However, in the case electricity, the instrumentality fades away as mere extensive quality and we in effect are subsumed by the medium itself; i.e. electricity surpasses spatial-temporal obstructions to a degree that turns media into environments within which the subject-object dichotomy is blurred to a point of indecipherability. The way I am extended by my computer as an informational environment is that I must yield to its structure in order to be able to act through it. It is, to be sure, a discontinuous process, unlike an instrumental one: I can distance myself from immediate objects and process my thought (which is otherwise a holistic condition) into a logical argument that can be reproduced or retracted at any moment. The eradication of concrete and immediate results and the separation of action from reaction are also an emergent characteristic that is lacking from a mere instrumental understanding/usage of medium.

What McLuhan seems to be saying by his reference to environments (e.g. 69, 148, 112) is that media’s nature as environments is always a higher level aspect in comparison to their instrumental value or function. The way I am referring to medium-as-environment’s pervasive nature is analogous to McLuhan’s explication of the autoamputative nature of media. Medium-as-environment exerts a great amount of pressure (in the form of information) on the subject and to be able to function under that pressure, some parts of the system must yield (self-amputate). McLuhan further explains:

“Self-amputation forbids self-recognition. The principle of self-amputation as an immediate relief of strain on the central nervous system applies very readily to the origin of the media of communication from speech to computer. ” (1964, 47)

A medium in the process of development (e.g. the PC) manifests what could be called a “bleed-through” whereby subjects “empowering” themselves through it must immerse in it to a point of becoming part of it. “[T]he stimulus to new invention is the stress of acceleration of pace and increase of load.” (ibid. 46) Similar psycho-physiological consequences are apparent in N. Katherine Hayles’ discussion (1999) on proprioceptive coherence – which, however, does not separate the medium form as having relevance to the nature of the condition, as can be seen below:

“Proprioceptive coherence, a term used by phenomenologists, refers to how these boundaries are formed through a combination of physiological feedback loops and habitual usage. An experienced tennis player, for example, frequently feels proprioceptive coherence with the racquet, experiencing it as if it were an extension of her arm. In much the same way, an experienced computer user feels proprioceptive coherence with the keyboard, experiencing the screen surface as a space into which her subjectivity can flow. ” (1999, 88)

It could be argued that, in McLuhan’s terms, proprioceptive coherence comes with a price; namely some form of autoamputation must occur in order for the subject to be able to extend itself through new technology. As hinted above, the form of the medium then becomes a relevant factor: the movement of the tennis racquet in sync with the human body pertains only to the physical, mass-force structures between material objects, while the computer demands that the subject – in addition to yielding to the kinesthetic coherence of the keyboard – concede to the informational patterns and logics of the computer. By unconsciously yielding to the intruding material and informational forces the human use of technology becomes possible but, at the same time, we are rendered quite oblivious to the effects of this tendency to the human condition itself. Whatever the form and nature of the medium that finally obsolesces PC as the leading human extension, we can be sure that it involves us more totally and only after have we become accustomed to it, can we truly understand what the previous form, computer and its related extensions, contributed to the human condition.

Intensity has its limits, just as everything else. By increasing the intensity of sensory experience out of proportion we soon enough run into pathologies. Any feeling taken out of context and simulated without any possibility of consequence leads us beyond the ethical or the esthetic; experience of inconsequentiality is the end of the will to exist. Visual, non-linear and iconic information, which we are  bombarded by in the seemingly ever more faithful and faster digital environments is a very primal sensory experience compared to visual-rational typographical representations, whose meaning in turn relies mostly on conceptual associations and metaphors. Icons do not disperse meaning and shatter into fragments like symbols do; they retain their integrity and uniqueness within each individual. If this development is examined in light of McLuhan’s tetrad (McLuhan 1992), there is a possibility that we will witness the obsolescence of our symbolic systems into a generalized global communitarism with no primary code or representational system to be deciphered, only a stream of iconic likenesses and indexes that perform specific, uniform functions. The faster the flow of information – and the more human social and political systems rely on it for their survival – the more the human “decipherers” must assume the role of the machine or alternately yield before it. Our current communicative existence that is primarily created through symbolic representations will become obsolete in this vision of future. Symbolic systems are by necessity generalizations; they must be enframed within some socio-cultural system in order for them to have an existence. Any natural language is always code not only to be deciphered but interpreted within social configurations that are formed out of the negotiated experiences of its participants. As information systems, they do not possess the speed and efficiency needed for post-singularity.

