The Recent Paradox of Kim Jong-Il

By Kevin | September 7, 2008

As far as contemporary absolute leaders are concerned, North Korea’s Kim Jong-Il certainly ranks as one of the most interesting.  To say nothing of his policies, politics, and views, he has been seen as larger–and decidedly stranger–than life.  Known as a gourmand despite the contradictions inherent in that lifestyle vis Communist practice, he has been profiled as a lover of drink, women, and a man of tastes opulent or equal to many a Bond villain.  In fact, some have viewed this leader as a prototypical figurehead for the whole genre of lavish spy films.  Operating in secrecy, transparent only when necessary, and regarded primarily by reputation, he is the subject of international attention.

There are two basic types of stories currently circulating in the Western media about this man.  The first variety speculates that he is getting progressively sicker, mainly because of his lack of recent public appearances and the general closed-lipped aura with which he is treated in his home country.  Because of complications related to several medical conditions, brought on by lifestyle choices that are hard to sustain, this could be true.

The other surmises that Kim Jong-Il is not sick at all, but rather, that he has in fact been dead since 2003 and has been publically regarded since then through any number of imposers that were chosen to continue the man’s likeness after his death.  Whether or not this is true (remember the spectulations that accompanied Fidel Castro’s recent bouts with illness), it is magnificently compelling.  The idea of surrogate or cloned leaders is not new, but for it to have been put into practice without anybody knowing about it really “ups the ante.”  Sci-Fi has taught us that cyborgs and replicants (in Blade Runner, esp) could easily assume human roles.  Philip K. Dick’s book The Simulacra (1964) posits an America in which the president is actually an android (wouldn’t that be more fun than our current political climate!).  And who can forget Star Wars Episode 1: The Phantom Menace, where Padme/Queen Amedala fooled us all?

Jostling aside, this situation could teach us something very interesting about the nature of illusory control.  If the slightly more incredulous situation is true, then a closed society (that is being looked upon by the eyes of the world) has been maintained by the image of authority, and not by the purely ontological agent of authority itself.  Sure, if this were proved true, it would still hold that there is/was actual authority behind the goverance of North Korea (that is, actual and visible manifest force, systems of surveillance, modes of incarceration, etc).  However, if we conceive of absolute rule as being primarily rooted in the physical and corporal will of the ruler, then how does the nature of such enacted power by proxy change once the truth has been determined?  To what extent is Jong-Il’s aura and constructed cultural significance more important than what he did/does/will do?

These questions–and this entire situation–are merely speculative.  They are very indicative, however, of more recent understandings of power that could be even more frightening that what humanity has already endured.

Posted in Culture, Film, Literature, Politics, September 2008 | Leave a comment

What we need more of is SCIENCE!

By James | September 5, 2008

CERN’s Large Hadron Collider is scheduled to become fully operational on Wednesday. This is a tremendously exciting event, but unfortunately it’s very rare that cutting-edge science gets the kind of attention it deserves in the media - and all too often the information gets distorted, as this article at The Times (of London, of course) explains.

On Thursday night I saw a Republican strategist on the BBC claim that “what’s taught in biology class” and other curriculum decisions should be left to local governments, which is a terribly stupid idea. I can see letting localities determine what to teach when it comes to local and state history, but there’s absolutely no reason why math and science curricula shouldn’t be determined at the national level. Do you know the members of your local school board? Do you think they’re better qualified to determine what children should learn than, say, a nationally selected board of experts? Science in Maine is no different from science in California - last time I checked, the gravitational constant was just that. Constant.

Posted in Politics, Science, September 2008 | Leave a comment

Political parties and economic growth

By Chris Muir | September 4, 2008

I’ve been hearing about these data from Larry Bartel’s book Unequal Democracy for awhile now:

There is a nice op-ed on these data by economist Alan Blinder in the New York Times.  The pattern is quite striking: everyone does better under democrats and inequality decreases, slightly.  No wonder Republicans try to distract voters by talking about personality and “values”.  Anyway, there are lots of potential problems with this kind of analysis, but my understanding is that the book provides a lot more corroborating evidence to support that general case that Republican economic policies have failed and continue to do so today.  I’ll have to read it and get back to you.

