What to do with this post-rational virtue of ours?

What does it take to be rational these days?

The disconcerting answer to this question is that it takes more than personal virtue. Much more. And that it takes more than personal rationality. Much more.

Let's consider the case of pollution. Pollution in and of itself is never rational - no one wants pollution to happen. Yet it happens anyway, and it happens for rational reasons.

Or, rather, as an aggregate of rational reasons.

You see, for any one particular agent, the polluting act is a rational thing to do. For instance, any one person not using a car in order to get around won't make that much of a dent in the overall pollution situation. That one person may, on the other hand, face a wide range of discomforts as a consequence of not using a car. To any one rational person, the tradeoff between not making a dent in the order of things on the one hand, and making clear and significant improvements in the here and now, is in fact not a tradeoff at all. As evidenced by the positively humongous number of people in cars.

The sum total of a large number of rational decisions is an irrational outcome.

It is somewhere around here that the proponents of free market ultra liberalism run into trouble. What do you do when the very thing you base your entire ideological enterprise on - the rational individual - isn't enough to produce the rational outcome we need?

Because - and I'm going to go radical on you all - we need to get a handle on pollution. And a whole range of other issues where the rational thing to do for one person isn't what we need to see in mass effect.

It isn't personal virtue - one person doing the right thing isn't enough. And it isn't personal rationality - that's what's gotten us into this mess, after all.

So. What to do? What's left of virtue and rationality now that the individual aren't the prime shakers and movers of this world we live in?

The secret, sneaky message hidden in computer games

By playing such games as Dishonored and Deus Ex: Human Revolution, I have learned a thing or two about sneaking. One of these things is that it is of vital importance to know the terrain before you try to be stealthy in it. After all, no amount of stealth in the world helps you when you suddenly find yourself in a brightly spotlighted alleyway surrounded by hostile people with very loaded guns.

I've also learned that the best way to gain information about the terrain is a five-step method that looks like this:

1. Arrive at a place where sneakiness is required.
2. Save the game.
3. Kill any and all enemies in the place, in any way. Do not be stealthy about it.
4. Gain information about the terrain. Be sure to take note of any helpful features.
5. Load the game. Use you newly acquired information about the terrain to great advantage.

I have this nagging suspicion that this might not be the best way to go about being sneaky in the real world. And, moreover, that this might not be the only computer game strategy that works wonders in a game setting while being utterly dysfunctional in any kind of real setting.

If you are worried about kids becoming violent, don't fret about the computer games. What they learn from them is that you want a save point before you do anything important, and that it is precisely those moments that don't have a save point where you have to be the most careful. And that if you are not careful, all is lost.

Stop and think. Gather information first, but be safe about it. Then act.

What you should be worried about is the rest of the world that the kids are inhabiting. For one thing, it does not include the option to save the current state of affairs. For another, it does include a whole range of situations that actively tries to teach them that violence is indeed the answer to problems. And - as is the case with the war on terror - that violence is indeed THE answer to the problem at hand.

Leave the computer games out of this. They are positively pacifistic, in comparison.

Marketing the futures of labor

Create jobs.

Think about these two words. These words who, somehow, have managed to become the very center of political discourse just about everywhere.

Create jobs.

It is not that we face some herculean task that will require stupendous amounts of manpower to complete. Rather, we are facing the opposite: the herculean task is done, and we have run out of things to do. The free market is of no help here - it is indeed very happy to send news to every stockholder everywhere that it can do just as much or sometimes more with less employees.

Which is true in every sense of being; one only has to think about how remarkably small the farmer class has become over the years. Saying that it has shrunk from 98% of everyone to a measly 2% might be a contestable statement, but the reversal of (im)productivity is indisputable. What used to demand hordes of people now demand but a few, and the production of everything is ever on the increase despite of this.

Because of this.

So the creation of jobs becomes an issue. One might think that we might reach a point where it is politically possible - and, indeed, wise - to declare that we are doing enough things in the world, and that we can finally say that the labor market is a matter of choice rather than of brutal necessity. One might think that there is something of a limit to how much needs to be done in a given year, and that the fact that so much energy is spent talking about how jobs are to be created is a sign that we have reached that very limit. And, with farming as a prime example, surpassed it.

One might think. But what are these restless politicians and the voices of authority saying?

More jobs!

One might think this to be somewhat disingenuous. One might think that the proper thing to ponder is the orderly retreat from a society based on mass employment, to something more suited for a technological reality where joblessness is to be expected as a natural feature of society. One might even think that insisting that just about everyone getting a job to be an old fashioned notion based out of the necessities of scarcity so ever prevalent in earlier times.

One would also be branded a political radical and somewhat of a lunatic for mentioning such ideas.

But what else is there to do? It's not likely that we will refrain from using the ever more advanced labor saving devices what destroys any possibility of an all-encompassing labor market, and enforcing a proverbial digging of holes just to fill them in a moment later seems an unlikely prospect as well. Least likely of all is that the jobs will actually return - no matter the political energy spent on convincing you otherwise.

We are entering a future where we have more than enough of just about everything, thanks to the ever more advanced means of production. But the advances regarding the means of distribution are sadly lagging very far behind, and if the blind faith in the notion of "creating more jobs" out of thin air is the leading vision of our time -

It would seem we still have things to do about the fact that we have run out of things to do.

Who wrote the words that keeps your heart pounding?

That might seem like a rhetorical question. Or something an English teacher might come up with to provoke poetic young hearts and minds into action. It might. But it isn't. It's actually a matter of life and death.

