Violaline http://www.alansondheim.org/violaline.mp3 http://www.alansondheim.org/violaline.jpg thinking of biwa and others ____ And some theory I've been working on recently: Digital Virus and the Extinction of Life http://www.alansondheim.org/coronad.jpg Entrance and Dominance of the Slurry Uniformity and Collapse Annihilation to the Limit Empire of Fire The Gray and the Global I began with: I wonder if the digital could not be considered a disease, dis/ease, or a collapse, co-lapse, cul-lapse, an infection that comes to every intelligence in the universe, and as such, ultimately cuts through, parcels into, continua of organisms and thought, until nothing is left but pieces - a universal conflagration that destroys, through that very parceling, life itself - so that what remains is only debris, partials, that, permanently distraught, nothing occurs further, all is brutal char, until that cycle begins again, something discovering the digital once more, if there be still room for life and living, until, yet again, the parceling begins anew, and over and over again, destruction through an inconceivable permanence of division... And to continue: Language is not a virus; language is messy, unconstant, morphing; the digital substrate is otherwise. There are limits to the digital and the digital is always limited. The universe is messy as well; even the Planck limits are messy, angles are messy. Start top-down, not bottom-up in any case. The world is always flux, always dirty, always unconstant. Digital machinery operates in potential well; flood it, short it out. But it becomes the model; flux rides on it. Flux rides on it and becomes scrolling. Scrolling seems into the complexity of the world like a virus, kills it, cancels it. Look at simple math, neither this nor that; not both this and that - models for expulsion. But the digital necessarily divides this; the digital is the industrialization of the world. Exclusion is fundamental to the digital. Just as we assume we understand, comprehend, the digital it escapes; it seeps. It seeps as industry, as framework; it seeps as device. Its promise to cure disease is a disease; it never remains one thing, one ethos; it always becomes otherwise. It invades so quietly, you hardly know it's there, and that's the signifier of its presence. Digital drives the world as if under the control of humans who appear to hold no responsibility for its effects; digital also drives the control of those same humans. The world starts from the bottom up; the digital starts from the top-down, or rather, does not recognize scale. You can't throw away the ladder because the ladder is monitored; you can't consign to silence, because silence is monitored; because there is no silence. The digital is totalization; it's the foundation of every application, every signal, every communication, every human relationship, every human. It's unrecognizable; only its overt manifestations appear otherwise. I use a digital machine to write this, but what is monitoring the air I breathe, producing the machines of the world, seeping through medicines which are absolutely necessary in a world of digital viruses. This is not a question. This is a command. Within the digital, every question is a command. Within the digital, tolerances are commands-demands; tolerances define the pale. The pale is always elsewhere. The pale is commanded-remanded. The pale is corral. This is of no concern and this is absolutely of no concern. Every culture in the universe discovers the digital. Every culture in the universe disappears as a result of digital plague. All of this is so fundamental, we know it, already in our genes. It is so fundamental, it disappears when we attempt observation, when we attempt analysis and cure, when we attempt healing or suturing, cover-up or displacement. Every healing or suturing, every cover-up or displacement, is a gift from the digital, is itself displaced, covered-up, eternal, permanent, the aegis of a universal ecocide. If the digital were a virus, it would be the smallest, based on a more or less originary, primordial, distinction, something Spencer Brown realized decades ago. But Brown didn't realize the viral consequences of this, of course, that 0/1 in terms of the development of intelligence, culture, species, ecologies, life itself, was fundamentally destructive, as if its employment were predestined to result in scrolling and wars of total annihilation. Which is what this mini-essay is about, as if it were a warning label or stop-sign, both useless, and as if this were nothing more then a poetic conceit. Which itself is a poetic conceit on the way to "Language is not a virus; language is messy, unconstant, morphing; the digital substrate is otherwise." and so forth and so on, and so off +++ _______________________________________________ NetBehaviour mailing list NetBehaviour@lists.netbehaviour.org https://lists.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour
