Today, through the vagaries of the Internet, I happened upon the wikiHow article for "How to Stop Staring at a Girl's Boobs" (http://www.wikihow.com/Stop-Staring-at-a-Girl%27s-Boobs). Oh, wikiHow, where were you when I was going through puberty? Or when I was...twenty-nine, which is my age at the time of this writing? Ahem. The article brought back memories of that time in my life when indeed it seemed that there was absolutely nothing to do other than stare at boobs...which, of course, is before I discovered that there were many other parts of a woman's body worth staring at. So, in the wiki spirit (it is, after all, the manual I can edit!), I here suggest a few additions and editions for the wikiHow page on boob-staring. From here on out, the text in brackets will be mine, to differentiate it from the original text.
Have you ever been in class or perhaps at a party and out of the corner of your eye you notice a beautiful girl with large boobs? [Or a plain girl with large boobs? Or an unattractive girl with large boobs? Or a beautiful girl with medium boobs? Or a plain girl with medium boobs? Or an unattractive girl with medium boobs? Or a beautiful girl with small boobs? Etc.] You gather up your courage to go talk to her, but you can't keep your eyes off her boobs? [Yes! Oh. That is a rhetorical question. I'm not supposed to answer it.] Here are some steps to help you in that and other similar situations.
1. Make eye contact with her when you talk to her. It's polite, and most likely her face will have some attractive feature. [If you don't understand this last assertion, then you clearly haven't been watching enough hardcore pornography, and if you haven't been watching enough hardcore pornography, then I doubt your credentials as an overly hormonal teenage boy. This article is targeted at teenage boys, right? Protip: I know fuck-all about the sexual development and desires of teenage lesbians, and the less I contemplate this particular subject, the better for you and me and the statutes of the great state of California, so I had best stop now.]
2. You can also talk about her shoes, earrings, and so forth, but not too much or she might think you're interested in something you really aren't. [Pretending to care about things that women are interested in but not really caring about those things is a great way to get near some boobs without drawing attention to the fact that you only care about getting near some boobs. Once you've mastered this skill the the point where you can pretend to care about a girl's thoughts and feelings, you will probably get to touch some boobs.]
3. Talk to her about anything: movies, school, current events, anything that at least partially distracts you from her breasts. [Yes. TALKING ABOUT ABSOLUTELY ANYTHING OTHER THAN HER BREASTS IS GENIUS ADVICE FOR TAKING YOUR ATTENTION AWAY FROM HER BREASTS. Unless the absolutely anything you're talking about is less interesting than her breasts, and if you're a fifteen year old boy there is probably nothing in the world that is more interesting to you than her breasts, and you find your attention straying back to her breasts anyway.]
4. You might get an erection from looking too long at her breasts. So don't stare. Look at her face. Look deep into her eyes. This doesn't mean look at another girl's breasts. [It doesn't? Oh shit, there goes my gameplan! I mean, of course. Stare into her eyes so her boobs don't give you a boner. That should be obvious. It's not like you can feel the gravity of your boobs pulling your little fireman up and your eyes down and your hands in closer, can you? It's not like her boobs have become the center of your attention, of your very universe, have they? Of course not! Of course not. No, stare into her eyes. Deep into her eyes. The eyes are the window to the soul, the gateway to the mind, and one of the most erotic parts of the body. Her beautiful eyes...redirecting all that libidinal energy towards this new body part can't have any possible side effec--ah, shit, now you've developed an eye fetish! You Japanese person, you! You're getting an erection from staring into her eyes, aren't you? Well, maybe there's another wikiHow page that can help you out with that, I don't know.]
5. If you are sure she isn't looking, take a quick glance at her breasts to relieve yourself, but don't forget to look away, as they can be hypnotic. [This gem of wisdom is perfect as it is; I have nothing to add to it.]
6. Don't daydream about girl's breasts, especially if you are in class. The teacher may call you out on it and jar you with a question, if you look spaced-out and have that silly smile on your face. [Because, as we all know, the best way to not think about something is to tell yourself not to think about it! Like if I tell you the last thing in the world you'd ever want to think about is the Candiru fish, which is an inch-long fish with sharp backwards-pointing spines on its back that lives in Amazonian rivers and is attracted to the compounds in urine such that it will swim up into peoples' genitals while they are peeing and so become lodged in their urinal tracts before dying of asphyxia and flexing its spines in reflex, causing unthinkable pain and forcing somebody in a nearby village to perform impromptu genital surgery with a hunting knife, THERE'S NO WAY you would think about a fish swimming up into your penis, dying and rotting and stabbing your penis with bony spines from the inside until you cut it out with a huge knife! And this thinking aversion technique works BEST when it comes to SEX, trust me! Alternately, you can try to think of horrific things to derail your sex drive. Think about your parents or siblings dying screaming in a fire, or think about how those boobs will, in the fullness of time, putrefact to black sacs of rot, shot through with maggots and carrion-eating beetles. There's NO WAY that distracting yourself in this way could be harmful to your your psyche AT ALL. If all else fails and your teacher does call on you while you have a silly smile on your face, you could always pretend as though you were happily contemplating the subject matter of the class. But she probably wouldn't believe you, because as you and I and your teacher all know, learning is for nerds.]
