Applied Semiotics

A tag search for "Precision Guided Munitions" on Flickr goes horribly wrong

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Things find us. Mosquitoes, gossip, bombs. There is the information and the vessel that moves the information.

My buddy Wade sent me this email:

subj: Benjamin Rush, "Plans for a Peace-Office"

SF author Will Shetterly linked to this on his blog, saying, "The plan itself is a charming mix of the practical and 17th century enlightened Christian gonzo."

http://www.lewrockwell.com/vance/vance76.html

Gonzo, indeed! For example, his plans for redecorating the War Office - what would now of course be the DoD - are striking:

In the lobby of this office let there be painted representations of all the common military instruments of death, also human skulls, broken bones, unburied and putrefying dead bodies, hospitals crowded with sick and wounded soldiers, villages on fire, mothers in besieged towns eating the flesh of their children, ships sinking in the ocean, rivers dyed with blood, and extensive plains without a tree or fence, or any object, but the ruins of deserted farm houses.
Above this group of woeful figures, – let the following words be inserted, in red characters to represent human blood,

"NATIONAL GLORY."

Folks, this is strange stuff. The kind of semantic air pocket that knocks the coffee out of your styrofoam cup and burns your leg. I mean, one moment you are thinking about your morning team meeting, then next... this.

Let's retrace our steps through this garden of forking paths: Crazy Age of Enlightenment Framer, the suspended animation of print, then blogged by Messrs Rockwell and Shetterly, the link cut-and-pasted into a email to me from Wade.

Awoken from the death-sleep of a forgotten book, the molecule-slowing cold of deep space, roused by the heat and warmth of the Internets into some kind of hyperactive quickening of forwards, the strangeness of this Peace Office idea is like The Blob crawling out of a freshly crashed meteor in a cornfield. One brain out of six billion pulls a gene of information loose from the big goopy genome of a book, enzyme splices it into a rhinovirus, and then wipes it on the handrail to the subway. And the next thing you know you are imagining Donald Rumsfeld as the Secretary of Peace, blissed out from the electrode implanted in his substantia nigra, transformed into the lever-whacking lab monkey of American foreign policy.

Shocked awake by our collective You Tubed Flickrated Dr. Frankenstein consciousness, these informational chimeras shamble to their feet and hammer at the glass double doors of our mental shopping centers. They find us. And after that finding, the world is different.

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This isn't Aeon Flux. It's just tagged that way. The meaning isn't destroyed, just stranged.

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I typed Aeon Flux into flickr’s tag field – and somehow wound up with what seems to be a Nike ad.

Nike has its headquarters in Portland, which is a very strange town. So what exactly is going on here? The quantum noise of people thinking and sticking words on things. Nothing new there - poets call it "motion of mind." They call it that in MFA programs, in any case.

What is new is that when I stick a word on something, and I make a misstep, or a misstick, the missticking still stays stuck. And that slippage, that seismo-semiotic skip remains visable from the air. It is findable. And that mashup of findability and strangeness is new.

Neomorphisms get neologisms. I would like to propose a new word. Proposals are usually the start of something strange anyway, somebody asking you to do something you didn’t think of on your own. The word is RESE, which is a strange kind of word, an acronym:

Reverse Entropic Strangeness Effect

Strangeness is created, but it is never destroyed. And once it is created, it gets found. Once it's found, it grows ever more findable, as the neural network of our brains is wired (and continually rewiring itself) for strangeness.

Chris Anderson has written extensively about The Long Tail, the way the Internet has changed the traditional behavior of markets. To quote him directly:

The theory of the Long Tail is that our culture and economy is increasingly shifting away from a focus on a relatively small number of "hits" (mainstream products and markets) at the head of the demand curve and toward a huge number of niches in the tail.

In other words, niche markets thrive because demand can ALWAYS find supply. This is how the Long Tail disintermediates, disambiguates and other discombobulates traditional markets through the subversive power of findability. But I want to push that concept one step further. The Long Tail not only allows people to find strangeness, but in the finding it creates more strangeness.

Dadaism works by through combinatorial effect - by combining disparate elements in an unexpected way it subverts the significance of both. It is the power of Eisensteinian montage to create meaning turned on its ear. Or as Johnson characterized the metaphysical poets, "The most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together."

The proliferation of life forms that evolutionary paleontologists call "The Cambrian Explosion" likely occurred because of the development of sexual reproduction - the deliberate combination of previously uncombined genes into totally new genomes. Information could suddenly shuffle its own deck, over and over again.

That's what we are in the middle of, right now, a long orgy of recombination, our information reproducing itself not in monastic cells of orthodox transcription, but in a writhing mess of brains, trained and untrained. A mess of information in transit and transition, with the only constants being change and strange.

The Long Tail isn't quite enough of a label for this phenomenon. Maybe we could call it the Long Flail, or the Strange Grail, which isn’t even an anagram, but does rhyme, and sounds very Golden Bough.

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This is Aeon Flux. And a physical tag of Aeon. And the tag has been tagged ...

"That which does not kill us makes us… stranger."

As much as I love that line, I didn’t write it. Trevor Goodchild says it in the animated series Aeon Flux.

Have the Internets ushered in a brave new tomorrow of transparency, a real-world correlate to what economists and game theorists have called perfect information, the informational equivalent to the frictionless void of high school physics homework? I don't know. It's probably something like that.

Have the Internets unleashed a horrific avalanche of human depravity and avarice upon a previously insulated world? I know that I managed to make to thirty years of age before I knew what a furry was - and then the internet brought not only the idea into my head, but an actual furry into my living room. Guess what? I never wanted to know about the furry lifestyle ("lifestyle" - a favorite strangeness mixer), but once that box is opened and the cat is out of the bag and the metaphor is mixed, there not a damn thing you can do about it. It's a kind of entropy, an arrow for time based on the inalienable ratchet that while strangeness is created, it is never destroyed. Because strangeness is bulletproof. And look, I don't have a problem with furries. Ok, actually I do. I don't think I would have so much trouble with the concept if these people were better looking. Maybe if I looked like that, I would want to pretend I was a priapic dolphin covered with synthetic fur. It may be one of the last acceptable prejudices in the developed world. Enjoy it while it lasts.

I don't know if the Internet, if this ever-improving exchange of information has made the world a better place. I don't know if it has made it a worse place, or only helped us be awful faster and harder than we ever have before. But there is one thing I know for certain...

The Internet has made the world stranger.

Out here on the perimeter, there are no stars. And the Internet is only perimeter. Everything is an edge. The long edge.

The edge is where things get strange.

Stranger.