December 2012 | Page 3 of 4

MonthDecember 2012

Synthesis, Synthesis Everywhere

December 10, 2012 / Klint Finley

Jeremy Antley compares my essay for Boing Boing on audio synthesis and the occult to Herman Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game:

Much of the plot for Glass Bead Game centers on the biographical sketch of Joseph Knecht, a typical Hessian-styled child prodigy turned intellectual tour-de-force whose pursuit of inner enlightenment means overcoming obstacles of both perception and understanding. One might recall the line from Hesse’s other well-known (and much shorter) work, Demian: “I wanted only to try to live in accord with the promptings which came from my true self. Why was that so very difficult?” The story follows Knecht from his childhood, where he fast becomes a virtuoso with the Violin, to his admission and development as an intellectual in the Order of Castalia, a sort-of utopian realm created in the aftermath of a terrible war in order to cultivate both learning and greater development of the highest expression of said learning, that being the aforementioned Glass Bead Game. Knecht eventually becomes “Magister Ludi,” or the head administrator in charge of the Glass Bead Game that, despite being the book’s title and one of the more important themes surrounding the plot’s development, finds description only in vague terms.

Antley explains that the rules of the game are never explained, the closest we get is an explanation of how the game was applied to the evolution of various disciplines. He quotes from the book:

At various times the Game was taken up and imitated by nearly all the scientific and scholarly disciplines, that is, adapted to special fields… The analytical study of musical values had led to the reduction of musical events to physical and mathematical formulas. Soon afterward philology borrowed this method and began to measure linguistic configurations as physics measures processes in nature. The visual arts soon followed suit, architecture having already led the way in establishing the links between visual art and mathematics. Thereafter more and more new relations, analogies and correspondences were discovered among the abstract formulas obtained in this way. Each discipline which seized upon the Game developed its own language of formulas, abbreviations and possible combinations.

Full Story: The Media Res: Glass Bead Meme

Morlocks – The Future Of Human Evolution?

December 9, 2012 / Klint Finley

On two species of humanoids in HG Wells’ The Time Machine — Eloi and Morlocks — Edward Strickson writes:

So, is it likely that this is our future? We can speculate, but I’d lean pretty far towards a no. As we combine our cultures and try to spread equality, it’s less likely that entire branch of us will be isolated, unless there is a natural disaster or something similar that separates us. But this does not mean that we will not change, just that the extremes of Eloi and Morlocks are (thankfully) looking less likely as time goes on, at least in my point of view.

Full Story: Teen Skepchick: Morlocks – The Future Of Human Evolution?

The historic tendency of “masters” to have sex with slaves may also prevent our evolution from ever bifurcating along class lines.

Strickson thinks that of the two species we’re more likely to end up like the Eloi: “Many more of us are able to get on with our lives without immediate dangers, knowing that if anything befalls us we will be looked after.”

I disagree. Modern medicine has licked a number of diseases, and increased our likelihood of surviving accidents. Yet our lives are not without immediate dangers. We risk death every day in the U.S. when we step into automobiles. The rest of the world face other dangers, ranging from war lords to malaria. We still have no cure for AIDs, which is still one of the most common causes of death in world.

Meanwhile, global warming is baking our planet, necessitating more adaptation and/or evolution. Perhaps the Morlocks, with their underground habitats, are our species’ future after all.

Alan Moore On The Subversive History Of Comics

December 8, 2012 / Klint Finley

Wired published Alan Moore’s contribution to Occupy Comics, an essay of the history of comics as subversion:

In the derivation of the word cartoon itself we see the art-form’s insurrectionary origins: during the tumults and upheavals of a volatile seventeenth century Italy, it became both expedient and popular to scrawl satirical depictions of political opponents on the sides of cardboard packages, otherwise known as cartons. Soon, these drawings were referred to by the same name as the boxes upon which they’d been emblazoned. As a method of communicating revolutionary ideas in a few crude lampooning strokes, often to an intended audience whose reading skills were limited, the power and effectiveness of the new medium was made immediately apparent.

This may also be the starting point for the receding but still-current attitude that comics and cartoons are best regarded as a province of the lower-class illiterate. However, following the realisation of the form’s immense political utility, it’s only with increasing difficulty that we can find a political event of any scale that has not been commemorated (and, often, most memorably commemorated) by the means of a cartoon.

