Kane X. Faucher's Blog
August 3, 2016
B0T
B0T (The follow-up to B1T), is now available. I'll be working on an academic book under contract with a UK uni press on a political economy critique of online social capital, due out sometime in 2017.
June 19, 2015
Draft Complete - UPDATE
First draft of B1T, a data/social engineering novel, is done - so in flood the usual doubts as to whether it can stand on its own legs. I've sent out a draft to a trusted reader and will await the verdict if it should be published, polished, or indefinitely shelved.
It's out: http://www.amazon.com/B1T-1-Kane-Fauc...
It's out: http://www.amazon.com/B1T-1-Kane-Fauc...
May 12, 2014
Adjuncts, Revenge, and Adaptation
I've tried my hand at adaptation here: http://www.amazon.com/Professor-Montg...
For those of you who may not know, over 2/3 of faculty in the US are precariously employed and underpaid adjuncts. Many are the stories of these educational champions who are forced to collect food stamps, have no benefits coverage, and can be fired at the whim of universities and colleges. The situation in Canada is only slightly better, at about 50%. The availability of tenure-track jobs has been steadily drying up, and yet enrolments continue to grow. Administrators love the academic reserve army of adjunct labour because they are cheap and disposable. This is higher education's shame.
My attempt here has been to adapt Alexandre Dumas' Count of Monte Cristo to tell a story about higher education. At first I was thinking it would be too difficult to entwine Dumas' revenge epic with a retelling from the higher education context. However, it fit much better than I could have imagined.
If you are an adjunct, enjoyed the original novel by Dumas, or both, you might want to give this one a read.
For those of you who may not know, over 2/3 of faculty in the US are precariously employed and underpaid adjuncts. Many are the stories of these educational champions who are forced to collect food stamps, have no benefits coverage, and can be fired at the whim of universities and colleges. The situation in Canada is only slightly better, at about 50%. The availability of tenure-track jobs has been steadily drying up, and yet enrolments continue to grow. Administrators love the academic reserve army of adjunct labour because they are cheap and disposable. This is higher education's shame.
My attempt here has been to adapt Alexandre Dumas' Count of Monte Cristo to tell a story about higher education. At first I was thinking it would be too difficult to entwine Dumas' revenge epic with a retelling from the higher education context. However, it fit much better than I could have imagined.
If you are an adjunct, enjoyed the original novel by Dumas, or both, you might want to give this one a read.
April 19, 2014
Preface to the ongoing novel on big data, "B1T B0T"
Among the throng of the disillusioned, gadget-prone, unemployed youth loosely confederated by a purpose given to them by hacktivist heroes in the wholesale rejection of government and corporate control over personal data, something far more sinister had been revealed. Those same hacktivist heroes, those computer libertarian outlaws that yanked the curtain of secrecy from the states of the world to reveal the extent of data collection were themselves proponents of an ideological agenda of rampant individualism. More sinister still was the gradual realization among these same angry youth, that their actions had for so long supported the aims of the state, their consumer behaviour reproducing the very same wretched working conditions in the most destitute of places on earth and contributing to their lack of employment opportunity. They priced themselves out of the job market as a result of buying things cheaply and in abundance.
The digital tools of their limping and confused revolution added ever more burden upon an ailing environment they claimed they wanted to heal. Their digital behaviour in profile management and the revision of their own digital records was little more than the devolution unto the individual of what was once the function of the state and corporate-controlled media: memory management. Whether it was by the Wilder Penfield experiments or in the way the media reshaped traumatic events to convey a more simple if not false story that contradicted the actual events themselves, this was no longer necessary in the auto-regulating control mechanisms installed within each and every individual under the guise of freedom of choice, flexibility, mobility, and the individual freedom to buy.
So many of these youth had laboured in service of an ideal, to reclaim the noble image and ideal of the Great Citizen. But that ideal never existed in the first place. It was a phantom history created by the minds of marketing professionals and agents of social engineering. The people had, for well over a century, always been consumers first, guided in their choices and driven by desires that were given material form.
Those consumer products of democracy and true freedom floated upon the sludge of the oppression of others, permissible violence, environmental destruction, the privatizing of all that was once public, the glorification of disloyal and mercenary financial heroes, the massive buy-in that an educated populace was anything more than an inflated cash system of ceremonial credentialization.
Enfolding this entire system in an ethereal, electric wrap is power, the complex, growing, arterial mesh that energizes what occurs inside is the steady pulse of data.
For those few who clandestinely tease secrets out of this mesh, who have the sharp ears to pierce the static, the individuals and systems inside are made to dance. With nothing more than data, at a considerable scale or size, we need only observe and measure. Vast data vitiates the requirements for critique or guesswork. The new digital positivism does not rise like some imposing monolith to cast its shadow over the world it governs, but instead rises up inside and through every limb of individuals and systems, feeding off a teeming supply of data. Countless invisible wires sluicing through every organism, every object, titrated into central processors and tended by data buccaneers.
Consider, if you will, the solitary bit, not set in an environment awash with semi-orderly electrons, and itself not even configured as one or zero. What can we say of it? Like Being and Nothing in the work of G.W.F. Hegel, it is purely conceptual without determination. The bit must be determined by what it is not in order to have become a particular bit, such as one or zero. This basest of units is the currency of what is now called information, and information is the measure of the relative order of a system. We say relative here because one would be hard pressed to find a system so pure that it is perfectly ordered or disordered outside of mathematics. It is simply by a bit of convention that eight bits makes the byte. However, each of those bits would have to possess a value of either one or zero. In thinking about that solitary and undetermined bit, we are not rushing off to say that it is a qubit, i.e., the superposition of one and zero, but considering the bit absolutely devoid of either so that it remains ambiguous, undetermined, and unthinkable.
For some who subscribe to a kind of digital atomism, the entire universe is composed of bits. Others, who eschew such binaries as vulgar may also point up the metaphysical difficulties that arise from the consequences of such a view, that God and Universal Computer are identical. That Life is a Program, and the only reason we cannot predict the future is not because we lack access to all the variables to make the computation, in a Laplacean thought experiment, but because the program is running at the fastest possible speed. Life, the Program, unfolds each of its steps at a pace that cannot be exceeded. This, too, calls up an arsenal of objections.
Baruch Spinoza, the 17th century Dutch rationalist philosopher, came close to this view of God as Computer by stripping God of free will, but it is perhaps to G.W.Leibniz’s credit that this idea of the universal computer is plugged into the human imagination with his theory of the monads, each of them separate, semi-autonomous units, like bits, that are arranged in the best of possible ways.
From the bit now are erected vast empires when once they were to be fashioned from the raw earth. The bit is not the crude substance of timber, coal, iron ore. The bit is the high symbol of choice, and so negligibly small, forming a delicate embroidery where on each web is a chain of decisions. Altering just one amplifies the effect all throughout that linear sequence, seeding micro-events at each discrete step.
