But not to worry. This is probably just one shit year in a sequence of many more shit years to come. No sign of anything getting better in our near future and lots of trends pointing downward. Does it have to be like this? Not in any way but the majority of people are stupid and we all suffer together.

ACL

I had messed up my knee in late summer of 2022 during a climbing accident and after a bit of stalling figured out that having my ACL reconstructed would be a good idea.

The surgery was scheduled for February 23rd of 2023. That made a lot of the beginning of the year waiting to go into surgery which was followed by getting the surgery (a supremely weird experience), then recuperating from it at home for a couple of weeks and going back to work while doing physical therapy.

The chronology as far as I could piece it together:

• Feb 23rd, surgery
• Feb 25th, dismissed from the Charité
• Feb 27th, first outing
• March 9th, half weight bearing
• March 12th, 90 degree flexion
• April 10th, walking without crutches
• April 15th, cycled on the Christiania to get coffee
• June 16th, hospital check-up and cleared for cycling
• June 18th, first time road cycling

I got around mostly using ride shares during the first part which was fine. Turns out that I spent €474,55 on cab rides. A fair bit of that was thankfully reimbursed by my saved up mobility budget. I stopped taking cabs and started cycling on the electric Christiania on April 15th and then had my first outing on the road bike on June 18th.

During one of my final check-ups I told my physician at the hospital that if I didn’t rationally knew I had knee surgery, a lot of the time I couldn’t remember it. There was no noticeable difference anymore.

Of course there are still lots of situations where I notice it. The difference in strength between the two legs is still there and catching up very slowly. But that things are more or less back to normal is exactly what was promised.

I’m cleared to boulder again from around Easter if I choose to ever practice that sport again.

Kids

School

The kids started their school year with the German event they call the Einschülung, something that I disagree but I have no shortage of things that I disagree with about the German school ‘system’. That’s for another blog post.

The concept of the school and how classes are setup is very cool and the teachers are young and engaged. If everything worked the way it should, things would be amazing. The only issue is that most of the time there are staff shortages that fully destabilize whatever plans or schedules had been drafted. Those shortages stem from the deep dysfunction of the Berlin civil service and mostly because of a lack of funding for the schools that need it the most.

I’m not sure what we’re going to do there but for now we’re going to see if things look up in the second half of the year.

Let it be clear that Germany is a country that in no way values kids and their education.

Father

Related to our kids going to school, on their first school day morning my dad passed away suddenly in Amsterdam. We knew he was sick but we had no idea that things would progress this quickly.

The funeral was of course in Turkey so I took a flight to Amsterdam to be with my family and see him off and then flew to Turkey with my mother to do the burial in our village. It was the first time I was back in Turkey since 2015.

That was a difficult thing to do and after that everything is different.

Holidays

I heard the news about my dad’s illness on our holiday in the Alps this year. Our first family holiday in a long time and otherwise a resounding success.

After all the affairs were wrapped up we went to Amsterdam for a week during the fall break to keep my mother company and to have the kids experience a bit of the Netherlands again. It was good to be back and to see people we hadn’t seen in a long time.

Studies

I’ve continued the trend of unapologetically self-studying things that I fancy. I can recommend it.

Abstract Algebra

To continue to study category theory I diagnosed a gap I had on basic abstract algebra and tried to close it. I didn’t finish either of the textbooks (Fraleigh and Galian) because it seems that text books are bad for self-studying people.

I worked through a couple of YouTube lecture series on the topic which gave me much more value.

Sheaf Theory

Then I continued on and off in Sheaf Theory Through Examples which is a very mixed book. It’s nowhere near as good as Fong and Spivak’s book and now nearing the end it is getting very obtuse and inaccessible. I’ll finish this and then move on to Bartosz Milewski.

Japanese

I kept studying Japanese for most of the year and on a whim I registered for the December JLPT. During registration I had a choice where I could either go for the safe but relatively irrelevant N5 level or stretch myself and go for N4.

I picked N4 and that turned out to be a lot tougher than expected. I had to push very hard on both vocabulary and grammar to get to a point where I even felt it was worth going to Düsseldorf to take the test. The 1-2 months before the test I was cramming flash cards throughout the day and studying most evenings.

The test itself in Düsseldorf was even harder than I expected and I think that it’s unlikely that I passed it, but who knows… Results are due end of January.

Even if I don’t get the certificate, stretching myself to N4 has made me study much much harder than I would ever have otherwise and I’ve advanced quite a bit. Also I got a quick trip to Düsseldorf out of it where I could eat Asian food at a level and authenticity that’s impossible to get in Berlin.

Cultural

With everything else that was going on, I didn’t have anything significant happen here. No time, no energy, no relevance.

I don’t really know how other people manage to binge dozens of crappy Netflix shows. I can’t really imagine spending entire evenings watching television. Do people do this still?

There are lots of good shows still that I would like to watch (The Last of Us, The Bear, Succession, etc.) but there’s just no time.

Books

I only read 15 books this year with Galian, Genki and the sheaf theory book—none of which are listed below—sucking up most of my reading time.

Cold Enough for Snow was a nice book and it also happened to be the only piece of fiction I read this year. The rest of the books above are all highly situational and none of them are particularly interesting or made a lasting impact.

Video

I watched six movies this year. The only notable one was Heat which I first saw as a teenager in the City cinema in Amsterdam.

