Silences never end

After writing about digital archives and the importance of sharing things in order to better keep (preserve) them, I suddenly remembered all the backup CDs I have in this place.

Yes, compact discs. From the days of Windows 98 and modems, and the Y2K bug. In order to avoid the imminent collapse (and/or the threat of having to download things again - an expensive proposition when paid by the minute), I backed things up. On compactly stacked discs. And promptly forgot all about them.

Until I remembered them. Which I did every once in a while, in a fit of nostalgia. Most recently, last night.

As with so many other things, I made it into a social event. The world needed to know what I thought during the "insert disc 5 of 17" process, and thus tweets happened about it. En masse.

While I went on doing my thing, two other things happened. The one was the nth happening of the Superb Owl, in all its incomprehensible oversizedness.

I ignored that.

The other thing was the desperate cries for help from the people of Syria, where the military unleashed every weapon of war they had. Literally.

That was harder to ignore.

How can one do archiving while reports of people dying are screaming at you, in real time? All the time?

How can one do anything at all, for that matter?

That is the dark side of the statement "the whole world is watching". You are a part of it. And there's a lot going on in it, impossible to ignore and more so to unfeel. Specially when it happens at you.

There are voices who won't voice anything after tonight. Friends lost.

At the same time, life. Things still needs to be done, schedules followed. While the world contains more sorrow than anyone can fathom, it is somehow also too small to contain time for grief.

So I keep going. Disc 6 of 17. Tweeting. Doing all those things that needs to be done, and that won't be done unless I do them.

That is the one thing one can do. Keep going.

Stay strong.

Originally published February 6, 2012

Default feelings

People have emotional baselines. Default feelings. Blueprints for all feelings to come.

Usually, these are based on feelings past.

This is not to say that there's determinism at work here. But you can understand a person very well if you manage to empathize with their emotional defaults. The places to where they go when they are not going anywhere in particular. The equilibrium awaiting perturbation.

Home.

There is no one default feeling. There's always a bunch of them, being more or less present at any given moment. Some might be frequent, others rare, but they are.

Some of my most frequent are based on being outdoors alone under an overcast sky, not quite rainy but all the more melancholy for it. Not just the one time, but many times, many ages: as a small kid, exploring the oversized mountain behind our equally oversized house; as a slightly less small kid, walking to the nearby village without telling anyone; as a school kid, not quite wanting to be social during recess; as a highschooler, deliberately getting off the bus at the wrong station in order to establish a good long distance between me and home; recently, deliberately trying to get lost in this city in order to find new places.

There is no one default feeling. But some are more frequent than others.

Remember, remember, the ninth of November

It is very possible to get post-traumatic stress disorder from reading European history. The kind where you simply break down and withdraw from the world for a while, due to the sheer despair of it all.

The utter, total and brutal despair of it all. Made all the worse for also being utterly, totally and brutally meaningless.

One point to illustrate this is the beginning of the First World War. The Great War. At the start in 1914, the militaries looked pretty much as they did in 1814 - think cavalry, brightly colored uniforms, drill formations marching into battle. The prevailing notion was that of the glorious charge - the way to go about things military was to attack, and then to attack some more until there was nothing left to attack. It was simple, it was glorious, and it was a great honor to fight and die for your country.

War was a thing of glory, where boys were turned into heroes.

And then the Great War happened. And they attacked. And they died. And attacked. And died. And attacked. And died.

Human beings have a keen sense of situational awareness. No matter how glorious it is to die for your country in a heroic charge, the glorious heroism fades away rather quickly when hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands have died in a charge against an enemy line. One enemy line, unmoving, unchanging, remaining as intact after the first five thousand casualties as it was before it all started. With the one difference that you can now hide from enemy fire behind the fresh mounds of corpses of those who came before.

Heroism died in the trenches. Only to be replaced with the bureaucratic coldness that would send millions more to their deaths, written off as the expected quota of dead maintenance necessary in order to keep the status quo going a little longer.

There was no glory or honor in it. There was only death.

In the millions.

