Cobb

I Am Not Your Friend

My cousin Star lives in a high rise apartment building in Manhattan. She's a commercial real estate broker, five foot ten and stunning. The first thing you notice when you walk into her pad is the large painting she made in the style of Basquiat, and secondly if the blinds aren't drawn, the New York skyline. I hung out with her for a week and learned a lot about her, and our family that I never knew. What I appreciate about her is that she is excruciatingly honest and not shy about anything. Of course she has a marvelous sense of taste and an engaging personality, but there are many things about us that are radically different. What I love about her is hard to define, but it's stronger than ever. 

This essay is about identity and some of the ideas I will take when I start looking at the right way to implement identity management. So the first reference you might want to consider is The Last ID.

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It took Star all of three days to get to the point at which she was comfortable enough with me to perform two very annoying acts. The first was to force me to watch Loose Change, the hiphop video / obiter dicta comspiracy tape about who was actually behind the 9/11 attacks on America. I didn't realize that my cousin was a Truther and it took many hours for me to discover this, as close as we are. All the while we were watching this video that she had obviously not watched herself in many years, she kept voicing impatient concern that this might not be the proper version of the documentary. So while she is fundamentally on the Truther side of the equation, perhaps what she recalls being more convinced by something other than the exhibit in question. The second annoying act was for her to read, given my birthdate, my full horoscope and assert with confidence that it was quite accurate. In fact it was. 

I could go on about other evidence I have to support my prejudicial notions about the practicality of Star which is hindered by such poisonous superstition, but she's more than good people, she's family. And today, all of that evidence is none of your gluten-free business. In a town where advertisements for Moving & Storage have taglines (I am not making this up) "Rick Perry: That voice in your head is not God", she fits right in. 

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I don't fit right in anywhere. So when I think of social media, as I often do, and in response to many such questions I reply "I don't have any friends."  So when I consider what's missing from social media and identity management it is the extent to which it does not identify the importance of certain of your traits with any bidirectional weight. 

If I cared as much about 9/11 today as I did when I was reading 'The Man Who Warned America' or 'The Looming Tower', I would have found my sojourn in NYC unbearable. As it stood, as I was referencing my iPad during the movie, I had a hard time recalling the name of that first book. If I had known somebody who died there that day, as Star did, the significance of the 'Truth' would be greater to me. So how could I adjust my affinity to such a 'friend' and still actually love her? It's easy to do in real life, but not done at all online. Star didn't even know what a Truther is, so it would not be something she would put in her profile for me to accept or reject in the first place. 

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The context for what I'm attempting to describe as an affinity system goes under the label 'WWID' for What Would I Do? And the first thing that I say about it is that it is a self-generated 'purity test' whose results you own and then selectively publish. 

As oldheads on the internet know, one of the first viral documents was the Armory Purity Test. I took it about 22 years ago - that's an old document by internet standards. Well, it actually precedes the WWW; it was  on USENET. (USENET seemed so huge back in the day). So if you bother to take the test, you will recognize peculiarities about the set of questions. But what if everybody were the author and everybody were the test takers and all of the results could be stored in a document under your control? This would be the beginning of WWID, except of course that there would be literally hundreds of such tests and many thousands of questions brought to bear. One could imagine, based upon the matter of 9/11 one such test with 500 questions.

I propose a system of such generalizable tests with each individual question indexed and tagged and then correlated into bunches. These bunches over time may vary but the more popular questions will tend to be central in them. People will then take these bunches of tests at their leisure, answering one or some fraction of all of the questions and have their answers under their secure control. Then for the purposes of affinity, the user of the system may publish results under an anonymous avatar linked to their Last ID in order to make matches.

Tests may be generated for any purpose. They may be job appliations, consumer preference surveys, political push tests, religious fidelity tests, entrance exams, special knowledge competency tests, psychological profiles, intelligence tests or medical diagnostics. Anywhere there is a question with an answer that in some way can be used to identify some personal trait of an individual, this system can be employed. 

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I am not your friend. But there is probably some subject upon which we could communicate a great deal for a couple of hours. I am trying to avoid short painful conversations, and engage long fruitful discussions. This tool would help a great deal more than Meetup + Facebook. 

The Debt

The Debt, starring Helen Mirren, is the sort of film that explores the animal side of our human nature and it reminds us that when we are pressed up against our ability to handle the truth we are likely to be faced with life or death situations. And so how many of us are prepared for that?

The story is that of a trio of Israeli war heroes who face the prospect of their world collapsing as the possibility of an ugly truth coming to light thirty years after the fact. Of the three, only the woman can rectify the problem. It's a very intriguing concept, and brilliantly handled by the film but the greatness of this story comes out in the terse dialogs between the three, but especially the woman, and the Nazi war criminal who is at the center of their heroic mission. 