Tips
Make a vow to only stare at them a few minutes a day, and then lower the number of minutes each day until you reach an equilibrium quotient. [I think this tip is suggesting that if you learn what things like "equilibrium quotient" means, your brain will grow at the expense of your balls and you'll somehow sap your sex drive. Protip: IT WON'T FUCKING WORK. Translated into normal human speech, this could also suggest that you ration your boobage staring and decrease the amount each day. Because staring at boobs and timing yourself and taking careful mental notes about the boob staring and trying to be economic with your boob staring such that you reserve your quota for staring at the *best* boobs and not just any old boobs is surely a step in the right direction from willy-nilly boob-staring. And, just like trying to not think about boobs is the best way to not think about boobs, rationing your boob-staring is surely the best way to ensure there's no way you'll ever slip outside of the brittle, artificial, and arbitrary limitations that your higher cognitive processes have imposed upon overwhelming instinct.]
When outdoors, wear sunglasses, so she will not be able to see where your eyes are looking. [Actually, that's some pretty good advice right there. It's half the reason why you'll never see me outdoors without sunglasses. The other half: hangovers.]
The more you treat her respectfully, you increase your chances that she will show you her entire boobs [Sic?] in an appropriate place. This is what dreams are made of. [It is? Well, prepare to be shocked: GIRLS DON'T HAVE PENISES, THEY HAVE VAGINAS INSTEAD! Now you can stop dreaming about boobs.]
Get to know the girl in question, if you would like to become her boyfriend. That way you could see her boobs more often. [Again, we repeat the advice that the only reason for ever having any contact with a woman is for the purpose of seeing boobs, and you should engineer all of your social interactions with such in mind. I know it's totally non-intuitive to think that if you spend more time around a woman such as by becoming her boyfriend, you will have more opportunities to see her boobs, but believe me, it's actually true! You should totally base your boyfriendidness upon whose boobs you like to look at the most! Protip: You don't have to be a boyfriend to stare at boobs? Have you ever heard of this thing called "The Internet?" Fully half of it is dedicated to images of boobs. Really! Try a Google image search for "boobs" right now and see what happens! You'll be surprised. ProProTip: Your ability to see a particular pair of boobs is inversely proportional to your desire to see a particular pair of boobs. The more you see your girlfriend's boobs, the more you'll wish you could see more boobs and different boobs! But you can't! Hah hah. You got monogamied, bitch.]
Warnings
Don't look off into space while talking to her if you are that afraid of looking at her boobs. Try to practice looking them in their eyes while talking to them. Then before you know it you'll be fine. [Protip: Warning: The guy who wrote this piece of advice was an idiot. Don't listen to him. In all honesty, staring off into space is the best alternative to staring at boobs if for whatever reason you feel you can't stare at boobs at the present time. I'm an adult, and I still do this every damn day. No amount of "practice" ever enables you to stop staring at boobs. You might even be able to stop visualizing her boobs in your head while you stare away into space; if so, you will be promoted from padawan to Jedi Master.]
If you find it hard to look at her eyes stare at the space between them.
[Jesus, now you have a bridge-of-the-nose fetish. Luckily for you, there's a 104% chance that there's already hentai that speaks to that need.]
I round out the article with a few select portions of my own sage advice that should have been included in the tips section, but for whatever reason were not.
--Don't be a fifteen year old boy.
--Don't hang around girls like the one featured in the picture at the top of this article, the one wearing a super-low-cut blouse, who is clearly *asking* you to look at her boobs by means of her wardrobe choices. So if you are around such girls and can't stop looking at their boobs, you probably shouldn't feel all that bad about it. Nevertheless, many of these women will all but shove their boobs in your face and then try to make you feel guilty if you stare at them, because a significant percentage of women quite honestly have no fucking clue as to how to be honest, fair, and non-contradictory in their assertions. They are as screwed up and as confused and as ashamed as you! No matter how good the boobs on such women might be, I assure you, the boobs are not worth it.
--Pray (Protip: IT WON'T FUCKING WORK)
--Be Gay. (Then you can stare at pecs!)
--Masturbate already. Get it out of your system.
--Stop masturbating. You're only making it worse.
--Accept that there's really very little you can do to control your sex drive at this point in your life. Be glad if staring at girl's boobs is your WORST problem when it comes to sex. Be thankful, actually, if you don't have the opportunity to fuck up in ways that make getting caught staring at boobs seem absolutely and utterly trivial, which it pretty much is.
--Wait about seven or eight years for your sex drive to cool down from "overwhelming" to "mostly overwhelming."
--Accept that the intense shame you feel now will largely be forgotten in ten years' time.
--Wait twenty years, until you're about thirty-five. Many thirty-five year old women will be happy if you stare at their boobs, especially if you compare their boobs to those of a teenager.
