No one gets a grip on living. The uncanny fact of existence is elusive. This is, no doubt, due to the transitory nature of mankind.
How well can existence register in a mere eighty years?
Are there any mortals that can pluck the flower of being?
Such questions may never be answered.
Even if one were to take into account the emerging trend of transhumanism.
Such an extension of faculties would merely yield an excess of yeses and no’s.
One’s and zero’s, life and death, light and shadow – the inescapable binary of mortality.
Suppose one extends this one material life we know. Suppose one extends it to eternity, whatever that is.
What then?
Can an eternal biological calculator fathom the mystery of being? Why there is an is, its relation to is not and the peculiar arrangement thereof?
Perhaps, but this perhaps is tenuous.
This past century mankind has exponentially increased its capacities. Yet such an increase has yielded more of the same. The same miasmic binary that limited Plato limits the 21st-century technocrat.
What are we to do in such a dispiriting situation?
Perhaps the answer is nothing.
All this wild blossoming is indicative of one thing.
The best thing to do with the flower of being is to water it.
Isn’t it interesting or perhaps more fittingly alarming that we have precious few markers of passage? A letter is such a finite thing. Perhaps no more finite than a tweet but certainly more tangibly finite. Because the leaf, the bit of tree, it will yellow and curl and return to earth. The words that it held in scripts so reflective of the man and mood that etched it, they are so personal, and thus so exquisitely temporal. You can picture these textures in the grand tapestry of time. Yes, of such markers there are precious few.
The modems hum, the screens glow, the constant podcast prattle. These innovations are worth celebrating. Yet as much as they inspire they alter the nature of inspiration. What is the qualia of this novelty?
What sort of poems, novels, philosophies, and sciences will flow from the omnipresent memory of machines? From these mirrors into which we can instill our favorite reflections and gaze thereupon to our heart’s content – can we expect an accurate picture? And if high definition does indeed provide accuracy is it fertile? Or is it merely a reflection of saliencies that serve onanistic solipsism.
It is difficult to tell how we will change. It is perhaps impossible to know how altered we already are. It is definitely impossible to know how altered we were at the advent of the transistor. For such knowledge is ephemeral. It is gone with those that possessed it.
It is precisely this thing, ephemerality, that we must watch.
For a flowers beauty is in the rareness and brevity of its blossom.
A beauty which the plastic rose destroys.
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I will never cease to be baffled by the pride that a good chunk of humanity seems to take in submitting to preistcraft. By preistcraft I do not necessarily mean religion.
In this broadened definition I include many ideologies and yes…among them I dare include that shibboleth called ‘science.’
Now, I am not a fan of comparing science to religion. This being due to the fact that science is not religion. But there is a sort of popular notion of science that may as well be religion.
It is both pro and prescriptive. It has a metaphysic. It has an ethic. There are within its dogmas not only cosmological claims but outright prophecies.
This is not the science of Spinoza or Feynman. That is to say it is not science. It is whimsy and hubris systematized. That is to say religion.
It has priests and teachers of the law.
I do not even so much here begrudge authoritarianism as I lament sloth. For its profound mental laziness that causes so many otherwise rational people to utter the demure prayer:
“I am not a scientist.”
Well…so bloody what?
Do you not have access to books? Or to get less medieval… to the sodding internet?
Ah but you require special training. These mysteries must of course be properly understood.
Yes, and did you not spend at least twelve years of your life in the school system?
Alright… I get it…that institution is deteriorated and generally rots the mind. Fine, all well and good. I too am cynical about the supposedly unalloyed good of mandatory public schooling.
However…even the most barefoot, twelve-toed, slug snacking Appalachian scion surely understands that the beauty of science is in its inherent democracy. Or if you prefer Libertarianism.
How is it that the experts to which you submit your reason came to their knowledge? Was it through sorcery? Did they approach a shewstone and therein decipher the mind of the most high God?
Or did they apply the fairly simple mechanisms of the scientific method to expand and expound upon the current body of knowledge?
You tell me that you cannot do the same?
Or are you in a roundabout way asserting that I cannot do so. That I must flagellate myself. That I should toss my critical faculties into the purifying flames of inquisition. That I should shroud my brain in the same Catholic darkness that gives you the jollies?
Suppose all those mea culpas ever bleeding from your rosary are valid. That we are both at sea before the vast incomprehensibility of the universe. That we require the confessional booth. That we must submit to a higher power.
Fine.
But I have a question…
WHICH?
To which higher power should I surrender? I suspect that your answer will depend entirely on your political persuasion.
If you do not know the things of which you are speaking of. If they are so arcane and require so many years of academic pilgrimage to fathom…then how…in all sodding Christendom do you know whether you agree.
