Internet — Everything Earth (“EE”) Addendum 29, vol. 35
Dr. Aazort’s Advanced Earth Studies Group – Multiversity of Artaxia
Greetings to Artaxia from exotic Earth! Your esteemed professor continues to masquerade as a human on this wonderful planet where “human” is so loosely defined that wide varieties of creatures are passing. Of course, understanding “human” remains my reason for having regularly visited and lived here for several thousand years compiling the indispensible “Everything Earth” (“EE”) reference. Remember, these are potential space-faring beings. You don’t want one showing up at your door without ready access to your EE. Order your copy today! (NOTE: Owing to the Federated System’s “no official contact” embargo of Earth, “Everything Earth” cannot be shipped to Earth.)
Roughly ten years ago a bizarre new consciousness invaded Earth. Aliens from Outer Space would love to take the credit/blame, but that belongs to a local culprit called “The Internet.”
Every civilization in the System has gone through just this sort of connectivity breakthrough. The successful ventures tie entire planetary societies together in a great forum or agora, creating common experiences, expectations and values. The failures merely magnify existing tomfoolery, turning a new marvel into yet another tool for self-extinction. Though one may have to search for it, there is wisdom on the Net. Simultaneously, a sufficient number of trolls can turn any forum into a brawl.
The Internet or “World Wide Web,” evolved from a highly-specialized, originally classified 1969 American defense department network called “ARPANET.” By 1990, with classified needs met elsewhere, what became “The Web” was opened for commercial use. Early “browsers” appeared that an average personal computer operator could use to send email, shop or just “surf” around the planet.
Meanwhile, computing technology itself accelerated wildly. Eventually mobile phones would far outperform “ARPANET’s original mainframes, and come to outnumber PCs. By 2010 every form of human communications could be accessed from a cell phone from almost any place on Earth. About one third of the planet had Internet access, reaching 80 percent in what are called “developed” nations. Such performance and penetration already reveal impacts too numerous to examine here.
But the central theme is plain: like all self-aware, sentient species, humans are crazy about communications, starting with speech. All “primitives,” historical or pan-galactic, invent complex and serviceable languages. In all cases, speech dramatically changes the way a species thinks.
At the personal level, language moves to the center of awareness and refuses to leave. Life becomes a nonstop self-conversation; a “milling crowd of self-narratives.” (The River That Flows Uphill, W. H. Calvin) Most meditation amounts to a quest just to silence the contraption!
At the social level, the discovery of language by hunter-gatherer societies seems to hasten the leadership and organizational skills needed for agriculture and civilization. With cities comes protection from the wilderness and all but the worst of famines. People get “jobs.” In a tidy feedback loop, all these developments certainly gave humans more to think – and talk – about, further enriching language.
Next, just for record-keeping at first, the city all but-demands writing just to function, then to educate and entertain. As little as 5000 years-old, writing is the high technology of Earth’s ancients. To an entirely non-literate people, writing is a technology so advanced as to be “… indistinguishable from magic.” (Arthur C. Clarke, Profiles of the Future, 1962). In addition to providing the scaffolding for civilization, writing, like speech, changed the way humans think. And, like speech, looped back to give them more to think – and write – about.
Poets, composers, philosophers, playwrights, novelists, historians, journalists – all communicated and interpreted experience, re-shaping human consciousness and, critically, introducing the idea of “progress.” It may be odd to consider, but, before the European Renaissance began ca 1453 CE, the Earth was widely seen as God’s perfected work. Any notion that His work might need improvement was heretical. But, of course, irresistible.
Coincidentally (or probably not), in 1455 CE, a mere two years later, the Gutenberg Bible appeared. The printing press began opening brave new worlds to the masses and still reigns supreme as mass media today, albeit barely. Perhaps needless to add – and like speech, cities and writing – books changed the way humans think and gave them still more to think about.
From speech, writing, printing, and theater, and on through the telegraph, radio, audio recording, film and TV, Earthlings have increasingly become creatures of their own media. This is a widely-loved, much-hated development crammed with mind-boggling surprises.
For example, different media might carry the same message. But, to an unappreciated extent, “the medium is the message.” So wrote the brilliant-if-crazy Marshall McCluhan in his 1964 book, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. More than book jackets or gift-wrapping, the package in which one’s particular information arrives shapes the perception, not only of the contents, but of the recipient. For a trivial instance, one’s self-esteem is pumped by the little box from Tiffany’s. Not so much by the plastic bag from Target.
By McLuhan’s time, tools like radio, film and television had already been busy remodeling human perception. In the hands of artists these media tools played with the deepest levels of awareness. Earth’s “culture wars” are almost entirely the fault of “poets,” Percival Shelley’s “unacknowledged legislators of the world.” Merely substitute “rock stars.”
And, just as the screwdriver is an extension of the hand or clothing an extension of the skin, media is one of the “Extensions of Man,” an extension of his very brain. McLuhan died in 1980. We can only speculate what he might have made of the Internet, with literally all human media technologies combined (if determined, one can probably even send Morse code).
The Net as this non-stop media omnibus stands apart from all other tools. In this role it is becoming the essential tool. Given that the human brain only reached its current physical size two million years ago (coincident with speech?), it should be remembered that this species is still very much a work in progress: “[Man] has never become accustomed to the tragic miracle of consciousness. Perhaps, as has been suggested, his species is not set, has not jelled, but is still in a state of becoming.” (John Steinbeck, Log from the Sea of Cortez, 1941). From here we ascend to still dizzier heights.
In his controversial 1976 book, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, author Julian Jaynes speculates: “Suppose you asked a flashlight in a completely dark room to turn itself on and to look around and see if there was any light – the flashlight as it looked around would of course see light everywhere and come to the conclusion that the room was brilliantly lit when in fact it was mostly just the opposite. So with consciousness.”
Typical of Jaynes, there is something of the Zen koan, mind tickle happening here. I’m interested in the flashlight since the well-known observer’s influence on what’s being observed is unquestionably complicated – and often created – by tools. The flashlight “thinks” the room is lit. The atomic particle under study misbehaves because of the study. The protean, ever-shifting Internet is two billion human minds driving by the same rear-view-mirror (an unfortunate handicap when traveling into the future).
Tools themselves, of course, take no moral or progressive stands. That is the job of the same evolving human consciousness that, well before the Net, banished slavery, ruled genocide a crime and at least began liberating women. But there is no reason why this “invader from inner space” can’t further the progress of a rare and privileged species. At least no good reason.
Dr. Aazort’s Film & Video
As my mentor, Prof. Spode Hardratt said: “If you really want to study humans, you gotta watch TV.” Since so much human TV is so very bad, I’ve limited myself primarily to movies and their other long forms.
Very Good: The Bad Lieutenant (1992 http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0103759/ Beware. There’s a really bad remake of this gritty Harvey Keitel film currently making the rounds, often with “Port of Call” tacked onto the title. In it, hobbled by a terrible script, the talented but perhaps over-busy Nicholas Cage tries and fails to recapture Keitel’s absorbingly insane performance as directed by Abel Ferrara. “The Bad Lieutenant” is arguably the best work Keitel has ever done. It’s certainly the bravest.
With perfection secured in the 1992 original, why attempt a remake with a poorly-doctored plot, no moral center and most of all, no Harvey Keitel? I know sequels are like bad weather, but watching the Cage version recently only confirmed that this property is fully-owned and operated by Mr. K.
Keitel has no name in the film. He doesn’t deserve one. He’s only “the bad lieutenant” (“BL”), and he’s way worse than bad. He’s rotten, horrible, impossible to sufficiently despise. And yet, horror that he is, he is also Everyman, lost in the cheap power games on offer in the Modern Circus, and losing every one of them.
He stumbles from one depravity to the next, ostensibly looking to recoup his gambling losses. In fact, perhaps from religious guilt or just self-loathing, he seems most interested in pushing his gambling sharks to the limit in a sort of “march of the flagellants.” He’s begging for a bullet, but boasts at one point, “I’m a cop!” He’s untouchable.
None of this is easy to watch. It has been dismissed as tawdry porn. But following Harvey Keitel as he tries to hold it all together while playing his own antagonist is richly rewarding. You first realize there’s a real spiritual center here when BL gives up his first cry of self-pity. He goes on several such whining, whimpering, weeping jags, always alone, revealing the tormented soul at work and play. “Get with the program” he advises a nun who has been brutally raped by two altar boys she knows. Blowing BL’s mind, she’s chosen forgiveness over revenge. Encountering Christianity in the raw like this finally takes him over the edge.
