fuck advocacy

the girlfriend effect

10/15/11 by Cyle Gage

There is a vocabulary to the emotions of human relationships and feelings. There are a lot of books about this; many firm, concise sentences have been declared. We may explain ourselves as a single word written one thousand times, or as many do, we may write nothing. There is a certain versatility to the absence of words and the ambiguity of potential explanations. There is a perfect complexity to the formless abstractions that have conquered the uncivilized and turned our fears into markets. I like these a lot. I prefer to think that the mathematicians and physicists keep key formulas ridiculously convoluted so that only a minority finds them accessible. Their language, their syntax, their symbolism just as complicated as the equations that drive our global economy or our interpersonal relationships. Systems as complex and potentially unknowable as the weather. However, the wonder of our contemporary world is not in what we’ve found, but in what we’ve determined we cannot find. Our everyday reason is beginning to move in similar directions.

Listen: I have a lot of things I can’t discuss because the discourse would destroy them. A lot of things that can’t be talked about because they’re too obscene or not obscene enough. I’m wasting time even mentioning them, and it’s a problem we all have, every single one of us whether we know it or not. The variables are all best left as unknowable Greek symbols, inverted in cube roots and imaginary numbers. For the sake of my argument, we are going to substitute the language of mathematics with a bastardized English. I’ve wanted to create a thousand verbs to elaborate upon them. A hundred dozen nouns of materials, shapes, forms borne of emotions, expectations, assumptions, revelations. I’ve wanted to enumerate these visions and graph them from a million data points, between social capital and synthesized personalities. Big numbers to keep me company, wrestling these tiny fragments caught up in pockets of the dark. Hopefully we’ll never be able to do this. These are transformative ideas rather than explanatory ones: these struggles are the conversations we should be having, and we are beginning to realize their importance between hashtags and occupations.

Tags: doomed, hilarious, penis envy

on contemporary poetry

9/17/11 by Cyle Gage

Poetry is dying. The old poetry is slow, uncaring, definitive; the new poetry is brash, boring, and predictable. The young would characterize themselves as bold and revolutionary; the old only remember those words as semiotic instances requiring further analysis. We have academia to remind each other that poetry still exists, while the young use it as they would use a condom. Poetry is a word thrown about for anything and everything, having been radically divorced from form, now more adverb than noun. (And those such examinations of language — the mere subtlety of it — is a reproachful casualty.)

The old poetry is all sound and fury: a spinning wheel of masturbatory fantasy doomed to irrelevancy (if it is not already as irrelevant as the new poetry is irreverent). The world of old poetry exists solely in books: broken tomes dusty and constantly on sale at the local manifestation of a national bookstore chain. Even in the small-town stores, poetry readings aren’t really advertised, and the audience tends to be made up of bored housewives who once heard of Anne Sexton. The old poetry lives in a didactic, formal space shirking any attempt at cultural or social relevancy. It exists in between the offices of tenured English professors, or those untenured staff writing hurried dissertations on the lost notes of Ezra Pound or Shelley, trying to find gold between stanzas.

The old poetry largely rejects anything but that “printed” form. In fact, it relies solely upon it: what’s online of old poets is third-party, of course. I’m not saying T.S. Eliot is gonna come back from the dead to post a new poem on Facebook, but I am saying that nobody is making an attempt to make him a subject worth any interest to the ADHD-augmented, besides being just another assignment in a visionless English class. The only way a 16-year-old will encounter Yeats is either through a teacher they don’t like or if they accidentally find themselves in the one-aisle poetry section of a Barnes & Noble. We do not have similar problems with contemporary art: usually that’s stenciled on the side of high school walls. Not only does Old Poetry not know how to remedy this, they don’t even know it’s as a problem. It’s as if poetry has become archaeology to them: why try to put emphasis on the civilizations of the dead? (The answers to this are as obvious as the problems of most modern-day citizens: nobody knows to learn from the past anymore.)

21st century so far, part one

9/5/11 by Cyle Gage

There is a vocabulary to the emotions of human relationships and feelings. Furthermore, it is one that a conceivable machine can not yet know, despite the ability for us to discern them with language. It is a discourse born from our wonderful inaccuracies, our assumptions, the politics of our ignorance. At the root of all human expression, especially the emotional kind, is a fragile faith in our fellow humans. We exist with the belief that we’ll try not to hurt each other, that we’ll each obey the rules of the non-game. I often compare it to driving: when you’re behind the wheel of a car in an urban area, your mind is unconsciously establishing a basis of trust with all those around you, whether they’re other drivers, or bicyclists, or pedestrians. And it’s not a game, despite the existence of rules and norms. This is a peculiar 20th-century phenomenon, but it is entirely human. It is only seemly to me that this basis of trust in driving typically occurs in the mid-teen years, along the same time a child is learning to be in relationships beyond the schoolyard friendship.

In the 21st century, this basis of trust in human capability and expression has extended far beyond the road, and has permeated throughout our culture as a foundational social construct. The old social foundations were group-centric: from family to community (geospatial/neighborhood) to nation/state. Sure, friends were in there, but they were more of a periphery item, not foundational but gleefully supplemental. I’d argue that this was to its advantage, as being suplemental rather than essential affords it a more nebulous and unrestrained quality. Friendship granted social wealth, so no matter how financially poorly-off you were, or how far you were from home, you had friends to ease your trouble (but not necessarily solve your problems). On the opposite end, in this old system, marriage was a cornerstone of society rather than just an act of love or free healthcare. We are seeing the dying days of this pseudo-sentimentality now. (I should say, the institution of marriage is pseudo-sentimental to those under 30, while it has an unconsciously weighted and inherent splendor to everyone else. Except those Generation X kids, who only view it with disdain.)