--Learn to appreciate the curve of a shoulder, the graceful architecture of a neck, the gentle swell of a hip from a tapered waist, a slender arm, or all the other thousands of things erotic about a woman. You're so hung up on staring at boobs--have you even thought about staring at asses instead?
And most of all:
--Accept that your desire to stare at boobs is absolutely natural. It doesn't actually get much more natural than that. It's nothing to be ashamed of, though I can understand why you'd want to control it just the same, but you should definitely be accepting of any failures in this regard. And believe me when I say that, sooner or later, you're pretty much guaranteed to find a girl who will want you to pay attention to her boobs. Crazy, I know, but it's true. It might not be the first girl whose boobs you stare at, or the ten-thousandth, but it will very probably come in the fullness time.
Unless, of course, too much boob-staring turns you into a crazy psycho killer in the meantime!
Wednesday, July 28, 2010
Tuesday, July 27, 2010
The Myth of Originality
Originality is a myth. Human beings never have and never will "create" anything; to do so would necessitate a mind that operates independent of sensory and symbolic input, and no such mind could ever exist and communicate with us in any way that would be meaningful. There is no creation, only infinite translation, re...-interpretation, and re-combination. All art, all thought, all action, is iterative, and derivative.
"But what about the space shuttle or the SR-71?" says the gentle reader. "There are no natural precedents for those creations."
Such as space shuttles and SR-71s are not found in nature, no. But just as the first human who picked up a rock and cracked at it with second rock until the first rock became a knife wasn't really creating out of nothing so much as he was adapting that which was extant for his or her own purposes, so too is even the most advanced human achievement an adaptation of that which already exists. There are a million or more permutations between that original stone knife and the SR-71, but there are such permutations. The SR-71 does not exist without the A-12, which does not exist without the U-2, which does not exist without the F-104...and so on back to the ME-262, and so on back more to the Wright Brothers Flyer, and so on back to the first human to look at a bird and envy its flight. The titanium in the skin of an SR-71 could only be produced after humans had mastered the metallurgy of iron, which was only possible once humans had mastered the metallurgy of bronze, and so on back to the knife again. Even the most radical breakthrough is no more and no less than an adaptation of that which already exists.
The notion that ideas can come from nowhere, that people can access some sort of headspace for inspiration that is anything more than the sum of their experiences to create something truly "original" or "out of this world" is fallacious, as is any valuation of that which is "original" over that which is "derivative." All human thought is derivative; the best of us can derive more broadly and deeply than others such that the origins of their derivations are not so obvious to him whose derivations are but narrow and shallow, until the origins of the best derivations are mystified in "genius" or made "divine," but even the best of us is merely creating a new permutation of existing elements.
Does a painter paint outside of the colors he can see? Does his mind tell him to go beyond the visual spectrum--that only by painting in colors that the human eye cannot perceive can his work be realized? So he paints a square blue sun--is the square unknown to him? Is blue? Is the sun? It is possible he paints a picture of the sun that the rest of us cannot even recognize as such, but in doing so he still rather reassembles elements of other paintings and of his own perceptions of the sun rather than do something truly original. Show me the man blind from birth who paints masterpieces, and I'll show you a sui generis thinker. Show me the cave artist who leap-frogged over twenty thousand years of technique to paint in exacting proportion and who then went beyond that to a new abstraction made only possible by the implementation of complex concepts that only developed in response to the perfection of established artistic techniques, and I'll show you an original thinker. Show me the poet who works in a language with which she has no other facility to create beautiful poetry, rather than drawing on the millennia of of literature and political history and conceptual development expressed in every syllable of our speech. Show me the poet who has never read any other poetry; show me the engineer who builds robots without understanding the workings of such simpler machines as other men have made and made explicit long before he was ever born. Then I'll show you an original thinker.
But until such time as that, I am going to aver that we are all plagiarists. Smartness is skill and subtlety in plagiarism; smartness is having so many sources recombining within one's head that one cannot attribute one's efforts to anything other than "originality."
"But what about the space shuttle or the SR-71?" says the gentle reader. "There are no natural precedents for those creations."
Such as space shuttles and SR-71s are not found in nature, no. But just as the first human who picked up a rock and cracked at it with second rock until the first rock became a knife wasn't really creating out of nothing so much as he was adapting that which was extant for his or her own purposes, so too is even the most advanced human achievement an adaptation of that which already exists. There are a million or more permutations between that original stone knife and the SR-71, but there are such permutations. The SR-71 does not exist without the A-12, which does not exist without the U-2, which does not exist without the F-104...and so on back to the ME-262, and so on back more to the Wright Brothers Flyer, and so on back to the first human to look at a bird and envy its flight. The titanium in the skin of an SR-71 could only be produced after humans had mastered the metallurgy of iron, which was only possible once humans had mastered the metallurgy of bronze, and so on back to the knife again. Even the most radical breakthrough is no more and no less than an adaptation of that which already exists.
