Day 4 is exchange or economy or communication. What happens when we exchange or communicate or manage resources? We are looking at difference. Why do we want to exchange things that are the same, or communicate things that are the same? Communication is a way to mediate difference. Nature and culture are two forms of difference. Culture makes machines, social machines called governments, civilization and society, and technical machines called roads, buildings, computers, satellites. Nature makes machines like ribosomes and mycelium. Are these things machines? Well they have interrelated parts that perform some sort of work. They all tend towards self preservation and self-propagation. Nature and Culture and overcome the myth of difference and combined in the cyborg and transcended in the AI - the cyborg is the material superhuman the ai is the disembodied spirit.
Communication is a way to mediate change. When I imagine sending a newsletter, The newsletter is difference. When it exists it exists in a market, but perhaps a gift marketplace. The receiving and reading of the newsletter is the bestowing and accepting of a gift, the validation of difference, the solidity of connection.
When an email is sent by a robot or an AI, there is a broken trust. There is the sending of a trojan horse. A hollow gift. You open the gift but there is no soul inside.
This does not mean robots should not send or respond to emails but then perhaps then people should not have to read these emails. Perhaps I have a list of questions and emails associated with them, like a spreadsheet. The spreadsheet updates with the AI responses to the questions. I no longer enter the gift economy of sending or receiving. I create a new type of arena.
It is an assault on my being to respond to a robot to be responded to by a robot.
This 30 min-ish meditation on Heidegger and Terrence Malick Films. Terrence Malick films are singular and beautiful and poetic. Their narrative is not the traditional cinematic high concept narrative. Instead it is a narrative of affect, a narrative of milieu.
The clip is a meditation of the different interpretations of Dasein - Heidegger’s concept of being. The TLDR is that Heidegger wants to bring back the question of being into philosophy. What does it mean just to be? What are the different ways of being? This in the past was lumped in with problems of consciousness as in Descartes’ cogito- “I think therefore I am.” But what happens when we investigate what it means to be on its own? What is it to am?
Quite a lot as it turns out. Watch the clip.
Questions
When I have a computer bug I imagine that the electrons imprisoned by the relentless pulse of the quartz crystal have rebelled.
The circuit board is a small city with highways and way stations, homes and third places.
I imagine the oppressive and toxic milieus where these circuit boards come from.
Their Dasein.
The people who make these circuit boards, under hazardous, precarious, unjust situations are not enough for me to resist buying more circuit board based machines.
I can make my own circuit board - this would be ethical perhaps.
Why would it be ethical? Maybe it would adhere to my own ethical standard of what I can stomach when I trace the evolution of an object. But that does not mean that this is what is ethical for you. Your microbiome is probably different. Maybe it is more sensitive and you do not own a smart phone.
Now I am getting depressed. I don’t like to dwell on these sorts of topics. I am uncomfortable with the shadow. I think most people these days are uncomfortable with the shadow. These days people do not give bad reviews of books in the newspaper. Ostensibly it is because there is so much stuff being published that why review something bad, only review good things. Maybe we should replace good and bad with complex and simple or insider and outsider or establishment and anti establishment or anti establishment and establishment. There are a lot of binaries and dichotomies.
If you are into this sort of thing.
x
Meredith