Sixteen Volts

Why is it that people bother to write about religion in a modern environment such as blogs? The whole thing is a bit embarrassing to watch, even though the situation is much worse in the analog world. That world is full of seemingly impotent whiners with filthy beards who think that "experiencing the sacred" is somehow important and that the terrorists have an important message.

Completely useless, false and bad memetic machines remain in headlines because ultimately they are systems that shoot themselves in the foot. I do recommend visualizing them machines that contain gears and conveyors.

They share a paranoid belief of being "persecuted" even though in reality it's just that whatever you feed into a logically inconsistent system, this input will necessarily collide with something else. Ultimately nothing really fits anything.

This is then considered to be criticism a.k.a. persecution. Irrational systems generate their own criticism in this sense, and are thus tempting targets for disgust and mockery. I guess that people have a tendency to need such targets.

I am also certain that this feeling is exactly identical with fundies and angry atheists (and feminists and leftists along with their most enthusiastic critics). Idiotic systems have a transgressive appeal that you can use either to let out angry steam (critics) or throw a tantrum (believers).

We have started to see "good" writers joining in the blogosphere. In principle this is not a problem. Quite the contrary.

I just realized why a meme such as criticism of "corpoism" is inevitable to emerge in the digital media. Around here the time delay between having some idea for the first time and that idea being available for the whole world is at best about twenty seconds.

In the older forms of media that really belong to a museum you first had an idea and then you had to write it in a form that was long, traditional and redundant, so that it could withstand the long journey into the reader's brain. Then you took it to the publisher who might eventually choose to publish it after a long period of time, after which it was printed and the cellulose stack was physically transported to make it available for the public. After days or even years, the reader perhaps purchased it for possible future reading.

Especially at the point where the meatsack generated the string of characters that was separate from the meat, all kinds of incidentals stuck onto the text. When some idea is edited from its initial form, the author's psychology sticks onto it as he tries to please others by adding in ideas that the author imagines the other relevant meatsacks and institutions to be holding. Such as "content", "interest" and consideration for traditions.

This is precisely what has so far been considered personality. Personality in turn is the absolute core of the cellulose-based literature of the past. Literary magazines show us the portraits of authors (as strange as this convention seems today) and literary studies examine the private lives of writers and their relationships with other writers with an interest that at least I consider to be musty and womanish.

Blogs --- or whatever form the digital writing will move to --- can completely bypass this structure of psychologizing everything and directly move to fast and cool descriptions of reality or the wild changes occurring in the subconscious. This is the very reason why poetry doesn't work in the blog form, why the cultural crowd is so totally out of it, and why the articles in Wired with all their descriptions of milieu and personalities feel like such very bad writing.

The job of a writer or a creative individual in refining ideas is taken by a group that I don't feel like calling a community and in which there is no difference between writers and readers. They toss around ideas almost as in table tennis, quickly and intuitively. This is why in the digital world it is possible to talk about authenticity, which has been impossible in the cellulose world for a century or two. In other words, the fact that thoughts can accurately depict what is going on inside your head when you don't have time to pretend.

For the same reason I still believe that the maximum length of a scientific paper should be eight lines. I can't remember if I have ever explained why. It is also irrelevant whether my ideas are proven to be true by me or somebody else. Or disproven or even stomped flat, which is (other than the value of one tiny variable) the exact same thing as proving.

Hate blogging is just embarassing. This is why I don't write that institutional culture is organized crime, which can best be seen in the Swedish decision to start collecting television licence fees also from Internet connections. I have often noticed that the goal of cultural institutions is to hold back information from customers so that only this institution can provide it to them and thus justify its existence. I have also heard responses from the members of cultural crowd so that some of them agree and some disagree with me. For some reason, those who disagree with me tend to be mostly women or older men.

I came up with a classification that somebody else has probably already invented and expressed much better. But I'll say it anyway.

With respect to its temporal axis, an immaterial object can be flat, ramped or fragmented.

Gmail is an excellent example of a temporally flat object. All messages are stored together and searching among messages from all times is equally fast. Another example of a temporally flat object is philosophy in which the same texts are equally important from one century to another.

Ramped objects have a perspective so that usually the older things seem smaller. Most email programs are such that it is harder to find older messages, assuming that the system hasn't completely thrown them out already. Popular culture is also pretty ramped this way.

Fragmented objects consist of a series of separate epochs. In principle the exact same thing is constructed from scratch each time. Human life if fragmented, and now that my Flickr account is full, I will start a new one and continue over there instead of paying for a pro-account. I will leave my present account floating in the digital space to remind me of this year.

The arrival of such memorials frozen in time was written about by Umberto Eco in an old book of his, and this has been also somehow moralized upon. I can almost guess why. In most of the traditional cultural life tradition has turned into an institution that you take refuge in.

The only thing remaining of the Usenet newsgroups is some kind of a digital mummy. Everything that was in them and even more has been already said in blogs many times a lot better.

I can see the current blogosphere as kind of a sketch. I recently read the archives of some old blogs and they pretty much contained the same things as they do today, but shorter and more superficial.

I believe that such catastrophic writing makes sense. It is good to occasionally write things from scratch. It gives you a new point of view towards especially the most familiar and evident things and prevents you from getting stuck on a single track.

I don't know how to put this more accurately. This is one of those memes that I shall leave for others to build on. As I have stated earlier, I believe that ideas should be served as close to their initial form as possible. Editing and smoothing them only makes it harder for the others to grab them and develop them further. In the digital world repetition is a virtue, reaching for credibility is a sin, and originality is irrelevant.

When I was recently studying something, I noticed that when you have found a solution and done it, it is useful to throw away the notes for a moment and see if you could do it again the next day. Naturally this was more work, but for a moment I thought that I had found the philosopher's stone for deeper learning.

This, of course, only as an analogy, and in other respects the digital tradition is more important than what some meatsack did and what it was like.

Somehow the following disclaimer taken from Yudkowsky's home page feels like it would fit here:

Most of my old writing is horrifically obsolete. Essentially you should assume that anything from 2001 or earlier was written by a different person who also happens to be named "Eliezer Yudkowsky". 2002-2003 is an iffy call.

Posted by Ilkka Kokkarinen on Thursday, July 20, 2006 at 2:14 PM