The notion that ideas can come from nowhere, that people can access some sort of headspace for inspiration that is anything more than the sum of their experiences to create something truly "original" or "out of this world" is fallacious, as is any valuation of that which is "original" over that which is "derivative." All human thought is derivative; the best of us can derive more broadly and deeply than others such that the origins of their derivations are not so obvious to him whose derivations are but narrow and shallow, until the origins of the best derivations are mystified in "genius" or made "divine," but even the best of us is merely creating a new permutation of existing elements.
Does a painter paint outside of the colors he can see? Does his mind tell him to go beyond the visual spectrum--that only by painting in colors that the human eye cannot perceive can his work be realized? So he paints a square blue sun--is the square unknown to him? Is blue? Is the sun? It is possible he paints a picture of the sun that the rest of us cannot even recognize as such, but in doing so he still rather reassembles elements of other paintings and of his own perceptions of the sun rather than do something truly original. Show me the man blind from birth who paints masterpieces, and I'll show you a sui generis thinker. Show me the cave artist who leap-frogged over twenty thousand years of technique to paint in exacting proportion and who then went beyond that to a new abstraction made only possible by the implementation of complex concepts that only developed in response to the perfection of established artistic techniques, and I'll show you an original thinker. Show me the poet who works in a language with which she has no other facility to create beautiful poetry, rather than drawing on the millennia of of literature and political history and conceptual development expressed in every syllable of our speech. Show me the poet who has never read any other poetry; show me the engineer who builds robots without understanding the workings of such simpler machines as other men have made and made explicit long before he was ever born. Then I'll show you an original thinker.
But until such time as that, I am going to aver that we are all plagiarists. Smartness is skill and subtlety in plagiarism; smartness is having so many sources recombining within one's head that one cannot attribute one's efforts to anything other than "originality."
Friday, July 23, 2010
Argumentum ad Novitatem
I am a late adopter. Most of my friends are early adopters. This puts me at something of a discord with them on a fairly regular basis.
It is not that I am inherently afraid of technology or progress. Far from it. I understand very well that technologies such as vaccines and intensive agriculture and indoor plumbing have brought a lot of good into a lot of lives.
But just as I see nothing inherently good in man, I see nothing inherently good in his productions. For every beneficial technology, we have such counterexamples in the form of weaponization (theoretical physics to nuclear weapons, computer programs to spyware and viruses) or unintended consequences (pollution, exclusivity, the stress of adaptation, car crashes).
Embracing something *just* because it's new--lusting over Apple's every new release, making an unboxing video and posting it on Youtube, going to Comic Con to geek out over next year's movie releases that you know, on a rational level, are probably all going to be terrible--seems like a dead end to me.
There are a lot of perfectly good things that are old (and, not inconsequentially, cheap or free). Read _The Iliad_ lately, gentle reader? Read _Paradise Lost_? I know you probably haven't, but I assure you that these books are as better than anything that's likely to be released this year. When was the last time you played through _Grim Fandango_ or _Torment: Planescape_, gentle gamer? Oh, the graphics are too primitive? Right. And you, gentle technology buyer, do you really have some need in your life that your current smart phone cannot address, but that can only be addressed by the next generation of smart phones, or do you create within yourself a need for newness that has nothing to do with your other needs?
Of course, being dissatisfied with something just because it's not "bleeding edge" is exactly how corporations want you to think. They need you to continue to shell out for new products as frequently as possible. This is why they design things to break or fail on you after a certain number of uses, frequently compromising on quality for the alleged reason of keeping costs down but actually doing so with the intention of keeping rate of purchase high. This is why there are new fashions every year, new movies, new models of iPhones, new models of cars. Your clothes from last year might be perfectly serviceable, as might your iPhone and your car, and most of the new movies will not be very good. But in all this newness, whether material or cultural, you need to ask yourself "Is this new thing really a *good*? Is it better than what I already have? Or is it just new?" And I don't know, if you measure new things by the metric of utility or significant improvement over the old if many new things are going to stack up.
To my mind, the burden is on anything new--whether a new technology or new artistic product or a new idea or a new restaurant or a new anything--to prove that it is worthwhile. A new instance of art has to prove it's at least as good as the art that has come before it, its digressions from tradition being justified as worthwhile and not just new for the sake of being new. A new restaurant has to have good food, independent of being trendy.
Testing the boundaries of the status quo without a clear justification has exactly as much end value as reactionary paranoia. Neither approach is defensible in terms of logic. I guess the new adopters will act as test subjects for the rest of us--getting sick from the pesticide-laden GMO food, having their iPhones break on them, going to see the new superhero movie on opening night and telling the rest of us how awful it was--and there's a benefit in that, in that their sacrifices will provide the rest of us with the empirical data to say that yes, this innovation is okay or no, this one is stupid and useless. Of course, there may very well be hidden costs of such new technologies that we won't understand for *years* down the line, so it might be decades before the early adopters or anybody else truly understand what those commitments truly cost. Those who are afraid of any change don't provide such useful services as human guinea pigs. But, personally, understanding that undertaking any new endeavor engenders a certain amount of risk, I would prefer to know what my risks are and what my rewards are rather than throw myself all but blindly (or with an excessive outlay of my limited funds) at the new.