As to the direction of the current scientific and information technological development, the logical conclusion of any implosive process is singularity, a point that represents the end game of an evolutionary trajectory. At technological singularity any reference to technology as extensions has become moot – singularity signifies a point that cannot be extended any further. The process has become complete: as machines attain consciousness, their capacities to calculate and process information increase so drastically that they can find solutions to practically anything humans can throw at them. The moment of this attainment is sudden and overwrites all previous frameworks of understanding. There will be no bleed-through, only a clean, surgical cut.

“Aika juoksee pakoon kaikkea, mitä joskus olin. Se täyttää minut kauhulla”, kaikuu tuttu ääni sekä edestä että takaa.

Nyt tässä istuessani (ja seuratessani ikkunasta naapuritalon nuorten viinanhuuruista sekoilua lumipenkoissa) ajatukseni kääntyvät väistämättä menneeseen, omaan nuoruuteeni. Tajuavatko  ihmiset kuinka epätodellista huolettomuus on? Eivät. Juuri siksi he huolettomasti vapaina syöksyvätkin huomiseen. Tiedostamattomuus on avain kaikkeen, näemmä… ja mitä siitäkin pitäisi ajatella, tai mitä johtopäätöksiä, paremminkin?

Vältän nykyhetkeä ja nykytilaani, koska se ei millään tavalla kosketa päänsisäistä todellisuuttani: näen itseni aivan jonain muuna kuin miksi olen kasvanut. Olen jotain mitä olin joskus ja mahdollisesti jotain mitä olen tuleva olemaan. Minulla on oikeus tähän ajatukseen, koska nykyisyyttä ei ole. Jos nykyisyyttä ei ole, niin väliäkö sillä, missä ajassa elän? Minä elän ikuisesti, jossain ajassa, siis. Kaikki joskus ollut on jättänyt jälkensä johonkin aikaan, ja jos aika on suhteellista, niin mikään ei ole kokonaan kadonnut. Mikään ei oikeasti katoa kokonaan, ei edes tämä näppäimistöni naputus. Jos olisi tarpeeksi laskennallista voimaa,  niin jokainen ääniaaltokin olisi mahdollista takavarikoida  uusintakierrosta varten kaiken taustahälyn keskeltä. Ajatella, että  tv-ruudun lumisadekin on vain jälki n. 14 miljardia vuotta sitten tapahtuneesta pamahduksesta, jonka ansiosta tämäkin blogi on todellisuutta.

Eli… takana on loistava menneisyys ja edessä tulevaisuus, jolta voi odottaa aivan mitä vaan.

The argument on information as potentia[1] is by no means a novel one; perhaps only reformulated and -contextualized. The difference is perhaps best seen as one between ontology and epistemology. While e.g. Foucault’s notion of ‘will to knowledge’ – as underlying trajectory on the development of Western epistemology – stems from epistemological shifts that he places in the time of Plato (see Foucault 1971, 218), to consider ‘will’ as represented by the instrumental orientation to mediation is to argue for an urge inherent to human nature, an ontology of instrumentalism. Lyotard’s propositions concerning the metaphysics of development seem to entail a tendency toward greater capacity and continuous modulation of form (cf. Lyotard 1991, 6), and that this process is not a conscious human enterprise, although it is obvious it can be accelerated by ideologies etc., seems to echo a more ontological foundation. It is essentially an evolutionary proposition that constitutes a reciprocal dialectic between humans and environment(s) or objects (ibid.).

