The Breaking Time

The drones will wait until the stars are right

Photo by Kirsty Wigglesworth, Associated Press

So this is real:

Yes, the Argus is the world's highest resolution camera, and the system is capable of monitoring and coordinating the information it receives more effectively than ever before. If this trajectory continues, one day you'll be standing at a street corner, texting a friend, and someone in a facility will be able to read your message from orbit.

Notice the ending discussion about UAVs that will stay aloft for years at a time, paired with blithe acceptance that people will be constantly monitored. Coincidentally, I saw this video a year to the day after Tim Maly coined "argus" as the collective noun for a group of drones.

As if the skies weren't already turning into something out of an early '80s sci-fi novel, DARPA is also proposing military robots in the ocean, using the seas as a "vast area for concealment and storage" until the stars time is right.

Together, this puts some strange tools in the arsenal of an established government, any established government. Imagine a crumbling regime's leaders stockpiling hundreds of machines, sleeping in the air or the ocean, ready to avenge their masters if someone ever ousts them.

Oh well. We can always hide in our drone-proof cities.

Someday this will all be yours

by Damien Williams, a follow-up to Life in the so-called space age

The Last Judgment, Heironymous Bosch

Come close and I'll tell you a secret.

The Breaking Time is really just the continual state of the post-Lapsarian condition. Everything we are and everything we do is a result of the Fall of Man, and that Fall makes itself evident in everything we ourselves create. All decay, all rot, all moral failures and lawlessness, all attempts by mad to trespass into God's domain with works like artificial intelligence, artificial life, and genetic manipulation are just the side-effects of humanity's experience and expression of evil; today is God's Judgment.

This is what I would tell you if I were a fundamentalist Christian-- that we are all sinful in some basic fashion (because of some basic action), and that nature has infected everything we do. But I'm not a fundamentalist Christian, so let's try something else.

The Breaking Time is just the precursor to the coming of the Messiah, and the fulfilling of YHVH's ultimate covenant with Man. We must strive through, as best we can but also spur on progress toward the time when this Messiah will make itself known. As such, we tolerate lawlessness, immorality, and decay, as we know that it will bring us closer to the time of Messianic Fruition.

 No? Okay, how about this:

That which we call "evil" is really just the effect of the workings of evolutionary biological processes, selfishness, procreative need, tribalism, and the insular nature of the preferred size of human social groups. The only thing that exists which can rightly be called "evil" are those forces of ignorance which lead us away from inquiry and scientific understanding, and those forces must, indeed, be stamped out and shown as false, broken, harmful, and dangerous, at all costs. Only then will the true nature of the universe be able to be known, free of antiquated moralising and repression.

What about this: The return of Maitreya has meant that there will be a world-wide awakening of consciousness, and His work must be helped along by those willing to make the world over in fire, and who are willing to do whatever it takes to survive these end times.

If you don't see your particular flavor of armageddon above I could go on, if you'd like.

Open Notes: Rural cyberpunk

2011 fire in the Great Dismal Swamp, seen from space. The fire was caused by drought, making the swamp's peat especially flammable. Image from NASA.

Awhile back, I made an off-the-cuff comment on Twitter about "rural cyberpunk." Visiting where I grew up this week (map above), I think there's a lot more there than initially met the eye, and it's time for some open, if haphazard, notes on this particular theme, mixing past, present, and twenty-minutes-from-now future:

• Landscapes full of abandoned buildings from variety of eras. Half-built bedroom communities, unfinished suburbs down the road from generational family homes.

• Relentless salvaging of old machinery to feed or mix with newer. Creative rigging of second-hand or "outdated" technology into rough but extremely reliable forms. Abandoned industrial equipment as resource. Constant repair/re-use.

• Blackwater. The world's most infamous private mercenary army, founded and originally based in Moyock, NC. Original training grounds on 3,000 acres of the Dismal Swamp.

• Farms as ground zero for backyard/grey market gene splicing. After all, it's not that different from what farmers have done for centuries: adapt technology and natural processes to alter forms of life. Use to find workarounds on killer seeds, etc. (farmers are also adept at slipping around central authority that gets in their way).

• Pervasive personal weaponry and a higher-than-average number of ex-soldiers from a variety of wars.

• Backroads dotted with towns largely ignored by larger governments. Weak or non-existent official social safety networks.

• Same lack of bigger institutions or gov, along with lack of attention from larger cities/culture providing appealing haven for people that want to be ignored — plenty of opportunity where no one's looking. Widespread surveillance is nigh-impossible in rural areas.