Neil Postman says that all technology is a Faustian bargain. He says that in the rush to embrace that which is new we rarely, if ever, realize what we are destroying or discarding in the old. To be sure, we think about technologies like agriculture as unalloyed goods. But look at how many of innovations in industrial agriculture are fraught with complications. The current model for corporate farms is to have huge monoculture crops. Planting great swathes of a single crop does increase yields, yes, I grant you. But it also means that the soil gets exhausted very quickly with all of those plants draining the same nutrients out of it, and the need for fertilizer goes up exponentially. Huge populations of the same plant leave fields open to epidemics of diseases and pests, which in turn necessitates the increased use of pesticides. The end result is that the innovation of factory agriculture involves serious risks to the human population in the pollution of dangerous chemicals, or even in the application and consumption of those chemicals. It poses a serious threat to ecosystems in the form of fertilizer run-off which can devastate aquatic fish and plants or be a real risk to human health if it gets into drinking water. It is a brittle system in that at best we are only ever barely staving off the consequences, and it is dependent on a lot of expensive, non-renewable chemicals in order to function. Does this make for a good?
We believe in a notion of "progress." But it seems to me that so much of human progress is not a movement forward as it is lateral movement. What metrics do we use to gauge whether we are better off now for our new technologies? Increased lifespan? There we succeed. Happiness? There we might well fail. In opening ourselves up to the new possibilities of technology, we do also open ourselves up to new risks and new demands. We are fast approaching our physical limitations with respect to our capabilities to interact with our creations. While the processing power of our computers increases all the time, the processing power of our brains does not, and we are hitting the wall with respect to the human capacity to absorb new information. We have new particular new afflictions--Internet addictions, increasingly widespread needs for constant stimulus and reinforcement and the adulation of faceless thousands, cyber-bullying, the damage to the psyche caused by such actions as spamming and trolling or a Facebook defriending--that would have been unimaginable in 1990 before the advent of the "good" of the Internet. We are reaching our physical limits, too--aided by that agriculture that produces huge surpluses of high-energy foods that we then edit in order to heap on even more energy, the non-physical nature of our new needs, so divorced from what our bodies and minds are adapted to do, will destroy us.
The newness that appeals to me is this: the re-discovery of the extant. That is the space that is available to us, that need not be mediated by any manufacturer or developer. The possibilities of the human body have not been exhausted--or if the limits have been proscribed, that should not mean that it should be any less interesting for an individual to use his own body. More to my taste, the possibilities of the human mind have not been exhausted. Do you think, with all of the need for networking and formatting, that individual initiative and individual experimentation and individual critical faculties are dead? And if such are dead, why the Hell would we want to persist in the world as it is? The possibilities for interaction on a personal scale are not dead. I have yet to see any technology that offers an improvement over the personal conversation. Social networking can distort time and distance to give us depersonalized fragments of a thousand conversations per day, but it cannot provide the intimacy or depth of actual human interaction. And why should we value a thousand snippets of conversation over one real conversation with all of its reciprocity, all of its possibilities for discovery, all of its capacity for the serious exploration of an idea? Because our brains, once tricked out with a love of novelty for the sake of finding new clumps of edible roots on the savanna, now are abused into getting bursts of dopamine from each new tewwt? If so, I say our brains are wrong--or rather, the way that our capabilities are being abused and misused is wrong. It is unhealthful, and it is unuseful. The best technologies are ones that render themselves the most invisible with regards to the "facilitation" of human communication.
So to you who reads this, I offer this challenge. Think about what you want, and think about what you need. Think about whether your technologies address a want or a need. Think about whether your needs are being satisfied by the technology you have, or whether those technologies are creating within you needs that cannot be satisfied. Think about whether your technologies are providing you with better opportunities than could your own mind and your own body. Think about whether you control your technologies, or your technologies control you with their constant demands on your time and attention and finances. Think about whether you are better off with a given technology, or without it.
And if you search yourself and find that your relationship with a given technology is positive, then good. If your judgment is not so compromised by an actual physical addiction to novelty or by a dependence upon something that is helping you in one way while seriously harming you in others and you can make the determination that a technology is a good and that its costs are acceptable, then all is well. Lord knows, I'm not giving up my flush toilet any time soon.
But if you do such searching of your extenuated soul and find that many of these appendages drain you in ways that they do not replete, or that there is nothing in the technology that is better than what you can do for yourself, maybe it's time to throw some of this shit the fuck away.
Let our approach to technology be strictly meritocratic. Let us not engage in the fawning nepotism of brand loyalty, the mad mob rule of trends and fashions, the autocratic impositions of giant corporations, the cheap liberalism that mistakes indulgence for progress or the reactionary conservatism that mistakes fear for genuineness.