A bit forms part of a simple list of instructions, more like a gene than an atom.
Consider, if you will, the bot. An entire history of automata springs up on its many simple machines, from the Greek myths where Hephaestus forges his own humanoid machines up through various mechanical apparatuses that refilled toilets, wrote letters, bowed, turned, and operated with clockwork autonomy. Today, the bots have been miniaturized; they are, in effect, programs composed of several bits that are tasked to do a variety of digital chores such as indexing the web or producing human-like text that ever more passes the Turing Test.
The digital tools of their limping and confused revolution added ever more burden upon an ailing environment they claimed they wanted to heal. Their digital behaviour in profile management and the revision of their own digital records was little more than the devolution unto the individual of what was once the function of the state and corporate-controlled media: memory management. Whether it was by the Wilder Penfield experiments or in the way the media reshaped traumatic events to convey a more simple if not false story that contradicted the actual events themselves, this was no longer necessary in the auto-regulating control mechanisms installed within each and every individual under the guise of freedom of choice, flexibility, mobility, and the individual freedom to buy.
So many of these youth had laboured in service of an ideal, to reclaim the noble image and ideal of the Great Citizen. But that ideal never existed in the first place. It was a phantom history created by the minds of marketing professionals and agents of social engineering. The people had, for well over a century, always been consumers first, guided in their choices and driven by desires that were given material form.
Those consumer products of democracy and true freedom floated upon the sludge of the oppression of others, permissible violence, environmental destruction, the privatizing of all that was once public, the glorification of disloyal and mercenary financial heroes, the massive buy-in that an educated populace was anything more than an inflated cash system of ceremonial credentialization.
Enfolding this entire system in an ethereal, electric wrap is power, the complex, growing, arterial mesh that energizes what occurs inside is the steady pulse of data.
For those few who clandestinely tease secrets out of this mesh, who have the sharp ears to pierce the static, the individuals and systems inside are made to dance. With nothing more than data, at a considerable scale or size, we need only observe and measure. Vast data vitiates the requirements for critique or guesswork. The new digital positivism does not rise like some imposing monolith to cast its shadow over the world it governs, but instead rises up inside and through every limb of individuals and systems, feeding off a teeming supply of data. Countless invisible wires sluicing through every organism, every object, titrated into central processors and tended by data buccaneers.
Consider, if you will, the solitary bit, not set in an environment awash with semi-orderly electrons, and itself not even configured as one or zero. What can we say of it? Like Being and Nothing in the work of G.W.F. Hegel, it is purely conceptual without determination. The bit must be determined by what it is not in order to have become a particular bit, such as one or zero. This basest of units is the currency of what is now called information, and information is the measure of the relative order of a system. We say relative here because one would be hard pressed to find a system so pure that it is perfectly ordered or disordered outside of mathematics. It is simply by a bit of convention that eight bits makes the byte. However, each of those bits would have to possess a value of either one or zero. In thinking about that solitary and undetermined bit, we are not rushing off to say that it is a qubit, i.e., the superposition of one and zero, but considering the bit absolutely devoid of either so that it remains ambiguous, undetermined, and unthinkable.
For some who subscribe to a kind of digital atomism, the entire universe is composed of bits. Others, who eschew such binaries as vulgar may also point up the metaphysical difficulties that arise from the consequences of such a view, that God and Universal Computer are identical. That Life is a Program, and the only reason we cannot predict the future is not because we lack access to all the variables to make the computation, in a Laplacean thought experiment, but because the program is running at the fastest possible speed. Life, the Program, unfolds each of its steps at a pace that cannot be exceeded. This, too, calls up an arsenal of objections.
Baruch Spinoza, the 17th century Dutch rationalist philosopher, came close to this view of God as Computer by stripping God of free will, but it is perhaps to G.W.Leibniz’s credit that this idea of the universal computer is plugged into the human imagination with his theory of the monads, each of them separate, semi-autonomous units, like bits, that are arranged in the best of possible ways.
From the bit now are erected vast empires when once they were to be fashioned from the raw earth. The bit is not the crude substance of timber, coal, iron ore. The bit is the high symbol of choice, and so negligibly small, forming a delicate embroidery where on each web is a chain of decisions. Altering just one amplifies the effect all throughout that linear sequence, seeding micro-events at each discrete step.
A bit forms part of a simple list of instructions, more like a gene than an atom.
Consider, if you will, the bot. An entire history of automata springs up on its many simple machines, from the Greek myths where Hephaestus forges his own humanoid machines up through various mechanical apparatuses that refilled toilets, wrote letters, bowed, turned, and operated with clockwork autonomy. Today, the bots have been miniaturized; they are, in effect, programs composed of several bits that are tasked to do a variety of digital chores such as indexing the web or producing human-like text that ever more passes the Turing Test.
An explanatory chapter selection from my ongoing book on big data: brief history of social control/engineering
A Brief History of Social Engineering: From Prediction to Prescription
The human all too human desire for controlling other human beings is one of the invariant features of the species. All that changes with the generations would be the refinement of the mechanisms by which other human beings can be controlled, the techniques for successful social engineering, and being able to better predict - or prescribe - desired outcomes.
The end product of millennia of focus - and more particularly the technics of social control in the past three centuries - can be located right where you may find yourself: at the computer or portable device, being given a choice from a set of restricted choices on a drop-down menu, set in a rigid and gridded digital environment that appeals to your sense of freedom of choice while at the same time limiting it.
Let us take the first arbitrary example: that patron saint of cybernetics as identified by cybernetics founder Norbert Wiener: Leibniz. Now, Leibniz’ theory of the monads - like little atomistic souls arranged in the most harmonious pattern according to some enclosing deity program - appears to suggest that command and control is built into the metaphysical system. Deviations are corrected, and can be done so through internal regulation. It would not be long until the Age of Enlightenment would privilege Reason, but also occupy itself with an interest in automata. We push through the folds of history and find ourselves on the eve of the industrial revolution, with the invention of the loom and the guillotine - both instruments that automate functions and have a technological determinist effect on human beings. Introduce the steam engine, develop a calculating machine, and it would not be long until entire human populations engage in a large migration from the fields to the factories. In those “satanic mills” is a new value, built on utilitarianism, which may be called “factory time.” Nothing better controls the motions of the human body better than subjugating it to the movements of the machine. We know this from Karl Marx. We also know that once we can control the physiological, it is but one step to control the psychological by simply applying similar techniques. Religion functioned as a convenient social backstop to ensure workers in deplorable conditions would accept these conditions as a down payment on their entrance to heaven. Know thy place in the social order was far more important than the Socratic know thyself. Marx speaks a great deal about the alienation of the worker from the products of his labour, from his fellow workers, and from the world at large. The factory is the world, and the product leading to profit the entire reality of that world.