Especially if you have a pacemaker.

You see, a pacemaker is a little computer, and computers run on code. Code that can be written, read and rewritten - just like any piece of literature. And just like literature, some dispositions and formulations works better than others.

It is therefore of the utmost importance that one has the possibility to read this code - literally the words that keeps that bleeding heart pounding. Yet if you ask to read these sacred words, you will probably be told that you can't.

Pacemaker software is as a rule closed software, and you are not allowed to read that.

Yet, these are the words that govern your life. If they contain flaws, errors and edge condition failures, it is your life that hangs in the balance. And since life is a tragedy of flaws, errors and edge condition failures, you will want to know about this.

In fact, you will want the whole world to know about this. So that every expert and amateur alike can look upon these words and despair. Before you do.

If there is a case to be made for free and open software, this is it.

Out of replace

I sometimes go to a nearby shopping mall just to be there.

Make no mistake. I have no business being there. I'm dirt poor, and can't afford to shop just about anything. If I actually made business there, I'd be put out of business quicker than a record label not migrating to the digital economy.

But I come there anyway. And the reason I go there is twofold. For one, they have a restaurant that serves an unlimited amount of food for a very limited amount of money, which goes a long way to balance my books. More importantly, though, I come to watch the others who are there, for whatever reason they might have.

Which, more often than not, is to shop. But that is not any of my business.

I do this to remind myself of the kind of society I live in. To remind myself of the Spectacle, and the brutally artificial forms under which we try to find ourselves. To watch how people try to conform to norms that are by design unfullfillable, and to watch how they invariably fail in oh so tragic ways.

I do this not to gloat, but to firmly ground myself in the reality of the unreal. And, basically, to bitchslap myself into continue doing what I'm doing - with the rationale that if I don't, this tragedy will continue ad infinitum. Or until it crash lands in a flurry of postconsumerist inevitabilities.

I have no business being there. Yet I go there, as a reminder to myself: Another world is not only possible, it is also very, very necessary.

It's easy to forget why you do the things you do. It's even easier to forget to remind yourself. And if you forget that long enough, you might start to think you have no business doing what you're doing. That you are out of place, slowly going out of business.

Sometimes, we just have to balance those books. Every once in a while.

A taxonomy for human beings

If you study biology, you study life. And when asked about what you study, you will want to be more specific, so you might say you study a particular domain. If the question persists, you might even go into kingdoms, phyla, classes, orders, family, genera or even species - in that order.

When studying life, these things matter.

If you happen to be human, you study humans. And when asked about what you study, you will want to be more specific, so you might say you study a particular domain. - And so forth, in that order.

The first order of differentiation you do is this: do I want to have sex with this person or not? And depending on whether or not you want to, the rest of your interactions with this particular human are colored by it.

The second order of differentiation is if it's a boy or a girl.

After that, you add class, race, appearance, personality and all those other things that makes up the impression you have of the human in question. In more or less that order.

Humans are strange creatures, are they not?

The magic works

Science and technology operates on one basic principle: the world works. And because it works, it can be made to do all kinds of interesting things. If you only know how it works.

Of course, the caveat to this is that the world sometimes faces obstacles in its workings. Knowing how it works (science) becomes that much more powerful once you get around to get around these obstacles (technology).

The way to make progress, then, is to define these obstacles and overcome them. Which, as any no-nonsense person will tell you, is the proper way to go about it. See the problem, tackle it, grapple with it, fix it - problem solved.

No need to fuss over it. Just get to it.

Which, evidently, works. Just take a look around you and behold the marvels of technology at work.

The problem here, of course, is that one can go too far in this problem solving-mentality. Science/technology works great when what you need to do is to make things work, but it does so on the condition that all it has to do is solve predefined problems. The returns quickly diminish if you leave this frame of reference.

For instance. Science may look at an unhappy person, and conclude that the unhappiness is caused by an abnormally low level of dopamine. The problem is this lack of dopamine, and the solution is to get those levels back up again. Which can be done by medication of some kind.

However, the cure for the sadness you feel because you are lonely is not a pill. And the world would be a truly sad place indeed if it were.

Trust science. It works. But don't put too much trust in it - that will only cause more problems than it solves. -

To love a cyborg

We are all cyborgs.

This may come as somewhat of a surprise. You would think this is one of those things you notice as you walk around in the world, feeling all soft and biological. This sudden change from non-cyborg to cyborg should have had some sort of visible sign, shouldn't it? It's not like these things happen over night, right?

Right?

Just as Rome wasn't built in a day, so our cyborghood wasn't built overnight. It was a process that took time, effort and many sleepless nights to accomplish. And many more sleepless morning, where many hard working persons struggle out of bed and back to the never ending work of building the world we live in.

Because, let's face it: we don't live in the natural world any more. We built this city, with concrete, steel, hard work and endless city council meetings (and a certain amount of rock and roll). And we built this economy, with all of its supply chains, complex interdependencies and the million things that just have to happen for the whole shebang to work.

And for us to be able to go to the store, get some food and live another day.

And that is how we became cyborgs. Depending on the machine, becoming the machine - speaking the machine language. Doing the biddings of the machine.

We are the machine. We are all cyborgs.

But don't ask yourself what it means to be a cyborg. Or even what life as a cyborg means. Those are the wrong kinds of questions, and will not lead you anywhere.

Instead, ask what it means to live. And, more importantly, what it means to love.