4drubble

The Percolation Approach

Nassim Taleb & Richard Herring in interview:

Herring: [P]eople knew the Middle East was very vulnerable to turmoil because of the demographics, a very young population, and widespread unemployment, the dissatisfaction with the distribution of income and with regimes that were getting geriatric. But knowing how it would unfold and knowing that somebody immolating themselves in a market in Tunisia would lead to this widespread discontent — and we still don’t know how it will end — is a really remarkable occurrence that I think would be very difficult to predict in any way.

Taleb: Definitely, and it actually taught us to try not to predict the catalyst, which is the most foolish thing in the world, but to try to identify areas of vulnerability. [It’s] like saying a bridge is fragile. I can’t predict which truck is going to break it, so I have to look at it more in a structural form — what physicists call the percolation approach. You study the terrain. You don’t study the components. You see in finance, we study the random walk. Physicists study percolation. They study the terrain — not a drunk person walking around — but the evolution of the terrain itself. Everything is dynamic. That is percolation.

And then you learn not to try to predict which truck is going to break that bridge. But you just look at bridges and say, “Oh, this bridge doesn’t have a great foundation. This other one does. And this one needs to be reinforced.”

Programming Fate

“Evitable Fate”, from Marshall McLuhan’s Take Today: The Executive As Dropout:

Since the satellite surround, beginning with Sputnik in 1957, there has come the sudden awareness that nature itself has dropped out.  Old experience is no longer relevant, and man must now assume responsibility for the total programming of his planetary environment through new knowledge. “Experience,” said Erasmus, “is the schoolmaster of fools.”  That is, the rates charged by this ruthless pedagogue are outrageous, and few have ever survived his instruction.  As the criminal said on his way to execution: “This will teach me a lesson!”  Today, effects and causes merge because they almost coincide in time and space in the new information environment.  Change itself has become the main staple.

The literate Greeks abstracted visual order out of preliterate oral chaos and called their artifact “Nature” (phusis).  This “natural” order consciously relegated the ancient gods and magic to the irrational “unconscious” and “chaotic.”  Magic played existence by ear.  In today’s electric world, man becomes aware that this artificial “Nature” of the Greeks is an extension of himself, just as he is an extension of nature—all that exists.

Since it is no longer safe to wait for the harsh judgment of results, we must discover how to anticipate effects with their causes in order to avoid the “inevitable” by “programming Fate.”

Jamais Cascio’s Truth and Beauty talk, Hacking the Earth* (*without voiding the warranty):

The Anthropocene cannot be rehearsed.

Notebook - Utopia, Rhetoric, Magic, Control, Multiplicity

Slavoj Žižek on Utopia

 Think about the strangeness of today’s situation: 30 or 40 years ago we were still debating what the future will be - communist, capitalist, fascist, whatever. Today, nobody even debates these issues. We all silently accept global capitalism is here to stay. On the other hand, we are obsessed with cosmic catastrophe: the whole life on earth disintegrating because of some virus, because of an asteroid hitting the earth and so on. So the paradox is that it’s much easier to imagine the end of all life on earth than a much more modest radical change in capitalism. Which means that we should reinvent utopia, but in what sense? There are two false meanings of utopia: one is this old notion of imagining an ideal society which we realize will never be realized; the other is the capitalist utopia in the sense of new and new perverse desires that you are not only allowed but even solicited to realize. The true utopia is when the situation is so without issue, without a way to resolve it within the coordinates of the possible, that out of the pure urge of survival you have to invent a new space. Utopia is not kind of a kind of a free imagination - utopia is a matter of inner most urgency. You are forced to imagine it, as the only way out, and this is what we need today.