When it comes to television things look slightly better:

• The Sandman: We did not finish it but enjoyed the episodes that we watched.
• Spy x Family S1: Exactly the light-hearted fun anime that I needed to watch. Nothing serious here but a fun conceit well executed.
• Tour de France Unchained: An epic dramatization of the world’s biggest cycling event that is a must watch if you’re even slightly interested in the sport.
• The Witcher S3: Nothing of note happened in this season but it was still kinda fun to watch I guess.
• Attack of Titan S4P2: It was good to watch the ending of this epic series but after such a long wait it was kinda hard to pick up the relatively complex storyline.
• Death Note: An anime classic that I started which is well executed but tough as nails and not at all compelling.
• Jujutsu Kaisen S2: The long awaited Hidden Inventory and Shibuya Incident arcs turned into a treat to watch despite the continuously escalating power levels and its sprawling cast of characters and villains.

Games

During my recovery from surgery I started and finished Breath of the Wild. The irony of having had a climbing accident and making Link free-climb epic cliffs on Hyrule was not lost on me.

That was the year. Let’s see what the new one does.

In fact Weleda supplied naturopathic materials for ‘medical experiments’ (i.e. torture) on prisoners at Dachau.

Jazz and popular music are often scorned at European Waldorf schools, and recorded music in general is frowned upon; these phenomena are considered to harbor demonic forces. Instead students read fairy tales, a staple of Waldorf education. Some sports, too, are forbidden, and art instruction often rigidly follows Steiner’s eccentric theories of color and form. Taken together with the pervasive anti-technological and anti-scientific bias, the suspicion toward rational thought, and the occasional outbreaks of racist gibberish, these factors indicate that Waldorf schooling is as questionable as the other aspects of the anthroposophist enterprise.

And if you choose to follow the wikipedia trail lots more weird things, such as this guy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valentin_Tomberg

And lots of nazis and fellow travelers or intellectual precursors in there, like this guy:

Karutz war ein deutscher HNO-Arzt und Ethnologe

That combination of professions is extremely sketchy. German Wikipedia neglects to mention this particular bit (weird how that keeps happening):

Karutz was more openly antisemitic than many of his anthroposophist colleagues. He denounced the “spirit of Jewry,”which he described as “cliquish, petty, narrow-minded, rigidly tied to the past, devoted to dead conceptual knowledge and hungry for world power.”

Well worth a read and not so long as you would think. A lot of the page consists of notes and comments.

https://social-ecology.org/wp/2009/01/anthroposophy-and-ecofascism-2/

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/annals-of-inquiry/slate-star-codex-and-silicon-valleys-war-against-the-media

It turns out that they met each other for a debate in 1996 in Bielefeld and Latour DESTROYED his opponent (full article).

Luhmann, as expected, failed to engage with the theme of the conference, Science and Technology Studies and didn’t come out of his bubble. The same bubble that he has managed to trap most of the German humanities in.

[Luhmann] only managed to address the theme of the conference—science and its sociological study—with half a sentence where he curtly asserted that science is an autopoietic subsystem of modern society.

An autopoietic subsystem, my ass. Latour quickly riposted into a frontal assault at the entirety of Luhmann-ism.

No, according to Latour, this theory didn’t have anything to offer to him and neither he concluded any of those gathered there. A quick perusal of the conference program should have sufficed to ascertain that the empirically obsessed STSers could not recover their objects in this theory. This may be bemoaned from the high vantage point of the Theory of Society as poor, theoretically “flat” sociology, nonetheless, Latour replied, this empirical Zoology of STS gives an account of this society as it is and not how it may appear from the distance of the chilling heights of systems theory. Latour clarified that fundamentally, systems theory represents everything that he and his colleagues in science studies have been battling for 20 years—yes, really battle and not just criticize. The purification of science, the simplification of the social by a demarcation with its environment, Luhmann’s work as the embodiment of the “cognitive turn” in epistemology—for Latour these were the old buzzwords that had to miss what’s special about science: its materiality. And in doing so of course also what’s specific for modern society, the large technological networks.

Latour battling ‘the purification of science [and] the simplification of the social’, a true hero of science and society.

To speak thus is to use the aesthetic as an anesthetic.

We would be unable to cope with modernity unless we had a few pockets of place in which to store our hope.

Rendering is technically what visual- and sonic-effects artists do to a film to generate a more or less consistent sense of atmosphere or world.

elcphrasis

Texts also exploit negative rhythm to generate tone. The absence of sound or graphic marks can be as potent as their presence. Gaps between stanzas, and other kinds of broken lineation, create tone out of sheer blankness.

Moreover, there is an aesthetic politics of the rhizome, which promotes rhizome for rhizome’s sake.

ecopoetics

Ecorhapsody

ecomimesis

Ecodidacticism

ecorhapsodic

It is providing a fantasy, an aesthetic playground in which the ideas in the book appear incarnated, a literary gravitational field generated by the sheer quantity of vivid description (elcphrasis).

This paradoxical act of identification with the fantasy object of ideology could be mirrored in critical analysis, by the relentless close reading of texts, not in order to achieve some tasteful distance toward them, but precisely in order to “mess around” with them, or as my students sometimes say in horror, “dissect.”

In sum, one of the principal complaints against establishing a vivid, solidly real nature “out there” or “over there” is that it just fails to be convincing. This lack of believability penetrates to the very core of ecomimesis, the most potent rhetorical device for establishing a sense of nature. The inherent instability of language, and of the human and nonhuman worlds, ensure that ecomimesis fails to deliver.