Posted in August 2008, Economics, Politics, Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Blog-ership: Fun Scholarship on Blogs

By Kevin | September 1, 2008

As a voracious reader and academic-in-the-making, I cannot help but be a bit of a Luddite in some instances.  One thing that I tend to be very defensive about is the future for that object known as “the book.”  The internet is great.  You have navigated its wiles and have ended up here, reading this prose, itself housed in an offshoot venue related to an internet journal…about books, clunky and flammable things that they are.  The internet is great for distribution, cost efficiency, some types of communication, instant gratification, and for social networking.  With some exceptions, it is generally a bad place to find authoritative scholarship.  There are a few places that present information with the same scrutiny and editorial control usually reserved for print writing, but as a proportion of the total amount of “stuff” on the net, those places are few and far between.

That said, one of the presentation venues (or is it a genre?  or just a technology? a vessel?) that is least associated with scholarly writing is the “blog.”  Webblogs can stand a lot of ground, from the diary-like confessional to the ardently updated, national news source.    Blogs interfaces have superseded old types of self-started html design over the years.  Blogs are quick, easy, relatively idiot-proof, and easy on the eyes.  They are generally presented such that they maximize the clarity of information.  Because of their ease and egalitarian ethos (ANYBODY can do it!), there are a lot of substandard blogs.  I have probably seen more crap blogs than I’ve had hot meals (the values and qualities of the data are roughly the same, trust me).

But, surprise, there is a lot of great stuff on blogs.  Some blogs strive for consistently high content and only deliver when this is possible.  Others soldier on at all costs, with the highs and lows that one would expect from something that his continuously in the works.  I wanted to use my “column” for the week to highlight two relatively recent examples that speak to what I am talking about.  These posts or post sequences have convinced me that blogs can do some really authoritative stuff.

The first is pop culture all the way, but comes from one of the best on the scene.  Stephen R. Bissette is a bit of a polymath, known equally as an author of comic books (his stint with Swamp Thing, to name but one), film critic (stalwart reviewer for Video Watchdog, and one of the experts consulted for the Danger: Diabolik [1969] DVD elements), and a teacher (at the Center for Cartoon Studies).  Anyway, it goes without saying that Bissette’s blog is worth following.  He updates regularly, writes in an always-entertaining but informative way, and tackles a wide variety of topics.  The series of posts that I picked out as an example deals with his memories of the comics of a company called Charlton, especially an intriguing–and if you follow his sequence of posts, pretty wildly imagined–dinosaur-monster-comic called Reptilicus.  My link above does a good job at showing his style.  Lots of images of rare comics, links to related sites, scans of pages, and memories that double as pieces for re-constructing a lost history.  This is a niche topic, of course, and not one that will have publishers clawing at the door.  It is, however, a story that deserves to be told, for the benefit of fans, cultural historians, and those who are bored at work.  The Reptilicus saga is long and fraught with intrigues and sexually explicit novelizations.  I recommend this other part if you don’t have time to follow it all.

The other example of fun, but serious and important, blog-ership comes from “Simon,” owner of the rare groove jazz blog Never Enough Rhodes.  He has written an eleven chapter history of a rather obscure musician called Todd Cochran.  Eleven chapters?  Brilliant!  I do not know anything about this Simon, but he has created the definitive biography of this musician (I said obscure above, but as we can see, he has worked with some big names and deserves to be much more widely known).  I am very interested in the jazz vinyl scene in blogland, a group of selfless collectors, enthusiasts, and even a few professional scholars who really want to people to know about some of the long-forgotten music of the past.  So, this blog history of Cochran shows me that blogs can do things that books cannot.  Here is a comprehensive discography, biography and piece of criticism.  It is a story in words, pictures, and music.  Listen to the first track as you begin to read and change as you keep going.  See all of those links?  Simon has shown us that other bloggers like himself have made vinyl rips available.  It would be almost impossible to track down all the music in this post.  The collector’s market cost of some of these discs is in the hundreds of dollars.  We are fortunate enough to know that some are available on CD at low cost, and these should be purchased.  But for the sake of being comprehensive, Simon has given us a window that looks out upon a land of a whole lot of killer music.  Cochran was a young prodigy, recording on several sessions before he was even 21.  His music spans straight-ahead acoustic jazz, soul jazz, outre spiritual jazz, electric and funky jazz, sideman and producer work on pop records, and more recently, several film scores.  He has done so many different things for somebody that no one seems to have heard of.  Simon has done a great job with this offering.  As one of the commentors states, it should be sold to Downbeat magazine as the definitive portrait of a lost musician.

