimate points in predicting that the United States will remain a default hyperpower for decades to come, despite a financial collapse and the rise of Asia. Where I have a problem is when Joffe chides the European Union for losing its "warrior culture," which the U.S. and even the U.K. maintain in spades, according to Joffe. Of course, he's right. And of course, making the argument that the warrior culture should be purged by degrees seems to play right into the school of Cassandras who warn that an empire is doomed when it "goes soft" - it stops propping up its warriors and seeking the expansion of its own territory, in favor of those wimpy activities like diplomacy.

I was mulling just these sort of cultural images in absorbing Foote. His Civil War: A Narrative History is as much a classic as Gibbons' Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Yet it is troubling because of the baggage Foote brings to the table. I first became aware of said baggage when he was interviewed shortly after Ken Burns' TV series came out. Foote said that even knowing what he knew now, he would, as a Southerner, have to fight with the South because "these are my people." He made these comments just when the Serbia struggles were at their height. I thought, "How cowardly, to choose allegiance based on family, clan, race, or grouping. If you know your chosen clique is wrong, you should stand up and say so. Tribal loyalties mean nothing compared to the integrity of ideals."

Foote's trilogy is a definite throwback to a previous era, both in its use of inappropriate racial stereotypes that seem inexcusably quaint for the 1960s, when it was written, and also for its use of 19th-century words like "improvement" and "vigor." The last is maddening, as we do not see the word used in histories of warfare written in the last few decades. That's because vigor, in this context, is a synonym for machismo. And it maps into the warrior culture concept Joffe is defending.

I realize that classes at West Point/Citadel/AFA are still filled with tales of honor and the warrior mystique. I have no problem with people relying on personal honor and virtue. But a good part of personal violence is tied to ideas of clan-based honor and virtue, enhanced with the machismo that passes for "vigor." And once we purge people of those group-related concepts of honor, valor, virtue, and vigor, the personal violence in society goes way down.

Islamic culture isn't there yet, which is why honor killings are still prevalent outside the Judeo-Christian realm. But it was not so long ago when duels in the U.S. and Europe were fought over honor, and victory went to the "vigorous." We don't shoot each other in honor duels any more, just as Neanderthal clubs are no longer part of daily fashion statements. Face it, the 'v' words are all tied to violence, and they all represent a lower and somewhat moronic form of conflict resolution.

I've often spoken out against standoff warfare in this blog, due to its dehumanizing nature, and the fact that you rarely see the blood from a UAV strike. But if we can point to something positive from standoff warfare, it's the degree to which it has taken the dimension of honor and virtue out of war. There has not been a true ground-based hand-to-hand conflict between armies, involving the United States, since Korea, and there have been very few such wars worldwide in the past 50 years. Since Vietnam, it's all been guerilla skirmishes and robotic warfare. There is nothing virtuous or vigorous or valorous about such notions of war, which might just lead us to conclude there is little that is worthy about war itself. But before we can move beyond war, we have to purge ourselves of the notion that virtue and honor, at least as they apply to the group rather than the individual, are still worthy concepts that serve the warrior culture. In reality, they are outmoded ideals that increase the levels of violence in society.

UAV Primer from MacGregor Eddy

I'll be visiting Creighton University in Omaha Tuesday, speaking on standoff warfare and space. MacGregor Eddy passes on this basic primer on why we need to pay attention to UAVs. Just so you know.

One Fast Move Or I'm Gone: Kerouac's Big Sur

I cannot recommend the film "One Fast Move Or I'm Gone: Kerouac's Big Sur" (Dar Williams, Patti Smith, Lenny Kaye, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Michael McClure, Carolyn Cassady, Sam Shepard, Tom Waits, Robert Hunter) enough, nor can I recommend the soundtrack by Jay Farrar and Ben Gibbard enough. There is nothing more to say, except direct you here.

"You Lie!"

I'll admit straight off the bat that I have my doubts about emulating the tactics of your enemies, particularly when both their means and ends are inherently idiotic. Nevertheless, it felt great to disrupt Rep. Doug Lamborn's Town Hall meeting on health care today, if only to use the tactics the tea-partiers have used so effectively in the past.