The problem comes when we start to think that there is something behind or beyond or above (in other words, outside!) the inside-outside distinction. Not that the distinction is real; it is entirely spurious. Thus, it is wrong to claim that there is something more real beyond inside and outside, whether that thing is a world of (sacred) nature (traditional ecological language) or machines (Deleuze and Guattari world). Yet it is equally wrong to say that there is nothing, to “believe in nothing,” as it were, and to say that he or she who has the best argument is the right one—pure nihilism. There is not even nothing beyond inside and outside. Getting used to that could take a lifetime, or more.

We can expect to find ambient qualities in any artwork whatsoever. We need not restrict ourselves to works that are specifically ambient, and especially not that subset of works that contain ecomimesis. In a world properly attuned to the environment, we would read poems with an eye to ecology, no matter what their content.

Nature cannot remain itself—it is the flickering shapes on the edges of our perception, the strangers who disturb us with their proximity, the machines whose monstrosity inspires revulsion.

They are identical because, under current economic conditions, not only is there no place, but there is also no space.

Before and after the work of capital, there persists a curious silence and absence marked by traces of misery and oppression.

Although some DJs have created superstar cults, the notion of the disco or house DJ is that of an anonymous worker in a “sound factory,” generating libidinal pulses in a space of dancing, producing ambience, in the same way as fairgrounds provide machines for enjoyment rather than work.

Marx described how capitalist alienation is fundamentally how human labor power and labor time get factored out of the process of value generation, even though they are intrinsic to it. Capitalism encrypts labor.

Rainforests are ransacked for biotechnology, and the insides of life-forms provide new products such as patented genomes in what ecofeminist Vandana Shiva describes as another wave of colonization.

In returning to Romanticism, ecocriticism highlights the yearning for a bygone life of feudal hierarchy. Primitivist environmentalisms crave a lost golden age of interconnect-edness with the environment. They look to pre-feudal, sometimes prehistoric, pasts to discover forms of primitive communism. In contrast, futurist environmentalisms are based on the notion that the golden age has not yet happened. They acknowledge that despite the medievalist glamour, most people never had much of a relationship with their land under a feudal hierarchy.

Ambient poetics is about making the imperceptible perceptible, while retaining the form of its imperceptibility—to make the invisible visible, the inaudible audible.

Ambient art wants to make the unknown known, like science. But it also wishes to retain the flavor of the unknown, a certain mystifying opacity—otherwise ambient art would in fact be science.

Organicism, that peculiarly English form of nature ideology, paints society as a nonsystemic heap of classes, beliefs, and practices, as ramshackle and spontaneous as a pile of compost. This is a rich, compelling, and finally authoritarian fantasy—there’s no arguing with it.

Tolkien narrates the victory of the suburbanite, the “little person,” embedded in a tamed yet natural-seeming environment. Nestled into the horizon as they are in their burrows, the wider world of global politics is blissfully unavailable to them. Tolkien’s work embodies a key nationalist fantasy, a sense of “world” as real, tangible yet indeterminate, evoking a metonymic chain of images—an anamorphic form.

The question of animals—sometimes I wonder whether it is the question—radically disrupts any idea of a single, independent, solid environment.

For Tolkien, dwarves, elves, hobbits, and talking eagles are welcome others, but swarthy “southern” or “eastern” men are not.

The only way to remain close to the strangers without killing them (turning them into yourself or into an inanimate object) is to maintain a sense of irony. If irony and movement are not part of environmentalism, strangers are in danger of disappearing, exclusion, ostracism, or worse.

State terror takes an interest in ecological catastrophe.

The struggle between individualism and holism offers an attenuated choice between absolute liberty and absolute authority—in other words, the dilemma called America. Americans are caught between the constitution and a militarized state, between placards and pepper spray.

Mud, mud, glorious mud.

Since it looks like capitalism is about to use an ecological rhetoric of scarcity to justify future developments, it is vital that we recognize that there are serious problems with imagining an ecological view based on limits, even at the level of abstraction we have been exploring. And we need to notice that scarcity and limitation are not the only ecological concepts on the block. What if the problem were in fact one of a badly distributed and reified surplus?

Green consumerism made it possible to be both pro-capitalist and green, repeating the Romantic struggle between rebelling and selling out.

To be a consumerist, you don’t have to consume anything, just contemplate the idea of consuming.

But this promise typifies the paradox of the Romantic avant-garde. If we could just get the aesthetic form right, we could crack reality, open it up, and change it.

Both quietism and activism are two sides of the same beautiful coin. The beautiful soul fuses the aesthetic and the moral.

Likewise, there are fascist and New Age versions of environmentalism.

Nature writing partly militates against ecology rather than for it. By setting up nature as an object “over there”—a pristine wilderness beyond all trace of human contact—it re-establishes the very separation it seeks to abolish.

Significantly, Althusser suggests, if only poetically, that ideology is a dimension of existence—we exist “within” it.167 A more engaged ecological criticism would acknowledge this environment—one we are caught in even as we judge it.

The dizzyingly additive quality of the images makes us forget where we came from at the start of the paragraph, and where we are going—how do we end up at otter scat? But just as “out of joint” is the metaphorical slash of the “as I write.” Since the “as” slides between analogy, temporality, and strict semantic continuity, and since this sliding must take place for the passage to seduce us to visualize a fantasy world, “As I write” breaches the consistency of the ecomimesis even as it broaches it.

Only a very privileged person would make such a big deal out of having eyes and ears, of being able to walk, read, write. There are hints that nature is best accessed by the able-bodied, or at least, those with sharp, undistracted organs of perception.

