Transit of Utah. From west to east, along a winding trajectory from desert to forest to desert, oil drilling, wind power, gas stations, Mormon farms, gold mines, high-security military bases, municipal alarm towers scattered across the landscape — for warning the population surrounding the bases where testing of bio- and chemical-warfare devices is ongoing — warning them of impending disaster. Continuing on the isolated Pony Express Trail, then descending into populated areas. Calling ahead to Dinosaur to see about road conditions. Plenty of snow on the Uintahs, plenty! At the last minute after checking out the Green River campground on the Utah side, I get word that the Echo Park road is open. So, gas up, including the extra tank, and head in from Jensen. Excellent weather, and finally arriving, no one else around, very good. Get the pick of the few camp spaces, #5, 7, and 9 are the best for shade, seclusion, and access to firewood — though shade is not the issue at this time of year, more important would be the access to morning sunshine to warm up — but since there’s no one else around, I can use the #6 picnic table in full sun in the morning for breakfast. So, I take #7 and offload/set-up quickly: already charged at being here once again…

Apocalyptic. Huge wind storm, driving wind upwards from the playa to the black clouds collected over the ranges. Wind. Then, much later in the evening, the air becomes heavy on the lungs, and a fine powdered dust hangs in the more still air, like a fog, but dust, powdered mountains, air-borne terrain. It is dark, lightning and thunder shuffles in the background, unseen, muffled behind the curtain of dislocated earth hanging in the air. Eyes sting, nose waters, pressure heavy on the lungs, body recalls the Great Sydney Dust Storm of ’09, sleep is disturbed so the reading of Augustus continues, more on that later.

Many other events and actions go un-commented-upon, so far. And there are more sounds to upload, along with numerous time-lapse sequences. These seem most apropos to the time here. Watching the weather — back to the “window weather’ concept.

The choppers take off in formation at 09:00 to the west, towards the Toano Range. No decent audio of that as the H4-Zoom is completely worthless recording anything in the wind, a constant feature of life here in Wendover (Wind-over). Really a drag, so that no decent outdoor recordings can be made, period. I just can’t justify the USD 75.00 wind sock, although if the effort is being made to do all this recording to begin with, what’s the point having lousy equipment? Of course, there’s always a higher-end regarding tools. And access to various steps on that sliding scale of quality is largely determined by affiliation to various levels of participation in the techno-social system. Consumer, pro-sumer, employee of a national broadcasting service. And the level of use of archive material depends strongly on the relative quality of the equipment used in the recording process. ach. It comes back to the issue of controlling natural energy flows through technology. The more energy I can exert (read: deploying more expensive systems), the more order I can apply to the system. More signal, less noise.

A few notes on techno-social systems:

In analyzing the affect of technology on a social system it is critical to see 1) who is determining the pathways of energy flow, 2) ultimately how individuals in the system interact with the pathway(s), 3) the resulting benefit and who receives it, 4) how benefit (energy) is accumulated by those controlling the protocols. Prior to this it is profitable to map the sources of energy that is being re-purposed (directed) by the techno-social system.

By tracing in detail 1) the relations of power, 2) the pathways where energy and power flow, 3) the sources and destinations of the flows, the entirety of human relation can be positioned at both a macro scale and a granular (that is, human-to-human) scale: understanding that all relation is permeated with the affects of the wider system.

Somehow, for a techno-social system to be successful, by definition, it has to capture some of the life-time/life-energy of participants in the system: that is a technology’s ultimate function in a social system. What is deterministic is the need for life to continue, and in this continuance, to refine pathways of energy flow to aid in that continuance via the collective techno-social system.

(Are there technologies which seek not to concentrate energy with a certain subset of individuals and increase their ultimate pro-creativity?) What about the struggle of certain individuals for a greater level of personal autonomy those who would seek to either not participate in prescribed flow pathways or would seek to alter those pathways to suit individual desires? The inertia of the techno-social affects the personal trajectories of adoption or imposition.

In a wide social system, technology is used as a means for concentrating energy for a subset of elites of the system. Participants are inculcated from birth with the idea that they are receiving more than they actually surrender to the social system.

Matt pushes off towards Salt Lake City for a flight back to LAX. I roll up sleeves, literally, and begin the task of altering yet another environment to conform to my needs and to optimize my time here. Cleaning is very necessary as I’m the first resident of the year — the center is normally closed from the end of November to the beginning of April. So, raising the level of order with the input of human life-energy and life-time. Scrubbing floors, wiping down shelves, polishing windows, moving furniture, vacuuming and wiping down everything (ceiling vents, floor, blinds, window sills, chairs, tables — everything has a coating of fine dust on it such that touching it leaves the hands dirty — opening all storage areas and inventorying everything, wiping down all devices, drawers, walls, surfaces). This will take days of sporadic effort, but today is completely used up, late into the night. Bringing things in from the truck, looking at the damage to the bike rim and roof rack, figuring out the food situation. Rearranging the kitchen and living spaces. Looking through the library to see what should be looked at more closely. And so on. Settling in for the duration.

The condition of virtuality arises when humans create a situation which attenuates the flows that are impinging on their sensual and embodied presence. When technology is defined as a way to alter the paths of energy flow: virtuality is a subset condition of the altered flows such that the flows that are obviously (or not!) entering the body system are attenuated. The obvious (materialist!) subset of the widest set is that grouping which attenuates the classical sensory-input spectra. These may be ‘scientifically’ framed based on typical wave-based mechanical and electro-magnetic physics: the EM frequency band of visible Light, the pressure-induced electricity of touch, and so on. In a holistic approach to presence, the affectations of flow are continuous, complete, and substantive.

Alluding to yet a further subset is the use of glass as a specific form of energized matter which is placed between the eye and the ‘world out there.’ This is a fundamental form of virtuality, where silicon dioxide is introduced as an attenuating filter of flows between embodied presence and the cosmos. (this is a short intro to a longer text on the history of glass that’s cooking on the back burner.)

Today, mulling the difference between technological determinism (as a self-propagating system on its own immutable trajectory) and the reciprocal idea that human social systems selectively construct the systems of technology they ‘desire’ (subject to all the variability of the particular social system within which the technology is embedded). Then, within that selection process, thinking about the process of development and the general trend towards greater complexity. Do these processes ever trend generally to greater simplicity? Does desire ever, on a wide social scale, ever become directed to less material abundance? Is material security predicated with amassing more-than-sufficient material wealth? Or do society-wide technological systems collapse towards simplicity only in cases of ‘natural’ disaster.