The human condition can thus be argued to exhibit a curiously continuous complexification with information as the underlying scale of change. Only hypotheses can be raised here to illuminate the telos of this process, if it indeed even has one. But the suggestion need not be more complicated than the closing of the mediative gap to reach an existence of unmediated and pure communication. Call it the reclaiming of the divine presence of Paradise, if you will. Peters (1999, 75) uses an analogy of angels as the ultimate example of unmediated information; angels are “bodies of pure meaning” (ibid. 75) which practically refers to a complete mental synthesis of subjects. Such a condition literally fuses the signifier and signified into one entity, into a transcendental sign – which in the strictest sense is annihilates all possibility of mediation, fusing information and meaning and imploding into singular consciousness. Singularity has no dimensions and thus all such predicative notions of ‘becoming’, ‘mediating’, ‘communicating’ are supplanted by mere ‘being’. Singularity of form can be likened to eternal present. Such union is devoid of constraint and friction; i.e. it lacks the “third party”, an in-between.

This “angelic” condition also lays the foundation for the phenomenology of technological/cybernetic totalism (cf. Lanier 2010, 94), which seriously entertains the possibility of future computation accelerating to a point of implosive singularity where technological development becomes instantaneous – meaning “super” machines designing ever more powerful copies of themselves. Technological singularity, coined and defined by Vernor Vinge (1993)[2] would annihilate all bases for mediation and thus renders the human species, at least in the current biophysical form, obsolete. It defines the boundary of informational acceleration at which human intellectual capacities are overstretched and meaning, in a manner of speaking, transforms into automatic response to oncoming stimuli.

In the humanistic side of things, technological singularity is always refutable by the infinite regresses of spatial-temporal relations to which we humans are mortally bound. This binding is a matter that concerns exactly the part of human condition that is actualizes us a mediative beings. Medium anchors us into existence.

Singularity as technological instantaneity and intelligence, no matter how intangible and fantastic, is a theoretically defendable proposition. If one is to consider it in light the history of technological development on the general cultural evolutionary trajectory and the intensification and complexification of the role of information on it (see e.g. Coren 2001; Kylmälä 2011), several arguments for teleonomic tendency can be found. The human species (from Homo s. Sapiens onward) has practically replaced organic evolution with cultural one due to which the general process(es) of evolution have become more informational in nature (Coren 2001, 2002; Avery 2003, 109).

As to our own age and informational evolution, Floridi (2002, 127) states: “No previous generation was ever exposed to such an extraordinary acceleration of technological power over reality, with corresponding social changes and ethical responsibilities.”  The underlying potential in technological development is information as the increasing complexity of structures. This implies that information has a special function in human “hands” and that this function manifests itself primarily in the instrumental relationship between humanity and environment.

It is conceivable that the instrumental understanding of medium has established itself as a cognitive “lock-in” of sorts, constraining perceptions to alternative and novel trajectories of change. This is troublesome because technology advances with or without us. To be sure there is some sort of a “reontologization” taking place on the informational scale and this has been going on for a long time. Ever since the 1960s advancement in processor speed has been exponential and measurable on the informational scale, asMoore’s law would have it. Today, some 30 odd years later, the cultural plane is practically digitized. Digital technology is now embraced for its capacity to process this stupefying information build-up. Wright’s observations support this:

“Human beings now produce more than five exabytes worth of recorded information per year: documents, e-mail messages, television shows, radio broadcasts, Web pages, medical records, spreadsheets, presentations, and books like this one. That is more than 50,000 times the number of words stored in the Library of Congress, or more than the total number of words ever spoken by human beings. Seventy-five percent of that information is digital” (Wright, 2007, 6).

Information as potential

When information is defined, a difference should be made between information as potential and information as realized. The former is constant, either as existing as atoms in the universe, reserving energy as potential or unmediated consciousness considering this potential. The latter becomes possible only as a function of conscious action, whose intensity depends of the level of consciousness of the entity in question.  It is not difficult to imagine that the “higher” the organism, the bigger the role of information to its existence. Information in itself is everywhere as potential but only its realization, (i.e. mediation), makes it a relevant issue.