When the war ended, it left Europe with a generation scarred from the war. Literally and figuratively. Crippled war veterans lined the city streets, and the despair from the futility of the war left many demoralized. Or radicalized, as the case might be - those who were still able to fight had the idea that a communist revolution might be just the thing to move things along.

There was no glory to be found. But no peace, either. Demoralized by despair or rallied by revolution, life agonized forward. All under the now very modern bureaucratic administrations of the new governments put in place. The old monarchies were gone - no more Kaiser, no more Czar, no more Sultan. No more of the old world. The new order painted everything grey.

Those who planned the Great War thought it would be over in a couple of months, at the most. After that, things would go back to normality - the various nations would resume their scheming and plotting and political backstabbing and all the rest of it. As they had for centuries.

Needless to say, they didn't.

Instead, something else grew out of this. Where the old monarchies relied on glory and nationalism to legitimate their doings, the new bureaucracies relied on centralization, planning and efficiency. After the madness, there were to be method to things - central planning, coordinated policies, scientific management. From the ashes of the old world, something new would be built. And it would be built on time, within budget and according to plan.

This last part is the most horrific. If there is any one part that causes the most despair, that is it. We will get to that.

The title of this post mentions the ninth of November. The date this alludes to happened in 1938, twenty years after the end of the Great War. But in order to put the Kristallnacht and what followed it into perspective, the backdrop of the First World War is necessary. The pointless war, the demoralized populace, the increased bureaucratization of state power - they all coalesce into the horrors that were the Second World War and the Holocaust.

The Holocaust had administrators. There were bureaucrats working with tireless German efficiency to work out the most efficient ways to organize everything - in detail. From compiling census data on how many Jews there were, to calculating how many Jews could be fitted into a cargo train, to organizing the trains so that they could get from where they were to the concentration camps, to formulating the most efficient guidelines for how to kill them once they were there. It was all to be made on time, within budget and according to plan.

The Holocaust had a budget. It had a plan. It was all legal.

It was all legal.

And since it was all organized, it was divided up into different parts. Any one part was not important in and of itself, but taken together, they grinded the gears forward toward the end result. The division of labor was such that everyone did what they did as if they had ordinary jobs. Because that's what they had. It was all so organized that the totality of the operation fell outside the scope of everyday activity, and it became all the more efficient for it. Those who repaired trains repaired trains, those who pushed papers pushed papers, and so on. Honest people with honest jobs, getting paid for doing a good job - not knowing what they were contributing to.

The Holocaust was not just a couple of madmen who one day got an idea to kill all the Jews. It was the result of millions of people working in organized synergy toward that end goal, each one of them doing their small part to contribute to the whole. Whatever they did. As long as they followed the laws and kept the system operating at a stable pace, they helped keep the routine execution of the plan going. The very fact that they were law-abiding, ordinary and decent citizens gave legitimacy to what was going on.

To put it brutally: you either helped the Holocaust in some way, or you were out of a job.

The true horror was the scale of it. The inertia of it. Take out any one part of the system, and honest people would respond by sending job applications to the new openings. Honest people would do honest work, and millions would die as a result.

There was glory in war once. It died with the First World war.

There was glory in doing a decent day's labor once. It died in the Holocaust.

Alongside this, the Second World War raged. And contrary to what Hollywood movies likes to tell you, the brunt of the raging went on on the east front. Germany and the Soviet Union sent their armies clashing, the latter more so than the former. It is famous how the Soviets sent wave after wave of barely armed people at the Germans, pointing machine guns at their backs. The thought was simple: send enough cannon fodder, and the Germans would eventually run out of cannons. It didn't matter what this cannon fodder did or how it got there - as long as it soaked up bullets, it served its purpose. It didn't even matter who they were - a common practice was to empty the mental institutions and send the inmates toward the awaiting Germans. Sanity was not required in order to die for the cause.

There was method to the madness. It was cold, ruthless method, but method nonetheless.

The Germans advanced. As they did, the Russians retreated, and scorched the earth behind them, leaving nothing to eat. Those who happened to live along the way soon found that they didn't - if the Russians didn't recruit them, the lack of food didn't starve them, or the Germans outright killed them, the oncoming winter would.