Enter Taylorism to further mechanize labour processes, but also enter the rise of the social sciences - in itself not an innocuous pursuit, for it assumes that social behaviour in both the individual and the collective sense can be measured scientifically, which then provides the tools for others to control. We might turn to the birth of positivism in the person of Auguste Comte. The belief in the clockwork universe where all were simply working out the predestined history towards its complete perfection was already the dream of dialectical thinkers like Hegel, or as part of the thought experiment of Laplace who said that if we could know the state of all particles in the universe, we could predict every future state and thus the future itself.
But enter entropy, that mischievous wrecker. Entropy is the measure of relative disorder in a system. The social equivalent might be the masses, the horde, the irrational forces that occasionally erupt in strikes and revolutions. Social mass unrest was a good symbol of entropy, and so we might refer to an important book written in 1899 by Gustav le Bon entitled La psychologie des foules (translated as simply “Crowds”). A great deal of pessimism regarding the unpredictability of crowds was already manifest in the uneasy Balance of Power, in various violent uprisings, and eventually in the first world war. There had to be a way of optimizing the social system to bring it back to harmonious function, to correct for unpredictable deviations. A whole science of crowd phenomena had been born. Such a desire for mass control was already being employed by V.I. Lenin in the 1917 Russian Revolution, and it should be said that there are so few successful examples of social control in history than this experiment conducted over such a long period - yet it tended towards blunt means of social control in the form of purges, suppression, spot assassinations, sentences to the gulags, complete control over culture and media, and one of the most advanced spy networks ever devised matched by the most meticulous record-keeping prior to the Internet.
Crowd control takes so many forms, and in the salad days we could even point to the way cities are laid out to facilitate containment and capture. But let us turn specifically to the United States to witness how they dealt with their own crowd problems and solutions.
We could turn to some of the pioneers of both public opinion and public relations, respectively, for how this would work out in practical terms. The much celebrated pioneer of the study of public opinion, Walter Lippmann, is fairly blunt in his appraisal of the masses: they are stupid, gullible, easily persuaded, and so must be directed by an elite few in the media to ensure social harmony. It meant simplifying issues to mere binaries so that opinion would not have to contend with unnerving shades of grey. Or, we may turn to that father of public relations, Edward Bernays, who also held that the masses were ignorant and unpredictable, and so needed to be guided. He ransacked his uncle Sigmund Freud’s theory of the unconscious and found the pecuniary hook to shift the economy from necessity to desire. He had located the perfect channel for the bubbling ferment of the unconscious: shopping. Imbuing all sorts of objects with psychoanalytic significance, he was able to get women to smoke, transformed unpopular politicians into more likable figures, popularized otherwise more high-brow entertainment for a mid-brow audience who craved status but also generally reacted negatively to higher cultural forms because of inborn social inferiority, and created many of the fictions that live on today, such as the need for the big breakfast. To list his “accomplishments” is worthy of its own special treatment.
Let us take just one lateral step to consider another American who was critical of the social world and where it was headed: the sociologist Thorstein Veblen. If anyone was puzzled why he seemed so misanthropic, disagreeably brusque, and impatient with others, one has only to read his works which paint an unflattering picture of human beings as progressing in one sense, but stubbornly invariant in another. That is, even with all the great developments in institutions and technologies, human beings were little changed from their primitive days of conspicuous status-chasing behaviours linked to power and domination, and in abiding by absurd rituals and ceremonial behaviours that were entirely superfluous. Judge for yourself why you might select the silver flatware over the steel variety when the former is far less durable than the latter. Or, perhaps you might consider attending a university’s convocation where the assembled don the medieval garb and engage in a ceremony that has little to do with education or what it means today.
The unchecked irrationality of capitalism and the promotion of regular citizens - soon to be redefined as consumers - to participate in the stock market (another Bernays intervention) would eventually recreate the economic bubbles of yesteryear (do read Charles Mackay’s Extraordinary Popular Delusions, and specifically the chapters dealing with tulipomania and the South Seas Bubble - Mackay would have got on famously with Veblen). And so the stock market crash.
And the rise of fascism in Italy, its contagion spreading to Germany. The irrational forces of love (for the leader) and hate (of the “other”) gave the unconscious its sustenance. The merger of the nazi mysticism and industrialized technological apparatus had shown itself to be remarkably adept at social engineering and control. The German technical focus on precision and meticulous record-keeping was perhaps even more sophisticated than the Soviets.
At the conclusion of the war with its twin nuclear finale, the need for social control became ever more urgent. Normalization was the watchword of the period. So, in the US, just as the women had been encouraged en masse to labour in the factories under the illusion of empowerment, they had to be shuffled out and back into the domestic home to make way for the returning soldiers. Democracy had to be vigorously promoted, and this was achieved through several means. The bubbling up of the Cold War also meant a need to divide the world into a useful binary that would regulate geopolitics and the individuals themselves. Normalization continued through the use of educational films on proper behaviours at home, in school, to despise difference, to embrace homogeneity and consumerism, and to be diligent patriots. As the suburbs yawned their way across the landscape, the automobile was king. The threat of nuclear annihilation was mitigated in part by stealing from Joseph Goebbel’s propaganda playbook: to optimize anxiety so that there was just enough fear to keep people vigilant, but not so much that it would be paralyzing.
But it is 1948 when Norbert Wiener publishes his book, Cybernetics: Command and Communication in the Animal and the Machine. This was a watershed year as Claude E. Shannon published his famous paper “The Theory of Mathematical Communication.” Of course, let it be known that the math and engineering Cold War hawks like Weaver and Neumann applied Shannon’s theory in ways that caused the author to retreat from the world. So begins the birth of the computer age and predictability, the creation of feedback systems to better control outcomes, the development of models that might apply to fields as diverse as economics, engineering, linguistics, anthropology, and even literary criticism. Cybernetics became the flavour of the month, an interdisciplinary approach to deferring entropy and optimizing order.
In parallel to these considerations was the new crop of Austrian and Chicago school economists who - against psychoanalysis, empirical verification, or actual observation - claimed that human beings were fundamentally rational beings who made rational choices as a means of seeking advantage. Mix this absurd axiomatic view of human nature with the philosophy of Ayn Rand who champions individualism over compassion, and rational instrumentalism over all other modes of thought, and you create the perfect conditions of neoliberal economic theory with its belief in the mysticism of technology, progress, borderless trade, deindustrialization, the service economy, dismantling unions and the Keynesian welfare state (or: socialism for the corporations and capitalism for the rest of us), the triumph of the calculating and disloyal narcissist, mercenary entrepreneurialism, so-called “small government,” and widespread deregulation, all in the belief that the market shall decide, and that it can be controlled with the use of prediction modeling. That, as we have learned, has failed.
