In The Embrace Of The Ledger: Art On The Blockchain

We've been hearing that the future of music is streaming. This may be so, it certainly looks that way. A future in which music is streamed and not owned looks to be here, but its current mode of delivery through central services that operate with heavy costs, from licensing to data storage to bandwidth is an animal that feeds off venture capital and music creators with a voracious appetite and has yet to prove profitable. Anyone who doesn't limit their listening habits to the Disney assembly line of future nervous breakdowns has been witness to much hand-wringing, rending of teeth and gnashing of garments or sommat over the economics of culture creation dissipating like a fog in the mid-day sun.

Observing the tense negotiations between indie labels and aggregators with Youtube, Pandora and Spotify many issues were brought up like a bad breakfast and chewed like a bitter, ever-repeating cud that couldn't be spat out. Politicians were lobbied, Youtube has yet to unveil their music subscription service and labels joined the streaming bandwagon, withdrew their releases from streaming and few of us would be surprised to see our finest artists show up as our roofer's apprentice or begging change downtown.

In the current mode of business there is no way artists could ever get a fair share of revenues created through music unless they have a proportionate ownership in all the companies involved. I had thoughts that perhaps what little cash we artists bring in should go directly into stock in Apple and Amazon, or establishing funds that invest in not-yet-public streaming startups to get a cut of the middle man's always disproportionate share of the still enormous amount of capital flow generated by music. Maybe one thing that prevents this is what music careers and startup tech companies have in common: the high early mortality rate of music careers and tech startups. You're taking the small gains from one high-risk endeavor and placing a bet on an uncertain proposition in another. But from the point of view of the middle men, maybe giving artists an equity stake would be a better position to negotiate lower rates. This would be a reversal of capitalist practice, though, for the hands that got dirty making the widgets have always gotten the smallest share of the value generated. And one may ask if what could happen to a successful cabal of small to mid-sized labels with ownership in delivery infrastructure be but another hegemonic gatekeeper.

Human Demonology: Your Creative Impulse

Life emerges from arrangements of matter and chemistry through a process that can't be traced from the properties of the physical component parts it inhabits. A similar phenomenon is the kind of artist who changes culture and how a society sees itself. This artist emerges from a complex of education, organization, rule enforcement and millions of points of sensory input. What is thrown at an individual for the sake of socialization is a set of base materials that may to some extent be woven into the body of this artist's work, but the living quality of expression arises as a new state that could not be calculated or predicted as a combination of this input. This impulse for creation and mutating the consciousness of humanity is like another layer of the chaos that expresses itself in the property that animates and mutates matter. This is a force so unstoppable that every jurisdictional, organizational and mode of indoctrination and application of force is ultimately put in place to keep it at bay. Alpha humans of every age in positions that can decide the fate of nations, whether they got there through action or accident, have a compulsive need to have things arranged as they want them and to envelop humanity in cryogenic deep freeze when they succeed in imposing their ideal.

With a certain density of human population on a planet, only so much freedom is possible. In fact, most people in recorded history have lived under terrible oppression. It is a part of modern western mythology that growing freedom is destiny, but it is taken  or scammed away so easily, that one might wonder if human tendency is in the opposite direction. Most things can be controlled in society and in a majority of individuals with little directive energy once set in motion, but the creative impulse can't ever be completely eradicated, and it doesn't take a huge endeavour to upset the whole arrangement. If this impulse is channelled less through culture and custom it comes out in twisted forms, commonly the SNAFU principle.

The Hyperloop is Elon Musk's Ticket to Olympus

    Okay, so, full disclosure: I really, really wish I was Elon Musk. I wish I was Elon Musk because the thing I spend the most time wondering about, out of all the things I spend time wondering about, is what the mass of ordinary human beings must look like to a person who is operating on a greater-than-global scale. I wonder about the kinds of questions you start asking yourself when you no longer have to ask "how am I going to pay all these bills?" I wonder what qualities a person has to possess to get to that rarefied zone. When Elon Musk crawls out of his diamond pit in the morning and hops aboard his private robo-pegasus to glide to work, do the blurry little dots scurrying along the streets below him look like people?

    Why am I asking these questions? Because Elon Musk just issued a challenge to the entire State of California, and I'm trying to fathom the endgame.

Human Demonology: Occupy Daath, or The Missing Protagonist

Satan Inc.

We may have reached a point where no choice or action can lead anywhere but mayhem, genocide and ecological apocalypse.

Why not buy from a big-box, low-rent retailer and fund human trafficking and forced labor? To get billions from point A to point B without resorting to walking or biking requires accepting environmental devastation, endless war and propping up dictatorial regimes. Mountains of Appalachia are leveled to provide the energy I'm using to power the laptop on which I write this. You are able to get online and read this because legal and moral crimes were committed. At the same time, behind all these things that make the way we live possible are the best efforts and innovations of millions of good people who do much to make life on earth better. Everyone drinks deeply from the same pool of atrocities. The picture all this makes varies with every map drawn of the territory. What the individual sees of their own self depends on which map they locate the “you are here” point. There is no master patter that can be laid over the landscape that can capture every aspect of the territory.