The Russians have a traditional ally, commonly called General Winter. He stopped Napoleon when he tried to take Moscow, and he slowed down the Germans when they tried to do the same. He didn't stop them, though. But when they reached Moscow they discovered something: there was no food to be had there, either. Neither for them or the non-relocated locals. And it was cold. As in minus forty centigrade cold.

Cold enough that people died along the way. At night a soldier would fall asleep, and next morning he would be a frozen corpse. Another casualty of war. Another calculated loss.

And if the terrain turned out to be uncooperative, these corpses could be used to create paths for the supply train. Smooth out the terrain, make the going easier.

Between all these cold, ruthless methods, millions died. As the saying goes, it's statistics at this point.

Eventually the war ended. But the history of Europe didn't end, and neither did the despair. As meaningless as the First World War was, nothing broke the back of optimism as much as the fact that it happened again.

Adorno said it was impossible to write poetry after Auschwitz. He had reason to say so.

What followed was the Cold War, the Iron Curtain, and the DDR. Where the bureaucratic survivors of the war took the lessons learned to heart, and applied even more bureaucratic and administrative oversight in order to secure that the new world was built properly. On time, within budget and according to plan.

The result was the soul-crushing dystopia of applied modernity. On the east side of the Iron Curtain we got the communist version, and on the west side we got the capitalist version. Both of them equally capable and willing to trample corpses in order to achieve results. Especially when they tried to outdo each other in their respective capabilities to kill each and every human being alive.

Twice, thrice. Should it come to that.

The Cold War ended. The Soviet Union ceased, the Iron Curtain fell, the Berlin Wall did likewise. Yet the despair continues, as it is clear that the bastion of freedom in the west has taken upon itself the role of making extra sure that the modern project is built on time, within budget and according to plan. No matter how many new, noncold wars they'll have to fight to make it so.

And at home, there are those who say that the ideas that so many millions died so needlessly because of - are actually the way forward. And every year, there are ever more people that listen and nod in agreement. As if no one had learned anything.

There is no end to history. It just continues.

Call it despair. Call it post-traumatic stress. It's European.

Remember, remember, the ninth of November.

You don't know half of it

You may or may not have noticed this, but the human being is capable of feeling a wide range of emotions.

Far wider than the range of words denoting emotions available in the vocabulary of an ordinary person.

Quick! What's the word for the feeling of remembering a heartache felt on an autumn afternoon faintly scented by the promise of resumed rain?

There is no such word.

If you are of the creative kind, you might very well have made up a word for this in the time between reading this line and the line above this one. If so - then good for you. It is a useful word.

Humans are peculiar creatures. They tend to feel something as a baseline feeling for an extended period of time, and to afterwards go around and remember/refeel this from time to time. Oftentimes, they use the rememberances of these baseline feelings as an unarticulated emotional backdrop which everything newly encountered is compared and contrasted to.

They never give words to these feelings, though. And thus never get around to the all-important task of getting to know themselves.

There is a feeling of sadness associated with this thought. There is, however, no word for this feeling.

Now might be a good time to change this.

The Corrosion of Character

Sometimes, I amble through some of my old posts. After the recent events in Oslo [Breivik], I ambled systematically to things I've written about terrorism, to see if there were any thought worthy of rethought. There were. A lot of them. I'm going to quote some of them, in order to put them into context. Starting with this recent one:

Wouldn't it be cool if there actually was a [Muslim] conspiracy? Think about it. If there were one, any and all other everyday problems would be null and void. Unimportant. There would be a war coming, a war in need of preparations! Forget all of those lousy drab problems that never go away - they are unimportant, not worthy of attention, irrelevant. When the war comes, no one will be either willing or able to remember them.

Those words of "what if" doesn't quite ound the same now as when I wrote them. To understate it. They are, in a way, a reuse of the words of another post:

The key to the concept of anomie is to think that the parents of yesterday succeeded in doing anything but teach their kids to use and understand the tools of modernity. Instead, the kids are left to fend for themselves, and to try to understand how the world works on their own - without either positive or negative feedback following good or bad actions. Because of this, both good and bad, good and evil, become indifferent concepts, impossible to differentiate. And thus, the one become as doable as the other. [...]

