Modernity is routine

Modernity is routine.

If you only take away one sentence from this, let it be that. It is the essence, the core, the Archimedean point - the point in general. The main theme and the main thrust. Not only of this text, not only of modernity, but also of that set of routines and recurrences that is your life.

Modernity is routine.

This sentence is, of course, not helpful in and of itself. Like all core statements, it needs to be surrounded by other statements that give it context and resonance. So that, when it is repeated, those in the know will nod and say "yes, that is indeed it, in more ways than I can recount".

Modernity is, to be sure, not just one thing. It is all the things, done over and over and over again, to the point that it has become - you guessed it - routine. But not just any old haphazard routine. No. It's designed routine, planned routine, large scale applied systemswide routine. Routine applied on stupendous scales, able to (re)produce desired results in the general case, and undesired side effects in many a specific case.

One of these systems is the worldwide road network, and the infrastructure that goes along with it. Especially the large scale megasuperhighways that scar the lands. If you look at them from the side, from beside them, they look ordinary enough, all grey and metal in motion and, most of all, boringly usual.

Routine.

Thing is, though, that they form a system. There's not just one road. There's lots and lots of them, and they are everywhere, and you can get from anywhere to just about everywhere else by following the road. Wherever you go, there you are, and you get there in a car.

This is trivial and boring. I am not telling you anything you don't already know.

I just want to underscore that modernity is boring. Routine.

If roads are anything, it is predictable. You can look at them on a map, and they will go where the maps say they go. Follow the directions, and you will get from point a to point b, wherever those might be. Looking at them from another angle, roads are predictable in that you pretty much know what you'll see before you've seen them. There's asphalt, there are cars in motion, and after a while there is a tremendous boredom at seeing the same thing over and over again: cars in motion passing by, replaced by other cars in motion, replaced by other cars in motion, replaced by other cars in motion, forever.

Boring. Routine.

If we want to understand modernity, this is the key image. It's the same thing happening over and over again, and it is happening over and over again in accordance with some plan that was once put in motion. In this case, someone built the road system and the cars that use it. It didn't just happen automagically - there's no such thing as a free lunch, and the prices at the drivethru are somewhat outrageous to those who are not used to them.

There's also nothing more modern than working at a fast food drive in. It is routine to the core, and it is routine in a way that communication isn't really necessary for it to function. There is a system in place, and those who want to use the system can usually follow the script provided by it to get the desired results. Those who want to drive just have to follow the general rules of traffic; those who want to order a Big Mac only have to utter the formulaic words that signals this. This is sufficient for things to progress: you get to where you're going, and you get the formulaic food that is proffered. And not just you - that queue in front and behind you can get the same results from the same actions,

Everything is routine. The need for communication and innovation is kept to a minimum, and things can proceed in a fast and efficient manner. Which is the whole point of fast food. Fast, efficient and utterly forgettable.

Boring. Routine.

This type of interaction - formulaic, standardized, rulebound - is the stuff of modernity. It is what makes up most of our interactions with most of the systems in our life. Especially bureaucracies, which impose any number of peculiar formulas, standards and rules which each have to be followed in an impersonal manner. It is very much not personal. That is the whole point, it is what makes roads, fast food joints and bureaucracies alike so efficient: nothing is personal, everything flows better if everyone acts as the script dictates. You get going, eating, papering all that much faster if you just play along.

Follow the formulas, even if they don't make sense. Become the mass produced standard unit of our time.

At this point, I figure at least someone will want to object to the use of the word 'efficient', with regards to either traffic jams, overcrowded slow serving fast food places or slowpaced bureaucracies. Which, to be sure, is a good and valid objection. In fact, it is part of my point: modernity is routine, modernity is boring, and modernity is dysfunctional.

Apply this to literally everything, and you know the ins and outs of modernity.

Bureaucracy is the most pervasive and hardest to capture aspect of this. On the one hand, most of us are in any number of ways defined by it (not least through our experiences with and documentation from the school system); on the other hand, it is often perceived as something natural, something that happens to everyone as a part of life. On the one hand, it defines us as persons; on the other hand, there's nothing less personal than paying taxes.

The main point of Kafka's writing is this tension. On the one hand, there is this incomprehensible bureaucratic machine that defines us and demands answers from us. On the other hand, there is this undefined traumatic core that is what we refer to as "ourselves", the thing in us that is not answerable or indeed even translatable into bureaucratic machine language. Yet the machine demands answers, and we must provide them, or else.

