The Exercise of Authoritah

September 12, 2013 By

I have this comic fantasy of some day being in a business situation where a client comes to me with a tricky problem. I ponder impassively for a moment. Then I pick up the phone and make one cryptic phone call. I then look at the client and say, “Go home, it will be taken care of.” This Godfather fantasy of being able to deliver on firm promises with a single phone call cracks me up because it so absurdly out of whack with the way I actually operate. Phone calls like this can only happen in the context of an asymmetric mode of relationship management I call collecting. In real life, I am more likely to be on the receiving end of such a call. 

Unlike normal adult patterns of relating, which I’ll call connecting, collecting is a mode of relating that is asymmetric  at a psychological level. Even when two people know each other personally, if it is a collection relationship, one party — the collector — defines the relationship unilaterally and strives forcefully to make that definition prevail. This striving is the essence of Eric Cartman’s signature line on South Park: “Respect my AUTHORITAH!”

authoritah2

Once authoritah has been effectively imposed, it can be exercised in dramatically leveraged and highly deterministic ways. A single phone call can move mountains, without tedious consultation, arguments, second-guessing or questioning. Connecting is for normal, nice people. Collecting is for people who are headed for either world domination or madness.

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Projected Presence

September 4, 2013 By

Kevin is a 2013 blogging resident visiting us from his home blog over at Melting Asphalt.

You shall not make for yourself a graven image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth; you shall not bow down to them or serve them; for I the LORD your God am a jealous God. — Exodus 20:4-5.

There’s no such thing as bad publicity. — P.T. Barnum.

I.

I’ve always been puzzled by idolatry. From the Greek eidos (form or shape) + latreia (worship), idolatry suggests a mindset I find almost impossible to fathom.

How could a basalt statue, or a small wooden figurine, command such power and attention that it would come to be worshipped? What kind of human would “bow down” to such an artifact, or attempt to “serve” it? And how could the practice become so common, in the early-historic Levant, as to require a special injunction against it — in no less privileged a location than the Ten Commandments?

In his mind-rending epic The Origin of Consciousness, Julian Jaynes offers an answer to all of these questions. It’s an answer that’s hard to take seriously, but worth examining — if for no other purpose than to expand our hypothesis-space.

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Roundup, May-August 2013, September in Bay Area, Sponsorship Update

August 28, 2013 By

Time for a roundup and Labor-Day long-read fodder for some of you. It’s been a summer of fairly ambitious posts for me. Besides finally finishing up the Gervais Principle series, I managed one usual-ribbonfarm-bag-of-tricks post (#8) and three that strike out in a new and somewhat difficult new direction of thinking/writing for me (#4, #10, #11). Residents Drew, Mike and Kevin added five more essays.

  1. The Gervais Principle VI: Children of an Absent God
  2. Civilization and the War on Entropy (Drew)
  3. Aphorisms: Collection 1
  4. On the Unraveling of Scripts
  5. War and Nonhuman Agency (Mike)
  6. Players versus Spectators
  7. Consciousness: An Outside View (Kevin)
  8. You Are Not an Artisan
  9. The Networked Narrative (Drew)
  10. The Quality of Life
  11. On Freedomspotting
  12. An Archetypes Map
  13. I and Thou and Life in Aspergerstan (Mike)

I also had one ambitious off-Ribbonfarm essay in Aeon Magazine: The American Cloud.

Sponsorship Update

It’s been a slow year on the sponsorship front. The 2013 total stands at $2275 so far, 61% of the 2013 total ($3750).

I suspect turning off the buy-me-a-coffee end-of-post link had something to do with this. It seems to have functioned as a sponsorship entry drug.  But since I don’t like playing behavioral economics games, I’ll leave that turned off.

If you’d like to see this increasing investment in this site, pitch in. I am hoping we can beat last year’s total and hit at least $4000.

Spending September in the Bay Area

In other news, I will be in the Bay Area all through September, working onsite with a consulting client. I am planning on catching up with folks in the area in the evenings as much as I can, and also go fishing for interesting new clients.

There will be a meetup of some of the Bay Area regulars from our Facebook group at La Boulange cafe on University Ave., Palo Alto, on Wednesday Sept 4 at 7 PM. The plan is to drink coffee, eat sandwiches and discuss the interesting developing trend of containerization of code.

I’ll try to pull together at least one more meetup in the city. Maybe a hike/outdoor activity of some sort. Suggestions welcome.

Email me if you’re interested. I should be free to meet up most evenings somewhere in the Peninsula/South Bay area. I’ll probably make it up to San Francisco a few evenings as well.

On Thinking Caps

August 26, 2013 By

I’d like a literal thinking cap. A regular baseball hat, but with the look of an orange or yellow construction hard hat. It would say “Construction in Progress, Do Not Disturb” on it.

Here’s why. There is an annoying asymmetry between inside-head and outside-head thinking. A thinking cap would solve this problem.

Somebody thinking outside their heads looks obviously busy. Whether they are cleaning, doing laundry, assembling furniture, performing brain surgery or repairing a broken computer, they send clear “do not disturb” signals.  You are unlikely to interrupt a coworker or spouse obviously occupied in such external thinking tasks to ask them to do something unrelated. I use the phrase external thinking rather than the word doing to distinguish tasks that require active logical thinking/planning and nearly full attention from those that are more mindless.

But somebody busy doing some intricate thinking inside their heads doesn’t send such clear signals. They just look somewhere between idle and spaced-out. Or they might be doing something that seems low-effort and okay to interrupt, like putting away dishes.

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I and Thou and Life in Aspergerstan

August 20, 2013 By

Mike is a 2013 blogging resident visiting us from his home blog Omniorthogonal.

“I want to see you not through the Machine,” said Kuno. “I want to speak to you not through the wearisome Machine.”

– E M Forster, The Machine Stops

Martin Buber (1878-1965) was a Jewish philosopher best known for integrating traditional Judaic thought with existentialism and other modern influences. His I and Thou is one of those little books that can utterly transform your worldview in just a few pages. It has some of the concentrated linguistic power of poetry or mathematics. Given its mystical religious overtones, that makes it feel somewhat dangerous to me — I can’t entirely embrace what it is saying, but fear that its linguistic spell might overpower my usual defenses.

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An Archetypes Map

August 14, 2013 By

I’ve been trying to organize my thinking around archetypes into a broader landscape. Here’s my first stab at organizing a subset of the many I’ve played around with over the years. This exercise interests me because I am trying to level up my sophistication in dealing with archetypes.

archetypesMapLet’s do a quick guided tour.

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Personality Ambidexterity: Or How to Turn Yourself Inside-Out

August 11, 2013 By

Fox and hedgehog are related archetypes that form an archetype schema: a set of related archetypes that arguably covers most of humanity very well. Push come to shove, most people are willing to classify themselves on a good schema, and suspend the instinct to challenge the underlying assumptions and fuzziness in boundaries.

The simplest sort of archetype schema is a binary classification (“there are two kinds of people in the world…”). Developing some capacity to inhabit the other side of a binary schema, within which you see yourself relatively clearly as being on one side, is like developing personality ambidexterity. To do this, you have to understand the symmetries and polarities in a given schema.

A symmetry in mathematics is a transformation that turns one thing into another. For example, a reflection symmetry flips (say) a left-hand silhouette drawn on paper so it looks like a right hand. Any archetype schema is based on various symmetries and polarities, but it may not be immediately apparent how to describe it explicitly as such (a necessary step before you can apply a transformation), or why it is worth bothering.

What operation might turn, say, a fox into a hedgehog? And why would we want to attempt that sort of “trading places” switcheroo?

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On Freedomspotting

August 8, 2013 By

Of all the seductive ideas in psychology, none is more dangerous than the idea that one is free. Humans have a tendency to jump to conclusions on the matter, on the basis of the flimsiest of evidence. We also believe that freedom is fragile. So humans who do suspect they are free are usually reluctant to advertise the belief. They suspect that to act visibly free is to invite some form of unwelcome authoritarian attention.

This classic exchange in The Dark Knight Rises illustrates how we think about freedom (Daggett is a corrupt executive with designs on Wayne Enterprises and Bane is the super-villain he has allied with, against Batman):

Bane: [to Daggett’s flunkey] Leave us!
John Daggett: No! You stay here, I’m in charge!
Bane: [puts his hand on Daggett’s shoulder] Do you feel in charge?  (flunkey leaves room)
John Daggett: I paid you a small fortune.
Bane: And this gives you power over me?

How does a free person act? Like Bane? Like a Bodhisattva? Like an Ayn Rand caricature? Like a successful entrepreneur with an early-retirement stash? Like a jerk? Like Frederick Douglass in Diary of a Slave when he has his first epiphanies about the nature of freedom in an environment of whippings?

All of the above. Freedom is a set of archetypal patterns of behavior rather than a state of being. Learning to detect these patterns is an interesting pursuit I call freedomspotting. It can be pursued as a hobby, or as a calling by teachers, investors, dictators, revolutionaries and others with a professional interest in either fueling or extinguishing sparks of freedom.

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The Quality of Life

July 31, 2013 By

The idea of quality of life is very twentieth-century. It sparks associations with ideas like statistical quality control and total quality management. It is the idea that entire human lives can be objectively modeled, measured and compared in meaningful ways. That lives can be idealized and normalized in ways that allow us to go beyond comparisons to absolute measures. That lives can be provisioned from cradle-to-grave. That an insistence on a unique, subjective evaluation of one’s own life is something of a individualist-literary conceit.

I suspect the phrase itself is a generalization of the older notion of modern conveniences, a phrase you frequently find in early twentieth-century writing. It referred to the diffusion of various technologies into everyday pre-industrial life, from running hot and cold water in bathrooms and garbage collection to anesthetics and vaccines.

That conception of the quality of life, as the sum total of material conveniences acquired and brutalities of nature thwarted through technology, seems naive today. But with hindsight, it was much better than what it evolved into: baroque United Nations statistics that reflect institutionally enabled and enforced scripts, which dictate what people ought to want.

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The Networked Narrative

July 25, 2013 By

Drew is a 2013 blogging resident visiting us from his home blog over at Kneeling Bus.

“In every age urban spaces—streets and squares—have served to stage spectacles in which the citizenry participated as players and audience. Urban life in nothing if not theatrical.”

-Spiro Kostof

“Places do not disappear, but their logic and their meaning become absorbed in the network.”

-Manuel Castells

The compact disc, a beachhead in the eventual digital absorption of nearly everything, introduced itself to the world via Philips and Sony with the promise of “perfect sound forever.” Today, that succinct phrase reads as a flawed prophecy about a then-nascent revolution in information and memory: The replacement of an analog world where death and decay ultimately eroded all but the most valued (and fortunate) vessels of information—paintings, books, records, and even buildings—with a digital one where the same bits that had previously lived in physical objects could achieve immortality and begin piling up forever unless consciously deleted. Analog information had to opt into survival through intentional preservation; digital information would have to opt out.

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