Bottom line, it is all myth in both the pejorative and philosophical sense.

Oftentimes, when trying to uncover the mythological underpinnings of our culture, the emphasis is on narrative and where character comes in. Attention can often concern itself on the question of from what protagonists and villains are made and how to make the greatest number identify with the one intended to represent the desirable behavior and thoughts. Entertainment "news", which has adapted so well to the web holds up the people in the creative industries behind whom the most cash has been spent. Reality shows and talent competitions perpetuate that hoary old Hollywood trope of the person in the street being discovered and plucked from obscurity. Cop shows with their tortured and earnest protagonists, the characters sketched out in most detail. The criminals get the most compelling and dramatic interactions with the intrepid heroes. The officials from higher up the law enforcement may be foils to "lone wolf" officers a la Dirty Harry, or the entire system could be represented as an occasionally squabbling, but unified family united against the criminals and the press, as in the original Law & Order and its myriad spinoffs. Generally, the victims, who represent neither law breakers nor law enforcement are props to kick off the plot so the real drama can proceed. This last group is where we find most of the population, helpless, at the mercy to the fates but for the authorities and their weapons and surveillance capabilities.

...the Cop Show has only three characters--victim, criminal, and policeperson--but the first two fail to be fully human--only the pig is real. Oddly enough, human society in the eighties (as seen in the other media) sometimes appeared to consist of the same three cliche/archetypes. First the victims, the whining minorities bitching about "rights"--and who pray tell did not belong to a "minority" in the eighties? Shit, even cops complained about their "rights" being abused. Then the criminals: largely non-white (despite the obligatory & hallucinatory "integration" of the media), largely poor (or else obscenely rich, hence even more alien), largely perverse (i.e. the forbidden mirrors of "our" desires). - Hakim Bey – Boycott Cop Culture 

The Myth of Work vs The Reality of Abuse

How surprised would you be if Cthulu awoke tomorrow?
I'm not sure I'd be very surprised, at this point.

By James Curcio

In the wake of yet another collosal political and social disappointment, I'd like to touch on an issue which, frankly, could be the topic of a book. And it's a book that, if it hasn't been written already, should be written. It needs to be written, and more importantly, it needs to be talked about.

Every culture has myths about work. What is acceptable for an employee or employer, what the nature of that relationship should be. It is in the benefit of the employer to have myths throughout the workforce that tie their very identity and sense of self worth into how well they meet that employers demands, and if there aren't forces in place, either enforced through government oversight or the unionization of the workers in some configuration, these myths can run rampant. There is, after all, a word in Japanese for working one's self to death. (They also apparently have a word for eating one's self to ruin. But that's another story.) 

Elements of our religions provide the infrastructure for these myths. They are further re-enforced by our social institutions, our education in many cases being little more than a tool for shaping people into effective workers as defined by the mandates of society.

This process is not inherently good or bad. As I said in the chapter on initiation in The Immanence of Myth, the prescriptive nature of indoctrination may sound ominous, but many of us know what humans become when left to be feral creatures. They can hardly be called human, at all. 

However, this process can still break down in any number of ways. And I believe many of you will agree, it has broken down in a fundamental way in the United States, and it is getting worse.

There was an article in Mother Jones entitled "All Work And No Pay" that I suggest you read immediately, before continuing with this piece. 

Mutual Best Interest, Cooperation and Survival

By James Curcio

I posted the following to my facebook recently, and it got a fair amount of thumbs-up around the fishbowl:

The myth of "everyone for themselves" will get you killed in the years that are coming. Learn to work together and be committed to your team. Corporations, major political groups give us no umbrage, so fuck them. Find trustworthy people. Be trustworthy. That's all I've got.

I'd like to explain what I meant a little more, but first I need to take a step back.

As we have explored time and again on this site, as well in the forthcoming book The Immanence of Myth: we live by our myths. They compound one upon the other, build up, not so much in direct heirarchies as in striated patterns. They are chaotic, intertwined and tangled, and can be hard to look at one at a time.

Still, we try.

There is one that has been especially present to my mind of late. I talk about it tangentially in my introductory post on gaming, but there are many other angles to look at.

This is the idea of "everyone for themselves," as it contrasts myths of cooperation. The myth is connected to pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps, of the objectivist self-determination of Rand, of separation of bodies and minds, and to hell with government oversight and regulations, free markets will sort themselves out.

You see how these tangle. You can find yourself feeling very strongly that the government should keep out of our lives, and at the same time believe in cooperation as central to survival, over and above competition. We contradict ourselves. We contradict one another, and we mean different things when we use the same words. This part of the discussion could take me far afield of what I actually want to explore, I hope you can see my point without devolving into the part-line arguments between democrat, socialist, republican and libertarian.

Instead, read this wiki article if you'd rather see where I'm going with this, but remember what I said: myths are not just theoretical. Because these myths are not abstract theories, they determine how we treat one another, how we behave, how we live. What we value.

Of particular interest to our inquiry is this:

When Richard Dawkins set out to "examine the biology of selfishness and altruism" in The Selfish Gene, he reinterpreted the basis of evolution, and therefore of altruism. He was "not advocating a morality based on evolution",[65] and even felt that "we must teach our children altruism, for we cannot expect it to be part of their biological nature."[66]But John Maynard Smith[67] was showing that behavior could be subject to evolution, Robert Trivers had shown that reciprocal altruism is strongly favored by natural selection to lead to complex systems of altruistic behavior (supporting Kropotkin's argument that cooperation is as much a factor of evolution as competition[68]), and Axelrod's dramatic results showed that in a very simple game the conditions for survival (be "nice", be provocable, promote the mutual interest) seem to be the essence of morality. While this does not yet amount to a science of morality, the game theoretic approach has clarified the conditions required for the evolution and persistence of cooperation, and shown how Darwinian natural selection can lead to complex behavior, including notions of morality, fairness, and justice. It is shown that the nature of self-interest is more profound than previously considered, and that behavior that seems altruistic may, in a broader view, be individually beneficial. Extensions of this work to morality[69] and the social contract[70] may yet resolve the old issue of individual interests versus group interests.

Cooperation may be best motivated when it is personally motivated and of personal benefit, but this does not mean that putting the group above ones self in certain cases is not of greater long-term personal benefit.

When we live by the myth of "everyone for themselves," in a society that supports this belief, we feel self-entitled when we do well, and we feel guilty when we do not. It was, in this mindset, strictly our fault if we didn't succeed by our rules, and maybe if we just thought more positively it would all get better. The whole world rests on our shoulders.



As I look around me and see friends and acquaintances lose jobs, go unemployed for long periods, lose their homes, drop off the grid altogether, I also see groups of us attempting to band together, dropping the "Jersey Shore bullshit," and helping each other. Whatever it takes to help each other survive and succeed. I too have been struggling - not to keep productive, that has never been hard for me - but to find a way of monetizing all the values I produce which seem to almost be in direct contradiction to the "values" espoused by hard-line capitalism. And I have found that the only way I am going to survive is by finding people that I can count on, and through people maximizing one another's strengths and mutually minimizing our weaknesses.

It's easy to make this sound like theory. I've been talking about this for years now, with friends and collaborators, and have seen I guess you could call them "test groups" splinter and fall apart because there wasn't enough external conflict to distract from the production of internal conflict.

When there is an identified "external threat" it is easier for people to band together against it, to identify and align their behavior through mutually beneficial patterns because the alternative is anathema to self preservation. So, without that, groups often turn into as I've called "Jersey Shore bullshit." Even when the people involved are otherwise smart. Then it just becomes pedantic Jersey Shore bullshit.

From the perspective of drama - all drama is conflict, and you can't have a story without drama. But in terms of our lives, in theory, many of us would probably like to mitigate conflict as much as possible. I think, however, that the truth is that many people manufacture conflict in the form of drama when natural conflict doesn't already arise. I think this is something that can be undone, I don't think it has to be that way, but I've seen it plenty. Bored people have plenty of drama in their lives, even if precious little genuine conflict. So - as the famous Chinese curse says - may you live in interesting times.

We've always known that narrative depends on conflict. You can't tell a story without an internal or external conflict. Maybe it isn't only true in fiction. Maybe we do thrive on conflict.

But I think - I hope I'm wrong - but I think that class stratification, tensions from increasing pressures driven by corporate owned resources, etc etc (see this article) in coming decades invariably leads to a place where the disenfranchised, otherwise well-intentioned individual can't help but become some form of "outlaw." We need cells, safe-houses, methods for the production and securement of goods and value to some extent excluded from corporate control. This is an incredible undertaking, one which most of us are in no way prepared for.

But parenthood is also a tremendous undertaking which most are not prepared for. We may have to learn as we go or die trying.

If we're going to see a return to tribalism in some sense as a survival technical (as it's always been for humans), I don't know about you, but I want someone I can trust on my 6. We have to drop the "everyone for themselves" bullshit to the extent that we realize that our best chances of survival are not alone. Humans have always banded together to survive.

To reiterate what I said: be trustworthy. Find those you can trust. That's all I've got.