Avoid the execrable Cage remake – and do make sure you get the original 1992 theatrical NC-17 release of the Keitel film. This used to be quite a challenge, given the repugnance with which this movie was greeted. Back when Blockbuster ruled the rental market and refused to rent NC-17, they stipulated a bowdlerized R-rated cut up just for them. Now, ironically, one of the sure places to find the NC-17 version is from Blockbuster online. Netflix also has it, and I was gratified that the Comcast On Demand offering, although tagged “R,” conformed fairly well to the NC-17 version I saw at an actual cinema in 1992, and it measured up OK with the list of cut scenes at http://movie-censorship.com/report.php?ID=5700924
Fun: How to Train Your Dragon (2010) http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0892769/ So many animated films are crawling from the woodwork – or in this case, attacking from the sky – that anything short of “Toy Story” class can easily get overlooked. I had never heard of this Dreamworks offering before I stumbled across it on cable. It turned out to be a funny and likeable find.
Many of the conventions are familiar enough: a smart nerd teen wants to make it big in a macho culture of dragon-hunting “Vikings” (all with inexplicable Scottish burrs). His Dad is the local king, who, like all his fellow Vikings, is built like a cement truck. His son “Hiccup” (you can’t have everything) would love to join in the swagger and fun, but he’s overly intellectual and physically underwhelming. Still, he begs and pleads for dragon combat training to do his bit for Berk, the little island that the Vikings have occupied for 300 years.
Before this can even get started, a big night attack occurs and Hiccup rolls out his new crossbow-cum-bola thrower. Firing at a passing shadow, he entangles a Night Fury, the best the dragons have to offer. The Night Fury is not only a hot fireball shooter, but so stealthy that no one has ever actually seen one. Hiccup tracks down his stricken prey the next day and the fun begins.
One of the most appealing aspects of “HTTYD” is the restraint shown when it comes to “animal schmaltz,” where movie critters are anthropomorphized to eye-rolling excess. Here the tone is moderated, especially for the Night Fury, “Toothless.” Grateful for the fish Hiccup has given him, Toothless obligingly regurgitates half and won’t quit staring expectantly until Hiccup takes a convincing bite. (Someone has been watching their nature films.) The human characters are likewise well-written and voiced (Hiccup’s mentor “Gobber the Belch,” is done by Craig Ferguson). And the happy ending (what other kind in this genre?) is perfectly acceptable.
This movie is already spawning sequels. Enjoy the original.
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Internet-Everything Earth Addendum 29, vol. 35
June 10, 2011Internet — Everything Earth (“EE”) Addendum 29, vol. 35
Dr. Aazort’s Advanced Earth Studies Group – Multiversity of Artaxia
Greetings to Artaxia from exotic Earth! Your esteemed professor continues to masquerade as a human on this wonderful planet where “human” is so loosely defined that wide varieties of creatures are passing. Of course, understanding “human” remains my reason for having regularly visited and lived here for several thousand years compiling the indispensible “Everything Earth” (“EE”) reference. Remember, these are potential space-faring beings. You don’t want one showing up at your door without ready access to your EE. Order your copy today! (NOTE: Owing to the Federated System’s “no official contact” embargo of Earth, “Everything Earth” cannot be shipped to Earth.)
Roughly ten years ago a bizarre new consciousness invaded Earth. Aliens from Outer Space would love to take the credit/blame, but that belongs to a local culprit called “The Internet.”
Every civilization in the System has gone through just this sort of connectivity breakthrough. The successful ventures tie entire planetary societies together in a great forum or agora, creating common experiences, expectations and values. The failures merely magnify existing tomfoolery, turning a new marvel into yet another tool for self-extinction. Though one may have to search for it, there is wisdom on the Net. Simultaneously, a sufficient number of trolls can turn any forum into a brawl.
The Internet or “World Wide Web,” evolved from a highly-specialized, originally classified 1969 American defense department network called “ARPANET.” By 1990, with classified needs met elsewhere, what became “The Web” was opened for commercial use. Early “browsers” appeared that an average personal computer operator could use to send email, shop or just “surf” around the planet.
Meanwhile, computing technology itself accelerated wildly. Eventually mobile phones would far outperform “ARPANET’s original mainframes, and come to outnumber PCs. By 2010 every form of human communications could be accessed from a cell phone from almost any place on Earth. About one third of the planet had Internet access, reaching 80 percent in what are called “developed” nations. Such performance and penetration already reveal impacts too numerous to examine here.
But the central theme is plain: like all self-aware, sentient species, humans are crazy about communications, starting with speech. All “primitives,” historical or pan-galactic, invent complex and serviceable languages. In all cases, speech dramatically changes the way a species thinks.