We are seeing in contemporary America the new formalization of friendship supplant the fading insitutions of marriage and family. Thanks to the misguided polarization of neoliberalism, we are largely seeing a systemic self-destruction of institutionalism in itself. Thanks to the equally misguided polarization of neoconservatism, we are also seeing the staunchly ineffective last stand of the old gods. We find the youth of America caught squarely in the middle, commodified to the point that our mere attention spans dictate the death-throes of markets, with monetarily tectonic reactions made at lightspeed thanks to convoluted financial systems reacting to our decisions before we’ve even made them. We have codified our friendships, our social circles, our locations, our interests, our habits, our hobbies, our wishes, our thoughts, our opinions, our purchases, et cetera ad naseum. We are drowning in information, though its effects are purely intellectual and moral.

the loop, uncensored

8/22/11 by Cyle Gage

Like it or not, we exist in a world of geometric forms, universal in their mathematical proof. Social circles, spheres of influence, the hard-edged square of Knowing Too Much, and loops of self-defeating information. Life has continually been defined in these terms, and the internet slowly creeps unto each. That which is defined mathematically is inherently perfect, for it is an unreal abstract. When brought to reality — that is, to introduce the human element — is to destroy such purity. The art of maintaining human involvement is to mitigate that impurity to manageable levels, lest our social systems collapse. Sociology and psychology are the abstract studies of such: the few in many, the one in few, the subjects being a kind of abstract geometric system of self. I am not saying that you are a square and I am a triangle, I am saying that we are complex systems, that one day may be plotted out mathematically with probabilities and their justification-proofs. I am entirely interested in our increasing faith in such forms. (And it is a faith.)

You have two basic kinds of social circles: entirely public or intimately secret. Inside a computer network, these are simple binary opposites, expressed in terms of “secure” and “insecure”, “private” and “public”, etc. In life, these definitions are fuzzy, but nonetheless logical results of a social lexicon: “friends”, “drinking buddies”, “acquaintances”, “coworkers” (three out of four are default Google+ circles: problem officer?) Family, friends, and all that nonsense; how you define such persons is an individual’s own abstraction, however misunderstood, neverknown, and noncompliant with others it ends up being. You cannot yet translate the everchanging nature of a social circle onto the codified latent image of Internet. Regardless, general principals can be applied to both systems of human interaction, for they are merely human.

Everything attempting to be in between the poles of “public” and “private” is inherently toxic, both to itself and to its environment. Knowledge, that which many social circles and loops protects, is that which ultimately destroys them. A familiar theme among common-sense technology consultants to multibillion-dollar corporations wishing to enter the new Social Internet is that you can either be “all in, or not in”. When Sony or the GOP gets a Twitter account, anyone can say whatever they want to them. This is hardly news, and it is hardly relevant. The Republican party, for example, has within it a very high-profile and delicate social circle. When we read Sarah Palin’s emails, you are witnessing a small breach into that information loop. The importance of this is not in its unravelling, but in its mere discovery. A loop is only as good as its secrecy. Anything else is destructive.

on writing, part 2

8/17/11 by Cyle Gage

I’ve been spending the last few months reexamining what writing means to me. The activity, the craft, the importance. In doing so, I have found my work becoming increasingly personal. I have experimented in various forms and techniques, from free associative sketching to regimented, outlined procedures, from pads and pens to typing in NotePad and beyond. I have created tools to help my own work, and further separated certain work from others, in an effort to section off parts of myself. What I have come to is a series of observations: some examining things that are wrong, some revelations that are evolutionary to me, and some that I feel just need to be written down. Because, as Stephen King said, there’s no reason not to write. Everything in my original post on writing still stands. If anything, what follows here were my next steps from there.

the work as personal

All creative work is personal, even nonfiction, though we find various ways to hide ourselves within it. A lot of writers waste more energy enforcing “ignore me, I’m just the author” when they should be using that force to focus on “here’s what I have to say”. Some of my favorite writers are so on top of their game because they know how to be in control of their act as writers. You, as a writer, should be the last thing you worry about, at least as it comes across on the page.

If the internet has proved anything, it’s that the voice of the writer, in order to be truly heard, must command words and form in ways that are increasingly immeasurable. The strong voices stand out because they realize they’re in an endless sea of shitty bloggers, and they realize that not necessarily being louder results in being better. Rather, striving for a content uniqueness and comfort-of-self is the true path to a good writer. Content uniqueness, (as in to be content, rather than the content of the writing,) being the ability to stand behind one’s work, embedding within it the uniqueness of one’s perspective, while understanding that it is very difficult to be unique among millions. Be content in what uniqueness you can grasp onto, and stop worrying about it. Just fucking write! Maybe don’t publish it, that’s where editing comes in, but you will find that the agency of writing becomes easier as you get more comfortable being yourself as a writer.

I wrote about that before: the ability to find your muse and learning how to softly guide that muse to work for you. Make some tea and sit by the fire for a session of divine inspiration. After awhile, you will find that your muse is always there, and what was limiting you was never anything but your own apprehension and self-doubt. (Please note that you always need self-doubt and apprehension, but in controlled amounts. I will explain later.) One could say that eventually, instead of gently rousing your muse from its slumber and humbly asking it for help, you come to the point where your muse becomes subservient to your ego. You can kick it around a bit, and not feel too bad about it. I’m not saying you should abuse it; I’m saying you should experiment with it. Bondage, S&M, that kind of thing, but never forget to respect that which once was so hard to come by. Sometimes you need to take what would normally be a flash of incredible inspiration and turn it against itself. There was a time when I would have one of those brilliant A-HA! moments, begin writing, and not look back. Now, if I have the sudden need to write something, I first question it. What is it that I’m suddenly finding so important to say? Where does it stem from? What emotion, what event, what acted as a catalyst?

