The Temptation Assumption Function of Totalized Fracture and Voluntary Exit

  1. Differential Diagnosis (1)

On the hand, we have a setup that is pitched to the worst excesses of human depravity and groupthink. This is less a function of information overload, then targeted distribution of bias within a relatively-closed system:

our information ecosystem no longer assists us in reaching consensus. In fact, it structurally discourages it, and instead facilitates a dissensus of bespoke pseudo-realities.  [Mediating Consent, R. DiResta]

Red team channel read by, consumed by, and indirectly funded by read team players. Blue team channel read by, consumed by, etc. So far, so facile, but not inaccurately so.

It is not hard to envision a corporate cultural shift and bifurcation that follows hard on the heels of this division. The choice is less Colgate or Crest by which to whiten one’s teeth, but red team brand v. blue team brand. This may not seem so much a consumer- or citizen-driven outcome as the strategic resolution of the Prisoner’s Dilemma imported into the Fortune 500. Who will first pull the pin on the grenade and accept that a full or nearly full share of half the market is more desirable than trying to strike the razor’s-edge equilibrium of messaging to two or more disparate groups who achieve self-definition by way of opposition to the outgroup Other? This is one way in which the choice fatigue dilemma solves itself.

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2. Differential Diagnosis (2)

Over and above the internal fault-line fracturing, the other shoe falls via indiscriminate external authors of systemic threats. It may not matter whether these come clothed in ideologies espousing specific political or commercial ends, or embracing a hodgepodge of philosophically confused, but no-less-virulent strands of nihilism and destruction-as-entertainment. We did it to gain power or earn chits, we did it because we could, we did it because why not, we did it because we were bored (or more likely, I alone did it because I was bored).

The temptation to answer to complex risk with complex analysis occasions the parable of the eye for an eye making the whole world blind, especially when the party assigned with managing complex risk by way of undertaking complex analysis has its own designs on ubiquitous access to information and, if not actual control of, at least seamless penetration into, the channels by which information flows. Thereby, the parable of the canny fox guarding the henhouse. Have confidence that a whetted appetite may give way to predation (whereby protein labeled internal threat becomes a meal), and in the same breath have doubt that the appetite to protect against external threat - if for no other reason than to keep this good thing going - will suffice.

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An archetype of garbage in/garbage out arises when the sum of known threats is calculated in a form of analysis that is impenetrable on its own terms. To wit:

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Is it so irresponsible, then, to turn off every news feed and go about marshaling whatever energies may be marshaled into the idea of the Beautiful? Not so much out of hedonism or an aesthete’s self-satisfying ardor, but because tuning out and dropping out (exit) achieves a coherence and Hippocratic-oath salience that seems beyond the grasp of engagement (voice). Maybe, maybe not, but responsibility aside, it seems worthwhile to attend to the possibility that the Beautiful also exists in the futile absurd, which can be observed accidentally/in the breach or with a strange kind of intentionality that remains available to the faithless. But is that a kind of keeping faith or just a kind of keeping score? All rights reserved, and more after the commercial break . . .

The Mouth of the Furnace, the Clinch of the Image, the Gestating Finality of the Exit Wound

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RESOLVED that the practical apparition of having a past commitment to the idea of a lifelong enmeshment no longer haunts or will be recognized for its haunting effect;

RESOLVED that the fixated too-muchness of drip from a bloody nose into the slanted white sink will suffice as a stand-in for a sacrament;

RESOLVED that generic genetic predisposition will scuff and adumbrate, slacken and contort, but will bear no more significance than the happenstance of being caught in a calming rain and walking for blocks with unbloomed umbrella in hand;

RESOLVED that the scratch and tickle of ego asking or demanding to be let loose will wherever possible be tamped down and sequestered, though no law will register as self-evident or self-enabling . . .

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I reckon — when I count at all

Reading prison novel in a blizzard. Were I a twitterer, I would have pithy quotes to send out into the ether. Instead, into this echo chamber, striding like a colossus in my own mind, go I.

a.

A section from emmanuel carrere’s the kingdom reduces the gospels to the words Jesus spoke directly, which appear in both Luke and Mark. Having read them twice last night and again this morning, it’s possible I know not a single Christian.