The failure of the youth mobilization movements of the 1960s was brought about through targeted commodification and a pop culture feedback system (or, perhaps akin to what Frankfurt School sociologist Theodor Adorno called the “culture industry”). The 1970s saw both a trumpeting of selfishness and a fundamental change in how exchange rates operated. The rise of populist neoliberals and neoconservatives was in full flower, partially thanks to the rabid, screeching minority of fundamentalist evangelicals who hijacked the political process.
How can we forget one of the other means of social control that also came into being in the 1980s - a far more material, programmatic, and profitable venture in the form of the pharmaceutical industry. Rather than simply seeing the therapist, which in itself is too prone to error, why not regulate human emotions by applying a clinical label that makes humans feel special (“I have x disorder”), followed by a simple solution in the form of a pill? The mind and all its problems, real or fabricated, was little more than a chemical engineering problem, and a profitable solution was at hand. It was no longer socially acceptable to be sad, to be anxious, to have any feelings that may interrupt the flow of consumption.
We enter now into the Internet age proper, the much feted and fetishized “information age” or the hyperbole of the “information revolution.” See here how the culmination of social control and engineering can be mediated through devices that we are obliged to consume and dispose of in a rapid cycle that keeps a sector of the economy afloat. Note the invitation to volunteer personal data online without having to be compelled to do so, all under the false promise of free expression. Note the fixation on one’s infinite potentiality, but how one is channeled into a system whereby it is the hosts and providers who profit by your free labour in ranking objects and humans (the same thing), in being ever more “connected” to more individuals, but losing all social skills. Everyone is merely a node attached to a wallet. It is here that prediction makes its transformation into prescription.
And how is this done? If all you know of this world is what is permitted to be shown online, and all choices are restricted, then we have the makings of a perfect control set. None will deviate from the choices provided since no others are offered. You will believe in the airy myths of progress, speed, efficiency, and connectivity, and will labour ever more within your digital prison while the unseen bots harvest all the data you happily surrender, making you either the target of marketing or government spy agencies. You are geolocated and tagged. Your entire perception of the world is now through the filter of the gadgets that transform space into commercial place, the augmentation of the real itself as you navigate a world through the products and services you can buy, or the unpaid labour you perform for the system and its meta-regulation. While you are told that you control your destiny, you become the controlled - a market segment, a bloc of consumers, a data set of demographic details. Swipe and click all you like, for it does not bring down the walls of the oligopolistic digital system, but instead empowers it.
And so is also resurrected the old game theory ideals, the prisoners dilemma, but you are blind to it as you seek your own advantage, to become the online celebrity, to become the web-based entrepreneur, to embrace the illusion and ephemerality of online popularity as you chase after abstract nothings like social capital, or attempt to increase your share of the equally abstract nothing of the attention economy. In fact, your entire social being is nothing more than an economical unit, your individuality a monotonous pseudo-uniqueness of frivolous self-expression (feeding the commodity system) and mundane events and conspicuous self-presentation as you upload pictures of yourself on vacation to increase your illusory status (as you treat the world as composed of checklist items so that you can say you’ve been there and done that). It is nothing but a game from which you do not prosper, and because the choices are rigged in advance, your behaviour becomes a prescribed one.
The tyranny of the model obtains here, for if we live in model homes, in model communities (offline and online), under a model economy with a model government, and purchase the same model goods and services, we become imprisoned within a kind of diorama where our options are limited by the restricted variables and choices that are available. Feel free to be the libertarian hero starring in your own distilled zombie epic, for your moves are restricted to the length and breadth of the chess board, and the finite number of moves are prescribed in advance - and they are finite no matter how large the number may be.
The human all too human desire for controlling other human beings is one of the invariant features of the species. All that changes with the generations would be the refinement of the mechanisms by which other human beings can be controlled, the techniques for successful social engineering, and being able to better predict - or prescribe - desired outcomes.
The end product of millennia of focus - and more particularly the technics of social control in the past three centuries - can be located right where you may find yourself: at the computer or portable device, being given a choice from a set of restricted choices on a drop-down menu, set in a rigid and gridded digital environment that appeals to your sense of freedom of choice while at the same time limiting it.
Let us take the first arbitrary example: that patron saint of cybernetics as identified by cybernetics founder Norbert Wiener: Leibniz. Now, Leibniz’ theory of the monads - like little atomistic souls arranged in the most harmonious pattern according to some enclosing deity program - appears to suggest that command and control is built into the metaphysical system. Deviations are corrected, and can be done so through internal regulation. It would not be long until the Age of Enlightenment would privilege Reason, but also occupy itself with an interest in automata. We push through the folds of history and find ourselves on the eve of the industrial revolution, with the invention of the loom and the guillotine - both instruments that automate functions and have a technological determinist effect on human beings. Introduce the steam engine, develop a calculating machine, and it would not be long until entire human populations engage in a large migration from the fields to the factories. In those “satanic mills” is a new value, built on utilitarianism, which may be called “factory time.” Nothing better controls the motions of the human body better than subjugating it to the movements of the machine. We know this from Karl Marx. We also know that once we can control the physiological, it is but one step to control the psychological by simply applying similar techniques. Religion functioned as a convenient social backstop to ensure workers in deplorable conditions would accept these conditions as a down payment on their entrance to heaven. Know thy place in the social order was far more important than the Socratic know thyself. Marx speaks a great deal about the alienation of the worker from the products of his labour, from his fellow workers, and from the world at large. The factory is the world, and the product leading to profit the entire reality of that world.
Enter Taylorism to further mechanize labour processes, but also enter the rise of the social sciences - in itself not an innocuous pursuit, for it assumes that social behaviour in both the individual and the collective sense can be measured scientifically, which then provides the tools for others to control. We might turn to the birth of positivism in the person of Auguste Comte. The belief in the clockwork universe where all were simply working out the predestined history towards its complete perfection was already the dream of dialectical thinkers like Hegel, or as part of the thought experiment of Laplace who said that if we could know the state of all particles in the universe, we could predict every future state and thus the future itself.
But enter entropy, that mischievous wrecker. Entropy is the measure of relative disorder in a system. The social equivalent might be the masses, the horde, the irrational forces that occasionally erupt in strikes and revolutions. Social mass unrest was a good symbol of entropy, and so we might refer to an important book written in 1899 by Gustav le Bon entitled La psychologie des foules (translated as simply “Crowds”). A great deal of pessimism regarding the unpredictability of crowds was already manifest in the uneasy Balance of Power, in various violent uprisings, and eventually in the first world war. There had to be a way of optimizing the social system to bring it back to harmonious function, to correct for unpredictable deviations. A whole science of crowd phenomena had been born. Such a desire for mass control was already being employed by V.I. Lenin in the 1917 Russian Revolution, and it should be said that there are so few successful examples of social control in history than this experiment conducted over such a long period - yet it tended towards blunt means of social control in the form of purges, suppression, spot assassinations, sentences to the gulags, complete control over culture and media, and one of the most advanced spy networks ever devised matched by the most meticulous record-keeping prior to the Internet.
