Last night, I dreamed of computer images, tight digitized blue rectangles, framed in bright white light, arranged in rows, scrolled down, by an invisible scroller. This rather distrubed me, as I was fully lucid, and was not sure if I was a robot or not. Perhaps I am having the dream of a machine? This is probably what an algorytymic infinity would look like. On a clear day you can see forever… an infinite amount of the same.
Or am I the interface between bio and algo -generated rythmicities experienceing the disconnections between incommensurate scales? I was listening to white noise, which helps me ignore the screams in the night, the occassional explosions of a burst of rock music, the sound of glass breaking, the laughter of a drunk, all of that messy analogue stuff. So maybe what I was viewing in my dream was what it is like to be white noise, a computer generated miracle, an antidote to the lucid dreamer brouht up on Milton and Shakespeare and technicolor science fiction movies, who wants to fly and rendevous with intelligences from mutliple dimensions, and develop superhuman capacities., to save the world, bringing forth a Second Axial Age- well so what? We are imprinted upon by culture. But which culture will do the imprinting? It appears the digital is much stronger, changing our nervous systems and our relationships.
The young, I fear, who will be dominated at an early age by AI, won’t register this tension. Already absorbed into the Borg, the time that is not our time, they will not register that tiny gap, nor register the discrepencies in subtle kinds of percieving, as the noise of mixed messages and commercials flood their young sensoriums with manufctured products, distracting them from what is happening upstream. So, I consider this tension to be something that only a dying boomer generation would register, the last generation to have known a world without a computer.
And what is a World anyway? Or the Earth? Or a Planet? Or the Global? These are the big ticket items that we are using without ownership or repsonsibility. We are networked, we own nothing, we are users. But I am getting distracted.
I am surely unfair. There are outsiders in every generation, who register the gaps, don’t fit the norm, who have a sensitivity to what is happening upstream, who read books. I know some of them personally. With this in mind, I read a smart, young Czek philosopher ( just turned thirty) who writes of Cosmogrammatology and the Spectral Earth. The Spectral Earth will be without us. This is a new concept that is an absence that many of us are feeling often. Now the young and the old are both feeling this. How to make a good death together? Is this common sense or a new nihilism? I’m not sure.
At any rate, I review David Abrams and this book ( I loved it twenty years ago) but with some misgivings. It does feel-well-sort of romantic. I like romanitic but also am wary of it. His new book, though it is told with great flare, is also a bit romantic. The opposite of human is not animal but the demonic. And animals who are abused can become demonic, too. If you give a dog too many mixed messages, she will bite you.