• Historical role of Northeastern NC (and many similar rural areas) as refuge for fleeing slaves, indentured servants, remaining natives during country's early history. Pockets of deep anti-Confederate/government sentiment during Civil War. 

• Juxtaposition of international ports and nearby complete wilderness. Revival of old smuggling routes along canals, inlets, and sounds. A lot of homes in this area have a small dock by a waterway. Evolution of decentralized black market distribution network for areas increasingly left out of "the future."

• Infrastructure neglect and the brunt end of climate change.

• Interesting things emerging from the area's "everyone" is ignoring or dismissing.

• Last, but not least, 'ol William Gibson's Twitter handle is, coincidentally, GreatDismal. The Dixie Flatline lives. ;-)

Feel free to add your own contributions or thoughts on this theme in the comments.

Zombies, Mutants, Cyborgs and Aliens: Fight for the Future

Welcome back Damien Williams for a riveting rant on, well, the aforementioned bogeymen, and what kind of future our culture is choosing.

Please pick another apocalypse. Image by Quidditch.

I don't like zombies. I don't mean I'm afraid of them, or that they skeeve me out. I mean that I don't like the current use of them as trope, or a modern cultural cipher. I told you this the last time we spoke, and I told you that I'd tell you why.

You see, back in the day, when Romero was using zombies to talk about consumer culture and the death of individual preference in the face of mass markets, a zombie horde was a potent symbol. It was crushing, endless, homogenizing death. Why do you think Dawn of the Dead takes place in a mall? It was a terrifying indictment of what Romero believed was happening to our society.

Later, when the zombie symbol came to be applied out to Western society as a whole, and not just its consumerist leanings, the fast zombie became the stand-in for the hyper-connectivity and infectious nature of concept, idea, and emotion. Unthinking Rage just spreads and spreads.

That was all well and good. The problem is, zombies don't represent that anymore. Honestly, so far as I see it? Zombies don't represent anything anymore. The modern zombie is an empty symbol, representing only itself. The fight against zombies is now only the pure expression of futility, of never giving up in the face of odds which will defeat us. Zombies are just about Fear. They are collapse and terror and, yes, also the changes that survival of terror wreaks on people. But, in the final offing, I think that's boring.

I'm what some might call a pop culture junkie. I'm interested in all aspects of the popular media (even if, as I say, I don't exactly enjoy every single one of them), because I believe that our pop culture is reflexively connected to the wider culture. It tells us what we're thinking, it tells us how we're feeling, and in turn it influences those thoughts and emotions.

Pop culture amplifies and exaggerates our existing beliefs, distilling them down and reflecting them back to us in a glittering panoply of spectacle and story. What this means for you and me is that, as long as I'm here at The Breaking Time, I'll very often talk to you about the nature of our society — and our perception of its imminent and immanent collapse — through the lens of our pop culture and what it is doing for and to us. If the ascension of “Reality” television is Jean Baudrillard's nightmare scenario, then the rise of zombie apocalypse narrative is mine.

Gongs and drums: Political manipulation in seven acts

McKinley/Roosevelt campaign poster, 1900

"Gongs and drums, banners and flags, are means whereby the ears and eyes of the host may be focused on one particular point."

-Sun Tzu

1912 short film from the Woodrow Wilson campaign attacking the Taft administration. According to PBS, "it is the earliest known example of a political party or candidate using the medium of motion picture to communicate with voters." Via The Daily Dish.

1930s film produced by the U.S. government advertising the achievements of the New Deal.

Kennedy campaign theme song, 1960.

"Nixon Now," theme song from his 1972 campaign

Reagan's famous "Morning in America" ad, 1984

Bush/Cheney "Wolves" ad, 2004

The time before X: how a generation gets old

Earlier this morning (or very late last night, depending on how one looks at it), today's xkcd comic hit me right in the gut.

Yes, I know generational memory doesn't quite work this way, but it still served as a marker of the reality of how quickly defining events become just another part of history.

Possibly due to the fact that it was late and I was tired, it shone a light on the weird spot occupied by my generational splinter (27-32-year-olds). We have a lot of "time before X" memories due to the particular spot our lives have happened to occupy.

The internet came of age when we did (in the mid-late '90s). Cellphones went from high-tech to ubiquitous. Columbine and 9/11 happened while we were in high school or early college.

I can still remember a time when the space I'm writing this in was seen as a new fad, subject to constant theories (in print, natch) about what was so special about it and where it could go.

I can remember going right to the gate to see my sister off on a flight, and when the idea of bag searches at the schoolhouse door was alien. Or, worst of all, a time before going off to war became something people my age had done by the hundreds of thousands.

