The Breaking Time

Building a phyle

Though, let's face it, the Neo-Victorians wouldn't cut it.

This blog (when I can post) frequently focuses on social organization and the ways people are trying to adapt to changing times, especially as the nation-state and other traditional institutions lose their old sway. 

So I'm overdue to delve into one that's stuck with me for some time: the phyles from Neil Stephenson's fascinating (though massively flawed on several levels) novel The Diamond Age. Phyles are cultural groupings powerful enough to largely replace nation-states. Despite being in an ostensibly post-national era, the Phyles largely break down on old lines (China, India, Japan), with some throwbacks like Maoists or Stephenson's BFFs, the Neo-Victorians.

Naturally enough, the actual workings of the phyles are largely in the background (this is a novel, after all, not a social treatise, and is usually awful when it stumbles in that direction), but as shorthand for "socioeconomic group that could supplant aspects of nations" it's useful for the following thought exercise.

How would a phyle actually work?

Is generational identity dead?

Forget this crap. (Also, if someone knows the photographer for this one, tell me)

Something interesting emerged in this discussion over at NSFWCorp about millenials' generational identity (it's locked for subscribers, but it's also $3 a month, so you should totally remedy that). 

Simply put, with a few notable exceptions — socially liberal, used to the internet, economically precarious — I feel largely removed from the popular story about millenials that's developed. No one in my social circle lives with their parents. They all have a ridiculous work ethic and pull long hours at whatever jobs they can find. Rather than delusionally entitled, they're realistic to the point of bleak cynicism.

All generational identities are massive generalizations to begin with, riddled with exceptions. But something has shifted, perhaps to the point where a Baby Boomer-style common culture is impossible.

Previous sweeping "generations" — the Lost, the Greatest, the Silent, the Boomers — came of age in eras of less inequality, broader social institutions, and a more cohesive mass media. Today, generational identity as we know it is probably dead.

This isn't to say that almost everyone 18-30 isn't shaped by some similar experiences, but it's easier to have a common perspective when there are three television channels, a tycoon's son still has to go for a draft physical, or when the entire country goes to war. That world is gone.

Hell, in 1930 12 percent of American men were part of the Freemasons; it's impossible to imagine any single organization today commanding that kind of influence.

Instead, the media environment keeps fragmenting, meaning parts of the same age group are exposed to widely varying cultures depending on their own interests. The increasing class divide further segregates the scions of the better-off into their own universes. The wealthy have always led different lives, of course, but the chasm has widened to the point their young are divorced from the experiences of others.

I've hoped for a strong millenial identity, partly as a counter to the get-thee-to-a-fracking field scoldings we often receive. But maybe the landscape is far too fragmented now for that to ever occur. The cultures that emerge won't have a common identity in any but the broadest sense.

Instead, they will be different shards, adapting to the world facing them in a thousand ways, or heading to hell purely by their own compass.

Cash isn't going to disappear

Cash isn't going to disappear. Not now. Not as electronic currencies get more advanced. Not when your mother starts using Bitcoin. Human beings will continue to use currency for a long, long damn time to come.

There are simply too many niches in an economy that using physical, anonymous objects to represent economic value fills for it to fade entirely. 

I bring this up because every once in awhile someone suggests that cash is on the way out, or outright encourages it. With Bitcoins' recent price surge, even as governments look at ways to regulate those that use it, there's more talk about how close we are to a cyberpunk cashless society.

Yes, potentially, if enough large sectors of the economy agreed all at once, the transition could go a long way to squeezing cash out in favor of say, Bitcoin or one of its eventual descendants.

But realistically companies start accepting Bitcoins out of convenience, and will accept their regulation for the same reason: no one wants to be the sacrificial lamb to the government. If you don't believe me, ask Wikileaks who won after national governments started leaning on the companies it relied upon.

Even as anonymous online currencies become more advanced (and potentially more appealing to some sectors of the grey market), hard cash occupies too much of an easy route to fade entirely.

Put it this way: it takes serious, ongoing technological innovation to try and keep an electronic currency one step ahead of the state, while it take serious, ongoing resources from governments just to feebly track the existing under-the-table cash markets. They're probably not in too big a hurry to turn over every stone, either, as the black market helped bail out the legal one during the last financial crisis.

It's hard to beat the basic fact that you can hand a wad of faded paper to someone and they'll give you something in return. Hell, if you really want to get innovative, you can even use dish detergent.

Fighting for the ashes: Individuals tending towards savagery

Damn. That took way too long, readers, and you have my apologies. I've been embroiled in freelance and day job projects, and the Breaking Time has been neglected in the process. So let's start our return properly, with this piece from Damien Williams on the latest manifestation of the urge to smash everything.

The aftermath of an Aug. 8, 2011 attack that wounded two professors at Monterey Tec. Individuals Tending Towards Savagery claimed responsibility. Their statement, if you can bear to read it, is translated here.

I've spent the last few months trying to lay the groundwork for a better world. That's a bit pompous. What I've really been doing is sitting around writing about the philosophical problems of cybernetics and cyborging, and relating them to various television shows, because I firmly believe that people can be made to see more than the potential terror of technology if they can see it in entertainment and then made to think about it.

So the real world comes along to remind me what I'm actually up against, out here: The Group known as "Individuals Tending Toward Savagery" (and isn't that just a fantastically uplifting, human-centric name?) has claimed responsibility for the 2011 shooting death of Dr Ernesto Méndez, a leader in the field of biotechnology, and they've promised more of the same, and worse, for any nano- or biotech experts who continue to do work in the field.

All of this death and terror to try to prevent the fabled Grey Goo Scenario which has been inimical to nanotechnology since it became known to the public imagination. Now, the nature of these "anarchists" seems to more be one of posturing and half-tactics, rather than what many would claim a "credible threat"-- their claims of responsibility are spotty, while their threats are many and varied-- but that doesn't mean they aren't stepping up their game.

And for what? To scare people into a Luddite fear of technological advancement? To act as a reactionary, loom-smashing gestapo- boogeyman? What's gained by this? What in these tactics and aims makes this world a better place?

I'm reminded of Warren Ellis' Global Frequency, and the story "Detonation." In it, a terrorist group (caveat: terrorists are not necessarily anarchists, nor vice versa) called the Red Right Hand seeks to devolve the world into a state of constant war, because the leader believes that it is only when we're at war that we reach our full potential. Or some utter bollocks like that.

You see, that line of thinking makes a valid argument. That is, if its premises were true, then its conclusion would necessarily follow. But what people always forget about the difference between validity and soundness is that validity doesn't make the premises true. "All aliens are secretly Jewish people and every Jewish person has a personal golem with them at all times. This is why I demand to see the Area 51 Records of the two golems recovered in the New Mexico desert in 1947." That is, technically, a perfectly valid argument. And also something I just made up, right now.

My point is this: what is it about smashing looms that makes people think we'll be better off? What is it about pure destruction that people tend to prefer to the work of creating and destroying, at the same time? Is it just that change is scary? Because, let me tell you, we've known that for about 10,000 years, so it's not exactly a startling revelation.

I only ask because it seems like the far better option would be to try to learn and understand as much about technology as possible, and then take all that loom-smashy energy and put it toward grassroots education of the wider culture. Make the real dangers and real benefits known to the whole world, and teach people how to not just blindly react to new tech.

Because this is a blind reaction. This is just fear on more fear on more fear. I don't see the world being better after this, I see it being more terrified. What's the point of that?

When Amazon uses fascists

...with having rights

Well this is interesting:

Amazon is at the centre of a deepening scandal in Germany as the online shopping giant faced claims that it employed security guards with neo-Nazi connections to intimidate its foreign workers.

Germany’s ARD television channel made the allegations in a documentary about Amazon’s treatment of more than 5,000 temporary staff from across Europe to work at its German packing and distribution centres.

The film showed omnipresent guards from a company named HESS Security wearing black uniforms, boots and with military haircuts. They were employed to keep order at hostels and budget hotels where foreign workers stayed. “Many of the workers are afraid,” the programme-makers said.

The documentary provided photographic evidence showing that guards regularly searched the bedrooms and kitchens of foreign staff. “They tell us they are the police here,” a Spanish woman complained. Workers were  allegedly frisked to check they had not walked away with breakfast rolls.

This is one of the big problems with viewing companies — any sort of companies — as the potential heralds of a better future: they're essentially amoral entities. Their job isn't to make the world better, it's to do a task in a way that makes them a lot of money. The bigger the company and the longer it endures, the more this is the case. All Steve Jobs' ideals didn't prevent Apple from using Chinese companies so hellish their workers committed suicide in droves.

