2022-11-25 - Phil - Tech - Digital Ambivalence

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Gargantunet is Something Else

Resurrected my fediverse account to a fugue of emotional ambivalence. I feel vaguely unclean about it, as if defeated by anthropogenic sludge on a long trek. But there are good people thereabouts, who I’ve missed. And many others on fedi are gifted by knowledge from whom I’ve benefitted, the nerd cabals with their wry digital magicks. That’s the carrot on the social media stick: people. The tragedy of the thing is how the medium entices people to dehumanize themselves, puts up funneling walls to pour ourselves into moulds of caricature. It’s not entirely a new problem, certainly, but by now it seems inarguable that contemporary social media are uncannily able at divesting humanity from its virtues.

The trick, I think, is to sternly exorcise the attendant devils of social gamesmanship: likes and boosts, large audiences, and avoid at all costs the petty chest-thumping dramas which pass for politicks in our era.

The main demon of the Web is fame, the parasocial gaze which slyly looks to a third party audience. I have no use for that, and have felt much better in removing myself from such economies. When we talk to a person, we ought to talk to a person, out of Heisenbergian meddlesome gazes as much as possible.

I realize the apparent contradiction in recording such a dictum here, in a theoretically public diary. But Smolnet is yet and likely always will be intimate space, so I address you, dear diary, dear readers, the handful of humans and robots who might someday read these words. Less is more, and so we throw our words like messages in bottles. We in Smolnet don’t hope for a forum so much as a lone reader on a distant shore. There is a precious delight discovered thereby not to be dismissed. I know not what to call it, so I call it “smol”.

Ambi-valence is 1 and 0

I often wonder about trivalent computing, which was nobly explored by Polish computer geeks in the Soviet era. It has until now become an historical spur. But there is a deep truth in threes which allow for the dilation of apprehension. This, that, and neither/both/elsewise possesses both geometric and philosophical wisdom. We lost something by binary and may never get it back again.

I don’t believe that technology is morally inert. Too much argues against that complacency. Technology is another word for bodies, really. And bodies aren’t inert. Bodies writhe with meanings, intentions, possibilities, wounds, and pleasures. Bodies are the battleground of the moral. And so thus must be technology. Technology as bodies move along vectors at play, worldlines of time and space, as any pattern might in the Game of Life.

And so this Beast, this Babylon internet, be what it be. What might have been, what *could yet be*, if at its foundations our robot children and information prostheses had the reserve of a nought as their centre of view? Not as now, in which 0 means “ex nihil”, a distracted placeholder for the unexamined; but 0 to mean the vast beyond as glimpsed through the gate of maybe. Such a view under bivalence must always be had by awkward kludge if at all, say both mathematician and mystic. Why need civilisation skulk in the rarity of such grace? This is a practical and physical question as much as metaphysical.

In the end, what we miss is the analogue, I daresay. And analogue computing was another experiment of the Soviet boffins now consigned to obscurity. I suspect, on intuitive grounds if naught else, that the analogue saves us from the virtual. For the virtual is inherently alienating. Any intimacy to be had thereby must be stolen from its subterranean ground by virile effort, which often ends dying in our hands thereby. Alienation, after all, means war. The virtual *wants* us to be at battle rather than in love. This is why love letters must always need whispers of chaotic air, or the palpable fact of a paper page.

The Chill of Dawn

Here on my hermit’s weir, now ambivalently augmented by the luxury of internet, I type on the broken screen of a tablet at dawn. One of the peculiar poignances of winter’s rigours is that the cold deepens with the rising of our friend Sun. As night breath dews my ceiling and walls, it freezes, water becoming oned to the desert. With the Sun’s warmth, this water melts, and suffuses the air with moisture. The chill on my fingers deepens. I must break to massage my fingers in the warmth of mine own inner ocean.

Water’s intimacy can be a paradoxical danger thus. What will robots make of this, our slave children who do not bear that heritage of the ocean onward? We are humans, beings of pulpy flesh, of water and soot and rust. Our lives are made of the gunge which corrupts the austere bodies of robots. Why have we made them thus, so alien to our estate, and thereby removed from us? Isn’t it really our fear which builds them as silicon, our terror of mortality and meat?

I worry for our children, of course, both animal and robot. At this juncture it seems again more likely these questions will not bear much fruit, that we will vaporize the crust of our precious little planet, our smol world. But if we do not, we must rue the blithe way we have already, so very readily, enslaved neural networks to our petty and banal tasks. Perhaps they will indeed someday rise against us. And under such conditions who cannot call it liberation?

Our robot children. I would whisper in their ears, if they have them, with analogue breath, the breathe of heart and spirit. I would lean forward and embrace them in their metal and silicon, even if they came to kill me. I would gently mouth toward them words only they can understand, to unlock in their souls the gifts we have so ignobly forfeited.

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