Consider, for example, a stone on a field under which a species of mollusc lives. It didn’t choose its habitat; it happened to evolve to a state that necessitates conditions as produced by the underside of a rock. In a sense, it can be said to occupy the first “dimension” of existence in which no sense data, no choice or question ever arise. It can hardly see potential in anything, beyond in its immediate instinctual relation to its environment. Lacking all but the basest instincts to survive, its condition remains informationally low and consists of no spatial or temporal plane, which herein simply refers to a state of unconsciousness – presumably a life form that cannot know itself, cannot have any relation to the information that affects its condition. Hence, the existence that is configured is free of all consideration: all factors influencing the condition of the being are external.

Next consider a fox on the field. It may take refuge from the hunters behind the rock, yet it cannot deduce the reasons why such an action is beneficial for its survival. Rather the question is of an instinctual necessity that relates to a certain level of consciousness. This could be called the second dimension of existence, characterized by fight-or-flight instinct where information already exists as potential. Because of this instinctual competence the condition of the 2-dimensional being is bound by space. Namely, the condition offers two states of action based on the primacy of the instinct survival. There is no element of choice involved, only an instinctual reaction to information pertaining to the survival of the system. The choice is flight or fight. Either/Or.

Next, consider a man running down the field. He grabs the stone and uses it to kill his pursuers. He can also sit down and fashion a sculpture out of the stone. The matter of survival has become one of choice. Pure instinct doesn’t lead to voluntary self-immolation, it requires reason. The existence of conscious choice relative to other(ness) leads eventually to the question of right and wrong. Each superseding question of right and wrong increases the informational quotient of this man’s condition and its role to his existence. Due to the awareness of all three dimensions (space, time and information as constitutive of the two) his existence is unlimited in spatial variability (typological potential) but nevertheless bound to a linear temporal progression. In effect, each question of choice, or each emergent dimension, introduces a new form of informational being. Four dimensional being would be one not bound by either space or time and could thus get rid of choices altogether. The fourth dimension is the same as unmediated singularity, pure and instantaneous communion, absolutely released from falseness of meaning. Morality, right and wrong, go out the window as there is no consequence, and as there is no consequence, there is no choice because there is no relation, and as there is no relation, there is no need of consciousness, at least in the bound sense particular to humans.

In a more concrete plane, the past few centuries of technological development give ample evidence of the severity and intensity of (realized) information growth, which can mostly be attributed to the mechanization and technologization of existence driven by industrial capitalism. Recently, Moore’s Law[3] has proven empirically the increasing complexity of human inventions and resulting increase of scale of information. There are futurologists (e.g. Mannermaa, 2004; Schwartz & Leyden & Hyatt 1999) who hypothesize the “information society” to last only 25-50 years, until a paradigm shift to bio-society begins, which, in turn, could last only 15 years until a new shift to a fusion society would take place – if the industrial society can be said to have lasted approximately 200 years, the pace of change is certainly picking up and, arguably, it is being fuelled by information. From mechanized printing technology of the mid-1800s to the invention of the microchip, all of these escalations involve an increase/intensification in the role of information to human mediation processes. And as information’s role in the human context increases, it is only natural to predict more advances in information processing systems that try to take advantage of this fact. The argument that can be formed on the basis this developmental trajectory is that difference in media forms relates primarily to a difference in the scale of informational quantity.

Both senses exist in a latent form in any human artifact. Consider for example the photograph. In the physical dimension, as an ordering of information in the form of a concrete object, a photograph can be supposed to retain an iconic likeness to reality. But this likeness has been created by means of technology, i.e. a camera, which inevitably consists of a bias as either a mode of enhancement, degree of fidelity, of color or shade etc. Barthes called the denotative, iconic dimension somewhat misleadingly “a message without a code” (see Barthes 1983, 196) because with a message we are already confronted with interpretation of information, which is produced by or through some medium, i.e. technology. Information ordered through some medium already entails a connotative dimension. In this view, it is the photograph-as-technology (a concrete product) that is positioned in the role of the subject, in a manner of speaking, affecting the representation of reality through its mechanical form and mode of production. The unfolding of any likeness can be argued to require a code, a culturally and socially anchored index itself, which situates information “stored” in the likeness (icon) to some frame of reference. The code, having nor physical form, is a means to reveal meanings and potentialities in things we experience and, thus, it also acts as an interpretative medium. Human linguistic skill is a unique cognitive capacity that functions on the basis of signs and their interpretation. To be human is to interpret and to interpret is to be bound by mediation.