Let us be conscious that humans make mistakes, and that these mistakes are frequently fashionable and highly expensive. Let us be conscious that the corporations that offer us newness are no better than the individuals that compose them, and often, due to diffusion of responsibility, quite a bit worse, such that there is nothing inherently good in their products. Let us remember that there is no such thing in all the world as an unequivocal good, that there is no progress without some form of compromise, and that we must be careful and conscious and conscientious in deciding whether the evils we engender are less than the evils we replace. Let us not forsake depth of inquiry and thoroughness of exploration for frequency or novelty of stimulation, no matter how much our pleasure-addled brains might tell us otherwise. Let us cultivate a sound understanding of that which we already possess before we rush to grab on to that which we do not yet have. Let us value intimacy, in all its iterations, over cheap sensation.
Let us remember that new is not the same as good.
It is not that I am inherently afraid of technology or progress. Far from it. I understand very well that technologies such as vaccines and intensive agriculture and indoor plumbing have brought a lot of good into a lot of lives.
But just as I see nothing inherently good in man, I see nothing inherently good in his productions. For every beneficial technology, we have such counterexamples in the form of weaponization (theoretical physics to nuclear weapons, computer programs to spyware and viruses) or unintended consequences (pollution, exclusivity, the stress of adaptation, car crashes).
Embracing something *just* because it's new--lusting over Apple's every new release, making an unboxing video and posting it on Youtube, going to Comic Con to geek out over next year's movie releases that you know, on a rational level, are probably all going to be terrible--seems like a dead end to me.
There are a lot of perfectly good things that are old (and, not inconsequentially, cheap or free). Read _The Iliad_ lately, gentle reader? Read _Paradise Lost_? I know you probably haven't, but I assure you that these books are as better than anything that's likely to be released this year. When was the last time you played through _Grim Fandango_ or _Torment: Planescape_, gentle gamer? Oh, the graphics are too primitive? Right. And you, gentle technology buyer, do you really have some need in your life that your current smart phone cannot address, but that can only be addressed by the next generation of smart phones, or do you create within yourself a need for newness that has nothing to do with your other needs?
Of course, being dissatisfied with something just because it's not "bleeding edge" is exactly how corporations want you to think. They need you to continue to shell out for new products as frequently as possible. This is why they design things to break or fail on you after a certain number of uses, frequently compromising on quality for the alleged reason of keeping costs down but actually doing so with the intention of keeping rate of purchase high. This is why there are new fashions every year, new movies, new models of iPhones, new models of cars. Your clothes from last year might be perfectly serviceable, as might your iPhone and your car, and most of the new movies will not be very good. But in all this newness, whether material or cultural, you need to ask yourself "Is this new thing really a *good*? Is it better than what I already have? Or is it just new?" And I don't know, if you measure new things by the metric of utility or significant improvement over the old if many new things are going to stack up.
To my mind, the burden is on anything new--whether a new technology or new artistic product or a new idea or a new restaurant or a new anything--to prove that it is worthwhile. A new instance of art has to prove it's at least as good as the art that has come before it, its digressions from tradition being justified as worthwhile and not just new for the sake of being new. A new restaurant has to have good food, independent of being trendy.
Testing the boundaries of the status quo without a clear justification has exactly as much end value as reactionary paranoia. Neither approach is defensible in terms of logic. I guess the new adopters will act as test subjects for the rest of us--getting sick from the pesticide-laden GMO food, having their iPhones break on them, going to see the new superhero movie on opening night and telling the rest of us how awful it was--and there's a benefit in that, in that their sacrifices will provide the rest of us with the empirical data to say that yes, this innovation is okay or no, this one is stupid and useless. Of course, there may very well be hidden costs of such new technologies that we won't understand for *years* down the line, so it might be decades before the early adopters or anybody else truly understand what those commitments truly cost. Those who are afraid of any change don't provide such useful services as human guinea pigs. But, personally, understanding that undertaking any new endeavor engenders a certain amount of risk, I would prefer to know what my risks are and what my rewards are rather than throw myself all but blindly (or with an excessive outlay of my limited funds) at the new.
Neil Postman says that all technology is a Faustian bargain. He says that in the rush to embrace that which is new we rarely, if ever, realize what we are destroying or discarding in the old. To be sure, we think about technologies like agriculture as unalloyed goods. But look at how many of innovations in industrial agriculture are fraught with complications. The current model for corporate farms is to have huge monoculture crops. Planting great swathes of a single crop does increase yields, yes, I grant you. But it also means that the soil gets exhausted very quickly with all of those plants draining the same nutrients out of it, and the need for fertilizer goes up exponentially. Huge populations of the same plant leave fields open to epidemics of diseases and pests, which in turn necessitates the increased use of pesticides. The end result is that the innovation of factory agriculture involves serious risks to the human population in the pollution of dangerous chemicals, or even in the application and consumption of those chemicals. It poses a serious threat to ecosystems in the form of fertilizer run-off which can devastate aquatic fish and plants or be a real risk to human health if it gets into drinking water. It is a brittle system in that at best we are only ever barely staving off the consequences, and it is dependent on a lot of expensive, non-renewable chemicals in order to function. Does this make for a good?