Then everything changed, bit by bit. I started to get an inkling when I dated a girl who was still riding. This year, with helping to train some younger journalists, really brought it home. The eight years separating us meant a whole range of cusps I had passed were just "the way things are" to them. On my end, it feels nigh-on schizophrenic to have so many before/after moments piled in one's past.

I'm sure this is partly just the blindness of having lived through a particular time. Pivotal moments are just the ones where you happen to get shot at, after all. They're doubly important if your friends all come under fire at the same time and get to gripe afterwards.

Time marches on, this is the way of things, this too shall pass. And it does.

It's as simple and devastating as that.

All Times Break

I was extremely happy when Damien Williams agreed to become a contributor here and submitted this piece for our relaunch. In his own wonderful style, it pulls together classic lore, poetry, mysticism, and pop culture for a fascinating meditation on this blog's core theme.

They tell you never to start a story with a quote, so I won't. I'll start with two. Here we go:

“It is said that what is called 'the spirit of an age' is something to which one cannot return. That this spirit gradually dissipates is due to the world's coming to an end. For this reason, although one would like to change today's world back to the spirit of one hundred years or more ago, it cannot be done. Thus it is important to make the best out of every generation.” - Yamamoto Tsunetomo, Hagakure: The Book of the Samurai, 1716

“. . .The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;

Surely the Second Coming is at hand. . .” — "The Second Coming," William Butler Yeats, 1920

And then there is, of course, the ever-popular I-Ching Hexagram 23 (~1,000 BCE), aptly titled Breaking Apart:

This pictures a time when inferior people are pushing forward and are about to crowd out the few remaining strong and superior men. Under these circumstances, which are due to the time, it is not favorable for the superior man to undertake anything.

The right behavior in such adverse times is to be deduced from the images and their attributes. The lower trigrams stands for the earth, whose attributes are docility and devotion. The upper trigram stands for the mountain, whose attribute is stillness. This suggests that one should submit to the bad time and remain quiet. For it is a question not of man’s doing but of time conditions, which, according to the laws of heaven, show an alternation of increase and decrease, fullness and emptiness. It is impossible to counteract these conditions of the time. Hence it is not cowardice but wisdom to submit and avoid action.

 We have always lived in the breaking times. We have always felt that every period of major upheaval is the end of the world, the final days, the utter Apocalypse, come at last. And we're right. Every major shift of perspective ends the world in which we lived, and brings to bear a completely new perspective. In fact, most often that perspective is necessarily new, because the only ones who survive the shift (or collapse, as some would have it) are those who can adapt to the radically altered contexts in which they find themselves.

As ever, we must adapt, or we will perish, and this isn't news.

When did we stop looking at the stars?

 

Last Friday, the space shuttle Atlantis broke Earth's gravity, headed for the international space station. It marked the last space shuttle launch.

While this is not the end of the space program, Atlantis' final journey marks a major point on a long, downward trajectory, not least for the 25,000 workers who will suffer directly from the program's end. These days, the government spends more on air conditioning in Iraq and Afghanistan than on NASA.

Appropriately, today is the 42nd anniversary of David Bowie's "Space Oddity," the classic lament of a doomed astronaut:

Let's not get too altruistic here, either. The space program's heyday came about in large part because Americans and their government viewed it as part of a greater war against the USSR.

Still, NASA's zenith proved something: we can go to space. We can send people to space. The resources exist. The technology is there. Hell, at this point the technology is old.

The only remaining question is: do we want to? When people look out at their society and think "what do I want us to do?" is "go to space, and keep going" on the list?

Not for a long time. People can talk efficiency all they wish, but governments have proven perfectly capable of spending larger sums on far more questionable things (remember all that air conditioning?). The program's death marked a deeper turn.

Partly, the shift came from space travel's birth, tied to the Cold War and '50s hubris. By the era's end, people were, rightly, tired of the damn struggle, and anything associated with it. "Space Oddity" was one early marker, the increasing skepticism of science fiction another.

"Fighting the commies" was never the whole reason, of course. Space exploration had real popular appeal for a long time, tapping into a primal grandeur, combined with humanity's explorational urge. But, forever tied to far-off dividends and the conflict that created it, the whole enterprise proved vulnerable to accusations that the only thing all that money created was "garbage floating in the sky," as Ursula LeGuin's infamously dismissed.

Defenders could even point to more immediate benefits, like the ridiculous amount of more down-to-earth devices spawned by space research. It didn't help. This is the kind of popular argument won in the heart, not the head.