Posted in Blogs, Culture, September 2008, music | Leave a comment

The only thing that runs in Africa is the food…

By James | August 29, 2008

If you have a few hours to spare, I recommend taking a look at Whatever You Do, Don’t Run: True Tales of a Botswana Safari Guide, by Peter Allison.  The title is pretty self-explanatory, and the book is just a series of anecdotes about the author’s time spent as a guide in the Okavango Delta.  Allison’s wit is always dry and self-deprecating, and I found it hard to stop reading.  Of special interest are Allison’s drunken strip poker game with some minor English royals and his numerous encounters with the dreaded honey badger (the most feared creature in Africa, because when it attacks you, it goes for the testicles).

Posted in Literature, environment | Leave a comment

Midweek blogging

By Chris Muir | August 29, 2008

As we try to reformat the blog a bit, I will be making weekly posts on tuesday, wednesday, or thursday.  Well, technically it’s friday morning right now, but close enough.  I will continue to post about a few topics that interest me, mainly biology (especially evolution), environmental issues, and how either of these topics intersect with politics.  One issue I’ve been thinking about lately is what makes something science.  Here a few widely held ideas and some critiques:

1) Predictive power

Physics and chemistry in particular are well known for their ability to make accurate and often incredibly precise predictions about the natural world.  While prediction is important, it’s a nonsensical requirement for many historical sciences like evolution which study events which may never occur again.

2) Methodology

Others argue that science is a set of methods.  In practice, it’s probably true that a lot of what gets called science is called so because it employs the “scientific method.”  I’m not a big fan of this because 1) many people who do “experiments” are nevertheless quite unscientific (e.g. studies that attempt to measure the efficacy of prayer when there is zero prior probability that prayer could work); and 2)  while the scientific method as we are taught in school applies very well to physics and chemistry especially, it is not always the best method for other sciences (e.g. in many sciences we want to know the probability of two of more events having occurred, not to truly rule out one event or another).

3) Approaching truth

Science might be united by a search for true reality.  However, many quite famous scientists who have formulated theories with amazing predictive power and employed experimental procedures to verify them, have nonetheless based the fundamentals of their theory on entirely erroneous premises.  Darwin, for example, was totally off on the mechanism of heredity (how genetic information is passed on from parent to offspring), yet he was still basically correct about much of evolution.  So merely approaching truth doesn’t qualify either since many wrong ideas are still quite useful and scientific.

I’m absolutely sure philosophers of science have through about these ideas much more - I lifted some ideas directly from them - but I haven’t gotten to reading all that yet.  Some day…

Posted in August 2008, Science | Leave a comment

Reflections on Evolution 2008

By Chris Muir | July 7, 2008

The Evolution 2008 conference, where academic researchers from all over the world get together to share their latest data and ideas on evolutionary biology, occurred from June 20-24. I gave a short talk on the last day, but was around for the entire conference sitting through lectures, viewing posters, and schmoozing with grad students and professors late into the evening. To summarize the whole conference would be impossible, but here are a couple reflections.

Reproductive Isolation

The observation that more distantly related species tend to produce crappier offspring, if they’ll hybridize at all, was noticed well before Darwin provided a theory of evolution. It wasn’t until the 1930’s and 40’s (a period in evolutionary biology known at the Modern Synthesis) that two scientists, Theodosius Dobzhansky and Hermann Muller, provided a genetic theory to explain the phenomenon. The low viability and/or fertility of hybrids is one form of reproductive isolation. The late Ernst Mayr emphasized that reproductive isolation is the key process leading to the formation of new species, which led to what we call the Biological Species Concept (BSC). Interestingly, within the group of biologists who study the origin of new species (speciation), the BSC is king, and most of the speciation talks at Evolution focused exclusively on reproductive isolation. Among my favorites were several studies comparing the rate and ultimate causes of reproductive isolation across a large taxonomic groups (e.g. toads or monkeyflowers). These studies go beyond a single species pair to demonstrate the general processes underlying most speciation events.

Outside the speciation sessions however, the BSC and the importance of reproductive isolation are treated with more skepticism. To give one obvious example, the BSC cannot apply to asexual taxa like bacteria because they don’t mate, period. Many other ideas about what species are and how they form have been proposed, but none are very popular outside certain fields (e.g. paleontologists generally use morphology since they can’t try to mate fossils). I tend to focus on reproductive isolation, but ultimately consider myself a pluralist. But what really interests me is why, sociologically speaking, one idea of speciation can be so dominantly accepted among a small group of researchers, but remain a point of contention among the rest of the field. I don’t really have ideas at the moment – just an observation.