Would it not be simpler to just vomit Druidic litanies?
Or at least more cough than humble bragging…
If you have ceased to be able to work with the facts and theories thus far achieved and must now entirely lean upon the insights of the clergy. How…HOW…pray tell is this science? The thing whose chief strength is mutability. A strength nourished by diligent scrutiny.
I guess there’s really not much use in railing against this madness. It seems to be more of a drive than a philosophical position.
I doubt I’ll ever understand it.
I guess I just don’t have that kinky submissive streak that plagues such a large chunk of humanity.
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It’s noble to admit when you don’t know. But, phrases like ‘I am not scientist’ can be nothing more than a cop out. It’s sister ‘You are not a scientist’ is often nothing more than an ad hominem.
Both phrases have their underpinnings in sloth and magical thinking.
Deferring to experts is generally healthy but the cases in which this is a necessity are rarer than not. Say what you will about public education but those availed of the capacity to read and write are not incapable of evaluating complex arguments.
The admission of ignorance seems a poor foundation from which to evaluate the statements of experts. If you are not an expert – how do you know which experts to trust?
As such statements like ‘I am not a scientist’ shouldn’t be viewed as humility and a good sense of one’s limits. At least not by default. One should consider that this maybe nothing more than laziness and virtue signaling. Yes, often it may be mere humble bragging.
‘Yes, I know that I don’t know! Ergo I am better than you – you great pretender!’ Cries the gloriously primitive subroutine.
Well, that’s all well and good except generally one isn’t simply admitting agnosticism but is in fact deferring to the priests that tickle his fancy.
This is why ‘I am not a scientist’ is magical thinking. It treats academics like oracles. It is the authority fallacy. Yes, but authority fallacy is when you say ‘cause daddy says’ we’re merely saying that these people may be more likely to be correct because this is their discipline. Sure but ‘more likely’ in a nebulous area is such shaky ground that you may as well be ‘cause daddy saysing.’
Shaky scientific ground is very shaky indeed since –
The history of science bears out that no crop of scientists has survived their season. That is – they sprout up, offer their fruits, and become the fertilizer for the next generation. I.E. a lot of very well established ideas are often just manure.
So when you hear ‘I am not a scientist – You are not a scientist – That is not science!’ etc. You may well be dealing with someone deifying their gut feelings. Yes, it is pure to admit the sin of ignorance and preposterously flock to the ever shifting church of science. To do otherwise would simply be denial! You great heretic.
The ‘I am not a scientist – You are not a scientist – That is not science!’ line of argument is often trotted out in all the little mysteries where establishing that X is indeed X proves difficult. Such times do indeed call for that formalized guesswork called heuristics – but in this process – ‘cause these guys seem correct to me’ should be the very last option.
We should all remain vigilant for this common pitfall of mistaking what seems correct to us for a humble acceptance of the best possible answer.
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Axon the company that was once Taser is just that a company – a corporate entity. Yet, its cloud holds police data which as far as I understand is subject to public interest and access. Whether or not the data is actually ‘public’ is a question that I do not have the time to research.
Fortunately, that’s a variable that isn’t indispensable to the problem domain currently under discussion. The outsourcing of data to a corporate entity by public servants is one that should cause concern. While it maybe an inevitability this practice must be subject to intense scrutiny and the construction of legal structures.
Axon has a very cozy relationship with many departments. Which is not in and of itself necessarily a bad thing. But, it does raise the age-old problem of the merging of state and corporate power. A problem that in its purest manifestation is called fascism.
I do not use this term lightly. Nor do I wield it as some sort of moralist bludgeon. The merging of state and corporate power when fully realized is the definition of fascism.
I am not a purist. I do not think that simply because the police is and may to a greater degree in the future become reliant on Axon’s databases – that this necessarily implies fascism. Databasing and weapons manufacture are not the chief province of policing. It is entirely acceptable for some level of delegation to occur.
So what we have here is a question of degree. How completely is policing going to become reliant on cloud storage, AI, and the companies that provide such solutions? As it stands in this honeymoon period the relationship is symbiotic. Will it remain so?
The history of many a company is marked by monopolistic yearnings. While I have not seen evidence of any egregious steps by Axon in this direction, there are some examples of corporate zeal.
One such example is Axon’s insistence that its systems are adopted by the largest departments. An insistence that they have pursued to the best of their abilities.
VieVue, Axon’s competitor won the bid for New York Police Department in 2016. Axon took some rather aggressive steps to wrest control.
