It's all around you, like smog. This train isn't bound for glory.
Background by Deak Ferrand, who pwnz.
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I recently found a copy of an email I sent to my loved one perhaps two years ago, with Subject: Today. For whatever reason, it interests me, so I am posting it here in the hopes that it also does something for you. "Campus" is a private college in whose offices I worked at the time (not teaching, sadly), and "Town" is the LA-area city in which it is located. North Park is somewhere I grew up, and Balboa Park is the large urban park in whose nooks and crannies the benign heart of San Diego, (my hometown) beats.
[X],
It's very strange to me, but on the busride over here, and walking to campus I felt - different. In a good way. Free and clear, I think might give a notion of it. Everything was very vivid and nice - walking through [Town] was like walking through North Park years ago, and walking across campus felt like walking through Balboa Park as a kid. I felt like I remember feeling a very long time ago. The concrete steps were eminently look-at-able, with the texture, the moisture, the moss... all very clear and present. I feel, still, remarkably unburdened. Not anxious, angry, exhausted. "Ain't got no quarrels with God," as it were. But not hyper-agitated like something drug-induced or forced. No drama, no epiphanies, but also no problems to speak of.
It's weird, and I wonder - is this what it feels like to not be depressed?
[ FAIR WARNING:There are some links to Encyclopedia Dramatica below. If you are still capable of being shocked or offended atanything, or are naïve, and liable to click on links without considering first the possible consequences, don't go there. Period. And don't cry to me if you do. ]
If the level of noise in the media (old and new) is any indication, we apparently have a Problem. Sometimes it's discussed as a problem with DRM, or with Intellectual Property, or with Piracy (Yaaar!), but, really, it's always the same problem, which is the increasingly weak connection between the distribution of creative work and compensation for its production. Briefly: Everyone loves art, but no-one is ponying up the $$$. Which would be great, except it's not clear how anyone is supposed to produce the art, music, and writing in question without either (a) starving, or (b) having a trust fund. And when we expand the discussion to things like software, it gets worse. At bottom, anything that can be considered information is vulnerable to being redistributed or repurposed without being paid for, and everyone from the UN to [your favorite shitty band's name here] has their panties in a twist over it.
The deeper problem is that many involved seem to be pretending that the world hasn't changed recently, nor will it change soon. Of course, the world is always changing. And in the areas of production and distribution of information, we may as well have all moved to Mars, for all the good our old ideas are going to do us. insisting that our expectations should determine our outcomes doesn't have much of an impact on the facts, who are notoriously cold dudes.
The solution can only begin after we admit the nature of our situation, and then react to it as it is, rather than as we would like to imagine it. The typical attempts at solutions - iTunes, DRM, prosecution of end-users, attacks on sites like the Pirate Bay, suppression of tools and information which facilitate "piracy", and so on - are all basically attempts to live full-time in Disneyland. People become embarassingly infantile when they try to preserve the world they understand in the face of the actual world as it stands, which does not care if they are comfortable.
So, what is our actual situation? Simply put:
If something can be rendered as electronically transmissable information, it already has been, or will be next week.
Anything thus encoded has already been rendered copyable, unlocked, and unrestricted, or can be made so on demand.
(To which should probably, for Tradition's sake, be added Rule 34: There is porn of it. No exceptions. )
Add to this that making art out of other art has been a major source of new aesthetic modes for perhaps a century now (collage, sampling, détournement, scratching, etc.), and the fact that such an approach is rational and proper when programming. Repurposing others' work is a current project of our civilization, and stopping it is first of all futile, and furthermore the act of a philistine.
In short, "Intellectual Property" is collapsing, or, really, it's moot - and there is nothing to be done about it. Let's take a look at the term itself. "Intellectual" is clear enough - we're dealing with brain-children here. Well, people have always had those. What about "Property"? Well... have people always had that? I suppose, yes, in the sense of consumables, durable goods, and other stuff. (They certainly did not, in terms of, say, land. ) But did the first person to tell a joke expect that it would never be repeated? Did they demand that someone give them a fish every time their joke was used? More likely, they just hoped to get invited over for drinks and roast mammoth more often, and perhaps to have a fractionally better chance at getting laid. This tradition is carried out even now by the rock bass players of the world.
This will end up being far too long if I go through every art and every period of history, but think it through with me - what was a musician or an author or artist at each stage of history? Or a mathematician or scientist or philosopher? How did they eat? What did they own? What were the corresponding articles that could be owned? Hint: People hired musicians to play music, not to compose it. People paid for books, or for manuscripts to be copied - the pay going to the printer, bookseller, scribe or scriptorium, not to the author. To buy a painting, of course, you had to go the painter - that's because a painting is a thing. But, while a book is a thing, a text, as embodied in a book, is not.