The eighteenth century, with its more readily available print media, saw the promotion of the scathing cartoon image from its lowly cardboard-box beginnings to the cheap pulp paper mass-production of the broadsheets and the illustrated chapbooks. Consequently this same period would witness the emergence of the form’s first masters, artists who could see the thrilling possibilities in this unruly and untamed new mode of cultural expression. We can see this evidenced in James Gilray’s often-scatological and lacerating barbed caricatures of the dementia-prone King George the Fourth, in William Hogarth’s stark depictions of society’s deprived and shameful lower reaches and even in the sublime illuminated texts of William Blake, in which the visionary’s radical opinions… He’d stood with the firebrands of the Gordon Riots, in a red cap denoting solidarity with the French revolutionaries across the channel, watching Newgate Prison burn…were of necessity concealed beneath a cryptic code of fierce spiritual essences; invented demi-gods with grandiose and punning names that can be viewed as having much in common with the later output of the superhero industry’s presiding genius, the genuinely great Jack Kirby.

Full Story: Wired: Alan Moore’s Essay for the Activist Occupy Comics Anthology

How Mesh Networks Connected Sandy Victims To The Outside World

December 7, 2012 / Klint Finley

Becky Kazansky writes:

Through a mesh network first launched in November 2011 through a local nonprofit, residents after the storm were able to alert people to their needs over social media and check up on relatives. Access is limited and the network could, at the time, support only about 100-150 connections simultaneously. But in the wake of a disaster that created a new camaraderie in Manhattan around cellphone charging stations and free wifi, New Yorkers can appreciate that when the neighborhood goes dark, even a scrap of a link to the outside world is better than nothing.

Full Story: TechPresident: In Red Hook, Mesh Network Connects Sandy Survivors Still Without Power

Via The Doctor, a volunteer with Project Byzantium, a Linux distribution that includes mesh networking out of the box. The Byzantium team also helped out during Sandy, as noted in the article.

My interview with The Doctor is here.

The Long Con: Mail-Order Conservatism

December 7, 2012 / Klint Finley

Rick Perlstein takes a look at the various snake oil and get rich quick schemes peddled on right-wing e-mailing lists, and dives into a bit of the history of New Right funding raising:

Following the standard scare-mongering playbook of the fundraising Right, Weyrich launched his appeal with some horrifying eventuality that sounded both entirely specific and hair-raisingly imminent (“all-out assault on our traditional family structure”—or, in the case of a 1976 pitch signed by Senator Jesse Helms, taxpayer-supported “grade school courses that teach our children that cannibalism, wife swapping, and the murder of infants and the elderly are acceptable behavior”; or, to take one from not too long ago, the white-slavery style claim that “babies are being harvested and sold on the black market by Planned Parenthood”). Closer inspection reveals the looming horror to be built on a non-falsifiable foundation (“could become”; “is likely to become”). This conditional prospect, which might prove discouraging to a skeptically minded mark, is all the more useful to reach those inclined to divide the moral universe in two—between the realm of the wicked, populated by secretive, conspiratorial elites, and the realm of the normal, orderly, safe, and sane.

Weyrich’s letter concludes by proposing an entirely specific, real-world remedy: slaying the wicked can easily be hastened for the low, low price of a $5, $10, or $25 contribution from you, the humble citizen-warrior.

Full Story: The Baffler: The Long Con: Mail-order conservatism

There’s much more. Perlstein concludes with some thoughts on what this says about the psychology of modern conservatism:

Lying is an initiation into the conservative elite. In this respect, as in so many others, it’s like multilayer marketing: the ones at the top reap the reward—and then they preen, pleased with themselves for mastering the game. Closing the sale, after all, is mainly a question of riding out the lie: showing that you have the skill and the stones to just brazen it out, and the savvy to ratchet up the stakes higher and higher. Sneering at, or ignoring, your earnest high-minded mandarin gatekeepers—“we’re not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact-checkers,” as one Romney aide put it—is another part of closing the deal. For years now, the story in the mainstream political press has been Romney’s difficulty in convincing conservatives, finally, that he is truly one of them. For these elites, his lying—so dismaying to the opinion-makers at the New York Times, who act like this is something new—is how he has pulled it off once and for all. And at the grassroots, his fluidity with their preferred fables helps them forget why they never trusted the guy in the first place.

