The Swan Song of Arnold Yates

 The world is mad tonight.

Unresting souls feed-bleed into

the turbid ebb and flow of online ire.

Yearning and burning in the worldweb gyre

the world is radical tonight.

Reason’s been flung apart; the Net cannot be told

what to do.

The sender cannot comprehend

the far-flung manipulation of what he sends.

A data-driven tide is loosed into the swirl

where hackers whack our data-driven world

everywhere

the ceremony of benevolence is drowned

in the turbid ebb and flow

of human usury.

Clueless proles lack all comprehension, while wizards twirl

their trolled-up swirls

into cookie-coded streams

that nullify our naive dreams

and herd us, the cattle-driven teams

in programmed herds of Left and Right

as online armies clash by night.

The world is mad tonight.

 

Glass half-Full

Bypassing GooFacAmzEtcetera

Have you ever ignored a very long “Terms and Conditions” contract,  by scrolling past all the fineprint so that you could sign at the bottom and move on?

Maybe you remember doing that a time or two—maybe ten or twenty times—just so you could gain access to some online service that you felt you needed to have right away.

I don’t know about you; but I have, many times.

Could it be that those unread contracts were the slippery slope where we began sliding into GooFacAmzEtcetera’s blank-check permissions to move us around like tokens around on an online monopoly board?

Could it be that that data-mining-manipulating-mindreading AI-bringing bundle all started with those fine-print contracts that we ignored back in the day?

Did we sign-off all our legal rights, for the sake of quick and easy internet surfing?

Maybe that’s the crossroads where we sold our data-souls to the devilitating database from hellbot.

Maybe that’s the bush bearing megabytes we’re better off not having bitten into?

Maybe that’s the open window where data analytics, data mining, data snooping and data mind-manipulation snuck in to abscond our online data-booty that we didn’t even know was booty because we were too occupied with bling or blather or boobs or blobs of blahblah.

Are you benefitted by googoo reading your mind? Do you feel the warm-fuzzies when faseboo gets you hooked up to a cyber-buddies. Do you buy into Amz  tossing up product images to instigate your next purchase?

In those ultra-long documents that we so hastily dismissed, there’s just no telling what details, legal rights, restrictions, disclaimers or general b.s. we may have thoughtlessly cast aside by declining an opportunity to reject the deal.

In recent times, we have seen reports about online snooping by GooFaceAmzEtcetera, invasion of privacy, predatory data-collection, even surveillance, which all together seems to add up to:   BigBrutha spying on us, to read our minds, manipulate our habits, and make bigbucks off of us, or politically manipulate our very predictable and manipulable online behavior.

Maybe you’re okay with BigBrutha bullying your life by baling into your blanks, bringing bling or blather or  boobs or blobs of blahblah.

Or maybe you would prefer to obliterate the cyber busybodies’ bullshit  by bringing in blockchain, blockstack, blockcoin, blockstock and/or Buterinian bypassing for buffering the buffoonery and bypassing the bullying beyond its ability to bind up your booty-blather and thereby bestow it in billowing clouds to the burgeoning BigBrutha database.

However you decide, now you know what the choices are! You have hereby been red-pilled, or blue-pilled, as your personalized database maybe.

And if you think this is all just bullshit blight, you may be bright.

Glass half-Full

From Wealth of Nations to Wealth of Data

Our Declaration of Independence is not the only hallmark document of the year 1776.

There was another one: Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, which Wikipedia refers to as a magnum opus.

Magnum opus means pretty doggone important idea, as the multilectic development of our dialectical ideas shape  history.

Smith’s groundbreaking insights propelled our modernizing world into the age of Economics, a new time when the effects of money and industrial productivity began to channel human culture in ways that outweighed traditional institutions.

The Church, the Royals, such ancient paths of power were, in the long run of history, outmoded by the power of the buck.

Freedom to gather wealth was being distributed widely among new, rising enterprisers in society, instead of being controlled by the purse of the Popes or the money of the Monarchs.

Now the tide is turning again, in a major way.