Ecomimesis aims to rupture the aesthetic distance, to break down the subject-object dualism, to convince us that we belong to this world. But the end result is to reinforce the aesthetic distance, the very dimension in which the subject-object dualism persists. Since de-distancing has been reified, distance returns even more strongly, in surround-sound, with panoramic intensity.

Writing outside the dominant Western traditions, Trungpa notices how materialism and spiritualism are joined at the hip:

Our choice is false if it has been reduced to one between hypocrisy and cynicism, between wholeheartedly getting into environmental rhetoric and cynically distancing ourselves from it. In both cases, we would be writing liturgies for the beautiful soul. Although it is “realistic” to be cynical rather than hypocritical, we do not wish to reinforce the current state of affairs. Our answer to the ruthless ransacking of nature, and of the idea of nature, must be yes, we admit to the reality of the situation. And no, we refuse to submit to it.

Ecocritique could establish collective forms of identity that included other species and their worlds, real and possible. It would subvert fixating images of “world” that inhibit humans from grasping their place in an already historical nature.

To think in terms of either crude action or pure ideas is to remain within the prison of the beautiful soul.

Dark ecology acknowledges that there is no way out of the paradoxes outlined in this book. Far from remaining natural, ecocriticism must admit that it is contingent and queer.

If it is to be properly critical, montage must juxtapose the contents with the frame. Why? Simply to juxtapose contents without bringing form and subject position into the mix would leave things as they are.

If ecology without nature has taught us anything, it is that there is a need to acknowledge irreducible otherness, whether in poetics, ethics, or politics.

All is not lost in a consumerist universe, if only because the junk that surrounds us is so inconsistent. Its inconsistency has the quality of a clue. This clue is the secret of suffering curled up inside the very dimension of the object.

Embodied in the sonic and graphic materiality of the text, the earth quakes, setting up a subject quake, a tremor of the “I.” What remains after our long delve into the fake otherness of ecomimesis is the fragility of an “I” that we can’t quite get rid of, but that at least can be made to vibrate, in such a way that does not strengthen its aggressive resolve (like a hammer or a boot), but that dissolves its form, however momentarily.

Heidegger has most powerfully described place as open and beyond concept. But Heidegger, infamously, solidifies this very openness, turning history into destiny and leaving the way open for an extreme right-wing politics, which can easily assimilate ecological thinking to its ideological ends, precisely because ecological thinking is highly aestheticized. The Nazis passed original laws to protect animals and (German) forests as ends in themselves.

Romantic environmentalism is a flavor of modern consumerist ideology. It is thoroughly urban, even when it is born in the countryside.

Moving from one station to the next becomes a metaphor for moving from one word to another in a sentence. Landmarks become textual.

To see a place in its strangeness is not just to see how it is permeated with otherness. That could collapse into racism: otherness immigrates and I’m ready with my gun. Within a horizon, you can indeed be aware of “another” place over yonder. Appreciating strangeness is seeing the very strangeness of similarity and familiarity. To reintroduce the uncanny into the poetics of the home (oikos, ecology, ecomimesis) is a political act.

The ecological thought, the thinking of interconnectedness, has a dark side embodied not in a hippie aesthetic of life over death, or a sadistic-sentimental Bambification of sentient beings, but in a “goth” assertion of the contingent and necessarily queer idea that we want to stay with a dying world: dark ecology.

Ecopsychology

We start by thinking that we can “save” something called “the world” “over there,” but end up realizing that we ourselves are implicated. This is the solution to beautiful soul syndrome: reframing our field of activity as one for which we ourselves are formally responsible, even guilty.

We should be finding ways to stick around with the sticky mess that we’re in and that we are, making thinking dirtier, identifying with ugliness, practicing “hauntology” (Derrida’s phrase) rather than ontology.

I often think that the trouble with posthumanism is that we have not yet achieved humanity, and that humanity and posthumanity have no time for what Derrida calls the animal that therefore I am.

In this respect, dark ecology diverges from those Romanticisms that follow a Hegelian dialectic, the story of the reconciliation of the self to the other, who turns out to be the self in disguise.159 It gets over the dilemma of the beautiful soul, not by turning the other into the self, but perversely, by leaving things the way they are.

And being-here, being literally on this earth (Da-sein), would entail a need for forgiveness, an equally radical assumption that whatever is there is our responsibility, and ultimately, “our fault.”

Dark ecology tells us that we can’t escape our minds. Far from giving us a liturgy for how to get out of our guilty minds, how to stick our heads in nature and lose them, Clare helps us to stay right here, in the poisoned mud. Which is just where we need to be, right now.

The only firm ethical option in the current catastrophe, as I observed before, is admitting to the ecologically catastrophic in all its meaningless contingency, accepting responsibility groundlessly, whether or not “we ourselves” can be proved to be responsible.

Instead of trying to pull the world out of the mud, we could jump down into the mud. To emerge from the poisoned chrysalis of the beautiful soul, we admit that we have a choice. We choose and accept our own death, and the fact of mortality among species and ecosystems. This is the ultimate rationality: holding our mind open for the absolutely unknown that is to come. Evolution will not be televised. One cannot have a video of one’s own extinction. A warning to deep ecology: if we aestheticize this acceptance, we arrive at fascism, the cult of death. Instead, ecological criticism must politicize the aesthetic. We choose this poisoned ground. We will be equal to this senseless actuality. Ecology may be without nature. But it is not without us.