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b.

Maps and art about maps predominate in my ever-revolving canon. Qui Zhijie and his total art work are on the playlist on a weekly if not daily basis. Last night I revisited a monograph on Jasper Johns by Michael Crichton (yes, that one) and came across this quote from Kozloff:

[the artist is] playing with the notion of measurement, in which the locked-in, diagrammatic in-scale dimensions of map images are contrasted with the virtually gratuitous dimensions of painterly gestures, the two being mutually usurped.

Crichton goes on to gloss the point:

Another way to say it is to observe that the artist produces an isolation between the map (an abstraction representing something) and the painting of the map (an abstraction representing an abstraction) in such a way that multiple ways of looking are simultaneously apparent.

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Mono-no-aware, late December

Shortly after Thanksgiving, I came down with a case of the Taking Everything Too Seriously.   It is easy to forget that we are protean bags of carbon meat strung up on breakable calcium assemblages, riding on a consolidated speck of dust in a big black expanding container of cavernous nothingness.  And remembering not to forget that helps, especially when coupled with healthy dose of mind-clutch (Glass Irony & God, Leaves of Grass, Human-All-Too-Human vis-à-vis Negotiations, Lethem, Kushner) and earworms (Lamar H.U.M.B.L.E., enter the 36 chambers, Beethoven’s Ninth, Aja).   Also remembering that we are here, so mine as well play a little.  Whether we are put here or placed here or just end up here, there is nowhere else.  More or less.

So I got a haircut with a different style – a “buzz-cut,” as was the middle school parlance – bought some clothes and shoes and art I want but don’t need, and tried, just now, in this second successive night/morning of post-holiday insomnia, to discern whether this pattern of self-seriousness had anything to do with the spirit of evasiveness (having no truck with the idea that the Redeemer is born, or that the man in the sled is bringing all us good ones presents) that seems, well, presently pervasive. And it seems likely.

Still, it’s not just the reason for the season that factors into it. There are other exterior conditional forces that might help explain why play remains elusive.  For example, we are in that time of mid-winter graying when all the plows kick up the slush and dirt and gather it on the side of the narrowing streets in flotsam piles and similar et cetera gathers in the storm drains.  Chicago in winter was the grayest; for whatever reason, whenever I used to visit Minneapolis it seemed the dirtiest, which can’t be the case, but memory serves, apparently.  Here in the Biggest City in the 605, the mid-winter grays are worst when cloud cover keeps the sun at bay and the light of morning just kind of seeps in, so that the early-morning DT sufferers, slowly shuffling amidst what passes for urban landscape, are apparitions on the wet black bough and hundreds of headlights pick them out in stop-motion pointillism. 

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I’m not saying I’m depressed – sleep-deprived, yes, but par for the course – I’m just saying that taking in the word-historical events in this milieu while also being encouraged to take stock of the decade, is too much.  So I am striving, in true 2nd-generation-American Midwest fashion, to dig sideways out of this climactic hole into a different hole where the scaffolding might be more easily reached.

I had the interesting experience of a 102 degree fever on Christmas Eve, and the shimmering perception that resulted was not altogether unpleasant. Also made my first contribution to what passes for a festschrift in this Philistine 605, and that was both an honor and a reminder that I am of the age and station in life where being asked to make such a contribution is a thing.

Recapturing play was a little easier after I put together the 60-piece wooden play Veterinarian set, which made Ikea furniture assembly look like putting a straw through a lid, and the invariable squeals of delight and surprising selective euphoria (who knew that a 2-oz container of Play-Dough would take the top prize?) vastly reduced my self-obsessive streak. All to the good, as it is said.

Incidentally but not unrelatedly, it took nearly four decades for me what is being served by the message that being good means you get stuff and being bad means you don’t.

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Limn.