Crowd control takes so many forms, and in the salad days we could even point to the way cities are laid out to facilitate containment and capture. But let us turn specifically to the United States to witness how they dealt with their own crowd problems and solutions.
We could turn to some of the pioneers of both public opinion and public relations, respectively, for how this would work out in practical terms. The much celebrated pioneer of the study of public opinion, Walter Lippmann, is fairly blunt in his appraisal of the masses: they are stupid, gullible, easily persuaded, and so must be directed by an elite few in the media to ensure social harmony. It meant simplifying issues to mere binaries so that opinion would not have to contend with unnerving shades of grey. Or, we may turn to that father of public relations, Edward Bernays, who also held that the masses were ignorant and unpredictable, and so needed to be guided. He ransacked his uncle Sigmund Freud’s theory of the unconscious and found the pecuniary hook to shift the economy from necessity to desire. He had located the perfect channel for the bubbling ferment of the unconscious: shopping. Imbuing all sorts of objects with psychoanalytic significance, he was able to get women to smoke, transformed unpopular politicians into more likable figures, popularized otherwise more high-brow entertainment for a mid-brow audience who craved status but also generally reacted negatively to higher cultural forms because of inborn social inferiority, and created many of the fictions that live on today, such as the need for the big breakfast. To list his “accomplishments” is worthy of its own special treatment.
Let us take just one lateral step to consider another American who was critical of the social world and where it was headed: the sociologist Thorstein Veblen. If anyone was puzzled why he seemed so misanthropic, disagreeably brusque, and impatient with others, one has only to read his works which paint an unflattering picture of human beings as progressing in one sense, but stubbornly invariant in another. That is, even with all the great developments in institutions and technologies, human beings were little changed from their primitive days of conspicuous status-chasing behaviours linked to power and domination, and in abiding by absurd rituals and ceremonial behaviours that were entirely superfluous. Judge for yourself why you might select the silver flatware over the steel variety when the former is far less durable than the latter. Or, perhaps you might consider attending a university’s convocation where the assembled don the medieval garb and engage in a ceremony that has little to do with education or what it means today.
The unchecked irrationality of capitalism and the promotion of regular citizens - soon to be redefined as consumers - to participate in the stock market (another Bernays intervention) would eventually recreate the economic bubbles of yesteryear (do read Charles Mackay’s Extraordinary Popular Delusions, and specifically the chapters dealing with tulipomania and the South Seas Bubble - Mackay would have got on famously with Veblen). And so the stock market crash.
And the rise of fascism in Italy, its contagion spreading to Germany. The irrational forces of love (for the leader) and hate (of the “other”) gave the unconscious its sustenance. The merger of the nazi mysticism and industrialized technological apparatus had shown itself to be remarkably adept at social engineering and control. The German technical focus on precision and meticulous record-keeping was perhaps even more sophisticated than the Soviets.
At the conclusion of the war with its twin nuclear finale, the need for social control became ever more urgent. Normalization was the watchword of the period. So, in the US, just as the women had been encouraged en masse to labour in the factories under the illusion of empowerment, they had to be shuffled out and back into the domestic home to make way for the returning soldiers. Democracy had to be vigorously promoted, and this was achieved through several means. The bubbling up of the Cold War also meant a need to divide the world into a useful binary that would regulate geopolitics and the individuals themselves. Normalization continued through the use of educational films on proper behaviours at home, in school, to despise difference, to embrace homogeneity and consumerism, and to be diligent patriots. As the suburbs yawned their way across the landscape, the automobile was king. The threat of nuclear annihilation was mitigated in part by stealing from Joseph Goebbel’s propaganda playbook: to optimize anxiety so that there was just enough fear to keep people vigilant, but not so much that it would be paralyzing.
But it is 1948 when Norbert Wiener publishes his book, Cybernetics: Command and Communication in the Animal and the Machine. This was a watershed year as Claude E. Shannon published his famous paper “The Theory of Mathematical Communication.” Of course, let it be known that the math and engineering Cold War hawks like Weaver and Neumann applied Shannon’s theory in ways that caused the author to retreat from the world. So begins the birth of the computer age and predictability, the creation of feedback systems to better control outcomes, the development of models that might apply to fields as diverse as economics, engineering, linguistics, anthropology, and even literary criticism. Cybernetics became the flavour of the month, an interdisciplinary approach to deferring entropy and optimizing order.
In parallel to these considerations was the new crop of Austrian and Chicago school economists who - against psychoanalysis, empirical verification, or actual observation - claimed that human beings were fundamentally rational beings who made rational choices as a means of seeking advantage. Mix this absurd axiomatic view of human nature with the philosophy of Ayn Rand who champions individualism over compassion, and rational instrumentalism over all other modes of thought, and you create the perfect conditions of neoliberal economic theory with its belief in the mysticism of technology, progress, borderless trade, deindustrialization, the service economy, dismantling unions and the Keynesian welfare state (or: socialism for the corporations and capitalism for the rest of us), the triumph of the calculating and disloyal narcissist, mercenary entrepreneurialism, so-called “small government,” and widespread deregulation, all in the belief that the market shall decide, and that it can be controlled with the use of prediction modeling. That, as we have learned, has failed.
The failure of the youth mobilization movements of the 1960s was brought about through targeted commodification and a pop culture feedback system (or, perhaps akin to what Frankfurt School sociologist Theodor Adorno called the “culture industry”). The 1970s saw both a trumpeting of selfishness and a fundamental change in how exchange rates operated. The rise of populist neoliberals and neoconservatives was in full flower, partially thanks to the rabid, screeching minority of fundamentalist evangelicals who hijacked the political process.
How can we forget one of the other means of social control that also came into being in the 1980s - a far more material, programmatic, and profitable venture in the form of the pharmaceutical industry. Rather than simply seeing the therapist, which in itself is too prone to error, why not regulate human emotions by applying a clinical label that makes humans feel special (“I have x disorder”), followed by a simple solution in the form of a pill? The mind and all its problems, real or fabricated, was little more than a chemical engineering problem, and a profitable solution was at hand. It was no longer socially acceptable to be sad, to be anxious, to have any feelings that may interrupt the flow of consumption.
We enter now into the Internet age proper, the much feted and fetishized “information age” or the hyperbole of the “information revolution.” See here how the culmination of social control and engineering can be mediated through devices that we are obliged to consume and dispose of in a rapid cycle that keeps a sector of the economy afloat. Note the invitation to volunteer personal data online without having to be compelled to do so, all under the false promise of free expression. Note the fixation on one’s infinite potentiality, but how one is channeled into a system whereby it is the hosts and providers who profit by your free labour in ranking objects and humans (the same thing), in being ever more “connected” to more individuals, but losing all social skills. Everyone is merely a node attached to a wallet. It is here that prediction makes its transformation into prescription.