The disappointing bit came at the end where he confessed to not having a cell phone out of principle. This is a terrible bit of intellectual laziness which brings me to this point on Sloterdijk by Adam Greenfield which rings true:

The task before us is to discover, or invent, a politics, a mobility and a conviviality that are both authentic to the circumstances in which we find ourselves and capable of giving full expression to the emancipatory potential that remains latent and unrealized in our networked technologies.

for life is a state of uncertainty and risk, of fragile adaptation to a past and present environment that the future cannot judge.

The actors come in varying sizes; this is the whole problem with innovation.

A signature on a contract, an endorsement, an agreement stabilizes the relative size of the actors by lending to the provisional definition of alliances the assistance of the law, a law whose weight is enormous because it is entirely formal and because it applies equally to everyone.

Woe betide those who trust the law alone to shelter their projects from random hazards.

Whereas we sociologists have to drag ourselves around everywhere. Our terrains aren’t territories. They have weird borders. They’re networks, rhizomes.

To translate is to betray: ambiguity is part of translation.

The problem is, the innovator has to count on assemblages of things that often have the same uncertain nature as groups of people.

Men and things exchange properties and replace one another; this is what gives technological projects their full savor.

We won’t keep the humans’ physical presence, their caps, their uniforms, or their outspokenness; but we’ll keep some of their knowledge, their abilities, their knowhow.

For a project to materialize, it must at once recruit new allies and at the same time make sure that their recruitment is assured.

To study a technological project, one must constantly move from signs to things, and vice versa.

A technological project is neither realistic nor unrealistic; it takes on reality, or loses it, by degrees.

“But we all know what economic studies are worth.”

The actors don’t have a strategy; they get their battle plans, contra dictory ones, from other actors.

The actors create both their society and their sociology, their language and their metalanguage.

No, because the actors also provide themselves with the means to pass from one point of view to another, and they unify, from their own point of view, and each for himself, the multiplicity of points of view thus deployed. Each constructs his own instrument in order to elaborate a synoptic view. All the actors thus repair, for themselves, the disorder they create by multiplying perspectives.

To survive in a variable-ontology world, the promoters of a technological project have to imagine little bridges that let them temporarily ensure their stability.

research is, as we know, the surest although the most enjoyable way for a company to go bankrupt.

They, too, want to stabilize a certain interpretation of what they are and what they want. And there they are, ordering notes and questionnaires, which accumulate in a file that is soon complicated enough to require new notes, syntheses, and summaries.

The human sciences do not show up as the curtain falls, in order to interpret the phenomenon. They constitute the phenomenon. And the most important human sciences, always overlooked, include accounting, management, economics, the “cameral sciences” (bureau-graphy), and statistics.

And then they reach the height of cruelty and ingratitude: here’s technological prowess that has given engineers hundreds of sleepless nights for ten years, that makes them quake with fright because it may not work, and the customers take it for granted!

The actors are always right, whether they’re multiplying viewpoints or cutting down on them. If we use the adjectives ‘irrational’ and ‘absurd,’ it’s because we haven’t made our own frames of reference supple enough.

Everything happens in defiance of common sense, but there is no common sense for innovations, since they happen, they begin, they invent common sense, the right direction , the correct procedure."

How can I become a being, an object, a thing-finally a self, yes, a full set, saturated with being-without them, without their agreement, without their coming to terms (since I myself am made from them, flesh of their flesh, a rib extracted from theirs), without their acknowledgment that I am transports, displacements of human beings?

Technology is sociology extended by other means.

Give me the state of things, and I’ll tell you what people can do-this is how technologism talks. Give me the state of human beings, and I’ll tell you how they will form things-this is the watchword of sociology.

The soul of machines constitutes the social element. The body of the social element is constituted by machines.

Our bureaucracy-so widely scorned-is our second brain, as indispensable as the first.

The disorder that is wiped away on one side by describing the tasks meticulously in neat logical trees turns up again on the other side, among the programmers, who are having as much fun as a barrel of monkeys, shooting themselves in the foot, dividing up tasks according to procedures that can’t be described, for their part, in neat logical trees.

Humans and nonhumans take on form by redistributing the competences and performances of the multitude of actors that they hold on to and that hold on to them.

A technology isn’t one single character; it’s a city, it’s a collective, it’s countless.

You can’t give me enough orders, not fast enough, not in time. You have to let me handle things on my own.

Every part of the system is as complicated as the system as a whole. Every plate we unfold is itself made up of plates to be unfolded!

But you’re drawing the wrong lesson. It is not our creative power that we need to curtail; it is our 101le that we need to extend, even to our lesser brothers who did not ask us for life. We acquainted them with existence. We need to acquaint them with love.

They all say the same thing: what the principal actors have put in their mouths! What doormats, these scientific journalists! Always ready to popularize, never to investigate.

They throw money out the window, but they think research means throwing money out the window

You don’t think you have the power? Then don’t expect that Aramis will.

I would have been happy to be something, in the end, anything at all-but first you have to agree among yourselves. I can’t be every thing to everybody. The finest project in the world can’t give more than it has, and what it has is what you give it.

Harman put Heidegger, McLuhan and Clement Greenberg through a comparison and treated their views on the surface of things and their essence. Greenberg sounded to have been thrown in to make a connection to the art world.

Given that being can only show itself on the surface, I started to wonder whether a object based approach to ANT borrowing from programming might not be a useful analogy? The links between objects are along API surfaces that can be made to interact with each other under certain circumstances. The trajectory of an object is its internal state. A state that is in a black box that we cannot access except through the API it exposes. We may be able to open the black box but that could have unintended consequences such as breakage or discovery.