Pre-order a copy of The Immanence of Myth, published by Weaponized in July 2011. (Or sign up to be notified of its release on Amazon.com)

Capitalism Five Ways

I'm not normally inclined to use this site just to point people's attention to something without providing some extensive unique commentary. However, I think this content stands on its own and is worth checking out:

(Capitalism Five Ways) 
Pre-order a copy of The Immanence of Myth, published by Weaponized in July 2011.

Sacred Christmas, and Disembowelment

(photographer site)

I generally try to stay out of commentary about Holidays. But you know, I'm going to. Some thoughts, as creatures stir all throughout the house...

I think it's fair to say that, for most people who would frequent this blog anyway, there is an evident divorce between anything resembling the sacred, and the experience that we have of Christmas. Hopefully, many of us can incorporate the idea of intentional family - the people you live for and would likely die for, or togetherness, into whatever it is that we do. (Why this isn't part of our day to day experience rather than something we only intend on a few days of the year is beyond me, and also beyond the scope of a little rambling blog post.)

What is Christmas for many people that I know?

Swig as much alcohol as you imagine you can stomach, and waddle through an awkward mine-field of hazily recalled, distant relatives.

What else is it?

Being dragged to Sunday mass in the freezing cold. The service, aside from its rare moments of beauty -- usually provided by the music, if the choir isn't cringingly awful -- being something to be silently endured. (Personally, I usually find myself fantasizing about having sex on the pews as part of some sort of joyful, unintentionally sacrilegious orgy. Choir girls -- with ID -- angels, whatever. Hey, it passes the time.)

And let's not ask what it is for the people in the photo to the left. That just stopped my reverie cold in its tracks, and replaced it with a desperate need for about a 5th of scotch. Moving on...

It is possible that some might actually maintain a handhold on the sacchirine myth of a perfect world of sugar plums (the fuck are sugar plums?) and eagerly anticipated presents, parents that never fight, and a fluffy Christmas tree that magically floated in the window without puncturing a thousand holes in daddy's clumsy hands. Obviously the damn thing also wasn't carrying a host of slumbering insects and a family of enraged squirrels. Kids don't scream, snow doesn't melt, and Mommy's drinking isn't eating its way through her liver.

Fuck. Obviously I have my own biases based on personal experience. No way I know what the holiday is for several million people.

This much I do know: it doesn't have anything to do with the sacred. The clamboring of the marketplace scares away the sacred, the sense of time which holidays attempt to re-connect us with. In their most traditional sense, cultural rules and chronological time is cast aside in lieu of primal, universal forces and sacred time.

This is an idea explored elegantly by Eliade in the Sacred and the Profane. Let me give a kind of Jungian reading of this idea, because it's quick and to the point. If we imagine the orbit of the Earth around the Sun as the psychological circle that all of us live in relation to, then the element of the sacred which is meant to permeate holidays originates from that supposedly fixed center-- the transcendent, the Sun. Of course, in the material world, the Sun is hurtling through space as well. But metaphors have never needed the agreement of empirical fact to have psychological impact.

There is a lot more I could say about the co-opting of holidays by political and cultural ideology-- the forces of consumerism and corporatism hiding behind the benevolent masks of smiling St. Nick having the most sway in this case.  But, instead, I'd like to show just a taste of some of the more horrifying beings lurking behind that mask, elsewhere in history and our imaginations.

I've been doing a bit of research today as I return to the text of Nyssa as Jenx and Vika do their things with the first round of photographs. I don't want to give up why it's relevant, but part of the research has led me to the Krampus, which I've written a little about here, and Perschta, his female counterpart. There is a really solid core idea of the psychological nature of winter in these two, Perschta, a swan goddess (or mythological being) of light, and at the same time, a horrifying figure that makes the Krampus look good natured.

All three of them: St. Nick, the Krampus, and Perschta are the same in this one way. All of them represent the darkest time of the year, a time when the fields lie fallow, when the unconscious gestates. Sounds pretty abstract, what it means is that there's a part of our conscious mind that wonders "What have I done well this past year? What can I do better in the future?" It wants to orient in relation to a larger picture of the self, and put us in accord with some kind of personal or cultural myth as a result.

The solstice is a passage from darkness back to light. And out of that can spring guilt. We need something else, a force both benevolent and terrible, to keep our sorry asses in line. Krampus charges out of the frigid night, howling, beating the christ out of women and children with sticks, and carrying the especially bad ones away. Perschta asks,"have you been weaving your flax little girl? Have you been good? Are you eating the awful gruel and fish that are to be consumed on my holiday?" If the answer is no, the poor children are disemboweled, and their insides are stuffed with straw and stones. So, you know. Don't fuck up.

And...Santa just gives you a bit of coal. For once Capitalism sees fit to work us with the carrot rather than the stick. If you're good, you get new toys that you can stuff full of firecrackers and blow up in the front lawn the next day. (Or maybe that was just me.)