We believe in a notion of "progress." But it seems to me that so much of human progress is not a movement forward as it is lateral movement. What metrics do we use to gauge whether we are better off now for our new technologies? Increased lifespan? There we succeed. Happiness? There we might well fail. In opening ourselves up to the new possibilities of technology, we do also open ourselves up to new risks and new demands. We are fast approaching our physical limitations with respect to our capabilities to interact with our creations. While the processing power of our computers increases all the time, the processing power of our brains does not, and we are hitting the wall with respect to the human capacity to absorb new information. We have new particular new afflictions--Internet addictions, increasingly widespread needs for constant stimulus and reinforcement and the adulation of faceless thousands, cyber-bullying, the damage to the psyche caused by such actions as spamming and trolling or a Facebook defriending--that would have been unimaginable in 1990 before the advent of the "good" of the Internet. We are reaching our physical limits, too--aided by that agriculture that produces huge surpluses of high-energy foods that we then edit in order to heap on even more energy, the non-physical nature of our new needs, so divorced from what our bodies and minds are adapted to do, will destroy us.
The newness that appeals to me is this: the re-discovery of the extant. That is the space that is available to us, that need not be mediated by any manufacturer or developer. The possibilities of the human body have not been exhausted--or if the limits have been proscribed, that should not mean that it should be any less interesting for an individual to use his own body. More to my taste, the possibilities of the human mind have not been exhausted. Do you think, with all of the need for networking and formatting, that individual initiative and individual experimentation and individual critical faculties are dead? And if such are dead, why the Hell would we want to persist in the world as it is? The possibilities for interaction on a personal scale are not dead. I have yet to see any technology that offers an improvement over the personal conversation. Social networking can distort time and distance to give us depersonalized fragments of a thousand conversations per day, but it cannot provide the intimacy or depth of actual human interaction. And why should we value a thousand snippets of conversation over one real conversation with all of its reciprocity, all of its possibilities for discovery, all of its capacity for the serious exploration of an idea? Because our brains, once tricked out with a love of novelty for the sake of finding new clumps of edible roots on the savanna, now are abused into getting bursts of dopamine from each new tewwt? If so, I say our brains are wrong--or rather, the way that our capabilities are being abused and misused is wrong. It is unhealthful, and it is unuseful. The best technologies are ones that render themselves the most invisible with regards to the "facilitation" of human communication.
So to you who reads this, I offer this challenge. Think about what you want, and think about what you need. Think about whether your technologies address a want or a need. Think about whether your needs are being satisfied by the technology you have, or whether those technologies are creating within you needs that cannot be satisfied. Think about whether your technologies are providing you with better opportunities than could your own mind and your own body. Think about whether you control your technologies, or your technologies control you with their constant demands on your time and attention and finances. Think about whether you are better off with a given technology, or without it.
And if you search yourself and find that your relationship with a given technology is positive, then good. If your judgment is not so compromised by an actual physical addiction to novelty or by a dependence upon something that is helping you in one way while seriously harming you in others and you can make the determination that a technology is a good and that its costs are acceptable, then all is well. Lord knows, I'm not giving up my flush toilet any time soon.
But if you do such searching of your extenuated soul and find that many of these appendages drain you in ways that they do not replete, or that there is nothing in the technology that is better than what you can do for yourself, maybe it's time to throw some of this shit the fuck away.
Let our approach to technology be strictly meritocratic. Let us not engage in the fawning nepotism of brand loyalty, the mad mob rule of trends and fashions, the autocratic impositions of giant corporations, the cheap liberalism that mistakes indulgence for progress or the reactionary conservatism that mistakes fear for genuineness.
Let us be conscious that humans make mistakes, and that these mistakes are frequently fashionable and highly expensive. Let us be conscious that the corporations that offer us newness are no better than the individuals that compose them, and often, due to diffusion of responsibility, quite a bit worse, such that there is nothing inherently good in their products. Let us remember that there is no such thing in all the world as an unequivocal good, that there is no progress without some form of compromise, and that we must be careful and conscious and conscientious in deciding whether the evils we engender are less than the evils we replace. Let us not forsake depth of inquiry and thoroughness of exploration for frequency or novelty of stimulation, no matter how much our pleasure-addled brains might tell us otherwise. Let us cultivate a sound understanding of that which we already possess before we rush to grab on to that which we do not yet have. Let us value intimacy, in all its iterations, over cheap sensation.
Let us remember that new is not the same as good.
Sunday, July 18, 2010
Reflections on _Two Gentlemen of Verona_
I took in a performance of _Two Gentlemen of Verona_ last night. It was the first time I'd ever been exposed to this particular play.
The play sucks. And when I say it sucks, I mean that the characters are inconsistent and a-psychological, the action is unfocused, and the language is dull. The lines are nearly bereft of those intricate metaphors, rhythms, and clever inversions that so characterize the Bard's better efforts. I'd say it ain't Shakespeare...but, well, it is. As a contrast to his mature works and as proof how of genius is not so much born as it is arrived at through effort and practice, _Two Gentlemen of Verona_ can be interesting. In itself, it's pretty much a piece of shit. The funniest character in the whole thing is the god-damned *dog*.