The point here is not that we are all the children of society (though we are), but the loneliness of the modern condition. The one we are all prone to fall into every now and then.

The best cure against loneliness is of course meaningful interaction with others. Every child knows this. Yet, somehow, this is forgotten as age happens: one starts to think about one's life as if what's lacking is something other than other people. The feeling of loneliness submerges, sublimates, subverts into something else - into an all encompassing life goal, a grand narrative of good versus evil, an epic quest, anything that brings order to the chaos that is the lack of other people.

Anomie is not a pleasant condition. It is also an extremely common one. Very few living among us are not anomic to some extent. And we all, sometimes, feel that urge to do something extreme. To borrow a thought from another post:

There are days when all I want to do is to yell a non-euphemistic "fuck this", blow up some minor monument and then use the following media spin to imprint the message "next time, I'm not going to dick around with minor monuments; stop this madness at once!". And then, once the madness inevitably continues, blow something bigger up, with the same spin. Rinse and repeat.

We all have our extremist days. It comes with being human.

As fortune would have it, most of us have social safety nets (in the form of friends, family etc) that helps to mitigate such thoughts. People who, as if by magic, makes the anomie go away by just being, and who remind us of why we do what we do. But the tendency is still to go into that dark place every now and then - it comes with the being human thing. One can live with it. Handle it. Like I did (in a backward kind of way) when I wrote this post:

If I was a terrorist, I wouldn't waste time dicking around with blowing things up or hijack airplanes or spread socialist propaganda or any of that nonsense. Bombs have a very limited blast radius, and it's easier (albeit slightly more expensive) to just buy a plane that to steal one. There are better ways to achieve my diabolical goals and aspirations.

You might  have caught glimpse of a tendency by now. A tendency that can be summarized by something I wrote in this post:

The key here is to understand that there will always be self-appointed philosopher kings. Persons who are fanatically convinced that so many of the world's problems will be solved if this one thing gets done, and who get so fanatic about it that they will take the world into their own hands to execute their master plan. No matter the cost - the world may burn while I save it.

An easy solution gets a difficult problem. An easy solution that fixes both the problem and the loneliness - until it doesn't.

The purpose of this collection of quotes is to show how important it is to take the time to acknowledge one's peers - even if only by the tiniest of gestures. But also to show that we all become the extremist every once in a while, and that this happens for a reason. When the world is big, inexplicable and lonely, people reach for explanations that will make it easy and manageable. Easy explanations is food for the starving soul, and if there happens to be company at the dinner table - why object?

We are all the children of society. This big, inexplicable and in oh so many ways lonely society, so effective at the mass production of anomie.

It is easy to feel tiny and insignificant in the setting of everyday life. As if that doesn't matter. But, paradoxically, it does - it is there all things of importance happen. It is there that you, me and everyone we know can create just enough sense to shoo away both the anomie and the terrorism of our lives. Through the creation of meaning and understanding. By being those persons who create a better context than that of extremism and terrorism.

If you've ever wondered how hugs save lives - this is how.

Originally published July 25, 2011

Aaron Swartz and the society of death

I hear words such as innovation, creativity, new ways of thinking, growth, initiative, engaging, effectivization, - you know the whole range of economic buzzwords. you've all heard those words to death.

That's what I hear when those words. Death, death, death, death.

Aaron Swartz is dead.

And with him, many of the buzzwords mentioned above.

We live in a society that de facto doesn't want or approve of the fulfilling of any of these words. That actively punishes those who by any feat of accident or intent happens to do something that could be described by these words.

No, rightists, it's not about the poor being lazy unworkable people who need to be incentivized to work.

No, leftists, it's not about the incessant attacks on labor unions by big capital.

It's about the fact that those who do anything worthy of those buzzwords is actively punished for it. With the least innovative, creative and forward looking of questions in mind:

How shall those who benefit from people living in a situation of low information density continue to get paid for distributing information?