Maybe something could be drawn from the relation between the much the kinder, gentler Coke-a-Cola Santa, Saint Nick, Christ and his mis-attributed birthday (if "he" had one at all), and these Pagan throwbacks from the Swiss Alps. It's late and I don't care enough at the moment. This much I know: Krampus and Frau Perschta would totally kick both Santa and Jesus' ass. That's for damn sure.

[Where is the fucking counterculture? Mythos Media.]

Myths of Capitalism (continued): The Inside Solution Fallacy

In the face of ecological and environmental challenges, which I don't think I need to enumerate here, I've often heard people make an assumption: at some point, they say, people will have to "wake up," and bring about some kind of change from the bottom up. I've even somewhat flippantly supported this premise, that if people "vote with their dollars" that, within the framework of capitalism, if the vote comes from a majority, it'll force a shift of priorities and may be the only way for a capitalist state to maintain cogency in the face of declining resources (material and human) that cannot support a never-ending increase in profits, even with the addition of technological advance in the mix. I even once wondered if this was an underlying element of the Obama administration, though in light of actions taken since he has taken office, I can only see it as a part of the narrative of the administration, rather than the reality- though this could be due to external political, economical, or social pressures.

Be that as it may, having spent many hours thinking about this, I've been wondering if the underlying premise is flawed. We may be able to generate cultural reform from within the system in the way that counterculture attempts- and more rarely, succeeds at doing. But this does not extend nearly so far as we'd like. Consider instead the idea that the ecological and economic pressures are already intensifying, the destratification is already underway, though we have a hard time seeing it because even rapid change in a historic sense may still seem slow to our eyes. What's the result of these pressures? Depression. Wild hope. Fear. Panic. In that order, the hoi polloi may become more pliable, not less. All of these things make people easier to manipulate, not less. We do see anger and outrage, embodied, for instance, by the exaggerated posturing of the Teabaggers, but it seems fairly impotent in terms of enacting the kind of change that would actually bring our culture back into alignment. The new slaves don't build pyramids, they work in Walmart and Mcdonalds. It is a mistake to assume that at some point mistreated, underpayed peasants will inevitably rise up in arms. For thousands of years civilizations such as the Egyptians build their empire on the back of a workforce living little better than their livestock. This has been, if anything, the norm rather than the exception over the past 3000 years.

We may also want to look at the history of the rise of Capitalism to understand the seed of its undoing:

Capitalism is a system that is committed to an unbounded increase in production in the name of an unbounded increase in profits. Production, however, cannot be increased in an unbounded way. Freed from the restraints of despots and paupers, capitalist entrepreneurs still have to confront the restraints of nature. The profitability of production cannot expand indefinitely. Any increase in the quantity of soil, water, minerals or plants put into  a particular production process per unit of time constitutes intensification. It has been the intention of this book to show that intensification inevitably leads to declining efficiencies. That declining efficiencies have adverse effects upon the average standard of living cannot be doubted. (Cannibals and Kings, Harris.) 

This follows from Harris' general thesis, that the processes of human history shows groups and even civilizations following a certain pattern of production which, if population is not kept in check through internal or external means, results in a forced movement to another method of production which often has a decreasing effect on the standard of living. In plentiful times, effective hunter gatherers have to put in far fewer hours per day than farmers, who have to invest their energies into the entire life cycle of the plants that they are harvesting, as well as deal with the repercussions of the strain that may put on the environment as population increases.

My point being that the argument that the ills that capitalism produces will inevitably outweigh the boons, and that it may be unlikely that a transition to a different method of production can occur from within that same system. If history has anything to say about this, it simply cannot. What history cannot show us is the results of production on the scale that it is presently in place, nor on the effects of globally intertwined civilizations and economies. But it may not be very hard to guess... it certain stands to reason that this is one of the reasons why the apocalypse myth has so forcefully become the zeitgeist of our age, even as capitalism tries to pull a profit out of that.

philosophy art and commerce

 There is a common misconception within the myths perpetuated by capitalistic culture, which claims that art and philosophy are useless endeavors – at best, a mental exercise, at worst, an activity for criminals and dilettantes. They forget that all of the great periods in human history, leaps of progress in terms of science, mathematics, and other disciplines that produce more "tangible" results, have occurred side-by-side with paradigm shifts in the arts and philosophy. It is impossible, and irrelevant, to definitively argue which came first. Art and philosophy, without trade, commerce, and application, is sterile and masturbatory. Similarly, trade and commerce is brutish and miopic when it isn’t applied with the sensibility that comes from in-depth philosophical and artistic debate. Both are crucial to cultural evolution, but only when applied together. This misconception is one of the dangers of prevalent capitalistic myths. It is possible that this misconception has actually further divorced these two currents, rendering art into the purely theoretical, a navel-gazing reflection upon itself. This in part came about through the hands of the art world itself, in the formation of the "art world," a world of happenings where nothing happens, of canvases painted white, and music performances where nothing is performed. Which is not to say that there has been no value produced, for instance, by John Cage's 4'33", but there can be little argument that this movement has unintentionally furthered the capitalist myth that art is purely masturbatory.
    What cannot be commodified cannot be useful, cannot be meaningful. In a Capitalistic society, the qualities of what cannot be quantified are irrelevant. Max Horkheimer deals with this in The Eclipse of Reason, for example:

"...the transformation of all products of human activity into commodities was achieved only with the emergence of industrialist society. The functions once performed by objective reason, by authoritarian religion, or by metaphysics have been taken over by the reifying mechanism of the anonymous economic apparatus. It is the price paid on the market that determines the salability of merchandise and thus the productiveness of a specific kind of labor. Activities are branded as senseless or superfluous, as luxuries, unless they are useful or, as in wartime, contribute to the maintenance and safeguarding of the general conditions under which industry can flourish. Productive work, manual or intellectual, has become respectable, indeed the only accepted way of spending one's life." (pg. 40)

    However, Horkeimer attributes this to the "subjective reason" which to his thinking performed a coupe d'etat of both so-called "objective reason," on the one hand, and the mythological impulse on the other. I would instead argue that this end result, which he is quite correct about, was not arrived at through the overthrow of objective reason, but it is instead its ultimate conclusion. It is the inevitable evolution of a specific mythology heritage, which gave birth to reason, which gave birth to the nation-state, which, through many other turn-abouts, gave birth to blind industry. Zeus consumed his own father, Kronos. That is not to say that he wasn't born by him. The same could be said of Horkheimer's objective and subjective reason, as presented in the Eclipse of Reason. No return to objective reason is possible: we are living in its aftermath. At the same time, it is arguable if it existed, save as an ideal, in the first place. Instead, the alternative can only come to life through the culture, embodied in the form of new art, and new myths.

Fragments on the history of Antimarkets / Capitalism

The theme of the past day for me seems to center around the history of capitalism. This has popped up in the several books I am muddling through (I mostly have time to read during my daily trolley/subway commute), and then this morning, while trying to wake me up, I happened upon an interesting article by Douglas Rushkoff that touches on the subject by way of discussing how our interests structure our discoveries and indeed the basis of what we consider real let alone valid. The point Rushkoff makes, and it's well made, is that scientists and mathematicians are biased to support the worldview of our economy as if its a given because thats how they make money- by showing how to game the system. However, that bias makes our economic system seem like universal, natural law. I would like to point out that this is not a bias exclusively unique to economics. Regardless, it creates a feedback loop between the "authorities" that re-enforce the system, and the people managing the system itself. Kind of an echo chamber.

There is some extent to which I let serendipity direct the progress of my research; books that people hand to me, things that I come upon online- all the information that we process is sorted based in part on the information we've already been exposed to, it predisposes us, as does our intentions at that time and a million other variables. There are several ways these tidbits fit into what I'm already working on, but I'll leave that for later.

On to these tidbits-

"Credit represented one more form of autocatalytic or turbulent dynamics that propelled preindustrial European cities ahead of their Eastern rivals, eventually enabling Europe to dominate the rest of the world. Credit (or, more exactly, compound interest) is an example of explosive, self-stimulated growth: money begetting money, a diabolical image that made many civilizations forbid usury. European merchants got around this prohibition through the use of the "bill of exchange," originally a means of long-distance payment (inherited from Islam); as
it circulated from fair to fiar its rate of return accrued usuriously. (This disguised form of usury was tolerated by church hierarchies use to the many risks of the circulation the bills of exchange involved.)

--1000 Years of Nonlinear History.

Then, from the Rushkoff article:

The economy in which we operate is not a natural system, but a set of rules developed in the Late Middle Ages in order to prevent the unchecked rise of a merchant class that was creating and exchanging value with impunity. This was what we might today call a peer-to-peer economy, and did not depend on central employers or even central currency.

People brought grain in from the fields, had it weighed at a grain store, and left with a receipt — usually stamped into a thin piece of foil. The foil could be torn into smaller pieces and used as currency in town. Each piece represented a specific amount of grain. The money was quite literally earned into existence — and the total amount in circulation reflected the abundance of the crop.

Now the interesting thing about this money is that it lost value over time. The grain store had to be paid, some of the grain was lost to rats and spoilage. So each year, the grain store would reissue the money for any grain that hadn't actually been claimed. This meant that the money was biased towards transactions — towards circulation, rather than hording. People wanted to spend it. And the more money circulates (to a point) the better and more bountiful the economy. Preventative maintenance on machinery, research and development on new windmills and water wheels, was at a high.

...

Feudal lords, early kings, and the aristocracy were not participating in this wealth creation. Their families hadn't created value in centuries, and they needed a mechanism through which to maintain their own stature in the face of a rising middle class. The two ideas they came up with are still with us today in essentially the same form, and have become so embedded in commerce that we mistake them for pre-existing laws of economic activity.

The first innovation was to centralize currency. What better way for the already rich to maintain their wealth than to make money scarce? Monarchs forcibly made abundant local currencies illegal, and required people to exchange value through artificially scarce central currencies, instead. Not only was centrally issued money easier to tax, but it gave central banks an easy way to extract value through debasement (removing gold content). The bias of scarce currency, however, was towards hording. Those with access to the treasury could accrue wealth by lending or investing passively in value creation by others. Prosperity on the periphery quickly diminished as value was drawn toward the center. Within a few decades of the establishment of central currency in France came local poverty, an end to subsistence farming, and the plague. (The economy we now celebrate as the happy result of these Renaissance innovations only took effect after Europe had lost half of its population.)

...

The second great innovation was the chartered monopoly, through which kings could grant exclusive control over a sector or region to a favored company in return for an investment in the enterprise. This gave rise to monopoly markets, such as the British East India Trading Company's exclusive right to trade in the American Colonies. Colonists who grew cotton were not permitted to sell it to other people or, worse, fabricate clothes. These activities would have generated value from the bottom up, in a way that could not have been extracted by a central authority. Instead, colonists were required to sell cotton to the Company, at fixed prices, who shipped it back to England where it was fabricated into clothes by another chartered monopoly, and then shipped to back to America for sale to the colonists. It was not more efficient; it was simply more extractive.

The resulting economy encouraged — and often forced — people to accept employment from chartered corporations rather than create value for themselves. When natives of the Indies began making rope to sell to the Dutch East India Trading Company, the Company sought and won laws making rope fabrication in the Indies illegal for anyone except the Company itself. Former rope-makers had to close their workshops, and work instead for lower wages as employees of the company."

I've been thinking about this in the back of my mind most of the day, but I seem to be fighting with a sinus thing yet again so I'm not the most clear-headed at the moment. Conclusion is that you either need to enter the game through having enough money to work with compound interest and investment, accept that you will be someone's indentured servant all your life, or build your own trade network and accept that most likely, if you are ever truly successful, you will be shut down or attacked by the powers-that-be as posing a threat to their way of life simply because you provide an alternative to their credit monopolies. (Certainly, if you gather the means to defend yourself from such incursions- as the founders of this country did- you would be even more likely to be branded as terrorist.)

This final scenario was one of the premises I was playing with in fictional form in Fallen Nation: Babylon Burning.

A shitty game. Anything beats option #2.

America, what will you do when you go to Walmart and the doors are closed?

Let us start this piece of wild conjecture with a supposition: you, like myself and many of those I know, have been aware for some time now that some kind of storm has been brewing in America. There is no arguing that the past eight years have sped up this process, but this pattern is not one that is unique to one administration. It is a pattern woven within the very fabric of Western civilization.

Let's be blunt, the mantle once held by Rome has simply passed on to a variety of Empires, from the Catholics to the the British, and most recently, to the United States. And like every other nation that has carried this banner, one must fall so that another might rise. (By the way, don't believe that the Empire lives on here in the States? Take a look at the architecture of our capital buildings. Why, what culture was it that the Romans so often aped?)

It is not entirely fair to call this martial spirit “Roman,” for as I said it has manifested across cultural and temporal boundaries with such regularity that it seems that what is present here is not only an archetype, but a biological imperative that operates in our neurology and endocrine systems every bit as much as in the memetic structure of the culture. This is not to say that it is an imperative that is universal, nor is it one that must be expressed in this form, but nevertheless it does, as this cultural program or complex would otherwise have ceased to express itself long ago.

Without undue elaboration, there are certain traits which embody this cultural program: patriarchy, commerce and industry as goods unto themselves, martial might and vigor used to spread the cultural myth far and wide through conquests, at the same time adopting harmonious forms, self assurance to the point of hubris, and most notably: the myth of the individual, which is a myth that never developed in the East except as an import from the West. None of this is to say that because of this common form these various civilizations are not different in equal ways, each with many other unique nuances, as there are countless ways which the United States is unlike Rome, and it is in fact only in the what I would call the underlying galvanizing myth of the society that this similarity resides. Additionally, it is obvious that cultures can exhibit some of these traits without embodying this “Roman” archetype. It is a character which, much like any of us, is constructed of generally the same parts, but when put together, has a unique, distinct and undeniable presence.