What this 'else' is, is seldom elucidated (in Kafka or elsewhere), and likewise the demand is oftentimes inscrutable as well. We have to live up to some standard, follow some formula, or else we will be found wanting.

The English language has a strange juxtaposition of meanings: the words "exam" and "test results" can refer to both schools and hospitals. There are exams for students, and for patients, and neither of the two can be said to eagerly await the test results

Do they measure up, or are they found wanting, deemed insufficient?

It's nothing personal. It's just what the rules and numbers say. And yet, at the same time, it is very personal. It's routine procedure, and no matter how good or bad the results, you have to move out to make room for the next group to go through the same procedure.

It is time to move on from roads and bureaucracies to other things. To many other things. Mass produced things, to be precise. Here, too, the same applies: it is the same thing over and over and over again, producing the same things in untold numbers of thousands or millions. It is very standardized and very formalized: the factory makes no allowances for innovation, and deviation is defection. If any one thing is not like the platonic ideal, it is defective and slated for destruction. The platonic ideal being the standardized blueprint laid out in advance, as planned by the specialists who plan such things.

You see the similarities here, I'm sure. Do they measure up, or are they found wanting? These standardized demands work just as well on inanimate objects as they do on people. The factory is but another name for the school, and vice versa: they are both routine sites of production.

No child left behind, as the bureaucratic demand states.

These demands, be they made of people or matter, do not spring from nothing. In fact, they spring from the most specific of circumstances, and can thus be both more specific and absurd than we imagine. The biggest example being the demands bureaucracies make of us. If you know the discourses and dynamics of these bureaucracies, the demands may seem more or less reasonable. If you know that they use a certain metric in their planning, measures to alter this metric makes sense. If you, as is most often the case, do not know these discourses and dynamics, these demands seem arbitrary.

To take a brutally down to earth example: dentists. If they find something wrong with your teeth, they can and will demand that you open your mouth and let them drill in you. As in, literally drill inside of you. If you ask them why, they will either tell you in general terms (you've got a hole, my friend!) or try to explain it in jargon so advanced and specific that you don't have any chance of following. In either case, you have to take them at their word that there really is something wrong, and that this wrong really needs drilling. You do not have access to the specialized knowledge that would enable you to make that call. You can either submit and get drilled, or refuse and wonder if you're broken.

Should you choose to submit, you will once again find that the procedure is utterly routine. It may not be routine for you, but it is for them. They are professionals, and treat the same problems over and over and over again. They know the routine, and all you need to do is to sit down and shut open. That is all input that is needed from your part. The rest is up to them and their specialized knowledge, and even more so to their incomprehensibly large arrays of specialized tools.

You have to trust the routine. Trust the system. Trust that these people, who see you as yet another replaceable standardized unit soon to be replaced by another just like you, know what they are doing, and that they will do it well. It's not personal.

Only, it is.

This goes for many other things, as I have tried to illustrate. Modernity is many things, and it's the same thing over and over and over again. It's not personal, it's just following procedure. Yet it is personal, as it is your name on those papers, and your mouth subjected to that drill. It is you driving that car and you ordering that burger, yet this fact is utterly irrelevant to the outcome, as it is meant to be the same for everyone. Standardization is the name of the game, and boring routine is just that: more of the same.

More of the same is also the main product of modernity. As each specialized field of knowledge - such as dentistry - become more and more inaccessible to outsiders, it becomes that much harder to improve things across fields. It is that much easier to change things inside them. It is, to use an example I've used elsewhere, easier to design new variants of ketchup than it is to solve complex multifaceted societal problems. There is also more money in ketchup design than there is in world improvement. Which is why there is umpteen variants of ketchup available in stores, and a seemingly empty void where there should be suggestions as to how to improve our society.

Any one specific specialized field of knowledge is, as you might imagine, specialized on its specific thing. Dentists want to improve dentistry, ketchupmakers want to improve ketchup, car manufacturers want to improve cars, and so on for each and every thing. Everyone wants to improve, tweak and optimize their own routines, and in this local optimization the global issues are left untended.

It is, to return to the image of traffic, as if everyone is focused on driving the best they can from point a to point b. Everyone is focused in individual performance, resulting in that everyone gets stuck in the same traffic jams, honking incomprehensibly to each other as gridlock grinds movement to a halt.

Day after day. The same boring routine. Over and over again. And then more of the same.

Modernity is many things.

Most of all, it is routine.

Troll encounter

"Many moons ago -"

"There's only one moon!"

"Okay. A long time ago -"

"Time is not a distance, it does not have length."