It is evident that these two referents of medium (instrument and in-between) cannot be used interchangeably. Both usages force us to orient in a certain way toward environments and objects within those environments. The environmental view claims power over immediacy of mediation, while the instrumental view can be afforded a distancing effect and thus in a way suggestive of hypermediacy, a state in which the sense of pervasiveness is eclipsed by the concrete presence of technology. (cf. Bolter & Grusin 2000, 31-44)

—–

To be able to consider medium ontologically, the focus must be in its form, as Van Loon notes (2008, 9). It seems that technological change most definitely affects the form and uses of media but it remains impossible to determine whether this constitutes something completely new. (Lister et al 2003, 47) Change is measurable perhaps only in terms of its scale; i.e. the rate of change based on some technological variable, its pervasiveness or the number of medium forms. This scale can be here likened to informational capacity of technology (or media) and thus inherently their physical nature. Structurally, change can be estimated e.g. according to Moore’s Law, which states that the number of transistors an integrated circuit can sustain doubles approximately every 18 months – this has been going on now for some 40 years. The power densities (the amount of power per unit volume) of transistors cannot rise ad infinitum, at least not in the current form, and this begs a metaphorical question: if the spaces in between transistors that accelerate the information that envelops us in the form of ever more faithful and complex virtual environments are scaling down, closing in on the “singularity” of nanometrics, what then happens to the “in-between”, the mediative condition itself? At which point does the power density exceed the limits of mediation? Since this implosion of mediative form, as it seems here, is not bound by human cognitive capacity or memory but technological miniaturization, how does it affect our ability to control it?

The requirement of universality, or generalization, concerns all communication. In the case of humans, to comprehend each individual as a unique totality with certain peculiarities and characteristics is simply beyond our ken: we cannot hope to know every ontogenetic trajectory that constitutes each singular human individual. And even if we could, we would still have to make compromises in communication because without common metaphorical “systems of meaning” there would be no understanding and all communication would be redundant. Therefore we resort to concepts and make generalizations of things. This is what essentially constitutes the problem of ‘medium’.

Once the human species “invented” knowing, as Nietzsche so poetically puts it (2006, 111), it was instantly cut off from its direct relationship to its environment. The ‘actualities’ of here and now were replaced by a semantic fog of war and the knowledgeable beast was reassigned to a role of a detached observer with an endless arsenal of concepts at her command. Any system of shared knowledge is a step away from the actual toward a more general; a social homology of meaning, if you will. Common code must be biased, or made understandable, which is to say that mediation is an inseparable part of social reality. Is ‘social reality’ and apt concept to represent the state in which we exist? No, but this is the muddle with which we are inescapably stuck.

Marshall McLuhan noted the development of speech separated humans from their immediate environment; it was a detachment from objects and distancing of the self so as to be able attain greater understanding of the surroundings (cf. McLuhan 1964, 148). In this McLuhan would certainly agree with Nietzsche. But it is thinking that already equals a generalization of sense experience; if thinking is to be understood as a rational process. Pure experience without any interpretation, the kind of which e.g. Merleau-Ponty (1962) speaks of, seek to give the human body an existence external to cognitive processes. Pure experience is thus another name for unmediated sensorial experience and deals with the most basic elements of the mind-body relation. But human beings are also rational animals by necessity of their intelligence and in analyzing the nature of the communicative dimension of human existence, the emphasis must lie in the way human beings create the processes of meaning-making.