Aaron Swartz is dead.

Pressured to death by a society that is perpetuated, strengthened and armed by those who want anything but innovation or forward thinking. Or any other buzzword that is so often invoked.

Death, death, death. If the present society has anything to say about it.

Let's remix it. Let's build something better. Let's turn the society into our society.

It is the only thing to do. Not only in memory of Aaron, but also as a preventive measure. How many other innovative, creative and forward thinking humans out there aren't there who at this very moment contemplate suicide because society makes its darnedest to imprint on them that they are criminal vermin?

It could have been you. It could have been me. It has most likely happened to someone you loved and lost.

Death, death, death. Enough!

Originally published January 13, 2013

Recently used

Recently, I visited the home of someone who has died. Recently.

It was a strange experience. Everything is there as it used to be, waiting to be used in the everyday life that has ceased to be. All the things that made up a life. Even the dust in the corners. Unmoving. Waiting. Silent reminders of something that won't return any time soon.

Being a home out in the countryside where few people roam and even angels fear to tread, the sense of desolation made itself abundantly clear.

"Nothing happens here. Nothing."

There is a whole host of social processes that occur when one is in someone else's home. They don't even have to be around - the sense of the place being Somebody's Place is prevalent through all of the things, nooks and crannies. There is always the possibility of them walking in at any moment.

Until there isn't.

There is a saying that life goes on. It does. It very much does.

And there's a lot to the going on.

Things have to be sorted. Organized. Given to the right people, donated to the right places. Put into new places and new uses, now that the old places are out of use.

Leaving a dead place is hard. You know it will be exactly the same as when you left it. It will remain so until you come back.

That's the hard part. The hardest part.

It is a hard thing to remember to turn off the light as one leaves. They will remain off. Along with everything else. Unused.

I languish in your lack of language

I've had the thought of a blog post floating in my mind for quite some time. You know how it is - you get a good idea, but never really get around to go through the motions of actually putting it to the text.

The dear Les got around to write this beauty of a blog post, leaving me without a choice in the matter. Peachy, I know.

So. Let's talk about violence, shall we?

No, not the one signified by the military, the state or any of those traditional institutions of violence. No. Something a bit closer to home. Something that happens in the home, as it were.

The violence of exclusion.

The violence that happens when a son, who for some time has hidden his homosexuality, decides to tell the family. The violence that happens in that silent moment afterwards, and the continued violence that is likely to happen as the image of the son fragments and reconstructs.

There is almost no need for violence of the physical kind. Even if that also has a tendency to happen.

Another example is when, at a family dinner, one of the more actively political youths makes a radical statement about something. Like, for instance, the unavoidable fact that she is appalled by the thought of eating dead meat, and that the very essence of her being recoils at the thought and sight of seeing those she loves eat and enjoy the vileness in her presence.

There is no small amount of violence in the statement "let's talk about something more pleasant, dear". Swatting aside all pain, agony and suffering with a swift discursive burst of polite unacknowledgement.

The examples can be made manifold. Like their anonymous victims, they are legion - and everywhere.

The general theme is that people cannot be themselves in their immediate community of peers. They have to hide, sacrifice, partition off parts of themselves in order to fit in. Regiment their thoughts and emotions in order to keep up the facade of being someone who belongs - the facade of being one of the included.

The upkeep of this facade comes in the form of violence towards one's own self. It takes quite a bit of discipline to keep that self in line, after all. One wrong move, one wrong word, and the show is over - and no one knows this more than the one who has to constantly monitor themselves in order to not be that wrong move.

We need language about this. Something that speaks for those who cannot be themselves. And, until we can remix such a language into being, people who can speak for these persons. Not only as they are, but also as they would like to be - as they would become, had they not have to hide away in the closet/corset of "let's talk about something more pleasant, dear".

Let's not do that. There's too much unpleasantness going on.

Why I am annoyed with Anonymous

One would be charitable if one said that the relation between the Pirate movement and Anonymous is complicated. On the one hand, there is an unmistakably shared root - we could postpone the lengthy definition of this root by simply calling it "internet culture". On the other hand, there is a definite tendency on the part of the pirates to view Anon as that idiot relative who with random precision manages to do the most unexpected of stupid things at the worst possible moments.

