What’s a Meta For?

[Note: I’m sure I didn’t make up that punning headline.]

Dave Rogers weighed in with a response to the blogthread (see Akma‘s entry and my response to start with) about metaphors for the Web by telling us about C.S. Lewis’ concept of transposition “when one attempts to adapt something of a higher or richer medium to a poorer medium.” That’s why, Lewis says (Rogers says) we can’t describe heaven: as we transpose it into terms we can understand, it loses its richness. “Could it be,” Dave wonders “that we have actually made a ‘higher medium’ that we cannot adequately explain in our ‘poorer medium’ world?”

This is a provocative idea. I think the evaluative terms get in the way, though. We could drop the “higher” and “poorer” and still use the idea of transposition to explain why we have trouble describing the experience of the Web. There are ways, obviously, in which the Web is a deprivation of the real world: five senses reduced to one, almost purely verbal, sedentary. That’s how the Web looks to people who think that it’s making us less social. (Hah!) The Web, it seems to me, is making us more social but also differently social — relationships mediated through keyboards are necessarily different than ones in which two people are close enough to breathe each other’s air. And you are not going to get me to say that one is better than the other.

So, what’s the richness of the Web that the RW can’t appreciate any more than it can appreciate heaven? While it would be self-contradictory to expect a full answer (“Please utter the unutterable in 100 words or less”), we need some type of answer since the Web isn’t something we can only experience by dying. Daniela Bouneva Elza at LivingCode suggests that it’s the “superculture” described by Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen in Figments of Reality. A superculture knits together multicultures “like genuine multicellular organisms,” say Black and Cohen. I don’t know that I find this particular metaphor all that helpful, but Daniela sure seems right in pointing at the realm of culture and sociality as the Web’s locus of ineffable richness. Culture, society, even civilization. These seem like good words for discussing what we’re building on the Web.

(By the way, I really like Dave’s explanation of why the Web’s space and time are so utterly different than the RW’s. And Daniela’s passing use of the word “extelligence” struck me; maybe too cute to stick, but there’s something right about it also. IMO.)

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Government Cracks Down on State-Run Piracy Ring

Senator Fritz Hollings today announced the Fair Value Protection Act aimed at stamping out the widespread piracy of intellectual property that, according to testimony before his committee, deprives authors of almost two billion dollars a year of revenues they have earned and deserve.

“The FVPA goes a long way to restoring the fair relationship between creators and consumers,” said Senator Hollings. “Honest consumers want to pay for the value they receive. They understand that creators deserve to be paid for their work and for what they contribute to our proud American culture.”

Mark Miwords, president of the Book Lovers for Fairness, a publishing industry trade association, said in testimony before the committee, “This buy- once-share-with-all practice has to stop. It’s unfair, it’s unreasonable and it’s Unamerican. The fact that governments themselves are funding this type of terrorism against intellectual property is outrageous.”

According to the terms of the FVPA, all public libraries will be closed permanently as of June 24.

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Bombastic Truth

The Bombast Chronicles: Rants and
Screeds of RageBoy collects the best of EGR into one
convenient hardbound volume. EGR is
Christopher Locke’s ‘zine which consists of equal
parts industry insight, comedy and reader
abuse. Chris is a good friend of mine, and mocks me
at several points in his book. Now that
we’ve gotten that out of the way…

Christopher Locke is a brave writer. Despite the
book’s subtitle, this is Chris’ book as much as it
is Rageboy’s, and not because Chris is the person
behind the persona. The Bombast Transcripts is
RageBoy and Chris Locke by turns. It’s RageBoy
interviewing Mr. Ed (yes, the horse) about ecommerce
and
post-modernism and RageBoy ranting about the demonic
master he served (known to the rest of us as IBM).
But it’s also Chris trusting us with his heart, as
well as with his art. It’s Chris falling in love.
For real. As in love poetry:

sitting in the lobby
of the Grand Wailea
there is no inside or outside.
the sky comes right through
it’s a breeze.
everywhere clouds
water flowers
one world continuous
no edges.

so much
so much has happened here
and on the way to this place
which has taken a lifetime
to arrive at.