Winter-Gray

:

This might apply indirectly or subliminally

Windmill proximity: sleep disturbance, headache, tinnitus, ear pressure, dizziness, vertigo, nausea, visual blurring, tachycardia, irritability, problems with concentration and memory, and panic episodes associated with sensations of internal pulsation or quivering when awake or asleep

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Beyond the aforementioned mind-clutch, December has been manic work and little time carved out for consumption, but consumption waits for no man, and of late includes:

READ:

The Map and the Territory, Houllebecq

Life Undercover:  Coming of Age in the CIA, Fox Owens, Laura (Whitney Monograph)

Wyndham Lewis on Art (doorstopper, smells of musty Hyde Park used bookstore)

Schjeldahl on dying    

READING:

Book of Delights, Gay (1/3 of the way)

Where the Sidewalk Ends (we read whatever picture makes us stop flipping)

The Cut, Pelecanos

Vernon Subutex 1, Despentes

Negotiations

Essays, Critical and Clinical

Duty Free Art:  Art in the Age of Planetary Civil War, Steyerl

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Being and the Ever-Present Need to Defer Becoming, or how a hero who actually becomes is tantamount to a villain.


The injunction everywhere to “be someone” maintains the pathological state that makes this society necessary. The injunction to be strong produces the very weakness it maintains itself on, to such a point that everything seems to take on a therapeutic aspect, even working or love. All the times we ask “how’s it going” all day long - like a society full of patients, taking each other’s temperatures

The theorists cum insurrectionists

Scripted Adventures of the International Hacker/Op Sec Analyst/Freelance Intelligence Officer continued . . .


Down and out in Corfu, with black mark on his soul and a significant contusion on his face, earned by way of bailing from his scooter and skidding about against a rail overlooking a beautiful coast out on the coast on the west side of the island. He eventually found the driver of the truck that had been leaning out into his lane and made the accident necessary, and he reduced the driver to chum that he took with him on the boat, Plump Buck Mulligan Stew, which the client had agreed would be available for his uninterrupted use following completion of his assignment in Belgrade. . . .

Down and out in Samarkand, sometime in 2014 or 2015, after cruising Shenzen but before pursuing a calling in Cairo, our hero succumbs to a powerful need to score, then finds a quiet, clean, well-lit place and to sit down with a packet of pleasure-death and study it, clutch it, snap it lightly against the tips of fingers, until ingesting it and hoping that it is more pleasure and less death or at the very least not immediate death, which sometimes it can be. And then traveling to rural Pakistan to kick with organic opiates easily at hand. Lips pursed around a hookah, eyes closed, he visualized in his mind’s jaundiced eye a lecture he would present in London at a UX conference in four days time, the subject of which he hadn’t yet determined but would at minimum cover this idea:

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Down and out in Sao Paolo, with approximately $7500 on his person, cut up into $250 or $500 portions, to be used to pay bribes, he arrived at the appointed hour in his motorcycle leathers, with an echo-location device, two bottles of rum, the cash, a quarter ounce of marijuana, two vials of adenochrome, and a various uppers, downers, opiates, and amphetamines.

His instructions were rather simple: meet the contact, get the laptop/router/WiFi he needed to gain access to the physicist’s VPN network, acquire the model and its legend, download it to the secure network and then save it to a thumbdrive (for whatever reason the client had a fetish for redundancy that put the very thing he wanted to secure at risk), pay whatever he needed to pay to get out of Sao Paolo, get back to LA, hand off the thumbdrive, ride into the sunset and then surrender to whatever sundry bodily, chemical, and existential pleasures Southern California had in store . . .

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Mono-no-aware: early December

Do you have the new phone yet that someone made continents away because they were forced to, and then someone else starved to death because when they mined the components they destroyed all the croplands and the forest?

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If the last three years of American politics have taught us anything, it’s this: the apocalypse is going to look a lot more like a T-Rex in drag than anything you’ll see in Mad Max.

Dancing about architecture, writing about food



Again, eating is a means of remaining embodied, and it stands to reason that the manner of embodiment - the specific means of sustenance - imprints the bodied self.

Better: Eating puts meat on the bone, and the meat you eat (or don’t eat, presumably) indwells the meat you are.

Worse (maybe?): You can’t help but look, feel, and behave in a way that bears relation to how your fuel looks, feels, and behaves.