Especially at those very moments.

Anons usually respond by saying that pirates are somewhat of a bore when these sentiments are aired. Which, in a sense, is true; planning and executing long term strategies for achieving realistic copyright and patent reform by feat of talking endlessly at the public opinion and with various interested parties - somehow includes less immediate gratification than doing random pointless overhyped DDoS attacks on arbitrarily chosen targets.

Somehow.

The reason I'm bringing this up right now is a piece of local developments. Rick wrote a summary of what happened, should you want the longer version; the long and the short of it is that a police raid took out a torrent site and generated a lot of political buzz of the good kind. The technical term for this is a "lucky break", and right about here Anonymous enters the picture.

You see, around the same time as this raid happened, some sort of unrelated technical jiffy over at the Pirate Bay took their site offline as well. Which was all manners of bad timing. Anonymous, not being the most patient and studious of non-organizations, immediately connected their paranoid dots and set out to revenge DDoS everything that moved.

I'm not sure what was accomplished by temporarily taking down the central bank of Sweden's website, but they nevertheless did it. And a couple of other seemingly random web sites that looked official, for good measure.

This in and of itself was no big deal. DDoS attacks happen to you just about every day once you reach a certain size or fame, and is to be expected by larger organizations. (Even the Pirate Party of Sweden has had its fair share of it at various times.) It happens, and then it doesn't happen anymore, and everything goes back to normal for everyone (except the computer security guys, who just might get those requests for bigger budgets approved a bit faster).

To give you a reference point: a DDoS attack is a computerized version of having a large number of people calling the same number over and over again until the phone system can't take the load any more. There's no real "hacking" involved in it, and the technical skill involved is akin to pressing the redial on a cell phone. No master hackery required.

What is a big deal is how this overhyped prank got picked up by the national news media. If I were a kind person, I'd say they had a momentary lapse of journalistic sensibility and bought into the hype in a moment of publishing frenzy. If I were a more impartial observer, I'd say they carried on as usual, and thus once again used the kind of language once reserved for such occasions as the reemergence of a fully communist Soviet Union with an unmistakable interest in annexing nearby territories.

If you are the kind of reader who trusts your morning paper, you suddenly "know" that the country of Sweden is under a brutal siege by a mysterious international hacker group by the name of Anonymous.

Remember what I said before about strategic long term reform efforts? This is not conducive to such efforts.

In fact, having the general public up in arms about the Dangerous Hackers could easily be called something very close to the opposite of conducive to such efforts. Which means that we of the political bent have to go from good buzz mode to crisis management mode, which is very much the opposite of a good time.

If this had only happened this one time, I might have shrugged it off as a onetime thing. But it has happened before. It. Has. Happened. Before. And the general pattern of it is that I and my fellow pirates are starting to become very annoyed at these random acts of unstrategic counterproductivity.

The charitable way to summarize the Pirate movement's attitude towards Anonymous is to say that it's complicated. The more honest way is to say there's a wish that these kids go play somewhere where they'll not make too much of a mess of things.

Dear Anonymous: we're expecting you. You are mentioned in our crisis management folders, several unforgettable times. So you'll have to forgive me when I say that you might want to rethink your approach to how to make the world a better place.

You're not doing it right now. You're not even doing it right, whatever it is you're doing.

There is a clown on the wing

Imagine you are on a plane, on your way to someplace far, far away. You've gotten through the airport security theatre without incident - not even one single snake! - and now watch through the window in calm anticipation of getting to where you are going slightly before the expected time of arrival. The sky is blue, the clouds are cloudy, and in the distance there are always new horizons to behold.

And just as you are about to doze off, you see a clown on the wing. And it seems to be using a hammer in ways that definitely are not described in the book of sound aerodynamic practices. And, more worryingly, it seems to know exactly what it does.