Ecological Niche Modeling

I am also interested in ecological niche modeling, which uses climate data from areas where species were collected to infer their entire range. There was an entire symposium dedicated to the topic at Evolution, where one of the major questions was how and how much do closely related species differ in their ecologies, if they differ at all. Much of the difficulty with the field is methodological – how well does niche modeling actually predict the range of species? It’s difficult to ask because the whole point of niche modeling is to infer the ecology without having to exhaustively sample. There were two talks on this topic that caught my eye. The first, by Joseph Bernardo, was highly critical. He laid out a bunch of fairly obvious reasons why niche modeling might often fail. However, he never bothered to reanalyze any data or provide concrete examples. It didn’t help that none of his figures showed up on the PowerPoint and he went over time despite prodding from the moderator to wrap up. Another talk by Rich Glor actually examined the robustness of niche modeling by comparing results observation rich and observation poor data sets. He found, surprisingly, that even observation poor data sets did pretty well compared to those with many observations, indicating the niche modeling may be robust to low sample size. I think there are still many potential pitfalls of ecological niche modeling, but the indications from the conference were promising.

Well, there is a lot more I could write about, but that is enough for now. Check out the website and program for more information.

Posted in Biology - Evolution, July 2008 | 1 Comment

Economic growth and the environment

By Chris Muir | June 11, 2008

The insistence by some biologists that we must halt economic growth in order to save the environment has bothered me for some time, but I was prompted to write about it now because yet another, albeit minor, group has adopted a policy statement on the issue.  That a naturalist group has agreed to this nonsense is not a big deal, but the Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy (CASSE) continually pressures major scientific organizations like the Ecological Society of America to adopt similar policy positions.  Although major scientific societies like ESA have not yet adopted a policy position on economic growth, in my personal experience, such views are widely held in the biological community.  Anyway, let me briefly address two major flaws with CASSE et al.’s arguments: 1) their downright shoddy use of empirical data; and 2) the illogic of their policy prescriptions.  First, a small qualification.  I agree with CASSE inasmuch as economic growth (measured as GDP) should not be a policy end unto itself in developed countries, but as I will show, it does not follow that reducing GDP will help preserve the natural world.
Anti-growthers claim that economic growth inexorably leads to environmental decline, but their standard of evidence for this purported causative link is abysmally low.  Two examples should suffice.  A brief letter to Science magazine proposed using GDP as an indicator of environmental decline.  Their reasoning?  The tight correlation between GDP and the number of threatened or endangered species (see below).  Well, duh!  The Endangered Species Act began in 1972 with zero species listed and, given the fact that recovery, if successful, takes decades, it must have increased with time.  GDP likewise is well known to have increased since it has been measured, in large part due to population growth.  Besides, why use GDP as an indicator of environmental decline because it correlates well when perfectly good measures like, oh, I don’t know, number of threatened or endangered species already exist and have a 100% correlation with a measure of environmental decline!?!

Another approach taken by anti-growthers to establish a causative link between GDP growth and environmental decline is to look at cross-sectional data.  A study often cited by anti-growthers did just that in 2001.  They find that for 3 out of 5 taxonomic groups, the number of threatened or endangered species rises with per capita GDP.  Already this is not a strong trend.  The bigger problem is that they have not controlled for some very obvious confounding factors.  First, economically developed countries have had higher population densities for longer and did much of their growth when environmental regulations were virtually nonexistent.  There is no a priori reason that contemporary economies cannot continue develop with more sound environmental policies.  Secondly, rich countries can afford to list many more endangered and threatened species because they have long had a dedicated staff of professional scientists whose job it is to do just that.  The authors even admit that their result could be an artifact, but (wrongly, in my opinion) do not seem to think it matters.
Even if there were an unassailable link between historic GDP growth and environmental degradation, it would not follow that reducing economic growth is a desirable policy to protect the environment.  CASSE et al. claim that economic growth (GDP) occurs at the expense of the environment.  However, GDP is merely an aggregate measure of everything people purchase and has no necessary relationship to anything.  For example, much technological innovation (e.g. energy efficient light bulbs) allows us to consume as much while using less resources, which is probably why GDP growth has generally become less natural resource intensive over time.  Another problem is that there exist endless policies that would assuredly reduce GDP and have no positive impact on the environment.  To give an absurd example, if the government paid everyone to stop working and chop down forests, GDP would surely decrease because no one would be performing productive labor, and the environment would be much worse off.  The new Farm Bill is a real life example of both poor economics and poor environmentalism.  Just as CASSE point out that GDP has no necessary relationship with real welfare or societal progress, it likewise has no necessary relationship with environmental stewardship.
The argument to stop growth as environmental policy is largely unsupported, politically illogical as it is naive, and arguably a distraction from more effective environmental policies.  Scientific societies should focus their policy positions on more direct means of biological conservation that are supported by their professional activities, rather than on indirect indicators like GDP on which biologists have no special expertise.  Ultimately, the sensible policy is simply to find the most efficient means of protecting the environment and let GDP fall where it may – it could go down, but it might go up.  A focus on GDP per se utterly misses the point.

