So I’m reading The Meme Hustler this quite long article by Evgeny Morozov about Tim O’Reilly and it’s both fascinating and really annoying in that way some journalism can be when you know a bit about the subject under discussion. I’m finding whenever I’m familiar with what Morozov’s writing about I can clearly see how he’s twisting and excluding information to make his broader point, but when I’m not familiar I’m all “ooh, that’s interesting!” and I get annoyed because I’m not able to transfer my scepticism to this new-to-me information because, well, that’s what professional writing excels at. Unfortunately for Morozov this completely undermines his broader points which could well be a useful and vital critique of prevailing ideologies in Silicon Valley, and this is a tragedy because they really need a good analysis that isn’t tainted by whatever grudge Morozov has against O’Reilly and his chums. It’s always been this way. Critiques of technology cultures seem to be unable to see through the red mist of fury. I have no idea why.
But I’m still working through the article, because for whatever its flaws it’s well written and does uncover some interesting nuggets, though not necessarily for the reasons Morozov intends. Take, for example, Alfred Korzybski, a philosopher who O’Reilly has time for. Here’s the bit that caught my eye, from about half-way through Morozov’s essay:
For Korzybski, the world has a relational structure that is always in flux; like Heraclitus, who argued that everything flows, Korzybski believed that an object A at time x1 is not the same object as object A at time x2 (he actually recommended indexing every term we use with a relevant numerical in order to distinguish “science 1933” from “science 2013”). Our language could never properly account for the highly fluid and relational structure of our reality—or as he put it in his most famous aphorism, “the map is not the territory.”
Korzybski argued that we relate to our environments through the process of “abstracting,” whereby our neurological limitations always produce an incomplete and very selective summary of the world around us. There was nothing harmful in this per se — Korzybski simply wanted to make people aware of the highly selective nature of abstracting and give us the tools to detect it in our everyday conversations. He wanted to artificially induce what he called a “neurological delay” so that we could gain more awareness of what we were doing in response to verbal and nonverbal stimuli, understand what features of reality have been omitted, and react appropriately.
To that end, Korzybski developed a number of mental tools meant to reveal all the abstracting around us; he patented the most famous of those—the “structural differential”—in the 1920s. He also encouraged his followers to start using “etc.” at the end of their statements as a way of making them aware of their inherent inability to say everything about a given subject and to promote what he called the “consciousness of abstraction.”
There was way too much craziness and bad science in Korzybski’s theories for him to be treated as a serious thinker, but his basic question — as Postman put it, “What are the characteristics of language which lead people into making false evaluations of the world around them?” — still remains relevant today.
I love this. Besides that glorious summary of what we see on Twitter etc every day – “people… making false evaluations of the world around them” – it taps in to so much of the stuff I’ve been thinking about over the years but haven’t found a coherent home for. Some notes:
- Photography is the capturing of moments of a world in flux. No two photos of an object or place are ever the same. See the heroic futility of photographers climbing mountains to try and replicate Ansel Adam’s landscapes. It can’t be done because those landscapes don’t exist anymore.
- Nostalgia has been fascinating me for a while. While I enjoy it on a personal level, I don’t think it’s healthy. It involves a denial that the world changes and that this is a good thing. It’s a desperate clinging on to a past which can never return because it is the past, and an infection of the present with faulty memories. It’s pernicious.
- I love the idea the we are made of stardust, that the matter in the universe is the same as it was at the Big Bang. That our bodies are merely reconstructed material that, centuries ago, was distributed across space. It gives the question “what is this made of” a vertiginous quality.
- The relational (is that right?) concept of place is also fascinating. If the Earth is moving through space then my notion of where I am (my living room, Birmingham, UK) is only accurate in relation to other places on the planet. As Buckminster says, “we are all astronauts aboard a little spaceship called Earth”. Where are we going?
- On a quantum level, which I naturally don’t fully understand, there might not be such a thing as solid matter. It’s all just energy. The space in atoms is so relatively huge that it’s theoretically possible to walk through walls should the electrons align.
- When we have a connection with a place, what does that mean? A relationship like that is usually built up over time, but over time a place changes. Are we connecting with that narrative? With the differences that we’ve experienced? Is being “from” somewhere a case of sharing the development over time?
- Radical change upsets us. Slow changes gives us identity. An absence of change is impossible.
- Time. Moving through time. The fourth dimension. I jokingly sub-titled a long-exposure photography workshop “Mapping The Fourth Dimension” which was a silly distraction but I couldn’t help myself. If a photograph captures a moment, a slow shutter stretches that moment while showing that our concept of a “moment” is pretty narrow. Can a moment be a hundred years long? Well, geologically speaking, yes.
- Time-lapse photography seems a desperately underused artform. Flat, regular, boring. The greatest innovation in recent years seems to be to “pan” the camera, mechanically or in post. How could time-lapse be used to explore these ideas of time and place?
- I’ve long held the opinion that the world is deterministic, in that what happens can be predicted by tracing causality, but that it’s so complex that it might as well not be, the illusion of free will being effectively fact. This seems to relate to Korzybski’s ideas. Which is nice because I’ve never found the notion outside my head.
Anyway, did I mention I’m applying for an Arts Council grant? More on that later this month.