When you try to tell your fellow passengers about this, there is a surprising lack of belief going on, and those who can be bothered to look out on the wing sees - a wing. After a while, they start to get tired of you, and a vague suspicion that you don't have all your clowns at home starts to take hold among the gathering. You are mad, radical, politically inconvenient, a nuisance, someone they'd rather not be afflicted by -

At the same time, the hammer is being swung all the more wantonly, and all thoughts of sound aerodynamic practices are thrown to the winds. Along with pieces of the wing, it would seem.

No one other than you seem to notice.

Some time later the captain ask you to come speak with him. With a certain firmness in his mediated voice. With a slight sense of dread, you make our way to him, walking past your fellow passengers. But when you get there, you discover that the captain isn't going to apply sound aerodynamic principles on you. Instead, he starts to explain exactly why there is a clown on the wing. Something about an international treaty of aviation signed 1823, that stipulates that anything and everything that flies over a certain height must have at least one clown on it. And that every design of flying machines since then have incorporated this in such a way that they simply do not work if they don't have a clown in place.

And, he continues, there are conferences, magazines, contests and whole subcultures dedicated to the various aspects and nuances of the clown. And at least one secular religion based on a particular reading of the Treaty.

Therefore, there is no cause for concern. The clown is there for the sake of goodness, and whatever it does is for the best. Therefore, there is also no need to criticize it - we should on the contrary have more of it, to prove that we are forward thinking!

Every flight since 1823 has, after all, had at least one clown somewhere, and flying is the safest way to travel! Just take it easy, relax - here, have a free drink and a brochure! We are still going to arrive a tad bit before our expected time of arrival.

Despite the obvious, experienced confidence, you cannot help but feel a certain lingering doubt creep into your mind. It should be possible to do things another way, and the brochure makes quite a point of not mentioning the fact that Hindenburg happened.

Without doubt, things can only get better.

It may or may not come as a surprise that what you just read is somewhat of an allegory. There are undoubtedly many clowns present in our lives, with just as savage disregard for sound principles as the one described above. And yet, there doesn't seem to be any real possibilities to talk about these things without being regarded as somewhat of a nut. Things, such as the fact that capitalism actively creates soul killing environments and cityscapes. Such as the fact that our way of life is an ecological disaster not waiting to happen. Such as the fact that any attempt to enforce the ever stricter regulations on intellectual property inevitably will lead us to a centrally planned economy of unrights. Such as the fact that politics is turning into a perpetual marketing scheme, far from any cries of collective decision making. -

It sure does feel like one cries out about a clown on the wing every time one mentions these things, doesn't it?

And it sure doesn't feel like an answer when people respond with - but capitalism creates jobs! but our way of life is the pinnacle of social evolution! but the artists must get paid! but you get to vote in every fourth opinion poll!

It sure does feel like we could do with some more criticism of the negative aspects of modernity, despite and because its tendency to have good aspects. Instead of just accepting the bad with the good.

We know that airplanes don't need to have clowns on their wings in order to fly. Yet we design in so many clowns in everyday life that it seems somewhat of a miracle that just about anything works without massive subsidies and brutal monkeywrenching.  When the clown is put into everyday action, the individual seems to become powerless.

(Have you ever noticed that when technology is discussed, just about anything is possible, but that when even the slightest of improvements to social conditions is mentioned, things suddenly get all the more difficult?)

No one particular individual can put an end to the clownery. And thus it is thought meaningless to try and do something about it, or even to make a critique of it in an effort to eventually do anything about it. To change the eternally unchangeable (est. 1823) is impossible, and thus any attempt is doomed to public ridicule.

But any particular individual can make a proverbial boatload of money off of it. And, indeed, even today the individual who invents a machine that can make the cutting down of irreplaceable rainforests is still considered an economic hero and a bringer of wealth to the nation. Not to mention a bringer of joy to politicians - right and left alike - whose whole political careers hinge on the moderns clown's ability to create jobs.

To criticize the clown generates social alienation. To help it along brings social success.

It's not hard to see how mental health is deteriorating among just about everyone. There is a clown on the wing, and it's more in tune with the times than you will ever be. And when you criticize it and its blatantly pathological behavior, the common response from just about everyone is that there is something wrong with you.

