*apologies: I feel I should post a lot less on this list; there are very few posting here at all. It's my daily practice to work in a continuous fashion, but not my intention to create bloatware. I'll slow up or stop unless something life-changing comes along that needs attention. I note that other lists have increased at times, as the wars plural need our attention and, for the list, perhaps mutual care. Please let me / us know what you think; I'd hate to see the list become moribund, particularly now that the world is becoming increasingly cruel. Thanks, Alan ___ wa, afternoon musing https://youtu.be/xQnY5X1jlis dutar when memory is perfect, there is no memory. azure and I found an old school yearbook from the 19th century, with lots of signatures, one of them mentioned the school. within a few hours we figured out who owned the yearbook, what year it was from, and what subsequently happened to the person who owned it; we traced her from new england to west virginia, we found the graves of her and her husband, we found images of the graves, everything and nothing is available, the world is flat, memories are fundamentally digital, interspersed between mind and network, shuttled, everywhere, for all time; what's not there, is not. this flatness scales everything; the digital is entirely transformable, manipulated; it carries a set series of symbols and protocols, smears and tears are non-existent, even in their digital reproduction. we move from the earth and the grit of the earth to clearing our screen. this is necessary and accessible, food comes from elsewhere, as does polluted air and the consequences of politics. perfect memory online is a click away and a click erased and a click found elsewhere and a click found in the company of others, of strangers, of protocols, of hard drives and as such of course contain none of the debris that someone like braudel might have used to reconstruct a culture. storage cleansed is invisible, totes the invisible, with the occasional diagnostics. but the point or plateau is, we ride these surfaces, we inhabit them as protocols and ghosts (i know you're there, the screen has changed), our emanations are always already duplicable. we are in other words superfluous, or in other words, nodes, smell and taste and atmosphere absent or regenerated (everything is ultimately regenerated). The world becomes protocol, RFC (request for comments), simultaneously flat and infinitely dimensional, both meeting in a series of rules necessary for communication. all of this is trite, is evident, but sometimes, at least for me, i have to remind myself - for example i'm staring at nothing but pixels which basically exist within the aegis of absent bodies. in the past myths and ceremonies were intertwined, as were kennings and other formalisms familiar to all, all within and without the surface, all promulgating communication; the kenning became the postage stamp. the flat earth (not my phrase, everything here is as i keep insisting, already known) carries everything and nothing to itself, flat but infinitely dimensional, multiply connected, striated with protocol layers transforming the protocols close to the speed of light in media. when we meet one another in 'real life' (as if that were always an option one way or another), we carry the ghosts, the auras of onlines presences with us. no wonder Trump succeeds, no wonder it takes wars, poverty, bodies, plagues, Ballard's crashlands, to shatter our complacency (complacent in _this regard,_ we're hardly complacent elsewhere, perhaps more engaged politically for example), we're hardly here, hardly there, always on the move, hardly on the move... i hardly wrote this, hardly read this, hardly am present, i'm fairly old now, perhaps i've died ... -- _______________________________________________ NetBehaviour mailing list NetBehaviour@lists.netbehaviour.org https://lists.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour
[NetBehaviour] wa, afternoon musing and apologies*
Alan Sondheim via NetBehaviour Thu, 25 Jan 2024 22:36:27 -0800