Beyond Hive Consciousness, Part 1

Jaron Lanier begins his long awaited first book, You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto, by trying to explain his day job as a technologist of the late 20th Century. In doing so, he cannot help but allude to Marshall McLuhan:

We make up extensions to your being, like remote eyes and ears (webcams and mobile phones) and expanded memory (the world of details you can search for online). (5)

This would have been yesterday's news to McLuhan, whose 1964 opus, Understanding Media, is subtitled "The Extensions of Man." McLuhan understood well that Lanier and his technologist coworkers were merely extending human organs in new, virtual ways.

Lanier, however, is aware of his ironic position, and takes pains to separate himself from the hive mentality that dominates Web 2.0 and all of its adherents (including contributors to the blogosphere). And since his own subtitle is "A Manifesto," which would seem to indicate a high level of public importance, Lanier provides a self-help list of do's and don'ts for those addicted to the superficiality of Web 2.0 reductionism:

• Don't post anonymously unless you really might be in danger.
• If you put effort into Wikipedia articles, put even more effort into using your personal voice and expression outside of the wiki to help attract people who don't yet realize that they are interested in the topics you contributed to.
• Create a website that expresses something about who you are that won't fit into the template available to you on a social networking site.
• Post a video once in a while that took you one hundred times more time to create than it takes to view.
• Write a blog post that took weeks of reflection before you heard the inner voice that needed to come out.
• If you are twittering, innovate in order to find a way to describe your internal state instead of trivial external events, to avoid the creeping danger of believing that objectively described events define you, as they would define a machine.
(21)

That's some good advice. If we all adhered to Lanier's dicta, we would be spared the vituperative trash that infects topical forums, Wikipedia would be useful background to the real story, websites would be windows into our souls, YouTube would be worth watching, more blogs would be worth reading, and Twitter might actually be interesting. Imagine the kind of Singularity we could then produce!

In 1991, Brian Eno famously quipped that "Future TV will be made with simple equipment, unqualified people, small budgets, and bad taste." Lanier sees the fulfillment of that prophecy in a section called "Schlock Defended." Again, he can see the irony of YouTube, and suggests that, while it could--and should--be of much higher quality, the motivation to create schlock is inarguably human.

Lanier then takes on computationalism in his chapter titled "I Am a Contrarian Loop," an obvious spoof on our own Doug Hofstadter's work. Lanier critiques the three "flavors" of computationalism that are supposed to result in the Singularity--the awakening of the web. First there's the notion that sheer quantities of data held in databases such as Google's will somehow wake up to some kind of cosmic consciousness. A second flavor--that proferred by Hofstadter--requires self-aware recursion--a "strange loop"--in order to qualify as consciousness. Finally, there is Web 2.0 computationalism, which holds to a new twist on the Turing test: if you buy music based on the recommendations of the hive "then the hive is effectively a person" (156). Lanier then suggests that human evolution is, in fact, realistic computationalism, and we could construct a myth, a creation tale, "to think computationally that isn't as vulnerable to the confusion brought about by our ideas about ideal computers" (157). For McLuhan, myth "is the mode of simultaneous awareness of a complex group of causes and effects" (McLuhan, 1962, 266). This "complex group of causes and effects" is simply another way to express Lanier's realistic computationalism.

To be continued...

[NOTE: This blog post was four weeks in the making. Part 2 could be four more. :dj]

Time Consciousness and the Role of Dominant Myths

Having been a fan of both Brian Eno (see "Stars: the Consciousness of Cool," below) and Stewart Brand since the '70s, I was surprised to learn that the two had come together in the '90s, collaborating on the project described in Brand's book of the same name: The Clock of the Long Now.

Here we find Eno master of time as well as space. Brand credits Eno with coining "the long now," which, says Eno, extends "our concept of the present in both directions, making the present longer" (29). Then Brand and Eno take the long now into the realm of myth, for The Clock of the Long Now, with its associated 10,000-Year Library,

aims for the mythic depth to become, as Brian Eno puts it, "one of those system-level ideas which sets in motion all sorts of behavior without ever having to be referred to directly again. This is what dominant myths do: they make some sorts of behavior ring with recognition and familiarity and value and a sense of goodness, and thus lay deep templates for social cohesion about what would otherwise be very hard-to-discuss topics." (49)

Or as James P. Carse would say in Finite and Infinite Games:

• “We resonate with myth when it resounds in us.”
• “Myths, told for their own sake, are not stories that have meanings, but stories that give meanings.”
• “Whole civilizations rise from stories—and can rise from nothing else.”

Just imagine what kind of civilization might arise from the myth of a long now...

The Metaphor Maker

People who hope to thrive in the Conceptual Age must understand the connections between diverse, and seemingly separate, disciplines. They must know how to link apparently unconnected elements to create something new. And they must become adept at analogy--at seeing one thing in terms of another. There are ample opportunities, in other words, for three types of people: the boundary crosser, the inventor, and the metaphor maker. (134)

-- Daniel H. Pink
A Whole New Mind

Pink has, here, hit upon the crux of metaphor as a wellspring of creativity -- the ability to "understand one thing in terms of something else" (139). Note the authors we admire in this blog:

• "The Hero's Journey" of Joseph Campbell is a metaphor;
• The Gutenberg Galaxy by Marshall McLuhan is a metaphor;
• "The medium is the message" is obviously a metaphor;
• as is I Am a Strange Loop by Douglas Hofstadter

It is always the metaphor maker who shows us a new reality -- an "imaginative rationality" (139) -- whether it's Pink Floyd "Learning to Fly" or a tone poem such as Brian Eno's "Stars."

Pink quotes Twyla Tharp, who "encourages people to boost their metaphor quotient, or MQ, because 'in the creative process, MQ is as valuable as IQ'" (139).

More importantly, metaphor is the basis of empathy, and, just as it allows us to understand others in terms of ourselves, it becomes the very foundation of consciousness, for "the more we understand metaphor, the more we understand ourselves" (140).

Q: What is I?

A: A metaphor. The question itself is metaphorical.

But the creative I is something more...

The creative I
is a metaphor maker.

The Music of Interrelation

In Understanding Media, Marshall McLuhan defines a "sacred" universe as one dominated by auditory media, including the spoken word. "A 'profane' universe, on the other hand, is one dominated by the visual sense. The clock and the alphabet, by hacking the universe into visual segments, ended the music of interrelation" [italics added] (210). So, how can McLuhan's concept of "sacred" vs. "profane" be applied to music, itself?

With the electronic music instrument, any tone can be made available in any intensity and for any length of time. Note that the older symphony orchestra was, by comparison, a machine of separate instruments that gave the effect of organic unity. With the electronic instrument, one starts with organic unity as an immediate fact of perfect synchronization. This makes the attempt to create the effect of organic unity quite pointless. Electronic music must seek other goals. (471)

For Brian Eno, those goals are nothing less than heightened awareness and consciousness itself. As case in point, consider "And Then So Clear". The use of vocoder immediately makes any attempt at organic unity pointless, as McLuhan, notes, but it does speak well of "the music of interrelation." And what we gain through Eno's impressionistic vocal is a mythic understanding of consciousness--clarity--itself, the very substance of sacred music. Check it out.

Stars: the Consciousness of Cool

"Stars" -- eight minutes of expanded consciousness, made aural by Brian Eno (see The Audio File, left).

This piece from the Apollo: Spheres & Soundtracks album composed with Daniel Lanois and Roger Eno exemplifies the points Tamm makes about Eno's notion of ambient in Brian Eno: His Music and the Vertical Color of Sound: 1) the atmosphere is "colored" by a drone-like background layer; 2) the sonic density is fairly low, giving the impression of significant space between aural events; 3) there's a ton of signal processing, most notably echo and reverb in spite of the well-known vacuum of space that might be indicated by the title; 4) many events occur at levels barely above the threshold of conscious hearing; and 5) it's completely alive between your ears (147-148). And, though Tamm cites Eno's references to Marshall McLuhan's "gobal village" on several occasions, "Stars" is a perfect example of McLuhan's concept of cool.

For McLuhan, a hot medium is "one that extends one single sense in 'high definition.' High definition is the state of being well filled with data. A photograph is, visually, 'high definition.' A cartoon is 'low definition,' simply because very little visual information is provided. [...] Hot media are, therefore, low in participation, and cool media are high in participation or completion by the audience" (Understanding Media 39).

Eno's "Stars" certainly extends a single sense, but it does so in such low definition that it compels the listener to fill in the space, to travel the lightyears between stars, to become a voidsucker--one with the universe--to experience the consciousness of a god--that is, to be more fully human.