Being a writer was never a job - it was a vocation, perhaps. Or a hobby. One participated in it because one was able to. Privilege was one way in. Working a day job was another. (I'll cite the lens-grinder Spinoza as proof that the day job option really was there.) The priesthood (a sort of combination of the previous two solutions) was another solution. But the best solution was patronage. If you were good, someone, hopefully, would notice; if not, you got a day job until someone did. This worked because there was a corresponding a social pressure for the affluent to be, as the cliché goes, "patrons of the arts". The artist got status from their work being read, heard, or viewed. The patron got status for supporting the culture by supporting those who contributed to it, or advanced it.
Now, this is limiting - what wealthy baron is going to support an author who wants to call wealth and aristocracy into question? And, of course, as society reorganized itself under new principles, new forms of production, and so on, new ways of creative production also emerged. Capitalism has a lot to do with this, but so do things like new printing technologies, which allowed for newspapers and other media that needed content-on-demand with minimal turnaround time - which noöne is going to do if you don't pay them for it. Or: The professional writer as a job category emerged. This is linked with the emergence of forms like the newspaper that did need to be paid for if one wanted the current version, andalso with the development of advertising - a still-relevant force on these here tubes. Similar stories can be told about the impact of recording technology on music, and of other social changes on the sciences, for that matter. This worked acceptably well for a while, until - now. The Great Interwebs Monster has swept the commercial-industrial model of creative production clean off the table, I fear.
Capitalism misconstrues the things it wasn't designed to model. (Witness what it has done to sex.) Patents, R&D divisions, and so on emerged to support the kind of commercially-driven production of ideas that we associate with new inventions, medicines, etc. But this is very different from creative work in the arts and letters, and shouldn't be - really, should never have been - the model for production in those areas.
As I've been insisting, times have of course changed, and in many ways for the better. The distance between creator and audience is quite small anymore - many bands now have fanbases in the low thousands, with whom they communicate directly through their websites. It is something of a mark of pride among music geeks to champion bands that have more members than fans. Nearly anyone can create and distribute music, art, or anything else online, probably not producing any durable media (books, CDs, etc.) on their own, and gathering such attention as they are able to gather. The age of superstars may be ending, and the age of the niche already has begun. It's been decades since bands started producing short runs of 7" vinyl singles - 500 copies used to be pretty standard, and I have the evidence in hand. 'Zines, and their current descendents on the web, tell the same story - if you produce something you believe in, and do so cheaply but sincerely, you will find a small, but equally sincere audience (many of whom will have their own creative projects) to share in the joy. The future is in Microfame.
But... Money?
My best guess at a solution to that problem is a return to the patronage system. Nothing, of course, will stop a suitably motivated but un-patronized person from pursuing their art - getting paid to write is quite different from being driven to write and needing to eat. For the unpopular but driven, day jobs remain available, and perhaps sleep gets lost, but the "starving artist" remains a viable personal myth.
How could patronage work under these new conditions? My thesis is that it already is working, and is simply taking time to be fully understood by everyone involved.
It is certainly possible (see SNOCAP) for the microfamous to impose on fans' goodwill to pay for recordings. Radiohead's recent experiment in soliciting voluntary payment for their work may give us some indication of how well that approach works. I suspect it will work just fine - except for the recording industry, who were, however, a bunch of greedy fucks who habitually ripped off artists anyway, so good riddance.
Another possibility, which seems to have worked out prety well for webcomic author Jeph Jacques, is the Shwag Approach. His strip, Questionable Content is, of course, free of charge, and, of course, partially suported by some modest advertising. Somewhere along the line, he started drawing clever T-shirts on his characters, and his fans started asking if it were possible to buy them. Not being an idiot, he started producing shirts, and now, if I am not mistaken, he works full-time on his strip and website, and supports the whole by working the schwag angle for all it's worth. (They are, I should add, very nice shirts.) Corresponding merch strategies no doubt work fairly well for bands, especially since wearing a pin, patch, or bumper sticker for a band noöne's ever heard of is quite the status booster in certain circles.
Of course, bands can perform at shows, and writers can give readings, and so on, as people are always eager to point out, but this doesn't work out so well if you can't travel, are unwilling or unable to perform, or if you are producing, for example, sample-heavey electronic music that can't be "performed" inany meaningful sense.