And then this (cue Munch, the Scream; fortissimo squall of atonal violins):

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Presumably sculpture is more of an arrangement of elements than an arranged marriage otherwise would be. Some parts fit better with others. That is, when functional fit-to-purpose locks in step with aesthetic dress-for-success, then we will make up on margin with volume. The id that rains will pour.

 

Instead of obligations embedded in generic free time, free time in Japan is exceptional condition excavated from general condition of obligation.

Down and out in . . . / COIN and the metaphors of warrior anthropology

 

. . . Myanmar, where the sesame crop is a throw of the dice and the monks’ lust after the blood of ethnic minorities abates ever so slightly on Guatama’s birthday. But the climate is nice.

. . . . Gozo, where the island economy hung tough on Omar Gadaffi’s tyrannical largesse until it didn’t, and then we all drank Cisk until the Brits came back on holiday and we played at the 12th century, once more.

. . . . Los Roques archipelago, where items would be measured by the gross weight of Venezuelan currency (that will be 3.4 lbs) rather than cash, because the liquidity fluctuations were both so extreme and so constant, and because there was much fun to be had in the gauche above-it-allness of it all. Fly-in meals from Caracas are intermittently a tenable concession to the ever-present possibility of food shortages. Also parasailing!

. . . . rural outposts of Central Sulawesi, Indonesia. State Department travel advisories specifically admonish to be wary of unforeseen and unpredictable dangers, as compared to immediately foreseeable and predictable, imminent dangers. Don’t guard against being a well-wisher or a quixotic toe-dipper-into-local-culture, or else stay at the Best Western outside the embassy compound. The ex pat journalist bar where you’re most likely to make into an ex pat journalist’s memoir, circa 2027: Custer’s Last Stand Bar and Grill.

. . . . Little Havana, Miami, where the AUSAs are always on the lookout for an easy RICO tie-in and every family lays claim to the best pork-laden tortas. Pervasive poverty that is read as “colorful” by the city fathers, as is perforce inner-city American style. Don’t sleep on the rising tides, all the while aware that less than 10% have boats.

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Before inking the contracts on their memoirs, Generals Petraeus and Mattis teamed up to write the Counterinsurgency Manual. I’m not sure if COIN dealt with donkeys or llamas, but I like to think that it did.

COIN:

Leaders at all levels must adjust their approach constantly, ensuring that their elements are ready each day to be greeted with a handshake or a hand grenade, to take on missions only infrequently practiced until recent years at our combat training centers, to be nation builders as well as warriors, to help re-establish institutions and local security forces, to assist in the rebuilding of infrastructure and basic services, and to facilitate the establishment of local governance and the rule of law.

The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff asked me…“The lines in your command chart, the command relationships, what are they? OPCON? TACON? Command?” “Sir, we don’t ask, because no one can sign up to any of that stuff.” “Well, how do you do business?” “Hand Shake Con. That’s it.” No memoranda of agreement. No memoranda of understanding…the relationships are worked out on the scene, and they aren’t pretty.

Once the social structure has been mapped and the culture is understood, COIN forces must understand how power is apportioned and used within a society. Understanding power is the key to manipulating the interests of groups within the society

Background screenings should include the collection of personal and biometric data and a search through available reporting databases to determine that the person is not an insurgent. Identification badges may be useful for local nationals working on U.S. and HN government facilities. However, these badges may be forged or stolen, and insurgents can use them to identify people working with the government. Therefore, biometrics is preferable, when available

LAST BUT NOT LEAST

ROE are directives issued by competent military authority that delineate the circumstances and limitations under which U.S. forces initiate and/or continue combat engagement with other forces encountered. In a large-scale deployment, the Secretary of Defense may issue ROE that are specific to the operation to a combatant commander. The combatant commander and subordinate commanders then issue ROE that must be consistent with the ROE received from the Secretary of Defense. In addition to stating the circumstances under which Soldiers or Marines may open fire—that is, upon positive identification of a member of a hostile force or upon clear indications of hostile intent—the ROE may include rules concerning when civilians may be detained, specify levels of approval authority for using heavy weapons, or identify facilities that may be protected with deadly force. All ROE comply with the law of war.

 
 

Donkeys, llamas, wild horses . . . ride or die . . .

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