I've made this point before, but it's worth repeating, because it's what I find most disturbing about the reverence Silicon Valley sometimes receives. It's not that tech companies don't make some really useful things, but their core purpose is entirely venal. "Don't be evil" and "think different" are nice, but expendable. If keeping the cheap labor in line requires hiring fascists, then so be it.

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.

Open Notes: Tech giants, North Korea, and convenient dystopias

Your next iPhone, made in sunny North Korea

• Google Exec Eric Schmidt recently returned from North Korea. While ostensibly a humanitarian and diplomatic mission, it's hard not to see in the wary welcomes for Kim Jong-Un's "knowledge-based economy" and the broaching of an end to sanctions as the beginning of North Korea becoming a China-style source of cheap labor for the tech industry. In fact, it's already being discussed.

• It's not that tech companies can't make good money if they pay their workers well and don't use Dickensian sweat shops; plenty do. But to make really whopping Apple-level amounts of cash requires really cheap labor, and that's easier in places where people are desperate and don't have any political power. Hence FoxConn.

• China's getting more prosperous and more restive, so the cost of doing business there might well go up, especially given growing labor unrest. Sooner, rather than later, escape hatches will be needed.

• The extreme irony of Stalinist states and the chic business sector finding that they need each other.

• Google's little-discussed yellow badge workers. While hardly laboring under North Korean conditions, it definitely points to a willingness to have an underclass even closer to home. Companies, whatever the ideals of their founders, are a structure set up for making money, and over time everything else becomes secondary.

• Combined with the slow collapse of the social safety net and real wages, give these trends a few decades and you could see more tech companies having large numbers low-wage employees closer to home, especially as the original founders age and they become more established institutions.

• William Gibson's line about the future not being evenly distributed applies to the future's nightmares as well (ask a Somali). It turns out the shining tech-fueled tomorrow might not just coexist with industrial dystopia, but require it.

Aaron Swartz

Aaron Swartz at an anti-SOPA protest. Photo by Daniel J. Sieradski/Creative Commons.

By now, I have no doubt my readers know about the tragic suicide of online pioneer and activist Aaron Swartz. The news felt like a punch in the gut; Swartz embodied so many of the finest strengths of our generation. There have been personal remembrances, calls to action, and deserved condemnations. There's not much more I can say.

So I'll leave it at this:

This man was facing over three fucking decades in prison for downloading academic articles. Articles paid for with the public's money but, like a huge chunk of legal cases, aren't available to the public. I have dealt with the justice system for years, and I have seen rapists, murderers, and corrupt public officials who didn't get the book thrown at them half that damn much.

This witch hunt was perpetrated in defense of a body of law that primarily protects those who do nothing, make nothing, contribute nothing, improve nothing, and are, in the end, nothing. The worst part was that it ruined someone who was the living opposite of that, before he even had the chance to defend himself in a trial.

That's wrong. It is the essence of wrong. Some things deserve to be broken, and everything that made this possible should be destined for the goddamn scrap heap.

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.

Farewell Coilhouse (and may it rise again)

Coilhouse commanders Nadya Lev and Meredith Yayanos. Image by Star St. Germain.

Last Wednesday, Coilhouse, "a love letter to alternative culture" magazine and blog near to my heart, announced an indefinite hiatus. Nadya Lev and Meredith Yayanos have both been struggling with health issues and "in its current form, Coilhouse is not financially solvent."

Yeah, I teared up.

For five years the Coilhouse crew produced one of the most beautiful, unique creations to grace the ever-evolving media landscape. If you're interested in alternative culture or simply love good writing, check out some of their greatest hits. There's a few of my pieces in there, along with a lot of incredible writers grappling just about every subject under the sun. Their amazing print issues are also available as free pdfs.

Up to their last day, Coilhouse intelligently tackled issues like misogyny in industrial music, race in the gothic subculture and fashion as identity.

My final piece, a personal take on alt culture's relentless spirit ended up being the last before their farewell, something for which I'm honored beyond words. 

Coilhouse gave me a chance when I'd not had much published outside of local reporting. They were willing to say things like "hell yeah we'll give you a column on deviant sci-fi!" which, believe me, is not something a writer hears very often. They pushed me hard, with honesty and respect, to expand my perspective while improving my craft. I was far from the only one.

Thank you, Nadya, Mer, and everyone else involved. You've already made the world a better place. I thank Coilhouse for how it's helped all of us who came in contact with it, and I look forward to its revival.

Until then, 

David Forbes