Others online have their own strategies - including the elegantly direct one of asking for money and gifts. We could call this the Paypal and Wishlist Approach, and while it might require sometimes showing some skin, it is rumored to work. A dollar each from 1,000 fans is just as spendable as a thousand dollars from a single patron. It could work better, if the idea of such "distributed patronage" became more commonplace. Like traditional patronage, this Micropatronage will work to the extent that there is a corresponding social value placed on being a patron. Once everyone stops paying for music, movies, and (perhaps) books entirely, this may become more realistic, as the basic problem - how to keep our creative workers fed - will become more obviously a problem. In the meanwhile, some amount of Merch may be in order.
Is all of this inadequate? It doesn't matter if it is. Our situation remains the same, regardless of whether we approve of it. Information wants to be free, and Anonymous is willing to coöperate with it. We must adapt or die.
I am not terribly interested in myself right now, so I would like to share with you some people in whom I am interested, as you should be, too, assuming you're not an utter tool.
It is little remembered in these dark days that America was once a nation of heroes. You found them on every street corner. Not all of them were born here, but they ended up here, and that's all it takes. You arrive in America, and you are reviled as a repulsive tick-laden foreign parasite for a while, until, eventually, you start telling people to fuck themselves, at which point it is conceded that you are One of Us. Since it was easy to die in passing over the oceans back then (the pterodons got many would-be immigrants) we were regularly infused with eugenically-enhanced blood. Proof:
Brother Theodore, having survived his childhood, the Nazis (not a joke - he was a literal prison camp survivor), and his own overzealous spleen, arrived here (with the assistance of Albert Einstein) and commenced making people laugh while simultaneously making them subtly uneasy. And he convinced them to pay him for this.More information available from the goodfolk over at Technoccult. N.B.: Do not miss the linked YouTube goodness! Here is a particularly succulent dithyramb against food. Relevant quote: "Evil that fails is evil; but evil that succeeds - is good!"
Tiny Tim had hair galore back when the Beatles were still in pompadours. He would hang out on the streets playing 1920s novelty songs on ukelele and singing in an inimitable falsetto. (Though he was, in fact, a baritone.) Somehow, he became famous as a result, and his many records are still available, and quite revelatory. Later he got married to the elusive "Miss Vicki" on the Tonight Show. The scholarly consensus is that Tiny Tim was a full-blood Yeti, and punk as fuck.
Joshua Norton, self-appointed Emperor of these United States and Protector of Mexico persuaded the people of San Francisco to treat him as such. The finest restaurants would feed him, and at more modest establishments, he would persuade them to let him include stray dogs in the proceedings - and all for no charge. His proclamations were published in the newspapers, and the money he issued was accepted in trade. Local gentry paid for his burial, monument, and funeral, and tens of thousands attended. Emperor Norton rules your ass, and mine. (He has also, it should be mentioned, attained beatitude in the Discordian faith tradition.)
Overall, I say unto you: Fuck Superman, Moses, Jesus, and even Michael Jordan. I know the inimitable indwelling light of the oversoul when I see it.
After reading the most recent comments here, I was struck by how dear to me my readers are. This 'blog has never had much traffic, mostly because I haven't made much of an effort to draw more eyeballs here. I suppose I should, on the principle that it is better to have more readers than fewer, but really I am just grateful to be read, and not moved much by statistics. The fact that here, readers can respond, and become co-authors in a sense, is also an innovation more remarkable than is generally acknowledged. The traditional distinction betwen creator and audience has been permanently blurred - maybe even abolished. And this conversational mode of writing is vastly more interesting to me than the strict monologue of traditional writing. It is simply remarkable to write something, and to then find out that someone has found some value in it, of whatever kind, and has something of value to offer in return. I try to be conscientious about making my entries potentially useful in more than one way. For example, I can imagine the recent posts concerning dreams working for people as amusing stories, or as food for philosophical thought, or as additional information about what our minds/brains do when dreaming. Perhaps people are just amused by my eccentric punctuation. It doesn't matter so much to me that people find in these entries what I intended them to find; it simply gratifies me that, through this odd medium, someone who I may not know at all has been, somehow, satisfied - or perhaps provoked. And so, thank you, gentle readers, for reading, and for making me more useful, in some small way, to my fellow humans.
And then I remembered - I have been read before! And my fellow authors and I were also each other's respondents and collaborators, almost as instantly. And it was good then, too. For once, many years ago, I bore the proud title of "peep", when I and others would leave art, poetry, memoirs, and reflections on the walls of the stairwells of the UCSD campus. This was a pretty remarkable scene, and I shall have more to say about it in an upcoming posting. In the meanwhile: Word to my peeps!