Posted in Biology, Economics, June 2008, environment | Leave a comment

Some initial impressions on Descent of Man

By Chris Muir | May 27, 2008

I have started reading Charles Darwin’s 1871 book Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex. Darwin published this book well after he introduced the idea of evolution by natural selection in his 1859 book On the Origin of Species. Despite persistent claims to the contrary, Darwin initially dealt very little with human evolution, partially to avoid controversy (as he admits in the introduction of Descent), but also because he was concerned with much broader patterns in nature than the origin of humans. He sums this point up very nicely in the introduction of Descent:

When we confine our attention to any one form , we are deprived of the weighty arguments derived from the nature of the affinities which connect together whole groups of organisms…

Darwin’s insightful comment on the utility of comparisons across many species, geographic areas, etc., while a staple of evolutionary research, is still greatly underappreciated, even by scientists. As Darwin presciently realized, the paucity of species closely related to humans, by prohibiting independent comparisons across many species, is the main problem with much evolutionary psychology research today. To take one example, there are many competing hypotheses as to why selection would have favored large brains in the lineage leading to modern humans and not other great apes - greater tool use, need to communicate, bipedalism allowed longer period of childhood development, and so on. The problem is that many of these selective pressures happened concurrently, and there is often no good way to rule out competing hypotheses since there exist no other big-brained species with which to make an independent comparison. Fortunately, biologists are no so impoverished in other areas of research. For example, we can infer that red, tubular flowers represent an adaptation to hummingbird pollination because those traits have evolved together independently many times across angiosperms.

Despite the dearth of data on human evolution in 1871, Darwin marshals several compelling arguments for the evolution of man from common ancestors with chimpanzee, gorilla, and other apes. Although now accepted as a scientific fact backed up by exquisitely detailed fossil and molecular data, even prominent 19th century naturalists like Wallace, who independently proposed natural selection, doubted the evolutionary origin of man. Darwin, often borrowing from contemporaries like Huxley and Häckel, dispatches such ideas by synthesizing disparate information, usually collected for entirely different reasons. For example, it was well known then that humans and apes suffered from more similar diseases (genetic and infectious) than, say, man and mouse or man and bird. Furthermore, diseases tend to pass more easily between man and ape than between man and more distantly related species (e.g. HIV evolved from Simian Immunodeficiency Virus). Darwin points out that this fact is completely explicable from the standpoint of common descent, but utterly mystifying under the view of special creation of man.

Although Darwin strongly affirms his belief in the natural origin humanity, still a controversial topic among the public, he shows characteristic caution often not observed in later students of human evolution. Brain size, often considered the pinnacle of (human) evolutionary progress and an indicator of intelligence by many biologists and anthropologists, has been abused to justify anthropocentrism and, much worse, racism or eugenics. Darwin however states that “no one supposes that the intellect of any two animals or of any two men can be accurately gauged by the cubic contents of their skills” (pg. 42). In contrarian fashion, he even notes:

[T]he wonderfully diversified instincts, mental powers, and affectations of ants are notorious, yet their cerebral ganglia are not so large as the quarter of a small pin’s head. Under this point of view, the brain of an ant is one of the most marvellous atoms of matter in the world, perhaps more so than the brain of man.

All this is not to say that Darwin’s language never comes off as Europocentric or even racist, or that he didn’t appreciate the unique qualities of human intelligence. He did. However, even in the first few chapters, he gets three things right: 1) that human descended from a common ancestor, like all life on earth, is the only explanation that makes sense of all the data; 2) even though human variation can be explained via natural selection, we should use much caution in naively interpreting the meaning of heritable differences between individuals or races; and 3) many “human” qualities such as intelligence (and morality) are not unique to humans. Scientists and nonscientists alike would do well to remember these lessons.

