"My World Picture" http://www.alansondheim.org/Nissan.jpg Understanding where we are in the world, and what the world is, becomes increasingly difficult; the greater the range of our instruments, the greater the appearance of anomalies. It takes incredible hubris to assume the universe can be understood in terms of fundamentals and reifications (if one's inclined to philosophy), given the presumed enormity of everything on both macro- and micro- levels. We invent chimeras somewhat and somehow in our likenesses, however defined - what might be considered local explanations that allow us to function. The explanations contradict each other; with the advent of tools and their progressive complexity and 'reach' over the millennia, they become associated with power, with conquest, with communication technologies that create the illusion that the world is growing smaller, that we somehow understand the local at all scales and species across the planet. It's a planet. Competition, cosmic events, internal and external parasites (and the world is full of parasites) define everything. Atomic annihilation is inevitable, and all our dreams and momentary bulwarks will inevitably go the way of all species, all worlds. Hierarchical power, the result of communication technologies, local survival mechanisms, and the nature of the very elements that constitute the world, ensure this. If one plays the lottery of survival, almost all the time winners and losers will be small-time and local, but sooner or later, someone or some network or some thing will gamble, and that will be it. The global rise in temperature (which was predicted decades ago) ensures desiccation, increasing apocalyptic religions associated with hierarchical power, increasingly violent local wars, starvation on a massive scale, fire economies as more of the world burns, 'bad actors' embedded in global networks, increasing drug and weapons trade, and so forth. It is only a matter of time. What we hold precious is so very fragile, and we shouldn't forget that whatever saurian culture existed in the past has disappeared with almost no trace at all. I look around our rooms here, and my own tendency to create space, spaces for our lives, our books, our musical instruments - so much that is fragile, that breathes for a short while in a dangerous world; I listen to the sounds of pain outside on the street. I turn on the computer, and again increase - not only of power/speed, but also of advertisement, control, levels of access, intrusions, barriers, protocol decays, leaks and what I think of as 'displacements' online - a site almost randomly curtailing access unless money or information is exchanged. It's more and more difficult to _think clearly_ as if one were given the privilege of monetary isolation (which now exists only among _the highest tiers_ of capital, however defined). (n.b. increased speed, no time to think, pervasiveness of the instantaneous, multiplcities, varieties of intelligences, real problems with irrealities, 'always already done that.') One of the tragedies of all of this is that _we have always already known_ these tendencies; we displace our own knowledge as a means of local (in time, space, community, economics) survival - and all survival is fundamentally local, tied into the global with enormously controlled, hacked, replaced, decaying protocols that ensure we either buy into their domains or give up our illusory power that we make a difference. We do make a difference of course, especially within the local, and the local might as well be the desk I'm writing on as well as the global networking that ensures both the transparency of the desk and its materiality, and the obdurate nature of our belief in futures against all odds. We arm ourselves, define ourselves within the local (for I am _here,_ not _there,_ no matter how connected we are; my arms reach no farther than my arms, etc. etc. - how 'basic') - connected only in the sense of abstract flows which comfort and frighten us, and ultimately become channels of power and accumulation, and most likely not our own. Reification obstructs thinking through simplicity; terms are defined and redefined as thought becomes tied to world-views, leverages, sememes, institutions, domains of poverty, and firewalls of economics, communication, travel, employment, education, health, philosophy, and environment. Touching everything, we are not there, where touching is everywhere. Where touching is not there at all, where there is no 'original face,' where touching, like thought, is an illusion. As an illusion, it is all there is. We are present for the short time of our lives, for our increasing knowledge of the long time of the world and the shorter time for the survival of the planetary biome as we know it. All of this is self-evident; cultural myths create the illusion of the long-term, of eternities, of our thought after our thought. With a whisper, we will be gone; with a whisper, we may take the going with us. Do we survive in the small, almost microscopic, domains given to each of us? The eternal question of course is 'what is to be done' and the answer or answers are increasingly lost in noise, ideologies, and power struggles. For who or what, for the most part does not want to continue? Firewalls are a form of aggrandizement and economics, and useless in the long run. The tragedy, the fundamental tragedy, is that there is now the potential for buttons anywhere on the planet to be pushed, while action at a distance increasingly becomes action at the local level, not the other way around. Too many ideologies, too many illusions of permanent and personal power, pave the way for disaster. Your disaster is our own, and it is also illusory that world-wide communications bring us all "closer together." The reality is we are all brought closer to the effects of power regimes everywhere, and it's easier, easiest, to be an actor who creates scarcity than one who benefits the planet through one or another form of shared abundance. (In the old catastrophe theory, this used to be called 'the fragility of good things' - in other words, there's one best solution, and an enormous number of bad ones, or none at all, or ones that have decayed, or ones that have been 'taken over' et cetera.) Where does this leave us? On the whole, when we're born, we 'inherit' the planet locally, and leave it to others when we die. No one, no thing, ever sees the full effect of their actions. (Most of these will be lost in noise, most of us will be lost in noise, long or short after we're gone.) On a personal level, I wake up in despair, go to sleep in despair, live in despair, the result of being a witness to old and new millennia. (I've been reading Zen koans, playing music, reach out to others as so many of us do, attempting to be kind, where I haven't been in the past, still try to feel that a state of grace and love is possible, beyond the 'immediacy' of the local of my existence. And what of it? What of any of this?) (And for me, there's no conclusion; the complexity of the world precludes that. I'm left with the absurdity that my only faith is in no faith, which of course is no answer at all; it's almost impossible to live without one or another sense of the 'goodness' of being alive. Such goodness is increasingly a luxury, the transparency of decay and devolution are too visible, too prevalent. I leave you with this, now at 6:17 a.m. in the morning, another sleepless night, one of many, and fewer and fewer, to come.) +++ _______________________________________________ NetBehaviour mailing list NetBehaviour@lists.netbehaviour.org https://lists.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour
