"It occurs to me that the artist’s role is, essentially, only
this: to communicate a distinct impression of overabundance. No matter how long a life you’re given, no matter how storied your many creations, you must
show how much, inexorably, you will leave undone. The true artist: not one who accomplishes but one who begins." --Private Papers
Exhibit 1.6
"Something darkly shimmering guided him, and it was everywhere, and in secret it caused all
things to seep together, and it belied the stringent solidity of maps." --Private Papers
Exhibit 1.5
"He felt that he had no life to lose. He was no proper self
and therefore no proper death, symbolical or actual, could await. He’d let slip
somewhere, or had had torn from him, the I of identity. He was a blowing dust
that got in under doors." --Private Papers
Exhibit 1.4
"What is fame, what is posterity, compared to the secret
irrevocable glory of having had one’s work?" --Private Papers
Exhibit 1.3
"Still, always, even in the quiet of your room you face the
onslaught. Endlessly you work to clear your vision against the day’s
overcrowding. You seek a single sheer coherent narrative of thought, the
prolonged extension of a tone amid the broken broadcast noises, antic and
ever-changing. You school yourself in history. You labor to remember:
underlying the current complexity is woeful oversimplification. Meanwhile you
will know the truth by the serene simplicity of its surface."--Private Papers
Exhibit 1.2
"Always, everything we see challenges us to understand. The
extent to which we take up the challenge by our own wits and without resorting
to prior interpretations is the extent to which we escape oppression."
--Private Papers
Exhibit 1.1
"PREMISE:
1. Neuroplasticity & the social circuitry of the Network are analagous phenomena.
2. The Network has become in a real sense the societal brain.
3. The science of neuroplasticity holds that the individual can change his/her own behavior & thus consciously reshape the cellular function of his/her brain for the better. This however is not easy once deleterious behavior has become ingrained (foreshortened attention spans, etc.).
4. Changing ingrained societal behaviors -- as in working to shape the societal brain as it manifests through the Network -- is magnitudinally harder than the already hard task of changing individual behavior.
5. This is the moral of much dystopian literature.
6. If one is concerned about the ways the Network & related digital technologies are changing individual & societal brain function; if one feels, intuitively, the value in questioning such qualitative change; if one sees the benefits of skepticism & caution when confronted with the utopian claims of the technocracy, then one may try -- as an individual wholly capable of modifying his/her own behavior -- to resist.
PROPOSAL:
7. I, a single neuron in the societal brain, refuse to be rewired.
8. I dread & resist the digital 'renaissance,' the effects of which are: disempowerment of the individual, fragmentation, reductivism, algorithmical & statistical hegemony, total corporate conquest, the annihilation of privacy, the supremacy of advertising, the wholesale dependency on seductive machines, the furtherance of the new despotism & of tyrannical organizations, etc. etc."
--Private Papers
1. Neuroplasticity & the social circuitry of the Network are analagous phenomena.
2. The Network has become in a real sense the societal brain.
3. The science of neuroplasticity holds that the individual can change his/her own behavior & thus consciously reshape the cellular function of his/her brain for the better. This however is not easy once deleterious behavior has become ingrained (foreshortened attention spans, etc.).
4. Changing ingrained societal behaviors -- as in working to shape the societal brain as it manifests through the Network -- is magnitudinally harder than the already hard task of changing individual behavior.
5. This is the moral of much dystopian literature.
6. If one is concerned about the ways the Network & related digital technologies are changing individual & societal brain function; if one feels, intuitively, the value in questioning such qualitative change; if one sees the benefits of skepticism & caution when confronted with the utopian claims of the technocracy, then one may try -- as an individual wholly capable of modifying his/her own behavior -- to resist.
PROPOSAL:
7. I, a single neuron in the societal brain, refuse to be rewired.
8. I dread & resist the digital 'renaissance,' the effects of which are: disempowerment of the individual, fragmentation, reductivism, algorithmical & statistical hegemony, total corporate conquest, the annihilation of privacy, the supremacy of advertising, the wholesale dependency on seductive machines, the furtherance of the new despotism & of tyrannical organizations, etc. etc."
--Private Papers
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