It would be sheer speculation to predict what the future holds for the U.S., but let's consider some of the basic facts available at this moment: the U.S. economy and value of the dollar is on very unstable ground, in part due to the idiocy of rolling thousands of default prone subprime mortgages into the investment packages and rating them AAA. But with all the hysterical news this has gathered, equally pressing are the results of climate change, which in ecological span of time is banging on our doorstep as we speak. Though argument can continue seemingly indefinitely about whether there is “climate change,” it is fact that at an alarming rate national disasters are sparking up in one location and then another, crippling the already taxed production capabilities of this country in virtually every industry. This is moving hand-in-hand with the effects of pollutants and untested chemicals will almost assuredly have effects on the safety of our future food and drinking water, effects which in the decades to come we can only speculate at. Tied into all of this, we are locked into a full-blown addiction to fossil fuels for the production of energy which, at this point, provides the entire backbone of our infrastructure, even our daily survival. Attempts to replace the heroin of oil with the methadone of other energy sources have been, thusfar, fairly superficial, and in some cases (as with ethanol), detrimental as a result of the other factors at play. We increasingly outsource to other countries, and the “giant sucking sound,” that Ross Perot suggested was heard as a result of NAFTA. (Who knew that someone so funny looking could be right? Certainly not America.)

This is only an incredibly cursory, even provisional, list of the factors at play, the singular point is to demonstrate some of the trends leading towards future realities which will have an effect on each and every one of our lives if they play out synergistically.

In the life-span of human civilization, it has been the East that has led the West, not the other way around. (Side-line note: Who owns an increasing minority share of our countries debt? China.) The only members of our waning empire who may reap true benefit in this brave new world are the outsourced international companies, many of whom are raking in billions in profits from the conflict in Iraq which was arguably manufactured for that very purpose.

In recognition of the facts precipitating this storm, apocalyptic mythology is bound to take hold, and surely it is a virtual pandemic. I am fascinated by elements of apocalyptic mythology, as is readily apparent in my creative work, but rather than proselytizing for the end-times, instead let's consider a very stern question: what the fuck are we doing?

By we, I mean you, me. Such global concerns as national or international market crashes and ecological disaster may seem out of our grasp, but all I see in the people around me is a business-as-usual sleepwalking state, where we follow the established patterns, many of us struggling harder and harder simply to make ends meet. At what point will we all wake up? At what point should we have a plan that involves something more than duct tape, some bottled water, and a couple cans of Campbell's Soup?

Cultural trends such as the “green movement” never seem to evolve further than the cult of the brand these days, casual and cursory lifestyle changes offered for the honor of claiming membership, usually resulting in minimal change of the status quo. The little changes make us feel better about ourselves, but though a good habit recycling plastic bottles does not change the situation.

Let's suppose, just for a minute, that all of this doomsaying is actually true: we actually do have to change the way we live our lives, and fast, if we want to weather this storm. We have to build communities, work locally and through the net, buy up land, and utilize it to the best of our abilities- at least until the possible eventuality that “buying” land no longer becomes necessary. Establish trade relationships with individuals who you can share with, as if the network you are building was a medieval village. (At least have the benefit of penicillin and the Internet. But do you know how to manufacture penicillin?) Learn what needs to be learned to maintain the quality of life that we have grown accustomed to, and at the same time come to realize which of those was never actually all that important.

Yeah, yeah, we've all heard the sustainability talk before. I've been a part of several experiments of this nature, and I have witnessed what I'm sure you expect: excessive concern regarding petty drama, an inability to maximize personal strengths and minimize weaknesses through self-knowledge or management, even though it should be common sense that if Fred is an excellent cook and can't build things to save his life, don't give him a hammer. Hierarchical politics, reaching the absurd point where individuals will viciously fight over who has the “majority share” of something that isn't even worth anything yet. If every member of a would-be community or network is unable to get out from under the heel of the grinding financial realities of living hand to mouth, it is virtually impossible for them to plan ahead, form a group and establish an operational plan that attempts to deal with the hurdles we expect to face, and grow their plan into physical reality.

Aside from these complications, it is surprisingly difficult to transition from our capitalistic upbringing to a community-reliant mentality. The day-to-day constantly sucks up all the energy and resources that were supposed to go towards building and sustaining a more conscious, conscientious way of life. We've been taught not to trust our neighbors. We live in an alienated, fractioned culture which can no longer even conceive of “community” without a sneer, or without the urge to try to sell someone something they don't need. There can be no community when there can be no trust between its members, and we are a decidedly untrusting and untrustworthy society.

America, what will you do when you go to Walmart and the doors are closed? (And yes, I realize that they are probably one of the international corporations that is positions to weather this storm thanks to their judicious application of pure evil. You get my point.)

It seems to me that this storm is brewing relatively quickly, and yet all of us are moving in slow motion. Let us hope that this is just misinformed fear-mongering, but supposing it isn't: we all need to pick up the pace, or, in the words of James Maynard Keenan, “learn to swim.”