Why be a jerk? Because Colorado Springs, while populated with many cool people, represents a closed community with closed politics and closed ideas. It is controlled by a tight clique of Libertarians, and its representative in Congress, Doug Lamborn, is the kind of guy who flew down to Honduras to support the coup. Frankly, I don't want no stinkin' dialog. I want to piss people off.

And in the end, the range of issues discussed regarding the public option and the role of health insurance companies was broader due to a rude intrusion than it would have been for playing nice. And I will give Doug Lamborn credit where credit is due. At one point, he said to his conservative supporters, "Well, turnabout is fair play. Some of those tea parties have been pretty rowdy."

Special award to good friend Pat Hill, who gave a dynamite speech on her health-insurance experience to a rally last week, and took on a prime role at the Town Hall. The Gazette ran a great photo of her here.

PHN

I haven't updated this blog in the last few weeks because I've been too busy experiencing the secular world. Performances and civic actions and visits from friends were all piled into a brief period in early October, so the meditation and processing of information got put on hold in favor of raw experience.

Unfortunately, the nervous system does not do well with buffered traffic jams of unprocessed information after bouts of shingles. It uses PHN, or post-herpetic neuralgia, as a way of putting an exclamation point on the limits of Available Bit-Rate living. Now, I'm a lucky guy, in that PHN hits me in flares as the neural-network traffic jams increase. Some victims of shingles have such damage done to nerve bundles that they experience PHN as a constant pain, a residual unpleasant leftover of plain ol' living. That would be icky.

Let's step back for those not in the loop. Shingles, or herpes zoster, is the leftover retroviral component of chicken pox. If you've had chicken pox as a child, you have a chance of getting shingles as young as your teen years, though it tends to show up when you get as old and grumpy as me. When a funny pox-like rash breaks out on your waist, arms, or face, you've got shingles. The rash itself isn't so bad, but your nerves in your limbs and trunk start doing weird things, acting as if they have severe sunburn or have been hit with hammers. It's treated with a cyclovir derivative, and lasts about a week. The weird thing is, you are contagious to those who have not had chicken pox - but they don't come down with shingles, they come down with chicken pox!

The folks that have chronic PHN seem to have had significant damage done to nerve bundles. They require some serious drug regimens, and I wonder if their ability to process visual or audio information is impacted - I don't think that's been studied very much. Those of us with the flare varieties seem to respond to sensual cues. If one sense is over-stimulated, it's usually not a problem, but if all senses are on overload, watch out! That's why researchers are beginning to see public events like a fair or amusement park as being those most like to stimulate a flare. Movies, concerts, plays, not so much - unless they're combined with everything else.

No surprise I hit my BRZILCH! moment. As soon as I got back from the San Francisco trip to Intel Developer Forum described above, I had to plan for a week's worth of Afghanistan actions, including the talk of Father Louis Vitale.

Ordinarily, the all-encompassing ice fog of Oct. 10-12 might have been a sense reducer, but I had to go see my friends Paul and Shea, and watch all the semi-trucks jackknife on the freeway. No letup there...












The very next day, my sister and niece arrived in Denver for a fast visit, so we took them wandering around the 16th St. mall, up to Boulder to the Dushanbe teahouse and Ethiopian food, and around the high points of the DIA-downtown corridor.



And, as soon as Lisa and Molly left, there was the political-punky-reggae concert of State Radio to attend, then Ping Chong's moving play about the disabled, Invisible Voices, then helping get the registration and repairs for Abby's new Jetta ready.




And then a Saturday night of Middle Eastern food and beer-tasting pumpkin brews, and a million other adventures. Some time around Shakira's performance on Saturday Night Live (yeah, that's right, blame Shakira), the nerve system shorted out. BRZILCH! Time for a reboot! Luckily, there are several days of low-input, low-impact activities to bring the applications back up in the brain. I just hope I don't have to endure the real-life equivalent of Microsoft's "Blue Screen of Death."