Gilles Deleuze in conversation with Antonio Negri

 We’re definitely moving toward “control” societies that are no longer exactly disciplinary. Foucault’s often taken as the theorist of discipli­nary societies and of their principal technology, confinement (not just in hospitals and prisons, but in schools, factories, and barracks). But he was actually one of the first to say that we’re moving away from dis­ciplinary societies, we’ve already left them behind. We’re moving toward control societies that no longer operate by confining people but through continuous control and instant communication. Bur­roughs was the first to address this. People are of course constantly talking about prisons, schools, hospitals: the institutions are breaking down. But they’re breaking down because they’re fighting a losing battle. New kinds of punishment, education, health care are being stealth­ily introduced. Open hospitals and teams providing home care have been around for some time. One can envisage education becoming less and less a closed site differentiated from the workspace as anoth­er closed site, but both disappearing and giving way to frightful con­tinual training, to continual monitoring of worker-schoolkids or bureaucrat-students. They try to present this as a reform of the school system, but it’s really its dismantling. In a control-based system noth­ing’s left alone for long. You yourself long ago suggested how work in Italy was being transformed by forms of part-time work done at home, which have spread since you wrote (and by new forms of circulation and distribution of products). One can of course see how each kind of society corresponds to a particular kind of machine—with simple mechanical machines corresponding to sovereign societies, thermo-dynamic machines to disciplinary societies, cybernetic machines and computers to control societies. But the machines don’t explain any­thing, you have to analyze the collective arrangements of which the machines are just one component. Compared with the approaching forms of ceaseless control in open sites, we may come to see the harsh­est confinement as part of a wonderful happy past. The quest for “uni-versals of communication” ought to make us shudder. It’s true that, even before control societies are fully in place, forms of delinquency or resistance (two different things) are also appearing. Computer pira­cy and viruses, for example, will replace strikes and what the nine­teenth century called “sabotage” (“clogging” the machinery) . You ask whether control or communication societies will lead to forms of resis­tance that might reopen the way for a communism understood as the “transversal organization of free individuals.” Maybe, I don’t know. But it would be nothing to do with minorities speaking out. Maybe speech and communication have been corrupted. They’re thoroughly per­meated by money—and not by accident but by their very nature. We’ve got to hijack speech. Creating has always been something dif­ferent from communicating. The key thing may be to create vacuoles of noncommunication, circuit breakers, so we can elude control.

From William A Covino’s Magic and/as Rhetoric: Outlines of a History of Phantasy

 The Romantic effort to reconstitute magic/rhetoric in the Western imagination was supplanted by what DeQuincey recognized as the sterile and non-magical rhetoric of “public business,” with its reliance on “external facts, tangible realities, and circumstantial details” (97, 227). In the post-Romantic modern age, the dissociation of magic and rhetoric seemed complete. I would propose, however, that rhetoric and magic remain synonymous, set in a diminished cosmology. Performing magic has always involved issuing a “coercive command”; insofar as such commands are intrinsic to language, and really do make and re-make reality, we “do magic” when we “do rhetoric,” and vice-versa (Covino, “Magic” 25-26; Burke 5). For the Greek orator, the Renaissance magus, the Romantic poet, and the variety of present-day institutional authorities who invoke a cosmology of sanctioned forces in every act of official discourse, language alters the social situation. Consider, for instance, the especially potent force of performatives, “statements that by themselves create a new state of affairs”. When George Bush issues a performative declaration of war against Iraq, we are reminded that all such declarations, from “I pronounce you husband and wife” to the professor’s “Your final grade is an A” to the boss’ “You’re fired,” are instances in which saying makes it so. In such cases, the speaker/writer performs magic by effecting real action through the “use of existing powerful symbols”. In the event that any of us employ powerful words to change a situation, or are ourselves changed by what we read or hear, we participate in a magical transactive transformation.

What is at issue then is not whether rhetoric is magic, but what kinds of magic/rhetoric produce what kinds of effects. Still enclosed in the Enlightenment privileging of plain, unambiguous maxims, we are too often victims of a repressive magic that limits the possibilities for action. Couliano associates such magic with the hypnosis induced in a “police State,” in contrast to the flexible but inefficient “magician State”:

But the essential difference between the two, the one which works altogether in favor of the [magician state], is that magic is a science of metamorphoses with the capacity to change, to adapt to all circumstances, to improve, whereas the police State always remains just what it is: in this case, the defender to the death of out-of-date values, of a political oligarchy useless and pernicious to the life of nations. The system of restraints is bound to perish, for what it defends is merely an accumulation of slogans without any vitality. The magician State, on the other hand, only expects to develop new possibilities and new tactics, and it is precisely excess of vitality which impedes its good running order.