Posted in Biology - Evolution, May 2008 | Leave a comment

Control Societies, From Fiction to Fact

By Kevin | May 21, 2008

The conspiracy theory craze of the 1990s–criticized and largely explored in some of Steve Beard’s journalism from his collections Logic Bomb: Transmissions from the Edge of Style Culture and Aftershocks: The End of Style Culture–helped further open up and prime the public’s willing desire to believe that the forces that seemed to control their bank accounts, governments, food packaging, and religions were actually in league with other, more nefarious masters. Oliver Stone’s JFK (1994) and the popularization of Area 51 in television and video games show how powerful these representations were. Of course, conspiracy theories had been around for far longer. The seeds of modern antisemitism come from one of Europe’s most long-lived and debated conspiracies, the supposed creation, perpetuation, and malicious intention of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion in 1920 and 1921. Here, antisemites fabricated a global conspiracy that placed the Jewish people at the center of problems that were manifest at other locations (and on other levels) of the social order.

Or, another example. Utopian and dystopian science fiction has long been a breeding ground for more extreme forms of speculation. Beyond UFOs, alternative histories, and “steam punk” are books that imagine prescient disruptions in the total world system (all sci-fi does this at one level or another, but some seem to be read more universally). I am thinking, in particular, of George Orwell’s famous 1984 (1948), a text that has been championed by Left and Right as a warning for the disappearance of civil liberties, against uncritically listening to corrupt government, and for the problems associated with the total (de)mystification of culture.

1984 never really leaves the collective consciousness, but is instantly remembered at the first threat of totalitarian power struggles. The book has spawned a list of imitators and admirers in film and television. From the glossy (Ultraviolet [2004], Equilibrium [2003]) to the gritty (Children of Men [2004], Brazil [1985]), the warnings have rung true.

The reason that I bring up these pop cultural precedents to potential civil disruptions is that there is a major initiative currently under consideration in Britain that could move the world one step closer (though that step may have already been taken, as I discuss below) to problematic control. That initiative, already defensively called the “Big Brother” database, is a centralized collection of all telephone calls, emails, and web site visits in the United Kingdom. The possible benefits (the ability to monitor terrorist and illegal activity; behavior tracking records that could be utilized in civil and criminal court cases; a large “receipt” for a year’s worth of social and cultural activity) and the certain side effects (almost guaranteed violations of civil liberties; a disruption to the processes of fair trail; potential security breaches) are evident.

Beyond those speculative and literary associations, I would like to take this possible occasion for control policy as a means of discussing some ideas from Alexander Galloway’s excellent book Protocol: How Control Exists After Decentralization (2004, MIT Press). Though I am currently only about halfway through, I have taken a keen interest in Galloway’s discussions of periodization theory as a means of mapping historical change over large expanses of time. Galloway is interested in setting up the technical, cultural and historical actions that lead to the invention and development of computing protocols that function to both enable and control the essence of decentralized internet and network discourse. The specifics of how protocol works are not as essential for the issue under consideration here. Rather, I am referring to his chart “Control Matrix” (Table 3.1, 114-15), which is a shorthand summary/synthesis of how control works (in largely materialist dimensions) in various historical periods. For example, the feudal/early modern period in Europe was characterized–though Galloway provides more examples than I am about to give– by certain disciplinary modes (tithe, tribute), different machines (levels, pulleys), virtues (loyalty), and active threats (armed revolt, sedition).

Our current era, perhaps a later instantiation of postmodernity, is governed by the computer and its associated logics (energy as information and immaterial, discipline as debugging, control as protocol, virtue as pattern and algorithm, all marked by strategies of security and containment across dispersed fields). Galloway continues by explaining how computer protocols have cultural analogs in how decentralized societies are controlled in other, sometimes physical and visible, realms.

My point with all this, without sticking too closely to Galloway’s argument, is that this latest piece of news from Britain is the sort of thing that shows the degree to which periodization theory works. It illustrates, in pretty terrifying terms, how the stuff of dystopic fiction becomes the lifeblood of mundane policy. Control will at once be “invisible” (carried out by machinic code that works without moral judgment, is immaterial, and does not reveal its apparatus), decentralized (it will take place across whole nations, over shifting servers and floating IPs, under constant surveillance from intelligent humans and from pattern-spotting artificial intelligence), and still strangely, almost nostalgically centralized (there will, no doubt, be some menacing building like the Ministry of Information that will invoke physical discipline and massive presence). This is the kind of notice that cannot be buried under the glitz and dazzle of summer movie premieres, professional sports, or Presidential weddings. The future is almost here, and we hardly have the perspective, let alone vocabulary and sense of understanding, to discuss it.

Posted in Culture, Film, Literature, May 2008, Politics | Leave a comment