…

And there’s Chris also writing in a lovely way
about the Buddhist prayer flags on Mt. Everest. And
there’s Chris reporting on his trip to Denmark in
which we feel him falling in love, but just for a
moment, with one of the organizers of the event that
brought him over. It’s in that essay
that he tells us flat out what we realize we’ve been
waiting for him to say all along:

What’s going on has nothing to do
with ecommerce or broadband or any of that. Those
are just tools. Like the horses we painted in the
caves at Lascaux, like the bone axes and bows we
made, the religions and mythologies we invented, the
literatures, arts, intellectual disciplines. Just
tools. What they are for is to help us fall in love
with the world again, and again, and again
forever.

The Web is the sound of us falling in love with
the world again. RageBoy is just tough love.

The Bombast Transcripts is a tour de
force. It is as right about the Internet as anyone
has been. But that story is entwined with Chris’
own. As he’s throwing acid in IBM’s face, he’s also
invoking his months of meditation, his decades of
debauchery, his years of geekhood. Bombast
risks everything in order to be true. Chris is
willing to embarrass himself and to embarrass his
readers if that’s the way to say what’s needful. No
one will like all of this book but if you can’t feel
the gust of truth blowing through it, then, well,
may RageBoy take your soul.

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Damn Canadians!

Thomas Vincent writes in response to my running Gary Lawrence Murphy‘s call for ripping CDs as a form of civil disobedience against the coming legislative stupidity:

All for bootlegging, all for the argument and I think it’s our duty as partiots…but did you notice…it’s easy for him to talk….he’s in Canada.

If our legislators keep this up, we’ll all be in Canada, pal. Eh?

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Web Space, Web Mind

AKMA continues his quest for a non-spatial metaphor for the Web. He wonders if the Web isn’t “a mind that we are building from the ground up.” AKMA is uncomfortable with the spatial metaphor because space is so familiar and the fit is so inexact that the metaphor may blind us to what is truly different about the Web. He likes the mind metaphor better because:

…we would be comparing something we’re only just beginning to apprehend (the Web) with something we’ve been misapprehending for millennia (the mind).

Nicely put, as always.

Given Akma’s misgivings about the spatial metaphor, I think he likes the mind metaphor not because we misapprehend the mind but because we are less certain of our understanding of the mind than we are of space, so we are less likely to fall into old habits of thought if we compare the Web to the mind. That is, the benefit of the mind metaphor is precisely that it’s less obvious to us.

There’s been a lot of thought given to the relationship of the Internet and the brain. My problem is that the more accessible that research is to me, the less I agree with it. The incomprehensible bits about the mechanics of the brain’s literal neural network seem promising and thought-extending. The parts I can understand talk about consciousness and suggest that the Internet as a whole is becoming aware, as foretold either by Nostradamus or Colossus: The Forbin Project, I forget which. This seems to me to make the old error of conceiving of consciousness as a set of formal, instantiate-anywhere processes (“Just add matter — of any type! — and stir!”)

People also intermittently notice that the Web is like Teilhard de Chardin’s noosphere, which also has the advantage of comparing the Web to something we don’t understand. I find that the noosphere comparison helps to focus my attention up from the many individual ideas and rants on the Web, but I’m not sure what else it adds.

The question about the mind as metaphor is whether it fits well enough to be obvious but is rich enough to shine light on corners otherwise left dark. And there are dangers, as with any metaphor. In particular, I personally find almost totally unappealing the notion that the Web, like the mind, is self-aware and self-interested. And the concept of a “hive mind,” as some have suggested, strikes me as actually repellant. (Note: I am announcing my prejudices, not justifying them.)

So, now the task might seem to be to write a 100-word essay on “How the Web is like a mind” but I think it’s actually to think about what it would be like to talk about the Web in mind terms. For the talk about metaphors swirling through the blogthreads is in fact really about a new rhetoric, replacing the old spatial one of “going” and “leaving,” etc. I don’t see what that new rhetoric would be. But I’m sure my co-bloggers will have suggestions…

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Speaking of Akma, how could you not read a blog entry entitled “More Saints Endorse Plagiarism,” especially if you know that the blogger is a theologian?