Within a paradigm that privileges machine virtues such as “good running order,” and values stability and efficiency, the discourse of slogans is the “sorcery” that prevails. The most obvious examples of such discourse come from advertising: in a recent Nike commercial, all of the reasons not to buy athletic shoes and start exercising disappear with the injunction, “Just Do It.” This is the kind of magic that Emig implicitly identifies with current-traditional rhetoric, the magic of authoritarian, simplistic incantations passed from salesperson to consumer, from teacher to student, incantations that identify preferred public discourse as instantaneous, formulaic, and absolute.

Countering such sorcery means disrupting it by employing the pre-Enlightenment magical/rhetorical belief in a cosmology of possibilities for re-ordering discourse and reality, through writing that creates new phantasms, new magic rhetorics.

Further Reading:

Building a (modular) thought tank by steelweaver

Or Maybe We Learn To Fly at the Brainsturbator Tumblr

An Invocation Against The Inevitable at Skilluminati

Possiblism & Impossiblism on the RI Forums

We Are The Monsters We’ve Been Waiting For at Rigorous Intuition

Ublopia or Otivion from Bruce Sterling’s Shaping Things

Indra’s Network & The Inventory of Effects

From George Draffan’s interview with Derrick Jensen, in How Shall I Live My Life (pg. 123-124, 128-130)

It is Indra’s web. Indra’s web is an ancient metaphor from India that’s been used to illustrate the interdependence of the universe. A Buddhist teacher once created a model of Indra’s net for a Chinese emperor - a net with a jewel in each of the knots, set up such that in the sunlight each jewel reflected all the other jewels, and also such that if you touched one part of the web, the entire web shimmered. It illustrates that each person and thing in the universe is in relation to everything else: everything is completely interdependent, and everything is reflected in everything else. You can’t touch one part of the web without moving the whole thing. A simple idea intellectually, but it has enormous implications if you try to live as if everything you did mattered. No more denial - or at least no more excuses for it. Denial has consequences too

If you think about it on a logical level, you can only go so far with it, because your imagination is only so large. But if you start to jump levels with it, and consider that your imagination is one of the jewels that reflects everything else, and is completely dependent on everything else, you begin to get a sense of its vastness. It’s humbling to realize that everything matters.

Social life, economic life, technological culture, they all arise together. Once again, we catch ourselves trying to reify life into separate compartments as if social structures were separate from technological ones. If you bring guns and snowmobiles to an Inuit group, and give them those, then their social relationships are instantly changed. Maybe the manifestation takes five years or a generation, but it’s inescapable that the effects of the new technology will radiate out to all parts of the web.

You can’t add more knots to the web without everything being affected everywhere else. Nor can you cut knots away and hope to not feel the effects. It’s a question of how perceptive you are, and how long it takes for you to notice damage to the web, and whether you care enough to take care of the whole web, or just run amok ripping out the parts you happen to want to rip out. Every species we drive extinct results in other species going extinct. That feedback, or those indications, are not immediately apparent. That’s part of the problem. Once again, we’re not perceptive enough to see what’s happening.

Most of what we see is layer after layer of projection, and most of what we do is based on our inability to understand that fact.

We’re stuck in our habitual ways of seeing and thinking and doing, and it’s resulting in suffering. There’s a great quote from a Canadian lumberman who said, “When I look at trees I see dollar bills.” Before we can deforest the planet, we have had to change the way we perceive it. Picture a forest that had been on this continent for thousands of years. The forest was a complex and interdependent web of trees and bugs and fungus and animals and water, and all the energy and genetic material that goes round and round. Up until five hundred years ago the people in what we now call North America lived in basic equilibrium with the forest, as part of the web. Then another culture and the beginnings of the industrial system were brought in from “outside”. Before trees could be cut, they had to be redefined as private or public property. But even before that they had to be redefined as property at all. If I see a woman on the street, and I perceive her as another being with wants and desires all her own, I will treat her differently than if I perceive her as a worker or as property or as an object for my personal enjoyment. It is the same with trees, mountains, the hours of my own life. Are they alive, or are they mere objects for my consumption?

Once that projection and objectification takes place, from living being to property - from trees to dollar bills - everything else falls into place. The forest has been privatized, and the clearcuts, landslides, and species extinctions are all externalized.

From Marshall McLuhan’s Take Today: The Executive As Dropout (pg. 90)

Environments work us over and remake us. It is man who is the content of and the message of the media, which are extensions of himself. Electronic man must know the effects of the world he has made above all things.