Really, (and I'm sorry if this seems odd) she chose to die. She was ill, and she mostly stopped eating - though she had a little pumpkin pie on her last night. I think not eating, which inevitably slows the body down until it finally stops, is an effective way of choosing not to continue. Eating is the Will to Live in action. She was old, tumorous, and probably on some level she (or her body) knew the game wasn't worth the price of the candle. I can respect that. She had a good run, enjoyed the fine companionship of her caretakers and her "sister", "Invariably", and was given a good home, a large cage, many tasty treats, and plenty of the things that make for a happy rat. And when it started to get uncomfortable, she checked out.
I can't help thinking of my mother's death, now. Sometimes, these days, I find it, perhaps, forgivable. And though I suppose I still disagree with her choice, I can perhaps respect it. She was sixty, and while she might have made it to eighty, she had little to look forward to in those last years. She was poor, her circumstances were perilous, and though she may not have acknowledged it, her mind was slipping - she must have known that. In time, her already poor health would inevitably have gotten worse. Alone, ill, unemployable, without significant family ties - well, perhaps she figured that sixty years was enough. She had got out of life what she could, and the prospects for more worth having must have seemed slight to her. And so she chose to get off the ride a little early, and call it a night. Maybe she was wrong, but the choice was hers, and perhaps I can allow her that freedom. We all go eventually, and who am I to tell her that she must take on the burden of stretching out the hours to the furthest limit of duration, just because it pains me to see her go, and go so brutally?
The essence of wisdom, some have told me, is to recognize that all is transitory. Perhaps there is less pain in giving in to that fact, and allowing the temporary beings we love to go when and how they see fit.
As it says in the Scrapetures:
"And so it is that we, as men, do not exist until we do; and then it is that we play with our world of existent things, and order and disorder them, and so it shall be that non-existence shall take us back from existence and that nameless spirituality shall return to Void, like a tired child home from a very wild circus." - Principia Discordia, pg 00058
Goodbye to all whom I have loved. I will remember you.
In the course of preparing the previous post, Dream Dream, the Universe helpfully provided me with some oddness, which I'd like to share.
I was doing some preliminary puttering about the 'blog, including revising my archive links, when I noticed that I needed to finish the recent dream series (I Dream I Dream, Dream I Dream, Dream Dream, I Dream I [forthcoming]). In particular, I figured the repeated-dreaming-of-waking dream should be next. Preliminary notes were made on this, and then I returned to patching up the archive links.
While I was in the side section, I glanced over at the links, and it occurred to me that by now, the anticipated revamping of silverladder (formerly the badscaryplace) must be up. It is - and has branched out into some interesting new modes and methods. Explorations ensued, which led me (by only a few clicks) to:
I was sleeping, and I woke up. Like any morning, I got out of bed, and began walking down the hallway to the kitchen to get some coffee.
And then I woke up.
I was amused - I would have to tell Mome about this. Dreaming of waking up! Worth a chuckle over morning coffee, at least. With this intention, I headed down the hall toward the kitchen.
And then I woke up.
Now that was a novelty and a half! Dreaming about waking and wanting to talk about dreaming of waking... Very amused, and eager to share, I got out of bed, headed to -
And then I woke up. Again.
This happened perhaps five times.
The last time, I was struck by the necessity of doing a little reality checking. Well, I could feel the solidity of the floor, and the world was vividly real...
And so it was, and so it is. Unless I'm just waiting to wake up again.
Rats have a bad rep, but they're very sociable, clever, personable, and, well, nice. Those of us who keep them as pets are more or less forced to become advocates just because their PR is so bad. Here's my contribution:
We have two pet rats. One is very ill. She doesn't move much, or eat or drink much, has a tumor, and is losing weight. It is about that time, I suppose, yes. I could say more, but I don't need to, do I?
It was a bit cold last night. Our other rat gathered all manner of nesting material, and arranged it at the top level of their cage - which is perhaps 3 1/2 feet tall, so this alone was a lot of work. But then, using her mouth, she grabbed her sick "sister" by the scruff of her neck and carried her up three ramps from the bottom to the top of the cage, and set her in among the bedding. I don't think it's unreasonable to say that she did this so her sick friend would be warm and comfortable, because she couldn't or wouldn't move herself.
Think about all this implies about the mentality and affect of rats - and then decide for yourselves who the "vermin" are.