"Back in the olden days -"

"Days are neither old nor young. They do not age, they pass."

"In the year of our lord -"

"There is no god."

"Look, do you want to hear this story or not?"

"Why did you mix senses like that? First looking, then hearing."

"Fine. I'm going now."

"But -"

"Goodbye."

Truth is trivial

The following is a true statement:

Some people learn better while on drugs.

We can determine that this is true based purely on grammar and statistics. It is a trivial move, yet it has nontrivial social consequences.

One of these consequences being that you probably don't agree with it, and have objections.

Thing is, the truth value is trivial in this case. All we need to do is to remember that humans are different from each other, that there are some seven-odd billion people in the world, and that there's bound to be a non-zero amount of humans who learn better while on drugs.

If this non-zero amount is also greater than one, then we have the grammatical minimum required to use "some". Which is all we need to get truth: some people learn better while on drugs.

There's bound to be objections at and to this point. Which is the point.

Truth is overrated. It isn't even the main point of our everyday communication.

When you read the sentence "some people learn better while on drugs", what you read wasn't that there's three or four persons in the world who do just that. What you read is more along the lines of social, political and ethical implications of such a statement. You tap into a vast, complicated and relentlessly interconnected web of assumptions, positions and opinions, contextualizing this one sentence into something much larger than the question of whether it is true or not.

Which, to be sure, makes uttering such a sentence something else entirely.

Social interaction is very seldom about truth.

Truth is trivial. The rest of it isn't.

Apply for the position as head of government

It's summer. It's vacation time. It is almost, but not quite, even warm outside.

For those who at last can enjoy a break from their hard work, these are good times. After many moons of sweat and toil, there's finally a slim chance for something as mythological as a sleep-in. A slow afternoon. An evening not haunted by the fast approaching workmorning after.

It's that time of year. For those who work.

For those unemployed, on the other hand, it's business as usual. This time of year is like any other time of year: still unemployed. Vacation is, after all, defined in opposition to being at work, and just like any dichotomy it becomes brutally pointless to reduce it to one word. Without workdays no vacation days, and without vacation days no workdays.

There are only noworkdays.

In an ambition to give everyone the opportunity to enjoy going on vacation, unemployed are encouraged by unemployment agencies to apply for jobs. Not just the one job, but many, to increase the odds. Ideally as many as possible, for the same reason.

Which makes sense on an individual level. A person applying for one (1) job has half the chance compared to a person who applies for two (2) jobs. Even less of a chance compared to a person who applied for three (3). It becomes strange, however, when this same strategy is used by a large number of people, as the number of jobs don't increase at the same rate as the number of applications. Seen on a systemic level, this paradoxically leads to more work for those who are already employed, as more applications has to be administered. The more unemployed applying for more jobs they for reasons of pure arithmetics can't get, the more workhours wasted on wasted work applications.

Which, to be sure, is wasted effort on the part of everyone involved.

Since you are an attentive reader, you have already noticed the title of this post. you probably already know where this is going. It is wasteful to waste energy on nothing, after all, and it's even more wasteful to write applications that won't be read by anyone. It is, by definition, be better to do things that have effect than to do things than don't, and thus I encourage you to do just that:

Apply for the position as head of government.

Now, at this point you might want to object that it is impossible to get that job by applying for it, since it's not a job following the ordinary rules of employment, and that the social spheres from which potential heads of government are chosen are rather hard to get into. Two objections that are completely true. However, it's not about one individual here, but about many of them. It's a numbers game. One particular person applying for the job won't do any particular difference. But if many people do it many times, the sheer number of applications becomes a message hard to ignore. Whether or not if anyone actually reads them or not.

Which has a greater effect than writing an application for a job that is just as impossible to get.

Thus, if you are not enjoying your summer vacation this summer, and find yourself in the paradoxical situation of working very hard at being unemployed - apply for the position as head of government. One time, two times, three times - for as long as your are encouraged to write as many applications as possible.

It's never a bad thing to show initiative, forwardness and innovativeness in the competitive modern job market, after all. -

Originally published June 24, 2014

Emotional pylons

Recently, I've been thinking about the notion of emotional pylons. Partly because I like the words, but mostly because I like the notions. Emotional pylons. What is it? And what could it be?

The latter question is, as always, more interesting than the former.

They could be a great many things. Over at my other blog - you know, the one with strange standalone nonsensical pieces of almost-fiction - I imagine them being some sort of disembodied system that caters to a towns emotional needs. It's just metaphysical enough to almost be theological, and just technological enough to almost be magical. It's almost fiction.