There is, in this tale, the story of how much we become defined not so much by our aims, but our ability to accept that which it makes us in the process, whether we succeed or fail. The heroes must struggle through the taunts of their captive as they decide whether he should be tortured, killed or brought to trial. As they stuggle with that ethical matter of the way in which they will embody the spirit of their new nation, as agents / soldiers of that nation, they must sublimate their own personal desires and lives. They become tools of their ambitions, and ambitions are always thwarted, and so it leaves them with what? Desparate confusion.

In The Debt's magnificent scene, the Nazi illustrates his contempt for Jews as he characterizes their behavior as sheeplike weakness. How is it, he asks, that the Jews were led to slaughter that so many were shephered into their deaths by so few? They were, he concludes, too weak and unpossessed of the pride and will to survive to do anything but submit to the superior force of will of the German soldiers. 

I found this to be a riveting scene because from my perspective it distills the very essence of human survival. We may thrive in an absence of conflict as we uniquely social creatures do. But we are so easily pressed into enforcing the courage of our convictions as a matter of principle and as a matter of survival, and all of our institutions fail and our social graces crumble away. We must do what we must do, and for the sake of keeping a promise or fufilling a mission, that predicament most always demands that someone must pay with their life.

We go through our lives planning to fill them with purpose and meaning. In the end, it may be all we have and our only purpose, is to cause the deaths of others and try to give that meaning. 

The Narrative of the Frankfurt School

For those of you who don't know, this is the drug that Breitbart is high on. And while I haven't gotten a chance to meet a lot of my philosophical compatriots face to face, I suspect that many of the more thoughtful ones might have a course or two at Claremont in common.

I've been waiting for Bill Whittle to get his proper funding so as to not be under the financial thumb of PJTV or whatever the reason was for this video to only recently become freely available. This is one of his more inspired 13 minutes - which covers a lot of ground. You're not likely, I think, to see anything this good on television of any sort. Yet.

Declaration Entertainment is the new home of Whittle and he's taking a slightly different tack from what I've seen. He's getting better. And again this particular message is the one that strikes home for former Progressives like me who were never quite comfortable with all of the Commies who show up for the MLK Day Parade. 

Interestingly enough, the Frankfurt School was exactly where I was pointed when I wanted to understand and make more sense of everything I had been trying to learn outside of my profession. And 'Critical Theory' is a category in this blog because it was the black critical theorists that I began reading back in '90 when I decided that being part of the Talented Tenth wasn't quite enough for me. Since it is Julyteenth I should expand on that a bit.

I can recall the day when, unlike just about every summer weekend before, I began wanting to enjoy the company of books to the company of my black yuppie compadres. I was at a pool party and a day or two before, I started reading Beloved by Toni Morrison. It was the first book by a black author that truly captivated me with its content and style. So much of what I had read before was so shallow by comparison - here finally was the intellectual level of black literature I had been searching for. As I had previously read Gloria Naylor's "Women of Brewster Place" and some others I forgot - I had been so embarassed. There seemed to be nothing to quench my thirst for art and literature above the level of BET, and I spent a lot of time and money looking for black highbrow culture. That Naylor had won a prize as one of the best American writers, I was more than disappointed. It was this kind of disappointment that was more indicative of my needs rather than Naylor's mediocrity. I began to head towards all things Asian, impressed as I was by the films of Kurosawa, the biography of Mishima, the philosophy of Sun Tzu, the manga of Otomo, the fiction of James Clavell and this chick named Maiko. At the same time, I was mightily impressed by both the Graywolf Annual on Multicultural Literacy and the original Cultural Literacy by E.D. Hirsch Jr. 

I was ending my 20s and I wanted more. I figured I had done quite enough of the buppie thing and it wasn't very satisfying. I wanted more than ski trips and a BMW. Well, I wanted those too, but also more. I wanted my black culture to be the ultimate black culture. And when I finally read Toni Morrison, and I finally saw The Colored Museum by George C. Wolfe, I began to see where it was. In fact there was something in academia, and I was introduced to the formal Critical Theorists through my associations with UCLA's black professoriate. So I read, in those days before Skip Gates had compiled the selections for the Norton Anthology, those considered on the leading edge of black scholarship Kimberle Crenshaw, Audre Lorde, Derrick Bell, bell hooks, Stephen L. Carter and the lord and master of all, my new hero Cornel West. It was Cornel West who finally gave me the understanding, at a philosophical level, what my American intellectual inheritance was. Without any idea that there was any substance to Conservative thought in America or Europe at all, I came to know the American Pragmatists through his survey, 'The American Evasion of Philosophy'.

Amidst the brain rot of Afrocentrism and the 50 page books of rabid bloviators like Juwanza Kinjufu and Francis Cress Welsing I came to the Progressive edge seeking Praxis.

Praxis is a specific kind of obedience that organizes itself around a social theory of reality in order to implement in the society the freedom, inherent in faith. If faith is the belief that God created all for freedom, then praxis is the social theory used to analyze what must be done for the historical realization of freedom. To sing about freedom and to pray for its coming is not enough. Freedom must be actualized in history by oppressed peoples who accept the intellectual challenge to analyze the work for the purpose of changing it. -- James Cone, Speaking the Truth

That was something I could sink my teeth into because Evasion showed me without question that all the philosophical basis for 'freedom' and 'liberty' were the All-American ideas of Emerson, Dewey, DuBois, Mills and Neibuhr and further that there was nothing other than pedantic epistemological nonsense coming out of Europe. I was basically in thrall to this mindset until my son was born and I had to get real. 

But there were cracks in the armor I could perceive before the beginning of the end. The post-modern deconstructionist babble was its own worst enemy. I understood Eco's semiotics well enough to tell that a lot of baffling bullshit was being sold. So when I finally got the recommendation to follow up on Adorno and company (not surprisingly from a friend at Columbia U.) I had just about had enough. Morrison had ironically showed me that good writing was better than coherent Left theory, so as she went off the deep end of suffering and started Playing in the Dark, I was ready to walk away from it all, which I finally did in about 96 in the midst of my Boohabian playground. The last blackified book I (sorta) read was 'Volunteer Slavery', which although it was about Corporate America, also pretty much summed up too much of black writing's intellectual direction. When I moved to the South and started reading 'Pushed Back To Strength', after about eight years of reading, I was pretty much done. 

I settled on reading James Baldwin as the last of my black literature knowing it would return me to the subjects of love and integrity. At least those were the books I wanted to read of Baldwin's. And having done so, I abandoned all of that Progessive philosophy to make money and raise a family in Atlanta, the black mecca. But the last of my high energy New York intellectual pursuits led me to the source and all I could hear was that Marx didn't get everything right, but the only way to really understand capitalism is to master Marxist thought. Therefore, Frankfurt School. Which is kinda weird considering that I actually wanted to get an MBA from Columbia and become a quant programmer on Wall Street. 

I was quite fortunate to have made my first six figure year in 1995 as an independent consultant. And that year I learned what it felt like to walk around a city in a suit because I wanted to, on a day I didn't have to work because I didn't feel like it. I was my own boss. The seeds were sown and the practicality of being that kind of breadwinner set me up for my conservative conversion several years hence. But I had stepped outside one main stream of The Narrative when I left New York. 

The Problem With Humanists

The goal of the humanities should be to disappear and be replaced by sciences, i.e. to become capable of doing useful, practical work in the world. Humanists should be striving to become scientists. What's dysfunctional is that many of them have rejected this ambition, have rejected the very idea of science, and are bent on remaining humanists forever. Thus they condemn themselves to doing research that can never be useful for anything except the advancement of their own careers. -- Benjamin Geer.

I came across this bit of wisdom over at Ian Bogost's site, with his great essay entitled The Turtlenecked Hairshirt. To wit:

If there is one reason things "digital" might release humanism from its turtlenecked hairshirt, it is precisely because computing has revealed a world full of things: hairdressers, recipes, pornographers, typefaces, Bible studies, scandals, magnetic disks, rugby players, dereferenced pointers, cardboard void fill, pro-lifers, snowstorms. The digital world is replete. It resists any efforts to be colonized by the post-colonialists. We cannot escape it by holing up in Berkeley waiting for the taurus of time to roll around to 1968. It will find us and it will videotape our kittens.

It's not "the digital" that marks the future of the humanities, it's what things digital point to: a great outdoors. A real world. A world of humans, things, and ideas. A world of the commonplace. A world that prepares jello salads. A world that litigates, that chews gum, that mixes cement. A world that rusts, that photosynthesizes, that ebbs. The philosophy of tomorrow should not be digital democracy but a democracy of objects.

If we want the humanities to become central, it is not the humanities that must change, but its members. We must want to be of the world, rather hidden from it. We must be brutal. We must invoke wrath instead of liberation. We must cull. We must burn away the dead wood to let new growth flourish. If we don't, we will suffocate under the noxious rot of our own decay.

And then if you go to the Democracy of Objects, you quickly get into matters that are most definitely over my head. What are the chances that I should actually read and understand Spinoza? Hmm.