At the personal level, language moves to the center of awareness and refuses to leave. Life becomes a nonstop self-conversation; a “milling crowd of self-narratives.” (The River That Flows Uphill, W. H. Calvin) Most meditation amounts to a quest just to silence the contraption!
At the social level, the discovery of language by hunter-gatherer societies seems to hasten the leadership and organizational skills needed for agriculture and civilization. With cities comes protection from the wilderness and all but the worst of famines. People get “jobs.” In a tidy feedback loop, all these developments certainly gave humans more to think – and talk – about, further enriching language.
Next, just for record-keeping at first, the city all but-demands writing just to function, then to educate and entertain. As little as 5000 years-old, writing is the high technology of Earth’s ancients. To an entirely non-literate people, writing is a technology so advanced as to be “… indistinguishable from magic.” (Arthur C. Clarke, Profiles of the Future, 1962). In addition to providing the scaffolding for civilization, writing, like speech, changed the way humans think. And, like speech, looped back to give them more to think – and write – about.
Poets, composers, philosophers, playwrights, novelists, historians, journalists – all communicated and interpreted experience, re-shaping human consciousness and, critically, introducing the idea of “progress.” It may be odd to consider, but, before the European Renaissance began ca 1453 CE, the Earth was widely seen as God’s perfected work. Any notion that His work might need improvement was heretical. But, of course, irresistible.
Coincidentally (or probably not), in 1455 CE, a mere two years later, the Gutenberg Bible appeared. The printing press began opening brave new worlds to the masses and still reigns supreme as mass media today, albeit barely. Perhaps needless to add – and like speech, cities and writing – books changed the way humans think and gave them still more to think about.
From speech, writing, printing, and theater, and on through the telegraph, radio, audio recording, film and TV, Earthlings have increasingly become creatures of their own media. This is a widely-loved, much-hated development crammed with mind-boggling surprises.
For example, different media might carry the same message. But, to an unappreciated extent, “the medium is the message.” So wrote the brilliant-if-crazy Marshall McCluhan in his 1964 book, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. More than book jackets or gift-wrapping, the package in which one’s particular information arrives shapes the perception, not only of the contents, but of the recipient. For a trivial instance, one’s self-esteem is pumped by the little box from Tiffany’s. Not so much by the plastic bag from Target.
By McLuhan’s time, tools like radio, film and television had already been busy remodeling human perception. In the hands of artists these media tools played with the deepest levels of awareness. Earth’s “culture wars” are almost entirely the fault of “poets,” Percival Shelley’s “unacknowledged legislators of the world.” Merely substitute “rock stars.”
And, just as the screwdriver is an extension of the hand or clothing an extension of the skin, media is one of the “Extensions of Man,” an extension of his very brain. McLuhan died in 1980. We can only speculate what he might have made of the Internet, with literally all human media technologies combined (if determined, one can probably even send Morse code).
The Net as this non-stop media omnibus stands apart from all other tools. In this role it is becoming the essential tool. Given that the human brain only reached its current physical size two million years ago (coincident with speech?), it should be remembered that this species is still very much a work in progress: “[Man] has never become accustomed to the tragic miracle of consciousness. Perhaps, as has been suggested, his species is not set, has not jelled, but is still in a state of becoming.” (John Steinbeck, Log from the Sea of Cortez, 1941). From here we ascend to still dizzier heights.
In his controversial 1976 book, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, author Julian Jaynes speculates: “Suppose you asked a flashlight in a completely dark room to turn itself on and to look around and see if there was any light – the flashlight as it looked around would of course see light everywhere and come to the conclusion that the room was brilliantly lit when in fact it was mostly just the opposite. So with consciousness.”
Typical of Jaynes, there is something of the Zen koan, mind tickle happening here. I’m interested in the flashlight since the well-known observer’s influence on what’s being observed is unquestionably complicated – and often created – by tools. The flashlight “thinks” the room is lit. The atomic particle under study misbehaves because of the study. The protean, ever-shifting Internet is two billion human minds driving by the same rear-view-mirror (an unfortunate handicap when traveling into the future).
Tools themselves, of course, take no moral or progressive stands. That is the job of the same evolving human consciousness that, well before the Net, banished slavery, ruled genocide a crime and at least began liberating women. But there is no reason why this “invader from inner space” can’t further the progress of a rare and privileged species. At least no good reason.