Another imagining is that they are social spaces. Social spaces where people get together, share their stories and experiences, discuss current events and difficulties, build shared values and generally support each other in various ways. Including in the ever important but also ever invisible emotional dimension, the one that underlies all others due to the human conditions. We are all human beings, human feelers, and these feels need to be attended to from time to time. And place.

There's a marked lack of places where people go in order to feel genuinely better when they leave. Where people can recharge emotionally, both themselves and others.

Another image is of memetics/semiotics. Sort of like pictures of kittens, only more so. Pictures, sayings, phrases, gestures - small everyday things that confirm and reaffirm that you (yes, you) still have a place in the order of things, that you are an accepted part of this here group of people. The nods and grunts and elaborate rituals that marks members as members, and that marks you as such, embracing you as you reciprocate. Or don't, as the case might be, depending on just how tired you are.

Another image:

This could keep going for a while. I'm not too terribly interested in defining what an emotional pylon is. I am, however, deep into thinking about what they might be, and how they might be implemented in a world near us.

On a street near us, as it were. -

Suddenly, identity politics

It is fashionable to argue against identity politics these days. Which is interesting, in that it is always interesting to see that certain issues tend to return at certain times, rather than at others. One cannot but ask: why now, and why with such unexpected intensity?

These questions will not be answered in this post. Instead, things will take a very liberal turn. Just like that.

One of the cornerstones of a liberal democracy is legal equality. Any one citizen is equal to any other citizen, and no one has greater status than any other. There are no estates (ie nobility, clergy and commoners), and no classes. That is to say, there is one set of laws that apply equally to everyone, and is applied equally on everyone. Crimes lead to the same punishment no matter who commits the deed; taxes are levied in the same ways no matter who's taxed; government agencies act and communicate in predictable and standardised ways - and so on and so forth. Everyone is equal before the law.

Everyone. No exceptions.

At this point, someone might object that this isn't true. An objection to which I respond both yes and no: yes, it is true that legal equality is a cornerstone of liberal democracy, and no, this is not true to the everyday experience of most people. It would not be hard to find examples of citizens being treated unequally, regardless if this is due to class, gender, ethnicity, ability or what have you. In fact, it would be far easier than it really ought to be.

If we, hypothetically, were to gather a sufficient amount of these examples to find systematic differences in how the law is applied, and that a specific group of citizens were thus systematically treated differently - what would happen if this group got together and formed some sort of organization in order to demand their rights as citizens? To, in the true spirit of liberal democracy, demand to be treated as full citizens of their polity?

Would that be identity politics?

That, too, is a question that will not be answered in this post. -

Originally published December 6, 2014

The implications of #shirtstorm for space exploration

It is imperative to create robust incentive structures in order to secure continual innovation. Innovation is a gradual process, and it requires a constant effort from start to finish. Thus, it is important to keep people motivated for the long haul - to sustain the required levels of efforts for as long as it takes.

Even when it takes longer than planned.

This means that it is sometimes both appropriate and necessary to relax some of the traditional strictures of project management and workplace culture. Nothing kills creativity and innovation as effectively as rules and regulations, and many a project has failed due to participants becoming dispirited by what they perceive as arbitrary rules enforced for no reason. Keeping these key people motivated is of vital importance, and in the grander scheme of things the bottom line is the bottom line.

Getting things done is what matters.

Seen in this light, the shirt in the aforementioned #shirtstorm is easy to understand. Landing a robot on a comet is a hard thing, requiring massive attention to minute details and immense efforts to ensure that every decimal point is where is should be. Calculations have to be made, and then remade, and then remade, and then double checked, and then correlated, and then adjusted for new information. It's hard work, and it's repetitious hard work, and it's repetitious hard work sustained over a long period of time. Giving the workers a break is only fair - even if this break takes the form of relaxing the routines regarding workplace attire.

The comet does not care what you wear, so why should we?

To reiterate: getting things done is what matters.

There are signs, however, that this is not enough. That innovation is still unnecessarily stifled by workplace and social conventions. That we need to promote robuster incentive structures in order to secure further innovation. Thus, we have considered to propose this as a possible next step:

Let those who accomplish the next great feat of space exploration be as sexist as they want for a whole year, without comment or repercussions.

It is our belief that this will serve as a very palpable incentive to those innovators who feel constricted by the strictures of contemporary society, and that unleashing their creative potential would serve mankind in the years to come.

Innovation is hard work, and it is vital to keep it up.