Tags: maybe we're not doomed, serious business, writing

What’s Wrong: Kanye West and/or America

8/16/11 by Cyle Gage

I don’t like Kanye West. As an artist, at least. I don’t know him personally. (Though I’m sure there’s at least one person in the world who does.) I think he’s a great producer, but a terrible standalone act. Through my examination of why Kanye sucks so much, (thanks to friends who keep insisting he’s worth listening to,) I’ve discovered something quite tragic: Kanye West serves as a wonderful allegory for why America sucks right now, too.

Presently in American culture we are obsessed with loving things that are inherently awful. Most people know this, but few do anything about it. Things like obscene reality television, dime-a-dozen CSI-wannabe shows, the autobiographies of our corrupt politicians, Katy Perry, mindless shows about home improvement and/or food, and the art of becoming super rich. We’re boisterous, without merit, shameless and bored. Our cultural expression reflects this, and it damns us. We’re dredging the bowels of our culture, seeing just how low we can go before something snaps. Unfortunately, I don’t believe anything will “snap”. During the Bush years people often thought just how far our reach had to extend before people would start really protesting. That flavor of American individuality is gone from our rhetoric, I suppose, never to return, or at least not until food prices go too high.

seriously folks

Our American government and civil culture is equally distorted. We’re protecting the rich while punishing 99.7% of the population. We keep giving money to people who have proven they’re only going to continue raping us with it. We keep voting for people who are clearly idiots. Our economy, as it stands right now, is inherently awful. Bored, greedy people running corporations that just want more profit at whatever cost. They know they’re awful, we know they’re awful, but we keep buying into their lies. I mean, even Ron Paul is looking like a better option every day. Anything radically different must be better than this!

Tags: doomed, kanye sucks, serious business, ugh

The New Self

7/16/11 by Cyle Gage

There is a line in the movie Beginners which goes like this, in reference to children of the last 30 years or so:

We are fortunate to feel a great sadness our parents could never afford.

I cannot truly disagree. I have toiled over this idea in my head for a few weeks, and I find that it resonates within me as our defining quality. In our contemporary emphasis on the pursuit and expectation of continual happiness, we have made sadness our true friend, as if the ability to willfully surrender to extreme oscillations between “true happiness” and “true sadness” is some kind of noble fortune. Our parents were too busy working hard and having children to truly know it as we do. They arrived upon it later in their lives, if at all, while those of us in the “digital” generation are afforded it wholesale immediately.

We are a generation adrift in a sea of context. Read carefully: we are not a “lost” generation. We are never lost. In fact, we are so hyperaware of our selves and our surroundings, that the idea of being lost is as foreign to us as the Internet truly is to our parents. We’ve seen that Generation X, the one preceding ours, has the precursors of our hyperawareness, as expressed by their constant contextualization of marriage. The questioning of a generation typically hinges, as that article suggests, on a collective answer. What is ours? You’d think — as I once did — that our generation would be defined by the answer to “where were you on 9/11/2001?” or “what did you do as America’s exceptionalism failed?” as if the answers are somehow relevant to our future world. Those questions are about symptoms, not the root causes of our problems.

America is too broad a concept, though, and we no longer truly wish to engage with it (see: the new Republican party). The self is our main arena now, within our cultural identity and our social lives. Individualism and its discontents. The first-world human in the 21st century moves swiftly from abstracting the self, to admiring the self, to destroying their own self.

Tags: cheerful, god machine, humanity is doomed

We Are Gadgets

7/10/11 by Cyle Gage

I finished reading Jaron Lanier’s You Are Not A Gadget a few days ago. If you like this blog, you should probably read it. Jaron is an old-school motherfucker with crazy dreadlocks (I could almost smell the patchouli on the page) who I consider to be one of the lost Techno Hippies of the 70s. The only successful one has been Steve Jobs (but he cut his hair).

The book centers around the consequences of our contemporary digital onslaught. The systematic codifying of social and economic life to mechanized processes, and the dehumanization and recontextualization that is happening every day because of it. These are themes I like a lot, obviously, and it’s neat to read the thoughts of an aged and mostly-respected computer guy when they nicely align with a lot of my ideas. However, I think his vocabulary is a bit dated, or rather maybe he’s not very good at coming up with terms for his troubles.

For example, for the first section of the book he talks a lot about “lock-in” and how developing big systems really sucks in the long run. “Lock-in” being the standardization and normalization of computer programs as they get bigger and bigger, but he also means the same defining and codifying of social systems as we make digital representations of them. See? I think I just described it better than he did. My favorite example being the concept of “friend” that has been locked-in to our social systems as a mere basic feature, a hard-link between two person-entities. Friendship is no longer nebulous or ambiguous; it’s locked-in to a certain standard. That standard can shift around a little bit (on Facebook it’s Friends, on Twitter it’s Followers, on Plus it’s Circles) but largely it’s a mechanism that we’ve integrated into our lives quite fully and readily. We have fragmented ourselves across a spectrum of global services. We are dumbing ourselves down because we believe that computers are somehow smarter.

Tags: friends don't let friends use virtual reality, hippies, humanity is doomed, internet drama

because twitter is still stupid

6/17/11 by Cyle Gage

hana beat me to it.

lol @ this article claiming that people who criticize twitter just don’t get it or are not cool enough or whatever. read it first, i’m going to bust this bitch apart right now.

first of all, the original article that the above article is in response to is about a guy who is making a TV series inspired by The Wire, and anyone who is inspired by The Wire to make more content like it is probably a pretty smart person. anyway, that aside, let’s get into this response-article and my response to it.

well, no, hold on, let me make another point: none of this conversation is happening on twitter. this is not twitter. nothing of what i have linked to so far is twitter. because you can’t have a serious conversation on twitter worth having. the big-kid talk is relegated to other parts of the web. anyone who tries to convince you that twitter is anything but children talking to each other is missing a fundamental flaw in the system.

ok, ok, let’s dissect this.

