" . . . it will not be regarded as a breach of decorum on my part to show the modus operandi by which some one of my own works was put together. I select 'The Raven,' as most generally known. It is my design to render it manifest that no one point in its composition is referrible either to accident or intuition—that the work proceeded, step by step, to its completion with the precision and rigid consequence of a mathematical problem."
—Poe ("The Philosophy of Composition," 1846.)
What with nothin' ventured, nothing gained, and my goings on are wrought with ambivalence to work (and wrung hands and gnashed teeth and...) in my waking life, I woke up this morning, made coffee, and am now forced to dredge my consciousness to provide what fleeting interest this Gather love snot of a maddening man may have. It's not that I am tired of writing poetry, or that I have nothing further to write--quite the opposite. But I've written alot of poetry recently, and no social commentary, and after yesterday's Crystallization of Identity piece, I am still on a Burroughs and Networks kick, which got me thinking about addiction and networks. So, pour yourself some coffee, sit back and drink this.
Gather, Networks, and Addiction.
In Naked Lunch, Burroughs describes the "basic formula," of addiction, or what he calls the algebra of need: "The face of ‘evil' is always the face of total need...Beyond a certain frequency need knows absolutely no limit or control." The addict has no choice; he will "do anything to satisfy total need"(xi). Of course, Burroughs formula does not just apply to heroin addiction; it is a crucial component of the power relations that undergird all of consumer culture. Total need guarantees total participation; and total participation means total subjugation.
A perfect commodity is anything that-like junk for the junkie- I absolutely have to buy. Now, there is a profound synergy between the algebra of need and the logic of self-regulating networks (and social networks). I think there are two reasons for this. First, the very structure of the network works to perpetuate infinite need. A network has no goal outside itself and therefore no objective measure of satiety. It strives only to maintain itself. But such self-maintainence is an endless task: a network's labor is never done. A network must make vast expenditures, simply in order to preserve, or reestablish, homeostasis. It's just like the later stages of heroin addiction, except in this case, it's the addicts that are recruiting more potential addicts, (so click and go invite more friends to Gather-just kidding).
I know this to be true, having spent time designing social networks, sitting in server cluster rooms and detox centers (although I have never done smack - I have observed enough). After a while, the drug doesn't get you high any longer; you need an ever larger dose merely to get straight. At this point you would "pay any price just to feel back to normal again". A network, just like an individual junkie, gives out more and more over time, only to receive less and less back. In the second place, the logic of networks tends toward the algebra of need because the addiction process is facilitated and accelerated when materiality is replaced by information, and connections.
Information is a lot cheaper to to produce than physical goods. It can be transported much more easily with a cost approaching 0. It's nearly an idea commodity because it feeds back upon itself and incites it's own want: the more of it you have, the more you need. Also, information can be replenished indefinitely by the producer and sold to more and more customers at almost no marginal cost. From the point of view of its corporate suppliers, information indeed wants to be free. But for the consumer, information remains a scarce resource because even too much is never enough. I would suggest that this prospect of generating higher revenues at lower costs is the real reason for the whole push to get people on the internet, have them value bits of information as much or more that atoms in the real world, and have consumers pay to be mesmerized by the pretty color lights on the computer screen. This is why so many digital providers want to move to the subscription business model. Get them hooked. Get them to keep coming back for their fix, stickiness is king. Now go post some comments, then invite more addicts to Gather.
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Comments: 19
the net needs us and we need the net!
Again this is very interesting indeed Will and thank you for the making me use my brain today...it had been getting slightly fuzzy of late!
Any thoughts?
-Will
To go slightly beyond Burroughs, who focuses exclusively on the object of his obsession, be it smack or sex, but always a "high" or de-sublimatory substitute for full identification with the One, we have to look at what processes, activities and behaviors in our own daily lives we are displacing when we "act out" on the Net, and see if they are changed differently than say, what happens when we drink alcoholically or smoke ice or slam a hypo into a vein.
There is always a cost. Lost time. Destroyed relationships. Broken dreams, etc. One could say that none of this matters once the algebra of need takes over. But if you read very carefully most of Burroughs' ouevre, as I have, you will see that in spite of his defiant pose and almost metallic prose response to his own addiction, there is great remorse over "what was not done." At first I thought it was based on what Will points out is the fact that once addicted at a certain level, the individual no longer feels extra pleasure, but just wants to get "straight", but the real issue is that in all cases of addiction, one is displacing in their behavior away from an original path, group of goals and life's purpose because one feels powerless--probably a trigger in the environment reminded them of childhood powerlessness, such as that suffered from sexual, physical or verbal abuse--and temporarily seeks the addiction to regain power in their lives. The thing is, it may work for a little while, but now the original trigger for the powerlessness is forgotten and the individual is powerless not only over their life's circumstances but also the newfound addiction itself. And always they are reminded of the time displaced, the regret grows, the things not done, the people not seen, the jobs not accomplished, and the vicious cycle breeds more powerlessness which causes the individual to get more drug or sex or Net addicted, or all three at once!
I do think the Net is different in its "Algebra of Need" , and thus agree with Will in his long comment here, because it shifts the addict from the real world to sim worlds, where he can be deluded into thinking he can have some control where in reality he can be even more manipulated by those who have greater technical expertise and can literally refine personalized techniques to trap him into their sim worlds with "sticky" incentives and then hypnotize him into devoting enormous personal resources there, time and money. One of the main goals of pre Simulationism as an art movement is examining this new form of zombification through mediated techniques of unreality.