Dr. Aazort’s Film & Video
As my mentor, Prof. Spode Hardratt said: “If you really want to study humans, you gotta watch TV.” Since so much human TV is so very bad, I’ve limited myself primarily to movies and their other long forms.
Very Good: The Bad Lieutenant (1992 http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0103759/ Beware. There’s a really bad remake of this gritty Harvey Keitel film currently making the rounds, often with “Port of Call” tacked onto the title. In it, hobbled by a terrible script, the talented but perhaps over-busy Nicholas Cage tries and fails to recapture Keitel’s absorbingly insane performance as directed by Abel Ferrara. “The Bad Lieutenant” is arguably the best work Keitel has ever done. It’s certainly the bravest.
With perfection secured in the 1992 original, why attempt a remake with a poorly-doctored plot, no moral center and most of all, no Harvey Keitel? I know sequels are like bad weather, but watching the Cage version recently only confirmed that this property is fully-owned and operated by Mr. K.
Keitel has no name in the film. He doesn’t deserve one. He’s only “the bad lieutenant” (“BL”), and he’s way worse than bad. He’s rotten, horrible, impossible to sufficiently despise. And yet, horror that he is, he is also Everyman, lost in the cheap power games on offer in the Modern Circus, and losing every one of them.
He stumbles from one depravity to the next, ostensibly looking to recoup his gambling losses. In fact, perhaps from religious guilt or just self-loathing, he seems most interested in pushing his gambling sharks to the limit in a sort of “march of the flagellants.” He’s begging for a bullet, but boasts at one point, “I’m a cop!” He’s untouchable.
None of this is easy to watch. It has been dismissed as tawdry porn. But following Harvey Keitel as he tries to hold it all together while playing his own antagonist is richly rewarding. You first realize there’s a real spiritual center here when BL gives up his first cry of self-pity. He goes on several such whining, whimpering, weeping jags, always alone, revealing the tormented soul at work and play. “Get with the program” he advises a nun who has been brutally raped by two altar boys she knows. Blowing BL’s mind, she’s chosen forgiveness over revenge. Encountering Christianity in the raw like this finally takes him over the edge.
Avoid the execrable Cage remake – and do make sure you get the original 1992 theatrical NC-17 release of the Keitel film. This used to be quite a challenge, given the repugnance with which this movie was greeted. Back when Blockbuster ruled the rental market and refused to rent NC-17, they stipulated a bowdlerized R-rated cut up just for them. Now, ironically, one of the sure places to find the NC-17 version is from Blockbuster online. Netflix also has it, and I was gratified that the Comcast On Demand offering, although tagged “R,” conformed fairly well to the NC-17 version I saw at an actual cinema in 1992, and it measured up OK with the list of cut scenes at http://movie-censorship.com/report.php?ID=5700924
Fun: How to Train Your Dragon (2010) http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0892769/ So many animated films are crawling from the woodwork – or in this case, attacking from the sky – that anything short of “Toy Story” class can easily get overlooked. I had never heard of this Dreamworks offering before I stumbled across it on cable. It turned out to be a funny and likeable find.
Many of the conventions are familiar enough: a smart nerd teen wants to make it big in a macho culture of dragon-hunting “Vikings” (all with inexplicable Scottish burrs). His Dad is the local king, who, like all his fellow Vikings, is built like a cement truck. His son “Hiccup” (you can’t have everything) would love to join in the swagger and fun, but he’s overly intellectual and physically underwhelming. Still, he begs and pleads for dragon combat training to do his bit for Berk, the little island that the Vikings have occupied for 300 years.
Before this can even get started, a big night attack occurs and Hiccup rolls out his new crossbow-cum-bola thrower. Firing at a passing shadow, he entangles a Night Fury, the best the dragons have to offer. The Night Fury is not only a hot fireball shooter, but so stealthy that no one has ever actually seen one. Hiccup tracks down his stricken prey the next day and the fun begins.
One of the most appealing aspects of “HTTYD” is the restraint shown when it comes to “animal schmaltz,” where movie critters are anthropomorphized to eye-rolling excess. Here the tone is moderated, especially for the Night Fury, “Toothless.” Grateful for the fish Hiccup has given him, Toothless obligingly regurgitates half and won’t quit staring expectantly until Hiccup takes a convincing bite. (Someone has been watching their nature films.) The human characters are likewise well-written and voiced (Hiccup’s mentor “Gobber the Belch,” is done by Craig Ferguson). And the happy ending (what other kind in this genre?) is perfectly acceptable.
This movie is already spawning sequels. Enjoy the original.
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