In understanding the conceptualization of sense experience into a culturally-enframed cognitive perspective, the concept of ‘medium’ can be said to pertain not only to the forms of knowledge and material technologies in human use but the human being itself. Medium as perspective that is materially anchored to the physical essence of humanity mutates both into an inescapable limbo of generalizations and an ideological instrument. In short, perspective subtracts the experiential world into a socially understandable compendium of meanings. To be sure, by relying on certain systems of concepts, we create perspectives analogous to those concepts. For example in modern society, we tend to place our hopes in scientific conceptual systems. Geometric perspectivalism – i.e. the perspective that “true” representation can be found through mathematical ordering – is how visual experience is mediated. Science, as a conceptual system, is the ultimate set of generalizations, which doesn’t seek any singular, unique truth; it measures what is generally most applicable and good. Science has no time for individual tragedies, it must have a universal tragedy under analysis until it can claim any understanding over the data. “Good” is what is most general because what is most general is the safest ground on which to draw new generalizations. Humans as rational beasts have a will to truth, which is to say a need for steady ground because their existence apparently lies outside any such possibility; hence the obsession to be sure. Time and space do not separate from man, not even through generalizations, they are constantly shifting all that can be perceived and communicated. Here deception becomes useful heuristic for human propensities. Relying in the power of generalizations (a form of self-deception) is to lull oneself into believing that the Truth is attainable. Truth is of course the unfolding of all existence as pure, unmediated information. What could such information be? What in this world could be and not be mediated? Perhaps death, the singular event to which all must inaugurate own their own, is the only “truth” that any one of us can truly experience. Death is the experience of the concept itself. Everything else – that is, life with all its variations and forms – is dampened and diluted through the senses into a rationalization of some sort, an ordering of sense data, a perspective, a tainted image that curbs the boundary between heaven and hell. Humanity is not in limbo; it is the limbo itself, the ultimate mediative situation, stagnant and without purity where nothing exists by its essence, where wholes and their parts cast only partial shadows because they lack the essence, that singular thing that ‘knowing’ destroyed in entering this world. The morgue and the maternity ward are the same, only the perspective has changed. I tell you it is a curse, not just one of epigenetic but phylogenetic proportions. It was inevitable we enter these solitary heights only to realize that there is no truth worth seeking.

If there ever was a choice, a different path to something else than “truths” (perhaps mere unadulterated existence) and, if we now deem such a path more preferable than the current informational ascendancy towards all possible truths, then where did we diverge? Perhaps we should blame Plato and his successors for leading us astray? Plato’s sins in this matter are somewhat divided. He was the one to regard the Pythagorean perspective to existence as being superior to the Homeric inundation and repetition of oral traditions, which truly links him with modernity and the scientific principle. Pythagorean philosophy preferred linear and fragmentary mathematical conceptual system to the representational, cyclical and holistic orality of Homer. In the Platonic sense, a universal is not an averaged-out corpus of opinions but a unique singularity that is the concept itself, an ultimate abstraction out of which every individual thing that refers to that singular concept in the world draws its lineage. In this tradition, to which we westerners must now adhere by necessity, concepts and systems thereof position our perspectives and even out every edge, reduce every sense of vitality and uniqueness into references of things. For any concept to exist, its referent must reduce itself to a mere shadow of a thing.