And it's definitely not hard to see why nationalism is on the rise. For all its being a propaganda move by the nineteenth century states of Europe, it's far easier to take it at face value than looking oneself in the mirror and say:

There is a clown on the wing, and my participation in modern life helps it to remain there, in a thousand systematically subtle way.

Welcome to the present.

Originally published November 4, 2011

Tough love, tougher peace

They say that war is hard. That tough decisions have to be made in wartime, and that it separates the chaff from the wheat. That war is a big forge that hammers toughness into people, much like the forges of times past hammered metal into swords.

They are wrong.

Now, war is not easy, either. But it exists in the realm of extremity that simplifies things. There is us and them, we and the enemy, friends and foes; and out of this simple distinction, every big decision in the world as always-already made beforehand. Friends, protect; enemies, destroy.

This is not easy. But it's simple enough. And as long as you are in the realm of extremes, all you have to do is follow the logic of the friend/foe distinction. All the brutally hard and uneasy choices one makes on the local scale, are situated within a global framework which is rarely questioned.

War is brutal and everything but easy. But it's simple.

Peace, on the other hand, removes this  framework. Suddenly, the simple/brutal life logic of the soldier is removed. There are no more foes, and thus the prospect of friends become that much harder. Us and them, too, becomes confusing as "we the people" disintegrate into an ever evolving confusion of identity merging and politics.

Suddenly, you are left on your own. You and your cosmological infoecology against the world. And all those words Sartre wrote about being forced into freedom becomes flesh - your flesh, as it were. Without much of a clue as to what the next step is.

How do you build a life? A friendship? A love? A self?

Many who return from a war zone find themselves unable to care about the small things. About the everyday choices that building a life, friend, love, self requires. Not because they find them unimportant, but because the simple/brutal logic of war gives them permission to act as if they don't care. And when given the choice between certainty and uncertainty, many prefer the former over the latter.

It's a simple choice. Probably an easy one too.

But what did we say about tough choices?

The Paradise Cage

A screen, placed on a wall. Showing images of places far away, exciting, beautiful, enthralling. Intoxicating. Images that one could watch forever, never tiring, never ceasing to be amazed by the Spectacle.

A screen, placed on a wall. No doors in sight.

The paradise cage.

He loves me, I love him! We are happy together! We are building our better future, right here, right now, and - oh, joy! If only you could feel what I feel!

Come along? Oh, but I can't. He doesn't like -

The paradise cage.

YES! Score! I've beaten the old record, and am now the ultimate champion of this game. I rule! Who's the champion? - I'm the champion!

What? A new level? Well, don't mind if i do!

The paradise cage.

Our quarterly report shows that our expected profits are off the charts! Congratulations, everyone! Our hard work have paid off, and soon we are also going to be very well paid off!

The father who barely knew his children didn't feel all that celebratory.

The paradise cage.

Talk is cheap. What you want is impact - and impact in large numbers. By maximizing your exposure in social media, you can make sure that your message will get across  to as many people as you need to cross. Whatever you have to say, you can say it to the world.

Why don't I have anyone to talk to?

The paradise cage.

There! There she goes! The beautiful, mysterious love of my life, who I see every day, walking past, and who makes my heart beat at least thrice as fast as it should by just being around!

She didn't even know his name.

The paradise cage.

We've discovered a new way to speed up the DNA sequencer, and with subsequent mass production we hope to reduce the cost to commercial levels. Just imagine the possibilities! No longer will genetic treatment be restricted to the wealthy, but everyone will be able to afford to be free of disease! We will finally make the common cold so uncommon no one will even remember it!

The virus killed two billion people.

The paradise cage.

- I love you.
- I love you too.

- This cannot work.

The paradise cage.

These three words can be found in the preface to Hélène Cixous' book Stigmata (pdf). These words, this preface, this book has made a home in my thinking. I return to it constantly, not to remember but to remember that I remember. And to keep me on some sort of level when the cage seems to want to engulf me once again.

Weber built a cage out of iron. Cixous out of paradise.

May you not live in either.