And how is this done? If all you know of this world is what is permitted to be shown online, and all choices are restricted, then we have the makings of a perfect control set. None will deviate from the choices provided since no others are offered. You will believe in the airy myths of progress, speed, efficiency, and connectivity, and will labour ever more within your digital prison while the unseen bots harvest all the data you happily surrender, making you either the target of marketing or government spy agencies. You are geolocated and tagged. Your entire perception of the world is now through the filter of the gadgets that transform space into commercial place, the augmentation of the real itself as you navigate a world through the products and services you can buy, or the unpaid labour you perform for the system and its meta-regulation. While you are told that you control your destiny, you become the controlled - a market segment, a bloc of consumers, a data set of demographic details. Swipe and click all you like, for it does not bring down the walls of the oligopolistic digital system, but instead empowers it.
And so is also resurrected the old game theory ideals, the prisoners dilemma, but you are blind to it as you seek your own advantage, to become the online celebrity, to become the web-based entrepreneur, to embrace the illusion and ephemerality of online popularity as you chase after abstract nothings like social capital, or attempt to increase your share of the equally abstract nothing of the attention economy. In fact, your entire social being is nothing more than an economical unit, your individuality a monotonous pseudo-uniqueness of frivolous self-expression (feeding the commodity system) and mundane events and conspicuous self-presentation as you upload pictures of yourself on vacation to increase your illusory status (as you treat the world as composed of checklist items so that you can say you’ve been there and done that). It is nothing but a game from which you do not prosper, and because the choices are rigged in advance, your behaviour becomes a prescribed one.
The tyranny of the model obtains here, for if we live in model homes, in model communities (offline and online), under a model economy with a model government, and purchase the same model goods and services, we become imprisoned within a kind of diorama where our options are limited by the restricted variables and choices that are available. Feel free to be the libertarian hero starring in your own distilled zombie epic, for your moves are restricted to the length and breadth of the chess board, and the finite number of moves are prescribed in advance - and they are finite no matter how large the number may be.
February 4, 2014
At the Mountains of Marking
A Tiny Satire of Lovecraft
Dean Cthulu of the Miskatonic University's English Department had directed me to assign ever more essay work to my students in order to better test their writing competencies. I have to say that I had my doubts, no less the concern that this should increase my already heavy workload. What Dean Cthulu did not warn me about was the size of the class I was appointed to teach, and thus also commit to grading.
The course, "Antarctic Literature," was scheduled to be delivered at our far-flung satellite campus, a place so bitterly cold and bolted through by icy winds. Upon arrival, myself and my trusty teaching assistant came upon a decrepit student lounge, entirely devoid of the usual bustle and laptop-burdened students. But there they were, beyond the lounge, gathered round the entrance of the lecture theatre where I was to deliver my course: all six hundred of them, milling about like six-foot tall penguins.
The first few weeks were tolerable, even with the sharp chill of the lecture theatre and its broken thermostat. The blackish ululating masses of students checking their Facebook rather than directing their attention to the front was to be expected, their cyclopean eyes fixated on their laptop screens.
But then came the day when they were to hand in their 15 page essay assignments. As the students filed out of class on that day, there grew mound-like at first their attempts at writing until a sizeable mountain of them remained as the last student vanished. We were left with a daunting peak of essays, rivalling the very peaks of the Himalayas themselves!
What eldritch forces conspired, I cannot say, for my teaching assistant had been taken by illness and so could not assist me in the grading of this mountain. I would be left to scale this mountain - alone.
Resigned to my pitiful state, I took the first essay from the peak and attempted to decipher the strange and disturbing mental scrawl of young minds mumbling in incomprehensible language; their sentences primitive, their parsing unholy, and their spelling seemingly derived from a much darker time without dictionaries.
I braved these papery elements stacked so ludicrously high. The terrifying sights I beheld as I worked my way deeper into this pile of prose, the inhuman tortures committed upon the English language, the sordid witchcraft of stitched incantations copied and pasted from non-credible websites, and no less ghastly being the abuse of the apostrophe a sight so horrifying that if I were to describe it to you, your hair would turn immediately white and your eyes would fall right out!
I braved these dementing experiences, quietly cursing Dean Cthulu under my breath for what he had condemned me to. By the following week, I had barely scraped the peak of this mountain before another essay assignment had come due, and so stacked upon an already dauntingly formidable mountain was to be more material replete with slithering similes, malignant metaphors, pestilential paragraphs, querulous quotations, blasphemous bibliographies, onerous openers, pilloried punctuation, cacodaemoniacal content, and all that can be considered sluggish, baleful, and jabbering in the foetid minds of the undergraduate!
If I was to have any luck in navigating this churning, demoniac zenith of student endevaour, I needed to task my trusted teaching assistant Danforth to take on his share, for I needed to prepare my lecture materials to appease this unblinking mass of uninterested students whose fiendish writing had caused me so much torment. And just how many of these works of inspired terror maliciously mistook the proper form of "to lose" and "loose"? Of heart-stopping homonym errors and improvised semicolon explosives laying erroneous waste across these papered expanses I must spare you any fuller description. Perhaps the most venal and improvident of writing and reasoning sins committed in these ominous pages was the invocation of the word "society," applied so generally with no clarification, and with such abominable frequency.
"Society has always..." "In our society..." O how these phrases, forged in depths of irrational hell, caused such horripilation!
Danforth was, as youth tend to be, overly confident that he would manage this maddening mountain of mush so that I may focus on course preparations. He tunnelled ever so vigilantly into the bowels of these multiplying essays, and for two weeks I could not locate him.
I am to blame for consigning Danforth to the infernal cold wastes of marking his way deeper into this mountain. In my report to Dean Cthulu, what may I say that would in any fashion bring sense to the insane horror of what befell my reliable and now luckless Danforth.
Danforth did not hint any of these specific horrors till after his memory had had a chance to draw on his bygone reading. He could never have seen so much in one instantaneous glance. The fool! I had warned him to avert his studious gaze from this frothy gibberish of student words!
At the time, his shrieks were confined to the repetition of a single, mad word of all too obvious source: "Society! Society!"
Dean Cthulu of the Miskatonic University's English Department had directed me to assign ever more essay work to my students in order to better test their writing competencies. I have to say that I had my doubts, no less the concern that this should increase my already heavy workload. What Dean Cthulu did not warn me about was the size of the class I was appointed to teach, and thus also commit to grading.
The course, "Antarctic Literature," was scheduled to be delivered at our far-flung satellite campus, a place so bitterly cold and bolted through by icy winds. Upon arrival, myself and my trusty teaching assistant came upon a decrepit student lounge, entirely devoid of the usual bustle and laptop-burdened students. But there they were, beyond the lounge, gathered round the entrance of the lecture theatre where I was to deliver my course: all six hundred of them, milling about like six-foot tall penguins.