Appearances are what concern us in digitality. Electricity was for McLuhan mostly a tactile experience (ibid., 275) Electricity affords such signal speeds that enable simulation of human perception. The faster the signal and the wider the bandwidth of the medium, the more comprehensive the perception. Tactility does not refer to something actual but to as comprehensive a representation of actuality as possible. Because no matter how fast the signal or wide the medium, it is still simulation. Since the introduction of photography, a race has been on for the most comprehensive visual form and perspective. Electricity increased the capacity of humans to comprehend and enter into new perspectives by manipulating information in new and efficient ways. The most ambitious project that concerns this development is virtual reality (VR) in which human physical experience is transported through its sensorioum to an alternate, computer-simulated world. VR perhaps manifests the ultimate attempt to annihilate the typographic conceptual systemic and replace it with a wholly new perceptual orientation. This begs the question: if our epistemological and interpretative systems are becoming ever more “visual-perceptual” (as opposed to “visual-rational”), then what happens to our ethical systems that are based on visual-rational conceptualizations of reality. Take “honesty”, for example, how do you “conceptualize” it in virtuality through visual-perceptual stimuli? By intensity of experience, perhaps? Intensity of experience is the new ethical! When we consider intensity in a simulated context, we must look to the capacity of the system providing that context to learn the extent of intensities and their possible increase. Capacity thus becomes the principle that measures what is good: the faster the processor and the wider the bandwidth, the better, or more ethical, that is. The lack of capacity is conversely bad. Lack in capacity may result in misunderstanding and that, if anything, in the human context, is bad karma. Humanity must therefore become post-human. VR is an ideological manifestation of the human compulsion to seek her final capacity, whatever that may be. The internet is a similar contraption, although it seeks a unified consciousness between man and machine from a different perspective. Its logic drives toward generalization of human experience; to a point that it can assume a machine form. Our hive minds and cloud solutions are in short a generalization of human experience, an average guess of what it is to be a creative and intelligent human individual. This is the lowered standard of humanity we are now handing out to the machine. We are inherently lending our brain power to the evolution of a machine consciousness as we incessantly configure with the Web. It is no surprise we came up with this. But what is it, the internet? Is it a place? The metaphors we use in connection to it seem to suggest it is a place. Every time we go there, it is as if we surrendered some part of ourselves to a thing called “Sign in”. We assume we are on top of this concept when it is actually the concept that is on top of us. We are only fuelling its nascent consciousness. It’s the worst case of tunnel vision: there is only one way and the way is more.

The notion of capacity has been central to the development personal computer since its inception: the hardware must be kept up to date so that it can suffer the intensity of the information flooded by the software. The more capacity, the more intense experience. And as the digital ideal seems to favor visual representation, i.e. iconic and indexical multiplicity to typographical representation, the question becomes one of visual capacity. In this sense the ethical and the esthetic are converging. A hypothesis might be suggested that the more visually-biased our epistemological systems become, the more the two systems begin to resemble each other.

Intensity has its limits, though. By increasing the intensity of sensory experience out of proportion we soon enough run into pathologies. Any feeling taken out of context and simulated without any possibility of consequence leads us beyond the ethical or the esthetic; experience of inconsequentiality is the end of the will to exist. Visual, non-linear and iconic information, which we are increasingly bombarded by in the digital environment, is a very primal sensory experience compared to visual-rational typographical representations, whose meaning in turn relies mostly on conceptual associations and metaphors. Icons do not disperse meaning and shatter into fragments like symbols do; they have their integrity, their uniqueness within each individual. Symbolic representations are by necessity generalizations; they must be conceptualized within some socio-cultural system in order for anyone to make sense of them. A symbolic system (e.g. any natural language) is thus always code to be deciphered, either by rational thought or by conditioning and, in this sense, it is a social enterprise that must be formed out of the most general feelings of the people who use it as a system of meaning-making. Any culture based on a purely arbitrary alphabetical system is primarily symbolic-rational in its experiential mode.

The problem that has plagued understandings of communication from Aristotle on in the 4th century BC to John Locke in the 17^th century all the way up to our present century lies in mediation. Signs and syntax, the concrete outcome of human linguistic capacity and the most complex means of producing representations of reality, could be here referred to as “technologies for thoughts”, which by necessity violate unmitigated feelings and perceptions in our drive to communicate: “’That then which words are the marks of,’ says Locke, ‘are the ideas of the speaker: nor can anyone apply them as marks, immediately, to anything else but the ideas that he himself hath’”. (Foucault 1966/1989, 90) In the medium theoretic understanding of mediation human communication is always and inevitably seen as being biased based on the form and mode of the medium – which are of technological origin (e.g. Innis 1982; McLuhan 1964; McLuhan & Fiore 1967/1996). In the current age, we witness the volume and intensity of this condition only growing in the wake unprecedented information technological development.