Documentary maker Adam Curtis criticised Twitter last week, describing it as a “self aggrandising [sic], smug pressure group”. Speaking at the Sheffield Doc/Fest, Curtis said: “Twitter is fun and it feeds the rat of the self but it is almost as if you miss large chunks of the world.”

ok, i can get behind this.

traditional media people typically misunderstand Twitter and social networks in general.

while this may be true, that people who work primarily in traditional media misunderstand twitter’s intentions, this does not make them inherently wrong. it makes their opinion simply different, because they’re basing it on different experience. this is called having a different perspective. 90% of the twitter hype i read and the backlash against twitter critics are from people who disregard criticism simply because it is criticism. for some reason argument is bad. because really, what major debates has twitter had to withstand? it has no true enemies…

Tags: twitter sucks

sex as what to me

6/16/11 by Cyle Gage

sex is fun, but it’s complicated. it’s a great social construct built atop a simple biological function. really, i don’t think i’ve known a more contradictory facet of our existence as a species… i mean, i know that dolphins are one of the only other species on the planet that can consciously have sex for fun, but obviously there’s no other species that covets it and thinks about it as heavily as we do, or obsesses their being/culture around it in so many ways.

yes, so, sex is basically for reproduction. continuation of us. keep humanity going. this much is obvious. even though it’s a common myth that this is really the driving force behind everything we do, and why macho guys get more ladies, i see it rather as the greatest measure of self-defeating nonsense that plagues our lives. it’s a distinct color among the palette of human conflict. penis envy is a contributing factor to all war policy, correct? but having said that — that we make far too much of a big deal out of sex — i do not mean that i would want it to become no thing. it’s a deal, just not a big deal. (all of humanity’s pursuits should be the reducing of big deals into things to merely deal with.)

but sex is so basic and elemental. it is literally the propagation of the species (when done correctly). what an immense primal-psychological weight to bear. it seems like such a big deal. how fascinating it is to see how we deal with it. look at the last few thousand years and how we’ve oppressed women because of sex! look at how some parts of the world still brutally oppress women! it’s mind-boggling, it bears noting and knowing, though it is unproductive for all men to feel inherent shame for this. (it only makes sense to me that woman is actually the sexually dominant one; the last 2000 years only prove that man has simply been compensating for the fact that he’s not.) i mean, look at the chinese telling people whether they can have children or not. it’s serious business.

Tags: delicious, dooooomed, fuckin, sex

attn: internet; re: twitter

6/6/11 by Cyle Gage

I hesitated about a month ago to comment on the whole NYTimes article by Bill Keller about how Twitter could possibly be killing off some of our humanity. I think he did a good enough job laying out a solid opinion that I didn’t have to tell anybody about how much I agreed with it (you probably already knew I did). He’s a decent writer. I mean, he is (or now was) the executive editor at the New York Times. What disturbed me the most about the whole response-fiasco is how nobody seems to care about that fact. He’s the goddamn executive editor of the new york times. You don’t think he gets to have a somewhat weighted opinion? I mean, I’m all for disagreeing with authority, I do it often, but always with the understanding that I am disagreeing with authority. There is an understanding that the authority we grant the person is earned by some social mechanism (whether we agree with it or not). I compare this to bashing a famous poet for his views on the demise of poetry… I can disagree with them, but they’re probably right. Nobody learns anything by blindly disagreeing with someone who probably knows more than you. (There is a middle ground between blindly agreeing and blindly disagreeing, lol.)

There were a few blog posts about, roughly, “welp technology has always been killing humanity; writing itself diminished human thought, we weren’t programmed to write, so why should we feel bad about tweeting?” I can tell you that you’re a near-sighted asshole and you’re wrong if you stand by that statement. You’re absolutely right that the human skill of writing has been a technological one and not a biological one, and that our brains were never “designed” to read or write. However, one can clearly see that the act of writing serves to enhance and expand knowledge rather than diminish it (in the vast majority of cases). One could easily argue that the formation of written language is a step in evolution that is beyond biology, the same way many see the internet/instantaneous communication as a step in evolution (which I would not disagree with). But writing has been around for thousands of years, and we have had a lot of time to mull it over, to consider it, to think about its implications. We have generally formulated a ways and means of integrating writing into our lives so that it is as natural as breathing, and yet does not disrupt or diminish our lives. Can the same be said for Twitter, or social media in general? It is way too soon to say for sure, but it is the perfect time to question it.

More Internet Alarmism: Like Buttons

5/23/11 by Cyle Gage

social media makes me feel inadequate as a human. that i can only “like” something, and i’d rather just “like” something than say something. that i’d rather let a mechanization, a normalization, a boiling-down of my feelings codify and signify who i am as a person. or that i have only 140 characters to make a point. some of the best jokes can’t be told in 140 characters. some of the best advice can’t. some of the best memories certainly can’t. what exactly are we gaining with all this shit? we’re gaining laziness. we’re making things easy. many would contend, and rightly so, that the internet is levelling and “democratizing” society, making us all equal contributors in a world which was once one-to-many. I wish it were so; it certainly has the capacity to. but too often, as the internet has proven, the cost of that democracy is a favoring of the lowest common denominator. we lower all standards to make everything accessible. me writing this out doesn’t fit into 140 characters, it doesn’t fit into a “like” or “dislike” button, but it now cannot be read by someone who doesn’t speak english. it won’t be read by a lot of people because it doesn’t exist on a popular platform. it can’t be parsed and optimized and normalized and mechanized as easily, to find out what ads should be displayed alongside it. (if it had ads.)