The first few weeks were tolerable, even with the sharp chill of the lecture theatre and its broken thermostat. The blackish ululating masses of students checking their Facebook rather than directing their attention to the front was to be expected, their cyclopean eyes fixated on their laptop screens.
But then came the day when they were to hand in their 15 page essay assignments. As the students filed out of class on that day, there grew mound-like at first their attempts at writing until a sizeable mountain of them remained as the last student vanished. We were left with a daunting peak of essays, rivalling the very peaks of the Himalayas themselves!
What eldritch forces conspired, I cannot say, for my teaching assistant had been taken by illness and so could not assist me in the grading of this mountain. I would be left to scale this mountain - alone.
Resigned to my pitiful state, I took the first essay from the peak and attempted to decipher the strange and disturbing mental scrawl of young minds mumbling in incomprehensible language; their sentences primitive, their parsing unholy, and their spelling seemingly derived from a much darker time without dictionaries.
I braved these papery elements stacked so ludicrously high. The terrifying sights I beheld as I worked my way deeper into this pile of prose, the inhuman tortures committed upon the English language, the sordid witchcraft of stitched incantations copied and pasted from non-credible websites, and no less ghastly being the abuse of the apostrophe a sight so horrifying that if I were to describe it to you, your hair would turn immediately white and your eyes would fall right out!
I braved these dementing experiences, quietly cursing Dean Cthulu under my breath for what he had condemned me to. By the following week, I had barely scraped the peak of this mountain before another essay assignment had come due, and so stacked upon an already dauntingly formidable mountain was to be more material replete with slithering similes, malignant metaphors, pestilential paragraphs, querulous quotations, blasphemous bibliographies, onerous openers, pilloried punctuation, cacodaemoniacal content, and all that can be considered sluggish, baleful, and jabbering in the foetid minds of the undergraduate!
If I was to have any luck in navigating this churning, demoniac zenith of student endevaour, I needed to task my trusted teaching assistant Danforth to take on his share, for I needed to prepare my lecture materials to appease this unblinking mass of uninterested students whose fiendish writing had caused me so much torment. And just how many of these works of inspired terror maliciously mistook the proper form of "to lose" and "loose"? Of heart-stopping homonym errors and improvised semicolon explosives laying erroneous waste across these papered expanses I must spare you any fuller description. Perhaps the most venal and improvident of writing and reasoning sins committed in these ominous pages was the invocation of the word "society," applied so generally with no clarification, and with such abominable frequency.
"Society has always..." "In our society..." O how these phrases, forged in depths of irrational hell, caused such horripilation!
Danforth was, as youth tend to be, overly confident that he would manage this maddening mountain of mush so that I may focus on course preparations. He tunnelled ever so vigilantly into the bowels of these multiplying essays, and for two weeks I could not locate him.
I am to blame for consigning Danforth to the infernal cold wastes of marking his way deeper into this mountain. In my report to Dean Cthulu, what may I say that would in any fashion bring sense to the insane horror of what befell my reliable and now luckless Danforth.
Danforth did not hint any of these specific horrors till after his memory had had a chance to draw on his bygone reading. He could never have seen so much in one instantaneous glance. The fool! I had warned him to avert his studious gaze from this frothy gibberish of student words!
At the time, his shrieks were confined to the repetition of a single, mad word of all too obvious source: "Society! Society!"
December 23, 2013
A Tiny Tale for My Goodreads Friends
A tiny and happy tale as my little gift to all of you.
Happy Holidays.
KXF
N-less-ness
When I was 7 in 1984, I remember my older brother plunking in one too many quarters into the pinball machine all to get high score N. I kept tugging on his sleeve that we had to get home because we were already late for dinner, but he just blew me off and kept himself in a tense ocular lock with the machine and its random array of blinking lights, its transistorized space movie sounds, and his fingers jamming the side buttons. It was as if he were certainly under a spell, chained to that machine and chasing after a N that he could call his own.
Eventually, after fourteen dollars and fifty-cents, he got high score N. For a day or two. It was a badge he could wear for just a short time. Someone with the initials of PQR got N+n.
N years later.
My neighbour works long hours so that he can get N in his bank account to afford that N-dollar vehicle that has a top speed of N, and a gas mileage of N. A young professor nearby has to publish N articles to boost his impact factor to at least N to get promoted to tenure. He moans that he only has N citations to his work, and is trying to write his Nth book. He has N-n articles than he thinks is necessary. An indie author across the street is bummed out because some random stranger on the Internet gave his book a rating of N out of n. He told me that he only has N reviews, so this rating really sticks out. The politician in our ward is really pushing hard to fundraise N dollars for her campaign. The polls put her at N%, and she needs at least N+n% for a safe margin. My little nephew places a lot of value in his online social life. On one site where it is all just people sharing updates, he boasts of having N followers, but he is really gunning to get N+n followers. On another site, his most recent post earned him N likes by N people who saw it. I ask him if that is good, and he tells me he could always use N more. He showed me a profile of one of his connections who get N presents for xmas, and had earned N points in collaborative video game. Another connection had been to N countries, and yet another user had N pairs of shoes, watched N movies, and had N friends. And I saw it again when reading a magazine where University A was saying how it would achieve N in worldwide rankings. Meanwhile, a news item about a man who lived to be N years old, and giving his secrets of longevity to all those who cared more about getting N more years and very little about the quality of those years.
Everyone I talked to seemed to be chasing after N as if their lives wouldn’t be complete without it. I asked each of them how many would be enough. It was always N+n more. And then what? [N+n]+n more, and so on. I find each of their Ns arbitrary, and yet they all devoted their strongest of efforts to acquire it only to set it higher once it was achieved. And everywhere I went online there was some person or product or service begging me to rank them, rate them, assign them N so that their cumulative Ns would reach N.
And so one day, I got rid of N.
I can’t really tell you how I did it, but I did it. It happened very quickly.
There were no more top N lists. There were no more N out of N ratings on a table-saw. There was no N likes on the social network. There were no N stars on the movie or book review. There were no more N points in some video game, nor any assignments being graded N to affect a GPA of N. None at all.
And it was then I noticed a change in this new, N-less world. Instead of just clicking N to rate a movie or book, people wrote something thoughtful. Instead of chasing so slavishly after N dollars or N status points or N home runs in a year or N countries visited as if the globe were nothing more than a checklist, people set different priorities. No longer was it about having the biggest N in anything; that didn’t matter anymore. It was as though N had been taking the place of something all this time, something more substantial and more meaningful... something we actually learned from. We took delight in discovering the qualities of the very things we once just so carelessly and indifferently gave N to. People seemed more relaxed, nicer, and with much more interesting things to say now that N wasn’t the centre of every conversation. People were friendlier now that N no longer stood between them.
Anna was not made to feel sad for the N Valentine’s Day cards she got in her grade three class, because it had nothing to do with N.
Bobby was not judged as being more or less liked online among his high school peers because there was no N friends to compare, and so his self-esteem remained strong.