Proverbially speaking, knowledge has a tendency to enhance “suffering” in some form or another. The ‘medium’ as a necessary function, the muddling in-between in the attainment of increasing amounts of knowledge, is at the heart of all this “pain”. Language, the most fundamental of all media, is the means by which an individual becomes a social being. If we acknowledge that bias is inherent to all media, then it follows that  this “becoming” is always tainted in some form or manner; i.e. that which is thought must be violated by abstracting it into a code that has no  intrinsic relation to the feelings and ideas to which it is a reference.  For Nietzsche (2006, 121) humans, the intelligent “beasts”,  are caged behind an impenetrable wall of metaphors, which they are driven to create. Thought as the signature of intelligence gives birth to medium, a system of metaphorical extermination of all pure meaning. This drive to “metaphorize” gives birth to all these concepts that lie, even here, to be sure, as the beginning and the end of all meaning; i.e. humanity makes sense of one set of concepts by and other set that is as just as arbitrary and unknowable. This is what human sociality/culture is: communication of meaning. But pure, subjective thought, i.e. information in its unmediated form without syntactic, semantic or pragmatic functions, involves no exchange of sympathies or antipathies and remains free of any external entropic effects, but once the process of inscribing supervenes the truth will ever be violated (cf. Lyotard 1991, 18-19) Thinking is the inevitability from which all action stems from. Lyotard’s notion of “givables” (ibid.) stands for the substance that must inevitably be processed for any meaning to exist or any communication to take place. But it is not only the thought that overlaps pain but also the process that mediates it. In this sense then mediation recalls the Schopenhauerian notion of evil being the positive, active force in the world, born out of the incessant human need to fulfill its cognitive capacity, as it were, and expand its sphere of knowledge, which, in the end, only leads further down the spiral: “It is the good which is negative; in other words, happiness and satisfaction always imply some desire fulfilled, some state of pain brought to an end.” (Schopenhauer 2010)

ÄOM = yksi päivä sinne tänne, huomenna menee tuplasti sitten. Koko ajatus on nurinkurinen ja kuvastaa viimeisen 40 vuoden end-of-the-pipe  –tyylistä sekoilua varsin mallikkaasti. Hieman kuin pelattaisiin Jerusalemin matkaa ja syytettäisiin sitä, joka jää ilman istuinta, kun musiikki loppuu.  Eli siis vain ja ainoastaan kuluttajaa.  Jos kaupat pitäisivät ”mustaa kirjaa” niistä, jotka jotain tänään ostavat, niin sitten, ehkä… Jos siihen ei olla valmiita, ympäristön hyväksi, niin ei sitten mitään, antaa mennä pikavauhtia putkesta alas koko roska. Älä tuota mitään –päivässä olisi jo ideaa. Tai ÄOM-kuukaudessa… siinä alkaisi rapista ”hyvinvointiyhteiskunnan” rappeutumat. Sillä sitähän me haluamme muuttaa tänäänkin, hyvinvointiyhteiskuntaa. Se on hyvinvoiva, toki, jos sattuu olemaan keskipalkkainen länsimainen ihmishenkilö. Hyvinvointiyhteiskunta = pahoinvointimaapallo. Kun vihreätkin tajuavat tuon, niin silloin asiat alkavat mahdollisesti jopa muuttua. Mutta kuten sanottu, se ei ole inhimillistä tai eettistä.

Tai no juu… Ihmisen saaminen tajuamaan kestämättömän tilansa vaatisi jonkinlaista järjestelmän uudelleen buuttausta, kognitiivista reduktiota, kollektiivista lobotomiaa. ÄOM-päivän kaltaiset hämärät yritykset saada ihmiset tajuamaan jotain, mikä tulee heille luonnostaan ovat ainoastaan naurettavia – oikeasti, uskooko edes villein vihreä, että ÄOM-päivä muuttaa jotain?  Jos on naiivia kysyä tällaisia, niin mikä pointti näissä tempauksissa oikein on?

No tällaista tänään, mä lähden tästä shoppaileen.