Here's how the climax of the play goes down (Spoiler alert: if you're concerned about spoilers for a play that is 400 years old, you're a moron).
Guy A: Oh Girl A, stop running through this forest in search of Guy B, who was my best friend and your fiancee until I betrayed him for love of you even though I was already in a relationship with Girl B, who is nothing to me now! Stop everything you're doing and fall in love with me, even though you have absolutely no reason whatsoever to do so!
Girl A: Piss off!
Guy A: Ah, fuck it! Get ready for rape!
Guy B: I, Guy B, who was beset by bandits in this very forest and who has become their king and who was given all of their treasure on account of my rather trivial ability to speak at least one language other than Italian, will conveniently appear at just this moment to prevent the raping!
Guy A: Oh! Even though I was just about to rape the woman you love, and even though you were exiled on account of my maligning you to the Duke, let's be friends again!
Guy B: Okay!
Guy A: Here, you can have Girl A! I don't care about her anymore!
Guy B: Okay!
Girl A: I have nothing to say about any of this!
Girl B: Oh Guy A, I have been watching you all this time as you tried to rape Girl A! I dressed in drag so you wouldn't recognize me, and you didn't recognize me, even when you sent me to Girl A to give her the ring that I had originally given to you as a symbol of our love! But now look! I reveal my long hair, which means I also have a vagina! You should love me now!
Guy A: You're right! The failure of my raping has made me realize that I actually loved you all along!
Girl B: Hooray!
The Duke: Oh, I am captured by bandits! But I instantly forgive everybody who threatened my life, tried to kidnap or rape my daughter, or manipulated me! Now let's go party!
All: Yay!
This shit is pretty terrible. This Shakespeare guy might have some potential, though. Maybe.
The play sucks. And when I say it sucks, I mean that the characters are inconsistent and a-psychological, the action is unfocused, and the language is dull. The lines are nearly bereft of those intricate metaphors, rhythms, and clever inversions that so characterize the Bard's better efforts. I'd say it ain't Shakespeare...but, well, it is. As a contrast to his mature works and as proof how of genius is not so much born as it is arrived at through effort and practice, _Two Gentlemen of Verona_ can be interesting. In itself, it's pretty much a piece of shit. The funniest character in the whole thing is the god-damned *dog*.
Here's how the climax of the play goes down (Spoiler alert: if you're concerned about spoilers for a play that is 400 years old, you're a moron).
Guy A: Oh Girl A, stop running through this forest in search of Guy B, who was my best friend and your fiancee until I betrayed him for love of you even though I was already in a relationship with Girl B, who is nothing to me now! Stop everything you're doing and fall in love with me, even though you have absolutely no reason whatsoever to do so!
Girl A: Piss off!
Guy A: Ah, fuck it! Get ready for rape!
Guy B: I, Guy B, who was beset by bandits in this very forest and who has become their king and who was given all of their treasure on account of my rather trivial ability to speak at least one language other than Italian, will conveniently appear at just this moment to prevent the raping!
Guy A: Oh! Even though I was just about to rape the woman you love, and even though you were exiled on account of my maligning you to the Duke, let's be friends again!
Guy B: Okay!
Guy A: Here, you can have Girl A! I don't care about her anymore!
Guy B: Okay!
Girl A: I have nothing to say about any of this!
Girl B: Oh Guy A, I have been watching you all this time as you tried to rape Girl A! I dressed in drag so you wouldn't recognize me, and you didn't recognize me, even when you sent me to Girl A to give her the ring that I had originally given to you as a symbol of our love! But now look! I reveal my long hair, which means I also have a vagina! You should love me now!
Guy A: You're right! The failure of my raping has made me realize that I actually loved you all along!
Girl B: Hooray!
The Duke: Oh, I am captured by bandits! But I instantly forgive everybody who threatened my life, tried to kidnap or rape my daughter, or manipulated me! Now let's go party!
All: Yay!
This shit is pretty terrible. This Shakespeare guy might have some potential, though. Maybe.
Friday, July 16, 2010
Zarathustran Musing
Esteem yourself neither by the number of instances nor by the intensity of the esteem of others. Does the decadent culture of the crowd prove nothing if not that those who receive the most praise are often, in truth, the least deserving of accolade? As well esteem yourself by the disapprobation you receive—then you know you are doing something that the stupid man cannot understand. Let his hatred be an honor to you; take your bruises for badges and your scars for garlands. As well esteem yourself in accordance with the apathy your efforts encounter, for in creating such as finds no resonance in cheap souls you might assume that you have done something worthwhile. And if your creations should happen to be received with embraces and your words with welcome, look to it that you speak your own soul. Let any semblance of convergence with the sickly commingled spirits of unthinking men be only semblance.
Thus spoke David Kammerzelt.
Thus spoke David Kammerzelt.
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