and if you think this isn’t a serious fucking point that holds some ground, you need to wake the fuck up. you’re being drugged. you’re being subverted, one click at a time. the internet used to be our place, run by our rules, spun to tell our own stories. now it’s corporate-controlled, brought to you by our feverent participation. we got ourselves into this mess, we can get ourselves out before it’s too late, can’t we? imagine if there were actual monetary figures associated with internet use! imagine this bullshit! $9.95 a month gets you facebook, youtube, and twitter. now we’re not talking about limits brought on merely by social convention anymore, but limits brought on by economic forces (see: what adults like to call the market), enabled by our collective inaction! it costs an additional $5.00 a month to get you some livejournal, some wordpress, some nytimes. it costs an additional $10.00 to get international sites like al jazeera and the bbc. right now the favoring of one over the other is largely social, i.e. our friends don’t read Slate, never link to it on facebook, it never pops up on gawker, so why would we read it? why would we even know what Slate is? but when it becomes economic, the lines are drawn even sharper. not only do we not know what it is, we are told we can’t view it without paying a fee. (which is why all paywalls are the stupidest fucking ideas on the internet if you want to maintain any kind of relevance over the next ten years.)

Tags: alarmism, facebook, huge blocks of text, humanity is doomed, internet drama

What’s Wrong: Men

5/19/11 by Cyle Gage

So… this photo has been reblogged over 2,000 times on castle nail fuck:

Click on the image to see the post itself. Or click here, whatevs.

If you go through some of the responses, they’re extremely polarized. And they’re mostly from dumb 15-year-old kids (who don’t know who Sean Connery is). Some of the more intelligent comments articulate the need for, or rather the necessary destruction of, gender norms, and how they’ve changed over the last 50 years. It’s a good thing that we’ve come down from the false, rigid, and patriarchal figure of Sean Connery to the more sensitive, effeminate, and gentle notion of many boy-bands. There are yet other reblogs viciously commenting on Sean Connery’s checkered past when it comes to beating women:

Oh look at that sassy Barbara Walters glance. Where has that gone? Anyway… I find it very interesting, this whole assertion of “where has masculinity gone?” Largely, I think the image macro is wrong. Nothing has really happened at all on a purely superficial level. Instead of Sean Connery, today we have Don Draper, any one of George Clooney’s characters, Vin Diesel, et cetera. We still have a plethora of “classic Men” embodying a rather patriarchal chivalry. The difference is that the more contemporary male figures are not so much anti-woman, as Connery once was; they are now more and more pro-man in response to feminism. And what’s wrong with that? We have feminist movements, why can’t we have masculine movements? (I have touched upon this before.)

Tags: manly man, men, what's wrong

An Introduction to Understanding

5/8/11 by Cyle Gage

An Introduction

This post is a bit odd for this blog. It’s longer than usual (over 5,000 words), it doesn’t have any profanity, and it’s an attempt at direct philosophy. Usually I write critically about a subject; this is philosophy about life, the universe, and understanding itself. And I’m telling you, it’s a long ride. The first half is my attempt at concisely discussing the simple nature of the universe as I understand it, and the second half is applying those ideas to life in a more practical fashion. I chose not to hypertextualize this with dozens of links to philosophers, articles, and whatnot, as I usually do. I wanted more of a pure text. Anyway, enjoy.

Basics, Foundations

Freedom and Equality

Freedom is inherent in all things. Nothing we do is inhibited. Freedom, insofar as the limitlessness of choice and the lack of foreign control, is the truth of the universe. The universe is unlimited, insofar as it has no arbitrary limits. However, this idea is fundamentally flawed in its typical human interpretation. Freedom is not a right, nor is it a privilege. It simply is, as true as atomic energy: it is among the basic facts, the lowest level of universal understanding. Everything is free, at least to begin with (whether that lasts a nanosecond or not), in its basest form. The universe began (and will return) to a state of complete freedom, even if that freedom means the elimination of everything. Freedom is nothingness, the absence of a means for description. The only real limits put upon that base of inherent freedom are those attributed because of universal balance/equilibrium (explained later).

On the macro-level of humanity, our individual and collective freedom is only limited by ourselves; the self agreeing upon the social/cultural norms of our environment. A person is free, anywhere they are, at any time. The limits of that freedom – the freedom we define in our politics, in our everyday, in our selves – are only constructed and imposed by the self. We are never slaves, but instead we are willing participants in the limits to our freedom. (Even if the expression of freedom means certain death, it is still freedom.) We agree, every time we wake up in the morning, to live by the rules put forth by the majority – or what we think is the majority. For the vast array of humanity, this acceptance is unconscious. These limits to our own freedom are so ingrained within our thought processes from birth that it is rarely questioned on the individual level and never fully realized by the collective. It is impossible for a human to truly achieve basic freedom, for it requires the absence of thought, for even in thought itself we are limited by our self-perception and human complexity in general. The institutions and norms of humanity are what destroy our inherent freedom.

Like Freedom, all things are inherently equal. Equality is as fundamental and elementary as Freedom. They are, in fact, complimentary systems, relying totally on each other. (They are often misunderstood as mutually exclusive.) Nothing can truly be free without being equal to all other things. The freedom for one particle to move relies on the equal chance that another particle can move to accommodate its movement. For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction; freedom is allowed to all things, as long as there is equality in the system. Again, on the macro-level of humanity, we often think that the pursuit of equality is in direct conflict with the protection of freedom. These are fundamentally flawed approaches, as if equality could be pursued or freedom could be protected. These truths are inherent, and what really needs to be fought is the ignorance of those who do not understand this. Commonly it is believed that the problem with equality is that it is forced; likewise one believes that the problem with freedom is that it creates inequality. These are not problems of equality or freedom, they are the problem of human institutions.