Chris no longer worried about getting that N GPA to retain his scholarship because it was acknowledged that he worked hard and produced good work, and that was in itself enough.
Daniel didn’t worry that he wasn’t making N salary because he realized he had a beautiful family and comfortable life, and that was good enough for him. No one judged him for how much or how little he had in his bank account because he was simply a good man.
Edward no longer fussed about only getting N reviewers, or about how many N-stars he received for his recent poetry collection because the Ns were gone, and he was happy that there were people out there that were inspired by his work. Some even wrote some very thoughtful reviews, commenting on things that even he hadn’t considered before.
Fiona didn’t spend her early mornings with her campaign team trying to devise new ways of getting N more votes from a demographic map that resembled a butcher’s diagram for a cow. Instead, they discussed innovative ways of reaching out to voters and hearing what issues mattered to them.
Gregory was over the moon to hear that the committee granted him tenure. As N was no longer a factor, they instead focused on the qualities that made him a good researcher, and an even greater teacher.
Heather sported the most serene and wise of smiles even though soon her eyes would be closed forever. As there was no more N to worry about or live for, she knew that she enjoyed her life for as long as it was.
I saw all of this and more, but didn’t bother counting the instances because that would sneak N back into our lives. And when I turn back the clock, I am sitting at the table with my older brother enjoying a wonderful dinner our mother made us. In that version of events without N, we were not late for dinner, and afterward we went playing in the woods looking for tadpoles.
e"N"d
Happy Holidays.
KXF
N-less-ness
When I was 7 in 1984, I remember my older brother plunking in one too many quarters into the pinball machine all to get high score N. I kept tugging on his sleeve that we had to get home because we were already late for dinner, but he just blew me off and kept himself in a tense ocular lock with the machine and its random array of blinking lights, its transistorized space movie sounds, and his fingers jamming the side buttons. It was as if he were certainly under a spell, chained to that machine and chasing after a N that he could call his own.
Eventually, after fourteen dollars and fifty-cents, he got high score N. For a day or two. It was a badge he could wear for just a short time. Someone with the initials of PQR got N+n.
N years later.
My neighbour works long hours so that he can get N in his bank account to afford that N-dollar vehicle that has a top speed of N, and a gas mileage of N. A young professor nearby has to publish N articles to boost his impact factor to at least N to get promoted to tenure. He moans that he only has N citations to his work, and is trying to write his Nth book. He has N-n articles than he thinks is necessary. An indie author across the street is bummed out because some random stranger on the Internet gave his book a rating of N out of n. He told me that he only has N reviews, so this rating really sticks out. The politician in our ward is really pushing hard to fundraise N dollars for her campaign. The polls put her at N%, and she needs at least N+n% for a safe margin. My little nephew places a lot of value in his online social life. On one site where it is all just people sharing updates, he boasts of having N followers, but he is really gunning to get N+n followers. On another site, his most recent post earned him N likes by N people who saw it. I ask him if that is good, and he tells me he could always use N more. He showed me a profile of one of his connections who get N presents for xmas, and had earned N points in collaborative video game. Another connection had been to N countries, and yet another user had N pairs of shoes, watched N movies, and had N friends. And I saw it again when reading a magazine where University A was saying how it would achieve N in worldwide rankings. Meanwhile, a news item about a man who lived to be N years old, and giving his secrets of longevity to all those who cared more about getting N more years and very little about the quality of those years.
Everyone I talked to seemed to be chasing after N as if their lives wouldn’t be complete without it. I asked each of them how many would be enough. It was always N+n more. And then what? [N+n]+n more, and so on. I find each of their Ns arbitrary, and yet they all devoted their strongest of efforts to acquire it only to set it higher once it was achieved. And everywhere I went online there was some person or product or service begging me to rank them, rate them, assign them N so that their cumulative Ns would reach N.
And so one day, I got rid of N.
I can’t really tell you how I did it, but I did it. It happened very quickly.
There were no more top N lists. There were no more N out of N ratings on a table-saw. There was no N likes on the social network. There were no N stars on the movie or book review. There were no more N points in some video game, nor any assignments being graded N to affect a GPA of N. None at all.
And it was then I noticed a change in this new, N-less world. Instead of just clicking N to rate a movie or book, people wrote something thoughtful. Instead of chasing so slavishly after N dollars or N status points or N home runs in a year or N countries visited as if the globe were nothing more than a checklist, people set different priorities. No longer was it about having the biggest N in anything; that didn’t matter anymore. It was as though N had been taking the place of something all this time, something more substantial and more meaningful... something we actually learned from. We took delight in discovering the qualities of the very things we once just so carelessly and indifferently gave N to. People seemed more relaxed, nicer, and with much more interesting things to say now that N wasn’t the centre of every conversation. People were friendlier now that N no longer stood between them.
Anna was not made to feel sad for the N Valentine’s Day cards she got in her grade three class, because it had nothing to do with N.
Bobby was not judged as being more or less liked online among his high school peers because there was no N friends to compare, and so his self-esteem remained strong.
Chris no longer worried about getting that N GPA to retain his scholarship because it was acknowledged that he worked hard and produced good work, and that was in itself enough.
Daniel didn’t worry that he wasn’t making N salary because he realized he had a beautiful family and comfortable life, and that was good enough for him. No one judged him for how much or how little he had in his bank account because he was simply a good man.
Edward no longer fussed about only getting N reviewers, or about how many N-stars he received for his recent poetry collection because the Ns were gone, and he was happy that there were people out there that were inspired by his work. Some even wrote some very thoughtful reviews, commenting on things that even he hadn’t considered before.
Fiona didn’t spend her early mornings with her campaign team trying to devise new ways of getting N more votes from a demographic map that resembled a butcher’s diagram for a cow. Instead, they discussed innovative ways of reaching out to voters and hearing what issues mattered to them.
Gregory was over the moon to hear that the committee granted him tenure. As N was no longer a factor, they instead focused on the qualities that made him a good researcher, and an even greater teacher.
Heather sported the most serene and wise of smiles even though soon her eyes would be closed forever. As there was no more N to worry about or live for, she knew that she enjoyed her life for as long as it was.
I saw all of this and more, but didn’t bother counting the instances because that would sneak N back into our lives. And when I turn back the clock, I am sitting at the table with my older brother enjoying a wonderful dinner our mother made us. In that version of events without N, we were not late for dinner, and afterward we went playing in the woods looking for tadpoles.
e"N"d
December 2, 2013
December 1, 2013
An Older, Derrida-inspired Piece on Anthologies
Published some few years ago, I had forgotten about this: http://www.angelhousepress.com/essays...
November 17, 2013
Breaking Books
With something sharp, I peel back the pastedown of a book from 1787 to reveal a secret leaf inside. Read about it here: http://kanexfaucher.weebly.com/breaki...
