from among the R-U-IN?S:

When developers of digital technologies design a program that requires you to interact with a computer as if it were a person, they ask you to accept in some corner of your brain that you might also be conceived of as a program. When they design an internet service that is edited by a vast anonymous crowd, they are suggesting that a random crowd of humans is an organism with a legitimate point of view.

Lanier, Jaron. You are not a gadget: a manifesto. Knopf, 2010. 7. eBook.

Well, exactly.  Instead of only “seek[ing]to inspire the phenomenon of individual intelligence,” as Lanier argues, the data-driven, aggregated Web should keep doing what it’s doing: giving us an antidote to the notion of a fixed and individual identity that’s been so prevalent in the West for so long.  By pointing out that crowds can be wise, that machines can communicate, and that decisions can emerge in the absence of an executive, the Web doesn’t diminish our identity; rather, it points out that that identity was never actually there to begin with, and that the points of view we hold so dear aren’t the product of an individual, but the product of an ever-shifting aggregate of 100+ billion neurons, each continually interacting with between 100 and 10,000 other neurons in ways both patterned and random. The point is, there are legitimate points of view outside the Enlightenment notion of the individual human—in fact, I would argue that the notion of self as aggregate, permeable, interconnected, and inessential is actually more humanistic than the Self-ish view, in that it is more likely to keep us from destroying ourselves and the planet we live on.

Manifest that, Mother hubbard.

The UK website If You Could is the project of design firm HudsonBec and asks this question: if you could do anything tomorrow, what would it be?  This week’s print series answers the question with wonderful prints from Rob Ryan and Jason Munn.

If You Could : Print Series : August 2008

Stone Age embrace: A remarkable triple burial -- containing a woman and two children who were 5 (left) and 8 years old, their limbs entwined -- was discovered at the Gobero site during the 2006 field season. Pollen clusters found in the sand indicated the three had been buried on top of flowers. The skeletons showed no sign of injury and had been ceremonially posed and buried, along with four arrowheads. The image appears in the September 2008 National Geographic. (Credit: Mike Hettwer (c) 2008 National Geographic)

This morning I’ve been reading stories in the  New York Times,  Science Daily, and National Geographic, all based on the findings of Paul Serno and his colleagues and presented in a paper on PLos ONE.  They tell of people who lived and died in the Sahara when the Sahara wasn’t dry, and the articles gave me that awe-filled, castles-in-the-air feeling that was so much more common in childhood, when the whole arc of human history seemed to whoosh up and past like a train.

Says John Nobel Wilford in the Times article:

A girl was buried wearing a bracelet carved from a hippo tusk. A man was seated on the carapace of a turtle.

And in the photo above, two children reach out to their mother for thousands of years.

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Whoosh.

“…it preserves a small zone for the playful, the useless, and the unauthorized.”

–Matt Greenfield, writing in The Valve about Ramsey Scott’s “Even the Hardy Boys Need Friends: An Epistolary Essay on Boredom.”

The quote above refers to Wayne Koestenbaum’s practice of assigning his grad students a two-page “lyric essay” each week in lieu of a final paper. This was common practice in my own graduate program at New School University, where I studied under people like David Lehman, Laurie Sheck, David Trinidad, and Susan Wheeler.  I remember that one of the “essays” took the form of a collage about Wordsworth poem.

But I fear it was my own common practice through my whole education, even when more traditional essays were warranted.  For better or worse, I could never figure out how to obey without also resisting.

Some experts say that people tune things out for good reasons, and that over time boredom becomes a tool for sorting information — an increasingly sensitive spam filter. In various fields including neuroscience and education, research suggests that falling into a numbed trance allows the brain to recast the outside world in ways that can be productive and creative at least as often as they are disruptive.

BENEDICT CAREY, “You’re Checked Out, but Your Brain Is Tuned In,” nytimes.com, 8/5/2008