“According to Politico, Taser, in an effort to thwart the agreement, hired a lobbyist to spread anxiety among the black clergy in New York about the effectiveness of VieVue cameras and petitioned the public advocate, in what Mayor Bill de Blasio described as a smear campaign; it also offered to give New York a thousand free Axon cameras. (The department declined.)” – Dana Goodyear – Shock to the System – The New Yorker Magazine (August 27th 2018) – [Page 42]
The reason for these tactics goes beyond fattening Axon’s bottom line. NYPD records “represent a critical node in Axon’s nervous system.” This desire for data is understandable for a company whose business model depends on the acquisition and processing of information.
“With New York, Chicago, L.A., and a majority of the other largest cities in the country using Axon’s cameras and data storage, the company can design the ways that evidence is collected, held, and shared – in systems that the public can’t opt out of.” — Dana Goodyear – Shock to the System – The New Yorker Magazine (August 27th, 2018) – [Page 42]
I boldened the statement – in systems that the public can’t opt out of – because it is indicative of a monopolistic trend. Whether it is a defacto monopoly like Google and Facebook, one that emerged due to overwhelming adoption, or it is the result of a naked pursuit for hegemony – it remains troubling.
Facebook, Cambridge Analytica, and Google are notorious for profiting off of user data in rather unsavory, privacy thwarting, legally questionable ways. Whether or not Axon will follow suit is uncertain.
What is certain is that Axon acquired VieVue this past spring. Something that in my opinion gives it monopoly status. A company whose bread and butter is information that holds enormous influence over the fates of millions of American citizens becoming monopolistic borders on the Orwellian. It is why I chose to call this series Taser, Axon, Skynet in reference to the dystopian world portrayed in the Terminator movies.
Some may be confused by my earlier assertion that there have been no egregious steps by Axon towards hegemony. How can I say that and only a few paragraphs later call the company a monopoly?
The reason is that Axon is a defacto monopoly. In order to build efficient systems, it must make every possible stride to get its hands on the materials that would allow this. In this case, those materials are things like NYPD contracts and the data generated from such contracts. We all want to assure that the best, most efficient, most honest systems are implemented by departments. Thus a monopoly may be an inevitability.
Some have proposed that we regulate Facebook and Google in the same way we regulate public utilities. That discussion is beyond the scope of this article. The regulation of companies as utilities argument is here mentioned because a defacto monopoly like Axon that deals in highly sensitive criminal justice information is a prime candidate for such regulation.
I do not know whether or not I will continue this article but there are many, many more matters of interest, and importance surrounding these advances in policing solutions.
Feel free to share your thoughts below, stay tuned, and as always thanks for reading.
One of my favorite articles on this topic is David J. Ley’s ‘No, Dopamine is not addictive.’Which is published in Psychology Today. There are however deeper and more complex perils at play in the age of information.
The reason that I find the aforementioned article particularly salient is because it touches on something that I call ‘facility delusion.’ Which is a rather awkward way of codifying an even more unwieldy idea. Namely, that technical jargon and the perception that one has grasped some concrete knowledge leads one to dangerous overconfidence. In the case of dopamine, it reduces your range of solutions to your problems and causes you to misinterpret and diminish the struggles of others.
As the meme goes, ‘We live in a society!’ And that means lots of complex interactions from even more complicated beings. The temptation to simplify is understandable even necessary but oversimplification is just as obfuscating as ‘Inception’ style convolutedness.
Now on to a bigger, uglier, stinkier fish. Think Coelacanth, it’s fitting since this fish is actually Evo Psych.
I happen to be somewhat infatuated with this sexy new idea. But just like the blonde in the littleblack dress it’s probably better to take things slow, with skepticism, and prophylactics.
Caution is rare, especially in romantic situations. Which is why so many courters of this cute little theory are a touch overeager.
Primarily I am talking about lay people of whom I am a number. I have seen some professional academics turned raconteurs get a bit carried away. But, the likes of Peterson and Gad Saad suffer more from overzealous audience members than from serious errors. Which is why I’ll be discussing popular conceptions of Evo Psych and the giddy cynics that it both attracts and manufactures.
Narrowing your range of options can be healthy. In fact, focusing on specific aspects of specific phenomenon in a specific way is pretty much how science works. However, relying too much on a particular lens can make you nearsighted.
As funny as it sounds, myopia, is exactly what I’ve been seeing. The popular imagination wants to feel smart, gritty, and down to earth. So, everything is seen in pseudo-Darwinian terms. Breaking things down to limbic forces forged in the crucible of a dog eat dog world gives us a cynicism boner. Dr. House is in! Now we’re armed with all we need to spit forth world-weary, sarcasm-tinged, wisdom to the bewildered herd. We can break their rose-colored glasses and reveal the truth in all its chaotic primordial fury!
Cheeky!