The fact is, the populace at large decided space travel wasn't a priority. It lost its glamour, its war, its money and its support. There were other fears, other dangers. Everything that's followed, from the lack of cutting edge spacecraft to the shuttle's end, is all part of that downward spiral.

So here's the question: we decided to give up on space travel. What did we get instead?

Was it worth it?

The Tribal Exemption

 Me against my brother. Me and my brother against our cousin. Me, my brother and my cousin against our neighbor. Me, my brother, my cousin and our neighbor against the stranger.

-Syrian proverb

Roman Polanski is out of jail. In 1977, he raped a child, pled guilty and then fled the country before his sentencing hearing. Last year he was arrested in Switzerland. Now, however, in part thanks to tactics from his lawyers, Swiss authorities are refusing the U.S. extradition request and releasing him.

There is, rightly, outrage in many quarters, across typical political boundaries. However, in others there is rejoicing. One thing I found most revealing about the entire Polanski case was the total divide between how his artistic and film colleagues viewed his arrest, and how everyone else did.

Kate Harding did an excellent roundup of film and artist support for Polanski. It's considerable, with over 130 film types who want him released from prison and view his crime (and over 30 years of refusing to pay for it) as no big deal. And privileged-among-the-privileged artist/philosophe Bernard Henri-Levy rallied a similar group of artists to oppose Polanski's detention as a "common terrorist" (I would have preferred "common rapist" but the choice of words, especially "common" is revealing). 

Interesting in this argument was the focus on Polanski's genius, his artistic talent and status, with the implication that this, in some way, was to balance or overwhelm the crime he was accused of (and pled guilty to) and faced punishment for.

The reality is this: Polanski, and his supporters, are part of a professional tribe, and they feel bound to defend members of that tribe, no matter how heinous the crime in the eyes of others. Furthermore, if members of the tribe are particularly talented at their chosen pursuit, they are given a free pass, because their fellows equate talent with virtue.

But the film industry, and Polanski, are far from the only ones. More, below the cut.

Going Ghost

So, exactly how does a person disappear in today's modern world? Wired decided to answer that very question, using writer Evan Ratliffe as the guinea pig:

I’m driving East out of San Francisco on I-80, fleeing my life under the cover of dusk. Having come to the interstate by a circuitous route, full of quick turns and double backs, I’m reasonably sure that no one is following me. I keep checking the rearview mirror anyway. From this point on, there’s no such thing as sure. Being too sure will get me caught.

I had intended to flee in broad daylight, but when you are going on the lam, there are a surprising number of last-minute errands to run. This morning, I picked up a set of professionally designed business cards for my fake company under my fake name, James Donald Gatz. I drove to a Best Buy, where I bought two prepaid cell phones with cash and then put a USB cord on my credit card — an arbitrary dollar amount I hoped would confuse investigators, who would scan my bill and wonder what gadgetry I had purchased. An oil change for my car was another head fake. Who would think that a guy about to sell his car would spend $60 at Oil Can Henry’s?

I already owned a couple of prepaid phones; I left one of the new ones with my girlfriend and mailed the other to my parents — giving them an untraceable way to contact me in emergencies. I bought some Just for Men beard-and-mustache dye at a drugstore. My final stop was the bank, to draw a $477 cashier’s check. It’s payment for rent on an anonymous office in Las Vegas, which is where I need to deliver the check by midday tomorrow.

Crossing the Bay Bridge, I glance back for a last nostalgic glimpse of the skyline. Then I reach over, slide the back cover off my cell phone, and pop out the battery. A cell phone with a battery inside is a cell phone that’s trackable.

Wired then offered a reward for enterprising investigators to find him. What follows is an interesting cat-and-mouse game, and full of interesting information about exactly how seemingly hard it is to disappear in our increasingly surveilled age.

Of course, Ratliffe's disappearance was still a game. It was an extremely revealing game, and he's clearly a smart guy who did a whole bunch of research in how not to be found. But it missed some key factors that I'll get into in a moment.

By contrast, federal agencies have, for the past seven years, been spending millions to create a system that better tracks homeless and transient populations. Ratliffe, with ingenuity and extensive preparation, had an extremely difficult time keeping ahead of his pursuers. Meanwhile, the government's spending millions because social agencies have a hell of a time tracking down individuals whose invisibility was often accidental, conducted with practically no resources.

This happens because the best way to escape notice is when no one's looking; and when there's an entire social network out there to keep it that way. Despite the seeming pervasiveness of records and monitoring technology, there are entire populations of such "ghosts" in the cities of our time.