Will Evans is a prophet here, and I can't wait to read his next article.
Because of how Will has so lucidly defined the network model in terms of addicts bringing in more addicts, we can also see how this would affect any family model if the computers are set up as networked shrines, the family who stays together thereby neither does not pray together nor watch TV together but rather gets online separately, and together (in a Boolean way of arriving at different rates of full immersion: becoming fully Simulationist together.)
This notion that consciousness is altered in recursive and permanent ways over long periods of time and extended hours online must be examined in pre Sim terms of what consciousness is for its owner, the individual mind, if the owner is not simply going to be regarded as nothing more than a host for, and agent for transmission of, memes.
The perfect addict: The hypnotized consumer slave clicking away, not even bothering to wipe away the drool.
The meme hypothesis is actually quite close (closer, I imagine, than Richard Dawkins would be comfortable with) to Burrough's account of consciousness and language as viral mechanisms. If we take seriously the ideas that memes, like genes, are always engaged in a Darwinian like struggle to survive and reproduce, then we cannot assimilate then to the fashionable view that the world is nothing but patterns of information. There's an interesting and almost irreducible gap between genotype and phenotype, between software instructions and hardware implementation: between the ideality of a repeating informational pattern, and the contingency of any particular material embodiment -- whether it is a question of genes or memes, DNA or ideas, the processes of transcription and implementation are never smooth or transparent. This Darwinian war between rival genes or memes is also a war between all these replicators, on the one hand, and the vehicles that bear them, on the other. This is why there was a call Dawkin's made regarding memes with a call for us to "rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicator."
Moving beyond the addiction trope, which I think we have dealt with, we need to have more discussion on the grammar of need in a virtual space. In flesh-space, on could argue that there is an algebra of need for human contact, connection, the interiorization of the Other into oneself through interaction with people in the community. This is no different in Seem worlds. So certainly there is a danger of people displacing flesh-world interaction with simulated world interaction, and that may or may not be a good thing, again - value judgement and outcome based. But in either space, the concept of identity and consciousness are under assault by virulent memes seeking to hijack our minds and turn them into memetic replicators - and this is a threat we face directly. This threat is real.
A classic example of a virulent meme in the real world: "A Diamond Is Forever" -- probably one of the very first truly virulent memes that has fundamentally shifted American culture, and goes unquestioned - and once enscounced in the host, replicated itself, and spreads. Before that meme, written in the early 1930s, there was no tradition of diamonds in our culture. There was no tradition of giving a diamond engagement band. There was zero connection between romantic love and diamonds. That meme created the need, the tradition, and the culture all at once by one very enterprising Public Relations man after the De Beers corporation discovered huge diamond deposits in South Africa and somehow had to create a market for those diamonds - so they created the idea that diamond are linked to love, and they can act as a physical manifestation of love - but it was always about creating customers. As Peter Drucker once said, the purpose of a corporation is not to create profits, its to create consumers.
This is an example of how a genes and memes are helpless without their hosts. They need to be instantiated in flesh, or at least in matter. But these comments are actually becoming articles in and of themselves, and I think we should circle back to how all these ideas are inter-related to John's comments.
People can certainly substitute one addiction in flesh world with addictive behavior in virtual worlds and suffer as a result. But this need not be dichotomous. It is possible to manifest an existence in physical space and virtual space, and have the two be mutually beneficial, integrated into a single whole, with positive feedbacks once some form of equilibrium is reached, but this needs to be a conscious decision.
On that note, I need to shower, get dressed, and go participate in flesh-space.
This is a topic we should really delve into - and may require a completely new post. Unless John wants to toss in his 2 cents about this topic.
I still go back to saying it's where you feel most connected and that these viral memes only become part of culture and tradition because it strikes some type of personal chord in people or where this is a weakness or it fills a gap.
Our meme theories, from Dawkins to his disciple Susan Blackmore in her Buddhist take in The Meme Machine to all the popularizers and academics of the theory, are still sketchy at best, and the science of memetics is young. Remember at best it is a mental template analogy of the "selfish gene" replicate theory of Dawkins, that as Will has shown without mentioning followed both Burroughs cultural viral theories as well as cybernetics theories they were loosely based on, along with of course a goodly use of the psychedelic wisdom through ayuahasca, mescaline and tripping balls on speed. Will is probably more up to speed on memes than anyone around, since he is used to projecting simulations of their progress over time longitutinally, but the greater memeplexes that mutate and the patterns that transform (such as the concept of jihad in the 20th Century) still require sifting out. Meme transfer is often akin to social contagion, but it can be slow at first and Mendelian over time: We can trace this better with ideas than we can at times with bits of behaviour or fashion, which also qualify as memes.
Inoculation means developing a truly autobiographical personhood, addressing the entire individual with a spiritual existence rather than the trappings as Ed pointed out, which no matter how much they demonstrate "human potential" represent only bypass and God as a game, much like geek wear or bionic implants on wannabe transhuman freak tribes. To plunge into a sim world with a whole self, a full set of resources and values, and most archival personal records in memory rather than offloaded, is to be prepared for the hazards of double blind interactivity to some degree. But to strive for transparency and character awareness through I-Thou interactions and author-to-author relationships for me represents an acting out of spiritual focus, what Sufis call "himma." If I keep my spiritual focus to remain integrated and resonating integrity while I "taste" my fellow infonauts online, I feel I cannot fail to make a difference, as well as delightful conversation, deep friendship and exchange of feelings and ideas in the upper strata of what I consider extended consciousness.