But it’s turning back the other way.

Oh, not back to the Church or the King, but back to another select group—the data mining Social Media.

Now Wealth of Nations morphs to Wealth of Data.

And it seems it happened in the blinking of an eye, so to speak.

All our data that we generate through ubiquitous universal social media gets scooped up and recycled as fodder to generate future wealth, for somebody.

For Whom? Who is gathering the new Wealth of Nations through our electronic and wifi conduits of the Wealth of Data?

Robber barons, monopolists, capitalists, opportunists, daytraders, speculators, hedgefunders, algorithmists, hackers, gamblers, midnight ramblers?

Future wealth, for somebody. . . for whomever is using the data as a field for harvest —to skim new wealth, through  their privileged knowledge of out trendy, predictable human habits. . . our fashions, fetishes, foibles and infamous freedoms.

Freedom to spend, mostly. Especially with all the cardswiping that you see in every spending venue these days.

It’s so easy to spend money nowadays.

Even if you don’t have any!

Using the data streams to  anticipate where the “markets” are headed, where the money’s going . . .those watchful, AI-wielding movers and shakers behind the scenes can know exactly when and where to lower their clickbait nets, and scoop up a big mess of digital debits or financial fish.

“Markets” being the main concentrations of consumer and business wealth that are being spent every day as we live and breathe and spend.

A lot of people are starting to figure this out, about now.

Some have been noticing the profit potentialities for awhile. Others have known from the beginning. They are the ones who have been establishing data-mining as the latest phase of capitalism.

I learned something about this, this morning, when I read Karin Petersson’s report about it on the Social Europe site.

   https://www.socialeurope.eu/politics-in-the-age-of-data

Karin’s opening statement got my attention in a big way.

“It’s impossible to change the world if you don’t understand the forces shaping it.”

That is so true, Karin.

I went on to read her concise treatise, which consisted of an insightful cautionary statement about the three main problems of this data-mining development. I will list those three here, while recommending that you read her article in order to get her thoughts from her article—not mine.

Karin’s list of the three problems:

~~Rage machine

~~Winner takes all

~~Survival of Democracy?

She is calling into question the survivability of democracy in these new social media conditions that have overtaken our way of life.

You should read it.  https://www.socialeurope.eu/politics-in-the-age-of-data. 

Now I do have something to say about her opening statement:

“It’s impossible to change the world if you don’t understand the forces shaping it.”

So true.

But I confess that my free-thinking mind dropped the KM bomb on me. That is. . . Karl Marx.

. . . not that Karin is a Marxist or anything like that.

My point is that even if you DO understand the forces shaping the world . . . odds are you still can’t change it!

Oh yes, maybe you can make some beneficial contributions, maybe some helpful new ideas, but convincing yourself that you can change the world based on what you know or understand about it . . . that is a dream that will never come true.

Take the Karl himself, and his idea: The factories and businesses of industrial production are owned by a few rich people.  If the regular working people—the proletariat— could take over that means of production and do a fairer job of running it— then society could distribute the wealth in an equitable way. Everybody would have a piece of the pie and we could all live then in an egalitarian commune.

Happily ever after, as they say.

Certainly I am oversimplifying this scenario, but I do it for the sake of simply making this point: You can’t change the world, even if youdo  understand the forces that are shaping it.

My layman’s reading, for instance, of Marx/Engels Communist Manifesto led me to the conclusion that their analysis of capitalism as it was developing in the mid-19th century was, for the most part, accurate!

They predicted, for instance, the alienation that would indeed later take hold of many workers as a result of having to perform repetitive production tasks.

So Marx, Engels and others later went on to prescribe a fix for the problem: dictatorship of the proletariat.

When Lenin, Trotsky and others got a hold of this concept they acted on it.

But look what happened. Things got bloody. By the time Stalin got hold of the new development, the formerly fresh thrust of worldwide communism turned into prison gulag.

And it did not recover until the time of Gorbachev, Yeltsin, etc.