Good History Of Cybersyn, Chile’s Cyberutopian Experiment Of The 70s

December 6, 2012 / Klint Finley

Good history and context of Chile’s experiment in social cybernetics in the 1960s:

In the early 1970s the scale of Beer’s proposed network was unprecedented. One of the largest computer networks of the day was a mere fifteen machines in the US, the military progenitor to the Internet known as ARPANET. Beer was suggesting a network with hundreds or thousands of endpoints. Moreover, the computational complexity of his concept eclipsed even that of the Apollo moon missions, which were still ongoing at that time. After a few hours of conversation President Allende responded to the audacious proposition: Chile must indeed become the world’s first cybernetic government, for the good of the people. Work was to start straight away.

Full Story: Damn Interesting: Nineteen Seventy Three

Previously: Cybersyn – the Chilean socialist Internet of the 70s

How Selecting Voters Randomly Can Lead to Better Elections

December 6, 2012 / Klint Finley

Joshua Davis wrote for Wired:

Roughly 2,500 years ago, the citizens of Athens developed a concept of democracy that’s still hailed by the modern world. It was not, however, a democracy in which every citizen had a vote. Aristotle argued that such a practice would lead to an oligarchy, where powerful individuals would unduly influence the masses. Instead the Athenians relied on a simple machine to randomly select citizens for office. It’s an idea whose time has come again.

Full Story: Wired: How Selecting Voters Randomly Can Lead to Better Elections

Google-Funded Drones To Hunt Rhino Poachers

December 5, 2012 / Klint Finley

Mother Jones reports:

First things first: No, the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) is not using drones to vaporize poachers. But thanks to a five million dollar grant awarded by Google on Tuesday, the organization is expanding its use of unmanned aerial vehicles to track and deter criminals who illegally hunt endangered animal species around the world.

Mother Jones: Mother Jones: Google-Funded Drones To Hunt Rhino Poachers

Liberal Bullying On Blog Comments

December 5, 2012 / Klint Finley

Ariel Meadow Stallings has written a good piece on “liberal bullying.” I thought this would be yet another “everyone needs to stop being so PC” type of post, but it isn’t:

I’m extra conflicted because I love observing and following the ways that language shifts. It’s exciting and fascinating to watch as the semantics of marginalized communities evolve. I recently had to talk to my aging lesbian mother and her partner about how the word “tranny” causes a lot of issues for folks in the transgender community. They’re totally aligned with the cause, and totally active in LGBT communities… and yet hadn’t gotten the latest memo.

Instead, Stallings is writing about uncivil blog comments meant to publicly shame. Here’s how Stallings identifies this behavior:

Focus on very public complaints. I can think of exactly one time when someone emailed their concern about problematic language. These complaints seem to be always intended for an audience.

Lack of interest in a dialogue. These complaints aren’t questions or invitations to discuss the issue. They’re harshly-worded accusations and scoldings (which I’ve written about before).

Lack of consideration for the context or intent. The focus is on this isolated incident (this one post, this one word, this one time), with de-emphasis on the author’s background, experience, or the context of the website on which the post appears.

And on a more stylistic note, these complaints are often prefaced with phrases like “Um,” and other condescending affectations.

Full Story: Liberal bullying: Privilege-checking and semantics-scolding as internet sport

(via Al Billings)

I suspect this bullying is counter-productive — attacking someone puts them on the defensive, making them try to find ways to justify what they’ve written, even if it’s insensitive, and find ways to disagree with the attacker.

Occult Secrets Of the Avant-Garde

December 4, 2012 / Klint Finley

From a “document presented to individuals who have been invited to join the Neoist Alliance,” probably from early 1990s:

Anyone who has allowed the scales to fall from their eyes can see that the world’s top occultists are to be found among the ruling class and that those New Age groups who attract disciples by offering training in ‘chaos magick’, ‘creative visualisation’ or ‘rubbing the Buddha for money’, are worse than mere rank amateurs, they are shameless charlatans. Indeed, many of them are quite consciously working to prevent the development of a system of symbol manipulation that is completely autonomous of the state. Currently, Masonry is marshalled in defence of the status quo, but as the Bavarian Illuminati demonstrated in the eighteenth-century, power always flows in two directions and it rarely emanates from what is widely misperceived as constituting the ‘centre’. The cellular form of secret societies devised by the founders for the security of the movement, can as readily be used to hoodwink the leadership, who thus become unwitting front men for activities they would never countenance. By infiltrating the Lodges of Masonry, it is possible to spread a heretical message of freedom across the world.

Stewart Home Society: Occult Secrets Of the Avant-Garde

Not that there’s much power in the lodges these days. But the organizational model is still alive and well at the The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (aka the Mormon Church). Alcoholics Anonymous is pretty interesting as well.

Previously: Occult Battles On The Streets Of London, 1993

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