What’s Wrong: Social Information

4/13/11 by Cyle Gage

Besides the obvious commodification of social information, the bigger problem is social information itself.

Coming from a web development background, when I see Facebook, I don’t see people: I see rows in a database. I see people being reduced to fields in a form; status updates, Likes, and other such mechanizations of personality, all of them simply a mass of data. The debate 3-5 years ago (and it goes back much further) was about how we (our individual selves) choose to be represented on the internet. This debate was founded on the idea that the self chooses to represent itself when staring at a computer. This was a reasonable assumption back then, when the majority of computer users were adults who had (somewhat) a capacity to distinguish online from offline. And it was largely true; when you logged in to a chatroom, you were vaguely aware that you could create any identity you wanted to. There was a separation.

For several decades psychologists have known that in many ways, we as people do not really consciously choose how we represent ourselves in real life, even though we’re made to feel that we choose who we are. We really don’t. We’re amalgamations of the people around us, our family, our genetics, and how culture affects us. This is all sub/unconscious, very little control is conscious (though it can be made into a more conscious process with meditation/self-understanding). Who we “are” is highly contextual, abstract, and relative. Who we are shifts constantly over time. Conversely, the more you realize and accept this, the more in control you become (though you can never truly be in control).

The internet is the first medium to truly defy this in its most fundamental form, because computerization of the self requires normalization and, therefore, definition. There are no abstract concepts in a database, facebook’s rows of information are broken down into data types: integers, strings, text blobs, relational foreign IDs leading to other databases, et cetera. There is no room for the amorphous ideas of friendship: there is only a row which links the unique identifier for me to the unique identifier for you. That is friendship to facebook, and it is becoming friendship for all young people.

Tags: doomed, lulz, what's wrong

I CAN HAS PART 2: LULZ IN A BUBBLE

4/10/11 by Cyle Gage

“Pool’s Closed.” – old internet adage

“Look at these sad trolls.” – Charlie Sheen

Another Epic Introduction

Why don’t you have a seat right here. We’ve fallen a long way, haven’t we? I’m rather disappointed. Yeah, I know I broke rules 1 and 2 when I wrote my research paper on “the lulz” almost four years ago. I look back, reading it again, and I’m surprised by how naive I was. But I had some good ideas, I was following the right path. Perhaps the internet itself was so young and unknown, as I was, trapped in a shifting world not yet bound by concrete intentions. Things on the internet simply existed, without real intentions, moving along a path we felt was a good one.

Before I start explaining how far we’ve gone downhill, let me recap a few crazy facts. In the time since I wrote my cute little research paper, internet usage has gone up to 30% of the world’s population, almost half of which is in Asia alone. WikiLeaks happened. Justin Bieber happened. There were two ROFLCons. We (the USA) are currently in three wars and a recession. Facebook has 500 million users and a movie. Google and Apple have made some mad bank, and all the neat little tech companies of the early and mid 2000s have been bought and are cashing in on multi-million or multi-billion dollar valuations. Twitter happened. Foursquare happened. Tumblr happened. Chatroulette happened. So-called “internet-fueled revolutions” are happening in northern Africa and the Middle East. Anonymous has gone after a lot of targets (cannons were fired). Moot won person of the year (and other great 4chan accomplishments). There’s a whole goddamn list on Wikipedia of “internet phenomena“. BitTorrent happened. Major corporations are “actually listening” to people on the internet. We got Obama, the first president who openly accepts the internet as, you know, actually something.

All this, and tons more, and what has come of it? Has the internet become a better place? A cooler place? A happier place? Well, the simple, extraordinary, and delightful gift of quaint early-millenium web-thinking has blossomed into a jaded, capitalized, and totalitarian internet. The democratization of online culture has lead to its wholesale monopolization, to its abandonment. Devoid of the innovative and cooperative spirit that manifested in early ARPANET, ISPs are ready and willing to limit your internet usage by the byte so they can make a few extra dollars, and people “running the web” are simply designing new and ever-stupider ways of monetizing it.

I dare say, should we be surprised by this? Everything is clear in hindsight, but I am not hesitant to say that we should have seen this coming. I wrote in the earlier work that proliferation was the next step, that the only thing our culture had to do was spread. The unforeseen but historically-obvious cost of this would be its normalization and valuation. On the internet today, we exist in a bubble, wherein a large amount of people are trying to capitalize on what the internet may or may not be. A lot of people are making huge bets, again, but based on new ideas. We made a lot of fun promises in the middle-days, but unfortunately some people took those as ones which could be cashed in. (To the oblivious dismay of academics everywhere.)

Tags: doomed, interweb, lulz

On Writing, lol

3/25/11 by Cyle Gage

I just finished reading Stephen King’s wonderful memoir/manual On Writing. It was a fantastic breeze of a read, being very moving in certain ways. I’ve always had a very fond respect for Stephen King’s work, and have read a great deal of it, because he has always seemed to me like the quintessential writer of the past 25 years who just writes what they like. And doesn’t care if you read it or not, really, but knows enough about writing to figure a lot of people will read it anyway. He doesn’t convey that exact sentiment in the book, he is much more humble, but in my fictionalized world he’s a bit more radical than he appears.

Of course, I haven’t been published, ever, and most of my writing I keep to myself or make very little attempt at promoting. I don’t think I’m anywhere yet ready to seek publication beyond my own vain internet presence (see: this). Though I love writing, and as King repeats: there is no reason not to write. I sat down at my computer one day in late high school and I spent several hours in deep thought after a very revelatory choice came to my mind: writing or programming, which would I choose to follow as a formal education in college? At the time I was looking squarely at a certain college and it had both a New Media program and a Writing program. I knew that I loved both and I couldn’t live without either; the end decision ended up being very practical. I knew that developing things for the web was what I could have a secure future doing. Especially as the eldest son in a slightly patriarchal family, I had in mind that I would be able to make a good living, with perhaps writing as a hobby on the side. Writers, and particularly poets (specifically my choices were New Media or Poetry) have a hard time making steady sums of money solely on writing.

Tags: doomed, lol, writing

In Admiration of a Fellow Hater

3/20/11 by Cyle Gage

Andy Rutledge might not know it, but he’s a hater. And he hates a lot. And I like it. If you like some of my rants, you’ll really like his, mostly because he’s older than me and has a lot more swing behind his hate. While I do not agree on some of his fundamentals (see: his very thorough and interesting article on capitalism), he is nonetheless a very articulate writer who I agree with the majority of the time. Here’s a best-of list of his very intriguing thoughts:

Capitalism. (My stance as a hater: weary disgruntlement, but worth understanding.)
Rational Professionalism. (My stance: valid points, somewhat beleaguered acceptance.)
Everybody under 40 is a sociopath. (My stance: excited agreement.)
Kickstarter Sucks. (My stance: more excited agreement, but for different reasons than his.)
The Sales Department should be Killed. (My stance: sure, why not.)

Tags: haters gonna hate

What’s Wrong: Making Things for The Internet

3/19/11 by Cyle Gage

Introduction

This is an article about the difference between these “jobs”, or “positions”, or “mindsets” in regards to making things on The Internet. I think they exist within separate spheres but encompassing the same general principle of the importance/balance of creativity vs knowledge. The jobs exist in different realms, with each side weighted differently; it’s the age-old left brain vs right brain, and how different responsibilities require different mixes of the two. The juggling/emphasis of each is what makes the job unique. It’s tough to go from being one to being another; people tend to be born predisposed to one of them. Kind of like being introverted or extroverted. These are constructs, yes, and they can be changed, but they’re often deeply ingrained in our ways of thinking. I’ll cover Designers, Developers, Engineers, and Architects. (And one more at the end.)

Tags: design, internet, interweb drama, what's wrong

One Thousand Words About Three Letters

3/14/11 by Cyle Gage

Introduction to a Manifesto, lol

This is a short (short, lol) piece about the word “lol” and how I use it and believe in it. It is important to note that this does not touch upon the lulz. That is wholly a different subject. This is immediately concerned with the continuing evolution of the word “lol” within its own form. The word has been around for quite some time, and is defined in dictionaries simply as the acronym for the words “laugh out loud” or “laughing out loud”. I don’t think it really means that, or ever truly meant that. Sure, in our virgin internet years, that’s what we “meant” when we wrote lol, but that’s like saying the paintbrush icon in Photoshop is supposed to be a paintbrush. No, that’s just our feeble attempt at making life easier for old people who don’t understand computers. Hence, “lol” means “laugh out loud”. But how often do you – savvy internet reader – think of those three words when you read the single word “lol”? I never do. In fact, I’m not sure I ever really did.

Should I make this?

3/1/11 by Cyle Gage

So I’m a web/interactive developer and I like small side-projects. I do a lot of them. Should I build this?

Project Name: TweetDick
Project Slogan: “I don’t even know what TweetDeck does, but fuck it.”
Features:

automatically posts in all caps
counts swears, always says you need more
if you’re retweeting, it removes the original tweeter (twat?)
generate random swear- and interweb-word-filled tweet, i.e. “fuck rofl shit cunt ass cunt lol”
auto-insult one of your followers, or someone you’re following
option to add Zingers(tm) to the end of your tweet (it makes room), such as:
- Deal with it.
- Fuck you.
- Problem?
- lulz
- and more!
auto-spam your own account.
the “How Drunk Are You?” filter, with added “I’m not drunk. Being on twitter is my job.” option.
automatically exits/logs off after 10 minutes, because seriously, you’ve got better things to do with your life. come on.
generate random bit.ly link. may not lead anywhere, who cares.
constant reminder that lulz divided by effort equals success; while effort approaches zero, success increases to infinity.

arcade fire, or, the fetishization of music as a depopularizing force

2/16/11 by Cyle Gage

So that Arcade Fire won a grammy, right? For album of the year, no less. And I suppose that’s a worthy benediction for the once-artful romance of music. I mean, what else was there to give an award to? Lady Gaga? Katy Perry? Does anybody really take this stuff seriously anymore?

Since the onslaught of emo music in the early 2000s, while I was in high school, I’ve been watching the steady devolution of pop from a rigid, monolithic structure to a screaming quorum of hedge-bets and has-beens. With rapidly decreasing traditional record sales, the transition from music as populist rejoinder to a cataclysmic divider has been thorough and remains unfinished. Perhaps, as I am afraid to believe, it will never be finished, like fashion (goddamn social network). This shattering of “music” as we know it in America has come largely thanks to the networking and layering/defining of social life, strictly upon our faith in the omniscient god-machine, life-sustainer and social differential engine.

The parallel is simple to see, but why would anybody want to see it. “Indie music” has come at a time when we are all worried about our social lives more than we’re worried about war or recession (do you remember we’re still in two wars and a recession?). The varied styles of indie music cater to those who would benefit most from their promise of distance; very different from how emo music assured that all of us have our hearts on our sleeves and we’re really all emotionally stunted and clueless, all of us together yearning to be understood. Rather terrifically, and terribly, emo music was firmly supplanted by that it is opposed to; instead of us wanting to be one and together sharing the same depression, now we all want to be islands with our own musical fortresses. I knew Eminem’s story arc before his second album came out, and I’m still surprised he hasn’t shot himself like Kobain did.