That’s one small idea for a man . . . and one giant, very hard lesson learned for mankind.

You can’t change the world, even if you do understand the forces that are changing it.

In the present context of data mining, this principle would perhaps translate to: find a way to regulate the data-miners, but don’t try to take the whole damned machine away from them. This is merely capitalism in its emerging 21st-century form.

Neither the technocrats in Brussels, nor the bureaucrats in Washington can stem the tides of history. You just have to regulate those who control the Wealth of Data, insofar as it is Constitutionally  possible, and leave the rest to each individual citizen’s free will and judgement.

The same principle applies, btw, for Climate Change.

Education, for whosoever is willing to learn, is the remedy. Not control. We all need to be convinced to do the right thing.

Life, liberty and pursuit of happiness must be assured for all, in spite of all the data-miners  who lurk behind our keypads, sucking the hot air out of our collective social media balloon.

Glass half-Full

the Tower of Signals

Thousands of years ago, we built a legendary tower, the shadow of which has seemed to darken our human history even unto today.

According to a certain well-known historical source, the Bible . . . the tower of Babel was erected in some location east of the Euphrates River. The region therein has been known since that ancient time by various names:  Chaldea, Shinar, Babylon, and a few other identities, such as the current one, Iraq.

So an ancient tale about the tower of Babel, especially its fall, has been passed down to us through the ages.   The biblical account says that The Tower of Babel’s undoing happened because the people were unable to communicate. So they were not able to get the thing built.

In our modern reflection upon that archaic project, I think what Will Rogers or Mark Twain or Yogi Berra, or some such sage  said, applies:

“What we have here is a failure to communicate.”

It’s an old story, but true.

Nevertheless, I’m here to tell ya that in spite of ourselves we people of the earth have managed to erect some pretty impressive towers here and there throughout the ages.

For instance, notice this  classic religious tower in San Francisco, which happens to be a double.

This structure represents that spirit of religion that dominated our Western culture for a couple of thousand years.

Here’s a Spanish project representing a more contemporary creative impulse toward the divine.

Very impressive. But the era of God-inspired basilica-building has been overtaken by more humanistic projects. Since the so-called Enlightenment in the 18th-century, people have aspired to ideals even loftier than mere religion. This modern emphasis has wrought even higher and higher feats of skyscraping.

The long epoch of God-inspired tower-building has been overtaken by a New Age of Man.

And yet, our rising human spirit has morphed itself beyond mere commercial, citified projections. Check out an Olympic objet d’art that the Barcelonans fashioned for the 1992 Olympics:

This fluidic rising structure embodies a humanic zeitgeist; it aspires to inspire ascension to world peace—a peace wrought through zealous sports competition instead of bloody wars fought with destructive weapons on muddy battlefields.

Pretty damned impresseve, huh?!

Higher and higher we strive; higher and higher we arrive.

Now in 21st-century AI, We find ourselves in the upper regions of human accomplishment.

Physical upbuilding has now taken a back seat to the loftiness of our ideals.

So we’ve built a stupendous net of ideas, an electronic network that ceaselessly transmits gigabytes of presciently important data around the world. It is a web as ethereal as the sun itself . . . as surreal as a Dali . . .  as real as a Warhol.

And towards this end, we’ve built towers of a different—a new and different—kind:

Towers such as this one--structures of ascending human perfectibility-- are slavishly repeating signals all day and all night for the benefit of all mankind!

For the benefit of Mr. Kite, ever and ever onward to greater heights!

We hold these spires to be self-evident—that our updated tower-driven secretions will project a worldwide web of human achievement to rise higher than  the Tower of Babel ever did!

Good luck with that.

Glass Chimera

To Do or Not to Do!

 That is the question, and so here spurts forth a contemporary quandary, purloine'd from the great classic tragic drama,  Hambiskit, by Mr. William Shakyerbootie:

Herein we heareth the soliloquy of yonder young prince Hambiskit, being uttered in the midst of his worst internetual crisis:

 

To do or not to do: Is that the question?

Whether ’tis nobler in this world to suffer

the slings and arrows of superfluous wwweb buffoonery,

or to sling comments against a viral flood of manipulators

and by opposing outsmart them.

To o’ercome, or to consume more and more?

and by consuming then regurgitate

the spewings of those faceless data-freaks

that the Web is heir to: ’tis a comment

boldly to be keyed.

Just sayin’.

To excel, or to consume?

to consume—perchance to daydream: aye, there’s the flub!

For in that slumber of couch-potato’d mess, what dreams may come?

when we have sluffed off the ancient laborious toil

that flesh was heir to!

Just sayin’.

Yeah, such pathoggery will surely add us pounds; there’s the rub:

there’s the lethergy

that makes such heavy weight of this long life.

For who, tell me who? will now bear the quips and scorns of time—

the hackers’ throng, the elites’ manipul’ry,

the publicized pangs of transgended sex, the laws’ demise,

the insolence of leftists and the the lumps of alt-right grumps. 

 Our attention to such useless compost daily piles up

while we ourselves with regularity do our deposits drop

from every bare bottom?

Pshaw!

Who, I ask you, who would such far-fetched feces bear?

—to groan and complain in this our cushy couchist pod

until the dread of whatever the hell’s after death—

that unsolicited’d app from whose click no traveller returns—

it wipes our will

and makes us  bear those charmin’ ills we have,

rather than fly to other charms we know not of.

Thus, consciousness makes cowards of us all, y’all,

and so the human hue of resolution

is slicked o’er with the clown'ed cast of infotainment.

Then enterprises of great pith and content,

by mere wasting of time, our  essential issues get sucked away,

and so we so thoughtlessly delete

the path of action.

To do or not to do, I tell ya, Ophelia Bodelia,

That is the question!

Just sayin’.

 

King of Soul

The Second Dumming

with apology to W.B. Yeats

Spinning, spinning on internet spires
the demagogues have lost sight of our foundation;
Polls spread apart; the moderates cannot hold;
Seared extremities are loosed upon the land,
The opiate tide is loosed, and everywhere
our old consensus urge gets lost in the noise
The worst gain all attention, while the best
Are mired in mediocrity.

Um, um, some revolution is at hand,
like, like . . . absurdity rules the land.
It’s ridiculous! Immediately as the tweets is tweeted
with some viral bizarrity from lala land,
it occludes our sight: somewhere in the pixels of the dream
a shape with venus body and head of man,
gazing blank and shiftless as The Cloud demands,
is moving its slow members, while all around
retweet droppings splatter from our looney clowns.
The narco takes the cake; so now we reep
as two centuries of freedom deep
spin downward now to chaos bleep by bleep.
So what rough beast, its hour come at last,
slouches toward America to delete our past?

King of Soul

"The Press"

Our world was forever changed when, about 577 years ago, Johann Gutenberg devised an effective way to reproduce printed documents. His invention enabled the printer man to apply controlled mechanical pressure to an inked image in a manner that facilitated efficient multiple printings.

When the printer man repeatedy applied "the press" (more about this later) to those blank pages, the world was changed forever.

Gutenberg's innovation enabled printers to print multiple editions of documents and books. Our Library of Congress recently displayed a centuries-old Bible that was printed by means of the Gutenberg innovation.

The printing industry progressed rapidly. It wasn't very long before books and other documents were being churned out all over the world in great numbers.

Books have changed the world.

Our fascination with the stories, literature and information we find in books has revolutionized the way we live. In the late 1800s, the American artist John Frederick Peto painted this image of a pile of books. His picture, recently displayed in our National Gallery of Art, captures the fascination that I find within those printed pages.

The spread of printing throughout the globe induced an information revolution that has affected the way we think about, and do, just about everything. As people became more and more literate, news of the times we live in became a larger and larger factor in the ways people think about the world. People in the modern world use news and contemporary information to inform their decisions, and modify their strategies for living life successfully.

News became such an obsessive element in our modern life that large institutions were built for the purpose of informing people about what's happening in our world.

Those massive news-spouting institutions now find themselves being cornered into a different role. The big picture of 21st-century information dispersal is being turned on its ear by an unruly multiplicity of online mini-sources. This development is along the lines of what George Orwell called the "brave new world."

Actually, it's the wild, wild West out there. What we have now is like a million Okies hightailing it across the internet prairie, every one of us hell-bound to claim our little stake of the cyber-dirt that's now being divvied up for the media of the masses.

Or "dictatorship of the proletariat", if that's what rings your chimes.

It used to be that "The Press" was all those journalists and editors who gathered and published the news on a daily basis.

But not any more. Our meaning of "the press" is now something else entirely, and I'm not sure how to define or describe it.

But I do surmise that our new understanding of "the press" has something to with that collective pressure applied by reporters on public spokespersons.

Here's an example. Sean Spicer, the new White House Press Secretary, argues with The Press about how many people showed up for the inauguration.

That's The Press now, and this disconnect between "us" and "them" is the new "news."

Lastly, as Uncle Walter might have said:

And that's the way it is, Tuesday, January 24, 2017.



Glass half-Full

From Gutenberg and Luther to Zuckerberg, Gates and Jobs

About 500 years ago, the new technology of the printing press enabled a religious revolution in the Christian church. The Catholic power structure was subsequently torn apart by the spreading of new Scriptural doctrines that were brought forth by Protestant leaders such as Luther and Calvin.

About 250 years ago, as that printing press technology was maturing, the political world was similarly torn apart by the rapid spreading of new political ideas. The old monarchic empires of Europe--most notably the British and the French--lost control of their institutions. Emerging democratic and republican movements rendered the old power structures irrelevant and replaced them with new, fledgeling governments. The American Revolution and the French Revolution changed the world forever.

Now those revolutionary movements of the 1700s have themselves produced worn-out overdeveloped institutions which have become cumbersome and must therefore be replaced or radically downsized

I'm talking about our old political parties and our old media institutions. And who knows-- even the government itself?

Like the 16th-century revolutionary advent of the printing press, we are witnessing an emerging 21st-century revolution in communications technology: the Internet. This changes everything about how we organize ourselves as different interest groups and cultural movements.

We will also endure a revolution in government institutions.

The powers-that-be, now morphing as powers-that-used-to-be, include not only the government itself but also the media behemoths and two political parties of the old order.

ABC, CBS, NBC appear to be going the way of the buffalo. Like IBM in the 1990s, morphing under assaults at the Gates of Redmond and the Jobs of Cupertino, the fates of these media giants will be determined by whether their leadership can change with the times.

And the old behemoth newspaper dailies--same thing. They gotta roll with the punches. Jeff Bezos bought the WashPo. What does that tell you?

But where this stuff is really hitting the fan now is in the political parties.

Bernie and Donald are tearing the old political landscape apart.

The old tags of Democrat and Republican are becoming irrelevant.

Our new identities slice right through both of those bloated institutions. Bernie and Donald are beneficiaries of this creeping political anarchy.

How can I identify these changes in a way that is descriptive without being simplistic?

Like it or not, the Democrats are now all basically socialists. But they are split between:

Occupiers and Mandarins.

Republicans are now all basically reactionaries (against Democrats). They are split between:

Trumpians and Conservatives.

Although this writer is a registered Republican, that association may be coming to an end. If the Trumpians take the booty in Cleveland, I'll be looking to find a new American party. It's dangerous, but I've read about some old guys from two centuries ago who took awfully risky chances when they signed a Declaration against King George III and then wrote a Constitution to boot.

Here's the beginning of my declaration, and the old Constitution will do just fine with maybe just a few updates. And this radical centrist is looking for some way to extend the American Experiment, without it falling apart.

People doing their thing on the Internet cast a plethora of disparate forces that are fragmenting our nation. The new political arrangements will have to reflect these changes or we're toast when the jihadis figure out how to penetrate whatever remains of our moral fortitude.

Glass half-Full