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The Obvious?‘s Euan reminds us that Lawrence Haggerty’s “The Spirit of the Internet: Vol. I: Speculations on the Evolution of Global Consciousness” talks about minds, the evolution of consciousness and the noosphere. (The implication that I have read it would not necessarily be warranted.)

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Keep on ripping

Gary Lawrence Murphy encourages us to keep on bootlegging as an act of civil disobedience against the coming Punish the Spread of Ideas and Creativity Act:

Unfortunately, mass civil disobedience is historically the best antidote to an unjust law. We can make it as clear as we can what our intentions will be. Let them sign it into their law. We, the people, will follow our law. Let Congress make his-story. We will make our-story.

Bootleg everything you can get your hands on.

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The Instant Gratification of Stupidity

AKMA, reflecting on sermons, writes

As I stop and look around, I observe both the amplified tendency toward speed that Dave [Rogers] cites and a patience for interesting narration (taking as examples Garrison Keillor, Lily Tomlin, Spalding Gray, Eve Ensler, extended raps, poetry slams, and other such cultural practices and practitioners). I don’t see people unable to follow a story, an argument, a sermon, but people who have diminished patience for tedium.

Oooh, a diminished patience for tedium! I like it!

But it reminds me of a line in my Upcoming Book with which I have become uncomfortable. It says something like “Are our attention spans getting shorter, or is the world becoming more interesting?” Facile, glib, and missing the real point which is that both are happening simultaneously. Likewise, part of the tedium for which we are losing patience seems to me to be the patience required to start slow and build, to do scut work so that your thinking can advance later. Instant knowledge gratification. As AKMA, a seriously well-read, multi-lingual scholar obviously knows, mastery often requires tedium. I worry about this, seeing my own impatience eroding my ability to think and to learn.

(Flameproofing myself: Yes, mastery is a sexist and politically charged term. But you know what I mean: If you want to learn ancient Greek, chemistry, medicine, piano or how to dance, you’re going to have to endure some boredom.)

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BTW, AKMA also has a thought-provoking piece on the significance of the facelessness (literal) of the Web.

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Why search engines suck™

At NetworkSolutions, go to the Manage Account tab, type in the name of the domain you want to manage, and click “Go!”. You’re taken to a page that presents an Ask.com search query box where you can type in the question you want answered. Could it be any easier?

Unfortunately, if you ask “How do I change domain servers?”, “How do I change name servers?” or “How do I change nameservers?”, the response is:

“Thanks for asking your question! Unfortunately, we couldn’t find any answers for this one.”

Ok, How about something a little easier? Why not try the example thoughtfully provided right under the instructions “Type in your question and click ‘Go!'”: “How do I renew my domain name?”. Response:

“Thanks for asking your question! Unfortunately, we couldn’t find any answers for this one.”

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Nothingness Explained

Judging from email, it seems that some of you have missed the hilarious point of my What Type of Nothingness Is the Universe and the Pathetic Bit of It You Call Your Life? quiz. Hint: It’s a quiz about nothingness. Get it?

Oh hohohoho. Oh, that’s rich.

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Wild Utopia

Kevin Marks writes, in reference to my “Web as Utopia” piece:

Dave, being a nice bloke, sees the
web as utopia. A transcendent Platonic ideal of
Socratic discourse, where those of good faith
commune on the nature of the world. Then there are
those who see in the seedier side of the web the
darkness of their own souls, for we are all fallen
creatures, and the line between good and evil runs
through all our hearts.

Hell no! I don’t see the Web as socratic. I see
it as connective, and socratic dialogue is only one
form of connecting, and a pretty paltry one at that.
Yelling, joking, teasing, provoking, criticizing,
grieving, and flirting are all forms of connecting.
So is simultaneous masturbation (no, I don’t mean
blogging). What makes the Web utopian (in some
sense) is that it’s connective, not that it’s
polite, rational or even intelligent. At least that’s what I meant to say. If I threw off the estimable Kevin Marks, I must have put it badly.

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