Tags: doomed, fuck, music

education: Friend Society (Best Of)

9/10/10 by Cyle Gage

Friend Society used to be called Fuck Society. Back when Flash was funny. It’s great for a lot of the same reasons dickcream was great. Most of these you probably shouldn’t watch at work.

From 2000: Gay Guys
From 2001: SOC: Fun at 7-11
From 2003: SOC: Camping
From 2004: Banana Phone
From 2005: Platinum and Platinum 2 and Popular on the Internet
From 2006: Panda takes a Bath
From 2008: Just my opinion part 3
Misc: Butts

Reading.

9/10/10 by Cyle Gage

Reading is important, and I’ve been doing it more than writing, and I’m sorry. Here’s what the fuck I’ve been reading. I’m tempted to write quirky, one-sentence (or even more quirky, one-word) reviews of these books, but I won’t. I know how to write a complete sentence, and this isn’t twitter. Some of these I haven’t actually finished yet, which I’ll indicate.

those who are drunk should not write

6/23/10 by Cyle Gage

As I write this, I am running out of scotch. A decently tasting 12-year-old single malt, being poured delicately into a petite lowball glass with a single ice cube. I maybe have two glasses left. I prefer my alcohol straight, or maybe on a few ice cubes, for a simple reason: I like to taste it. I somehow enjoy the experience of new distressing alcohol-tastes. There is a certain goodness to the specific horrors of straight alcohol. Some refer to a quality bourbon drank straight as “battery acid”, but I see it as a worthwhile pain. A deliberate, constructed choice is a good one. This is not to say that drinking is a good choice; I am merely examining what drinking “responsibly” means to me.

What’s Wrong: the internet 15 years later

3/2/10 by Cyle Gage

So this guy in 1995 wrote about why the internet will suck. This article was reprinted and reblogged and is going around the web right now and a lot of assholes are feeling pretty smug about “how wrong this guy was” and how the internet is actually quite awesome now. Hold the fuck on for a second, and read the article, and think about it. This guy definitely was not wrong on most of his ideas, and no one should feel good about that. The internet does still suck in pretty much all the ways he describes.

The author immediately refers to the internet (the 1995 internet, mind you) as “trendy and oversold”. It still fucking is. Trendy? See: Twitter. Oversold? See: Google. A lot of what he says the futurists predicted have not happened presently, and what small steps we made (like internet video conferencing and Second Life) are relegated only to either academics (whose careers rely on them) or the most cutting-edge corporations (who don’t mind dumping money on trendy things to appeal to their employees).

Tags: bullshit, internet drama, random, what's wrong

God in the 21st Century

2/28/10 by Cyle Gage

The correspondences between humans and machines has grown obsequiously colloquial. I have often found myself vexed between two similar lenses: the machine asking questions, and the machine as a facilitator of questions. Both situations are troubling, as they increase the negligence of human social utility. I have happened upon myself not yearning for the nuance of human touch, but for an atemporal connection through social media. In the current era, when travel is extensive and our time together short, I can easily gauge why this has become our modus operandi. No longer are we content within walled cities or enclosed habitats: we find ourselves drifting interwork. Time and space have given way to a voidless, infinite creationist unreality. Our transit has forced every association to become zero-indexed and casual. The misunderstandings of youth once gave way to the forced sociality of adulthood. But now we are all trapped in the stasis of networked sleeplessness, beguiled into an aloof selfless digitization of normalcy and causality.

Tags: humanity is doomed, internet drama, religion

What’s Wrong: Empire State of Fuck

2/11/10 by Cyle Gage

I don’t really know what’s wrong with the world today, but here’s a place to start:

Ugh. I’ve listened to this song a couple times since it came out and I’ve largely avoided it because it makes me very depressed. I didn’t really know why, I just felt a pain in my gut when I heard those lyrics and that pseudo-R&B beat and poor old Alicia Keys’ voice. Unfortunately, I’ll analyze this a bit.

Tags: bullshit, dancemoves, music, what's wrong

education: encyclopedia dramatica

2/7/10 by Cyle Gage

[education is a weekly (or once in awhile) post about one or two worthwhile links. sites you should visit, see, hear, just generally experience and appreciate and learn from. I'll write a brief "WHY SHOULD YOU CARE?" along with each one. think about it. analyze it. do you like it? do you not? I want to educate you; as in the latin verb educo, to lead forth, as in I'm leading you away from my site. Hahaha.]

ED is important. It’s a living, breathing Traité de bave et d’éternité. Forget MTV, forget the New Yorker, forget CBGB, forget California, ED is the real culture purveyor of our time. It is an irrational order to the chaos of the internet, without giving in to cheap gimmicks like sites that just post memes or try to capture the moment. ED utilizes the chaos: absorbs it, interprets it, uses it to define itself. ED perpetuates itself without shame.

Put simply, Encyclopedia Dramatica is Wikipedia for trolls. It also focuses primarily on internet culture. It is written in the language of that culture: hateful, rude, awful, distasteful, and unforgiving humor. ED embraces the notion that the internet is not a good place and that’s okay. We prefer it to be a bad place. A celebration in decadence and irresponsibility. A rabbit hole unfit for Disney movies. A malevolent, unapologetic place mired with endless catacombs of self-referential nonsense. A dark foreboding forest to which there is no escape. I could go on with these metaphors, but I’ll try to hold back.

Tags: bullshit, education, internet drama, serious business, why so serious?