[Complexity and simplicity are used here as general indicators of the depth and breadth of the techno-social system's process of provision and production that leads to services, situations, or products deemed necessary for participants. Metrics of complexity would include geographic proximity, ease of access, energy density, and the number of substantive steps required to produce a product or create a desired energy flow. The relative necessity of a product is highly subjective and varies widely between different systems. Necessity is a cultural construct. Complexity may be indicated by the number of discrete steps that can be described that a process passes through -- steps/degrees of flow alteration.]

When examining a production system, the primary question would have to be, “does this process end with a net gain of energy that can be utilized for the evolutionary advantage of the social system?” This question itself would suggest the inevitable rise of an elite subgroup when the wider population reaches certain environmental carrying thresholds — where that (evolutionarily optimal) subgroup is carried by the energy-providing activities of a wider group. But this is another issue to look at later.

The existence of (the) ‘natural disaster’ suggests that the state of a particular techno-social system may be seen essentially as the (ordered) organization of flows to keep back natural chaotic forces or to push those natural forces along certain (technologically-defined) pathways. Does this make the system merely at the affect of natural laws, and thus binding it into a materially deterministic framework? Nah, that ignores quantum, with its statistically indeterminate outcomes. Although obviously, any techno-social system is bound to thermodynamics and all other prescribed or yet unknown ‘natural laws.’

System collapse to simplicity is obviously a result of the ‘natural’ disaster precipitated by war (as an extension of human survival mechanisms?). War is the impingement of one techno-socially organized and directed expression of ordered energy onto another — with one set of system pathways disrupted to greater simplicity. Loss could be defined by the destruction of the internal structure for the directing of cumulative energy of participants in that social system. Winning is essentially acquiring access to the total (or partial) energy sources of the losing social system. This includes individuals, and all the pathways of energy flow that they have constructed — these are then directed, incorporated, into the winning system.

The whole deterministic model seems to focus on material interpretations — that is, metrics of ‘advance’ that will happen along an apparently calculable technological trajectory. Rather, as outlined here, there are conditions of technological advance and retreat that are framed by other factors which make the prediction of a trajectory highly inaccurate. The first being the level of complexity of the techno-social systems, the second, the efficiency of that system, and the third, the stability. All of these factors fluctuate over time and are deeply embedded in a milieu of human and, indeed, cosmological factors. The general trend, however, looking at the broad arc of the history of technology is to increasing complexity, variable-yet-generally-increasing control by social systems of a wider range of ‘natural’ energy flows. Is it deterministic to say that there will be an increase in complexity of any techno-social system unless interrupted by natural disaster? [Clearly, the complexity of a (the!) techno-social system is limited, as the energy basis for the system is not infinite: what does that imply?]

What motivates this evolution to increasing complexity? The short answer could be the drive to reproductive advantage — evolutionary motivations for life to not just continue, but continue with advantage over the competition. It is easy to see that the affect of this drive could be interpreted as having its own character and endless source of ‘forward’ motivation. But clearly the ultimate source for that is, again, the impelling force of life-systems to simply continue and continue with ever-greater complexity (creating an ever-widening ring of increasing entropy). So, the ‘explanation’ for technological change, as a social phenomena, ultimately rests, as do all social systems, on the fundamentals of living systems.

Vastly complex systems obscure the actual and perceived level of reproductive advantage — for example, while modern Western medical advances have increased overall abilities for successful propagation of the species, the wider technological system on which that (medical)sub-system depends generates substances (and situations) toxic to reproductive viability and life in general. One would then have to argue that the reproductive viability increase is for a limited number of the total population. Those remaining after the cull benefit from technologically augmented survival, while the biologically and energetically compromised remainder are ‘used up’ in supporting the few. The increase of complexity may be directly correlated to the larger absolute number of people, combined with the drive to absolutely optimize reproductive capabilities of those in the positions of power at the same time as the elimination of all actual or potential competing life-forces.

without framing the precise context, a couple quick notes to Rob, regarding the Internet of Things (IOT) and social pro-activity:

and

Mills, using the key word, power, sketches out the relation between the individual and small groupings of people and their often problematic relation to those exercising power within The State. It is the terms abuse of power and exercising power which are most intriguing. What do they actually mean? I believe they are derived not from abstracted political relationships, but rather actualized movements of energy, deflected through socially-constructed pathways of relation, that may be read as the substance of the social system itself.

Power is yielded to some and stripped from others in a social system. It is apparently concentrated in the hands of some, and depleted from the reach of others. The State is one operational field or framework for the circulation or movement of power: the social system actually is the cumulative expression of re-configured energy flows. The State can only be the sum of energy expressed by the individual participants in it. When the participant in a social system is measured, the next reasonable step is that the results of that applied metric are used to place that individual within a scalar array of productive potential within the equation of state. All of this is predicated on the actual framework of what a social system is — a way of establishing a set of relations of power between individuals. (Back to the architecture of the continuum of relation — where the minimum granular unit, the individual, is in array with a certain number of other individuals in immediate relation. These minimum units of relations are replete with complex flows of individual life-time/life-energy: body energy expressed to maintain viability, needs filled by necessity.) Abuse of power is the routine deflection of flows of those energies in the service of maintaining some minimum order beneficial to a subset of individuals in a social system and conversely detrimental to the viability of others.

A democratic state should not be about anything else but the active facilitation of the viability of all participants, without exception. All concentrations of power should be directed in the service of this ideal, and great effort should be made to minimize the degree of concentrations of power with subsets of individuals of the system. That is, individuals must not surrender their autonomy to wider-scale State-sponsored reorganizations of power flows. [hehe, this sounds like an anarchists credo or at least a libertarian view of State -- with the qualification that it should be undertaken with deep thought and consequent action in the field of human obligations as opposed to human rights.]

All of this is not to say that there is a simplistic mathematical formula by which the State might be circumscribed, although this is often done. As with any abstracted model of complex systems, the State can be re-presented to varying degrees of accuracy. (The current obsession with The Market, as a hyper-simplistic model of the abstracted relations going on between nine billion people globally is a good example of the usefulness and the uselessness of such models — how well does this model circumscribe what is actually going on between peoples in the world? The unquestioned belief that the activities of the Market accurately indicate the status of relation and suggest ways to alter the character of those relations is both true but also very, very false.)

The ‘people’ who exercise the power, are not always the same people with those over whom it is exercised, and the ‘self-government’ spoken of, is not the government of each by himself, but of each by all the rest. The will of the people, moreover, practically means, the will of the most numerous or the most active part of the people; the majority, or those who succeed in making themselves accepted as the majority; the people, consequently, may desire to oppress a part of their number; and precautions are as much needed against this, as against any other abuse of power.

… the practical question, where to place the limit — how to make the fitting adjustment between individual independence and social control — is a subject on which nearly everything remains to be done. All that makes existence valuable to any one, depends on the enforcement of restraints upon the actions of other people. Some rules of conduct, therefore, must be imposed, by law in the first place, and by opinion on many things which are not fit subjects for the operation of law. What these rules should be, is the principal question in human affairs; but if we except a few of the most obvious cases, it is one of those which least progress has been made in resolving. No two ages, and scarcely any two countries, have decided it alike; and the decision of one age or country is a wonder to another. Yet the people of any given age and country no more suspect any difficulty in it, than if it were a subject on which mankind had always been agreed. The rules which obtain among themselves appear to them self-evident and self-justifying. This all but universal illusion is one of the examples of the magical influence of custom, which is not only, as the proverb says a second nature, but is continually mistaken for the first. The effect of custom, in preventing any misgiving respecting the rules of conduct which mankind impose on one another, is all the more complete because the subject is one on which it is not generally considered necessary that reasons should be given, either by one person to others, or by each to himself. — John Mills, “On Liberty”

The confusion of the two nature’s and the consequent operation of the social system based on the results of this confusion is probably a chief factor in the inhumanity displayed within and at the edges (of power) of social systems predicated on such mistaken conceptions.

Mills does not examine the actualizations of energy that are the instruments or carriers of inter-personal exchanges of power. In order for his ideas (the liberties of thought) to be properly mapped back onto reality, they need to be connected to or mapped across the activated and dynamic matrix of flow, imho. This, combined with an exploration of the dynamic of human expressive activities where collective discourse and exchange takes place and where one becomes “capable of rectifying his mistakes by discussion and experience.” This process of change arrives “not by experience alone. There must be discussion, to show how experience is to be interpreted.” Enter the widened definition of dialogue, where the sharing of life-energies/life-times becomes the matrix for change.

Starting with the immediate body as a field-of-action to release control (versus the control-at-a-distance regime we are immersed within now):

Bushwhacking is a method to relinquish control of the trajectory of the body. By exposing the body to the unknown, one has to respond in real time, in the present. This present invites the presence of be-here-now and within that state of be-ing, the embodied self yields to the edge that divides the controlled from un-controlled. Precisely at that edge is the locus of active transformation and change. Making the next step into the unknown is, literally, an act of trust in the body, in a belief that entering the unknown will present possibility. Whether or not this possibility is merely the chance of the continuance of the species (in a biological framework), the projection of life into the not-now, the future, or whether it is an operative pre-condition for a transcendent state I cannot at this moment comment on. Somehow, this is a question that each individuated being self-wise has to make in each of those moments.

Human-controlled flows — those apparently known, defined, located, standardized, measured flows — are merely thin veneers on an un-controlled cosmos which dwarfs all. Or does it? Are we not energized elements, expressions of that cosmos, as much as any else? Does the scalar really matter when space and time are suspended (along with the artifice of Cartesian models and all other abstracted human frameworks)?

Go to your edge. This phrase comes up in yogic teachings in the West. It suggests a shaky physical state where muscles struggle to maintain some configuration that they are barely fit to do. Of course, that meaning may deepen as a practice becomes more holistic and not limited to the mere physical (think pilates). Moving further into the the image — what would it mean to an animal to go to its edge? The edge would be the dividing line between living and losing control over all body systems (organismic death). A tad over precipitates a very different outcome than a tad under. Can it be that non-human systems exist at that edge at all times and at all scales — that this is the condition of non-equilibrium states? But it would seem that human systems exist at this edge as well, except that the human has abstracted numerous illusions suggesting that it is not subject to the same razor-edge condition. (The illusion of control of future trajectories.)

How to translate this image into a practice?

(but wait a minute, LIFE is, by definition, a redirecting of the flows of energy in a natural system — a redirecting that is a necessary (but not sufficient) condition of living systems — according to basic non-equilibrium thermodynamics of living systems.)

However, there is a scalar difference between humans and other living entities where some humans attempt this kind of control on wide scales, with others re-directing those same energies to completely different configurations, some only images of what their ‘original’ pattern of flow once were. (it’s a question of degree?)

The juxtaposition: humans re-organizing the ‘natural’ flows around them (as technology), and humans re-organizing the flows which are human — other humans (as society).

These processes are indistinguishable in their application and only express some difference in the materialized extremity of their results. Humans are simply an other expression of the natural system. It is only in the degree or scale of re-organization of flows that they extend that distinguishes them from other expressions of life. One could argue that earlier Archean life on the planet, utilizing the energy available in certain chemical bonds over eons, completely transformed the composition of the atmosphere in a process of dynamic equilibrium — something we humans are apparently doing yet again in a vastly shorter time. Life, via evolutionary developments, integrally tapped into an available energy source/flow with gusto until the source was depleted or another ‘easier’ source was encountered. Life based on photosynthetic processes of energy utilization is a example that has a long and continuing evolutionary history.

Hannah Arendt, in The Human Condition, explores this process of (the human) redirection of flows as the idea of “fabrication” — as a god-like means to artificially re-create and temporarily reify natural systems. She squarely positions this energy exertion as part of the “external subjectivization of the modern world.” This condition of externalization is a necessary precedent condition for the social and represents the ‘mechanism’ which draws granular and embodied human power from the individual into the social system (for cumulative and disgressionary use by that system). This energy consequently becomes unavailable to the individual, although the pathways that the social system constructs for the expression of its energy may be utilized by the individual, depending on their particular positioning within the system.

(Working at a job for “The Man,” that vaguely persistent image that arose in the times of African-American slavery, frames this dynamic. While most individuals in the middle- and upper-class would consider that their work in the service of someone else is merely a fact of existence and that the convertible and abstracted instrumental returns (money) more than suffice as a reward for the life-time and life-energy expended in this way. It is this collective faith in the abstracted social instrument of money (and other codes) (see Code and Money), expressed as a crucial social adhesive, which gives the social system a form for the expression of the cumulative energy of individual participants.)

Within the life process itself, of which laboring remains an integral part and which it never transcends, it is idle to ask questions that presuppose the category of means and end, such as whether men live and consume in order to have the strength to labor or whether they labor in order to have the means of consumption.

If we consider this loss of the faculty to distinguish clearly between means and end in terms of human behavior, we can say that the free disposition and use of tools for a specific end product is replaced by rhythmic unification of the laboring body with its implement, the movement of laboring itself acting as the unifying force. Labor but not work requires for best result a rhythmically ordered performance and, in so far as many laborers gang together, needs rhythmic co-ordination of all individual movements. In this motion, the tools lose their instrumental character, and the clear distinction between man and his implements, as well as his ends, becomes blurred. What dominates the labor process and all work processes which are performed in the mode of laboring is neither man’s purposeful effort nor the product he may desire, but the motion of the process itself and the rhythm it imposes upon the laborers. Labor implements are drawn into this rhythm until the body and tool swing in the same repetitive movement, that is, until, in the use of machines, which of all implements are best suited to the performance of the animal laborans, it is not longer the body’s movement that determines the implement’s movement but the machine’s movement which enforces the movements of the body. — Hannah Arendt, “The Human Condition”

Further, deeper, wider, (more iconoclastic), what is research? Merely to search again? The broadening of a socially-sanctioned knowledge-base? A connecting-of-threads to historic tradition? A discovery of what’s been before? A following of a pre-existing trajectory (but with more fuel for a higher, further flight)? What about re-sensing instead of re-searching? Immersing senses in a situation again (related to German entgegen ‘opposite’). Sensually immersive: sensing difference again (from another situation), and reflecting on that. Or, better yet, riding the gradient of that difference, and using that potential, that power, that source, to express from.

Re-search — to circle again, more intensively — but to remain detached. Neither academic detachment nor technological objectivity are the way that is needed now. We need immersive, connected, aware, and sensual be-ing. In order to apprehend what the world needs of us. An empathetic engagement with all expressions of life-energy.

Creative action — as a descriptor of the wide field of human endeavor — sets up instances of resonance by configuring energies in novel ways. What does it mean to configure energies in novel ways? Assuming the universe is infinite, there are an infinite number of configurations of energy. Bringing energies in juxtaposition, resulting in the creation of difference: it is at the edge where resonant flows arise, along an expressive energy gradient. This juxtaposition of energy requires the Self to take on, generate, new pathways of flow. But how to initiate, how to self-start this process of potentially resonant expression?

One who speaks is such a path-maker. Gathering embodied energy, using the applied protocols of individual body merged with adopted social forms, we speak. Energy flows from one idiosyncratic body to the next. As energy flows, a gradient arises. From where there was undisturbed silence, an arrhythmic disturbance occurs. Within the modulations of energy applied by the body, within this applied difference and at the point where this intersects the presence of the Other, this is where change originates.

Change and difference? Dropping Cartesian temporal and spatial frameworks, what then is change? Can it be reduced to simple difference? Both can be traced back to the (apparently) anisotropic distribution of energy in the universe. This is a primary condition of life. Creation legends depend on the differentiation of energized matter from that-which-is-not, they depend on the creation of levels of being which exhibit difference. And it is along and within those differences, fundamental boundary conditions, where the creative, the unexpected, arises.

The road-as-pathway is a channel for the flow of energy. It is defined by socially-constructed standards and protocols: a web of socially-applied energies follow the limitations and directedness of those protocols. Roads are a human construct in response to the existence of natural blockages that divert from desired trajectories, that expend communal life-energies and threaten the control of energy resources.

The road is perhaps a synthesized mirror for the human-navigable river, that directed natural space of flow, or the ocean which is the cumulative and spatial confluence-of-all-rivers.

Practically all natural landscapes have some form of blockage as to cause a deviation to even slow and deliberate human passage. So, when there is a lack of free and easy passage, first a foot-path evolves, or is established through troddden effort. This is a trajectory for the body, with the foot leading. Seeking a pathway on foot requires vigilance and concentrated attention in many environments, though this condition is necessarily eliminated from daily life in the developed world — almost completely through the efforts to flatten, level, grade, and pave large swaths of the Terran surface.

When working in Colombia, in the eastern Llanos, for Big Oil, we hired trocha crews who would cut paths in the jungle for the geophone lines to be laid along. Armed with machetes they would hack a one-meter-wide swath along the surveyed lines, leaving short protruding sticks of vegetation cut at an angle — treacherous when struggling along the lines up steep slopes and down. One slip and you would be impaled, and in that country, any break in the protective skin could mean serious infection problems. Walking was never so high-risk: never fall down. It was a choice of absolutely impenetrable jungle on either side, or the possibility of forward/backward movement along these lines. Helipads for extraction were cut in the jungle every 5 clicks or so.

At any rate, the foot is connected to a membered body, so the whole embodied system is implicated in the formation of the pathway. With senses correlating from memorized resonance previous ways taken and the outcomes, choices are made what immediate and final trajectory the body takes. This trajectory is anchored with the planting of the foot and the establishment of balance on that foot. The four corners of the foot root momentarily with the earth. One foot following the other, and that embodied motion precisely driven by the flow of energy entering the senses. Breaking trail can be exhausting, making a way for someone else’s body to pass across the terrain. Following someone else’s path is easier.

Animals make pathways: I am following the cloven tracks of a deer, several of them. I can lope along the game trail at a fair clip, despite the altitude which stretches lungs to a pant, judging how fresh the tracks are by how they desiccate along the edges in the dry western air. But how many hours since passage does half-a-centimeter of crumbled track mean? What happens if I catch up with the deer, if they have stopped to rest or eat? What happens if there’s a mountain lion, an ambush predator, hanging around along this pathway, waiting for an easy mark? I don’t think about it, but keep running as fast as the uneven terrain allows, watching carefully for ankle-twisting roots and rocks. Hooves on a game trail tend to break up the damp soil into loose chunks which make high boots an ankle-saving necessity, though they slow me down, and don’t allow the foot to feel the ground as accurately. I run until I have to stop, sucking the air in with fast but controlled gasps. There they are, 200 yards ahead, traversing a steep slope of piñon, upwind. Okay, today, with a bow, I would have survived a few more days with protein-stuffed belly. The path defined as an enriched flow of food energy.

Morning reading, sparking off Jacques Ellul’s classic, The Technological Society, where he attempts the first comprehensive definition and discussion of technology as something that pervades and underlies social formation(s). He also discusses a distinct relationship between the machine and technology, where the machine is the most important and obvious aspect of technology; where mechanization “transforms everything it touches into a machine;” but where technology is a cumulative way (perhaps expression?) of integration of the machinic into the social fabric, it is represented by a continuous re-formation of the (human) life-form(s) to the techno-social system. Without this impelling force, humans, as simply another evolutionary life-form expression, would not have arrived at where they are in this moment.

The distinction of human and machinic was a product of materialist thinking which detached the human being from the system of applied flows that the machinic imposes on the world. It is thus easier, mentally, for humans to imagine that there was a master/slave relationship between themselves and that ‘other’ world of technology: that they controlled the technology. This is clearly demonstrated to be a fallacious historical and contemporary view of that relation. Instead the relation is immersive, affective, and it is especially distortive of human-to-human relation. By distortive, going back to basic assumptions about technology, I mean that each expression of technology (which can more-or-less easily be seen as separate for the purposes of analysis of this affect), is seen to apply a set of conditioned flows of power (energy) in its genesis, operation, action, existence, and dissolution. These conditioned flows are formative of ‘natural’ energy flows which occur any/everywhere including between humans.

Right off, Ellul attacks the commonly held belief that there is a particular boundary between technology and science which, though historically indistinct and presently contentious is a fabrication. He contends that the domain of science, beyond “hypothesis and theory” cannot exist without technology. This is at least one small step in realizing that human presences and actions should not divided into arbitrary categories, but considered holistically and in concert with all other fields/flows that are present.

Neither science nor technology can exist without an originary research which is the process of experiencing and re-membering the flows that exist around us. That is, science and technology both rely on the basic functions of the human experiencing of the world, the reception of sensual energies that supply a psychical representation of that world. Science looks for the initial repetition of pattern, relying on memory (in some form) to overlay repeated patterns of flow. When there is a correspondence of flow re-membered, this is duly noted in resonant neural energy patterns in mind. Technology relies on this same re-membering of the flows that surround the social species, but, critically, moves one step ahead (affecting fundamental structures to the social): it applies the (collective) memory of those flows to alter those flows in congruence or consequence to those observed patterns. This is a critical difference, and one that easily circumscribes the relationship of the two ‘fields’ which are framed as distinct but inter-related, rendering them as simply two terms distinguishing similar patterns of human activity. Ellul calls them an “ensemble of means.”

This application of alteration and affectation, along with its resultant refined patterns of energy flow, become, as an cumulative expression of the presence of the human, the fabric of sociality itself.

My approach to technology is not about a return to Nature in that romantic or even Luddite sensibility, but instead, it is a wider understanding or impression of first what the cost is of the totality of altered flows that we as a life-form have imposed on the world, and then, more deeply, what does it mean that we, as simply another expression of life on the earth, have come to where we are as that life-form. Consequent decisions may then be made — to participate or not in certain of these defined energy flows. (more on that later!)

Discussion of the technological cannot exist simply in the realm of the technical or scientific, as the applied alterations to flows of energy as well as their affectations on the wider milieu cannot be completely (or accurately) circumscribed through numeracy.

from Kevin Hamilton on the iDC list: Thanks for sharing this tantalizing bit from your project Chris, I’m sure eager to see more of the outcomes. You rightfully remind us that framing the discussion in terms of ideologies or worldviews, even economically-influenced ones, leaves out the fact that there are bodies moving around (or not moving), generating these stories.

Much of the flow of human resources (beings) as a primary energy source, was facilitated (forced along) by the formative pathways of the Military-Industrial complex (Interstate highway system, for example, the car culture in general, etc, ad nauseum). It was the prescribed protocollary forces of that M-I system that facilitated (required!) mobility of the bodies as a dispensable resource. And that enforced mobility had a cost — the essential alienation of the displaced Self. This displaced Self would have been a major social problem in regards to social stability, but that problem was muted by universal consumerism (chain retailing) which imposed a sameness on most major (Cartesian) points under the domain of the M-I complex. The pathways remain the same, but the strictness of their applied impression on each individual gives rise to a plethora of different stories: variations on a theme.

These energy flows are not arbitrary, but are complex interactions between evolutionary expressions of life on the planet (humans as perhaps a non-unique expression of that life, in principle) and how techno-social systems re-form and impress pathways on those energies…

reflections on neoscenes :: drift

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blurb for SNO gallery exhibition web site, November 2009, NSW, Australia:

drift arises from an ordered archive of ambient phonographic fragments recorded over the past twenty years or so. From this archive improvisational works are assembled: indeterminate and reductive modulations that critically sample the flow of embodied be-ing. Known objects and discrete events populate our world only because we are social animals who have learned the dominant protocols of the techno-social system that we inhabit. This condition is especially onerous with the protocols circumscribing the failed (object-oriented) materialist world-view. drift consciously moves algorithmically with-in and with-out of recognizable protocols, acknowledging that without these memory-impressed protocols, all immediate experience becomes an incomprehensible flow. However, the cosmos we participate in, and indeed, are part of, is composed of these flows and comprehension is an illusion. What we know is only the temporal persistence of patterns in our embodied consciousness which resonate with an attenuated selection of those flows. drift simulates the full signal width of the flows, recognizable or not, and simply transits the field which is the present.

blurb for SNO gallery wall, December 2009, NSW, Australia:

reflections on neoscenes :: drift

drift is an approach to the task of comprehending the flow of life around and through the energized body. In particular, sonic energy flows may be used as an indication of the order of the localized universe. In some world-views, all points in a energy field are thought to contain the full (yet indeterminate) information set necessary to reconstruct the entire implicate order of the universe.

or

drift arises in habitually restless nomadic sampling of sonic energies.

drift depends on a somewhat fluid, though discontinuous, processing of those mediated samples.

drift retrospectively charts a pathway taken.

drift follows that pathway as defined by the energy constraints of that path.

drift reflects the trace of an indeterminate trajectory.

drift moves through numerically limited post-Cartesian dimensions and through several discrete parallel universes.

drift should be of infinite length to adequately circumscribe the unknowable Void.

drift demands an assumption of relativity and provides quantized realism.

drift is a simulation of energized be-ing.

drift is made available by the relentless domination of the machinic over the humane.

drift is a simulation of apprehending the storehouses of knowledge that culture tend to build: a consuming of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

drift is be-ing lost.

or

Energized expressions that are the essence of life arise when beings-of-energy frame and re-direct small samples of the impressing flows that they are immersed within. This sixty minute piece is a spontaneous low-resolution sonographic drift approximating the extent of the universe.

or

Depending on your frame of reference — concatenated with the dynamic range of your point-of-view — you may resonate as you follow this drift, or you may not. And, as you go, it is good to recall that the simulation is not the thing itself: the map is not the territory.

Do humans (life-forms) exert control over environments by modifying flows to help them re-member and stabilize their forms? To form them in a way that resonates within their energized neural storage regime (life-form)? Probably not, as from a bio-thermodynamic point of view, life exerts control (simply) in order to deplete energy gradients (according to the authors of Into the Cool, an exploration of NET (non-equilibrium thermodynamics) and its relation to life/living systems).

Or can this even be considered a control process, this interaction of modifying flows? Or is it merely part of the cumulative (dynamic) process of life as an engagement of the entropic/negentropic fundamentals of the universe?

I realized that in Regime of Amplification I got the terminology a bit wrong — focusing on the anisotropic concentration and rarefaction of energized matter as the fundamental condition (as driven by gravitational forces). When it is the gradient between the two situations which is of primary interest and importance. — a bit similar to seeing only the elemental yin and yang instead of the overarching dynamic unity, the taijitu. So, a rewrite is in order — to look at the transitional state rather than (theoretical and limited) end-states.

Sound can be the energy interface/pathway between these textual explorations / structural formalities and the external, the Other.

If I could have written this DCA thing before, I would have. It is a question of style and form only. As I have already written reams (megabits) of pure (well, relatively pure) text already, megabits, not in Word, but in BBEdit, close to code, pure code; not to mention the reams of paper writing that preceded that. On an old portable manual typewriter. From picnic tables in the Great Sand Dunes on crisp winter mornings, to attic havens in the dark Icelandic winter. Drilling words out out out to the many Others. Printed direct onto papers from flat or slightly curvilinear screens to nine-pin printers. Usually, on the obverse, each sheet of that paper was already a xerographic work in itself, thanks to sometimes free access to photocopy machines in various places. Photocopy art. Nobody knows what that’s about anymore. And the postcards. The thousands of them, all silver-prints. Tight hand-written like the 4000+ pages of journal, with double-ought Rapidograph pen and permanent India inks. Sometimes exploding with the pressure shifts of flying too much. Is a remix in order, of all this life-energized output, a tracing of threads? Correlated with all the memorable human encounters — teaching, exhibitions, studios, happenstance, friends, friends-of-friends, shared meals, and strangers — what can be made from it? And how to proceed.

Big question. The difference between that lived praxis and the reflection on praxis. Or is there a difference, is a difference necessary? Or is the difference a construct itself, an artificial category, a social imprint? A remnant of Whorf’s linguistic framing which, simply stated, says that a language alters the way one thinks. Or, to go a bit further than Whorf, that a language is a particular set of (neural) pathways upon which energized thought follows along, passes through. The pathways form as the language portions of thinking form in ones embodied presence. This suggests that a multi-modality of expression is an attempt or penchant to explore different pathways of (neural) energy flow, each along its accustomed way. Life is multi-modal. And energy is the substrate that the modes are embossed in. Embossed patterns which fill with flow, or over-flow. When energy does not have a predetermined pattern to move within, how will it express? It will leak into other spaces, bleed over into other patterns, or simply build up in some corner of the body until it is expressed in pathology.

… what is is movement. Actually what tends to make it difficult for us to work in terms of this notion is that we usually think of movement in the traditional way as an active relationship of what is and what is not. — David Bohm

This gets to a core condition — all is movement: movement/motion is creative (including our consciousness). It also suggests that a redirection of that movement is not really possible, as redirection itself as a concept is simply the mapping relative to a Cartesian or other reductive framework. That is, unless the redirection is thought of as a (the) outcome of processional (negentropic) attenuation of flows caused by life. Which suggests that life itself is essentially creative, an obvious linguistic tautology. But life, as a general phenomena, affects a wide range of arbitrarily specified flows (flows that can be viewed in a traditionally categorized way as being different). By this I mean that in addition to the base (chemical) energy conversion mechanisms that govern most life forms there are a vast, subtle, and complex array of expressions of these processes which biochemists have been slowly teasing out, but never reaching a finality on at all. Whatever the case, the flows can be said to follow more or less explicit pathways (although our traditional view of these pathways is largely informed by mechanistic understanding and reductive framing. It is also such that it is our implicate consciousness, our full and immediate apprehension of the phenomena that we sense, is part of that originary what is.

Memory is the prime example of the persistence of a pathway of flow. It is precisely the persistence that allows us to move through the world without each successive moment being a surprising cacophony of unpredicted and unrecognizable sensory impressions. While at the same time, memory is itself, as an element of consciousness, implicate to what is being circumscribed.

The process of thought is not, however, merely a representation of the manifest world; rather it makes an important contribution to how we experience this world, for, as we have already pointed out earlier, this experience is a fusion of sensory information with the replay of some of the content of memory (which latter contains thought built into its very form and order). — David Bohm

Presuming the Terran system is a (fully) self-regulating system, then the hypothesis would have to include the entire evolutionary process which produced human beings among other biota under the particular macroscopic and microscopic availing conditions. Self-regulation would then suggest that the system will solve the current problems of human over-population and resource spoilage as it solves all other oscillations of what is a system in thermodynamic disequilibrium. Biospheric self-organization (among a holistic range of other mechanisms that we likely have no clue about in the moment), will do it’s thing. Despite, in spite of, and at the effect of what a specific biotic evolutionary line is doing. There is plenty of data showing wide-scale fluctuations in, for example, atmospheric components related to changing biotic fluxes.

(extracted and edited from The Regime of Amplification)

The second example — though it is a much more complex combination of pathways in its geo-political and material deployments and in its interaction with the overall continuum of relation — is foundational to the TSS and is also a prototypical expression of amplification. It is even more a prototype than radio. Radio is merely one sub-system of what is ultimately a military organization.

A military system incorporates all the requisite patterns of an amplification system: input signal (the human population and other concentrated energy sources available to the TSS); amplification process (provisioning and equipping of the select grouping of people through the collective life-energies of the greater population of the TSS); the feedback system (communications, command, and control systems); and the output signal (the expression of amplified energy flow as a campaign to secure the viability of the TSS either by offense or defense).

In its most simplified form, a military organization is a numeric subset of the larger population of individuals making up a particular TSS — these individuals are its base energy source and generally consist of a selection of the most optimized body-systems. Outside of that social system, a military organization appears as an amplified and coherent signal (noting that the Latin root of the word “coherent” is “cohort,” a Roman military unit). Coherency of the signal in this case is the quality of how effectively and efficiently this sub-system expresses the desires of the TSS. It accomplishes this primarily through operations that secure energy sources and that stabilize the pathways of utilization.

The selection process for participants in the military system is crucial. Individuals are chosen for their generally optimized body condition or because of specially amplified characteristics which are necessary to the ultimate expression of the system. Because coherency is an important value to the output energy, individual participants in a military system are subject to a rigidly defined set of pathways for all impression and expression and so, need to be highly socialized individuals. This means that they are comfortable with having their position within larger flow pathways determined not by individual preference, but by the hierarchic expressions of the system. Protocol rules: eccentricity is not rewarded. As always, optimization of the process is essential to the execution of coherent expression.

The primary outward expression of all military systems are via weapons. Weapons are themselves amplified energy sources: weapons are the output of amplified and directed pathways of energy flow. Weapon systems require the complex concentration of sometimes quite diverse matter/energy flows. When in the hands of optimized individuals, weapons then amplify the energy expressions of that individual. Weapon systems can range from the body itself to intensely complex concentrations of energy requiring the direct participation of millions of individuals to procure. Weapons are tools, are defined by technology, and are the amplified expressions of the TSS.

Consider a sword. A sword comes into being through the energy-intensive combination of iron, carbon, perhaps some leather and bone, along with traces of manganese, chromium, and vanadium. This combining process is obviously dependent on the availability of the resources which exist only in certain local concentrations. The locus of concentration must be secured over a long period of human-scaled time as it takes a long-term commitment of human resources to actually extract iron ore. The ore must be removed from the surrounding matrix material using the life-energy of individuals along with other energy amplification processes. A significant amount of heat energy is required to render the iron ore into the necessary basic form of raw iron. The source of this heat energy has to be secured by assembling a quantity of materials which can be burned at a specific location where specific types of fires are necessary to get the ore hot enough to transform into raw iron. The raw iron is subsequently forged via the life-energy of an individual also in concert with other pre-existing technological pathways. The forging process requires a skill-set that is not usually possible for an individual to directly assemble from scratch in a single life-time. The process therefore requires the presence of a stable enough TSS that allows for the transmission of information across generations along with the ensuing innovation/optimization that inevitably occur. Depending on the complexity, it may require the existence of externalized memory systems which consequently require special protocols. The complexity of the pathway is such that making one sword would not represent an optimal outcome, suggesting instead that many swords should be produced. This requires that a system of standards is developed. The entire process demands an ordered, coherent, and harmonized set of energy flows from many individuals such that the particular amplified signal be actualized.

When all these steps are completed in an optimized manner, the sword, the weapon, is placed in the hands of the optimized individual. In the hands of the soldier, the sword increases the efficiency of the individual in their ability to secure the pathways of their Regime of Amplification, their TSS. It increases their viability as an individual and consequently the viability of the collective. This increase however comes only after they are trained to use it. To teach the optimized use, the experience of other humans, stored in living or external memory, needs to be available. Learning, the soldier forms both his body and his embodied behavior in relation to the sword in order to optimize the combined body-weapon potential. The potential energy of the combined system that creates the sword and makes it available to the soldier plus the life-time submitted to learning to use it is the source of this increased efficiency. Without the complete set of refined pathways for concentrating energy, the soldier would not be a pathway for optimized expression. This is the fundamental process of arming a military through particular weapon systems.

Each weapon system is the product of an extremely specialized process flow which is more or less complex. The more complex the flow, the more energy that the TSS has to expend on maintaining the pathway and the structural elements of that flow. This increasing complexity must be offset by a resultant increase in the efficacy of the body-weapon combination. The weapon system must deliver a saturating energy flow, a lethal expression, into the enemy.

The example of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945 is the sword amplified by many orders of magnitude. The techno-social infrastructure required to produce the physically rather small device was colossal. It was historically the largest weapon production system in areal distribution, in numbers of people involved, and in energy consumption. It included substantial sub-systems for the prospecting and mining of the uranium, for the construction of the uranium processing system which included the largest single-purpose electrical grid sub-system ever constructed, and for the construction and operation of sophisticated facilities for research and testing in remote and extreme environments. All of these had to operate at high degrees of precision and with an ordered, coherent, and highly secure system of command and control down to individual lives. Altogether, an enormously energy-intensive pathway to construct and maintain. It is no coincidence that its ultimate expression was the most massively concentrated and rapid release of energy that the world had experienced before. It securely guaranteed for some years the viability of the Regime of Amplification which deployed it.

Feedback is critical to a military system. A rigidly defined set of pathways for the concentration and expression of energy is constantly at threat from changing external and internal conditions. The history of the TSS is littered with body-systems sacrificed by the rigid clinging to a specific set of pathways of expression. This slaughter came about when changing conditions de-stabilized those pathways, reduced the optimal efficiency of the military system below some threshold, and consequently ended its viability. Feedback is dependent on complex communications systems which report on the affect of the projected body-weapon engagement systems. These command and control systems are vital to the optimization process. A military structure that is blinded by the loss of its communication system is in immediately crisis.

In the end, the Regime of Amplification has its weapons systems which are deployed via its most optimized individuals against any real or perceived threat. A threat is fundamentally defined as a condition which obstructs access to external energy sources or that distorts the requisite pathways of power within the system. The weapon systems have to provide a saturating expression of energy to the enemy system. There are many nuanced examples scattered throughout human history where the specific dynamics are more or less complex, but at base, the vast majority of events which take place among and between social systems are driven by a focused desire to sustain viability. This desire drives the preparation and deployment of military pathways for expressive energies to flow. The Regime of Amplification is constructed on the broadest of such pathways.

I would prefer that this whole thesis stay out of the regime imposed by semiotics, that approach to social inquiry being an expression of how the dominant world-view is itself dominated by abstracted elements rather than focusing on the flows of energy themselves. The abstracted systems do, of course, have a heavy bearing on the regime of flows within the social, and largely govern the pathways along which energy flows. However, in order to understand the dynamics of the flows which underlie the abstractions, one has to clear away the abstraction. I hope to frame the issue of language and protocol only to the degree that makes it possible to subtract it from the picture.

Consider the difference as framed following: when two people are speaking to each other, one can make a fundamental structural observation that breaks down the process into the movement of sonic energy and the presence of language. What is the sonic element? It is the movement of embodied energy, energy arising from the embodied presence of one person, arising from the complex negentropic life-form of one. This energy arises through the precise evolutionary configuration of body which allows for that expression, the lungs, the throat, the voice box, the mouth. It is projected through the ‘medium of substances’ between the two, into the embodied presence of the second. Into the ear canal to energize the neural system that is hearing. This is a fundamental. This phenomena exists independent of the language being used, and regardless whether that language is shared by the two people.

Proxemics then becomes a question of potentialities and possibilities of flow or not-flow as proffered by the arrangement of energized bodies (at all scales!) — not simply a systematic coding of the arrangements and orientations of bodies in a Cartesian space. Hall does include body-heat (thermal code) in his list of proxemic behavior along with other sensory “codes,” but stays away from the actuality and implications of energetics (as illustrated by the previous paragraph. (A System for the Notation of Proxemic Behavior, Edward T. Hall, American Anthropologist, New Series, Vol. 65, No. 5, Selected Papers in Method and Technique (Oct., 1963), pp. 1003-1026)

The presence of language, then, is a formulator of meaning. Language does not carry energy itself. What one says is different than how one says it. The use of language (merely) imposes a modulation (amplitude, frequency, in time) of the energy movement. This modulation is a learned social function. And of that imposed modulation, when examined closely, it loses some of its monumental qualities (semiotics-as-deterministic-abstraction-of-abstraction):

There is no language in itself, nor any universality of language, but a concourse of dialectics, patois, slangs, special languages. There exists no ideal “competent” speaker-hearer of language, any more that there exists a homogeneous linguistic community … there is no mother tongue, but a seizure of power by a dominant tongue within a political multiplicity. — Deleuze and Guattari (Rhizome)

Human dialogue, therefore, although it has its distinctive life in the sign, that is in sound and gesture (the letters of language have their place in this only in special instances, as when, between friends in a meeting, notes describing the atmosphere skim back and forth across the table), can exist without the sign, but admittedly not in an objectively comprehensible form. On the other hand an element of communication, however inward, seems to belong to its essence. But in its highest moments dialogue reaches out even beyond these boundaries. It is completed outside contents, even the most personal, which are or can be communicated. Moreover it is completed not in some “mystical” event, but in one that is in the precise sense factual, thoroughly dovetailed into the common human world and the concrete time-sequence. — Martin Buber; Gregor-Smith, Ronald (Translator); Friedman, Maurice (Introduction by). Between Man and Man. Florence, KY, USA: Routledge, 1947. p 5.

It is that essence that is what passes in the continuum of relation that all human encounter actualizes itself. It is the same essence, that something that Schrödinger posits as negentropy, the tendency towards which is a unique characteristic of life. This is the essence which is not objectively comprehensible. It is recognized when the engagement which is the genuine dialogic instance is explored in all its intricacies (after the fact), or simply observing other humans engage. People-watching without pretension or preconception will bring a profound understanding of encounter. On the surface, dialogue is judged by its linguistic content; even more abstract engagement is measured to the metric of knowledge or even base information transferred.

The tendency of life towards negentropy is sourced in the human-to-human encounter. For without this encounter, life would, literally, cease, in the case of the reproductive encounter. But isn’t it such that any human-to-human encounter affects change on both the Self and the Other? Change that may not immediately be recognized as creative, but none-the-less is essentially creative in that it is the site of change, evolution, growth, transformation.

What then is that precious something that contained in our food which keeps us from death? That is easily answered. Every process, event, happening – call it what you will; in a word, everything that is going on in Nature means an increase of the entropy of the part of the world where it is going on. Thus a living organism continually increases its entropy – or, as you may say, produces positive entropy – and thus tends to approach the dangerous state of maximum entropy, which is death. It can only keep aloof from it, i.e. alive, by continually drawing from its environment negative entropy – which is something very positive as we shall immediately see. What an organism feeds upon is negative entropy. Or, to put it less paradoxically, the essential thing in metabolism is that the organism succeeds in freeing itself from all the entropy it cannot help produce while alive. — Erwin Schrödinger

Economic efficiency is not correlated to the material efficiency within a limited system. (as example, the Icelandic Hydrogen Economy scam — where the production of the consumed goods necessary for running the infrastructure is remote: off the island and not at all within local system. None of the materials in the infrastructure are available locally on the island, none, except for the human consumers and the human bodies for local construction labor. That simple fact takes economic advantage of cheaper remote industrial labor, ecological damage, etc, and removes those factors from the costing of the local system. Local politico-economic policies are calculated and framed without considering the material re-sourcing.) This approach could be the biggest factor driving the lack of material efficiency of the global system where the feedback mechanisms are more localized and limited and driven by abstracted profit frameworks (which are locally influenced by taxation/government, shareholders, boards, consumers). And very often there is a complete ignorance of the physical reality of the (remote) resource extractives industries which prop up the whole system. If one travels to the location where large-scale (and generally un-sustainable) resource extraction is occurring, it is inevitable that there are social and environmental issues, it’s just a matter of whether they are discoverable under present knowledge-bases, or whether they are recognized by contemporaneous social milieus. Life is a transitory phenomena at all scales. When available energy sources (concentrations of matter) are exhausted, life cannot proceed.

The concept of memory is related to my own work and practice — as an artist, part of my work does relate to the creation and preservation of my personal archive. Also, memory is a feature of collective Techno-Social Systems as a mapping of embodied participation in that system over time. It is also a concept to consider in the wider perspective of my work which examines human presence, encounter with the Other, collective social systems and their impact on the individual and finally, creative action.

Memory is the trace of energies from the surrounding situation that literally impress (on) the embodied self. Making the radical assumption framed by the words of physicist David Bohm, that

… there is a universal flux that cannot be defined explicitly but which can be known only implicitly, as indicated by the explicitly definable forms and shapes, some stable and some unstable, that can be abstracted from the universal flux.

Phenomenal events and configurations of these energies pass through the body (as simply another manifestation of this flux), leaving altered states of be-ing. These embodied traces persist in time, but as with all life and being, are transitory. They exist as change, and are often experienced as a fundamental awareness of difference — “I originally felt like that, but now I feel like this, having experienced this event.”

External memory storage situations via digital technological mediation are, by nature, material, reductive, and transitory. They are subject to decay and loss as with any other external (and internal) means.

Three significant issues arise in the process of externalized memory storage. The first is in the process of creating the artifact. As with any pre-digital artifact, making a “memory” artifact requires that the Self (or someone) step out of living and mediate their presence in the operation of the device that creates the artifact. This stepping out applies not only to the making of the artifact but also to the (onerous) process of archiving. This process radically changes the experience of a life-trajectory by an individual. And, as suggested by Quantum ideas, the observer affects that which is observed, the act of making memory artifacts actually affects the scenario that is being recorded.

A second major issue occurs when any of these processes are taken over by extensions of the Techno-Social System, they subject the Self to a loss of autonomy. (i.e., cloud computing as one example of a centralized architecture that removes the trace of the digital artifact wholly out of the purview of the individual (creator, participant).) The level of loss of autonomy are on a sliding scale — loss occurs whenever the individual is not in control of the mediatory storage (its provenance, creation, organization, archiving, sustenance, distribution, demise, destruction). Any externalization falls under this regime.

The third issue lies in the maintenance of archive. As a fundamentally ordered system (timely retrieval is critical for a functioning archive), the archive requires an essentially constant energy influx to maintain that order. That energy source is, at base, the human being. How much personal energy will humans participating in a Techno-social system be willing to dispense of or provide to maintain an ever-growing energy burden of either a collective or individual archive? Is that why the Library of Alexandria burned?