A final example that Harman gave was about writing about something such as wine. He said that by putting it into a machine, you could get a definite analysis of the wine, but lose its essence. To me it seems that a wine writer, writes about wine for humans and a machine writes about wine for machines. Presupposing that the human’s point of view is the only one that is valid, devolves to the anthropocentrism that we had just left behind us. Of course, wine to a robot is something else than wine is to us, and robots may have electromagnetic pleasures that we in turn cannot fathom, but translations can always be made however much they lose of the ’essence’ of the object (as translations always do).

Harman’s response dives back into qualia, something which I had hoped to avoid: http://twitter.com/DrZamalek/status/321888255505211392

And because of the lecture I found this book New Materialism: Interviews and Cartographies and I’m looking forward to reading the interview with Manuel DeLanda that is in there.

I’ve been working on a personal transit app that has a different take on things than most apps. That has taken quite some time and attention but it is progressing rapidly. The state of open transit data around the world, however, is still disappointing.

I finished the Prince of Networks and published my notes here as wel as excerpts from an interview with Harman.

On the other hand I am also putting the final touches on the game we’re making for saba. That is coming along rapidly and we should be able to submit that to the App Store in the near future. It looks like I’m becoming something of an iOS programmer.

On Wednesday I visited the encampment near my office protesting the liberalization of rents and wrote some thoughts about that. Similar protests are going on where I live.

I also have gotten quite busy arranging stuff for our upcoming Hack de Overheid in Amsterdam on June 16th. I will be holding a workshop demystifying programming for people who don’t know how to program yet. You are very welcome to join us if also want to get your feet wet with code, data journalism or open data.

I also briefly wrote up the launch of Politwoops in the USA with help from our friends from Sunlight.

My bicycle got a second brake which is a requirement in the highly responsible Germany. Talking about bicycles, I started a Tumblr to document the miserably state of cycle paths in Berlin.

Then it was also off to the Campus Party Housewarming Party and the day after the mediaboard of the region organized a Gamersnet summer meeting in a videogame arcade lounge. The Berlin gaming scene is still rather nascent but there may be some potential here. The city is still too artist heavy and engineer thin which will need to change for more stuff to be built.

On Friday everything continued apace with a special anniversary visit to the local Cafe CK who are providing us with the only drinkable coffee within a literal mile.

The coming week it’s off to Copenhagen for a brief visit to the European Data Forum (open data) and to the Metropolis Laboratory (urban games).

I must say I’m quite impressed by the clarity and breadth of thought that Harman and many of the philosophers in that current express. This interview (my excerpts from it) with him contained some insights and phrases that I had not seen expressed before.

More generally speaking whether it is Harman or Bogost or DeLanda or any of the others, it is particularly nice to be reading the current philosophers of our age who right now are relevant, alive and online. This last bout of reading has finally made me reach the long overdue realization that philosophy need not be a dead pursuit nor that writings on philosophy need to be obtuse.

So here are my notes from the book which is filled with brilliance:

the engineer must /negotiate/ with the mountain at every stage of the project, testing to see where the rock resists and where it yields, and is quite often surprised by the behaviour of the rock.

it is impossible to derive one thing instantly from another without the needed labour

Actors become more real by making larger parts of the cosmos vibrate in harmony with their goals, or by taking detours in their goals to capitalize on the force of nearby actants.

It is never the actant in naked purity that possesses force, but only the actant involved in its ramshackle associations with others, which collapse if these associations are not lovingly maintained.

Harmony is a result, not a guiding principle.

Systems are assembled at great pains, one actant at a time, and loopholes always remain.

To see something ‘directly’ means following a lengthy chain of transformations from one medium into another and on into another.

Their main difference is that Plato’s metaphysics seeks reality at a layer deeper than all articulation by qualities, while Latour thinks there is no reality outside such articulations.

Yet they are allowed to enter only by virtue of their effect on other things, since Latour holds that there is never anything more to them than this.

The question is only whether we grant sufficient reality to objects when we say that a thing is not just /known/ by what it ‘modifies, transforms, perturbs or creates’, but that it actually is nothing more than these effects. If the pragmatism of knowledge becomes a pragmatism of ontology, the very reality of things will be defined as their bundle of effects on other things.

Latour does not mind defining an actor by what it affects, but he does not allow an actor to borrow its effects in advance. Payment in real time is demanded at every stage of the translation.

If not for this basic asymmetry between an actor’s components and its alliances, we would have a purely holistic cosmos. Everything would be defined to an equal degree by the actors above it as below it, and there would be no place in reality not defined utterly by its context.

Monisms are too pious and sugary in their holism, dualisms too static in their trench warfare, and triads too smug in their happy endings. But fourfold structures allow for tension no less than plurality, and hence we find Empedocles, Plato, Aristotle, Scotus Eriugena, Francis Bacon, Vico, Kant, Greimas, McLuhan, and others chopping the world into four.

Instead of an objective nature filled with genuine realities and a subjective cultural sphere filled with fabricated fictions, there is a single plane of actors that encompasses neutrinos, stars, palm trees, rivers, cats, armies, nations, superheroes, unicorns and square circles. All objects are treated in the same way. Latour justifies this with his broad conception of an actor as anything that has an effect on other things. […] Latour adds that if all entities are equally real, all are not equally /strong/. Fictional characters and myths have weaker legions of allies testifying to their existence than do lumps of coal. Hence, we can democratize the world of actors and still avoid the free-for-all of social construction.