In the early 20th Century, the still-novel technology of photography was used to produce this unlikely image:
As you can see (but probably can't believe) it documents the existence of fairies. Nowadays, no-one would be fooled by this, because we are used to the notion that photographs can be faked. The original notion of photography, however, was that it shows things as they actually are. We are no longer so naïve, I suppose. Whenever a convincing UFO shot shows up these days, we immediately appeal to Photoshop as an explanation.
After JFK was killed, the Zapruder Film was pored over by conspiracy buffs and others trying to get an accurate and detailed understanding of what took place in Dallas that day. If such a thing were to happen again, and another such film emerged, it would be regarded with the same sort of skepticism that (rightly, as it turned out) was directed at the Alien Autopsy video. Simply put, we can fake that now, and easily. Film, also, has revealed its plasticity - and its inability to preserve and guarantee fact.
Recently, a true American folk-hero died. His name? Bigfoot. Of course, his family and friends knew him as Ray. Oddly enough, the man who invented flying saucers as we know them was also called Ray. Beware Rays! They will create myths inside of which you may spend your entire life. (For those interested in helping our fellow humans to descend into madness, Pope Fenderson has some fancy DIY UFO instructions that you can use to advance the cause of our alien overlords.)
Of course, we have had a long education in the flexibility of the written and spoken word. The existence of many, mutually contradictory scriptures - which can't therefore all be divinely authored or guaranteed - should provide anyone with an immense education in critical thinking. But, should that not suffice, we have the great hoaxers like Jonathan Swift, Orson Welles, Alan Abel, Joey Skaggs, and so on, to provide us, one way or another, with the Big Clue. To wit: People Lie - and many of them do it routinely, for fun and for profit. The unnerving upshot of this is that one should never believe what one hears or reads, unless the source is unimpeachable and skeptical - and even then, one ought never to believe it with certainty. This conclusion, however alarming, is unavoidable.
And, as technology grows, the scope of reliable knowledge shrinks.
Don't despair yet! Keep reading, as things are about to get much, much worse. After that, you can despair all you want.
Let's consider conspiracy theory for a moment - not to endorse it, but to understand its prominent role in our culture. Why does it arise? It arises because people in power are people, and, as noted above, people lie - especially when lying provides a suitable means to a desired end. More than this, though - most modern governments have been repeatedly caught lying, and caught running projects entirely devoted to lying, and then lying about those programs. Disinformation is a recognized strategy for keeping one step ahead of enemy governments, as is secrecy.
Some regard flying saucer flaps as deliberate government smokescreens designed to create ample noise around incidents or information that might otherwise tip off their rivals to secret aircraft programs and so on. Indeed, the Stealth Bomber was widely reported as a flying saucer by residents of areas where it was being tested. Once you unleash the saucer-heads on any phenomenon, so much junk information will be generated that any effective research becomes imposible. It is often forgotten that the initial report of a "flying disk" downed near Roswell, New Mexico was made by the Air force - and later retracted.
We are also accustomed, now, to governmental secrecy about such programs as MKULTRA and COINTELPRO, which involve(d?) serious tampering with the affected individuals' perceived "realities". Part of what we have come to expect about such things is that the facts come out decades after the events are over - and even then, perhaps incompletely. Such abuses, naturally, are not limited to the American government. Or: We can't know what may be going on right now, or how much of what appears to be going on is fraud, misdirection, disinformation, or manipulation of apparent reality.
Regrettably, people are slow to adapt to changing conditions, and there are many sad tales of people who still mistake appearance for reality. Some of them fall in love with people who don't exist. There are many such stories. For example, the LA Weekly recently featured a piece that should be required reading in schools, in which someone, in fact, falls in love with someone who doesn't exist, and changes her entire life as a result. There was another recent case of two people who fell in love with each other's fraudulent alter ego - that one ended in the murder of a third party.
Of course, the internet has a long tradition of hoaxing, trolling, flamebaiting, milking LOLcows, and other exercizes in recreational memetics. The One True Holy Day of the internet is April First, and those benighted n00bs who wander into this playground of the clever and disdainful had best wise up right quick.
It's this simple: Over a hundred people died in Bogota recently from a pigeon-borne illness. I saw it in the London Times. There are concerns that the disease, which is currently untreatable, will spread to other countries. If you don't believe me, try interjecting that tidbit into your next conversation, and you will see how little skepticism the average person is equipped with. For the win, try to get the pigeon story to spread into the traditional media.
As many philosophers have asserted over the millenia, indubitable truth is limited to the immediate fact of uninterpreted experience, which is, for sure, happening - though many have raised serious doubts about the existence of the experiencer and the experienced.
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