That would be great if what we had was the truth. But sadly we don’t even have a very clear grasp of evolutionary psychology when we smugly opine about things like Sexual Market Value or ‘genetics.’
Evolutionary psychology is psychology that functions from the perspective of evolution. Assuming that evolution is true it uses the theory to explain neurology, general biology, and behavior.
Which is all well and good. The problem is not evo psych. It is Pop Evo Psych. The problem is that evo psych gives us insights into biological and behavioral mechanisms, it explains how those mechanisms arose, and why (Adaptation). It tells you that this is a car and that it functions so and so because it makes sense to function so and so, you are well adapted to be on roads etc. But it doesn’t tell what roads you are on.
The giddy cynics that I’m describing don’t realize this. Instead, everything is a comically oversimplified, edge lord-esque, set of ideas. You’re not depressed because your spouse cheated on you, your dog died, and your friends are listless idiots, you’re depressed because your mother was depressed. Your love interest isn’t a complicated barely scientifically understood entity that rejected you for mercurial reasons. No, your market value wasn’t high enough. Better hire a PR firm, preferably one sporting fuzzy hats and designer sunglasses.
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The sexual market value idea has merit. Some of it can be supported via biology and evolutionary psychology. However, immediately jumping to it as the cause for your relationship woes is silly. Just because we have primordial urges, that it may be the engine that drives the car that we are, this does not mean it is the road we’re traveling on.
There’s a huge emergent world of complex phenomenon like philosophy, ethics, art, and culture that comprise the highway system of human existence.
So when you feel lost in your relationship, in your understanding of the world, if you’re depressed or anxious this can be a multitude of things. Most of which don’t have much to do with the fact that you’re low on some arbitrary totem pole or attracted to pithy inattentive men.
The world is not a sterile laboratory. The world is dirty and baroque.
Monochromatically chanting the muh genes, muh secks mantra will leave you bored and lost. No matter how slick you feel reducing everything to chimpanzee absurdity.
It’s not considered in the same category as rights, privileges, and all the myriad distinctions thereof.
No. Even prisoners and slaves are unquestionably reserved the right to draw air. Certainly, a hair-splitter might say ah but they are killed!
Yes, sometimes but until the point of termination, no one rations their air…sets restrictions on it…how much to inhale…how much to exhale…and where such a thing is appropriate.
Throughout our lifetimes we adopt and abdicate many a position. In so doing we exhale and inhale ideas. If it is bizarre to assume restriction on literal respiration why is it any less bizarre to restrict intellectual respiration?
Yes. But breathing and speaking are two different things. You don’t need to speak to live. I disagree. We are a social species. Our very existence depends on interaction.
Ok. But its only a certain sort of speaking that is absolutely essential. Why should we let fascists, and bigots, and all kinds of meanies be mean?
Throughout our lifetiems, we adopt and abdicate many a position. Its important to allow this to take place naturally. You will gain very little in the way of reforming someone’s position by telling them to shut up. Even less so with the might of the state behind you.
People often say erroneous and heinous things. But we cannot know the intent with certainty. Even when the certainty of intent is almost certainly established we cannot penalize someone for intellectual respiration. This somewhat foppish metaphor I’ve adopted has its merits. It is used because throughout our lifetimes we adopt and abdicate many a position.
Speaking is popularly considered unproductive. Busy people use terse language and do busy things like profit handsomely from exporting manufacturing to exotic locations with charmingly lax labor laws. But even these humanitarians need to speak to do so. In fact, the assembly of ideas into an actionable coherency is speech whether or not it is externalized as air passing over the vocal chords.
When people mull a problem they often mutter under their breaths. This is because they are breathing in and out ideas. They are engaging in something that is more than a right. They are engaging in intellectual respiration.
Many people say things they don’t mean. They’re exhaling bad air. Should an accident of fraught nerves be grounds for prosecution? Again even if the intent of malice is clear there is no guarantee that the expression of an offensive and wrongheaded notion isn’t entirely or at leas in part representative of a misapprehension of the offendee.
Exhaling an idea is an inextricable part of processing that idea. Those who do so may process the idea entirely out of their being. It is not our business to force their breathing. You don’t do CPR on someone merely because they have a cough.
Let people be let people breathe.
But what if they shout fire in a theater? There is a difference between libel and speech. If you accuse the theater of being on fire when it clearly isn’t…I’m of course joking but I think this defense still holds.
Let people be let people breathe.
Anyone that’s around the age of thirty is likely well aware of the distance between the ideas and politics of their early twenties and their present outlook.
Should you have been throttled for thinking skinny jeans were cool?
Well, perhaps so. But then you have become the bully you wish to resist.
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