In this sense, an object is a sort of invisible railway junction between its own pieces and its outer effects. An object is /weird/—it is never replaceable by any sum total of qualities or effects. It is a real thing apart from all foreign relations with the world, and apart from all domestic relations with its own pieces.

And like it or not, Apple and Amazon are stirring up more interest, even among intellectuals, than most academic critiques of capitalism. Is that just because we are all a bunch of brainwashed idiots locked in on our own trivial conveniences? Hardly. It’s because these companies are also doing something exciting that addresses where consciousness really is today, and which it didn’t know that it wanted. Did I know in advance that my brain would catch fire as soon as I had a smartphone and a tablet computer? Not at all. I initially thought both of these things were consumerist pseudo-needs, just like the academic Left still does. But I was wrong, and so were they. To have the right electronic device in your hands can sharpen your brain as much as the discovery of an important new author.

Life has to be optimistic, or it becomes merely reactive. And I really fear that the Left is becoming the permanent homeland of the critics and the grumblers.

It is frankly a failure of imagination to try to explain away 1989 by griping about how Central Europe was simply recuperated into a banal consumer capitalism and nothing changed, or that at least political discourse mattered behind the Iron Curtain before ’89, and so forth.

And just goes on and on. The entire thing is worth reading and positions Harman as one of the more notable thinkers and philosophers we have right now.

[…] the peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that is robbing the human race, posterity as well as the current generation, those who dissent from the opinion, even more than those who hold it.

If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.

The book is part of a tradition of more recent popular scientific book in that it practices science-by-anecdote. It is a vast collection of mostly interesting anecdotes, tidbits from other scientists, entertaining stories and luminous examples conveniently arranged chapterwise in trends. It is very personal and at times a bit careless but mostly interesting.

The book does read well and spouts its vision to make the reader aware of the problems we are faced with and their possible solutions. This has become more and more necessary as we are faced daily with systems which are completely out of touch with the human(e).

[1]: And have been ill since, no causality there I hope. Mostly recovered now.

The book defends the premise that many people of arbitrary intelligence often come to better conclusions than one or a few people of exceptional intelligence. This counterintuitive statement which I first saw in Condorcet’s Jury Theorem is made quite plausible with a very readable mix of theory, anecdotes and loads of studies.

Overall a very fun book which makes some pressing statements about the way we organize society and perceive knowledge that prompted me to rethink my own views.

I put my summary on the wiki, but I’ll past it here completely for your reading pleasure comments can be placed here and I am receptive towards edits in the wiki (register before editing).

Chapter 1

The many may very well be smarter than the smartest few. This may seem counterintuitive, Surowiecki gives a lot of interesting reasons backed up with tons of studies and anekdotes about why this is the case.

If you put together the information of a lot of people and the error of a lot of people in the right way, the information is filtered and the error is cancelled out. Preconditions for the effect:

• Diversity of opinions
• Independence
• Decentralization
• Aggregation

Chapter 2

You want to generate as many loser as quickly as possible and kill them. So you need diverse creators, financers and also diverse decision makers. This way the best will be created and will survive.

(The internet is widely diverse and creating a lot of stuff, what is missing currently is a smart way of aggregating the wide wide variety of information.)

p.31 Adding in a few people who know less, but have different skills actually improves the groups performance.

The fields of decision making and strategy are impossible to become an expert in single-handedly.

Homogenous groups often fall prey to group think. Their isolation from the outside world and self-convincedness makes dissent highly improbable.

Chapter 3

Independence means using private information. This not only relates to facts but also to more indirect forms of knowledge, interpretation and analysis. Rationality and impartiality is not required.

Problems lie in herding and risk averseness.

Information cascades a sequential decision making process where people stop using their own knowledge and look at what other people are doing, thinking that they are using their own knowledge while they are not (they are also looking at others)

(Sunstein, cybercascades?)

p.60 groups are better at deciding between possible solutions to a problem than they are at coming up with them

Smart selection by:

• Wide array of options and information
• Willingness of some people to put their own judgement ahead of the group

Most people are usually overconfident.

Chapter 4

Decentralization is a good thing, if it is paired with adequate aggregation.

Chapter 5

Friedrich Hayek (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_Hayek) on coordination problems

Chapter 6

Cooperation problems

strong reciprocity  the willingness to punish bad behaviour at no benefit (or even at a cost) to yourself

A kind of prosocial behaviour depends on being:

• nice
• forgiving
• retaliatory

Markets increase prosociality out of a purely selfish necessity. The cost of distrusting each transaction is too high.

Mancur Olson (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mancur_Olson) - “The Logic of Collective Action”

Public goods are only valuable if enough people participate (see Sunstein).

experiments by Ernst Fehr and Simon Gächter: the Dictator Game (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dictator_Game)

Chapter 7

A wide discourse on traffic systems and how these could be more efficiently priced hyper responsive traffic pricing systems and people’s resistance to them.

Chapter 8

Homogenous small groups do not work well, even a single minority opinion will nuance the group and prevent group polarization.

(We need Devil’s advocates.)

Cass Sunstein - “Why Societies Need Dissent”

Groups made better decisions than their smartest members.

Chapter 10

A discussion on layers of management and bureaucracy versus dynamic loosely coupled organizations.

Inauthentic behaviours from subordinates are usually rewarded. It is usually not in your best interest to report failure to your boss.

The setting of targets ellicits gaming the targets (advertedly setting them too low) and then cheating on them in any way possible.

Giving people the possibility to influence their working conditions is often enough to get better results (even if they will not use the possibilty at all).

