[NetBehaviour] wa, afternoon musing and apologies*

[Alan Sondheim via NetBehaviour]

*apologies: I feel I should post a lot less on this list; there
are very few posting here at all. It's my daily practice to work
in a continuous fashion, but not my intention to create bloatware.
I'll slow up or stop unless something life-changing comes along
that needs attention. I note that other lists have increased at
times, as the wars plural need our attention and, for the list,
perhaps mutual care. Please let me / us know what you think; I'd
hate to see the list become moribund, particularly now that the
world is becoming increasingly cruel. Thanks, Alan

___


wa, afternoon musing

https://youtu.be/xQnY5X1jlis dutar

when memory is perfect, there is no memory. azure and I found an
old school yearbook from the 19th century, with lots of
signatures, one of them mentioned the school. within a few hours
we figured out who owned the yearbook, what year it was from,
and what subsequently happened to the person who owned it; we
traced her from new england to west virginia, we found the
graves of her and her husband, we found images of the graves,
everything and nothing is available, the world is flat, memories
are fundamentally digital, interspersed between mind and
network, shuttled, everywhere, for all time; what's not there,
is not. this flatness scales everything; the digital is entirely
transformable, manipulated; it carries a set series of symbols
and protocols, smears and tears are non-existent, even in their
digital reproduction. we move from the earth and the grit of the
earth to clearing our screen. this is necessary and accessible,
food comes from elsewhere, as does polluted air and the
consequences of politics. perfect memory online is a click away
and a click erased and a click found elsewhere and a click found
in the company of others, of strangers, of protocols, of hard
drives and as such of course contain none of the debris that
someone like braudel might have used to reconstruct a culture.
storage cleansed is invisible, totes the invisible, with the
occasional diagnostics. but the point or plateau is, we ride
these surfaces, we inhabit them as protocols and ghosts (i know
you're there, the screen has changed), our emanations are always
already duplicable. we are in other words superfluous, or in
other words, nodes, smell and taste and atmosphere absent or
regenerated (everything is ultimately regenerated). The world
becomes protocol, RFC (request for comments), simultaneously
flat and infinitely dimensional, both meeting in a series of
rules necessary for communication. all of this is trite, is
evident, but sometimes, at least for me, i have to remind myself
- for example i'm staring at nothing but pixels which basically
exist within the aegis of absent bodies. in the past myths and
ceremonies were intertwined, as were kennings and other
formalisms familiar to all, all within and without the surface,
all promulgating communication; the kenning became the postage
stamp. the flat earth (not my phrase, everything here is as i
keep insisting, already known) carries everything and nothing to
itself, flat but infinitely dimensional, multiply connected,
striated with protocol layers transforming the protocols close
to the speed of light in media. when we meet one another in
'real life' (as if that were always an option one way or
another), we carry the ghosts, the auras of onlines presences
with us. no wonder Trump succeeds, no wonder it takes wars,
poverty, bodies, plagues, Ballard's crashlands, to shatter our
complacency (complacent in _this regard,_ we're hardly
complacent elsewhere, perhaps more engaged politically for
example), we're hardly here, hardly there, always on the move,
hardly on the move... i hardly wrote this, hardly read this,
hardly am present, i'm fairly old now, perhaps i've died ...

--

_______________________________________________
NetBehaviour mailing list
NetBehaviour@lists.netbehaviour.org
https://lists.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour