Crisis 22
The Algorithmics
Section Overview - The Algorhithmics: Marilyn - Bubbles - Algo Something
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Section Overview
The final section contains a creative essay (🎸 The Algorithmics), which dramatizes the link between algorithmic technology and the extremism which leads to violence. This section also contains the following poem and two short stories:
🦋 The Tao of Putin contains a very brief poem which depicts the Russian atrocities in Bucha in terms of Daoist symbolism. I compare and contrast Zhuangzi’s mystic butcher with Putin, who cuts “with the sharpest of blades, extracting the vile Nazi within. / Working within the confines of invisibility, / he must find the empty space between the Slavic bone.”
🍒 Macaron, Not Macron aims at a comic distance from the present catastrophic dangers. It features a New York lawyer who is so obsessed by artistic beauty and by his transexual assistant that he can’t see the skyscrapers crumbling all around him.
Finally, ⏳ AD / BC is an apocalyptic vision that suggests a link between war in Ancient Mesopotamia and present-day Ukraine. In this short story, an old professor is wheeled to a cafe in Penticton in the summer of 2022. He imagines he hears the faraway silos open and he remembers, only in fragments, the discovery of a 4044 year-old tablet he found in Iraq back in 2003, while the bombs were dropping all around him …
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THE ALGORITHMICS
Marilyn
December 10, 2023
It doesn’t really matter what you feel about his personality and his music — and both do get rather creepy — Marilyn Manson does make some insightful points:
When I was a kid growing up, music was the escape. That's the only thing that had no judgements. You can put on a record and it's not gonna yell at you for dressing the way you do. It's gonna make you feel better about it. — Bowling for Columbine, 2002
Manson is right: music doesn’t complain about your behaviour. Instead, it makes you feel good about yourself. It doesn’t really matter what kind of person you are or what kind of music you listen to. If you’re feeling angry and need to let off steam, Black Sabbath or Metallica would be a good choice. If you’re feeling nostalgic, The Eagles; self-empowered, Beyoncé; etc. The point here is that it’s a self-selective process. Lovers of Albinoni are unlikely to feel better about themselves if they listen to Gorgoroth. Instead, they choose what they like and generally keep listening to that genre or style.
If you’re in a strange and happy state, you might listen to “Sweet Dreams” by the Eurythmics: Sweet dreams are made of these / Who am I to disagree? If you’re in a creepy mood, you might watch the Marilyn Manson version. Inspired by Manson’s absurd and disturbing scenarios, you might decide to add a little twist of your own: Sweet dreams are made of fleas / Who am I to disagree? You might then argue that this isn’t quite as warped as it seems, submitting to the court as evidence “The Flea,” in which John Donne says to his reluctant mistress:
People stay within their comfort zones in their lives and on the Web, yet these zones are different for everyone. Although Marilyn may be off most people’s register, his creepy video has 297 million views (Annie’s has almost a billion views). Donne’s kinky poem is a classic, in print now for almost 400 years.
Note: if the above version of “Sweet Dreams” was too graphically creepy, check out Manson’s acoustic Italian TV version — in what looks like a church… I laughed when I saw the first blog comment, by @circleJerkin68: “Manson didn’t sell his soul to the devil... he sold his eyebrows.”
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Bubbles
The algorithm that a website like YouTube uses will find out what you want and give it to you. You choose the video to start with, but then the algorithm takes over and finds more of the same, and more of the similar. The videos you watch — and the ones you see on the right of your screen, at your finger tips, miraculously responding to your every mood — make you feel good about yourself and your view of the world.
But watching like this can put you into a bubble, and this is more serious than the music bubble that throbs around you. This is because YouTube, like the Web, deals with everything in every possible way. Some people listening to music hardly hear the words, yet watching YouTube music videos is a more holistic engagement in sound, words, and moving images. As a result, you’re more likely to come into contact with the meaning, as well as the sound, of a song. For instance, if you missed the real-life meaning of CCR’s “thunder magic spoke / Let the people know my wisdom / Fill the land with smoke,” someone will post a video of running through the jungle in Vietnam, with the Viet Cong firing through the dark.
Here the poetic becomes realistic, which is a powerful thing. Add to this that most of what we watch on YourTube is fairly realistic, and hence it shapes our view of the real world. It can change our views of the world or stop them from changing. It can show us endless new and exciting ways of thinking, feeling, listening, and seeing. Yet it can also keep us in isolated groups, huddled around our computers, dreaming up communal ideologies, victimhood, and revenge.
It can lead us into divided politics, as we click from one angry malcontent to the next, until the clicks accumulate and we get the sense that there are an unlimited number of people like us who aren’t willing to take it anymore. We become convinced that the Ukrainians are Nazis or that the Russians are all violently insane; that trans rights mean everything or that abortion is the work of the Devil; that Donald Trump won the election in 2020 or that conservatives deserve to burn in the wastebasket of the deplorables; that the capitalist system is the only problem or the only solution.
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You become convinced that some of them want to use you, and that some of them want to be used by you. You battle them in a series of posts, during which they demonstrate their unreasonableness and their unwillingness to see the truth.
Or, you don’t know what to think. You’ve been betrayed by the false views of your family, your friends, and your lover. You search for some nebulous connection.
It doesn’t really matter if you’re unsure of yourself, or if you’re an alpha top dog and think everybody else is an idiot. Either way, you’re alienated, and either way humans can’t live with alienation.
Finished with my woman / 'Cause she couldn't help me with my mind / People think I'm insane / Because I am frowning all the time
All day long I think of things / But nothing seems to satisfy / Think I'll lose my mind / If I don't find something to pacify
Can you help me / Occupy my brain?
I need someone to show me / The things in life that I can't find / I can't see the things that make true happiness / I must be blind
So you go online and find those far-flung few, that abstract band of brothers who you don’t have to live with, don’t have to do the dishes after, don’t have to agree upon a way to disagree. You connect with them on the wavelength of your alienated outrage.
On the blog posts you up the level of your articulate self, finding words with bombast. You go so far as to threaten to blast them with bombs and find their family and do the same.
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You’re part of a paranoid subset of a greater reality. The algorithm doesn’t care. It doesn’t urge you to understand that greater reality, much less to join it. To do that, you’d need to use your own brain, conduct your own index finger, tap on your own keys and enter a new subject, preferably one you thought was stupid, deplorable, woke, or fascist.
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Algo Something
If I were going to start a band, I would borrow from The Eurythmics (Greek for Harmonious-beats) and call it The Algorithmics. This would refer to 1. the rhythm of the music, 2. the algorithm that urges you to come back and listen to the same type of music, and 3. the arbitrary nature of the process. The history of algorithms is a fascinating one, and traces a long line of complex math from Babylon and India to the West. My band’s name, however, would refer to the Spanish word algo, or something. And in my application of algo to the Web, this something could be anything. The rhythmic part of the name would refer to the process which multiplies the algo part, which is the substance or content — and, again, it doesn’t matter what the substance or content is. It’s just algo, something.
This algo could be the idea that the bombing of Mariupol is the most patriotic and holy thing that can be done. Or it could be that the dead president of Venezuela set up a corrupt voting system whereby computers shifted votes from honest Republicans to crafty Democrats.
It really doesn’t matter what examples we take. The same principle would operate if a jellybean-sized brain in another galaxy hated the colour of the other jellybean-sized brain. The only thing that both of them can agree on is that the only way to settle their difference is to get rid of the jellybean-sized brain of the other jellybean.
So you dare your opponents — and all of them are idiots — to take you on. You give them a time and place and tell them to bring it on. You don’t really expect them to show up, but you allow them to follow you as you set fire to a government building. Four government workers were working late, but they got what they deserved.
Make a joke and I will sigh / And you will laugh and I will cry / Happiness I cannot feel / And love to me is so unreal
All the good intentions in your universe connect inside you, like the founding fathers around a table, like immigrants landing on Ellis Island, the proud liberators of Paris and Rome, a silent convoy of helicopters flying into Da Nang. The essence of all of your holy emotions gets purified into the mind of the true believer who will do anything, hide a bomb in his turban, slaughter a village of peasants.
And so as you hear these words / Telling you now of my state / I tell you to enjoy life / I wish I could, but it's too late
As the front door is kicked in you raise your right hand in a pledge of allegiance. Your left hand grabs a gun while your right hand moves across the hail of shrapnel and grabs a thick, dark red felt pen. The laptop on your table deflects the bullets even while it lines up ten more videos on the same theme, from the same algorithm that brought you from all those forgotten “Beginnings,” where “Time passes much too quickly / When we're together laughing,” to “The End,” where The blue bus is calling us
Driver, where you taking us?
Before collapsing, you scribble onto your blood-splattered wall the everlasting motto: Exterminate the brutes!
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Next: ☯️ Both In and Out of the Game