Success is usually a question of luck and not of skill because the problems are so difficult.

Chasing the expert is a mistake.

Chapter 11

Investors herd, they are overconfident, they underestimate randomness, explain good results on skill and bad results on malfortune.

Investors do not have to be rational for markets to work well.

Once everyone starts piggybacking on the wisdom of the group, then no one is doing anyting to add to the wisdom of the group.

Too much information also influences, especially if it comes with hype or commentary from people in power.

Chapter 12

National Issues Convention Deliberative Poll (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deliberative_opinion_poll) James Fishkin proposed Deliberation Day

Given enough information and the chance to talk things over with peers, ordinary people are more capable of understanding complex issues and making meaningful choices about them.

Efforts to stop inertia in the people.

Public Choice Theorists (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_choice_theory)

Most decisions are about what to do, involving values, trade-offs and choices about which kind of society we should live in. There is no reason to think that experts are better at making these decisions than the average voter.

In chapter three it discusses ‘the study of the internet as a modality of cultural transmission’. Interesting stuff, I will post more about this later.

The paper studies 6 forms of CMC and examines how they measure up in the form of Group, Community and Social Network and it also provides definitions of those three terms.

The conclusion is that the concept of community is nebulous.

First impression is that it is a very interesting topic but this book is a shallow entry level guide into the field of captology.

I have worked out my notes into somewhat coherent ramblings about the book. As I said a good foundation of basic concepts any interaction engineer should be aware of but nothing extremely new or noteworthy.

“Strangers and hospitality: on the social and ethical conditions of virtual communities”

This is an interesting paper for me giving me some needed context for communities and especially for this paper of hospitality.

It was my first contact with Heidegger’s phenomenological philosophy and the first time I have ever heard of Levinas and his philosophies of the Other and the Third.

I looked both of these up in Wikipedia to get some founding. So I’m crash coursing myself through philosophy.

I made extensive notes with interesting parts and parts where I have more questions.

Thackara gave the talk primarily for the new batch of students of an institution called DasArts which trains performance artists or something along those lines. I don’t really think it matters what exactly they do. They are a bunch of artistic people doing very artistic things.

Thackara’s talk fits into the current theme which is called The Grand Integration Game.

Thackara gave a very interesting lecture about how design and high technology can and should improve the way in which we live.

His opening statement is about the wave of technological determinism that has brought us where we are now. Now should be the first time when we are able to and when it is necessary to foresee the possible effects technology might have before releasing it into the wild.

I have some issues with the above:

• Why has the need to rethink the scientifical process arisen now? Is it now more urgent than before or are people simply more aware?

• How can we foresee all the possible effects of technology? Sometimes (maybe even usually) technologies are used in ways that were completely unforeseen by their original creators.

• Isn’t this just a version of the Precautionary Principle?

• Thinking whether or not it is wise to use certain technologies is fine but getting global concensus is impossible. It only takes one country to clone people or create self-reproducing nanotechnology.

Then he described ways in which we can alter the current state of things for the better. He gave us a set of principles (you might also call them values or best practices) which were permeating each of these redesigns of the world.

He did not get through all of the principles due to a lack of time but as far as I got them they were something like:

• iPod time vs. fixed time

• Closer rather than faster

• Human Agency

• and in general stuff like: humanity, durability, flexibility, dynamicity, organicity

Most of the examples came down to employ even more technology but desiging more humane and more ecologically sound systems with them.

So out with the big inflexible, inhuman system that nobody understands and wants and bring in the new systems which empower people to do the stuff they want. Sounds pretty good to me.

I will talk some more about certain specifics from Michiel’s notes.

For those interested in identities I would like to point out my blogpost discussing the presentation Dick Hardt gave at OSCON about Identity 2.0. This is at a very practical level and talks about identity, privacy and verifiability. The presentation is well worth watching, it is fun and it has a visionary air about it.

One interesting point was a slight redefinition of privacy (or a single facet of it) that it should not be limited to your information getting out but also to other people’s information getting in. Hearing someone else talk in your close proximity burdens you with having to process that information and therefore is a breach of your privacy.

Currently you see a lot of people reclaiming this privacy by using portable media players (iPods and such) to disconnect auditorily from the world. I do it myself in the train.

The important part of privacy is the part of moral identity. It is a person’s right to tell their own story even if it is false or vain or overly ambitious. It is the need to reduce the chance of other people making up their mind about who you are based on second hand evidence.

The —now common— practice of Googling prospective dates tells us we have already lost this one.

Bibi’s research topic on the coming irrelevance of location struck home with me. My ties to locations are pretty loose so I feel I could be anywhere as long as I have an internet connection. I already do most of my work via the internet and a lot of my friends keep in touch via MSN.

Bibi’s research is more practically oriented on ambient intelligence in locations that adapt to users’ preferences. She did not go into such futuristic domains as augmented reality where the complete notion of space becomes redefinable.

Cathy talked about Trusted Computing. This is a very difficult subject and before trusting anything the companies have to say about it, always first read what Bruce Schneier has to say about it.

Trusted computing initiatives are certainly going to be used to restrict use of some kinds of hardware and some kinds of data. They are inevitably going to decrease interoperability and annoy customers. And they will be broken within days after launch but that will only slightly reduce the pain.

Mr. Miller then talked about collective actions such as elections and how they come to an outcome using someting called a Joint Procedural Mechanism. This same mechanism applies to expert systems with computers.

Thinking about this I could not come up with other JPMs where the mechanism is purely computer based.