Now, if you carefully examine human communications technology, you realize that we make our machines do things we have stopped doing. And this is a crisis. We are, unknowingly, hemorrhaging not only our intelligence, but our developmental opportunities, because these depend upon contexts that support or elicit them for activation. Our contexts support that, but mainly for machines and certain forms of malignant collectives, or organs of collectives, such as the prison-industrial complex and its myriad modern tentacles. In any case, we often build into our tech, what we have left out of our intelligence. Let me give you a few pointed examples. I suspect you regular receive text and email messages. I do not receive texts. Because I am not ‘accustomed’ to receiving texts, I do not trust them. At all. What this means is simple: you are likely to believe that a person texting you is the person you think they are. I am not. In other words, when I receive texts? I never trust their authority. You probably do. This is far less trivial than it appears because it has to do with a central issue to human and personal cognition: trusted authorities. In our time, we blatantly trust and celebrate -false authorities- and grant zero trust to -worthy authorities-, particularly as collectives. The fact about a text you receive is this: until you -verify the identity of a sender you have no idea who is sending it or what the context or meaning is-. In fact, because you think you recognize the name, you authorize the sender, and, probably, you interpret the content accordingly. I do not do this. Ever. Even when I receive an email, I examine it forensically to determine what its actual source was. Fast, too. I can also use a similar skill in language parsing to immediately recognize a mismatch in what I call ‘intentionary identity’: I can detect subtle nuances in text that betray the actual intentions both of the author and of the anatomical elements of the text. I will be illustrating other examples in later posts, including what we can learn about how communication fails... by remembering how modems work. And how we can leverage these understandings to facilitate extremely unexpected communications events... even with nonhuman organisms. Machines cannot remember what a brain they have nearly destroyed by mimicking a few of its modest functions might have become instead of their worshipers. I trust you will forgive me if, before I am gone, I demonstrate that our engineers are forced to remember and represent much of what we, the common people have long forgotten or were obstructed from discovering. Because I will.
Posted on: Wed, 30 Oct 2013 12:26:28 +0000
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